Arts, Popular Culture, and Chinese Migration in Spain. Dialectics of the Incorporation

This paper discusses how the Chinese origin people in Spain it is present and active in the Arts and popular culture of the country. Besides that only very recently the Chinese population volume is significant in Spain, since the very beginning  of his presence the art and popular culture have been a way for the Chinese incorporation to the Spanish society: circus, acrobats, painters; and very soon it also developed another phenomenon as some of the Spaniard magicians adopted Chinese names for their presentation into the public. This kind of two ways incorporation  is still at work.

In this paper we will analyze how the Spanish arts and popular culture use the “Chinese” and  how  they are incorporated to the mainstream as well as to the marginal society. At the same time, Chinese in Spain are agents/actors/producers of arts and popular culture that interplay with the rest of the society showing an incorporation dimension where the class level is also at play. This dialectics of the incorporation will be analyzed through  different  artists and creators’ cases studies.