Immigration
Although information about when the Chinese first arrived in Nicaragua is scarce, Fernando Centeno Chiong, a Nicaraguan historian, journalist and university professor of Chinese descent, published an article in La Prensa about the presence of the Chinese. Chiong wrote that there are some references that exist stating that the Chinese first arrived in Nicaragua in the mid-19th century, most notably during the California Gold Rush, in which people from all over the world traveled to California to mine for gold, tens of thousands of whom travelled by steamboats operated by the Accessory Transit Company, whose director was Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. The steamboats' course went up the San Juan River, a site that had been proposed for the Nicaragua Canal, Chiong wrote:
"...It is possible that between the thousands of passengers who made that passage there were Chinese citizens who remained in Nicaragua, attracted by the natural beauty and the hospitality of a country that continues maintaining those same characteristics to the immigrants of different nationalities that have already made Nicaragua their second mother country."
— Fernando Centeno Chiong
During that time, there were restrictions that prohibited the entrance of Asian citizens in the country, in spite of which, many of them defied the prohibition and settled in what is thought to have been the first Chinese presence in the American continent, perhaps before the arrival of these citizens to Peru or Panama.
Shortly after World War II, which began in 1939 and ended in 1945, large quantities of Chinese began arriving in Nicaragua, but during the 1979 Sandinista revolution, many fled to nearby Honduras, Costa Rica, and the USA.
Read more about this topic: Chinese Nicaraguan
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