"El Destierro de los Chinos": Popular Perspectives of Chinese-Mexican Interracial Marriage as Reflected in Poetry, Cartoon, Comedy, and Corridos

Drawing from poetry, cartoons, comedy, and musical recordings of the UCLA Frontera Collection, this paper examines the historical phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican intermarriage through the lense of Mexican popular culture of the early twentieth century.  Popular Mexican culture portrayed Chinese cross-cultural marriages as relationships of abuse, slavery, and neglect, and rejected the offspring of such unions as sub-human, degenerative, and unworthy of full inclusion within the Mexican national community.  Interracial marriage with prosperous Chinese merchants was scornfully depicted as a shameless short cut by which slothful Mexican women avoided the need to work and secured lives of material comfort.  Such popular criticism of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, moreover, was often couched within larger discourses of revolutionary economic nationalism.  Beyond presenting an historical examination of the phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, as one important theoretical implication, this paper destabilizes prevalent notions of "mestizaje" within the disciplines of Latin American Studies and Latino Studies.  It challenges the "white-brown" binary of traditional racial theory in Latino Studies and sounds a clarion call for further research and discussion related to the important contributions of Chinese, Japanese, African, Middle Eastern, and other overlooked ethnic immigrant groups to the Mexican and cultural melting pot.