Between 1880 and 1910, during the term of President Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican government was trying to modernize the country, especially in building railroads and developing the sparsely populated northern states.

The push here was to populate and develop the empty northern states as well as to promote European education and customs into rural areas dominated by indigenous people.

[32][33] This immigration caused Chinese communities to appear in a number of places in the country, including Manzanillo, Ciudad Juárez, Salina Cruz, Mazatlán, Tampico, Veracruz and Piedras Negras,[34] concentrating in northern Mexico because of its proximity to the United States and the existence of opportunities in the developing economy.

[35] Whether directly from China or from the United States, Chinese immigrants were overwhelmingly men (98%) and between the ages of 15 and 29 according to the Registro Nacional de Extranjeros (National Foreigner Registry).

By the time of the Mexican Revolution, a number of Chinese merchants had considerable control of segments of the economy, especially in new markets created by the railroads and mines in states such as Sonora.

[42][43] By the 1920s, the community, centered on Dolores Street just south of the Alameda Central and Palacio de Bellas Artes, was firmly established and growing.

[34][44] One reason for this was that at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, many Chinese in the north migrated south to here, both to flee the violence and the growing anti-Chinese sentiment.

One was called the Chee Kung Tong (a more conservative group) and the other Partido Nacionalista China, who supported the more westerned movement of Sun Yat Sen.

The Chinese as a whole turned out to be hardworking, frugal, mutually supportive within their communities, and often succeeding as entrepreneurs in agriculture and small commercial enterprises.

In both cases, when their numbers reached a certain percentage of the local population and when they attained a certain amount of monetary success, backlashes occurred on both sides of the border.

While Chinese persecution was mostly limited to the north, it had national implications, mostly due to the political clout of Revolution leaders coming out of the northern border states.

They were blamed for spreading diseases, degenerating the Mexican race, corrupting morals, inciting civil unrest and generally undermining Mexico's social and political makeup.

The Chinese were accused of competing unfairly for jobs, especially as the formerly empty northern states began to experience a surplus of labor both due to increasing population and cutbacks in industries such as mining and petroleum.

[54] Overall resentment eventually grew into formal anti-Chinese movements in northern Mexico,[41] with most of the people active in these groups coming from the same social class or even the same business circles as the targeted Chinese.

It was led by José María Arana with the purpose of "defending Mexican merchants and rid Sonora of Chinese business owners.

These groups, along with many in the state and federal governments, pushed laws to segregate Chinese, prohibit interracial marriage and eventually deportation.

Francisco I. Madero offered to pay an indemnity of three million pesos to the Chinese government for the act but this never happened due to the coup by Victoriano Huerta.

The powerful political leadership of this state pushed the federal government to cancel further immigration from China in 1921, with the nullification of the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation, with all foreign manual labor prohibited eight years later.

[7] In other areas, including Mexico City, Chinese were being forced to live in ghettos starting in the 1920s, separating them due to supposed hygiene and moral reasons.

On numerous occasions, officials in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested the Mexican government with frequent but not uniformly positive results.

The Chinese expats in Mexico, along with their allies in China, created a paradigm of transnational resistance against Mexican Sinophobia underpinned by transpacific contact.

[63] Macau was attractive for these refugees because it had a cosmopolitan atmosphere more accepting of mixed race unions and its Portuguese influence gave it a familiar Latin cultural aspect.

[68] The size of the Chinese Mexican community in Macau and Guangdong fluctuated over the 20th century as some moved to other places in China and others managed to return to Mexico.

[71] Among the reasons Chinese-Mexican families were pushed to do this were that the problems they faced in China — including economic hardships, alienation from Chinese culture and the upheavals that occurred in that country — made Mexico a far more desirable place to live.

Branches of this organization in the northern states wrote letters to the federal government pressuring them to document and repatriate these Mexican nationals in China.

Chinese Mexicans in Mexicali consider themselves equally “cachanilla,” a term used for locals, as other residents of the city, even if they speak Cantonese in addition to Spanish.

Most of the shops and restaurants here had abundant Chinese-style decorations and altars, but statues of the Virgin of Guadalupe and San Judas Tadeo (a popular saint in Mexico) can be seen as well.

[82] Most recent immigrants congregate further south in the Viaducto neighborhood, with the Barrio Chino no longer serving as an entry point for new arrivals.

[80] The Comunidad China de México, A.C., established in 1980, sponsors Chinese festivals, classes and other activities to preserve and promote Chinese-Mexican culture.

The largest annual event by far is the Chinese New Year’s celebration, which not only attracts thousands of visitors from the rest of the city, it also has major sponsors such as the Cuauhtemoc borough and Coca-Cola.