Chino

Abstract

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.

Comparative Orientalism in Latin American Revolutions: Antichinismo of Mexico and El Salvador

“…Impressively, Schiavone Camacho (2012) has traced the routes of mixed Chinese Mexican families from their deportation from Sonora and Sinaloa in the 1930s. While diasporic connections helped shape where Chinese people lived, I have shown that their distribution was also the design of Mexican policy that sought to insert Chinese migrants into the regional economies with the greatest setbacks from indigenous rebellions, namely the Yaqui in Sonora and the Mayans in Yucatan (Chang 2017). In addition to the structural features that enable and shape the Chinese diaspora, the imagined racial figure of Chinese people also determined where they were sent, how they were treated, and, importantly, how they were expected to interact with the domestic population of settler communities and indigenous pueblos.…”

“…In this period, anti-Chinese attitudes favored Indians as acceptable agents of capitalism, if not potentially patriotic citizens. This association would continue to develop and evolve for the next three decades (Chang 2017).…”

“…The approach used in this article expands on these works through an Asian Americanist critique that locates the inquiry in the larger context of the reconstruction of the revolutionary government with a theoretical framework of racial states. By following expressions of antichinismo from the streets to meeting halls, to legislatures and national party convention floors, I have shown the ways that anti-Chinese publics contributed to rewriting the relationship between the government and the governed (Chang 2017).…”

“…My recent book on the influence of anti-Chinese politics, or antichinismo, in the formation of Mexican mestizo national identity is a case study in the interracial dynamics of Latin American Orientalism (Chang 2017). I argued that antichinismo predated mestizo nationalism in Mexico because it created political conditions for the mass incorporation of a diverse indigenous peasantry into institutions of state discipline.…”

Boicot contra mexicanos: el movimiento antichino en Chihuahua

“…25 En marzo de 1915, Villa ordenó a sus comandantes que evitaran atacar a los chinos de Chihuahua: eran necesarios para abastecer a la población y evitar que el hambre la llevara a la desesperación. 26 No obstante, en octubre del mismo año, en Santa Rosalía (hoy Camargo), el general villista Baudelio Uribe ordenó la ejecución de chinos y árabes. 27 En febrero de 1916, huestes carrancistas asesinaron al chino Charley Chee, dueño de un hotel en Jiménez.…”