The Chinese in Mexico is the first comprehensive English-language monograph on Chinese immigration to and settlement in Mexico as a consequence of legal exclusion from the United States after 1882. This engaging social history offers an intimate view of the lived realities of Chinese migrants while at the same time painting a larger picture of the Mexican nation in a transnational context. Romero traces the development of a “Chinese transnational commercial orbit” that created complex and sophisticated networks between China, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. Drawing on myriad U.S. and Mexican sources, the book argues that the Chinese forged the transnational orbit “in resistance, and adaptation” to Chinese Exclusion in the United States (p. 5). Networks included highly organized schemes of human “smuggling” as well as transnational capital and wholesaling that facilitated the success of Chinese business enterprises in Mexico. Since much of the existing literature has focused on anti-Chinese organizing, among Romero's central aims is to “humanize Chinese immigrants” (p. 7) by offering life stories. After reading the book one comes away with a sense of not only the broad transnational framework but also how it affected Chinese lives and possibilities in Mexico and elsewhere in the diaspora. The book adds to the growing literature in Chinese transnational studies and the project of recovering the history of Asians in Latin America.
Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 60,000 Chinese traveled to Mexico. In the first main chapter Romero offers an overview of the reasons for high rates of emigration from Guangdong Province in southern China. He draws compelling connections between U.S. exclusion and Chinese settlement in Mexico as Mexican planners sought to recruit laborers. Labor contracting set the foundation for the transnational orbit; at the same time, it created diverse commercial openings. The following chapter examines the processes of transnational labor contracting and smuggling. Romero shows how the Chinese “invented undocumented emigration from Latin America” (p. 31). Mexico became not only a “strategic gateway” to the north but also “a land of financial opportunity” (p. 29). Chinese also arrived through family chain migration. The book shows how the Chinese, while concentrating in certain places, became dispersed throughout most of the nation. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 did not deter Chinese immigration (p. 54).
The next two chapters describe Chinese migrants' transnational lives. Chapter 4 studies the transnational families Chinese men established with Chinese and Mexican women. It analyzes negative popular cultural representations of mixed-race unions. According to these paranoid depictions, Chinese men endangered Mexican women and threatened Mexican manhood. Chapter 5 focuses on the diverse occupations Chinese filled as well as how conflicts among transnational organizations led to violence during the so-called “tong wars” in the 1920s and sparked some of the anti-Chinese organizing of the period. Romero contends that transnational capital and wholesaling were crucial in the success of Chinese enterprises. He demonstrates that the Chinese occupied two broad socioeconomic levels. On the one hand, poor agricultural laborers and unskilled workers had relatively low rates of assimilation into Mexican society. On the other hand, wealthier merchants and skilled artisans tended toward higher degrees of assimilation.
The following chapter addresses anti-Chinese organizing and the varied responses to it. It studies changes over time in Mexican federal policy toward the Chinese. This chapter describes the most violent episode against overseas Chinese in the Americas in the twentieth century. In May 1911 Maderista revolutionary soldiers in the northern town Torreón, Coahuila, brutally killed over 300 Chinese. Yet, Romero challenges the idea that the Chinese were “passive victims of Mexican discrimination” (p. 146). He explores the views of the northern and tropical industrial and commercial elite who argued in favor of Chinese immigration as a labor source. The book studies the tactics that the Chinese used to resist anti-Chinese organizing. Nevertheless, the author shows how the anti-Chinese movement ultimately succeeded. In 1931 the northern state of Sonora expelled the Chinese—the first expulsion of an overseas Chinese community in the world, according to Romero. In the aftermath campaigns spread ardently throughout the nation, leading to drastic population decline by 1940. As Romero concludes, “To this day, the Chinese immigrant community of Mexico has never recovered” (p. 195).
The Conclusion questions notions of Mexican and Chicano mestizaje that have ignored or elided the Chinese. Romero ends by calling for a “new intellectual space” and the bridging of research agendas across a number of fields to study historical and contemporary Asian-Latino relations in Latin America and the United States (p. 197).
The Chinese in Mexico will be of interest to scholars of Mexico, Latin America, the United States, and the Chinese diaspora. It offers a nuanced understanding of Mexican society, the Chinese presence in the nation, and elaborate transnational migrant networks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
