By Deborah Van Hoewyk
Having spent half a decade or so living in New York City’s Chinatown, I came to think of Chinese New Year as a second chance at the whole resolutions-for-good thing. My dog, on the other hand, thought the fireworks were awful – when we went out early in the morning, the curbs were bordered six inches deep with fluffy blasted paper, and the air still smelled of sulfur. Better than the parades and fireworks, though, I was enamored of the zodiac signs that purported to shape the coming year.
The Year of the Dragon
And 2024 is the Year of the Dragon. It starts Saturday, February 10; the celebration begins on the eve (February 9) and runs through Saturday, February 24, ending with the Festival of Lanterns. (The dates on the true lunar calendar are a bit different.)
If you were BORN in a year of the dragon (this year and 2012, 2000, 1988, 1976, 1965, 1952, 1940, and every 12 years before that), you are intelligent, energetic, and generous, as well as outspoken and impatient, and a perfectionist to boot. But the atmosphere the Dragon brings to its year is for everyone – this year should present us all with possibilities for change and growth, progress and innovation.
Five elements cycle through the Chinese calendar – wood, fire, earth, metal and water; given the 12 signs and five elements, a complete cycle for the Chinese calendar takes 60 years. This year, the element of wood underlies the year of the Dragon, making it a year for growth, imagination, and enthusiasm.
Can you celebrate all this good fortune in Mexico? Yes, indeed! Chinese people, for various reasons at various times, settled in Baja California; the desert area of central Mexico called El Bajío, which covers all or parts of seven Mexican states; Guerrero; Mexico City; the Yucatán; and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The two best places to celebrate the Lunar New Year are Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, and Mexico City.
Baja California
If you go to Mexicali to celebrate Chinese New Year, the event starts with a parade from the Kiosko Chino (Chinese pagoda) in Plaza de la Amistad (Friendship Plaza) at the US-Mexican border. The Plaza, built in 1991, commemorates the sister-city relationship between Mexicali and Nanjing, China; the pagoda was donated to Mexicali by Nanjing in 1995, built by Chinese and Mexican artisans working together, and inaugurated on the Chinese New Year, February 1, 1995. The parade, replete with dragon and lion dancers, starts at the pagoda and goes south to Mexicali’s Chinatown, known as La Chinesca.
The Chinese Presence in Mexicali: The Chinese, as they did in many other places, arrived in Mexicali at the turn of the 20th century to work. They were brought in by the Colorado River company to work on railroad and irrigation projects. Even more Chinese came to northwestern Mexico as part of the “cotton episode,” during which US-backed companies expanded cotton production into Mexico, creating a period of regional prosperity in the area around Mexicali. In 1903, there were 22 Chinese immigrants in the Mexicali Valley; in 1913, a thousand; in 1919, there were 17,000 and they seriously outnumbered the Mexican residents.
Chinese people had also moved west to the Mexicali Valley from the cotton-producing regions of Coahuila and Sonora to escape anti-Chinese sentiment; in mid-May 1911, a faction of Pancho Villa’s revolutionary forces destroyed Chinese homes and businesses and killed over 300 Chinese in the Massacre of Torreón, Coahuila. (Remember that the US passed anti-Chinese legislation [the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882], discriminated against the Chinese, drove them out of any number of towns, and in 1871, massacred 19 Chinese residents of Los Angeles, laying waste to LA’s Chinatown.)
As time went on, more Chinese moved to Mexicali and opened businesses to serve the community; Mexicali and Tijuana host the largest Chinese populations in Mexico, with Tijuana’s share at about 15,000 and Mexicali’s over 10,000; through the 1940s, Mexicali was actually majority Chinese.
Chinese Contributions to Mexicali. Today, Chinese immigrants are considered major contributors to the area’s social, economic and cultural development. There are over 300 (some say 1,000) Chinese restaurants in Mexicali; most serve Cantonese food, but adapted to Mexican tastes – “even the rice is different.” Apparently, it’s quite the thing to eat Cantonese food to celebrate the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe (December 12).
One of the most interesting Chinese contributions is the La Chinesca neighborhood on the northern edge of Mexicali. Beneath La Chinesca is an area of tunnels, dwellings, and businesses that reaches under the border to Calexico in California. Although they were thought to have been dug to give the Chinese respite from intense heat, which badly affected them, the tunnels proved extremely popular during the Prohibition era in the US (1920-33), connecting the bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, and bordellos of Mexicali with eager US customers. Excluded from the above-ground “Sin City” activities, the Chinese also excavated casinos, opium dens, distilleries, and bordellos. Chinese residents occupied housing carved out beside the tunnels until the 1970s; today, the connecting tunnels are mostly closed and the houses and businesses are accessed through trap doors in businesses above.
In 2022, Mexicali won the national prize for innovation in tourism in the cultural tourism category, awarded by the federal Secretariat of Tourism at its annual convention, the Tianguis Turístico. The prize was for a historical tour, “Origins and Secrets of La Chinesca,” developed and managed by Rubén “Junior” Hernández Chen, chairperson of the Committee for the Historic Center of Mexicali. (The earliest version of the tour, “La Chinesca,” also won the 2018 prize for diversification in cultural tourism.) You can find information (in Spanish) about the tour on their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064772856377); the address is Callejon Reforma 306, and you can make a reservation by calling +52 686 150 3694.
Mexico City
If you go to CDMX to celebrate the Lunar New Year, you will have as exciting an experience as you might in Mexicali, but bigger! More and different events and, obviously, more people! But it will be different. The Chinese of Mexico City no longer live in the city’s Chinatown, or Barrio Chino; Barrio Chino is very small, located in the Centro Histórico on a few blocks of Calle Dolores and its callejones (alleys); these streets are closed to cars. At times, the Chinese New Year celebration resembles a street fair, with plenty to eat and many souvenirs to buy; this year, there will be a plethora of golden dragons on the vendor tables.
The entrance to Barrio Chino is marked by an Arco Chino (Chinese Arch) in the paifang style – originally paifang architecture represented the organization of communities, but by now “paifang” has come to mean the gate of a community and is used only in decorative structures.
This being Mexico City, the Arch is not IN Barrio Chino, but on Santos Degollado Plaza immediately to the west (the Arch was too big to fit on Calle Dolores). Part of an ongoing effort to promote Chinatown as a tourist attraction, it was planned cooperatively with the Chinese Embassy. At the inauguration by then-mayor Marcelo Ebrard and Yen Heng-min, China’s ambassador, Ebrard declared the Plaza to be part of Chinatown. A smaller arch was put up in 2018 to mark the actual entrance to Calle Dolores.
The Chinese in Mexico City – Phase 1: On October 8, 1565, after four months and eight days at sea, a Basque navigator-friar named Andrés de Urdaneta sailed into Acapulco from the Philippines, establishing the trade route from New Spain to Asia and back to New Spain. He had left from Barra de Navidad, Jalisco (south of Acapulco and north of Puerto Vallarta), on an expedition led by the explorer Miguel López de Legazpi, also from the Basque region; the expedition was intended to colonize the Philippines, which, along with Guam, the Mariana Islands, and parts of other islands off the coast of southeast Asia, was referred to as the Spanish East Indies.
The round trip had immense implications for New Spain, not just in terms of establishing global trade, but world influence as well, as the Spanish East Indies were mostly governed from New Spain. Immigration from Asia to New Spain began immediately. Those who came were mostly Chinese and Filipino, and practiced many trades, from musicians and scribes, to tailors and cobblers, to barbers and silversmiths. The city’s zocalo (Plaza Mayor) hosted the Parián, an Asian market, where they sold their wares and goods imported from Asia.
This trade network, often called the “Manila Galleon,” included a thriving traffic in esclavos chinos (Chinese slaves), or indios chinos (equating them with indigenous Mexicans), although they hailed from various Asian countries. Goods brought into Acapulco were hauled overland by mule trains along the “China Road,” which ran up from Acapulco to Mexico City, the administrative center for tracking trade. Goods not intended for New Spain were loaded back on the mule trains and went on down the road to Veracruz for shipping to Europe.
The Manila Galleon lasted until early in the Mexican War of Independence (1810-21); Spain declared that the trade route should be eliminated in 1813, and trade ended in 1815, removing its benefits for New Spain.
The Chinese in Mexico City – Phase 2: In the early 20th century, the importation of workers to build railroads and other components of developing urbanization brought the Chinese to Mexico City as well. In 1901, there were only 40 Chinese listed in Mexico City, but by 1910, there were 1,482, many of whom moved from northern Mexico to escape the anti-Chinese (actually, the anti-foreign, or “nativist”) ideas of the Revolutionary forces (the Torreón massacre occurred in 1911).
The Chinese who came to Dolores Street were businesspeople, not construction workers. They opened restaurants, bakeries, laundries, and lard shops – lard was essential to both Chinese and Mexican cooking. Around 1930, when Mexico undertook an expulsion campaign to rid itself of Chinese immigrants, there were about 25,000 Chinese in the country as a whole; by 1940, there were fewer than 5,000.
Beginning shortly after this expulsion campaign, however, both deported Chinese and the Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) made efforts to “repatriate” the deported, and to increase Chinese immigration in general. The 2020 census identified 10,547 Chinese immigrants in Mexico, nearly a 60% increase over 2010; this does not count Mexico’s much larger Chinese-Mexican population, which goes back to the fact that early Chinese immigration was limited to men, who intermarried with Mexican women.
The history of Chinese immigration to Mexico, indeed to countries around the world, is complex and nuanced, involving racism and exploitation, resentment, often violent and deadly, of Chinese financial success, and – finally – an appreciation of Chinese culture and tradition. The Chinese New Year is perhaps the best occasion to do your own appreciating of that culture – have fun, and may your Year of the Dragon be especially rewarding!