"Chinese Businesses in Mexico: Transnational Networks and Survival Strategies, 1899-1947"

While much of the scholarship on Chinese businesses in Mexico focuses on how local environments and different state policies impacted the formation and the operation of Chinese enterprises, this paper reorients the study of these businesses within their wider trade networks spanning North America and Asian Pacific. Analyzing diverse transnational sources including Chinese newspaper reports, advertisements in overseas Chinese magazines, and family letters, it argues that rather than localized enterprises confined within the national boundaries of Mexico or their immediate localities, Chinese Mexican enterprises were intimately linked to the expansive global commercial networks facilitated by co-ethnic business associations in both the United States and across the Pacific in China. By participating in the expansive trade networks, Chinese Mexican businesses diversified their merchandise while expanding their markets across the national boundaries. They were thus able to survive and prosper notwithstanding the various episodes of anti-Chinese violence and hostile policies that aimed at stifling these companies. Therefore, far from isolated stores that commanded meager resources as the scholarship has commonly assumed, Chinese Mexican businesses leveraged their commercial networks to acquire profits and customers both along the U.S.-Mexico borders and between China and Mexico. In so doing, these merchants incorporated the U.S.-Mexico borderlands into the broader Pacific world. Besides enhancing the survival of Chinese Mexican businesses, transnational trade also transmitted goods and services that reproduced elements of Chinese material culture in Mexico, thereby generating a cultural borderland that connected both sides of the Pacific. Thus, this paper proposes the concept of transpacific borderland to link the seemingly disparate and distant geographical spaces of the east and west Pacific which much of the current historiography has studied separately.