Grace Peña Delgado's Making the Chinese Mexican provides a fascinating glimpse into the story of Chinese migrants traversing the US–Mexican borderlands. Her work places the story of these fronterizos in the context of transpacific migrations, US Chinese exclusion laws, and the rise of Mexican nationalism with its attending impact on the changing Mexican attitudes toward Chinese. Beyond suggesting a far more expansive definition of borderland history through her exploration of these themes, Delgado also explores “how Chinese, British, and Spanish imperial influences, regionalism, and localism mediated the nation-making process and shaped Chinese Mexican identities” (6). Beginning with organized migration schemes in the 1870s and concluding with the pushback against the Chinese in Mexico in the 1930s, Delgado's work is meticulously researched and deeply thought-provoking.

Through chapters encompassing both state policy and its effects, as well as migrant family and community networks, Delgado reveals the importance of a porous border and fluid identities to the Chinese of the border regions. She does so via her extensive research on both sides of the border, in archives and libraries in the United States and Mexico, making particular use of collections of family papers. These documents, combined with media reports, provide the basis of her discussion, both giving it a deeply personal feel and highlighting the impact of changing conditions on the people most affected.

So convincing is she in making her case for a borderlands history not bound by national narratives that inevitably omit this population, that by the end of the book it is unclear to what extent it makes sense to talk about “Chinese Mexicans” at all. For a remarkably short period, from the consolidation of a Treaty of Amity between the Qing government of China and the government of Mexico in the 1890s to the expulsion of the Chinese from Sonora, transnational migrants lived in the border territory with, it seems, somewhat less than perfect regard for where the line was actually drawn. The fact that Delgado's rich and fascinating story takes us so often up to San Francisco and across the Pacific back to China, not to mention alternating between Arizona and Sonora, suggests that few members of this already small population really felt long committed to the notion of being “Chinese Mexican” in any exclusive sense.

As with any innovative new history, Delgado's work raises as many new questions as it answers, paving the way for new avenues of study. For example, a chapter on “Border Crossers and Alien Smugglers” focusses on the smugglers more than on the migrants; if combined with some of the recent work of Erika Lee, Mae Ngai, and Evelyn Hu-Dehart, it might be possible to uncover an even more nuanced understanding of the movements not only of the smugglers, but also of the migrants who came to Mexico temporarily for the sole purpose of transiting to the United States, then to what extent are these people also part of the borderlands population and of the fronterizos story? Further, the book ends just as the mass expulsions and deportations back to China were beginning; though discussed briefly at the end of the work, more details about the process of the deportations and some sense of the aftermath of this project in which “the Chinese were unmade as Mexicans” would be useful (188–89). For some of these migrants, their journey ends with them back in China, and following them there seems like the next logical step in understanding the transnational connections forged between China, the United States, and Mexico at this critical juncture. Though relevant sources from China are limited, rediscovering this generation of Chinese Mexicans upon their unwilling return to Asia could prove fascinating.

These questions notwithstanding, Making the Chinese Mexican serves as testament to the ways in which diasporic networks, as well as personal and economic ties across ethnic boundaries, serve to complicate our understanding of the US–Mexican borderlands. By expanding the concept of the border to reach deep into the United States and across the Pacific Ocean, Delgado makes a strong argument for her project of expanding the whole conception of the borderland beyond oft-assumed geographic limits. Moreover, the book is a valuable contribution to the history both of the growing transnational history of the Chinese in the United States and of the emerging field of Asian migrations to Mexico.