Recent years have witnessed an outpouring of superb new scholarship on Chinese communities in Latin America that simultaneously widens the focus of Asian American studies beyond the United States and bridges area studies paradigms long conceived as unrelated. Fredy González's fine book on Chinese immigrants in twentieth-century Mexico is a strong addition. Other scholars have explored the exploitation of Chinese labor and anti-Chinese violence during Mexico's revolution, which culminated in formal policies of ethnic cleansing through mass deportations in the 1930s. Paisanos Chinos (Spanish for “Chinese countrymen”) begins in the late 1920s at the apex of anti-Chinese movements and spans the 1940s and the Cold War period. It follows the lives of Chinese migrants who stayed, returned, or later arrived and who, according to González, successfully labored to be recognized as “Chinese Mexicans”: patriotic contributors to Mexican society who simultaneously identified with a Chinese homeland.

González uses the terms “Chinese Mexicans” and “paisanos Chinos” interchangeably and mostly to refer to the men (and substantially fewer women) who were born in China, rather than to second-generation Chinese Mexicans who were usually of mixed ancestry and, according to him, highly assimilated and identified with the national culture of their Mexican mothers. While other scholars have underscored a more enduring Chinese hybridity in subsequent generations, González's focus on Chinese immigrants as “Chinese Mexicans” nicely upends older paradigms that stressed “overseas Chinese” as sojourners whose identities and material interests remained apart from those of host countries. He points out that unlike in the United States, Chinese immigrants to Mexico could naturalize and become citizens; yet while some did, memories of violence and deportation, including the expulsion of Mexican citizens and their bicultural children, made paisanos skeptical of the benefits. He argues that instead, regardless of their status and reasons for coming, Chinese immigrants asserted a place in Mexican society by building institutions that celebrated Chinese heritage and transnational ties to China as positive for the Mexican nation. This began in earnest during the Second World War, when Chinese Mexicans were able to bridge bitter divides between Guomindang and Chee Kung Tong factions to raise money for the war against Imperial Japan, a shared enemy of Mexico that declared war on the Axis powers in 1942. Chinese Mexicans in the southern city of Mérida responded positively to the Mexican government's call on Chinese to register and train with the Mexican Army. Elsewhere, Chinese labor groups affiliated with Mexico's National Confederation of Workers.

In some of the most fascinating sections of his book, González traces how the fierce competition between the “two Chinas” after 1949 played out inside Mexico. He provides particularly rich detail on the efforts of the Republic of China's embassy to protect and police the lives of men it considered Chinese subjects. Remarkably, and unlike most scholarship on Asians in the Americas, Paisanos Chinos draws heavily on Chinese sources. Trained as a Latin Americanist, González undertook intensive Chinese language study and conducted archival research in Taipei, Hong Kong, and Beijing. He has more to say about the ROC than the PRC, due partly to source availability, but also because he argues that most Chinese Mexicans remained loyal to the nationalist cause and that the ROC was particularly effective in staving off Mexican recognition of Beijing until 1972. This was never a foregone conclusion. Post-revolutionary Mexico defined itself as staunchly independent of US leadership in Latin America, and Mexican leftists saw communist China, not the USSR, as the more inspiring model. González attributes the ROC's interim success to the leadership of ambassador Feng-Shan Ho, who served in Egypt when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser recognized Beijing and was determined to prevent similar outcomes in Latin America. Ho spearheaded an array of public displays of Chinese cultural identification with Mexican nationalism, including an annual march of Chinese Mexicans to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and tours by Chinese Mexicans to Taipei to perform Mexican folk dances.

But the PRC was also active inside Mexico, hosting a commercial exposition in Mexico in 1963, disseminating positive media through the New China News Agency (Xinhuashe), and forming a Mexico-China friendship institute that tapped the energies of Mexican artists and intellectuals. Scholars of Chile, Cuba, and Peru have identified similar PRC initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s, suggesting a much more active presence of Mao's China in Cold War Latin America than most Latin Americanist scholars have ever thought to explore. Certainly the US and Mexican governments took notice of PRC activities and worried (for different reasons) that “Chinese Reds” were using cultural work to recruit armed revolutionaries. González smartly points out how such rumors built on older “yellow peril” languages that posited Chinese sociability as spreading addiction and filth, attacking the nation from within. Paisanos Chinos is a remarkable achievement and an inspiring model for continued transnational scholarship on Asia and Latin America.