Genealogías Chino Mexicanas/Chinese Mexican Genealogies: (Digital) Community, Historical Memory, and Self-Archives

Abstract

Beginning in the mid to late nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants fleeing civil unrest, violence, overpopulation, and poverty in China, found themselves ensnared in global networks of their exclusion. Following their exclusion from the United States in 1882, Chinese migrated to various parts of the world for refuge and better prospects, including the Americas. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a significant number of Chinese immigrants and laborers arrived in Mexico, with some viewing it as a temporary stopover en route to the United States while others were recruited or brought to assist in industrializing the country.

By 1910, Chinese immigrants had settled in every Mexican state except Tlaxcala. Initially arriving as laborers, they dynamized Northern Mexico with their entrepreneurial zeal, primarily engaging in the service sector, establishing abarrotes/general stores, restaurants and coffee shops, and laundries, and later establishing themselves in commerce and trade. Many Chinese immigrants, primarily men, married Mexican women and established Chinese Mexican households and families in Mexico. Despite making Mexico their home, Chinese immigrants faced prolonged anti-Chinese campaigns from roughly 1900 to 1960 aimed at their eradication. This dissertation explores the intergenerational narratives of these immigrants and their descendants in Mexico and across the Americas, now as diasporic Chinese Mexicans, illustrating the inextricable nature of this history in shaping present-day hi/stories, cultural productions, community, and identity.

The scholarship about Chinese in Mexico has focused on their local businesses, the violence they experienced during the Mexican Revolution, and their mass displacement and expulsion from Northern Mexico. Most recently, scholarship has excavated the role of Chinese associations in maintaining transpacific ties and how forced deportations led to transpacific families during the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus on the early history of Chinese Mexicans has left contemporary stories unexplored, and the way these communities—who suffered murders, displacement, deportations, and compounded acts of violence—have continued living in Mexico, embracing and re-imagining their Chinese Mexican history.

Working at the intersection of American, Asian (Latinx), Latinx, and Latin American Studies, “Genealogías Chino Mexicanas” tells the hi/stories of Chinese Mexican communities in Mexico and the ways contemporary descendants—as diasporic Chinese Mexicans—contest, configure, and articulate their Chinese Mexican histories in Mexico and across the Americas. I combine known nineteenth and twentieth-century histories of Chinese Mexicans and Chinese in Mexico, focusing on solidarity networks, mutual-aid associations, and familial ties alongside cultural, social, and political ethnographic fieldwork. I examine descendants’ interactions with historical memory, virtual community, (diasporic) identity, and battles for justice within the context of a history marked by anti-Chinese violence. Despite decades of violence towards their communities and families resulting in family separations, community disruption, property destruction, and the suppression of histories, diasporic Chinese Mexicans are reviving the legacies of their ancestors through ongoing efforts to remember, foster community, and self-archive. I examine how the foundational blueprints left by their ancestors shape present-day connections and subjectivities among diasporic Chinese Mexicans, giving rise to what I call Genealogías Chino Mexicanas/Chinese Mexican Genealogies.

Recognizing the inherent absences, silences, and violence across and within Chinese Mexican archives that have relegated Chinese Mexican histories to the margins of public memory, this dissertation draws from various sources, including life histories and interviews—as pláticas and testimonios, participant and site observations, community and family-based archival research, autoethnography, digital ethnographies, and primary and secondary literature. These sources originate generously from the self-archives of diasporic Chinese Mexicans, compiled from 24-month community-based fieldwork. When referring to self-archives, I denote my interlocutors’ individual and collective efforts to uncover, safeguard, organize, and share their own records, documents, and narratives regarding their families, communities, and personal experiences spanning generations and locations. My interlocutors have taken on roles akin to archivists, anthropologists, historians, and scholars, entrusted with preserving their own histories. I present the dynamic self-archives of diasporic Chinese Mexicans as a glimpse into their presence, subjectivities, and survival within Mexico and throughout the diaspora.