Racial Violence and Mobilizing Ethnicity: A Comparative Look at the Chinese and Japanese in Revolutionary Mexico, 1910–30

Ideas of Asian racial difference played an important and yet unexamined role in the path and character of the Mexican revolution.  As competing factions of the revolution struggled over control, the shifting battle lines were marked by racial violence against the Chinese and a subtle appropriation of Japanese imperialism.  In 1915 Lee Yan You and Wong Toy were murdered for protecting their general merchandise store near the Sonoran coast by troops loyal to General Francisco Villa.  These murders were part of military campaigns in contest with the conservative Constitutionalist General Plutarco Elias Calles. Soldiers on all sides of the war performed ritualized, murder, humiliation and endangerment of the Chinese.

Alternatively, exemplary narratives of Japanese military prowess and racial ascendency after the Ruso-Japanese War (1905) structured the federal government’s response to the fractured rebellions against the Diaz dictatorship.  After the war, Diaz sought the recruitment of ex-soldiers from the Japanese military as ideal settlers in hostile Indian territory.  Also General Huerta commissioned a colonel in 1914 to visit Japan and conduct an evaluation of the army as a model for a renewed effort to quell the revolution and repel the U.S.  Later, Japanese military visits and bilateral negotiations punctuated the institutionalization of Norteño power in the 1920s.

While the Mexican revolution has been characterized as a nationalist rebellion, the role of foreigners in the war has not been well understood.  The prevailing emphasis on class-consciousness and state-formation in the historiography of the revolution has also left the question of race and ethnicity during wartime limited to the travails of the populist mestizo renaissance.  The history of anti-Chinese violence and Mexican emulation of the Japanese demonstrate the important role that foreigners played in the conflict as well as how ideas about their racial identity helped to shape the notion of mestizo nationalism.