Popular Culture, State Formation, and Anti-Chinese Racism in the Making of Post-Revolutionary Mexico

FAIN: HR-50179-05

Gerardo Renique
CUNY Research Foundation, City College (New York, NY 10031-9101)

The proposed project is to complete a book-manuscript on Mexico’s anti-Chinese campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s. My book focuses on the relationship of this movement to the racial understandings and nationalist projects of Mexico’s post-revolutionary state formation and nation building. I analyze the relationship between these campaigns and both popular and official mestizaje. I look both at the neglected place of Asian and Orientalist tropes in theories of mestizaje; the relationship between anti-Chinese sentiments and mestizaje and indigenismo; and the use of the anti-Chinese campaigns to advance the mechanisms of social control through mass mobilization that constituted the trade-mark of Mexico’s post-revolutionary state.