Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960

Abstract

Julia María Schiavone Camacho’s book, entitled Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910 – 1960, is a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on Mexican diaspora studies and immigrant self-positioning. Schiavone Camacho uncovers and documents the history of roughly 500 Chinese Mexicans who left Mexico and repatriated. These are Chinese men who married Mexican women and were forced to leave Mexico, Mexican women who lost their citizenship by marrying a foreigner, or the children of these latter relationships. In her analysis, Schiavone Camacho makes a compelling case that oral interviews add a texture needed to better understand the gendered construction of nationality and citizenship in twentieth-century Mexico. She conducted 27 interviews with both men and women as part of this diaspora study, with her strongest chapters appearing in the third and fourth parts of the book. The book is divided into four parts: “Chinese Settlement in Northwestern Mexico and Local Responses”; “Chinese Removal”; “Chinese Mexican Community Formation and Reinventing Mexican Citizenship Abroad”; and “Finding the Way Back to the Homeland.” The first two parts of the book provide useful historical overviews and reframe previously used primary sources such as the papers of José Angel Espinoza and José María Arana. In the third section of the book, Schiavone Camacho examines how deported (and some self-exiled) Chinese Mexicans situated in Southeast Asia (in Guangdong province, Hong Kong, and Macau, specifically) reimagine their Mexican national identity: “They became Mexican in China” (p. 173). This account of strategic nationalism is layered with a gendered analysis. It reveals how Mexico occupied a patriarchal place in the lives of Chinese Mexicans both in Mexico and abroad during the administrations of Lázaro Cárdenas and Adolfo López Mateos.Building on the pioneering work of Evelyn Hu-DeHart and more recent works by Robert Chao Romero, Grace Delgado, Kif Augustine-Adams, Isabelle Lausent-Herrera, José Jorge Gómez Izquierdo, Aarón Grageda Bustamante, and others on Chinese immigrants in Mexico, Schiavone Camacho carefully draws on Sino-Mexican relations to argue that Chinese Mexicans deported in the 1930s, along with those repatriated in the late 1930s and 1950s, complicate the dominant Mexican discourse of immigrant exclusion. These Chinese Mexicans with interstitial citizenships allow a more nuanced understanding of how Mexican policymakers, and Mexicans more generally, racialized the Chinese and later felt sympathy for them. Emphasizing this contradictory behavior is not unique in studying immigrant groups in the Americas; however, the gendered approach and the focus on how Mexican women negotiated their position with Chinese and Mexican government officials are novel attributes of Schiavone Camacho’s work.Schiavone Camacho asserts that the hybrid identities of Chinese Mexicans are strategic and seemingly genuine because of their desire to return to an imagined Mexico that once rejected and deported them. Her interviews clearly reinforce this idea, which she calls “diasporic Mexican citizenship” (p. 6). As a reader, however, I would have liked to have seen both more discussion of her interactions with her informants and a bit of skepticism regarding their stories. Were any of the Chinese Mexicans duplicitous in their interactions with one another? Did their destitute situations in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau truly forge such lasting bonds to be drawn upon when they returned to Mexico?Chinese Mexicans is an accessible book. It can be used well with undergraduate courses and is a good teaching tool for those in the field of oral history. Schiavone Camacho’s argument about chineros (Chinese-friendly Mexicans) and antichinistas (anti-Chinese Mexicans) shows that Mexicans and Mexican policymakers were not monolithi-cally racist, nor were they consistently complicit with such racism (p. 39). Scholars examining Spaniards, Japanese, Arabs, and Jews in Mexico have also made this case about the country’s ambivalent treatment of its immigrants. Schiavone Camacho’s chronological layout also makes the text easy to follow. The strength of the work is its use of a gendered lens to better understand how Mexican immigration policies affected women, their families, and their relationships with their husbands and larger Mexican families. The stories revealed in the diplomatic correspondence of the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, combined with women’s letters about their hardships in Asia, provide a much-needed dimension to discussions of deportation policies. Moreover, the stories recollected by these deported families’ children illustrate the tragic predicament of stateless people, topics that unfortunately resonate in current US politics.Lastly, I commend Schiavone Camacho for bridging the disparate scholarship of borderland studies, immigration and legal histories, Mexican and Chinese histories, and gender studies in her history of social justice for Chinese Mexican families.