Brazil-China Connections: the chinese migration in downtown São Paulo

Abstract

From the economic opening of China in 1979 until these days, a socioeconomic dynamics has been forming, linking wholesale centers between China and Brazil through trade flows and migratory mobilities. These are routes that supply popular markets and involve a constant movement of people, especially between São Paulo and the cities of Guangzhou and Yiwu. This article discusses the establishment of Chinese migrants in the popular trade of downtown São Paulo, through galleries and the "dawn market" located in the neighborhood of Brás and on a street called 25 de março – currently, the country's largest distributor of goods imported directly from China. It is not only a question of locating a migratory process in space, but of how it affects the restructuring of places by promoting the articulation of transnational socioeconomic dynamics.