COVER STORY : Countries of Origin : Stretching the Conventional Bounds of Race and Ethnicity, Asian Immigrants From Latin America Find a Haven in L.A.

Angelita Low, 27, speaks English to her friends, Spanish at work and Chinese at home. That’s life when you’re a Chinese American teacher of bilingual classes from a Nicaraguan town called Bonanza.

Her tri-cultural balancing act is an increasingly common experience in Los Angeles, which provides a window on an overlooked dimension of history: The Latin American nations that send immigrants to Los Angeles are ethnically diverse societies that have drawn immigrants from throughout the world.

Latino immigrants in Los Angeles include Koreans and Japanese from Brazil, Taiwanese from Argentina and Chinese from Cuba. There are more than 100,000 Asian Latinos in California, with 12,000 of them in Los Angeles, according to the 1990 U.S. Census.

Dubbed “re-migrants” by scholars, Asian Latinos find a comfortable haven in increasingly Asian and Latino Los Angeles. Recently arrived Asians from Latin America who don’t speak English can get by with Spanish in much of the city. Younger Asians born in Latin America taste exotic Asian foods for the first time and learn their parents’ languages in the area’s thriving Korean and Chinese enclaves.

Asian Latinos stretch conventional bounds of race and ethnicity. “I’m a Chinese Nicaraguan American,” Low said. “There are three parts within me and each is important.”

Their multifaceted identities, however, can complicate even some of life’s simplest pleasures. “It was really difficult during the World Cup (last summer, in which the United States, South Korea and Argentina fielded teams). Everyone expected me to pick a side, but I couldn’t really choose one,” said Saeill Kim, 29, a Korean American raised in Argentina.

Bianco Min, 26, an aspiring actor who was born in Korea and raised in Sao Paulo, said he used to startle Korean American girls by greeting them with the customary Brazilian hug and kisses. “They thought I was hitting on them,” he said.

But Min’s background has also worked in his favor. “Some Korean girls love my accent.”

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Asians from Latin America can be invisible to outsiders. They have no ethnic boom town of their own. There are no Asian Latin restaurants or grocery stores. Signs of their presence are more subtle.

In Downtown’s garment district, the sounds of Portuguese waft from stores owned by Koreans from Brazil. Two years ago, Korean Airlines began nonstop flights to Sao Paulo from Los Angeles International Airport. And at Dayton Heights Elementary School near Silver Lake, Mexican immigrant children learn English from Low, who just 15 years ago was a newcomer plodding through English bilingual classes as a seventh-grader at Virgil Junior High in Westlake.

Low’s life has been chaotic and colorful. As a Nicaraguan refugee, she befriended other Spanish-speaking children in school. When she got to Occidental College, where she earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in education, Low joined the Latino and Asian student groups.

While Low sees herself as Asian and Latino, others choose one identity over another. Some have passed only briefly through Latin America on their way to the United States, where they mingle mainly with others from their Asian homelands.

But others see themselves as 100% Latino. “I’m a Mexican, not a Korean Mexican, not a Mexican American. Just a Mexican,” insists Jorge Alberto Kim, a Spanish-language spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District who was raised in Mexico City.

Kim, who was a banker in Mexico, came to Los Angeles in 1983. He quickly learned English, which he now speaks flawlessly, and built a successful public relations business.

Despite his Asian features, Kim, 36, says he wants to be seen as a credit to Mexico. “I want to show that Mexican immigrants are productive and contribute to this country. My father always told me to remember that I’m a Mexican, and that I owe my success to Mexico and the education I got in Mexico.”

Kim’s family has lived in Mexico since his Korean grandparents went there in 1905 to work on a Yucatan cotton plantation.

Also among those Korean pioneers was the maternal grandmother of Samuel Mark, 44, assistant vice president of civic and community relations at USC, who came to the United States from Cuba when he was 10. A longtime Latino activist,43he started the Office of Hispanic Programs at USC and was knighted by King Juan Carlos I of Spain for his contributions to Latino culture in California.

“I am Hispanic even though my ancestry is Asian. Many people think that Hispanic is a race, like black or white. Of course it’s not, we are of all races,” Mark said.

Third-generation Asian Latinos such as Kim and Mark are the legacy of Asian immigration to Latin America that began when the African slave trade ended in the late 19th Century. Thousands of Japanese were taken to Brazil as contract laborers to pick coffee, and nearly 125,000 Chinese went to Cuba’s sugar plantations from 1848 to 1874.

Today, there are 1.1 million ethnic Japanese in Brazil, the largest Japanese population outside of Japan.

In some ways, Asians fared better in South America than the United States.

Brazil has had four Asian Cabinet members, and Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is a descendant of Japanese immigrants.

Latin America was also open to Asians when the Chinese exclusion act of 1882 and the National Origins Act of 1924 kept them out of the United States.

Additionally, Asian immigrants could become citizens in several Latin countries, a right they did not have in this country until 1952.

Their success in this century, however, followed brutal conditions for many during the first wave of immigration in the 1800s. More than 16,000 Chinese laborers died en route to Cuba from 1848 to 1874. Many were whipped and some were kept in bamboo cages.

Jorge Kim’s grandparents found that when they left the cotton fields to find work in cities outside the Yucatan they had learned the wrong language. “They worked in the fields with Mayans, and learned that language instead of Spanish. They thought everyone in Mexico spoke Mayan.”

Unable to get by in Spanish-speaking states, they returned to the Yucatan to work and study Spanish until they were ready to move on. Today, Kim’s family owns a 2,000-acre cattle ranch in Oaxaca.

Kim’s and Mark’s grandparents were among 1,000 Koreans who went to Yucatan at the turn of the century, recruited by labor agents who went to Korea to find field workers for plantations in Mexico and Hawaii.

From Yucatan, Mark’s maternal grandparents went on to Cuba. His paternal grandfather, a Presbyterian minister who published a Chinese newspaper in Havana, arrived in Cuba from China in the 1920s.

Low’s grandfather was one who had hoped to come to the United States, but settled for Nicaragua.

Leaving his family behind in southern China, he got a job in a Chinese-owned store in the Nicaraguan coastal city of Bluefields. When he saved enough to start his own general store, he found a most promising location: the gold-mining town of Bonanza.

The town lived up to its name. The store did well enough to prompt Low’s father to immigrate from China in 1948 to take it over. But fear of a backlash against immigrants and business owners after the Sandinista revolution in 1979 led the family to Los Angeles.

Although Chinese and Japanese had gone to Latin America in large numbers since the 19th Century, large-scale Korean immigration began in the 1960s.

Until the late 1960s, the United States had country-based immigration quotas that restricted the number of Koreans who were eligible to enter. But sparsely populated South American countries sought immigrants. Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia took large numbers of immigrants through agreements with the Korean government.

Many of the Koreans were college-educated, and some had enough savings to start small businesses. By the 1980s, there were large Korean communities in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires.

Many Koreans who owned businesses began to leave during the economic downturn in the late 1980s, but they did not return to the fast-growing economy of Korea. Many chose instead to come to Los Angeles, the capital of Korean America.

“After living in Brazil I became more Western. It would be too hard for me to adapt to life in Korea, but the U.S. is closer to Brazil,” said Gye Sung Na, 49, who lived in Sao Paulo for 15 years before coming to Los Angeles in 1989.

Another lure was the growing network of Brazilians among Los Angeles’ Koreans. Na owns a wholesale clothing store in the garment district, just as he did in Sao Paulo. Many of the stores on his block of Santee Street are owned by other Koreans who had stores near his former one in Sao Paulo’s garment district.

About 400 Korean families from Brazil, nearly all of them in the garment business, recently formed a social group called Club Paulista, named after Sao Paulo. Members often work together on business ventures, and also hold golf tournaments and other social activities.

Asians from South America are also enrolling in large numbers at local colleges. Samuel Mark has noticed that upper-level Spanish literature classes at USC now typically have several Asian students, including Chinese and Koreans from Paraguay and Peru.

Many students who come to Los Angeles after attending high school in Latin America also go through an Asian cultural awakening. “I learned to be Korean in L.A.,” said Brazilian-born Daniel Lee.

A recent USC graduate who came to the United States on a college soccer scholarship, Lee had always thought of himself as Brazilian until he went to work for a Korean Brazilian garment manufacturer. His ability to speak Korean improved, and he now enjoys going to coffee shops and restaurants in Koreatown.

When his parents visited from Sao Paulo, he impressed them by speaking Korean and ordering unusual dishes at a Korean restaurant, which he wasn’t able to do before coming to Los Angeles.

Saeill Kim, who came from Argentina at 17, learned to speak Korean in a class at UC San Diego. In Los Angeles, he became active in a Korean church.

His ties in the Korean community paid off in 1989, when he graduated from college at the start of the recession. Unable to find work as an engineer, Kim was hired by a Korean-owned building supply company that needed him to work with their clients, who were mostly Argentine contractors.

Kim’s three younger siblings reflect the variations in identity that can exist in a single family. He and one of his sisters are active in their Koreatown church and socialize mainly with Koreans.

His younger brother and another sister, who is dating a Mexican American, feel a stronger pull toward their Latino side. Their cousins still in Argentina consider themselves Argentines and plan to live the rest of their lives there.

Although he now considers himself a Korean American, Saeill Kim said his upbringing in Argentina will continue to be important to him. “I’d prefer to marry a Korean,” he said, “but it would be great if she speaks Spanish. I want to continue to speak Spanish at home.”

* IN VOICES

As an Asian-Latino, Samuel Mark represents a unique hybrid that has blended naturally into Los Angeles’ urban formula. “The good aspect of this is that you have a certain distance and objectivity, a readiness to not be judgmental and to be more accepting of differences,” says Mark. Page 18

ON THE COVER

A frequently overlooked segment of Latin American immigration to the United States is aptly represented by Bianco Min, a Brazilian Korean. Min, seen with some examples of his Brazilian art collection in his Los Angeles apartment, is one of an estimated 100,000 Asian Latinos now living in California.

The group has found a particularly welcome destination in the increasingly multicultural environment that is Los Angeles, home to about 12,000 Asian Latinos, according to 1990 census figures.