Mexican Travelers in Asia and the United States: Imagining Chinese, Japanese, and North-Americans in the Late Nineteenth Century

On November 7, 1874, the steamship Vasco de Gama docked in Yokohama. Aboard were five Mexican scientists which formed part of the Astronomic Commission in charge of observing the transit of Venus across the sun—a rare celestial phenomenon whose measurement was thought to allow them to estimate the distance between the Earth and the sun. Their itinerary had taken them to Havana across the United States, then to Japan— where they spent two months—and afterwards to Hong Kong. As a result of the trip, the commission published its astronomical conclusions as well as two memoirs, penned by scientists Francisco Díaz Covarrubias and Francisco Bulnes. These became the first known public accounts of Mexicans traveling in Asia since independence from Spain.

The presentation investigates how traveling Mexicans positioned themselves and “others” at a moment when the newly introduced steam technologies changed the way people moved around and experienced the world. It argues that while the journeys generated a sense of belonging to a collectivity formed by “modern travelers”, they also contributed to accentuate notions of racialized and gendered hierarchies that often denigrated other fellow travelers and local populations. In particular, the paper will look into the differentiated roles that Chinese, Japanese, and North Americans played in the Mexican stories. While Díaz and Bulnes’s accounts will be at the center of the analysis, they will be compared to those of other contemporary Mexicans who also spent time abroad. The paper attempts to enrich discussions related to travel and travelers during the age of steam, representations of Asians, Anglo and Latin Americans, Latin American and Asian American Studies, transnational and transpacific exchanges, as well as global history, all of which have often overlooked the way in which Mexicans moved around and participated in the formation of a transpacific world through the 19th century.