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

1. Creating Chinese-Mexican Ties and Families in Sonora, 1910s–early 1930s

21 chapter one Creating Chinese-­ Mexican Ties and Families in Sonora, 1910s–Early 1930s This story begins in southeastern China in the mid-­ nineteenth century, when Chinese men increasingly departed their villages and towns and formed diasporic overseas communities around the world, becoming huaqiao , “Chinese sojourners.”1 Among the emigrants from Guangdong Province several decades later was Wong Fang, Alfonso Wong Campoy’s father. Around the turn of the twentieth century, when he was a very young man, Wong Fang traveled to San Francisco with his uncle, who became a businessman there.Wong Fang continued his journey to Sonora and settled in Pueblo Viejo, a community adjacent to the small town of Navojoa, a semitropical area in the valley of the Río Mayo near the state’s southern border with Sinaloa. He went to school, learned Spanish, and worked in the community ; he later moved to Navojoa proper.2 Adapting to local society, Wong Fang became “Alfonso Wong Fang,” adding a common Mexican given name and using his Chinese names as surnames, a regular practice among Chinese in Latin America.3 With his uncle remaining in San Francisco, he benefited from cross-­ border ties among Chinese men in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, eventually becoming an associate of an important Navojoa enterprise , Ching Chong y Compañía, which sold a wide variety of goods. As a 22 | Chinese Settlement and Local Responses businessman, he traveled to other towns in Sonora and Sinaloa, but his primary home was in Navojoa. Wong Fang also ran a shop that sold candy and ice cream and employed a woman named Dolores Campoy Rivera. Campoy Rivera’s family was from Navojoa; her father worked in the local post office. In time, Dolores and Alfonso married and started a family. Their first child was born in Navojoa on 12 October 1928, and in keeping with Mexican custom, the parents named their first-­ born son after his father and used the father’s family name as the first surname, followed by the mother’s paternal surname: Alfonso Wong Campoy. Business dealings caused the young family to travel often over the next few years; as a result , the couple’s second child, María del Carmen IrmaWong Campoy, was born in Hermosillo, Sonora’s capital, and the third, Héctor Manuel Wong Campoy, was born in Culiacán, Sinaloa.4 By forging culturally hybrid Chinese Mexican families and adopting local social norms such as naming practices while maintaining a sense of Cantonese or Taishanese identity and passing it on to their children, Chinese men became part of Sonoran society. mexico united states arizona baja california california chihuahua sinaloa sonora Nogales Nogales Cananea Ciudad Obregón Guaymas Hermosillo Magdalena Navojoa Mazatlán Mexicali Tucson • • • • • • • • • • • Sonora and the Mexican-U.S. Borderlands Creating Chinese-Mexican Ties and Families | 23 Chinese in Sonora In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Alfonso Wong Fang and other Chinese men settled in a fluid, culturally diverse, and ethnically and class stratified Mexican society.5 Situated on the border with the United States, Sonora drew influence from both central Mexico and its northern neighbor and in time became a hybrid “contact zone.”6 The marginalized indigenous groups residing in Sonora included the Yaqui, Tohono O’odham, Seri, Apache, and Mayo. The export economy had attracted foreigners interested in taking part in mining enterprises and trade throughout the nineteenth century. French, British, German, and American immigrants had married into wealthy Mexican families. As its border economy took shape between 1860 and 1900, the state gained more newcomers from the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Mexicans from elsewhere in the nation also migrated north during this time in search of work in mines, on haciendas, and in nascent border towns. Isolation from markets in central Mexico increased Sonoran economic dependence on the United States, and foreign investment came to dominate the economy by the turn of the twentieth century. As Mexicans and Americans came into increased contact, they engaged in cultural exchange as well as conflict. The new border towns eventually led to a complicated MexicanU .S. economic interdependence, but vast inequality characterized the burgeoning relationship. As a consequence of the Spanish colonial past and the persistent presence of foreigners since Mexican independence in 1821, people in Sonora often viewed themselves as ethnically distinct from other Mexicans, and Sonorans’ notions of race explicitly privileged the lighter skinned.7...