Official Anti-Chinese Racism, Callismo and Consensus

Official Anti-Chinese Racism, Callismo and Consensus

The anti-Chinese movement peaked during the administrations of Calles (1924-1928), Portes Gil (1928-1930), Ortiz Rubio (1930-1932) and Abelardo Rodriguez (1932-1934). The assassination of Alvaro Obregón, just weeks before he was to take office for a second term as president (1928-1932), cleared the path for Calles’s emergence as the “Jefe Maximo” of the Revolution.⁶⁴ During the six-year period (1928-1934) known in Mexican history as the Maximato or the “Rule of the Jefe Maximo,” the anti-Chinese movement thrived as an integral part of the complex and dynamic constellation of forces that shaped México’s state, politics and culture. On the one hand, anti-chinismo formed a natural synergy with the overtly nationalist and racial agenda of Calles’s new revolutionary orthodoxy. In these circumstances, the anti-Chinese movement quickly emerged as a natural base for the “mass political groups” upon which Calles erected the alliance that would enable him to overcome the political defeat caused by Obregón’s 1928 re-election. After Obregón’s assassination, Calles set out to reconstruct the “revolutionary family” and lay the foundations for the institutionalization of the post revolutionary state. The anti-Chinese movement and its leadership played a crucial role in the formation of the official party, the Partido Nacional Revoluciónario (PNR). Finally, anti-Chinese rhetoric and mobilization served Calles well in his ongoing conflicts with both the Catholic Church and the United States. In this (international) arena, the nationalist positions of the anti-Chinese movement served as useful counters to both the imperialist pronouncements of the new American ambassador and the Vatican-backed Catholic backlash against the anti-clerical measures of Calle’s revolutionary state.⁶⁵ Although it did not give its unconditional support to the government, the anti-Chinese movement did contribute to the creation of consent through its celebration and acceptance of the state-led nationalism, which would be a trademark of Calle’s regime.⁶⁶

In this respect, the increasingly vocal public demonstrations and political organizations launched by the anti-Chinese movement in early 1925 must be understood within the broader context of Calles’ multi-faceted political offensive against the Church, the expansion of the Cristero War, the renewed tensions with American oil interests, and a number of workers conflicts. In order to maintain his regime afloat, Calles established as his primary goal the political elimination of his adversaries and opponents. In this context, which has been described by historian Jean Meyer (1981: 116) as one of a “political combat, growing more political with the day,” Obregonistas and callistas “destroyed each other in the struggle,” and the government supported workers’ organization demolished independent unions and labor federations. Meanwhile, the anti-Chinese movement flourished without problems and with Calles’ approval as a site from which the unifying flames of nationalist and racial sentiment could be usefully fanned.

It was in these circumstances that the Sonoran anti-Chinese Committees convened two consecutive Anti-Chinese Conventions convention in Nogales and Hermosillo (Sonora) in April 1925. In these conventions, delegates of anti-Chinese committees in different regions of México, as well as union representatives, agraristas (land reform advocates), public health functionaries, and city council members assembled to create a national organization, and to discuss a common platform and strategy of struggle. The rules of the second convention cautioned that discussions had to be “exclusively restricted to nationalist topics.” Discussion of “political and religious matters” was “absolutely prohibited” Sonora’s congressman Jose Angel Espinoza as elected president of the new umbrella organization, Liga Nacionalista Pro-Raza, and his newspaper El Nacionalista named the official publication of the national anti-Chinese movement. The conventions were preceded by a well-orchestrated and unprecedented series of marches, demonstrations and conferences. These events served to distribute anti-Chinese propaganda and to post banners. Several of the demonstrations were followed by attacks against Chinese commercial establishments in Hermosillo, Nogales, and Guaymas. In the district of Nacozari after looting and destroying several businesses, a party of armed men kidnapped twenty Chinese demanding their immediate “colonization” in “Chinatowns” as stated in the controversial Law 31, and an end to central government intervention in state affairs.⁶⁷

Following the Sonoran conventions, anti-Chinese organizations in different parts of the country held similar meetings aimed at the creation of a more centralized political direction, the definition of local strategies and the coordination of actions. Their political platforms highlighted demands to the central government for the annulment of all agreements between China and México, the prohibition of marriages between Chinese men and Mexican women, and the establishment of Chinatowns. Their political strategies usually revolved around public marches and demonstrations, and letter writing and lobbying campaigns to state and federal authorities demanding anti-Chinese legislation. The recently created Liga Nacional Pro-Raza and the Bloque Anti-chino in the national congress in México City coordinated these actions. This was the case, for example, of a request made by the Anti-Chinese Commitee of Torreon demanding the revocation of treaties, formation of Chinatowns, prohibition of “inter-racial” marriages, and the deportation of undocumented Chinese immigrants. Within a few months the Torreon petition had received the support of state legislatures in Michoacan, Nuevo Leon, Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Tlaxcala, Queretaro and San Luis Potosi, all of whom passed it as state law while demanding that the central government approve its adoption also as federal legislature. By the following year, the legislatures of Sonora, Sinaloa, Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, Tamaulipas, Aguascalientes and Puebla had rejected a renewed treaty between México and China and demanded an end to all diplomatic relations with China.⁶⁸ Thus, by the second half of the 1920s, antichinismo, although still strongest in the northwest states of Sonora and Sinaloa, had emerged as a nationally organized political movement with broad political appeal among popular classes and middle sectors of Mexican society.

The failure of the Revolución Renovadora launched in March 1929 by the Obregonistas-- including the Sonoran governor Fausto Topete-- cleared the way to the total predominance of Calles and, with him, antichinismo.⁶⁹ Under the administration of callista governors Francisco S. Elías (1920-1931) and Rodolfo Elías Calles (1931-1935)—the first being an uncle and the second a son of the Jefe Maximo himself--the anti-Chinese movement reached its political zenith. Incorporated within the political and cultural repertoire of Callismo as a replacement to its virtually nonexistent social and agrarian policies, anti-Chinese racism become a factor in a regional development strategy geared around the expansion of a capitalist economy oriented to markets in the American West and Southwest.⁷⁰ Calles’s plans, however, were hampered by increases in US tariffs on Mexican agricultural products, the return of thousands of deported Mexican workers, and the stagnation of the mining industry. At the same time, northern anti-Chinese sentiments were rekindled by both the economic paralysis and an outbreak of meningitis along the North Pacific coast. These regional stimuli to anti-Chinese rhetoric were reinforced by political and intellectual debates on México’s national identity and popular culture, the government “social prophylaxis” or temperance campaigns against prostitution, alcohol and drug consumption, prohibitions against Syrian, Lebanese, Armenian, Palestinian, Arab, Turkish, Russian, Polish and black or African immigration, and, finally, by Calles’s initiative to create a party that would unite all of the parties and groups of the “revolutionary family.”⁷¹

Although it received the official support and shared with the federal state a number of intellectuals and organizers, antichinismo also maintained a relative--and many times conflictive—autonomy with respect to the state. The creation of the official party or Partido Nacional Revoluciónario (PNR or National Revolutionary Party) marked the beginnings of an official or state anti-Chinese racism. Under the leadership of Jose Angel Espinoza, the most important anti-Chinese organizer and “organic intellectual” of the moment, the most prominent representatives of the anti-Chinese committees formed a committee to organize the Sonoran delegation to the founding congress of the official party.⁷² The relationship between these leaders and politicians and the anti-Chinese committees, however, was not an easy one as it was frequently enmeshed with the tensions between the central state and the regions. Given its anti-centralist tradition, Sonora’s anti-Chinese movement, for example, clashed on several occasions with Calles’s official anti-Chinese politicians, for whom the demands of national state formation tended to prevail over regional interests. Espinoza himself acknowledged this problem in his comments regarding the distrust “maintained by provincial people” against “high level functionaries from the capital city.” In his opinion, there did not exist a favorable opinion of the anti-Chinese movement among the “intellectual circles” and “high bourgeoisie” whose “accommodating nationalism” was restricted to the “social and political order,” and to favoring national industry. For Espinoza, the “antichinista” ranks were mostly drawn from popular classes of the northerner frontier states. These classes maintained an “uninterested nationalism” that was “strongly attached to both the national economy and the ethnic future of the country.”(Espinoza 1932:99,177-183)

By the early 1930’s anti-Chinese rhetoric and ideology gained greater authority, legitimacy and reach within both state institutions and civil society. Approximately 200 anti-Chinese committees or nationalist leagues existed in the Northern states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Baja California Norte, Chihuahua, Colima, Nayarit, Durango and Nuevo Leon; Tamaulipas and Veracruz in the Gulf; Chiapas and Oaxaca in the Southeast; and on a more reduced scale in Yucatan, México City, Michoacan and Guadalajara. In the national congress the representatives and senators belonging to the “Anti-Chinese Block” formed a Directing Committee (Comite Director) of the Anti-Chinese Campaign affiliated to the PNR and charged with the creation of new committees, and the coordination between state institutions and the anti-Chinese organizations. With the cooperation of the Bloque Nacional Revoluciónario made up of PNR representatives in Congress and the Chambers of Commerce, the Comite Director also organized the so-called “nationalist campaigns” for “the defense of national commerce . . . national sovereignity . . . and the integrity of the race.” (Sanchez Lira 1956:33)⁷³ Sonorans and Sinaloans including Jose Angel Espinoza, Walterio Pesqueira, Miguel A. Salazar and Juan de Dios Batiz dominated its executive committee. Under its support, anti-Chinese committees and nationalist leagues were unified into umbrella organizations including the Comite Nacionalista de la Costa Occidental based in Sonora, the Liga Anti-China Sinaloense (Sinaloa), the Alianza Nacional Antichina Chihuahuense (Chihuahua), the Liga Mexicana Antichina from Chiapas, and the Liga Nacional ProRaza/Campaña Antichina from Tamaulipas.⁷⁴ Likewise, the official newspaper of the PNR, El Nacional Revolucionario, not only dealt frequently with the “Chinese problem,” but also treated it in extremely racist fashion. Its pages reproduced articles from the anti-Chinese press, published original anti-Chinese editorial comments, and spread anti-Chinese rumors and propaganda.

The recently reorganized Public Health Department carried on sanitary campaigns specifically aimed against the Chinese population who were painted as congenital carriers of infectious diseases. The revolutionary doctors, health specialists, functionaries and politicians who created the Union Nacionalista Mexicana Pro-Raza y Salud Publica under the leadership of General Norberto Rochin, espoused similar goals. The educational campaigns directed by the Union, which was affiliated with nineteen committees in several parts of México, preached the need for a “national prophylaxis of social, ethnic and racial character.” Needless to say, its actions and rhetoric were mainly aimed against the Chinese. Similar aspirations were voiced by the Union Nacional Mexicana whose goals, as stated in its founding manifesto, were “to combat undesirable immigrations,” and “contribute to the avoidance of the moral and physical degeneration of the Mexican race,” and combat the threats posed by the “highly detrimental yellow race.”⁷⁵ On the other hand, the scientific strategy of national/racial formation also influenced the prophylactic, antialcoholic, and sexual education programs sponsored by the Secretaria de Educación Pública, the Departamento de Salubridad Pública, and the Dirección Antialcohólica de la Secretaría de Industria, Comercio y Trabajo. These campaigns included—or implied—assertions made by the Sociedad Eugénica Mexicana para el Mejoramiento de la Raza, concerning the negative eugenic value of the Chinese population.⁷⁶

At the core of the state apparatus, Secretary of the Interior Carlos Riva Palacios, maintained the same intransigent and aggressive anti-Chinese attitude inaugurated by his predecessor Plutarco Elías Calles. He opposed the Treaty of 1889 traditionally maintained by the Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores (Secretary of Foreign Relations). In the atmosphere of intimidation, violence and political obsequiousness prevailing during the Maximato, dissident voices --derisively referred to as chineros (“Chinaman lovers”⁷⁷) were frequently silenced or disqualified as traitors to the race and the fatherland. Overall, during these years, apart from for occasional criticisms of the “excesses” of the anti-Chinese campaigns, anti-Chinese racism, xenophobia and racism in general were not critically confronted except by the Mexican Communist Party (PCM).⁷⁸

It was finally during a general economic crisis and the political turmoil generated in early 1930 by the contradictions of the Maximato, that the anti-Chinese movement found fertile ground for launching its so called “nationalist campaign” (Espinoza 1932: 83 ss) aimed at expelling the Chinese from México. Inaugurated in Sonora during the summer of 1931 the illegal deportations continued into 1933. Not surprisingly, this campaign it was more successful in states such as Sonora and Sinaloa, where official antichismo coincided with organized antichinismo.

As a form of moral panic, the anti-Chinese movement provided a language of consensus within the highly conflictive projects of state and nation building. In this respect, demonization of the Chinese can be seen as the “ideological vehicle” (Hall 1988) for the articulation of the economic and political crises of the 1930s. ⁷⁹ Thus, for J.A. Espinoza, the “principal cause of the crisis” in Sonora was rooted in the “two thousand [Chinese] businesses employing seven thousand persons.” For the Sonoran paper, El Intruso, the “eternal curse of the meningitis,” beriberi and tuberculosis was “inherited from the Chinese who have served us with germs in the merchandises we buy from them.”⁸⁰ Similarly during a parliamentary debate, Sinaloan deputy Juan de Dios Batiz claimed “95% of the Chinese resident in his state suffered from syphilis, trachoma, beri-beri or leprosy.” As a result, Batiz reasoned, there was a “potential danger to the degeneration of our race if the hybridization [of the Chinese] is not restrained.”⁸¹ Writing from Tampico (Tamaulipas) the correspondent of El Nacional Revolucionario, official newspaper of the PNR, asserted that the Chinese presented a general “living danger” because of their “diseases, vices and habits,” while the particular community of Chinese resident in Tampico “were also dedicated to the immoral trade of slaves to be sent to remote China.”⁸² An editorial in the same newspaper claimed that “the presence of undesirable foreigners” was affecting “the national health (sic) ...economy, morality and eugenics of the race.”⁸³

In its founding act, the Liga Antichina y Antijudía from Guasabe (Sinaloa), clearly expressed the ideological role of race--and ideas about the Chinese “race” in particular--in the definition of a political strategy. For this group, “the absorbent labor of pernicious foreign races” and “the inconvenience of the mixing of the Asiatic race with that of ours” constituted a very real threat to the national and patriotic interests of the fatherland. To combat this insidious Chinese presence, they suggested
“...Legislative and sanitary means of struggle, strict and frequent fiscal inspection, prohibition of the mix of that race [the Chinese] with ours, commercial boycott, relentless war against the individuals of our race that in one form or another favor the Chinese, and the protection of the national industry, agriculture, commerce and labor...⁸⁴”
The political conjuncture of the 1930s created a unique set of conditions within which the state, its political class and the anti-Chinese movement could coordinate their ideological and political initiatives. Obregón’s demise also meant a defeat of his more ambiguous and conciliatory position towards the “Chinese problem.” Whereas the American government had taken a more active role in the problem during the 1920s, during the 1930’s under the principle of the good neighbor, the complaints and accusations of Chinese diplomats on behalf of their countrymen in México did not find audience among the powerful neighbor to the North.

In 1930, the Sonoran legislature reintroduced the “80% law” as well as “the marriages law” previously considered as unconstitutional by México’s Supreme Court. Moreover, the enforcement of these laws was modified in more strictly racial terms. In its new version Law 31 stated the prohibition of marriages between Mexican women with “Chinese individuals even if they are naturalized Mexican,” and Law 27 also established that “the foreigners naturalized Mexican,” will not be considered nationals. (Espinoza 1932:58-60). Another important instrument in the offensive against the Chinese was the new Health Code that specifically prohibited the sale of vegetables, bread and meat to Chinese merchants. Moreover it also prohibited the Chinese from elaborating and selling nixtamal (cornmeal) and traditional Chinese medicines. (Chinese traditional doctors were greatly appreciated particularly in the most remote villages lacking medical services. (Espinoza 1932:63-65)). Other dispositions included the prohibition of women’s work in Chinese establishments, the creation of a registration system that included photographic identity cards and the periodic control of Chinese population. Finally municipal authorities often imposed exorbitant and abusive taxes on the Chinese merchants (Trueba Lara 1989).

The anti-Chinese committees, with the direct support of governor Francisco Elías --proclaimed “general in chief” of antichinismo-- were charged with the supervision and enforcement of the anti-Chinese legislation. As put by an anti-Chinese leader they became “a powerful, conscious and necessary auxiliary force of the government.” (Espinoza 1932: 96). In close cooperation with local authorities and workers unions the committees organized marches and demonstrations demanding “nationalist campaigns” to expel the Chinese. Their so-called “direct actions” involved psychological and physical intimidation against members of the Chinese merchant and business community. In other cases, mobs known as Guardias Verdes, in reference to regional anti-Porfirian traditions embodied in the political club Francisco Morales, armed with clubs and stones looted and destroyed selected Chinese establishments.⁸⁵ In this way the anti-Chinese movement set out to inscribe itself within the patriotic/regional traditions epitomized by this prominent Sonoran politician and military whose name had inspired popular and middle classes in their struggle against Porfirio Diaz. ⁸⁶ The most vulgar, offensive and harsh comments however were reserved for Sonoran women, whose supposed physical and moral weakness made possible the “degeneration of the race.” Through jokes, rumormongering, plays and corridos the anti-Chinese press and propaganda reproduced the image of the Sonoran women as a potential traitor to the race, the fatherland and Mexican masculine honor (Cortes 1943:16-19; Espinoza 1931:167-175).

Faced with Chinese refusal to comply with laws and decrees that they considered unjust and illegal, the state government and the anti-Chinese movement increased their campaign of intimidation between June and August of 1931. The government acted through new legal decrees while the anti-Chinese movement boycotted the Chinese establishments. Those less fortunate peddlers, barbers, truck farmers, butchers, tailors, cobblers or day laborers living in remote towns or villages, became the first victims of illegal detentions. Many were robbed of their meager belongings and violently ejected to the United States.⁸⁷ Since many Chinese, with the assistance of Mexican friends, partners or sympathizers, managed to hide themselves, governor Elías was forced to create “rural brigades” to search for almost a year. More fortunate businessmen and merchants managed to bribe authorities and were granted a more decorous but not less unjust deportation after seeing their property robbed or forcibly sold at bargain prices. By the end of the summer the Chinese community, including Mexicans, their Sonoran-born and their Mexican wives had left the state. Some of them went to China; others managed to relocate in the United States, and a few of them moved to other states -- mostly to Mexicali and Ensenada in Baja California Norte (Hu-deHart 1985; Guadarrama et.al. 1985:85-86)

An immediate consequence of the expulsion was the momentary disarticulation of the trade circuits established by the Chinese in Sonoran territory. These trade networks stretched across the border with the United States and into the neighboring states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa, as well as to the most remote populations in the state. In many cases the rural and urban populations that depended on the Chinese business and credits were forced to establish barter systems for the acquisition of basic products. State revenue also suffered the loss of its most important contributors after the American mining companies. The most important financial institution in the state --the Bank of Sonora-- was also forced to close its doors due to the massive withdrawal and repatriation of Chinese capital mostly to banks in China and the United States. Those who benefited most from the expulsion were those Sonorans indebted to Chinese entrepreneurs, among them the prominent generales-empresarios from the southern Yaqui and Mayo valley.⁸⁸ Others such as Alejandro Villaseñor, the anti-Chinese leader, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Nogales and state deputy, benefited from the prompt bargain sales forced upon Chinese merchants before their departure. Of the approximately 2,000 small Chinese businesses in operation before the expulsion, 1,454 passed to the control of Sonorans. Of these, only 77 small industries and workshops like bakeries, laundries, nixtamal plants, and shoe repair establishments were handed over to unemployed Sonorans (Guadarrama et.al. 1985:86; Ramirez et. al. 1985: 75-76). The principal beneficiaries were those middle sector individuals active in the anti-Chinese movement with marginal or no participation in the Maderista or Constitucionalista insurrections. For these individuals, the expulsion of the Chinese allowed them to emulate the revolutionary elite of generales-empresarios whose fortunes were founded on the grabbing of public and private lands in the Yaqui and Mayo Valleys irrigation districts. Such was the case for example, of governor Rodolfo Elías Calles (son of the Jefe Maximo) who made a name for himself as businessmen and agriculturalist both in the Yaqui Valley as in the Mante Valley in Tamaulipas where he also led the expulsion of the Chinese established in that agricultural district.⁸⁹

For the next three years prodded by the PNR and the anti-Chinese committees, the “nationalist campaigns” were propagated to the rest of the country.⁹⁰ With the prominent participation of Sonorans and Sinaloans the anti-Chinese and xenophobic campaigns were expanded to include other “undesirable foreigners,” particularly Jews, but also Syrians and Palestinians.⁹¹ In Baja California Norte, the Sonora-born governor Abelardo Rodriguez enthusiastically supported persecution of the Chinese, and the Sonoran Alfredo Echevarría, a Sonoran veteran of earlier anti-Chinese campaigns, founded the Partido Nacionalista Anti-Chino of Baja California in 1932. More importantly, the Campañas Nacionalistas coalesced around the anti-Chinese movement. These committees promoted and organized by the PNR would eventually become the post-revolutionary state’s preferred technology of mass control and mobilization.⁹²

The demise of Callista politics during the Lazaro Cárdenas administration (1934-1940), his leftward turn, and his cooperation with the Allies in the context of the ascendance of fascism, undermined and marginalized anti-Chinese racism and xenophobia in general. However, the determinist essentialism and racial hierarchy intrinsic to racist thought remained present in México’s cultural formation in a subtle mode intertwined with the discourses of mestizaje that lay at the core of México’s national identity and post revolutionary state formation.
Conclusions

This article has argued that antichinismo played an important role as a racial political movement in México’s politics, cultural nationalism and state formation during the crucial transitional decades of the 1920s and the 1930s. Viewed through the lens of antichinismo, race appears as an additional (though less studied feature) of a “cultural revolution” that also included anti-clerical, educational, temperance and hygiene campaigns. From this perspective, the racial nature and racist implications of the theories of mestizaje also appear crystal clear. Anti-Chinese rhetoric and discourse helped to legitimize the emerging nationalist orthodoxy and strengthen the hegemonizing capacity of the post-revolutionary state.

Archivo General de la Nación-Fondo Presidencial Obregón/Calles (AGN-OB/CALL), Mexico City, Mexico.

Archivo Histórico General del Estado de Sonora (AHGES), Hermosillo, Sonora.

Archivo Histórico- Secretaria de Salubridad Publica, Fondo Salubridad Publica (SSP-AH/FSP)

Jose Maria Arana Archives (AJMA), Special Collections, Library of the University of Arizona,

Tucson, Arizona.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) -- Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of México, College Point, Maryland.