SWEET &
SOUR TIMES ON THE BORDER
A review of Chinese immigration to Mexico.
By Joe Cummings©
His
Bio - His E-mail
Less than 500 metres south of the U.S. border, in front
of a ochre-stuccoed shopfront signed Café Nueva
Asia, a technicolor banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe
hangs side by side with a red paper lamp bearing Chinese
characters. Although nearly three months have elapsed
between the Feast Day of Guadalupe and Chinese New Year,
here in Mexicali--capital of Baja California Norte, Mexico--the
Chinese Mexican family who own the restaurant invoke all
the heavenly powers to bring more business into their
tiny café. Four elderly Chinese men, two of whom
sport the stiff straw cowboy hat common to northern Mexico,
kibitz over hamburgers and green tea, speaking a mixture
of Cantonese and Spanish. Along with burgers and chow
mein, the red-bordered wall menu offers shark-fin tacos--perhaps
the ultimate California surfer's revenge.
The only Mexican border town that's also a state capital,
Mexicali boasts Baja California Norte's largest population,
an officially recognised 850,000. City promoters make
much of the fact that the city is considerably less tourism-dependent
than slightly larger Tijuana to the west; in Mexicali
you won't find any zebra-painted burros on Mexicali street
corners, nor a bar strip designed to entice gringos.
As
citizens of the state capital, Mexicalienses see themselves
standing a step closer to Mexico City, yet at the same
time can claim to be true cachanillas. Like the cachanilla,
a sturdy desert plant that flowers in arid, saline soil,
Mexicali has flourished at the edge of the harsh Sonoran
Desert and bloomed as one of Mexico's most prosperous
communities. Mexicali's Chinese are proud to include themselves
among cachanillas; many can sing or recite the verse from
Antonio Valdez's famous corrido 'La Cachanilla' which
says, 'Mexicali fue mi cuña' ('Mexicali was my
cradle').
Mexicali lays claim to the highest per capita concentration
of Chinese residents in Mexico, but the current count
of 5,000 of Chinese ancestry hardly compares with Chinese
colonies in large U.S. cities like San Francisco or New
York. Earlier this century, however, Mexicali was numerically
and culturally more Chinese than Mexican.
The first Chinese to arrive in the area at the turn of
the century signed on as labourers for the Colorado River
Land Company, an American enterprise which designed and
built an extensive irrigation system in the fertile Valle
de Mexicali. Some immigrants came overland from America,
often fleeing officially sanctioned anti-Chinese policies
in the U.S., while others sailed directly from China via
the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez. As in California,
thousands of Chinese coolies were lured to the area by
the promise of high wages that never materialised.
A 200-meter desert peak near Baja California's Crucero
La Trinidad is named El Chinero in memory of a group of
160 Chinese labourers who perished while crossing the
San Felipe Desert in search of work in the valley. The
desert itself was known for a time as El Desierto de los
Chinos, 'Desert of the Chinese.' An unscrupulous boatman
landed the group at a fork in the Río Colorado,
telling them Mexicali was only a short distance away;
sixty-five kilometres of burning desert lay between them
and the goal they never reached.
Many of the Chinese labourers who survived the building
of the irrigation system stayed on after its completion,
congregating in an area of Mexicali today known as Chinesca
('Chinatown'). Especially during the U.S. Prohibition
years, when Americans flocked to Mexican border towns
to partake of the alcoholic beverages outlawed at home,
Chinese labourers and farmers moved into the city and
spent their hard-earned savings to open bars, restaurants,
and hotels. Chinesca eventually housed virtually all of
the city's casinos and bars, and an underground tunnel
system connected bordellos and opium dens with Mexicali's
counterpart city on the U.S. side, Calexico. Bootleggers
also used this route to supply the U.S. with booze purchased
in Mexico. Many, but by no means all, of the Prohibition-era
businesses were operated by chinos.
By
1920 Mexicali's chinos outnumbered the mexicanos 10,000
to 700. A group of 5,000 single Chinese males started
the Asociación China, a Mexicali social organization
at least partly devoted to the procurement of Chinese
wives from overseas. The association remains active today.
In 1927 a series of Tong wars in northern Mexico erupted
over control of gambling and prostitution rings. Mexican
alarm over the Chinese participation in organized crime
led to the government-encouraged Movimiento Anti-Chino
in the late 1920s, a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment
that swept the country and led to the torture and murder
of hundreds of Chinese in northern Mexico--a tragic echo
of what happened on a larger scale in California in the
1880s. To Mexico's credit, the government never enacted
an equivalent to the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act, which
for a time prevented all persons of Chinese heritage from
holding U.S. citizenship.
Mexicali quickly became a refuge for Chinese fleeing
the violence on both sides of the border, since in that
Chinese-dominated city the clans were strong enough to
protect their own. As the anti-Chinese movement faded
away, still more Chinese arrived in Mexicali, which became
the Mexican headquarters for the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-Sen's
nationalist Chinese party. During World War II, the nationalists
were pushed out of China first by the Japanese and then
by the Communists. In a humanitarian change of heart,
the Mexican government loosened its immigration policies
to allow a large number of Chinese refugees into Mexico
in the 1940s.
By the end of the war, Mexicali featured just two cinemas;
both of which screened Chinese movies almost exclusively.
But as the city recovered from the post-Prohibition recession,
a steady influx of Mexicans diluted the local population
until the Chinese once again became a minority.
Until Mexico severed diplomatic relations with the nationalist
Taiwan government in the 1960s, Mexicali harboured a Taiwan
consulate, which became a magnet for overseas Chinese
travelling between the U.S. and Mexico. The consulate
promptly moved across the border to Calexico, later to
close when the U.S. in turn withdrew its recognition of
Taiwan. Although the Calexico consular office continued
operations under the name Coordinating Council for North
America, the loss of the Taiwan consulate virtually ended
the influx of new Chinese to the area.
Mexicali still boasts more Chinese restaurants per capita
than any other city in Mexico, and a smaller Chinesca
survives in the downtown area near the border, near the
intersection of Avenida Madero and Calle Melgar. Local
Chinese associations struggle to preserve the arts and
culture of the homeland through the sponsorship of Chinese
festivals, calligraphy clubs, and language classes. But
in most aspects, Chinese cultural life has blended with
local Mexican and American traditions to create a unique,
hybrid culture like that exemplified by the Café
Nueva Asia.
At last count well over a hundred Chinese restaurants
could be found in Mexicali. Cantonese cooking predominates,
but with few exceptions it's not the sort you'd recognise
from Canton or Hong Kong--or Vancouver or San Francisco,
for that matter. As in many Chinese restaurants outside
of Asia, immigrant cooks have adapted their native cuisine
to local tastes. Almost every Chinese restaurant in Mexicali,
for example, serves each dish with a small bowl of what
tastes like generic steak sauce, a distinctly norteño
touch.
As in the rest of the country, the city's Chinese restaurants
are among the most economical places to eat. To satisfy
Mexican appetites accustomed to stacks of tortillas, lard-laced
beans, heavily seasoned rice and barbecued meats, Mexicali's
Chinese restaurants serve huge individual portions that
might feed a family of five in China. Some dining rooms
represent the ultimate in Chinese restaurant kitsch and
are worth visiting for their exterior and interior designs
alone. Along Mexicali's broader avenidas huge multi-room
palacios with curving green-tiled roofs and red-and-gold
lacquered pavilions invoke the imperial architecture of
China past. The word 'Dragón' appears in no less
than four local restaurant names.
Local chinos stick with the smaller, less ostentatious
cafes in congested Chinesca. China Town is located on
Callejon Chinesca, between Avenida Reforma and Avenida
Juarez.
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