Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960 by Julia María Schiavone Camacho (review)

This monograph contributes substantially to the growing scholarship on a long-neglected topic: the Chinese in Mexico (or Chinese Mexicans). It provides sweeping coverage of topics such as identity, citizenship, racialization, gender, class, and family resilience. The book adds to the historiographies on transnational movements, race relations, nationalism, cultural construction, and gender.

Looking for economic betterment, Chinese men began entering Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A "back-to-China" drive during the early 1930s, led by anti-Chinese racists (particularly in the state of Sonora), assumed transnational dimensions as state authorities forced Chinese Mexican families to cross borders, first into the U.S. Southwest and from there to China. Adding complexity to this transnational movement, Japanese ships assisted in the return of some of these exiles to Mexico.

In focusing on the subject of race and racism in Mexico, the author reassesses the racial homogeneity thesis that Mexicans are the product solely of the process of mestizaje. Certainly, other races lived in Mexico besides people of Spanish and Indian descent, and they became the victims of racism, with that directed toward the Chinese among the most virulent strains. In part, these expressions resulted from the Mexican Revolution's emphasis on indigenismo, an ideal that excluded the Chinese.

The author broadens the meaning of Mexican nationalism to include the feelings Mexican women and their mixed-blood children developed for the motherland while abroad. Before the expulsions, the author finds, Chinese Mexican families tended to relate more to their locale (state, region, or town) than they did to their country. But once back in China, a reversal of identification with place occurred as Mexican wives and mothers formed an idealized image of Mexico and now longed for la patria. This nostalgia for Mexico made them (and often their children) more "Mexican" than before, and this sentiment grew following the Japanese invasion of China, during World War II, after the Communist Revolution of 1949, and even more during the Cold War.

The study examines immigrant life and immigrant adjustment to a foreign setting. Several hundred women and children had arrived in China by the 1930s and many found themselves deserted by their Chinese heads of household who returned to Chinese women whom they had married before their emigration to Mexico. Abandoned families survived their forced stay in China (some of them from the 1930s through the 1960s) by struggling mightily and establishing stable lives; they founded, for example, support networks in Guangdong Province, British Hong Kong, and Macau, then a Portuguese colony whose culture mixed Latin, Iberian, and Catholic traditions.

Making women the main agents in this drama, the author further describes the Herculean efforts they undertook to once again become part of the Mexican nation upon returning from China. Women challenged policy that deprived them of the Mexican citizenship they had lost upon marrying Chinese men. Mothers wished their mixed-blood children to be recognized as citizens of Mexico and not of China as Mexico's laws dictated. They challenged the concept of mestizaje (which excluded their children from rights as Mexican citizens) and fought discrimination that kept their offspring from job opportunities.

This work stands as a valuable study not only for the knowledge it advances, but for its contributions to several historiographic fields. Here we see transnational history not as confined to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, but encompassing activities unfolding in trans-oceanic spaces. Research on racism, a topic mainly associated with the United States, now exposes Mexico as a culprit, even though discrimination there has historically been attributed to class distinctions. A yearning for "Mexico lindo" during the 1930s now surfaces in China, not solely the U.S. Southwest. Cultural studies profit from this work as the author demonstrates how Chinese customs and traits also shaped Mexican...