Chinese-Mexicans feel right at home in Mexicali

City directly across U.S. border home to thousands of Chinese

In an arid city on Mexico’s northern border, Esteban Leon is showing off a classroom filled with computers.

“We teach the kids to go into Windows so they can put in the Chinese characters,” he said, pointing to a screen.

Mr. Leon is director of a school run by the Chinese Association of Mexicali, one of several groups formed in Mexico in the early 1900s to preserve Chinese history and culture. On Sundays, it holds classes for ChineseMexican children to learn Mandarin and calligraphy, history and dance.

Peifen Huang, 32, a Chinese immigrant who has lived in the city for nine years, teaches Mandarin at the school.

“I like living here a lot,” she said in Spanish. “The culture here is much more open and I see a lot of Mexicans who are interested in Chinese culture, who want to learn more about it.”

Mexicali, a city directly across the border from Calexico, Calif., is the unlikely home of thousands of Chinese immigrants and their descendants, who will begin celebrating the Lunar New Year Thursday.

“Most Americans don’t have any idea this is here,” said Otto Ho, a tourist from Los Angeles spending the day in Mexicali. “We have a big history, too, Chinese in L.A. and in San Francisco, but it’s a different kind of history.”

California’s dusty Interstate 8 winds from San Diego through rocky mountains and arid desert, unrolling into the lush green of Imperial Valley’s fields. A few kilometres south, across the border, Mexico’s Highway 2 does the same. Between them lies the Calexico-Mexicali crossing. At a glance, it is nearly impossible to tell the two cities apart, but the pagodas on the Mexican side are the first clue to the different demographic.

Mexicali’s Chinese population has set it apart from other cities in Mexico. Many have been here for generations, brought to California first by the lure of economic opportunity and then the draw of family.

“The obvious reason was the Gold Rush, as well as sea resources,” said Mr. Leon, who also goes by Lenng Sin On — he’s a third-generation Chinese-Mexican.

Then, came the Transcontinental Railroad, which connected one end of the U.S. to the other and a source of jobs for Chinese. Employers quickly discovered these immigrants had a strong work ethic and demanded less money than their European counterparts.

Mr. Leon said Chinese first started to head south into Mexico when the U.S., alarmed by the influx of people that threatened the ideal of a homogeneous America, enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — its first immigration controls — after work on the railway was finished.

“That pushed Chinese people to come down here to Mexico, to Baja California, to look for a future,” he said.

In the early 1900s, the Colorado Riverland Co. began developing the region around Mexicali for agriculture, digging canals to link the river to the dry and dusty valley, and importing Chinese workers.

At the same time, the immigrants faced discriminatory policies farther south in Mexico: They had been enticed with land and promises of railway work, but many ended up marginalized, deported or in some cases massacred, as at Torreon during the Mexican Revolution, when more than 300 Chinese were killed in 1911.

Mexicali was a relatively safe place, far enough from the rest of Mexico to avoid the rabid xenophobia of the early 20th century and within sight of the still-porous U.S. border.

“Mexicali was always on the periphery,” said Jason Chang, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, who wrote his dissertation on Mexicali’s Chinese presence.

“That allowed it to escape some of the other patterns of development in the rest of the nation — that allowed the Chinese population to get so large.”

In Mexicali, the epicentre of Mexico’s Chinese immigration, the onceclosed Chinese community has become far more open as racial tensions have subsided. Now the city is proud of — and even renowned for — its unusual hybrid cultures. Its fusion food — Chinese style, but with Mexican ingredients — is particularly famous.

Mexicali is a big draw for people planning to emigrate to Mexico from China, said Ms. Huang.

“China is rising economically,” she said. “But people come here for a better future, too.”

People come here for a better future