Paisanos Chinos

Scholars of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas will want to read the latest addition to this growing field, Paisanos Chinos. It is a well-written and fairly well-researched book on Chinese Mexican political formation. Fredy González's scholarship on the Chinese Mexican community, understudied in Latin American history and scholarship on global Asias, is excellent, rigorous, and compelling. By spanning myriad national spaces, often simultaneously—expansive and ambitious conceptual parameters—González's work shows that transpacific webs of migration, intersecting with categories of race, class, and political affiliation, determined who belonged, ambivalently or not, to the Mexican body politic. Similar approaches have been adopted in recent scholarly work on Chinese in Peru and Nicaragua, but González is the first Latin American–trained historian to deploy a diasporic perspective to chronicle the history of modern Mexico from the vantage of a racial minority.Paisanos Chinos is among the strongest monographs in a rather recent boom in studying Chinese Mexicans. González successfully counters a narrative entrenched in such studies. According to this narrative, in the 1910s revolutionary fervor and mestizaje isolated the Chinese; wanton violence ensued, especially in northern Mexico. Class and political cleavages between rival Chinese Tong organizations exacerbated Sinophobia throughout the 1920s, again sparking violence—mostly against the Chinese merchant classes—and business boycotts, which were partly fended off by the political collaborations of Chinese, Mexican, and some American officials. In the early 1930s, the Chinese were ousted from Sonora and vilified throughout Mexico; few Chinese communities remained after 1940, outside the political centers of Mexico.Contrary to this narrative, González instead treats Sinophobia and Mexican postrevolutionary nationalism as historically contingent processes unfolding in the wake of other revolutionary nationalisms, specifically those in China and Japan. As González eloquently states in the introduction, the silencing of Chinese-descended people was especially apparent in Mexico, which mostly upheld the view that national identity was forged from the racial mixture of European criollos and indigenous peoples. The Chinese were neither, and despite holding citizenship, intermarrying, and establishing successful businesses, they had to struggle to assert themselves as rightful Mexicans.As González convincingly argues, the strength of diasporic political ties was the most important factor in the long-term settlement of Chinese in Mexico. Political ties with Mexican officials, established amid earlier struggles in the 1920s and 1930s (covered in chapters 1 and 2), would prove vital to Chinese Mexicans and to Mexico's overall standing as one of the Allies in World War II. Chinese Mexican politics were nimble, accommodating shifting wartime and postwar landscapes. At the same time, González reveals the ongoing tensions between the Guomindang and Chee Kung Tong as the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 raised conflicts over diplomatic recognition and the legitimacy of the Maoist project. While anticommunism reintroduced Sinophobia, it also opened opportunities to showcase the Chinese Mexican community nationally and internationally. Cultural diplomacy, namely through the annual pilgrimage of Chinese Catholics to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, fostered goodwill and allayed tensions about fears of a looming PRC threat.While chapters 1 and 2 somewhat repeat the familiar history of Chinese Mexicans in Sonora and Baja California during the 1920s and 1930s, González takes great pains to enrich this narrative by highlighting the impact of anti-Chinese movements in places not previously studied: Tampico, Mexico City, and Chiapas. Without the political work of Chinese Mexicans in regions other than the Mexican north, anti-Chinese attacks in Sonora and Baja California may have been more ferocious and lasted longer. Certainly, the reassertion of Chinese Mexicans in the north would have been less robust.González's focus on greater Mexico is a welcome addition to a body of literature in need of new frameworks, new questions, and unmined primary sources. I believe Paisanos Chinos provides these. González's knowledge of Pinyin romanization, Spanish, and English—a rare set of language fluencies even among most scholars of global Asias—allowed him to dynamically explore an array of source materials and international archives quite unique among historians of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas. For the most part, González draws on government sources and newspapers, particularly the correspondence contained in Chinese Legation records in Mexico. He also makes excellent use of Chinese Mexican newspapers as well as periodicals from other Chinese Tong organizations in the Americas. Finally, González mines relevant documents from national archival holdings in Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Washington, DC, and Mexico City while also incorporating key records from regional- and state-level archives in Baja California, Chiapas, and Tampico.González is one of a growing number of academics who over the last two decades or so have worked to rescue history from nation-centered narratives. Such scholarship has produced a vibrant, diverse revisionism showing that Chinese communities in the Americas worked against nationalistic narratives. González's Paisanos Chinos stands out within the field of Latin American history by being seriously embedded in transpacific and diasporic perspectives

Diaspora · Immigration · Latin Americans · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

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