Racial Alterity in the Mestizo Nation

Abstract

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.

Permanent migrants and temporary citizens: multinational Chinese mobilities in the Americas

“…Nor does the document seem to be, as Aihwa Ong (1999: 2) once argued, about 'claims to participate in labor markets'. Instead, I argue that such multiple residencies and citizenships are comforting indicators of rights to live and be included in these countries, against the instability of Taiwan's political status, China's treatment of its minorities and dissidents, and the historical expulsions of Chinese subjects on the continent (Chang 2011;Young 2014). Thus many Taiwanese-or Chinese-born interviewees who left Peru, Argentina and Venezuela for Chile, migrated as citizens of Latin American countries.…”

“…Despite the commercial demand for cheap Chinese labour, the governing and elite classes of these countries in the mid-to-late nineteenth century generally considered a Chinese presence to be socially undesirable (Young 2014, so they paradoxically attempted to restrict, or formally exclude, Chinese migrants from entering their territories. 3 Post-colonial efforts in several Central and South American countries included plans to 'whiten' their national populations and identities and/or articulate nationalistic 'mestizo' racial superiority (Chang 2011;Peña-Delgado 2012). Nation-building projects encouraged European migrants and investments, while physically and symbolically excluded the Chinese, Africans, and their descendants (López 2016).…”

“…I have shown how the contingent and non-linear nature of their mobilities and attachments importantly shape the multiple onward pathways that are possible in their futures. Their citizenship is legally or culturally 'always historically situated and subject to socio-political ruptures', such as the recent sudden backlash against Chinese businesses across the continent, which demonstrates how 'citizenship can be stripped away as easily as it was granted' (Siu 2005: 27; see also Chang 2011). In contrast to their previous countries of residence or birth, especially for interviewees who arrived more recently, Chile emerged as a practical and temporary country in which to earn a living and remain relatively close to other kin in the region.…”

Dystopian Eugenics and Mestizo Futurisms in Eduardo Urzaiz'sEugenia

“…Stepan and Gilman (2019) use the concept of transvaluation (Stepan and Gilman, 2019: 92) to account for minority group scientists who used the language of science of the time to both counteract the dominant scientific discourses of pathologisation while degrading and making inferior ‘Other’ groups. For instance, Vasconcelos in his most famous book The Cosmic Race (1925) tended to be both critical about the science of the time – particularly eugenics and Social Darwinism – while deprecating the ‘yellow races’ continually throughout his works (Oliver Chang, 2011; Sánchez‐Rivera, 2020a; Manrique, 2016). I argue that Urzaiz – due to his positionality (as a Cuban migrant educated in Mexico and the United States) and ‘closeness’ to the popularisation of eugenics – was both wary and excited about using eugenics as a way of bringing modernity and civilisation to Yucatán.…”

The Legacies of ‘Race’ Science, Anti‐Chinese Racism, and COVID‐19 in Mexico

“…For instance, in his best-known book entitled The Cosmic Race (1925), 'Vasconcelos redeems the figure of the mestizo only at the expense of other groups, particularly Asians, whom he continually denigrates' (Manrique, 2016: 8). Although Vasconcelos actively accused the United States of 'the exclusion of the Japanese and Chinese from California', the deprecation of 'yellow races' was a common topic throughout The Cosmic Race, especially parts 1 and 2 (Chang, 2011;Vasconcelos, [1925] 2013: 25). Thus, in Mexico anti-Chinese logics are built into the mestizo nation, which rests on a seemingly post-racial social structure that predicates unity on the exclusion of certain groups (Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka, 2015;Chang, 2017;Wade, 2017).…”