MEXICO: Vamos!

Long patient lines of frightened Chinese stood in front of the customs house at Nogales last week and tried to get into the U. S. Arizona jails all along the border were filled with them. Into San Francisco harbor came 49 Chinese merchants on the Panama steamer El Salvador. Their money was gone; they were gloomily resigned to returning to Hongkong and poverty.

There were until last week about 15,000 Chinese in Mexico.* They are not coolies. Most of them are prosperous, hard-working shopkeepers and farmers. In the northwestern states of Sonora and Sinaloa, Chinese merchants own about 80% of the grocery shops and vegetable markets. Indolent Mexicans regard the affluent Chinese with sullen eyes.

There exist several sorts of Mexican Ku Klux Klans. One of them is the Comite Nacionalista Anti-China de la Costa Occidental, known as the Anti-Chinese Society. This society resorted to an old law passed by the Sonora Legislature in 1919, providing that all industrial and mercantile establishments must employ 80% Mexicans. In March 1931 this law was amended to prevent the exclusion of naturalized Chinese clerks anxious to evade the law, but despite its severity no serious attempt was made to enforce it until last June.

Disheartened Mexican laborers were returning from the U. S. in droves, unable to find employment. They were poor, they were hungry and all the grocery stores seemed to be owned by plump, placid Chinese. Nationalistic mobs gathered. At least three Chinese were killed by angry crowds. Stores were broken open, Chinese homes set afire. Town councils forcibly closed other stores; taxes were raised; shop-keepers were fined for non-compliance with the law.

Plutarco Elias Calles’ son, Rodolfo, Governor of Sonora, looked on complacently as the Anti-Chinese Society, backed by local authority, gave orders for the expulsion of all Chinese from his province by Sept. 5. The adjoining states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua issued similar edicts. Chinese grocers had no time to dispose of their property but fled in terror. The Mexican wholesale chain-store, Juan Lung-tain & Co. and Fong qui Co. lost over $1,000,000 each. Long lines of fugitives formed at the border.

In Washington the Chinese Legation protested formally. So did the Nationalist Government in Nanking. As the crisis became acute, rambunctious Governor Calles received quiet orders from Mexico City. The expulsion of Sonera’s Chinese was indefinitely postponed.

Mexico’s anti-Chinese crusade is but one phase of widespread antipathy to foreigners. An anti-Semitic movement has been going on for some time. In last week’s Nation, Correspondent Anita Brenner published a succinct summary of the Jewish situation. Jews were invited by President Calles in 1924 to enter the country, colonize, farm, keep shops. The agricultural program proved unfeasible, but by 1927 there were nearly 20,000 Semites in Mexico, 75% of them concentrated about Mexico City. They peddled, drove taxis, set up small businesses, shrewdly undersold easy-going native merchants. Last spring the National Revolutionary Party, of which President Ortiz Rubio is titular head, started a violent campaign to oust Jews from Mexico. Permits allowing them to trade in the markets were recalled. As a result, some Jews in Mexico City are starving. All, says Correspondent Brenner, live in daily dread of a pogrom.

* Mexico’s total population: 14,235,000. Among aliens. Chinese in Mexico rank fourth, after Spaniards, U. S. citizens and Guatemalans.