It was the second Friday of January 2015, just a little afternoon. I was standing in front of Shei,1 a Chinese woman in her late forties who lives and works in Mexico City. She was crying.
Shei is a peddler who sells homemade spring rolls and rice âto goâ that she puts in plastic bags for the hungry clients that quickly pass by as they commute. She works in the commercial corridor linking the San LĂĄzaro Metro station to the TAPO bus station in DelegaciĂłn Venustiano Carranza, on the outskirts of the Centro HistĂłrico (downtown). This is one of the busiest stations in the city, which means that her working spot is privileged because of the high level of transit. Visibility and accessibility are two fundamental elements that are highly contested among street vendors; their livelihood depends on them. In order for Shei to work here, a public space that urban and popular dynamics have turned private, she had to become part ofâand pay the necessary fees toâthe popular organizations that control it. She needed the approval of the street vendorsâ organization and the protection of its Mexican leader.
We had just met. I was accompanied by the leader of her assigned work area. Contacting him was the only way to approach Shei without arousing suspicion or creating conflict. Popular markets are often rife with tensions between organizations that fight each other for space and political support; there are also tensions with the police and the government. Peddlers and their leaders are wary of people who want to talk to them about their work and their organization. Although meeting Shei through her area leader reflected his approval, it also reinforced the hierarchical power structures of the organization, in which Shei was at the bottom. Approaching her through her leader was the only option I had: it protected her while legitimizing my presence in the eyes of others, but also put her in a vulnerable position.
âAquĂ la señorita quiere hablar con ustedâ (âThe lady wants to speak to youâ)âthe leader blurted out when we reached SheiÂŽs vending spot, before turning around and leaving. How could she say no? What could be going through her head as she heard words in a language she didnât fully understand, spoken so sharply by the man who could take away her work? I quickly introduced myself and told her what I was doing thereâtrying to make up for the abrupt introduction by the leader, who had other things to do. As I was telling her that I wanted to learn about the lives of Chinese women in Mexico and talk to her about her own experiences, she took a few steps back and answered in Chinese-accented Spanish: âPara muchas seguro es muy buena, pero para mĂ, como no tengo dinero, es muy difĂcilâ (âIâm sure for many itâs very good, but for me, since I have no money, itâs very hardâ). I asked herâas gently as I couldâif she had been in Mexico for a long time, but I didnât really need an answer. She nodded slowly while looking at me with a tissue over her eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks. After trying and failing, I never found out exactly why she had cried. That was the end of our exchange, yet in a way, her reaction spoke volumes.
This ethnographic vignette sheds light on many of the issues that come up in a process of migration entangled with precarious labor conditions. It shows the difficulties entailed in working within Mexico Cityâs popular economy and the strong power relations and social organizations constructed within its networks. It makes visible the ways cultural and political characteristics are bound to specific places and their dynamics. It exposes the emotional as well as the economic vulnerabilities that migrants often face and reveals the controversies surrounding migration in all their complexity: Why does someone go through the brutal changes that traveling from one country to the other demandsâa change of language, of culture, of food, of feelings of belonging, of familyâto end up struggling selling food on the streets? It pushes us to ask: What does this economic activity actually entail for the people that carry it out; what does it mean for a Chinese woman to work as a vendor in a popular market in Mexico City?
My interest in the immersion of Chinese women in this kind of activity was based on three premises. First, I recognized that this economic endeavor was not one customarily performed by the Chinese in Mexico. Second, I considered that the temporal space in which I developed my research signaled a change in economic and social activities between both countries. And third, I considered there had been a process of change in this migration: a process of feminization that entailed new forms of empowerment, where women, who find themselves in stages of transition, have to seek and fight for new places within diverse social structures. Starting with the hypothesis that their incorporation into Mexico Cityâs networks of popular economy was related to their gender and the opportunities they could find in this specific economic system, I deduced that their participation rapidly changed the dynamics of various markets in Mexico.
Shei is one of many Chinese women living in Mexico City today who have found a place within the popular economy networks of the Centro HistĂłrico and nearby neighborhoods. In this womanâs working conditions and in her reaction, I saw a reflection of the struggles for survival that many experience, often with no other choice but to leave everything behind and travel to the other side of the world. Hers is an example of the new realities that marginalized actors experience within global dynamics. Shei does not represent the experiences of all Chinese women in Mexico, of course. However, her case was the materialization of the most difficult aspects of migration. Hers was the most severe reaction I encountered while conducting an interview, and it was the last interview I conducted for my field research in Mexico City, where I had sought to learn about the experiences of the Chinese women who had migrated to this great megalopolis and were now working within the networks of the popular economy. Their experiences show how local perceptions and imaginaries about these migrants are often unfounded, built on misconceptions, fear and xenophobia that are historic in nature.
1.1 Chinese Migration to Mexico
Hu-DeHart (2005) stated that it was impossible to understand the dynamics of the Chinese in one settlement without considering its connectivities with other settlements. More than that, I also deem it impossible to understand contemporary networks of Chinese migrations to Mexico without taking into account their development for a century and a half throughout the Americas. Although the first waves of Chinese migrations are not necessarily related to all of the migrant populations that fall within the focus of my work, it is important to grasp the ways in which the Chinese have arrived and organized in different localities, as well as to understand the responses that local populations have had to their presence. Moreover, to focus on the experiences of women and on the impacts that their increasing migration has had on these networksânotably from the 1990s onwardâit is necessary to first analyze the structural organization of this migrant group, as well as its transformations over time.
Chinese migrations to Mexico are not a new phenomenon. They started roughly 150 years ago, but in terms of numbers were most significant in the early decades of the last century. As in many other countries, from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth, Chinese migrants to Mexico were mostly young men looking for work, with the majority hailing from Guangdong. Their common origin often implied that many not only knew each other before migration, but were also related. In fact, their processes of migration eventually became a system where one pioneer migrant, once established, would try to bring other men from his town or family to work with him, thus creating translocal ties at a time when even communication from one town to the other was complicated. These men became a very important source of development in under-inhabited places such as the desert between the United States and Mexico (Curtis 1995; Hu-DeHart 2005) and the plantations in YucatĂĄn and other southern Mexican states (Cervera 2007).2 At that time, most of the Chinese in Mexico were concentrated in the northern states (especially Sonora and Baja California), in areas where the mining and agricultural industries were growing and avid for development, needing both manual labor and new markets (Curtis 1995). Chinese presence and labor were critical in the development of these areas. After they had boosted agriculture, they often left the fields and established themselves as small business owners (Hu-DeHart 2005).
During this first period of Chinese migration, the presence of women was rare and there is little that we know about the experiences of the few that were in Mexico. The workload in this country, as elsewhere, was hard and the income insufficient. The workersâ families (wives and children or parents) often remained in China, dependent upon remittances sent by the migrants. Remittance systems ad...