Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960

Introduction

1 Introduction “Mexico delights me. Navojoa delights me,” said Alfonso Wong Campoy, the eldest son of a Chinese father and a Mexican mother, with a warm smile. As I sat in his living room in Navojoa, Sonora, in 2004, he described the hardship and tragedy as well as the joy that characterized his family’s experiences. Local hatred for his mixed-­ race family drove the Wong Campoys out of northern Mexico in 1933, when Alfonso was four years old. Nearly thirty years would pass before he saw Navojoa and Mexico again. He would ultimately resettle in the same town from which regional authorities expelled his family when he was a boy, and he has subsequently remained there.1 Wong Campoy’s strong sense of love for his town, Navojoa , and his nation, Mexico, became palpable to me during our conversation . I left wondering how someone who had been through all that he had could love Mexico the way he does. Since then, I have thought about that question, and it has driven this project. Having left at a young age, Wong Campoy learned about Navojoa and Mexico from his mother and father and the community they forged abroad. With his Chinese Mexican compatriots, he yearned for Mexico and struggled for years to return. He became Mexican in China. The expulsion of his family and three decades across the Pacific did not break his ties to his homeland. On the contrary, those experiences fostered his sense of self as a Mexican. Although he and others genuinely loved Mexico, the Chinese Mexican community claimed Mexicanness strategically to leave China during a time of intense social and political turmoil; in turn, that community helped to shape postrevolutionary Mexican citizenship and Cold War politics. This book is a journey that follows the paths of the Wong Campoys and other Chinese Mexican families. Along the way, it traces the emergence of a Chinese Mexican identity rooted in an imagined Mexican homeland and the memory of that history. Chinese Mexicans pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be Mexican: The expulsion from Mexico and stages of repatriation ensured that these families would forge strong transpacific 2 | Introduction ties and become profoundly cosmopolitan people: The national identity they developed had a transnational foundation.The book explores the tensions therein and studies what the history of Chinese Mexicans can teach us about nations, borders, and belonging. It examines how the story of Chinese Mexicans has both informed and been erased from the history of Mexico and the Mexican-U.S. borderlands. Scholars of transnational migration and diasporas assert that people develop stronger national identities outside the nation’s borders as they experience a sense of longing for the homeland. Chinese Mexicans became Mexican only after authorities deported them to China. By tracing the transpacific journeys and national identity formation of Chinese Mexicans, this book adds to and complicates the literature in borderlands, Mexican, Latin American, and U.S. history as well as that of transnational migration and diasporas and of overseas Chinese, Asian American, and gender studies. The book explores the complex intersections of identity, citizenship, racialization, gender ideology, and class in Mexico, the United States, and China in a single narrative frame. Treating transnationalism trilaterally, the book views the construction of borders and the politics of belonging in three countries in light of each other; it studies the tripartite foreign relations that emerged with the Chinese Mexican expulsion from northern Mexico. Contesting the public/private split, it rethinks the implicitly public focus of diaspora studies by centering on the family and interpersonal relations as key to identity. Adding to a growing body of scholarship that challenges nationalist studies of Mexico as sealed off from other nations, the book works against assumptions of ethnic homoAlfonso Wong Campoy at his fruit stand in the Navojoa Central Market. Photograph by author. Introduction | 3 geneity and questions notions of mestizaje—the ideology of the nation’s heritage of racial and cultural mixture—that recognize only Spanish and indigenous ethnic and cultural influence in Mexico. The complex ties Mexicans and Chinese formed in northern Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the integration of Chinese men into local communities led to racial and cultural fusion and over time to the formation of a new cultural identity—Chinese Mexican. Racially and culturally hybrid families straddled the boundaries of identity and nation. They made alternating claims on Chineseness...