Scholars of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas will want to read the latest addition to this growing field, Paisanos Chinos. It is a well-written and fairly well-researched book on Chinese Mexican political formation. Fredy González's scholarship on the Chinese Mexican community, understudied in Latin American history and scholarship on global Asias, is excellent, rigorous, and compelling. By spanning myriad national spaces, often simultaneously—expansive and ambitious conceptual parameters—González's work shows that transpacific webs of migration, intersecting with categories of race, class, and political affiliation, determined who belonged, ambivalently or not, to the Mexican body politic. Similar approaches have been adopted in recent scholarly work on Chinese in Peru and Nicaragua, but González is the first Latin American–trained historian to deploy a diasporic perspective to chronicle the history of modern Mexico from the vantage of a racial minority.
Paisanos Chinos is among the strongest monographs in a rather recent boom...
