Chinatowns are sometimes portrayed as gritty underworlds riddled with prostitution, playing and drug trafficking. A few of that is rooted in reality, however that unfair depiction is essentially the results of rampant xenophobia and cultural ignorance, particularly within the West.
Given the space and language barrier, it’s onerous to think about how, a century in the past, the Chinese language inhabitants of Mexicali, a border metropolis between Mexico and the US, outnumbered the native Mexican inhabitants in dimension.
It was that era of Chinese language migrants who constructed La Chinesca, or “The Chinese language” in English – the oldest Chinatown in Mexico.
One of many earliest data of Chinese language presence in Mexico goes again to 1635, in the direction of the tip of Imperial China’s Ming dynasty. That yr, Spanish barbers protested about competitors from the Chinese language, which noticed the municipality suggest to chop the variety of Chinese language barber retailers.
By the 1870s, the Mexican authorities had began to encourage Chinese language immigration after failing to draw extra Europeans to settle, particularly within the scorching desert state of Baja California, the place Mexicali is situated.