Though Chinese men had become integrated into communities in northern Mexico by the turn of the century, exclusionary ideology during the Mexican Revolution laid the groundwork for the formation of anti-Chinese campaigns, which first emerged in the state of Sonora.  These crusades eventually developed into a powerful anti-Chinese movement, which culminated during the Great Depression when the states of Sonora and Sinaloa expelled Chinese men en masse.  Thousands of Chinese and their Mexican-origin families traversed the Mexican-U.S. Borderlands to be deported to China by the United States Immigration Service.  Mexican women and Chinese Mexican children often accompanied the expelled Chinese to China.  Mexican Chinese families who came to reside in various areas of southeastern China developed hybrid cultures and identities while at the same time conceptualizing of themselves as Mexican.  Over time, they became concentrated in the Portuguese colony Macau where they formed a community whose web extended to the British colony Hong Kong and parts of Mainland China, as well as Mexico.  Drawing on an elaborate rhetoric of Mexican nationalism, the Mexican Chinese appealed for their repatriation to the Mexican homeland.  Groups of people returned to Mexico at various stages between the late 1930s and 1980s.  Moving between Mexico, the Mexican-U.S. Borderlands, and China, this project expands our notions of Borderlands History and the Mexican and Chinese diasporas.

Julia María Schiavone Camacho received her Ph.D. in Borderlands History at the University of Texas El Paso History where she is an associate professor of history. She is spending the '07-'08 academic year at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies as a  Research Fellow completing her manuscript “Crossing Boundaries, In Between Homelands: Expulsion, Diasporic Identities, and Memory of the Mexican Chinese, 1910-1980s" for publication.

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Last updated December 19 2007.