Chinese in Mexico: Mexicali, La Chinesca, and the Expulsion from Sonora

Chinese in Mexico (墨西哥华人, Mòxīgē huárén) is usually told through a coolie ship or a border post. The colony that mattered most came through neither. Its people were recruited across a line by an American land company, held by a rail fare, paid by a cotton crop, killed by a revolution in 1911, legislated out of the workforce by a state in 1919, and removed from two states between 1931 and 1934 by committees rather than decree.

Against those instruments stood one counter-instrument, neither a ship nor a treaty: a charter registered on 28 October 1918, in a federal territory with no legislature able to pass a state labour statute. It gave the community a legal person able to hold property, hire a lawyer, run a school and a clinic, bury its dead, and speak to a governor appointed from Mexico City.

In Mexico the Chinese were admitted by capital, attacked by nationalism, and preserved by paperwork. The dates that matter: February 1911, when one testimony places a first contracted contingent of about two hundred Cantonese leaving Canton and entering through San Francisco without legal documents; 15 May 1911, Torreón; 1919, Sonora; 1931 to 1934, the removal; 1952, statehood for Baja California. The 1911 date rests on one testimony — Antonio Yee Chein, thirteen on the journey, quoted by Yolanda Sánchez Ogás — and describes one contingent, not every arrival.

The 1904 municipal count recorded 177 inhabitants in 39 families, seven of them foreign, and no Chinese; the 1910 count recorded 460 in the town and 438 in the valley, again none in the places enumerated. “The Chinese founded Mexicali” is a commemorative claim, repeated by the municipality and the consulate, and those counts contradict it. An individual Chinese presence before 1911 cannot be excluded; a founding is not in the record.

Mexico’s Chinese did enter through Yucatán henequen and, later, the US border; the delta’s labour came instead against a rail fare, as the coolie-trade overview sets out. Cuban, Peruvian and Guyanese Chinese came on contracts; these did not. This colony lost almost everything without ever facing an exclusion statute at a frontier.

The company across the line

The buyer was not Mexico. The Colorado River Land Company was Los Angeles capital, and in 1904 it bought more than 300,000 hectares of the delta from Guillermo Andrade. The delta had been under water in 1905, so the first work was engineering: clearing mesquite, levelling fields, cutting canals, setting gates.

The company recruited not across the Pacific but across the street. American exclusion had stranded Chinese labour within walking distance of the line, and a recruiter in Calexico could hire men already there. The merchant exemption left a commercial class in California while excluding the labouring class — the mechanism the site describes in its restaurant and merchant-exemption history.

The instrument that held them was a fare, not a contract. A man owed passage to San Francisco and the bonded rail fare from the line to Mexicali, and the employer recovered the outlay by keeping him on the payroll. The mechanism is the credit ticket (赊单, shēdān), the same instrument the Macau trade ran on, here relocated with one change: the creditor was a recruiter in California, not a contractor in Havana, and no indenture was signed. The Mexican version is a fare reconstructed by Sánchez Ogás, with no external wage table located.

The gap made the arithmetic work: $2.50 for nine hours on the US side, one dollar for eleven in Mexicali. Mexicans crossed north for melon work and Chinese crews filled the cotton fields. Coercion was administrative, and the only protest documented across twenty-five years is a June 1922 strike threat over a few centavos an hour — one book’s finding, not proof that Chinese labour never struck. The colony was an American business decision, taken on land whose Mexican sovereignty was nominal.

The crop, and the ratio

The colony expanded with the cotton boom. The valley planted 12 hectares in 1912, 12,800 in 1914–15, 50,000 in 1920–21, a peak of 60,000 hectares and 86,478 bales in 1923–24, and 10,800 hectares in 1932–33. In the peak months, September to June, it hired about 5,000 jornaleros, and Chinese made up up to 42 per cent in peak season — Dorothy Kerig’s figure, taken by Sánchez Ogás and applied to 1923–24, when about 5,500 were hired. It is a seasonal share, not a headcount.

They were not only pickers. The 1918 agricultural census counted 75 properties, of which 22 large holdings were American-owned and 11 extensive holdings Chinese-owned: Chic Chec, Tong Wo, On Ging, Yuep Yen Yun and Maw Fug among them. The ranchería count of 1921 is the demographic spine: 32 Chinese ranches holding 81,917 acres, 1,442 residents — 1,314 men against 128 women — and six ranches named simply “La Chinesca No. 1” through “No. 6.” That counts residents on Chinese ranches, not the whole community.

About half the valley’s Chinese men had wives in their home villages, and only men emigrated. Schiavone Camacho adds two further pressures: Chinese norms of provision, and Mexican women’s search for protection amid revolutionary disorder. If the men came alone and married where they worked, the next generation was born to Mexican mothers. The Mexican grandmother in a fourth-generation family is arithmetic, not assimilation — true of many such families, not all.

Puig reconstructs the Torreón colony as Heungshan (Zhongshan, 中山) and Enping (恩平), and Enping’s Latin America corridor is the one traced in the site’s Enping diaspora piece. Enping is a Wuyi county and Zhongshan is not; the founding cohort belongs in those two names, not a five-counties formula. Claims about the community as a whole differ by narrator.

One block, bought not imposed

La Chinesca was a property transaction before it was a neighbourhood. In 1918 the businessman Wong Siw Nam arrived from San Francisco for the Wong Kong Ja Tong (also romanised Wong Kong Har Tong), a body with branches in San Francisco and Cananea, and began buying, renting and occupying lots in a single block of the town centre. The 1918 cadastral survey registered 25 Chinese proprietors and tenants in the first section, several renting from Mexicans because as foreigners they could not hold property.

That disability produced the block’s rental economy and the prestanombres — a Mexican citizen holding the licence, lease or title while the Chinese merchant ran the business. The 1921 Sanborn map marks sites as “dormitorios de chinos”, Chinese dormitories; the 1928 population register shows 27 Chinese giving a post-office box as their address.

It was not a barrio chino in the legal sense. Hermosillo and twelve other Sonoran municipios got legally segregated districts; Sinaloa’s congress approved segregation zones on 8 December 1919. In Mexicali the Chinese chose the block, and the local anti-Chinese league, in Sánchez Ogás’s account, “did not prosper.” Gao Weinong reads the same block the other way — as a defensive asset, with the Chinese a majority of the urban core, a commercial quarter that housed people, against a racial zone drawn by statute.

The block is documented as the Chinese quarter — the pequeño Cantón, in Chinese the “Little Canton” (小广州, Xiǎo Guǎngzhōu) — from about 1920. The first use of “La Chinesca” and its etymology are unknown, and no source dates the word to 1918.

Below grade

The cellars came first from heat. Summer temperatures reach 50°C, there were no electric fans until the 1940s, and housing above ground was short. The wish to be invisible while undocumented added a second reason, and US Prohibition added a trade: Calexico customers crossed for drinking and gambling licensed inside the block, the first casino permit going to Wing Lee and Tay Chan on 10 July 1915.

So the same cellar had four uses — residence, storage, concealment and, after 1915, licensed drinking and gambling — and they overlapped. Climate and housing are the documented origins; concealment should not be allowed to win retroactively.

Cecilia Cárdenas’s account maps the warren from inside, and it is testimony rather than an architectural survey: a street door, then a second door so low a man could not pass upright, rows of small beds, kitchens at the back, married couples walled into their own section, and two doors she was never allowed through — one onto gambling tables, one onto a hall where an old man sat in a high chair with fingernails five centimetres long.

A passage under the international line is not documented. No INAH report, municipal survey or engineering record in this file describes one. The tunnel story is the tourist version of a building technique: a 105-minute tour of the subsoil under a label, “underground city” (地下城, dìxiàchéng), that belongs to the tour rather than the record.

15 May 1911

Torreón, deep in Coahuila, is where the story turns national. The press ran for years before a shot was fired, naming the Chinese as a racial, hygienic and economic threat. Juan Puig’s reading of the 1910 municipal rolls places the colony in abarrotes, fondas, laundries, bakeries, tailors and cantinas; Chinese market gardening along the Nazas ditches competed with Mexican truck farmers who held water rights but less capital. The trigger was the shop counter.

The battle was decided before the killing began. Maderista columns entered on 15 May 1911 after the federal garrison withdrew; accounts indicate about 2,000 rebels against a garrison of roughly 400. Delfino Ríos, who saw it: “Las calles de Torreón a las tres de la tarde estaban cubiertas de cadáveres.”

The “Chinese sniper” appears only afterwards, and it contradicts the consular and municipal record. Puig dismantles it and implicates the column command by omission — hours of killing with no officer restoring order. He does not claim a written order, and neither does this article.

The Chinese legation’s report names 303 dead, name by name; Carlos Castañón’s 303 (2021) confirms and identifies them. Puig’s own tally has been read as 249; some counts add five Japanese victims for 308. Contemporary estimates ran higher, but the 500 figure has no archival citation in this file.

The 1899 Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation gave residents a treaty footing for consular intervention; the 1909 Qing nationality law, grounded in descent rather than birthplace, made the Torreón dead Chinese subjects however long they had lived in Coahuila. Its termination is contested — 1921 in one account, 1927 in another — and this article does not choose a year. The cruiser Hai Chi (海圻号, Hǎiqí hào) was ordered toward the Caribbean in 1911, a Mexican port call being disputed.

The legation claimed 3,100,000 pesos oro; a protocol was signed on 16 December 1911, ratification due 15 June 1912, payment due 1 July 1912. The Chinese revolution disrupted ratification, the Mexican Senate never voted, the file closed in 1934, and, on the account of El Financiero in 2026, citing Puig and Castañón, the indemnity was never paid. On 17 May 2021 the Mexican state held a ceremony of petición de perdón for grievances against the Chinese community, 110 years after the killing.

The statute, and the register that turned inside out

The labour law that followed had no race in it. Sonora’s 1919 Ley de Trabajo y Previsión Social contained no racial clause; it enforced a citizen’s right to work and was applied racially. The 80 per cent requirement the literature attaches to Sonora is documented for Sinaloa, by decree of 27 December 1919, and probable but unconfirmed for Sonora, where one book calls it a ninety-per-cent law — a figure this file can source only for Sinaloa.

Merchants naturalised themselves, their Mexican-born sons and their partners, and where naturalisation was too slow they used the prestanombres. The device left a documentary trace — licences in Mexican names, powers of attorney, partnership contracts — and that trace lets a historian reconstruct Chinese commercial networks out of Mexican paper rather than Chinese sources.

Sonora’s counter-move was to attack the citizenship itself. Naturalisation rules were tightened; Ley 31 of 13 December 1923 prohibited marriage between Mexican women and Chinese men, and Ley 89 of 1931 extended the apparatus. The removal instrument was simpler: Article 33 of the 1917 Constitution let the executive expel a foreigner deemed pernicioso without prior hearing — no charge, no court record, no appeal.

The sharpest irony is a document turning inside out. Chinese consuls had registered Mexican-born children as Chinese nationals; in 1931 Mexican officials used those very registers as proof that the children were foreigners.

Marital unity completed the trap: a Mexican woman who married a foreigner took his nationality, so the wives of Chinese men were legally Chinese in 1931, and the 1930 census counted them as Chinese. Schiavone Camacho’s fifth chapter is titled, flatly, “The women are neither Chinese nor Mexican.” Women who stayed were called mujeres de chinos; women who followed were accused of betraying the nation.

Mexico then legislated the rule away. Article 30, first reform, was published in the Diario Oficial on 18 January 1934; the 1934 nationality law let married Mexican women keep their nationality, adopted ius soli, and raised the residence requirement from two to five years, reversing within three years the legal basis of the 1931 claim. The reform is documented; the reading that it repaired the marital-unity instrument is Schiavone Camacho’s, attributed rather than asserted as intent.

The removal, and what “remained” means

The removal was machinery, and most of it was state and municipal. Governors, municipal juntas and anti-Chinese (排华, páihuá) committees compiled registers of Chinese residents, boycotted their shops, pressured landlords and employers, forced sales of stock and inventoried assets. There was no presidential decree; a federal expulsion would have created a record and a legal remedy.

Sinaloa’s campaign opened in July 1931 with what Cárdenas García calls “escandalosas manifestaciones” that turned violent within days; Sonora’s third campaign “successfully ousted the Chinese” in autumn 1931. The pressure years were 1930 and 1931, and what they produced was as much hiding as departure.

The numbers do not agree, and they are not counting the same thing. Estimates of those removed from Sonora and Sinaloa between 1931 and 1934 run from about 3,500 to more than 10,000; the Article 33 files record 406 Chinese targeted and 149 formally deported. The hard evidence is the census series: Sonora counted 4,486 Chinese in 1910, 3,639 in 1921 and 92 in 1940; Sinaloa counted 667, then 1,040, then 165. A New York Times report of 18 October 1931 announced that “nearly all of 10,000 Orientals” were gone from five north-western states, a contemporary claim rather than a count. These describe people removed, people displaced, formal federal acts and a census category; they are not addends.

In 1930 the census counted 1,590 Chinese in Mexicali city, while a governor’s meeting that June, with 26 camps represented, counted 121 Chinese left in the valley’s camps. One is a city population, the other resident field labour; neither is the community.

Others moved within Mexico rather than leaving it, to Baja California and Chihuahua; Cárdenas García records that in Baja California, Tamaulipas and the Federal District “muchos lograron quedarse,” while in Sonora and Sinaloa they “prácticamente desaparecieron.” Expulsion doubled as expropriation: a few Chinese of scarce skills were allowed to stay, with assets inventoried, seized or auctioned. What remained was a sorting process, not a remnant — property, naturalisation papers or a Mexican spouse could buy time, so the survivors were wealthier, better documented and more Mexican-connected than the community that had arrived in 1920.

The shield was constitutional

Baja California was a federal territory until 1952. Its governor was appointed from Mexico City, and there was no territorial legislature to enact a Sonora-style labour statute. That is the whole of the shield, and it is structural rather than moral: protection from statute, not from politics.

The proof that it was not a sanctuary is dated. On 22 January 1934 President Abelardo Rodríguez ordered the migration department to prevent “núcleos de población extranjera residente” in both Baja Californias, allowing exceptions only against a $500 bond and a six-month limit. That order restricted foreign settlement; it is not by itself evidence of mass expulsion from the territory.

The colony’s end came by land rather than by decree. On 27 January 1937 peasants took the ranches they worked, with the ejido Michoacán de Ocampo absorbing “ranchos 2, 3 y 15 de la Chinesca.” Deportation, outmigration and the collapse of the cotton area all contributed; land reform was the instrument, not the sole cause.

So the survival has two parents. The shield created the space; the charter used it. A charter in a hostile state would have been dissolved; a territory without an association had no body able to hold property or litigate.

The charter

The Asociación China de Mexicali was constituted on 28 October 1918 by Wong Wah Foy, Wong Fook Yee and Tam Yue Pon. The notice survives in the Periódico Oficial, and Governor Esteban Cantú recognised the association in October 1919. Its address, avenida Juárez 105, has not changed.

A chartered association (中华会馆, Zhōnghuá huìguǎn) could hold, lease, sue, hire a lawyer and appear before a governor as a legal person. It did what a consulate does, from a body registered in Mexican civil law, while keeping Chinese-language schooling and KMT ties.

Its first victory was fiscal, and the sum is nine pesos a quarter. A municipal ordinance, Article 182-bis, printed in the Periódico Oficial of 10 July 1915, taxed “todo varón vecino de la municipalidad que pertenezca a la raza amarilla” — every male resident belonging to the yellow race — 4.50 pesos a quarter for public instruction and 4.50 for public charity. It was worded by race, not nationality, which is why naturalisation was no defence; it ran about a decade, until the association hired a lawyer and obtained its repeal under President Calles.

The institutional complex grew around the charter. The school dates from the late 1920s — community history gives 1928 to 1930 — beginning in the basement of the Methodist temple Mei Yi Mei, founded by Chau Gee Chiu, who had arrived in Mexicali in 1910 at fourteen. That arrival is the individual earlier presence the censuses cannot rule out, one man’s date rather than evidence that the community predates 1911. The school was integrated into the association in 1937, got its own building in 1972, taught in Cantonese and the Taishan (台山, Táishān) dialect, added Mandarin in 2004, and is described by community sources as the only Chinese community school in Mexico.

The archive is an institution too. The association’s first book of registered members — founding members, then the first Chinese businesses, including sixty-three ranches — is treated as the community’s foundational document, and around the charter by the 1930s stood 28 surname and native-place associations, among them León Chong How Tong, Chew Lung Tong and Wong Kong Ja Tong, each housing, feeding and placing new arrivals. Dues, property, a lawyer, a school, a clinic, a cemetery: a body that could do what an individual foreigner legally could not, in a town where no state statute could reach.

Two repatriations, and the village that had no category for her

Schiavone Camacho reports that more than six hundred Mexican women and their Chinese-Mexican children had settled in China by 1933, by choice or by deportation order; the figure rests on her oral-history reconstruction, twenty-seven interviews, and is not independently verified.

In Taishan, the Mexican wife was usually the second wife. The husband had already married in China, so the returnee was demoted into a household that had a first wife, in-laws and a genealogy. She stood outside the lineage: no entry in the clan genealogy (族谱, zúpǔ) — the exclusion is the fact, and the site explains how such a genealogy records a wife in its guide to reading a zupu — and no role in the ancestral rites at the hall (祠堂, cítáng). The family’s wealth had largely been confiscated, so she arrived without capital and entered a remittance-organised village economy at its lowest rung.

What survived was domestic liturgy: rancheras sung at full volume while washing clothes in the stream, the rosary taught in Spanish, instructions never to lose their Catholicism.

Then the state reversed one half of its own policy. Lázaro Cárdenas’s operation of 1937 admitted some four hundred Mexican women and hundreds of their mixed-race children while barring their Chinese husbands and fathers — including men who had naturalised as Mexicans. 1960 corrected the asymmetry: under López Mateos, Chinese men were at last allowed to return with their families, 250 to 350 people were repatriated, and a trickle continued until about 1980. Selection favoured families with working-age sons and agricultural skills, leaving the old, the sick and the widowed in China.

They were settlers in life and sojourners in burial. Property, naturalisation and the purchase of cemetery ground all say settler; the expectation of return survived as a duty to be buried at home (落叶归根, luòyè guīgēn). Schiavone Camacho compresses the outcome into a line about one returnee, Alfonso Wong Campoy: “he became Mexican in China.”

The ledger and the village name

Latin American censuses classified Chinese under national labels — chino, asiático — which erased ethnicity by the second generation, and a Registro Civil entry for a Chinese father’s birthplace records a province at best. There is no usable present-day count of Chinese-Mexicans: the census stopped counting the category, and the Chinese-language figures that circulate are not census-based.

Four Chinese-specific record classes survive, alongside the Registro Civil. Association membership rolls record founding members and native-place affiliation; the first book lists the first Chinese businesses, including sixty-three ranches. School enrolment lists carry a name, sometimes a village, and a dialect. Panteón de los Pioneros burial records — the community gave $2,000 in 1919 for an exclusive eastern section — record a village name more often than a civil entry does. Consular registration cards are the same class of document that was turned against the community’s children in 1931; the civil registry covers births and marriages.

Access at Juárez 105 is unknown, and this article will not promise that a letter will be answered.

A mayor, Armando Gallego Moreno, built a swimming pool and recreation area on part of the Chinese section of the Panteón de los Pioneros in 1974–77, and the remains were exhumed and handed to relatives.

Descendants in Sonora, Baja California and Arizona began hunting records in the 1990s and 2000s. The Asociación de Descendientes de chinos de ultramar de Mexicali, led by Ramón G. Yee, works on identity and ancestry. The Chinese consul-general attended the association school’s National Day event in October 2024 and its New Year’s celebration on 1 January 2025.

The tunnel story now feeds a tourist economy: La Chinesca became Baja California’s first Barrio Mágico, designated in August 2023. The ledger is upstairs.

No corpus of remittance letters (侨批, qiáopī) was located in this file — the standard study contains no family correspondence; the site’s introduction to qiaopi describes what such a corpus looks like where one survives. The Chinese-language layer is thin in the same way: the community’s accounts run through provincial overseas-Chinese offices and the consulate, not a local archive. The record-method family used for other diasporas is set out in the site’s records guide and its village-finding method.

Most searches stop at a province, not a village, and some stop at a name spelled in Spanish. The archive can put a county back into a family. It cannot promise the village.

The ledger is a Mexican civil document and a Cantonese village list at once, and it sits in the same building as the school, the clinic’s successor and the wall of presidents’ photographs. A Chinese-Mexican in Mexicali looking for a Cantonese village is the same reader as a Taishanese in Toronto looking for a Wuyi one: both hold a name, in Spanish or in English, and ask a county to recognise it. One of them is asking a building that has been at the same address since 1919.

Continue Reading

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• Chinese in Guyana: From Indenture to the Presidency

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Sources

Books

• Yolanda Sánchez Ogás, Historia de los chinos en el valle y ciudad de Mexicali (ICBC / Gobierno de Baja California, 2021) — the delta colony, the 1918 charter, the wage gap — bajacalifornia.gob.mx
• Juan Puig, Entre el río Perla y el Nazas: la China decimonónica y sus braceros emigrantes (CONACULTA, 1993) — the Torreón colony and the killing of 1911.
• Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) — repatriation, the Mexican wives, the 1931 registers.
• Fredy González, Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017) — the repatriation politics of the 1930s and 1960s.
• 高伟浓 (Gao Weinong), 《拉丁美洲华侨华人移民史、社团与文化活动远眺》 (暨南大学出版社, 2012) — the block read as a defensive quarter.

Articles

• Zhou Shenyu, “La población china en México desde finales del siglo XIX hasta la década de 1940,” Boletín Americanista 90 (2025) — the census series by state — doi.org
• Nicolás Cárdenas García, “Perniciosos e indeseables. La deportación de chinos en el México posrevolucionario,” Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México 71 (2026) — Article 33, the 406 files, the 149 deportations — doi.org
• Cárdenas García, “La expulsión de los chinos de Sinaloa (1919–1935),” EHMCM 61 (2021) — the Sinaloa decrees of December 1919 and the July 1931 campaign.
• Pablo Yankelevich, “Mexicanos por naturalización en la primera mitad del siglo XX,” Historia Mexicana LXIV:4 (2015) — the 1934 nationality reform.
• “De alienígenas chinos e indígenas yaquis,” Anuario de Historia de América Latina (JBLAs) 55 (2019) — the 1919 Sonora labour law without a racial clause — doi.org
• Kif Augustine-Adams, “Marriage and Mestizaje, Chinese and Mexican: Constitutional Interpretation and Resistance in Sonora, 1921–1935,” Law and History Review 29:2 (2011) — Ley 31 of 13 December 1923 and the amparo suits — doi.org

Official records, period press and community sources

• Gobierno de México, “Versión estenográfica: petición de perdón por agravios a la comunidad china en México,” 17 May 2021 — gob.mx
• Juan Antonio García Villa, “Historia de una indemnización jamás pagada,” El Financiero, 15 May 2026 — the 1911 protocol, the 249 reading of Puig’s tally — elfinanciero.com.mx
• BBC Mundo, “La ‘olvidada’ matanza de chinos en México,” 15 May 2015 — the 303 dead and Delfino Ríos’s testimony — bbc.com
• The New York Times, “5 Mexican States Cleared of Chinese,” 18 October 1931 — the period claim of 10,000 gone.
• Tusanaje, “Escuela Comunitaria China de Mexicali,” 8 September 2020 — the school’s founding, Chau Gee Chiu, the Taishan dialect — tusanaje.org
• Library of Congress, Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Mexicali, Baja California, 1921 — the block annotation reproduced in figure 2 — Wikimedia Commons