How early Chinese migrants in Mexico came to dominate trade south of the US border

From the 1800s, Chinese migrants spurned by the US used gumption and family networks to gain a monopoly on small business in northern Mexico

Reading Time:9 minutes

A Chinese store in Hermosillo, in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, in 1900. During this period, Chinese migrants became a force in small business south of the US border. Hugo Wong focuses on this in his book America’s Lost Chinese. Photo: Historical Society, from The Chinese in Northern Mexico / HKU

Published: 6:15pm, 15 Jun 2024

In America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream, author Hugo Wong tells the inspiring story of his ancestors, Chinese migrants rejected by the United States who went on to build a new community in Mexico.

In this excerpt, we learn how this innovative diaspora came to dominate trade south of the US border:

Every Saturday night, after receiving their pay, Mexican workers went to the nearest village to have a drink at local cantinas, where customers often leave carried out feet-first, and drunken Mexican workers sometimes attacked Chinese workers.

One of Leung Hing’s children recalled that, being the tallest, Hing was often called in for help by his compatriots.

The author’s great-grandfather Leung Hing with three brothers and family in Mazatlan, Mexico, in 1903. Photo: HKU Press

As in the United States, Hing noticed how docile and timid his fellow Chinese were in the face of the bullying and aggression they suffered. He ventured that the reason could be that the Chinese did not know the local language and so were unable to speak back.

At the turn of the century, an American missionary in China observed that: “The Chinese dislike fighting, although they do not readily yield. Their dislike is not from fear of pain, but because they do not like to be considered rude.