2012/01/19 by Kathleen López · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
paper · doi:10.1215/00182168-1471112
openalex publication_date 2012/01/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
The centennial of the Mexican Revolution inspired a plethora of commemorative lectures and publications, many focusing on national identity. In this book, Robert Chao Romero focuses on an aspect of the revolutionary era that historians often overlook: the role of tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants in shaping Mexican society and economy and inciting extreme expressions of revolutionary nationalism. Romero details the Chinese settlement patterns and international politics that led to a period of anti-Chinese violence, culminating in their expulsion from Sonora in 1931. He skillfully draws from US consular reports and Immigration and Naturalization Service case files. Data mined from the 1930 Mexican municipal census manuscripts lend rich detail about the age, gender, birthplace, marital status, occupation, literacy, and property ownership of migrants.This book demonstrates the need for a hemispheric approach to Latin American immigration history, one that follows the paths of migrants themselves. Most Chinese arrived in Mexico after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, when the United States closed its gates to Chinese laborers. Many diverted their paths to Mexico for opportunities in the developing economy, some with the intention of crossing into the United States legally or illegally. Chinese merchants became highly visible in Mexico, especially in the northern borderland regions. By the 1920s they developed a monopoly over the grocery and dry goods trade, bolstered by transnational linkages with US-based Chinese wholesalers. A main contribution to international migration history is Romero’s discussion of the inner workings of a “transnational commercial orbit,” a network of Chinese engaged in immigrant smuggling, labor contracting, wholesale merchandising, and small-scale trade that encompassed port cities in China, North America, and Latin America and the Caribbean.Romero demonstrates how discourses of the Chinese as “yellow peril” took on a unique character in the context of Mexican revolutionary nationalism. The organized anti-Chinese campaigns included boycotts, lootings and violent attacks, and legislation. For two days in 1911, bands of Maderista soldiers attacked Chinese residents in the town of Torreón, resulting in 303 deaths and extensive property damage. Although this incident marked the bloodiest anti-Chinese massacre in the Americas during the twentieth century, few historians of Latin America or of the Chinese diaspora have studied it in depth.The chapter on transnational Chinese-Mexican marriages adds a new dimension to studies of gender and citizenship in Latin American history. Proponents of the Sinophobic campaigns portrayed Mexican women who married prosperous Chinese merchants as “dirty,” “lazy,” and “unpatriotic.” Furthermore, images of Chinese-Mexican children as racially degenerate and subhuman “were based upon the view that the Chinese represented a threat to Mexican mestizaje and the development of a unified national racial identity” (p. 89). Eventually, Chinese-Mexican intermarriage was banned in Sonora, underscoring the perception of Chinese as unworthy of full inclusion in the postrevolutionary Mexican nation.As they did elsewhere in the diaspora, Chinese merchants in Mexico defended their community through ethnic associations and the legal system, even bringing successful claims before the Mexican Supreme Court. In some cases, Mexicans came to the aid of Chinese merchants. Despite these efforts, in 1931 the northern state of Sonora expelled the Chinese for failure to comply with a law requiring that 80 percent of employees be Mexican. Some Chinese relocated to the capital and other regions of Mexico, some fled to the United States (where they faced INS interrogation), and some returned to China. By 1940 the Chinese population in Mexico dropped to less than 5,000. This extreme outcome of the anti-Chinese campaigns in Mexico invites comparisons with other nationalistic movements in Latin America. During the same time period nativist policies in places such as Brazil, Cuba, and Panama targeted Asians, West Indians, and other foreigners. Additionally, a discussion of official and popular attitudes toward other immigrant groups in Mexico would clarify and contextualize which threats were perceived to be uniquely Chinese.As the first English-language monograph on the subject, The Chinese in Mexico contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the Asian presence in Latin America and the Caribbean and a rethinking of notions of cultural and national identity. This book will be foundational for future studies on the history and contemporary situation of the Chinese in Mexico and useful to specialists of Latin America and of the Chinese diaspora, especially those interested in immigration, citizenship, and gender. With some notable exceptions such as Thomas Holloway, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Jeffrey Lesser, and Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, historians have traditionally focused on European immigrants in industry and agriculture. Theorizing of race and identity has been dominated by the concept of mestizaje, primarily concerned with racial mixing of indigenous, African, and European populations. In addition to expanding notions of mestizaje, Romero’s research suggests new directions in Latino/Chicano studies and Asian American studies, an agenda that includes secondary migrations of Asians from Latin America to the United States and Asian-Latino relations.