Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960 by Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill)

A multitude of ironies pervade the history of the Chinese Mexicans, perhaps most strongly the reasons that helped to bring their ancestors to Mexico in the first place. Before he was toppled in the Mexican Revolution, President Porfirio Diaz held dictatorial power in his country from 1876 until 1910 with a brief hiatus and he advocated Chinese immigration. His reasons were highly pragmatic, not humanitarian. While the US was busily deporting their Chinese residents, Diaz saw them not only as a cheap labor source but as a way to “whiten” the complexion of his compatriots, many of whom were indigenous or mestizo (of mixed European and indigenous blood.) Himself a mestizo, Diaz knew well the handicaps that came from this background and believed dilution of this ethnic group would lead to greater acceptance of his country on the world stage.

With the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 came a strong backlash against the Chinese residents,  who had flourished under Diaz’s program of giving them integration into Mexican society.  Chinese laborers had swiftly become merchants and businessmen, “the first petit bourgeois class.”. Many of them became fluent in Spanish and established families with Mexican women. Some became naturalized citizens of Mexico. They shared cultural similarities with their Mexican neighbors; the importance of extended family, the honoring of the dead, and a fluid approach toward monogamy were touchstones of both countries.

However the Chinese propensity toward “frugality and economic discipline” made them a target when the Revolution began. Under the banner of “They’re stealing our jobs. They’re stealing our women,” racist policies were launched by anti-Chinese activists. Violence erupted against not only the Chinese but against those Mexicans who were their friends. Although the courts at first supported the Chinese, anti-Chinese policies became law and the Chinese were vigorously expelled in the 1930’s, eerily mirroring modern-day US immigration policies against Mexican refugees.

But the Chinese in Mexico had not only established economic roots, their children had known only Mexico from birth and their wives were fully Mexican. The expulsion of these families was an uprooting that was abrupt and cruel. Once within China, men were reunited with the women they had taken as wives before their emigration to Mexico and the wives they brought them were viewed as concubines by Chinese society. The half-Mexican children were unaccepted by villagers; living without the local language and without status, the culture shock of the Mexican families was immense. The wives banded together and the more sophisticated of them began to appeal to Mexican diplomats in China and Hong Kong. They wanted to go home.

Laws at that time were based upon women taking the nationality of their husbands upon marriage and many of the Mexican wives became delighted that they had never been legally married. Still the process of repatriation was tortuous and lengthy. While women waited for a homeward passage, their children began to learn how to be Chinese, while being encouraged by their mothers to long for their old lives in Mexico.

Some of the families found more congenial homes in Macau and Hong Kong, which as colonies, were less xenophobic toward immigrants than villages in rural China. Although many of the colonies’ residents found refuge in the Catholic churches and in Macau’s Portuguese community and didn’t return in the first wave of repatriation, Mao’s victory made them uneasy and the specter of Communism during the Cold War helped to facilitate their return to Mexico. In 1960, after almost thirty years in Asia, 267 Chinese Mexicans came back to Mexico, with 70 more waiting for their turn. Even in the 1980’s, Chinese Mexicans were still coming home from China.

But they came back faced with the gulf of being “between cultures,” especially the children of the expulsion who were now adults. For years they had known Mexico only through the culture embodied within their mothers and in dim memories of their own. In China they had been seen as Mexicans, now back in their homeland they were Chinese. Even so, one man who had left Mexico when he was four and returned to his original hometown as an adult told Schiavone Camacho, “Mexico delights me. Navojoa delights me.” 

After a difficult readjustment on the part of both the repatriated and the Mexican government, the Chinese Mexicans have strengthened the position of mixed-race citizens in Mexico, thus defeating Diaz’s original hope that they would help to eliminate that category by turning Mexico white.

Now their culinary history lives on, both in Asia and in Central America. In Hong Kong bakeries sell “Mexico buns,” introduced by the Mexican wives of expelled Chinese. In Mexico Chinese restaurants flourish. And in Mexican cities and towns, through their knowledge of two countries, “Chinese Mexicans have expanded the idea of Mexicanness.”`Janet Brown