Jason Oliver Chang
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040863
- eISBN:
- 9780252099359
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040863.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
U.S. consular reports on Mexican anti-Chinese activities document the uncoordinated, synchronous anti-Chinese activities that took place as a part of the revolutionary battlefield. This chapter ...
More
U.S. consular reports on Mexican anti-Chinese activities document the uncoordinated, synchronous anti-Chinese activities that took place as a part of the revolutionary battlefield. This chapter traces the social relations that gave rise to cooperative violence, or grotesque assemblies, in the context of the revolution. Events like the massacre at Torreón in 1911 illustrate the emergence of new social ties based upon Porfian discontent and doing harm to Chinese. Individual cases of tactical assassinations and ritual violence against the Chinese bodies further illuminate the absence of mestizo nationalism as motivation. The chapter details reports of ritualized violence that present a battlefield where Chinese immigrants are under constant attack. These modes of popular violence against Chinese shifted the political identity of assailants, no matter their allegiance or affiliation, to patriotic revolutionaries. Peasants and Indians did not threaten the bourgeois military leaders of the revolution when they expressed antichinismo.Less
U.S. consular reports on Mexican anti-Chinese activities document the uncoordinated, synchronous anti-Chinese activities that took place as a part of the revolutionary battlefield. This chapter traces the social relations that gave rise to cooperative violence, or grotesque assemblies, in the context of the revolution. Events like the massacre at Torreón in 1911 illustrate the emergence of new social ties based upon Porfian discontent and doing harm to Chinese. Individual cases of tactical assassinations and ritual violence against the Chinese bodies further illuminate the absence of mestizo nationalism as motivation. The chapter details reports of ritualized violence that present a battlefield where Chinese immigrants are under constant attack. These modes of popular violence against Chinese shifted the political identity of assailants, no matter their allegiance or affiliation, to patriotic revolutionaries. Peasants and Indians did not threaten the bourgeois military leaders of the revolution when they expressed antichinismo.
Jason Oliver Chang
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040863
- eISBN:
- 9780252099359
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040863.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This book tells the history of anti-Chinese politics in Mexican culture. It reveals the hidden influence that anti-Chinese racism, or antichinismo, has had on the formation of the revolutionary ...
More
This book tells the history of anti-Chinese politics in Mexican culture. It reveals the hidden influence that anti-Chinese racism, or antichinismo, has had on the formation of the revolutionary government and mestizo national identity. The imagined racial figure of Chinese men created a profound impact in Mexican society. The book employs an Asian Americanist critique to evaluate Mexico as a racial state to discuss the political function of antichinismo at various points of national crisis. After the revolution, the social rights mandate of the 1917 constitution created a new rationality for the legitimacy and authority of the national state – to care for the good of the indigenous population. This book shows how Mexican politics relied upon racism against Chinese people to create polemical notions of the public good that helped generate new relationships between the government and the governed. The book is divided chronologically to attend to three major phases of antichinismo: the disposable worker, the killable subject, and the pernicious defiler. Through discourses of Chinese racial difference, diverse Mexican actors created alternative visions of the nation and helped rework the relationships of rule and consent. A regional approach to telling this national story illustrates that people took up antichinismo for different reasons but coalesced through the state ideology of revolutionary government’s mestizo nationalism.Less
This book tells the history of anti-Chinese politics in Mexican culture. It reveals the hidden influence that anti-Chinese racism, or antichinismo, has had on the formation of the revolutionary government and mestizo national identity. The imagined racial figure of Chinese men created a profound impact in Mexican society. The book employs an Asian Americanist critique to evaluate Mexico as a racial state to discuss the political function of antichinismo at various points of national crisis. After the revolution, the social rights mandate of the 1917 constitution created a new rationality for the legitimacy and authority of the national state – to care for the good of the indigenous population. This book shows how Mexican politics relied upon racism against Chinese people to create polemical notions of the public good that helped generate new relationships between the government and the governed. The book is divided chronologically to attend to three major phases of antichinismo: the disposable worker, the killable subject, and the pernicious defiler. Through discourses of Chinese racial difference, diverse Mexican actors created alternative visions of the nation and helped rework the relationships of rule and consent. A regional approach to telling this national story illustrates that people took up antichinismo for different reasons but coalesced through the state ideology of revolutionary government’s mestizo nationalism.
