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Making Mexico: Legal Nationality, Chinese Race, and the 1930 Population Census

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Kif Augustine-Adams
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“Take the census; make the country. Let's do both together!” “Hacer censos, es hacer Patria. Ayúdenos a hacerlos” cajoled one bold, bright poster in the days before May 15, 1930 when census takers dispersed across Mexico to count its inhabitants. Other placards similarly played on multiple meanings for the verb “hacer”—to make or to do: “Taking a census will make the country …” “Hagamos censos y haremos patria…” At the same time, within that collective nation-building, a census jingle affirmed individual importance: “A census is a count. He who is numbered, counts. And he who counts, succeeds.” “Un censo es una cuenta. El que censa, cuenta. Y el que cuenta, acierta.” In government propaganda, the 1930 census made Mexico and drew its inhabitants into the national fold, an ongoing, delicate project after the fratricide of the 1910 Revolution.

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Law and History Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 113 - 144
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Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2009

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References

1. All translations are by the author. Archival materials referenced in this section are found at Centro de Información, Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía, e Informática, Distrito Federal (Balderas), Mexico City, Legajos 2046 and 2047 [hereinafter INEGI]. The epigraph is a statement made by a census enumerator in Emilio Carballido's play “The Census,” D.F. 52 obras en un acto 49–75, 58 (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006) (“Usted sabe lo que es un censo … Es … es ser patriota, engrandecer a México …”).

Statistical data gathering through a census is a well-developed theoretical model for modern governance and nation-building. See, e.g., Asad, Talal, “Ethnographic Representations, Statistics, and Modern Power,” Social Research 61.1 (1994): 55–88, 76Google Scholar(arguing that “[f]rom a governmental standpoint,” a census “regulat[es] and transform[s]” a population); Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar(noting that “[c]ategories had to be invented into which people could conveniently fall in order to be counted”); Foucault, Michel, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Random House, 1977), 148Google Scholar(articulating the power of taxonomies and classifications to govern and discipline individuals). For an in depth discussion of the United States Census, see Mezey, Naomi, “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination,” Northwestern University Law Review 97 (2003): 1701–68Google Scholar.

2. Censo de población del municipio de Cananea, Pueblo de Naco, Sonora, 1930, 77, lines 93–96 microfilmed as Film 1520330, items 1–3 [hereinafter “Municipio de Cananea, Pueblo de Naco”], 1930 Mexican Population Census Ballots, State of Sonora, Genealogical Society of Utah; available through Family History Centers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/FHC/frameset_fhc.asp [hereinafter “FHC”]. The last name Gim was sometimes written Gin or Hing. I have used Gim throughout the text of this article because that is the spelling the family used, but followed the original spelling, whether Gim or Gin when citing sources.

3. Municipio de Cananea, Pueblo de Naco, 177, lines 93–96.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Censo de población del municipio de Cucurpe, Sonora, 1930, 1, lines 8–10, microfilmed as Film 1520330, item 7 [hereinafter “Municipio de Cucurpe”], FHC.

8. Municipio de Cucurpe, 1, lines 8–10.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid..

11. Secretaria de la Economía Nacional, Dirección General de Estadística, Quinto censo de población, 15 de mayo de 1930, Estado de Sonora, 109 (México: Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 1934) [hereinafter Quinto censo].

12. Ngai's, MaeImpossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar provides a particularly powerful account of citizenship, race, and nation-building in the United States; see also Haney-Lopez, Ian, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Gross, Ariela, “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Yale Law Journal 108 (1988): 109–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gross, Ariela, “Beyond Black and White: Cultural Approaches to Race and Slavery,” Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 640–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Calavita, Kitty, “The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and ‘Passing’: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1910,” Law and Social Inquiry 25 (2000): 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. For example, Mexican Supreme Court decisions become “jurisprudencia obligatoria” or formally binding jurisprudence primarily when the full court interprets a point of law the same way five times in a row. See Zamora, Stephen et al., Mexican Law (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004), 85. A single Supreme Court ruling may also become formally bindingGoogle Scholar jurisprudence when the full Supreme Court resolves conflicting rulings by different chambers within the court or conflicting rulings by lower circuit courts. Zamora, , Mexican Law, 84Google Scholar.

14. U.S. Constitution, art. 1, sect. 2, clause 3.

15. México, 1917 Constitution, art. 52 (original text). Previously, Article 53 of the 1857 Mexican Constitution had apportioned political representation based on population but did not mandate or mention a census.

16. See, e.g., México, Ley de 30 de diciembre de 1922 (creating the National Statistics Department and establishing the census as “the basis for official national statistics”); México, Reglamento de 29 de noviembre de 1923 (charging the National Statistics Department with conducting a general population census for the entire country each decade).

17. Departamento de la Estadística Nacional, Memoria de los censos generales de poblacíon, agrícola ganadero e industrial de 1930, 34–7 (México: Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 1932) [hereinafter Memoria de los censos].

18. Memoria de los censos, 34–7.

19. Cynthia Radding de Murrieta and Romo, Juan José Gracida, Sonora: Una historia compartida, 322–33Google Scholar(México: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 1989), 322–33; Carr, Barry, The Peculiarities of the Mexican North, 1880–1928 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1971), 1Google Scholar.

20. Murrieta, Radding de and Romo, Gracida, Sonora, 322Google Scholar.

21. Carr, , Peculiarities, 8Google Scholar.

22. Bantjes, Adrian A., As If Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1998), xviGoogle Scholar; Carr, , Peculiarities, 9Google Scholar.

23. Murrieta, Cynthia Radding de and Murrieta, Rosa María Ruiz, “La reconstrucción del modelo de progreso 1919–1929,” in Historia General de Sonora, vol. 4, Sonora moderno 1880–1929, 315–54, 319–21 (Hermosillo, Sonora: Gobierno del estado de Sonora, 1997)Google Scholar.

24. Murrieta, Radding de and Romo, Gracida, Sonora, 146, 149Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., 146, 148; see also Camín, Héctor Aguilar, La frontera nómada: Sonora y la revolución mexicana (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1977), 9 (“The Sonoran hegemony in the post-revolutionary years was vast and of lasting effect”)Google Scholar.

26. Hu-Dehart, Evelyn, “La comunidad china en el desarrollo de Sonora,” in Historia General de Sonora, vol. 4, Sonora Moderno 1880–1929, 195–211, 198 (Hermosillo, Sonora: Gobierno del estado de Sonora, 1997).Google Scholar Other sources suggest that, at least by 1926, the Chinese population in the Pacific territory of Baja California (today divided into the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur) had surpassed that of Sonora. See, e.g., Romero, Robert Chao, The Dragon in Big Lusong: Chinese Immigration and Settlement in Mexico, 1882–1940 (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of California-Los Angeles, 2003), 71, 74, 79 (on file with author)Google Scholar.

27. Romero, , The Dragon in Big Lusong, 69Google Scholar.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 272–75 (discussing the Romero Commission Report officially titled Dictamen del vocal ingeniero José María Romero: Encargado de estudiar la influencía social y economica del la inmigración asiatica en México [México, D.F., 1911]).

30. Romero, , The Dragon in Big Lusong, 277–78Google Scholar(citing and discussing the report entitled El servicio de migración en México por Andrés Landa y Piña jefe del Departamento de Migración [México, D.F.: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1930]).

31. Sonora, Artículo 106, Ley de trabajo y previsión social en el estado, 31 de marzo de 1919 (requiring eighty percent of employees in business establishments to be Mexican nationals); Sonora, Ley no. 27 del 8 de diciembre 1923 (creating Chinese ghettos); Sonora, Aviso a los comerciantes de abarrotes en general dictado por el director general de Salubridad Pública en el estado, 12 de noviembre de 1930 (prohibiting Chinese from living in or sleeping in commercial establishments); Sonora, Ley número 89 del 14 de mayo de 1931 (prohibiting employers from counting naturalized citizens as part of the eighty percent of employees required to be Mexican nationals under the 1919 law).

32. Chinos y antichinos en México: Documentos para su estudio, ed. Lara, José Luis Trueba (Guadalajara: Gobierno del estado de Jalisco, 1988), 134Google Scholar.

33. Sonora, Ley número 31, 13 de diciembre de 1923.

34. Hu-Dehart, , “La comunidad china en el desarrollo de Sonora,” 210Google Scholar.

35. Réñique, Gerardo, “Race, Region, and Nation: Sonora's Anti-Chinese Racism and Mexico's Postrevolutionary Nationalism, 1920s-1930s,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. al, Nancy Applebaum et. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003),Google Scholar 220 (citing a speech Arana made in Cananea, Sonora, on April 29, 1916).

36. Wilfley, L. R. and Bassett, A. T., Memorandum on the Law and the Facts in the Matter of the Claim of China against Mexico for Losses of Life and Property Suffered by Chinese Subjects at Torreón on May 13, 14 and 15, 1911 (México, D.F.: American Book and Printing, 1911), 4.Google Scholar See also, Puig, Juan, Entre el río Perla y el Nazas: La China decimonónica y sus braceros emigrantes, la colonia china de Torreón y la matanza de 1911 (México, D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1992), 173–74Google Scholar.

37. Réñique, , “Race, Region, and Nation,” 224Google Scholar(citing a 1921 newspaper editorial and anti-Chinese crusaders José Angel Espinoza and Felipe Cortés).

38. Réñique, Gerardo, “Región, raza y nación en el antichinismo sonorense: Cultura regional y mestizaje en el México posrevolucionario,” in Seis expulsiones y un adiós: Despojos y exclusions en Sonora, ed. Bustamante, A. Grageda (México: Plaza y Valdés, 2003), 231–89Google Scholar. The allegations regarding Governor Rodolfo Calles's orders are set forth in various letters from U.S. officials. See, e.g., Letter dated February 25, 1932 from Lewis V. Boyle, American Consul, to the Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., United States, National Archives, RG 59, M1370, 812.504/1273.

39. In litigation in federal court in Hermosillo, the state capital, a number of Chinese men describe how they were taken to the border between Arizona and Sonora by police or other government officials and forced across under threat of violence. See, e.g., Francisco Ley et al., Amparo no. 82, 11 Agosto 1932 and Agustín Chang, Amparo no. 77, 16 Agosto 1932, Casa de la Cultura Jurídica de la Suprema Corte de la Nación, Hermosillo, Sonora, Juzgado Quinto de Distrito.

The forcible expulsion of Chinese from Mexico into the United States caused significant consternation along the border and diplomatic tensions between the two countries. Arizona Daily Star, March 19, 1932, editorial; Letter dated March 16, 1932 from W. Doak, U.S. Secretary of Labor, to Henry L. Stimson, U.S. Secretary of State, United States, National Archives, RG59, M1370, 812.504/1281; Letter dated March 21, 1932 from Bartley F. Yost, Consul, to Henry L. Stimson, U.S. Secretary of State, United States, National Archives, RG59, M1370, 812.504/1282.

40. Letter dated December 29, 1932 from N. F. Allman, Mexican Consul in Shanghai, to the Secretary of Foreign Relations, Mexico City, Mexico, in Relaciones diplomáticas entre México y China 1898–1948, comp. Felipe Pardinas, (México: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 1982), 1:461–65.Google Scholar See also Schiavone, Julia Maria, “Aunque vayamos a escarbar camotes amargos a la sierra, queremos México: nacionalism mexicano en China 1930s–1960s, y la repatriación de los 1960s” (unpublished paper presented at the XXX Simposio de Historia y Antropología de Sonora, Hermosillo, Sonora, 2005)Google Scholar(on file with author).

41. See Duncan, Robert H., “The Chinese and Economic Development in Baja California, 1889–1929,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74 (1994): 615–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar(discussing why discrimination against Chinese in Baja California Norte was not as pronounced as in Sonora).

42. See Julia Delgado de Gin, 25 June 1933, Border Crossings from Mexico to the United States, 1903–1957, Ancestry.com (listing her husband's place of residence as Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico).

43. Secretaria de la Economía Nacional, Dirección General de Estadistica, Sexto censo de población, 6 de Marzo de 1940, Estado de Sonora 21 (México: Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 1940).

44. Memoria de los censos, 37.

45. Data for this project came directly from the 1930 census ballots. In 1988, the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU) microfilmed the extant original ballots for the 1930 Mexican population census as part of a larger genealogical and record archiving project. Copies of the microfilm, catalogued primarily by municipality and pueblos within municipalities, are available through family history centers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Microfilm coverage of census ballots from Sonora is fairly complete, with seventy-two percent of the population represented. Ballots for the remaining twenty-eight percent of the population in a number of municipalities (Alamos, Bacanora, Bátuc, Etchojoa, Huatabampo, Navojoa, Opodepe, Pitiquito, Sahuaripa, San Pedro de la Cueva, Santa Ana, Suaqui, Tepache, Tepupa, and Trincheras) were not microfilmed, apparently because they were missing from the ballots provided to the GSU. The aggregate census data that the National Department of Statistics published in 1934 does not report the geographical distribution of the 3,571 Chinese across Sonora's seventy-four municipalities. Assuming, however, that Chinese represent the same proportion of the population in the municipalities whose census ballots were microfilmed and in those whose ballots were not, the census ballots reviewed for this project represent seventy-two percent of the population counted as Chinese in Sonora. The reasonableness of this assumption is born out by this project's count of individuals identified as Chinese in the microfilmed ballots at 2,558, or 71.6 percent of the official total of 3,571.

The official census count identifies the Chinese population in Sonora as overwhelmingly male at 3,159 or eighty-eight percent. Quinto censo, 109. Because of their predominance in the population and the patrilineal and patriarchal character of contemporary nationality law, these men became the primary reference points of the study. Of the twelve percent of the Chinese population that was female, only a very small handful were adult women born in China. Adult women's identification as Chinese largely derived from Mexico's dependent nationality laws that, as discussed in detail below, expatriated native-born women who married foreigners. Beyond the summary data, the census ballots themselves present a rich, virtually untapped, set of data relating to the Chinese experience in Mexico. Robert Chao Romero is one of the very few other scholars who have used the 1930 Mexican population census ballots rather than the summarized data to explicate the Chinese experience in Mexico. See Romero, The Dragon in Big Lusong.

46. Memoria de los censos, 24.

47. Ibid., 53.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 17.

50. Vandiver, Marylee Mason, “Racial Classifications in Latin American Census,” Social Forces 28.2 (1949): 138–46, 139Google Scholar.

51. Memoria de los censos, 54.

52. In retrospect, historians and scholars have also posited the decreasing importance race and ethnicity in Mexico over the course of the nineteenth century. See, e.g., Knight, Alan, “The Peculiarities of Mexican History: Mexico Compared to Latin America, 1821–1992,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992): 99–144, 118–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Memoria de los censos, 52–3. See also Esteva-Fabregat, Claudi, Mestizaje in Ibero-America (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1987)Google Scholar.

54. Memoria de los censos, 52–3.

55. Knight, Alan, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo in Mexico, 1910–1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, ed. Graham, R. (Austin: University of Texas, 1990), 71–113Google Scholar, 72; Borah, Woodrow, “Race and Class in Mexico,” in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, ed. Domínguez, J. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 1–12Google Scholar; Wagley, Charles, “On the Concept of Social Race in the Americas,” in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, ed. Domínguez, J. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 13–27Google Scholar.

56. Cabrera, Luis, “El balance de la revolución,” in La revolución es la revolución, comp. Luis Cabrera (Mexico: PRI, 1985), 249–66Google Scholar.

57. Ibid., 250.

58. Ibid., 249.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.. See also Enríquez, Andres Molina, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico: A. Carranza, 1909), 270Google Scholar(available on-line at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com) (arguing that “the fundamental and unavoidable foundation of all work towards the future good of the country has to be with mestizos as the prevailing ethnic element and dominant political class”).

61. Memoria de los censos, 52–3.

62. Ibid., 53.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid.. See also the actual census ballot forms microfilmed, for example, as film number 1520321, FHC.

66. Stepan, Nancy Leys, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991), 147Google Scholar.

67. Réñique, , “Race, Region, and Nation,” 257Google Scholar; Benítez, Agustín Basave, México mestizo: Análisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la mestizofilia de Andrés Molina Enríquez (México: FCE, 1992), 121Google Scholar; Knight, , “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo in Mexico,” 71Google Scholar.

68. Stepan, , The Hour of Eugenics, 147–48.Google Scholar See also, Ofer, Dalia, “Anti-Semitism and the ‘Science of Race’” in Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, ed. Lange, B. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 61–76Google Scholar.

69. Stepan, , The Hour of Eugenics, 149Google Scholar.

70. Vasconcelos, José, La raza cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana (México: Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, 1948).Google Scholar See also Beer, Gabriella de, Vasconcelos and His World (New York: Las Americas, 1966)Google Scholar(detailing Vasconcelos's life) and Brading, David A., “Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 7.1 (1988): 75–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar(identifying the anthropologist Manuel Gamio as a proponent of mestizaje as the Mexican ideal in the early twentieth century).

71. Vasconcelos, , La raza cósmica, 17Google Scholar.

72. Ibid., 41–43.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid., 18.

75. Ibid., 18–19, 28.

76. Memoria de los censos, 57, 157.

77. See also Schor, Paul, “Mobilising for Pure Prestige? Challenging Federal Census Ethnic Categories in the USA (1850–1940),” International Social Science Journal 57 (2005): 89–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar(available on-line at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.0020–8701.2005.00533.x) (discussing Mexican-American resistance to the separate racial classification in the 1930 U.S. census).

78. 1930 U.S. Census Enumerator Instructions, http://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/inst1930.shtml.

79. Ibid.

80. See, e.g., Guerin-Gonzales, Camille, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Balderrama, Francisco and Rodríguez, Raymond, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

81. See Chorover, Stephen L., From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Alan Stoskopf, Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (2002) (available on-line at http://www.facinghistorycampus.org/campus/reslib.nsf/CMRB/2d9cb93da4291b 8485256f8d005b4e77?OpenDocument); Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics.

82. Stepan, , The Hour of Eugenics, 151Google Scholar.

83. Vasconcelos, , La raza cósmica, 30Google Scholar.

84. Ibid., 29.

85. Ibid.

86. See notes 29 and 30 above and accompanying text.

87. See Réñique, “Región, raza y nación”; Réñique, “Race, Region, and Nation”; Romero, The Dragon in Big Lusong; Lara, José Luis Trueba, Los chinos en Sonora: Una historia olvidada (Hermosillo: Universidad de Sonora, 1990)Google Scholar; Lara, José Luis Trueba, “La xenofobia en la legislación sonorense: el Caso de los chinos,” in Memoria: XIII Simposio de historia y antropología de Sonora 1 (1989): 341–74Google Scholar; Hu-DeHart, Evelyn, “Immigrants to a Developing Society: The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1875–1932,” Journal of Arizona History 21 (1980): 49–86Google Scholar; Cumberland, Charles, “The Sonoran Chinese and the Mexican Revolution,” Hispanic American Historical Review 40.2 (1960): 191–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88. Espinoza, José Angel, El problema chino en México (México, 1931), 124Google Scholar.

89. My review of archival files of federal cases of first instance involving Chinese in Sonora in the early twentieth century shows that the judge granted relief in virtually all cases in 1924 where individuals protested against enforcement of two 1923 state laws, the anti-miscegenation Ley 31 and Ley 27 that created Chinese ghettos. In contrast, by 1931 and with a number of different judges, the complainant prevailed in almost no case, whatever the law at issue. I have summarized my findings in a document entitled “Amparo pedido por chinos, Datos del inventario del Juzgado Quinto de Distrito, 1900–1943,” which I developed from files at the archives of the Supreme Court, Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.

90. Enríquez, Molina, “Los grandes problemas,” 284–85Google Scholar.

91. Ley de Santa Anna, 30 de enero de 1854, Decreto del gobierno sobre extranjeros y nacionalidad, art. 1.

92. 2 S.J.F. 588 (Epoca 2, 13 July 1881); Ley sobre extranjería y naturalización de 28 de mayo de 1886 [hereinafter Ley de 1886] (“Article 2. The following are aliens … [4] Mexican women who have married aliens; they retain their alien character even as widows”).

93. Cuoto, Ricardo, Derecho civil mexicano: De las personas (Mexico: La Vasconia, 1919),Google Scholar 1:92. See also Letter dated 1 February 1929 from G. Estrada, Ministry of Foreign Relations of Mexico to Arthur Schoenfeld, Chargé d'Affaires ad interim of the United States (stating that nationality in Mexico was governed by “the General Constitution of the Republic, article 30; [and] the Law of Alienage and Naturalization of May 28, 1886, partly modified by the regulations of the afore-mentioned constitutional article”). United States, National Archives, RG59, M274, 812.012/18.

94. Amparo civil directo 4654/51, Figueroa Exiquio. 28 de Septiembre de 1951. Unanimidad de cuatro votos. (Tercera Sala; Quinta Epoca, Semanario Judicial de la Federación, parte 109 (CIX), page 2827); Amparo directo 5486/54. Eva Llaca viuda de González. 12 de enero de 1956. Mayoría de cuatro votos. Ponente: José Castro Estrada. (Semanario Judicial de la Federación, parte 127 (CXXVII) page 111; available at Tesis Seleccionada www.scjn.gob.mx/ius/tesis2.asp.

95. Ley de 1886, art. 1(1).

96. Ibid., arts. 1(2) and 2(2) (stating that “Mexicans include … those born in the national territory of a Mexican mother and of a father who is not legally known” and “Aliens include … the children of an alien father, or of an alien mother and unknown father, born in the national territory …”).

97. Ibid., art. 2(2) (… One year after reaching the age of majority, they [children born in Mexico to an alien father or to an alien mother and unknown father] shall be regarded as Mexicans, unless they declare before the civil authorities of their residence that they follow their parents' citizenship”).

98. Vallarta, Ignacio Luis, Exposición de motivos del proyecto de ley sobre extranjería y naturalización (Mexico: Francisco Diaz de Léon, 1890), 10Google Scholar.

99. Ibid., 12.

100. Ibid., 12–13.

101. México, 1917 Constitution, art. 30(1) (“Persons born within the Republic to foreign parents are considered Mexicans by birth, if within a year of reaching the age of majority, they appear before the Secretary of Foreign Relations and declare their election of Mexican citizenship …”).

102. See Dirección de los Censos, Instrucciones para empadronadores, jefes de manzana, de sección, de cuartel y de agencias censales (México: Departamento de la Estadística Nacional, 1930), 13Google Scholar; Dirección de los Censos, Instrucciones generales para la ejecución de los censos de población y agrícola ganadero, 15 de mayo de 1930 (México: Departamento de la Estadística Nacional, 1930), 24.Google Scholar Both pamphlets are available in the Centro de Información, INEGI, Balderas, Legajo 2046.

103. Relación de los ejemplos para empadronar los habitantes de un poblado urbano, contenidos en la boleta I. INEGI, Balderas, Legajo 2046.

104. Ibid.

105. Ibid.

106. Torpey, John, “The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Torpey, John and Caplan, Jane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 256–70, 269Google Scholar.

107. Torpey, , “The Great War,” 269Google Scholar.

108. Dirección General de Estadística, Quinto censo de población 15 de mayo de 1930, Resumen general (México: Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 1936), xxviiGoogle Scholar.

109. Ibid.

110. Ibid.

111. RobledoVerduzco, Alonso Gómez, “Derecho internacional y nueva ley de nacionalidad mexicana,” Boletín mexicano de derecho comparado 80 (1994): 315–45, 321.Google Scholar See also, Trigueros, Laura, “Nacionalidad” in Diccionario jurídico mexicano, ed. Universidad Nacional México, Autónoma de (México: UNAM, 1988)Google Scholar and “Evolución legislativa mexicanaen material de nacionalidad,” Justicia electoral 80 (2000): 131–45, 139Google Scholar(setting forth constitutional and legislative provisions regarding nationality).

112. See, e.g., Acevedo, Luis Cabrera, La suprema corte de justicia durante el gobierno de Plutarco Elías Calles 1924–1928 (México: Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación, 1998), 156, 172, 174, 202–211Google Scholar(citing cases invoking constitutional protections).

113. See, e.g., Letter dated 1 February 1929 from G. Estrada, Ministry of Foreign Relations of Mexico to Arthur Schoenfeld, Chargé d'Affaires ad interim of the United States (stating that nationality in Mexico was governed by “the General Constitution of the Republic, article 30; [and] the Law of Alienage and Naturalization of May 28, 1886, partly modified by the regulations of the afore-mentioned constitutional article”). United States, National Archives, RG59, M274, 812.012/18.

114. Espinosa, Hector Enrique, Estudio sociojurídico de la nacionalidad: México y la nación indoibera—Nueva ley de nacionalidad de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (México: UNAM, 1934), 125Google Scholar.

115. Constitution, art. 30(1) (original text).

116. See, e.g., Derechos del pueblo mexicano: México a traves de sus constituciones, Articulado (México: Porrúa, 1985), 5:30–11Google Scholar.

117. See, e.g., Ibid.. (quoting deputy to the constitutional congress Machorro Narváez: “this [Article 30(1)], by theory and by law, is nationalization, it is not that they were Mexicans by birth”).

118. Ramírez, Felipe Tena, Leyes fundamentales de México, 1808–1987 (México: Porrúa, 1987), 835, 890Google Scholar.

119. Memoria de los censos, 178–79.

120. See, e.g., Censo de población del municipio Aconchi, 1, lines 17–18 and lines 26–31, microfilmed as Film 1520321, item 6 (two civilly married wives and their children changed to Chinese), FHC; Censo de población del municipio Altar, 52, lines 2–6 microfilmed as Film 1520321, item 9 (civilly married wife and children changed to Chinese), FHC; Censo de población del municipio Baviacora, 3, lines 32–33 microfilmed as Film 1520328, item 11 (same), FHC; Censo de población del municipio Guaymas, 205, line 48 microfilmed as Film 1520331, items 5–9 (civilly married wife changed to Chinese), FHC; Censo de población del municipio Hermosillo, 2, lines 43–44 microfilmed as Film 1520347 and Film 1520348, item 1 (same), FHC. A more complete list of changes that the Census Management Office made is in the author's possession.

121. Censo de población del municipio de Bacum, Sonora, 1930, 56, lines 67–74 microfilmed as Film 1520328, item 9 [hereinafter “Municipio de Bacum”], FHC.

122. Municipio de Bacum, 56, line 67.

123. Ibid., lines 84–85.

124. Ibid., lines 26–31.

125. The Census Management Office also added up the number of men and women on each page, blacked out civil status designations for children under fourteen, removed references to the language children under two year spoke, and made other corrections to the data. See, e.g., Censo de población del municipio de Cajeme, 56, microfilmed as Film 1520329, items 4–7, FHC, and Censo de población del municipio de Caborca, 28, microfilmed as Film 1520329, item 3, FHC.

126. Censo de población del municipio de Bacerac, 10, lines 36–39 microfilmed as Film 1520328, item 7, FHC.

127. Ibid.,10, lines 36–37.

128. Ibid., lines 38–39.

129. Memoria de los censos, 52.