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Ashlyn Chak

Chinatowns are often portrayed as gritty underworlds riddled with prostitution, gambling and drug trafficking. Some of this is rooted in truth, but that unfair depiction is largely the result of rampant xenophobia and cultural ignorance, especially in the West.
In a series of articles, the Post explores the historical and social significance of major Chinatowns around the world and the communities that shape them.
Given the distance and language barrier, it is hard to imagine how, a century ago, the Chinese population of Mexicali, a border city between Mexico and the US, outnumbered the local Mexican population in size.
It was that generation of Chinese migrants who built La Chinesca, or “The Chinese” in English – the oldest Chinatown in Mexico.
One of the earliest records of Chinese presence in Mexico goes back to 1635, towards the end of Imperial China’s Ming dynasty. That year, Spanish barbers protested about competition from the Chinese, which saw the municipality propose to cut the number of Chinese barber shops.

By the 1870s, the Mexican government had started to encourage Chinese immigration after failing to attract more Europeans to settle, especially in the hot desert state of Baja California, where Mexicali is located.
More Chinese migrant workers arrived in Mexico after the US introduced the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The legislation banned all immigration of, and denied citizenship to, Chinese people, a situation that did not change until the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act in 1943.
Robert Chao Romero, a professor of Asian-American and Chicano studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, explored this period in his 2010 book, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940.
“The impetus for many Chinese to go to Mexico was the closure of the US,” he says.
In 1893, Chinese immigration was institutionalised in Mexico through a treaty with the Qing dynasty, which gave them the same legal rights as Mexican nationals. At this point, there were about 1,000 Chinese people in the country.
More arrived between the 1890s and 1910s to build and work in farmlands as the country underwent further modernisation and industrialisation, especially in the relatively empty and less-developed northern regions.

Romero says that Mexicali was fairly new at the time and it was hard to recruit Mexican labourers to work in the north since they could just cross the border to the US and make more money there.
“The Chinese were recruited to work in cotton, but many branched off into commerce and owned grocery stores, hotels and restaurants,” he adds. “That was the origin of the Chinatown in Mexicali.”
In 1910, there were 13,000 Chinese nationals in Mexico, according to the 2001 paper, “Small Numbers, Great Impact: Mexico and Its Immigrants, 1821-1973”, by Jürgen Buchenau, a professor of history and Latin American studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in the US state of North Carolina.
In Mexico’s northwestern Sonora state, next to Baja California, there were an estimated 4,486 Chinese people, which was the largest foreign presence in that state.

The Chinese began to dominate several industries. This deeply dissatisfied some locals, resulting in the torture and killing of hundreds of Chinese people in northern and rural Mexico.
In May 1911, over 300 Chinese people were massacred over three days in Torreón, in the state of Coahuila, amounting to half of the local Chinese community. Shops and homes were also vandalised.
But with the US still cut off, Mexico’s Chinese population continued to grow, from 14,000 in the 1920s to 19,000 in the 1930s – even more than the number of Americans in Mexico. Anti-Chinese sentiment in the country, however, also continued to rise.
The first illegal expulsions of Chinese people and their families from their communities took place in Sonora in the 1930s, Romero says, and included Mexican wives and Chinese-Mexican children. Many were driven to neighbouring Baja California, and Mexicali.
“Although there was also some persecution of Chinese in Mexicali, many went there because it was still friendlier, more hospitable, and the Chinese had longer-term established connections in commerce and politics.
“Mexicali was a kind of frontier where the city was just developing and there was a trade network between the US and Mexico [at the border].”

Some went to Mexico City, too, and built Barrio Chino, but that Chinatown spans only two blocks today.
Many Chinese in Mexicali reportedly opened bars and casinos, and even built a tunnel system to transport illegal alcohol and connect brothels and opium dens to the US during its Prohibition era from 1920 to 1933.
Because of the unbearable desert heat in summer, when temperatures can rise above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), half of La Chinesca is underground. Over 30 Chinese-built basements were once interconnected beneath Mexicali, though they have since been disconnected due to unassociated private ownership.
Continued deportations and expulsions, however, meant that by the 1940s, Mexico’s Chinese and Chinese-Mexican population had been reduced by nearly 70 per cent, to just 7,000. In the 1970s, it fell to only 2,000.
Although government efforts to repatriate Mexican-Chinese families saw small numbers of Mexican women and their mixed children permitted to return, their Chinese husbands and fathers were usually excluded.
Buchenau wrote that, compared with the Europeans and North Americans who were “challenged but not dislodged” by the locals, the Chinese “found themselves virtually defenceless in the face of a xenophobia that targeted them more than any other national group”.
That is why Romero only researched until 1940 for his book.
“The Chinese were once a very strong presence in Mexico and places like Cuba and Peru, and still are – to this day – to a certain extent,” he says. “But it is a forgotten story.”


Despite the mark that early Chinese immigrants had left on Mexicali, there was only one Chinese school of “about 30 students” in the city in the 1960s, as recalled by the late Republic of China ambassador Ho Feng-shan in his 1990 memoir My Forty Years as a Diplomat.
Ho also wrote that ethnic Chinese men often married Mexican women – early Chinese immigrants were mostly male – and “about 80 per cent of the offspring in the Chinese community were of mixed blood” when he visited Mexicali some time around the 1960s. He estimated there were no more than 600 Chinese people there, including those with Mexican ancestry.
However, the state of the US-Mexico border was changing and the Chinese population of Mexico began to grow again in the late 20th century. Most were of Cantonese and southern Chinese ancestry, similar to many large Chinese diasporic communities worldwide.
Some came with the repatriation of Chinese-Mexicans who had been refugees in Hong Kong, or their relatives or descendants, says Fredy González, an associate professor of global Asian studies and history at the University of Illinois Chicago in the US, and author of Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics Among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico (2017).
“Even more arrived after 1979, once China opened up and people began to migrate overseas. Some were migrants who sought a better life, either hoping to be smuggled into the US or as small business owners in Mexico, in import businesses and restaurants.”

A 2020 census by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography counted only 10,547 Chinese nationals living in the country, but many scholars, including González, “consider the government estimates to be undercounts”, he says.
“The number of Chinese in the country is difficult to get at,” González adds. “Not all Chinese have legal documentation, and they have potentially a distrust of Mexican officials because of the history of anti-Chinese racism in the country.
“And Mexican citizens do not count as Chinese in these estimates as they are [rarely] counted by race [or ethnicity].”
The population of Mexicans with Chinese ancestry is possibly quite vast, though many have assimilated into the local community over generations, for reasons including the desire to hide their Chinese ancestry to avoid xenophobic attacks.
Today, La Chinesca is known for having the most Chinese restaurants per capita in Mexico, with some historic establishments offering Mexican-Cantonese fusion that showcase Mexicali’s distant but crucial Chinese past. However, very few people of more than half Chinese ancestry still live there.


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A view of La Chinesca in 2023. Photo: AFP

Tourist guide Elvia Chen, granddaughter of a Chinese migrant, shows historical pictures in a museum in La Chinesca. Photo: AFP

A showcase displaying souvenirs is seen next to a curtain made of Chinese food containers at the entrance to a museum in La Chinesca. Photo: AFP

A mural depicting scenes of the history of the Chinese community in Mexico adorns an abandoned building in La Chinesca. Photo: AFP

Buildings display Chinese-style architecture on a street in La Chinesca. Photo: Shutterstock

Lunar New Year celebrations take place in La Chinesca. Photo: Instagram/nic.maynardp

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Street food vendors serve customers in Bangkok’s Chinatown. Photo: Shutterstock

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A street in Lower Manhattan Chinatown in the early 20th century. The Chinatown is said to date back to the 1850s. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

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Pedestrians walk through Yokohama Chinatown in 2020. Photo: AFP

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America’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 saw many immigrants turn to Mexico, but their broad business dominance led to dreadful consequences


America’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 saw many immigrants turn to Mexico, but their broad business dominance led to dreadful consequences.


How the oldest and largest Chinatown in Mexico rose despite terrible xenophobia

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}America’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 saw many immigrants turn to Mexico, but their broad business dominance led to dreadful consequences

America’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 saw many immigrants turn to Mexico, but their broad business dominance led to dreadful consequences