Antichinistas and Gendered Sinophobia in the Mexican National Imaginary

This paper expands our understanding of Mexican nationalism by examining the anti-Chinese rhetoric of Sonorans José María Arana and José Ángel Espinoza. Drawing on caricatures of Chinese men, their Mexican wives, and Chinese-Mexican children, Arana and Espinoza constructed a brand of Sinophobia that sought nothing less than the expulsion of Chinese from Mexico. In Sonora during the 1910s, the cauldron of revolutionary violence was stirred most vehemently by José María Arana, a Magdalena schoolteacher and businessman. In addition to his near-constant travel on behalf of the anti-Chinese crusade, Arana also founded and published Pro-Patria (pro-fatherland). Under the banner “Either them or us,” Arana articulated the anti-Chinese campaign to readers throughout the state through invidious caricatures of Chinese men, their lifestyles, marriages, and children. He used this broadsheet to “point out the evils and vices of the Chinese . . . and called on our Mexican patriotism to arouse the spirit of solidarity to counter the Chinese plague.” Arana’s anti-Chinese campaigns spurred the passage of draconian labor, public hygiene, and marriage laws and enforced them with brutal vigilantism.

In the mid-1920s, José Ángel Espinoza’s portraits of Sonora Chinese were direct attacks on their racial unsuitability that appealed both to those harboring subtle anti-Sinitic impulses and to those proclaiming rabid Sinophobic ideologies. The transmogrification of Chinese into pestilent merchants and heroine-injecting, opium-smoking tongs resonated, but the images and rhetoric of intermarriage and offenses to public hygiene provided the vehicle in which the anti-Chinese campaign rode to its apex. Espinoza’s hatred of the Chinese was in step with the Sonoran enmity for native peoples and non-European foreigners, and his caricatures of Chinese nourished an anti-Chinese vitriol that fed on fear and racism. By 1931, the Sonorans purged themselves of the so-called “yellow peril” by attacking what had made the Chinese Mexican.