Mixed Race Studies

The Transpacific Shift in Mixed-Race Studies: Sawyer Seminar II

University of Southern California, Univeristy Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library (DML)
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Friday, 2013-02-08, 10:00-16:00 PST (Local Time)

Presented by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture’s “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars Series at the University of Southern California.

Conference Convenors:

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Southern California

Brian C. Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Southern California

Velina Hasu Houston, Associate Dean for Faculty Recognition and Development, Director of Dramatic Writing and Professor
University of Southern California

PRESENTERS – MORNING SESSION (10:00 AM)

“Filipino-Mexican Relations, Mestizaje, and Identity in Colonial and Contemporary Mexico”
Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

“Unruly Identities in the Hispanic Pacific”
Jason Chang, Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

Respondent: Robert Chao Romero, Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

PRESENTERS – AFTERNOON SESSION (1:30 PM)

“Erasing Race and Sex: Adoption of Stateless GI babies in Early Cold War America”
Bongsoo Park, Independent scholar; Ph.D. U-Minnesota
University of Minnesota

“Seeing Race: Korean ‘GI Babies’ and Legacies of U.S. Neocolonial Care”
Susie Woo, ACLS New Faculty Fellow in American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Respondent: Lily Anne Welty, IAC Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian American Studies Center
University of California, Los Angeles

For more information, click here.

The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940. [González Review]

H-Net Reviews
February, 2012

Fredy González
Yale University

Robert Chao Romero. The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. xii + 254 pp., ISBN 978-0-8165-2772-4.

Moving across the Transnational Commercial Orbit

Robert Chao Romero’s The Chinese in Mexico, the first English-language monograph on the subject, makes an important contribution to the existing literature on the topic of immigration and race in Mexican history. Previous work on the Mexican Chinese has mostly highlighted the 1930s anti-Chinese violence in the northern part of the country. Romero departs from this historiography by focusing instead on the economic links that the Chinese in Mexico maintained with other regions of the Americas as well with home communities in Guangzhou. In addition, he offers a substantive social history of the pre-1940 Chinese community in Mexico. His work argues that the Chinese in Mexico were not passive victims of anti-Chinese violence and instead possessed a greater amount of agency than previously acknowledged. In both the United States and Mexico, the Chinese took concrete steps to resist and adapt to anti-Chinese movements and legislation.

Central to Romero’s work is the transnational commercial orbit, an economic network created by the Chinese on both sides of the Pacific and extended to Mexico after the passage of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It allowed the Chinese to smuggle and recruit migrant labor, collect capital for investment, and import goods for sale to Chinese businesses, all “in resistance, and adaptation, to the Chinese exclusion laws” (p. 5). The transnational commercial orbit helps explain why, after the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mexico would become an important nexus in the Chinese migrant networks of North America and the Caribbean. One aspect of this was the practice of substitution, in which Chinese workers who landed at U.S. ports of entry and obtained a transit visa en route to Cuba or Mexico switched places with Chinese merchants already based in the United States. By exchanging an undocumented Chinese migrant for a documented one, Chinese workers circumvented immigration restrictions under the Exclusion Act. The practice required coordination between Chinese communities across the Americas. In his discussion, Romero makes a case for the significance of the Chinese community in Mexico to other Asian migrations to the Americas…

Read the entire review here.

The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940

University of Arizona Press
2010-07-22
272 pages
6.00 in x 9.00
Paper (978-0-8165-1460-1)
Cloth (978-0-8165-2772-4)

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

An estimated 60,000 Chinese entered Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, constituting Mexico’s second-largest foreign ethnic community at the time. The Chinese in Mexico provides a social history of Chinese immigration to and settlement in Mexico in the context of the global Chinese diaspora of the era.

Robert Romero argues that Chinese immigrants turned to Mexico as a new land of economic opportunity after the passage of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As a consequence of this legislation, Romero claims, Chinese immigrants journeyed to Mexico in order to gain illicit entry into the United States and in search of employment opportunities within Mexico’s developing economy. Romero details the development, after 1882, of the “Chinese transnational commercial orbit,” a network encompassing China, Latin America, Canada, and the Caribbean, shaped and traveled by entrepreneurial Chinese pursuing commercial opportunities in human smuggling, labor contracting, wholesale merchandising, and small-scale trade.

Romero’s study is based on a wide array of Mexican and U.S. archival sources. It draws from such quantitative and qualitative sources as oral histories, census records, consular reports, INS interviews, and legal documents. Two sources, used for the first time in this kind of study, provide a comprehensive sociological and historical window into the lives of Chinese immigrants in Mexico during these years: the Chinese Exclusion Act case files of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the 1930 Mexican municipal census manuscripts. From these documents, Romero crafts a vividly personal and compelling story of individual lives caught in an extensive network of early transnationalism.

“El Destierro de los Chinos”: Popular Perspectives of Chinese-Mexican Interracial Marriage as Reflected in Poetry, Cartoon, Comedy, and Corridos

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10 11:20 PST (Local Time)
San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
Torrey 3 (Marriott)
San Diego, California

Robert Chao Romero, Assistant Professor, Chicana and Chicano Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Drawing from poetry, cartoons, comedy, and musical recordings of the UCLA Frontera Collection, this paper examines the historical phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican intermarriage through the lense of Mexican popular culture of the early twentieth century. Popular Mexican culture portrayed Chinese cross-cultural marriages as relationships of abuse, slavery, and neglect, and rejected the offspring of such unions as sub-human, degenerative, and unworthy of full inclusion within the Mexican national community. Interracial marriage with prosperous Chinese merchants was scornfully depicted as a shameless short cut by which slothful Mexican women avoided the need to work and secured lives of material comfort. Such popular criticism of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, moreover, was often couched within larger discourses of revolutionary economic nationalism. Beyond presenting an historical examination of the phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, as one important theoretical implication, this paper destabilizes prevalent notions of “mestizaje” within the disciplines of Latin American Studies and Latino Studies. It challenges the “white-brown” binary of traditional racial theory in Latino Studies and sounds a clarion call for further research and discussion related to the important contributions of Chinese, Japanese, African, Middle Eastern, and other overlooked ethnic immigrant groups to the Mexican and cultural melting pot.