4
Intermarriage and the Making of a Multicultural Society in the Baja California Borderlands
Verónica Castillo-Muñoz
Maria Librada Wong Duarte was born in La Paz, Baja California, in 1915. The daughter of a Chinese immigrant man and a Mexican mestiza woman, she was raised speaking both Spanish and Cantonese. Her younger brother, Alejandro Vicente Wong Duarte, used his bilingual abilities to secure a job as a sailor in La Paz, facilitating communication between Mexican and Chinese commercial interests.1 Maria Librada and Alejandro Vicente’s bicultural identities were not unique to the region. Indeed, they formed part of a new generation of Chinese Mexican children in Baja California. The boom of US and European mining enterprises and agribusinesses spearheaded a large migration of Chinese, Japanese, and European single men to the Baja California peninsula. Agribusiness and mining companies had initially relied on local indigenous and Mexican labor, but when the scarcity of workers threatened production, managers recruited additional skilled and nonskilled laborers from central Mexico, Japan, China, and Europe.
Figure 4.1. Maria Librada Wong Duarte, 1933, immigration form F14. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Registro del Departamento de Migración.
Historians have previously attributed the success of settlements in Baja California to mining, fishing, and agribusiness, as well as to colonization projects sponsored by the Mexican government.2 While these factors were important, they do not explain fully why more single men, who were highly transient in the past, began to settle permanently, leading to the formation of culturally and racially diverse communities in Baja California.
By 1921, more than 93 percent of Baja California’s population was racially mixed, according to Mexican census records. People there spoke at least fourteen different languages and eight distinct dialects.3 Thirty years earlier, the region consisted primarily of Mexican and local native peoples. Census records and oral testimonies reveal that migration and mixed race unions contributed to the increase of permanent settlements in the region. For example, in the Mexicali Valley, mestizo, European, Japanese, and Chinese men intermarried and cohabitated with mestizo and Indian women.4 Chinese and Japanese last names then, became widespread in agricultural communities in the Mexicali Valley, while Chinese and European surnames became commonplace in coastal communities where they settled.
In the past ten years, more historians have published important works on the Chinese experience at the US-Mexico borderlands.5 These authors examine the transnational lives of the Chinese living in the Southwest and northern Mexico since the Chinese Exclusion Act took effect in the United States in 1882. For example, Julia Schiavone Camacho has demonstrated that Chinese Mexican families pushed the boundaries of mestizaje in Sonora, Mexico, by claiming Mexicanidad (Mexican identities) at a time of exclusion.6 This chapter contributes to this larger historiography by examining how migration and mixed race marriages complicate our understanding of race and ethnicity in northern Mexico. As Paul Spickard notes, intermarriage and ethnicity can be useful theoretical tools to examine social relations and how societies change over time.7 This chapter examines why ideologies of mestizaje took precedence over ideologies of Whiteness (criollo) in twentieth-century Mexico and how mestizaje both incorporated and excluded people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds in Baja California.
The Santa Rosalía Mines
Five hundred miles south of the US-Mexico border in Santa Rosalía, the Compagnie du Boleo, a French mining company, recruited Chinese and Japanese workers, most notably after 1892, when the Mexican government prevented the company from hiring indigenous people during the Yaqui Wars. President Porfirio Díaz prohibited the Compagnie du Boleo from hiring Yaqui Indians because he feared they would spend their earnings on arms and ammunition.8
Boleo managers recruited Mexican mestizos from the nearby states of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Nayarit, but they departed after only a year, largely because competing recruiters from the United States traveled to Santa Rosalía to hire mestizos with the promise of higher wages. Between 1895 and 1899, the Santa Rosalía mestizo population declined from 4,115 to 2,975 (see table 4.1), while the European population remained under 300. These foreigners represented a skilled class that occupied managerial positions as supervisors, engineers, and merchants.9 Indeed, French newspapers advertised jobs for young engineers interested in work outside the country with the company. To entice them, the Compagnie du Boleo offered them free transportation from France to Santa Rosalía and covered all their housing expenses.10 Santa Rosalía also served as an important port of entry for Chinese and Japanese migrant workers. The approval of the 1899 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation between Mexico and China facilitated the migration of thousands of Chinese men to northern Mexico. In fact, the Compagnie du Boleo, a French-owned mining company, built its own port in Santa Rosalía and recruited workers directly from China.
Chinese migration to Mexico was part of a larger transpacific migration to Latin America, Canada, and the United States that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century, when about 113,000 Chinese workers emigrated to the United States and Canada, and about 80,000 went to Latin America.11 According to historian Robert Chao Romero, Chinese immigrants numbered about 24,000 by 1924, making them the second largest group of immigrants in Mexico.12 The Mexican government benefited from the Chinese Exclusion Act enacted in the United States in 1882.13 In contrast, Mexico signed treaties with Japan in 1889 and with China in 1899 to facilitate efforts to bring Asian men to work in Mexico.14
To transport Chinese workers who had embarked in Hong Kong or Vladivostok, a Russian port city near the Chinese border, the Compagnie du Boleo contracted German and French vessels.15 Ten years later, in 1900, the company contracted with the Tokio Imin Gaisha (Oriental Immigration Co.) to bring Japanese workers to Santa Rosalía.16 Within ten years, Boleo had recruited approximately three thousand Chinese and one thousand Japanese workers. This trend coincided with the discovery of large deposits of copper in Baja California that had the potential to produce an average of eleven thousand tons of copper per year.17 Company records indicate that the Mexican Department of Development approved every single petition to bring Chinese workers to Santa Rosalía over objections from the Mexican Department of Health, which cited the threat of highly contagious diseases among Chinese workers as its rationale. For example, in 1907, when agents from the Department of Health denied Boleo’s request to bring more workers from Hong Kong to Santa Rosalía, Pablo Macedo, the company’s manager, wrote to both departments to ask them to approve his petition. He argued that it would “jeopardize” the company if Chinese workers could not come to Santa Rosalía. As expected, the Department of Development overruled the Department of Health’s decision, and the company continued to bring workers to Santa Rosalía from China and Japan.18
In an effort to reduce dependence on Chinese workers, the Compagnie du Boleo turned to mestizo laborers and their families, offering them free transportation from Sinaloa and Sonora to the mines. Mestizo and Indian workers lived in the communities of Providencia, Purgatorio, Soledad, and Santa Rosalía. To accommodate employees, the company established three different communities in Santa Rosalía: Mesa Francia, Mesa Mexicana, and Arroyo. Reflective of the racial, cultural, and skilled hierarchies at the company, Mesa Francia housed European administrators and engineers, while Mesa Mexicana housed families of government employees and Mexican administrators. Both settlements had two-story homes with separate patios and fantastic views of the Sea of Cortes. In contrast, Arroyo, the settlement for Mexican workers and their families, was located far down the hill, away from Mesas Francia and Mexicana. These workers’ dwellings were similar to homes in Purgatorio, Soledad, and Providencia: small wooden boxes or shacks with a diminutive kitchen and running water, but no electricity.19 They also had a church, but it was a prefabricated metal structure that Boleo purchased at an exhibition in France in 1894, most likely built by Gustave Eiffel, the famous French engineer.20 It was shipped to Santa Rosalía, erected between Mesa Francia and Arroyo, and named Santa Barbara. It was the only church in town. Most marriages between Mexican women and European men were celebrated there.21 Outside the church was a large plaza with cafes, restaurants, and bars where women and men could stroll and mingle. Even though the space was considered a segregated area for workers, French engineers and administrators frequented the public square, where they met and sustained romantic relationships with Mexican women.
By 1920, approximately 71 percent of the French single male immigrants who had been hired at the company married Mexican women.22 These Mexican women, in turn, specifically the ones who had married engineers and administrators, gained better housing with electricity and running water in Mesa Francia. As the wives of administrators and engineers, they also enjoyed the benefits of upward mobility. Table 4.2 offers a small sample of intermarriages celebrated in Baja California’s coastal region. Marriage records reveal that Mexican women were usually the daughters of migrant mestizo workers or politicians from Baja California (see table 4.2).
Engineers and managers who married Mexican women eventually applied for Mexican citizenship, which the government granted after they had been in the country for more than five years.23 In 1897, Nicolas Minar, a Greek mechanic at the Compagnie du Boleo, married María de Jesús Serrano, a widow from Mulege, Baja California. One year later, thirty-one-year-old Mathiot Pierre, a French engineer at Boleo, married twenty-three-year-old Agustina Mejia, also from Mulege. Polish and German Jews emigrated from California to Ensenada to work for British and American investment companies. In 1887, Maximiliano Bernstein served as director for the International Mexican Co. in Ensenada. He later invested in mining and cattle in San Rafael, near Ensenada. Bernstein married a mestizo woman, Guadalupe Riveroll, and they had five children. His business partner, Luis Mendelson, also Jewish, came to Baja California to work as a broker for the Lower California Development Co. He married Carmen La Madrid, a mestizo woman from Baja California. Both Bernstein and Mendelson settled permanently in Baja California and became Mexican citizens.24 Mendelson later served as attorney general of Ensenada.
In contrast, marriages between Chinese men and Mexican women were scarcely recorded in the Boleo census. Later population documents show that even though they were not recorded, such marriages did occur, but based on the company’s experience with the Department of Health, the company managers probably did not want to disclose that Mexican women intermarried or cohabited with Chinese laborers. Only three marriages appeared in the census. Perhaps the company survey excluded Chinese workers cohabitating with Mexican mestiza women outside of marriage. The Chinese men who married Mexican women left the bachelor housing provided by Boleo, and moved into the emerging towns of Santa Rosalía and Mulege, away from the company. By 1926, Chinese people composed 26 percent of the population of Santa Rosalía, and civil records show that twelve out of twenty-nine Chinese men living in Santa Rosalía had married Mexican women.25 Based on the few records available, we do know that Chinese merchants were the first people to settle outside the company town. As in Mexicali, Chinese stores sprouted up in Santa Rosalía outside the Boleo mines. Some stores sold vegetables, shoes, and staples at lower prices than the company store. Jobs at Chinese stores and restaurants provided alternative employment options for Chinese workers from the Compagnie du Boleo.
In the Mexicali Valley, similar migration patterns emerged in agricultural communities where there was a burgeoning demand for laborers as the native population began to decline. In 1912, the Colorado River Land Co. (CRLC) introduced labor-intensive cotton to the Mexicali Valley, aggressively leasing and developing 676,024 acres of land near the Colorado River.26 The need for seasonal farm labor led to a jump in population from 462 to 11,700 people during the cotton season. At the same time, census takers noted a remarkable decline in the Indian population in Baja California. According to a 1921 census report, Indians represented only 6 percent of the population in Baja California.27 The Cocopah population declined from 5,000 in 1890 to 1,817 in 1920.28 The census also revealed that many Indian women intermarried or lived in consensual unions with Mexican mestizo men, thus accounting for a substantial increase in the mestizo population in the Mexicali Valley.29
Initially, indigenous and mestizo families lived in separate communities. While Mexican workers lived on CRLC farms, indigenous farmers were displaced by the 1906 damming of the Colorado River. In response, indigenous people moved closer to the US-Mexico border. Yet, they did not leave willingly, and they resisted the settlement of immigrant mestizo workers. Zaragoza Contreras, one of the first mestizo migrants, described the Cocopah as “wild Indians who did not speak a word of Spanish. We could not live in peace because they would shoot at us every time we went outside in the evenings.”30 His narrative reveals the tensions between the native population (trying to survive under new conditions) and the mestizo newcomers (who viewed the Cocopah as foreigners because they did not speak Spanish). Ethnic tensions increased after the CRLC opened additional land to European American farmers and mestizo workers.
Many mestizo men first came to the Mexicali Valley by themselves, and then brought their families a few years later. Between 1901 and 1907, the Sumaya, Villarino, and Barrios Arias families were among the thirty mestizo families who migrated to the Mexicali Valley from nearby states.31 Leaving his wife and family, Ramón Sumaya came in 1901 from the Ensenada mining camps. Seven years later, Bernarda Sumaya joined her husband in Mexicali, bringing her widowed comadre, Delfina Moreno. These two women were among the first mestizas who worked as temporary farm laborers for the CRLC, clearing land and planting trees along the Colorado River. Still, CRLC preferred to hire men over women for labor-intensive tasks such as clearing the land and the installation of irrigation works. By 1909, the Sumayas saved enough money to purchase a vacant lot from A. J. Flores, and they opened a small shop that supplied goods and staples to mestizo migrant workers in the valley.32 The two women probably ran this shop, while Sumaya continued working as a seasonal laborer at different CRLC farms. The 1910 census reported 989 men and 428 women living in Mexicali.33 They made homes out of cachanilla and other native plants that provided protection from the extreme climate.
CRLC farmers did not offer permanent housing for farmhands, making it difficult for farmers to retain farmhands and build a stable workforce. Workers built improvised structures (known as ramadas) out of grass, loose boards, and wood. The farmers did not want to invest in worker housing, and the CRLC did not provide them with any incentive to do so.34 In fact, the CRLC contract stated that all improvements by the renter (including the construction of housing and fences) would become property of the CRLC after the lease expired. No extra compensation would be provided for these upgrades.35 After their contracts ended, many workers left the farms voluntarily to find other agricultural jobs in Mexico, while others migrated to the United States. The CRLC investors feared that the permanent settlement of Mexican workers on the farms would lead to the confiscation of substantial portions of their property if those workers stayed for more than one year. This seemed to be the policy after the company had a difficult time evicting indigenous and Mexican tenants who claimed to have permanent lease and work agreements with (former owner) Guillermo Andrade.36
With a cotton boom in 1914, more male laborers were contracted from the nearby states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Nayarit. Mestizos and Indians worked side by side in the cotton fields. Daily interactions between Indians and mestizos changed their perceptions of one another. Mestizos, who formerly viewed indigenous people as “savages,” started to appreciate the Cocopah people’s knack for building homes resistant to the extreme heat. In turn, Cocopah people, who had grown up listening to their parents’ stories about “evil” mestizos, found their own perspectives changing as they spent time working with them on CRLC farms.37 Indeed, previously Cocopah children believed in a mestizo “boogie” man who would come at night to take them away if they misbehaved, and Cocopah adults perceived the mestizos as “evil” foreigners not worth trusting.38
In spite of these common misconceptions, indigenous women continued to marry mestizo men in greater numbers than they had done so in the past. In fact, marriage and consensual unions became central to the survival of women in the Mexicali Valley. More than 80 percent of women between the ages of sixteen and sixty were married or lived in consensual unions with migrant men, while about 20 percent were widows or single mothers.39 For single mestizo men, finding wives or women with whom they could cohabitate was one way to get their domestic needs met. Women not only provided homemade meals but also contributed financially to the household. In 1927, 537 out of 1,006 civil marriages celebrated in Baja California’s Northern Territory were between Indian women and migrant men.
The nature of seasonal labor reinforced gender and labor inequalities in the Mexicali Valley. In spite of the flourishing cotton industry, single women struggled to find permanent jobs in the valley. Between 1910 and 1920, the majority of women were identified as part-time workers and only during the cotton-picking season.40 Cotton farms and ranchos offered housing and year-round work to male heads of household and single men under the assumption that men were better equipped to perform physical labor and were responsible for maintaining dependents. Indeed, cotton farms had a skewed population of 8,237 men to 4,675 women.41 Women were usually offered only part-time work, and only during the cotton-picking season.
Oral testimonies of indigenous women reveal that as strategies of survival, single mothers and widows often agreed to live in consensual unions with mestizo men to escape extreme poverty and hunger. Juana Portillo Laguna, for instance, lived in a consensual relationship with Estanislao Sandoval, a mestizo who worked as a cowboy near Sierra Juarez. When Sandoval left Juana for another woman, she shortly moved in with Juan Valenzuela, a worker from Guaymas Sonora. Valenzuela helped raise her children, and they had more children together. Because he was well connected in the Mexicali Valley, Valenzuela had steady work even in the off-season. The couple stayed together for many years until their children became adults.42
In some cases, single mothers who lived in consensual unions with mestizos endured domestic abuse, for many had few other recourse for survival. The experience of Delfina Cuero provides a glimpse in to the lives of Indian single mothers. A Diegueño Indian, she was widowed when her four children were young. To provide for her children, she lived with different mestizo men, even if it meant great harm. In her autobiography, Cuero describes her traumatic experience with different mestizo men:
I tried to live with several different men, each one said he would take care of me but each time it was always the same. I did all the cooking, washing, ironing, and everything, all the work I had always done, but it wasn’t enough. I had to clear land and cut fence posts. I had to work like a man, as well as the house and garden work, hard, heavy work. If I didn’t do enough to suit him, he would beat me. I have been black and blue so many times because there was still more work to do. Even with all that, each man would get mad about feeding my children and beat me for that. When the man would not let me feed my children, I would have to find someone else to work for.43
Cuero’s narrative demonstrates how unmarried native women faced enormous challenges in the countryside. Life for Cuero and her children became even more precarious as she moved around with her children to work temporary jobs. In between relationships, she worked as a part-time farmhand, took in laundry, and begged for food when she was unemployed. Her perilous situation forced her to ask her comadre, Matilda, to help her raise Eugenia, one of her younger daughters. Left with no other recourse, given the gender discrimination at the worksites, she also negotiated consensual unions for her two teenage daughters, Lupe and Lola, hoping each would find a better life with a male partner. Meanwhile, her two older sons had found well-paying jobs on nearby farms.
As more men and women moved around to work on different farms in Baja California, the Mexican government began looking for ways to motivate seasonal workers to stay permanently in Baja California. To do so, Subjefe Politico Esteban Cantú approved land colonization projects in Mexicali. Cantú’s strategy was to populate the valley with Mexican residents in order to ward off the constant threat of US annexation. Indeed, between 1910 and 1920, the US government, represented by the US Senate, three times attempted to approve the purchase of Baja California.44 In 1919, Elwood Mead, a former professor from the University of California and the appointed chairman of the California Commission on Colonization and Rural Credit, advocated for the US purchase of the Mexican territory. His idea: to shift the boundary line far enough south to place the Colorado River wholly within the borders of the United States.45
Cantú’s strategies included expropriating approximately 6,500 hectares from the Compañia de Terrenos y Colonizacion (an English company) and the Compañia de Terrenos y Aguas de la Baja California (a US company) to form Mexican colonias.46 These companies had purchased the land from the CRLC, but because they had defaulted on their property taxes, Cantú targeted them. Cantú’s support for the settlement of Mexicans in new colonias proved successful. By 1919, there were four thousand Mexicans living in the Mexicali Valley who owned or leased an average of 10 hectares per family. Colonia Herradura had approximately 240 hectares for twenty-four families; Abasolo had 129 hectares for twelve families; and Sonora (among the largest colonias) had 685 hectares for sixty-five families.47 As a result, the number of Mexicans in Mexicali tripled between 1910 and 1919 (see table 4.3).
Families living in colonias (such as those in table 4.3) had only enough land for subsistence farming, so they still needed to work on CRLC farms to make ends meet. The Mexicali government designed an optional plan where a tenant could either purchase the lot or lease it for three years or more.48 In an effort to increase the size of the Mexican army at the border, Cantú offered men (women were excluded) the option to stay in colonias at no cost as long as they served in the army.49 Cantú was clearly concerned about the region’s US-dominated agribusiness model, and fearful of losing the Mexicali Valley to the United States.
The boom in cotton production during World War I led to a labor shortage. CRLC farmers complained about the high turnover of Mexican laborers as most of those recruited as seasonal cotton pickers did not return. Instead, they crossed the border and worked for agricultural enterprises in Arizona and in California’s Imperial Valley. Imperial Valley growers proved more successful than their counterparts in Mexicali at attracting and retaining workers because they offered higher wages.50 According to Lawrence Cardoso, Mexicans earned an average of $0.12 per day in Mexico, while they earned between $1.00 and $3.50 per day in the United States for the same type of work.51
From 1910 to 1920, irrigation development transformed the Colorado Desert into the Imperial Valley, giving rise to some of the most fertile farmland in the United States. By 1920, the Imperial Valley was called “America’s Amazing Winter Garden” and the “American Valley of the Nile.”52 Growers increased significantly the cultivation of cantaloupe, lettuce, cotton, and alfalfa. The cantaloupe industry alone yielded $9.5 million in profits in one year.53 Imperial Valley farmers were desperately in need of labor, as the regular sources of workers had decreased in different years. The Chinese Exclusion Act that went into effect in 1882 prohibited US farmers from hiring Chinese laborers.54 Consequently, they hired Mexicans in greater numbers. In 1917, the US secretary of labor was pressured to omit the required literacy test for the contracting of foreign labor at the US-Mexican border. As a result, more than 750,000 Mexicans migrated to the US Southwest to work in agriculture, transportation, and mining between 1910 and 1930.55 Historian Vicki Ruiz writes that by 1920, Mexican migrant workers and Mexican Americans emerged as the primary labor force in the mining, agricultural, and railroad industries in the US Southwest.56 In order to attract more workers, CRLC managers employed recruiters known as enganchadores to hire Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese workers from mining towns in Santa Rosalía and Ensenada. CRLC recruiters used deceiving tactics to attract Chinese and Japanese workers from Santa Rosalía to work in the Mexicali Valley. Recruiters told them that they would own land and get paid higher wages if they worked for the CRLC. Some Chinese and Japanese workers left the mines in search of better opportunities. Mariano Ma, for example, left his job at the mines near Ensenada to go to the Mexicali Valley, only to find out wages there were actually lower.57
The labor shortage persisted, and the CRLC could not attract enough Chinese or Japanese immigrants. By 1912, the CRLC began formal talks with the Mexican government to contract Chinese workers. Some renters with the CRLC were actually wealthy Chinese American farmers from California who recruited their own labor force from Canton, China.58 Cantú approved the contract of Chinese laborers, under the condition that each one pay a $100 tax when they entered the territory.59 But not all Chinese workers arrived through the ports of Baja California; many arrived at the port of San Francisco in California, where they were sent on a “sealed” South Pacific train to Calexico.60 At the CRLC, there were two basic labor agreements. Some farmers paid an hourly wage for time on the job cultivating and picking cotton, while others divided the profits among the workers after the harvest. While Chinese laborers who belonged to transnational Chinese associations based on regional, family origin, or political associations chose the latter agreement, Mexican workers preferred a set wage.
Workers with management skills, such as Mariano Ma, eventually scored better jobs in the Mexicali Valley. His story provides an example of how Chinese workers moved into leadership positions at the CRLC. In 1884, Mariano Ma emigrated from China to work at the Ensenada mines. In 1906, the CRLC recruited him to clear land for farms. Between 1884 and 1906, Ma learned to speak English and Spanish, which allowed him to ascend the company’s ranks, first working as a contractor, later as a supervisor for the company’s irrigation projects. As a supervisor, Ma managed thousands of men from different backgrounds: “As a supervisor I oversaw men from different countries: Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and Anglo workers. There were some occasions where I had to supervise and mobilize 2,000 men as if they were soldiers.”61 His trilingual abilities were the key to his upward mobility from seasonal worker to supervisor. Ma later became a Mexican citizen, and worked for the company until 1937.
As more Asian American farmers from San Francisco subleased medium-size parcels from the CRLC, the Asian working population increased in Baja California. Farmers subleased an average of 100 to 3,000 hectares known as ranchos.62 According to historian Evelyn Hu-DeHart, there existed approximately 125 Chinese-operated ranchos on CRLC land that employed 1,314 Chinese men.63 Some Chinese cotton ranchers invested in other enterprises in Mexicali as well. Wong Kee, a well-respected cotton rancher, had stores and other business ventures in Baja California.64 In 1915, two Japanese farmers, K. Lato and Ben Kodama, leased a medium-sized parcel from the CRLC and employed about 30 Japanese laborers on their ranch; they also opened stores in Mexicali.65 From 1914 to 1920, the ongoing influx of Chinese laborers into Mexicali surpassed that of Mexican workers. Approximately 5,000 Chinese and 500 Japanese workers lived in the valley.66 Chinese laborers worked in fields other than agriculture; some of them even had jobs in Mexicali’s red light district. As historians Casey Christensen and Eric Schantz note, gaming houses and bars emerged in Baja California in 1909 and became part of the border economy.67 In the 1920s, when alcohol was prohibited in the United States under the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, or the Volstead Act, US and Chinese investors opened gaming houses, restaurants, and bars in Mexicali and Tijuana, where many Chinese men worked in these red light districts as cooks, bartenders, and waiters.
At the same time, US-owned land companies in Baja California continued to rely on Asian and Mexican laborers. By 1910, intermarriage between mestizas and Asian men was changing the racial makeup of the Mexicali Valley. Census records show that after 1910, more Chinese and Japanese workers married or lived in consensual unions with Mexican women. In 1927, approximately 300 out of 1,006 weddings in Baja California took place between Asian men and mestiza women.68 This seems to be consistent with the mixed race marriages recorded in Chihuahua and Sonora, where they also had a large migration of Chinese workers.69 As Grace Peña Delgado and Julia María Schiavone Camacho noted, Mexican wives could help their Chinese husbands establish social ties within the local community.70
The testimonies of local Mexican and Asian merchants reveal, as well, the close connections they had with agricultural workers. For example, Henry Wong was an agricultural worker in the Mexicali Valley who came from Canton, China, as a teenager. At the age of twenty-nine, Wong filed a petition for Mexican citizenship in the municipality of Mexicali.71 Wong Luen, a merchant from Mexicali, testified that he had known Wong since he was chiquito (young), and that he was worthy of Mexican citizenship because he was a decent man. Similarly, Mexican merchants Carlos Saracho and Enrique Uribe testified on behalf of Luis Ma Chu, and José Lim, and Antonio Foy. Luis Ma Chu came to Baja California Norte from Canton in 1917. He worked on farms in Baja California for six years.72 After he married a Mexican woman in 1922, he applied for Mexican citizenship. His application was approved and he became a naturalized Mexican citizen. Chinese men, previously confined to CRLC farms, moved to the northern part of Mexicali, which they called Chinatown, while other people moved onto CRLC lands rented by Chinese farmers.
Over time, marriages between Mexican women and Chinese men transformed segregated neighborhoods assigned to Chinese bachelors into diverse Chinese Mexican communities. In 1913, Manuel Lee Chew immigrated to the Mexicali Valley to work for Rancho del Pacífico, a CRLC cotton farm. Lee Chew had two older brothers who had worked in the valley since 1910, and they had arranged the job for him. In 1920, while working as a supervisor at Rancho del Pacífico, he met Flavia Mancilla Camacho, a mestiza migrant from Santa Rosalía who worked part time on the ranch during cotton-picking season. Her father had come to Mexicali a few years prior from Santa Rosalía, where he had worked at the Compagnie du Boleo. Lee Chew asked Mancilla Camacho to marry him after a long courtship. She loved him and was determined to marry him, although her father opposed. Her father finally gave his consent, and in 1920 Lee Chew arranged a big wedding celebration at Casa Blanca, one of the most expensive restaurants in Mexicali’s Chinatown. The bride’s family and Chinese and Mexican workers from the farm all attended the wedding. Lee Chew borrowed a new Cadillac from a friend (a Chinese merchant from Tijuana), and he drove his new bride back to Rancho del Pacífico.73
Mixed Race Children and the State
By the 1920s, mixed race marriages became part of a larger public debate in postrevolutionary Mexico. President Alvaro Obregon envisioned a new government that incorporated rural indigenous people into the mainstream of Mexican society through education and by emphasis on mestizo roots. In 1921, Alvaro Obregon appointed José Vasconcelos, a noted scholar and politician, as head of Mexico’s Department of Education. His mission was to overhaul the educational system. Vasconcelos changed the school curricula and launched a campaign to send teachers to rural communities to educate indigenous people, with the goal of incorporating them into what he called the Raza Cosmica (Cosmic Race).74 Vasconcelos was a critic of US segregation policies on Indian reservations and believed that the incorporation of Indians (not segregation) would modernize the Mexican countryside. According to Vasconcelos, people of mixed race origins (mestizaje) were the race of the future, or what he called “the fifth race.”75 At the same time, Vasconcelos and Mexican politicians began to politicize civil marriages increasingly condemning marriages between Mexican women and Chinese men.
The children of mixed race mestizo and indigenous couples went along with this new image of postrevolutionary Mexico. Growing up in the 1920s, Cocopah mestizos forged new identities in Baja California. The local government categorized the children of mestizo and Cocopah parents as “Cucapá-Mestizo” because most of these children spoke both Yuma and Spanish. Locally, the second Cocopah mestizo generation was known as cuarterones because they spoke more Spanish than Yuma. Interviews with Cucapá-Mestizo children reveal that their identities where shaped according to the place where they grew up.
For example, the sons and daughters of Felix, a Mexican mestizo cowboy from New Mexico and Petra Portillo, a Cocopah Indian from El Mayor, identified themselves as Cocopah.76 When their parents worked as seasonal laborers in the United States, the children stayed with their maternal grandparents in El Mayor. The children grew up around Cocopah people, learned indigenous cultivation techniques, spoke mainly Yuma, and frequently traveled to visit relatives in Yuma, Arizona.77 Still, when the Portillo Laguna children got older, they worked on US farms with mestizos and formed intimate relationships. Adelina, María de Jesús, Felipa, and Juana Portillo, for instance, all married mestizo migrant men.78 Cucapá-Mestizo families who moved near the Mexicali municipality spoke more Spanish than Cocopah, and their children attended local schools with mestizo children.
As a symbol of their integration to mestizo culture, only 457 reported that they spoke an indigenous language by 1921.79 Most Cucapá-Mestizo men dressed like their mestizo fathers in pants and shirts, but wore their long hair braided. Women chose dresses instead of Indian attire and, like the men, wore their long hair braided.80 Mestizo children visited relatives in El Mayor, Yuma, and Somerton, but only a few learned Yuma language or fishing and farming techniques. Adela Sandoval Portillo, granddaughter of Petra Laguna and Felix Portillo, lamented that the second generation of Cucapá-Mestizos did not want to learn indigenous fishing techniques, and instead chose to work as seasonal laborers on irrigation projects and cotton farms, much like mestizo migrant workers.81
Chinese Mexican children had similar experiences as Cocopah mestizo children. Most spoke both Cantonese and Spanish because their fathers spoke to them in Cantonese and their mothers spoke to them in Spanish. As Julian Lim has observed, the testimony of Manuel Lee Mancilla provides a window to examine how Chinese and Mexicans lived and challenged daily live on the border.82 As the son of Flavia Mancilla Camacho and Manuel Lee Chew, he spoke both languages fluently. Manuel Lee Mancilla recalls how his mother, Flavia, taught him how to write and speak in Spanish to prepare him for elementary school.83 But Manuel felt more comfortable speaking Cantonese, the language spoken at the farm where his father worked as a manager, and where he and his siblings spent most of their time. As a young child, his favorite foods were those given to him by the Chinese cook who prepared meals for the workers and maintained a vegetable garden near the cotton farms. On the farm, young Manuel got to know the vegetables and meat used to prepare authentic Chinese meals. He and his siblings ate with the Chinese workers, who often talked about various dishes from their villages back in China. But as Manuel and his siblings got older, they spent their days in school rather than the ranch. The Lee Mancilla children spoke Spanish at school and Cantonese at home. As an adult, Manuel Lee Mancilla volunteered as an interpreter for Chinese workers in the Mexicali Valley. Like his father, he married a Mexican mestizo woman, Enriqueta Sandoval from Tecate. Lee Mancilla and Sandoval later opened a restaurant called La Paloma Oriental that fused the flavors of Chinese and Mexican cuisines.
Nevertheless, as intermarriage between Chinese men and Mexican women became more common in northern Mexico, xenophobia and anti-Chinese sentiment were also on the rise. In Sonora, merchants and politicians pressured the Mexican government to pass laws banning marriages between Mexican women and Chinese men.
Anti-Chinese zealots scorned Mexican women who dared to marry Chinese men, whom the zealots considered genetically inferior.84 They argued that the Chinese were of a lesser race, and that such marriages jeopardized the future of the Mexican nation.85 During the 1920s, the states of Sonora and Sinaloa passed laws prohibiting intermarriage between Mexican women and Chinese men.86 In 1923, Sonora passed Law 31, prohibiting marriage not only between Mexican women and Chinese men, but also between Mexican women and Chinese Mexican men, even naturalized Mexican citizens of Chinese descent.87 Violators were fined from 100 to 500 pesos. Women who married Chinese men were categorized as Chinese and were forced to register as foreigners. In addition, the newspapers published the names of Mexican women married to Chinese men to bring shame upon the wife and her extended family.88
In Baja California, there was no law prohibiting marriages between Mexican women and Chinese men, but the Department of Immigration enforced the registration of Mexican women who were married to Chinese men. Isabel Barrera Wong, a mestiza woman from El Triunfo, Baja California, had to register as a foreigner because she married Mr. Wong, a migrant merchant from southern China (see figure 4.2).89 The children of the Wong Barrera family were also registered as foreigners, even though they were born in Baja California. Maria Librada Wong Duarte and her brother, Alejandro Wong Duarte, mentioned earlier, were forced to register with the Department of Immigration as Chinese nationals.90 These immigration cards issued to Chinese Mexicans reveal the contradictory nature of exclusion. The identifications defined their ethnicity as mestizos of Chinese nationality.
Conclusion
As these stories attest, intermarriage played a central role in shaping Baja California cultural, racial, and ethnic borderlands. Government plans to separate workers by race and ethnicity were initially supported by land developers and mine managers. For example, the Compagnie du Boleo designed a company town with strict boundaries segregating Asian and Mexican workers, and also separating workers from managers. In the Mexicali Valley, Chinese workers lived on CRLC ranchos while mestizos and Indian workers lived in Mexican colonias. Over time, intermarriage and cohabitation challenged these racial boundaries. Contrary to previous scholarship, my research demonstrates that Chinese, Japanese, and French workers did not live in what would be described as solely bachelor communities. Many intermarried with local mestizo and Indian women and settled permanently in Baja California. In Santa Rosalía, 70 percent of the European engineers who came to work at the Compagnie du Boleo married Mexican women. Chinese workers from Boleo also intermarried and cohabitated with Mexican women, and they moved out of company housing to settle in mixed race communities with their families.
Figure 4.2. Isabel Barrera Wong from El Triunfo, Baja California, immigration form F14. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
In the Mexicali Valley mixed race families moved to Mexicali’s downtown near the international border with Calexico, California, an area initially occupied by displaced Indians. After 1910, Mexicali became a booming town with Mexican, Chinese, and mixed race colonias. New government buildings were built in Mexicali’s downtown after Cantú moved his post from Ensenada to Mexicali, near to the Mexican customs office. Mexicali became a municipality in 1914, and by 1917 government offices were relocated from Ensenada to Mexicali. Between 1917 and 1920, Chinese merchants and farmers purchased more than twenty lots in downtown Mexicali (for $100 to $1,000 per lot) to open casinos, restaurants, stores, and hotels. In 1917, Wong Wa Fey purchased two lots, which later became the first Chinese Association in Mexicali, later known as Chineseca (Chinatown).91
This essay also shows how indigenous and Mestizo women enabled migrant men to succeed in Baja California. The changing racial and ethnic landscape did not go unnoticed. The anti-Chinese movement led to policing of mixed race marriages marginalizing of Chinese Mexican families in northern Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. When President Lázaro Cárdenas redistributed land in Baja California, it excluded Asian and Asian Mexican people from petitioning for communal farmland. Asian and Asian Mexican farmers were the first targeted during CRLC land expropriations in 1937. However, in spite of Mexico’s efforts to exclude them, Asian men still benefited from land reform policies. Asian men who married Mexican women benefited from land distribution through their wives. Similarly, Asian Mexican farmers purchased private land in the Mexicali Valley where they continued to plant cotton and vegetables on a smaller scale. Asian Mexicans who did not purchase farms either migrated to the United States or lived in the city of Mexicali, where they worked for Chinese and Chinese Mexican merchants, restaurateurs, and casino owners in Mexicali’s Chinatown.
By the 1940s, Asian and Asian Mexican people who remained in Mexicali continued to participate in the Chinese Association, which promoted the interest of the region’s Chinese community throughout the twentieth century. To this day, the association offers Spanish and English classes for recent immigrants and sponsors Chinese schools for Chinese Mexican children. The association’s continuity exemplifies that, in many ways, Asian and Asian Mexican workers in Baja California succeeded at challenging marginalization and discrimination by appropriating and shaping their own conceptions of Mexicanidad. Multiracial border towns like Mexicali extended across transnational borders and shaped communities by influencing labor practices, border politics, and migration patterns in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Notes
1. “Registro de Extranjeros Chinos,” Departamento de Migracion/Chinos/Caja 1/Extranjeros, Exp. 150, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
2. Celso Aguirre Bernal, Compendio Histórico Biográfico de Mexicali 1539–1966 (Mexicali: Mexicali, B. CFA, 1966); Dorothy Pierson Kerig, “Yankee Enclave: The Colorado River Land Company and Mexican Agrarian Reform in Baja California, 1902–1944” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 1989); Everardo Garduño, La Disputa Por La Tierra . . . La Disputa por La Voz: Historia Oral del Movimiento Agrario en el Valle de Mexicali (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2004); Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
3. Censo General de Habitantes (Instituto General de Estadística y Geografía, 1920).
4. In colonial Mexico, the Spanish Crown created a caste system dividing racially mixed families into different categories. Initially, the word “mestizo” applied to the offspring of indigenous women and Spanish men, but by the nineteenth century it had evolved into a term used to indicate a broader range of racially mixed families, such as the children of African and Indian parents. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination in Colonial Mexico City (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). These two sources offer more information on the concept of mestizo.
5. Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 67; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “China Towns and Borderlands: Inter-Asian Encounters in the Diaspora,” Modern Asian Studies 46.2 (2012): 425–451; Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migrations and the Search for a Homeland 1910–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migrations, Localisms and Exclusion in the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Freddie González, “Chinese Dragon and Eagle of Anahuac: The Local, National, and International Implications of the Ensenada Anti-Chinese Campaign of 1934,” Western Historical Quarterly 44.1 (2013): 48–68; Elliot Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era to World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Jason Oliver Chang, “Racial Alterity in a Mestizo Nation,” Journal of Asian American Studies 14.3 (2011): 331–359; Julia Lim, “Chinos and Paisanos: Chinese Mexican Relations in the Borderlands,” Pacific Historical Review 79.19 (2010): 50–85.
6. Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans; Schiavone Camacho, “Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930–1960,” Pacific Historical Review 78.4 (2009): 545–577.
7. Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnicity Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
8. Edward H. Spicer, The Yaquis: A Cultural History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962); José Patricio Nicoli, El Estado de Sonora: Yaquis y Mayos (Mexico City: Imprenta de Francisco Díaz de León, 1885); Edith Gonzalez Cruz, “La Inversión Francesa en la Minería Durante el Porfiriato” (thesis, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Veracruz, 1985). These four sources offer more information on the Yaqui Indians.
9. Compagnie du Boleo census records, 1893, 1895, and 1899, vols. 306–315, document 330, expediente 31, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez, La Paz, Baja California.
10. León Diguet, “La Basse-Californie d’après,” Annales de Geographie 9.45 (1900): 243–250.
11. Erika Lee, “The Yellow Peril: Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review 76.4 (2007): 537–562; Hu-DeHart, “China Towns and Borderlands”; Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans; Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican.
12. Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 67.
13. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited unskilled Chinese workers from immigrating to the United States.
14. Trev Sue-A-Quan, Cane Reapers: Chinese Indentured Immigrants in Guyana (Vancouver: Riftswood, 1999); Clarence E. Glick, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980); Young, Alien Nation. These three sources offer more information on transpacific migration to the Caribbean, Hawai‘i, and Latin America.
15. Memorias de Gobernación, 1907–1908, grupo Gobernación, Sección Colonización, pagina XIV, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City; Ramo de Gobernación, Jefatura Política del Distrito Sur de la Baja California, 1903–1911, Archivo Pablo Martínez, La Paz, Baja California Sur.
16. María Elena Ota Mishima, Siete Migraciones Japonesas en México 1890–1978 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1982), 53–54; Daniel Marterso with Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Andrea Geiger, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste and Borders, 1885–1928 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
17. Ignacio Rivas Hernandez, “La Industria,” in Historia General de Baja California Sur I. La Economia Regional, ed. Deni Trejo Barajas and Edith Gonzalez Cruz (La Paz: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2002), 303.
18. In 1904, a vessel arrived from Japan with 400 Japanese workers. Historical document, July 21, 1904, vol. 383, document 570, expediente 5, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez, La Paz, Baja California. In 1908, a vessel arrived from Vladivostock with 473 Chinese workers contracted by the company. Ramón Corral, December 28, 1908, letter to government indicating vessel en route, Fondo Gobernación, vol. 469, document 460, expediente 74, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez, La Paz, Baja California; p. XLVII, 1907, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
19. Compagnie du Boleo meeting minutes, March 2, 1893, grupo gobernación, vol. 250, expediente 139, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez, La Paz, Baja California.
20. There is still some debate about who built the church. The Compagnie du Boleo did not keep a receipt of the purchase.
21. Registry of weddings and baptisms, 1895–1900, Iglesia de Santa Barbara, Santa Rosalia, Baja California.
22. Mexican census records from 1900, 1920, and 1930, vol. 919, expediente 33, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez, La Paz, Baja California.
23. File of applications for naturalization (Aplicaciones de Naturalización Mexicana a Extranjeros), 1917–1924, Juzgado Primero del Distrito, Casa de la Cultura Juridica, Mexicali, Baja California.
24. Norton B. Stern, Jewish Refuge and Homeland (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book, 1973).
25. Historical document, vol. 919, expediente 33, Archivo Histórico Pablo Martínez, La Paz, Baja California.
26. Out of the 823,620 acres owned by the CRLC, 146,596 acres were categorized as mountains, riverbeds, or lakes. Allison, “Reclamation of the Lower Colorado.”
27. Mexican census records from 1910 and 1921, Baja California, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
28. Mexican census records from 1890 and 1910, Northern Territory of Baja California, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
29. In 1917, some Cocopah families left the Mexicali Valley for Yuma, Arizona, after receiving reservation land grants approved by US President Woodrow Wilson the same year. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, “Cocopah Tribe: Introductory Information,” www.itcaonline.com; Otis Tout, The First Thirty Years in Imperial Valley California (San Diego: Otis Tout Publisher, 1931), 273; Alvarez de Williams, The Cocopah People (Phoenix: Indian Travel Series, 1974), 42; St. John, Line in the Sand, 79.
30. “Indios broncos que no hablaban ni jota de español y que no nos dejaban vivir en paz, pues a cada rato nos balaceaban, principalmente cuando pretendíamos salir después de la puesta del sol.” Pablo Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización del Valle de Mexicali y Otros Escritos Paralelos (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2002), 112.
31. Oral statements, “Pioneros y Fundadores de Mexicali,” box V, expediente 47, fondo Pablo Martínez, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno del Estado, Mexicali, Baja California; José Alfredo Gómez Estrada, La Gente del Delta del Rio Colorado: Indigenas, colonizadores y ejidatarios (Mexicali: Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, 2000).
32. A. J. Flores to Ramón Sumaya, report of purchases and sales, February 12, 1909, Office of the Notary of the State of Baja California, book 10, Protocolo de Primera Instancia, Mexicali, Baja California.
33. Aguirre Bernal, Compendio.
34. Harrington W. Cochran, report on Baja California, 1919, 130-E and 38, box 001, Special Collections, University of California, Irvine; Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 147.
35. CRLC rental agreement, 1933, box 67, Sherman Library, Corona del Mar, California.
36. Aguirre Bernal, Compendio; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave.”
37. Adela Sandoval Portillo, oral interview in Gómez Estrada, La Gente del Delta.
38. Ibid.
39. Mexican census records from the Northern Territory and Southern Territory of Baja California, 1910 and 1921, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
40. Mexican census records from the Northern Territory of Baja California, 1910 and 1921, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
41. Mexican census records from the Northern Territory of Baja California, 1921, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
42. Adela Sandoval Portillo, interview in Gómez Estrada, La Gente del Delta; Mexican census records from the Northern Territory of Baja California, 1910 and 1921, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
43. Florence C. Shipek, ed., Autobiography of Delfina Cuero (Menlo Park, CA: Ballenas Press, 1991), 62.
44. Elwood Mead, “The Southwest International Problems,” 1919, San Francisco Chronicle, in Jas. D. Schuyler Papers, Water Research Archive Center, University of California, Berkeley.
45. Ibid.; quote from Eric Boime, “Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Colorado River Delta, the Yellow Peril, and the Movement for Federal Reclamation, 1901–1928,” Pacific Historical Review 78.1 (2009): 49.
46. Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 162.
47. Cochran, report on Baja California; María Eugenia Anguiano, Agricultura y Migración en el Valle de Mexicali (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1995), 77; Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 162.
48. Cochran, report on Baja California.
49. Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 162.
50. Mexican laborers who migrated to the United States faced precarious living and labor conditions. Gilbert González explains how Mexican families lived in poor, segregated enclaves throughout the Southwest. Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in Southern California County 1890–1950 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 8.
51. Lawrence A. Cardoso, Mexican Emigration to the United States, 1897–1931: Socio-economic Patterns (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980).
52. “Imperial America’s Fertile Winter Garden,” Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1920.
53. Ibid.
54. Chinese people continued to go to the United States illegally, but their rate of immigration slowed. Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 1–16.
55. US Department of Agriculture published report (1917), 18; González, Labor and Community, 7.
56. Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11–12; David Gutíerrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
57. Mariano Ma, statement in Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 439.
58. Almost all Chinese immigrants and merchants who applied for Mexican citizenship between 1917 and 1924 declared that they were from Canton, China. File of applications for naturalization, 1917–1924, Juzgado Primero del Distrito, Casa de la Cultura Juridica, Mexicali, Baja California.
59. Cochran, report on Baja California; Kerig, “Yankee Enclave,” 157.
60. Robert H. Duncan, “The Chinese and the Economic Development of Northern Baja California, 1889–1929,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74.4 (1994): 623; Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 35.
61. “Como contratista o como mayordomo y teniendo bajo mis ordenes a hombres de numerosas nacionalidades: Mexicanos, Chinos, Japoneses y Norteamericanos. . . . En ciertas temporadas llegué a tener bajo mis ordenes hasta 2,000 hombres que en ocasiones tenia necesidad de reclutar y movilizar como un ejercito.” Herrera Carrillo, Reconquista y Colonización, 439.
62. K. Lato and Ben Kodama, court report, 1920, file of applications for naturalization, 1917–1924.
63. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “La Comunidad China,” Revista Ciguatan, no. 17 (1988): 16.
64. File of applications for naturalization, 1917–1924.
65. Ibid.
66. Cochran likely categorized indigenous people, Mexican mestizos, and Chinese Mexicans all as “Mexicans.” Cochran, report on Baja California.
67. Casey Christensen, “Mujeres Publicas: American Prostitutes in Baja California, 1910–1930,” American Historical Review 82 (May 2013): 215–247; Eric Schantz, “From the Mexicali Rose to the Tijuana Brass: Vice Tours of the United States-Mexico Border 1910–1965” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001).
68. Calculated from marriage statistics in Abelardo Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa. Del Gobierno del Distrito Norte de la Baja California 1924–1927 (1927; repr., Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1993), 336.
69. Romero, Chinese in Mexico; Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans.
70. Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican; Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans, 31.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Manuel Lee Mancilla, Viaje al Corazón de La Península: Testimonio de Manuel Lee Mancilla (Mexicali: Instituto de la Cultura de Baja California, 2000).
74. José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica (Los Angeles: California State University, Los Angeles, Centro de Publicaciones Department of Chicano Studies, 1979).
75. Ibid.
76. Adela Sandoval Portillo, interviewed in Gómez Estrada, La Gente del Delta, 110–111.
77. Statement by Portillo, Archivo Histórico del Gobierno del Estado, Mexicali, Baja California.
78. Adelina married Condrio Garcia. Juana married Stanislao Sandoval; after he abandoned her, she cohabitated with Juan Valenzuela, a migrant mestizo worker from Guymas Sonora. Agrarian Census, expediente, Ejido Cucapá, 1937, Registro Agrario Nacional, Baja California.
79. Mexican census data on languages, 1921, Northern Territory of Baja California, Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía.
80. Secretaria de la Economia Nacional, Mexican census data on population, 1910 and 1921, Northern Territory of Baja California.
81. Statement by Portillo.
82. Lim, “Chinos and Paisanos.”
83. Lee Mancilla, Viaje al Corazón de La Península.
84. Letter to Governor Agustín Olachea, Baja California Norte, in José Gómez Izquierdo, El Movimiento Antichino en México 1871–1934: Problemas del Racismo y del Nacionalismo Durante la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1991), 146.
85. José Angel Espinoza, El Ejemplo de Sonora (Mexico: Edicion Privada, 1932); Rodríguez, Memoria Administrativa, 58.
86. Catalina Velázquez Morales, Los Imigrantes Chinos en Baja California, 1920–1937 (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2001), 191.
87. Espinosa, El Ejemplo de Sonora, 35.
88. Camacho, “Crossing Boundaries.”
89. See Registro de Extranjeros, Caja 46, Expediente 64, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
90. Maria Librada La Paz, Baja California Registration Immigration Form (F14), 1933, Alejandro Vicente Wong, Baja California Registration Immigration Form (F14), 1933, Registro de Extranjeros Chinos, Departamento de Migracion/Chinos/Caja 1/Extranjeros, Exp. 160, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City.
91. Registro de la Propiedad, Ensenada, Baja California, 1917.