Freeing Chinese Men, Leaving María Behind: Gender and the Latin American Coolie Trade

In 1872, the María Luz, a ship carrying 233 Chinese contract laborers to Peru, was detained in Japan and its captain criminally convicted of crimes against Chinese subjects. All Chinese men and boys were freed and returned to China. But a lone Chinese girl was left behind to fulfill a personal service contract to the Peruvian shipmaster. This paper analyzes the María Luz trials to center Latin American participation in the coolie trade and to illuminate its trans-imperial gendered logics. It argues that liberal ideals of masculinity and broader patriarchal practices shaped the international traffic in Chinese contract workers and challenges to it. The coolie trade’s overwhelmingly male character reflected gender divisions of labor and control of female sexuality in China as well as in the Americas, Europe, and Japan. During the trials, the Japanese court and British advisors denounced contract labor’s assault on Chinese men’s bodies and freedom, while upholding women’s sexual servitude as acceptable. In stunning legal opinions that equated the coolie trade to slavery, Imperial Japan asserted membership within the comity of Western nations thorough a Japanese rescue of Chinese men from abusive Peruvian men and the defense of patriarchal domesticity.