This book tells the history of anti-Chinese politics in Mexican culture. It reveals the hidden influence that anti-Chinese racism, or antichinismo, has had on the formation of the revolutionary government and mestizo national identity. The imagined racial figure of Chinese men created a profound impact in Mexican society. The book employs an Asian Americanist critique to evaluate Mexico as a racial state to discuss the political function of antichinismo at various points of national crisis. After the revolution, the social rights mandate of the 1917 constitution created a new rationality for the legitimacy and authority of the national state – to care for the good of the indigenous population. This book shows how Mexican politics relied upon racism against Chinese people to create polemical notions of the public good that helped generate new relationships between the government and the governed. The book is divided chronologically to attend to three major phases of antichinismo: the disposable worker, the killable subject, and the pernicious defiler. Through discourses of Chinese racial difference, diverse Mexican actors created alternative visions of the nation and helped rework the relationships of rule and consent. A regional approach to telling this national story illustrates that people took up antichinismo for different reasons but coalesced through the state ideology of revolutionary government’s mestizo nationalism.

The eviction of Chinese cotton farmers from Mexicali, Baja California serves as a focal point to explore the racial boundaries of dominant discourses of Mexican national identity. By examining the politics of agrarian reform, the article illustrates how the racial alterity of Chinese immigrants to national ideals served to consolidate diverse Mexican peoples as liberal mestizo racial subjects. Racial alterity is further explored by tracing the lives of Mexican women who married Chinese men and their multi-ethnic children. Anti-Chinese politics and conscription of mestizo subjects were central themes in the Mexicanization of Baja California.

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Across Latin America, mestizo nationalism became a common response to postcolonial independence, revolt, and revolution in the twentieth century. These different mixed-race nationalisms have been the subject of continuous debate in Latin American studies. The field of Asian American studies offers a different approach that highlights the political and cultural function of anti-Chinese politics beyond their targeting of racialized Chinese subjects. This article examines the anti-Chinese politics and mestizo nationalisms of Mexico and El Salvador to question if and when popular Orientalist racism aided indigenous and peasant consent to statesponsored mestizo nationalism. This methodology underscores the historical role that ideological formations of Asia and Asians have contributed to the political and cultural life of race in Latin America even when actual populations remained small or nonexistent. By understanding racial formations in a multiracial context I underscore the notion that anti-Chinese racism is not only important in that it discriminated against Chinese, but also that it served non-Chinese Latin Americans remarkably well and helped build an unstable equilibrium of mestizo hegemony.

This article aims to open the discussion of U.S. imperialism and Chinese comprador intermediaries in the Pacific to an enlarged historical analysis of inherited empires. Beginning with the formation of trans-Pacific Spanish commerce and the specialized role of Chinese intermediary commercial brokers, I introduce the notion of the comprador Pacific as a historical framework to understand the succession of imperial states, overlapping racializations, and the maintenance of a territorial assemblage bridging Asia and the Americas. The figure of the Chinese comprador is centered as a social and cultural icon of the enduring material circuits of Pacific empires. The article combines a commodity history of silver with a social history of the Chinese middleman occupation, along with exemplary biographical vignettes of key figures involved in imperial succession in the comprador Pacific.