Please join us for the last in our Ford Postdoctoral Lecture Series, please pass this onto any other students or student groups you know that might be interested:
Roberto Chao Romero
“El Destierro de los Chinos”: Popular Perspectives of Chinese-Mexican Interracial Marriage as Reflected in Poetry, Cartoon, Comedy, and Corridos of the Early Twentieth Century
Date: Tuesday March 31, 2009
Time: 4:00 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
Location: Wilson 104
Drawing from poetry, cartoons, comedy, and corridos, this talk examines the historical phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican intermarriage through the lens of Mexican popular culture of the early twentieth century. Popular Mexican culture portrayed Chinese cross-cultural marriages as relationships of abuse, slavery, and neglect, and rejected the offspring of such unions as sub-human, degenerative, and unworthy of full inclusion within the Mexican national community. Interracial marriage with prosperous Chinese merchants was scornfully depicted as a shameless short cut by which slothful Mexican women avoided the need to work and secured lives of material comfort. Such popular criticism of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, moreover, was often couched within larger discourses of revolutionary economic nationalism. Beyond presenting an historical examination of the phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, as one important theoretical consideration, this paper argues for the revision of prevalent notions of “mestizaje” within the discipline of Chicano/Latino Studies. It challenges the “white-brown” binary of traditional Chicano racial theory and sounds a clarion call for further research and discussion related to the important contributions of Chinese, Japanese, African, Middle Eastern, and other overlooked ethnic immigrant groups to the Mexican and Chicano cultural melting pot.
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