Chino

Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940

Jason Oliver Chang

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252099359
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Sociología

From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, antichinismo --the politics of racism against Chinese Mexicans--found potent expression in Mexico. Jason Oliver Chang delves into the untold story of how antichinismo helped the revolutionary Mexican state, and the elite in control, of it build their nation. As Chang shows, anti-Chinese politics shared intimate bonds with a romantic ideology that surrounded the transformation of the mass indigenous peasantry into dignified mestizos. Racializing a Chinese Other became instrumental in organizing the political power and resources for winning Mexico's revolutionary war, building state power, and seizing national hegemony in order to dominate the majority Indian population. By centering the Chinese in the drama of Mexican history, Chang opens up a fascinating untold story about the ways antichinismo was embedded within Mexico's revolutionary national state and its ideologies. Groundbreaking and boldly argued, Chino is a first-of-its-kind look at the essential role the Chinese played in Mexican culture and politics.

1

The Politics of Chinese Immigration in the Era of Mexican National Colonization

A Cuban-based Mexican economist and diplomat named Manuel Zapata Vera proclaimed in 1882 to the El Monitor Republicano, an ardent liberalist, Mexico City newspaper, of the changing conditions of Chinese immigration and its potential for Mexico: “There is a lot of hope for Chinese immigration.” Comparing Cuba’s coolies and California’s Chinese sojourner population, Vera asked his readers to consider the benefits of Chinese “corporeal faculties” for mass employment in Mexican development. Even after describing California’s grievances against Chinese vice and labor competition and after explaining Cuban officials’ anxieties about the growth of mixed Chinese African families, Vera pauses to question, “Is this a complete condemnation of Chinese immigration to Mexico?” which he answers with an emphatic “no!” Vera’s essay offered Mexico City readers a view of Chinese immigration as a consummate solution to the perennial frustrations of capitalist development and industrial expansion.1 One month later, the U.S. Congress seemingly gave the opposite answer to Vera’s question when they passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Chinese migration and settlement in Mexico were neither accidents nor mere side effects of U.S. exclusion. This U.S. immigration law paralleled a new wave of Mexican land reforms to facilitate economic expansion. U.S. immigration restrictions made simultaneous Mexican policies more successful by pushing Chinese migrants from the United States south to Mexico as they looked for clandestine entry. The U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese immigration and barred the Chinese people from naturalization as aliens ineligible, based on their race, for citizenship. The law was the result of years of anti-Chinese hostility, white labor-union agitation, and legal arbitration to enact immigration restrictions.2 El Monitor Republicano reporters explained the U.S. law’s passage and content to Mexico City readers. While the United States enacted restrictionist measures, Mexican officials attempted to propel national colonization by articulating an aggressive regime of land reform and settler recruitment, for which the Chinese people became the most significant immigrant group. Only immigrants from Spain outnumbered the Chinese immigrants in Mexico, and the Chinese people were the most geographically distributed foreign-born group in the republic. In December 1883, Mexico passed the Colonization Law, also known as the Law of Demarcation and Colonization of Vacant Lands (Ley de deslinde y colonización de terrenos baldíos), which enacted sweeping transformations to legal title that affirmed the rights of some and disavowed the rights of others. Land reform was important because it changed peoples’ relationship to territory, which fundamentally altered their political and social identities. Mexican colonization laws introduced a selective bias for which Chinese immigrants were recruited into development projects.

This chapter describes how different streams of Chinese migration intersected with Mexican national colonization policy. To explain some of the ways that Mexican colonization policy shaped the Chinese experience, the chapter offers an overview of the formation of the Mexican racial state and examines the Mexican racial state through its history of Indian relations with national colonization policies and the various racial projects generated. These nineteenth-century projects show how liberal ideology shaped the meaning of race through colonization policy, an area of governance that tied land, Indians, and immigrants together. Mexican colonization policy stratified economic and political rights and led to a graduated citizenship that reflected the aims of modernization. Graduated citizenship was indexed by racial discourses, class structure, and instrumentality to the reproduction of the state apparatus. The Porfirian administration introduced Chinese men as racialized instruments of policy in order to expand and deepen the power of the state through the expansion of infrastructure projects. Although Mexico is not traditionally associated with the nineteenth-century coolie trade, Mexican colonization policy permitted the continuation of these exploitative labor practices while labeling the policy as open immigration and economic development.

This overview also describes several of Mexico’s other Others, such as African, Jewish, and Japanese people, because understanding the racial foundations of the Mexican state and the influence of colonization policy is important when framing the influence of anti-Chinese politics in the reconstruction of state power after the revolution. This and the next chapters address a pressing question in Asian American studies: Can we compare Chinese immigration regulation in political contexts other than the United States by describing migration circuits, differences in political context, bureaucratic structure, and statutory content? Scholars David Scott Fitzgerald and David Cook-Martín argue that the diffusion of racist immigration policy originates from states with institutions of democratic input and that open policies are initiated by more-authoritarian states.3 This chapter shows that the meaning of immigration restriction or openness goes deeper than the size of a nation’s welcome mat. A theory of racial states implies that an immigration statute’s degree of selection is a poor measure of openness because all states seek immigration policies that reinforce foundational domestic racial inequalities. In Mexico the openness of immigration policies was designed to undermine indigenous resistance to national colonization. These analytical dimensions also illustrate that while both the United States and Mexico racialized their Chinese populations, they did so with different intents and outcomes.

Scholars of immigration have long moved away from a one-way–journey, nation-centric model of immigration in order to represent immigrants’ choices and migration patterns by describing the larger transnational factors that push and pull people through migration and integration and remigration.4 Chinese immigration to Mexico in the second half of the nineteenth century reflected the convergence of new forces that pulled or attracted Chinese immigrants to Mexico and two forces that pushed Chinese migrants into Mexico: the decline of the coolie system and U.S. restriction of Chinese immigration, both of which began in the 1870s. This historical background is useful to illustrate the deep political and structural fissures that determined Chinese experiences and shaped Mexican perceptions of the Chinese people. The forces that pulled Chinese immigrants to Mexico were a mix of regional conditions that included caudillos (political strongmen); the degree of hostility, indifference, or cooperation of different and competing Indian populations; tensions between provincial powers and centralized state authority; the legal rights granted to foreigners; and the prevailing policies of colonization. In 1876 Porfirio Díaz became dictator of Mexico, enacting aggressive colonization policies that favored foreigners and intensified suppression of Indian resistance. The Porfiriato resulted in several decades of programs to modernize the country during a period that the Chinese people were rejected from the United States and that colonial officials dismantled the system of Chinese indenture. Porfirian officials and industry leaders intended to redirect these streams of migration to the deserts of Sonora, the coastal plains of Yucatán, the fertile valleys of Coahuila, the mountains of Oaxaca, and the highlands of Chihuahua.

However seductive it may seem to attribute Mexican racism to mimicry of U.S. racial forms, this study stresses the importance of decentering the racial imaginary of U.S. imperialism and the necessity of building an understanding of an autonomous Mexican racial state. I acknowledge that theoretical frameworks of imperialism and empire make it necessary to consider how imperial states shape the conditions of other states, but empire is not everywhere, and it is never complete. I diverge from the majority of scholars who claim that Mexico borrowed anti-Chinese attitudes from the United States. Instead, the focus of this book is on endemic institutions and intellectual thought that organized Mexican perceptions of Chinese racial difference.

Vera saw Mexico positioned between the Cuban and Californian realities of the Chinese diaspora. Both transpacific sojourners and the coolie trade began in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chinese emigration rapidly expanded at midcentury due to the discovery of gold in California and the outbreak of violent conflict between Qing China and European powers, a conflict often called the Opium Wars. The imposition of trade policies that favored European aggressors led to the formation of coastal trading colonies, such as Hong Kong and Shanghai. Gradually, officials and plantation owners turned to indentured Asian workers to fill the labor gap created by the emancipation of enslaved Africans in European colonies around the world. Drawing resources from both British India and the Chinese trade colonies, the English coolie system recruited, entrapped, and kidnapped displaced and desperate people. Mexico would not become integrated into these networks until the system began to decline.

Mexican independence from Spain included the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of chattel slavery. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, a majority of Mexico’s African slaves had already been freed, but outlawing slavery itself was a pragmatic proclamation by the constitution’s framers to gain the support of African Mexican communities, which was vital to the war for independence.5 Because of this precedent, Mexican officials abstained from the coolie trade, as an extension of its prohibition on human bondage. However, from 1847 to 1874, more than 220,000 contracted, male, Chinese workers were brought to newly independent Peru and Spanish Cuba. At that time, Liberals in Mexico City viewed slavery as a moral offense and as a sign of economic weakness—a mode of production that would not survive in a market with free labor. The economic rationale followed that free wage earners would work better and harder than either conscripted slaves or contracted coolies.6 As the attitude in Vera’s Republicano article attests, Mexican Liberals disdained coolie indenture, calling it slavery by another name. However, the high-minded ideals of Mexico City philosophers did not reflect the actual practices of debt peonage in Yucatán, the trade in indigenous slaves in the north, or the use of recruited work gangs for the republic’s infrastructure projects.

In the United States Chinese migrants had flocked to California in response to the gold rush, their numbers expanding from twenty thousand in 1850 to more than fifty thousand in 1870. These migrants spread out through the U.S. west, in mining, agriculture, railroad construction, and manufacturing, and when the economic depression of the 1870s struck the nation, white labor unions responded by condemning the Chinese labor force. Despite being voluntary migrants, Chinese men were perceived by U.S. whites as innately willing to indenture themselves, and Chinese women as slavishly prone to prostitution. Democratic politicians, seeking to expand their constituencies, responded by promulgating California nativism, labor protectionism, and antimiscegenation laws to the federal legislature. This legislative push led to the first partial restrictionist measure in 1875 and the more robust prohibition in 1882.7

Patterns of Chinese migration in the late nineteenth century responded to both these new restrictions and the unraveling of the coolie trade. Chinese migration to Mexico was contingent on these larger patterns. Harsh abuse throughout the coolie system brought heavy criticism of Asian indenture and led the Qing government to pass restrictions on the labor practice. The coolie system was formally dismantled by 1877, but recruiters, shipowners, and industrialists remained dependent upon the traffic in Asian labor. Meanwhile, Chinese migrants anticipated exclusion from the United States when more than fifty thousand Chinese immigrated there in 1881. By the time of Mexico’s 1883 colonization law, Chinese people were already seeking entry to Mexico on their own,8 and operatives of the coolie trade were in search of new markets to continue the circulation of Asian laborers.

In order to understand why Mexican officials thought of Chinese people as an inferior, yet necessary, element of colonization policy, we must examine the historical background of Mexican national colonization. The 1883 colonization law dictated the rights of colonos blancos (white settlers) and defined the colonization enterprises that they could initiate. The Indian population was not exempt from this colonization scheme, but to participate they had to relinquish indigenous ties to the land and adopt the modernizing intent of the law. The Chinese people in Mexico were never to become colonos blancos, nor were they simply accidental migrants making Mexico home instead of continuing their journey to the United States. Vera’s Republicano editorial shows how racial ideology shaped principles of state selection in the recruitment of settlers and laborers for colonization. According to Vera, if Europeans could not be acquired for colonization, then the state would have to look to African and Asian workers. Of these choices, Vera was clear that Asian migrants were preferable both to African ones and to the indigenous population. The advent of intensive national colonization policy in the second half of the nineteenth century brought numerous ethnic groups into the country as potential settlers. Chinese immigrants became instruments of this policy, not as colonos but as motores de sangre.

Foundations of the Mexican Racial State

Mexican immigration policy in the nineteenth century was shaped by the belief that Mexico was potentially wealthy but that the native population was insufficient in number and quality to realize that wealth. The perceived solution was to increase the number and whiteness of the national population through immigration. Criollos thought that the mass immigration of whites would lead to the racial improvement of the Indian population through generations of racial mixing, leading to gradual mixing or racial replacement. Mexico’s political class held racist perceptions of foreigners: Europeans were considered to be racially superior, but different ethnic groups possessed unique and useful attributes. The ideal of blanqueamiento shaped the perceptions of foreign immigrants’ ethnicity.

The conflation of nation building and colonization was the central paradox of the early Mexican republic. The problem, as Benedict Anderson describes, was how to turn a colony into a homeland.9 The ensuing transformation was both ideological and structural. Through constitutional independence, the Mexican state reconstructed the extensiveness of sovereign crown authority over colonial territory and its residents. The declaration of independence from Spain was marked by the emergence of a resolute Liberal order concerned with the rights and liberties denied to criollos under the crown. In 1821 Agustín de Iturbide and Vicente Guerrero issued a revolutionary proclamation in the Plan de Iguala to announce three guarantees: the supremacy of Roman Catholicism, complete independence, and social equality. The 1824 constitution extended citizenship to all of Mexico’s residents. This was ostensibly designed to abolish race and social class whi...