Stuck at the Border: The Mexican Revolution, Chinese Refugees, and the Exclusion Era United States

In February 1917, after a failed expedition through northern Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa, General John J. Pershing marched back into the U.S. with thousands of refugees in tow, including Mexicans, Americans, and over 500 Chinese.  In the next several months, the status of these Chinese refugees posed a serious bureaucratic and ethical problem for U.S. officials.  The majority of these Chinese refugees fell into the excluded class of “laborer” under the Chinese Exclusion Acts and therefore could not be granted legal admission to the U.S.  At the same time, U.S. military and immigration officials recognized the intense danger that remained in Mexico for Chinese immigrants and expressed a desire to provide a safe haven for Pershing’s Chinese, especially since they had provided invaluable services to the American soldiers as they traversed the Mexican terrain together.  Based on government correspondence, military and immigration records, newspapers, and photograph/postcard collections, this paper uses the case of Pershing’s Chinese to analyze more broadly the history of Chinese immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the years of the Mexican Revolution and the U.S. entry into WWI.  As the Chinese in northern Mexico fled to the border, they found themselves at a political and diplomatic impasse – running from revolutionary violence in Mexico and barred from entering U.S. soil because of the exclusion laws.  This paper unravels the circuits of communication and diplomatic efforts made on behalf of Pershing’s Chinese to create a larger story about transnationalism in the face of intensely nationalist projects on both sides of the border.  Along the way, as Chinese refugees straddled the border between illegal and legal, excludable laborer and those deserving of asylum in the U.S., this paper also analyzes notions of citizenship and belonging that became even more acute during wartime in the borderlands.