Making the Chinese Mexican

Several theses drive this book's narrative, among them are three that the author develops scrupulously. First, international and national influences shaped the histories of the borderlands of Arizona and Sonora. Migration—created in the nineteenth century by civil war in China and global demands for labor—brought the Chinese to the United States and Mexico. Chinese communities sprouted in both countries by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though they were more successful in Mexico where the Chinese established themselves as merchants. Commerce among these businessmen involved crossing borders and even smuggling of Chinese from Mexican ports to the United States. Both from Sonora and Arizona, Chinese merchants ventured back to China occasionally to maintain family or business connections. Thus did national and international activity intersect in the borderlands. Further, the author elaborates on the now accepted truth that borderlands transcend man-made boundaries. In Arizona, relationships between Mexicans and Chinese took root in the Tucson enclave (El Barrio) where Mexican American citizens helped the Chinese by renting them land or purchasing merchandise from them. In Sonora similar Chinese communities took shape and marriages became commonplace with Mexican women. Kinship bonds and commercial ties did not confine themselves to geographic delineations, however. Instead, interplay among groups characterized life in this transnational region; for the author, “the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was a world of overlapping cultures” where migration, settlement, relationships, commercial exchange, and cultural distillation occurred (p. 12

China · Chinese americans · Economic history · Economy · Ethnology · Geography · Immigration · Kinship · Political science · Settlement (finance · Spanish Civil War · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy