The first Asian Argentines were Filipinos, who were fellow subjects under Spanish colonization. Eventually, the Filipinos joined the Argentines in the
Argentine War of Independence. Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr. in his paper “Manilamen and seafaring: Engaging the Maritime World beyond the Spanish Realm” states that during the war, an Argentine of French descent, Hypolite Bouchard, who was a privateer for the Argentine Army who laid siege to
Monterey, Californina, had in his second ship, the
Santa Rosa, which was captained by the American Peter Corney, a multiethnic crew that included Filipinos. Mercene, who wrote the book “Manila Men,” proposes that those Manilamen were recruited in San Blas, an alternative port to
Acapulco, Mexico, where several Filipinos had settled during the Manila-Acapulco
galleon trade era. In the 19th century, Argentina saw a wave of West Asian immigrants, particularly from
Lebanon and
Syria, which were then provinces of the
Ottoman Empire because of the
1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus. East Asian immigrants, particularly the
Japanese came largely from
Okinawa Prefecture in small numbers during the early 20th century. The overthrow of
Juan Perón in 1955 precipitated a long period of unrest and economic instability that stemmed Japanese immigration after 1960. The second wave consisted primarily of
Korean entrepreneurs, settling in
Buenos Aires during the 1960s, and the third wave was mostly composed of Chinese entrepreneurs, who settled in Buenos Aires during the 1990s. By the later half of the 20th century, Asian Argentines were active in politics, an example of a political party being a special
Unidad Básica (
Peronist) party office under the name
Unión de Residentes Taiwaneses Justicialistas ("Union of Justicialist
Taiwanese Residents) at the heart of
Buenos Aires's Chinatown Arribeños & Mendoza. This branch later closed, presumably as assimilation continued, while a regular
Unidad Básica opened across the street. == Society ==