Mixed Race Studies

Becoming Mexican Across the Pacific: The Expulsion of Mexican Chinese Families from Mexico to China and Diasporic Imaginings of a Mexican Homeland, 1930s–60s

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10 11:40 PST (Local Time)
San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
Torrey 3 (Marriott)
San Diego, California

Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
University of Texa, El Paso

Chinese men arrived in Mexico after Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Chinese concentrated in the north due to its proximity to the United States and opportunities in the developing economy. Chinese men forged a variety of ties with Mexicans including romantic liaisons with Mexican women. Anti-Chinese campaigns emerged in the border state Sonora during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Spreading rapidly and gaining tremendous power, the movement reached its zenith during the Great Depression when the United States forcibly repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Overlapping partially with Mexican “repatriation,” a mass expulsion of Chinese occurred in Sonora and its southern neighbor Sinaloa. Mexican women and Chinese Mexican children accompanied Chinese men for a variety of reasons. Some Chinese men and Mexican Chinese families departed Sonora and Sinaloa through Mexican ports. Others traversed the Mexican-U.S. borderlands, landing in the custody of U.S. Immigration Service agents who, in enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, jailed and deported them to China. Complicating international relations, the United States accused officials in Sonora of violating its immigration laws by forcing Chinese across its border. Mexican Chinese families faced great challenges in their new locations in Guangdong province. While some families remained unified, others broke apart. The Mexican Chinese families, congregated in Portuguese Macau. The colony’s Catholic and Iberian culture was similar to Mexico’s and the Mexican Chinese found niches. Over time, they created a coherent enclave whose web extended to British Hong Kong as well as Guangdong. The concept of the “Mexican homeland” gained increasing salience in the context of great flux in mid-twentieth-century China. The Mexican Chinese “became Mexican” over time and from abroad as they struggled to return to Mexico. Following these families across borders and oceans, this paper examines larger questions of nationalism and “diasporas.”

“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.

Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1910s-1960s

2009 Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2009-06-11 through 2009-06-14

Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
University of Texa, El Paso

On May 12, 1960, the Mexican Chinese community leader in Macau, Ramón Lay Mazo, wrote to a prominent Mexican widow, Doña Concepción Rodríguez Viuda de Aragón, in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Seeking her continued support for the Mexican Chinese repatriation cause, he conveyed the deep, devoted love Mexican women living in China felt for their nation, Mexico. When he asked Mexican women in China whether they wanted to move to other countries, they replied, “Ni que me den un palacio allá, prefiero México, aunque vaya a vivir bajo un mesquite” (“Not even if they gave me a palace there, I prefer Mexico, even if I have to live under a mesquite”). Disheartened by the Mexican government’s disregard for them and their desperate situations, Ramón tried to convince Mexican women to consider living elsewhere. He warned them that Mexico might not be the same as it once was and that it might be more difficult to survive in the communities where they had once lived. To this the women rejoined, “Aunque vayamos a escarbar camotes amargos a la sierra, queremos México” (“Even if we have to dig for bitter sweet potatoes in the sierra, we want Mexico”). The conditions, where in the nation they might live, and how long they might have to wait were no matter. They wanted to return to the Mexican homeland they had longed for since years past…

Read the entire paper here.

Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930s–1960s

Pacific Historical Review
Volume 78, Number 4 (November 2009)
pages 545–577
DOI 10.1525/phr.2009.78.4.545

Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
University of Texa, El Paso

This article follows Mexican Chinese families from Mexico, across the Mexican-U.S. border, to China, and back to Mexico. Settling in northern Mexico in the nineteenth century, Chinese formed multiple ties with Mexicans. An anti-Chinese movement emerged during the Mexican Revolution and peaked during the Great Depression. The Mexican government deported several thousand Chinese men and their Mexican-origin families from Sonora and neighboring Sinaloa, some directly to China and others to the United States, whose immigration agents also deported the families to China. They arrived in Guangdong (Canton) Province but eventually congregated in Macau where they forged a coherent Mexican Chinese enclave. Developing a strategic Mexican nationalism, they appealed for repatriation. The Mexican Chinese “became Mexican” only after authorities compelled them to struggle for years from abroad for the inclusion of their mixed-race families in the nation. They became diasporic citizens and fashioned hybrid identities to survive in Mexico and China.

Black Chinese: History, Hybridity, and Home
(Original Title: Black Chinese: Historical Intersections, Hybridity, and the Creation of Home)

Chinese America: History and Perspectives
Chinese Historical Society of America
2007-01-01

Wendy Thompson Taiwo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities & Social Sciences
Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York

In entering into the twenty-first century, one might affirm that the face of Chinese America has changed or has it? Chineseness has been constantly conceptualized through the measure of phenotype, the quantity of blood, the preservation of language, or the possession of surname.  But what happens when African American bodies and other nonwhite cultural sites are introduced into dialogue with Chineseness and Chinese American history in order to create a different story?…

…Regarding sexual relations, with the ban on immigration and entry of Chinese women into the country, Chinese men were encouraged to seek out arrangements with local women but with a catch.  Stringent antimiscegenation laws made this endeavor a severely limited one due to restrictions that made involvement with white women illegal. And so if not with white women, Chinese men took up freely with Spanish, indigenous, and African American women. (4) In terms of relationships built around the institution of the small Chinese store, it was found common for the owner to shack up with hired African American women who assisted around the store, many of these relationships having moved organically from employer-employee to that of live-in partner.

This added benefit of having an African American woman around the store begged to legitimize the Chinese store owner’s place within a black community where he made his business. It also opened up the opportunity for the Chinese owner to start a family where immigration blockage inhibited reentry or fatherhood within a Chinese family context. For most, it was a matter of a long gap in time until they returned to China, if they returned at all. Also of benefit was the African American female partner whose marriage promised small social accommodations, such as courtesy from whites when they learned of her last name, class, status, and relation…

…This is where my own personal investment in this topic comes from as it is not likely obvious from my name or in photographs where my mother is absent; it is that I am an African American Chinese living in the center of two cultural imaginations.

My birth occurred in January 1981 to a Burmese Chinese woman and her African American husband in the California Bay Area exactly fifteen years after antimiscegenation laws meant to prevent black-white sexual relations and intermarriage in the United States were struck down by a Supreme Court ruling in the case of Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I was born the eldest of three girls who all hold a different skin tone, phenotype, hair texture, and relationship to race and cultural identity. However, what we share is an individual relationship to Chineseness, a personal quarrel with having to prove that we owned a biracial space outside of a generalized assumption of what we were and where we should stay because of it.  Since childhood, we tended to identify culturally with our mother–who we spent most of our time with, who we felt comforted by, who we loved dearly, and who conversely saw her offspring as Chinese Americans…

Read the entire article here.