Counting Chinese People in a Catholic Country: Religious Difference, Racial Discrimination, and the 1930 Mexican Population Census

On May 15, 1930, in the small border town of Naco, Sonora, census enumerator Miguel Robles started to count. When he finished walking his assigned portions of Calle Hidalgo, Avenida Independencia, and Calle Morelos, he had enumerated 143 individuals, each of whom answered the single question regarding religious identity the same way: Catholic. A block over, a carpenter named Ignacio Ledgard left his tools for the day to canvas his own neighborhood, counting 252 individuals, including his own family. They also all identified as Catholic, except for two Chinese men with no religion.¹

Across the Mexican republic, the aggregate statistical data from the 1930 population census painted the same picture. Of more than 16.5 million individuals counted, 97.7% identified as Catholic.² The strong anticlerical provisions of the 1917 Constitution and the federal government's vigorous, violent enforcement campaigns—particularly against the Cristero Rebellion in the late 1920s and de-Christianization efforts in the 1930s—constructed the postrevolutionary Mexican state as highly secular and antagonistic to religion, especially Catholicism. Nonetheless, at the granular, quotidian level, individuals and families overwhelmingly claimed to be Catholic. In the professed identity of its population, Mexico was a Catholic country.

The two Chinese men with no religion stood out in enumerator Robles's tally So did 22 individuals without religion in another census taker's count of 239 individuals in a neighborhood nearer to Naco's international border with the United States; of the 22, 18 had emigrated from China.³ In contrast to the Mexican population as a whole, Chinese persons in northern Mexico, whether immigrants or native-born, did not identify as Catholic in numbers even approaching 97.7%. The Chinese population was religiously different, much more religiously diverse.

In a burgeoning historiography scholars have plumbed a wealth of primary data—newspapers, books, music, diplomatic archives, censuses, court cases, private letters, personal interviews—to explicate the prejudice Chinese people in Mexico experienced and resisted in the early twentieth century For example, Gerardo Rénique has argued that anti-Chinese prejudice provided "a safe outlet for the otherwise denied or muted racialism inscribed in the official indigenista racial orthodoxy" of postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism.⁴ Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho identified Catholicism as a source of significant comfort and identity for Chinese Mexican families in transpacific migration.⁵ Jason Oliver Chang connected constructions of the state and religion when, in 1926, officials in Colima saw in Chinese-Mexican miscegenation "a compelling secular rationale for claiming the government's exclusive authority to regulate marriage" as "[a] nticlerical and antimiscegenation discourse became intertwined with the fear of the sacramental union of degenerates."⁶ Fredy González's work on Chinese communities in Mexico after 1931, the height of anti-Chinese discrimination, pays sustained attention to religion—Catholicism and devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe specifically—in the lives of Chinese Mexicans in the mid twentieth century.⁷ Their careful research and explication deepen our understanding of the complex factors that interacted to construct postrevolutionary Mexico: race, nationalism, economic competition, class, geography gender, and religion, among others.

With the extant historiography as foundation, I argue that religious prejudice intertwined with racism and economic nationalism to justify violence and discrimination, culminating in the state-sponsored expulsion of Chinese people and their families from Sonora in 1931 and 1932.⁸ The Chinese population's religious difference, including those who professed no religion, compounded and magnified racial discrimination against it, even as that same racial discrimination obviated essential contributions Chinese people made to the vitality of the Mexican nation. First, with religion as the analytic lens, I explicate the 1930 census as an act of governance. While the US-mediated end to the Cristero War in 1929 formally concluded the most brutal enforcement of the anticlerical Mexican state, intermittent violence continued until 1941. Moreover, the federal government engaged in vigorous de-Christianization campaigns into the late 1930s.⁹

Nonetheless, even the formally anticlerical Mexican state and the violence it employed to that end conceded a question on the population census to the...