Recent years have witnessed an outpouring of superb new scholarship on Chinese communities in Latin America that simultaneously widens the focus of Asian American studies beyond the United States and bridges area studies paradigms long conceived as unrelated. Fredy González's fine book on Chinese immigrants in twentieth-century Mexico is a strong addition. Other scholars have explored the exploitation of Chinese labor and anti-Chinese violence during Mexico's revolution, which culminated in formal policies of ethnic cleansing through mass deportations in the 1930s. Paisanos Chinos (Spanish for “Chinese countrymen”) begins in the late 1920s at the apex of anti-Chinese movements and spans the 1940s and the Cold War period. It follows the lives of Chinese migrants who stayed, returned, or later arrived and who, according to González, successfully labored to be recognized as “Chinese Mexicans”: patriotic contributors to Mexican society who simultaneously identified with a Chinese homeland.
González uses the terms “Chinese...
