Marriage and Mestizaje, Chinese and Mexican: Constitutional Interpretation and Resistance in Sonora, 1921–1935

On a hopeful September day in 1912, Gim Pon, a twenty-five year old Chinese man from Canton, boarded the steamship Siberia in Hong Kong harbor to sail west across the Pacific. The Siberia docked briefly in San Francisco, but Gim Pon's destination, and that of seven fellow Chinese travelers, was not California but the northern Mexican state of Sonora. In the early twentieth century, thousands of men like Gim Pon immigrated to Mexico, boosting the Chinese population there from slightly over 1,000 in 1895 to more than 24,000 in the mid-1920s. Sonora, which hugs Arizona at the United States/Mexico border, was a popular destination, and hosted the largest Chinese population of any Mexican state through the 1920s. Once in Sonora, Gim Pon adapted to life in Mexico: he changed his name to Francisco Gim, learned Spanish, and became naturalized as a Mexican citizen on February 27, 1920. Most importantly, he formed a family with Julia Delgado.

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Specters of Belonging

10.1093/oso/9780190879365.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Adrián Félix

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Life Cycle ◽

The United States ◽

Political Life ◽

The Political ◽

Mexican Migrants ◽

Mexican State ◽

Mexico Border ◽

Mexican Migrant ◽

Transnational Citizenship

In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.

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