In my thesis, I present an analysis of how my informants manage the threat of racial stigma in their daily lives. East Asians’ introduction in Peru as plantation laborers established their race as stigmatized. As the interview data suggest, the stigma’s persistence is felt among my informants through institutions such as the Chinese restaurant chifa and encounters with racial discrimination in everyday tasks. I argue that the chifa embodies a mixture of shame and pride. On one hand, the rise of chifas as mainstream institutions suggests East Asians’ triumph over adversity and counters the lowly image put forth by their history as menial laborers. On the other hand, the chifa recalls a past when the Chinese laborer and his businesses were considered dirty and base. Since stigma discredits the individual and prevents her from realizing her full humanity, the historical view of East Asians has continued to threaten my informants’ dignity.
After demonstrating how their East Asian racial identity continues to stigmatize my informants, I explore the primary means through which my informants mitigate this reality: the selective deployment of particular cultural values and social boundaries. My informants consistently remark on the values of discipline, respect for authority, and integrity—values in which they view themselves as personally excelling. Moreover, my informants find these values absent in Peruvians, allowing them to draw a boundary between themselves and Peruvians based on social behaviors. With values serving as the foundation of these boundaries, my informants justify their moral superiority over non-Asian Peruvians. I argue that this race-based social distinction is used to alleviate the harms of racial stigma attached to East Asian ancestry.
My final chapter focuses on specific instances in which my informants activate and suppress these boundaries in order to manage and contain the effects of racial stigma. I discuss how my informants sometimes suppress boundaries to prevent the dehumanizing effects of stigmatization. When the threat of stigma is minimal, they activate the social boundaries because race is a neutral or advantageous feature of the situation. This management of boundaries is demonstrated through two phenomena: my informants’ fear of crime and their attitudes toward the word chinita, meaning “little Chinese girl.” The women consistently expressed fears of walking alone, in certain areas and at certain times of day. Their disclosure of such fears was initiated by questions regarding race. Yet, they attribute experiences of muggings or their fear of them to issues of economic class, shying away from racial interpretations. They suppress boundaries to avoid inviting racial stigma into already high-threat situations.
Similarly, the word chinita is presented in interviews as a racial label. When interpreted as a racial term, informants express acceptance of the word as both a racial identifier and a nickname, freely activating the social boundary because of its harmlessness. However, other informants immediately reject the word, showing indignation and offense at its use. The negative reactions toward chinita arise from associations of the word with cat calling, a behavior performed by men towards women that thereby places gender in focus. Women seek to reject the unwanted sexual attention or deny strangers’ unfounded assumptions of their identity. My informants see cat calling as sparked by gender rather than race. Thus, race is seen as not only harmless, but also irrelevant to their interpretation of chinita, allowing them to suppress social boundaries.
I thus argue that young East Asian women living in Peru negotiate their racial stigma by selectively interpreting their social environment in ways that at times emphasize, but at other times de-emphasize, their racial identity. Their interpretations of situations actively employ class- or gender-based interpretations in place of racial ones as a means of restoring and defending East Asians’ dignity. As a result, they effectively manage the degrading effects of stigmatization.