CESR Speaker Series: Professor Lok Siu

Chifas, or Peruvian Chinese food and restaurants, are ubiquitous throughout South America, a region with the largest population of ethnic Chinese in the American hemisphere. They first
emerged in the second half of the 1800s to service Chinese workers who settled in Lima. As chifas gained widespread popularity, they proliferated throughout neighborhoods and cities. Over time, the food served in chifas morphed and shifted according to local tastes, spices, and food preferences. Cultural proximity and intimacy among Chinese, Black, indigenous, and mestizo Peruvians helped generate new dishes. Today, chifas are considered an important part of Peru’s national cuisine. This talk examines the development and transformation of Chifas in order to illustrate one distinctive culinary formation—chifas in Peru—within the broader global circuit of Chinese foodways.
Lok Siu is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Associate Vice Chancellor of Research at UC Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist with expertise in diaspora, transnational migration, belonging and citizenship, food, ethnography, and hemispheric Asian American studies, she is an award-winning author of several books, including, most recently, Chinese Diaspora: Its Development in Global Perspective (2021), and the forthcoming Worlding Latin Asian: Cultural Intimacies in Food, Art, and Politics (Duke U. Press).