ERIC Number: EJ760978
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007
Pages: 32
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0005-2604
EISSN: N/A
"El destierro de los Chinos": Popular Perspectives on Chinese-Mexican Intermarriage in the Early Twentieth Century
Romero, Robert Chao
Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, v32 n1 p113-144 Spr 2007
This essay examines Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage during the early twentieth century through the lens of Mexican popular culture. Comedy, poetry, cartoons, and musical recordings of the time portrayed these marriages as relationships of abuse, slavery, and neglect, and rejected the offspring of such unions as subhuman and unworthy of full inclusion in the Mexican national community. Marriage with prosperous Chinese merchants was scornfully depicted as a shortcut by which slothful Mexican women secured lives of material comfort without working. Such popular criticism was often couched within larger discourses of revolutionary economic nationalism. In examining the historical phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican intermarriage, this essay destabilizes prevalent notions of mestizaje within the discipline of Chicana/o studies and challenges the white-brown binary of traditional Chicano racial theory. It calls for further research on the important contributions of Chinese, Japanese, African, Middle Eastern, and other overlooked immigrant ethnic groups to the Mexican and Chicano cultural melting pot. (Contains 5 figures and 15 notes.)
Descriptors: Poetry, Mexicans, Marriage, Cartoons, Slavery, Inclusive Schools, Cultural Pluralism, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Racial Relations, Immigration, Social History, Immigrants, Social Bias, Multiracial Persons, Social Influences
UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. 193 Haines Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1544. Tel: 310-794-9380; Tel: 310-825-2642; Fax: 310-206-1784; e-mail: press@chicano.ucla.edu; Web site: http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/press
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Mexico
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A