Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II

Abstract

Elliott Young’s Alien Nation looks at two simultaneous processes fundamental to the history of Chinese immigration to the Americas. National governments throughout the Americas considered the Chinese as inassimilable and undesirable outsiders. At the same time, Chinese migrants established networks and cooperated across borders to evade migration controls and gain entry into the Americas.Relying on archival and published primary sources from seven countries in North America and Europe, Young’s work builds on and complements national-level histories of Chinese immigrants in Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and the United States. The book’s hemispheric and global scope allows Young to track common patterns in Chinese migration to the Americas. While geographically and chronologically expansive, Young’s work does not lose sight of the stories of individual migrants. Throughout the book, Young privileges the agency of migrants who may be viewed as victims, whether as coerced coolies who led mutinies in protest of their mistreatment, or as undocumented migrants who used fraudulent family connections and papers to enter the United States. The attention to serial migration is particularly welcome.Young’s book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Coolies and Contracts, 1847–1874,” focuses on the era before Chinese exclusion and, concurring with the work of Moon-Ho Jung, blurs the distinction between coolie and free-labor migration regimes, including the credit-ticket system that facilitated Chinese migration to the United States and Canada. Some Chinese undoubtedly were coerced or tricked into participating in the coolie trade, but Young argues that many Chinese signed contracts of their own free will and rebelled against ill treatment. At the same time, “free” laborers, such as the Chinese who began to migrate to Mexico during the late nineteenth century, could endure abuses similar to the horrors of the coolie trade. The word coolie, which refers to “low-status workers, usually from China and India” (xv), was sometimes used to describe both free and unfree forms of labor and was deployed to marginalize Chinese migration as undesirable.Part 2, “Clandestine Crossings and the Production of Illegal Aliens, 1882–1900,” is a transnational history of the early years of Chinese Exclusion. After the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the US government worried about Chinese immigration via Mexico and Canada. It pressured both to similarly bar the Chinese, while a growing immigration bureaucracy helped shift the image of the Chinese from “the coolie of the mid-nineteenth century” to “the illegal alien of the late nineteenth century” (130). Chinese managed to evade immigration inspectors and create smuggling networks during the Exclusion era that brought Chinese from Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean in large numbers, but “at great expense and danger” (153).Part 3, “Competing Revolutionary Nationalisms, 1900–1940,” looks at political developments in China and the Americas that had an outsized influence on Chinese migrants. Young argues that revolutionary fervor along with the weakness of the Mexican state created the conditions for anti-Chinese violence and the Mexican expulsion of Chinese during the 1930s. Chapter 7 examines Chinese political and mutual aid networks and explores differences among Chinese associations as a way to highlight the point that Chinese migrants thought and acted differently from one another. While outside observers used examples of violence between Chinese organizations to characterize the Chinese as criminal, these networks were crucial for Chinese arrival and adaptation to the Americas.Young’s book raises tantalizing questions for further research. Were Chinese networks divided along hometown, class, and gender lines? Moreover, how did anti-Chinese ideology spread across the Americas? While these questions might fall outside the scope of Young’s work, they will be useful for future scholars to understand Chinese immigration on a global scale.This well-written and accessible book is a shining example of the promise of transnational history to advance contemporary scholarship. It should find its place on reading lists on Latin American and Asian American history as well as borderlands studies.