Making Mexico: Legal nationality, chinese race, and the 1930 population census

Law and History Review

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 113-144

  Augustine Adams, Kif ^a  

^a BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67649695175     PISSN: 07382480     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S073824800000167X     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. All translations are by the author. Archival materials referenced in this section are found at Centro de Informatión, Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía, e Informática, Distrito Federal (Balderas), Mexico City, Legajos 2046 and 2047 [hereinafter INEGI]. The epigraph is a statement made by a census enumerator in Emilio Carballido's play "The Census," D.F. 52 obras en un acto 49-75, 58 (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006) ("Usted sabe lo que es un censo.., Es... es ser patriota, engrandecer a México..."). Statistical data gathering through a census is a well-developed theoretical model for modem governance and nation-building. See, e.g., Talal Asad, "Ethnographic Representations, Statistics, and Modem Power," Social Research 61.1 (1994): 55-88, 76 (arguing that "[f]rom a governmental standpoint," a census "regulat[es] and transform[s]" a population); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2-3 (noting that "[c]tegories had to be invented into which people could conveniently fall in order to be counted"); Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977), 148 (articulating the power of taxonomies and classifications to govern and discipline individuals). For an in depth discussion of the United States Census, see Naomi Mezey, "Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination," Northwestern University Law Review 97 (2003): 1701-68
2. Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) provides a particularly powerful account of citizenship, race, and nation-building in the United States; see also Ian Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Ariela Gross, "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South." Yale Law Journal 108 (1988): 109-88; Ariela Gross. "Beyond Black and White: Cultural Approaches to Race and Slavery," Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 640-90; Kitty Calavita, "The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and 'Passing': Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882-1910," Law and Social Inquiry 25 (2000): 1-36
3. Cynthia Radding de Murrieta and Juan José Gracida Romo, Sonora: Una historia compartida, 322-33 (México: Institute de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 1989), 322-33: Barry Carr, The Peculiarities of the Mexican North, 1880-1928 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1971), 1
4. Carr, Peculiarities, 8
5. Adrian A. Bantjes, As If Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1998), xvi; Carr, Peculiarities, 9
6. Evelyn Hu-Dehart, "La comunidad china en el desarrollo de Sonora," in Historia General de Sonora, vol. 4. Sonora Moderno 1880-1929, 195-211, 198 (Hermosillo, Sonora: Gobierno del estado de Sonora, 1997). Other sources suggest that, at least by 1926, the Chinese population in the Pacific territory of Baja California (today divided into the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur) had surpassed that of Sonora. See, e.g., Robert Chao Romero, The Dragon in Big Lusong: Chinese Immigration and Settlement in Mexico, 1882-1940 (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of California-Los Angeles, 2003), 71, 74, 79 (on file with author)
7. Romero, The Dragon in Big Lusong, 69
8. Chinos y antichinos en México: Documentos para su estudio, ed. José Luis Trueba Lara (Guadalajara: Gobierno del estado de Jalisco, 1988), 134
9. Hu-Dehart, "La comunidad china en el desarrollo de Sonora," 210
10. Gerardo Réñique, "Race, Region, and Nation: Sonora's Anti-Chinese Racism and Mexico's Postrevolutionary Nationalism, 1920s-1930s," in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy Applebaum et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003), 220 (citing a speech Arana made in Cananea, Sonora, on April 29, 1916)
11. L. R. Wilfley and A. T. Bassett, Memorandum on the Law and the Facts in the Matter of the Claim of China against Mexico for Losses of Life and Property Suffered by Chinese Subjects at Torreón on May 13, 14 and 15, 1911 (México, D.F.: American Book and Printing, 1911), 4
12. See also, Juan Puig, Entre el río Perla y el Nazas: La China decimonónica y sus braceros emigrantes, la colonia china de Torreón y la matanza de 1911 (México, D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1992), 173-74
13. Gerardo Réñique, "Región, raza y nación en el antichinismo sonorense: Cultura regional y mestizaje en el México posrevolucionario," in Seis expulsiones y un adiós: Despojos y exclusions en Sonora, ed. A. Grageda Bustamante (México: Plaza y Valdés, 2003), 231-89. The allegations regarding Governor Rodolfo Calles's orders are set forth in various letters from U.S. officials. See. e.g., Letter dated February 25. 1932 from Lewis V. Boyle, American Consul, to the Secretary of State. Washington, D.C., United States, National Archives, RG 59. M1370. 812.504/1273
14. See Robert H. Duncan, "The Chinese and Economic Development in Baja California, 1889-1929," Hispanic American Historical Review 74 (1994): 615-47 (discussing why discrimination against Chinese in Baja California Norte was not as pronounced as in Sonora)
15. Secretaria de la Economía Nacional, Dirección General de Estadistica, Sexto censo de población, 6 de Marzo de 1940, Estado de Sonora 21 (México: Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 1940)
16. Marylee Mason Vandiver, "Racial Classifications in Latin American Census," Social Forces 28.2 (1949): 138-46, 139
17. In retrospect, historians and scholars have also posited the decreasing importance of race and ethnicity in Mexico over the course of the nineteenth century. See, e.g., Alan Knight, "The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin America, 1821-1992," Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992): 99-144, 118-23
18. Alan Knight, "Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo in Mexico, 1910-1940." in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. R. Graham (Austin: University of Texas, 1990), 71-113, 72; Woodrow Borah, "Race and Class in Mexico," in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, ed. J. Domíguez (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 1-12; Charles Wagley, "On the Concept of Social Race in the Americas," in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, ed. J. Domíguez (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 13-27
19. Luis Cabrera. "El balance de la revolutión." in La revolutión es la revolutión, comp. Luis Cabrera (Mexico: PR1, 1985), 249-66
20. Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991), 147
21. Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, 147-48
22. See also, Dalia Ofer, "Anti-Semitism and the 'Science of Race'" in Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, ed. B. Lange (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 61-76
23. José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana (México: Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, 1948)
24. See also Gabriella de Beer, Vasconcelos and His World (New York: Las Americas, 1966) (detailing Vasconcelos's life) and David A. Brading, "Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico," Bulletin of Latin American Research 7.1 (1988): 75-89 (identifying the anthropologist Manuel Gamio as a proponent of mestizaje as the Mexican ideal in the early twentieth century)
25. Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica, 17
26. See also Paul Schor, "Mobilising for Pure Prestige? Challenging Federal Census Ethnic Categories in the USA (1850-1940)," International Social Science Journal 57 (2005): 89-101 (available on-line at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.0020-8701.2005.00533.x) (discussing Mexican-American resistance to the separate racial classification in the 1930 U.S. census)
27. 1930 U.S. Census Enumerator Instructions, http://usa.ipums.org/usa/ voliii/inst1930.shtml
28. See Stephen L. Chorover, From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1979); Alan Stoskopf, Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (2002) (available on-line at http://www.facinghistorycampus.org/campus/reslib. nsf/CMRB/ 2d9cb93da4291b8485256f8d005b4e77?OpenDocument); Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics
29. See Réñique, "Región, raza y nación"; Réñique, "Race, Region, and Nation"; Romero, The Dragon in Big Lusong; José Luis Trueba Lara, Los chinos en Sonora: Una historia olvidada (Hermosillo: Universidad de Sonora, 1990); José Luis Trueba Lara, "La xenofobia en la legislatión sonorense: el Caso de los chinos," in Memoria: XIII Simposio de historia y antropología de Sonora 1 (1989): 341-74; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, "Immigrants to a Developing Society: The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1875-1932," Journal of Arizona History 21 (1980): 49-86; Charles Cumberland, "The Sonoran Chinese and the Mexican Revolution," Hispanic American Historical Review 40.2 (1960): 191-211
30. José Angel Espinoza, El problema chino en México (México, 1931), 124
31. Molina Enríquez, "Los grandes problemas," 284-85
32. Ricardo Cuoto. Derecho civil mexicano: De las personas (Mexico: La Vasconia. 1919), 1:92
33. Ignacio Luis Vallarta, Expositión de motivos del proyecto de ley sobre extranjería y naturalizatión (Mexico: Francisco Diaz de Léon, 1890), 10
34. John Torpey, "The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System" in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. John Torpey and Jane Caplan (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2001), 256-70. 269
35. Torpey. "The Great War," 269
36. Directión General de Estadística, Quinto censo de poblatión 15 de mayo de 1930, Resumen general (México: Estados Unidos Mexicanos. 1936), xxvii
37. Alonso Gómez Robledo Verduzco, "Derecho internacional y nueva ley de nacionalidad mexicana," Boletín mexicano de derecho comparado 80 (1994): 315-45. 321
38. See also, Laura Trigueros, "Nacionalidad" in Diccionario jurídico mexicano, ed. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (México: UNAM, 1988) and "Evolución legislativa mexicana en material de nacionalidad," Justicia electoral 80 (2000): 131-45, 139 (setting forth constitutional and legislative provisions regarding nationality)
39. See, e.g.. Luis Cabrera Acevedo, La suprema corte de justicia durante el gobierno de Plutarco Elías Calles 1924-1928 (México: Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación, 1998), 156, 172, 174, 202-211 (citing cases invoking constitutional protections)
40. Hector Enrique Espinosa, Estudio sociojurídico de la nacionalidad: México y la natión indoibera-Nueva ley de nacionalidad de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (México: UNAM, 1934), 125
41. See, e.g., Derechos del pueblo mexicano: México a troves de sus constituciones, Articulado (México: Porrúa, 1985), 5:30-11
42. Felipe Tena Ramírez, Leyes fundamentales de México, 1808-1987 (México: Porrúa, 1987). 835, 890