The Land of Humans and the Diasporic Imaginary

Benjamin Han, “The Land of Humans and the Diasporic Imaginary,” The 7^th World Humanities Forum, November 8-10, 2023, Busan, Korea.

Abstract: One of the earliest memories of Latin America in the South Korean cultural imaginary is closely intertwined with the history of the Korean migration to Mexico. In 1905, Ilford, a British ship carrying approximately 1,033 Koreans left the port of Incheon for Mexico, making its arrival in Yucatán. The Koreans arrived in Mexico as contractual laborers to work on henequen plantations that thrived in response to the growing demand for hard fibers across the globe since the late 1870s. Many of the Korean laborers came to a foreign nation with the hope to return to their homeland after their contract ended only to discover that their nation-state has vanished under the Japanese colonial rule. As a result, when the four-year labor contract ended for many Korean workers, many of them stayed in Mexico while others remigrated to Cuba and the United States in search of better economic opportunities. While this history of the global Korean diaspora has been narrated in films and novels in the last few decades, in 1994, the Korean Broadcasting Station (KBS), one of the three terrestrial broadcasting networks in Korea, broadcast a historical TV drama based on the real-life story of Juanita Kim (Kim Hŭngsun), one of the first members of the Korean diaspora in Mexico. This paper examines how The Land of Humans as a historical TV drama illuminates Korea’s reckoning with the world through the embrace of the global diaspora in Latin America in its attempt to claim diasporic subjectivities as an intrinsic part of hanminjok (Korean people) and nationalism shaping modernity. However, in its desire to claim the voices and subjectivities of the Korean diaspora in Mexico, the TV drama not only constructs them as the Other but also valorizes the Korean American diasporic experience and subjectivity in the transpacific relation between Korea and Latin America. I further problematize how the historical drama depicts the reckoning process through the United States as a referent and destination site for the Korean diaspora in Mexico to find legibility.