Chinos and paisanos: Chinese mexican relations in the borderlands

Pacific Historical Review

Volumn 79, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 50-85

  Lim, Julian ^a  

^a Cornell University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ASIAN IMMIGRANT; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; MIGRANTS EXPERIENCE; RACIAL IDENTITY; RACISM; VIOLENCE;

MEXICO [NORTH AMERICA];

EID: 75949117291     PISSN: 00308684     EISSN: 15338584     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/phr.2010.79.1.50     Document Type: Review

References (244)

1. Manuel Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península: Testimonio de Manuel Lee Mancilla [Journey to the heart of the peninsula: The testimonio of Manuel Lee Mancilla], ed. Maricela González Félix (Mexicali, Mex., 2000), 22.
2. Hereafter Manuel Lee Chew will be referred to as Lee Chew and his eldest son, Manuel Lee Mancilla, will be referred to as Lee Mancilla throughout the article. Based on a series of interviews conducted by Maricela González Félix with Lee Mancilla in the mid-1990s, the testimonio is part of a larger project titled "The frontier of a subterranean city: The social and economic relations between the Chinese and Mexicans, 1910-1940." Ibid., 10, 12.
3. His testimonio is not long, only sixty-six pages, including a six-page introduction by González Félix; it is entirely in Spanish, and all translations are by the author of this article. Further article and chapter-length studies from the project have been published in Centro Cultural Tijuana, China en las Californias [China in the Californias] (Mexico City, 2002), and Catalina Velázquez Morales, Miguel León Portilla, and Hilaria Joy Heath Constable, eds., Baja California: Un presente con historia [Baja California: The present and its history] (2 vols., Mexicali, Mex., 2002).
4. The only other testimonio by a Chinese Mexican that I could locate was also produced with González Félix's editorial assistance, in connection with Mexicali's centennial celebrations. Born in 1919 of Chinese and Mexican descent, Saúl Chong Martinez left for China when he was ten years old and returned to Mexico in 1940; his testimonio consists mostly of memories about China and life in Mexico post-1940. Saúl Chong Martinez, Desde la distancia del tiempo y la proximidad de mis sentimientos: Testimonio de Saúl Chong Martinez [From the distance of time and the nearness of my emotions: Testimonio of Saúl Chong Martinez], ed. Ma-ricela González Félix (Mexico City, 2005).
5. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 13.
6. Georg Gugelberger and Michael Kearney, "Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America," Latin American Perspectives, 18: 3 (1991), 10;
7. Marc Zimmerman, "Testimonio in Guatemala: Payeras, Rigoberta, and Beyond," in ibid., 18: 4 (1991), 31.
8. For example, to what extent did the familiar narrative tropes of the immigrant story-hardships in the sending country, migration, progress, assimilation, and so on-inform the production of the testimonio, on the part of both Lee Mancilla and González Félix? On the diffculties of memory and biases affecting oral history more generally, see Alistair Thomson, "Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History," Journal of American History, 85 (1998), 584.
9. On the problematic nature of editorial power, see Zimmerman, "Testimonio in Guatemala," 30-34.
10. González Félix's other works include El proceso de aculturación de la población de origen chino en la ciudad de Mexicali [The process of acculturation of the Chinese-origin population in the city of Mexicali] (Mexicali, Mex., 1990);
11. "El opio, una fuente de acumulación de capital en el norte de Baja California, 1910-1920" [Opium: a source of capital accumulation in northern Baja California, 1910-1920], Revista Calafia, 10: 5 (2005), online at www.uabc.mx/historicas/Revista/Vol-X/Numero%205/index-numero5.htm, accessed Sept. 19, 2008;
12. and Chong Martinez, Desde la distancia del tiempo y la proximidad de mis sentimientos.
13. Thomson, "Fifty Years On," 584, 590;
14. Zimmerman, "Testimonio in Guatemala," 22.
15. Gugelberger and Kearney, "Voices for the Voiceless," 8-9.
16. While Lee Mancil-la's testimonio remains the observations of one man and is therefore necessarily partial, when analyzed in concert with other available primary and secondary sources, it provides an accurate and richly detailed portrayal of the history of Chinese Mexicans.
17. George Yúdice, "Testimonio and Postmodernism," Latin American Perspectives, 18: 3 (1991), 15.
18. Leo M. Jacques and Evelyn Hu-DeHart led the way in recovering the history of the Chinese in Mexico, and their combined studies provide a fascinating tale of Chinese migration and economic rise in the Americas, as well as of anti-Chinese violence and territorial purges. See, for example, Leo M. Jacques, "Have Quick More Money Than Mandarins: The Chinese in Sonora," Journal of Arizona History, 17 (1976), 201- 218;
19. Jacques, "Chinese Merchants in Sonora, 1900-1931," in Luz M. Martínez Montiel, ed., Asiatic Migrations in Latin America (Mexico City, 1981), 13-20;
20. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, "Immigrants to a Developing Society: The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1875-1932," Journal of Arizona History, 21 (1980), 49-85;
21. Hu-DeHart, "Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Sonora, Mexico, 1876-1932," Amerasia Journal, 9: 2 (1982), 1-28;
22. Hu-DeHart, "The Chinese of Baja California Norte, 1910-1934," Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, 12 (1985-1986), 9-30;
23. Hu-DeHart, "Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru (1849-1930)," Amerasia Journal, 15: 2 (1989), 91-116;
24. Hu-DeHart, "Huagong and Huashang: The Chinese as Laborers and Merchants in Latin America and the Caribbean," in ibid., 28: 2 (2002), 64-90.
25. More recently, scholars have expanded the paths for inquiry to explore new questions about the U.S.-Mexican border, state formation, and the transnational nature of Chinese immigration. See, for example, Grace Delgado, "In the Age of Exclusion: Race, Region and Chinese Identity in the Making of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands, 1863- 1943" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2000);
26. Grace Peña Delgado, "At Exclusion's Southern Gate: Changing Categories of Race and Class Among Chinese Fronterizos, 1882-1904," in Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, eds., Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham. N.C., 2004), 183-207;
27. Erika Lee, "Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924," Journal of American History, 89 (2002), 54-86;
28. Gerardo Rénique, "Anti-Chinese Racism, Nationalism and State Formation in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1920s-1930s," Political Power and Social Theory, 14 (2000), 91-140;
29. Rénique, "Race, Region, and Nation: Sonora's Anti-Chinese Racism and Mexico's Postrevolutionary Nationalism, 1920s-1930s," in Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 211-236;
30. Robert Chao Romero, "Flies, Chickens, Cochis, and Chinese: Chinese Immigration to Northern Mexico, 1876-1931," Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, 20 (2002-2003), 56-83;
31. Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong: Chinese Immigration and Settlement in Mexico, 1882-1940" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2003);
32. Romero, "Transnational Chinese Immigrant Smuggling to the United States via Mexico and Cuba, 1882-1916," Amerasia Journal, 30: 3 (2004/2005), 1-16;
33. Julia María Schiavone Camacho, "Traversing Boundaries: Chinese, Mexicans, and Chinese Mexicans in the Formation of Gender, Race, and Nation in the Twentieth-Century U.S.-Mexican Borderlands" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, El Paso, 2006);
34. and Schiavone Camacho, "Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacifc Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930s-1960s," Pacific Historical Review, 78 (2009), 545-577.
35. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 61.
36. Ibid..
37. Miguel Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border During the Porfiriato (Berkeley, 1997), 101-102;
38. Paul J. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham, N.C., 2005), 77.
39. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 17, n. 12.
40. Daniel D. Arreola and James R. Curtis date the founding of Mexicali as 1903. See Daniel D. Arreola and James R. Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (Tucson, 1993), 15.
41. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 14-15, 18.
42. Eric Michael Schantz, "From the Mexicali Rose to the Tijuana Brass: Vice Tours of the United States-Mexico Border, 1910-1965" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2001), 55.
43. Despite Manuel Lee Chew's impressions, it appears that Mexicali was already gaining a reputation for its red-light and vice industry activities. See ibid., 58-75.
44. Robert H. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California, 1889-1929," Hispanic American Historical Review, 74 (1994), 620, 632;
45. Schantz, "From the Mexicali Rose to the Tijuana Brass," 100.
46. These figures most likely fall on the conservative end, since census data fail to capture immigrants in the country illegally as well as seasonal workers. James R. Curtis, "Mexicali's Chinatown," Geographical Review, 85 (1995), 337.
47. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 13-14.
48. Erika Lee, "Defying Exclusion: Chinese Immigrants and Their Strategies During the Exclusion Era," in Sucheng Chan, ed., Chinese American Transnationalism: The Flow of People, Resources, and Ideas Between China and America During the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia, 2006), 3;
49. Hu-DeHart, "Immigrants to a Developing Society," 275;
50. Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 30.
51. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado, 80-81;
52. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 617.
53. Quoted in Kennett Cott, "Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue, 1876- 1910," Hispanic American Historical Review, 67 (1987), 65.
54. La Constitucíon, June 4, 1881, p. 4,
55. quoted in Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 132.
56. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 18-19. "Sangrita" in this context is hard to translate; it literally means "little blood" and is also the name for an alcoholic drink, but it may also have been a Mexicali colloquialism with another meaning.
57. Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 57-65.
58. For the role of politicians, see Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998).
59. Romero, "Transnational Chinese Immigrant Smuggling," 1-16;
60. Clifford Alan Perkins, Border Patrol: With the U.S. Immigration Service on the Mexican Boundary, 1910- 1954 (El Paso, Tex., 1978), 12, 44-46;
61. Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 91-97;
62. Delgado, "In the Age of Exclusion," 207;
63. Delgado, "At Exclusion's Southern Gate," 198;
64. Lee, "Enforcing the Borders," 59-63.
65. Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 48-51;
66. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 616-617;
67. Curtis, "Mexicali's Chinatown," 337;
68. Hu-DeHart, "Immigrants to a Developing Society," 277.
69. Raymond B. Craib, "Chinese Immigrants in Porfrian Mexico: A Preliminary Study of Settlement, Economic Activity and Anti-Chinese Sentiment," The Latin American Institute Research Paper Series (Albuquerque, 1996), 7-9;
70. Hu-DeHart, "Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Sonora," 3;
71. Curtis, "Mexicali's Chinatown," 337;
72. Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920 (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 33-64.
73. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 620-621.
74. Census data and population figures for Chinese residents in Mexico, and especially in Baja California, vary and are not exact, failing to capture many illegal Chinese immigrants and seasonal, migrant laborers. James Curtis has estimated that the peak of Chinese migration to the Mexicali Valley was reached in 1919, "when an estimated 5,000 to 11,000 Chinese resided either permanently or temporarily in and around Mexicali." Curtis, "Mexicali's Chinatown," 338. Compare this to the more modest and conservative estimates provided in Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 620, table 2.
75. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 39;
76. Mee-Ae Kim, "Immigrants, Workers, Pioneers: The Chinese and Mexican Colonization Efforts, 1890-1930" (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington State University, 2000), 7.
77. Of course, part of the reason for the signifcant infux of Chinese into Mexicali was also due to the numbers of Chinese who fed the anti-Chinese persecution in other parts of Mexico after 1915, particularly in Sonora. Much has been written about the anti-Chinese persecution in Sonora. See, for example, Charles C. Cumberland, "The Sonora Chinese and the Mexican Revolution," Hispanic American Historical Review, 40 (1960), 191-211;
78. Philip A. Dennis, "The Anti-Chinese Campaigns in Sonora, Mexico," Ethnohistory, 26 (1979), 65-80;
79. Jacques, "Have Quick More Money Than Mandarins," 201-218;
80. Jacques, "Chinese Merchants in Sonora," 13-20;
81. Hu-DeHart, "Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Sonora," 1-28;
82. and Romero, "Flies, Chickens, Cochis, and Chinese," 56-83.
83. Quoted in Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 632;
84. Arreola and Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities, 21-22.
85. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 17.
86. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 621.
87. An extensive historical treatment of the CRLC can be found in Dorothy Pierson Kerig, "Yankee Enclave: The Colorado River Land Company and Mexican Agrarian Reform in Baja California, 1902-1944" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1986). Eric Boime has also analyzed the Colorado River Delta and the anti-Asian underpinnings of the international dispute over water allocation that emerged at the Calexico-Mexicali border. See Eric Boime, "'Beating Plowshares into Swords': The Colorado River Delta, the Yellow Peril, and the Movement for Federal Reclamation, 1901-1928," Pacific Historical Review, 78 (2009), 27-53.
88. Hu-DeHart, "The Chinese of Baja California Norte," 9.
89. American Vice Consul General in-charge Stuart J. Fuller to Assistant Secretary of State, April 21, 1909, 52271/70, Subject Correspondence, 1906-1932, Records of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter RG 85). A microflmed copy of this manuscript is available in Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A: Subject Correspondence Files, Part 1: Asian Immigration and Exclusion, 1906-1913 (Bethesda, Md., 1993), frame 0380, reel 12 (microfilm collection hereafter Records of the INS).
90. Translation of Chinese handbill attached to ibid.;
91. also available in Records of the INS, frame 0393, reel 12.
92. "The only effect of this," the government warned, "might be to cause dissatisfaction among the imported laborers as soon as they fnd out that they are in Mexico, thereby resulting in efforts to secure unlawful ingress to this country," and Calexico immigration offcers were advised to "keep careful watch of the Chinese employed on this plantation, so that any smuggling operations may be frustrated." Acting Commissioner-General F. H. Larned to Inspector in Charge, Immigration Service, San Diego, June 18, 1909, 52271/70, RG 85; also available in Records of the INS, frames 0377-0378, reel 12.
93. See Romero, "Transnational Chinese Immigrant Smuggling," 5-6;
94. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 17;
95. and Harrison Gray Otis to U.S. Consul A. P. Wilder, Dec. 21, 1908, File 52271/70, RG 85; also available in Records of the INS, frame 0387, reel 12.
96. The relationship with the CRLC also afforded some Chinese a level of protection from harsh enforcements of the exclusion laws; when ranch cook Louie Geow was fnally arrested after regularly crossing into Calexico without the proper immigration papers, his deportation proceedings were discontinued after a call to the immigration offce by Harry Chandler. See Oscar Fawler to Oscar S. Straus, Jan. 7, 1909, File 52085/1, RG 85; also available in Records of the INS, frames 0425-0427, reel 6.
97. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 13;
98. Curtis, "Mexicali's Chinatown," 337-338;
99. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 625;
100. Craib, "Chinese Immigrants in Porfrian Mexico," 8;
101. Kerig, "Yankee Enclave," 160-161.
102. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 13, 19.
103. See also Hu-DeHart, "The Chinese of Baja California Norte," 10.
104. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 19;
105. Curtis, "Mexicali's Chinatown," 338;
106. Kerig, "Yankee Enclave," 160.
107. Hu-DeHart, "The Chinese of Baja California Norte," 11;
108. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 631;
109. Curtis, "Mexicali's Chinatown," 338.
110. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 25-26, 29.
111. For negative stereotypes developed on the U.S. side of the border, see, for example, Arnoldo de León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin, Tex., 1983), 25-29,
112. and Haiming Liu, The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration (New Brunswick, N.J., 2005), 107.
113. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 618, 622-623;
114. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 21.
115. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 623;
116. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 37.
117. In places like Sonora, the Chinese commanded the local economy to the extent that Hu-DeHart has referred to them as the "regional petite bourgeoisie." Hu-DeHart, "Huagong and Huashang," 69.
118. See also Hu-DeHart, "The Chinese of Baja California Norte," 14,
119. and Hu-DeHart, "Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers," 95.
120. El Excélsior, May 19, 1910,
121. quoted in Hu-DeHart, "The Chinese of Baja California Norte," 19.
122. Cott, "Mexican Diplomacy and the Chinese Issue," 81-82;
123. Romero, "Flies, Chickens, Cochis, and Chinese," 63;
124. Craib, "Chinese Immigrants in Porfrian Mexico," 12, 14;
125. Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 230-237. Although sureño means "southerner," there is no direct translation in this context for guacho; northerners, but especially Sonorans, frequently used the term guacho as an offensive label for people from Mexico City.
126. Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 223, 237. In brief, the Mexican Revolution is typically understood to have started in 1911 with the toppling of the Porfrio Díaz regime. Francisco Madero, of one of the wealthiest families in Mexico, challenged Díaz's reelection to the presidency but was jailed for sedition. Upon his release, he fled to the United States and encouraged armed resistance to the Díaz dictatorship. On May 21, 1911, Díaz agreed to resign; Madero then became president but soon found himself besieged by local rebellions that resulted in his assassination, throwing the country into a violent civil war that lasted for the rest of the decade.
127. Rénique, "Race, Region, and Nation," 215-223;
128. Hu-DeHart, "Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Sonora," 10-24;
129. Hu-DeHart, "Immigrants to a Developing Society," 285.
130. The overthrow of Díaz signaled not only a rejection of the regime's dependence on foreign powers but also of "scientifc" theories that defined Indians as backward and mestizos as degenerate. Thus, issues of national identity became central during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods, and the mestizo became the icon of racial and social integration of the "new" Mexican nation. But as Gerardo Rénique argues, the prominence of indigenismo [an idealization of Native peoples and cultures] and mestizaje [an idealization of mixed-race people and their culture] in the national culture was modifed by a preference for the blanco-criollo [white Creole] racial ideal of the Mexican northerner, which through a succession of several Sonoran presidents came to dominate Mexican politics and state formation. See Alexandra Minna Stern, "From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and Science in Mexico, 1920-1960," in Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, 187-210,
131. and Rénique, "Race, Region, and Nation," 211-236.
132. Romero, "Flies, Chickens, Cochis, and Chinese," 63;
133. Craib, "Chinese Immigrants in Porfrian Mexico," 14;
134. Hu-DeHart, "Immigrants to a Developing Society," 288-289;
135. Craib, "Chinese Immigrants in Porfrian Mexico," 1, 11;
136. Cumberland, "The Sonora Chinese and the Mexican Revolution," 192;
137. Tulitas Jamieson, Tulitas of Torreón: Reminiscences of Life in Mexico (El Paso, Tex., 1969), 116-121.
138. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 34.
139. It should be noted, however, that there were also Mexicans who helped the Chinese and thus earned the pejorative nickname "chineros" by anti-Chinese crusaders. Moisés González Navarro, Los Extranjeros en México y los Mexicanos en el Extranjero, 1821-1970 [Foreigners in Mexico and Mexicans abroad, 1821-1970] (3 vols., Mexico City, 1994), 3: 87.
140. During the Torreón massacre, one Mexican tailor saved eight Chinese by standing all night in front of a Chinese laundry, lying to revolutionary soldiers about the whereabouts of the Chinese he was hiding. Another protected the lives of seventy Chinese by running to the roof of the restaurant building where the Chinese were hiding and redirecting the angry mob in the wrong direction. Hermina Almaraz, whose own father was a leader of the Maderista faction, saved eleven Chinese by taking them inside her home and threatening the Maderista troops "that they could only enter the house over her dead body." Wilfey & 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 Torreon On May 13, 14, 15, 1911" (Mexico City, 1911), 7, quoted in Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 241. Scattered as they might be, such examples of bravery and benevolence speak loudly about the limits of anti-Chinese mobilization. Risking their own safety and lives to protect their friends and neighbors, these Mexican samaritans reasserted the humanity of the Chinese, despite the efforts of anti-Chinese agitators to dehumanize them. While the Revolution whipped up a call to arms against the Chinese, it also generated important moments of Mexican connection to and identifca-tion with the local Chinese in their midst.
141. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 34.
142. Rénique, "Anti-Chinese Racism, Nationalism and State Formation," 101-104, 115 -116.
143. Curtis, "Mexicali's Chinatown," 340;
144. Jacques, "Have Quick More Money Than Mandarins," 210;
145. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 633. The law, however, permitted Chinese businessmen with a minimum of 500 pesos in capital to enter and settle in Mexico.
146. Schiavone Camacho, "Traversing Boundaries," 112-140;
147. Hu-DeHart, "Immigrants to a Developing Society," 301-305;
148. Jacques, "Have Quick More Money Than Mandarins," 210-213;
149. Hu-DeHart, "Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Sonora," 16-17;
150. Cumberland, "The Sonora Chinese and the Mexican Revolution," 201-203;
151. Dennis, "The Anti-Chinese Campaigns in Sonora, Mexico," 69;
152. Rénique, "Anti-Chinese Racism, Nationalism and State Formation," 120-123.
153. Acting Secretary to Secretary of State, July 21, 1919, 54261/158, RG 85; also available in Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Series A: Subject Correspondence Files, Supplement to Part 1: Asian Immigration and Exclusion, 1898-1941 (Bethesda, Md., 1997), frame 0005, reel 6. U.S. offcials hesitated to give the Chinn-Grivel company of Calexico the requested transit privileges to bring 1,000 Chinese laborers to Baja California via San Francisco in 1919, fearing the possibility of "riots with the object of injuring the Chinese or driving them out of the country and across the boundary into the United States." Ibid.
154. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 615-616;
155. Eric Michael Schantz, "All Night at the Owl: The Social and Political Relations of Mexicali's Red-Light District, 1909-1925," in Andrew Grant Wood, ed., On the Border: Society and Culture Between the United States and Mexico (Lanham, Md., 2004), 118.
156. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 34-35, 32.
157. On Pancho Villa's disposition toward the Chinese, see Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, Calif., 1998), 630.
158. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 626;
159. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado, 89.
160. For additional information on the financing and administration of the "Kingdom of Cantú,"
161. see also Schantz, "All Night at the Owl," 99-104,
162. and Schantz, "From the Mexicali Rose to the Tijuana Brass," 149-209. Baja California Norte was not yet a state at this point and was instead designated as a district.
163. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado, 89-90, 95.
164. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 25.
165. Eric Schantz provides a more detailed description of La Chinesca and its associations with Mexicali's vice industry in Schantz, "All Night at the Owl," 104-126,
166. and Schantz, "From the Mexicali Rose to the Tijuana Brass," 244-318, 386-395.
167. Esteban Flores, "Informe que rinde el jefe de la seccion sobre la situacion de las colonias asiáticas en la costa occidental de la republica" [Report of the head of relations in the Department of Labor on the situation of Asian colonies on the west coast of the republic] (1919), 35-36, 71, 50, photocopy of manuscript in Raymond Craib's possession (hereafter Flores, "Informe").
168. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 641, 638.
169. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 61.
170. Compare with the examples of cooperative interactions among some of Sonora's Chinese and Mexicans as described in Julia María Schiavone Camacho's dissertation. Schiavone Camacho, "Traversing Boundaries," 43-62.
171. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 21;
172. Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia, 1992), 63.
173. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 22.
174. Ibid., 41, 61.
175. The terms "chinera" and "chinero" translate roughly as "Chinese-lover" and had a distinctly negative connotation.
176. Delgado, "In the Age of Exclusion," 300;
177. Heather S. Hatch, "The Chinese in the Southwest: A Photographic Record," Journal of Arizona History, 21 (1980), 274.
178. On the experiences of Chinese Mexican families that relocated to China, and their subsequent Mexican repatriations, see Schiavone Camacho, "Traversing Boundaries," 141-2 26.
179. "Comité de Salud Publica de San Pedro, Coahuila," quoted in Kim, "Immigrants, Workers, Pioneers," 142. Sonora passed a statute banning marriages and "illicit" relationships between Mexicans and persons of Chinese heritage in 1923.
180. For example, while many Chinese were risking their lives trying to sneak into the United States, Lee Sing, a successful merchant with businesses in Tucson and Nogales, Arizona, liquidated his assets and properties to marry a Mexican woman to whom he had been long engaged, moved south across the border into Sonora, became a Mexican citizen, and fathered three children with his wife. Delgado, "At Exclusion's Southern Gate," 187.
181. Although less commonly documented, Chinese women married Mexican men as well: Lily Liu and her sister Amelia Mendez, for example, both married Mexican men in Tucson. Delgado, "In the Age of Exclusion," 271.
182. Since under Chinese custom a daughter left the home of her family at marriage, marrying into the house and family of her new husband, such intermarriages between Chinese women and Mexican men could suggest even stronger identifcations with Mexican culture and society. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, revised ed. (Boston, 1998), 36-37.
183. Flores, "Informe," 55-56.
184. More surprising for Flores was that in the Villa de Seris there was also a Yaqui Indian woman married to an "asiático," a noteworthy union given the general belief at the time of "the resistance of the women of this tribe to marry with individuals of other races." Ibid., 56.
185. Robert Chao Romero, in disputing the characterization of the Chinese in Mexico as organized into deviant "bachelor societies," appropriately emphasized the marriage and family patterns that Chinese men created and maintained in Mexico. He aptly noted a discrepancy between the number of Chinese female immigrants registered as entering Mexico from 1911 to 1928 and the rate of growth of the Chinese female population in Mexico during those same years. Only 307 Chinese women reportedly entered Mexico from 1911 to 1928, but the Chinese female population in Mexico gained 2,626 persons between 1910 and 1930. Whereas the Chinese female population grew from 245 in 1921 to 2,711 in 1930, a mere 168 Chinese women were recorded as entering Mexican ports within those years. Although gross errors in governmental statistical data gathering may have been at play, Romero also suggests that "a more plausible explanation relates to Chinese Mexican intermarriage patterns and the concomitant birth of female offspring as a result of these unions." This explanation becomes likelier when considering that Mexican women and Mexican Chinese children were generally considered Chinese nationals, at least for purposes of the census, if their husbands and fathers were Chinese nationals. Romero, "The Dragon in Big Lusong," 119-120.
186. See also Hu-DeHart "Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers," 99.
187. Department of State, Offce of Strategic Services, "Report on the Japanese and Chinese in Mexico and Central America," Oct. 1941, photocopy of manuscript in author's possession.
188. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 41.
189. José María Romero, "Commission on Immigration Report 1903," quoted in Craib, "Chinese Immigrants in Porfrian Mexico," 20;
190. Hu-DeHart "Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution," 5;
191. Craib, "Chinese Immigrants in Porfrian Mexico," 25.
192. Ironically, in Mexicali it was exactly in La Chinesca and in stereotypically Chinese spaces, such as the opium den and gambling hall, that multiracial interactions were most visible. As Lee Mancilla described La Chinesca's casinos, "Americans, Filipinos, Japanese and blacks came there. All of the world came there." Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 43.
193. For a description of the multiracial dimensions of the opium trade, see also Schantz, "From the Mexicali Rose to the Tijuana Brass," 266-278.
194. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 47-48.
195. Many of the Chinese businesses in La Chinesca, closely associated with Mexicali's red-light district, were also likely hit by Governor Esteban Cantú's prohibitive taxation scheme, by means of which the government policed the vice industry even as it taxed and extracted revenue from it. See Schantz, "All Night at the Owl," 99-103.
196. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado, 105;
197. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 5th ed. (New York, 2004), 190-194;
198. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 632.
199. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 37.
200. Duncan, "The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California," 622;
201. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado, 81;
202. Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles, 149, 202.
203. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 26, 37.
204. Sam Chang, an asparagus farmer in the San Fernando valley, complained in 1931 that "[w]e are very upset that Chinatown in Los Angeles is flling with several hundred Chinese who entered secretly from Mexico." Sam Chang to a
205. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 37-38.
206. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado, 146-147;
207. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 50.
208. Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) 161-163;
209. Acuña, Occupied America, 208-211.
210. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado, 153;
211. Alan Knight, "The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo, c. 1930-1946," in Leslie Bethell, ed., Mexico Since Independence (Cambridge, U.K., 1991), 252-253.
212. John J. Dwyer, The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, N.C., 2008), 65, 67.
213. In ejidos, land is held communally, but farmers cultivate their own individual lots, and every member of the community shares equal access rights to pasture and other common lands. Daniel Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua (Chicago, 1993), 23.
214. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 51.
215. Ibid., 38, 51-52.
216. According to a colonization agreement signed between the CRLC owners and the Mexican government on April 14, 1936, the company had begun to survey, subdivide, and sell some of its property at below-market prices to Mexican colonists. Although the CRLC was obligated to colonize only 12,000 acres in the frst year of the agreement, the company had sold or leased over 27,000 acres to hundreds of Mexican nationals within its frst six months. Dwyer, The Agrarian Dispute, 46-50, 71-72.
217. As Dwyer has pointed out, the expropriation of CRLC property combined economic agendas with the nationalist aspiration to "Mexicanize" Baja California, manufacturing national cohesion by excluding Chinese, Japanese, and other foreigners from the valley felds. Ibid., 89-100.
218. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 50, 53.
219. Ibid., 56-57.
220. Thus, apparently Lee Mancilla was one of few who entered the United States under the annual Chinese quota of 105 that Congress established upon repealing the exclusion acts in 1943. As Mae Ngai has pointed out, this quota betrayed "Congress's continued antipathy towards Chinese migration" since, unlike any other immigration quota, it applied to all Chinese persons, regardless of their country of birth or residence. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J., 2004), 203.
221. With the term "Chinese persons" further defined in the courts as "persons who are of as much as one-half Chinese blood," the racial quota for Chinese reached those persons of mixed-descent and national origin, such as Lee Mancilla. See the case of Wagio Kong Tjauw Wong v. P. A. Esperdy, 214 F. Supp. 264 (S.D.N.Y. 1963), 265.
222. See also Mae M. Ngai, "Legacies of Exclusion: Illegal Chinese Immigration during the Cold War Years," Journal of American Ethnic History, 18 (Fall 1998), 29, n. 16.
223. Erika Lee, "Orientalisms in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History," Journal of Asian American Studies, 8 (2005), 250.
224. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 17, note 11.
225. Ibid., 19, 21.
226. I would like to thank the anonymous referee who reminded me of this fact.
227. Stern, "From Mestizophilia to Biotypology," 190-192.
228. For a discussion of how mestizaje theories informed Mexican revolutionary nationalism and state formation, see Rénique, "Anti-Chinese Racism, Nationalism and State Formation," 91-140.
229. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al corazón de la península, 48-49, 55, 59, n. 27.
230. Ibid. The testimonio of Manuel Lee Mancilla and the experiences of his Chinese Mexican family thus argue against simple depictions of "sojourning" Chinese, particularly since such stereotypes fed into and were reproduced in anti-Chinese propaganda. Although transnational studies of the Chinese have revealed important processes of migration and information circuits, they continue to retain some of the problematic "sojourner" versus "settler" discourse, in which "sojourner" suggests someone who does not belong and cannot settle down, whereas "settler" assumes unilateral direction of movement and assimilation into the new land while repudiating the old. Haiming Liu has acknowledged the pitfalls of conceptualizing diasporic Chinese as "sojourners," and yet still emphasizes a "sojourning tradition" where, "[i]n the process of immigration, returning home is normal." Liu, The Transnational History of a Chinese Family, 6.
231. Similarly, Madeline Y. Hsu has argued that for the Taishanese migrating from southern China, "[s]ojourning overseas had become a way of life." Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, 176.
232. The label of "sojournor" distracts from the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when massive migrations of capital and labor occurred, Asian immigrant workers were accompanied by competing numbers of Latin American and European workers in following the circuits of U.S. capital around the globe to survive in an increasingly market-driven world. See Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 11.
233. Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, 12-13.
234. Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1942 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 161-162.
235. Karl Jacoby, "Between North and South: The Alternative Borderlands of William H. Ellis and the African American Colony of 1895," in Truett and Young, eds., Continental Crossroads, 211.
236. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 9, 10.
237. See also Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley, 1997), which shows how Mexicans in the "hybrid southwestern culture" transgressed racial-ized boundaries and "forged new identities in the racially charged borderlands between whiteness and blackness";
238. ibid., 5;
239. Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (Cambridge, U.K., 2005); and Truett and Young, eds., Continental Crossroads.
240. For a comparison, see the description of early New York as a hybrid frontier settlement found in John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore, Md., 1999), xix.
241. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, 1987), 3.
242. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, "Introduction: Making Transnational History: Nations, Regions, and Borderlands," in Truett and Young, eds., Continental Crossroads, 2.
243. Ibid.;
244. Elliott Young, "Imagining Alternative Modernities: Ignacio Martínez's Travel Narratives," in Truett and Young, eds., Continental Crossroads, 175.