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Chin-Chun-Chan:Popular Sinophobia in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2021

Robert M. Buffington
Robert M. Buffington*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article looks at popular responses to the zarzuela Chin-Chun-Chan and the issues that surfaced around its timely subject in early twentieth-century Mexico City. The principal source is the Mexico City satiric penny press for workers, supplemented by somewhat less polemical broadsides, both sold on the streets of the capital. Aimed mostly at working-class Mexicans, these sources offer a glimpse at popular attitudes circulating in a public sphere otherwise dominated by the perspective of educated elites. The article has four sections. First, it briefly reviews social commentary on the democratization of musical theater. Second, it examines Chin-Chun-Chan as a political symbol that crystalized around working-class complaints about the Porfirian regime, especially its alleged disregard for Mexican workers and Mexican national identity. Third, it analyzes the ways in which the phrase “Chin-Chun-Chan” entered popular language as a racial signifier for a range of things, some of which bore little relation to its theatrical origins. Finally, it links popular Sinophobia in late Porfirian Mexico City to the virulent anti-Chinese campaigns in northern Mexico, which played a key role in defining national identity after the 1910 Revolution, and to the “hemispheric orientalism” that has characterized anti-Asian sentiments throughout the Americas.

Keywords

anti-Chinese sentimentpenny pressPorfirian popular cultureracism in languageJosé Guadalupe Posada
Type
Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 279 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Academy of American Franciscan History

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Footnotes

This article benefited greatly from the generosity, insights, and encouragement of my University of Colorado Boulder colleagues Emmanuel David, Leila Gómez, Kristie Soares, and Christina Sue; the time to write provided by a University of Colorado Boulder College Scholar Award; and exceptionally helpful suggestions from external reviewers and editors at The Americas.

References

1. Zarzuela is a Spanish musical theater genre that combines singing, dancing, and spoken dialogue. It dates back at least to mid seventeenth-century Spain and was well established in Mexico by the late eighteenth century. The title translates: Chin-Chun-Chan: Chinese Conflict in One Act and Three Scenes.

2. Antenor Lescano, “Nota metropolitana,” El Mundo Ilustrado, June 26, 1904, reprinted in Luis Reyes de la Maza, El teatro en México durante el Porfirismo, vol. 3 (1900–1910) (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México [hereafter UNAM], 1968), 249–250.

3. On the Vanegas Arroyo and Posada collaboration, see Buffington, Robert M. and Salazar, J. Osciel, “José Guadalupe Posada and Visual Culture in Porfirian Mexico,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, Beezley, William, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, online publication date July 2018)Google Scholar; Frank, Patrick, Posada's Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery, 1890–1910 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Gretton, Thomas, “Posada and the ‘Popular’: Commodities and Social Constructs in Mexico before the Revolution,” Oxford Art Journal 17:2 (1994): 32–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and González, Agustín Sánchez, La portentosa vida de José Guadalupe Posada (Monterrey, Mexico: Ediciones de Don Lupe, 2013)Google Scholar.

4. The Spanish word “calavera” translates literally as skull or skeleton. Published in conjunction with the annual celebrations for Day of the Dead (October 31-November 2) and accompanied by satiric verses, Posada's calaveras poke fun at the pretentions of the living in the face of their inevitable mortality.

5. See for example Cantina Chin-Chun-Chan's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Chin-Chun-Chan/424542367599473; Beatriz Doumerc and Gabriel Barnes, El mago Chin-chun-chan, illustrated by Horacio Elena (Madrid: Editorial Bruño, 2009), https://www.brunolibros.es/libro.php?id=1761397, accessed January 18, 2021; and Banda Espuela de Oro, “Me pasas un chin chun chan,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWo59vp7VMM, accessed January 18, 2021.

6. Jacqueline Avila, “Chin Chun Chan: The Zarzuela as an Ethnic and Technological Farce,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (New York: Oxford University Press, online publication date February 2018); Pablo Dueñas and Jesús Flores Escalante, Teatro mexicano, historia y dramaturgia, vol. 20, Teatro de revista (1904–1936) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995); Armando de María y Campos, “El teatro de género chico en la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1956); Alejandro Ortiz Bullé Goyri, “José F. Elizondo y el estreno de la zarzuela Chin Chun Chan” (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, online publication 2007), http://zaloamati.azc.uam.mx/handle/11191/2724, accessed January 9, 2021; and Luis Reyes de la Maza, El teatro en México durante el porfirismo, vol. 3.

7. The cakewalk scene is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B9CRiuxqTI, accessed January 9, 2021. General Porfirio Díaz was president of Mexico from 1876 to 1880, and 1884 to 1911, a period known as the “Porfiriato.”

8. See especially Janet L. Sturman, “Immigration and Cosmopolitan Identity during the Porfiriato,” in Sturman, The Course of Mexican Music (New York: Routledge, 2016), 162–192; and Avila, “Chin Chun Chan: The Zarzuela as an Ethnic and Technological Farce.” Ana Paulina Lee analyzes an 1883 Brazilian musical theater (teatro de revista) production, O Mandarino, and the racial politics of “yellowface” in Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 65–86.

9. Robert M. Buffington, A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). See also María Elena Díaz, “The Satiric Penny Press for Workers in Mexico: 1900–1910: A Case Study in the Politicisation of Popular Culture,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22:3 (October 1990): 497–525; and John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). Literacy rates in Mexico City were around 50 percent, more than double that of the country as a whole. Buffington, A Sentimental Education, 8.

10. In basic semiotic theory, a sign is comprised of a signifier, the signified, and a referent. In these first stages of its evolution, the signifier was “Chin-Chun-Chan” and the signified was the Chinese presence in Mexico. The principal referent was government-supported immigration of Chinese workers into the country and the alleged social and cultural disruptions to Mexican society that resulted from their presence.

11. On “hemispheric orientalism” see Erika Lee, “Orientalisms in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8:3 (October 2005): 238.

12. Susan E. Bryan, “Teatro popular y sociedad durante el Porfiriato,” in Cultura, ideas y mentalidades, Solange Alberro, ed. (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1992), 179. The practice of teatro por horas (theater by the hour), or tandas as they were called in Mexico, began in Madrid theaters in 1869 and spread to Mexico a decade later. Bryan, “Teatro popular,” 182.

13. Bryan, “Teatro popular,” 191, 212–213.

14. Bryan, “Teatro popular,” 183.

15. Quoted in Bryan, “Teatro popular,” 191–192. The Spanish word “cursi,” translated here as “tacky,” has a range of meanings including overly sweet, cheesy, tasteless, and pretentious. A poet of some subtlety, Gutiérrez Nájera likely meant all of these things. One real (sometimes less) was the usual admission price for both the jacalones and the tanda cheap seats. When Mexico switched from the real to the peso in 1897, a real was worth one-eighth of a peso or 12 1/2 centavos. Daily wages for workers in turn-of-the-century Mexico City ranged from 50 centavos to 5 pesos, which meant that most could afford to attend the theater, at least on occasion. Wages were higher for men than women and they likely attended the theater more often. On working-class wages, see Marie Eileen Francois, A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance in Mexico City, 1750–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 160–161.

16. Bryan, “Teatro popular,” 191.

17. Luis G. Urbina, “La Conesa,” El Imparcial, November, 1907, 3. Reprinted in “Ecos teatrales” de Luis G. Urbina (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1963), 101. Original: “Líbreme Dios de sermonear aquí en contra del género chico. En todas partes del mundo civilizado hay lugares para la alegría insana. Lo que yo digo es que un teatro de primer orden, como el Principal, con sus viejas tradiciones de arte, con su situación céntrica y ventajosa, con la decidida preferencia que el público le otorga, no debe ser el nido ni el propagandista de la pornografía y del mal gusto.”

18. “Por los teatros,” El Imparcial, March 31, 1904. Reprinted in Luis Reyes de la Maza, El teatro en México durante el Porfirismo, vol. 3, 239–240. El Imparcial benefited from generous government subsidies and could be counted on to reflect official attitudes on most topics.

19. “El arte (?) moderno,” El Papagayo, July 17, 1904, 1. The caption alleges that the chorus girls’ tights were stuffed with cotton, presumably to give them shapelier legs. The “Scene XLI” in the caption refers to the Famous 41 scandal of 1901 that followed a police raid on an all-male Mexico City private dance hall where half the men were dressed as women. For details on the penny-press response to the scandal, see Robert Buffington, “Homophobia and the Mexican Working Class, 1900–1910,” in The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901, Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michelle Rocío Nasser, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 193–225. The Moriones sisters, owners of the Teatro Principal, commissioned and rehearsed a zarzuela on Los cuarenta y uno (The Forty-One) but gave it up after an indignant press leaked their plans. Bryan, “Teatro popular,” 197.

20. “Nuestro programa,” El Papagayo, July 17, 1904, 2. Torroella's aggravating circumstances—premeditación, alevosía y ventaja—are from the 1872 penal code's definition of intentional homicide (tomo 2, libro 3, capítulo 7). The “murdered” goddesses in this case are three classical muses: Thalia (comedy), Euterpe (music, song, lyric poetry), and Terpsichore (dance).

21. “Habladurías,” El Papagayo, July 17, 1904, 2–3. On the Teatro Principal scandal, see Luis Reyes de la Maza, El teatro en México durante el Porfirismo, vol. 3, 246–247.

22. “El Arte,” La Araña, August 18, 1904, 1. Page 4 features an advertisement for a cantina named Chin-Chun-Chan, specializing in mixed drinks.

23. “Importante,” El Papagayo, August 21, 1904, 3. “Chintarará” is a syllabic string commonly used to signify a musical melody much like “tra-la-la” in English. La Catarina is the female equivalent of a male dandy or catrín. Posada's famous illustration “La Calavera Catrina” depicts her as a skeleton dressed in a fancy hat.

24. “Prensa pequeña,” La Araña, September 1, 1904, 2.

25. Original: “A la siguiente semana pasa por un Teatro de género chico, penetra en él y vé “Enseñanza Libre,” “S. Juan de Luz,” y alguna otra por el estilo. Discurren por el escenario tipos grotescos que provocan risa; dicen frases indecorosas y accionen con modales groseros; el artesano ríe, goza y se distrae; torna a su hogar y comparte su familia de esta alegría.”

26. On government subsidies for mainstream daily newspapers, see Florence Toussaint Alcaraz, Escenario de la prensa en el Porfiriato (Mexico City: Fundación Manuel Buendía, 1989).

27. On the Porfirian regime's ambivalent approach to the recruitment of Chinese labor, see José Jorge Gómez Izquierdo, El movimiento antichino en México (1871–1934) (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1992); Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010); and Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). At its peak in 1924, the Chinese population would nearly double to over 24,000. Statistics from Romero, 56.

28. Statistics from Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940, 58, and Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 21–22, 226. On race-based Mexican immigration policies, see David Scott Fitzgerald and David Cook-Martin, “Mexico: Selecting Those Who Never Came,” in Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 215–258.

29. El Economista Mexicano, December 16, 1891. Quoted in José Jorge Gómez Izquierdo, El movimiento antichino en México (1871–1934), 61. Original: “Forman el carácter de los hijos de Confucio la redomada astucia, la perseverancia casi sin límites y una moral … enteramente heterogénea de las más elementales nociones de la nuestra … es gente muy unida por lo que llega a ser tan formidable y prejudicial a la causa pública de los pueblos que incautamente admiten en su seno a tales extraños elementos. Si se añade lo antipático y repulsivo que en su totalidad es este mongol, sus hábitos, su monstruosa lengua, verdadera matraca de monosílabos, se comprende … la animadversión general e instintiva en contra suya.”

30. José Covarrubias, “La inmigración china considerada desde los puntos de vista intelectual y moral,” Revista Positiva, November, 1904, quoted in José Jorge Gómez Izquierdo, El movimiento antichino en México (1871–1934), 70. Original: “No pudiéndose pensar en asimilarlo ni en dominarlo [al chino], solo se debe tratar de considerarlo como asociado, aconsejándose al gobierno no su exclusión sistemática como se ha hecho en otros países … sino solamente una intervención constante que permita dirigir esa inmigración a los puntos en que hace falta, reducirla a los términos convenientes y conservar siempre en manos de gobierno la dirección de su movimiento.”

31. For details on Chinese immigration into Mexico during this period, see Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Immigrants to a Developing Society: The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1875–1932.” Journal of Arizona History 21:3 (Fall 1980): 275–312; Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940, 12–29; Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 31–92; and Fredy González, Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 17–20. Erika Lee provides a comprehensive overview of Chinese exclusion in the United States in At America's Gate: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

32. William H. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 104.

33. Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 35.

34. Jonathan C. Brown, “Native and Foreign-Born Workers in Porfirian Mexico,” American Historical Review 98:3 (June 1993): 792. The requirement that foreign nationals register their presence in the country was waived in 1886.

35. David W. Walker, “Porfirian Labor Politics: Working Class Organizations in Mexico City and Porfirio Díaz,” The Americas 37:3 (January 1981): 278–280.

36. On penny-press politics, see María Elena Díaz, “The Satiric Penny Press for Workers in Mexico, 1900–1910: A Case Study for the Politicisation of Popular Culture,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22:3 (October 1990): 497–525; John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 102–106; Rafael Barajas Durán (“El Fisgón”), Posada: mito y mitote: la caricatura política de José Guadalupe Posada y Manuel Alfonso Manilla (“Tezontle”), (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009), 205–342; and Robert M. Buffington, A Sentimental Education for the Working Man, 9–14, 131–138.

37. The wage scale for foreign and national workers, especially those contracted by American and European companies, reflected a racialized labor hierarchy legitimized by the scientific racism of Díaz's científicos and others. See for example Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, “Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States, 1880s-1930s,” Journal of American History 86:3 (December 1999): 1156–1187.

38. “Chin-Chun-Chan, en la Ciudad de los Mártires,” La Guacamaya, August 18, 1904, 1. La Guacamaya was the most popular and long-lived paper of the penny press. Circulation numbers are impossible to verify—the editor claimed 29,000 for one edition—but other evidence suggests that it was widely read and distributed. The City of Martyrs is probably Uruapan in the state of Michoacán, where one of Maximilian's officers executed five liberal insurgents on October 20, 1865, in the wake of his infamous decree permitting the execution without trial of rebel combatants. Benito Juárez would later use this decree to justify the execution of Maximilian. The use of mock Chinese is discussed at length below.

39. For an excellent concise overview of concerns about “coolie” labor in Latin America, see Ana Paulina Lee, Mandarin Brazil, 4–5.

40. On the many uses of chingar in Mexican popular culture, see Octavio Paz's classic discussion in Labyrinth of Solitude, Lysander Kemp et al., trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 65–88.

41. “Por saludar á un hijo de la Chi … na,” La Araña, September 1, 1904, 1.

42. “Los obreras de ‘La Concordia,” El Pinche, May 5, 1905, 2. Original: “Se pretende que sean esclavos y los que nacimos bajo la bandera tricolor nunca lo hemos sido. ¿Esclavos? ¡Vayan á traer á los hijos de Chin-chun-chan, á ver si quieren serlo.”

43. “Infernales: sus majestades los chinos,” El Diablito Bromista, September 26, 1907, 3. The original reads: “No puede dar un paso sin tropezar con una cara de mono ú séase un chino. Pasa usted por una esquina, chino al canto. Que entra usted á un restaurant, chino al canto. Que vas u señora á hacer la plaza, se encuentra con un chino cochino.” Earlier in the editorial, the author resorts to a classic disease metaphor, in this case a “plague of filthy Chinese pigs, special conduit for Asian microbes.” A second racialized immigrant group targeted by the author was black Cubans, who he characterized as “scoundrels, hucksters, and thieves” (maldosos, timistas y rateros), a commentary on their character rather than their hygiene. The author was probably the paper's editor Antonio de P. Escárcega.

44. Original: “Ay, Diablito, si yo no sé cómo el Gobierno está dejando entrar tanta gente de esta; ya que permite la entrada, que los despachara á las colonias agrícolas, allí estarían mejor y no aquí donde corre riesgo el cruzamiento de razas, y el trabajo de los como yo, nos vivimos de lavar ageno… . Eso sí es lavar á uno con escobeta y jabón. De acuerdo con la viudita.”

45. “El Peligro Amarillo,” El Diablito Rojo, August 10, 1908, 1.

46. The traditional china poblana figure is most often associated with colonial Puebla. According to some origin stories, the first china poblana was a young woman from India, brought to Mexico from China via Manila as a servant. See Kate Risse, “Catarina de San Juan and the China Poblana: From Spiritual Humility to Civil Obedience,” Confluencia 18:1 (Fall 2002): 70–80. There is no evident irony in either the image or the poem, perhaps because immigration fears were directed almost exclusively at men, who made up the bulk of Chinese immigrants.

47. “El amor amarillo,” El Diablito Rojo, August 10, 1908, 2. The “dear reader” in the poem is gendered female and the poem is addressed specifically to Mexican women—although its intended audience is more likely Mexican men.

48. On the racist underpinnings of mestizaje and the way it excuses racist language, see Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa, and Emiko Saldívar Tanaka, “‘We Are Not Racists, We Are Mexicans’: Privilege, Nationalism and Post-Race Ideology in Mexico,” Critical Sociology 42:4–5 (2016): 515–533; and Emiko Saldívar, “‘It's Not Race, It's Culture’: Untangling Racial Politics in Mexico,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 9:1 (2014): 89–108. On racial humor and racist denial in context of the Memín Penguín comic book controversy, see Christina A. Sue and Tanya Golash-Boza, “‘It Was Only a Joke’: How Racial Humour Fuels Color-Blind Ideologies in Mexico and Peru,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36:10 (2013): 1582–1598; and Claudio Lomnitz, “Mexico's Race Problem,” Boston Review, November 1, 2005, http://bostonreview.net/claudio-lomnitz-mexico-race-problem, accessed January 10, 2021.

49. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 90–101. Italics in the original.

50. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 92.

51. The Spanish noun cochino translates into English as pig or hog; the adjective form is a commonly used word for filthy. The loose Spanish usage is similar to English in this regard. A classic explanation of the symbolic link between filth, pigs (as eaters of filth), and the role of pollution fears in maintaining social cohesion is Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966).

52. These metaphoric connections are explored (and theorized) in Sharon P. Holland, Marcia Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Thompkins, “On the Visceral,” GLQ 20:4 (2014): 391–406.

53. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 83. For the links between racial fears and the ingestion of food in the nineteenth-century United States, see Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

54. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 85.

55. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 85–87. Italics in the original.

56. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 94.

57. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 94.

58. On working-class publics, see Buffington, A Sentimental Education for the Working Man, 97–99.

59. See for example Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review 76:4 (November 2007): 537–562. Italics in the original.

60. Jane H. Hill, The Everyday Language of White Racism (Chichester, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 41. See also Teun A. Van Dijk, “Analyzing Racism Through Discourse Analysis,” in Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods, John H. Stanfield II and Rutledge M. Dennis, eds. (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 92–134.

61. Hill, The Everyday Language of White Racism, 128.

62. The ironic use of mock English was hardly unique to the penny press. It appears in several places in the libretto for Chin-Chun-Chan.

63. Hill, The Everyday Language of White Racism, 154.

64. Buffington, A Sentimental Education for the Working Man, 24–26. For an insightful overview of the role of language in identity formation, see Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies 7:4–5 (2005): 585–614.

65. For an overview of the complex historiography on race mixture in colonial Mexico, see Ben Vinson III, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 18–34.

66. On racial categories in official and popular culture, see for example Christina A. Sue, Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

67. The tendency of “viral narratives” to jump scale—in this case from Chinese migrant workers to Asian microbes—is explored in Ed Cohen, “The Paradoxical Politics of Viral Containment; or, How Scale Undoes Us One and All,” Social Text 29:1 (Spring 2011): 15–35. Miscegenation fears played a central role in postrevolutionary Sinophobia in Mexico, as noted in the concluding section of this article.

68. The English language version of mock Chinese resorts to a similar monosyllabic chain. See for example Kat Chow, “How ‘Ching Chong’ Became the Go-To Slur for Mocking East Asians,” Codeswitch, National Public Radio, July 14, 2014: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/14/330769890/how-ching-chong-became-the-go-to-slur-for-mocking-east-asians, accessed January 10, 2021. The original 1917 “Ching Chong Chinaman” song begins: “Ching Chong Chinaman / Sitting on a wall / Along came a white man / and chopped his tail off.” An especially egregious contemporary example is Rush Limbaugh's mock Chinese imitation of Chinese President Hu Jintao: The Young Turks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSjbavwk2Kg, accessed January 10, 2021.

69. Rafael Medina and José F. Elizondo, Chin-Chun-Chan: conflicto chino en un acto y tres cuadras (Mexico City: Medina y Comp. Impresores, 1904), 9. Chinese accents in spoken Spanish most often involve substituting ‘l’ for ‘r’ as in English.

70. Medina and Elizondo, Chin-Chun-Chan, 12, 23.

71. Medina and Elizondo, Chin-Chun-Chan, 7. The patently ridiculous explanation provided by a provincial nouveau riche visitor to Mexico City references the Three Wise Monkeys in Japanese folklore: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil. The joke is compounded by the character's regional accent and its dehumanization of the Chinese as unable to hear, see, or understand what's going on around them—at least in Mexico.

72. “Obras de venta,” La Araña, October 25, 1904, 3. The same issue includes an advertisement for the “Gran Cantina: Chin-Chun-Chan,” an indicator of how quickly the zarzuela title made its way into popular culture.

73. “Desde la tela,” La Araña, August 31, 1904, 3. The Bombardeo (bombardment) was likely a cantina or bar. Italics added.

74. “Desde la estaca,” La Guacamaya, October 20, 1904, 3.

75. “Desde la jaula,” El Papagayo, August 28, 1904. The author of this dialogue and the preceding one was probably well-known working-class poet Antonio Negrete, an on-again, off-again penny-press editor.

76. “Desde la estaca,” La Guacamaya, May 19, 1904, 3.

77. “Desde la estaca,” La Guacamaya, October 6, 1904, 3.

78. For details on the penny-press response to the scandal, see Robert Buffington, “Homophobia and the Mexican Working Class, 1900–1910,” 193–225.

79. As noted earlier, “chintarará” is a syllabic chain used to signify a generic musical phrase, much like “tra-la-la” in English. “Chin chin” also functions as an onomatopoeic sound for cymbals (platillos).

80. Gerardo Rénique, “Race, Region, and Nation: Sonora's Anti-Chinese Racism and Mexico's Postrevolutionary Nationalism, 1920s-1930s,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosenblatt, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 212. The historiography on norteño Sinophobia is extensive. See for example Evelyn Hu-DeHart,” Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Sonora, Mexico: 1876–1932,” Amerasia 9:2 (1982): 1–28; Gómez Izquierdo, El movimiento antichino en México (1871–1934); Romero, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940; Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico; González, Paisanos chinos; Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican; and Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue, “Model or Menace?: Racial Discourses and the Role of Chinese and Mexican Labor at the US-Mexico Border, 1900–1940,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 40:2 (Fall 2015): 7–34.

81. Rénique, “Race, Region, and Nation,” 228–229.

82. Rénique, “Race, Region, and Nation,” 221.

83. Romero, Robert Chao, “El destierro de los Chinos: Popular Perspectives on Chinese-Mexican Intermarriage in the Early Twentieth Century,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 32:1 (Spring 2007): 119Google Scholar. For more on miscegenation concerns and contested marriages, see Delgado, Grace Peña, “Of Kith and Kin: Land, Leases, and Guanxi in Tucson's Chinese and Mexican Communities, 1880s-1920s,” Journal of Arizona History 46:1 (Spring 2005): 33–54Google Scholar; and Augustine-Adams, Kif, “Marriage and ‘Mestizaje,’ Chinese and Mexican: Constitutional Interpretation and Resistance in Sonora, 1921—1935,” Law and History Review 29:2 (May 2011): 419–463CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84. Romero, “El destierro de los Chinos,” 139.

85. Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” 545.

86. Ana Paulina Lee, Mandarin Brazil, 211.