Chinese Mexicans Research Articles

Book Review: Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960, by Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.

Book Review: Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960, by Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.

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

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.

The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940 by Robert Chao Romero, and: Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusions in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Grace Peña Delgado, and: Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland 1910–1960 by Julia María Schiavone Camacho (review)

Reviewed by: The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940 by Robert Chao Romero, and: Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusions in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Grace Peña Delgado, and: Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland 1910–1960 by Julia María Schiavone Camacho Ignacio López-Calvo (bio) Robert Chao Romero. The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. 255 pp. Paperback $26.95, isbn 978-0-8165-1460-1. Grace Peña Delgado. Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusions in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. 226 pp. Paperback $24.95, isbn 978-0-8047-8862-5. Julia María Schiavone Camacho. Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland 1910–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 304 pp. Hardcover $39.95, isbn 978-0-8078-3540-1. Following Evelyn Hu-DeHart’s pioneering essays and the publication in 2010 of Robert Chao Romero’s The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940, two more studies on this topic were published in 2012: Grace Peña Delgado’s Making the Chinese Mexican and María Schiavone Camacho’s Chinese Mexicans. While the three books share common findings and a hemispheric approach (at times producing a sort of déjà vu feeling, if one reads them in sequence), they also complement one another nicely to propose collectively a much-needed revised social history of Chinese community in Mexico. In a time span of only three years, the publication of these three books has covered a major lacuna in the history of Mexico and the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, and is proof of the vitality of this relatively new subfield, which studies the history of Asians in the Americas. Fortunately, Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, Lok Siu, Jeffrey Lesser, Juan Pérez de la Riva, Kathleen López, Daniel Masterson, Tsugio Shindo, and others have published important historical studies on the Asian presence in other Latin American and Caribbean countries. The cultural production of these Asian communities in the region has also been increasingly studied in recent years. Chao Romero’s The Chinese in Mexico, the first English-language monograph on the Chinese presence and heritage in Mexico, opened the dialogue to a revision of the official notion of mestizaje in Mexico. Like the other two books considered in this review, it moves from the public to the private, often citing case studies of Chinese immigrants, such as Pablo Chee, Ricardo Cuan, and Alejandro Chan, whose stories offer a microcosm of their community. They were part of the more than sixty thousand Chinese who migrated to almost every state in Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Chinese immigrants were recruited to serve mostly as agricultural contract laborers, they soon moved to commerce, and by the 1920s, they had a monopoly on the grocery and dry goods trade in northern Mexico. In part, this economic success engendered anti-Chinese protests that culminated in racist legislation, boycotts, lootings, and even [End Page 180] massacres, such as the one in Torreón on May 15, 1911, where 303 Chinese immigrants were murdered by revolutionary soldiers. As Chao Romero explains, the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States coincided with the efforts of Mexican businessmen and their government to attract Chinese labor. As a result, Chinese immigrants chose Mexico either to find business opportunities in its developing economy or to get smuggled into the United States. As the author points out, “the Chinese were the first ‘undocumented immigrants’ from Mexico, and they created the first organized system of human smuggling from Mexico to the United States” (Romero, p. 3). This sophisticated smuggling business that, during the late nineteenth century had its headquarters in Havana, Cuba, also had international ramifications and collaborators in China, Mexico, and several cities in the United States, including San Francisco, Tucson, San Diego, El Paso, New York, Boston, and New Orleans. The San Francisco fraternal organization Chinese Six Companies was reportedly the chief sponsor of the human trafficking that brought approximately two thousand unauthorized Chinese to the United States...

Chinese Mexicans: transpacific migration and the search for a homeland, 1910-1960

At the turn of the twentieth century, a wave of Chinese men made their way to the northern Mexican border state of Sonora to work and live. The ties--and families--these Mexicans and Chinese created led to the formation of a new cultural identity: Chinese Mexican. During the tumult of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, however, anti-Chinese sentiment ultimately led to mass expulsion of these people. Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho follows the community through the mid-twentieth century, across borders and oceans, to show how they fought for their place as Mexicans, both in Mexico and abroad. Tracing transnational geography, Schiavone Camacho explores how these men and women developed a strong sense of Mexican national identity while living abroad--in the United States, briefly, and then in southeast Asia where they created a hybrid community and taught their children about the Mexican homeland. Schiavone Camacho also addresses how Mexican women challenged their legal status after being stripped of Mexican citizenship because they married Chinese men. After repatriation in the 1930s-1960s, Chinese Mexican men and women, who had left Mexico with strong regional identities, now claimed national cultural belonging and Mexican identity in ways they had not before.