Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico 1880–1940 by Jason Oliver Chang (review)

In his book Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico 1880–1940, Jason Chang argues that anti-chinismo was not a footnote in the history of Mexico but instead was central to the construction of mestizo national identity. Other scholars have written about the Sino-phobic movements in Mexico, particularly in the northwestern part of the country, but none has made such bold claims about the centrality of this xenophobic movement to the construction of the Mexican nation. Whether one accepts all of the claims being made, the argument forces us to rethink the origins of Mexico's mestizo mythology.

The book is organized chronologically, with the first two chapters focused on the construction of the notion of Chinese as motores de sangre (motors of blood) in the late nineteenth century, and the next three chapters examining the rise of the anti-Chinese movement which culminated in the expulsion of almost all of the Chinese population from northwestern Mexico. The narrative arc of the book highlights the shift from encouraging Chinese migration during the Porfiriato to discouraging such migration in the 1920s and then to purging Chinese populations by the 1930s.

In the late nineteenth century, Porfirian landowners began recruiting Chinese laborers to work on plantations. The government believed the Chinese presented an easy way to colonize land in sparsely populated regions, and a more reliable source of labor than the Indigenous. Chang shows that, although popular expressions of anti-chinismo existed in this period, Porfirians were more interested in exploiting Chinese labor than assuaging citizen complaints about the competition and racial dangers posed by Chinese workers. That calculation changed during the Mexican Revolution when the government targeted Indians for incorporation and assimilation. According to Chang, it was the anti-chinismo that allowed for "the racial transformation of Indians into mestizos" (14).

Chapter Four questions the standard causal explanation that attributes the rise of anti-chinismo to the existence of mestizo nationalism. Instead, Chang wants to reverse that causality and argue that it was anti-chinismo that allowed for the development of mestizo nationalism. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact origins of ideas as diffuse and widespread as mestizo nationalism and indigenismo (the incorporation and assimilation of Indigenous by non-Indigenous elites), especially since one can trace these ideologies back to the Porifiriato, but Chang insists on the centrality of anti-chinismo to the forging of national unity by the revolutionary state.

Almost every historian of the Mexican Revolution points to Manuel Gamio and José Vasconcelos as the two most important intellectuals of mestizo nationalism, but Chang argues that their impact in Mexico in the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s was limited, due to their absence from the country. Instead, Chang focuses on the politically organized anti-chinistas whose clubs and political caucuses helped push through immigration restrictions and anti-foreigner legislation. Chang sums it up by noting that "the overemphasis on Gamio and Vasconcelos in the formation of Mexican mestizo identity has served to obscure the history of antichinismo and limit the interrogation of Mexican national-identity formation" (130).

The most significant contribution of this book is the juxtaposition of anti-chinismo and indigenismo. As Chang argues, "The disavowal and eviction of the Chinese people and the conscription of Indian people were two sides of the same racial contract" (188). Some may feel that Chang overemphasizes the significance of antichinista discourse given that the Chinese population at its height never exceeded 25,000 people, at least officially, and that the question of how to assimilate the Indian occupied the minds of most Mexican intellectuals more than worrying about the dangers posed by Chinese migrants. However, by asking readers to take seriously the anti-Chinese movement and its larger influence on forging the Mexican nation, Chang makes a major contribution to Mexican history and the history of the Chinese in the Americas.