To a large extent, China’s rise to economic dominance and deepening political influence in Latin America has been a quiet affair.

Even the United States – first preoccupied with wars in the Middle East and then turning inward to the tune of “America First” – seemed to hardly notice over the past two decades as its chief economic competitor and geopolitical rival dethroned Uncle Sam as top trading partner and go-to investor in much of his own backyard. At least until recently.

But for Miriam Arce Pinta, China’s arrival in her picturesque fishing village on Peru’s Pacific coast has been anything but tranquil. 

More like a bang.

“The frequent construction blasts rattle our houses, leave cracks in the walls, and put everyone on edge,” says Ms. Arce, a lifelong Chancay resident and artist who has become the face of local opposition to China’s local megaport project.

When completed, the mammoth installation will transform the quaint fishing harbor and resort town, with its key resting spot for migrating bird species, into a bustling beachhead. It will become a hub for exporting the region’s prized raw materials and food back to China and importing Chinese products into South America.

It will certainly change the view from Ms. Arce’s hillside home, which might have inspired Monet or Matisse: Close-knit houses on slopes cascade down to a beach where an armada of pastel-hued skiffs jostles for space with food carts shaded by umbrellas. Two old piers with whitewashed railings carry tourists out over the placid bay, while amateur anglers cast lines into the surf. 

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Miriam Arce Pinta, an artist and activist, stands near a site in Chancay, Peru, where China is building a megaport to expand trade with the region. She opposes the project.

The adjacent commercial fishing pier is mostly quiet, many of the local boat captains having accepted buyouts from the port builders or cash incentives to move elsewhere. Already, construction has put extensive tracts of the sea off-limits to Chancay’s fishing fleets. 

“As if the explosions at all hours weren’t enough, the big trucks transporting earth to the new roads and beachfront they are constructing operate around the clock in day and night shifts,” Ms. Arce says. “It’s constant noise, and the trucks leave an inescapable dust in what before was refreshing sea air.”    

She and the band of unhappy residents, environmentalists, and local merchants she has galvanized to oppose the megaport have become a minor nuisance to Cosco Shipping, the Chinese state-owned company behind the project.

But even Ms. Arce acknowledges that the prospects for halting the operation are dim. The Peruvian government is keen to see the megaport completed, and such trade infrastructure is considered crucial to Beijing.

“The Chancay port is a prime example of how China seeks to secure, from end to end, the supply chains that underpin its economic growth and its aspirations to upgrade its economy,” says Margaret Myers, director of the Asia & Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.

At the same time, if China is hearing any cries from Latin America, it’s much more the entreaties of governments and companies from São Paulo to Panama City that all want the Asian colossus to come in: They’re eager to have Beijing assist the region in modernizing its infrastructure and diversifying its economy. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A briny crust covers Chile’s largest salt flats, Salar de Atacama, which is mined for lithium and other minerals.

And just as it has done in Africa and Central and Southeast Asia, China has been eager to fill a void left in Latin America by the hemisphere’s declining and distracted superpower to the north.

In a matter of a few years, China has supplanted the U.S. as the top trading partner for all of South America except Colombia, Ecuador, and Paraguay – and trends suggest those countries could soon follow. A similar pattern is emerging in Central America and the Caribbean, except for Mexico. 

Twenty countries have joined Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, underscoring China’s rising challenge to the U.S. as Latin America’s No. 1 source of foreign investment. And in recent months, one new president after the other has taken office pledging to prioritize economic and even political relations with China – sometimes as a pointed rebuff to the U.S.

In February Argentine President Alberto Fernández raised eyebrows in Washington when he was one of the few world leaders – along with Ecuador’s Guillermo Lasso – to travel to Beijing for the Olympic Games. 

Mr. Fernández used the occasion to sign up Argentina for the Belt and Road Initiative and to deepen China’s involvement in Argentina’s electrical power industry – including nuclear plants. Accords were penned strengthening Argentina’s place as an exporter of food products, from soybeans to beef, to China.

Karen Norris/Staff

Beijing is also zeroing in on South America’s reserves of rare earth and other minerals required for high-tech industries – including the “white gold” of the future, lithium. China is increasingly active in the “Lithium Triangle” made up of Argentina, Bolivia, and above all, Chile.

All of this economic activity has inevitably led to closer political and even security ties, with China enticing Latin America’s growing number of leftist-led governments with talk of mutually beneficial “south-south relations.”

One result: A region that was once one of the world’s friendliest toward Taiwan has shifted toward Beijing. Several countries have recently decided to recognize the People’s Republic of China, instead of Taiwan, as Nicaragua did in December.  

For some experts on Latin America, it is no coincidence that the Biden administration has invited the hemisphere’s democracies to the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles June 6-10 – only the second time the U.S. is hosting the event since the inaugural summit in Miami in 1994.

But if Washington has any thoughts of using the gathering to slow China’s rise in the region, some Latin America specialists have a message: Don’t bother. It’s too late. 

“Many countries – including Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay – now export more to China than to the U.S. and the European Union combined, while economic relations in many cases have matured beyond natural resource exports to infrastructure development and other investment,” says Jorge Heine, a former Chilean ambassador to Beijing who is now a research professor specializing in the international politics of the Global South at Boston University. “These are countries that need the trade. They need modern infrastructure. They don’t see the U.S. very active in these roles, so they’re not about to push the Chinese back.”

Across Chile’s Atacama Desert, where vast salt flats hug the base of the Andes Mountains, checkerboards of electric yellow, aquamarine, and lizard green salt ponds garishly announce the presence of Chile’s lithium mining operations.

Surrounded by a vast moonscape that at first seems lifeless – the sudden movement of a pair of guanacos off in the salt flats suggests otherwise – the lakes offer an astounding scene: It could be a science fiction setting of futuristic farms on some distant planet producing psychedelic-hued liquid nutrition for humans back on Earth.

Yet while Chile’s lithium ponds may indeed be about future energy sources, their origins are in distant geological epochs. Countless millennia of Andes erosion have left vast deposits of lithium in the soupy brines deep below the salt flats. The viscous matter is pumped up and spread across the ponds to evaporate in the intense desert sun. This concentrates the salts that contain potassium for producing fertilizers – and lithium. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A mining company worker measures the evaporation in a salt pond in remote northern Chile. It is part of the process of extracting lithium, a key component of batteries that power everything from cellphones

There are no phalanxes of headlamp-clad miners at these operations. Instead, workers in protective gear tend the ponds and gauge the brines for the right concentration of elements. When a worker launches a rowboat out into a lemon-colored lake to take depth measurements, the scene is reminiscent of the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”: The only things missing are tangerine trees and marmalade skies.  

The workers process the salts and extract the lithium for export – mostly to China and South Korea, where it is an essential component in the batteries that power everything from cellphones to electric cars. Chile is the world’s second-largest exporter of lithium after Australia, and its deposits make it a prime investment target for China.

In 2018, the Chinese company Tianqi bought a 24% stake in the Santiago-based SQM mining and fertilizer corporation, Chile’s second-largest producer of lithium after the American company Albemarle. In January, the Chinese electric vehicle company BYD won a contract to produce 80,000 metric tons of lithium over 20 years, despite the objections of then-President-elect Gabriel Boric.

The socialist Mr. Boric, who took office in April, had called on the outgoing conservative government to suspend awarding new lithium and other mining contracts to allow his government to develop new resource extraction policies. Mr. Boric wants to promote more domestic uses of the country’s mineral wealth – something past governments have attempted, with little success.

Yet despite cries of “China, hands off our lithium!” from leftist voices in Santiago and some Indigenous groups in Atacama, China’s growing role in Chile’s industry seems to raise few alarms.

“I haven’t seen any pressure from our Chinese investors to lower our standards or change our focus on sustainability, but it’s negligible the influence Tianqi could have in that way even if they wanted to,” says Alejandro Bucher, vice president for community relations at SQM’s Atacama operations.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A salt pond, tinted yellow by minerals in the brine, slowly evaporates in the desert sun in Chile – part of the process to extract lithium and other elements from the barren landscape. The operation is run by SQM, a Santiago-based mining and fertilizer company that is 20% owned by the Chinese

SQM was hampered in the past with a less-than-stellar reputation for maintaining environmental standards and working with local communities, Mr. Bucher acknowledges. But he says the company has done a turnabout in recent years, now implementing environmental standards above those required by the Chilean government and working closely with local Indigenous communities on water, housing, and employment issues.

“Our Chinese investors came in after we set our new course, so it seems they are on board with the shift to sustainability and transparency,” he says. 

For many countries, the common description of the region’s big new player is that of an economic giant pursuing its own interests, a partner that is more pragmatic than ideological. They depict China as less interventionist in national affairs than the U.S. was when it dominated the region.

“The idea we are hearing more now – that China poses more risks to us than other big powers – is not convincing to me,” says Andrés Rebolledo, a Chilean trade diplomat who helped negotiate free trade accords with both the U.S. and China. “My perspective is that as such a small part of the global economy, a country like Chile has to trade with everyone while understanding that the big economic powers are all going to defend their interests and act like the bigger partner.”

“My advice for Chile and Latin America is the same,” Ambassador Rebolledo says. “Be the sweethearts of everybody, but married to no one.”      

Still, as China’s influence grows, that harmless portrait is being challenged.

A recent “China in the World” study released by Chile’s Instituto Desafíos de la Democracia and the Taiwan-based Doublethink Lab finds that China is becoming more assertive in regional affairs. Moreover, the report places Chile among the world’s top 15 countries most influenced by China – not just economically but also politically. 

A debate is brewing in academic and diplomatic circles about Beijing’s deepening footprint, too. “What I’m seeing are two groups that interpret the growing influence of China from two different and increasingly distinct perspectives: one group that says China’s only interest is our natural resources and not our development, and which is growing more suspicious and distrustful of China; and another group that responds to China’s rising influence with a ‘So what?’ and says if we want value-added economies, that’s our job and not China’s responsibility,” says Dorotea López Giral, director of the University of Chile’s Institute of International Studies.         

Perhaps not surprisingly, Dr. López says, the first group is more attached to the U.S., is more likely to invoke values of democracy and free markets and human rights in discussions of China, and is more often from the old guard of Chilean academia and diplomacy. The second group, she says, is more pragmatic, prefers a foreign policy “autonomous” from any great power, and is generally younger.

And she believes the second group is prevailing. “It used to be that the young rising academics all sought scholarships to the U.S., but we don’t even have a U.S. studies center anymore. We had to close it,” says Dr. López, noting that a China studies program was established two years ago.

“Now the Chinese are offering 20,000 scholarships ... and everyone wants to go to China,” she adds. “For China we are the cool friend, and Chilean students are responding to that.” 

When China announced plans to build a series of megafarms for pigs in Argentina’s northern Chaco region, the provincial governor heralded the project. He saw it as an opportunity for an impoverished Chaco to dip into the enticing and growing pool of Chinese investments in Argentina and Latin America.

After all, Argentina had already been supplying China with agricultural goods – soybeans beginning in the 1990s, then beef for a growing middle class, and even wines for diversifying Chinese palates. Shipping pork to China would be no different. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Pigs ready for sale jostle at La Felicidad farm in Resistencia, Argentina. While pig farming isn’t widespread in Chaco, the provincial government is urging the Chinese to invest in big new operations.

If anything, the pig farms offered even greater promise, officials argued. The operations would bring value-added industries to underdeveloped Chaco in the form of skilled butchering and state-of-the-art packaging, freezing, and transport.

But not everyone shares the governor’s enthusiasm. A coalition of opponents quickly formed among environmentalists, critics of neoliberal economics, and Indigenous groups. Questioning the safety and long-term viability of such intensive farming, critics note that if China is looking to produce pork far from home, it is because of a 2018-19 African swine fever outbreak that forced the country to destroy half of its national pig herd and turn to expensive imports. Critics contend the megafarms risk repeating such public health disasters in Chaco.

Beyond that, opponents say it is no mere coincidence that China chose Chaco – a marginalized region hungry for economic development – for the farms.    

“Argentina is in a very deep economic crisis – so already at a national level, any promise of jobs and dollars, they will go with it,” says Enrique Viale, a prominent environmental lawyer in Buenos Aires. “Chaco is even more desperate for investment, with the added advantage for some investors of being outside the national spotlight where it might be easier to try cutting corners on standards.”

Indeed, for some experts, it’s the economic fragility of so many Latin American countries that partially explains China’s growing presence in the region.

“In Argentina, it’s the country’s weakness that leads to China being the increasingly important partner,” says Juan Luis Bour, chief economist at the Foundation for Latin American Economic Research in Buenos Aires. “Argentina needs loans to build dams and roads and other infrastructure, but after decades of financial crises it has no international credit. So it turns to the only lender out there, China, even if it has to accept terms that are substantially in the lender’s interest.”

This imbalance can leave a country like Argentina with little leverage. One example Professor Bour cites is a Chinese satellite-
tracking station built in a remote part of Patagonia under favorable terms to China. Some worry that Beijing could be using the facility for spying and surveillance activities.

“The real problem is the combination of the Chinese state and Chinese companies makes their style very predatory,” says Evan Ellis, Latin America research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. “You can benefit from a predatory partner, but you have to be on top of your game, and that’s much harder if you’re the much weaker partner.”

At the Qom Indigenous reserve in Espinillo, a small outpost on the edge of Chaco’s Impenetrable region – a thick, semiarid forest of spiny trees and prickly bushes – most residents have heard the rumors about Chinese investments in their lands. Many don’t like it.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Qom community leader Angel Meza and his sister Lucia Meza are dubious of China underwriting big agricultural projects in their autonomous area of Argentina’s Chaco province.

“The worst part is that we started hearing about big pig farms and we saw the picture of the town administrator with visiting Chinese people, but we could never get a straight story,” says Angel Meza, a Qom leader who favors jobs for local youth but is dubious of big projects on Indigenous lands. “We have held assemblies to discuss these rumors about the Chinese coming here, but we have no solid information.”

Outside town, Horacio Garcia sits in the shade on his family’s 120-acre plot and explains why he worries about talk of Chinese investment in the area.

“I never thought too much about the pig farms, but then we heard the Chinese might put in big citrus groves, and that worried me because my neighbors say they would favor that kind of thing,” he says. “It would be hard to stand up to big investors like the Chinese.”

In Resistencia, Chaco’s capital, provincial officials believe concerns over the proposed pig farms have been overblown. They insist opposition to Chinese investment is primarily from local forces who would be against any change.

“We are no longer talking about megafarms, but smaller operations with 600 or 1,000 sows, a very safe and sanitary option,” says Sebastián Bravo, undersecretary for livestock affairs. Noting Chaco has the technical know-how and local feed production to develop the farms and create thousands of jobs, he adds, “The fact it’s the Chinese behind the project makes no difference. It could be Europeans or anyone else, and we would insist on the same high standards to go forward.”

Just outside town at the 370-acre La Felicidad farm, Eduardo Corcia shows off his 250-mother-pig operation. He has a big personality and pivots easily from the micro of the proposed Chaco pig farms to the macro of China’s investment in Latin America.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

“The problem we face in Argentina is that the Americans aren’t around, but the Chinese are.” Says Eduardo Corcia, owner of a pig farm in Resistencia, Argentina

“[People] talk of local pork producers teaming up with these new farms, but I’m not sure it makes much sense to me,” he says. “I’d be afraid I’d be left with a lot of excess production capacity once the Chinese get their domestic production back on track.”

Despite that, Mr. Corcia says he understands the need for significant foreign investment in infrastructure and value-added enterprises if Chaco, Argentina, and even Latin America are to boost prosperity. 

“I like the idea of foreign business partners, why not?” says the doctor-turned-farmer, who is expanding his operation to include on-site butchering and a refrigeration plant. “But would I want to go in with the Chinese? I don’t know; they have their ways that are different.”

Mr. Corcia says he’d be more comfortable working with Americans, and he senses that’s probably true of many Argentines. “The problem we face in Argentina is that the Americans aren’t around, but the Chinese are,” he says. 

And as it goes in much of life, he adds, you dance with those who show up at your party.

Zack Koscielny has only been in charge of livestock and crops for four years, but the freckled farmer has already become accustomed to successive dry spells, including one last year that put large swaths of the Canadian prairies in exceptional drought.

Then, this season, Manitoba was hit by a major spring blizzard and several Colorado lows that have caused flooding in the Red River Valley and brought unseasonably cold, damp weather that has delayed planting across the province. 

“The weather’s been crazy,” says Mr. Koscielny on a chilly spring day on the fields of Green Beach Farm in Strathclair, three hours northwest of Winnipeg.

The uncertainty would be enough to deter most starting out. But Mr. Koscielny instead has decided to reimagine his family’s fourth-generation farm into something different in the prairies. Mimicking native prairie, his fields look “messy” as he intercrops instead of planting the tidy single crop fields of wheat and canola of his childhood. He puts his pigs and chickens out on the pasture and arranges for calves to be born outdoors, later in the season and far from a barn. It’s all an effort to restore the soil health here to buffer against the wild swings in weather – and the pessimism that prevails when it comes to the climate.

“It seems like a constant challenge with the weather. But I have a hard time blaming Mother Nature for it. That’s her job. And it’s our job to deal with it,” he says, adjusting his baseball cap as he rotates his two dozen yearlings to a new pasture to avoid overgrazing. “Instead of all this ‘woe is me’ stuff, I think farmers have such an opportunity if they manage land properly and stop fighting Mother Nature.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Zack Koscielny and his sister, Emma-Jean, tag a newborn calf while its mother watches, on May 9, 2022, in Strathclair, Manitoba. Regenerative agriculture benefits the environment while building resiliency in the system. Mr. Koscielny says he tries to work with Mother Nature.

Mr. Koscielny’s approach is part of a global movement known as “regenerative agriculture,” a sweeping term that entails the many ways farmers can restore and nourish ecosystems while also growing food. For years now, a small but increasing number of producers have been turning away from the traditional, linear supply chain approach to agriculture in favor of the way Mr. Koscielny is farming, using techniques such as rotational grazing, cover cropping, or even growing trees in pastureland. 

Supporters say this form of agriculture leads to both better products and healthier soils. It also, according to a growing body of research, helps farmers both fight climate change and adapt to the extreme weather events caused by it.

Big stakes for global climate

Although it’s tricky to calculate exact numbers, groups such as Project Drawdown estimate that agriculture and land use are responsible for about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse emissions. And in Canada and the United States, government agencies put the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions caused by agriculture alone at around 10% – a figure advocates say may be conservative. Regenerative practices, on the other hand, can turn agriculture into a climate solution, in part by storing more carbon in the soil. Project Drawdown, for instance, estimated that regenerative agriculture could have a greater climate solution impact than either electric cars or geothermal heating.

But as important to Mr. Koscielny and his fellow farmers is how it can help protect against climate extremes. Thanks to everything from healthier bacteria and microbes within the soil ecosystem to deeper root systems, land tended by regenerative agriculture practices has the ability to hold more water. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A white calf and its mother. Calving season at the Koscielny farm is later than what's typical on other farms – in the spring – so the calves are born outdoors instead of in a barn.

“People who are doing regenerative practices are experiencing much lower drought impacts because they have soils that are better at retaining moisture overall,” says Cathy Day, climate policy coordinator for the National Sustainable Agriculture Commission in Washington.

And that matters here.

The prairies, home to 80% of Canada’s farmland, have grappled with drought for centuries. But scientists predict even drier conditions – alongside the kind of flooding that has put farms under water in southern Manitoba this spring – as a new norm in prairie life. This year, a report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change zeroed in on the world’s agricultural systems, saying that global warming is already threatening food sources around the world, and that extreme weather will be the new normal for farmers.

The risk to North American topsoil

For farms across the North American Wheat Belt, the drought-flood cycle is particularly damaging. Parched, powdery soil does not absorb water quickly, so the water from torrential rains tends to rush across the surface, carrying even more topsoil away. That’s what has happened in the American Midwest over recent years, where farmers accustomed to predictable rainfall patterns have suffered ruined fields and crops from both dry spells and extreme rains. 

Here in Manitoba, last year’s drought caused several municipalities to declare agricultural disaster in the prairies. Farmer Larry Wegner in Virden, Manitoba, says he had to plan for raising fewer cattle to have enough forage through the winter, and he expects to face such decisions more frequently. “In the prairies we’re going to see milder weather, so more water running in wintertime, which is rare for this part of the world. And we’re going to see drier summers. So we have to start thinking, how do I start planning ahead for that to make it better?”

Those questions will be centerstage at the Manitoba Forage & Grassland Association conference in November on regenerative agriculture – the fifth they’ll have held. The meeting will bring in experts to discuss ways to improve soil health so that the ground holds more water in periods of heavy rainfall, and so there are reserves from wetlands in times of drought. 

The principles behind regenerative agriculture date back centuries, to the way Indigenous peoples grew food before industrial agriculture. But it can be hard for farmers to transform their methods, says Brenda Tjaden, founder of the Manitoba consultancy Sustainable Grain. Farmers’ fields might look “messier,” she says. There is currently no certification like a green label, since regenerative agricultural practices is a systems-based approach to land management so is harder to measure. “It doesn’t follow a particular regime,” she says. “Are there waterways close by? Are there any grasslands? Are there any trees in the vicinity?”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Zack Koscielny has lunch, which includes garden-fresh salsa and purple potato and squash soups, with his mom, Karen Gamey-Koscielny, and dad, Jason Koscielny, on May 9, 2022, in Strathclair, Manitoba.

Indeed, one of the characteristics of regenerative agriculture is that it is place specific, says Lara Bryant, deputy director for water and agriculture with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Working in harmony with a wet, southeastern U.S. ecosystem is far different from what a farmer would do in the dry Southwest, or the drought- and flood-battered Grain Belt. 

That’s one of the reasons why, in a report her organization released in April, Ms. Bryant recommended increased policy support for regenerative agriculture training and mentorship, as well as increased financial support.

“We need to increase the support to farmers and ranchers at the beginning level,” she says. “And our policies need to not get in the way of regenerative agriculture.”

“Surprised how much progress we’ve made”

Mr. Koscielny grew up ecologically minded. His parents, who farmed part time, were long driven by locally grown food – a lunch spread around their table included garden-fresh salsa and purple potato and squash soups. They’ve watched the farms grow around them and an industry demanding “bigger, bigger, bigger,” says his mother, Karen Gamey-Koscielny, whose family settled this farm in 1919. 

“But if you don’t have good soil, you’ve got nothing,” says her husband, Jason Koscielny. 

Their son Zack says that, when it came to choosing a career after earning a degree in agroecology at the University of Manitoba, he had no intention of going into monoculture-style grain production.

Instead he runs “five quarters,” or 800 acres, that has seen Timothy grass and a variety of vetches return. With big cracks forming on his hills last year, the rains this year are not replenished “by any stretch,” he says. “But we’re just surprised how much progress we’ve made. And even with the dry conditions we’ve added animals every year of the drought.”

Regenerative agriculture, he says, is first off a practical measure to reduce inputs and increase margins. But it also digs deeper. “It’s rewarding to be doing a job that can really be making a big difference on such a huge issue that most people just say, ‘Well, I don’t know how we’ll ever address that,’” he says. “I think we’re front and center as far as having the ability to make change and make the difference.”

Stephanie Hanes contributed to this article from Northampton, Massachusetts.

Joe Giddens/Reuters

Coronation chicken vol-au-vents are served at a reception to celebrate the start of Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee at Sandringham House in Sandringham, England, Feb. 5, 2022. Coronation chicken was invented in 1953 in honor of Elizabeth's ascent to the throne, and includes curry powder among its ingredients.

Alice Grahame still remembers the excitement of eating her first curry as a child, brought back home by her father in thin brown oily bags.

“The flavors were out of this world. There’s something about the smell of spices that gets you stimulated,” says the Londoner, a self-confessed aficionado of Indian food.

Her early experience of curry is commonplace among Britons: going to a takeaway for unattainable spices, or else suffering her mother’s “off the shelf, ready-made jars” of curry sauce.

Nowadays, her spice cupboard is varied with curry regularly cooked at home, ever since a Pakistani friend during her university years taught her the “proper way” of cooking curry and pilau rice.

Ms. Grahame’s trajectory reflects the absorption of new foods – and the societal changes – during Britain’s transition from global empire to postcolonialism, under the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II, now being celebrated in her Platinum Jubilee. One of the key changes during the era is represented by curry, now considered a quintessential national cuisine molded both by English ideas and immigrant diasporas.

“It’s seen in the same breath as fish and chips was,” says food historian and author Lizzie Collingham, who wrote “Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors.” “I’m cautious about labels, but it captures people’s imagination.”

A colonial mix

Elizabeth’s glittering coronation in 1953 ushered in a new era of change almost immediately, with a record 20 million people on television tuning in to see it. The occasion was also marked with the invention of “coronation chicken,” a creamy curry dish served up to feed foreign dignitaries.

Ingredients remained limited, despite wartime rationing coming to an end. Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume created coronation chicken using poached chicken, chopped onions, curry powder, tomato puree, pepper, red wine, and lemon juice.

The recipe, completed with mayonnaise, lightly whipped cream, and dried apricots (or frequently in later variations, mango chutney), made its way into the British gastronomic classic “The Constance Spry Cookery Book” and has since become a classic.

Though coronation chicken is “revolting” to Dr. Collingham, it stands as a marker between the end of the British Empire and an incoming era of postcolonial immigration under the queen’s long reign. 

“It comes from Anglo-Indian cuisine, which is a weird mix. The British in India during the 19th century loved mango chutney. In India you have different relishes in different regions, perhaps sprinkling coconut on curries or adding sultanas. The British, however, would sprinkle all of them together,” she says.

Coronation chicken was an oddity, however, in the postwar period. Curry had fallen out of favor, due to kitchens moving out of basements with the loss of servants and curry cooking being deemed as “quite smelly.”

Curry, through a Victorian lens

British upper classes had dined on curry as far back as the 1600s, but it disappeared in the late 17th century. When Britain grasped control of Bengal via the East India Company, curry reappeared on British tables both at home and abroad.

Over time, Britons adapted versions of their subjects’ dishes suited to their own taste, inventing a standardized curry powder.

“They don’t really understand the sophisticated use of spices in India, too tricky to bring home to Britain – so they simplify it,” says Dr. Collingham. “The Victorians really felt that they made Indian food their own. It was their food, part of the nation. You’ll find Victorian cookery writers saying it was a national British food.”

Evidence of this Anglo-Indian evolution is found on page 77 of a recipe book from 1840, handwritten by a domestic servant by the name of Eleanor Grantham in East Yorkshire in northern England.

Instead of oil, she recommends cooking with beef dripping to create an imitation of curry that Sam Bartle, collections officer at the East Riding Archive, calls “horrible, but edible.”

Ms. Grantham’s curry recipe uses sour apples, milk, sultanas, and, most importantly, curry powder “widely available because of colonial trade links,” says the archivist. “It’s about fusing seasonal ingredients with Indian ingredients, and the start of curry as associated with Britain.”

The arrival of modern curry

Though much has changed since Ms. Grantham’s East Yorkshire recipe, curry continues to play a pivotal role in social life – but now driven by chefs of immigrant origin. East Yorkshire is famous for its “Balti curry” in Bradford, a former industrial city with a high concentration of curry houses largely run by Pakistani and Indian migrants, who make up almost a quarter of Bradford’s population.

But it is the impact of Bangladeshi immigration into Britain during the 1960s, just the second decade of the queen’s reign, that historians credit with popularizing curry as we know it today.

“A food revolution goes hand in hand with immigration in the second and third decade of the queen’s reign,” says Dr. Collingham. “Bangladeshi seamen often worked unpleasant jobs on steamship boiler rooms, and so jumped ship to find work in the U.K.”

Many found jobs in catering, washing plates, before buying bombed-out fish and chips shops and adapting the English dish with curry sauce.

By the 1970s, Bangladeshis pioneered the modern-day curry house, operating a menu of mainstay dishes: chicken korma, dhansak (usually mutton or goat meat), rogan josh (lamb curry), and madras curry (known for packing in heat).

Still, chefs do accommodate the “less tropical palates of locals,” notes former restaurant worker Shahena Begum, a second-generation British Bangladeshi from Huddersfield in northern England. That might mean blending sauces to reduce chunkiness, or adding coconut cream to make it vegan friendly. It’s a contrast to food cooked at home, she says.

Sometimes the changes even have taken her aback, she says: the abundance of sugar added “to suit the Western palate” or the accompaniment of chicken tikka masala by fries, for example.

The new wave

A newer, wealthier wave of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in the 1990s turned up their noses at the creamy curries cooked by their predecessors. Instead, they refocused curry on street food and specializing around regional and cultural cuisines.

Aktar Islam’s Michelin-starred restaurant Opheem cooks food inspired by influences across India. His “experimental approach” garners advanced bookings as one of London’s most recognized places to eat. “There’s a nuanced understanding about Indian-inspired food nowadays and [about] what British curry is,” says Mr. Islam.

Similar high-end, luxury “authentic” restaurants now dominate British cities, attracting a new generation of young Britons accustomed to evolved palates.

Mr. Islam credits this boom on better education of Britain’s postcolonial history and more Britons traveling abroad, thereby granting them an understanding of the “difference between real Indian food and British curry.”

For Ms. Begum, who bridges the gap between the immigrant pioneers embraced in the early years of Queen Elizabeth and a new generation, curry epitomizes change and mass acceptance. 

After years of being made to feel embarrassed for eating curry for dinner at home, she says, “curry, as a national dish, is like a love letter.”

Adael Mejia strides into the lobby of the hotel where he’ll be performing that night wearing a multicolored overcoat made of recycled clothes that goes nearly to his ankles and a ski mask. 

He’s a poet. But he’s also a revolutionary. 

Mr. Mejia, the 19-year-old youth poet laureate of Worcester, Massachusetts, is helping to lead an artistic revival, or revolution, as he puts it, in his postindustrial hometown of 200,000.

He also represents another revolution – one taking place in the world of poetry. The art form young people often associate with dry high school lessons on Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost is becoming more direct and diverse, in both its creators and its influences, and it is, perhaps most saliently, primarily shared and shaped by social media.

“If it wasn’t for social media – if it wasn’t for being able to post myself and people being able to find out about me through their phone – I would be performing to my mom still,” Mr. Mejia says.

Social media has transformed the way millennials and Generation Z discover, consume, and write poetry. Thanks to platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, poetry is now more accessible and more ubiquitous than ever, and it’s driving a resurgence in poetry’s popularity, eliminating barriers to entry for young poets, and changing the art form itself.

“It’s highly shareable,” says Jennifer Benka, president of the Academy of American Poets. “It’s a very accessible art form that has been absolutely aided by the increasing availability of digital devices, and technology, and social media.” 

Twelve percent of American adults reported in a National Endowment for the Arts survey that they had read poetry in 2017, the last time the survey was given. That was a 5 point increase from 2012 when poetry readership hit a low of about 7%.

The increase was even more marked among youth 18 to 24 years old, more than doubling from 8.2% to 17.5% between 2012 and 2017.

There’s evidence that trend continued during the pandemic.

Visits to the free poetry website poets.org, maintained by the Academy of American Poets, went up 30% in 2020 as the pandemic began, and traffic remains high, Ms. Benka says.

“This has been, particularly the first year of the pandemic, a time of overwhelming grief and loss and loneliness, and a lot of people wanting to make sense of what was happening in the world,” she says.

Then came Amanda Gorman’s showstopping performance at the 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden. Eventbrite reported that the number of poetry events registered on the online invitation site leaped 24% in the weeks following the inauguration performance. That figure has increased an additional 26% in the past year, an Eventbrite spokeswoman told the Monitor.

Social media, among other factors, has revived poetry so much that Ms. Benka describes the present moment as “American poetry’s heyday.”

Chris Young/The Canadian Press/AP/File

Rupi Kaur recites a poem during We Day in Toronto, Sept. 19, 2019. Ms. Kaur is an "Instapoet" who found success posting her prose on social media. She has 4.5 million followers on Instagram, and her most recent book of poems, titled "Home Body," is a bestseller.

Poetry gained widespread attention on social media in 2013 and 2014 with the success of Indian Canadian artist Rupi Kaur. Ms. Kaur, who was at the time in her early 20s, would publish brief poems accompanied by illustrations on her Instagram account, which racked up millions of likes. In 2014, an established publisher released a collection of her poems, “Milk and Honey,” which sold more than 2.5 million copies.

Donovan Beck also found his audience online.

At age 22 and still a student at California State University, Northridge, Mr. Beck has nearly 440,000 followers on TikTok and an additional 28,000 followers on Instagram. 

His poetry, which he performs looking straight into the camera under warm lighting, focuses on mental health, loneliness, and hope, often offering affirmation and optimism.

Mr. Beck came to the art form in high school, when he discovered poets like Andrea Gibson and Rudy Francisco on YouTube and began to write his own. During the pandemic, a friend convinced him to start performing on TikTok, and his account took off.    

“I feel like TikTok does open up doors for people to go look,” says Laryssa Lopes, a senior at Southeastern Vocational Technical High School in South Easton, Massachusetts. Since a class project sparked her interest in poetry last year, she’s been watching more and more poetry videos on the platform.

Sometimes she’ll even look up a poet she sees on TikTok or watch longer performances on YouTube – something she’d never be doing without social media. “It does open your eyes.”

While social media has dramatically increased readers’ access to established poets, it’s also knocked down barriers for aspiring ones.

“There’s a little red button on TikTok and a little red button on Instagram in order to record your piece and go share it. And if that’s the only barrier that stops you, that’s good,” Mr. Beck says.

Social media allows poets to skirt traditional gatekeeping institutions like publishing houses and literary magazines, Mr. Beck says, “allowing Black writers and minority group writers to share their stories in ways that would have never been possible.”

The low barrier for publishing, combined with the parameters for posting on each platform, is changing the shape of poetry, with new voices sharing forthright prose. Black and immigrant poets in particular, whose work may not have been heard without social media, grapple with tough issues like identity and justice through stanzas and verse. 

That’s what’s attracting readers like Tricia Barros, another senior at Southeastern. 

“I always thought about [poetry] as boring,” she said. Then her teacher showed them videos online of slam poets speaking about being Black, like her, and she realized poetry was anything but boring. Now, she writes her own.

But the platforms that welcome new audiences can also invite a barrage of criticism. Much of the poetry originating on social media is short and simple. Poets like Ms. Kaur have faced ridicule for the plain verse. 

“People have debates about – is it poetry? Is this not poetry?” says poet Jingming “Mimi” Yu, a student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln – and Nebraska’s first youth poet laureate. “Social media has made art way more accessible than it used to be and kind of forced us to redefine what a poem is.”

Coming of age principally on Instagram and TikTok where endless streams of content compete for attention, “we don’t have the time to make [a] super large metaphor that has to be dissected to be understood,” Mr. Beck says. “So we just say what we need to say, and the audiences connect with that.” 

Mr. Mejia certainly knows how to connect with an audience. On a Friday night this spring, he’s performing at a gala for an arts center in Worcester. His performance is intense, beginning with him circling the stage and ending with him atop a chair, arms outstretched. 

The poem he recites is about the struggles and challenges of a young artist who goes from homelessness to the heights of fame. 

Though this performance is in person, just in the shadows offstage a man holds up a smartphone. Mr. Mejia’s poetry was being streamed live. 

AP

Internally displaced people wait for aid in Djibo, Burkina Faso, May 26.

In late May the world reached a grim milestone. For the first time on record, according to the United Nations, the number of people forced to flee their homes because of violence and conflict surpassed 100 million. “It’s a record that should never have been set,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

It is also an important catalyst behind a hopeful turn in diplomacy and governance in Africa, which has the world’s highest concentration of displaced people. On May 28, in a special summit on the spread of terrorism and a resurgence of military coups on the continent, African leaders took responsibility.

“We must look at internal reasons that lead to instability and make our people vulnerable to exploitative ideologies,” Angolan President João Lourenço told his peers. “We must find political and economic solutions because terrorism is compounding the issues of hunger, poverty, and displaced persons. There’s need for firmness not only in condemning but in taking actions against those who take power through unconstitutional means.”

African Union Chairperson H.E. Moussa Faki Mahamat was more blunt. Government takeovers and terrorism are flourishing, he said, “because we do not honor our own commitments” to democracy, human rights, collective security, and economic development.

Those acknowledgments matter for several reasons. They reflect a growing alignment of political norms and public aspirations for democracy and good governance in Africa. (Angola jumped 10 places on Transparency International’s most recent annual corruption survey by prosecuting dishonest public officials.) At a time when the world’s attention is increasingly focused elsewhere, they are also a recognition that healing broken societies starts from within.

For the first time, an annual survey by the Norwegian Refugee Council published on June 1 found that the 10 most neglected crises of conflict-driven human displacement were in Africa. One reason for that neglect is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although Africa accounts for 60% of the world’s displaced people – including 72,000 more just last week in Congo, according to the U.N. – the Norwegian study found a striking shift in the world’s attention away from humanitarian emergencies in places like Ethiopia and South Sudan.

The study makes an urgent plea for more international attention on Africa’s crises. But attempts to address crises of displacement from the outside have had limited success. Colombia, for example, is offering special temporary residence visas to an estimated 1.7 million Venezuelans fleeing the crisis in their own country. The World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and United States government have provided $800 million to help that effort. That initiative, however, will reach fewer than a third who left Venezuela since 2014.

The recognition by African leaders that they bear responsibility for addressing the causes of mass displacement – including poor governance, civil wars, and military coups – may lead to a shift in how they address the spread of violent Islamist extremism. They can take a cue from local leaders in countries like Mali and Burkina Faso who are promoting reconciliation with jihadis through dialogue.

“Our conversations with them became deeper [and] they were more helpful and forgiving,” one community leader in northern Mali told The New Humanitarian of talks between farmers and the Islamists threatening to displace them from their homes and land. Africa has seen a 70% increase in violent attacks by Islamist militants in the past year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Affairs. In Burkina Faso, 1.3 million people have been displaced. The problem has spread despite national and international military cooperation. But the humanitarian crisis may be prompting Africa to adopt a different strategy – one based on democracy building and social reconciliation.