The re‐sinification of San José's Chinatown: Multiple Chinas in Costa Rica

The Costa Rican Chinatown inaugurated in 2012 as a project of the San José mayor, is generally agreed to have been a failure, neither able to maintain Chinese businesses nor to draw new local consumers or foreign tourists. Since 2021, however, the district has rebounded in ways that accentuate changing Chinese cultural politics. Through the notion of re‐sinification, this article highlights both the growing ownership of the district by local and migrant Chinese entrepreneurs and the replacement of traditional Orientalist cultural forms by more cosmopolitan expressions of pan‐Asian culture and Chinese nationalism. The district's evolution illustrates how local Chinese community members negotiate multiple Chinas in Central America and highlights their relationship to an ascendant Global China, changing both the meaning and value of Chineseness as a site of urban development.