Cantonese Culture in the Americas

Introduction

Since the seventeenth century, hundreds of thousands of Cantonese migrants from Guangdong’s coastal region have crossed the South China Sea and the Pacific through commerce, contract labor, education, and family reunification. They moved back and forth among Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and North America.

This project shifts the focus from a group of Guangdong people to a broader question: how Cantonese culture has been carried abroad, transformed, and transmitted across generations. Through oral histories, visual archives, and digital humanities methods, this project documents cultural survival, migration, and memory.