Chinese communities resident in Mexico and Cuba face a common problem: their dealings with business partners in China are perceived as a threat to national interests. In Mexico this concern emanates from manufacturers unable to compete with Chinese imports, and is evident in antagonistic news media and acts of hostility against Chinese businesses. In Cuba it stems from the state's stewardship over economic sovereignty, and is evident in efforts to assimilate Havana's Chinatown and its entrenched informal sector into a centralized scheme of commercial regulation. Interviews with policy makers, local officials and Chinese entrepreneurs indicate that the “rationalization” of Chinese ethnic allegiances for the greater public good is a critical step towards alleviating tensions. I conclude that both countries can leverage benefits from overseas Chinese communities, but to do so they must support their entrepreneurial activities, harness their networks to promote targeted imports and exports, and develop more culturally sensitive regulations.

This paper considers a particular debate in the scholarly literature on ethnicity in the United States regarding ethnic entrepreneurship which has come to be known as the ‘ethnic enclave economy hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, ethnic enterprises and their workers benefit from clustering. The current consensus seems to be that the hypothesis is both redundant and misguided. In denying this critique, this paper draws on Lefebvre's theorisation of space and on industrial cluster and actor network theories to argue that the dominant interpretation of the notion of an enclave has been misconceived. Hence the need is to begin to theorise what ethnic enclave economies really are, beyond the spatial metaphor in which the hypothesis was first grounded, in order to interrogate generative processes of ethnic business formation.