The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City [1 ed.] 9783030533434, 9783030533441

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Translations
Abbreviations
List of Figures
1 Introduction
1.1 Chinese Migration to Mexico
1.2 Context
1.3 Objectives and Questions
1.4 Methodology and Research Design: Who, Where and How?
1.5 The Subjects
1.6 The Places
1.7 Theoretical and Conceptual Framework
1.8 Outline of the Study
Bibliography
Part I Locating the Chinese in Mexican Popular Markets
2 The Organization and Characteristics of Street Markets and “Popular” Economy
2.1 Popular Markets: From Spaces of Struggle to Spaces of Opportunities
2.1.1 Defining Spaces of Opportunities
2.1.2 Popular Political Organizations
2.2 Tepito and Its Actors, an Intersectional Approach
2.2.1 Learning the Game of Trade, Childhood and Adulthood in Tepito
2.2.2 Marriage and Comadrazgo
2.2.3 From Fayuca to Ethnic Intermediation
2.3 Migration and Commerce in Tepito
2.4 Conclusions
Bibliography
3 Building Alternative Commodity Chains Between Mexico and China
3.1 Yiwu: The Construction of the World’s Factory
3.1.1 Yiwu, in a Plastic Nutshell
3.1.2 From Yiwu to Tepito
3.1.3 A Global Locality
3.2 Following the Production of a Hair Garment: The Role of Migrants in the Establishment of New Global Commodity Chains
3.2.1 Migration and Global Production
3.2.2 Transnational Commercial Spaces: The Chinese in Tepito
3.3 Tepito’s “Plaza Beijing”: Migration, Commodities and Discrimination
3.4 Conclusions
Bibliography
Part II Herstories of Migration, Building Spaces of Opportunities
4 Gender Inequality in China, a Path to Migration
4.1 Visibilizing Chinese Women in Migration Studies
4.2 The Feminization of Chinese Migration Patterns: Causes and Effects
4.3 Childhood in a Chinese Jia: Structural Inequalities
4.4 Unequal Access to Education and Work for Women in China
Bibliography
5 Migration to Mexico as a Strategy for Survival and Growth: Building Opportunities in Mexican Popular Markets
5.1 New Migration Patterns to Mexico City’s Popular Markets and the Search for Opportunities
5.1.1 Migration to Mexico
5.2 Marriage and Work Within Migration: Changing the Organization of the Household
5.2.1 Family Organization
5.2.2 Family Practices and Social Protection
5.3 From Petty Vendors to Importers: The Need for Networks and Associations to Grow in Popular Markets
5.3.1 Chinese Businesspeople: A Trade Chain Linking Different Economic Capacities
5.3.2 Guangxi in Tepito
5.4 Conclusions
Bibliography
Part III Migration and Commodity Chains, Drafting Alternative Spaces of Globalization
6 Women as Actors of Transnational Formations
6.1 What Are Alternative Spaces of Globalization?
6.1.1 Constructing Cities: Where Place, Space and Gender Come Together
6.2 Vulnerabilities and Resistances in the City: Building Networks of Trust Between Guanxi and Comadrazgo
6.3 Constructing Cities Through Belonging: Bringing Gender In
6.4 Transnational Motherhoods
6.5 Building Transnational Family Businesses
6.6 Building Alternatives to Survival and Growth
6.7 Conclusions
Bibliography
7 Conclusions
Bibliography
Annex
Research Methods
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND ASIA

The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City Ximena Alba Villalever

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia

Series Editors Ignacio López-Calvo University of California, Merced Merced, CA, USA Kathleen López Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA

This series is devoted to the diversity of encounters between Latin America and Asia through multiple points of contact across time and space. It welcomes different theoretical and disciplinary approaches to define, describe, and explore the histories and cultural production of people of Asian descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. It also welcomes research on Hispano-Filipino history and cultural production. Themes may include Asian immigration and geopolitics, the influence and/or representation of the Hispanic world in Asian cultures, Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Hispanic world and Asia, and other transpacific and south-south exchanges that disrupt the boundaries of traditional academic fields and singular notions of identity. The geographical scope of the series incorporates the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean region. We welcome single-author monographs and volumes of essays from experts in the field from different academic backgrounds. About the Series Editors Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced, USA and director of the UC Merced Center for the Humanities. He is author of several books on Latin American and US Latino literature. He is co-executive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. Kathleen López is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA. She is author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (2013) and a contributor to Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2015), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (2016), and Imagining Asia in the Americas (2016). Advisory Board Koichi Hagimoto, Wellesley College, USA Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University, USA Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh, USA Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University, USA Debbie Lee-DiStefano, Southeast Missouri State University, USA Shigeko Mato, Waseda University, Japan Zelideth María Rivas, Marshall University, USA Robert Chao Romero, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Lok Siu, University of California, Berkeley, USA Araceli Tinajero, City College of New York, USA Laura Torres-Rodríguez, New York University, USA

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15129

Ximena Alba Villalever

The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City

Ximena Alba Villalever Lateinamerika Institut Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia ISBN 978-3-030-53343-4 ISBN 978-3-030-53344-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53344-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible without the help and support from the Chinese and Mexican traders working on the streets of Mexico City. My most sincere thanks to all the people who opened their world to me and allowed me to have a small glimpse of what it is to work within the popular economy. Particularly, I want to thank all of the women who figure in this book, these are part of their stories and I hope I managed to stay faithful to them. Special thanks to María Rosete and An Lan, who helped me enter the world of women in trade; and to Armando Sánchez, who took his time in showing me how the Tepito market has changed in the last decades. Many people guided, enriched and invested time and effort in this work. Especially, I thank the IRTG “Between Spaces,” the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Free University of Berlin and all of its academic and administrative staff, for giving me the best conditions possible to carry out this research; the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for funding the research and writing; special thanks to Kenya Herrera and Tanja Wälty, who made comments to this work all along its construction process and until the very end; Ignacio López-Calvo, Kathy López, Camille Davis and Liam McLean for showing interest in my research and making the publication of this book possible; the two manuscript reviewers, who enriched the book with their comments to my work and

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

their support in the first phase of publishing; Barbara Belejack and David Bolick for their proofreading work, extremely necessary for a non-native English speaker; finally, my family for putting up with me during this long and hard process of research.

Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 Chinese Migration to Mexico 1.2 Context 1.3 Objectives and Questions 1.4 Methodology and Research Design: Who, Where and How? 1.5 The Subjects 1.6 The Places 1.7 Theoretical and Conceptual Framework 1.8 Outline of the Study Bibliography

Part I 2

1 4 9 13 14 15 20 21 27 31

Locating the Chinese in Mexican Popular Markets

The Organization and Characteristics of Street Markets and “Popular” Economy 2.1 Popular Markets: From Spaces of Struggle to Spaces of Opportunities 2.2 Tepito and Its Actors, an Intersectional Approach 2.3 Migration and Commerce in Tepito 2.4 Conclusions Bibliography

41 43 53 65 72 74 vii

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CONTENTS

Building Alternative Commodity Chains Between Mexico and China 3.1 Yiwu: The Construction of the World’s Factory 3.2 Following the Production of a Hair Garment: The Role of Migrants in the Establishment of New Global Commodity Chains 3.3 Tepito’s “Plaza Beijing”: Migration, Commodities and Discrimination 3.4 Conclusions Bibliography

77 79

87 95 101 103

Part II Her stories of Migration, Building Spaces of Opportunities 4

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Gender Inequality in China, a Path to Migration 4.1 Visibilizing Chinese Women in Migration Studies 4.2 The Feminization of Chinese Migration Patterns: Causes and Effects 4.3 Childhood in a Chinese Jia: Structural Inequalities 4.4 Unequal Access to Education and Work for Women in China Bibliography Migration to Mexico as a Strategy for Survival and Growth: Building Opportunities in Mexican Popular Markets 5.1 New Migration Patterns to Mexico City’s Popular Markets and the Search for Opportunities 5.2 Marriage and Work Within Migration: Changing the Organization of the Household 5.3 From Petty Vendors to Importers: The Need for Networks and Associations to Grow in Popular Markets 5.4 Conclusions Bibliography

109 112 118 122 130 137

143 145 156

167 177 182

CONTENTS

Part III

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Migration and Commodity Chains, Drafting Alternative Spaces of Globalization

Women as Actors of Transnational Formations 6.1 What Are Alternative Spaces of Globalization? 6.2 Vulnerabilities and Resistances in the City: Building Networks of Trust Between Guanxi and Comadrazgo 6.3 Constructing Cities Through Belonging: Bringing Gender In 6.4 Transnational Motherhoods 6.5 Building Transnational Family Businesses 6.6 Building Alternatives to Survival and Growth 6.7 Conclusions Bibliography

189 191

Conclusions Bibliography

245 264

201 213 218 226 229 237 241

Annex

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Index

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List of Translations

Abarrotes (groceries) Agremiade (union member—“e” for non-gendered form) Barrio (neighborhood—coloquial ) bodega (warehouse) Cafés de chinos (Chinese coffeeshops) Centro Histórico (downtown/Historical Center) Colonia (neighborhood) Colportage (peddling) Comadrazgo (godmotherhood) Delegación (district) Diablero (man pushing a cart) Fayuca (new or used commodities smuggled to Mexico from the United States) Fayuqueres (people dealing with fayuca—“e” for non-gendered form) Huiguan (association) Jia (house/family) mercados populares (popular markets) mojado (unauthorized migrant—coloquial ) Plaza de los “chinitos” (Chinese square) Tepiteñes (people from/working in Tepito) Tiendita (store) Vecindad (popular housing)

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Abbreviations

NAFTA PRC WTO

North American Free Trade Agreement People’s Republic of China World Trade Organization

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. II.1 Fig. 6.1

“América Latina”, outside of the Yiwu market Chinatown in Dolores street, after New Year Festivities 2014 “China in Tepito” Mural by Daniel Manrique

Map 1.1 Map 1.2

Chinese vendors in other popular markets Chinese vendors in the Barrio of Tepito

86 106 235 16 17

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

It was the second Friday of January 2015, just a little afternoon. I was standing in front of Shei,1 a Chinese woman in her late forties who lives and works in Mexico City. She was crying. Shei is a peddler who sells homemade spring rolls and rice “to go” that she puts in plastic bags for the hungry clients that quickly pass by as they commute. She works in the commercial corridor linking the San Lázaro Metro station to the TAPO bus station in Delegación Venustiano Carranza, on the outskirts of the Centro Histórico (downtown). This is one of the busiest stations in the city, which means that her working spot is privileged because of the high level of transit. Visibility and accessibility are two fundamental elements that are highly contested among street vendors; their livelihood depends on them. In order for Shei to work here, a public space that urban and popular dynamics have turned private, she

1 The names of the Chinese women and men in this book were changed to maintain privacy and anonymity, except in the case of those whose names are known in the media. On some occasions, I used pseudonyms that are common Latin names in Mexico; at other times, Chinese names, sometimes using only one syllable, as the women do themselves in the Tepito market. The selection depended on how each woman chose to identify herself in Mexico—whether to keep her Chinese name or a shortened version of it, or choose one that might be easier for Mexican acquaintances. The Mexican interlocutors are identified by their own names because they are already highly visible in public and political spheres.

© The Author(s) 2020 X. Alba Villalever, The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53344-1_1

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had to become part of—and pay the necessary fees to—the popular organizations that control it. She needed the approval of the street vendors’ organization and the protection of its Mexican leader. We had just met. I was accompanied by the leader of her assigned work area. Contacting him was the only way to approach Shei without arousing suspicion or creating conflict. Popular markets are often rife with tensions between organizations that fight each other for space and political support; there are also tensions with the police and the government. Peddlers and their leaders are wary of people who want to talk to them about their work and their organization. Although meeting Shei through her area leader reflected his approval, it also reinforced the hierarchical power structures of the organization, in which Shei was at the bottom. Approaching her through her leader was the only option I had: it protected her while legitimizing my presence in the eyes of others, but also put her in a vulnerable position. “Aquí la señorita quiere hablar con usted” (“The lady wants to speak to you”)—the leader blurted out when we reached Shei´s vending spot, before turning around and leaving. How could she say no? What could be going through her head as she heard words in a language she didn’t fully understand, spoken so sharply by the man who could take away her work? I quickly introduced myself and told her what I was doing there—trying to make up for the abrupt introduction by the leader, who had other things to do. As I was telling her that I wanted to learn about the lives of Chinese women in Mexico and talk to her about her own experiences, she took a few steps back and answered in Chinese-accented Spanish: “Para muchas seguro es muy buena, pero para mí, como no tengo dinero, es muy difícil ” (“I’m sure for many it’s very good, but for me, since I have no money, it’s very hard”). I asked her—as gently as I could—if she had been in Mexico for a long time, but I didn’t really need an answer. She nodded slowly while looking at me with a tissue over her eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks. After trying and failing, I never found out exactly why she had cried. That was the end of our exchange, yet in a way, her reaction spoke volumes. This ethnographic vignette sheds light on many of the issues that come up in a process of migration entangled with precarious labor conditions. It shows the difficulties entailed in working within Mexico City’s popular economy and the strong power relations and social organizations constructed within its networks. It makes visible the ways cultural and political characteristics are bound to specific places and their dynamics. It

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exposes the emotional as well as the economic vulnerabilities that migrants often face and reveals the controversies surrounding migration in all their complexity: Why does someone go through the brutal changes that traveling from one country to the other demands—a change of language, of culture, of food, of feelings of belonging, of family—to end up struggling selling food on the streets? It pushes us to ask: What does this economic activity actually entail for the people that carry it out; what does it mean for a Chinese woman to work as a vendor in a popular market in Mexico City? My interest in the immersion of Chinese women in this kind of activity was based on three premises. First, I recognized that this economic endeavor was not one customarily performed by the Chinese in Mexico. Second, I considered that the temporal space in which I developed my research signaled a change in economic and social activities between both countries. And third, I considered there had been a process of change in this migration: a process of feminization that entailed new forms of empowerment, where women, who find themselves in stages of transition, have to seek and fight for new places within diverse social structures. Starting with the hypothesis that their incorporation into Mexico City’s networks of popular economy was related to their gender and the opportunities they could find in this specific economic system, I deduced that their participation rapidly changed the dynamics of various markets in Mexico. Shei is one of many Chinese women living in Mexico City today who have found a place within the popular economy networks of the Centro Histórico and nearby neighborhoods. In this woman’s working conditions and in her reaction, I saw a reflection of the struggles for survival that many experience, often with no other choice but to leave everything behind and travel to the other side of the world. Hers is an example of the new realities that marginalized actors experience within global dynamics. Shei does not represent the experiences of all Chinese women in Mexico, of course. However, her case was the materialization of the most difficult aspects of migration. Hers was the most severe reaction I encountered while conducting an interview, and it was the last interview I conducted for my field research in Mexico City, where I had sought to learn about the experiences of the Chinese women who had migrated to this great megalopolis and were now working within the networks of the popular economy. Their experiences show how local perceptions and imaginaries about these migrants are often unfounded, built on misconceptions, fear and xenophobia that are historic in nature.

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1.1

Chinese Migration to Mexico

Hu-DeHart (2005) stated that it was impossible to understand the dynamics of the Chinese in one settlement without considering its connectivities with other settlements. More than that, I also deem it impossible to understand contemporary networks of Chinese migrations to Mexico without taking into account their development for a century and a half throughout the Americas. Although the first waves of Chinese migrations are not necessarily related to all of the migrant populations that fall within the focus of my work, it is important to grasp the ways in which the Chinese have arrived and organized in different localities, as well as to understand the responses that local populations have had to their presence. Moreover, to focus on the experiences of women and on the impacts that their increasing migration has had on these networks—notably from the 1990s onward—it is necessary to first analyze the structural organization of this migrant group, as well as its transformations over time. Chinese migrations to Mexico are not a new phenomenon. They started roughly 150 years ago, but in terms of numbers were most significant in the early decades of the last century. As in many other countries, from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth, Chinese migrants to Mexico were mostly young men looking for work, with the majority hailing from Guangdong. Their common origin often implied that many not only knew each other before migration, but were also related. In fact, their processes of migration eventually became a system where one pioneer migrant, once established, would try to bring other men from his town or family to work with him, thus creating translocal ties at a time when even communication from one town to the other was complicated. These men became a very important source of development in under-inhabited places such as the desert between the United States and Mexico (Curtis 1995; Hu-DeHart 2005) and the plantations in Yucatán and other southern Mexican states (Cervera 2007).2 At that time, most of the Chinese in Mexico were concentrated in the northern states (especially Sonora and Baja California), in areas where

2 According to Cervera (2007: 38), one of the first influxes of Chinese to arrive in the southern Mexican peninsula came from Cuba in 1892 to work as indentured workers in haciendas henequeneras, but there was already a rather invisible presence of Chinese in the south, having arrived through Belize.

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the mining and agricultural industries were growing and avid for development, needing both manual labor and new markets (Curtis 1995). Chinese presence and labor were critical in the development of these areas. After they had boosted agriculture, they often left the fields and established themselves as small business owners (Hu-DeHart 2005). During this first period of Chinese migration, the presence of women was rare and there is little that we know about the experiences of the few that were in Mexico. The workload in this country, as elsewhere, was hard and the income insufficient. The workers’ families (wives and children or parents) often remained in China, dependent upon remittances sent by the migrants. Remittance systems advanced local development in the regions of origin and brought growth to specific areas in China, particularly to provinces that were prone to producing migrants. Decades later, the development of some of these provinces was recognized and boosted by the state, eventually turned—after the 1980s—into Special Economic Zones, with one particular economic activity leading the area’s development. Meanwhile, the migrants often faced very difficult conditions, at least during their initial years in Mexico. Little by little, Chinese men started settling down and forming communities and anchorage far from home. Their living conditions in Mexico eventually surpassed those of their families in China. Through their organization in associations or huiguan,3 they created bank-like systems that would facilitate sending money back home, thereby strengthening translocal relationships that had been difficult to sustain. As McKeown states: “These businesses and associations were built on the trust and familiarity of kinship, and then helped reinforce those ties through their institutionalized services. Without these services, migration would rarely have been a practical strategy for the economic survival of families, lineages, or villages.” (1999: 102)

McKeown was referring to the United States, but this was also true in Mexico. Despite the harsh conditions they faced on arrival, from the beginning of the twentieth-century Chinese migrants not only developed plantation fields that boosted local economies, they also set up commodity shops that made living conditions more bearable in poorly 3 For a more exhaustive analysis of these associations, see Cinco (1999: 33).

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connected places in rural Mexico. Chinese workers and merchants created commercial bonds with the United States, strengthening ties that had been notably weak before the Mexican Revolution (Hu-DeHart 2005: 94) and giving the migrant population a role to play between producers and consumers, the role of middlemen minority (Bonacich 1973), which has been their trademark ever since. However, it was their ascension and stabilization into the category of middlemen—which Hu-DeHart defined as a petite bourgeoisie—and their capacity to maintain commercial ties across space and under very harsh conditions, which made the group a target of social scrutiny and resentment.4 This resentment grew from the perception that the Chinese had more economic opportunities than Mexicans, a perception still held by many local vendors within popular markets. At that time, resentment led to outrage, and these feelings soon materialized into violence, pillage and persecution against the Chinese. A first expression of these violent events took place in Torreón, Coahuila, in 1911, where over three hundred Chinese were killed, and several others were dispossessed of their businesses and properties (Curtis 1995: 339; González 2017: 24). After that, several more extended and organized waves of antiChinese movements took place in Mexico: the first lasted from 1916 to 1919, particularly in the northern region of the country and specifically in Sonora (Curtis 1995; Hu-DeHart 2005; Schiavone Camacho 2009). The second took place in 1921, when the powerful political leadership from Sonora forced the prohibition of Chinese migration (Curtis 1995; Cinco 1999), drastically reducing the numbers of Chinese entering the country. From then on, there was a strengthening of the social and economic networks through which the Chinese had always moved, and the huiguan became strategic in countering aggression (González 2017). Kinship, political belonging and friendship networks gained a whole new meaning: they became strategies of protection and survival. In 1925, antiChinese campaigns resumed (Cinco 1999; Hu-DeHart 2005), driven by 4 The idea that strangers (whom local populations often classified as inferior) were “taking jobs” was the main impetus for the racist and prejudicial feelings against migrants—much as it still is today. In the case of the Chinese in northern Mexico, authors like Hu-DeHart have made it clear that the development of these areas would never have reached the same levels had it not been for the efforts of the Chinese. Nevertheless, they were persecuted for this exact same reason. For a more complete discussion of antiChinese sentiment in Mexico, see Cinco (1999: 35), Curtis (1995: 340) and González (2017).

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a mix of political, social and economic factors. Three of these factors stand out: (1) the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the construction of a nation-state that sought to “‘Mexicanize’ the country and its economy” (Curtis 1995: 340), and in which the Chinese presence was unwanted; (2) the end of WWI, which meant a decrease in demand for cotton production at the same time that Mexican workers who had migrated north to replace the US workforce during the war were returning home; (3) and racist-inspired propaganda, also coming from the United States. This was nourished, first, by the sentiment that jobs should be reserved for Mexicans, and second, by the complaint that the low wages under which the Chinese were willing to work (when employed by other more established Chinese) were so low that it was impossible to compete (Curtis 1995; Cinco 1999; Hu-DeHart 2005; Schiavone Camacho 2009; Alba Villalever 2014). These tragic events led the Chinese in Mexico to create and reproduce various networks that still have an impact today. Since the 1880s, Chinese community resources in Mexico, which have materialized through networks of information, trust, kinship and even employment, have been a strong vehicle for the integration for migrants. Even today, once a certain level of integration into economic activities is achieved in a specific locality, Chinese migrants tend to develop an endo-community job market, thus creating and perpetuating Chinese economic enclaves.5 Chinese markets and shops were always run by family members, loans were offered to Chinese friends and neighbors, and temporary jobs were offered to newcomers. These jobs would be paid with housing and food rather than a salary, depriving newcomers of purchasing power and forcing them to rely on the social and economic networks already in place. This system of social and economic reproduction was initially meant as a way of insertion. But it ended up as an obstacle for individual growth. Migrants often found themselves trapped in circular capital flows that

5 In a strict sense, economic enclaves depict the embeddedness of a specific economy in a wider economic context. The social life of the people working within the limits of the enclave revolves around the enterprise and its economy (Sariego, [1988] 2010). Likewise, ethnic enclaves, or ethnic enclave economies, refer to the social and economic networks that are created and reproduced by immigrants, particularly visible in determined localities where the actors develop specific economic activities that are nourished by migration flows (Portes and Bach 1985; Sanders and Nee 1987; Zhou and Logan 1989; Portes and Jensen 1989, 1992; Curtis 1995; Zhou 1998).

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restricted their progress—much as they still do today (Alba Villalever 2014). In fact, some of these same migration networks still exist, and through social interactions often connect separate geographies where Chinese economic enclaves are still strong, for instance between Taishan6 (Guangdong) and Mexicali (Baja California) (Curtis 1995; Alba Villalever 2014). But new Chinese settlements also rely on these community resources to grow and survive, and in recent years have formed new enclaves, like the one in Mexico City where my research took place. These systems allow for the reproduction of social bonds that continuously traverse borders and create extensive networks across the Pacific. As a bonus, they give migrants a sense of belonging to a “Chinese community overseas.” However, over time and with the widening of migration from China to Mexico, the diasporic circuits that have structured Chinese migrations and their insertion into local places of settlement eventually became a system ruled by hierarchies, dividing different groups by social position and economic background, and thus defining each individual’s possibilities for growth. This has resulted in increased differentiation between migrants with higher economic capacities and those with fewer opportunities. Even today, before they can leave their country, prospective migrants within traditional Chinese economic enclaves often have to find a job in the country where they are to settle. On the one hand, this facilitates the acquisition of legal working documents and implies that the migrants will easily find food and lodging when they arrive, thus ensuring their survival. On the other hand, since these elements are usually provided by employers already established in Mexico, what often results is an ever-increasing that debt employees owe their employers. Their salaries are then reduced to diminish that debt, thereby depriving them of the freedom to find better opportunities or create businesses of their own.7 This social system gradually became a factor of social inequality, not only regarding economic capacities, but also with respect to social means

6 To maintain unity in the text, the romanization of Mandarin (Pinyin) will be used for all the names of cities or provinces in China. 7 In the worst-case scenarios, this is also provided by agencies or smugglers, who often raise their fees without notice and deprive travelers of the option to return home. Although some evidence of these networks was encountered during my field research, it was impossible to pursue the subject, which in any case was beyond the purview of my research.

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and community resources; the weaker the newcomer’s connections with the Chinese employers, the worse the job offers, living conditions and opportunities for growth. These same gaps between migrants with different amounts of social and economic capital are still found within more recent migration processes to Mexico. Those who come with fewer capital still find themselves in positions that are hard to overcome within the community’s networks, however, what I found in popular markets in Mexico City was a little different. In this locality, the roles played by migrants with higher or lower capital were all important to build commercial networks among popular economy. While those with higher capital would interact with Mexicans in the same positions, those with lower capital would reach a population deprived of better conditions. These made possible a different kind of interaction among migrant vendors with different economic capital, which was a key factor in their incorporation into Mexican popular markets. The differences between old and new migration processes and the strategies of incorporation of migrants lie in a context of globalization in which the relation that China has with the localities of insertion and with the Chinese overseas is foremost.

1.2

Context

The economic tendencies of the last three and a half decades have restructured the dynamics of all countries and the ways in which they interact. Migration from one country to the other is a reflection of relations between contexts; it is both the result of and the producer of bridges or ties between different territories. Often, these ties are inherently localized and depend on specific contexts: political, economic, social or even cultural; however, through migration these localities and their specific characteristics are transformed, given new meanings and dynamics that result from the movement of actors with different backgrounds and their interactions(Besserer and Nieto 2015). This book considers two specific contexts in two different countries—Mexico and China. I argue that despite their geographical separation, the interactions of different actors and social institutions between both countries have created interrelated dynamics. In 1978, under the rule of Deng Xiaoping, China engaged in a major political and economic reform that continues to transform the social landscape of the country and its relations with other nations. This has played a

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fundamental role in the reshuffling of global economic order. This reform, the Open Door Policy, not only implied a profound change in the country’s economic system, but also put it on the winning track toward global economic leadership. In the last two decades, GDP per capita has grown steadily, making China the second-largest economy in the world after the United States (IMF 2019). However, although in general terms living conditions in China have been improving, in actual terms income disparities have grown and perceptions of well-being among those in China’s lower economic strata have shrunk (Bartolini 2015). This is not unexpected; considering that China’s population has reached 1.4 billion, urban growth has skyrocketed and agricultural fields have been abandoned at a troubling rate. As a result of these conditions, a variety of demonstrations have erupted in recent decades, calling for a path to democracy in China and, since the 1990s, demonstrators have increasingly demanded better salaries and working conditions (So 2007). Clearly, the country’s growth has not kept pace with the expectations of its people. While some are getting richer, others are struggling just to survive. Social inequality continues to grow, as the vast majority are confronted with limited offers of employment, disadvantageous or unsatisfying labor options, inadequate salaries and exploitation. Liberalization8 has brought both growth and marginalization (Harvey 2005), and Chinese people of all backgrounds have to go through several process of readjustment. For many, readjustment implies migration.

8 Authors like So argue that the Chinese model cannot be categorized as neoliberal because it relies on a deeper relation between the state and economic development, is still “highly nationalistic and authoritarian” (2007: 61), and—most importantly—its state developmentalism has lifted a substantial part of the population out of poverty. Although it is true that China’s development strategies in no way mirror the neoliberal strategies that have been developed in Latin America, I believe that the recent responses of the Chinese state to global economic dynamics thoroughly abide by the neoliberal model. As far as lifting the population out of poverty, the issue should be looked at from a wider— intersectional—perspective to fully understand the country’s economic path and its impact on Chinese society, as I argue throughout the book. However, So’s argument on the state authoritarianism and its role in subordinating labor to keep wages low and export prices competitive in a global economy—a trademark of the East Asian developmental state—is a fact that cannot be overlooked. So considers one possible outcome of China’s state developmentalism to be the return to neoliberalism, another interesting scenario that will not be pursued in this book. Hence, I will categorize China’s actual economic strategy as neoliberal.

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With economic restructuring, Chinese society has changed. Its understanding of and adaptation to the world market has had many effects. In China, the first impacts were perceived not long after reforms began. One major change was that Chinese overseas—often constructed under the term “diaspora”9 —were now beginning to be considered privileged actors in the development of Chinese commodity chains around the world. However, it would be several years before these impacts became visible and their effects on other countries apparent. In the case of Mexico, two of these effects have been visible since the nineties: the growing migration of Chinese women and their integration into an unlikely economic field: retail and wholesale in popular markets; and the increasing circulation and consumption of commodities “Made in China.” Both phenomena are most visible in specific localities, for example, the streets and corridors of Mexico City’s popular marketplaces in the Centro Histórico. Popular markets and their economic, social and political organization are the specific context on which I focus in Mexico. Within these markets are various levels of informality10 that structure commercial, social and political relations. The popular economy cannot be easily delimited. Its existence is acutely linked to those networks of economy that are considered “formal,” with which it engages in constant dialogue and confrontation. Working in popular markets is one of the most common methods of survival for inhabitants of this megalopolis. By some estimates, there are between 350,000 and 500,000 street vendors in Mexico City (Alba Vega 2012: 82). In spite of moving through unrecognized economic parameters, popular markets are places where enormous amounts of capital circulate daily. Within these markets in which the 9 In this book, I avoid talking about “a Chinese diaspora” because I consider that it obscures the inner differences between the diversity of actors of migration and frustrates the visibilization of individual forms of action and/or agency. Instead, I follow McKeown (1999) and Hu-DeHart (2007) on the utility of considering a diasporic perspective to view and analyze these migrations and their inherent global connectivities. 10 Throughout the book, I refer to markets in Mexico City and their dynamics, which fall within different levels of informality, as “popular markets”, “popular commerce” or “popular economy”. I do this, first, because it is the emic term used by the actors that live and work in these economic dynamics. Also, the term “informality” refers to a state dictate that will not always be significant. Last, the term “informality” brings with it many implications and cultural constructions that involve illegality. Therefore, to avoid the value judgments that often accompany the meaning of “informality”, I will only use the term when specifically referring to issues related to state control.

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popular economy reigns, delimitations between formality and informality are blurred, and so are the borders between center and margin, legality and illegality, growth and survival. Multiple interactions between actors in different fields, like family and commerce, and among different territorialities is one way in which different levels of this “informality” are produced as strategies of survival (Müller 2014). But these interactions also produce unexpected spaces with new dynamics. In recent decades, the demands of the people that work and live within this economy have transformed their daily practices into political struggles. What started as a way of survival became a way of living, and as is often the case, people started to organize and fight for territory, visibility and power. Today, every aspect of the popular economy is regulated by a wide range of popular organizations. For some, popular markets are places where they are given the tools to survive, for others they represent a form of economic, political and social growth. Moreover, the integration of Chinese migrants created new dynamics within Mexico’s popular markets. Chinese migration is not a new phenomenon in Mexico, but rather a process that has been changing through time and in which a wide variety of actors participate. In recent years, the Chinese in Mexico City have started to engage in this economic activity that takes place outside of hegemonic economic systems. This is an economy forged by the social, political, cultural and economic conditions of the locality and its actors. The arrival of the Chinese also brought new ways of doing business and new commercial networks. These reach back to China, connecting various places, actors and dynamics. To grasp these complexities, we need to consider the economic, political and cultural paths of both China and Mexico and the way they intertwine. Although China has now experienced years of economic growth and development, it has also known rapid social transformation and growing inequality (Bartolini 2015), making international migration a more attractive means of livelihood for many Chinese citizens. In Mexico, meanwhile, structural inequalities have for decades pushed an important part of its population to search for alternative economies that have grown in specific interactions with the state; this is a population that has lagged behind, but also has built its own means of survival and livelihood. In recent years, the actors that conform these two separate contexts have brought them together, creating bridges between separate places through their interactions; in their search of economic survival and growth, they have created alternative spaces of globalization. In this book, I explore and assess what these

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places and their economies mean for the Chinese women that work in them, as well as the impact, in turn, that these women have on them.

1.3

Objectives and Questions

Interested in the ways in which Mexico and China have become articulated in a very specific manner through the interactions of Chinese women working as vendors in Mexican popular markets, I first had to make visible that their experiences are transnational and so too are the social spaces in which they move. They create social fabrics among the localities in which they are embedded as they move through different territories. To examine the impacts that these women have had in the Mexican market, I also had to focus on the resources they have found and appropriated to venture down these new paths: these are commercial mechanisms, economic strategies and sociocultural practices. These strategies reconfigure their conception of themselves as individuals, as women and as vendors and importers, and they give them specific positions on different social structures. This implies not only a reconfiguration of gender roles in a transforming Chinese society, but also in a Mexican one. In this sense, the analysis of the role of women in a globalized economy has been of foremost importance. The book is guided by a search for the articulations between the local and the global, the ways that local, personal interactions and economic struggles can be translated into processes of globalization. More specifically, I ask: How do Chinese migrant women in Mexico City´s popular markets, through the social spaces that they build with their interactions between Mexico and China, forge their own ways of participation in global processes? The question signals the existence of alternative processes of globalization that arise from unexpected spaces, such as struggles for survival that feed and are fed by migration. I argue that there is a path constructed from the local to the global by actors that are considered to be on the margins of the hegemonic economy. This path starts from strategies of survival in specific localities, such as Mexico City’s public marketplaces, through interactions that take place within them, such as articulations between Chinese and Mexican vendors, and through links constructed with other places, such as the hometowns in China and Yiwu, in Zhejiang Province, the biggest commodity market in the world today.

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I argue that there is a connection between gender dynamics and the restructuring of social orders and women’s participation in migration. This can only be looked at through an intersectional perspective that takes into account gender, class, race and regional and cultural belongings. By examining their participation in Mexican popular markets and the tools they develop that allow that participation, I trace the transformations actors can exert on localities through migration. There are different ways in which individuals link places and reshape social spaces through their migration in search of work. In this specific analysis, migration networks to Mexico are considered as the result of an intersection between strategies of survival and strategies of growth, as the construction of alternative spaces of globalization that have arisen from the particular situations of the migrating population and the spaces where they establish themselves in Mexico. To render this discussion more tangible, I first ask: What factors have encouraged the migration of Chinese women to Mexico and what strategies have they developed to venture into popular markets? Here, I inquire about the opportunities given to women in China and the elements that have attracted new migrations of Chinese women to Mexico. I analyze transnational social information networks that allow the insertion of migrant women in economic activities that derive from marginalized dynamics, and link the importance of popular economies as spaces of opportunities. Second: How do women’s migration processes create transnational social spaces and transform localities? Here, I analyze women’s participation within various power structures, economic flows and social networks. I shed light on their performativity and subjectivation within the different spaces in which they move and on how these processes have impacts on social structures. While working in networks of the popular economy, these women have found and reproduced various strategies of labor insertion that have changed their perceptions of self and of family. For this question, the analysis of space and the importance of the different relationships developed by diverse actors are paramount.

1.4 Methodology and Research Design: Who, Where and How? As an anthropologist concerned with gender studies and feminist debates, the core of this research originated in my interest in asserting the importance of women’s participation in diverse spaces. Having studied Chinese

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migrations for several years, I was struck by the lack of research with a gender perspective. There have been few studies of Chinese migrant women, most of them by French, British and American scholars, and studies about the role played by women who stayed back in their home country while their husbands worked in the United States.11 In Mexico, however, there is still not a single published study focusing specifically on the experiences of Chinese women, either as those who moved or as those who stayed, and these gaps in the research need to be addressed. The data used in this book was mostly gathered through ethnographic research carried out from November 2013 to May 2014 in several popular markets in Mexico City, particularly in the Tepito market and surrounding area as well as in Plaza de la Tecnología—colloquially known as “Plaza de la Computación”—San Cosme and San Lázaro (Maps 1.1 and 1.2). For the research, semi-structured interviews, in-depth interviews and informal conversations were carried out with Chinese women as well as with Mexican vendors and leaders of the popular organizations to which most of these women were “members.” Most of the women interviewed did not wish to be recorded, but they all agreed that I take notes during our interviews: my journal hence became my most important form of documentation.12 Focusing on gender dynamics sheds light on several aspects of migration, beginning with the reasons women migrate and the vulnerabilities they face both before and after they migrate. It reveals the importance of gender structures and roles within the family and in the workplace, as well as their possible transformations (hence the need to consider agency and empowerment in these processes). It also shows new forms of embeddedness of Chinese in local dynamics.

1.5

The Subjects

This book is based on the experiences of 22 Chinese women of varied background who have worked within different levels of popular economy 11 Among the leading authors of these investigations are Zhou and Logan (1989), Zhou and Nordquist (1994), Zhou (2000), Baxter and Raw ([1988] 2004), Song (1995), Lee et al. (2002), Ryan (2002), Auguin (2005), Lévy (2005), Lévy and Lieber (2009, 2010), Lausent-Herrera (2007), Siu (2001, 2005) and Mazumdar (2003, 2007). 12 For a more detailed explanation on the research methods, as well as a list of the interviews carried out during research, see the Annex.

X. ALBA VILLALEVER 2797000.000000

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0 Km

Legend Streets and spots with the presence of Chinese peddlers Delegación Cuauhtemoc Market of Tepito

Map 1.1

Projection: Lambert Conformal Conic Datum: ITRF92 Scale: 1: 50 000 Units: Meters Sources: INEGI-Encuesta intercensal 2015 Authors: Ximena Alba Villalever & Mario Hernandez Trejo Year: 2017

Chinese vendors in other popular markets

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Map 1.2

Chinese vendors in the Barrio of Tepito

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in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico. While some of them grew to be importers of products Made in China, others were intermediaries between importers and vendors, and others were peddlers or street vendors, selling food or a few specific commodities. Their positions within these commercial and economic spaces depended on several factors, including social capital, cultural and regional ties, age (ranging from 24 to nearly 60) and the various networks to which they have access within their migratory experiences. Despite these differences, they all participate in a process of globalization that in this book I call “alternative,” because it has been constructed with different means than those constructed within greater (more institutional) economic and hegemonic global flows. When we start with the experiences of these women, we see them as core to the migration process, furthering our understanding of the influence of migration in local and translocal spaces. However, because I chose to analyze different experiences that the Chinese women at the center of this research were willing to share, taking into consideration different aspects of their realities and the ways in which they have overcome the difficulties that migration implies, it is no wonder that the project underwent a number of changes. My encounter with Shei, for instance, and particularly her reaction to my presence and my motives, told me a lot about the emotional turmoil caused by migration. I wanted to learn about the experiences of these women as foreign merchants in Mexico City’s great popular markets; I wanted to know what it was like for someone from China to enter into a world with such specific local dynamics; I wanted to know what their experiences had been as women, what their conditions had been like when they arrived in Mexico, the ways in which they initially made contact with the street vendors’ leaders who controlled their working conditions. Instead, in the case of Shei, what was expressed without words was a set of vulnerabilities intrinsic to migration and worthy of analysis in themselves. Her reaction had an impact on my own research experience, revealing aspects I had not initially considered, including the role emotions play in economic and symbolic struggles. These aspects were taken into account in my analysis, particularly when considering transnational motherhood, issues of trust and commerce and issues of identification and belonging. During my field research, I was always very aware that the people with whom I spoke were in difficult situations on so many different levels: they are migrants, a variable that is in itself a destabilizing situation; they work within different levels of informality, either due to their legal residency and labor status

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in Mexico or to their incorporation into a sector of economy that falls within the limits of “informality.” Some of my interlocutors were in much more unstable positions than others, as was the case of Shei. Their positions as women represent in themselves a source of marginalization and vulnerability. I sought to take all of this into account. For a long time, migration and its implications were considered through strictly economic perspectives, with a particular focus on remittances. Through gender studies, other aspects of these processes have been made visible. Migration crosses every aspect of a person’s life and cuts across all the fields in which actors find themselves, such as family and work (Herrera 2004, 2012; Lausent-Herrera 2007), sexuality (Lévy 2005; Piscitelli 2005; Lévy and Lieber 2009, 2010) and motherhood (Madianou and Miller 2011). It often means prolonged separation from loved ones, parents, children or spouses. Migration transforms the organization of families, and the role each person must perform in these extended spaces between China and Mexico. As a result, gender relations and the structures that define them are also modified. During my research, the interaction between all these aspects—the economic, the personal and intimate, the family—was rendered increasingly clear. My work was based on the idea that there are actors who manage to create alternative forms of bonding with local spaces through their own ways of growth and survival. There are a variety of social and economic interactions in Chinese migration processes that constitute a social fabric that is constantly created or renewed. They entail several networks: the circulation of massive amounts of capital and commodities that are spurred by the state; the sending of small remittances that may have important implications for those that receive them as well as for those who send them; and very personal, intimate exchanges across space with the help of increasingly modernized means of communication, just to name a few of the exchanges that take place across the Pacific. These networks and the ways in which they intertwine are producing changes in the lives of the women who are the subjects of this book; they are transforming the spaces in which they move. Lastly, my encounter with Shei led me to acknowledge once again that migration is a process through which categorizations are transformed, erased or reinforced. Migrants working in networks of popular economy are constantly moving between different stages of marginalization—as women, as migrants and foreigners, as actors of popular, rather than hegemonic economies—where variables such as social class and gender are

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inescapable. Their experiences as economic agents and their strategies to overcome these stages of marginalization and the dynamics that take place “in-between” hence became my main focus.

1.6

The Places

This book starts from a local analysis to first understand the places where the principal actors are embedded and their experiences in them. Several markets in Mexico City and in China were approached from an ethnographic perspective. Their specificities are anchored on localities that somehow have been integrated into global networks. For instance, the market of Tepito, a pivotal space in my analysis, has been articulated through Chinese commerce and migration to the city of Yiwu, in China. These markets have specific characteristics that are dependent on their geographies and the social and economic dynamics in which they were constructed. In Mexico, the idea was to follow popular economy networks in different locations with Chinese presence. I mainly focused on Tepito because it is a hub for various forms of participation and plays a major role in the economic activities of the Chinese. In China, I also focus on one specific geographic location: Yiwu. This market in China also has global specificities and is characterized by its importance as a hub of international commerce. The two markets are relevant because they link Mexico and China through small-scale wholesale transactions that take place through the work of migrants. Although bound to territorial delimitations, these markets are constantly crisscrossed by local and global networks that produce continuous changes, depending on the actors that participate in them. Especially in Tepito, I met with two quite different realities. First was the knowledge of constant social and political struggle in which Tepiteñes13 are enmeshed on a daily basis. These struggles have different manifestations:

13 I use “Tepiteñes” (with an “e”) as the common label for people who live or grew up in Tepito to avoid a/o repetitions or gendered distinctions. Needless to say, Tepito and the networks of popular economy, as well as Mexico’s entire social organization, are full of gender distinctions and uneven power relations. The use of “Tepiteñes” is not intended to gloss over these differences, but to state that indeed they exist and are found within the dualistic heteronormal discourse that we often reproduce. I do the same with other Spanish words charged with gender distinctions, such as agremiades (literally meaning unionized, and, in the context of Tepiteñes, used to refer to a member of a specific vendors’ organization)or fayuqueres (referring to the men and women who made their living through fayuca networks, bringing commodities into Mexico through the US-Mexico border).

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usually discursive, often confrontational, sometimes violent. I was able to participate in some of these struggles, mostly discursive, since I was closely observed and protected by the leader with whom I often worked, María Rosete, who made my insertion into the market of Tepito possible. I began to understand the need for space in the battle for survival and also in the battle for political growth. From her perspective, I could see another side of the arrival of the Chinese in Tepito, one that did not correspond with what Hearn saw through the eyes and perceptions of Victor Cisneros, another downtown Mexico City leader. Tepiteñes build their own opportunities. They struggle against the state, the government and policies designed to “put order” in this place. But they also engage in struggles against other vendors and leaders. Whether they accept or reject Chinese presence and participation in popular markets depends on their own experiences with them. Asia and Latin America have distinctive dynamics that must be analyzed from their own specific contexts as well. To understand Chinese migrants in Mexico, it is not only necessary to understand their experiences in Mexico and the ways in which they are adapting to their new conditions, it is also vital to examine their backgrounds in China, the contexts in which they grew and from which they emigrated, and the ways in which they still contribute to their homelands, even from afar.

1.7

Theoretical and Conceptual Framework

Throughout the book, I explain how Chinese women become actors in global markets. In doing so, I bring together studies of transnational formation, theories of globalization (particularly alternative processes of globalization) and gender studies. Shifts in systems of economic production and their impacts on social organization are particularly evident in the context of popular markets: first, because these are places where strategies of survival come face-to-face with significant capital flows and commercial development. And, second, because their social and economic interactions are so heterogeneous that they range from the most profitable to the most vulnerable. The dialectics between center and margin, on the other hand, were analyzed within what feminist geographers refer to as standpoint theory. In this sense, my intention is to elaborate a theoretical framework that uses an intersectional perspective to analyze localized, specific experiences of Chinese migrant women.

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My interest in analyzing the participation of Chinese women in Mexico was the result of a need to show from a feminist perspective the input of women in urban experiences and in economic processes; a concern for inequalities and the patterns in which they develop; and a profound desire to find a way to understand the power regimes through which these inequalities are formed. With respect to the analysis of power regimes, I was determined to bypass these power structures by deconstructing established set of binary productions of inequality, such as center/periphery, north/south and men/women. To accomplish these tasks, instead of starting with existing power structures, my analysis begins with the experiences of the people that are involved and transit within them, illustrating down-to-earth, day-to-day ways of living to eventually understand their particularity. Although such daily activities might not seem connected to the wider theoretical structure, this connection will eventually be made clear. I start from a transnational living perspective (Guarnizo 2003; Besserer and Nieto 2015) and the construction of transnational formations that arise from below (Portes 1997a; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Faist 2006; Smith 2001). These perspectives allowed me to look at different sets of survival strategies that take place between spaces. These strategies and the impacts their actors have on wider processes through their mobility are what I call alternative spaces of globalization. This is a concept built on Sassen’s discussion of alternative circuits of survival (2000, 2005, 2013) as adjacent processes of globalization, and Ribeiro’s discussion of alter-native globalizations (2006). These processes are alternatives to the hegemonic circuits of globalization, rather than merely adjacent to them as described by Sassen. They construct globalization in different ways and from different places. Talking about alternative spaces of globalization gives place to personal perceptions about the spaces where the subjects carry out their social interactions and through which they move. Localities are changed by the actors’ diverse interactions within them; these changes at the local level also have impacts at the global level. The basic research axes of my work are set on labor markets with a focus on gender inequalities; on the family, their dynamics and power operations, and their effects on the construction of subjectivity; and on the construction of alternative markets and alternative ways of doing commerce that build global connections. As will be seen throughout the book, Mexican markets such as Tepito, which have grown from very localized micro-social links to

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become places of globalization (Menéndez 2010), are strategic research sites (Sassen 2005) for the study of labor division and processes of gender segmentation. They are also places of gender re-enactments (Butler 1988, 2011), where subjectivity takes place. Throughout the book, I elucidate the ways in which gender, migration and global processes interact. For instance, how do individual economic transactions between Chinese and Mexican vendors in a Mexican popular market gradually result in the construction of global spaces? Migration here is core. It creates social dynamics that go beyond commonly delimitated structures, crisscrossing borders—geopolitical, social or those represented by the porous boundaries of institutional mechanisms, such as formal/informal markets. Migration connects the local dynamics of popular markets in Mexico to processes of global commodity production in China. The roles played by Chinese migrants working in Mexico are foremost. Although migration is the central element of the book, I seek not to describe the processes of mobility themselves, but rather to comprehend the experiences of the subjects that are affected by mobility and how they transform the localities in which they move and their dynamics. The theory on global cities was built on the idea of the construction of a space that is ruled by financial flows and that rather than being unbound to nation-states, is a construction between nation-states; global cities are spaces articulated by a set of dynamics that transcend national boundaries (Sassen 2001). However, too often these processes are considered relevant when referring to hegemonic circulation of commodities, information and capital—what Ribeiro (2006) calls hegemonic conceptualizations of globalization. By bringing her theory on global cities to the level of subjects, Sassen reflected on the construction of alternative circuits of survival . She considered the participation of a number of actors in global processes to have been undermined, especially when taking into account migration and the roles that migrants have on these great global networks (because how would stockbrokers be able to work if someone else—probably a migrant woman—wasn’t home taking care of their children?). Nevertheless, she did not consider these to be elements of the territorializations of globalization. Although Sassen considers that these invisible global actors integrate into already existing global dynamics, I argue instead that there are actors that construct new ways of articulations and create different territorializations of globalization (Ribeiro 2006); these actors construct alternative spaces of globalization. They continuously create a variety of social spaces across distance, spaces that they cross daily

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through interactions with their families back home and with their peers in Mexico: through remittances, through voice messages and photo sharing of their children, whom they have seen grow on their screens, through commercial alliances with Mexicans and trades that take place in China. They create anchorage to their localities (of residence, of origin and of commercial transactions) while building circuits through their movements (of ideas and information, of emotions, of economic transactions and remittances, of commercial deals). Because of the marginal economies in which they move, their connectivities and their impacts might seem insignificant at the global level, but during the course of the book I will prove the opposite and tie together their micro-social processes to mesolevels of articulation and henceforth to global linkages. Considering these popular commercial networks between Mexico and China as spatial units with global references (Sassen 2003a, b), I will show how the actors are positioned as bonds or bridges between different fragmented places of globalization. In this sense, places that have often been considered marginal—such as popular markets—are also links in what Sassen calls strategic places of globalization. Analyzing transnational lived experiences shows how people in the margins or people that organize “from below” also have ways of appropriating the city and of constructing new articulations of the city. Therefore, they also participate in the construction of the global city. The theoretical perspective of transnationalism acknowledges the existence of different dimensions that transcend boundaries (Besserer 1999) and sheds light on how migrants carry out their lives in-between different places. In this sense, Chinese migrant women participate and transform social institutions, such as families, social networks of migration and commerce. This is a transnational phenomenon because it entails activities “of an economic, political, and cultural sort that require the involvement of participants on a regular basis as a major part of their occupation” (Portes 1997a: 16). Transnational social spaces are domains of cross-border social relations (Faist 2006); however, these transnational networks link not only families and individuals through these exchanges, but also territories and nations. They are social fabrics that traverse and that are crossed over by their actors (Pries 2013). For instance, places like Tepito cross borders and go beyond their delimitations through the experiences and social networks of the people that work in them. The insertion of Chinese women into migration and into the economic networks of Mexican commerce has had further impacts on perceptions of space. It has

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allowed social, economic and cultural practices to expand across distance, producing new transnational articulations between Mexico and China. Portes rightfully warned of the conceptual conflict that could result from considering all immigrants who maintain strong bonds with both home and settlement countries as transnational entrepreneurs or as transmigrants (Glick Schiller et al. 1992, 1995), a concept that he rejects, arguing that it adds nothing new to what is already known. In this book, likewise parting from methodological nationalisms (Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Portes 1997b), I argue that actors who are not necessarily as economically influential as transnational entrepreneurs still participate in transnational connections in their own ways. These include immigrants who have inserted themselves in the same economic activities of transnational entrepreneurs, and who have, through their activities and their roles as connectors or intermediaries, created bridges between transnational activities, local dynamics and global contexts. Globalization from below14 and transnationalism from below are two forms of analysis that have tried to understand the power of those that are not visibly empowered. They stem from the idea that those in the margin(s) also have an important role to play in forging new economic bonds. Through these perspectives, I seek to understand the participation of women as actors in a new global era that is transforming the world system. Last but not least, in the transnational conceptualization that I use throughout this book I recognize the existence and interaction of two different constructions: first, transnational social fields (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004), which take as units of analysis the individuals and their ways of interaction—a personal networks perspective—and, second, transnational social spaces (Pries and Seeliger 2012; Faist 2006; Dahinden 2010) which focus on the construction of wider social spaces constituted by networks of networks—a whole networks perspective. These are both determined by the individual’s capitals (Bourdieu 1979). Two different typologies of actors of transnational articulation are considered: migrants who perform constant transpacific travels and create different types of bridges between localities through their interactions with locals; and people that stay behind and maintain ties with those who migrate. 14 In this book, I talk about alternative processes of globalization or alternative spaces of globalization. I do so in accordance with Ribeiro’s conceptualization and to avoid a dualistic construction between center/periphery, north/south by not conceptualizing the processes I look at as the “counterpart” to hegemonic globalization.

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In talking about the articulation between fields and spaces, individuals and structures, Bourdieu’s work is helpful. The different kinds of capital of each individual are significant in the structuring of the diversity of fields through which they move. This is not because of the predetermination of actors to the roles and dispositions of their habitus (Bourdieu 1979) but because of the roles that individuals—agents—play in structures and how they transform them (Mahmood 2001). There is a latent complexity that comes between actors and structures in these spaces. Within urban constructions, there are different articulations between global connections and personal, lived experiences. Harvey argues that the right to the city should be extended beyond political and economic elites, and that there should be a disposition of the masses to the right to the city and thus of the construction of the cities (Harvey 2005: 16). In this sense, the “city” as a spatial unit of analysis will be paramount but must be analyzed through both local and global references. Social spaces are determined by several factors and entail two distinct dynamics: they are constantly transformed by the social relations and power structures that develop within them; and they bring transformations to those same social relations and power structures. Social spaces are not necessarily linked to a territorial delimitation but to the interactions among actors and the dynamics that take place in them. In marginal urban spaces, unexpected interactions often produce spaces of opportunities. An example is the brief business transaction between a Mexican vendor who sells bags in retail and a Chinese wholesaler who furnishes these bags in Tepito. The Mexican vendor knows the market in Mexico, the Chinese knows that of China. They share their knowledge, a trip to China and a business transaction, slowly creating a commercial network that today has transformed Mexico’s popular economy. These are different from interactions and activities that intentionally connect— such as the creation of transnational micro-enterprises, or networks of transnational commerce. Contrary to what Portes asserts about the irrelevance of these weaker ties created by migrants, I argue that these brief or ephemeral interactions are also important components of transnational articulations and global dynamics. Finally, gender and processes of empowerment are of high relevance in my work. Braidotti claims that the “transformations of the system of economic production are also altering traditional social and symbolic structures” (Braidotti 1994:2). These transformations are the result of a

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global redistribution of labor. In this book, I follow Marta Lamas’ definition of gender as a concept that alludes to a cultural process that assigns a hierarchical order to social places, identities and canons of behavior depending on the symbolization that is made out of sexual differentiation. In this sense, gender refers to a set of beliefs, practices and cultural mandates that establish a symbolic division between what is considered to be proper to men (masculine) and what is considered to be proper to women (feminine) (2014: 11). Although I will often refer to the vulnerabilities that the women in question have faced or continue to face, my intention throughout this book is not to show these women as victims but as actors. By finding themselves in these situations of vulnerability and finding ways to overcome them, they gain agency. Like Butler, I start with the consideration that gender is performative and that there is a duality of performativity: individuals are both acted upon and acting, they are vulnerable to and affected by discourses that are not necessarily chosen. There is a deliberate exposure of power within the construction of these discourses and of symbolic and social constructions, but this also produces resistances of a kind (Butler 2015). Because family organization plays such an important role in my analysis, taking in consideration this duality of performativity is essential to understanding the transformations that the migration of women and their incorporation into popular economic networks in Mexico has brought on their own self-perceptions and on the places that they occupy in their families.

1.8

Outline of the Study

This text is structured into three parts. Part I, “Locating the Chinese in Mexican Popular Markets,” allows the reader to become familiar with the research subject, the localities where the research took place and their dynamics. Part II, “Her Stories of Migration, Building Spaces of Opportunities,” focuses specifically on the Chinese women who work in Mexico City’s popular markets. This part is largely ethnographical, and the purpose of these chapters is to understand the heterogeneity of women who work in these markets and the trajectories that they had to go through to arrive there. Both chapters deal with inequality and processes of agency from different angles. Their purpose is to look at the creation of new spaces that are constructed through migration as strategies for survival. Part III, “Migration and Commodity Chains, Drafting Alternative Spaces of Globalization,” brings together the experiences of

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the women who migrated and the transformations that their participation in local economies—such as popular markets—entailed. Here, I analyze the various social spaces through which the women move, as well as the links that they build through their interactions, both in specific localities and across distances. The objective in this part is to show how the local and the global are intertwined and how local transformations also affect global movements. Each section of the book is developed around one or two core cases. These focus the discussion and are complemented by extracts from other interviews, experiences and reflections. More specifically, in Chapter 2, I analyze the rise and organization of popular markets in Mexico City. I examine the growing politicization of these markets’ populations to demand better conditions and their constant struggles for spaces of survival and of growth. Tepito in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico (historical center) is portrayed through the narratives of specific actors: the leader of a street vendors’ organization, a vendor who ventured as a “Marco Polo” (traveling to China to discover new merchandise to trade in the market) and a person who grew up in the barrio in which the Tepito market is located. In this chapter, I analyze how people of lower socioeconomic strata have made trade and popular markets a way to earn a living and a way of life. To do this, I analyze the intersection of several variables of differentiation that result in forms of inequality: namely gender, class and origin. Again, the objective is to show the dual reality of popular marketplaces as spaces of opportunities, since the Mexican popular economy has been both a source of growth for people in the margins and a space of struggle with highly conflictive political, social and economic dynamics. In Chapter 3, I analyze the growth of Yiwu, China’s international market city, in the province of Zhejiang. I intertwine the dynamics of this economy to the arrival of Chinese migrants to Mexico City in the last three decades and their incorporation into popular markets. I take a look at the two major economic and political events that played a decisive role in the process that I analyze: first, the economic reform in China in 1979; second, the introduction of NAFTA15 in 1994. In this chapter, I analyze localized experiences of articulation between China and Mexico, particularly those created through the arrival of Chinese people and commodities in networks of popular consumption in Mexico. Their insertion as vendors 15 The North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico.

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and importers of commodities “Made in China” produced a substantial boost in commercial activity in places like Tepito. In this chapter, the realities of Mexicans in popular markets are interwoven with the arrival and incorporation of the Chinese, who often come from underprivileged backgrounds in search of opportunities—just like their Mexican counterparts. Chapter 4 focuses on different forms of structural oppression that Chinese women face before and after migration, and on the forms of resistance that they develop according to their own capabilities. To do so, I first discuss the context and development of Chinese society: the unequal access to education, labor and family inheritance that women and girls experience compared to men. These inequalities, China´s shifting society after Deng Xiaoping´s Reform in 1979 and the country´s integration into the WTO in 2001 deeply transformed migration patterns from China to the Americas. In Mexico, the feminization of these patterns and the growing diversity of the local origins of migrants are among the most important changes and are analyzed here. The reasons and the ways in which women enter migration vary from case to case: they are linked to their economic capacities, to the needs of their families, to their personal desires and their capabilities to fulfill them and to the localities in which they grew up and the experiences that they allowed their inhabitants. The stories of each of the women in this book are different, as are their forms of resistance. In this chapter, I use the narratives of the women I spoke with in Mexico and the body of academic research about the migration of Chinese women to understand the specific case of Mexico City’s popular markets. In Chapter 5, I analyze specific events in the experiences of the women interviewed in Mexico City’s popular markets to look at how the intersection among different factors of inequality impact these women´s lives after migration. Considering that Mexico is better known as a country of emigration rather than immigration, the chapter seeks to find the reasons why Mexico—and specifically the networks of popular economy that are so intrinsic to the country´s historical context of social inequality—has become such a strong node of contemporary Chinese migration patterns, particularly important for the migration of women. As expected, the results of this analysis show the creation of different networks among migrants as one of the most important factors for the growth of these patterns. Here, we start to see the first signs of articulation between migrants with substantial capital and access to opportunities and those

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who travel as a last resource. Mexican popular markets are the product of a very heterogeneous population, and the Chinese who work in them have inserted themselves in different layers of this social fabric. Chapter 6 focuses on the social and economic interactions that Chinese women build among themselves in Mexico City, with their families back home and with their Mexican co-vendors in Mexican popular markets. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the concepts of ‘globalization from below’ and the ‘global city’ and explain the usefulness of analyzing the production of alternative spaces of globalization. The analysis continues with specific experiences lived by the women in Mexico and the continuous struggles that they undergo daily to succeed in their quest for better opportunities for themselves and their families. I look at how limitations imposed by a social differentiation of gender may become a tool of resistance. I seek to show that these women become bonding agents and produce spaces that link different places, such as the market of Tepito in Mexico City and the city of Yiwu in China, the source of most Chinese commodities sold in Mexico. I do this first by looking at the construction of a hybrid conception of trade built between two different cultural notions of trust: comadrazgo and guanxi. I argue that these have been particularly important in the experiences of women in popular commerce. The chapter continues by showing how their modes of life are transnational because of their continuing economic and emotional participation in their homelands despite the distance. These women and their families are creating spaces of transnational interaction in different manners: through remittances and social participation, through motherhood at a distance and through the construction of transnational family enterprises that encompass entire processes of production, distribution and consumption. Finally, I consider how the localities where the Chinese have arrived in Mexico have changed as a result of the migrants’ incorporation into local dynamics. This has implied transformations in local ways of doing business, in local forms of consumption and even in the physical organization of the markets. By focusing on the everyday struggles of migrants and locals alike, by looking at their strategies to get ahead, I show how Mexican popular markets, starting with Tepito, are increasingly becoming spaces of opportunities in which alternative spaces of globalization arise. In the concluding chapter of the book, I show the need to look toward the local—to the individual—when talking about the global. I argue that without considering these micro-social processes in which individuals move and construct their own realities, our understanding of how

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globalization, global chains or global processes are constructed is incomplete. I connect local practices to global processes by examining the ways in which popular vendors (Chinese and Mexican), by striving for survival and by trying to overcome the positions in the margins to which they were relegated by hegemonic actors and institutions, have constructed bridges between China and Mexico, bridges which were then extended to other parts of the globe. The clear objective of the book is to give a place to women in the study of Chinese migrations and in the study of globalization. I conclude here that first, migration, and second, work within the popular economy, have been strategies of survival developed by Chinese women to overcome the vulnerabilities imposed by the inequalities to which they have been subjected. I show that Chinese women working in Mexican popular markets have become agents of change and connectors between different localities, and in this sense, they propel the creation of alternative spaces of globalisation.

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Bonacich, Edna. 1973. “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.” American Sociological Review, 38 (5). American Sociological Association: 583– 94. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094409?ref=search-gateway:95507583bd4b 254ffb36fcdac35a7299. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La Distinction. Minuit. https://doi.org/10.14361/978 3839413272-033. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects. Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: an Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, 40 (4). JSTOR: 519–31. Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies That Matter. Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2015. Vulnerabilidad y resistencia revisitadas. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6taXkozajec. Cervera, José Juan. 2007. La Gloria De La Raza, Los Chinos en Yucatán. Instituto de Cultura de Yucatán. Cinco, Mónica. 1999. Mas Allá De Las Fronteras: Los Chinos en La Ciudad De México. Bachelor’s thesis, Universidad Autónoma Metropolotana - Iztapalapa. Supervised by Raúl Nieto. Mexico DF. Curtis, James R. 1995. “Mexicali’s Chinatown.” Geographical Review. JSTOR: 335–48. Dahinden, Janine. 2010. “The Dynamics of Migrants’ Transnational Formations: Between Mobility and Locality” In Diaspora and Transnationalism, edited by Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist, 51–72. Amsterdam University Press. Faist, Thomas. 2006. “The Transnational Social Spaces of Migration.” Working Papers. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1992. “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 645 (1). Wiley Online Library: 1–24. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton. 1995. “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration.” Anthropological Quarterly, 68 (1). The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research: 48– 63. https://doi.org/10.2307/3317464?ref=nox-route:75396a97278f212488eb814e0a6f19fd. González, Fredy. 2017. Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics Among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico. University of California Press. Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo. 2003. “The Economics of Transnational Living.” International Migration Review, 37 (3). Wiley Online Library: 666–99. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herrera, Gioconda. 2004. “Elementos Para una Comprensión de las Familias Transnacionales Desde la Experiencia Migratoria del Sur del Ecuador.” In Migraciones: un Juego con Cartas Marcadas, 215–32.

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Herrera, Gioconda. 2012. “Género y Migración Internacional en la Experiencia Latinoamericana. De la Visibilización del Campo a una Presencia Selectiva.” Política y Sociedad, 49 (1): 35–46. https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_poso.2012. v49.n1.36518. Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. 2005. “On Coolies and Shopkeepers. The Chinese as Huagong (Laborers) and Huashang (Merchants) in Latin America/ Caribbean.” In Displacements and Diasporas, edited by Wanni Anderson and Robert Lee, 78–112. Rutgers University Press. Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. 2007. “Latin America in Asia-Pacific Perspective.” In Asian Diasporas New Formations, New Conceptions, edited by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Lok CD Siu, 29–62. Stanford University Press. Lamas, Marta. 2014. Cuerpo, Sexo Y Política. Editorial Océano de México, S.A. de C.V. Mexico, DF. Lausent-Herrera, Isabelle. 2007. “Paroles de FemmesDansl’ImmigrationChinoiseauPérou.” Diasporas, Histoire et Sociétés, 11: 37–56. Lee, Maggy, Anita Chan, Hannah Bradby, and Gill Green. 2002. “Chinese Migrant Women and Families in Britain.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 25 (6): 607–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(02)00339-4. Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2004. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.” International Migration Review, 38 (3). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.: 1002–39. https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x. Lévy, Florence. 2005. “Les Femmes du Nord, une Migration au ProfilAtypique.” Hommes & Migrations, 1254: 45–57. Lévy, Florence, and Marylène Lieber. 2009. “La Sexualité CommeRessourceMigratoire.” RevueFrançaise De Sociologie, 50 (4): 719–46. Lévy, Florence, and Marylène Lieber. 2010. “‘Le Faire Sans ‘enÊtre’, le DilemneIdentitaire des Prostituées Chinoises à Paris.” In Cachezce Travail Que Je Ne SauraiVoir. Ethnographies du Travail du Sexe, edited by Marylène Lieber, Janine Dahinden, and Hellen Hertz. Lausane-Antipodes. 61–81. Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. 2011. “Mobile Phone Parenting: Reconfiguring Relationships Between Filipina Mothers and Their Children in the Philippines.” New Media & Society, 13 (3): 457–70. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology, 16 (2). Wiley Online Library: 202–36. Mazumdar, Sucheta. 2003. “What Happened to the Women? Chinese and Indian Male Migration to the United States in Global Perspective.” Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology: 58–76. Mazumdar, Sucheta. 2007. “Localities of the Global: Asian Migrations Between Slavery and Citizenship.” International Review of Social History, 52 (1): 124– 33.

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Menéndez, Alicia, 2010. Teoría urbana postcolonial y de género: la ciudad global y su representación. Instituto Asturiano de la Mujer. KRK. McKeown, Adam. 1999. “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875–1943.” Journal of American Ethnic History, 18 (2): 73–110. https:// doi.org/10.2307/27502416. Müller, Frank. 2014. The Global City and Its Other. PhD Dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin. Supervised by Marianne Braig. Berlin. Piscitelli, Adriana. 2005. “Apresentação: Gênero No Mercado Do Sexo.” CadernosPagu, 25. Núcleo de Estudos de Gênero - Pagu/Unicamp: 7–23. https:// doi.org/10.1590/s0104- 83332005000200001. Portes, Alejandro. 1997a. “Globalization From Below: the Rise of Transnational Communities.” UK Economic and Social Research Council Transnational Communities Programme. http://books.google.de/books?id=hN-BXw AACAAJ&dq=intitle: Globalization + from + Below + The + Rise + of + Transnational + Communities&hl = &cd = 1& source = gbs_api. Portes, Alejandro. 1997b. “Immigration Theory for a New Century: Some Problems and Opportunities.” International Migration Review, 31 (4): 799–825. https://doi.org/10.2307/2547415. Portes, Alejandro, and Leif Jensen. 1989. “The Enclave and the Entrants: Patterns of Ethnic Enterprise in Miami Before and After Mariel.” American Sociological Review 54 (6): 929–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095716. Portes, Alejandro, and Leif Jensen. 1992. “Disproving the Enclave Hypothesis: Reply.” American Sociological Review, 57 (3). American Sociological Association: 418–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/2096246?ref=no-x-route:bdb7caf97 e0ffbace1362cdcb9651982. Portes, Alejandro, and Robert L. Bach. 1985. Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. University of California Press. Pries, Ludger. 2013. New Transnational Social Spaces: International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early Twenty-First Century. Routledge. Pries, Ludger, and Martin Seeliger. 2012. “Transnational Social Spaces. Between Methodological Nationalism and Cosmo-Globalism.” In Beyond Methodological Nationalism Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, edited by Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, and Nina Glick Schiller, 219–38. Routledge. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2006. “Economic Globalization From Below.” Etnográfica, 10 (2): 233–49. Ryan, Jan. 2002. “Chinese Women as Transnational Migrants: Gender and Class in Global Migration Narratives.” International Migration, 40 (2). Wiley Online Library: 93–116. Sanders, Jimy M., and Victor Nee. 1987. “Limits of Ethnic Solidarity in the Enclave Economy.” American Sociological Review, 52 (6): 745–73. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2095833.

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Sariego, Juan Luis. [1988] 2010. Enclaves y Minerales en el Norte de México: Historia Social de los Mineros de Cananea y Nueva Rosita 1900–1970. Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. Mexico DF. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Migration and the Feminization of Survival.” Journal of International Affairs, 53 (2, Spring). New York: 503–24. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City. Princeton University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2003a. “Localizando Ciudades en Circuitos Globales.” EURE (Santiago), 29 (88). Santiago de Chile: SciELO Chile: 5–27. Sassen, Saskia. 2003b. “The Feminization of Survival: Alternative Global Circuits.” VS Verlag FürSozialwissenschaften: 59–77. Sassen, Saskia. 2005. “Strategic Instantiations of Gendering: Global Cities and Survival Circuits.” Managing Urban Frontiers: Sustainability and Urban Growth in Developing Countries. ETH Zurich, CH. Ashgate, Farnham, UK, 294. Sassen, Saskia. 2013. “Strategic Instantiations of Gendering in the Global Economy: The Feminizing of Survival.” In East Asian Gender in Transition, edited by Joo-hyun Cho, 15–50. Daegu: Keimyung University Press. Schiavone Camacho, Julia María. 2009. “Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930s–1960s.” Pacific Historical Review, 78 (4): 545–77. https://doi.org/ 10.1525/phr.2009.78.4.545. Siu, Lok CD. 2001. “Diasporic Cultural Citizenship: Chineseness and Belonging in Central America and Panama.” Social Text, no. 19 (4, Winter): 7–28. Siu, Lok CD. 2005. “Queen of the Chinese Colony: Gender, Nation, and Belonging in Diaspora.” Anthropological Quarterly, 78 (3). George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research: 511–42. Smith, Michael Peter. 2001. Transnational Urbanism. Locating Globalization. Wiley-Blackwell. Smith, Michael Peter, and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo. 1998. “The Locations of Transnationalism.” In Transnationalism From Below, edited by Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo: 3–34. Transaction Publishers. So, Alvin Y. 2007. “Globalization and the Transition From Neoliberal Capitalism to State Developmentalism in China.” International Review of Modern Sociology, 61–76. Song, Miri. 1995. “Between “the Front” and “the Back”: Chinese Women’s Work in Family Businesses.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 18 (3). London: 285–98. Zhou, Min, and John R. Logan. 1989. “Returns on Human Capital in Ethic Enclaves: New York City’s Chinatown.” American Sociological Review. JSTOR, 809–20.

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Zhou, Min, and Regina Nordquist. 1994. “Work and Its Place in the Lives of Immigrant Women: Garment Workers in New York City’s Chinatown.” Applied Behavioral Science Review, 2 (2): 187–211. https://doi.org/10. 1016/1068-8595(94)90013-2. Zhou, Yu. 1998. “Beyond Ethnic Enclaves: Location Strategies of Chinese Producer Service Firms in Los Angeles*.” Economic Geography, 74 (3). Wiley Online Library: 228–51. Zhou, Yu. 2000. “The Fall of ‘the Other Half of the Sky’? Chinese Immigrant Women in the New York Area.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (4): 445–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(00)00106-0.

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PART I

Locating the Chinese in Mexican Popular Markets

“¡Paso! ¡Paso! ¡Abre paso güerita, ahí te voy!” (“Get out of my way honey! Coming through!”) The young man was yelling from behind, pushing a cart too small for its cargo of cardboard boxes marked with Chinese pictograms and tied together with a string that seemed about to burst. The heavy load didn’t slow the diablero 1 but rather seemed to push him to go faster through the people, the carts and the stands that had since early morning filled the free space of the streets of Tepito. In this market, you learn to dodge both the shoppers and the diableros; you either move, or you get shoved or run over. Moving too slowly or wandering about is undesirable. Outsiders may be targets of pickpocketing, armed robbery or verbal or physical sexual assault. There are policemen standing in pairs every couple of blocks on the outskirts of Tepito, but as I was often told by those who live and work in this neighborhood, they are “just for show.” The safety of the streets actually depends on the leaders that control them and on the vendors themselves, who see to the welfare of their clients. But it also comes down to an ability to blend in and to know where to go and where not to go—just as it does elsewhere in the city. I always tried to move quickly and smoothly, always pretending I knew where I was and where I was going; most of the time, this was not true, 1 Diablero is the name used to refer to the men pushing the carts or dollies known as “diablos” or “diablitos” because of the resemblance of their handlebars to two horns (from which the diableros hold and push the cart).

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the streets and the paths of Tepito are too tumultuous, too covert, to know where you are when you have never been there before. The sounds and the sights of markets like this one, moreover, make the mind wonder. I often found myself in musical battles. Standing in one spot I could hear everything from reggaeton to Mexican classics, to electronic music, to banda music, to the top 100 pop songs of the month—a constant battle between Taylor Swift, Daddy Yankee, Vicente Fernandez and La Arrolladora Banda el Limón. Meanwhile, it was hard to know where to look. On each side of the streets, the stalls are full of colorful merchandise: clothes, toys, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays, electronics, beauty products and wigs, kitchenware, hairbrushes, watches, shoes, food and drinks, just to begin with. On the walls, lampposts and other surfaces, all kinds of advertisements, graffiti, political messages or propaganda, commercial offers, job offers (and services offered) and notices about self-help meetings. On some streets, the sky peaks through the colourful tarps that protect both vendors and customers from rain and sun. Others are a sea of tarps, the air moist and heavy. I was moving fast, but not as fast as the young man pushing the cart behind me wanted me to go. The faster he delivered his cargo, the faster he could make another run and the more he would earn that day. Diableros are paid per trip; the more time they spend on their runs the fewer trips they can make and the less they can earn. Plus, once the carts are in motion—an already difficult task because of the weight of their load—stopping is not an ideal option. I moved out of the way and continued toward Plaza Charly, one of the many plazas near Tepito where Chinese vendors have established their shops in the last decade. The Chinese have become a common sight on these tumultuous commercial streets. Both vendors and shoppers are now accustomed to a presence that as recently as ten years ago was not only rare, but also almost unthinkable. Today, “ir a la plaza de los chinitos ” (“going to the plaza de los chinitos ”) is synonym for going shopping for cheap products. The arrival of Chinese vendors has not only been visible in markets like Tepito, the biggest street market in Mexico, but also throughout the intricate networks of popular markets in Mexico City and beyond. Chinese participation in Mexico’s popular economy networks has been fundamental to the development of trading that is no longer local, but global. In addition to their presence as vendors and entrepreneurs, the Chinese are also present in these streets through the ubiquitous “Made in China” commodities. Most of the products that diableros —like the one

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pushing me to get out of the way—move day to day from warehouses to shops are imported from China, often by Chinese families. The arrival of these foreign vendors has been a complicated process that has met both approval and disapproval from the people that live and work in places like Tepito. Looking at the boom in Chinese commodities within the commercial networks of popular markets enables us to understand why the Chinese have been so eager to venture into this particular branch of the popular economy. But this process can also be understood the other way around. The arrival of the Chinese in these networks made possible the boom in Chinese commodities for lower-income Mexicans. In fact, the markets of Tepito and of Yiwu in China´s Zhejiang Province have grown together and the participation of migrants in this process of growth was crucial. The presence of Chinese vendors and Chinese trade affects Mexican vendors and consumers in multiple ways. Today new forms of interaction take place in a trans-Pacific social space that combine Mexican and Chinese ways of living, producing, consuming and doing business. Popular economy is made out of rhizomatic interstices where different political claims and struggles for survival take place. These are the result of processes of economic appropriation and of construction of opportunities “from below” in Mexico as well as in China. It is in these interactions that we see the first traces of the production of spaces of globalization from the local; the first bridges constructed through the efforts of individuals trying to stay afloat; the first hints of global processes constructed “from below”—alternative spaces of globalization.

Bibliography Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 2007. The Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell.

CHAPTER 2

The Organization and Characteristics of Street Markets and “Popular” Economy

Located within the limits of Delegación Cuauhtémoc and still part of Mexico City’s historical center, for decades Tepito has been the main distribution center for low- and medium-quality commodities destined for low-income consumers throughout the city and the rest of Mexico. Tepito is a node of the country’s popular markets. These markets first thrived because of fayuca networks: large quantities of low-cost consumer goods purchased in the United States and brought to Mexico as ant-commerce (because of the way ants carry heavy loads)—in small quantities over time—or smuggled in to be sold at high-profit margins without paying taxes. Large volumes of these commodities first came to Tepito and were then distributed elsewhere. The implementation of the NAFTA agreement in 1994 was a watershed for popular markets and their vendors, and put an end to the profitable fayuca networks that had flourished since the 1970s (Gauthier 2012; Aguiar 2013; Maerk 2010). Nowadays, most commodities sold in popular markets in Mexico are procured from China. Although China is Mexico’s second-largest commercial partner after the United States (Hearn 2018), the commodity chains that move within these spaces are not part of these hegemonic flows of capital. Instead, they result from small-scale, commercial processes that link Mexico to China. These links are particularly strong among the localities of popular markets

© The Author(s) 2020 X. Alba Villalever, The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53344-1_2

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in Mexico and the Chinese vendors’ places of origin and the commercial localities in China in which they do business. “Popular” economy is the emic term used to refer to commerce characterized by trade dynamics that operate in unofficially recognized parameters, referred to and analyzed as “informal” by many authors (Hart 1985; Soto 1987; Portes et al. 1989). In this text, I chose to refer to this economy by the emic term because it encompasses much wider social phenomena than just an economic transaction. The popular economy is still a porous space in which legal and illegal transactions take place and in which the role of the state is secondary to the self-governance practices of local representatives (also known as leaders), by which Mexican popular markets abide within determined power structures (Alba Vega 2012). These are spaces where a multiplicity of actors interact: among the most important groups are institutional political actors affiliated with various parties, street vendors and the popular leaders who mediate between the former and the latter. Each of these groups is highly heterogeneous, with its own needs and agendas to advance. Within these struggles, through their own means of political, social and economic appropriation, the interaction of these various actors reshapes the dynamics of these spaces. In recent years, the distribution of Chinese commodities has become a new source of income in Mexico, and hence a new source of contention. For Mexican popular vendors, the need for a market stall or other vending space is a battle for survival and for growth. While these battles sometimes involve negotiations with the local government to reach a mutually beneficial decision—for instance, permission to sell on certain streets in exchange for votes in the next election—on other occasions they end up as street fights against other organizations and their vendors. For Chinese men and women to integrate into this local economy, they had to be accepted by the existing popular organizations that control commerce and rule the streets. As will be seen throughout this book, the actual experiences of many Chinese vendors in downtown Mexico City significantly contradict local perceptions about their activities and the extent of their social and financial capital. The reality portrayed here differs from the one Hearn describes in his analysis of the Chinese in Tepito (2018). This difference is anchored on the interaction that specific local actors have with the Chinese: while the Mexican vendors and leaders with whom I spoke have deep commercial relationships with them, those interviewed by Hearn reject these commercial ties. These contradictions

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are based on long-standing misconceptions and xenophobia. To understand them, the social fabric of these markets and the gradual arrival of the Chinese must be examined. The interaction between the Mexicans who compose the networks of popular economy in Mexican street markets and the Chinese who have slowly integrated themselves into their dynamics reshapes the social spaces of these markets, transforming them into spaces of opportunities. These are created through a search for alternative means of economic survival by people deprived of regular access to basic consumer goods and decent living conditions. They result from the production of economic circuits that are not additional to hegemonic circuits, but alternatives that cross these hegemonic circuits multiple times. I will explain this through an analysis of Mexico City’s popular markets, particularly Tepito and how the Chinese have entered its dynamics. In this context, the interaction of Mexican and Chinese vendors in Mexican popular markets has resulted in the construction of alternative commercial routes that intersect Mexican and Chinese commercial strategies “from below.” This chapter traces the construction of street markets as spaces of opportunities sought after not only by local populations, but also increasingly by migrants. It analyzes these markets in their urban context to understand their dynamics and the role they play in the expansion of global networks. I first look at Tepito and the need for self-governance mechanisms in its territory. Then, from the actors’ perspectives, I analyze how the market has grown and what that means in terms of opportunities and limitations, depending on their various capitals. These opportunities are created by the actors themselves, first through fayuca networks and then through new business transactions with China. The last section of this chapter focuses on the construction of these new bridges through commerce—bridges that would not have been possible without the arrival of Chinese vendors.

2.1 Popular Markets: From Spaces of Struggle to Spaces of Opportunities Mexico City is an urban agglomerate of around twenty million inhabitants.1 For decades it has ranked among the topmost populous cities 1 Officially, Mexico City was known as the Federal District at the time of this research and until 2016. According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI), the population of the Federal District was 8,985,339 inhabitants in 2015 (https://www. inegi.org.mx/app/areasgeograficas/?ag=09). Mexico City Metropolitan Area, however,

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in the world. No wonder then, that in a city of this magnitude, wealth distribution has become so unequal and economic disparity between populations has grown wider. By the second half of the twentieth century, the city’s population had increased exponentially as a result of massive abandonment of the countryside. Moreover, the shift in the Mexican economic model and the 1982 economic crisis resulted in a lack of jobs that pushed a growing portion of the city’s inhabitants to seek their own ways of economic survival. Migration and integration into the networks of the popular economy have become common survival strategies (Alba Vega 2012). For a long time, the popular economy and migration have been inextricably linked. Many of Mexico City’s poorest residents arrived from other parts of the Republic; lacking other options, street commerce was often their only way to stay afloat. Later, human mobility became part of this commerce: at first because commodities were brought in from the United States by vendors themselves; and later because of the arrival of the Chinese and the networks that they built with Mexican vendors. Chinese men and women arrived at popular markets willing to build a new commercial network between Mexico and China from scratch. They started to work hand in hand with a local population of traders eager to find new commercial networks and partners who could supply their clients’ demands after the decline of the fayuca networks. This commerce, however, is often vilified, reprimanded and stigmatized. First, because it does not happen within the strict rules of the hegemonic economic structure and, therefore, is often thought of by political and economic elites as a practice that should be excised—or at the very least remain outside their own urban spaces, which they usually consider to be the “centre.” The dual construction of center and periphery is charged with symbolic meanings that continue to widen the gap between those who already have access to goods, services and capital, and those who do not. Moreover, the origin of these new migrant vendors has led to additional discrimination. The fact that the Chinese have entered Mexico City’s networks of popular economy has not been generally accepted; this itself has become a source of struggle for migrants.

which incorporates the conurbation around Mexico City, reached up to 21 million 581 in 2018, according to a report published by the UN in 2014 (https://www.un.org/en/ events/citiesday/assets/pdf/the_worlds_cities_in_2018_data_booklet.pdf).

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There is evidently a need to understand the power relations constructed between populations and among localities with various economic levels and origins. The level of development and the access to goods, services, employment and capital are first and foremost a result and continuous reproduction of systemic symbolic differentiations (Reygadas 2015) and of the structures that result from these constructions. Following a Foucauldian interpretation in which “(…) in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations” (Foucault 1982: 780), I argue that the need of people at the margins to surpass these inequalities results in the construction of spaces of opportunities. 2.1.1

Defining Spaces of Opportunities

Mexico City has one of the highest number of inhabitants living in urban marginal zones (Davis 2006; Besserer and Nieto 2015) with a high rate of poverty. Each has been segregated from what too often is referred to as the “centre,” considered the hegemonic space around which the people residing in these marginal zones orbit. There are specific locations in the city where the forms of resistance mentioned by Foucault take place; the locations relevant to my research are known as colonias populares , where the stronger networks of popular economy and commerce are found. These are often marginal zones—slums—and may be the result of a deteriorating or decaying inner city, or located on the outskirts of the city (Davis 2004: 11). Mexico City’s popular markets are set up in specific places. Populations that have emerged from very heterogeneous conditions (mostly marginalized) participate in them. Davis (2006) categorized slums as “classic”—found in the center of the city–or “new”—located on the outskirts of the city. The colonias where I conducted my research belong to Davis’s “classic” categorization. Most of them border middle- or high-class residential areas that were developed after older, impoverished neighborhoods were gentrified. For inhabitants of the colonias populares , this is manifested in a constant reminder of the unequal conditions and segregation to which they are subject. In this sense, these places become spaces of struggle; they are the borderlines that the model of neoliberal globalization has shaped between populations with unequal economic capacities (Fraser 2003).

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But within these spaces of struggle, new strategies of economic and political appropriation take place, giving way to spaces of opportunities mediated by new ways of self-governance, where people learn to rely on themselves instead of the state. Here, finally, we understand the policemen standing at the street corners of Tepito—referred to in the introduction— as if their mere presence was already a symbol of security. The fact that their presence is “just for show,” as many of the Mexican vendors told me with a mixture of humor and disdain, indicates an attempt by the state to retain control over a divergent territory. In reality, security in these spaces is taken care of by the people themselves; however, several problems arise: first, there are constant struggles between the people of Tepito—as well as in other barrios populares —and the state, which is deeply embedded within the power structure of Tepito, but incapable of restraining it. Second, security is taken care of by the people themselves and through street leaders who wish to retain their vendors. Nevertheless, that does not mean that conflicts between the various organizations that rule the streets of markets like Tepito are easily mediated, controlled or resolved. Tepito is one of the most politicized and conflictive popular markets in Mexico because of its size, the amount of money that circulates within it, the battles for space and for commerce, and the presence and circulation of illegal commodities and transactions. I want to show the popular economy as a space of opportunities; however, that should not obscure the fact that these opportunities are self-created and emerge from very difficult conditions. Indeed, these opportunities are the result of decades of daily struggle in colonias populares . These markets and the activities that they allow become alternatives and strategies for people left without options. In a Bordieuan sense, there is a “structure of relative positions within which the actors and groups think, act and take positions. These relative positions are defined by the volume and structure of their capital” (Hilguers and Mangez 2014: 10). In Tepito, each actor’s capacity for growth is different. Sometimes greater social, political or financial capital result in better opportunities, but on other occasions it is all a matter of luck, timing and the actor’s capacity to interact with others—a capacity to “think, act and take positions.” In spite of the fact that Tepito’s population is extremely heterogeneous, it is also a space with very specific sociocultural attributes that give actors the tools to construct and apprehend feelings of belonging. Notwithstanding the obvious shortcomings of the barrio in which Oscar Lewis ([1961] 2001, 1966) embarked on an investigation that led him

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to elaborate the concept of a culture of poverty, both the place and its people enforce cultural and economic norms that represent opportunities to succeed. Lewis proposed that poverty be analyzed not in terms of individual marginalization but through a set of attributes shared by communities and families. It is, in his own terms, “[…] a specific conceptual model that describes in positive terms a subculture of Western society with its own structure and rationale, a way of life handed on from generation to generation along family lines.” (Lewis 1966: 19)

In his “conceptual model,” symbolic constructions of center-periphery again appear to play a fundamental role in social organization. In this model, actors are deprived of their agency. However, the “Sanchez” family, central to Lewis’s analysis and the core of his notion of a culture of poverty, is known by Tepiteñes as one of the richest families in the barrio today. By word of mouth, I came to hear that this family’s net worth— estimated in the millions of dollars—was earned through the commerce of fayuca that they brought from the United States to the market of Tepito. Families like this one have managed to find and construct spaces of opportunities that stem from profound economic struggles. Tepito—Mexico’s foremost popular market—is territorially delimited, but its borders are porous. They shrink and expand, depending on the time of the year. During the period that Mexicans refer to as GuadalupeReyes,2 for instance, the borders of Tepito expand by several blocks to accommodate shoppers at the busiest time of the year. Tepito is also a network of spaces: it has been constructed through the articulations and relations created between the people that live and/or work in it. Networks of popular economy are spread throughout the city, but they often extend beyond its territorial delimitations. Tepito, for instance, stretches as far as California through networks created by vendors who first participated in the fayuca trade between Mexico and the United States, establishing shops that are visibly connected to the barrio in Mexico City, such as shops that are called “Tepito,” but located far from the eponymous market (Alba Villalever 2013). In more recent years, Tepito has even 2 Guadalupe-Reyes is the period of time that starts with the festivity of La Virgen de Guadalupe on December 12, and ends with Día de Reyes, Three Kings’ Day, on January 6. This is the longest period of festivities in the Catholic calendar.

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expanded all the way to China, where vendors and businesspeople have established offices (Hernández 2010) that link both places directly. These offices exist to facilitate business transactions between Mexican popular vendors and Chinese manufacturers. As one of Tepito’s leaders told me, young Mexican vendors are even learning Chinese to go abroad and work in these offices. Through these networks, there is a constant articulation between local spaces and global mechanisms. This is an outcome that would have been more difficult to accomplish without the participation of Chinese migrants in the popular networks of Mexico City. In Tepito, people with various amounts of social, political and financial capital interact, sometimes through mutually unintelligible languages. The places in Mexico City where the popular economy has developed over decades are a mix of diverse groups that are separately organized but interconnected. Individuals, however, move among several fields—the structures referred to by Bourdieu (1979)—and occupy various positions within them. Through movement, these fields are woven together to form social spaces of popular economy in various localities. These spaces have their own set of characteristics and dynamics. They depend, for instance, on the economic capacities of their populations; on their specific land uses (housing, commercial or industrial); level of social development fostered by government public policies (road construction, public transportation, electricity, water and sewerage); and level of security. These characteristics may both represent and/or determine the social and financial capitals of their inhabitants, and hence, the strength and nature of the fields that determine their interactions (political, cultural or educational). Barrios populares and mercados populares are spaces that have been relegated by the city’s conceptions of development in almost every sense, although often they are located in the heart of the city—as is the case with Tepito, San Cosme, San Lázaro and other markets in the Centro Histórico such as Plaza de la Tecnología.3 These are also spaces that have missed out on the benefits of international tourism and of the benefits of being considered as spaces of leisure and recreational activities, which might 3 Plaza de la Tecnología is colloquially referred to as Plaza de la Computación both by vendors that work there and by customary clients. It lies along the main thoroughfare—Eje Central Lázaro Cárdenas—and is crossed by the streets Venustiano Carranza, República de Uruguay and República del Salvador in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico. As many other markets in the area (see Maps 1.1 and 1.2 in “Introduction”), this plaza carries stigmatizations of dealing with stolen goods, counterfeit and contraband, and of being a setting where robberies take place as well.

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have made a positive economic impact. Moreover, the collective imaginaries of an important part of the population have characterized these spaces as dangerous, decaying zones with high rates of crime. Popular markets such as these are not considered as ludic spaces and to a certain degree possess these negative characteristics. But most of all they are spaces where people search for the closest available means to make a living or have access to basic consumer goods. They have had to organize because of unequal access to opportunities offered by the state. 2.1.2

Popular Political Organizations

The dynamics of these markets surpass the logics of government institutions; however, in popular markets there are several regulations that maintain a certain level of “control” (Castro Nieto 1990) and make up a patchwork of self-governance mechanisms. In this sense, the Tepito market—the largest of its kind—functions as a control center for these self-governed networks that extend throughout the Mexican popular economy. Distinctive territories or localities where its laws are stronger constitute this economy and rule on top of formalized networks and state policies, although in several ways concomitant with them. Several organizations led by three distinctive political fronts4 (Alba Villalever 2013: 95–96) are the main components of social and political organization; they also act as labor unions and provide a sense of belonging to their members. Each has its own territorial delimitations, and each agremiade 5 (union member) must comply with a set of standardized elements of identification. For instance, as Stamm (2007) and Alba Villalever (2013) report in their ethnographic work in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico and the barrio of Tepito, each political front has a specific color tarp used to shade open-air vending spaces. The colorful tarps that make the streets of popular markets so unique are not without meaning; they reflect the vendor’s political affiliation. However, these delimitations face numerous constraints, namely, the availability of tarps of a particular color or the

4 Frente Metropolitano de Organizaciones Populares (FreMOP), led by María Rosete Sánchez; Asociación de Comerciantes Establecidos, Semifijos y Ambulantes del Barrio de Tepito A.C., led by Miguel Galán; and Confederación de Organizaciones de la Zona Económica de Tepito y el Distrito Federal A.C., led by Leonardo Yllescas. 5 Used with an “e” to avoid gendered references in Spanish.

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prevalence of tin roofs in several parts of the market, ultimately rendering the use of tarp color politically useless (Alba Villalever 2013). Moreover, every front has a specific affiliation to a Mexican political party, organizing popular economy into a corporative system (Stamm 2007). The fronts are supported by, and supporters of, their respective parties (Alba Vega 2012). Initially, this support was primarily based on the advantages vendors could obtain from political parties, rather than on their actual political concerns. Nevertheless, the politicization of people working within the popular economy has been growing.6 Their political exchanges rely on territorial expansion for the vendors’ organizations in exchange for their support at the ballot box. In this sense, clientelismo, or political patronage, has become common within the popular economy. Accordingly, Tepito is a set of territories divided by political affiliations that are highly identifiable. It operates through a vertical system of control that wants to appear to be otherwise. Certainly, if a political party fails to keep its promises to its vendor organization, it risks losing thousands of supporters and an important element of political leverage. Similarly, if vendor organization leaders fail to abide by agreements with their political parties, they risk losing their territories—which are in constant dispute between vendor organizations—or their political leverage. The balance achieved through these various political agreements is, in fact, unstable. There have been several government attempts to control these markets, mostly by relocating vendors to established Plazas. Three major relocations have occurred in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico, in 1957, 1993 and 2007. In each of these efforts, buildings were constructed or repurposed for street vendors to conduct business in, thus giving them a “permanent” workplace. This, however, also strengthened popular organizations, which were given the task of controlling street vending and gave leaders the role of “political intermediaries” (Stamm 2007). Particularly in the second relocation of street vendors to public squares in 1993, the assignment of individual stalls to several vendors within public squares allowed their independence from the vendors’ leaders, this independence was however temporary (Stamm 2007; Maerk 2010; Alba Villalever 2013).

6 To have a broader understanding of the intertwining between political institutions and informal organizations, see Stamm (2007: 3–7), Alba Vega (2012), Alba Villalever (2013: 48–56), Castro Nieto (1987, 1990), and Silva Londoño (2006, 2010).

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With time, more and more people that had been discarded from hegemonic economic activities started to organize themselves in Tepito. Among them were people cast aside because of physical conditions (disability or impairment due to age or medical conditions), education levels, ethnic origins (indigenous groups or foreigners)7 or family circumstances that affected their ability to work specific days or hours (single mothers with small children, elder-care responsibilities, etc.). Often, these groups made use of the categorizations imposed on them to create their own organizations, for instance, organizations of visually impaired vendors, senior vendors, or vendors that belong to specific indigenous groups. Such organizations provide additional security and stability to them as vendors in Tepito; they are thus assured a place to sell and greater support when confronted by other groups or even by the state. The regulation of popular markets such as Tepito transcends government institutions and social order hinges on popular organization. These markets are the most dynamic result of the decline of the welfare state and Keynesian model, accompanied by a neoliberal economic strategy that has left a major part of the Mexican population outside of institutionalized economic activities. The heightened development of the popular economy and informal networks was also an expression of the slumization of several parts of Mexico City and their populations (Davis 2004). The economic agency of these people and their need to find ways to survive however they can is what made this economy what it is today. Just like in Tepito, other popular markets are also organized by popular associations that are led by vendors themselves. Sometimes these organizations permanently transform public spaces into commercial spaces, as is the case with streets and sidewalks in Tepito and San Cosme or corridors linking public transport stations, such as the one where Shei—the woman selling spring rolls—was working.8 Sometimes public spaces are transformed temporarily, set up on specific days of the week or during specific

7 For instance, during interviews there was often talk about Latin American and Caribbean immigrants, particularly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Cuba. Central Americans were referred to as refugees. During their interviews, Maria and Laureano mentioned people coming from India, Haiti, Korea and China. Among the members of indigenous groups working as vendors in these spaces, the Mazahuas, from State of Mexico, were most prominent. 8 Shei was mentioned in the introduction to this book. Her case will be further discussed in Chapter 6.

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festivities, like the one set up by Gloria—a Chinese woman from Guangdong Province—for Chinese New Year in the old Mexico City Chinatown on Calle Dolores, or during Christmas and Día de Reyes. Vendors need permission to work in many of these semi-permanent commercial spaces. They also must pay daily or weekly fees that vary depending on the size of the stall, its location or the organization to which the vendor is affiliated (Stamm 2007) or face severe retaliation. In markets like Tepito, most stalls are permanent and vendors must “buy” them for a fixed price. They also must pay daily fees, depending on the products sold, location of the street, organization controlling the street and nature of the stall. The relation between leaders and agremiades entails the daily payment of fees in exchange for protection and the opportunity to work in the market. This transaction is not always transparent, yet is abided by all. These systems of organization are not always evident, but in most cases, foreigners conform to them with no questions asked. The presence of leaders in the market and the nature of the relationships that foreign vendors have with them was explained as follows by Yun, a Chinese woman, owner of a stall on the outskirts of Tepito: Yun: “si esta calle tiene líder, no sé si entonces ya [soy] como su miembro o no, pero respetamos a ellos y ellos nos cobran y pagamos. También ellos mantienen negocio, seguridad en el día, así, no sé si eso ya es participar o no (…) Todo respeto. Ellos también, si tú respetas ellos también te respetan… Yo pienso que en apariencia hay más cosas que tampoco entendemos, cosas más profundas, de cómo se organiza el grupo o no, casi no nos metemos con eso, nada más ellos cobran y luego nos saludamos en la calle y luego ya conocemos, así, como los mexicanos se saludan mutuamente (ríe)…” (“if this street has a leader, then I am not sure if that makes me a member or not, but we respect them, they charge us a fee and we pay. They have their own business to take care of, they look out for the safety of the streets during the day, that kind of thing. I’m not sure if that means that I participate in the organization. For me it’s just a matter of respect. With them, too: if you respect them they respect you… I think there must be more to it than what we understand, deeper issues, how the group is organized or not. But we hardly get involved in that. They just charge us and we pay, we greet each other on the streets, just like the Mexicans do (she laughs)…”)

The dynamics of specific localities of the city are intimately embedded in the practices and customs of the people that inhabit them as well as

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on their relation to the state and other institutions. As Yun’s experience shows, as strangers to these local dynamics, migrants have to blend in and follow the customs if they want to avoid trouble. By doing so, they incorporate elements from local populations into their own conceptualization of daily life. In this sense, how they experience the place in which they settle determines how they perform their economic activities and their social relations. Therefore, localities are conformed by a variety of spaces (Bourdieu 1997) and actors that give them their specific characteristics. The population of every locality, by interacting and developing as individuals and as groups, transform the city; they construct the city (Lefebvre [1974] 2007).

2.2 Tepito and Its Actors, an Intersectional Approach We need to consider class and power to understand the social dynamics that take place in colonias populares . Spaces are symbolically charged and give meaning to the people that move within them (Augé [1992] 2000), while at the same time it is the people and their interactions that construct these same spaces and their dynamics. The production of spaces of opportunities stems from constant daily struggles to overcome inequality. In this sense, the people that forge these spaces build alternatives for themselves. They are resistant and through their struggles they become constructors of the city. However, these struggles, inequalities and opportunities depend on the variables—or categories of differentiation—that characterize each actor, such as gender, class and origin. These categories and their impact on the actors’ interactions produce a variety of social dynamics that are structured by power relations. Talking about popular commerce implies a discussion of class; talking about class implies a discussion of work, as does talking about power. Moreover, each of these elements is affected by gender. To understand places like Tepito—popular markets—it is necessary to delve into the lives of those who have experienced these markets directly. To understand places like Tepito—popular markets—it is necessary to delve into the experiences of the people that have lived these markets in the flesh. Different levels of marginalization and inequality operate in Tepito. The realities of those who work in popular markets are determined by, and at the same time determine, family organization, gender roles, childhood, work and economic capacity.

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2.2.1

Learning the Game of Trade, Childhood and Adulthood in Tepito

In the barrio of Tepito, one of the most common sources of income is commerce. Tepiteñes learn how to trade during childhood. First, they learn the “game” while they tag along with their parents at their workplace, which can range from established shops, to semi-permanent stalls, small carts that constantly roam the market streets or simply miscellaneous items spread on a sidewalk.9 From childhood, Tepiteñes start earning their own money by selling whatever they can or by helping their parents with the business. Being Tepiteñe and working within popular markets is a way of life. Although the characteristics of these places have changed with each generation, certain cultural traits and models of social interaction still dictate people’s day-to-day experiences. The strategies that families carry out to survive in their constant struggles for access to a livelihood are one of these prevailing characteristics. Within family survival strategies, the role that children play is crucial. María Rosete, the leader of one of the market’s three fronts and one of the strongest leaders in Tepito, recalls: María: “Desde que tengo uso de razón [empecé a trabajar en el comercio]; desde los tres años. Desde los tres años yo ya andaba con mi mamá. Me acuerdo que me dejaba aquí en Jesús Carranza. Mi papá era el que hacía la limpieza del Cine Victoria, ya desapareció, es donde ahora está el DIF. Era el que hacía la limpieza de esos grandes cines, y hacía las tortas para venderlas. Y mi mamá vendía afuera, porque ya estaban separados. Mi mamá vendía cuentos y revistas afuera. Tres por un peso. Yo me quedaba ahí. Yo no recuerdo mucho de esa etapa, estaba muy chiquita, pero sí me acuerdo que ahí me dejaban, cuidando el puesto mientras ella no sé a dónde se iba. […] A mí, cada que se llevaban tres revistas me tenían que dar un peso […] Y ya ahí empecé, toda mi vida trabajé. Toda mi vida ayudando a mi mamá.” (“I started working in commerce since before I can remember, since I was three years old. When I was three I was already working with my mom. I remember that she used to leave me here on the street, on Jesús Carranza. My dad used to clean the “Cine Victoria” -it’s gone now, it’s

9 For a more extensive description of the different forms of street vending and their various implications, see Silva Londoño (2006: 28–34) and Alba Villalever (2013: 44–47).

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now a DIF.10 He used to clean it and he also made sandwiches to sell. My mom used to sell out on the streets; they were already separated at the time. She used to sell comics and magazines, three for a Peso. That’s where I would stay. I can’t remember much of that time because I was very young, but I remember that she would leave me there to look after the stall while she went elsewhere, who knows where. […] Every time someone took three magazines they had to give me a peso […] and that’s how I started. I worked my whole life. My whole life, helping my mom.”)

During her childhood in the 1960s, she would receive a coin for every three magazines that she sold, and from an early age understood the meaning of work. That was her introduction into the world of commerce, helping her mother who suffered from a disease that impaired her motor skills and relied on her three-year-old daughter—the eldest of what would eventually be nine children—to take care of the family business. María assumed the role that was expected of her: as the eldest she had to care for those who were younger and whoever was sick. Since her mother was ill, she had to take care of the family from a very early age, assuming the role of mother and provider. María never considered this a burden, but instead saw it as an addition to her life experience. In Wirth’s early conceptions of modernity and of the roles that urbanities—rather than cities—play in today’s social organizations, he argues that within urban centers, previous modes of life and of organization persist (1938). In this case, there is an overlap of common practices in Mexican rural areas and those of barrios populares : a child is an extra mouth to feed, but is also an extra pair of hands. The role that children play within family organizations and survival is foremost within barrios populares and popular commerce, as it is in the fields. Armando, the youngest son of five children, is today an important figure for many Tepiteñes . His father was originally from Tungareo, in Michoacán’s municipality of Marabatío, and his mother was from El Oro, a small village in the state of Mexico. When they arrived in Mexico City, they both became street vendors. Just like María, Armando was introduced into commerce and the popular economy at a very early age. He recalls his first earnings at the age of nine, when he started selling liquorfilled candy in small plastic bags. However difficult the entrance into

10 A DIF is a government institution for the integral development of the family (Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia in Spanish).

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commerce in Mexico City was for Armando’s parents, they gave him the opportunity to study, although they were illiterate themselves. Armando: “Mis padres se dedicaron al comercio. Mi padre fue una persona que no tuvo vicios, pero los dos eran analfabetas. Eso es casi un pecado. Y tuvieron que venirse abriendo paso muy duramente ¿no? Mi padre recogía jitomates en el mercado de La Merced, mi hermano mayor los lavaba, y hacía las salsas que se venden en las fondas. Unas latitas ahí que la gente pues de escasos recursos llevaba. Y ahí empezó mi papá con el comercio. […] Mi papá se abrió camino solo, se enseñó a hacer cuentas por una inercia de supervivencia, de que no le vieran la cara de what.11 Mi mamá pues no sabía, con trabajos yo le enseñé a mi mamá a leer y a escribir. […] O sea, no le dio chance de nada, no sabía nada. Hasta que nací yo, empecé a lo que yo sabía de la escuela, que es el legado más importante de mi vida, de que mis padres me dieran esa educación. […] Yo estudié derecho en la universidad. Y para mí ha sido la máxima fortuna y el legado… un tesoro que mis padres me hayan dejado estudiar.” (“My parents worked in commerce. My father was a person without any bad habits, but they were both illiterate. That’s almost a sin. So they had to make their way in very hard conditions, right? My father would pick up tomatoes in the market of La Merced, my big brother would wash them and they would make salsa that they sold in fondas 12 -those little jars of salsa that people who didn’t have much money would buy. That’s how my father started with commerce. […] My father made his own way; he taught himself to do accounts just to survive, to avoid being conned. My mom couldn’t read or write, I taught her what I knew. She had it tough. She didn’t have a chance to do anything; she didn’t know anything. Until I was born, and then I started teaching her what I was learning in school and for me that’s been the greatest thing, the most valuable legacy, the fact that my parents gave me an education. […] I studied law in the university. That’s been the greatest gift for me … a treasure, that my parents allowed me to have an education.”)

Although Armando was introduced into commerce as a child and spent his childhood in Tepito, his narrative—in contrast to that of María—was 11 “Ver la cara” is an expression in Spanish that in this context means “take advantage of someone”. “Para que no te vean la cara de what” is an expression used in Mexico that comes from an advertisement for an English-language school—a facial expression of utter confusion in response to the English language. Meanwhile, a voice off in the distance says, “Para que no te vean la cara de what?”—implying an urgent need for language classes. 12 Fondas are popular diners.

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never centered on commerce but rather on ways of living and experiencing the popular economy and barrios populares . This may be related to the fact that the brother closest in age to Armando was twelve years older, and six people were working to support the family when Armando was growing up. In contrast, Maria was the oldest and her parents were divorced. She worked in the market out of necessity, as a means for the entire family to survive. Her presence and her work ensured that her parents and her younger siblings could stay afloat. It is worth noting at this point that most Chinese women in Mexico City’s popular markets also consider their work as essential to the survival of their parents and children, as we will see later. Their families remain in China, but in contrast to their Mexican counterparts, most migrants from rural China rarely have siblings, meaning that the care and well-being of their elderly parents falls on their shoulders. The narratives of María and Armando show us the ways in which popular commerce is often the last and only alternative for many people. Many families like theirs came to the city for better opportunities. What they found was work on the streets, selling whatever was available. Need is a common denominator for people who work within the networks of popular economy, and here, we see different levels of need, traversed by multiple variables. First, migration from the countryside to the city, then entrance into popular commerce—both expressions of the need for work and the uneven distribution of wealth and resources. Within networks of popular economy, class and regional original intersect; given the social conditions in Mexico and the distribution of wealth and resources, race and ethnicity are also deeply embedded in these inequalities. Age and an individual’s position in the family structure also come into play. Finally, as we will see in the next section, so does gender. 2.2.2

Marriage and Comadrazgo

In Mexico, poverty and rural contexts are two factors that place women— already at a disadvantage even among higher social strata—in positions of inequality and vulnerability. Women constitute half of those who work in street markets (Sanchez Nava 2012). I concur with Gayle Rubin’s use of Marxist analysis in exploring the situation of women. Rubin refers to a sex/gender system that is part of the organization of (capitalist) societies; it complements, but is separate from economic systems. “Sex/gender system […] is a neutral term which refers to the domain and indicates

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that oppression is not inevitable in that domain, but is the product of the specific social relations which organize it” (Rubin 1975: 168). Women and their positions within the social structures of Mexico’s popular classes have very complex conditions that are expressed through cultural practices. I focus on the two social practices I find most relevant in the context of popular economy: marriage and comadrazgo. As we saw earlier, poverty sometimes causes children to assume roles meant for others, such as their parents. Marriage in these contexts represents a stepping stone toward growth and independence, a way for women to get out of the first household and build their own. At the end of twentieth century, marriage was still an important step toward independence for Mexican women in Tepito. Getting married and giving birth to a first child are transition processes that mark the entrance into adulthood (De Oliveira 1995). This, however, gets in the way of other aspects of their lives, such as education. María: “Tuve la oportunidad [de estudiar], pero mis necesidades fueron muchas. O sea, yo soy la mayor de nueve hermanos. La hice, mientras mi mamá estaba con su enfermedad, pues yo tuve que ayudarla, desde chiquita, desde los tres años yo andaba con ella ayudándole a todos. O sea, desde esa edad yo me hice responsable. Tuve obligaciones. […] en Tepito, como ahora, desde muy jovencitas pues ya agarramos nuestro camino. Yo a los 16 años ya me había casado, y yo ya no seguí mis estudios; porque mi mamá sí estaba dispuesta a… Yo estudié en bachilleres de Cien Metros, ya no terminé el sexto semestre, fue el único que me faltó, por eso no tengo mi acreditación. Pero […] al final no fue por falta de dinero sino ya por compromisos. Y pues me llevó el amor… Me llevó el amor y cambié todo con eso.” (“I had a chance to study, but I had other needs as well. I mean, I am the eldest of nine siblings. While my mom was sick I had to help her, I’ve been helping her with everything since I was three, taking care of everybody. At the age of three I already had responsibilities, I had obligations. […] In Tepito, just like it is now, we’re out on our own from the time we are very young. When I was 16, I was already married, so I couldn’t keep up with my studies. My mom was actually willing to let me study. I used to study at the “Bachilleres de Cien Metros”, but I couldn’t finish the sixth semester [12th grade], I just missed the last year of school and that’s why I don’t have my diploma. But it wasn’t because of a lack of money, but because I had other commitments… love swept me away… I was in love and I changed everything because of that.”)

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María never finished high school, despite her intent to study law,13 and she married when she was only sixteen years old. In her narrative, marriage equaled a source of independence for women, making her own way in the world. She considers this to be just as true today as it was when she was young. However, she made a distinction between her own experiences and that of her mother’s generation. According to María, the women in her mother’s family not only had to resort to marriage to get out of the house—they also married the first man that they could find. “Mi mamá no tenía nada, mi mamá desde los tres años fue huérfana de padre y madre. Crecieron con una tía, se tuvieron que salir de su casa muy jóvenes, y además, se salieron huyendo, y con la primera pareja que se les presentó, que les dio las posibilidades de tener un hogar ¿no? Muy difícil, porque a final de cuentas, todas sus hermanas de mi mamá terminaron separándose de sus maridos, de sus primeros maridos, y fueron buscando una pareja tras otra.” (“My mom didn’t have anything while growing up. She was an orphan since the age of three. They grew up with an aunt, but they had to leave at a very young age, and they had to run away. They ran away with the first partner that they found, the first partner that gave them the possibility to build a home. That was very difficult, because at the end of the day, my mom and all of her sisters ended up separating from their husbands, from their first husbands, and they ended up looking for one partner after the other.”)

Marriage is a practice that is deeply embedded in a structure defined by gender roles and the possibilities for women within family organizations. In María experience, marriage was considered a practice that launched women into adulthood. But it was also the only possibility they had to start building their own lives; being a single woman in rural or popular contexts was still unconceivable when María was young. Marriage becomes an escape from the first household (the parents’ household), an act of independence from the family. But often women are choosing marriage—instead of choosing a husband. As María explained, this was

13 Although María always regretted not studying for a career, she never saw it as a permanent obstacle. During one of our last visits, she told me with great pride and satisfaction that she had just started studying law through an open-university program at the UNAM. As of 2018, Maria Rosete is a local representative in Mexico City’s Cuauhtémoc District with the PES (Partido Encuentro Social).

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what happened to her mother and aunts. For them, marriage resulted in subordination and instability. The use of comadrazgo within the popular economy is another symbolic construction of social relations that stems from rural contexts. Through comadrazgo, women occupy an essential role within the organization of peddlers and other vendors. The extrapolation of comadrazgo as a social contract is deeply embedded in the social organization of lower-income populations in urban centers. These affiliations are often developed as strategies to climb the social ladder and seek a certain level of economic security, particularly in the case of christenings. The comadrazgo (or compadrazgo) relationship means that responsibility for raising a child would be transferred to the godparents in the event that their compadres or comadres—the parents—could no longer provide that care. As Neomi DeAnda points out, “comadrazgo and compadrazgo not only unite people who may not be kin by blood, but these relationships carry lifelong expectations of mutual responsibility, caring, nurturing, and representation within and across families” (DeAnda 2007: 31). Comadrazgos are a social contract, but within popular economy markets, they are also a way of protection. Comadrazgos within popular markets have been used as tools to strengthen social and economic ties, to seek stronger bonds between leaders and vendors. In this sense, comadrazgo is no longer centered on the future well-being of a particular child, but serves as a social contract between parents and godparents. Within the popular economy, it has primarily been a tool used among women, tying women leaders to their agremiades or affiliated vendors. Comadrazgos entail family and social structures as well as strategic relations; they are tightly linked to religious affiliations and family reproduction. This system reflects a source of empowerment and of respect for, and between, the women who hold these roles. However, it is also a system that often reproduces discourses about the role of women as “mothers,” “caregivers” or pillars of the household, thereby confining gender to a domestic sphere (although as will be seen in the following chapters, the borders between the “private” or “domestic” spheres and the “public” are at times also blurred). Through María’s narrative, we find one aspect of the submission of women and the construction and reproduction of power structures within the sociocultural system in which they are inscribed, where in order to become their true selves, a woman must marry. As explained by María, marriage is a “choice” (with emphasis on the quotation marks), but this

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“choice” is forced upon women in order to obtain legitimacy as individuals. In this case, as María frankly stated, divorce was a common practice resulting in marriage with the first available man, and a pattern of consecutive marriages developed. Consecutive marriages can also represent elements of a society intrinsically organized through a sex/gender system. In social spaces such as Tepito and other popular markets, we find elements of traditional reproduction of social structures and intrinsic unequal and oppressive systems to which women are subject, but there are also elements of women’s social and economic empowerment. In recent decades, these elements of empowerment have intersected with the arrival of Chinese vendors and commodities in the market. This development cannot be understood without first looking at the processes by which the Chinese arrived in Mexico and the networks that Chinese and Mexican vendors built between their two countries. 2.2.3

From Fayuca to Ethnic Intermediation

The development of Mexico City’s popular economy has had several stages and depended on various actors, starting with the state and popular organizations. Lately, the rapid increase in the numbers of Chinese merchants within its networks marks a new stage of this economy. This new stage is linked not only to neoliberal structures and, therefore, new state policies, but is also thoroughly anchored in the development of social relations and the bridging of weak ties (Granovetter 1973, 1983). This can be seen through the story of Laureano. Just as María does, he recalls participating in commerce for as long as he can remember. Laureano learned what he needed about commerce and informality on the streets. What he can do, he has learned from experience. He has constantly changed his line of business, depending on what he has seen flourish or fade away in the market of Tepito. Two characteristics are fundamental for survival in popular markets: adaptation and innovation. In other words: market flexibility. Once again, the lives and practices of people working at the margins are intrinsically linked to the neoliberal model according to which the country’s economy is regulated, even more so when these activities transcend national boundaries. Laureano, for instance, has had to innovate several times in his life: He traveled to the United States to participate in the fayuca networks during the 1980s; then in 1992, he went to China to discover new products that

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were still being adapted for mass production in a global market, making him a pioneer in this form of trade. Laureano: “[…] íbamos a Nuevo Laredo o a Los Angeles… [Yo llegué a ir] muchas veces. Me la pasaba de mojado, yo, cuando íbamos a Nuevo Laredo, de mojado… […] yo ya me quedaba allá, seis o siete meses, y mandaba la mercancía para acá. Era mucha gente la que llegaba a comprar allá, a Estados Unidos, yo me encargaba de los tráilers, de mandarlos pa’acá. O sea, yo recogía las mercancías de ellos y mandábamos los tráilers para acá. Ya ellos aquí [en Tepito] recogían su mercancía. Teníamos un punto a donde llegaba el tráiler, y pues ya, ellos descargaban sus mercancías, venían con sus nombres. Podía ser chamarras, blusas, boxers, ropa íntima de mujer, calceta, tenis, todo eso tenía que venir, grabadoras, estéreos… […] Ahora ya mucha gente se va a China…” (“We would go to Nuevo Laredo or Los Angeles. I got to go several times. I used to go as a “mojado”, a wetback, when we went to Nuevo Laredo. I was a wetback […] and I used to stay there for months at a time, six or seven months, and I used to send the merchandise back here. There were a lot of people that would go to the United States to buy goods. I was in charge of the trailers, getting them back here. I mean, I would pick up their merchandise and we’d send it back to Mexico. They would pick up their own stuff in Tepito. We had a delivery spot where they would come to pick it up, each cargo came with the purchasers’ names. It could be jackets, blouses, boxers, women’s underwear, socks, tennis shoes, all that had to come in, tape recorders and stereos […]. Now a lot of people are going to China…”)

It was 1984 and he was sixteen years old when he traveled to the United States for the first time. Although he had never been there before, Laureano claims that as soon as he arrived in the neighboring country, he instantly knew what he had to do and the way in which it had to be done. It was “a vendor’s instinct,” but it was also a matter of networks. When Laureano traveled to the United States for the first time, he wasn’t alone. Before he left he already knew where he was to go, where he was to sleep, how and with whom he was to do business. Eight years later, he traveled to China for the first time. As a vendor, he had journeyed from mojado—a person that crosses the border between Mexico and the United States without legal papers—to “Marco Polo”—a commercial broker between Chinese producers and Mexican vendors (Alba Villalever 2013;

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Maerk 2010). While fayuqueres constantly travel to the United States to purchase the latest merchandise and bring it back to Mexico by land (taxfree), Marco Polos travel to China and then await the shipment of goods to Mexico. This travel is done legally and has deeper capital implications. Vendors like Laureano, hence, have gone from carrying a double burden of informality to obtain their merchandises—as fayuquere and as mojade— to becoming symbols of commercial exuberance, Marco Polos, named for the pioneer traveler who developed much earlier trade links between Asia and “the West.” Laureano traveled to the United States through the networks and the know-how that surround Tepiteñes . When he traveled to China it was through the invitation of a Chinese vendor that he had met on the streets of Tepito. Laureano became one of the many Tepiteñes who traveled across the Pacific in search of new products to sell—even before economic and commercial networks were established between the two countries. María, Armando and Laureano were all born and raised in Tepito. The three of them had different backgrounds, opportunities and levels of education. However, all three grew up within commerce and developed within the popular economy. They neither know nor care about other ways of earning a living. At different moments in their lives, both men worked with María Rosete. Today one of Tepito’s emblematic figures, María represents one of the links of the chain that has been gradually tying Tepito to Yiwu and, consequently, Mexico to China. The alliance between María and her Chinese counterpart, An Lan, started around 2005; it began as a result of a brief interaction, which eventually led to a business association that now moves hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. María explains her decision to partner with An Lan the same way she explains everything: it was an opportunity to grow as a vendor and embark on new commercial paths. Since then, not only has she traveled to China on more than one occasion and developed her own “Rosete” brand of products Made in China, but she has also been working very closely with other Chinese vendors, of whom several have become her agremiades . This association thoroughly differs from Victor Cisneros’ conception of the Chinese in Tepito (Hearn 2018). Cisneros is one of the barrios ’ established vendor leaders, whose understanding of and relationship to the Chinese contradicts that of María. He sees them as “Chinese economic invaders”

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that will fuel the illicit trade in Tepito’s networks (Hearn 2018: 205). María’s experience and perception of the Chinese is very different; she has respect for the efforts of the foreign vendors and rightly concluded that their participation in Tepito’s networks would be beneficial to local vendors as well. It is unusual for anyone to wander into Tepito without looking for a particular trade—almost exclusively merchants and clients roam its street. This is also the case with the Chinese who have entered this space. And just as any other Tepiteñe, each began trading with whatever was at their disposal. In most cases, these elements were embedded in global patterns of consumption that have grown stronger with time and have started transforming the own dynamics of Tepiteñes . This was the case, for instance, with María and Laureano. Tepito’s market is structured by social organizations with which every street vendor must comply. María Rosete grew up in an economically precarious environment, started trading magazines as a child and grew up to become one of the most powerful leaders of Tepito, to which—at the time of our last conversation—around 5000 street vendors were agremiades (members) organized in 12 different organizations. Of her journey growing up in the barrio, she stated that María: “Tepito nos abrió las puertas y nos dio la visión para que nosotros pudiéramos sobresalir. [Es] un espacio donde las posibilidades son muy grandes. En todos los aspectos. Desde el que se quiere dedicar a ser una gente honesta, hasta el que es un gran delincuente.” (“Tepito opened its doors to us so that we could see how we could get ahead. It’s a place where the possibilities are enormous in every respect, from those who want to earn their living honestly to those who become major criminals.”)

Her words address important aspects of the mobility of the people that develop economic activities in this place. They imply a multiplicity of social spaces through which traders have the opportunity to move. People who grow up in precarious economic circumstances or find themselves in vulnerable situations can also find opportunities to stay afloat and sometimes even climb the socioeconomic ladder through their incorporation to the [labor] market. There are also individuals in Tepito with strong economic, political and educational capital. Frequently, these are people

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who have managed to excel because of their own abilities, their family’s support or simply because of fortuitous events. Education is a privilege that very few can enjoy. This was particularly evident in Armando’s narrative of the gift that his parents gave him when they made it possible for him to study, or in María’s determination to finish her education. In this sense, education represents a source of pride, often accompanied by admiration and appreciation for the parents who gave their children that opportunity. However, a higher level of education does not always represent an advantage in Tepito. Within the popular economy, acquired experiences in the praxis of the street and of commerce are fundamental, as is trust between the people and their leaders. To understand what the entrance of Chinese vendors and traders meant to Tepito, it was first necessary to understand the dynamics of the market and form a first impression of those who work within popular economy networks. María, Armando and Laureano are three individuals who directly experienced the arrival of the Chinese in Tepito, although María has played a more active role in their incorporation into the market. In the next section, I analyze the arrival of Chinese migrants and commodities, Tepito, still focusing on the perspective of various Mexican actors. Lastly, I discuss these new commercial and social networks as transnational social spaces.

2.3

Migration and Commerce in Tepito

Tepito lies in a borderland between formal and informal commerce and is one of the most recent economic enclaves where Chinese migrants have decided to venture. Among the Mexican elite, this market is unjustly known only as a place of counterfeit, contraband and trafficking. Although these characteristics are, in fact, present, they do not define Tepito, especially for Tepiteñes and those who know what to expect from Tepito, for whom it is a place of opportunities. As María Rosete stated: “Tepito es un espacio en donde las posibilidades son muy grandes.” It is a place where the opportunities are grand. Being Tepiteñe can be a source of pride for the people that work there. Tepiteñes like María, Armando and Laureano, constantly wish to reiterate that Tepito has a lot to offer to those with enough creativity to make something of it. Fayuca

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networks were one strategy for commercial growth, but today they have been replaced by trade in Chinese merchandise. Fayuca was for many Tepiteñes a “golden age,” a time of great affluence and commercial success. The fayuca trade started in the 1970s and consisted of micro-commercial networks of goods purchased in the United States and later brought to Mexico, smuggled in large quantities or in small cargos at a time—also known as ant-commerce. According to Laureano, although the trip to the United States represented a very important monetary investment for most Tepiteñes, it was generally worthwhile. Sales were substantial and vendors often managed to handle considerable amounts of money. They acted as both importers and traders, which expanded their profit margins. However, the arrival of NAFTA in January 1994 eliminated the benefits of bringing consumer goods from the United States to Mexico. Tepiteñes soon discovered that their prices could no longer compete with those of the big commercial chains. María recalls that the first Chinese people to set up business in Tepito arrived in the mid-1990s, around the time that the impact of NAFTA on low-income Mexicans was becoming apparent and business in popular markets declined. Fayuqueres were losing their entrepreneurial roles, supplanted by Marco Polos, often accompanied by Chinese businesswomen and men. The products they now bring to Tepito are brought directly from China. Laureano: “Más que nada, no es que se me haya ocurrido sino por necesidad, tienes que buscar algo… nosotros buscamos alguna salida para sacar un poquito más… y como se prestó la oportunidad de ir a China, y con poco dinero, y la cantidad de mercancía que traías, pues te pegabas con la gente que se iba para allá… Eso era lo que pasaba. Más que nada por la necesidad. No era porque quisiéramos ir a conocer, las casas o así, no, no, la necesidad…” (“It was mostly necessity that brought me to China; it wasn’t just something that occurred to me. You have to find something… we search for alternatives that give you a little extra… and the opportunity to go to China presented itself. With a little money and the amount of merchandise you can bring in, well, you just stick with the people who go there… That’s how it happened. Mostly because of necessity. It wasn’t that we wanted to visit, see their houses and so on; it was necessity…”)

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In this narration from Laureano, he explains that it was necessity that led him forth to find new ways of economic participation with China and with Chinese vendors. The people who are the subjects of this research—both Mexican and Chinese—often find themselves in situations of necessity. Economic survival is one of the main elements that impel their existence. Popular commerce represents a strategy of survival for Mexicans who have missed out on more stable or formal job opportunities; for Chinese people residing in Mexico, it has come to represent not only a strategy of survival but also a possibility of growth. Moreover, their insertion into migration and the economic networks of Mexican commerce has had further impacts on their perceptions of space, extending their social, economic and cultural practices across the Pacific Ocean, thereby producing new transnational articulations between Mexico and China. In no way has Laureano had a transnational life to the extent that he could be categorized and an actor of transnational articulation. But through the connections he has made and the networks in which he has traveled, we glimpse what would eventually become, through trade, a transnational social field. The fact that he did not travel to China on his own but was helped and guided by a Chinese businessman reveals the intertwining of social and commercial networks, which would strengthen with time. As clarified by Levitt and Glick Schiller, “The concept of social fields is a powerful tool for conceptualizing the potential array of social relations linking those who move and those who stay behind. It takes us beyond the direct experience of migration into domains of interaction where individuals who do not move themselves maintain social relations across borders through various forms of communication. Individuals who have such direct connections with migrants may connect with others who do not.” (2004: 1009)

At the time Laureano first traveled, there were very few Mexicans who traveled to China on their own for commerce, and even fewer Chinese worked in popular markets. But little by little their presence grew stronger and so did need to incorporate Chinese-Mexican commercial networks into popular markets, particularly with the entry of NAFTA and the demise of the fayuca trade. As Chinese export manufacturers began considering the Mexican market as an opportunity for growth, Mexico, along with other Latin American countries, gained visibility in China.

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Merchants like Laureano were invited to go to China by the few Chinese that were already established in Tepito. Often, they also handled the necessary paperwork and organization of the trip, arranging transportation, accommodations and translation services. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of 2000, more and more Mexican merchants from Tepito started making their first “business trips” to China. This had several beneficial results for Chinese merchants; on the one hand, their Mexican counterparts helped them to readjust their own purchases to better suit the Mexican market. On the other, they also established commercial ties with Mexicans, which usually guaranteed the sale of whatever they could import. This can be seen for instance in the case of An Lan, one of the first Chinese women to arrive in Mexico and work within the popular economy. Although she started sailing retail in Tepito in the 1990s, in 2014, when I conducted my field research, she was already importing around a thousand containers a year, which she distributed between steady clients, her own shops and irregular clients. Excellent commercial capabilities such as An Lan’s not only had impacts on the social and economic positions of the actors involved, but also implied new ties between the Mexicans and the Chinese, and, furthermore, a new way for Chinese migrants to insert themselves in the Mexican economy—even if they themselves were not importers. Many Chinese vendors in Tepito rely on already established import connections between China and Mexico. But the experiences of Chinese women in Tepito have been very heterogeneous, and their levels of economic and political engagement differ from one case to the next. Hence, their reasons for migration, although often intensified because of economic needs, have been quite different as well. The Chinese have also had to adapt to the cultural, social and commercial norms that reign in Mexican popular markets. They have not only had to become businesspeople, but also have had to adapt their ways of life and ways of doing business to Mexican customs and practices. Using Tepito as a starting point to understand the characteristics of the participation of the Chinese within the popular economy is relevant in two ways. First, although the Chinese have been participating in a variety of markets within the popular economy, and although I tried not to focus only on Tepito during my field research, this market is without a doubt the one where the Chinese presence has had the greatest impact. Second, and most importantly, because Tepito is not only a distribution center for commodities sold throughout the country, but also,

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as María expressed several times during our conversations, a “commercial laboratory,” in the sense that other established economies are afraid of innovation and have grown too comfortable with the profit-making commodities they currently trade. Thus, they wait for places like Tepito to develop new markets and try them out before they are swallowed by hegemonic markets. This is exactly what Victor Cisneros eventually concluded as he witnessed the strength with which the Chinese swept through Tepito; as Hearn reports, in 2014 Cisneros stopped fighting against the arrival of the Chinese, claiming “you can’t win, so it’s better not to try. And safer” (Hearn 2018: 187). Although Cisneros argued that his new perspective about the Chinese in the market was a matter of “safety, it was also a belated response to a potentially lucrative commercial network that popular vendors and leaders like María and Laureano had recognized early on. Ribeiro (2006) has also previously shed light on this articulation between alternative processes of globalization that must constantly innovate and the ways in which hegemonic markets often end up engulfing the markets themselves. He took as an example XiuShui Market, in Beijing, in which counterfeit and fake designer brands at accessible prices used to be found, but which ended up becoming a modern mall. As I have demonstrated in these last few pages, the popular economy is a place with a widely heterogeneous population that shares a lack of access to formal labor market networks and has created a very particular social fabric that can be both strong and fragile. Individuals of very diverse origins have actively participated in the economic networks of this space. However, no foreign presence has been as important or as visible as the Chinese. Armando: “[Los coreanos] introdujeron la mayoría de enseres como los relojes, las chamarras […] algún tipo de camisas… […] Y luego empezaron a llegar las familias de chinos. Y quiero que sepas que los primeros chinos se hicieron cargo de los baños públicos en Tepito y en el Centro Histórico. […] Independientemente de los cafés y todo eso, para abrir el abanico, […] empezaron a vender enseres que son conocidos, que se conocen en el barrio chino, […] Y empezaron a manejar la bisutería… […] Yo creo que en 1983, 1984 […] los chinos fueron trayendo mercancía que se reunían en los cafés cantoneses. Pero ya después se da un vuelco ¿no? Porque abren la economía, los mismos chinos desplazan a los coreanos…” (“It was the Koreans who introduced most of these commodities, watches, jackets, […] some shirts … […] and then Chinese families started

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to arrive. I want you to know that the first Chinese to work in Tepito and in the Centro Histórico were in charge of the public toilets. […] Apart from the cafés and all that, to increase their options, they started selling appliances that were already popular in Chinatown. […] They started selling costume jewelry… […] I think around 1983 or 1984 […] the Chinese started bringing in these goods that they were already selling in their Cantonese cafés. But then it gets all turned around, no? Because they open up this economy. And then the Chinese displace the Koreans…”)

Chinese migrants have often focused on specific economic fields overseas. In Mexico, during the middle of the twentieth century, the most prominent economic activities pursued by Chinese migrants mainly revolved around grocery shops, catering businesses (Hu-DeHart 2005), cafés de chinos (Chinese restaurants that sell both Chinese and Mexican specialities, coffee and pan dulce, sweet bread), restaurants and lavanderías (laundry facilities) (Cinco 2015). The restaurant business is one of the most common economic activities carried out by Chinese migrants around the globe, ranging from small, take-out places to elegant banquet facilities with “Chinese food” that would never be found in China because it has been adapted to local tastes. In Mexico, the small take-out cafés became known as cafés de chinos ; during the twentieth century, these places came to represent “the Chinese”14 in Mexican collective imaginaries (Cinco 2015). Grocery shops were especially prominent in rural areas that still lacked connectivity with other urban zones and where basic supplies were difficult to find. Although restaurants and lavanderías were also developed in these areas, they expanded more rapidly in the cities, supplying a basic service to an increasingly urbanized Mexican population. But in the last 20 years these activities that were common within traditional migration patterns have gradually been abandoned and supplanted by other economic activities more in tune with contemporary economic realities. As Armando stated, the Chinese have changed their economic activities to fulfill the needs they identified in the market. In recent decades, for instance, Chinese migrants have taken over businesses previously owned by Jews in Mexico’s Centro Histórico.15 They have done

14 Monica Cinco refers to these representations as “la sinidad.” 15 The same has been noted in other countries with recent and growing flows of Chinese

migrants, such as France, where many Chinese took over marroquineries and textile shops in Le Marais that for a long time had been owned by Jews (Alba Villalever 2011).

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this based on the premise that because of their cultural capabilities— such as language and know-how—as well as their networks with China, they can supply the same products already sold in the Centro Histórico but at cheaper prices. Little by little, Chinese participation expanded as more and more people moved into other commercial ventures. What they found in Tepito was a lack of basic consumer goods that were readily available in China, which led to the construction of a new commercial circuit that they could exploit. Meanwhile, Chinese women found greater opportunities to create new economic paths for themselves in Mexico City’s popular markets. This is evident in the case of An Lan, who was one of the first Chinese to innovate in her area of expertise and to integrate into the networks of Tepito. From then on, the presence of Chinese women and men in popular markets has gradually increased, for instance, in Tepito, San Lázaro, San Cosme, La Merced and Plaza de la Tecnología. The ways in which they participate in local economic dynamics depend on their opportunities or capabilities (Sen 2004) and capitals (Bourdieu 1997), both in China before migration and in Mexico. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the millennium, Koreans constituted another group that was also actively participating in commerce within Tepito, supported mostly by Miguel Galán, another powerful figure in and leader of a political front (Asociación de ComerciantesFijos y Semifijos de Tepito).16 As might be expected, foreign participation within commerce in Tepito is more constrained and evidently requires support from one of the various street vendor leaders. Moreover, independent vendors (not affiliated a vendor organization) are infrequent. Thorough fare sales permits are granted to the organizations that control peddling and not to the peddlers themselves (Maerk 2010), which makes it almost impossible for vendors to operate without prior agreement with these leaders. Hence, those that are “independent” from an organization cannot sell on the streets or in permanent or semipermanent stalls, but are required to have a stand within the plazas. Moreover, foreign vendors are deprived of the “right” to work on the streets, and are therefore forced to rent shops bordering the market’s main streets or located within assigned plazas, where daily rents are much higher. This represents a double adversity. First, a lack of organizational 16 Koreans, however, have often been linked to mafia networks in Tepito and other popular barrios in Mexico City. These networks range from counterfeit products to weapons sales and extortion of fellow citizens (La Redacción 2003; Sánchez 2003).

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affiliation would put them in dangerous situations; second, they would still have to pay an “affiliation” fee to the vendor organization in charge of the street or plaza where the shop was located—in addition to paying a rental fee for their shop. Affiliation guarantees support and protection in the event of conflict, either with other vendors, with institutional authorities or with clients; it gives them a certain level of security in the barrio as well, as Yun explained earlier. However, in recent years some vendor leaders have made greater allowances for the incorporation of Chinese vendors into economic activities on the streets. They live and work, however, in rather harsh conditions, as we saw in the case of Shei in the introduction to this book. Shei was one of the few Chinese vendors that I encountered who worked as a peddlers in the City, without the “stability” of having an established shop.17 Although working as a peddler was for a Chinese an adventitious activity because it implied a deep embeddedness into the networks of the popular economy, it also shows the deep necessities that vendors like her have encountered in their paths.

2.4

Conclusions

The popular economy has specific territorialities, but it also expands beyond their borders. Popular markets are one of the most recent spaces where Chinese migrants have ventured into economic activities in Mexico City; the migrant population has become an essential factor of the creation of new trade circuits. Through their interaction, they produce transnational social spaces built between Mexico and China. Within these transnational social spaces, there are territorially based practices (Smith and Guarnizo 1998) that have rendered this a space of opportunities— albeit one that imposes major difficulties as well. Before focusing directly on Chinese participation in these commercial spaces, it was necessary to explore Mexican social practices. The practices on which I focus are too localized and personal—too micro—to be considered catalysts of change from a whole networks perspective of transnational formations. However, these microsocial and economic practices are the first phase in the transformation and production of alternative spaces of opportunities. Linkages are created from 17 During my field research, I only encountered or even heard of two Chinese couples working as peddlers in Mexico City. The other couple worked in San Cosme in a onemeter square dismountable shop, just outside the entrance of Metro San Cosme.

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localized and personal experiences of Mexicans and Chinese, such as the commercial ties created among Marco Polos like Laureano and Chinese businesspeople; the cultural interpolations in the form of novel commodities imported by the Chinese, like the ones depicted by Armando; and the construction of transnational partnerships, such as that of María Rosete and An Lan. Within these networks, interactions occur among actors who differ with respect to social, as well as economic capital. Each actor’s level of insertion depends on the interactions that they are able to build. Through its networks, the popular economy is built as spaces of opportunities by and for people who lack access to hegemonic networks and have been forced to find or invent new ways of economic participation. In Mexico, the popular economy is a well-established survival strategy for a wide sector of the population left behind due to the government’s inability to provide employment, adequate wages and equal opportunities. Most people who work within the range of popular economy are or have been in positions of vulnerability. Nonetheless, these are networks that are also highly organized through hierarchies and power structures difficult to overthrow. The place a person holds within these structures primarily depends on economic capacity, although national, regional and even local belongings are also determinative. Gender, moreover, plays a distinctive role in this social organization, both in the social imaginary and embodied experiences. Mexican popular markets are made of a variety of social and material networks and interactions that interact with each other. For instance, global commodity chains (Gereffi and Martin 2010) that link both countries together have been constructed parallel to the influx of people from China to Tepito. In popular markets, Chinese commodities have gradually been replacing fayuca, which, particularly during the 1970s and the 1980s, had been one of the main sources of trade in the barrio. The emergence of Chinese vendors in the networks of Tepito and the dynamics of the broader popular economy were the beginning of a gradual process. The popular economy was born from the needs of a population deprived of other means of income, and grew to become a turbulent trading space, marginalized, politicized, structured by hierarchies and constantly transforming spaces of struggle and of opportunities. The networks of popular economy are in a way highly determined by the people that have constructed them, that feed them, that move through them. The incorporation of the Chinese into its dynamics is no different, but their steady increase has also depended on other factors, including the decline of the fayuca networks and burgeoning Chinese production and exportation capabilities.

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Websites Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI). https://www.inegi.org. mx/app/areasgeograficas/?ag=09. Hernández, Mónica. 2010. “Tepito abre una Oficina en China.” El Universal, January 10. http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/primera/34230.html. La Redacción. 2003. “Las Entrañas de la Mafia Coreana.” Proceso, January 4. http://hemeroteca.proceso.com.mx/?page_id=278958&a51dc2 6366d99bb5fa29cea4747565fec=188862&rl=wh. Sánchez, Raymundo. 2003. “La Mafia Coreana Controla ya la Venta de Armas.” Crónica, November 6. http://www.cronica.com.mx/notas/2003/ 93026.html.

CHAPTER 3

Building Alternative Commodity Chains Between Mexico and China

On a Monday morning I am walking through the streets of Tepito following Vianney, a Mexican woman in her twenties who has been working for María Rosete for several years. Our destination: Plaza Beijing—“la plaza de los chinitos ” as Vianney calls it and as it is known by the many Mexicans who frequently shop there. Not long ago, Plaza Beijing was still a vecindad 1 in decaying conditions but with a choice location and a few commercial tenants. Today the building entrances lead to a labyrinth of inner stalls whose names reflect a mixture of Mexico and China. Other stalls open directly onto the street, displaying all manner of plastic goods, from cups and saucers to children’s toys. But just a quick glance is enough to know that the overwhelming majority of items sold here come from Yiwu. Parallel to the growth of Tepito and the incorporation of the Chinese into the popular economy in Mexico City, a “market city” in China has also been developing. It is located in the city of Yiwu, in the province of Zhejiang, in eastern China. This is another market that thrives because of personal interactions and the need for economic survival, rather than 1 Vecindades are residential units; they were usually inhabited by lower-class families in Mexico City from the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Although some vecindades are still inhabited, most have been demolished to construct new buildings or are now used as warehouses.

© The Author(s) 2020 X. Alba Villalever, The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53344-1_3

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a market that was conceived “from above” as a lucrative investment. The city itself has a commercial tradition as long and complex as Tepito’s, yet profoundly different in regard to its relation to the state and hence to the image that people have of it. With little more than one million people, half of Yiwu’s population is constituted by migrants from other regions of China, drawn by the region’s growing economy (Guiheux 2011). Yiwu was institutionally accepted as a trading and market-oriented city in 1982, after a long history of back-and-forth disputes between the population’s growing commercial (and mostly informal) activities and the government’s rejection of these activities (Guiheux 2011). Yiwu has grown impressively in the last decade, both in population and GDP per capita, its main source of income being that of trade and taking place in what is known as “Yiwu International Commodity City” (义乌国际小商 品城 - pinyin: yiwu guoji xiaoshangpin cheng ).2 This market is intimately related to the experiences of migration and to the economic activities of the Chinese in Mexican popular markets, as well as of those of Mexican vendors working alongside them. Yiwu and Tepito are linked together in a variety of ways; their parallel development and the ways in which the dynamics of both places have merged have not been haphazard, yet it has been unexpected. It has been the result of the deep links and enmeshments created between the markets and migration processes, between the localities and the people that work in them, for instance through the creation of plazas such as Plaza Beijing. Through an ethnographic3 and bibliographic reconstruction of the dynamics of this market, I look at the different forms of connectivities that have been constructed with other countries through the people that work in it, and I show the growth of its networks and its positioning at the global level. I shed light on the links created between Yiwu and Mexico, through traders, through commodity chains and eventually through migrants.

2 Before the upheaval of this market in China, only one other place in the country was destined for international commerce between China and occidental countries: the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, which was opened in 1957 by Zhou Enlai (Guiheux 2011). http:// www.cantonfair.org.cn/en/index.asp?m=0. 3 I spent much less time in this market than in Tepito; therefore, I rely heavily on demographic research, in addition to personal observations, informal conversations and the published research of other authors to create a portrait of Yiwu.

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Yiwu: The Construction of the World’s Factory

As recently as forty years ago, Yiwu was only a rural village. Although it had an economy that revolved around agriculture, the limited resources provided by the region’s soil pushed its population to find additional activities to meet household needs, hence turning to commerce during the off-season (Guiheux 2011). According to Guiheux, colportage (peddlers continuously transporting their merchandise from door to door) in the region started as early as the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). At first, trading was limited to small items, such as candy or feathers. In the 1950s, the establishment of a state monopoly dissolved the organizational systems that had been developed by colporteurs and reduced the number of traders to a minimum. But in the 1960s, the need to resort to peddling again became imperative after the Great Leap Forward and the failure of monopolies to supply basic goods of consumption to rural populations led to famine. The government recognized the need for this activity, and from 1963 on, peddling became a tolerated—although still unauthorized—activity (Guiheux 2011). However, this kind of unauthorized commerce (which would perfectly fit the description of popular economy used in Mexico) gradually gained importance, and during the 1970s a large number of peddlers were mingling among authorized commerce and setting up improvised, clandestine stalls on the streets. Once again, the authorities revisited the incorporation of these peddlers into formalized networks (Guiheux 2011). Similar to Mexico, where the government repeatedly tried to put a stop to street-vending through the creation of public plazas where streetvendors were to be relocated (Alba Vega 2012; Maerk 2010; Stamm 2007: 5–7), China made several attempts to formalize the economic circuits already established by colporteurs (Guiheux 2011). However, the conditions of the Mexican and Chinese alternative economies were very different, as were the measures implemented by the respective governments. Contrary to the virtual ghettoization of popular markets in Mexico, China took the opposite approach: it sought to reap the benefits of an already established market by formalizing its activities. Henceforth, commerce in Yiwu was considered by the Chinese government as a legitimate economic activity; the previously clandestine market established by peddlers was authorized in 1980 and financial support was granted for

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the region to grow. Today, this city is home to one of the most important centers of production and wholesale markets of small-sized consumer goods destined for export, placing it therefore among the largest global financial circuits. In addition, the increasing global significance of this market has led to social, economic and political transformations. For instance, during the last thirty years Yiwu has transformed from a rural village to a city of more than one million inhabitants with a booming and growing participation in global networks (Guiheux 2011). During a short stay in China in October 2013, I had the opportunity to visit the city of Yiwu and its market and to briefly observe its dynamics. I wandered through the market together with two university colleagues and a young Chinese man whom we had contacted through the networks of An Lan, the Chinese businesswoman in Tepito who was associated with María Rosete. An Lan is one of the entrepreneurs who have constructed transnational businesses between Mexico and China and who has offices and shops on both sides of the Pacific. The businesswoman, who today runs an import emporium between Yiwu and Tepito, put us in contact with her secretary in Yiwu. She then gave us the name and phone number of Leonardo,4 a young Chinese man who had studied Spanish in Colombia and now worked in Yiwu. His job was to give trade-oriented tours to vendors from Latin America who wanted to buy novelty products and sell them back home, just like Tepiteñes did in Mexico. Leonardo’s job is a mix between translator, tour guide and accountant. He offers his clients assistance with customs and oversees the shipping of their products once they have left. In addition, Leonardo—originally from Guangzhou—has a family trading-company in his hometown that manufactures products for export. Like many other Chinese families, Leonardo’s family makes a living through commerce and small-scale production. Like many Mexican families that work within popular markets, Chinese families have found that they cannot rely on just one economic activity; therefore, people have to work in various forms of commerce in order to survive. Leonardo picked us up in our hotel and off we went to discover the market that furnishes the world. He had a few difficulties understanding that our purpose was not to buy merchandise but rather to visit the market in order to understand it. Although he is used to guiding tours in 4 As did many of the Chinese working in Mexican popular markets, Leonardo chose his own name to make it easier for his clients to remember and pronounce.

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Yiwu’s market, not knowing our line of business or even acknowledging that we had no desire to trade at all, confused him. After all, this market city revolves around commerce, and tourism here basically consists of the search for commercial affinities; visitors with other interests are seldom seen. Besides, Leonardo’s job is to make these transactions happen: he shows people the products that they are looking for, he translates whatever needs to be translated as they negotiate, and he takes care of the safe arrival of the products to whichever country they are destined. Contrary to Tepito, where most of the people on the streets and in the corridors and alleyways are nationals, in Yiwu, diversity is seen everywhere: vendors from across the globe comingle in the hallways of this market every day. In a sense, all of the parties involved in trading in Yiwu—including individuals such as Leonardo, who was there to facilitate transactions— were part of a process of globalization that started on a very small scale and gradually began to grow. What made Yiwu a global city was not the flow of capital, but the diversity of people, cultures and tastes. In this one place, people from all over Africa, the Middle East and Latin America—not to mention other parts of China and the rest of Asia—all came together for the same purpose: supplying, with their own means, access to a market that would otherwise be unavailable for a large part of the world’s population. Without the participation of vendors that range from peddlers and colporteurs —selling piece by piece and craft by craft with the help of a small cart or a bamboo stick balancing a basket on each side—to wholesalers and import emporiums such as An Lan’s, the growth of the region where Yiwu is located and the expanding connectivities between different places, such as Yiwu and Tepito, would not have been possible. These localities are what they are because of the very small-scale links that individuals have gradually been building. 3.1.1

Yiwu, in a Plastic Nutshell

We had arrived in Yiwu that same day from Shanghai, in just three hours via the new railway connection.5 According to An Lan, traveling from Shanghai to the market city would have taken a whole day by bus and taxi 5 A new bullet train that travels up to 300 km/hour was completed by the end of 2014 (after our visit), shortening this trip by half. Before the completion of these two newer high-speed railways and of the airport that was renovated in 2009, the travel to Yiwu used to be much more complicated.

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just a couple of years back. But the growth of the region’s economy and its establishment as one of China’s main hubs of international commerce and as what can today be considered the world’s largest wholesale center for small-commodities has put the city and its municipal region (Jinhua) in the center of development policies set forth by the Chinese government. Yiwu International Commodity City actually consists of 5 different buildings, all linked by a never-ending corridor that goes through every building in consecutive order (Building nº 1 is connected to Building nº 2, which is connected to Building nº 3, and so on and so forth). Every building specializes in different commodities. Toys, fantasy and imitation jewelry, paper and plastic products and some basic electronics are found in the first building; bags, backpacks and textiles in the second; the third and fourth buildings consist mainly of textile industries; and the fifth building specializes on imported products, particularly African art crafts. In the whole market, more than 70,000 stalls can be found. At around 3:20 p.m. that Saturday, we entered the market of Yiwu through the Eastern entrance directly into the main alleyway of Building nº 1, but through its backdoor. Spreading around us was an enormity of people and movement, lights, colors and toys. Flying about our heads you could find suspicious UFOs that came and went around the hall, almost touching people’s heads but not quite, flying low enough to make the hairs on the top of one’s head fly. On the floor, cars were racing. On the ground, ceiling and walls, dots of light of every color imaginable were projected by small black boxes with a beaming mechanism and were racing and chasing each other, as if they were bugs invading every surface. Kids were running around, trying to step on the lights and trying not to step on anything else; young people were looking up and following with their heads the swishing sounds of planes and other flying vessels as they came flying by. The adventitious feeling of being in a place where toys, colors and light come to life everyday was soon put to ease, as Leonardo told us that this was the last day of one of China’s most important holidays and, since we arrived barely one hour before closure, families were already gathering around to close their businesses, their children already out of childcare (a facility which can also be found on the 2nd level in Building 1). That is why children were running around with the toys, Leonardo explained: “las familias se están divirtiendo juntas antes de que acaben sus vacaciones y tengan que regresar a sus vidas normales ” (“Families are having

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fun together before their holidays are over and they have to go to their everyday lives”). As a Mexican researcher working within popular economy and having visited several different kinds of Mexican formal and informal markets, I couldn’t fail to notice both the resemblances and differences between them and this Chinese market. The size of the market, for starters, cannot be compared even to Tepito. Yet although Yiwu was rather crowded and packed with commodities from the floor to the ceiling, the uproar could not compare to the volume in Mexican markets, even considering the fact that it was the last Saturday of one of China’s most important festivities,6 which meant that families of the workers had gathered in the halls to spend time together. Yiwu’s halls, clean and somewhat spacious, differed from the streets where semi-permanent stalls have been set in Tepito, from the cramped corridors of the plazas where Mexican vendors have been relocated and from the removable stalls set up every day on the streets or in commercial corridors, such as the one where Shei works. Nevertheless, all these spaces shared striking similarities: the people and merchandise found within them. In the market stalls and alleys of the Yiwu market, I found all manner of products and several types of merchants. Those who worked inside the stalls were usually women. Men were more often in charge of transportation and packing the commodities that had been sold, hence they were constantly moving through the alleys—the Chinese version of the “diableros .” There were those who were outside the shops selling food (fruits or meat on a stick), water or refreshments, or anything else a worker or client might need after a long day in the market. These would be equivalent to Mexico’s peddlers, selling food or refreshments in small carts that they continuously push through the streets of the markets. A few older men were walking around, looking for the tired and unkempt, trying to shine shoes or even repair them, pointing to a visitor’s worn soles and then to the glue-sticks in their hands. Finally, there were those who would come up to you and then suddenly flash an iPhone that they were selling for 2500 RMB (360 dollars). Moreover, at almost every intersection between two halls in the market, clients can find a variety

6 October 1 is the celebration of the foundation of People’s Republic of China. The legal holiday lasts three days, whereas it is often prolonged to seven days; this is referred to as the “Golden week.”

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of companies specializing in worldwide shipping of the chosen commodities, DHL, UPS, etc. According to Leonardo, a company like DHL may charge 60 RMB to ship smaller amounts, such as a kilo, from Yiwu to Latin America. Larger quantities should be sent by containers, which usually leave from Ningbo; some go to Shanghai, but customs there are much higher. In this market, as within popular markets in Mexico, people did what they could with the means that they had. In Yiwu, as in Tepito, business was king. 3.1.2

From Yiwu to Tepito

While we walked through the alleys of the market, Leonardo explained that this is the foremost commodity market not only in China but also in the world. Most of the products here are destined for Africa, the Middle East or Latin America because of their quality and their price. The quality of the merchandise is not bad, but it is not the best either. According to Leonardo, vendors from Europe or the United States are more likely to purchase their products from smaller, more expensive Chinese markets that offer better quality. A couple of months later, while in Mexico, this same argument was expressed again by Rocío, a Chinese woman working in Mexico City’s Plaza de la Tecnología: Rocío: “The clients, they always ask ‘ Esto está hecho en China?’ (‘is this made in China?’) and when you tell them it is, they say it is not good quality. I tell them in China we have a wide range of qualities, we have very bad qualities but also very good ones, but if they want the cheapest stuff, they can’t expect the best quality. You get what you pay for. You can pay a decent price for very good quality. But they always want the best products at the same prices as the products with the lowest quality… That doesn’t make any sense.”

At first, today’s well-known products with the label “Made in China” started arriving to Tepito as low quality, extremely cheap products sold mostly by Korean, first, and then by Chinese businesspeople. In fact, the first products that were brought from China to Mexico were not “consumable” by Mexicans. María Rosete recalls: María: “[…] de ese detalle sí me acuerdo, que los primeros productos que llegaban chinos eran de muy baja calidad, feos, no tenían gusto… […] ¡Estaban horribles! Los colores [eran feos]. Estaba bien la mercancía, pero de

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muy mal gusto. […] Los mismos chinos empezaron a adaptar las mercancías al gusto mexicano.” (“I do remember that the first commodities that came from China were really low quality, they were ugly, tasteless… They were horrible! The colours were ugly. The products were okay, but tasteless. […] It was the Chinese who started adapting their products to Mexican taste.”)

Chinese commodities in Mexico had to go through a process of transformation to adapt to Mexican taste. This was similar to what Chinese migrants in the early twentieth century had to do in the restaurant business: learn to prepare food that locals would consume. In this case, the interaction of Chinese merchants with Mexican clients was essential to readapt Chinese manufacturing to fit Mexican tastes. This entailed excellent communication between merchants and consumers in Mexico and producers in China and is perfectly encompassed in the post-Fordist model of flexible specialization. At first, Chinese merchants would bring whatever was being produced in China to Mexico; later, they started producing whatever was actually being consumed in Mexico. Production was adapted to the needs of consumers through a transnational communication process that was encouraged by the Chinese in Mexico and their association with Mexican vendors and constant interaction with Mexican clients. In time, both popular demand and Chinese production changed and adapted to each other. This implied a revolution in the commercial dynamics between markets like Yiwu and Tepito. 3.1.3

A Global Locality

Thanks to the vendors who move within these economic circuits created between China and the countries where they now reside, Latin America is more and more present in the everyday dynamics of Yiwu (Fig. 3.1). For instance, Spanish is a language with growing presence, attracting people—like Leonardo—from other regions of China who have studied the language. Guiheux (2011) also noted an important migration of Muslim Chinese from throughout the country who migrated to Yiwu at the beginning of this millennium to make use of their fluent Arabic and become “guides” for Middle Easterners and North Africans looking for commodities in the ever-expanding market. Hence, within the market and its surroundings, finding signs and posters in multiple languages is not uncommon. There are also global products with local references,

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Fig. 3.1 “Am´erica Latina”, outside of the Yiwu market

for instance party hats and paper plates that say “¡Feliz cumpleaños!” or “Happy birthday!”, or Havaiana flip-flops in green and yellow to allude to their “true” Brazilian origin. Outside the market, signs in Arabic advertise nearby restaurants (inferred from the picture of shish-kebabs and grills). A variety of languages can also be heard throughout the hallways of the market. There is always a Chinese “guide” that accompanies each small group of “business-tourists,” which are normally parties of two to five. These “guides”—like Leonardo—are in charge of showing customers around the market and helping them make their purchases; they earn from three to five percent commission on the total amount that their “tourists’” purchase. Leonardo came to Yiwu market with a clear advantage. Not only did he speak Spanish, but having lived in Colombia for two years, he also was able to establish close relationships with several Colombian vendors who had an interest in traveling to China to discover

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Yiwu.7 He already had clients for his particular services when he began working in the market. Today, he has around seven regular clients from Colombia and Venezuela.8 As Leonardo was explaining how the market worked, I noticed an important distinction compared with the strategies of Tepiteñes such as María Rosete and Laureano, whose initial decision to go to China had in fact been proposed by the Chinese entrepreneurs with whom they had already established commercial relationships. Leonardo perceived the market as a locality in which people of diverse origins interacted; these people would later depart and take with them the commodities they had purchased. But the relations created between Tepito and Yiwu seemed to me to be different, stronger. When I later inquired about this issue with our guide, he confirmed my impression. From what he had seen while working in Yiwu in recent years, the quality of the relationship was different: Mexicans had stronger relationships with Chinese importers and entrepreneurs. I will unravel these relationships, the bases of their strength and the nature of their impact through an examination of the creation of the Yiwu market, the arrival of Chinese migrants in Mexico City’s popular markets, and the construction of commercial bonds between both localities.

3.2 Following the Production of a Hair Garment: The Role of Migrants in the Establishment of New Global Commodity Chains Guangdong, Fujian and more recently Zhejiang have grown to be the most important clusters of manufacturing of consumer goods in China (Shi and Ganne 2009). This responds to an industrialization process that focused on the coastal regions and specifically contributed toward the development of Special Economic Zones, which were the result of China’s new open-trade strategies, established in 1978. These provinces have rapidly adapted to China’s immersion in the world economy and the

7 Since the death of Chávez, Leonardo claims that business with Venezuela has strongly declined. He also said that at the time of our meeting in 2013, business in general in Yiwu was not as strong as it had been two years before. He considered that this had to do with the dollar’s decline in value during those two years. 8 Of these customers, only one is a woman.

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world market, and were destined to be both industrialization hubs and export-oriented venues. In the market of Yiwu, the commodities that are sold can come from all over the country, but most are manufactured in the same province of Zhejiang, where the market is located, by individuals and families who have migrated to Yiwu in search of work. Leonardo, an immigrant himself, effusively agreed with the presence of people from other regions in this city: Leonardo: “Sí claro, mucho, mucho, de todas las partes de China, acá hay de todas las partes de China. […] Más vienen de otras provincias que están cerca a Yiwu, por ejemplo Henan, Jiangxi, y Anhui, sí, más o menos esas tres provincias. […] Algunas personas rentan una tienda en el mercado para negociar allá. Algunas trabajan en la fábrica como obreros, también hay algunas personas que vienen a Yiwu y ellos venden los productos por la calle.” (“Yes, of course, there are lots of people coming from all parts of China, here you find people from all parts of China. […] Of course, there are more people coming from provinces close to Yiwu, for instance Henan, Jiangxi, Anhui, I think mostly from these three provinces. […] Some people rent a store in the market to do business there. Others work as laborers in factories. There are also people who come to Yiwu to sell their products on the streets.”)

Just like Tepito, Yiwu is a migration hub, where people who find themselves marginalized come in search of opportunities. Of course, economic capacities here are very diverse, and commerce takes place on a variety of levels, from owners of profitable, jewelry emporia to people who live day to day, investing in one glue-stick at a time, trying to make a profit from on-the-spot shoe repairs. Many of the stalls in the market are run by owners themselves who do not have the means to employ someone to work for them but have enough capital to pay for a stall. In other cases, the stalls are run by employees, who earned maximum salaries of 3000 Yuan (430 dollars) per month at the time of my visit; this was barely enough to live, let alone to save money and build up economic capital. Moreover, as I observed during our visit to the market, most people working in the shops were women. Just as in the case of Mexico, symbolic and social constructions of class and gender have a major impact on an individual’s prospects. Several months later, in an interview via Skype, Leonardo graciously added his

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own explanation for this phenomenon, based on his own construction of the role of women in Chinese society: Leonardo: “La mayoría [de las personas que trabajan en el mercado] son mujeres. […] No conozco las cifras, pero yo pienso que un 70 u 80 por ciento de las personas que trabajan en el mercado son mujeres… yo pienso. […] Porque en cultura en China, mujer no necesita ganar mucho dinero, ellas solamente tienen un trabajo, por ejemplo si trabajan 8 horas de la mañana a la tarde, y luego regresa a la casa ya está bien. La tarea de la mujer en China es cuidar a la familia. En China la cultura es diferente. Por eso, sí, ellas trabajan en la tienda pero con poco salario. Pero no tienen mucho trabajo allá, es más tranquilo y así. Pero hombre necesita ganar más dinero para mantener la familia. ¿Me entiende?” (“Most of the people working in the market are women. […] I don´t know the numbers, but I would say around 70 or 80 percent of the people working in the market are women… I think. […] That is because in Chinese culture, women don’t need to earn a lot of money, they just need a job to keep them busy. For instance, if they work 8 hours a day from the morning to the afternoon, and then they come back home, that’s all right, it’s enough. Women’s job in China is to take care of the family. In China we have different cultural values. That’s why, yes, they work in the stores, but with lower salaries. But they don’t have a lot to do, it’s quiet. Men, on the other hand, they need to earn more money to take care of the family. You know what I mean?”)

Moreover, small family businesses have started to develop as strategies of incorporation into the growing proficiency of the Chinese market. Nevertheless, the ability to create such a business also depends on the family’s economic prospects and levels of education. Guiheux (2011) and Shi and Ganne (2009) trace the growth of industrialization in Zhejiang since the 1970s. First as small rural enterprises or “‘black market’ family workshops” that had a workshop at the front and a shop behind (前厂后店) and that had very little financial support; according to these authors, the province of Zhejiang received the least amount of state support until the 1980s (2009: 241). State support became more important during this decade, and small enterprises were both financed and controlled by local governments (Guiheux 2011). These enterprises produced basic, small commodities of low quality, predominantly for consumption in rural markets in China. A decade later, most of these small enterprises had been privatized; since then, most households within

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smaller cities have developed some form of manufacturing (Guiheux 2011), transforming the region’s economy from agriculture into small, industry-based, family companies (Shi and Ganne 2009). Moreover, in this province, there is a special relationship between the manufacturing sector and the government. As Leonardo explained to me: Leonardo: “En Yiwu es muy especial, hay muchas fábricas pequeñas, el gobierno no le cobra nada de impuestos. El gobierno dice a la gente que sí tiene que pagar impuestos, pero en realidad el Gobierno de Yiwu no le cobra nada a las fábricas pequeñas. Ellos quieren proteger las fábricas, porque no tienen mucho dinero en el comienzo de establecimiento. Entonces la política ahí es diferente que en otras provincias. Por eso en esta provincia tienen mejor negocio que en otras provincias.” (“Yiwu is a very special place, there are a lot of small enterprises, the government doesn’t charge them any taxes. The government actually tells people that they do have to pay taxes, but in reality Yiwu’s government doesn’t charge anything to small enterprises. They want to protect them, because they don’t have a lot of money when they start their business. So, the local policies there are different than in the rest of the country. That’s why business is better in this province.”)

A peculiar characteristic of small-scale, family manufacturing is that each territory has specialized in specific kinds of production,9 in other words, “[…] one product per village and one sector per region” (Shi and Ganne 2009: 242). The industrial spectrum can range from machinery, electrical appliances and chemical fertilizers, to crafts, toys and decorations. The products on the first and second floors of the first building that we entered in the Yiwu market (particularly imitation or costume jewelry and hair garments) are primarily produced by these local, family micro-enterprises that have developed in recent decades. Despite the effectiveness of these manufacturing processes, as of 2009, the zone where Yiwu is situated was still the least developed in the Zhejiang cluster (Shi and Ganne 2009). Because of the rapid development of the city of Yiwu, many families have either moved to the city or have been swallowed by its growth. Keeping in mind that these small family enterprises were initially rural, families still needed to complete the 9 For a very detailed list of the products manufactured in each particular geographical distribution of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), see Shi and Ganne (2009: 242– 246).

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household’s income and many divided their labor power between manufacturing and trading. Therefore, many of the stalls within the market are run by the same families that produce the goods; in many cases, these families are employees of the trading companies that sell their products. Inside the market, stalls are run by family members or in charge of employees. A well-located stand in a middle corridor may cost around 80,000 US dollars (370,000 RMB) per year. But just like in Mexico’s plazas, some stalls cost more, for example, those that specialize in Yiwu’s most profitable business: fantasy jewelry. As previously noted, today the market is run by the municipal government, which has boosted the development of trading in the region overall, but especially in Yiwu. 3.2.1

Migration and Global Production

The growth of Yiwu has brought development to the province, and its population has been able to adapt to a certain degree to the change in economic objectives. However, growth has not been trouble-free. To achieve growth in these regions, the Chinese government allowed foreign investment to enter, which boosted the private sector and eventually led to the arrival of major transnational enterprises seeking to take advantage of low-budget, local micro-businesses, limiting salaries. For many, hence, migration is still the best strategy to remain afloat. The region of Zhejiang has historically been one of China’s most important regions of emigration. Along with Guangdong and Fujian, it constituted the most important centers of Chinese emigration during the twentieth century (Skeldon 1996). However, the city of Yiwu was not part of these important migratory processes until the 1990s. After 2001, with the entrance of China to the World Trade Organization, Yiwu became a destination for internal migration, clamoring every day for more manual labor to serve a growing global market. As its own market started developing and adjusting to China’s new commercial and economic dynamics in the wake of the economic opening in 1978, the population of Yiwu also started adapting to its growing globalization. Little by little new routes of emigration started opening up, integrating not only Yiwu, but also many other cities and regions of China that had not experienced significant emigration before. Simultaneously, new commercial circuits between China and the destinations of its emigrating population started to grow. Commodity production has progressively coupled with China’s new commercial relations with other countries, particularly western countries. The production

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methods of these families have become quite flexible and are now attuned to the growing liberalization of the Chinese economy. There is no retail at this stage of the trade. Items are sold in terms of dozens—at least 100 dozen of the same product are needed to make a sale in the market of Yiwu. According to Leonardo—who himself leads a family micro-enterprise of electronic appliances—the first step in production consists of understanding the market and finding products that will be well received by the buyers. Once a product is identified, the production system starts quite slowly, first making the frame of the product—normally made out of plastic—by the thousand. The selection of colors and designs, drawings and glitter are added later, normally by the same family enterprise, although on occasions extended families divide their work in a production system. In these cases, they constitute co-operative capital companies, or “collective enterprises” as they are called by local authorities (Shi and Ganne 2009: 249). In recent years, a transnational version of these co-operative capital companies has evolved, retaining family participation not only in the production process, but also in sales. This newer version extends between China and Mexico and has become particularly prevalent among the Chinese in Tepito. 3.2.2

Transnational Commercial Spaces: The Chinese in Tepito

In Mexico, a similar effect on production and commercialization systems can be noticed. To explain how these transnational commercial spaces that stretch between Mexico and China are constructed, I will briefly dwell on a specific case. An Lan, the Chinese businesswoman who now works side-by-side with María Rosete, was one of the first Chinese to start a business in Tepito. It was her assessment that the Mexican market lacked many products that were quite common in China; importing them would mean opening a new, potentially beneficial, trading circuit. Although she arrived in Mexico initially hoping to enter the medical profession—she was a doctor in China—An Lan rapidly understood the advantages that trading between China and Mexico would entail. In 1997, after many months of studying the Mexican market and its dynamics, the self-made businesswoman was importing her first container to Mexico and selling

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her products “from door to door” around Tepito; just like the colporteurs in Yiwu before the Chinese city was transformed. Of course, for An Lan to bring even one container to Mexico, she needed a very strong support network, both in Mexico and in China, and a very deep understanding of how market structures work. When she began importing, few Chinese were established in Tepito or in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico—except for the owners of cafés de chinos . They gradually became more visible in the first decade of the new millennium, especially in the second half of the decade. Of all the Chinese women with whom I spoke in Tepito, she was the only one who had arrived in Mexico before 2000. In contrast, most of the women who decided to establish a store in Tepito did so because they thought of it as an easy first-step: after all, Chinese merchants and entrepreneurs like An Lan had established a precedent. By the time most of these women arrived, Chinese vendors and products had already been a presence in Tepito for about twenty years. The market had already become dependent on them, making it easier for newcomers to establish their businesses there. Kernen and Vulliet, in a very well-constructed analysis of Chinese entrepreneurs participating in Mali and Senegal, link the new international migration processes and integration strategies of Chinese overseas with the growing fragility of the Chinese middle-class (Kernen and Vulliet 2008: 11). Some of those left behind by economic reforms have opted for international migration as an economic growth strategy. These authors state that their interlocutors (most of whom were men) told them that opening a small business in China required very high amounts of initial capital, whereas African countries made the process easier. In the case of many of my Chinese interlocutors in Mexico, I found similar complaints about the difficulties of increasing their capital in China, in contrast with their experiences in Mexico City, where it was easier to start a business. The regular price of renting a stall in the Yiwu market may be as much as 80,000 US dollars per year, whereas the costs of working within Mexican markets (depending on the level of “formality” of the stall) may go from less than a dollar a day to about 6500 US dollars a year in an established plaza10 ; therefore, the amount of capital investment needed is profoundly different. In this scenario, however, two things must be noted: first, however “easy” it may be for Chinese migrants

10 This was the case in Plaza Beijing in 2014.

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to set up a business in Tepito, where the boundaries between formal and informal economy are profoundly blurred, for Mexicans Tepito itself is a place where people develop their own strategies of survival. Most of the Chinese with whom I spoke, especially those who referred to how “easy” it was to do business in Mexico, managed to insert themselves as fundamental links in the current dynamics of Tepito. The relative ease that they found results from a combination of the social and economic features of Tepito, the commercial relationship that has developed between China and Mexico in recent decades, and the particular backgrounds of the Chinese installed in this space. Second, there is a difference in integration strategies and in the activities undertaken by Chinese migrants installed in Tepito that depends on their social positions and their roles in family organizations, as well as the period in which they arrived in Mexico. The growing presence of both Chinese vendors and Chinese products in Tepito come hand in hand. The fact that the Chinese decided to establish their trade network in Tepito is not a coincidence, nor is the fact that they had the impact that they did. Both the Chinese and the Mexican societies have had to adjust to structural economic changes that have frequently encouraged, a certain level of institutionalized informality. Both in China and in Mexico peddling has been highly reproduced as a means of survival by families marginalized from other economic activities. In Mexico, as in China, many now “formalized” markets were once market spaces created by particular social needs: the need to consume inexpensive products on the one hand and the need to earn a living by selling those products on the other. Yiwu has been developing as a market city since 2002 and since then has grown impressively. At the same time, Tepito has become familiar with the presence of the Chinese—as well as their commodities—and incorporated them into its everyday dynamics. What at first seemed unthinkable—associating with or working for Chinese migrants in Tepito—is now quite common for Tepiteñes. New commercial networks between businesspeople from China and from Tepito have been created and have sought to adapt as much as possible to Mexican demand. Today, in Yiwu there is a specific production for Latin America that is completely different from production destined for the Middle East or Africa. In fact, a service offers Tepito vendors—as well as vendors from other commercial spaces—personalized commodity production. For example, María Rosete developed her own brand-name called, not surprisingly, “Rosete”; An

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Lan created “Anne” and “Epox”,11 and her sister-in-law, who also works in Tepito, developed her own brand, “Yun,” named after her. For this innovating type of production, the presence of Chinese people and their exchange with Mexican vendors was also fundamental. Through different systems of articulation, diverse actors that move among different social and commercial spaces between both countries have been key for the development of this specific market destined for Mexico and Tepito. Many of the Chinese migrants who developed as vendors in Tepito not only sell products made in Yiwu, but also come from that city themselves, or from the province of Zhejiang. Many others lived in Yiwu before moving to Mexico, while others know it only as the place where the commodities they sell are manufactured. But what links them together is the search for opportunities. These spaces are built from struggle, and their struggles in situ have resulted from the discrimination they faced in the popular networks of Mexico.

3.3

Tepito’s “Plaza Beijing”: Migration, Commodities and Discrimination

The participation of the Chinese in Mexico’s popular markets has impacted the circulation of products “Made in China.” But commodity flows have dynamics of their own that affect the integration strategies that the migrants in question use in different social spaces. In this last section, I go deeper into translocal connectivities and reveal the ways in which the local and global intertwine and are continuously reshaped. Chinese migrants and their new dynamics of insertion into popular networks have transformed local spaces. Through relationships with other migrants and the local community, they have reshaped the dynamics of these localities, as I will explain through the case of Plaza Beijing. In Plaza Beijing, the majority of products sold are manufactured in Yiwu and imported directly to Tepito. However, very few of the vendors come from either Yiwu or Beijing. Most are originally from Guangdong and had some form of relationship with other Chinese migrants in Mexico before they arrived. There are no Mexican shop owners in Plaza Beijing; everyone there is employed by the Chinese. When I first entered the

11 This is a name that An Lan considered to be more “masculine,” which would appeal to a male population looking for electronic devices.

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plaza, it was as if I had been transported to another country, or some sort of Chinese-Mexican border city where elements of both countries intermingle. While vendors communicate in Chinese among themselves (most in Cantonese, although Mandarin is also used), their Mexican employees use Spanish. Nevertheless, exchanges between Mexicans and Chinese take place in a very simplified, rudimentary Spanish, whether between employees and employers or between clients and vendors. Plaza Beijing is a place specifically created as a response to the high presence of Asian vendors surrounding what used to be the vecindad and designed as a strategy to profit from their presence. In this sense, the creation of Plaza Beijing was the result of a twofold strategy of survival, on the one side the Chinese that came to Mexico to search for better life opportunities for themselves and for their families, and on the other side the Mexicans who adapted to the presence of the Chinese and incorporated their own assets and activities to this new situation. Between both places there are different ways of articulation that come into play, created through the interactions between various actors. Plaza Beijing is managed by a Mexican couple, but the stalls are run by Chinese men and women. Around 2008, David and Virginia, the Mexican couple that built and currently manage the Plaza, started noticing a massive inflow of Chinese who wanted to do business in Tepito. Little by little they noticed the Chinese businesses proliferating in their streets surrounding what had once been their family’s old vecindad. By this time, the building no longer housed tenants but was used as a commercial space and as bodegas (warehouses). Like many other places in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico and its surrounding areas, this vecindad had already adapted to Tepito’s commercial growth and was now about to adapt to the Chinese presence as well. The vecindad was located at the intersection of three streets in the center of what had become Mexico City’s most recent Chinese economic enclave: Peña y Peña, Ortega and Carmen. As David explained during an informal conversation, at that time the Chinese seemed to be looking for convenient conditions to set up their own businesses of imported commodities from China. Therefore, many of the foreigners came to David and his wife in the lookout for a place to rent to sell their products. As far as the businessman from Tepito could tell, the Chinese came to the Tepito market right after their arrival to Mexico and often came with significant investment capacities. According to him, the newly arrived Chinese were willing to invest a considerable amount of money in order to

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have access to a stall in the vecindad, which had not yet been converted into a Plaza. The newly arrived Chinese did indeed often have significant initial sums of money that they were willing to invest. Nevertheless, these sums often constituted their entire capital; they often saw this investment as their only possibility of working within the enclave. As many of the women with whom I spoke complained, they were forced to invest enormous amounts of money just for the possibility of renting a stall. Otherwise, they would not be able to enter into these complexly structured popular spaces. This was not only a complaint about the difficulties imposed on them when trying to acquire a shop to work in, but also a complaint about the economic roadblocks they faced as foreign vendors. Often, Chinese vendors were not allowed to work in the same Plazas as Mexicans, who paid very cheap rents because of the arrangements between leaders and local governments. With very few exceptions, such as Shei, Chinese vendors were not allowed to work on the streets with semi-permanent or temporary stalls, because those places were reserved for Mexicans.12 Their only option was to rent stalls on the outskirts of markets like Tepito, for which they had to pay much larger sums of money. For their part, the Mexican couple that owned the vecindad was torn between two contrasting thoughts. First, as many other Mexican vendors, they were concerned that the area was being invaded 13 by Chinese migrants, to the extent that they would steal economic opportunities for Mexicans. As often happens in places with a high presence of migrants, although vendors in Tepito understand the importance of Chinese migrants and their products for the market, they often still 12 Two years after my field research, while talking to a colleague who is also interested in Chinese migration to Mexico City, I learned that for a very short time there was a massive incorporation of Chinese peddlers inside the Mexico City subway system. All of them, like Shei and Tianjin, sold homemade fried goods in the station corridors. However, this phenomenon did not last long, and from one day to the next they were gone. I can think of two probable explanations: first, but less likely, the Chinese, on their own initiative, made these places their vending spots without being aware of the political struggles and power relations involved in the popular economy and peddling in Mexico; or, second, their respective vendor leaders had put them there and later removed them after a dispute between the leaders and members of their organizations. 13 Although this was not a recorded interview but an informal conversation, David used the word “invadidos ” while referring to the presence of Chinese on the streets of Tepito. I consider it important to retain the same expression that he used, although by no means do I concur with it.

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perceive the Chinese as a group that is taking their jobs away. In fact, the insertion of Chinese vendors in Tepito has not been easy for either the immigrants or the locals. Both parties have had to go through a readjustment process to be able to attain a certain level of peaceful interaction. Despite the intensity of their commercial ties in recent years, relations between the Chinese and Mexicans in popular markets are still often embedded in racial discrimination. When I spoke to Laureano— a Tepiteñe who has worked closely with Chinese vendors and traveled to China himself—about the Chinese presence in Tepito and how it has changed market dynamics, he told me: Laureano: “Para los mexicanos bajó mucho la venta. Y la de ellos [los chinos] subió. Porque como traían la mercancía más barata, cambió mucho. En la forma de convivio, pues ya hubo más robos y más todo, por culpa de ellos… Porque los robaban a ellos, los robaban mucho a ellos, pero por lo mismo que daban barato, pues la gente se enojaba y pues se iban a robar. O sea […] empezaron a llegar dos o tres, y ya cuando [nos dimos cuenta y] volteamos, ya había muchísima gente, de chinos y coreanos. Entonces como estaban dando el gane en el comercio, pues mucha gente optó por robarlos o hacerles cosas para que se fueran, pero nunca se fueron…” (“Sales went down a lot for Mexicans [with the arrival of the Chinese]. And theirs went up. They brought in really cheap products, so that changed everything. As far as getting along, well, there was more robbery and more of everything because of them… Because they started to get robbed a lot, but that’s because their prices were so cheap, so people would get angry and that’s why they would rob them. I mean […] they started to come little by little, two or three, and then [by the time we realized] we turned around and they were everywhere, Chinese and Korean. And so, because business was going so well for them, well, people started to rob them and do things to them so that they would leave, but they never left…”)

They never left, yet they still suffer from insecurity on the street where they work every day. The kidnapping of Chinese vendors is not uncommon in these markets, despite the fees that the Chinese, like the Mexicans, pay to their leaders to reduce risks and insecurity. Moreover, they also face discrimination in the form of higher fees than what the Mexicans pay for their vending spots. The second matter that the Mexican couple had to acknowledge was that the presence of the Chinese in Tepito and their willingness to

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work within the market represented an opportunity of growth for them. According to David, it was difficult to deny these spaces to Chinese vendors: “Venían y te ofrecían 10.000 pesos directo y de contado… Eso es más del doble de lo que un mexicano pagaría por el mismo lugar. ¿Cómo puede uno decir que no a eso?” (“They come and offer you 10 000 pesos, right there and in cash… that’s more than double what a Mexican would pay for the same location. How can one say no to that?”) David started renting small shops in his family’s vecindad around 2008, well before the building became a Plaza. He first opened a couple of stalls that looked out into the streets. As the numbers of Chinese merchants continued to increase, eventually there was no room to accommodate all the Chinese who were looking for a place to rent next to their already established paisanos. It was then that the couple decided they would transform the old and decaying building of the vecindad into a modern plaza. The old vecindad was torn down and in its place a modern, yet simple plaza was finished in 2010. “Ahí fue cuando decidimos que íbamos a transformar la casa en una plaza. Empezamos la construcción pero incluso antes de que el edificio estuviera listo ya se habían rentado todos los puestos!” (“That’s when we decided that we were going to turn the house into a plaza. So, we started the construction, but even before the building was finished all of the stalls were already rented!”) Virginia said, still amazed of the ways business had gone. To accomplish its transformation into a modern commercial spot, David and Virginia had to associate with a Chinese businessman, a major investor in the construction of the plaza, who is now a partner and co-manager. As David proudly said, this needed to be a Plaza that attracted the Chinese, a Plaza that would allow them to be identified. That’s how the building came to be called “Plaza Beijing”— colloquially known by Mexicans as “la plaza de los chinitos .” Interestingly, not one of the Chinese that work in this Plaza comes from Beijing; many, moreover, have never been to the Chinese capital. They mostly come from Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang, and in the last couple of years they have managed to recreate the same migration networks that used to be reproduced by the Chinese at the beginning of last century. In Plaza Beijing, most of the vendors are either related by blood, were friends in China or were united by commercial associations. Every single Chinese with whom I spoke in this Plaza mentioned that they had either come because someone had told them about the advantages of doing business there in comparison with China, or they were already in Mexico and came

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to Tepito because of what they heard about the opportunities it offered for economic growth. In the words of Smith and Guarnizo: “Even in the highly unlikely event that every new immigrant became ‘settled’ and severed all her or his connections with their country of origin, a continuous flow of new arrivals and material goods may reproduce a transnational social field” (1998: 19). In this sense, the dynamics of Plaza Beijing as well as those of the streets of Peña y Peña, Ortega and Carmen, which surround the former vecindad, depict the magnitude of transnational links for the promotion of migration. Family networks were, and still are, one of the core systems of reproduction of Chinese migration patterns. Plaza Beijing stands today as a perfect materialization of the importance of family bonds and employment networks—the origin of economic enclaves of this nature. For migrants, one way to overcome barriers imposed by cultural, language or commercial differences is to find an environment where other people who share the same forms of social reproduction are already established. This is what has happened in the streets of Peña y Peña and Ortega and in Plaza Beijing, among many other spaces of popular economy with strong presence of Chinese vendors. These places have developed as Chinese economic enclaves; they have been growing and consolidating thanks to the continuous arrival of an external source of manual labor and of capital investment. In these places, commercial interactions between migrants and locals have slowly become stronger and deeper. The commerce developed here by the Chinese is not necessarily directed toward other Chinese, but rather to an expanding Mexican clientele. The use of networks and the construction of transnational spaces between separate localities are not only related to the insertion of Chinese migrants into local Mexican dynamics but also to the material goods, commodities and information that they bring with them. The insertion of Chinese vendors in these very particular Mexican localities has created spaces of interaction where commercial linkages, commodities and capital flows exist outside of hegemonic institutions. These spaces were built through small exchanges, by people searching for better opportunities. This is particularly true for markets that have risen from marginal positions to gain a place in global networks, such as Tepito and Yiwu.

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Conclusions

Tepito and Yiwu are two physically separated markets that are tied together through the people that interact within them and through their commerce. The market of Yiwu has very similar dynamics to those of the Mexican popular markets. They both developed from trade that occurs outside hegemonic circuits. The markets in both countries, moreover, have very specific interactions with the state that differ from those of other localities. In Mexico political struggle has become commonplace among markets and barrios populares political arrangements and economic appropriation are closely connected. In China various measures were taken to incorporate the needs of the people and their efforts to stay afloat. But in both countries, the common denominators are unmet basic needs, marginal access to work—and strategies of economic empowerment. Markets such as Tepito and Yiwu have become links in the articulation of a wider global chain that has been constructed from the bottom up. These two commercial spaces grew out of the need for economic insertion using whatever means was available: from peddling or colportage; from small, family-based manufacturing or small-time smuggling and contraband to major import-export enterprises. The ways in which the respective government’ policies were implemented resulted in different outcomes for these markets. “The social construction of ‘place’ is still a process of local meaning-making, territorial specificity, juridical control, and economic development, however complexly articulated these localities become in transnational economic, political, and cultural flows” (Smith and Guarnizo 1998: 12). Whereas Tepito is considered a marginal market, a place that is beyond governability, Yiwu has achieved international recognition as a global supplier, the world’s largest wholesale market. As Wence so clearly formulated: these are spaces “whose inhabitants have been struggling for their rights every day, making it habitable and at the same time, building their own lives as urban citizens of that city that stigmatizes and rejects their presence”14 (Wence 2015: 232; my translation). The commercial dynamics of Mexican popular economy grew within the borders of economic

14 Quote in Spanish “[…] en cuyos habitantes han ido gestionando cotidianamente sus derechos, construyendo su habitabilidad y a la par, construyéndose a sí mismos como urbanitas de esa ciudad que estigmatiza y rechaza su presencia.”

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marginalization, in an attempt by its population to overcome inequalities engendered by a neoliberal system that pursues the benefit of a small minority to the detriment of the rest. In the case of popular economy in Mexico, the growing politicization of its population, its organization to demand better conditions and its constant struggle for spaces of survival, first, and of growth, later,15 can only be understood as a struggle for their right to the city (Lefebvre [1968] 1978) and consequently as their relevance as constructors of the city. It is in this last sense that I can start weaving the reality of people that have built themselves in these spaces in the margin, within popular economy and particularly Tepiteñes—Tepito being the center of distribution of commodities to the rest of the city’s popular markets and to other cities as well—to the arrival and incorporation of Chinese into these dynamics. Through the people that have developed between these two markets, transnational links have started to form and have become stronger between China and Mexico. Popular economy represents a set of spaces that are developed in a variety of delimited geographical places and that have several extensions that act like social and economic tentacles as they start to meddle within different dynamics. These tentacles have developed throughout Mexico, but also have limbs that extend to other countries. One of these extensions—perhaps the most important—has reached all the way to China, and its articulation has been created and strengthened thanks to the participation of Chinese in this space and their interactions across localities. The actors in question connect these spaces, directly and indirectly, through ideas, practices and resources that travel and are exchanged on transnational grounds (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). The incorporation of Chinese vendors into the networks of Mexican popular economy has been complicated, but it has been an engine for commercial growth in recent decades. Through their participation as vendors or as commercial intermediaries, the social organization of popular markets has changed. Both these spaces and the people who work in them are starting to adapt this new presence. This has created an idea of a “China” that, in the collective imaginaries of Tepiteñes, represents both an ally, a source of

15 Alba Villalever (2013) mentions the progress—particularly in Tepito—from an activity that began as a means of survival to an activity that grew stronger and attracted more individuals until it became a strategy for growth, rather than a strategy for survival.

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growth and of commercial possibilities, and a foe, a relentless commercial competitor. But these interconnectivities and transactions between countries were not random. They depended on individuals, on seemingly endless numbers of people communicating, transmitting, transacting in commercial fields between Mexico and China. Some of these actors are highly visible, namely An Lan and María Rosete, but they are just one link of a greater chain constructed through a diversity of people who have different ways of participation and have become connectors with other places. The next part of the book focuses specifically on these actors, Chinese women working in Mexican popular markets.

Bibliography Alba Vega, Carlos. 2012. “La calle para quien la ocupa: Las condiciones sociopolíticas de la globalización no hegemónica en México DF”. In Nueva sociedad, 241: 79–92. Alba Villalever, Carlos. 2013. Los Territorios Tepiteños: Territorialización, Informalidad Y Globalización. Master’s thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Supervised by Manuel Suárez Lastra. Mexico, DF. Guiheux, Gilles. Letter. 2011. “Yiwu, 2011, Chine: Bourg Rural Devenu Place Urbaine Mondialisée.” Paper presented to Entre Le Licite Et L’illicite: Migrations, Travail, Marché, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-La-Salle, 18 September 2011. http://www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr/migrations11.html. Kernen, Antoine, and Benoît Vulliet. 2008. “Petits Commerçants et Entrepreneurs Chinois au Mali et au Sénégal.” Afrique Contemporaine, 4 (May). De Boeck University: 69–94. Lefebvre, Henri. [1968] 1978. El Derecho a La Ciudad. 4th ed. Barcelona: Historia/ciencia/sociedad. Barcelona: Península. Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2004. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.” International Migration Review, 38 (3). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.: 1002–39. https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x. Maerk, Johannes. 2010. “Desde Acá - Tepito, Barrio en La Ciudad De México.” Revista Del CESLA, 2 (13). Varsovia: Uniwersytet Warszawski: 531–42. Shi, Lu, and Bernard Ganne. 2009. “Understanding the Zhejiang Industrial Clusters: Questions and Re-Evaluations.” World Scientific: 239–66. Skeldon, Ronald. 1996. “Migration From China.” Journal of International Affairs, 49 (2). Columbia University School of International Public Affairs: 434.

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Smith, Michael Peter, and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo. 1998. “The Locations of Transnationalism.” In Transnationalism From Below, edited by Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo: 3–34. Transaction Publishers. Stamm, Caroline. 2007. “La Democratización de la Gestión de las Plazas de Comercio Popular en el Centro Histórico de la Ciudad de México.” Trace Travaux Et Recherches Dans Les Amériques Du Centre, 51: 83–93. http:// trace.revues.org/654. Wence, Nancy. 2015. “Entre Los Hilos De La Bolivianidad.” In La Ciudad Transnacional Comparada, Modos De Vida, Gubernamentalidad Y Desposesión. Edited by Federico Besserer and Raúl Nieto: 209–44. Juan Pablos Editor, S.A. / Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Iztapalapa. Mexico DF.

PART II

Herstories of Migration, Building Spaces of Opportunities

“¿Es importante mi edad? ¡Eso no te quiero decir! Ya sabes que a las muchachas no se les pregunta su edad…” (“Does my age matter? I don’t want to tell you! You should know better than to ask a girl how old she is…”)

Gloria was laughing and looking at me from across the desk in her office as she told me she wouldn’t tell me her age; it would not be “ladylike.” We were in her office, located in Mexico City’s old Chinatown, on Calle Dolores (Dolores street). The Chinese New Year celebration had just passed, and hundreds of commingled images of Mao Zedong (毛泽东), of Fu (福—bliss or good fortune) and of Fu Mao (福猫) or cats of good fortune were covering the walls of the alleys of Chinatown as if they were the canvas of a pop artist (Fig. II.1). Over the images, graffiti in Chinese read “新年快乐” (“Happy New Year!”), and as a background to the whole image was a drawing of a dragon’s head looking straight into the observers’ eyes. It was 2014, the year of the horse. In 2007, Gloria left China for the first time in her life to join her husband, who had been sent to Mexico by the company he worked for in China. Playfully, she commented, “Ahora me da mucha pena decir, pero cuando mi esposo me dijo que él tenía que ir a México por su trabajo, le pregunté ¿México? ¿Y eso dónde está?” (“I’m embarrassed to say this, but when my husband first told me he had to go to Mexico for his work, I asked him ‘Mexico? Where’s that?’”)

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Chinatown in Dolores street, after New Year Festivities 2014

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Inside Gloria’s office, another small black and white printed image of Mao was placed in one of the cupboards, and spread all around hung small red Fu souvenirs—keychains and bracelets—that were left unsold from Gloria’s temporary standing stall where she sold Chinese commodities during the festivities on Dolores street. This was not her daily job, since she actually owned and managed an electronics store in Plaza de la Computación; but sales during the Chinese festivities allowed her to complement her household’s income. For her, this was a good opportunity to make the best out of a festivity that was established through a consensual economic desire between the Jefe de Delegación (the mayor) and the owners of the restaurants and shops of Calle Dolores. Although this was a complementary activity to her daily routine, Gloria was complaining about the incongruence of the conditions that she found, conditions that many women face in their daily struggles in Mexican markets. Gloria: “Los mexicanos pagan un precio para trabajar, pero para nosotras siempre es más caro. Pero ¡no es justo! Todos trabajamos lo mismo, si vendemos lo mismo. Ellos piensan que nosotros ganamos más y que tenemos más dinero. Pero eso no tiene sentido. Todos vendemos lo mismo pero nosotros pagamos más, entonces ¿quién tiene más ganancia?” (“Mexicans pay a price to work, but the price is always higher for us Chinese. It’s not fair! We all work the same, we sell the same things. They think we earn more and that we have more money, but that doesn’t make any sense. We all sell the same things but we pay more, so who earns more?”)

Like Gloria, several women had worked selling their “Chinese souvenirs” during the Chinese Festivities in the capital’s Chinatown. They all had more or less the same vending setups and the same supplies to earn their living that day: a metal structure on which they hung the products that they were selling, a waist pouch that served as a cash register and, sometimes, a male companion who stood in the proximity and provided company, and “muscle” too, just in case. In Mexico City, street vending is a common sight. Very few streets of the city are free of this economic activity. Having access to all kinds of products and commodities on the streets, either as pedestrians or when driving, has become such a given in the daily lives of urbanites that it is rarely questioned. A couple of years back, the Chinese New Year became one of the few times of year when Chinese people are allowed to carry out

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this activity, in the delimitations of Chinatown, a 300-meter pedestrian street. In the year of 2014, only Chinese women worked on Calle Dolores that day. Their presence in the uproar of the festivities, shielded behind by the commodities that they sold to local tourists, was invisible, and their complaints remained unsaid, fearing they might result in their workspace being denied the following year. To understand the singularity of the participation of Chinese women in the specific context of popular economy in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico, we must first review the development of Chinese migration to Mexico and the actual context of China and of women in China. In the next two chapters, I dig into the migration processes of many women from China to Mexico and the different forms of agency that Chinese migrant women have developed in their trajectories, producing—in the process—changes in the structures in which they are embedded.

CHAPTER 4

Gender Inequality in China, a Path to Migration

China’s political and economic climb to its current position in the world order has been long and not without difficulties, but it has resulted in a high growth rate for the country. In the first 35 years after its Open Door Policy in 1978, China’s participation in global trade grew to thrice its size (Lardy 2005). Since then, the country’s GDP grew at a steady 9.7% per year (Chuang 2010: 3). However, as is often the case, macroeconomic accounts are not necessarily reflected in microeconomic values. While economic development has positioned the PRC at the top of the list in economic power, social development has lagged (Chuang 2010: 14). China is one of today’s great powers, but its growth as a country has come with profound inequality, within a structure that is a determinant of people’s opportunities and access to health, education and employment. “Using national level data, Shang and Kanbur (2003) find that across provinces and within provinces, between and within rural and urban areas, social inequalities, such as education and healthcare provision, have increased substantially since the reforms began” (Chuang 2010: 13). Moreover, the country’s social structure has been built within an inconspicuous system of symbolic and social differentiation that limits people’s free will and range of decisions. Subjugation of women is latent in this system, as expected. In addition to gender, class and regional belonging, © The Author(s) 2020 X. Alba Villalever, The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53344-1_4

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there are structural elements of social differentiation; these also determine the reach of state policies and development strategies of Chinese government institutions which impact each individual’s case differently. An overtly clear example of this—of the control brought to bear on women, their bodies and their choices in China—can be seen in the population controls known as one-child policies that were put into action in 1979 as one of the country’s strategies for pushing forward. The impact these measures had on Chinese society and its current uneven male/female ratio was enormous, but their consequences were particularly felt by women, who were not only refused the possibility of decision-making regarding family reproduction and of having more than one child, just as men were, but they were also deprived of essential decisions over their own bodies, being constantly monitored (regarding young women’s menstrual cycles), having IUD forcibly inserted into their bodies, and often even unable to bring their pregnancies to completion and often violently forced to miscarry (Whyte et al. 2015). For girls, moreover, these implementations represented a whole different level of discrimination. Subject to a symbolic construction of their existences as opposed to that of boys, they have often been considered burdens due to vestiges of patrilineal systems of inheritance and systematic reproductions of gender-based inequalities, such as employment opportunities, income equality and gender-based separation of profession. Although one-child policies in China were gradually lifted in different regions of the country and depending on the social and ethnic backgrounds of the parents, and although the harshest period of implementation of these laws lasted about four years—mostly in the early 1980s—they were not abolished until October 2015. This issue illustrates the still highly unequal and even dangerous positions which women have been put through—by either state policies or family standards—in order to bring progress to a country or a household. Wei argues that: […] under the restrictions of China’s mainstream ideology, namely the structural sexual caste system, gender-based separation of profession, and the established concepts of “male-domination” and “male superiority”, gender equality has not been truly recognized as an idea, system and mechanism, nor is practiced widely in society. (Wei 2013: 58)

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Indeed, (Chinese) women have historically been placed in subordinate positions within social structures. As in many societies, they have been traditionally assigned to private spheres while men have been assigned to public ones. Within each sphere, specific tasks are determined according to specific genders and therefore to different rights. These start with the right to be born and to have a dignified childhood and life, and expand to the right to education, to a labor market with equal employment opportunities and remuneration, to ownership and inheritance and to health,1 among many others. In China, unequal access to different rights and opportunities because of a symbolic differentiation of gender is an issue that is carried out not only by poorly enacted social policies—such as population controls in the PRC—but that often stem from within the household and because of the reproduction of cultural norms that assign genders to specific spheres and attribute determined liberties and limits to them. Women in China continue holding specific—and subordinate—roles and positions in different social structures, such as the family, the state and even diasporic networks. This chapter will analyze different forms of structural discriminations against women that have been constructed and reproduced in households and familial contexts, in China and in migration. It will first start by reviewing the most prominent research about the economic participation of Chinese women in migration to occidental countries to have a clear idea about how the phenomenon has been analyzed, as well as the academic progress and shortfalls, with particular regard to the discussion of vulnerability and agency. After this short overview, I give a more detail account of the arrival of Chinese women to Mexico, followed by an analysis of how they have been progressively incorporated into the networks of Mexican popular markets. To do this, I will analyze the structural inequalities faced by women in different stages of their lives (from childhood to adulthood) that stem from social organization in China and that are reproduced—and sometimes reinforced—in migration. Along the way, I will give special attention to resistance strategies women have used to overcome these inequalities, building up to the hypothesis that first migration and then incorporation into Mexican popular markets have become a strategy and a space in which they have been able to build opportunities for themselves. 1 As Sen argues, negligence of health and nutrition is a crude disadvantage widely affecting the survival of women (Sen 2001: 470).

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4.1 Visibilizing Chinese Women in Migration Studies There is a dire need today to shed light on women’s migration worldwide. Although in recent decades this phenomenon has gained importance in academic research and in political debates, it is still widely overlooked. The phenomenon not only informs the economic, political and social changes of the countries of origin, but it also enlightens the processes of change in the countries where the women in question settle. In the case of Chinese women, China’s currently changing conditions—with particular regard to the political and economic watershed decisions of 1978—are strongly related to the growing dynamism of their international mobility. The migration of women crosses and is crossed by a diversity of contexts and contributes to the enhancement and strengthening of different social fabrics. It must be understood as a phenomenon that is enmeshed in a diversity of social, economic and political contexts. In the last thirty years, a growing body of research has aimed at showing the relevance of understanding the migration processes of Chinese women—not as a side note to those of men, but rather on their own—and how they are enmeshed in a complex and changing social fabric. Notwithstanding these efforts, the participation of Chinese women in American and European countries has seldom been studied, although women represent an important share of the migrant labor force. Among these few studies, we find publications regarding migration to the United States (Zhou and Logan 1989; Zhou and Nordquist 1994; Zhou 2000; Mazumdar 2007), Canada (Man 2004; Salaff and Greve 2004), Britain (Baxter and Raw [1988] 2004; Song 1995; Lee et al. 2002), France (Lévy 2005; Lévy and Lieber 2009, 2010), Peru (Lausent-Herrera 2007) and the Caribbean and Central America (Siu 2001, 2005a, b). These efforts have been pushed in part by the rise, since the late seventies, of feminist geography and a search for broader understandings of power relations regarding gender, class and race in particular.2 In the following pages, I will review the most relevant works focusing on the migration of Chinese women to give context to the specific case of Chinese women working in Mexican popular markets. It is noteworthy that studies have been inexistent on the participation of women in this migration process in Mexico. 2 Journals focusing on these issues are for instance Signs, Women Studies International Forum, Feminist Studies and Connexions, among others.

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In 1989, Min Zhou’s and Min Zhou and Logan’s analysis on New York’s Chinese enclave stated—for the first time on the American continent—the need for analyzing women’s labor market as independent from that of men. Giving relevance to the presence of women was a small step on the bumpy road of migration studies with a gender perspective, but even so, it was an important step forward. As of that date, 24 years had already passed since the mass arrival of Chinese women to that state, which took place after the country’s immigration policies were revised (which had banned the migration of Chinese people since 1882 through the Chinese Exclusion Act) and thereafter allowed family reunification processes in 1965 (Zhou and Logan 1989). In 1994, Zhou and Nordquist focused on women working in the garment industry and delved into two issues: they first reflected on the articulation between survival and social mobility, women’s labor and the ethnic enclave as a space of opportunities, and they analyzed the positions of subordination in which the migrant women in question found themselves within their family structures and in reference to their employment opportunities. In both Zhou and Logan’s (1989) and Zhou and Nordquist’s (1994) research work, the authors considered the work of Chinese women as a survival strategy for the family. In these studies, the presence of children was a variable that deeply affected the experiences of Chinese women and that put them in conditions very different from those of Chinese men, since they were not only expected to contribute to the family’s income but to take care of household obligations and childcare as well. In this sense, the gender variable determined what the authors considered triple roles women played as mother, wife and wage worker (Zhou and Logan 1989: 818; Zhou and Nordquist 1994: 188); the work of women—contrary to that of men—was not limited then to wage labor, but to domestic work as well. These considerations, albeit grounded, are problematic. They impose a paradox because, on the one hand, they lay out the subordinate positions to which women are held, determined by social constructions of gender that push them to adjust their contribution to the household to new standards—such as wage labor—while keeping traditional ones—like care of the household and children. But on the other hand, these considerations also reflect heteronormative discourses that eliminate the possibility of agency for migrant working women.

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In 1988, Baxter and Raw ([1988] 2004) published a breakthrough article focusing on Chinese migrant women—mothers and their children—working in family catering services in Britain. This article had an excellent approach to understanding the intrinsic interrelations between gender roles and economic systems. Its authors specifically suggested the effects of the development of capitalism in southeast China, especially in Hong Kong, which was under British rule until 1997 and where most Chinese immigrants that had settled in Britain came from. The authors, accordingly, keenly perceived the intertwinement between local dynamics in both the sending and receiving societies and in mobility. This is an effort that would be thoroughly pursued later on in transnational studies and that is as a key analytical axis of my research. Baxter and Raw determined three main research axes for understanding the experiences of Chinese women in migration and the impact they can have on social structures: (1) the changing role of Chinese women within symbolic and social constructions; (2) the increase in the female Chinese migrant population; and (3) the importance of networks in migration. In this combo, the categories of gender, class and race are determinants that intersect within power relations, but they are also propellers of social struggle. The intersections between these three categories must be understood in their own contexts. Each individual case contains its own characteristics, and these particular contexts must always be taken into account (Song 1995). In the case of Chinese migrant women in Mexican popular markets, I will argue that these categories are also used to their advantage as binding processes in which, in situations where all the odds might seem to be against the most dispossessed or vulnerable, subtle, almost imperceptible forms of resistance come into play. Lee et al. (2002) state that studies on the Chinese in Britain have constantly focused on migrants working in catering services, therefore diminishing the diversity of contexts in which Chinese migrants are embedded. The authors thus reflect on education, class, origin and generational factors as well as on gender, all of which have different implications and intersect at different levels. To do this, they focus mostly on women’s experiences of family relationships, dividing them into three categories: Chinese overseas brides, women who migrate with their families, and women who migrate with a strategy of individual advancement (Lee et al. 2002: 610). Ryan (2002) enters the discussion more dramatically and with a more abstract scope, considering gender as one of the key elements in an

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understanding of global migrations and transnationalism. She states that “Women, both in the past and present, have participated in labour migration” (2002: 95). However, these migration patterns have been obscured all too often by statistical tables, historical narratives or stereotypical views, therefore becoming obscured depictions of migration that are not subjugated by elements of gender, class and ethnicity. She recalls Jaschok and Miers’ work: Women and Chinese Patriarchy (1994) and calls for the need to highlight the diversity of ways in which women “negotiate, adapt, and sometimes rework the texture of their lives” (Ryan 2002: 98) instead of enclosing their experiences in submissive positions or as victims of family interests. This diversity of approaches depends on the circumstances in which the actors have found themselves and the dynamics in which they move in their migration. Hence, class and ethnicity (or regional origin) as well as gender must be added to the equation of studies on Chinese transnationalism and “diaspora.” Ryan proposes “mapping the world of women” (2002: 95) as a strategy for overturning problems derived from a male-driven conceptualization of migration. I propose, on the one hand, that “mapping the world of women” can be done through a transnational perspective, taking into account the conceptualization that Glick Schiller and her colleagues have of transnational social fields (1992)—which mostly considers the networks that each individual may construct around him or herself—and on the other hand an account of agency elements that emanate from the different positions in which these women find themselves. From another perspective, Mazumdar (2003, 2007) analyzes the role that women play in migration while staying behind in China, particularly in the early twentieth century: their work was essential for the survival of their families. The roles played by those who leave and those who stay are equally important, especially when we consider transnational families. I argue throughout this book that it is through the connections that happen at these micro-social levels that the strength of migration networks can be rendered relevant. A few other studies that account for the experiences of Chinese women in other western countries are also relevant to understanding both new and old processes of migration and their dynamics. In France, Auguin (2005), with a more traditional perspective, focuses on the roles of women in Chinese families. Lévy (2005) and Lévy and Lieber (2009, 2010), for their part, focus on migration flows from the north of China (Dongbei) to Paris. These are new migrations that started in

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the nineties, consisting of women almost exclusively. Their specificity is that these women, upon arrival and despite their qualifications (such as engineers), have had to begin with economic activities that they had not considered, such as prostitution or trash collection. Similarly, in Canada, Man (2004), with an intersectional axis, draws attention to the deskilling which Chinese women are experiencing and to the need for programs and policies to revert this phenomenon. Finally, Salaff and Greve (2004), also focusing on the migration of skilled work, delve into the impact on children and childcare in Chinese families and on the career and personal development of women, which, they argue, are affected more than men. Few efforts have been made in Latin America to shed light on the experiences, the activities and the impacts of Chinese women who have migrated. Lausent-Herrera (2007) focused on Chinese women in Peru with a historical perspective, trying to remedy the absolute absence of women in historical accounts. An interesting twist to Lausent-Herrera’s work is the mirror-like approach through which she tries to understand contemporary migrations of women by looking at migrations in the past. In addition to this, the author looks into the different reasons for migrations and decries the existence of forced migrations as the result of economic, social and political constraints in China’s post-reform era. Lok Siu (2001, 2005a, b), in her work among the Chinese in Central America and particularly in Panama, considers the ideas of “diasporic citizenship” and “idealized diasporic subjectivity” and suggests that gender itself is what challenges, forges and reaffirms these identities. To do this, she plays with the interconnections between the negotiation of differences and of senses of collectivity throughout the process of community formation, giving relevance not only to gender differences, but also to ethnicity, national difference (of the country of settlement), migration generations and racial background (Siu 2005b: 512). Together, all of the efforts mentioned here are noteworthy, not only for understanding Chinese women in migration, but also the progression of feminist studies and migration studies, particularly regarding further discussions on intersectionality as well as on post-colonial and decolonial studies (this last aspect considering work on the British side in particular). In this sense, it is not irrelevant to notice the complete absence of this kind of research in Mexico, and its almost complete absence in Latin American countries, with the exception of Lok Siu’s and LausentHerrera’s work. A possible explanation for this could be that the feminist

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agenda in Latin American countries had to be revisited first by Latin American researchers and activists from their positions as opposed to white hegemonic discourses (Schild 2015). Also, the continuous consideration of Mexico as a sending rather than as a receiving state for migrants has lead most of the research to focus mainly on the migration flows of Mexicans toward the north and into the United States (although the study of Mexican women in this area is also still rather scarce). Hence, women have never been the focus of interest in research on Chinese migrations in Mexico; to the contrary, they have often been considered as part of the processes of migration which “Chinese people” go through, generally considering the experiences of Chinese men and women as the same, or narrowing the participation of women to that of the wives of the migrants or as a compound set of experiences. This epistemological lack can be explained by three factors. First, the relatively new interest presented to Mexican researchers to understand Chinese presences in Mexico; second, as Zhou already inferred in the case of the United States, the historical gender unbalance within Chinese migrants in Mexico, which until the start of family reunification processes in 1965 were mostly constituted by men; and third, a continuing patriarchal social construction of migration, rendering women’s participation invisible or reducing it to their roles in households and family reproduction. Furthermore, most of the research conducted on Chinese migration to Mexico had, until relatively recently, focused on the first waves, which occurred during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. These studies, therefore, concentrated mainly on either the economic, political or social contexts that culminated in Mexico’s anti-Chinese movements,3 or on the processes that resulted from this forgotten part of history.4 In fact, until today, very little research on Chinese migrations to Mexico have focused on contemporary migrations or on Chinese in Mexico nowadays (Cinco 1999; Martinez 2008; Alba Villalever 2008; Rodriguez Tapia 2015). Even fewer have focused on the Chinese population living in Mexico City, the most important work having been carried out by Cinco (1999).

3 This is a period in Mexican history that had been pushed back to a place of oblivion and that was finally and rightfully brought to light by researchers from various disciplines in the social sciences. 4 An exhaustive review of the literature on this matter can be found in Ang (2010).

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As we have seen so far, shedding light on the experiences of women can not only address their participation within migration and within economic, social and political reproductions, but it can also bring forth different elements of social and symbolic constructions of differentiation that are essential for understanding the structures through which the actors—both men and women—move. Indeed, Chinese women have migrated in a variety of ways, in different periods of time, and with a wide range of backgrounds and prospects. They have moved from domestic work to paid labor; from highly qualified arenas to retail or to sexual work; from activities deeply embedded in common or traditional employment within their enclaves to businesses that they have started from scratch. In short, Chinese women have been moving and innovating within their own experiences in the context of migration, despite the evident difficulties that they have had to face in the process. In this sense, we have to move away from patriarchal binary schemes, where roles are defined by symbolic and social constructions of gender differentiation, and acknowledge the existence of spaces of actions, of response and of agency that are deployed by women and men and that depend on both ample structures and ideologies, and on local and newly acquired elements of identification.

4.2 The Feminization of Chinese Migration Patterns: Causes and Effects As in most American and European countries, Chinese women in Mexico were neither part of the usual circuits of Chinese migrations nor of the pre-set dynamics5 of local Chinese settlements until the end of the 1970s. A growing presence of women among Chinese migrants was to be noticed particularly within the second half of the twentieth century (Hu-DeHart 2005, 2007; Cinco 1999). A large majority of the women who emigrated from China at the time did so in order to join their (often male) relatives who were already established in Mexico. While Chinese men went out to work in the fields, in construction, or in their own businesses, the 5 These pre-set dynamics are a system of reproduction of Chinese migrations through which an already established Chinese migrant will employ a newcomer that has been previously selected through social networks (neighbors, friends, kin). This employer will cover transportation costs and will often offer room and board to the new employee, therefore avoiding the payment of salaries per se.

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presence of women was important because it allowed the reproduction of the male labor force while they took care of other aspects of life, such as food, shelter and health, or children. At this time, therefore, the conditions under which Chinese women found themselves afforded them few possibilities for economic growth or empowerment. The gradual increase in migration to Mexico by Chinese women was due to different circumstances and brought with it different implications. From a political perspective, several factors came into play and affected migration processes. Migration became more complicated and highly dangerous in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War. There were several governmental efforts to restrict and control migration, and Hong Kong and Taiwan became escape valves for Chinese that fled mainland China, which later became the point of departure for subsequent migrations (Skeldon 1996). With respect to the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act which was put into place in 1882 and which was made less stringent in 1943—thereby allowing an entry quota of 105 Chinese per year—was eventually lifted in 1965, marking an increase of migration to that country, as well as to Canada and Australia, which had also just adjusted their migration policies. The once very important presence of Chinese in Mexico was highly diminished from the third to the seventh decade of the last century. Lastly, Sino-Mexican relations, that had first been frozen during the Chinese Civil War and then because of Mexico’s alignment with the Republic of China in Taiwan, were resumed. In an effort to re-establish diplomatic relations and to make amends for the crimes that had been forced upon many Chinese men and SinoMexican families who were violently deported “back” to China in the first half of the twentieth century, two big repatriation processes took place. The first, during the rule of Lázaro Cárdenas, took place in 1937. This repatriation, however, included almost exclusively the return of Mexican women and their children who had been sent out of Mexico with their Chinese husbands. The husbands, at that time, were not allowed to enter the country again, which resulted in an emerging transpacific effort to bring families back together that lasted several decades (Schiavone Camacho 2009: 561). The second and third repatriation processes were more significant in terms of numbers. One took place in 1960, when thirteen repatriates arrived in Mexico from Hong Kong on the 7th of November, and 113 repatriates arrived from Macao nine days later. Finally, in 1972, Mexico and the People’s Republic of China renewed their relations after Mexico—following the United States—voted for the

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PRC’s incorporation into the UN. Taiwan broke ties with Mexico after that and withdrew its diplomatic representations, and the PRC and Mexico finally started their new diplomatic relations (Anguiano Roch 2012). Renewing the possibility for Chinese people to travel to Mexico and settle transformed and brought new dynamics to both the migrant population and to their ways of participation in the localities where they settled. From this time on, the dynamics of Chinese migrations to Mexico were turned upside-down. One of the most important changes was the increase of migration of Chinese women. Initially, however, the lodging systems offered by huiguans in the receiving countries rarely took the migration of women into consideration. Chinese housing in Mexico, for example, which was provided by these Chinese associations (Curtis 1995; Alba Villalever 2014) was destined for men, and although the repatriation and family reunification processes that took place after 1960 the housing of family members—women and children—started to be accepted by some of them, settlement strategies and work offers within the enclaves were not provided to women traveling on their own. Furthermore, the presence of Chinese people began to be more visible in cities, their economic participation was no longer restricted to underdeveloped areas, and they started to develop mostly within the service industry. With time and because of the hard conditions that Chinese people faced in Mexico, they started moving around and settling in different Mexican states, extending with their movements the commercial and social networks that they had already established. The Chinese in Mexico reinforced their role as intermediaries by concentrating on certain economic activities, such as commerce and trade. In this sense, the Chinese were not only connected to China, but also to other places in the Americas where they still had family, friendship or commercial ties, hence creating diasporic connections across territories. Very traditional standards of work division and gender statuses that stemmed from China’s ideologies and symbolic and social distinctions were maintained within diasporic circuits, however, and these same divisions and distinctions deployed by social constructions of gender are still reproduced today, particularly regarding the migration processes of families that still follow the same strategies set up by earlier migrants (such as migrations patterns to the north of Mexico, where Chinese enclaves continue to grow, fed by migrations that continue to the present). Prevailing traces of these old networks are still strong in places like Mexicali or Tijuana, where huiguans are still functioning and active, and where

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the economic enclaves constructed in the first decades of the twentieth century by Chinese migrants are still in place. Many Chinese—both men and women—still come to work in the shops and restaurants of other family members or friends who are already established in Mexico (Alba Villalever 2014) but today they are readapting and transforming to better fit into present economic dynamics. Eventually, Chinese women found different strategies for overcoming these structures and developing their own paths, these eventually becoming new networks that have likewise fed Chinese mobilities but that have changed group dynamics and the impacts of individuals. Chinese migrations to Mexico today are not structured the way they used to be. The migration of women from China to Mexico started changing and expanding beyond its already established family reunification patterns at the end of the twentieth century. This represented a new migration process that changed the structures characteristic to Chinese migrations to Mexico until then. It was a result of a renewed Chinese society that had marked social and economic imbrications. Chinese women have played a growing role, both in China and abroad, over the last twenty years. The presence of women in migratory patterns has not only grown but has also been gaining importance in the economic networks of migration, in spite of the continued presence of social constructions of differentiation that have often kept women’s participation in a place of subordination. Although women’s migration was further encouraged when Mexican and Chinese diplomatic relations were re-established, the role played by Chinese women within migratory routes and their incorporation into local dynamics has remained substantially invisible in academic research until today, and this gap poses a barrier to understanding contemporary participation of Chinese people in Mexico. Because of the initial absence of women in Chinese settlements in Mexico, as in most countries, with their progressive incorporation into migration networks, gender relations became one of the primary concepts of classification within the enclaves, along with economic background. Family bonds have been essential in the reproduction of Chinese migrations, and gender and age have played an important role in work division and integration strategies up to the present time. The migration of Chinese women started out as part of family reunification processes; women began migrating to join their husbands, fathers, uncles or brothers, furthering the settlement of Chinese families in more developed areas and urban centers. At

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this time, although their presence was significant for the reproduction of the family unit, many women’s activities still centered on reproduction of the household and, as such, they had little room for integration or even participation in Mexican dynamics. Even within family businesses, the activities that women and even girls within migration were “allowed” to perform were often behind the counter, having very scant relations with locals (Alba Villalever 2008). Growing up as a girl in a Chinese household overseas became a burden for many, and different strategies for overcoming these structures came into being. Drawing from the experiences of the women interviewed, I will now consider the structures within which migrating women and girls were embedded and the strategies they developed to overcome these inequalities.

4.3 Childhood in a Chinese Jia6 : Structural Inequalities Limei is a 24-year-old woman who arrived in Mexico when she was a teenager. Her migration is deeply embedded in the “traditional” migration processes to Mexico, a solid system of work division where the assignment of different roles is highly determined by gender. The way that Limei and her family carried out their migration from China all the way to Mexico City, their strategies of social reproduction and the economic activities that the family put into action in Mexico and within migration are critical aspects for understanding a young woman’s position in a family household. Limei first arrived in Ciudad Juarez, in Mexico’s northern state of Chihuahua, in 2004, when she was just 14 years old. Her family is originally from Kaiping, in the province of Guangdong. Her father was the first of the nuclear family to migrate to Mexico, but not the first of the extended family. In fact, he arrived in Ciudad Juarez to work for his brother-in-law, who had established a Chinese restaurant in that city a couple of years previously. This migration system in which all members of a family partake in the same economic activity—in most cases inserted within the Chinese enclave’s economy—is often reproduced by Chinese

6 Jia (家) is an interesting term that can refer to simply a house, a household in its ampler sense and the family as in the union of its members.

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families with Guangdong and Fujian origins, especially those belonging to lower social strata in China. Limei’s uncle had become ill and had asked her father for help running the business. As a 14-year-old girl, Limei did not consider that their conditions in China were bad, but she does remember her parents talking about how they could do better in Mexico. One year after the departure of her father, Limei left China together with her mother and younger brother to reunite with him. At first, both parents worked in her uncle’s restaurant while the children attended a Mexican school. Limei’s arrival in Ciudad Juarez was difficult; she complained that her classmates would stare at her. At the time of her arrival, there weren’t many Chinese in her school, and not only did she feel like she was being looked at “as if she were in a zoo,” as she described it, but it was hard for her to understand what was going on in class because she didn’t speak any Spanish yet. Once she started learning Spanish, however, her perception of her new conditions changed drastically. As we talked, she reminisced that school in Mexico was easier and more interesting than in China: “Teníamos clases de música, ¡que me gustaban mucho! Y además podíamos hablar más con los compañeros, podíamos hablar de otras cosas y hacer preguntas. En China eso no podíamos hacer. Sólo se podía hablar del tema que quería el maestro.” (“We had music lessons, which I loved! And we could talk more with our classmates and about different subjects, we could even ask questions. In China we couldn’t do any of those things, we could only talk about the subject that the teacher wanted to talk about.”) Despite her initial struggles, Limei ultimately stated that she had liked studying in a Mexican school, and even considered that it did her good. She said school was more fun in Mexico, and she enjoyed it more. Unfortunately, the illness of Limei’s uncle eventually worsened, and he could no longer take care of the restaurant. At that point, Limei’s parents took charge of the business and, unable to count on her uncle’s help because of his sickness, they had to seek elsewhere for someone to work in the restaurant. It was then that Limei was asked to help her parents with the family business they inherited, and so she never finished high school in Mexico. Meanwhile, her younger brother stayed in school and graduated five years later. Children’s education is fundamental for Chinese families. Couples living abroad often send their children back to China to offer them what they consider a better education (Alba Villalever 2014). However, just as with Mexican families, children’s participation in the survival of the household becomes not only necessary but also unavoidable in Chinese

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families with low economic capacity. The decision to take one child out of school to allow the other to finish is enmeshed in very intricate social configurations that reveal the intersection of different levels of social access to economic capital; it is part of the practical sense— in a Bourdieusian sense—of families’ survival. Families are corporate bodies sustained by a tendency to perpetuate their social being (Bourdieu 1997, 2000). This tendency entails different powers and privileges that are at the base of their reproduction strategies: marriage, reproduction, inheritance, economic strategies, and last but most importantly, education strategies (Bourdieu 1997: 33). An individual’s education is a weighty factor in improving his or her life prospects; in the case of women, however, already positioned in the least advantageous of conditions, literacy becomes invaluable (Sen 2001), and yet obtaining it is not always granted. Acknowledging, as Wei claims, that “Chinese families have long preferred boys to girls, they have invested more in sons’ education and such family decisions have severely influenced girls’ education” (Wei 2013: 56), I argue that families’ tendencies to perpetuate themselves socially often prevent young women and girls from gaining economic empowerment and constructing their own subjectivities. In Limei´s case, age and gender are two variables to consider. Limei is the elder sibling, but she is also a woman. The first variable reveals a choice made as a principle of the family’s reproduction and survival. Although Limei appreciated her schooling experience in Mexico, she never questioned the decision of her parents to take her out of school to work in the restaurant. As she saw it, it was her obligation to help her parents in the family business, and she acted according to her own construction of the role of an elder daughter in a low-income household. Limei’s experience and the way in which the family reacted to an economic crisis stress the structure of the family in economic terms. The way in which the family is structured is highly dependent on its socioeconomic position; this is also the case for Mexican families in similar conditions. For instance, this same reaction to a child’s participation in the survival of the household was also seen in the case of Mexican vendors and leaders of popular organizations, analyzed in Chapter 2. In María’s case, as the elder sibling, she had to take care of her family at a very young age due to her mother’s illness. In the case of Armando, the youngest of his family, the contrary could be observed, he was able to not only finish his studies, but was afterward able to complete a university degree, an achievement that none of his older siblings—all men—were able to

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do, in part because of their participation in the family’s business.7 When confronted with economic needs, families with low economic capacities have to draw on the assets they already possess. These assets are often the hand-labor that they “produce.” Children, then, become a fundamental part of the household’s income or of the household’s system of reproduction. Gender, the second variable, refers back to Wei’s argument on the weight of gender structures to which women are subject at different social levels, which start with the construction of the role of women in the household, and then extend to the opportunities to which they have access regarding education and then employment (2013). The structure around this variable is not merely economic; it reflects an intersection of structures of a social, economic and cultural nature. Limei grew up in a context where gender dictates the roles a person is supposed to play. Limei: “Las mujeres chinas siempre estamos pensando en el futuro. Siempre tenemos que pensar en lo que debemos de hacer y en lo que se espera de nosotras. En China pensamos mucho en la importancia de tener una casa, de formar un hogar… Pero no pensamos tanto en el trabajo, no es tan importante. Lo que es más importante es la familia, para las mujeres lo más importante en China es la familia. […] En la familia todo el mundo se cuida, todos tienen que aportar algo y todos comparten todo, la familia es siempre unida y fuerte. Pero en todo eso el papel de las mujeres es más importante.” (“Chinese women are always thinking about the future. We always need to think about what we need to do and what is expected of us. In China we think a lot about the importance of having a house, of forming a family… But we don’t think so much about work, that is not as important; what is most important is the family. For Chinese women there is nothing as important as the family.”)

By stopping school and starting to work in her parents’ restaurant, Limei enacted the role that was expected of her. In this sense, these decisions are not only determinants of the reproduction of the family group, but also of the individuals’ positions within it and within other structures, such 7 Armando also considered that his brothers did not necessarily share the same love that he did for studying, and as they grew older, they were already so involved in commerce that they no longer deemed it necessary or useful to return to their studies.

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as work and educational institutions. They are results of the habitus in which they have been constructed. Bourdieu, who coined the concept of habitus in the Social Sciences, considered it as a “system of structured, structuring dispositions” (Bourdieu 1990: 52). But there is a rigidity to this definition that renders the concept ineffective for understanding the processes of subjectivation that I wish to evidence here. I would rather understand habitus as Mahmood (2001) reconsidered it, as a pedagogical process of acquisition of moral values, as a conscious effort to adjust inner thoughts and feelings to the actions being carried out. This reformulation still considers the relevance of conceiving Bourdieu’s structures as both structured and structuring, associated with particular sets of conditions of existence. But in Mahmood’s conceptualization, particular attention is paid to individuals’ active choices and ways of acting within these structures. It is within these choices that individuals (per)form agency, understood as “the capacity to realize one’s own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles (whether individual or collective)” (Mahmood 2001: 206). In the case being analyzed here, the growing agency of women has been both a propeller and a result of their incorporation into wage labor. Although some of the women who figure in this study attained university degrees in China, several others, like Limei, never finished high school. Most of the younger migrant women interviewed in Mexico followed their family’s migration networks, but their experiences were different from Limei’s because they were able to make their own decisions as to whether to migrate to Mexico or to remain in China. Migration was for many a first step of economic participation, yet this implied in almost every case becoming an employee within the family business, in which family structures and differentiated constructions of gender were reinforced, allowing the family’s reproduction while at the same time often limiting the woman’s individual opportunities for growth. Around 2010, Limei’s family decided that conditions in Ciudad Juarez8 made it no longer viable for them to stay there, insecurity having grown to unbearable proportions in the city, not only putting the family in danger but also disrupting their clientele and making their business unprofitable. Limei’s family slowly started moving to Mexico City—first her parents, who were to start the family business again from zero, and 8 Ciudad Juárez has become one of the country’s most dangerous cities in recent decades.

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the children a year later. Limei’s parents opened their new restaurant among many other cafés de chinos already existent and popular in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico. To do this, Limei’s family made use, once again, of the already established economic networks within the Chinese economic enclave in Mexico City. They established themselves close to other Chinese businesses that they knew had already been successful in the area and opened a new Cantonese style Chinese restaurant on Soledad street. This time around, Limei decided not to continue working in her parents’ restaurant. Once keeping the perspective of continuing the family’s migration process in mind, now with the move from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City, Limei saw an opportunity to put a little distance between herself and the family business. At the time, her brother had already finished his studies and was able to start helping their parents run the business. Although Limei had dutifully carried out her obligations in the family structure, she explained that working in the restaurant was not something she liked, nor did she appreciate her place in the division of labor: since her Spanish skills were much better than her parents’, she had always been in charge of attending to the customers, a task she didn’t enjoy. Her mother was in charge of the cash register, and her father and brother worked back in the kitchen. But the main reason Limei decided to not work in the family business, as she told me, was that her parents had decided to hand the restaurant down to her brother. Hierarchical social and symbolic structures in a Chinese jia 9 impact the opportunities of individuals unequally. Education and inheritance are two interrelated elements of the social structures of families that constantly shape the lives of young Chinese women. In this sense, family decisions, as was the case for Limei, tend to become vicious cycles that reinforce unequal structures: if neither a woman’s job opportunities nor her income is as promising as for men, then for a family with low capital, preparing a young girl is not as profitable as doing the same for a boy. This aspect of inequality in children’s education and children’s opportunities is paradoxically reproduced even (or more thoroughly) in the context of migration, and it is an effect of the economic conditions and social positions of the families in question.

9 Wong refers in his article to jia as “the Chinese family.”

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Coming back to Min Zhou and Logan’s analysis of the participation of women in Chinese economic enclaves and recalling the way in which Leonardo—back in Yiwu10 —had explained the participation of Chinese women in a household’s income, it is clear that “(…) women on the whole are expected (and expect themselves ) to earn wages in ways that do not conflict with their family obligations. […] Their purpose is not to develop a working career (this applies even to many who had professional occupations in China) but to contribute immediately to the household income for the benefit of younger members.” (1989: 818 emphasis added)

Within patrilineal social systems of inheritance, the place of girls is still considered an asset that can be passed down from the parents’ household to the husband’s, in spite of the fact that, since Republican times (1912– 1949), there are legal prescriptions calling for equality among male and female inheritors, something which is rarely followed among contemporary Chinese families. “When it comes to the management of jia property, it is unambiguous that the traditional bias against women in the family still prevails” (Wong 1985: 66). One of the main reasons for the inheritance discrepancy, which often still passes property down mostly to male children, is because the still prevailing patrilineal family traditions imply the loss of the inherited assets that the jia (family) has accumulated and passed on to daughters once they get married. These assets, then, within this cultural construction of inheritance and marriage, would be passed down to the husband’s family. Moreover, marriage today is still not only expected of women, but it is almost considered an obligation. Hong Fincher, in an insightful research on Chinese women, education, work and marriage, states: In 2007, the Women’s Federation defined the term “leftover” women (sheng nü) as unmarried women over the age of twenty-seven […]. The Chinese word “sheng” refers mainly to leftover or spoiled food, which must be discarded. When used in relation to women, the term adds to the emotional resonance of the media campaign. (2013a: 38 original italics)

10 Leonardo was referred to in Chapter 3.

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Unmarried young women are often seen as a failure, a disgrace not only to themselves but also to their family.11 Women are held to the expectations of finding a husband and at the same time deprived of their rightful part of the family’s inheritance because abiding by the first obligation— marriage—results in the loss of the inherited part of the family’s capital. As long as these structures are still valid, investment in a girl’s upbringing will still be considered a less profitable decision than handing down a business to a male child, and overcoming these imposed social limitations becomes a lifelong struggle for women. It was this aspect which most definitely defined Limei’s life path and her role in the family. It reveals the direct link between structural organizations and inequality. The different constructions of the value and rights of children clearly lean toward the educational and economic growth of boys to the detriment of girls, also resulting in inequality regarding property and inheritance ownership (Hong Fincher 2013a, b), as well as of access to equal paying employment. As picked up by Sen (2001), there is a structural cultural construction of gender that results in the conception that a boy’s returns for the family will be greater than those of a girl. Notwithstanding the constant reproduction of these structures, the reality of women and their perceptions with regard to family, marriage and their duties within them are no longer embedded in their cultural constructions; and in order to overcome the obstacles that they face, they have sought different ways of empowerment. The elements analyzed in Limei’s experience reveal not only gender positions and the intrinsic inequalities which Chinese women face, particularly young Chinese women and girls that are not yet at the head of their own families, but they also hint at Limei’s gradual subjective construction. When her uncle was no longer able to work and the family restaurant was in the hands of her parents, the responsibility of helping them was instantly given to Limei. In this aspect, her condition not only as a woman but also as an elder sibling entailed her responsibility in helping the family business while the younger siblings—in this case only one brother—continued with their studies. In fact, in any given case, even if Limei had had a younger sister instead of a brother, her responsibility at this point would have been the same. This is an issue that had to do with the family’s low economic capital. However, the fact that she had 11 In my field research, only two of the women over 27 with whom I spoke were not yet married.

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to quit school in order to preserve the family’s income and that, as she grew older, she came to understand that the restaurant would be handed down to her brother and not to her, or to them both for that matter, reveals a much deeper social structure of gender bias that crosses not only economic factors but social and cultural factors as well. This problem also reflects other issues linked to unviable kinship and family organizations and inheritance practices that are still structured by social and cultural constructions that are no longer consonant with contemporary economic contexts. When patrilineal affiliations organize families in such a way that the only support system for the elderly is the children, handing down assets to daughters is considered a loss from the moment that she marries. The economic shifts of recent decades, namely the rise in the cost of living and the precarization of labor, in addition to a number of social policies to (attempt to) control population growth, have had a profound impact on Chinese society. Family and social practices, however, have yet to catch up with these changes and readapt their social organizations to these new realities. As Wei rightfully claims, and as I have shown in the preceding pages, there is still a rigid structural sexual caste system in China, built on a concept of male domination.12 The place women have held within familial institutions is not only relevant when talking about childhood; it is also an important element that determines the positions, the limits and the opportunities that women have found on their paths. These are also linked to migration and determine the processes of every individual according to their capital, among which access to education and work are fundamental.

4.4 Unequal Access to Education and Work for Women in China Fei and Sandra are two women from the provinces of Anhui and Zhejiang, respectively. Neither of them finished high school in China, and before moving out of their country, they both worked as employees in manufacturing.

12 This same argument is in fact also valid in the case of Mexico and its systems of symbolic and social differentiation, as was analyzed in Chapter 2, where reiterated acts that are subject to gender and class elements are reproduced.

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Fei, a woman in her fifties, reached middle-school education and, as many other women from Anhui,13 she first migrated to the Zhejiang Province where she worked in a factory before leaving. While she talked to me about her job back home, she pointed to the bags all around her in her shop in Tepito and told me she used to make exactly the same kind of products when she worked in her country. Fei works today in Tepito selling bags and lives in Colonia Guerrero with her husband and son. She arrived in Mexico from Italy in 2010, where she spent several years before continuing her journey with her son and her husband; her elder daughter stayed in Europe. Fei had moved to Italy in search of a job in which she could earn a better living than she did in China. In Europe, she worked in a manufacturing company, just as she had done before in China, but the conditions and the earnings were not what she had expected. Moreover, the crisis the country was going through after 2008 made it even more difficult for her to find the stability she sought. Many Chinese working now in Mexico’s popular markets were in Italy or Spain first, but Mexico eventually came to represent, in the collective imaginary and (sometimes) in the realities of many migrants, a better economic option. Sandra also worked in a factory near Shanghai, in Zhejiang Province. She manufactured clothes that were destined to be sold in markets and malls around the globe. Sandra arrived in Mexico less than a year before our conversation and worked in Plaza Beijing with her husband. Sandra was thoroughly unhappy with her new place of residence and with her new life in Mexico, she does not speak a word of Spanish nor is she eager to learn the language. In spite of this, the couple already manage their own shop in the Plaza, and they work side by side with other members of the husband’s family, who had told the couple about the possibilities they could have in Mexico. This is related to the second explanation that Fei gave about her decision to leave China, which reveals the importance of the construction of migration networks, namely those that have been constructed between eastern coastal areas of migration from China to Europe and to American countries, particularly in Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang. The proximity of Anhui (where Fei is originally from) to Zhejiang (where Sandra is from) has stimulated over a century a continuous, though not intensive, stage migration process. Zhejiang is one of today’s most important emigration hubs, its destinations having mainly 13 For a more extensive study of the internal migration of women from Anhui, see Connelly et al. (2010).

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been European countries, but it is also one of China’s most important regions of internal immigration, particularly for women such as Fei who come from rural contexts or small cities. Fei, then, initially followed traditional paths of migration, from Anhui to Zhejiang, and then to Italy. But her last transition was still unexpected at the time. Moving from Italy to Mexico as a Chinese migrant is a new and growing phenomenon. Contrary to Sandra’s case, who had family already established in the Latin American country, Fei had no pre-established networks yet she had heard of the opportunities that this new economic enclave could offer her. In Fei’s own words, the simple but compelling explanation of her decision to leave China was “we needed to eat.” She argued that there were no job opportunities in China and that incomes were very scarce and therefore life was difficult. Indeed, in spite of various social and political efforts and in spite of the current discourses on social equality and growth that China wishes to portray to the outside, social gaps have grown wider and inequalities in quality of life standards14 and people’s opportunities and accessibility to growth have been unavoidable, especially employment and education opportunities for women. Social background, regional and cultural origin, and gender heavily determine these opportunities. Braun (2005) analyzing the interrelations between women’s issues in the labor market and the intrinsic marginalization that they have been put through stated that “by the end of 2000, only 64% of Chinese women living in urban areas were still in paid employment—2.6% less than a decade earlier. Although the employment situation has also worsened for men, 81.5% of the male population is still employed” (Braun 2005: 110). During my field research in Mexico, I found that gender inequalities are often present from early ages in the lives of many girls, inequalities that are not only latent in their experiences but that are often incorporated into their own subjectivities. Access to education is one of the most relevant aspects of inequality and is in itself the result of an intersection between gender and economic differentiations. Many of the women with whom I spoke said they had not completed high school. The case of Limei was particular because the last years of her schooling were in Mexico and not

14 These conditions of marginalization are also related to social security systems that are mostly organized as family care structures in which children have to take on the role of the state and care for the elderly or the sick. They have also been a factor of health problems that have come along with troublesome environmental issues due to the skyrocketing growth of urbanization (Edmonds 1999; Harvey 2005; So 2007).

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in China, and the conditions of her family impeded the completion of her education; however, even women who stayed in China had similar experiences. Sandra and Fei were also unable to complete high school because they started working. Both women were in precarious economic conditions, the first grew up in a rural context, the second in a small city near Shanghai, a region where small manufacturing is the daily bread for much of its population. Peicun and Xiaobei, two women in their early twenties working together in Plaza de la Tecnología, didn’t finish their education either. They moved to Mexico around 2011, following their parents, but contrary to Limei’s case, they decided to go to Mexico as adults. Both young women lived and worked in Tijuana before deciding to move to Mexico City to become employees in an electronics shop in Plaza de la Tecnología. Peicun explained that she didn’t finish high school because she started working at home. After that, when she was 19 years old, she worked for two months in a retail shop in Guangdong, right before moving to Mexico to work in her parents’ restaurant. However, there have also been cases of women who managed to finish their degrees and who had found jobs in China. They too decided to leave because their opportunities were scarce in China. Wei (2013) argues that, even after achieving higher education, inequalities are still reproduced and even accentuated for women in China. She points to four issues that show how, in spite of various state policies and government initiatives that were launched with greater impetus since the 1990s (Attané 2012: 6) to minimize gender inequalities in China,15 in certain fields, namely higher education, employment conditions have worsened for women. That is to say, not only do women have less access to education, but those that do manage to attain a high level of education due to their higher symbolic and economic capitals still face strong constraints when finding work. Moreover, Wei sustains that not only are there significantly lower employment opportunities for women after graduation compared to men, but also significantly lower starting salaries for women in China and, additionally, she finds that women’s job satisfaction is unanimously lower than that of men. There are clear differences determined by gender in the distribution of professions and work units, and “even after receiving higher 15 Wei’s analysis utilizes the data from two studies by the College of Pedagogics of Peking University in 2003 and 2009. Attane, in turn, cites three successive programs for the development of women (中国妇女发展纲要—Zhongguo funü fazhan gangyao) beginning in 1995.

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education and having acquired the same scholarly attainments and capabilities as men, women have not been able to obtain professions of the same social status, efficiency and job satisfaction as men” (Wei 2013: 56). These conditions were also manifested in most of the experiences of the women with whom I talked. Many of them stated that they did have a job back in China, but often these were jobs that they didn’t like and where they saw no future. In addition to this, the jobs in China of many of the women with whom I spoke were not paying them enough to live and to care for their families, and their working conditions were difficult, as were the cases of Fei and Sandra, for instance. Cecilia, for her part, finished high school but was not able to attend university. She could not find a job in China and had to move out of the country, at first leaving her husband behind, as many other women have done. Cecilia first moved to Singapore, where she worked as an employee in a McDonald’s before coming to Mexico to join her husband, who had moved there because his uncle had invited him to work with him in Peña y Peña, a street close to Tepito with a considerable presence of Chinese vendors, where Plaza Beijing is located. This lack of opportunities, as Wei has specified, is not only applicable to cases of women without higher education. Rosario, Alicia and Laura, among many others, had all earned a degree in China, and before leaving they had all worked as middle-school teachers. Although none of them had wanted to become teachers (Alicia, for instance, had studied Tourism), it was the only job with relatively acceptable income that they could find, and they were all unsatisfied with this option. Moreover, not only are job opportunities in China lower for women than for men, regardless of how high the level of education, but wages continue to be uneven due to gender bias. Rosario talked about the low salaries in China when she decided to get out of her country. The income that she earned as a high school teacher—a profession that she neither liked nor had chosen—was increasingly insufficient because of China’s accelerated growth and rising cost of living. Her salary in Hubei, her province of origin, before leaving in 2005 was 800 Yuan—equivalent to around 100 dollars—per month, and in Mexico she earned much more than that even when she was just starting to work as an employee in her cousin’s shop in Tepito. In fewer cases, women considered their employment conditions in China as not so bad, but they wanted to come to Mexico in order to broaden their possibilities. These were the cases, for instance, of Yun, a translator, of An Lan, a doctor, and of Cristina, an employee in

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a big tourism office, who were all working in Beijing, a factor that also determined their access to better salaries than women working in smaller cities. Surprisingly (or not) these three women also had bonds between them of either kinship or friendship before migration, and they all felt that Mexico could offer them more possibilities for personal growth than what they saw in China. The continuous reproduction of traditional “female” industries in China is another aspect of uncanny importance here. It brings us back to a differentiated construction of gender and the roles that are to be performed, determined by symbolic and social differentiations. The most common work areas for women in China are health care, education, the hospitability industry, wholesale, retail and—only in recent years—finance (Wei 2013). This is rather interesting when we consider the former jobs of most women now working in Mexico’s popular markets, who were mostly teachers, hostesses in hotels or in office lobbies, wholesalers and retailers, manufacturing workers, and finally doctors, as in the case of An Lan. It is also interesting to note that in Mexico, all of the women I focused on in this study work in wholesale and retail, another activity that has been categorized as a traditionally “female” industry. One last element that intersects with the different limitations and possibilities that Chinese women have found in their paths is related to their regional origins. The economic and social dimensions of these women’s realities are dependent on the development of their country in social, economic and political aspects. In 2010, “the average annual income of employed urban women is just 67.3 percent of the average annual income of men, while the average annual income of employed rural women is 56 percent of men’s annual income” (Wei 2013: 61). Moreover, in cases of larger cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin) and other urbanized regions with characteristics that differed from those on the coast, the gap between average annual income for men and women is closer to the second figure than to the first (Wei 2013). The problem lies in the paradox of development, where the changes that should in fact be directed at the improvement of living conditions of the populations that are most in need rarely reach the people that are the furthest away from the “centers.” Hence, regional origins also constitute an important element with a profound impact on the already unequal opportunities for women in China. As Wei claims, “we should not only pay close attention to the number and proportion of women employed, but also focus on the quality and

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benefit of the employment so as to promote the levels of actual equality in the pursuit of quantitative equality” (Wei 2013: 62). This is evident in Alicia’s case: although she had greater access to education and employment than other women, she did not consider that her possibilities for personal growth and fulfillment in China were giving her what she needed. Alicia is a 27-year-old woman, and her parents are, in her own words, “still working and still young, so they don’t need my help yet.” Moreover, she is still single, and in spite of the symbolic constructions that this entails at her age, she feels comfortable. She studied tourism in Hangzhou city, capital of the province of Zhejiang; before leaving China she worked as a rural teacher. Despite the fact of not having had any teaching experience or having been trained as a teacher, Alicia mentioned that very precarious conditions prevail in the province of Zhejiang, as well as a low education level, two factors that have intensified the need for teachers in rural schools. To this need, moreover, is added the need to create paid employment for women in China. There have been, in fact, state efforts to widen both education and labor markets for women in the country. However, as stated by Wei and as Alicia’s experience shows, working opportunities for women are mostly limited to the areas of health care, education, hotels, wholesale and retail, in spite of their level of education or selected careers. Many young women like Alicia are faced with a barrier that leads them in one single direction: they are to be educators of the future generations, whether they have chosen to, or prepared for it, or not. Alicia, therefore, came to Mexico in search of “adventure,” looking for something that could fulfill her more than the job she had as a teacher in China. Cases like hers are also intrinsic to these same social constructions of differentiation that have constantly placed women in specific education areas and employment conditions in China and from which they choose to get away. Finally, the gap between urban and rural circumstances in China that has pushed the migration of thousands of people to the cities is exhausting the capacities of urban structures to absorb the influx of internal migration. The gap between coastal Chinese provinces and internal western provinces is also to be noted, particularly with regard to the Special Economic Zones. However, along with the development of these Zones as industrialization hubs, state-owned enterprises have lowered efficiency and profit-making abilities (Sun 2013), and although they have remained—for now—big employment hubs in China, they are rapidly losing importance. The former system of lifelong employment and

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government security, known as the “iron rice bowl,” began diminishing drastically in 1986 (Benson and Zhu 1999). Only a few of the parents of the women with whom I spoke still belong to this employment system which gave the families in question lifelong economic support. China’s aging populations are left with limited possibilities and have to rely on younger generations. Today, many young people in China—both men and women—with low social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1979) feel a great weight of responsibility on their shoulders and see little future in their paths within their country. Migration, then, has become an advantageous decision, at least within the social imaginaries made through communication networks between migrants and future migrants. The reproduction of migration networks is often due to the circulation of information and tips about the possibilities of work and/or self-employment in other countries. Although for many women survival was one of the top reasons for leaving China, social imaginaries of migration were a weighty reason for arriving in Mexico. The constructions in social imaginaries about what migration entails and about the possibilities that it can provide among possible migrants have been an important factor of emigration. This has also been the case in the construction of new migration paths that women have developed because of the obstacles they find because of gender discrimination. The increasing participation of Chinese women in migration is related to their possibilities of incorporation into wage labor abroad, but there are other economic and social aspects that also represent incentives for them to complete their migratory patterns.

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Siu, Lok C. D. 2005b. “Queen of the Chinese Colony: Gender, Nation, and Belonging in Diaspora.” Anthropological Quarterly, 78 (3). George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research: 511–42. Skeldon, Ronald. 1996. “Migration from China.” Journal of International Affairs, 49 (2). Columbia University School of International Public Affairs: 434. So, Alvin Y. 2007. “Globalization and the Transition from Neoliberal Capitalism to State Developmentalism in China.” International Review of Modern Sociology, 61–76. Song, Miri. 1995. “Between ‘the Front’ and ‘the Back’: Chinese Women’s Work in Family Businesses.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 18 (3). London: 285–98. Sun, Zhengyun. 2013. Explaining Regional Disparities of China’s Economic Growth: Geography, Policy and Infrastructure. Undergraduate thesis, Department of Economics, University of California Berkeley. Supervised by Bryan Graham. Berkeley. Wei, Guoying. 2013. “Analysis of Progress and Issues of Gender Equality in China.” In East Asian Gender in Transition, edited by Joo-hyun Cho: 51–72. Keimyung University Press. Whyte, Martin King, Wang Feng, and Yong Cai. 2015. “Challenging Myths About China’s One-Child Policy.” The China Journal, 74: 144–59. https:// doi.org/10.1086/681664. Wong, Siu-lun. 1985. “The Chinese Family Firm: a Model.” The British Journal of Sociology, 36 (1) (March): 58–72. Zhou, Min, and John R. Logan. 1989. “Returns on Human Capital in Ethic Enclaves: New York City’s Chinatown.” American Sociological Review. JSTOR: 809–20. Zhou, Min, and Regina Nordquist. 1994. “Work and Its Place in the Lives of Immigrant Women: Garment Workers in New York City’s Chinatown.” Applied Behavioral Science Review, 2 (2): 187–211. https://doi.org/10. 1016/1068-8595(94)90013-2. Zhou, Yu. 2000. “The Fall of ‘the Other Half of the Sky’? Chinese Immigrant Women in the New York Area.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (4): 445–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(00)00106-0.

CHAPTER 5

Migration to Mexico as a Strategy for Survival and Growth: Building Opportunities in Mexican Popular Markets

The participation of women in Tepito has played an important role in the economic networks that link Mexico and China. Women’s participation in Mexican popular markets accounts for half of their working population (Sanchez Nava 2012), and this participation is essential for commercial activity in these markets. But most importantly, women’s work in Mexico’s informal sector keeps many households afloat. Working in popular markets has become a subsistence strategy for many women unable to find other opportunities in formalized networks (Babb 1990). This has also been the case for Chinese women in the last two decades. Mexico has seen the creation of new migration patterns from China, particularly since the 2000s, as women have been moving away in increasing numbers from the traditional activities often embarked upon by Chinese migrants. Chinese economic enclaves (consisting of ethnostalgic [Hirai 2009] neighborhoods abounding in Chinese restaurants, ethnic shops and grocery stores) in Mexico have offered few possibilities of economic participation for women historically. Job offers in these traditional networks are still suffused with cultural gender differentiations that undermine women’s capacity as economic agents, allowing them scant possibilities for growth. The migration of Chinese women nowadays, however, as the first to leave the family core, is increasingly significant in

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terms of numbers. This is mainly due to the fact that, in spite of continuous efforts to open the labor market for women in China, the structural inequalities faced by the feminine population are still prevalent. According to Wei (2013), not only do women have less access to education in China, but those who manage to attain it are still faced with strong constraints to find work, and starting salaries for women are still significantly lower than they are for men. Either by themselves or with their families, migration has been the only way many women could help their families get ahead, and their incorporation into popular markets became a strategy of economic agency. The impact that this transformation of Chinese migration patterns to Mexico had on the social organization of migrants is noteworthy. In this chapter, I seek to understand how women have experienced migration and what it has implied for them. To this end, I portray specific aspects of the lives of Chinese women working in Mexico City’s popular markets. Their life stories, their journeys, unveil their reasons and strategies for diving into the dynamics of Mexican popular markets. Like Joan Scott (1986), I also understand individuals to be subjects whose experiences make them what they are, and so I relate their daily practices to social and economic structures (family, employment, business and education being the most prominent in their discourses). To show these processes of subjectivation and to relate them to the construction of spaces of opportunities, I divide this chapter into three parts, focusing in each one on specific aspects in which women, through migration and through their incorporation into Mexican popular markets, have built different forms of agency that have transformed their life experiences. The chapter sheds light on the fact that all the women I interviewed share the same set of historic and socially constructed categories of differentiation with impacts on their experiences, in spite of the great differences in their individual journeys. Notwithstanding the need to understand agency and to consider their capital as individuals, their position as women has variously determined the opportunities they had in their lives and the roles they had to take upon themselves within their families and households. First, I look into the reasons why Mexico has become such a strong—albeit unexpected—destination for contemporary Chinese migration patterns, attracting the attention of Chinese women in particular. I argue that the networks of popular economy—intrinsic to the country’s historical context of social inequality—take on special importance for the migration of women because they have allowed them more possibilities

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for growth. Second, I focus on how marriage and family organization have changed in the context of migration, especially because of women’s participation in networks of popular markets. In this case, I depict specific events in the experiences of the women interviewed in Mexico City’s popular markets to look at how the intersection of different factors of inequality (economic background, regional origin, family composition, etc.) impacts their lives after migration. Finally, the analysis focuses on the specific case on An Lan and her path to becoming one of the most prominent Chinese businesspersons in Tepito. The construction of networks among women with different backgrounds and capital also protrudes from her presence and strength in the market. These networks are built from below and depend on the strategies and possibilities that the women in question have found and developed in order to grow as businesswomen in Mexican popular markets. I argue that there are different forms of articulation between migrants with high capital and better access to opportunities and those that travel as a last resort for survival. Mexican popular markets are made up of a very heterogeneous population, and the Chinese people who come to work in them have inserted themselves into different layers of this social fabric.

5.1 New Migration Patterns to Mexico City’s Popular Markets and the Search for Opportunities While Yun and I were talking behind the counter in her shop, her employees—all Mexican—were coming to her continually with money and inquiries from the clients. They would give her numbers and prices, waiting for Yun to give them the change that they themselves requested as they handed her the payment; they would repeat the questions that had been posed to them by clients trying to get lower prices or about novelty items. While we were talking, Yun would look up every so often through the hole in the ceiling of her shop, where other employees were working, asking if they had found the products they were looking for in storage and helping get them down. Like most shops in this plaza— located just one street across from the “official delimitation” of the Tepito market—hers is divided into two levels. The upper level, which can only be accessed by a ladder through a one square meter hole in the ceiling, serves as a little warehouse to store some of the commodities that she and

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her husband continuously import from China and that, little by little, are brought down to be exhibited in the lower part of the store. Yun is a 34-year-old Chinese woman who migrated to Mexico from Beijing in 2004 and now works on the outskirts of Tepito. Drawing from her own experience, she explained that the expectation of economic growth for Chinese people is higher in the popular economy than elsewhere: Yun: “En México cuando uno quiere mantener un negocio, para la gente que no estudiaba muchos años no importaba, en China depende de estudios. Allá como mucha gente, cuando tú tienes por ejemplo licenciatura o maestría o doctorado, nadie quiere venir a México a hacer negocio como este tipo. Ellos pueden trabajar en una empresa grande o hacer un negocio de otra forma, un gran negocio en China. Así es más fácil que aquí. Pero si tú no tienes licenciatura, si no estudias nada en China es difícil tener un buen trabajo. Mejor venir aquí a trabajar, hacer una tiendita y luego vender y comprar y así puedes mantener la vida. Por eso depende. Eso es una cosa. Otra cosa, como China es muy grande, hay muchas provincias, aquí se dice “estados”, allá hay muchos “estados”, algunos “estados” son muy pobres, luego la gente viene de pueblos chiquitos, dicen “mejor yo voy a ver a México, a ver allá cómo viven”, si la gente viene de la ciudad o de un pueblo grande, y tienen la oportunidad de trabajo, ellos no quieren venir aquí, porque es lejos, y porque no es tan seguro, porque luego en la sociedad hay muchos problemas, porque es otro idioma… Mejor quedarse en China porque allá también pueden conseguir trabajo.” (“In Mexico, if you want to run a business, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t studied for many years; in China, it depends on your studies. There, if you have a degree or a master’s or a doctorate, no one wants to come to Mexico to do business like this. They can work in a big company or do business another way, have a big business in China. It’s easier that way than here. But if you don’t have a degree, if you haven’t studied anything in China, it’s hard to get a good job. Better to come here to work, start a little shop and then buy and sell so you can make a living. That’s why it depends. That’s one thing. Another thing, because China is very big, there are many provinces—here they say ‘states.’ There are many ‘states’ and some are very poor, so people come from small towns. They say, ‘it’s better for me to go to Mexico and see how they live there.’ If people come from the city or from a big town and they have an opportunity to work, they don’t want to come here, because it’s far away, and because it’s not very safe, because there are a lot of problems in society,

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because it’s another language… better to stay in China because they can also get a job there.”)

In Yun’s own way of understanding the intersection between different categories of differentiation, she also explained a very unique specificity of the Chinese working in Mexican popular markets: their heterogeneity. All the women I interviewed in Mexico had very different types of capital. While some came from big urban agglomerations where work diversity and opportunities were greater, others came from rural areas where work options were limited. Some came from families with reasonable economic backgrounds while others lived in conditions of poverty. While some of them never finished high school, others had degrees in medicine, engineering or tourism. Some came directly from China to Mexico, whereas others migrated to other countries first. Hardly any of them had any experience in trade or commerce before leaving China. This was not the reason for their insertion into Mexico’s popular markets; it was rather the opportunity they all saw in this space. Song (1995), while analyzing the work of Chinese women in Britain, perceived the will and the need of creating a family enterprise within migration as a strategy for the survival of the household, but also for the personal achievement of migrants: “For most Chinese families, shop ownership was the only viable and conceivable means of social and economic mobility. Shop ownership was considered to be preferable to waged work in the Chinese ethnic economy for a number of reasons: (…) not only was shop ownership more profitable than waged work, such as in restaurants and in clothing manufacturing, but the control they were able to exercise, by virtue of self-employment, was seen as invaluable.” (1995: 289)

This invaluable virtue of self-employment the author talks about is also linked in many cases to the migrants’ previous lack of opportunities for growth and their quest for survival. The desire most individuals have of becoming their own bosses with their own businesses translates in social imaginaries as a path toward upward social mobility. In spite of their differences, they all talked about the lack of opportunities for them back home, and most of them saw possibilities for growth in Mexico’s market, as Yun had explained. Although Yun was talking generally about the link between education and work opportunities, this is most relevant

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in the case of women because of the unequal education and labor structures that offer fewer alternatives to them compared to men. Indeed, education becomes a strategy for social reproduction (Bourdieu 1997) and improving their prospects in life (Sen 2001), but levels of education are only one of the variables at stake when undertaking such enterprises. Social organization and the unequal power relations that result from these intersectional variables of differentiation often hinder these strategies. Regional origins can significantly determine someone’s access to employment before and after migration. As Yun also added in her insightful analysis of migration, coming from an impoverished environment or from a big city in China would never produce the same outcomes with regard to life opportunities. For Chinese women, because of the unequal access to education according to gender, regional origin and economic background, and because of a title’s low impact on salaries for women after achieving the same level of education as men (Wei 2013), migration to Mexico and incorporation into popular markets became a very productive and sought-after strategy in the last two decades. 5.1.1

Migration to Mexico

Although Mexico has had a constant inflow of Chinese migrants for a century and a half, it has seldom been considered by migrants as an idyllic destination for those seeking work but rather as a trampoline for reaching what was actually being sought: “the American dream.” Besides the United States, other countries have also been preferred destinations for Chinese migrants. Canada, for instance, has been an important destination for migrants from Hong Kong and Guangdong; France and England for people from Fujian and Zhejiang (Skeldon 1996). Throughout the twentieth century, these destinations represented highly sought-after models of growth for migrants looking for improvement in their living conditions, either for economic reasons or because of political and social strife in their own country. But in recent decades, traveling to those countries that had been regarded by Chinese migrants throughout the last century as ideal places for building better opportunities have gradually lost their appeal,1 the conditions and attractiveness of these countries have changed or diminished. Skeldon, analyzing Chinese migrations since 1 In addition to this, migration can also entail danger, either traveling by land to European countries or by sea to countries on the American continent.

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the eighteenth century, stated “that the destination areas provided opportunities for poorer migrants to become successful through hard work and personal contacts” (1996: 438). When previously established social networks of migration still reigned over the definitions of the places of settlement and the dynamics set forth by migrants, these places continued to figure as spaces of opportunities. But now, when travel expenses, papers that are needed, plus the costs of arriving and getting settled are considered, these trips to developed countries have become quite expensive. The need for increased economic capital before migration has made it more difficult for people to settle, and newer destinations have emerged for migrants with more limited resources. Although after 1979 greater possibilities of personal wealth accumulation gave people from China more freedom to move (Skeldon 1996: 441), this doesn’t necessarily signify greater opportunities after migration, particularly when traveling to countries where settlement expenses are higher than those back home. Although Chinese migration to the United States, France and England is still popular among migrants with higher economic capacity or with very well-established social networks of migration, those with lower economic capacity have chosen other destinations (Nyíri 2011). In the last two decades, traveling to Mexico and setting up a new business or integrating into already existing commercial networks in the popular economy has provided a source of opportunity to migrants, and this is particularly true in the case of migrant women. Generally, the intersection between low levels of education and gender (particularly when at the head of a family) results in fewer possibilities for work, but this is not necessarily true in the case of Mexican popular networks. As María Rosete explained about the dynamics of Tepito and as was analyzed in Chapter 2: “Tepito is a place that offers a lot of possibilities for people who know where to find them.” Likewise, Yun explained that as she understood the conditions in this place she had gotten to know, education was not an issue in Mexico if you could settle for making a living with a small shop (a tiendita). Many of the Chinese women with whom I interacted in Mexico City were also often confronted with these difficult experiences, with this lack of choices or options. With very few exceptions, most of the Chinese women that migrated to Mexico City and started working in the popular economy had rarely found opportunities for significant growth before their migration processes. They often came from difficult economic backgrounds and had very few or no opportunities for growth in China. Many grew up with very few resources or in

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rural areas far from big cities, having few possibilities, if any, to study and therefore acquire a well-paid job. The migration of Chinese women outside of China is not new, but the reasons for migration are, and so are the ways in which they have integrated and adapted to different economic circuits. The women I spoke with during my research all had very different regional origins. Many of them came from coastal provinces of China with well-established traditions of migration, such as Guangdong and Fujian—the two Chinese provinces with the highest percentage of international emigrants—or from Zhejiang. Others came from inner northern or western provinces of China that not only have no tradition of migration, but where migration was actually highly regulated and often prohibited in the pre-reform era, such as Hubei, Hebei and Shanxi. A few of them came from big international cities or globalization hubs, such as Beijing and Shanghai. However different the migration stories of these women, they all shared a number of conditions of inequality in China that pushed them to look for better opportunities elsewhere and integrate into these circuits of mobility to Mexico. This can be seen through the cases of Fei—presented in Chapter 4—and Laura, who both tried to make a living in European countries before coming to Mexico. Both Fei’s and Laura’s considerations of Mexico and their reasons for coming here relate to their lack of opportunities in China and in other countries. Laura arrived in Mexico City in 2006, coming from the city of Kaifeng, in the Henan Province of China. She used to work in China as a teacher and was dissatisfied with her conditions and opportunities for work there. Like Fei, Laura now works in the outskirts of Tepito, but before coming to Mexico she also lived and worked in Europe for several years. Before she could start her own business, which she runs together with her husband, she had to work as an employee in several different shops in Mexico, working for other Chinese people, selling the same kind of disposable products that she has in her own store now (cheap trinkets, hair accessories, plastic articles, fans, keychains, bracelets and small plastic toys). Their son, who was 21 years old at the time of the study, arrived in Mexico a year after his mother. He finished high school in a Mexican school and then started studying for a career, Laura told me as she beamed with pride. Unlike Fei, who had only lived in Italy, Laura had moved across Europe several times because she never really found the conditions that she was looking for.

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Laura: “I had experience working in other countries in Europe before coming to Mexico. I was in Italy, France, Germany, and that other little country… Holland. But it was always more difficult for me to set up a business in those countries. The people are too different, they do things differently, it wasn’t easy to do business or to deal with them. But it was also difficult because of the money… In Mexico it was much easier for me to set up a small business. I didn’t have a lot of money, but here even with the small amount that I had one can build something much better than in European countries.”

The fact that Laura had the possibility to move from one country to another suggests she had accumulated a certain amount of capital, a condition that was lacking with many other women. Her narrative also refers to the difficulties she found in her journey toward obtaining what she was looking for, a certain economic stability, which—as Song (1995) had already perceived—she thought would only be possible by creating her own business and being her own employer. Laura tried to achieve this goal in several countries in Europe before realizing that, because of the conditions she found there, it would not be possible. In Mexico’s popular markets, however, she found the right conditions for building her own little enterprise from scratch and becoming her own boss. Laura: “Now I think it was a good decision for me to come to Mexico. Although work here is hard, I am satisfied with the results. Life would definitely be easier in China, I would have my friends and my family there, we would be close to each other, but work would be just as difficult as it is here, and I probably wouldn’t earn as much.”

In Laura’s case, coming to Mexico did indeed pose an advantage for her over the possibilities that she and her family had had, not only in China but in Europe as well. Mexico offered a little more flexibility, opportunities that are no longer available in other countries. But these possibilities depend on an individual’s capital. An additional investment to procure a working space is something that not all migrants can afford. As was seen in Chapter 3, many Chinese migrants have had to pay high rent to Mexican landlords in order to secure a working space in markets like Tepito, something not all of them could do. Unlike many other Chinese migrants in Mexico, Laura comes from a province in China with no tradition of migration, in which household registration systems or Hukou (户口) were not completely lifted until

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2014. For her, traveling without previously established networks was an additional obstacle to finding better opportunities. Laura: “When I first came to Mexico City in 2006 there weren’t a lot of Chinese vendors in the downtown area or in Tepito. But there are more and more everyday and it is becoming more difficult to manage. There are a lot of differences between us, and that often creates problems. I am originally from the city of Kaifeng, in the Henan Province of China. There aren’t very many people in Mexico from that region. Before, there used to be a lot of people that came from Guangdong, but more and more people are coming from the northern provinces of the country now. The problem is that there is no relation between them, sometimes they don’t even understand each other because of language differences and they also have different cultures. We are not all the same, we don’t necessarily understand each other.”

As we can see from Laura’s narrative, the region of origin of the Chinese population in Mexico represents a category of differentiation in itself. Here, national belonging does not necessarily imply a bond with other co-nationals. Regional differences can be as important a category as any other, and they are often indiscernible from other categorizations. A migrant’s opportunities for education and work are consistently determined by the region of origin. Moreover, migrants’ capabilities of entering into pre-existent networks of migration also depend on their hometowns and their development. The use of specific networks as a migration strategy is another determinant in the experiences of the women I spoke with. In a sense, this migration strategy determines the conditions and opportunities of the women who employ it. Although methods of migration, tools of insertion and of network constructions between China and Mexico have changed over time, family networks are still essential for Chinese migrations. Their relevance is also intimately related to the argument presented before about regional origins as one additional element of marginalization from sufficient and convenient employment opportunities for individuals. Quite often, in the case of many Chinese settlements worldwide, all it takes is one “adventurous” person to take off and build a relatively profitable economic activity for a migration network to be established, and once this person gets settled, it is likely that others will soon join. Fei, for instance, first migrated to Italy because she had acquaintances who had already told her about the job opportunities in a variety of enterprises where she could work. They had told her about the possibilities offered

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by working in a European country. None of them talked about the difficulties and none had expected the country’s crisis to affect their work.2 She didn’t know anybody in Mexico when she traveled here, but she had already heard of the possibilities that this land could offer her and her family. Gloria, like many others, came to Mexico without really knowing where she would land. She had stronger economic and educational capital, however, and this gave her and her husband—who had a degree in engineering—better chances to slowly build a business of their own. For starters, they both made use of their previously acquired knowledge in order to push their business forward. Back in China, Gloria used to work in a shipping business with exportation goods in Guangzhou, and before that she had worked in a factory. She had a lot of experience in business when she arrived in Mexico, and her husband also had years of experience in his field. Therefore, Gloria told me, they had confidence that they would make it, in spite of the fact that they didn’t know anybody working in popular markets in Mexico when they arrived. The consolidation of Gloria’s enterprise was much more tedious than she had expected, however, and it was not until seven years after her arrival in Mexico that she was finally running her own business with her husband—a small yet solid retail business whose clients are passersby. In her experience, moreover, in order to have a big wholesale business you need quite a lot of capital to start with, and her household neither has it nor will ever have it. As Gloria explained, she didn’t have a network of people that was already established in Mexico; she only knew her husband. She had no other relatives or acquaintances here prior to her arrival, and from her perspective, this was a fundamental factor that explained the difficulties of setting up her business. Gloria: “Para las personas que vienen de otras ciudades de mi región es mucho más fácil. Como las que vienen de Toisan [Taishan], para ellas ya es

2 This was the same case that was found in Lévy and Lieber (2010) and the continuous migration of Chinese women from Dongbei to Paris, in spite of the difficult conditions they had to face in the French capital. The fear of “losing face” with other Chinese has been a condition that perpetuates the influx of women in search of the “possibilities” that migration entails, only to find a completely different reality once they are in their new place of settlement, where they are unable to get the jobs that they were promised, find themselves without a stable legal status and have to figure out their own means of survival outside of the already established networks of Chinese labor (Alba Villalever 2011).

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bien fácil, ya conocen a mucha gente aquí antes de llegar, ya tienen familia o ya tienen amigos. Cuando llegan a México ellos ya tienen su trabajo que les da otra persona que ya conocen, ya tienen donde vivir, ya tienen gente que les ayuda. De la ciudad de donde venimos mi esposo y yo no es igual, no existió desde hace tanto tiempo la migración. La gente antes no se iba tan fácil. Entonces cuando nosotros llegamos, cuando yo llegué no conocía a nadie, no teníamos a nadie aquí, no sabíamos dónde empezar, no teníamos amigos, no teníamos nada. Para la otragenteesmásfácil.” (“For people who come from other cities in my region it is much easier, like those who come from Toisan [Taishan]. It’s already very easy for them, they already know a lot of people here before they arrive, they already have family, or they already have friends. When they arrive in Mexico, they already have a job that somebody they already know has gotten them, they already have a place to live, they already have people to help them. It’s not the same in the city where my husband and I come from; there had been no migration for such long time. People didn’t leave so easily before. So when we arrived, when I arrived, I didn’t know anybody, we had no one here, we didn’t know where to start, we had no friends, we had nothing. It’s easier for other people.”)

Although Gloria comes from Guangdong, one of the most traditional regions of Chinese migration worldwide because of its strategic political and commercial location (McKeown 1999a), there had not been very much migration out of the specific locality she is from, and this hindered her access to traditional networks of migration. However, despite not having access to these networks, Gloria and her husband still set up their business in Plaza de la Tecnología, a location where Chinese vendors almost exclusively from Guangdong Province have established their shops. Plaza de la Tecnología is a strong link today to the economic enclave in which the Chinese have ventured and to which they have added their own dynamics. Limei, Xiaobei and Peicun, for instance—all originally from this province—all worked in this Plaza. The three of them are originally from the city of Kaiping, one of the oldest and most important international migration hubs in China over the past two centuries. Like Limei with her family, the other two also traveled first to the north of Mexico—the country’s foremost entry point of Chinese migration due to its proximity to the United States—as part of a family reunification process. Upon arrival in Mexico, all these young women had the opportunity (or, in

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Limei’s case, the obligation) to go to work right away in the family business. Traditional family migration patterns such as theirs have gradually constructed translocal social bridges connecting Mexico to China: Guangdong to Mexico’s northern states (Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua); Kaiping and Taishan to Tijuana and Mexicali3 or to Mexico City. All three women, however, felt that their possibilities for growth in the family business were nonexistent, and each of them independently decided to move out of Tijuana and build their own path on their own. That is how they came to work in Plaza de la Tecnología, a place they had heard about from other acquaintances that could offer them better possibilities for work. Moving to Mexico City from Tijuana became their individual growth strategy. Their experiences of migration and their decision to move to Mexico City and to start working in Mexican popular markets—an activity that was already chiefly sought by Chinese people upon their arrival in the capital city—can be related to Boserup’s argument on the importance of women’s economic independence in the enhancement of women’s standing. For many women, the first step toward economic empowerment and their own subjective constructions entails a separation from their family in one way or another. To do this, they not only had to be aware of the places they occupied in these corporate bodies, but they also had to acknowledge the opportunities implied by parting with them. In this way, and in their own way of participation, the economic empowerment of women has become an essential part of social restructuring. In their own way of empowerment, Chinese women have sought their own means and their own paths, and for many women the option has been to enter the popular economy. Not all of them had the same conditions or the same opportunities, however, even once in Mexico. Their integration strategies respond to their social and economic backgrounds as well. In the case of travel to Mexico’s popular markets, the previously established networks of family or friends that provided help with these investments are often no longer the most common means of migration. Many migrants have to come up with new ways to make their journeys and—for those coming from more marginalized circumstances—new survival strategies. Although popular networks grant people with limited resources opportunities for work and possibilities for survival and growth, their structure is based on 3 Mexico’s best-organized and strongest Chinese economic enclaves are found in Tijuana and Mexicali, Baja California.

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power relations and they also pose disadvantages for those less fortunate. However, the process of migration and the search for the right conditions for women to be self-employed, to build their own business, have become sources of agency and of economic growth, through which the women in question have built their own spaces of opportunities and have often transformed their place in the family organization.

5.2 Marriage and Work Within Migration: Changing the Organization of the Household “Every day I wake up, make breakfast, get ready, come to work, I eat at work, when I’m done, I go back home, make dinner for everybody and eat. Sundays are my days off; I don’t come to work on Sundays. I stay home and clean and buy food for the week. Fei looks at me, briefly smiles, and takes her left hand into her right, lightly pressing them against her belly in body language that evoked for me both resignation to and rejection of her condition. We’re all so busy here, everybody has too much work, there’s no time to have friends or to do anything else.” (Fieldwork Journal, March 13, 2014)

Every time I went by Fei’s shop in Tepito’s outskirts I found her working alone, waiting for, or attending to, clients passing by. At home, as she described it, tasks such as cooking, cleaning and shopping—those that made the reproduction of her household possible—depended on her as well. Fei is 55 years old and has been living in Mexico City since 2010, yet her Spanish skills are almost nonexistent.4 She communicates with the people that surround her through gestures and with a few mechanized words she has learned—all mostly related to her business. As we talked, Fei seemed unsatisfied with her conditions in Mexico and what she had to give up to be there, but she assured me that in spite of it all, she could earn a better living working in Tepito than she did in China or Italy. Like her, many women would like to go back to China but are unable to because they feel their families’ possibilities of survival there would be even slimmer. Others have experienced changes in their own perceptions through migration, as well as in the places they occupy in their families; they have been able to grow and become the heads of their families; they have managed to build a family with a better balance in the 4 And so is her Italian, despite the years spent earlier in Italy.

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division of labor in the household; they have become more independent. These women have experienced migration differently; it has affected their daily practices in different ways, along with their positions in and understandings of social and economic structures (such as family, employment, business and education). Their responses to these conditions are part of a process of subjectivation through which they become agents of their own paths. Family expectations and individual responses to the roles they should play in the family are a cultural construction that continues to hold sway. This is clear, for instance, in Gloria’s case. Although she started to work right after finishing her studies in China, she put a lot of emphasis on the fact that women are working today because they must support their families, since men’s salaries are no longer enough to provide for the whole family. Gloria: “Para que la familia pueda sobrevivir uno tiene que trabajar, no hay otra forma de vivir. Antes quizá las cosas no eran igual. Antes los hombres trabajaban afuera y las mujeres trabajaban en la casa. Y en esos tiempos la división así tenía sentido. Pero hoy ya no tiene sentido; hoy ya el trabajo de los hombres no es suficiente, ya no es suficiente para vivir o para comer. La familia completa no puede depender de una sola persona, se necesitan más, las mujeres por eso ahora también salen a trabajar.” (“One has to work if the family is to survive, there is no other way to live. Maybe things weren’t the same before. Before, men worked outside the home and women worked inside it, and in those days a division of labor like that made sense. But it doesn’t make sense anymore; a man’s work is no longer enough nowadays; it’s no longer enough to live on or to eat. The whole family cannot depend on just one person, more are needed, so now women also go out to work.”)

According to Gloria, women have the obligation to take on paying jobs to contribute. In her experience, there is a double construction of the roles that women should carry out. First, she argues that there were no other solutions for the reproduction of the household than the integration of women to wage labor. Second, working was not only necessary for the reproduction of the household, but also for the growth of women. Gloria: “Luego, una cosa importante es que antes, las mujeres se quedaban a trabajar en la casa, entonces su mundo era ese. La casa era lo que conocían,

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estaban encerradas. Ellas no podían saber lo que pasaba afuera, no se enteraban. Ahora ya empiezan a conocer, a escuchar sobre las cosas que pasan en otros lugares, en el mundo. Ahora ya hay más formas de tener una mente abierta. […] Ahora las mujeres se están metiendo más al trabajo porque ya tienen más conocimientos, son más inteligentes, y ya tienen más conexiones con otros lugares y con otras personas.” (“So then, one important thing is that before, women stayed home to work, so that was their world. The home was what they knew, they were locked in. They had no way of knowing what was going on outside, they didn’t find out. Now they are beginning to find out, to hear about things that happen in other places, in the world. Now there are more ways to have an open mind. […] Now women are getting into work more because they are more knowledgeable, they are more intelligent, and they have more connections to other places and other people now.”)

Gloria considers that the effects of women’s integration into wage labor were significant with regard to women’s own perceptions. Before leaving China, Gloria, who had asserted that working was an experience of growth for her and for women in general, still considered that there was an imbalance between the responsibilities of men and women in the household. Gloria: “El único problema es que, no sé cómo sea en otros lugares, pero en China las mujeres trabajaban en la casa mientras que los hombres trabajaban en la oficina, o el campo o la empresa. Pero ahora la diferencia es que las mujeres trabajan afuera también, pero adentro siguen trabajando como antes, mientras que los hombres regresan a la casa y ya acabó su trabajo. Así las mujeres no sólo hacen su parte para ayudar al hombre, sino que siguen haciendo todo lo que ya hacían antes.” (“The only problem is that, I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but in China women worked at home while men worked in the office, or the field, or the company. But now the difference is that women work outside as well, but inside they continue to work the same as before, while the men return home and their work is done. So women not only do their part to help men, but they continue to do everything they did before.”)

Chinese women clearly still play roles that are socially attributed by gender, in spite of the fact that their economic participation is essential to the survival of the household. As Sen (2001) states, this has often translated not into a division of labor but rather an accumulation of labor for women, who not only have to go out to earn a living, but also still

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have to come back home to perform the tasks that, because of gender bias, have been attributed to women. Many young women like Gloria recall that back in China they not only had to do everything at home, responding to their traditional constructions of families and the role of women within them and within households, but they still had to work to top off the household’s income. Yun had an interpretation like Gloria’s with regard to the different roles and responsibilities of men and women in the household, but she goes a little further than Gloria and considers women’s integration into wage labor an essential part of women’s stability and economic independence. Yun: “Algunos trabajos de hombres, para los hombres es conveniente afrontar, hombre está adelante, mujer está atrás. Pero, eso es nada más de papel diferente, pero los dos casi igual de responsabilidad, como esos dos son únicos… [Este] papel diferente, por ejemplo, es hombre, debería de ser apoyo principal de una familia, mujer como segundo apoyo, pero mujer sí tiene que trabajar afuera, yo digo que para mantener a su propia familia. No puede ser como tu papá y necesitas dinero o pagar alguna enfermedad o consulta al doctor, y la mujer sólo pide dinero a su esposo: si esposo quiere, da, mucho mejor, si no quiere ¿cómo hace una mujer? Mejor es también trabajar, para mantener a la familia, y luego también para mantenerse a sí mismos. No sólodepender del hombre.” (“It’s convenient with certain jobs, that men face them, that the man be in front and the woman behind him. But, that’s nothing more than a different role, but both have almost the same responsibility, since those two are unique… [This] different role, for example, is the man, he should be the main supporter of a family, and the woman is a second support, but I say that a woman does have to work outside to support her own family. It can’t be like he’s your father and you need money or to pay for an illness or a doctor’s visit, and the woman only asks her husband for money: if the husband wants to, he gives it to her, so much the better; if he doesn’t want to, what is a woman to do? It’s also better to work, to support the family, and then also to support themselves. Not just depend on the man.”)

Gloria’s narrative shows the absolute need for women to belong to the wage-labor population; beneficial also for their own perceptions of the world and for their understanding of wider contexts. For Yun, wage labor is also a source of independence and a way to grow, to be responsible for herself instead of expecting somebody else to take care of her (as did the father/husband figure in her narrative).

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In addition to this, Yun argued: Yun: “Así en Beijing las mujeres todas trabajan […] No sé cómo era en la generación de mi abuelita, mi abuelita tuvo 5 hijos, su vida y todo en casa, cuidando a los hijos. Mi mamá, en la generación de mi mamá ya trabajó. Hasta yo... casi yo estudié y luego trabajé, como una cosa tan normal, casi nunca pensamos que nos casamos y luego quedamos en casa, no, casi nunca pensamos así. Es una cosa normal…” (“So in Beijing, all the women work […] I don’t know what it was like in my grandmother’s generation. She had five children; her life and everything was at home, taking care of the children. My mother, in my mother’s generation, she already worked. Even I... I studied and then worked, since it was something very normal; we almost never thought that we would get married and then stay home. No, we almost never thought like that. It’s a normal thing.”)

What Yun found difficult to grasp—the idea that women should stay at home rather than work—is precisely the ideal future for other women. Limei’s greatest goal, for instance, was to become a mother. Limei: “Ser mujer… Yo digo que como persona es muy bien, porque tiene bebés. Y si tiene bebés es muy bonito… […] es que también unos no quieren bebés, pero yo digo, a mí sí. Es que bien bonito que siento…” (“Being a woman… I say that as a person it’s very good, because you have babies. And if you have babies, it’s very nice… […] some people don’t want babies either, but I do. It’s so nice, I feel so good.”)

Limei’s wish is still to find a husband from China who can take care of her and her future family; but she bears in mind the possibility that this may never happen, in which case she is “prepared” to continue working. Even though Limei had elements of empowerment and of dissatisfaction toward her position and her possibilities within the family household, her construction of an ideal family is still enmeshed within these primary conceptions of what the family should be like. From her point of view, Chinese women work because they have to but not because they want to. They have to work because they don’t have a man that can take care of them. For Limei, through her own pedagogical processes of acquisition of moral values—through her habitus (Mahmood 2001)—a woman is meant to create a family and care for her family. This way of thinking

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is in tune with the way she was brought up and with the ways her family and her role within it have been structured. The social and cultural contexts in which these gender biases are constructed have, in other cases, gradually started to be transcended, and migration processes often stimulate this process. Marriage and children are two things that are expected of a grown daughter in China. When women reach a certain age, marriage is an issue that is imposed upon them rather harshly. One of the women I spoke with had a noteworthy experience along these lines. She was reaching an age where marriage was impending, and before coming to Mexico her parents were already making arrangements to find her a suitable match in China. The family’s pressure was the main reason that pushed her to leave her country, and she made use of previous work connections with someone who was already in Mexico City in order to move. This person was already working in a one of the popular markets downtown; she looked for a job for the woman in question before her arrival and gave her a place to stay. So migration can be a strategy sometimes for overcoming other structural gender bias impositions on women, like marriage, for instance. In this case, economic empowerment and migration were also a solution for avoiding a family dispute that originated from old-fashioned cultural norms. This woman is still on good terms with her family and, like many other young women, sends her parents money whenever she can. Although her reason for migration was unique, it was also accompanied by a common expectation, that migration would enable her to work and have new possibilities for growth. 5.2.1

Family Organization

The incorporation of women into wage labor, although not a recent phenomenon, is going through processes of change and has had an impact on women’s subjectivities. It has been a process in which symbolic constructions of differentiated gender roles have been overruled by the new conditions set forth by the neoliberal economic system to which China has been adjusting. Women’s personal experiences, their migration patterns and the ways in which they enter and participate in economic activities frequently represent a transformation in the structures in which they are embedded, particularly those that are gender differentiated. This can be seen in the case of Yun. As she was explaining her experience in Mexico to me, how she had come to work in the popular economy and

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what it had implied in her case, she abruptly looked up at the alley outside of her shop, where her husband was sitting on a cardboard box full of bags wrapped in plastic, lazily smoking a cigarette and joking around with their employees. She said: Yun: “Tú ya puedes ver que hay mucha gente que viene y “Yun, esto”, “Yun, lo otro”, “Yun, allá”… y así. ¡No hablan con mi esposo, que está ahí afuera! (ríe) ¡Casi nadie le pregunta! Así es esto. La mujer trabaja mucho en México. […] Desde mi [punto de] vista [las mujeres trabajan más que los hombres], sí. Yo no conozco todos los chinos que están aquí. Los que yo conozco, la mayoría, la mujer carga más… Más responsabilidad. Como los hombres siempre dicen que la mujer entiende español, y luego es más fácil aprender un idioma… no sé… como los hombres ya casi no piensan nada, sólo la mujer piensa, la mujer organiza todo del negocio… sí. Sólo digo de lo que yo conozco… (ríe) [Y los hombres] checan afuera… o… lleva mercancía afuera, o así, o carga… […] los hombres siempre dicen “si tú entiendes, tú haces. Yo hago poco porque no entiendo.” Así. […] Mi esposo nunca aprendió español, nada, nunca. Por eso, digo, ¡mírelo! Por eso qué fácil decir “tú entiendes tú haces” “tú entiendes tú contestas”, “tú entiendes tú mandas”, “yo no entiendo”.” (“You can see how a lot of people come and say “Yun, this”, “Yun, that”, “Yun, over there…” They never talk to my husband, but he’s right there! [she laughs]Almost nobody asks him! That’s how it is. Women work a lot in Mexico. […] The way I see it, women work more than men. I don’t know all the Chinese people here, but among those that I do know, the workload is heavier on women… More responsibilities. Men are always saying that it’s the women who understand Spanish, that it’s easier for women to learn a language… I don’t know… it’s like men don’t think about anything, just women, women organize the whole business. I’m just talking from my own experience.[She laughs.][And men,] they keep an eye on things outside, or they carry merchandise outside… […] They are always saying “if you understand, you should do it. I can’t do much because I don’t understand.” […] My husband never learned Spanish— nothing, never. That’s why I’m saying, look at him! It’s easy to say, “you understand, you do it,” “you understand, you answer”, “you understand, you order”, “I don’t understand”.”)

As was seen in the previous chapter, wholesale and retail are among the work areas “reserved” for women (Wei 2013). The fact that these economic activities are considered a “female” industry is highly relevant to understanding the significance of the participation of Chinese women

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in this particular economic enclave, and also to understand Yun’s narrative of how her husband has dealt with their new situation. Yun explained that her husband—as well as those of many of her acquaintances and friends— thinks that she is better suited to taking care of their new business in Mexico, arguing that it is “easier” for women to deal with such an activity. Yun talked particularly about the fact that her Spanish skills were better than those of her husband (she was the only one who arrived in Mexico with proficient Spanish skills, having studied the language as a major in university in Beijing), but in other cases, although the women’s Spanish skills were no better than their husbands’, they still performed the same tasks as Yun in their family business. In most cases, women were in charge of the shop while men would act as diableros . As in Yun’s case, it is not uncommon for women to become the main providers for their households after migrating, often working alone or with other women (in the case of Rosario, for instance, it was her mother) until they manage to set everything up for their husbands to join them. Once their husbands join them, women generally maintain the control of their shops while the men help them with more physical activities, such as the transportation of commodities from warehouses to shops. However, once immersed in migration and adapted to the new conditions in their places of residence and in their work within the enclave, this work differentiation by gender has acquired new meanings, bringing with it different implications. Gloria also considered that migration was a mind-opening experience in this sense. Through migration, she went from being an employee who had never heard of Mexico to taking care of her own business with her husband, to having employees herself and to learning a new language. Overall, she had to learn how to adapt to the new conditions that her experiences of migration gave her. Moreover, she concluded that after migration, the boundaries of the roles that had been assigned by gender had often been somewhat blurred: Gloria: “Con mi esposo, ahora ya no vivimos en China, entonces ahora todo es diferente, todo es más complicado, y ahora en la casa trabajamos los dos para ayudarnos, ya no soy sólo yo. Él también trabaja en la oficina y en la casa.” (“With my husband, we don’t live in China anymore, so everything is different now, everything is more complicated, and now in the house we both work to help each other, it’s not just me anymore. He also works in the office and at home.”)

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This was not the case in all of the experiences of the different women I talked with. Even within migration, many women must still “carry the ‘double burden’ of both waged work as well as most domestic labours” (Song 1995: 4). Moreover, “career women still undertake the duties of nurturing, nursing and assisting, which are arguably a social extension of women’s roles in the families” (Wei 2013: 60). In the experiences of some women, additionally, the roles that are to be played in the public sphere are completely overturned. Yun: “En China es diferente, en este caso, poquito diferente. En este caso puede ser que aquí las mujeres trabajan 80%, allá en China puede ser que el hombre trabaja 60%, mujer trabaja 40%. Aquíes al revés…” (“It’s different in China, in this case, a little bit different. In this case it could be that women work 80% here, there in China it could be that men work 60%, women work 40%. Here it’s the other way around…”)

The ways in which couples adapted to their new conditions depended also on the time that they had been married before migration, on their backgrounds, on their jobs and on their levels of education. Nevertheless, in many cases the women stated that their husbands did participate often in regular tasks that were previously reserved for women, such as cleaning and cooking. 5.2.2

Family Practices and Social Protection

In addition to this, there are other conditions that have to do with the economic and political changes of China, such as the inescapable need for individuals to take on the role of the state because of the decline of pension systems and of sufficient incomes, or the results of a second generation of one-child policies that have left young people today to take care of their parents on their own. Yun, for instance, considers: Yun: “La familia es una relación directa, por ejemplo los padres, y luego si tú quieres también puedes mantener eso de los abuelos, así, y los hijos, eso todo es la relación directa. No es obligatorio… pero la mayoría así. Y luego ahorita en China todos son únicos hijos en mi generación… mis compañeros, mis amigos, casi todos son únicos hijos. Yo creo que también deberíamos de mantener eso, arriba los mayores, y abajo los menores, y como tú estás en medio entonces tú debes mantener a todos. Como mi esposo, mire, tiene hermanas, menos presión. Pero la mayoría ahorita de mi generación todos únicos, así

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que hay que mantener. Si primos y tíos y tías, si tú quieres, también puedes, si no, no es tan importante. Pero los padres, losniños, sí, son turesponsabilidad.” (“The family is a direct relationship, for example the parents, and then if you like you can also help the grandparents, like that, and the children, that’s all a direct relationship. It’s not mandatory… but most of them are like that. And then right now in China everyone is an only child in my generation… my classmates, my friends, almost everyone is an only child. I think we should keep that too, up with the older ones, down with the younger ones, and since you’re in the middle then you ought to support everyone. Like my husband, look, he has sisters, less pressure. But most of my generation right now are all only children, so they have to support. If you have cousins and uncles and aunts, if you want to, you can, if not, it’s not that important. But the parents, the kids, yes, they’re your responsibility.”)

Although China has come a long way in adjusting to its new position in the world economy and despite the country’s efforts to keep up with social policies that fight against growing social gaps, family systems are still the best, and often the only, social structures for taking care of the disadvantaged (unemployed or elderly, for instance). While social welfare systems are unable to keep up with China’s aging society (Jackson et al. 2009), family systems, such as “care-giving reciprocity” from adults to their parents—or the “familialist welfare regime”—have a whole new meaning in today’s transforming Chinese society (Ochiai 2013). Despite the fact that China’s income per capita has grown 11-fold (Jackson et al. 2009: 2), not only does the income remain low in comparison with other countries (one-fifth compared to South Korea; one-ninth compared to the United States), the cost of living has also increased in China. In addition to this, China’s population is increasingly aging (Jackson et al. 2009), making it even more difficult for households to stay afloat. Less privileged families, often coming from rural areas, do not have access to any “formal old-age insurance schemes” (Ebbers et al. 2008) and have to turn to traditional support systems, giving many young and middle-aged people one more reason to pursue migration. But the burden put on young people is often too heavy. It entails cultural contexts that have not yet reached today’s economic span. What happens when a young couple must provide for themselves, for their children and for their parents, when only two people are actively participating in a labor market that proves to be scarce? In Gloria’s case, just like in Yun’s, it was not a choice to be made, but rather a clear and unavoidable conclusion.

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Gloria: “Es que… nosotros crecimos en un mundo, en una familia, en la que la reciprocidad es muy importante. Como a nosotros nos cuidaron nuestros padres cuando lo necesitábamos, desde que éramos bebés y hasta que crecimos y pudimos trabajar también, entonces para nosotros es una obligación trabajar más para también poder ayudar a ellos cuando lo necesitan. Tenemos que proveer por nuestros padres cuando ellos ya no pueden solos, cuando tienen la necesidad como nosotros tuvimos alguna vez. Asíescomofunciona.” (“The thing is… we grew up in a world, in a family, where reciprocity is very important. Since we were taken care of by our parents when we needed it, since when we were babies and until we grew up and were able to work, then we have an obligation to work more so that we can also help them when they need it. We have to provide for our parents when they can no longer stand alone, when they are in need as we once were. That’s how it works.”)

Between traditional family support networks and one-child policies, today’s young adults face very high responsibilities for their elderly, particularly in rural areas, where opportunities are lower but policy implementation has been more rigorous. In addition to this, within these patrilineal social organization systems, family roles are very important and division of labor is very closely linked with gender and with the role that kinship still plays in social organization and reproduction. As women in China have fewer work opportunities than men and often only have access to lower incomes, the fact is that migration has been a strategy for overcoming financial crises, providing for the endurance of the household, and also a strategy for growth. From another perspective, the growing productivity and commercialization that resulted from China’s immersion in the world market and the world economy, plus the high mobilization of an unskilled workforce to the cities, has produced runaway urbanization, high unemployment rates and/or employment with very low wages. This situation has transformed the gender organization of traditional households and has also drawn attention to the integration of women into wage labor. In this context, the growing need for the participation of women in wage labor to complement family incomes has also had a strong impact on the incorporation of women into migration flows. As argued, through categories of differentiation, women are consistently being constructed in social institutions as subjects in the margins of economic and social opportunities and have been subject to decisions

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about their own lives that are made by others. Women have found it difficult to fulfill the roles expected of them—and that they often also consider their obligation and duty—in the current social, economic and political contexts in China in which they are developing. Migration has been an important space of action through which women are transforming their conditions and the organization of their families. It has worked as a tool to withstand the unequal social and economic conditions that oftentimes continue to be maintained in Chinese social institutions.

5.3 From Petty Vendors to Importers: The Need for Networks and Associations to Grow in Popular Markets Yun and An Lan are sisters-in-law, and they were the only two women I met in Mexico who grew up in Beijing. They both had access to and a choice of education in China (taking into account the limitations imposed by the traditional “female” industries mentioned before) and came from well-placed families on the socioeconomic ladder. According to Yun’s own explanations of migration—where only those coming from impoverished, rural settings and small cities tended to migrate to countries like Mexico, where they could set up a tiendita with a very small investment—neither she, nor her sister-in-law fit the migration profile she described. But migration is not a simple unidirectional phenomenon. It should not be understood merely as the result of factors that are isolated in economic, political or social arenas, but rather as an enmeshment of different elements. The women I interacted with have indeed learned and incorporated into their practices a set of cultural and economic operations that have allowed them to comprehend and participate in the dynamics of popular markets. An Lan is, without a doubt, one of the pivotal actors in the transformations of the dynamics of Tepito, and hence of Mexican popular markets and the commodities that circulate in them. Her ability to seize the opportunities this world offered her was unprecedented. An Lan arrived in Mexico City in 1994 when she was 29 years old. Only three years later, she had already established her own shop in Eje 1 in Tepito and imported her first container directly from Yiwu. A couple of years after that she would become acquainted with María Rosete, her future partner. But commerce is not the reason why An Lan moved to Mexico. She had obtained a degree in Medicine in Beijing and had

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worked in the Chinese capital for a couple of years before coming to Mexico City with a short-term visa to work in a clinic. She came to see how things worked and to determine whether she could set up her own medical clinic in that city. She decided soon after arriving that she wanted to stay and practice her craft in Mexico, but she was unable to certify her Chinese medical license because of bureaucratic complications and could not pursue her career legally in Mexico. An decided to stay, nevertheless, and try to make a living any way she could. That is when she ventured into the city’s Centro Histórico with a new life strategy: commerce. An Lan: “Trabajé poquito tiempo para la clínica pero no me titulé, no me dieron licencia, entonces no pude hacer más, crecer sin titularme. Sí puedo todavía, tengo pacientes que me buscan, pero yo pienso que mejor no ¿verdad? Me buscaría problemas. Pero me adapté y encontré una solución, eso gracias al mercado mexicano. Yo ya no podía trabajar, tuve que dejar mi título ¿verdad? y no podía trabajar, ¿en qué trabajo? Tuve que buscar y así, ‘¡ah, pues esto!’ […] Y entonces desde ahí ya empezamos a ir puesto por puesto, aquí cerca de Tepito, y checamos con los comerciantes. Desde ahí iniciamos. Y todo ese año así comenzamos, ofreciendo mercancías calle por calle. En Colombia tenemos clientes, en Bolivia tenemos clientes, en Eje 1 tenemos clientes, en Carmen, claro, nunca falta que tenemos clientes. Entonces desde ahí, ya iniciamos. Como no teníamos local, íbamos preguntando a la gente, calle por calle, para ver si no querían vender nuestra mercancía.” (“I worked for the clinic for a short while, but I didn’t get a degree, I wasn’t given a license, so I couldn’t do more, I couldn’t grow without a degree. I can still do that, I have patients who look out for me, but I think it’s better not to, right? I’d get in trouble. But I adapted and found a solution, thanks to the Mexican market. I couldn’t work anymore, I had to give up my degree, right? and I couldn’t work, what would I do? I had to look for it and so, ah, that’s it! […] And then from there we started to go store to store, here near Tepito, and we checked with the merchants. That’s where we started. And all that year we started like that, offering merchandise street by street. In Colombia we have clients, in Bolivia we have clients, in Eje 1 we have clients, in Carmen, of course, we never lack clients. So that is where we started. Since we didn’t have a store, we approached people, street by street, to see if they wanted to sell our merchandise.”)

An Lan is an important businesswoman now who moves impressive quantities of capital and commodities between China and Mexico. But when she arrived in Mexico City, before she had her shop, before she met María,

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before she got acquainted with Tepito’s political public sphere,5 she had to become a peddler first. Just like any other Tepiteñe, An Lan started from the bottom and used the tools she had at hand to work her way up on the economic ladder of popular economy. Back in China, An Lan’s mother and father were employees if a factory that belonged to the state, like all the rest of them until the 1990s. Her parents, therefore, were in the “iron rice bowl” which was a great benefit for An’s family, whose economic situation was not as difficult as many other Chinese people who found themselves forced to migrate. Unlike the experiences of many Chinese migrants, An Lan’s was a decision not compelled by necessity but prompted by will and curiosity. In Tepito, her new workplace, An is comfortably established and plays an important role in developing the presence of Chinese people in the market. María Rosete, her current business partner, talks about the work of An Lan as a pioneering addition to Tepito’s commerce: María: “Bueno, ‘la Doctora’ es pionera, porque fue de las primeras chinitas que viajaron a Asia para traer la mercancía, es de las primeras importadoras que hay, que existen aquí en Tepito, de las primerititas, ahorita ya hay más importadoras…” (“Well, ‘the Doctor’6 is a pioneer, because she was one of the first Chinese women to travel to Asia to bring in merchandise, she is one of the first importers here in Tepito, one of the first…”)

Today, An Lan almost stands as an institution of what Chinese incorporation into the Mexican market should be like. She’s been asked several times to be the president of a newly created Cámara de Empresarios Chinos en México (Chamber of Chinese Entrepreneurs in Mexico), but she has refused each time because she does not want her attention averted from commerce to politics. Over time and because of her expertise, she has become a sort of anchor for Chinese migrant women in Mexican popular markets, and Chinese migrants who have just arrived—like Fei or Yun—often go to her for advice, support or for merchandise.

5 As the commercial partner of María Rosete—who ran for office in Delegación Cuauhtémoc in 2012—An Lan often found herself in public scenes and appeared often in newspapers; see Hernández (2010), Sastre (2010), and Verza (2013). 6 An Lan’s nickname in Tepito is “la Doctora” (the Doctor).

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5.3.1

Chinese Businesspeople: A Trade Chain Linking Different Economic Capacities

Although Chinese migrants have arrived through a diversity of paths and have had very different conditions of settlement and have used and created a diversity of migration and economic strategies, they have also created and reinforced networks with different levels of strength and that are structured in a hierarchical order. This order has to do with economic and social capital, as well as with levels of establishment and investment capacities. During a conversation in which I tried to figure out inner conflicts or deeper relations between Chinese people and the ways they have made the creation of these new networks possible in such specifically local dynamics as those found in popular markets, a short exchange with María Rosete and An Lan went as follows: María Rosete: “Aquí […] se ayudan también entre sí. Inclusive […] hay chinos que vienen de España, ya quebró España y ya ahora vienen a asentarse aquí, quieren poner su negocio en México. Y ‘la Doctora’ tiene contacto con ellos. También vienen de Italia, hablan hasta italiano, entonces ya vienen de Italia y ‘la Doctora’ los trae.” (“Here […] people help each other too. There are even […] Chinese people who come from Spain. Spain has gone bankrupt, and they are coming to settle here now. They want to set up their business in Mexico, and ‘the Doctor’ has contact with them. They also come from Italy, they even speak Italian, and ‘the Doctor’ brings them.”) An Lan: “Nos conocimos aquí, porque ellos aquí buscaron los comercios. Dicen los amigos de España y de Italia, 3 o 4 personas, que están buscando un importador que pueda traerles mercancía a México, y nos dicen que allá ya se acabó el negocio o no hay negocio, entonces están buscando en este mercado, es entonces cuando nos encontramos. No porconocerlosya.” (“We met here, because they were looking for shops here. Our friends from Spain and Italy—3 or 4 people—tell us that they are looking for an importer who can bring merchandise to them in Mexico, and they tell us that there is no more business there or there is no business at all, so they are looking into this market. That’s when we meet; it’s not because we already know them.”) María Rosete: “Son buenos comerciantes, porque hasta eso ellos mismos están viendo a ver quién da más barato, pero no se pelean, no es como aquí, aquí los mexicanos sí nos peleamos, pero ellos no, ellos no se pelean…”

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(“[…] They are good merchants, because even though they are seeing who is the cheapest, they don’t fight. It’s not like here, here we Mexicans do fight, but they don’t, they don’t fight…”) An Lan: “Generalmente, la verdad es que por ser paisanos, a pesar de que también causamos competencias, la verdad es que personalmente no tenemos problemas.” (“Generally, because we are paisanos,7 even though we also create competition, the truth is that we don’t have any problems personally.”)

As An Lan states, newcomer Chinese migrants often turn to her to start their own businesses. The businesswoman, in this sense, both profits from the arrival of newcomers and renders their arrival easier. Because she is already well established in the market, she works as an anchor in the dynamics of the new place of settlement. In An Lan’s experience, her ability to succeed and grow was all thanks to the possibilities that the Mexican market could offer her. She made use of her know-how and started out little by little. She created her own networks and inserted herself into other networks that had already been created. For other migrants, An Lan was a milestone in their process of incorporation into Mexican popular markets. For instance, Yun, who has had her own shop for 5 years, but who used to work for An Lan, recalls: Yun: “Para mí, casi igual [tener mi propio local]. Sólo cuando yo trabajaba para [La Doctora] no pensaba mucho. Era una empleada. Nada más ella me pagaba y yo me encargaba de hacer bien mi trabajo. Yo no pensaba mucho. Cuando tienes tu propio negocio, tú debes administrar todo, hay que aprender más cosas… Para mí no [fue tan dificil]. Nada más necesitaba práctica. Por ejemplo, algunas cosas de contabilidad no entendía, yo pregunté al contador, yo platiqué con ella [La Doctora] y ella me explicó, y día por día ya conocí, ya entendí. Y luego ya podía pensar en más cosas y entenderlas, y así. […] Como ella al principio también tuvo mucho trabajo, y no sé, al principio también le cansaba y no podía administrar todo, y luego mejor rentamos el local y le pagábamos a ella, más sencillo para ella y para nosotros. Podía ser una experiencia para practicar, para aprender las cosas. Y luego como con

7 While talking in Spanish to the Chinese in Mexico, the expression paisano (fellow countryman) was always used to refer to other Chinese people living and/or working in the same place, either known by the interlocutors or not. This, as explained by Freddy Gonzalez, has been a practice among many Chinese migrants in Mexico and other Spanishspeaking countries since the twentieth century (2017: 6).

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mi esposo ya nos casamos, debíamos mantener nuestra propia vida (ríe), ¡Por eso!” (“For me, it’s almost the same [as having my own place]. Only when I worked for [the Doctor] I didn’t think very much. I was an employee. She just paid me, and I did my job well. I didn’t think very much. When you have your own business, you have to manage everything, you have to learn more about it… For me [it was not so difficult]. I just needed practice. For example, I didn’t understand certain things about accounting. I asked the accountant, I talked to her [the Doctor] and she explained to me, and day by day I got to know, I understood. And then I could think about more things and understand them, and so on. […] Since she also had a lot of work at the beginning, and I don’t know, at first she also got tired and couldn’t manage everything, and then it was better to rent the place and pay her, which was easier for her and for us. The experience could serve as a chance to practice, to learn things. And then, since my husband and I were already married, we had to maintain our own life (laughs), that’s why!”)

For smaller vendors, their relations with businesspeople like An Lan or Yun are of a different nature. The two women from the Chinese capital city are importers now, and they bring thousands of products from China to Mexico, which they then sell wholesale to other Chinese merchants with smaller shops in Tepito and other popular markets or to Mexican vendors who either have their own shops in Mexico City or have shops in other parts of Mexico. This second layer of traders then sells their own products wholesale or retail to other vendors who have less economic capacities than they do, who work, for instance, in movable stands on the streets or as peddlers. With few exceptions, most of the intermediaries on this last level of trade are Mexicans: Chinese peddlers are still not a common sight in popular markets. The Mexican popular economy cannot be regarded as a place that openly offers economic possibilities to everyone, let alone to foreigners. Shei appeared in the introduction to this book as a street vendor in the San Lazaro corridor, selling perishable products—food that she makes herself at home. This condition relegates her to the margins of this trading system between Chinese importers and retail vendors. There are, however, a few other cases of Chinese peddlers who do participate in this last layer of trade in Mexico. Tianjin and her husband, for instance, work from a one-meter square movable stand outside of metro station San Cosme. They sell—like Shei—homemade goodies to passersby, but they also have

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a couple of other commodities for sale, mostly women’s bags, which they buy from bigger Chinese vendors working in Tepito. Tianjin and her husband both come from Taishan and didn’t get past middle school in China. She arrived in 2002, and her husband joined her five year later; they struggled for around five more years, working in various restaurants owned by other Chinese people until they managed to acquire their place for a movable stand at the entrance of metro station San Cosme. Neither Tianjin nor her husband speak Spanish, although “hers is better than mine,” he tells me laughing. The fact that now there are also Chinese vendors selling retail products has signified a great improvement in their experience, since while they do not have the means to buy large quantities of products from bigger vendors in the first layer, they can still acquire products from the second layer. Although they become the third intermediary business party, the bags that they sell in their stall are still cheaper than those that could be found in other more established shops in the city outside of popular markets. They range between 75 and 100 Pesos, while their spring rolls are five pesos apiece. At these prices and working from 8 am to 5 or 6 pm, Tianjin and her husband still manage to earn more than when they both used to work in Chinese restaurants. 5.3.2

Guangxi in Tepito

Certainly, An Lan’s economic capacities upon arriving in Mexico, although not great, were much better than those of the people that had been born and raised in Tepito and other Chinese migrant women I interacted with, such as Shei or Tianjin, whose conditions in Mexico could be considered more of an economic impasse than a path for growth, such as had been An’s promising business career. But upon her arrival in Mexico’s world of commerce, Tepito was the only place she could find entry with the limited social and economic capital that she had initially. Entering Tepito’s popular market offered her a space of opportunities that other commercial dynamics would not have given her. An Lan: “La verdad es que no conocía a nadie de Tepito, pero buscamos. Iniciamos, por ejemplo, queríamos vender en las tiendas grandes, por ejemplo Gigante, pero ahí nadie nos recibió, y además nosotros no teníamos mucho para presentar en este tipo de tiendas grandes, entonces buscamos los comerciantes chiquititos, a ver si les gustan mis productos, si les gusta el precio, desde ahí iniciamos. Entonces buscamos en el Centro, así, en la ciudad de México

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buscamos en el Centro, buscamos ahí por el metro Revolución, ahí hay unos comerciantes chiquititos, y luego buscamos ahí en Central de Abastos… finalmente nos fijamos aquí [en Tepito] porque sí hay gente que le gusta este tipo de mercancías. Además sí son comerciantes precisamente para nosotros, como importadores chiquititos, para iniciar.” (“The truth is I didn’t know anyone in Tepito, but we looked. We started, for example, wanting to sell in the big stores, like Gigante,8 but nobody received us there, and besides, we didn’t have much to present in that type of big store, so we looked for the little merchants, to see if they would like my products, if they would like the price, and that’s where we began. So we looked into downtown Mexico City, we looked in the city center, we looked there around the Revolución metro station; there are some small shops there. Then we looked in Central de Abastos (literally, “Supply Center”—the main wholesale market for produce and other foodstuffs) …and finally we looked here [in Tepito] because there are people here who like this type of merchandise. Besides, these merchants are just right for us, as small importers, to start with.”)

An important aspect of An Lan’s ability to succeed in commerce is reflected in her knowledge of market mechanisms and in her willingness to start from the very bottom. Before becoming a prominent figure in Tepito’s commercial networks, importing more than a thousand containers of Chinese commodities per year, An first started working as a peddler, but her strategy differed slightly from those who were already working in that area. Instead of waiting for customers to pass by and find her products, she would go from semi-established vendor to semi-established vendor, bringing her products to them and persuading them to buy. In An’s experience, having the possibility of doing business with small actors, with small businesspeople, people with economic capacities similar to her own, was one of the main things that allowed her to progressively grow. An Lan started making contacts, doing small business deals with other vendors; she started associating herself with the networks of the popular economy, while at the same time building other networks with China.

8 Grupo Gigante S.A.B. is a Mexican chain of convenience stores that became the

third-largest service store company in the country in 2006. Among its subsidiaries in Mexico and the USA are Gigante Supermercados, Office Depot, Radio Shack, and Toks. Due to near bankruptcy in 2007, Gigante Supermercados was sold to the second-largest supermarket chain in Mexico, Soriana. Grupo Gigante kept its business with the other three subsidiaries in Mexico (Cardoso 2007).

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Through her participation at the local level, she started making global connections from below. Girón understands globalization as a process of integration of cultures, nations and markets that interact in increasingly tight spaces, in which knowledge and know-how come together with financial markets to form single entities (2009: 17). This is exactly what has happened in the spaces that have been constructed between Mexico’s popular economy and Chinese migration and immersion in business. In order to clear the way in business for herself and for those who came after her, An Lan needed a particular way of understanding the kind of trade that took place in the particular dynamics of Tepito and the people who make a living from it. María Rosete recalls the arrival of Chinese businesspeople like An Lan to Tepito: María: “Y por cierto, desde ahí se ve la apertura de crédito, la apertura crediticia. Porque yo… llegó y me dijo: “¿no quieres esta blusa?”, le dije “Sí”. “¿Cuántas?”, le dije, “No pos, tráeme diez cajas”. Y en la tarde […] le hablé por teléfono y dice: “¿Cuántas?”, y le digo “¡Pues tráeme diez!”, y dice: “¿No quieles más?” (-simula acento chino-), y le digo: “Pues es que no tengo dinero…”, “Tú dime cuántas, ¿veinte? Me pagas mañana”, “¡OK!”… Y así… Ni me conocía… Eso no era normal en Tepito. Ni entre mexicanos. Era difícil. Muy difícil. Los chinos vinieron a hacer esa apertura. Por eso su crecimiento también…” (“And by the way, that is where you can see the opening of credit. Because I… she came up to me and said, “don’t you want this blouse?” I said, “Yes.” “How many?” I said, “Well, bring me 10 boxes.” And in the afternoon […] I spoke to her on the phone and she said, “How many?” and I said, “Well, bring me ten!” and she said, “You don’t want moll than that?” (imitating a Chinese accent), and I say: “Well, I don’t have any money…” “You tell me how many, twenty? You can pay me tomorrow.” “OK!”… And so on… She didn’t even know me… That was not normal in Tepito—not even among Mexicans. It was difficult, very difficult. The Chinese came to make that opening. That also explains their growth…”)

An Lan’s whole imperiotepiteño(Tepito empire) is built on trust. An Lan uses the word “trust” (confianza) as the translation for guanxi, a condition that has been indispensable for her growth in Tepito. Guanxi has been defined as “the use of special relationships,” a value that is still common in the PRC, although some authors argue that it has started

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to be seen as old-fashioned “and not in keep with modern business practices” (Anderson and Lee 2005: 2). For An Lan, however, it was the element that allowed her to not only integrate into the networks of the popular economy, but through it she was able to transform certain dynamics of the markets. Guanxi becomes more and more an important issue because it has been slowly introduced into the dynamics of Tepito. Laura, for her part, made a similar observation during our conversation: Laura: “I am much more comfortable here in Mexico than I ever was in Europe. Mexicans are very nice and considerate; they are like the Chinese… their ways of doing business… the trust networks that they can create. Here, I have had much better relations (guanxi) with Mexicans ( 这儿里关系更好, zhe’er li guanxi genghao). This is something that was not possible in European countries.”

As María Rosete and Armando Sanchez often said during our meetings, it was the Chinese who started introducing the meaning of trust into business in Tepito. Trust was already a part of the daily praxis here, the social relations between Mexicans, between leaders and agremiades (union members), were built through trust, but this was not the case in commercial relations. This is what the Chinese brought to Tepito commerce. Before their arrival, créditos (credits) was practically inconceivable in the popular networks. Guanxi and trust, however, are not necessarily intelligible social constructs. Guanxi actually goes far beyond trust. It has overtones of relationships, personal contact, kinship or experiences. Guangxi “forms an intricate, pervasive relational network which the Chinese cultivate energetically, subtly, and imaginatively. It contains mutual obligations, assurances, and understanding, and governs Chinese attitudes toward long-term social and business relationships” (Luo 2000: 2 in Nitsch and Diebel 2008: 85). In order for Chinese businesswomen like An Lan to grow, they had to rely on their trust toward Mexican peddlers; they had to start building guanxi. To do this, reciprocity was fundamental, but innovation and inventiveness in the way of doing business were as well. An’s capacity to take on the opportunities that were given to her and her ability to make the most of her situation express the importance of social and economic capital to facilitate the incorporation of individuals in external dynamics. However, while merging into Mexico City’s popular commerce, An Lan had the support of her family, and being recently

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married, she didn’t have children to care for when she travelled for the first time. Family too, and children in particular, have an impact on the extent to which Chinese businesswomen in popular markets can thrive. An Lan’s experiences and ways of integration into Tepito’s dynamics shed light on the ways in which spaces of opportunities are built by actors from below. She is a prominent businesswoman today, but she made her way in a very contentious space, and she broadened her capabilities by accepting the possibilities that came along. She was visionary enough to understand that the only way real growth would come about was through an intense dialogue with the people around her, however difficult and adverse that proved to be, and by creating a deep embeddedness within the dynamics of the new space where she had landed. Popular economy is a space where one cannot survive on one’s own. Relationships within its dynamics are necessary; they are what allows not only growth, but also survival. Trust and reciprocity are the basis of these relationships.

5.4

Conclusions

The outcomes of international mobility are unpredictable. The introductory experience with Shei—however short an interaction it was— presented a set of symbolic elements that show how vulnerable a subject in migration can be. Vulnerable, without a doubt, but resistant and moldable as well. As stated by Foucault (1982), resistance is plural, and not homogeneous. There are different forms of resistance that take place in specific locations and that are carried out by subjects that have been relegated to the margins by hegemonic powers. The construction of spaces of opportunities by Chinese women in Mexican popular markets is one such form of resistance. Chinese migration patterns have shifted in the last three decades. Women nowadays have progressively changed their processes and reasons for migration. More and more, women are achieving active economic and social participation in the networks of Chinese migrations, and they are contributing significantly—and in a more visible manner, perhaps, than before—to new ways of economic articulation with host societies. In this sense, the cases of many of the women who figure as protagonists of this research are representative of these achievements. The case of An Lan is exemplary of this participation because of the level of economic accumulation that she has accomplished in the more than twenty years that she has worked in Tepito. But the participation

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of other women, who might have less visible effects on wider economic networks, is also fundamental to understanding the current changes in Chinese social and economic dynamics. These women’s experiences are articulated in different fields. They are related commercially because they participate in a very particular economic enclave to which they have added their own notions of commerce and business. They are often linked socially because they either build new networks of migration (for instance, Yun came because of An Lan, but An started her path on her own; Gloria came first, but she was later joined by her sister-in-law as well) or because they integrate themselves into old ones (such as the cases of the women who were first established in the north of Mexico) or because they participate in both (such as Laura and Fei, who first moved to Europe following other members of their families and neighborhoods, but they then continued their path to Mexico without previously established relations). They are linked economically, because An Lan’s business would not be as important without the participation of other Chinese people working in the second layer of commercial participation, and likewise these second and third layers wouldn’t have managed to integrate themselves into this profitable business were it not for the paths and the conditions that subjects such as An Lan had already built. These conditions respond to very different factors that are all linked together, such as the new situations of China and its relationship with other nations and the new possibilities of migration for a population that had previously been restrained from any kind of mobility. But it is also the result of a growing appreciation and awareness of the roles that women should/could play in different societal spaces. In addition to power structures reproduced by the state, other institutionalized inequalities also determine the opportunities of women in China. Social institutions, such as the family, are still very deeply rooted hierarchical systems that generate and sustain gender inequalities. Moreover, the unequal opportunities for girls and women do not depend on their gender alone, but on their economic backgrounds, on their social and regional belongings, and on the cultural norms they were brought up with. However, once immersed in migration, margins are reconfigured, and the actors’ positions can be changed and adjusted to new situations. Gender is not a consistent category that is independent of other variables, be they political, social or cultural (Butler 1990). Quite the contrary, it must be understood in the context of all its intersections and the multiplicity of its identifications.

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In the lives and constructions of different women, we can see the performative acts through which they find their own spaces of economic, social and/or political participation and appropriation. In this sense, migration has been an important element of growth and a space of agency that has both had effects on and been affected by a growing gender perspective on society. Alicia Girón states that the gender category has indeed built new paradigms in economy, and that this change has had an impact also on macroeconomics. That is why the visibilization of women in economic networks is such an important task nowadays (Girón 2009). Moreover, the embeddedness of women’s integration into wage labor and the deeply rooted changes that this brings to the configurations of different social spaces must be analyzed through the context of neoliberal globalization processes to which China is still adjusting. “Though East Asian societies are known as traditionally dominated by the patriarchal family system and Confucian values, their women and family structures are undergoing rapid transformations under the influence of neoliberal globalization” (Cho 2013: 5). The transformation of women’s lives and the readjustment of their families respond to the alternative strategies of survival that people with low capabilities of integration into the hegemonic economic and financial systems—people in the margin—have to engage in. In cases such as Fei’s, Tianjin’s or Shei’s, the importance of referring to “survival” is evident. In cases like An Lan’s, Yun’s or Laura’s, we can advance toward the creation of alternative options. The progressive creation of stronger economic bonds between Mexico and China also reveals the consolidation of stronger social bonds. The migratory experiences of Chinese women to Mexico and particularly their insertion into Mexican networks of popular economy should be understood as part of the construction of alternative circuits of survival (Sassen 2000). Two different aspects are important here in understanding the particularity of these women’s cases and the relevance of the different forms of economic empowerment that women have built for themselves in the context of migration. First, migration has different impacts on the experiences of individuals, depending on the stage in which the process took place, as children, as young adults or as heads of a household. Limei, for instance, migrated as a teenager and as part of a family reunification process. Contrary to most of the other women I spoke with, coming to Mexico was not her decision but her parents’, which eventually reunited the family again in Mexico. This was the same modus operandi deployed

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by migrant families across the Americas throughout the second half of the twentieth century. However, the reproduction of these traditional patterns of migration has adapted very slowly to the participation of women in its networks, a considerable number of women migrating only from the second part of the last century on. This difference is relevant when analyzing the cases of other women, like Yun, Gloria, Fei, Laura or An Lan, among many others, who have created new paths of migration and who have had to create new forms of production and insertion into economic enclaves. Second (migrant) women find themselves in a continuous search for opportunities. This often results in second and even posterior migration processes; moving to Mexico City from the North of Mexico implies a newer vision of migration and a wider scope of the opportunities that migration can bring. In this sense, the growing participation of Chinese people in Mexico City’s popular markets has been a highly relevant aspect of this shift, an element that is particularly visible in the case of the three women working in Plaza de la Tecnología, who went through two very different dynamics. On the one hand, they have performed one of the “traditional activities” that Chinese people have engaged in for a century and a half in Mexico—which used to consist of laundry and shoe repair, and today still consists of grocery shops and restaurants—and on the other hand, they ventured into Mexican popular markets, incorporating themselves into the growing enterprises of Chinese migrants and their consolidation in global economy networks. As can be seen through the cases presented here, women cannot be identified as one homogeneous category (2005). From An Lan’s experience as a very proficient businesswoman who has managed to build—from scratch—an imports empire in Mexico of products “Made in China” even though the university degree she earned before migrating was in medicine; to Limei’s traditional migration process as the daughter of a migrant couple from the Guangdong Province who established a family-run restaurant in Mexico’s northern region; to the story of a woman who used to work in a factory and now runs her own business, the stories of Chinese women working in commerce in Mexico City’s popular markets are—of course—highly heterogeneous. A variety of factors have been involved in each individual’s experiences; they have had different levels of access to education and their economic possibilities have been diverse. While An Lan earned a degree in Medicine, Limei, Fei, Tianjin and many others never finished high school.

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Today, the first is an important businesswoman who imports thousands of containers of Chinese commodities and the second is an employee who sought better opportunities for herself outside of her family enterprise. Shei and Tianjin found themselves in conditions similar to those of Mexican populations that have been constantly marginalized, working on the streets and earning just enough to live day-to-day. These women have very different paths altogether, but what they have shared is a set of historic and socially constructed categories of differentiation. Their positions as “women” have in different ways determined the opportunities that they had in their life paths and the roles that they had to play in their families and households. With regard to accessing education and work-related opportunities, women seem to be at a constant disadvantage in comparison with men. These elements of categorization have been delimited socially as much as geographically. The situation of women within social stratification and rural-urban contexts, as well as their regional origins, determines the opportunities to which they have had access in as important a way as gender. Migration is often seen as a strategy for survival and for growth. In this way, in order to comprehensively grasp the reality of the women I have focused on, it was not only necessary to understand their experiences in Mexico and the ways in which they have grasped specific elements of the local dynamics, but also to look into their backgrounds in China, the contexts in which they grew up and from which they emigrated, their spaces of interaction and of representation, their differing access to social capital and the ways in which they express all of these elements. It was necessary to understand their habitus , the ways in which they have learned to experience their world and their own ways of subjectivation (Butler 1997a, b, in Mahmood 2001). China and Mexico have very distinct dynamics that have to be analyzed in their own particular contexts, but in the case of these women who inhabit transnational realities, both contexts are important in grasping the complexity of their experiences and of the changes that migration has implied in their lives. As stated by Smith and Guarnizo, “class, gender and regional origin emerge as critical determinants of migrant’s destinations, attainment, and transnationality” (1998: 14). The crossing of different variables and factors for migration resulted in the participation of a diversity of actors who had varying degrees of access to opportunities in both China and Mexico, and different ways of insertion into their dynamics. The backgrounds, stories, wishes and expectations of the women I worked with are very different; not all of them had

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the same disadvantages back in China and not all of them have the same opportunities in Mexico. But they share the experience of migration and they share the insertion into particular spaces of commerce in Mexico which have their own distinct dynamics. In spite of their differences, they managed to participate in the local dynamics of Mexican popular markets and have inconspicuously incorporated themselves into a trading system to which most may have access, although each individual’s level of access depends on the capital they already possess. In this intertwinement between different actors, places and dynamics, transnational social spaces are constructed. These are entanglements between localities and networks, between local elements and mobility (Dahinden 2010). Within them, women like Fei or Tianjin need actors with greater capitals than their own in order to reach success in their career trajectories. But the ways in which they have inserted themselves into local dynamics have also had impacts on these dynamics and are transforming localities. I will focus now on how the participation of Chinese women in the networks of popular economy has transformed the dynamics of these markets.

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Rainer Baub¨ock and Thomas Faist, 51–72. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ebbers, Haiko, Rudolf Hagendijk, and Harry Smorenberg. 2008. “China’s Pension System.” Positioning Paper. http://repository.nyenrode.nl/record/ frisid:10067. Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, 8 (4, Summer): 777–95. Giron, ´ Alicia. 2009. “Introduccion.” ´ In G´enero y Globalizaci´on, edited by Alicia Giron, ´ 13–26. Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales CLACSO. González, Fredy. 2017. Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics Among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico. Oakland: University of California Press. Hirai, Shinji. 2009. Economía política de la nostalgia: un estudio sobre la transformación del paisaje urbano en la migración transnacional entre México y Estados Unidos, México, UAM-I/Juan Pablos. Jackson, Richard, Keisuke Nakashima, and Neil Howe. 2009. China’s Long March to Retirement Reform. Washington: Prudential Foundation. ˆ L´evy, Florence, and Maryl`ene Lieber. 2010. “‘Le Faire Sans ‘enEtre’, le DilemneIdentitaire des Prostitu´ees Chinoises a` Paris.” In Cachezce Travail Que Je Ne SauraiVoir. Mahmood, Saba. 2001. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology, 16 (2). Wiley Online Library: 202–36. McKeown, Adam. 1999a. “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875– 1943.” Journal of American Ethnic History, 18 (2): 73–110. https://doi.org/10.2307/27502416. Nitsch, Manfred, and Frank Diebel. 2008. “Gu¯anxi Economics: Confucius Meets Lenin, Keynes, and Schumpeter in Contemporary China.” INTERVENTION. Journal of Economics, 5 (1). Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd: 77–104. https:// doi.org/10.4337/ejeep.2008.01.08. Nyíri, Pál. 2011. “Chinese Entrepreneurs in Poor Countries: A Transnational ‘Middleman Minority’ and Its Futures.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 12 (1): 145–53. Ochiai, Emiko. 2013. “The Logics of Family and Gender Changes in Early 21stCentury East Asia.” In East Asian Gender in Transition, edited by Joo-hyun Cho, 117–66. Daegu: Keimyung University Press. Sanchez Nava, Laura Kristhell. 2012. El comercio en las calles de la Ciudad de México. Balance y perspectivas teóricas para abordarlo. ULÚA. Revista de Historia, Sociedad y Cultura, 20: 27–70. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Migration and the Feminization of Survival.” Journal of International Affairs, 53 (2, Spring). New York: 503–24.

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Scott, Joan W. 1986. “Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American Historical Review, 91 (5). JSTOR: 1053–75. Sen, Amartya. 2001. “The Many Faces of Gender Inequality.” New Republic, 35–39. Skeldon, Ronald. 1996. “Migration From China.” Journal of International Affairs, 49 (2). Columbia University School of International Public Affairs: 434. Smith, Michael Peter, and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo. 1998. “The Locations of Transnationalism.” In Transnationalism From Below, edited by Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, 3–34. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Song, Miri. 1995. “Between ‘the Front’ and ‘the Back’: Chinese Women’s Work in Family Businesses.” Women’s Studies International Forum, 18 (3). London: 285–98. Wei, Guoying. 2013. “Analysis of Progress and Issues of Gender Equality in China.” In East Asian Gender in Transition, edited by Joo-hyun Cho: 51–72. Daegu: Keimyung University Press.

Electronic Newspapers and Internet Sites Cardoso, Victor. 2007. “Gigante vendio´ sus 204 Tiendas de Autoservicio a Grupo Soriana.” La Jornada, December 7. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ 2007/12/07/index.php?section=economia&article=026n1eco. Hern´andez, Monica. ´ 2010. “Tepito abre una Oficina en China.” El Universal, January 10. http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/primera/34230.html. Sastre, Noelia. 2010. “Tepito, el ‘Barrio Bravo’ del DF, Abre Oficina en China.” ABC, February 10. http://www.abc.es/20100112/internacional-iberoamer ica/tepitoabreoficinachina-201001121324.html. Verza, Mar´ia. 2013. “La Otra Cara de China en M´exico.” El Mundo, June 4. http://www.elmundo.es/america/2013/06/05/mexico/1370383322.html.

PART III

Migration and Commodity Chains, Drafting Alternative Spaces of Globalization

I met Cristina for the second time in the stall in which she works. She is a young Chinese woman who is originally from the province of Hebei in China and who came to Mexico in 2011. During our first meeting, one week earlier, we had arranged to meet again so that she could introduce me to her friend Alicia, who works in the adjacent stall in Plaza Charly, on the outskirts of Tepito. It is Tuesday afternoon. The date for the meeting was carefully chosen: on Tuesdays, Tepito is at rest, but the Chinese are not. While the clamor of the streets gives way to an eerie tranquillity, the Chinese who work there use this time to refurnish their shops, do inventory and sell directly to clients who are either too oblivious to know that Tepito rests on Tuesdays or consciously decided to shop on Tuesday to avoid the waves of people and merchandise they would normally have to confront. Located on the second floor of the plaza where Cristina and Alicia work are a variety of stalls with products Made in China that are sold by Chinese and Mexicans alike. Cristina manages her business with her husband; their business is adjacent to a shop belonging to Cristina’s mother, where Cristina first worked when she arrived in Mexico. In 2009, her father became the first in the family to make the trip to Mexico, and his wife and daughter joined him one year later. At that time, the young woman was not yet married, but was already engaged. While her fiancé stayed in China, she travelled to Mexico to set up her own business. At first, she had to work in her parents’ shop, but by the time she returned to China to get married in 2013, she had already established her little

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shop in Plaza Charly. After that, it was easier for her husband to join her in Mexico. Alicia runs her own business. She came to Mexico alone, hoping for a better life. Alicia’s migration path was rare among the Chinese in Mexico City: she came to Mexico and arrived at Plaza Charly without knowing anyone and with no contacts in the Mexican market. Alicia’s only link to Mexico and Tepito was the knowledge that she had gathered from her experience in the market in Yiwu, where she is from. When we spoke, she told me her younger brother had joined her in Mexico. He had arrived just a couple of months before and, with Alicia’s help, was already trying to set up his own store in Plaza Charly. Sun, another Chinese woman from Yiwu, works in the stall adjacent to Alicia’s. The business is managed by an acquaintance of her sister, who arrived in Mexico four years before Sun. But she and her husband, who both recently arrived in Mexico, work there as vendors. A little further along the corridor, a family from Guangdong has their own shop. Families like this one are often found together in their stalls, chatting and promptly attending to clients, each member with his or her particular task. Meanwhile, people from other provinces where migration is not so prevalent (such as the three young women of the second floor in Plaza Charly) usually work in their own shops, either alone or as couples. Some are employed by other Chinese until they are able to set up their own businesses. Alicia, Cristina and Sun first met in Plaza Charly. Today, they have neighboring stalls, and during downtimes in the market, they get together to chat and spend their free time together. It is lunchtime and many of the stalls are filled with the aroma of spices and rice. Most workers purchase their lunch every day from a Chinese vendor who, after carefully weighing supply and demand in plazas like this one, decided to enter the on-the-go “Asian” food industry. Today, Sun and her husband are eating Korean, “but the one who makes it is Chinese”, they told me. For many workers—particularly those like Alicia and Sun who come from Yiwu—Korean food is the taste of home. Over the decades, the presence of Korean families in eastern coastal provinces in China has transformed the dynamics, the tastes, the traditions and many other cultural and social aspects of everyday life. So too has the more recent presence of Muslims, particularly in Yiwu—another side effect of the market city’s growth (Guiheux 2011) that has changed its dynamics. Likewise, the participation of the Chinese in both economic

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and social networks within the dynamics of Mexican popular markets has transformed this locality and broadened its cultural spectrum. Migrants participate in social, commercial and cultural articulations between Mexico and China through their interactions, transforming the localities in which they have settled. In this last section of the book, my objective is to look at how these transformations that result from migrant participation in the networks of Mexican popular markets weld spaces of globalization—to show that they too are constructors of global cities (Lefebvre 1978; Harvey 2008). I consider here a social fabric that is plurilocal and that entails social and economic dynamics not only in Mexico and in China, but also in a variety of transnational formations between both countries. It is in this plurilocality that new spaces of interaction and alternative spaces of globalization are created. There are different ways of insertion and of belonging that both migrants and locals have set in place to participate in an increasingly global economy. The ways in which these women have experienced the city, the market and migration processes are related to the intrinsic inequalities to which they have been subjected. I argue that because of the ways they experience the city and migration, they have built their own strategies to counteract these inequalities, thereby creating new opportunities for social and economic empowerment. These strategies are employed by individuals as well as by social units, such as the family. These micro-units of research (individuals, households and families) are connected to wider commercial circuits and have transformed the dynamics of the market between China and Mexico, particularly in the case of the popular economy, hence rendering visible the interconnections between hegemonic economic circuits and alternative circuits of survival (Sassen 2013). Finally, in this section, I depict situations in which Chinese women have found themselves while embarking on a variety of economic activities enmeshed in popular networks. I argue that through their daily activities and participation within different social networks, migrant women and their families engage in transnational interactions; by doing so, they transform social institutions. In this final part of the book, I will show the variety of networks that are created by actors within migration, acting either individually, within their family unit or among more extended kinship, friendship or trade dynamics. I seek to show that these women become bonding agents and produce spaces that link different places, such as the market of Tepito in Mexico City and the city of Yiwu in China, the source of most Chinese

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commodities sold in Mexico. Through remittances and social participation; through long-distance motherhood; through the reproduction of social institutions and transnational care-chain systems that replace the role of the state; through forms of resistance that stem from vulnerable conditions, these women and their families are creating spaces of transnational interaction and alternative spaces of globalization. Bibliography Guiheux, Gilles. 2011. Letter. “Yiwu, 2011, Chine: Bourg Rural Devenu Place Urbaine Mondialisée.” Paper presented to Entre Le Licite Et L’illicite: Migrations, Travail, Marché, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-La-Salle, 18 September 2011. http://www.ccic-cerisy.asso.fr/migrat ions11.html. Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review. 23–40. 292. Lefebvre, Henri. [1968] 1978. El Derecho a La Ciudad. Fourth Edition. Barcelona: Historia/ciencia/sociedad; Barcelona: Península. Sassen, Saskia. 2013. “Strategic Instantiations of Gendering in the Global Economy: The Feminizing of Survival.” In East Asian Gender in Transition, edited by Joo-hyun Cho, 15–50. Daegu: Keimyung University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Women as Actors of Transnational Formations

The subtlest forms of economic, social and cultural participation are always hidden within the interstices of wider processes. These forms of participation include the commercial networks that slowly have been created between the two countries through Mexican and Chinese vendors. They are often not only invisible, but usually overlooked, not considered processes with the power to effect change. Meanwhile, larger and more influential processes remain in the spotlight. However, without these subtleties, without the rugged edges of everyday interactions, struggles and concessions between people, the more visible, broader processes would never have become what they are today. It is within these social interstices that we can explain the emergence of micro-processes that eventually develop into something much larger. Contrary to first impressions, the global is also constructed in the local and is only rendered global through movement: movement of capital, commodities, ideas and people. Hence, a micro-social vantage point is essential to grasp the construction of alternative spaces of globalization. Lefebvre argued that social spaces cannot be understood as one thing or product, but as “the outcome of a sequence and set of operations” ([1974] 2007: 73). The interactions among Mexican and Chinese are operations that are at the core of the connections created between Mexico and China; they are reflected in the form of translocal connectivities, © The Author(s) 2020 X. Alba Villalever, The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53344-1_6

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in daily transactions that continuously traverse borders, thereby transforming the cultural, social and economic spaces in which they move. These are transformations that are anchored in the local. Nevertheless, a variety of other spaces exist in which translocality can be found, within commerce, family and even emotions. These are subtle articulations that take place among a multiplicity of actors with diverse characteristics and that produce transnational social spaces. They may be created through the interaction of migrants with locals: they produce hybrid cultural expressions that impact business and the ways that localities are organized. But they are also created through the interaction between migrants and the people who stay behind in China, children and other kin, with whom migrants continuously establish new networks of information and remittances, of commerce and of emotions. To analyze the creation and gradual interweaving of these different forms of participation and interaction among Chinese women who work in Mexican popular markets I first delve into the theoretical framework of alternative spaces of globalization. To do this, I discuss the concept of globalization through an alternative vantage point to consider the impact that individuals and their interactions have in the construction of social and economic spaces that are unlikely to be considered as a strategic research site of globalization (Sassen 2005). I consider the participation of migrants and their interactions as the foremost actors of construction of these alternative spaces of globalization. Second, I analyze the production of a hybrid idiom of trust (Yükseker 2004) among Chinese and Mexican women working as vendors and importers in Mexican popular markets. To do this, I analyze the use of guanxi as a business and social strategy for Chinese women and the use of comadrazgo within Mexican popular markets as a social contract that binds women in specific ways. The hybrid idiom of trust is a form of resistance against the vulnerable positions in which women find themselves. Then, I look at how transnational formations are constructed through the daily activities and interactions with other actors across territories. First, I consider the role that feelings of belonging play in women’s integration into Mexican popular markets. By analyzing the down-to-earth, everyday experiences of women, I am able to show how the global is produced at the level of ordinary activities and interactions, and how through the global, subjectivities and spaces are transformed I then focus on various forms of transnational livelihood in which the participation of women has had a profound impact on social organizations of both migrants and ethnic enclaves. The first has

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to do with motherhood, with remittances and with new constructions of parental participation at a distance. The second is embedded within trade routes and the organization of transnational family enterprises. Finally, I analyze how urban and local dynamics interact with gender dynamics and the implications that this has on the subjects and on the different social and economic spaces through which they move.

6.1 What Are Alternative Spaces of Globalization? In their first theorization, global cities were understood as constituted by cross-border dynamics of technological connectivities, border transactions such as investment and commerce, global financial organizations, foreign direct investments, state and government policies and, fundamentally, growth of transnational labor markets for professionals and specialized service workers (Sassen 2007). In short, global cities were categorized as part of a hegemonic conceptualization of globalization (Ribeiro 2006). Sassen ultimately recognized the existence of other units of analysis that could likewise shed light on global connections, but left out the participation of the actors that move in these other dynamics of the creation of global cities (Sassen 2007). She considered the category of global city to be valid only when referring to a component of global connexions of strategic places, leaving out the impacts of less visible actors, such as migrants or owners of small businesses. I propose instead to focus on the actors that move outside these hegemonic constructions, through their specific networks of migration and their participation in popular economies, and to consider them as constructors of alternative processes of globalization. In other words, the creation of these networks constructed by and among the Chinese within Mexico’s popular markets reinforces and expands the strategic places of globalization of which Sassen speaks. In his study of the market of Ciudad del Este, Ribeiro considered that, as one of the landmarks of this space and of the participation of the different kinds of traders in it, “the city is a major hub of grassroots globalization, it has connections with different fragmented global spaces in the non-hegemonic global economy” (Ribeiro 2006: 242). In his case study, he argued that most actors connect only two fragmented places of globalization, the one where they buy their products and the one in which they sell them. In my case, I argue that there is a diversity of social

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spaces in which actors move; they continuously link different fragmented places of globalization. In this sense, the relevance of the local is foremost. Indeed, the places that are more visible are those where actors obtain their commodities and those in which they sell them, primarily Yiwu in China, and Tepito, Plaza de la Tecnología, San Lázaro or anywhere else in the Mexican popular economy in which the actors might find themselves. But there are other places that are likewise linked through their activities, the places where they are from, for instance, where they have left parents, husbands or children, to whom they constantly send money and for whom they fight to maintain their established roles as providers and affection relations. Ribeiro concludes that: “(t)he construction of translocal systems and translocal cultures is also a common characteristic of other globalizations. Translocal links and networking are present in economic globalization from below. This indicates that “alter-native” transnational agents disregard or bypass the normative and regulating power of nation-States.” (Ribeiro 2006: 247)

I consider places with characteristics different from those defined by Sassen to also be strategic links of global connexions; however, they can only be seen through a translocal perspective. They are characterized by micro-social links that by themselves might seem disconnected from global connectivities. Nevertheless, as they create networks of networks, they become stronger and play stronger roles among them. Here, and to a large extent due to the presence of the Chinese, popular markets are a “social laboratory”1 where new spaces of interaction, of commerce and of global processes are first developed. To do this, I consider two specific vantage points, first, the relevance of considering alternative global economies (Ribeiro 2006, 2007) and second, the impacts that women have in the production of these alternative economies. As Ribeiro states, these are actors of non-hegemonic globalization not because they “intend to destroy global capitalism or to install some kind of radical alternative to the prevailing order. They are non-hegemonic because their activities defy the economic establishment everywhere on the local,

1 This is an extrapolation from one of María Rosete’s considerations of Tepito and from her interpretation of this space as a “commercial laboratory.”

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regional, national, international and transnational levels.” (Ribeiro 2006: 234)

Ribeiro sought to shed light on the fact that the alternative global economy of which he speaks is a process that does not oppose hegemonic market systems, but instead is a response from those deprived of access to this hegemonic market. It is in this counter-system that the actors that find themselves on the lower end of the social pyramid can better access the commodity chains and capitals to which those who are better positioned in the upper levels ipso facto already have access. Eventually, Sassen also adhered to this conceptualization and delved into these linkages at the lower levels, as well as the participation of subjects in global networks. Her goal then was to incorporate the participation of subjects that are rarely considered as actors of globalization into the model of the global city, to comprehend the existence of “disadvantaged locations in global cities” (2013: 22). Within her contributions on Countergeographies of globalization (2000), she focused on specific networks that are made up of these actors, particularly human trafficking and prostitution networks, as well as labor and care-system migrations. She focused on the boundaries and opportunities of women in today’s world system economy and the reasons for and the impacts of their mobility processes on these structures. Sassen adds, “(t)hese counter-geographies are dynamic; to some extent they are part of the shadow economy, but they also use some of the institutional infrastructure of the formal economy” (2000: 504). It was in this effort to decentralize the analysis of globalization, that she ultimately developed a parallel typology of global participation, which she characterized as the result of alternative circuits of survival . I use these two theories of globalization to shed light on the entwining of more evident processes of global linkages, such as commodity chains and financial flows, and those processes hidden within the interstices of globalization, such as individual linkages, migration and the creation of transnational social and commercial spaces. Like Ribeiro, I consider that these alternative processes of globalization “either open an avenue for upward mobility or the possibility of survival in national and global economies that are not capable to provide full employment for all citizens” (Ribeiro 2006: 235). I argue more specifically that in the case of the Chinese, the spaces that they construct between countries and the diversity of transnational interactions can also be considered alternative

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circuits of survival and a step toward the construction of the city (Harvey 2008). Mexico City belongs today to this growing list of urban entities catalogued as global cities (Sassen 2003a). In it, we find strategic places of globalization, such as global trade and finance networks, and spaces where complex survival networks are constructed, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3. The participation of individuals in such urban compositions has to be understood as a constitutive part of these global articulations, and in this sense the role played by institutions, such as families and households, is as important as any other. Popular commerce in Mexico, too often considered a marginal economy with little benefit to the national economy (or even detrimental to it), is one of the links in these chains of global connections. It is an important economic institution that continuously crosses borders, encompassing global economic and social linkages, in part due to the participation of transnational actors who progressively articulate different spaces through their economic and social flows. This was the case during the fayuca era and is still the case today, configured through constant commercial connectivities with China. In recent decades, the relevance of focusing on lower social-economic strata when talking about the possible linkages between separate places has become evident, and its analysis has been particularly driven by the theoretical approximation of transnationalism (Glick Schiller et al. 1992, 1995; Portes et al. 2002; Guarnizo 2003; Faist 2006). This perspective contributes “to our understanding of how everyday practices of ordinary people produce cultural meanings that sustain transnational networks and make possible enduring translocal ties” (Smith 2003: 468). Looking at the social and commercial dynamics that are carried out in markets like Tepito between Mexicans and Chinese renders evident the connexions between those macro-dynamics considered by Sassen and other microsocial levels of interaction where individual relationships transform and construct spaces. As Levitt and Glick Schiller state, “(…) migrants are often embedded in multi-layered, multi-sited transnational social fields, encompassing those who move and those who stay behind. As a result, basic assumptions about social institutions such as the family, citizenship, and nation-states need to be revisited.” (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004: 1003)

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What I will argue over these next pages is that the Chinese have added their own ways of participation to the dynamics of Tepito’s fervent social environment. In this sense, these transnational formations have been the result of a combination of transnational mobility and locality in receiving and sending countries (Dahinden 2010). Migrants articulate their places of origin to their places of establishment through their interactions, their personal dynamics and their participation in local economies. As I will show here, they often do so unexpectedly, through emotions, daily activities and new ways of family bonding that are rendered transnational. The popular economy has specific territorialities but expands through interactions that take place within them, as was seen in Chapter 2. Mexican popular markets have become a space in which Chinese women have found options for survival and growth. Within these places, they have constructed a web of interactions with actors with a variety of capitals and conditions. Through this web of interactions, the Chinese have produced transnational social spaces between Mexico and China. The production of transnational social spaces and the construction of alternative spaces of globalization are two processes that are intertwined. A whole networks perspective—which takes into account different levels of articulation—considers transnational social spaces as domains of cross-border social relations (Faist 2006) that are the results of a combination of transnational mobility and localities in receiving and sending countries (Dahinden 2010). On the other hand, a personal networks perspective emphasizes the visualizations of specific transnational practices, the connectivities among people (Glick Schiller et al. 1992, 1995; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). Here I follow a personal networks perspective to make sense of social and economic processes that arise outside a hegemonic agenda. They developed on such a small scale that they might be unperceivable, but over time they have had significant impacts. First, they have resulted in the transformation of the social and economic dynamics of the localities in which they carry out their interactions, and second in the production “from below” of spaces of globalization. Michael Peter Smith and Guarnizo push the relevance of

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understanding that practices from below are not always oppositional practices,2 they may be neither “self-consciously resistant nor even loosely political in character” (1998: 5). I concur with these authors; therefore, I argue that these initial steps in the production of alternative spaces of globalization are constituted by a set of operations that people on the margins enact as alternatives to the limitations created by state institutions and social structures. They do so not with the intention of creating oppositional practices, but because of their need to survive. These operations may consist of networks and pathways of commodities and information that are contained within the social space of these markets. These operations are tangible; they are produced within a determined place in a specific moment, such as interactions between Tepiteñes and Chinese in the Mexican market. But there may also be operations that are intangible, immaterial. These may include a phone call to a family member on the other side of the Pacific Ocean; a bank transaction involving a Chinese worker in Mexico whose salary in Yuans is paid by direct deposit to a Chinese bank account; an online purchase of a new product based solely on a picture or the written description provided by the seller; an employee and an employer who never meet but interact through an intermediary who has a relationship with the employer, as was the case with Leonardo and An Lan, which was explored in Chapter 3. Both kinds of operations contribute to the construction and reproduction of transnational social spaces. As Smith and Guarnizo stated, “we must avoid, at all costs, confusing intentionality with consequences, as when actors are designated ‘resistant’ or ‘oppositional’ because their practices produce some social change, even when it was not intended, fought for, or socially organized. In the last instance, (…) ‘transnationalism from 2 In their introduction to the book Transnationalism from Below, Smith and Guarnizo (1998) examine the analysis of the transnational experiences of various migrant groups, as well as hybrid identities, that had been collected up to that date and that were considered to be counter-hegemonic processes. For example, the authors refer to the work of Bhabha (1994) who considers transmigrant practices and identities as “counter-narratives of the nation”; Portes (1997a), who encompasses entrepreneurial practices of transmigrants as an expression of popular resistance; and Kearney (1991), who conceptualized Mixtec migrant farmworkers as creators of autonomous spaces where neither the United States nor the Mexican state have control. Although these authors also consider these transmigrant processes and organizations to be counter-hegemonic, they reject the idea that they should always be considered as acts of resistance (Smith and Guarnizo 1998: 5).

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below’ must be located and historicized if it is to have any meaningful referent capable of being studied now or in the future.” (1998: 29)

I build the concept of alternative spaces of globalization along the same line of thought. I consider both the tangible and intangible operations enacted by migrants, along with their transnational dynamics, to be meaningful. Nevertheless, they should be examined separately to analyze the various levels of the production of space. This gives relevance to the everyday struggles of people in the margins, including migrants who are searching for opportunities they lack in their places of origin. I seek to give relevance to their actions, to the ways in which they connect, even outside the networks that are generally considered influential. I want to demonstrate the relevance of these individuals and of their interactions, however small and apparently unimportant they may be. Their actions are in fact a resistance to the existence and reproduction of power asymmetries that are structured by gender, race and class. The theory on transnationalism (Glick Schiller et al. 1992, 1995; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Besserer 1999; Portes et al. 2002; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004) focuses on understanding not only migration processes but also strategies of belonging in continuous transitions between social, political and economic spaces. To do this, transnationalism has to delve deeply into the continuous ebb and flow of people between different spaces and among different interactions. The global city is partially created by transnational actors who gradually articulate various places through their economic and social flows. By adding to Sassen’s analytical agenda the theory of transnationalism, I argue that we should not only look at national or urban economies, but also focus on a much smaller scale— such as local economies developed within Mexican popular markets (or at an even smaller scale, economies of translocal households). 6.1.1

Constructing Cities: Where Place, Space and Gender Come Together

Chinese women have important impacts on the construction processes of spaces of alternative globalization through their specific participation in Mexico City’s popular economy. To shed light on their relevance in these construction processes, it is first necessary to consider the notion of the right to the city (Harvey 2008) and of those who construct it. To do so, the concept of the city has to be dissected and reduced to its most

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relevant features. Wirth, Lefebvre or Harvey have worked along these lines and consider as most relevant the conceptual division between place and space. Place, in this sense, would be the territorial, the delimited, the palpable. Space, then, is abstract. It is constructed through interactions and is made up of social, economic, political and cultural relationships. Wirth (1938) sought to go beyond the arbitrary boundaries of “cities” as rigid administrative concepts, blurring their delimitations to understand the dynamics that construct them. This is what he considered as “urbanism,” as a mode of life. Although they agreed with the distinction between cities and urbanism, Lefebvre and later Harvey sharply criticized the manner in which both constructions were conceived as separate. While developing his argumentative formulations about the construction of the city, Lefebvre had two main concerns: first, the relationships between place and space, between territories and interactions, and second, the production of space through daily activities. Spaces are conglomerates of social fabrics that interact and constantly change. Urban life, Lefebvre says, “suggests meetings, the confrontation of differences, reciprocal knowledge and acknowledgement (including ideological and political confrontation), ways of living, ‘patterns’ which coexist in the city” (Lefebvre [1996] 2000: 75). The main argument here is that there is a double correlated process of construction, through which individuals and their ways of organization transform places and spaces; as they do so, they build and reproduce themselves as “persons.” The construction of the city per se, however, is a more intricate process, in which these interactions are essential, but in which more extensive processes of connectivity must also accompany them. The city and urbanism are indeed not separate; they grow and feed each other and continuously transform each other through time. The city is the palpable object that is constructed through the abstract, through the interactions and social relations that make up the urban. At the same time, the urban is what builds the city. Hence those that interact within specific places that make up the city are its constructors. The issue here is, when the spaces in which these constructors move are transnational—not held down in one specific locality—and when the networks of networks of these actors create strategic places of globalization, the city, too, becomes transnational and global. Nevertheless, this global city is different from the one envisioned by Sassen, although it is linked to it. Sassen sought to find the counter-geographies of globalization, which were circuits created

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alongside wider global flows. I seek to understand these alternative globalizations not as processes that follow a hegemonic globalization, but as noteworthy processes in themselves. They do not follow other circuits but instead build their own, thereby reinforcing and expanding globalization. This argument counters that of Wirth, who considers that “the city as a community resolves itself into a series of tenuous segmental relationships superimposed upon a territorial base with a definite centre but without a definite periphery and upon a division of labor which far transcends the immediate locality and is world-wide in scope.” (Wirth 1938: 23)

In the process that I analyze, I argue that the delimitations between center and periphery, between hegemonic and subaltern, between men and women are also blurred. Wirth’s understanding of the city embraces a broad understanding of cities and urban ways of life that remains relevant today. What must to be added to his analysis, considering postmodern and decolonial studies, is the dualism between center and periphery and the limitation to territorially based spaces. Although Wirth did take into account the permeability of borders and localities and did consider the possibility of social, economic and commercial relationships among different cities on a global scale, I consider that he errs in considering that centers are definite. Furthermore, the relation between gender and the construction of space has been one of the main issues raised by feminist geographers. As Doreen Massey points out, it has long been evident that gender relations vary over time, but that they vary over space is a more recent—but equally necessary—discussion (Massey [1994] 2001: 178). The ways in which the category of gender interacts with urban dynamics are not always evident, but they come to light in the interstices created by daily activities, by interactions and by different ways of experiencing the city. Alicia Lindón (1999) also contributed to this argument by defining “modos de vida” (ways of life) as a structuration, and not only a structure, of the processes through which individuals organize their practices and representations facing their life conditions. This nuance allows a certain flexibility and an intersection between a variety of factors that impact the lives of individuals. Soto Villagr´an (2006), in an interesting attempt to render the articulation between places and spaces more visible, argues that the symbolic limitations that are culturally imposed on women have a spatial

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correlation. While places give historic and geographic specificities to the symbolic existences of women, spaces are social constructions that articulate and give meaning to them. As was seen earlier in this book, patterns of perception and action are built in the habitus of the subjects. They organize practices and representations, and by doing so they establish the perceived social orders and social structures in which the subjects find themselves. In addition, places also provide their own set of elements that forge the interactions of groups and individuals. In Bourdieu’s comprehension of place and space (1997), individuals establish through their interaction strong circuits of economic, social and cultural exchange. Within these circuits they each occupy different positions. Their interactions and the social constructions that enable them and revolve around them are also agents of change. Granted, Chinese migration to Mexico and incorporation into popular economy networks in the capital city are not a phenomenon solely linked to women. However, the roles of women in these incorporation strategies are noteworthy and entail a variety of social and economic elements that should not be ignored. Amid the different spaces in which Chinese women have carried out their activities, they have interwoven dynamics of interaction with several actors and through different social institutions. The market, the family and the household are the foremost of these institutions. Taking into consideration the particularity of the case analyzed here, it is fair to ask the question: How can we link the personal experiences of subjects, of migrants, of women, to wider social levels and, in particular, to economic and social linkages between different countries? In contrast to financial networks, individuals do not move in global networks but in transnational spaces that enmesh different contexts and fields. Tepito, for instance, is a place with historic and geographic specificities that have given its inhabitants elements of belonging and, most importantly, elements to create themselves as social and political subjects. After all, “Tepito existe porque resiste”—a common phrase heard (and read) throughout Tepito. But it was the spaces built through popular economy that gave Tepito—and other markets like it—its significance. Spaces are constructed through experiences and interactions. Social spaces are both local and global. They depend on, and are determined by, the actors that move within them and by the ways in which they interact among themselves. In this sense, individuals are the basis of the production of space. But spaces are also determined by symbolic constructions and social categories of differentiation such as gender, class, race

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and cultural, national or regional belongings. These categories not only determine the power structures and the respective roles to be played by the subjects, but they are also relevant to understand the construction of new strategies of insertion. The specific dynamics of popular markets have made possible the creation of new strategies developed by the Chinese, which explains the growth of a Chinese presence in Tepito and in other popular markets, accelerated by the creation and reproduction of new networks of Chinese migration. These strategies may consist of new ways of interacting with Mexicans, with other Chinese in Mexico or with families across borders. Each of these interactions has a different impact on a woman’s experience. Women’s experiences in the city and in migration, along with their incorporation into local dynamics, shed light on the relations between gender and space. These interconnections lead to the transformation of localities—such as popular markets in Mexico or global centers of production and distribution of Chinese commodities such as Yiwu—and explain the creation of transnational social spaces. So far, in previous chapters we have seen elements of the symbolic constructions of gender structures and of power between actors that take place in the localities relevant to my research. Various forms of agency that women have experienced were analyzed. Through movement from one locality to another, and with it the interaction within new dynamics, migrants are transforming their perceptions of themselves and their surroundings. In a way, migration has given women opportunities to imagine and experience new life trajectories. The daily experiences of Chinese women in popular markets constitute the basis for the construction of alternative circuits of survival (Sassen 2003b). I will look at these experiences to make sense of the ways migrant participation within local interactions is intertwined with the expansion of global dynamics in places that do not enter into the traditional conceptualization of strategic places of globalization (Sassen 2003a).

6.2 Vulnerabilities and Resistances in the City: Building Networks of Trust Between Guanxi and Comadrazgo Shei and I were standing behind the folding table on which she laid out her fried and baked-goods for passers-by to see. It was just a little after

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noon, too early for lunchtime and therefore a rather quiet time for work in this commercial corridor. Although all the women with whom I interacted during my field research were enmeshed within the networks of Mexican popular markets, all but two worked in established shops. Shei was one of them. She and her husband are among the few Chinese that have managed to work in Mexico City’s great popular networks as peddlers. Being so deeply enmeshed in the popular economy—often at great personal cost—does not represent an advantage.3 As I already discussed, Mexico’s popular economy is a very well-established and flourishing strategy of survival for those left behind by the government’s inability to provide employment, adequate wages and equal opportunities for all. Most people who work within the ranges of popular economy are or have been in positions of vulnerability. Nonetheless, these networks are also hierarchical and respond to a set of power structures that can rarely be overturned. The place a person holds within these structures depends mostly on economic capacity, although national, regional and even local references are also determining. Gender, moreover, plays a distinctive role in this social organization, both in social imaginary and embodied experiences it intersects with different layers of social and symbolic differentiation. Armando4 was the man who introduced me to Shei’s leader in Tepito. He was also present during my brief interaction with Shei, who did not want to speak to me. As we were walking away, he said to me: “I know this woman, I’ve seen her work here for months, she is one of the vendors who earns the most money per day on this street. Her reaction… it can only tell you the things that she must have had to do to get where she is. She is a beautiful woman… and who knows what the leaders here must have asked for to allow her and her husband to work here….” In Mexican popular markets, peddlers are not able to just go out and work wherever they want on the street. They need to be affiliated with a peddler’s organization, their working spaces have to be assigned by the leaders, and they need to pay a daily fee for this space. In exchange, peddlers receive protection from their leaders whenever they have problems with other vendors, with clients or even with the police. The places 3 During my field research, this was only the second Chinese couple working as peddlers that I encountered or even heard of in Mexico City. The other couple worked in San Cosme in a one-meter square dismountable shop, just outside Metro San Cosme. 4 Armando was introduced in Chapter 2.

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where they are assigned to work might depend on the organization to which they belong and their relationship with the leader of that organization. In addition to the daily fee, leaders expect support from their agremiades during political discussions related to struggles over space, demonstrations for basic urban rights or for political support. On a regular basis, street vending affiliations are given exclusively to Mexicans and very few leaders have accepted foreigners as agremiades. Shei, without a doubt, was an anomaly. But what is more remarkable about this ethnographic passage is the immediate assumption—from the man who was with me—that a woman’s most valuable asset is her body, and the possibility of transforming it into currency. Armando’s reaction reflects the highly patriarchal system of representations of migration and of women. It also reflects the reality of many women, not just migrants, when the female body is viewed as a system of exchange. “Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality” (MacKinnon 1982: 541). This is a harsh assertion that only approximates an even harsher reality. But beyond sexual objectification, there is a complex set of structures and practices that seek to maintain women in subordinate positions. Shei’s reaction depicts the difficulties of migration, which should also be analyzed in terms of emotions and nostalgia. Throughout their journeys, migrants often face obstacles that are imposed precisely because of their representation as “others.” But “otherness” does not only come to light when referring to national belongings—it is not just “the Chinese” as opposed to “the Mexican.” As has been made clear by Armando’s comment, this “otherness” stems from gender distinctions as well. Men and women, in this conception, are not the same. The category of “Woman” in this aspect—just as “otherness”—is a source of vulnerability that stems from patriarchal structures. In Butler’s work on vulnerability and resistance, following Beauvoir, the concept of gender is a relation or a set of relations and not an isolated attribute; only the feminine gender is “marked” and defined, as opposed to the masculine gender which is unequivocally “universal” (Butler 1990: 59). Likewise, Braidotti argues that “[…] the category Woman, despite all the differences that actually exist among individual women, is very clearly identifiable as suffering from

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common culturally enforced assumptions. […] This is the traditional representation of Woman as irrational, oversensitive, destined to be a wife and mother. Woman as body, sex, and sin. Woman as ‘other-than’ Man.” (1991: 157)

Migrant women, hence, often find themselves in double positions of vulnerability. However, I argue that these elements of vulnerability also represent gateways of agency or even economic empowerment. In this sense, following Saba Mahmood, I consider “agency not simply as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable” (Mahmood 2001: 210). Shei’s position not only reflects her embeddedness into Mexico City’s networks of popular economy, but her conditions and her possibilities are also determined by the ways in which she manages to insert herself into these networks. Migration entails an immense set of difficulties. Chinese migrants, both men and women, go through enormous efforts to reach their goals and support their families, but often their expectations are not fulfilled; they may end up in even more marginalized situations than they were when they began. Additionally, the immediate response and assumptions of the man who was with me gave me a second perspective on migration, particularly female migration, which also has strong implications. This was not only the perception of a local about the presence of migrant women, but of a male local. His assumptions also reveal the difficulties and barriers imposed on women in such dynamics. The ways that locals perceive migration also affect the possibilities and limitations faced by migrants. In his explanation of what had just happened with Shei, Armando sensed the possibility (or imposition) that the possession of a female body created for her. He considered that being a woman was a vulnerability, in the sense that her greatest value was the possibility of engaging in body-transactions. At the same time, that vulnerability could also be considered a resource. As he said, Shei earned more money per day than most vendors in her corridor, but who knows what she had to do to get there. Butler (2014, 2015) roughly understood vulnerability as the result of conditions of precariousness and argued that it is these conditions that become forces of movement. But she also argued that there are very

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different ways of mobilizing these vulnerabilities. Bodies, said the philosopher, are dependent on other bodies, on relations and on networks, and we cannot understand bodily vulnerability outside these social relations. In the case of Shei, or Armando’s interpretation of her reaction to our meeting, positions of vulnerability were revealed. In a symbolic construction of differentiation, a woman’s body is considered by patriarchal and heteronormative conceptions as a means of exchange, often immediately attributing her access to a particular position to this exchange. More importantly, however, it is a vulnerability because within the possibility of exchange, and within the power relations that are structured by gender differences, women are always positioned in the lower categories. Moreover, class and economic capacity are also determinants that too often render women like Shei in positions of double vulnerability. In Fei’s case, vulnerability was also present, although expressed in different ways. Fei migrated to survive, therefore, her options for mobility were limited to work and home. She transitions daily from one place to the other to support her family and her household. Her work, both domestic and paid, is what keeps her family afloat. Although Fei has little time for leisure and rest, she is also embedded in a process of construction of networks that have allowed Chinese women with very different characteristics to integrate into the popular economy. However, being a woman has also proven to be a resource that stems from vulnerability— shared vulnerability. In this sense, gender and socioeconomic conditions are significant factors in the construction of relationships between these women. They are not only variables through which they have been categorized, but also variables through which the women themselves have found common ground and therefore feelings of belonging, of trust. Through these feelings, these vulnerabilities have become elements of resistance. Through the movement of groups and of individuals like her, different linkages have been made, and little by little stronger networks have been created. To understand the power of these networks, I first ask: What can the spaces in which women like Fei move offer them in contrast to their difficult conditions they face in China? And what impacts can they have on these spaces? To explain the conditions of these shared vulnerabilities as a way of bonding, as soft skills, I will briefly go back to the association between María and An Lan. Before she met An Lan, María had already been invited by a Han, a Chinese man and the first person from China that she had ever met in Tepito—to go with him and do business in China.

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María once told me—half joking, half serious—that she never went with him because she didn’t trust him. “Y él me invitaba a China y nunca quise ir (ríe)… le vi malas intenciones …” (“He had already invited me to China but I never accepted (she laughs)… I thought he had bad intentions…”). When she met An Lan, however, and was later invited to go to China with her, she never questioned the intentions of the Chinese businesswoman. For María, there was no room in this association for any matter other than business. Here, symbolic constructions of gender played an important role; business decisions were also made through a quick interpretation of a potentially vulnerable situation. A business transaction involving an international trip between a man and a woman might be interpreted a certain way, whereas the same transaction between two women was less likely to be interpreted in that way. Returning to the example of Shei and Armando’s interpretation of her condition and possibilities, had Shei been a man who had responded the same way to my presence, Armando’s interpretation would have been very different. In contrast to what had occurred with Han, a tacit trust and mutual sense of security existed between María and An Lan, which opened the door to their transnational alliance. Although Han had invited her to China several years earlier, it was not until 2009 when María made went to China for the first time, accompanied by An Lan. Today the two women rarely make an entrance without appearing arm-in-arm. They have become a team, associates and friends, but most importantly, they have become builders of bridges between very different cultural, social, commercial and political spaces. According to Wirth, a city is a place where the need for secondary contacts is greater than the need for primary contacts. That is to say, urbanites seek out the people from whom they can obtain most benefits, they are “dependent upon more people for the satisfaction of their life-needs than are rural people and thus are associated with a greater number of organized groups, but they are less dependent upon particular persons, and their dependence upon others is confined to a highly fractionalized aspect of the other’s round of activity.” (Wirth 1938: 13)

In “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Granovetter developed a theory that would provide a way to understand the relation between micro- and

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macro-levels of interaction. He focused on the importance of interpersonal ties and argued that weak ties—acquaintances rather than strong relations—are also important for mobility opportunities and play a role in social cohesion (1973: 1373). In a nutshell, he argued that weak ties make up bridges between different social structures or groups. “The macroscopic side of this communications argument is that social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent” (Granovetter 1983: 202). One of the author’s main concerns is the expansion of news through weak ties. Indeed, among the Chinese in Mexican popular markets, weak ties have been imperative tools of insertion into the business. It is through weak ties that the labor market within the popular economy has expanded into a new enclave for the Chinese in Mexico. This is clear, for instance, when we take into consideration the young women who moved from Tijuana to Mexico City because of an acquaintance who told them about the possibilities of work in the megalopolis, as I described in the previous chapter. In the case of Fei, as will be argued below, the importance of weak ties is not only evident but also sheds light on the relevance of looking at the micro-social to understand wider processes, such as the expansion of economic markets and commodity flows. Trust, for Granovetter, is one of the main elements for the reproduction and consolidation of stronger networks within determined groups. Trust, I have also argued, is one of the main components of the organization of popular economy and of the consolidation of migration networks among the Chinese; these networks are visible in the construction of economic enclaves with international kinship and friendship alliances. Moreover, a variety of cultural elements are constructed through trust that are both determinant of, and determined by, localities and specific groups. Guanxi and comadrazgo are two of these relevant cultural elements of networks formation. Guanxi is a Chinese word that means relationship and the trust and reciprocity entailed within this relationship. In a way, guanxi works both as secondary and as primary contacts, or as strong and weak ties, as was characterized by Granovetter (1973, 1983). Comadrazgo is also a specific kind of relationship that entails trust and reciprocity. What I want to explore here are the ways in which these two elements are intertwined within a particular space—and what that implies. María and Fei were acquainted through An Lan. Fei had only recently become acquainted with An Lan, due to An’s position within the market of Tepito and because of her relationship with María, an important leader in the market and, therefore, a key actor for integration into the market.

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María Rosete barely knows Fei. They have no common language, but they communicate through gestures and with the help of few words; however, they have a good relationship and, most importantly, they are closely linked by the often unspoken rules of the Tepito market. As I have already discussed, the migration of Chinese women has changed the social and economic dynamics of the places in which they have settled. In Tepito, Chinese women have played an important role in the strengthening of the economic networks between Mexico and China. Their presence solidified a change in the kind of relations that have been developing between people of both countries in this market. In recent decades, as Chinese women began following new routes of migration, they started to expand the activities that had traditionally been developed by the Chinese in Mexico. The popular economy, as I discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, is a space that can offer opportunities to people in need, provided they know how to take advantage of it. The way that Chinese women have taken advantage of this space has been through the development of soft skills to manage their imbrication into the dynamics of places like Tepito. There are different articulations between the execution of these soft skills and the social spaces in which these women move. These articulations have gradually allowed the construction of new linkages with local places. The personal experiences of women, their migration patterns and the ways in which they insert themselves and participate in the development of different fields frequently represent a transformation in the gender structures in which they develop. In this sense, the market of Tepito offers opportunities of sociability. In this commercial space, associations between Chinese and Mexicans have gradually started to form, either as small businesswomen or as importers (Braig and Alba Vega 2013). I focus on associations of women, not only because they respond to a need on the part of the Chinese to create networks in a territory that is still foreign to them in order to better integrate into its dynamics, but also because they represent a strategy for local actors to integrate into global networks in which they also want to participate. In this sense, the associations women have created are sources of growth and of social and economic integration (Sipi 2000). These women not only expand their possibilities for individual growth, but also transform the dynamics of the migrant groups and the system of hierarchies that structure them. They likewise transform the localities and the social spaces in which they are embedded and the relationships created between them.

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Fei is now one of María’s agremiades , which entails the continuous transaction of daily fees in exchange for protection and the possibility of working in the market. But a relationship between leader and agremiade goes far beyond this rigid conception of a one-dimensional exchange. It also reveals a relationship of trust and care. Today, within popular economy networks in Mexico, leadership and kinship are two closely related social structures that have often been materialized as comadrazgo (or, less frequently, compadrazgo)5 . Comadrazgo is a social contract and, in places like Tepito, within markets of the popular economy, it is also a means of protection. Agremiades are not necessarily linked to their leaders through these structures of comadrazgo. Nevertheless, the relationships between vendors and leaders or among vendors themselves within the networks of these markets still have characteristics similar to those found in the comadrazgo relationship. Among the Chinese, there are other ways of doing business and of reproducing social relations that are comparable to comadrazgo; this is the case of guanxi, a Chinese idiom that expresses “relationship” and the trust and reciprocity entailed within this relationship. Many of the Chinese women with whom I spoke used the word confianza (trust) as a translation for guanxi. An Lan, for instance, considered that guanxi was an indispensable element for her growth in Tepito. For Chinese businesswomen to grow, they had to develop their trust of Mexican petty vendors and small-scale wholesalers; they had to start building guanxi and incorporating it into the ways of doing business in Mexican street markets. To accomplish this, reciprocity was fundamental, but so was business innovation.

5 At this point of the book, it is relevant to note the bias present in all research. In my case, because I worked closely with only one vendor leader in Tepito, I have no basis to comment about the possibility of relationships similar to compadrazgo between male leaders and male migrants from China. To the best of my knowledge, these relationships did not exist. In fact, María Rosete was one of the first leaders to have so many Chinese agremiades under the umbrella of her organization; she remains one of the few leaders to do so. Her openness responds to María’s understanding of the market as an actor with a life of its own and that moves according to its own will. “Nosotros nos tenemos que mover con él, si no, nos quedamos atrás ” (“Either we move with it, or we stay behind”)—she told me once during an interview. In any case, whatever trust networks may exist between men, they are obviously much less visible than those between women. More importantly, the trust relationships between women transform conditions that stem from a particular vulnerability (each woman confronts different vulnerabilities) into agents of resistance.

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For the Mexican popular classes, comadrazgo plays a similar role. Between Mexicans and Chinese, social relations are not expressed in the same ways as they are between co-nationals, but trust is a fundamental element that will determine the participation of certain actors in these networks. Vulnerability for women on the streets or in business transactions, for instance, is a reason to find trustworthy associations. Insecurity is common in popular markets; for women, harassment of a sexual nature is an everyday issue that ranges from unpleasant insinuations to violence and rape. Business associations among women work as a strategy of protection against these situations of vulnerability. In these exchanges, there is an implicit sense of trust: these are business partnerships in which sexual discrimination or insinuation is one less adversity to think about. To explain this, I have to go back one step and consider some of the most striking features of the dynamics of Tepito. Tepito is a space that is in the city but whose dynamics thoroughly differ from those of other urban places. It is a marginalized center; a space with a highly politicized yet profoundly divided population, where social and symbolic constructions have long determined the ways in which its population organized itself. But it is also a place where people’s impulses and constructions of self and of survival have likewise had impacts on the prevailing structures. It is in this sense that popular organizations were formed: through the need for acknowledgment of a rather marginalized Mexican population, whose last resource of survival was to dive into economic networks that went beyond the grip of the state. In this first moment of politicization of Tepito and of the growth of the importance of popular economy for a considerable part of Mexico City’s population, comadrazgo was paramount (Alba Vega 2012); just like guanxi has been for the Chinese who have established themselves there in recent decades. But what is most interesting in this scenario, is that both cultural constructions, both strategies of belonging and of doing business, have mingled in the spaces of popular economy in Mexico: this has produced a hybrid idiom of trust (Yükseker 2004) among women of different origins. As Laura expressed during our interview: “Here, I have had much better relations ( guanxi) with Mexicans (…) This is something that in European countries was not possible.” Recalling the difficulties she had encountered in Europe, she deemed the similarities between the Mexican and Chinese ways of doing business an important advantage in establishing a business among popular networks.

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Over the years and through their interactions, the Chinese and the Mexicans have embodied each other’s conceptions of trust and of protection. The Mexicans have incorporated guanxi into their ways of doing business, and the Chinese have embodied ways of interacting similar to comadrazgo in their relationships with Mexican women in the markets. It must be said, however, that these relationships are always with women that have a certain power within markets. Herrera argued, although in a thoroughly different context (friendship among Chicanas) that “this adopted sisterhood, comadrazgo, can be constructed as a strong female alliance” (Herrera 2011: 52). Using cultural and symbolic elements that emanate from different places and contexts, these women have created new social spaces. Gender was not only a variable that allowed Chinese women to enter into an already too politicized and closed, albeit diversified space. It was also a variable that allowed Tepiteñes, particularly those in power or with influence, such as María Rosete, to grant access to the market to the migrant population. In addition to gender, class is also determinative of the ways in which the Chinese have entered and impacted these local spaces. In the case of Fei, as with many of the Chinese women and with Tepiteñes themselves, the amount of time spent working determines survival. Fei’s mobility seems confined to specific places: work, home and that intangible place created through technology that allows two or more individuals separated by great (or small) distances to meet. As she explained, the amount of time she had to talk to her family in China depended on her workload: “sometimes it can be once a week, but sometimes it is once a month, and then sometimes two months pass without having time to talk to them.” However limited, the places through which she constantly transits have an impact on her, just as she has an impact on them. Mobility establishes, to a certain degree, the possibilities that subjects have to create bonds with others and hence to create feelings of belonging or to reproduce family and social networks. Fei, in spite of her limited, two-directional daily movement, is nonetheless an actor of change, a builder of networks and of the city. As Soto Villagr´an argues, these are “repeated daily actions, which by their persistence produce the established order, but where we can also observe individual and collective ruptures that destabilize social meaning” (own translation—Soto Villagr´an 2006: 106). Fei’s daily and repeated actions at home and at work establish her routine and might seem insignificant.

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But today she is part of a much wider universe in which commodities and information also move, and where ways of bonding and of understanding are enmeshed. The participation of the Chinese within popular markets in Mexico has completed transformed these places and the reach of their networks. Their presence has had an impact on the ways the markets are organized and the ways they do business. Moreover, because of the transformation of China’s political, social and economic institutions and the increase in numbers of women migrants to Mexico, particularly within popular commerce, the impacts these women have are profound. Jennifer Bair sought to understand the ways in which difference operates within social and economic structures and argued that “the particular ways in which difference matters –that is, the conditions under which difference operates as a form of power or a resource for resistance and the manner in which it shapes subjectivity– are variable and contingent” (Bair 2010: 203). In her efforts to build on feminist economic politics, her goal is not to highlight that gender matters, but rather to understand how gender can modify power relations and hierarchical economic organizations. According to Bair, gender is always structuring, but not always in the same ways. Along the same lines, Sipi argues the need for a “shift from asking about the gendered consequences of globalization to showing how the activities of gendered subjects are themselves constitutive of it” (Bair 2010: 206). This was one of the main points I sought to make in this section. There are new forms of interactions that depend on the construction of bridges between different spaces. These interactions allow actors to settle in new dynamics and to reorganize their lives. In Mexico, the Chinese constantly have to move between different social codes that allow them to integrate into local spaces. Places such as Tepito—spaces of constant struggle—provide tools to forge interactions, and sharing specific conditions can also represent firm grounds of identification. Interactions occur within specific places through which the actors move—where home and work are located, for instance—but they are also constructed through networks of communication, information and affection. It is in this second aspect that translocality and the construction of transnational networks become relevant. Commerce and trust go together in popular markets; trust is earned through work, but also through different processes of identification. In order for processes of identification to take place, differentiation comes into play.

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6.3 Constructing Cities Through Belonging: Bringing Gender In Belonging and identification are two processes intimately embedded in the study of migration. With migration comes border crossing. Borders, as has repeatedly been reiterated, are porous constructions that are meant to separate while at the same time making similarities visible (Kearney 1991, 2004). Nationalities, then, are often accompanied by symbolic constructions of difference and identification, which repeatedly cross and intersect, thereby strengthening social fabrics. Gloria’s arrival in Mexico reveals the importance of the processes of belonging and of identification. Her first impression was of surprise, as she noticed a set of similarities between Mexicans and herself. She first thought of this as a physical similarity, which became evident to her as she strode through the corridors of Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport. But after some time in Mexico, she also noticed cultural similarities, particularly while doing business with Mexicans. She explained to me with relief: Gloria: “Cuando me bajé del avión, pensé que iba a ver pura gente blanca, como los que vemos en las películas, güeros de ojos azules, ¿sabes? Pero cuando empecé a ver a los mexicanos en el aeropuerto me di cuenta de que en realidad ¡parecen chinos!” (“When I got off the plane, I thought I was just going to see white people, like the ones you see in the movies, light-skinned, blue eyes, you know? But when I began to see Mexicans in the airport, I realized that actually, they look Chinese!”)

What may be considered a banal issue actually reveals critical sentiments within migration: the construction of the self as opposed to the “other,” and the construction of feelings of belonging. Being “Mexican” or “Chinese” means nothing without the context of difference or of affinity, and this applies to Mexicans as well. Within popular markets Mexicans often construct “the Chinese”6 as immigrants with certain features that are not

6 There has been latent discrimination towards the Chinese in Mexico ever since the end

of the nineteenth century. The most dramatic repercussions were felt by the Chinese in the first half of the last century as a result of the anti-Chinese movements that took place after the Mexican Revolution, as we saw earlier in this book. Although discrimination has not reached those levels since then, it still persists. Throughout the book, we have seen indications of the discrimination that many Chinese men and women living and working

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necessarily related to their national origins. For example, Koreans,7 who also had an important presence in Tepito in the 1990s, were often referred to by Mexican vendors as “Chinese.”8 People from China, for their part, often make tacit distinctions between their co-nationals from other regions: there are differences between those coming from the North, East, South or Central China; between those coming from different provinces, such as Guangdong, Fujian or Zhejiang, or from Hubei, Hebei or Henan; there are even differences between those coming from specific localities, as Taishan or Kaiping, Beijing or Shanghai. These are all differentiations that play important roles in the daily activities of people and of their feelings of belonging. As Lidola states, reflecting on Yuval-Davis’s conceptualization of belonging, it must first be triggered by a sense of exclusion (Yuval-Davis et al. 2005, in Lidola 2011). Hence, it sets both the boundaries of not belonging—unbelonging—and builds up the elements of belonging, as I will now illustrate. During Gloria’s first experience of migration, she went through an elaborate process of personal identification. First, by constructing herself as separate from those with whom she would be in contact with—Mexicans—and second, by deconstructing these same notions and replacing them with elements of identification. Physical features, as well as cultural attributes and language, are factors of cultural differentiation that play a crucial role within migration. As Gloria later explained to me, for her it was a relief to find a Mexican population that was not fundamentally opposed to her own complexion when she arrived; it allowed her to feel less out of place. This was not necessarily because of constructed similarities between Mexican and Chinese, but rather because of a shared distance from a more critical “Other”—“güeros de ojos azules,” as Gloria said in Spanish. In contrast, whenever I spoke to Mexican vendors who had been to markets in China, one of the first things these Marco Polos would say

in Mexico face today. However, the main focus here is not on discrimination; numerous studies about the Chinese in Mexico have already been dedicated to this issue (Cinco 1999; Martinez 2008; Schiavone-Camacho 2009; González 2017). For an exemplary review of the literature on this topic, see Ang (2010). 7 One of Tepito’s leaders, Miguel Galán, was partly responsible for advancing the presence of Koreans in the market in the 1990s. 8 Often, in fact, when trying to track down other Chinese vendors in popular markets through Mexican contacts, I would be led into a vending stall owned by Koreans.

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was that the similarities between Mexicans and Chinese, between “their markets” and “ours,” were uncanny. Little by little, Gloria began to experience social and cultural similarities, just as she had experienced a physical similarity. As Gloria started working in her new business in Plaza de la Tecnología, she noticed that the ways that Mexicans and Chinese worked were not all that different. Other women had already expressed similar feelings, like Laura, who considered that “Mexicans are very nice and considerate, they are like Chinese… their ways of doing business… the trust networks that they can create.” Through these feelings of identification that many of the women experienced in popular markets in Mexico, it can be inferred that the ways in which trade works and is carried out by vendors has been a tool to strengthen the social fabric among people of different origins. As we saw before in the case of An Lan, there is another perspective that should also be taken into account. Both An Lan and María Rosete believed that business used to be more complicated before there was a substantial presence of Chinese in the Tepito market. But by the time businesswomen like Gloria or Laura arrived in Mexico, networks of trust had already been established; they came to reinforce and develop them. By the time businesswomen like Gloria or Laura came, these networks had already been constructed, and they came to reinforce them and develop them. Here, too, we find the progressive construction of social spaces through interactions between diverse groups. Here, we grasp once again the reality of the “social laboratory” that is Tepito and other markets that are linked to this marginal center. In this sense, too, business and trade have become spaces of interaction that lead to a sense of belonging. Within popular markets, particularly in Tepito, trade or business is the common denominator of almost everyone. The fact that a majority of the commodities traded in Tepito are produced in a faraway continent visibilizes how macro-levels of social and economic interactions—global commodity chains—come together with micro-social linkages. There are other spaces of belonging that are much more visible and equally important to the livelihood of Chinese women within Mexican popular markets. In spite of the fact that Gloria did not feel alienated from the people who surrounded her, she was in fact immersed in a new dynamic in which she found herself to be alone, relying only on her relationship with her husband. But gradually, Gloria was able to insert herself into a variety of spaces that have given her elements of belonging. Her shop is located in Plaza de la Tecnología, one of Mexico City’s biggest

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plazas dedicated to electronics and computer technology and also one of the plazas organized by popular associations within the networks of the popular economy. Nevertheless, she established her office in a very different neighborhood, in what used to be Mexico City’s Chinatown in the first half of the twentieth century (Cinco 1999; Alba Villalever 2008). In this sense, Gloria’s office is not only a place from which she organizes her daily work activities and her transnational business, but also a space of interaction where other people from China, particularly those from Guangdong, like Gloria, get together for lunch. Moreover, Gloria and her husband also decided to join the Christian Chinese Church9 in Colonia Viaducto.10 Today, seven years after her arrival, Gloria has a very strong network consisting of business associations, social and family networks in both China and Mexico, and cultural-religious organizations11 through which she has managed to grow in the very same dynamics that were once unfamiliar to her. Meanwhile, Fei’s integration into spaces of interaction is not as visible as that of Gloria, since her economic situation is less favorable and her social networks in Mexico are more reduced than those of people who come from Guangdong. Nevertheless, Fei has made use of the networks within reach and through them has managed to stay afloat. By integrating themselves into networks of Mexican popular economy, both Gloria and Fei have participated in the construction of networks of survival within migration. With the expansion and reinforcement of these networks, little by little, alternative circuits of survival are produced. For many, migration is a tool for economic growth, but it can also be a process of self-reliance. Although Gloria’s husband came to Mexico City with the intention of staying just a couple of years, after a while he and Gloria decided together to change their strategy and to start their own 9 The Church was created around 2005 and today has about sixty members, half of whom are Chinese and the other half are Mexicans. Three couples run the congregation: a Chinese-Canadian couple, a young Chinese couple from Hong Kong who came to Mexico from Reunion Island, and a Mexican couple. 10 Recently arrived Chinese consider the colonia, or district, where the Church is located to be the city’s new Chinatown. Mexicans, however, have not yet noticed the transformation of this space as a Chinatown; it has acquired this characteristic only through the feelings of belonging that the Chinese attribute to it. Nevertheless, it is a place where a significant number of Chinese reside today; because of this presence, several Chinese stores and restaurants have opened in recent years. 11 For a more detailed analysis of this religious organization see Cinco (2017).

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business. Gloria did not come to Mexico as the wife or daughter of an already established merchant; she came as an indispensable component of a family economic unit that was about to embark on a new work-strategy. Like Gloria and Rocío, most Chinese women that set up their businesses within the confines of popular markets do not travel alone. Sometimes they are the first to dive into the whirlpools of migration, later followed by someone else; on other occasions, they are the ones who come after their kin—husbands, siblings or parents—have already established themselves. The roles played by women are substantial not only for the survival and reproduction of the household, but also for the dynamics of economic networks between Mexico and China and for local spaces. These women have articulated their social relations between these two countries; they have kept family and social networks alive despite the distance. Moreover, by belonging to networks of popular economy, they eventually have a great potential for global articulation. They often integrate themselves into economic networks that are situated within the margins of financial global networks. These women are in the search of opportunities, and by weaving their activities to those of Mexicans that are in similar positions as theirs, they produce these spaces of opportunities with global characteristics. Through their own experiences, they produce alternative circuits of survival that link different and often remote spaces. Migration not only affects individuals and their economic situations, it also affects emotions, traditions and daily practices—as well as the surroundings of both migrants and their families. In the cases of Fei and Gloria, the impacts on emotions were evident. Both alluded to the importance of friends and families for their well-being. In these individual experiences, the links between the low-scale economies in which they move do not yet correspond to global networks. But they reveal the importance of the economic participation of women and their increase in migration processes. The participation of these women plays an important role in the economic networks that articulate between Mexico and China and transforms the dynamics of migration. In this sense, there is a correlation between individual processes of adaptation to economic dynamics (Cuche 2009; Elias and Etoré 1991) and the development of localities of anchorage of their commercial and social networks. As I have demonstrated, Chinese women within migration have managed to create new ways of articulation to local dynamics and among themselves. The situations in which they are embedded have redefined not only the structures of the migrant group, but also those of the locality

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in which they have settled. There is an intrinsic correlation between the spaces through which the actors move, the places in which they interact and their dynamics, and the construction of particular networks that progressively grow stronger. Moreover, just as any locality can offer different opportunities to both local or migrant individuals, the benefits those localities receive depends on the levels of integration and of interaction of the actors within them. The opportunities that Chinese women have found in Tepito depended, on the one hand, on the openness of Tepiteñes to their presence in the market, and on the other hand, to the need of these same actors—Tepiteñes—to find a new source of trade that would benefit them the way that fayuca from the United States used to do. The importance of the dynamics of popular commerce in places like Tepito, which were intended to provide a supply of commodities for actors who lack economic support, has also allowed migrants to participate in these economic spaces. The construction of popular economy networks, which began as an entwinement of strong and weak ties, of bridges created among different groups that would otherwise be incohesive, has also made room for the integration of the Chinese. In this sense, gender is an element that has allowed the creation of these bridges. Through the trust that emanates from a shared condition, it has become a source of empowerment. This shared condition of gender has become an essential tool to build alternative circuits of survival .

6.4

Transnational Motherhoods

Song is a young Chinese woman who works in Plaza Beijing and who came to Mexico with her sister, Xuejun. As soon as we met and started talking in Plaza Beijing, Song took out her smartphone and showed it to me. On the small screen is a picture of her children, who are now six and four years old; they were four and two when she left China. She tells me she has tried to go back to China at least once a year to hold her children, but has missed out on watching them grow. As she takes her cell phone back from me, she stares at the picture on the screen, then quickly turns it off and carefully puts it in her pocket, her eyes still staring at the place where the picture had been. Xuejun, her younger sister, then looks at me and tells me that fortunately her sister is going back to China next week for the Spring Festival. Her children will have time off from school, and Song will spend time with her family and then spend time in the market, choosing novelty merchandise and purchasing new orders.

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Song’s husband had accompanied the two sisters to Mexico, but since they were just starting to set up their new business in Tepito, they did not have enough money to send to the children’s grandparents, who were caring for them back in Yiwu. Therefore, they decided as a couple that Song’s husband would go back to China, where he could both work and take care of the children. Today, his parents take care of the children at home. Song’s husband is still in China, where he works and comes home to his children every day. Meanwhile, Song is away, working for the wellbeing of her family, yet separated from them by an ocean, unable to see them and spend time with them. Most of the Chinese women with whom I spoke were not only migrants, but also mothers who had to leave their children in China or send them back after their birth in Mexico. This has been a common practice for Chinese in Mexico in recent decades (Alba Villalever 2008). Of the women with whom I spoke, none was raising children in Mexico. The decisions they made about pregnancy and childbirth depended on their finances and their personal situations. More often than not, new-born babies are sent to China to live with their paternal grandparents. This was the case with Gloria, who became a mother three years after arriving in Mexico City; Yun, whose seven-year-old daughter was also born in Mexico and then taken to China six months later by Yun’s mother-in-law; An Lan, who has a twelve-year-old boy in Beijing, who was also born in Mexico; and even Cristina, who has no children yet, but dreams of having a baby soon (although she told me that she would still have to wait several months to ensure that her baby would not be born in “the year of the sheep,” a decision advised by both her mother and her mother-in-law) and has already talked to her husband and her mother-in-law to arrange for the care of her child and the expenses of both grandmother and baby back in China. When she talks about her daughter—now four years old—Gloria’s face reflects both the joy of thinking about her nena (her baby girl) and the pain that comes from living so far away. During the last months of her pregnancy, Gloria and her husband were joined in Mexico by her motherin-law, who took care of her and later helped take care of the baby during her first months of life in Mexico. Eventually, the grandmother took the baby to China, leaving behind the heartbroken parents just four months after the birth of their child. In spite of the pain this caused them, they decided to send their daughter away because they thought that would be best for her. For many women with whom I spoke, a very important

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factor in the process of becoming a mother is the knowledge that—just like Gloria—they will not be with their babies to see them grow. The reasons that lead many couples to send their children back to China are manifold. The foremost has to do with education and the parents’ desire for their children to grow up in an environment that can provide them the same values that they themselves received. Many Chinese believe that their children will not be able to receive an appropriate education in Mexico. The second reason has to do with work and economic capital. Considering the workload of most Chinese men and women in popular markets, caring for children in Mexico would mean either taking time off, which would prevent them from earning enough money to provide for the whole family, or bringing the children to work, which would prevent the children from acquiring an education (as occurred with Limei). In any case, Chinese couples always try their best to send their children back to their home country to live with either their grandparents (usually cared for by the paternal grandmother) or the husband, in cases where the children are born before the mother leaves China. A third reason is language, which plays a fundamental role in the cultural upbringing of the children. Chinese parents are reluctant to place their children in schools where they will not be learning their language from an early age; therefore, they have one more reason to send them back to China or to leave them behind. Finally, security was an issue that was important to most women with whom I spoke. For many Chinese women, the daily insecurity that they feel working in popular markets is something that they want make sure their children to not have to confront. In China, they argue, they would never face the same kinds of fears and insecurities on the street. Although for most women clearly the best decision is to send their children away, it is nonetheless never an easy decision, nor an easy way of living. Gloria constantly sends money back to China, so that her nena and her parents-in-law, who take care of her, can survive. In this sense, she is experiencing a motherhood that differs from what she initially considered: a transnational motherhood. Transnational social spaces entail processes where the actors continuously travel between two or more very different contexts, all of which are intrinsically linked to the ways in which they experience life within migration. Transnational motherhood and migration have changed the ways migrant women understand work and families. Constructions of transnational motherhood represent vulnerabilities and at the same time provide opportunities of agency and resistance.

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In this sense, the search for opportunities becomes twofold. First, in the sense of economic survival and the ways in which individuals (mothers) try to overcome economic obstacles, and second with respect to opportunities to develop a sense of motherhood despite the distance, to construct new forms of maternal interaction even when the family is territorially divided. In this second sense, motherhood also entails the creation of family spaces that stretch across borders and are hence rendered transnational. Moreover, in these situations of transnational parenthood, in order to transcend the difficulties of being away, of being mothers apart from their children, Chinese women have to make use of various technologies and find new strategies for bonding and for parental roles. These new technologies become a fundamental tool for family reproduction and communication. Internet services, such as messaging applications or videoconference systems, allow Chinese families to maintain powerful bonds. This was clear in the case of Song, who holds her phone and the pictures that she has there dearly. However, in this case the different social and economic capital that the women and their families possess are also important in their daily lives, their migration paths and their work experiences in Mexico. Although Song and her sister Xuejun had arrived in Mexico and entered the networks of popular markets just two years prior to my research, they were already fairly well established and had managed to build a sizeable business in Plaza Beijing by the time we spoke. The two sisters had been able to gather a little capital to start their business as soon as they arrived and also could rely on support from their families in China. Their path was not without difficulties, but they arrived in Mexico’s popular markets under much better circumstances than other women, many of whom still have not managed to create a business of their own and continue to work as employees. An example is Julia, a young Chinese woman who works for the two sisters. Julia comes from Taishan, in Guangdong, and her family, just like many other Taishanese in Mexico, owns a restaurant—or café de chinos —in Tijuana. Upon arriving in Mexico, Julia had the opportunity to immediately work in a family business. Nevertheless, she soon perceived that staying within these family-labor structures would not allow her to grow. Moving to Mexico City from Tijuana became a strategy for individual growth, just like it had been for Peicun and Xiaobei (in Chapter 4). Although Julia has been in Mexico longer than the two sisters and has better Spanish-language skills than they do, she still does not have the social and economic capital to

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start her own business. She was able to finish high school before moving to Mexico, but does not have a university degree. Xuejun and Song were both accountants back in China. They had finished their degrees in Yiwu, their hometown, and before coming to work in Plaza Beijing they already had experience working within the “Chinese International Market City” and had contacts that made it easier for them to do business in Mexico. Like Alicia, they had heard about Mexico through interactions in the market of Yiwu; moreover, they had friends who had already moved to Mexico City to do business, and who persuaded them to join them and work in popular markets. In spite of their very different paths and opportunities, both Julia and Song have children back in China; they both became mothers before migrating and then left their children behind. Julia’s baby girl turned three the year that we met. But Julia’s insertion into Mexican economic dynamics has not been as fruitful as it was for her employers, and she has not been able to go back to China since she first came to Mexico, shortly after her baby was born. Her husband, like Song’s, also stayed back home, and his parents help take care of the child. However, for almost three years, Julia has only had contact with her daughter by computer or cell phone. Often, the young woman uploads pictures of her young daughter and adds short messages on her wall on WeChat, a social platform similar to Facebook that is often used by young people in China. Most of the messages are directed to her daughter, in a mixture of Spanish and Chinese, neither of which the young girl can read. On other occasions, she attaches pictures of the girl with her father or with her grandparents, or sitting by herself, eating or having a haircut. Her daughter’s daily life, the process of growing up, is uploaded onto the social platform. This is Julia’s way of being present for her daughter, to also be part of her life and show that despite the distance she cares and holds her tight. Some pictures are sometimes placed next to the other and attached to a written message; one message in Chinese read: “this is you when you were three months old, and you today, the day of your third birthday. I think of you every day. But do you still remember that I am your mother?” Most aspects of these women’s lives revolve around their children and the opportunities that they can give them by establishing their commercial shops in Mexican popular markets. Moreover, having children and giving them better lives and opportunities were among the most important reasons why many women migrated. However, their constructions of “motherhood” and “family” and their actual lived experiences are

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different when they have been away from their children for more than two or three years. In most cases, the importance and construction of the family in women’s memories reveal feelings of comfort and of wellness. But they have found themselves at a crossroad between these feelings and their household economic situation. Therefore, they find themselves in paradoxical situations, where they constantly seek to improve the wellbeing of their families, but to do this they are forced to leave them. To preserve what is most important for them—their families and their roles within them—they must first reconfigure their initial constructions of what family means. They have had to accept transnational motherhood, meaning that they still hold fundamental roles within the family’s structure, but they have to develop this role from afar, limiting their participation to two elements of interaction: the remittances that they can send and communication through electronic gadgets. Long-distance communication is today an essential element of migrants’ day-to-day practices and of their permanence and relevance within family interactions. Through smartphones, video chats or platforms such as WeChat—the one used by Julia—technology can give these women a sense of closeness and of participation with their children and their partners. Although some women are able to go back and forth between Mexico and China, in most cases, mothers are unable to see or hold their children for years and are forced to watch them grow through computer screens and cell phones. Meanwhile, they send remittances not only to take care of the children, but also to provide for their parents and parents-in-law, who often are no longer working or who have less than sufficient incomes to provide for themselves and the grandchildren under their care. Within their lived experiences, it is emotions that drive their actions and their will to succeed. In these women’s lived experiences, they are still mothers and their roles are central. The only difference is that family and parental duties have been extended to a transnational space where communications are carried out through smartphones and computers. Meanwhile, day-to-day decision making is carried out either by the grandparents who take care of the children in China or, as is the case with these two women, by the husbands, who remained in China. There are various ways in which these women come to accept their new positions as mothers who are apart from their children. Yun, for instance, considers the fact that she is away from her child as a temporary condition that will only be resolved once the girl is old enough to make her own decisions.

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She relates the fact that they are apart as a condition that has already been internalized by all members of the family. In Yun’s experience, children have the right to choose what they want when they are old enough: Yun: “Para ella es igual, como está chiquita no piensa tantas cosas. Por eso yo pienso que cuando esté grande, ya va a saber más cosas, ya piensa, luego yo voy a platicar con ella y ver cómo va a quedar su futuro. Así es más fácil. Como ahorita ella está en la escuela y ya casi para ella ya entiende que sus padres regresan a Beijing… Aunque no siempre, a veces nos turnamos, como cada 2 o 3 meses nos vemos. Normalmente nos llamamos por Internet, y así. ¡Con cámara!” (“It’s all the same to her, since she’s small and doesn’t think about these things. That’s why I think that when she’s older, she’ll know more, she’ll be thinking then so I’ll talk to her and see what her future will be. It’s easier that way. Since now she’s in school, basically she understands that her parents are returning to Beijing … although not always, sometimes we take turns, like every two or three months we see each other. Normally we call through the Internet and so on. With the camera!”)

This, however, might also be a strategy for the mother to overcome her own conflict about being away from her child. In the experiences of most of the women with whom I spoke during my field research, two interrelated elements constituted the highlights of femininity: family and motherhood. Motherhood and womanhood were often conflated. “Woman” is the pillar of the family, being a “Woman” means, in the symbolic construction of many of these women’s discourses, creating a family; hence, it means being a mother. On the other hand, most of the women with whom I spoke defined “Family”—also as a signifier—as a sense of closeness, of protection, of home. For them, “Family” means being together and sharing life. Moreover, most women referred to the role of women in the family as an ultimate goal of femininity. Becoming a woman was for many first and foremost becoming a mother. The role of women in the family is core; the care and the teaching of their children are what is most important. However, they have all been faced with harsh realities that are rarely in tune with their constructions of motherhood or of family, which they have had to learn to adapt to their actual transnational experiences. But through migration, many women go through processes of reformulation of the family and of the roles that they play in it. Their conception of family has been transformed through migration. They have all been forced to live a transnational maternity,

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which implies that they still hold a key role in the family, but that this role had somehow been limited to the remittances they send and to their access to new technological means of communication, which gave them a sense of closeness and of parental participation. There is yet another perspective that brings us once again to the interactions between vulnerabilities and resistances. These conditions of transnational motherhood could be understood as a rupture of normative motherhood (Madianou and Miller 2011). Through their migration processes and the ways in which they have reshaped their roles and relationships, these women have also transformed notions of family in another sense. Their experiences as mothers within migration and the relationships that they build in transnational spaces of interaction with their children also entail forms of empowerment. As McKay has emphasized: “[…] fulfilling one’s financial and communication obligations can enhance intimacy and strengthen relationships within the family […] highlighting the role of economic provision as an integral part of emotional nurturing […]” (McKay 2007: 188, in Madianou and Miller 2011: 6). These women face a constant battle between their former constructions of motherhood and family and their actual experiences. The reasons that drive them to keep working within Mexico’s networks of popular economy are always related to the well-being of their families. The reason they give up their right to embrace their children every day is precisely to be able to give them better opportunities. Transforming their roles as mothers or giving up many of the joys that they had expected from motherhood implies vulnerabilities that are reflected in emotions as well as in economic activities. In their social imaginaries, the better they integrate into these economic networks linking China to Mexico, the sooner they will return to China and experience maternity in a normative way. In their search to surpass the emotional obstacles that they have faced, Chinese women have had to become agents of their own realities and of their experiences in Mexico; the way that they do this is by inserting themselves into these alternative global networks. There is clear evidence that the roles of women, particularly those inserted within migration, have had a significant impact on family structures, which are undergoing several transformations. Grandparents and fathers become the children’s main caretakers as they grow up. Meanwhile, as women continue to play an essential role as providers, they must also reconfigure their own expectations and constructions of motherhood and families through experiences lived at a distance.

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6.5

Building Transnational Family Businesses

The second process of construction of transnational social spaces through family ties is more deeply linked to the participation of Chinese women in trade networks among Mexican popular markets. The ways in which their families are organized and the opportunities to which they have had access have restructured the dynamics of the networks of popular economy and the markets through which these networks move. In this case, not only is the participation of family members who migrate relevant, but also the participation of those who stay behind and become an essential part of the connections between places through their interactions. Lived experiences within transnational migrations are an important element that structures social organizations. In traditional patterns of Chinese migration to Europe and Latin America, men always left first, sometimes followed by their wives and children. Within this form of organization, it was difficult to conceive of the construction of family enterprises, given the permanence of women’s roles within the household. The ways in which Chinese migrations function today are different; the participation of women is essential, but evidently women have specificities to their economic immersion that produce different ways of organization within family cores. The migration of women who are the first to leave the family core is a new phenomenon caused by structural inequalities that they face in their country of origin. Although China has made continuous efforts to open the labor market to women, options are still limited and so is the pay. Most women with whom I spoke came to Mexico because they thought they would have greater opportunities there. In contrast, their husbands often had paying jobs in China that offered more stability. The women, then, often migrate while having an “income cushion” that they can rely on back home. Nevertheless, the work they must do to establish their business in Mexico City is difficult and so are the conditions in which they find themselves. The transnational reality of Chinese women in popular markets reveals the extent to which they have established different forms of articulation between their locality of settlement and their country of origin. The dynamics that are being developed between these two places are transnational social spaces in the sense that there is a specific social space—built through family and commercial networks—created between different geographical places. These transnational articulations modify the structures and dynamics of the localities

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in which they interact. For instance, the dynamics between those who left and those who stayed behind created not only transnational families, but also transnational family enterprises, created through the extension of trade and manufacturing between Mexico and China. Family members who stay behind in China are in charge of acquiring commodities to be sent to Mexico and arranging for their transportation. They may even be responsible for the production of the commodities destined for Mexico, where they will be sold by those who have migrated, thus creating transnational family micro-enterprises. In spaces like these, such as Yiwu or Tepito, distant places are connected through trade networks that result from alternative strategies of survival. In this sense, the market is not only a place of bonding, where contacts between different actors are paramount, but also a place in which new social transnational spaces are constructed and expanded. This is the case with Cristina’s family. Cristina is a 27-year-old woman originally from Hebei; she arrived in Mexico in 2010. While her mother is also in Mexico, her father works in China. Cristina’s husband joined her in Mexico three years after her arrival. Today, Cristina’s mother lives with the couple in Mexico. Her father, who also worked in Tepito for several years, has moved back permanently to China, where he continues to help the family business. At first, he started to work along the corridors of the Yiwu market, looking for new and cheaper export commodities for his wife and daughter to sell in Tepito. The Chinese who import commodities Made in China have developed strategies that depend on their economic capacities and their social networks. An Lan, for instance, has offices both in China and in Mexico. She hires people in China to look at new products that are being produced; she then does market research to determine whether these products will sell in Mexico and sends her feedback to her employees in China so that they can make arrangements to better fit production to her customers’ tastes. Yun first chooses her products through the internet; she looks at what is offered and then contacts the producers if there is a need to modify colors, shapes or sizes. She has tried in recent years to limit her visits to China for personal matters and to visit her daughter, however she often has to reserve some of her free time for business. The case of Rosario is very similar. While her mother also lives in Mexico, her father went back to China and is now in charge of the selection and purchase of products that will be sold by the other half of the family residing in Mexico.

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But some family businesses have grown more extensively. In Chapter 3, I analyzed the growth of Yiwu in recent decades and examined the ways in which Chinese households with limited resources have expanded their economic activities to include several phases of production, distribution and the commercialization of markets in developing regions of their own country. In addition to developing their own manufacturing microbusinesses, as families gained flexibility and economic security, they also began to handle the transportation of these commodities to markets and later their sales. In recent years, these same strategies have been seen as growth strategies for families that are spread across countries. Today, for instance, Cristina’s father helps his sister with the production of the bags that are sold in Mexico. Cristina and her family now handle all phases of transnational commerce between China and Tepito, and they own all the profits of their “small” family business. Along with other families in recent years, this family is now divided by the Pacific Ocean. Nevertheless, it follows one basic economic strategy: import businesses. Part of the family stays in China and works on one aspect of the family business, while the rest of the family work in Mexico selling the commodities that were selected and purchased in China. Families like Cristina’s illustrate one of many ways in which migration and commerce come together and build transnational bridges through the transformation and adaptation of family ties, as I will further explain with the help of the interconnection between Yiwu and Tepito. The growth of the Yiwu market and the province’s continuing industrialization are a result of the connections constructed between this market and Mexican markets such as Tepito. These connections built “from below” have produced new and stronger transnational dynamics that result in alternative ways of production, distribution, sales and consumption between both localities. As Yiwu grew, small-scale, family production businesses began to proliferate. Often, families who had small manufacturing businesses would also venture into commerce to add to the family income. This was done on a local or regional basis. As Gilles Guiheux (2011) has stated, more often than not, gendered divisions of labor are consistent in these situations in the Zhejiang Province: while men work in production, women manage the sales in Yiwu. Lately, many plurilocal families and households, which extend in spaces across the Pacific, have developed similar strategies of economic reproduction. They have appropriated and further constructed a set of commercial dynamics that extend between local conditions of productions in one geographical delimitation

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(Yiwu) and local conditions of consumption in another (Tepito). They have done this through a constant, transnational flow of information, commodities, capital and even people. At the same time, these constant flows have resulted in the formation of transnational family enterprises that link Mexico and China through commerce. These situations tend to occur when either the husband or parents of women migrants stay behind in China to take care of the children. In this sense, the actors in these transnational networks are both those who leave and those who stay behind. Wherever they may live, all members of plurilocal families are actors of transnational articulations between China and Mexico. They have embodied their conditions as members of a family that is geographically dispersed and has built economic networks between both countries. When transnational family businesses are created, there is a second level of importance to the participation of women within migration and their incorporation into economic activities in Mexico’s popular markets. It is important to take into consideration this agency and embeddedness of women’s integration into wage labor in the neoliberal contexts to which both China and Mexico are still readjusting. The transformation of the lives of women and their families responds to new survival strategies that people with minimal capacity to integrate into hegemonic economic and financial systems must employ. However, these women have diverse backgrounds and opportunities, which are reflected in their different levels of embeddedness in Mexico City’s market and commercial dynamics and in the ways in which their families adapt to their new conditions. There are different ways of articulation between the places of origin of the people that migrate and their places of residence, which depend on the local dynamics of both countries and on their different economic capacities and social networks. It is through their interactions within the social spaces that are created across borders that they create translocal spaces; I delve into this next.

6.6 Building Alternatives to Survival and Growth Transnational networks ensure that certain places continue to produce migrants, while other places continue to attract them. Through transnational social spaces, Chinese migrants constitute a basic means of integration into the local dynamics of the countries where they settle. These

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primary sources are normally constituted by family networks that allow the continuity of migration, as is the case in Plaza Beijing. In addition to migration patterns through established social networks, other strategies have been developed by migrants in Mexico. Several women with whom I spoke arrived in Mexico through family and friendship networks, but many others stated that prior to leaving China, they had no strong bonds with anyone who had established ties in Mexico. However, once they arrived, they implemented new strategies to make use of the already structured networks often used by migrants. In this last section, I weave together the various levels of social articulations that have been used, produced and reproduced by the Chinese women who were the focus of my research. It was through the interaction of these networks and because of the particular economic activities undertaken by the migrants that these actors started creating alternative spaces of globalization. In contrast to many of the women with whom I spoke, Alicia decided to come to Mexico because she was tired of her life in China. Alicia is originally from Yiwu, and, like many from her hometown, had the opportunity to integrate into the labor networks that revolve around the market. For a while, she was in charge of transportation logistics from the market of Yiwu to the coast of Ningbo, the harbor where a majority of Chinese commodities sold in Yiwu depart for destinations around the globe. For Alicia, it was almost inevitable that she would go to Mexico, because of her connection to the market of Yiwu. As was mentioned earlier, many clients in the Yiwu market are from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. This not only represents a source of information for prospective migrants about the lands to which they might venture, but also represents one of the many links between micro-social interactions and wider processes of globalization. From her experience in this market and her interactions with foreign clients and national vendors working in close contact with a diverse group of people from other countries, Alicia acquired a set of commercial contacts who told her about the increasing demand for Chinese products in Mexico. She had not only seen the growing importance of Latin America in the market, but had already met and done business with people from Mexico who told her about the possibilities of working in the Mexican market. This was one of the main reasons that prompted her to go to Mexico and establish a shop in Tepito: she considered it to be an opportunity for growth. In 2010, Alicia arrived in Tepito alone in search of “adventure.” Because she was born in Yiwu and had worked in the market city, she

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had assumed that working in Tepito would not be so different from her experience in Yiwu: this was not a completely unknown dynamic. Additionally, many Chinese were already established in the market, making it easier for her to establish herself there as well. Barely six months after arriving, the young woman had already set up her own store in Plaza Charly. Moreover, since she was relatively young and did not need to care for her parents, who, in her own words “are still too young and can work for themselves for a long time”; therefore, she did not feel the need to build a large import business for herself. In addition, today it is easier to find products right in Tepito. Alicia works mostly in retail, selling bags, backpacks, purses and wallets, because she considers that wholesale is for bigger vendors with more capital and greater economic need. But not all women experience insertion into the market the way she did. Rosario’s integration into the networks of popular economy in Mexico City has been so adept that she is known by Mexican vendors as “La Tepiteña.” However, in spite of her successful business in Tepito, her initial experience in the Mexican market did not fall into place as easily as Alicia claims that it did. While Rosario established herself in Tepito, her husband was still working in China as an engineer. Today, they are both in Mexico and take care of their own shop. Like Yun, Rosario organizes the import business and handles the cash register in the shop; meanwhile, her husband moves merchandise from their warehouse a couple of blocks away, pushing a diablito to the back of the shop. Rosario and her husband first worked in a shop run by her cousin, the same shop where her parents were working two years before she arrived. In contrast to Alicia, it took the couple five years to establish their own shop. The difference in the experiences of these women has a logical explanation: by the time Alicia arrived in the market, connections between Yiwu and Tepito had already been established and were growing stronger. When she arrived in 2010, she did not have to establish new commercial bridges between Mexico and China in order to sell the commodities in vogue in Tepito, as An Lan, Yun, Rosario and other Chinese had to do at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this millennium. Alicia’s insertion into the Mexican market was relatively easy because she was able to rely on commodity flows that other actors had already established during the previous fifteen years. As such, she could simply furnish her shop with products that she bought from other Chinese importers that were already established in the Mexican market. Moreover, there was not only a commercial linkage but also a strong social fabric that helped ease her

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arrival and her insertion into the market. For Rosario the process was not so simple. Despite the promising commercial relationship that had started to develop between the two markets, in 2006 the Chinese presence in Tepito was still uncommon and hampered by a certain level of mistrust and prejudice. In the years before Rosario arrived in Mexico, few people imported products from China. Therefore, it was more complicated for the Chinese to work as vendors in the markets and make a profit. They had to compete for space with local vendors, who not only paid less for their stalls, but also avoided certain taxes, such as those on land use. This would have been unimaginable for Chinese migrants who had to ensure that all their legal documents were in order. In addition, as we saw earlier, the Chinese were also subject to discrimination and extortion from both institutions and individuals, further restricting their economic and social development. Moreover, insecurity was rampant—not only with respect to extortion, but also robberies and violence within the barrios —a particular concern of women working in Tepito. Rosario: “Fue muy difícil empezar un negocio propio. Cuando uno trabaja para alguien no se tiene que preocupar por nada. Pero trabajar solos es mucha preocupación. Hay preocupación por la seguridad, por las mercancías que tienen que llegar y por no poder vender los productos. Son muchas cosas en las que uno tiene que pensar.” (“It was very difficult to start your own business. When you work for someone you don’t have to worry about anything. But working for yourself is a lot of worry. Worry about safety, about merchandise that has to arrive and not being able to sell products. There are a lot of things one has to think about.”)

The examples of Alicia and Rosario show us complementary facets of the migration experiences of different women. The case of Alicia was unique because she was the first person in her family to migrate. She had no social network that could facilitate her arrival; however, the place where she grew up and started her working life allowed her to get to know and to venture into dynamics that expanded beyond her social imaginaries. Alicia made use of the linkages established between Yiwu and Tepito to install herself into commercial networks. Initially, she arrived in Mexico to analyze the market and then determine whether it would be beneficial to stay. On the other hand, Rosario exemplifies the ways in which people who migrate can integrate into the territories in which they arrive. In

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contrast to Alicia, Rosario was not alone when she first came to Mexico. Her parents and one of her cousins were already established there. Her cousin even had a history of creating networks with other Chinese businesswomen in Tepito and was married to a Mexican man.12 Nevertheless, the process of insertion into Mexican commerce was difficult for Rosario because the risk was higher. As I have stated before, another way that networks are articulated beyond national borders is through technological means of communication. During an encounter with Yun in her stall, she showed me the websites of her favorite suppliers in China to explain how she selected and purchased most of the merchandise they sold in Mexico. She explained that at first this was complicated. Although she had access to everything that was produced and sold in Zhejiang, she did not really know what would sell in the Mexican market. Moreover, she did not really know any suppliers in China; therefore, she had no idea which one was best for her business. As she recalled: Yun: “Antes, como por ejemplo yo regresaba a China un mes. Quince días de trabajo y quince días me quedaba en casa, antes. Pero ahorita como casi todos los días, un mes completo en casa, acompañando a mis parientes.” (“Before, for example, I would go back to China one month. Two weeks of work and two weeks at home, before. But right now, almost every day, a whole month at home, spending time with my relatives.”)

When Yun and her husband first started their import business, whenever they wanted to arrange a deal they had to do so in China, taking time that could otherwise be spent with their families. But with time and experience their shop has grown and so have their networks. Yun had to first build trust and establish business relationships, both in China and in Mexico, before she could place orders through the Internet and avoid the inconvenience of having to spend all her time in the market instead of with her family. She had to be sure that Chinese manufacturers were able to produce commodities that Mexicans would buy, which meant that

12 The cousin was married to a Mexican man that she met in China and with whom she created a family back home. Eventually, the couple and their three children moved to Mexico. A short time after that they divorced, forcing Rosario’s cousin to venture into the Tepito market. Later she met another Chinese man who lived in Mexico, and they moved together to Los Angeles. His sister stayed in Mexico and took charge of the shop.

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first she needed to understand her Mexican clients, their needs and their preferences. In Yiwu, production and commercialization has been transformed to better adapt to specific tastes around the world. To make these transformations possible, the Chinese needed the insights of Mexican vendors and clients. Tepiteñes often refer to their market as a space with cuttingedge products that are always at the forefront of market strategies (Braig and Alba Vega 2013). Nowadays, the Chinese have made this search for cutting-edge products possible through their constant communication between the Mexican and Chinese markets. In Tepito, within contemporary Chinese migrations, Hu-DeHart (2005) and Bonacich’s (1973) arguments about the Chinese as a middle(wo)men minority that were discussed in Chapter 1 are still valid. Chinese migration and incorporation into Mexico’s popular markets has not only increased local commerce, but has actually elevated popular markets to a larger—global—scale. During the first period of Chinese migration to Mexico, the Chinese migrants that built abarrotes shops in poorly connected territories created bridges between more urbanized spaces where common products were easily found and remote places, such as plantations and growing cities. Similarly, today Chinese migrants are constructing new commercial bridges between production markets in China and consumer markets in Mexico. Gradually, women such as Rosario and Alicia have been drawn to migration, which represents an opportunity to surpass obstacles that otherwise would be insurmountable. Therefore, they began to embed their daily practices and economic participation within new commercial networks between China and the countries to which they migrated, especially in countries with developing economies and a substantial population with limited economic means. In this process, the Chinese learned to profit from the creation and reproduction of commodity chains—made possible thanks to economic liberalization in China and to the particular dynamics of popular markets in Mexico, specifically, Tepito. In the 1980s, commodities “Made in China” were still not common in Mexico, but were slowly starting to appear in markets. Little by little, these products became more visible in the everyday lives of Mexicans (Fig. 6.1). Today, the Chinese control much of the influx of commodities from China to Tepito and, as Tepito functions as a distribution center for popular markets throughout the country, to most of the popular markets in Mexico. Moreover, Chinese commodities now constitute the vast majority of products that circulate in the marketplace. There are

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Fig. 6.1 “China in Tepito” Mural by Daniel Manrique

still other importation modalities that do not go through Chinese businesses, for instance the Korean importation network, which continued to gain strength until the Chinese arrived. Additionally, there are Marco Polos, Mexican vendors like María Rosete or Laureano that travel to China to buy their own products. But Marco Polos also depend on the Chinese who have established themselves in popular markets and share

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their knowledge of the Chinese market. Evidently, the end-game has always been to create alliances to expand commercial horizons. The experiences of these women and their insertion into Mexican dynamics not only have impacts on their particular conditions. They also entail changes in the dynamics in which they are inserted, such as the increase in commercial relations between vendors, intermediaries and importers that has accompanied these constant exchanges between people from Mexico and people from China ever since they began. Social relations that are specific to Tepito, a market with very particular economic, social and political dynamics, have gone through several changes. Social articulations in this kind of market had been somewhat delimited by their geographic extensions, but with the incorporation of Chinese migrants they have expanded through other types of spaces. The argument elucidated here was that the insertion of Chinese women into Mexican commercial spaces and their participation in this commerce have re-configured economic and social networks. In turn, these transformations have changed the strategies of anchorage of the Chinese to unusual spaces, such as popular Mexican markets. These women are not inserted into hegemonic, global commercial flows between China and Mexico; they do not work in Chinese transnational enterprises with offices in Mexico, and they do not have an important relation to Chinese economic instances. In fact, they arrived in Mexico in search of opportunities for themselves and their families. Just as many Mexicans do, they found those opportunities within popular networks. Although the functions these women perform are not per se “global” functions, they are indeed a fundamental element that renders global linkages possible (Sassen 2003b). Their activities and participation have progressively integrated into wider contexts, for instance, the major capital flows that play an important role in the binational relations between China and Mexico. The analysis of these local dynamics sheds light on the ways in which Chinese women in Mexico have managed to establish new links that articulate different spaces through their mechanisms of economic anchorage. Stories such as those of Alicia and Rosario open a wider perspective on the impact these actors have on global dynamics and the changes that result from new ways of economic insertion (local changes, as well as the global changes that transform the relationship between China and Mexico).

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Conclusions

The actors who are the focus of this book develop their daily activities in different and separate spaces, thus constructing an enmeshment of spaces and dynamics among several cities and countries, as well as between different places within a city. I argued here that the spaces through which these migrants move and in which they participate through their economic activities, not only conform transnational social spaces, but also fragmented places of globalization. In this sense, migrants move and participate in three different levels. First, their modes of life are transnational not only because of their continuing economic and emotional participation in their homelands, but also because they are constructing a diversity of translocalities, a second level at which the dynamics of particular places are both local and foreign. These dynamics become, through the participation of these actors, unique to those places. What Ribeiro considered to be fragmented places of globalization constitutes the third level; these three levels then reveal the existence of the transnational city. Ongoing changes in the ways of organization of the city, here understood as both a territorial space and as a set of interactions, are themselves changing wider global processes. Spaces and places are co-dependent and affect each other through time. As such, the goal was to understand the linkages between places and spaces in which Chinese migrant women interact in Mexico City and the ways in which localities are affected by their presence. These women constantly travel between different social spaces built on transnational articulations, rendering their experiences long-lasting processes of in-between. This is where transnational social spaces are created, as actors constantly readjust to new social constructions, such as family relations, parenthood and marriage or systems of family-care, or business connections, either through associations with Mexicans or within the creation of transnational family businesses. The actors who are the subjects of my research create new spaces through their ways of interacting between local and translocal dynamics. To show this, I relied on the experiences of the women as bonding agents, as producers of spaces that link different places, such as the market of Tepito in Mexico City and the city of Yiwu in China. Additionally, the analysis of different stages and strategies of arrival of Chinese women into the dynamics of popular markets has shed light

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on the diversity of networks created within migration. It is in the intersections of these networks that the articulation of local dynamics with global contexts is rendered visible; here we can see how even the smallest levels of participation of actors in global dynamics is relevant to the extension of global commodity chains and the construction of the city. María Rosete and An Lan are, in their own way and rhythm, constructors of the city; they have searched for and found alternative ways to increase their capital and social networks through elements they already had within reach. Chinese importers and vendors of a more moderate caliber, like Yun and Rosario, are also participating in the construction of a global consumer market with localized aspects. They have done this by acting as links or bridges between Chinese producers and vendors, and Mexican vendors and clients. Cristina, Gloria, Song and her sister Xuejun, as smallscale importers, are making use of these initial bridges and exploring new horizons, expanding the commercial networks between both countries through transnational family businesses. At another level of this system, by buying most of their merchandise from Chinese importers in Tepito, Alicia, Fei and Laura make use of established social resources and commercial networks to stock their store and sell at retail or smallscale wholesale. Most of their clients are Mexicans, thus, continuing a dynamic market structure of producers, importers and sellers from China, and intermediary sellers and consumers from Mexico. Sun, Peicun, Paolei, Xiaobe, Limei and Julia, as employees of more prominent businesspeople, also play their role within the system: they keep the networks running, they feed them and add previously existent networks to them, increasing the commercial impact, the economic enclave and, therefore, Chinese participation within local dynamics. Last but not least, individuals with much more reduced social and economic capital, such as Shei and Tianjin, represent still another relevant level of these alternative global articulations. They do not participate in the wholesale business and have no import capacities, but have inserted themselves within these same networks and have searched within them for spaces of survival. The economic activities of actors such as Shei are a reflection of the growth of the Chinese presence within the popular economy in Mexico City. Unlike other businesswomen, they have no means to participate in wider economic processes; nevertheless, they have found their own ways to incorporate themselves into this economic world. These actors are less visible, but through their interactions with better positioned actors they

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also participate in the construction of the cities they inhabit, through alternative circuits of survival. Focusing on the personal experiences of the women in question was important to retrace from there a diachronic line of the construction of networks that have propelled both migration and commercial growth. In Fei’s experience, for instance, we see one first step regarding the arrival of the Chinese into Mexican dynamics. Her case is one example of the ways in which, through weak ties and through networks of information, actors of migration gather all the necessary data to complete their trajectories. The unavoidable link to a leader of vendors within the Mexican popular economy is carried out through weak ties. The much-needed trust from a leader toward her or his agremiades is drawn from experience; currents of information drive the proliferation of these links. Migration networks are made up of kinship and friendship structures, which are also nourished by the flow of emotions and information over distances. Gloria’s case reveals a second step in the consolidation of migration networks, as evidenced by the subsequent arrival of Rocío, her sister-in-law, and the ways in which they have both integrated into economic dynamics in Plaza de la Computación. Alicia’s case represents a third step, in which the strength and anchorage of social, commercial and cultural networks are made evident and are used by newcomers upon arrival. Actors such as Laura, Fei and Alicia are middle-(wo)men; they serve as links between those moving more significant quantities of capital and commodities and those with less acquisition capacities. In this chapter, I presented an initial approach to the articulation between migration, popular economy and the production of space, framed by a gender perspective. These three elements were foremost in highlighting the different ways of articulation that Chinese women have created within the spaces in which they develop their activities between Mexico and China. Their participation in the networks of popular economy reveals their incorporation into global dynamics. At first, this participation was a result of life and migration patterns that frequently forced them to venture into economic activities in which they had no experience. Little by little, as stronger migration and production networks were created, the participation of Chinese women in this commercial arena became increasingly visible, and their commercial activities in Tepito became spaces of opportunities for other newcomers as well. Their experiences are deployed among social and economic spheres that may be either transnational or local; as transmigrants they constantly

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move between and within different spaces. Some correspond to Chinese social processes and others to Mexican social processes, but there are also spaces formed between both social locations. I therefore conclude that gender can, in fact, be considered a factor of change for spatial dynamics and on transnational articulations. In this sense, the reality of these women is fully linked to the neoliberal contexts that encompass contemporary relations between China and Mexico and the global dynamics of production, distribution and consumption of commodities “Made in China.” It is in this context that analyzing the intertwining of localities and global dynamics is made relevant. These places, which adhere to particular conditions created by the multiplicity of social interactions within them and by social spaces that may extend beyond their borders, are still delimited to a specific territory. Tepito and the surrounding area—where most Chinese are established in shopping plazas—is a space that is highly controlled by local structures, while also containing global elements and dynamics. The Chinese presence is more and more a basic element of its dynamics. Spaces of opportunities take shape through the articulation between local and global conformations. For instance, the intersection between the dynamics of Chinese women and their particular social contexts and the social and economic dynamics of Tepito make up one part of the social fabric that shapes relations. The Chinese establish themselves here because this is where they find better opportunities to develop with the capital that they possess. Finally, I argued here that through different levels of agency and empowerment, determined actors build connections with locals in between networks. By trying to bypass a system from which they did not benefit, they extend the networks of Chinese migration and Chinese commercial networks and commodity chains. This is why we must consider the agency of migrants in the configuration of the transnational city. It is these individuals who create connections between different networks and the intersection of economic circuits—local, transnational or diasporic—that allow the construction of the transnational city (Besserer and Wence 2012), a city that is in motion and constant transformation. Through remittances and social participation, through motherhood at a distance, through the reproduction of social institutions and care-chain systems that replace the role of the state, through resistance that stems from vulnerable conditions, these women and their families are creating other spaces of transnational interaction and alternative global connectivities.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusions

This book focuses on the migration of Chinese women to Mexico and their participation as importers and vendors of commodities “Made in China” and sold in Mexican popular markets. These women come from a diversity of places in China, and while many of them have followed traditional migration patterns to Mexico that have been reproduced in the last century, others have ventured onto new paths and found new ways of inserting themselves into an economic activity that is very specific to Mexico: popular commerce. Although the women focused on in this research have different economic and cultural backgrounds, they all share a condition of inequality—determined by their gender—that has driven them to seek opportunities outside of China. For many, moving to Mexico and entering the popular economy gave them tools that enabled them to grow and get ahead, while others found new forms of inequality that put them in difficult conditions. During the course of the book, I chose to give attention to different elements of the social and economic realities that I am analyzing, which I consider to have been overlooked in academic research: the ways Chinese women have participated in processes of migration to Mexico in the last twenty years and the profound changes these have had on the economic, social and cultural networks migrants have moved through; the relevance

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of considering an intersectional perspective in the study of Chinese migration, considering variables such as gender, economic background, regional origin and race; and finally, the more subtle forms of agency and of resistance that women undertake in order to transcend different obstacles they face in their life paths. These obstacles have been established through social and symbolic constructions of difference, and they reveal the structural oppression to which many women in different countries are subjected. In the case presented here, these processes of agency, however small, had an impact on a variety of social structures and stimulated alternative processes of globalization. Hence, the purpose of the book is threefold; it seeks to visibilize the participation (economic, social, cultural) of Chinese women in migration; look at different forms of agency and empowerment; and look at the ways in which these forms of participation are reflected in new processes of globalization. To look at these processes it was necessary to move from the micro to the macro and back again, to look at the ways in which global processes have effects on the experiences of individuals and mostly to look at the ways in which specific interactions between actors also have impacts on global aspects. To shed light on these articulations, I focused on the experiences of these women considering specific contexts: labor markets, commerce and family. These contexts were chosen for different reasons: as was stated in the introduction, they were all experienced individually but their constructions and the roles that every woman I spoke with played in these contexts were built on wider scopes, through social constructions and economic dynamics. These three contexts are essential to understanding the impact that the migration of Chinese women and their incorporation into networks of popular economy have had on local dynamics and way they have been reflected in the production of alternative spaces of globalization. I understand these to mean the creation of different spaces of interaction that are constructed outside of hegemonic economic and financial processes that are rendered possible through participation in alternative economies and strategies of survival of actors who have been left outside of these hegemonic processes. I consider these to be spaces of interaction, first, because in the cases analyzed here, they have been created in the context of Mexican and Chinese dynamics. People who constantly move from one place to another and that maintain ties between both countries have in this sense become producers of new spaces through their interactions across the distances between them. Second, because the survival strategies being focused on here,

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those related to popular economies, reveal different layers of participation and of economic access, and although they are often enacted at a local, personal and intimate level, they are also expressed in larger structures, in transnational networks of migration, in international commercial exchanges and, eventually, in the production of spaces of globalization. This book is also deeply positioned in a context of globalization that has emerged from unexpected places and has been forged by actors that are rarely thought of when considering global processes. In spite of the immensity of ideas that have been encapsulated under the term “globalization,” which in short alludes to a space without territoriality that is the result of interactions across distances, of the circulation of money, of commodities, of ideas, of news and information and—in spite of efforts at states’ borders to stop them—of people, this book focuses on very specific dynamics wholly anchored in the local: Mexican popular markets and the role that Chinese women who work there have on them. To do this, I look at the ways in which migrants and locals, through their interactions in these localities, move in transnational spaces and, through these movements, constitute global processes. In this sense, the analysis represents a dialectic between the global and the local that is rendered visible through transnational formations. The economic transactions that take place in Mexican popular markets develop in a context of specific regulations that are negotiated with local state mechanisms. These negotiations blur the porous borders between legal and illegal, formal and informal, the center and the margin. Therefore, women are the focus of the research, actors who are rarely considered as producers of great movements of capital or participants in global connections; but the objective here was to prove that they participate in globalization and the construction of cities as much as those that move in hegemonic spheres. Through their migration movements and interactions of an economic, cultural, commercial or personal nature, Chinese migrant women have created spaces across localities, weaving urban fabrics that transform local dynamics and change the ways in which different places in them connect. In the text, I focus specifically on how relations Chinese migrant women have with their families and with Mexican vendors have created different articulations between Mexican and Chinese markets. To do this, I had to look at the microsocial processes that are being produced in specific localities through the interaction of locals and migrants, specifically in Tepito, Plaza de la Tecnología, Plaza Beijing or Plaza Charly, among many others. Equally

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relevant was the transnational interaction between migrants and their families back home, between their places of origin and their places of settlement. Chinese women play a particular role in the construction of these alternative spaces of globalization because of the conditions that they find both in China and in Mexico and because of the strategies that they have had to implement in order for them and their families to stay afloat in a time of employment precariousness. In this sense, gender not only became a fundamental variable for understanding processes of difference and inequality in my own work, but in the experiences of many of the women it was a tool for bonding, for building stronger social and commercial networks among them. Gender was used as a soft skill to stand against inequality and fight for survival. Throughout the entire book and in reaching the conclusions that I will articulate in the next pages, I develop different arguments that seek to connect local practices to global processes by looking at the ways in which popular vendors—both Chinese and Mexican, in their struggle to survive and overcome the marginal positions in which they were placed by hegemonic actors and institutions—have constructed bridges between China and Mexico. I was able to localize and visibilize the production of spaces between localities that were the result of different levels of interaction between actors such as An Lan, María Rosete, Laureano, Rosario, Fei, Yun, Cristina, Gloria, Sandra, Laura, Cecilia, Alicia, Rocío, Paolei, Xiaobei, Peicun, Shei, Limei, Julia, Tianjin, Sun, Song and Xuejun, and many other men and women that do not figure in this book. Here, by way of conclusion, I state three main arguments that I pursued throughout the book and that answer the questions posed in the introduction, which sought to shed light on the ways in which local, personal interactions and economic struggles are reflected in the construction of alternative processes of globalization. The broader interrogation that encompassed the book was: How do Chinese migrant women in Mexico City’s popular markets, through the social spaces that they build with their interactions, forge their own ways of participation in global dynamics? To answer this broader interrogation and to look at the extent to which these migrants participate in the construction of processes of globalization, two narrower questions were posed: What factors have stimulated the migration of Chinese women to Mexico and what strategies have they developed for venturing into Mexican popular markets? And how do the migration

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processes of women transform the social spaces in which they develop and what impacts are they having in local spaces? Actors that have been left out of hegemonic economic circuits have to search for their own ways of economic accessibility; they build survival strategies with what they find within their reach, and through their interactions, they construct spaces of opportunities and transform local dynamics. This has been the case of Chinese women that have employed migration to Mexico as a strategy for keeping their families afloat and finding better opportunities for themselves. They have entered the world of Mexican popular economy because most of them have found better opportunities for building their own ways of economic livelihood with reduced initial investments within it. Depending on their individual backgrounds, these women have inserted themselves as importers, distributers, wholesale and retail vendors, and even as peddlers in downtown Mexico City’s popular markets. The integration of Chinese women in these networks was the result of the particular contexts of China and Mexico; both contexts reveal different levels of marginalization. In Mexico, street vending and popular markets are common practices that people who find themselves excluded from hegemonic economic circulation deploy, not only to have access to popular cultural goods and basic-need commodities at affordable prices, but they also give vendors accessibility to a relatively stable income which the state has failed to provide. Street vending in Mexico City has long been a strategy for making ends meet; popular economy offers the possibility of economic participation to those who have been segregated from employment opportunities because of structural social inequalities, such as ethnic minorities, populations with limited financial resources, people with different physical disabilities, and women. These commercial spaces have proven to be particularly attractive for the economic participation of vulnerable populations because of their self-regulating characteristics. As María Rosete claimed, Tepito is a place that offers opportunities to those who know where to find them. In spite of growing market prosperity in China, the transformation of the country from a planned economy to a market economy made the already lagging work opportunities for part of the population even worse. Not surprisingly, the phenomenon was much clearer in the case of women than for men. The growing precariousness of employment and the limited opportunities offered to women gave this part of the population greater reasons for choosing international migration as a strategy for

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finding better living conditions for themselves and for their families. The women that figure in this book—and who come from very different backgrounds—had different reasons for leaving their country. Some, like An Lan, Yun, Gloria, Rocío and Christina, had acquired university degrees in China and had good jobs before leaving. Despite this, most of them considered that they had already reached their highest potential in China, and migration became a strategy for further growth. Others, like Rosario, Laura, Alicia, Song, Sun and Xuejun, did not consider their salaries in China to be enough to live on and support their households; while living costs were increasing, their purchasing powers kept diminishing. In their cases, migration became a quest for opportunities. Even though they knew not what they would find away from home, they deemed it would be better than what they already had. The few that migrated at younger ages often traveled as part of family reunification processes and only found and followed their own paths once they were established in Mexico, as was the case for Xiaobei, Limei, Peicun and Paolei. There were fewer— though equally relevant—cases of those who thought of migration as a literal survival strategy, as the only “real”1 possibility for their families to stay alive. These were the cases of Fei, Sandra, Julia, Tianjin and, probably, of Shei. Throughout the book, particularly in Chapters 2 and 3, I analyze the dynamics and structures of Mexican popular markets, considering these to be places where actors that find themselves at different levels of marginalization can construct spaces of opportunities. Following María’s insights, popular markets are social and commercial laboratories in which a very wide range of possibilities is available for its actors, from very powerful businesspeople to extremely poor vendors. In other spaces, social and economic relations between people of such different backgrounds could seldom come together and actually create a commercial space and a social fabric where all of the different layers were equally important. This is not to say that tensions between different people in popular markets are uncommon; quite the contrary. Friction and tension are the order of the day, and work in popular markets calls for resilience. Nevertheless, a couple of years ago it would have been unthinkable for people in Tepito or other parts of the city to allow Chinese migrants to sell their products 1 The quotation marks imply the paradox between the imagined ideas and the realities of migration, which doesn’t always result in better living conditions or better opportunities, yet it continues to be, in the minds of many, an alternative for growth.

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as peddlers. The common asseveration on this matter is that the migrants often have more money than the locals, and therefore, giving them a space for work on the street would be taking it away from a Mexican vendor. In this aspect, as in many others, Chinese migrants face harsh and direct racist discrimination. Women, moreover, face sexual assaults and discrimination as well. It is important to mention the immense difficulties that migration entails. Chinese migrants, both men and women, expend enormous effort to reach their goals and support their families, but many times their social imaginaries of migration are never met, and people end up in situations that are even more marginalized than before. Being foreigners, being Chinese, being women, all these represent different obstacles to the actors at the center of my research. In most cases, however, resilience and flexibility allowed them to overcome these obstacles and make progress with their businesses. Eventually, the presence of Chinese people in popular markets stopped being a rarity, trade relations between Mexicans and Chinese people flourished, and, progressively, the dynamics of Tepito first and later of other popular markets in Mexico started to change, incorporating the new presence of the Chinese in their dynamics. A particularity of popular economy is the importance of social and trade relations between individuals. These are relations that are mediated by a sense of trust and of market speculation. The Chinese have their own ways of doing business. One of the characteristics that allowed Chinese women like An Lan to become fundamental links in the articulation between China and Mexico, between markets like Yiwu with Tepito, was that their own strategies relied on social relations, on trust, on the search for individuals with similar economic capacities. Slowly, Mexican popular markets that had long been mediated by relations of comadrazgo met with new ways of bonding. Chinese vendors created guanxi among themselves and with Mexican vendors, they went door to door to sell their products, they extended loans to those who had no means for paying immediately, and they extended new commercial possibilities that reached even the most dispossessed. To give answer to the first and, to some degree, the second narrower questions of this book, Chinese women that migrate to Mexico are seeking spaces of opportunity for themselves and their families. The ways they have experienced life through migration have entailed very different conditions. They have found different forms of appropriating economic and social networks in popular markets in Mexico City, and through these

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different experiences they have also brought transformations to the places where they have established themselves and to the relations they have created within them; they have appropriated the city through their own means. In the last twenty years, Chinese migrants have secured indispensable roles in popular commerce; after the fall of the fayuca era, they saw what was missing in popular markets and they reached out to obtain it in their country of origin. They redirected a commercial corridor that had been built across the border with the United States and established a new connection between cheap production in Chinese markets and the limited purchasing power of those who worked and shopped in Mexican popular markets. They became the main providers and distributers of commodities “Made in China.” The importance of the participation of Chinese women in this process was neither because of the products that come from China to Mexico nor because of the distribution of these products in Mexican popular markets, but rather because of the intertwinements that they created between Chinese and Mexican alternative economies. Chinese women did not bring products to Mexico to be sold to Mexicans, they brought products to Mexico and then distributed these products to Mexican vendors, to be sold by Mexicans to Mexicans. In this sense, they created new commercial networks initiated on Chinese grounds and by Chinese hands that expanded through Mexican ones. They constructed themselves, not as Chinese women who are part of Chinese diasporic economic networks, but rather as women of commerce who are participants in a market. Their employees in Mexico’s market are not Chinese only, but mainly Mexicans; the capital flows that they construct are not meant to stay in the same circuits, but they circulate in Mexico among vendors, vendors’ leaders, distributors and clients; and in China among producers, distributors, sellers and packers. These women, functioning as importers and distributers of Chinese commodities in Mexico, have become links and have made strong bonds between both Chinese and Mexican economic dynamics. Moreover, through their activities, they have managed to create new relations and new ways of bonding between Mexicans and Chinese. The incorporation of women in these economic activities in Mexico City’s popular markets has also established new patterns in the dynamics of migration. They have changed different structures through processes of subjectivity and agency, and they have found ways of resistance through their vulnerabilities. This takes me to my second argument.

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The interweaving between migration and popular economy has presented Chinese women new grounds for overcoming the vulnerabilities imposed by social and symbolic constructions of gender difference and has granted them new tools of resistance and survival. Social and symbolic constructions of gender have established the roles and access potentials of women within different contexts. In the case that was analyzed, particularly in Chapter 4, I found that these inequalities start in the Chinese jia (family), where education possibilities and inheritance mechanisms favor boys to the detriment of girls as a result of patriarchal systems of kinship that undervalue the input of women in the economic and material capital of the family. These constructions of differentiation and unequal access to opportunities extend to the public sphere as well. Employment opportunities and salaries continue to be lower for women than for men, even after attaining university degrees and the same professional positions. Moreover, the symbolic construction of the female body within patriarchal and male-dominated societies not only continues to put women in positions of vulnerability and in conditions susceptible to violence and assault, but it also limits the possibilities of women working in spaces that are often constructed as male-dominated, such as commerce. In the case of Chinese women working in Mexican popular markets, all of these obstacles were detected in their different experiences, yet what I found was that migration actually presented women with tools to overcome them. These tools were seized through processes of economic empowerment and of agency that took place after migration, specifically with regard to their families’ organization and within commerce. Popular economy presented ideal conditions for these processes of empowerment to take place. It provided spaces for women to work and to contribute to their households, either accompanied by their husbands or not. By migrating to Mexico and entering Mexican popular markets, Chinese women acquired the visibility that was their due in their roles as providers. Through their activities in Mexico City and their ways of resisting positions of inequality, these women are in turn transforming the very same social orders that placed them in positions of vulnerability in the first place. Additionally, I found that the popular economy offered a space through which social and commercial relations between women gave them a more secure anchor in these very specific local dynamics. The robust integration of Chinese women in markets like Tepito was a result of strategies of survival, of economic empowerment and of the construction of feminized networks of trust and of guanxi.

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In today’s general neoliberal context, the role women play in their household’s income becomes ever more relevant, particularly in populations that tend to migrate. Employment precariousness, the rising cost of living and the scarcity of employment with sufficient income for women have become the predominant conditions for a great part of the world’s population who have no other choice but to look elsewhere for better opportunities for living. Here the contexts of migration and popular economy converge as two strategies for people who are marginalized from more institutionalized livelihoods. The participation of women in migration has not only grown, but it has become more and more important in the economy of China and in the economic and social connections that migrants have built between different countries. The importance of this migration is not only a feature of the process itself, but also of the implications it brings with it: women have become a primary source of income for the household, and this has brought about a reformulation of family structures and of economic strategies, both in China and abroad. This was the case of most of the women I spoke with during my field research. They have a strong sense of economic agency and have therefore had to adapt to the new conditions that the relations between their country of origin and their country of arrival have offered. The case presented here is paradoxical in some ways. First, I have argued that Chinese migrations to Mexico represent forms of economic empowerment for women who have found themselves in a marginal labor market in China. However, these women have incorporated themselves in popular economic networks in Mexico that have developed in spaces that are considered as separate from hegemonic economic circulations. These networks were themselves the result of the economic empowerment of Mexicans who had often been marginalized from other economic— hegemonic—markets. Second, women in migration face diverse levels of vulnerability. These have compelled them to be resilient, resistant and perseverant. In many ways migration entails the transformation of the migrants’ own perceptions of life, of family, of work and of women. For instance, in the cases of Chinese women who left their children back in China, there is a transformation of their roles as mothers, of their perceptions of what being a mother means. They all wish to create their own families or to be with their families, yet their economic difficulties and their need for growth and survival keep them separated from their children in most cases, and often from their husbands too. This is a type of

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vulnerability that is reflected in their emotions and their economic activities as well. In their new conceptions as migrants, the better and the faster their integration into stable economic networks, the faster they can reappropriate their roles as mothers and reunite with their families. To overcome the obstacles they face, Chinese women have had to empower their realities and their experiences in Mexico. It is through this empowerment that they have been able to have an impact on broader economic levels. The construction of alternative circuits of survival (Sassen 2005, 2013) as a side effect of neoliberal economic systems must be considered to understand the migration of women and their specific agendas as economic actors. Going back to the arguments of Chapters 4 and 5, the personal experiences of the women in question must be looked at in terms of the bigger picture of social and symbolic constructions of gender and of the roles that are determined by them. There is constant interplay between personal experiences—agency—and gender constructions—power relations—and it is in this play that vulnerabilities and resistances become porous and melt away with regard to each other (Butler 2015). Moreover, women have been in a marginal position in the ranges of power in the economic activities of migration and the city. Chinese women have found different ways of agency and empowerment, of resistance; through migration, they have managed to modify the institutional structures that had often positioned them, through social and cultural constructions, in conditions of inequality and situations of disadvantage when compared to men. Their insertion into Mexico’s popular markets must be understood as a strategy undertaken by people on the margins, an attempt to reconfigure urban dynamics that protrude from an unarticulated center that extends beyond the norms. It is in this reconfiguration that the actors involved find different economic strategies of survival, and it is because of these alternative options that Chinese migrant women are positioning themselves in these marginalized circuits. Their imbrication into the margin, into these popular networks, gives them access to an otherwise unreachable economic market. What started as a lack of opportunity soon became a source of innovation and a claim of economic empowerment for many women. The leap into Mexican popular markets is one of today’s most visible strategies developed by Chinese women in Mexico. Through these forms of empowerment and resistance that have been the results of different vulnerabilities that women have faced and continue to face, the women this research focused on have created

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the conditions necessary for building new transnational spaces—through transnational motherhood, for instance, or through transnational family enterprises. The new dynamics that are taking place in Mexican popular markets with the integration of Chinese migrant women are the result of different localities coming together through people’s interactions. Women working in popular networks in Mexico City are in particular scenarios: a mixture of local elements and the dynamics of their own places of origin. The ways in which Chinese women have appropriated the economic contexts in which they participate have allowed me to analyze the relations between spatial conformations and the social interactions that take place within them and in migration processes. The social spaces in which these women have developed cannot be understood as isolated spaces, anchored uniquely in a local dynamic, but as an intertwinement between local economies and transnational formations, as transactions that take place between different places. To continue answering the second question, and to understand the context in which the women who were the focus of my research have constructed new spaces between China and Mexico through alternative circuits of survival, it was necessary to take into account not only a perspective that focused on their experiences of migration to Mexico, but also on the experiences of Mexicans whose daily activities are linked to the Chinese presence in Mexico. I visualized different transnational connections to make sense of the social, economic and cultural aspects of the spaces in which these women regard themselves and in which they share their commercial spaces with Mexican vendors in relations of both competition and cooperation. Through these connections and their experiences, the actors in question have progressively constructed different transnational social and economic spaces between Mexico and China, but they are likewise produced or constructed in the spaces within which they move. There are multiple dynamics of change between actors, spaces and places that can only be understood when considering movement. This takes me to my third argument. Chinese women working in Mexican popular markets have become agents of change and connectors between different localities, and in this sense, they have become promoters of alternative spaces of globalization. Localities cannot be understood without considering the movements of the people that interact within them. In the case of the Chinese, their strategies of insertion in economic and social arenas are perceptible and geographically delimited. Chinese migrations around the

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world are connected through very diverse networks that comprise a social fabric that cannot be located in space and that can only be understood through a diasporic perspective (McKeown 1999). In the broader case of Chinese migrations, there is a strong correlation between the commercial proficiencies of the actors of mobility and the creation and enforcement of economic routes that have linked their country with a diversity of territories dispersed around the world. For instance, the expansion of China as the “world’s factory”—la fábrica del mundo, as Rosario put it—has been due in great part to the participation of migrants in different localities and in commercial networks with different lands. They have served as mediators between production capacities in China and consumption needs in their places of settlement and have thus transformed commodities to fit local tastes better. The participation of women in this aspect is fundamental since it has allowed an extension of the social, cultural and economic ties that are present between the different spaces. The participation of women in the networks of Chinese economic enclaves has gradually become a fundamental part of the reality of Chinese migrations. This is particularly visible in the case being analyzed here. Although the migration of Chinese women to Mexico is not a new phenomenon, a number of social dynamics have changed during the last decades, and their recent incorporation in the networks of popular economy in Mexico City has had impacts on the economic and political frugality of these places. The dynamics developed by Chinese women in order to incorporate themselves in local economies and the creation of new strategies of anchorage in these local spaces are fundamental for the creation of global links, links that can transform world dynamics. Throughout the different chapters of this book, it was made clear that the migration of Chinese women represents a factor of change in their own lives. Yet they become agents of change themselves through the different interactions they have on their paths and through the different activities, boundaries and opportunities that they encounter. Chinese women in Mexico have experienced their lives under very different conditions through migration. For some of them it was easier to settle than for others, depending on the level of support they had from their families in China, from their parents, siblings or husbands, who often traveled with them on their new life paths. Some of the women went from being doctors to being importers, from being teachers to being vendors, from working at home to managing their own shops, from being employees

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to being employers. Others who were less fortunate went from having nothing in China, to having nothing and being away from their families. Their experiences have ranged from experiences of discrimination and marginalization, to new marriages, motherhood and more adventurous experiences. From these experiences and from the efforts they have had to make in order to function well in the diverse spaces they move through, other transformations of the ways in which they relate in specific dynamics have arisen. These changes consequently produce shifting processes on systems of hierarchies and social organization. They range from labor situations, family contexts, social issues, daily experiences and consumption processes, as well as political, economic and religious aspects that all come together in migration processes. Important aspects of these changes, for instance, are family relations, which must be maintained over great distances. Nowadays, this has been rendered much easier thanks to the development of new technological forms of communication that are becoming increasingly more accessible to everybody. As a result of these changes in family relations and in the roles that every individual plays within them, as well as in the extended transnational spaces constructed between Mexico and China, gender relations are also transformed and, through them, so are the structures that determine these relations. As I have stated before, migration is not a simple unidirectional phenomenon that affects only those who are subjects of mobility, but rather a continuous process that is affected by different factors and that affects different actors, thereby producing changes on wider social levels through the restructuring of social configurations. Migration is experienced individually; it has different repercussions on its actors depending on a set of factors that determine their realities: economic capabilities are a fundamental determinant, but age and gender also play central roles in these determinations. Women deal with the impacts of mobility according to the resources they have acquired throughout their lives. Although the incorporation of Chinese migrants into the dynamics of popular economy in Mexico is relatively recent, they have little by little started to construct wider networks of migration, making stronger bonds between Mexico and China, holding onto what their social and economic contexts have granted them, and building alternative circuits of survival through these spaces of opportunities. Not only has this migrant population participated in the construction of new circuits of migration, creating stronger bonds with locals, but also, through their participation they thoroughly

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transformed the dynamics of their places of arrival. These articulations are for instance created by the interaction of actors like An Lan and María Rosete. They have created connections between China and Mexico through the production of unexpected spaces, through bonds that were initially rather weak but that eventually, through their constant reproduction and strengthening, through the daily activities of these actors, became stable networks and intricate social fabrics. When talking about global processes, particularly with reference to commerce and capital flows, the participation of individuals is commonly left aside, the focus mainly being put on institutions and commodities. I have argued that clear impacts are created in local dynamics through the participation of actors that are in search of opportunities and that have repercussions on wider scopes, such as in the creation of new commercial routes between China and Mexico, routes that have emerged from alternative economies and from strategies of survival. Chinese participation in Mexican popular markets has produced commercial exchanges between China and Mexico and has linked two places that as recently as twenty years ago were completely unconnected—Yiwu and Tepito. In the introduction I said I was on the lookout for individuals who became connectors through their activities. But how can people—individuals— link territories that are so far apart from each other, such as China and Mexico, and what implications do these articulations have? In the context of Chinese migration, and the relations that migrants create among themselves and with locals, there are different levels of articulation that are connected in the diversity of spaces in which the actors move. On a global level, the economic networks through which Chinese migrants move crisscross each other and are integrated into a pattern that enmeshes Chinese and Mexican economic and social dynamics. These are presented in particular by the construction of Chinese global commodity chains. Global dynamics created through a constant flow of capital, people and information have repercussions on local levels. On transnational levels, social aspects of Chinese migration are mingled with the effects that this migration brings to a transnational space. This level is produced through the to and fro of information and through long-distance relationships. They allow the reproduction of the group socially and not materially. This level is linked to the local networks and their dynamics. Through their connectivities, family relations, power structures and traditional economic patterns are being transformed. The social and economic networks that enable the reproduction of migration flows are in constant movement; the

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networks they comprise are constantly transforming and readapting to the new situation of the actors of migration, and in this, local conditions of insertion of the Chinese are fundamental. Both networks are conformed by different tissues that are progressively tied together and thus create the necessary conditions for establishing one of the links of an alternative process of globalization that is connecting places through actors. Taking these three arguments into consideration, I will reflect on the broader question that determined the path of this book. I conclude that in the individual experiences of these women, the evidence of articulation between China and Mexico and of the construction of alternative spaces of globalization is perhaps invisible. Yet they represent the growing Chinese presence in the networks of popular economy on Mexico City’s streets. They are indeed important actors in the construction of these alternative spaces. They participate in activities that have arisen in the margins of hegemonic economies in Mexico City and they have managed to create an indispensable role for themselves in today’s dynamics of popular economy. At the same time, they have preserved social and family networks with those that they left back home and constructed new commercial and economic networks between their country of origin and the localities where they arrived, constructing new transnational forms of participation and hence managing to build sturdy connections between Mexico and China. It is these connections—that began in the local and extended through the transnational—that eventually became alternative spaces of globalization. The commercial insertion of migrants and their participation as mediators between Chinese production and Mexican distribution and consumption in popular markets has had repercussions on the articulations between Mexico and China as well. It has not only created new and robust economic and commercial exchanges between both nations, but also the construction of social fabrics that are woven across the distances and in the spaces between them. The participation of Chinese women in the extension and reproduction of global commodity chains, even on what could be considered a very small scale, is considerable; it entails the formation of alternative spaces of globalization. The participation of Chinese women in the construction of global connectivities is only evident when considering two contexts: first, the conditions of a Mexican popular economy that is often negotiated beyond the limits of the state’s political and economic regulations, although in concomitance and close dialogue with it. Second, the often difficult conditions

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under which Chinese women have grown up in China, and which they find themselves facing again in Mexico. The women that find themselves in these conditions have to produce new spaces of interaction and of commercial growth. In order to become agents of change and connectors between different localities, these actors of alternative processes of globalization have first been faced with more localized and personal transformations. Their families and their social and commercial relations must adapt to the spaces between the places in which they develop. Strategies of survival are not always visible, magnified acts, but rather small ways of participation that move through the interstices of social fabrics. To conclude, there are spaces that emerge from places and interactions that are not strategic, hegemonic or powerful, but that arise instead from the local, intimate and mundane, from strategies of survival and of growth that become alternative processes of globalization. In order for these spaces to become what they are, they need both anchorage in local dynamics and integration with other forms of interaction that are rendered possible through the movement of capital, commodities, ideas and people. The economic empowerment of the people that move in these spaces is of foremost relevance, it is often necessity and strategies of survival and of growth that take place outside of hegemonic centers that allow for the construction of alternative ways of living, of interacting and of participating in the construction of wider circuits. In spaces of popular economy, commercial flows are built outside of hegemonic spheres; in these places there is an ongoing construction of alternative spaces of globalization that protrudes from unexpected spaces. ∗ ∗ ∗ In trying to close a long process of research that was conceived as a result of different interests and that has stretched over several years, I present a set of final considerations that, more than offering a definite end to this research, open new doors that stem from the findings that were presented here. Migration cannot be looked at and comprehensively understood without considering the intersection between different variables. Gender, race, ethnic origin and economic background all come together in these processes and affect each other to different extents in diverse contexts. A gender perspective is fundamental for understanding not only the complexities of the migration of women but also that of men. In this

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research, I chose to focus particularly on women in Mexican popular markets because I considered their role to be crucial in many respects that were discussed in this book, and also because of the complete lack of studies on the migration of Chinese women to Mexico. However, research that combines the participation of Chinese men and women in these spaces would give new insights, for instance, into the ways in which transnational family enterprises are organized between Mexico and China. On another note, I argued that gender became a tool of resistance for women, an incorporation of the Mexican idea of comadrazgo and the Chinese conception of guanxi. But compadrazgos are also poignant in Mexican popular dynamics; “manhood” is understood differently in these spaces of struggle—in the “barrio bravo” (rough neighborhood) as many know Tepito. It would be interesting to look at the experiences of Chinese men and the ways in which they incorporate these local notions, and at the ways in which they are subjected to violence in these spaces. As many women who figure in this book suffer sexual, verbal or physical assault, I was likewise informed that many of their male friends or relatives were kidnapped or attacked and robbed of the merchandise that they, as diableros , had to transport day by day. Analyzing migration without considering the imprints—effects and affects—that this process has on the body overlooks a determinant aspect of this social process. The body should also be understood as a construct of social relations and of cultural meanings. The body is a space where power relations are embodied but also a place where kinds of resistances are produced (Butler 2011). Sex, body, femininity, motherhood and economic survival: all of these elements determined the paths of all of the women that were subjects of my research in one way or another. These should be analyzed in a subsequent study. Additionally, there are other topics related to the body and its commoditization that could not be taken into account in this book but which present a broad subject that should be analyzed further: the creation of networks of prostitution of Chinese women (among many other nationalities); and the creation of networks of human trafficking that often accompany the consolidation of migration and commercial corridors. Although I made one brief visit to China during my research, specifically to the market of Yiwu in Zhejiang, there was no time to dig deeper into the transformation of the dynamics of this place through its

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interconnections with other localities such as Tepito. Although my analysis was based on a transnational perspective, I focused primarily on the impacts that the migration of Chinese has on Mexican markets and not the other way around. Some questions that come to mind are: How do those who stay behind (e.g., parents, husbands and children) understand the migration of part of their household and incorporate that into their everyday lives? What are their experiences in these transnational spaces? What impacts have there been in China on social, local and regional developments through the construction of transnational family enterprises and commercial networks with places like Mexico? Lastly, the case that I presented here was only one of the ways in which alternative spaces of globalization are made. I focused particularly on the impacts of migration on commercial routes (and vice versa) between very specific localities in Mexico and China and on the ways in which people that have been marginalized from hegemonic economy appropriate and construct the city, but there are other forms of participation, of construction of the city and spaces of opportunity. A deeper look into the intertwinements between the creation of commercial corridors of countries considered to be “developing” and migration networks stemming from them, is most relevant today. As there are continuous efforts to expand, contract, eliminate or create free trade agreements—movements made primarily to benefit those already on top—and of pushing for economic globalization, the most prominent political and economic forces continuously seek the implementation of borders and the construction of walls to stop the circulation of people who are either fleeing violence or seeking economic competence or survival. The objective of this book was to shed light on individuals—and particularly on women— as actors of change, as constructors of cities, as agents of globalization and of growth. However, as long as those in decisive positions continue to see the movement of people as detrimental, as counter to growth, the longer the lives and conditions of many migrants, who risk everything to search for spaces of opportunities, are put at risk. A last issue that I wish to propose for discussion, an exercise that will have to be pursued in future works, is the need for a dialogue between academics, heads of state and policy makers, and civil society organizations on the best way to approach migration issues, considering all points of view and, above all else, pursuing the protection and fulfillment of human rights.

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Bibliography Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies That Matter. Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2015. Vulnerabilidad y resistencia revisitadas. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6taXkozajec. McKeown, Adam. 1999. “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 58 (2). Association for Asian Studies: 306–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/2659399?ref=search-gateway:4cd9a0953 22ad812c93d066ea73cdcb0. Sassen, Saskia. 2005. “Strategic Instantiations of Gendering: Global Cities and Survival Circuits.” Managing Urban Frontiers: Sustainability and Urban Growth in Developing Countries. ETH Zurich, CH. Ashgate, Farnham, UK, 294. Sassen, Saskia. 2013. “Strategic Instantiations of Gendering in the Global Economy: The Feminizing of Survival.” In East Asian Gender in Transition, edited by Joo-hyun Cho, 15–50. Daegu: Keimyung University Press.

Annex

Research Methods In a study of Chinese migration to Mexico, quantitative databases can be misleading. Between first, second and third generations; ChineseMexicans or Chinese who have acquired Mexican nationality; undocumented migrants, migrants with tourist visas, work visas, returnees or sojourners; or even those who were smuggled into the country, the number of Chinese in Mexico is not only impossible to calculate, it is also of little relevance to my research. These migrations are constituted by complex, heterogeneous phenomena that cannot be accounted for numerically. For this research, ethnographic research and interviews with the people involved in the processes analyzed were my main sources of information. The ethnographic research took place in Mexico City between 2013 and 2014, although visits to the localities were made both before and after this period. During the research, I had various interactions with 22 Chinese women and the people who surround them, both Chinese and Mexican. My main tool for information gathering was semistructured interviews—most of which could not be recorded—along with informal conversations, and participant observation of daily practices at each woman’s workspace. My field journal became essential for research.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 X. Alba Villalever, The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53344-1

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Although sometimes my interlocutors asked that I not take notes about some aspect of their lives (and, therefore, not include it in the book), most of the information gathered during interviews, chats, and observations was captured through this tool. Time constraints prevented me from creating strong, trusting relationships during my field research. I had few opportunities to observe these women in other spaces of interaction, such as their homes or at social gatherings outside the market. Our interactions usually took place while they worked, sometimes accompanied by family, friends or clients. With the younger women it was also possible to establish communication through an instant messaging service and social platform common in China called WeChat. In some cases, this allowed me to ask follow-up questions or dig deeper into their experiences. The women with whom I interacted were all contacted through a snowball effect. Three initial contacts opened the way: a Mexican woman, the leader of one of Tepito’s most influential vendor’s organizations; a Mexican vendor, who was a client of many Chinese women with stores near Tepito; and a Mexican colleague of Chinese descent who was also working on her Ph.D. on the Chinese in Mexico and knew several Chinese women working in commerce. Often, however, the snowball effect would lead me to a dead end. I was often led to the same people with whom I had already spoken. When following leads from Mexican vendors, I would often end up standing in front of a Korean woman, as “Chinese” for Mexican vendors was a very ample categorization closer to a meaning of “otherness” than a nationality. In most cases, I would establish contact with the women during the first encounter and explain my objectives. This would lead to a second encounter, in which a semi-structured interview would take place. Consistent with a grounded theory method (Strauss and Corbin 1994) and the conditions of my field research, the guidelines for questions had to be flexible in order to follow the different paths of the women interviewed; however, there were specific issues that guided the direction of our discussions: the conditions the women had experienced in China before leaving; the trajectories of their journey prior to their arrival at the Mexican markets where they were working; their reasons for moving to Mexico; their families; their thoughts about migration, work and family; and their perspectives for the future. Occasionally, additional encounters took place; in three cases, in-depth interviews were carried out. I also conducted in-depth interviews with three Tepiteñes, one of whom was María Rosete, one of the three most important popular organization

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leaders in Tepito; the second, a long-time advisor to Rosete; and the third, a vendor who traveled to China. Additionally, a number of informal chats took place during participant observation, particularly within the vicinity of the Tepito market and Plaza de la Tecnología. As is always the case when conducting ethnographic research, I was faced with several difficulties and limitations, some of which were impossible to overcome, some of which changed the direction of my research and some of which were integrated into the corpus of knowledge that will be presented in the next five chapters. For instance, addressing gender inequality during my interviews was complicated. Although the rise of Communism brought with it a shift in the participation of women from private to public spheres, subsequently transforming Chinese family and social structures, there also has been an overlap of gender roles defined by power relations, where the participation of male and female actors within social structures has been determined and perpetrated by the patriarchal system. To address these cultural contexts, the research at hand follows a transversal analysis of both symbolic constructions and re-enactments, a dialectic between the perceptions of the subjects and theoretical and analytical corpus of the researcher. Similarly, political, religious and personal matters are subjects that were not likely to be discussed with an unknown interlocutor, such as myself. Few of the women with whom I spoke were comfortable enough to talk about the differences in opportunities for men and women, both in China and in Mexico. However, during my interviews it became evident from the women’s reconstructions of their experiences that their job opportunities were few and that those opportunities would not lead to career growth. Ironically, I had not considered marital status and the presence of children as important variables. However, once I began my field research, it became very clear how much these two factors affected every aspect of each woman’s experience. Moreover, I was unable to include other variables worthy of analysis because of difficulties that I encountered during my field research. Three main topics that could never be directly approached during interviews come to mind: immigration status and questions about legal residence; importation and sale of illegal products (which also applied to the ingression or smuggling of other persons of Chinese origin); and matters of sexuality, particularly the use of the body as a system of exchange. Approaching these issues requires trust and confidentiality. Unfortunately, I could not meet those two requirements in the time that I had for my research.

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My ethnographic research presented a double challenge: the use of several languages during chats and interviews (some in Spanish or English; most in Mandarin) and restrictions on recording. Because of these challenges, I use a variety of ethnographic references in this text and employ a mixture of writing strategies to represent people’s voices. Since I did not record most of the interviews with Chinese men and women, at the request of my interlocutors, I took notes in my field journal and later reconstructed conversations as monologues. These reconstructions are used and quoted as the interviewee’s own voice in the book. However, I should clarify that these are not word-to-word transcriptions of what the subjects said, as was the case with the Mexican interlocutors or better-positioned Chinese (referring to economic status and social visibility), who agreed to be recorded. During the writing phase of the book, I considered many strategies of conversation reconstruction. To keep the different voices “present” (Ghasarian 2004) and to give them equal weight, I found that reconstruction of the interactions as if they had been recorded was the most useful strategy. In almost all cases, I reconstructed the interviews the same day they took place. I wanted to depict on paper the most accurate version of our discussions and keep the material as free of false memories as possible. However, the material had already gone through an unintentional screening process, of course; what was later traced on paper was the result of this screening. Dialogue reconstruction was an initial process of analysis that helped me recognize the direction that future interviews, as well as the book itself, should take. But it considerably limited my ethnographic material. For instance, it erased the porous limits of irony in interviews with women like Rosario, Alicia and Gloria; it lost some of the subtleties of discourse that cannot be instantly absorbed by the brain, however well-trained we think our minds might be. Most importantly, it limited the possibility of multiple interpretations. Finally, because a variety of languages were used during interviews, it was impossible to render a literal transcription. Therefore, interviews conducted in English and Spanish were transcribed in the original language; those conducted in Chinese were written in English. This method also gave significance to the efforts made by many women to learn and speak in another language, in most cases Spanish.

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Bibliography Ghasarian, Christian. 2004. “Sur Les Chemins De L’ethnographie R´eflexive.” In De L’ethnographie a` l’Anthropologie R´eflexive. Nouveaux Terrains, Nouvelles Politiques, Nouveaux Enjeux, edited by Christian Ghasarian, 5–33. Paris: Armand Colin. Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. 1994. “Grounded Theory Methodology. An Overview.” Handbook of Qualitative Research, 17: 273–85.

List of Interviews Alicia – 11.03.2014 (interview was not recorded) An Lan – 30.01.2012 / 3.10.2012 (interviews were recorded + informal conversations) Anonymous – 02.04.2014 (interview was recorded but she asked to remain anonymous) Armando Sánchez – 29.05.2014 / 09.01.2015 (interviews were recorded + informal conversations) Cecilia – 25.03.2014 (interview was not recorded) Cristina – 25.02.2014 (interview was not recorded) Fei – 13.03.2014 (interview was not recorded + informal conversations) Gloria – 23.02.2014 (interview was not recorded + informal conversations) Julia – 25.03.2014 (interview was not recorded) Laura – 22-02-2014 (interview was not recorded + informal conversations) Laureano – 12.05.2014 (interview was recorded + informal conversations) Leonardo – 10.05.2013 / 14.12.2014 (first interview was not recorded, second interview -via skype- was recorded) Limei – 11.02.2014 (interview was not recorded) Maria Rosete - 30.01.12 / 04.10.12 / 10.03.2014 / 11.05.2014 / 20.05.2014 (interviews were recorded + informal conversations) Paocun – 08.04.2014 (interview was not recorded) Paolei – 08.04.2014 (interview was not recorded) Rocío – 07.04.2014 (interview was not recorded + informal conversations) Rosario – 04.03.2014 (interview was not recorded + informal conversations) Sandra – 24.03.2014 (interview was not recorded) Shei – 09.01.2015 (informal conversation) Song – 24.03.2014 (interview was not recorded) Sun – 11.03.2014 (interview was not recorded)

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Tianjin – 29.05.2014 (interview was not recorded) Xiaobei – 08.04.2014 (interview was not recorded) Xuejun – 24.03.2014 (interview was not recorded) Yun – 04-03.2014 (interview was recorded + informal conversations)

Index

A Africa, 81, 84, 94, 230 agency, 11, 27, 47, 111, 113, 115, 118, 126, 144, 156, 179, 201, 204, 229, 246, 252, 253, 255 agency and empowerment, 15, 240, 246, 255 agency and resistance, 220, 246 economic agency, 51, 144, 254 agremiade, 20, 49, 52, 60, 63, 64, 176, 203, 209, 239 alternative circuits of survival, 22, 23, 179, 193, 194, 201, 216–218, 239, 255, 256, 258 alternative economies, 12, 79, 192, 246, 252, 259 alternative economies and strategies of survival, 246 alternative markets, 22 alternative spaces of globalization, 12, 14, 22, 23, 25, 27, 30, 189, 190, 195–197, 230, 246, 248, 256, 260, 261, 263

Americas, 4, 29, 120, 180 ant-commerce, 41, 66 anti-Chinese movements, 6, 117, 213 anti-Chinese campaigns, 6 anti-Chinese sentiment, 6 articulation between China and Mexico, 28, 251, 260 Asia, 21, 63, 81

B Baja California, 4, 8, 155 barrio, 28, 46, 47, 63, 64, 72, 73, 232 barrios populares , 46, 48, 55, 57, 101 barrios populares and popular commerce, 55 Beijing, 69, 95, 99, 135, 146, 150, 163, 167, 214, 219, 224 belonging, 6, 8, 14, 18, 49, 73, 109, 123, 152, 178, 197, 201, 203, 210, 213, 214, 217

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 X. Alba Villalever, The Migration of Chinese Women to Mexico City, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53344-1

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elements of belonging, 200, 214, 215 feelings of belonging, 3, 46, 190, 205, 211, 213, 214, 216 spaces of belonging, 215 borders, 8, 12, 23, 45, 47, 60, 62, 67, 72, 101, 190, 191, 194, 199, 201, 213, 221, 229, 233, 240, 247, 252, 263 border crossing, 213 boundaries, 23 Bourdieu, Pierre, 25, 26, 48, 53, 71, 124, 126, 137, 148, 200 Braidotti, Rossi, 26, 203 Butler, Judith, 23, 27, 178, 181, 203, 204, 255, 262 C cafés de chinos , 70, 93, 127 Canton Fair, 78 capitals, 7, 9, 11, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 29, 41–46, 48, 63, 64, 71, 73, 81, 88, 92, 93, 97, 99, 100, 124, 127, 129, 130, 136, 137, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 168, 170, 182, 189, 193, 195, 200, 221, 229, 231, 236, 238–240, 247, 252, 253, 259, 261 social and economic capital, 9, 173, 176, 221, 238 symbolic and economic capitals, 133 care-chain systems, 240 categories of differentiation, 53, 144, 147, 166, 181, 200 Centro Histórico, 1, 3, 11, 18, 28, 48–50, 70, 93, 96, 127, 168 China, 5, 8–14, 18–21, 23–26, 28–31, 41–44, 48, 51, 57, 61–63, 66–68, 70–73, 77–87, 89, 91–94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102,

109–112, 114–116, 118–123, 126, 130–137, 143, 144, 146–158, 160, 161, 164–169, 172–174, 178–182, 189, 190, 192, 194, 195, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 216–223, 225–240, 245, 248–250, 252, 254, 256–260, 263, 266, 267 Chinatown, 52, 216 Chinese businesspeople, 73, 84, 170, 175 Chinese entrepreneurs, 87, 93, 169 Chinese importers and entrepreneurs, 87 Chinese businesswoman, 92, 206 businesswomen in Mexican popular markets, 145 Chinese businesswomen in Tepito, 80, 233 see middlemen minority Chinese commodities, 42, 73, 174, 181, 201, 230, 234 Chinese commodities in Mexico, 85, 252 Chinese commodities sold in Mexico, 30 Chinese commodity chains, 11 Chinese export manufacturers, 67 Chinese manufacturers, 48, 233 see manufacturing Chinese commodity chains, 11 Chinese community overseas (Chinese overseas), 8, 9, 11, 93, 114 Chinese enclave, 113, 120, 122 Chinese Exclusion Act, 113, 119 Chinese International Market City, 222 Chinese market, 7, 83, 84, 89, 234, 236, 247, 252 Chinese-Mexicans, 265 Chinese migrants in Mexico City’s popular markets, 87

INDEX

Chinese (migrant) women in (Mexican) popular markets, 9, 12, 13, 18, 27, 29, 41, 43, 44, 57, 71, 87, 95, 98, 103, 112, 114, 131, 143, 144, 147, 169, 177, 180, 190–192, 207, 212, 215, 220, 226, 234, 256 Chinese migration and Chinese commodity chains, 11 Chinese migration patterns, 100, 118, 144, 177 contemporary Chinese migration patterns, 29, 144 traditional Chinese migration patterns, 70, 155 Chinese migration to Mexico, 4, 117, 200, 234, 265 Cinco, Mónica, 5–7, 70, 117, 118, 214, 216 colonias populares , 45, 46, 53 colportage, 79, 101 comadrazgo, 30, 57, 58, 60, 190, 207, 209–211, 251, 262 commerce between China and Tepito, 228 commodities, 18, 19, 23, 28, 41, 44, 46, 61, 65, 69, 73, 82–85, 87–89, 94–96, 100, 102, 145, 163, 167, 168, 173, 189, 192, 196, 215, 227–229, 231, 239, 247, 249, 257, 259, 261 commodities Made in China, 11, 227, 234, 240, 245, 252 commodity chains, 27, 41, 73, 78, 193, 215, 234, 238, 240, 260 commodity shops, 5 cultural and economic norms, 47 culture of poverty, 47 D Davis, Mike, 45, 51 Delegación Cuauhtémoc, 41, 169

273

Delegación Venustiano Carranza, 1 Deng Xiaoping, 9, 29 diablero, 83, 163, 262 diaspora, 11, 115 diasporic, 120, 240, 252 diasporic circuits, 8, 120 diasporic networks, 111 diasporic perspective, 11, 257 discrimination (against women), 111 domestic work, 113, 118 double burden, 63, 164 dynamics of Mexican popular markets, 144, 182

E economic economic crisis, 44, 124 economic development, 10, 101, 109 economic disparity, 44 economic networks, 6, 7, 24, 27, 67, 69, 121, 127, 143, 178, 179, 208, 210, 217, 225, 229, 252, 254, 255, 259, 260 economic and social networks, 236, 251 economic enclave, 65, 96, 100, 121, 127, 132, 154, 163, 178, 180, 207, 238 Chinese economic enclaves, 7, 8, 100, 128, 143, 155, 257 enclave, 97, 118, 120, 121, 163, 190 enclave economies, 7 ethnic economic enclaves, 113 economic reform, 9, 28 economic restructuring, 11 reforms, 11, 93, 109 see Open Door Policy economic survival, 5, 12, 43, 44, 67, 77, 221, 262

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education, 51, 58, 63, 65, 89, 109, 111, 114, 123–125, 127, 128, 131–136, 144, 147–149, 152, 157, 164, 181, 220, 253 access to education, 29, 130, 132, 133, 144, 148, 180 access to education and employment, 136 education in China, 144, 167 emigration, 29, 91, 131, 137 emotions, 18, 24, 190, 195, 203, 217, 223, 225, 239, 255 employment, 7, 10, 45, 73, 100, 109, 118, 125, 129, 132–134, 136, 137, 144, 157, 166, 202, 248, 249, 254 employment and education opportunities for women, 132 employment for women in China, 136 employment opportunities, 110, 111, 113, 133, 152, 249, 253 empowerment economic empowerment, 101, 124, 155, 179, 204, 253–255, 261 economic empowerment and migration, 161 economic empowerment of women, 155 social and economic empowerment, 61 see agency endo-community job market, 7 Europe, 84, 131, 150, 151, 178, 210, 226 exclusion, 214 exploitation, 10 F family business, 55, 89, 122–124, 126, 127, 129, 155, 163, 221, 227–229, 237, 238

family enterprise, 30, 90, 92, 147, 181, 191, 226, 227, 229, 256, 262, 263 family-labor structures, 221 family organization, 27, 53, 55, 59, 94, 130, 145, 156, 161 family reunification, 113, 121, 154, 179, 250 fayuca, 20, 41, 43, 44, 47, 61, 65–67, 73, 194, 252 fayuqueres , 63, 66 feminist, 14, 22, 116 feminist economic politics, 212 feminist geographers, 21, 199 feminist geography, 112 feminization, 3, 29 feminization of Chinese migration, 118 feminization of migration, 3 Foucault, Michel, 45, 177 Fujian, 87, 91, 99, 123, 131, 148, 150, 214 G gender constructions of gender, 113, 118, 120, 126, 201, 206, 253, 255 gender-based inequalities, 110 gender discrimination, 137 gender inequality, 267 gender roles, 13, 53, 59, 114, 161, 267 gender structures, 15, 125, 208 gender studies, 14, 19, 21 ghettoization, 79 Glick Schiller, Nina, 25, 67, 102, 115, 194, 195, 197 global global connectivities, 11, 192, 240, 260 global dynamics, 3, 23, 26, 201, 236, 238–240, 248, 259

INDEX

global markets, 21, 62, 91 global networks, 20, 23, 43, 80, 100, 193, 200, 208, 217, 225 global processes, 13, 23, 31, 192, 237, 246–248, 259 global spaces, 23, 191 global trade, 109, 194 spatial units with global references, 24 global city, 24, 30, 81, 191, 193, 197, 198 global commodity chains, 73, 87, 215, 238, 259, 260 global economy, 180, 193 globalization alter-native globalization, 22 alternative processes of globalization, 13, 21, 25, 69, 191, 193, 246, 248, 261 fragmented places of globalization, 24, 191, 192, 237 model of neoliberal globalization, 45 processes of globalization, 13, 230, 246, 248 strategic places of globalization, 24, 191, 194, 198, 201 territorialization of globalization, 23 globalization from below, 25, 30, 192 governability, 101 Great Leap Forward, 79 Guangdong, 4, 8, 52, 87, 91, 95, 99, 122, 123, 131, 133, 148, 150, 154, 155, 180, 214, 216, 221 Guangzhou, 78, 80, 153 guanxi, 30, 175, 176, 190, 201, 207, 209–211, 251, 253, 262 H habitus , 26, 126, 160, 181, 200 Harvey, David, 10, 26, 194, 197, 198 hegemonic

275

hegemonic circuits, 22, 43, 101 hegemonic conceptualizations of globalization, 23 hegemonic discourses, 117 hegemonic economic circuits and alternative circuits of survival, 249 hegemonic global flows, 18 hegemonic markets, 69 heteronormative discourses, 113 Hong Kong, 114, 119, 148, 216 Hu-DeHart, Evelyn, 4–7, 11, 70, 118, 234 huiguan, 5, 6, 120 hukou, 151

I identification, 18, 49, 118, 178, 212–214 feelings of identification, 215 processes of identification, 212 imaginaries, 3, 49, 70, 102 imaginaries of migration, 137, 251 social imaginaries, 137, 147, 225, 232 inequality social inequality, 8, 10, 29, 144 unequal education and labor structures, 148 unequal opportunities for girls and women, 178 unequal power relations, 148 informal improvised, clandestine stalls on the streets, 79 informality, 11, 12, 18, 19, 61, 63, 94 informal sector, 143 unauthorized commerce, 79 intermediary, 173, 196, 238 international commerce, 20, 78, 82

276

INDEX

international migration, 12, 93, 154, 249 international mobility, 112, 177 intersectionality, 116 intersectional perspective, 14, 21, 246 intersection of variables of differentiation, 28, 148

J jia, 122, 127, 128, 253

K Kaiping, 122, 154, 155, 214 kinship, 5–7, 130, 135, 166, 207, 209, 239, 253 Korea (Korean), 69–71, 84, 98, 165, 214, 235, 266

L labor market (for women in China), 22, 69, 111, 113, 132, 136, 144, 165, 191, 207, 226, 246, 254 Latin America, 21, 80, 81, 84, 85, 94, 116, 226, 230 leaders, 2, 15, 18, 21, 42, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 60, 64, 65, 69, 71, 97, 98, 124, 176, 202, 203, 209, 252, 267 popular leaders, 42 vendor organization leaders, 50 vendors leaders, 63, 71, 72, 97 Lefebvre, Henri, 53, 102, 189, 198 legal status, 153 legal working documents, 8 Lewis, Oscar, 46, 47 liberalization, 10, 92, 234 local and global, 20, 26, 95, 200, 240 local representatives, 42. See also leaders

M Made in China, 11, 18, 29, 63, 84, 95, 180, 227, 234, 240, 245, 252 commodities Made in China, 11, 29, 227, 234, 240, 245, 252 products Made in China, 18, 63, 84, 95, 180 see Chinese commodities; commodities Mahmood, Sabah, 26, 126, 160, 181, 204 manufacturing Chinese manufacturing, 85 family-based manufacturing, 101 manufacturing company, 131 manufacturing micro-business, 228 Marco Polo, 28, 62, 63, 66, 73, 214, 235 margin marginal, 24, 26, 100, 101, 194, 215, 248, 255 marginalization, 10, 19, 20, 47, 53, 102, 132, 152, 249, 250, 258 marginalized, 3, 14, 45, 73, 88, 94, 155, 181, 204, 210, 251, 254, 255, 263 marginal zones, 45 people at the margins, 45 Mckeown, Adam, 5, 11, 154, 257 mercados populares , 48 methodological nationalism, 25 Mexicali, 8, 120, 155 Mexican popular economy, 28, 49, 101, 102, 172, 192, 216, 239, 249, 260 Mexican formal and informal markets, 83 Mexican popular markets, 9, 13, 14, 27, 30, 31, 42, 43, 68, 73, 78, 101, 103, 111, 112, 114, 143–145, 147, 155, 167, 169,

INDEX

171, 177, 180, 182, 190, 195, 197, 202, 207, 215, 222, 226, 245, 247, 248, 250–253, 255, 256, 259, 262 Mexico’s popular economy and Chinese migration, 175 Mexico, 2–9, 11–15, 18–27, 29–31, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 55, 57, 58, 61–63, 66–68, 70, 72, 73, 77–80, 83–85, 87, 88, 91–96, 99, 101–103, 111, 112, 116–123, 126, 131, 133–135, 143, 146–154, 161, 163, 167, 168, 172, 173, 179, 194, 201, 207, 209, 212, 213, 217, 219, 221, 222, 225, 227, 229, 230, 232, 234, 236, 245, 248, 252, 258, 267 Mexico and China, 9, 13, 20, 24, 25, 44, 67, 72, 77, 80, 92, 103, 143, 179, 189, 195, 208, 217, 223, 227, 229, 231, 239, 256, 258, 260, 262, 263 Mexico City, 1–3, 8, 9, 11–13, 15, 18, 20, 21, 27–30, 41–45, 47–52, 55, 57, 61, 71, 72, 77, 84, 93, 96, 122, 127, 133, 144, 145, 149, 150, 155, 156, 161, 167, 168, 172, 174, 176, 180, 194, 197, 202, 204, 207, 210, 213, 215, 216, 219, 221, 222, 226, 229, 231, 237, 238, 248, 249, 251–253, 256, 257 micro-business (microenterprise/collective enterprises), 26, 90–92, 227, 228 Middle East, 81, 84, 94, 230 middlemen minority, 6 middle(wo)men, 234 migration networks, 8, 14, 99, 115, 121, 126, 131, 137, 207, 239, 263

277

migration of Chinese women to Mexico, 14, 245, 248, 257, 262 mojado, 62 motherhood long-distance motherhood, 259 transnational motherhood. See transnational Muslim, 85 N NAFTA, 28, 41, 66, 67 nation-state, 7, 23, 192, 194 neoliberal neoliberal economic strategy, 51 neoliberal economic system, 161, 255 neoliberal model, 10, 61 neoliberal structures, 61 neoliberal system, 102 new migration, 9, 14, 115, 121 new migration paths, 137 new migration patterns from China, 143 new networks of migration, 178 new processes of globalization, 246 Ningbo, 84, 230 O one-child policies, 110, 164, 166 Open Door Policy, 10, 109 opportunities, 3, 6, 8, 14, 21, 26–30, 43, 45–47, 49, 53, 57, 63–65, 67, 71–73, 88, 96, 97, 100, 109, 111, 113, 125–127, 130, 132, 134, 136, 144, 147, 149, 151, 152, 156, 167, 177, 178, 181, 193, 197, 201, 202, 207, 208, 217, 220, 222, 225, 229, 239, 245, 249, 250, 254, 263, 266 opportunities for women in China, 135

278

INDEX

opportunities from below, 177 search for opportunities, 95, 180, 221 see employment; inequality; spaces of opportunities otherness, 203, 266 P Pacific, 8, 19, 63, 67, 80, 196, 228 patriarchal system, 203, 253, 267 peddler, 1, 2, 18, 60, 71, 72, 79, 81, 83, 97, 169, 172, 174, 176, 202, 249, 251 pioneer migrant, 4 Plaza Beijing, 77, 78, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 131, 134, 218, 221, 222, 230, 247 Plaza de la Tecnología, 15, 48, 71, 84, 133, 154, 155, 180, 192, 215, 247, 267 Plaza de los chinitos , 77, 99 policies, 21, 82, 101, 111, 113, 116, 119, 130, 165, 191 government public policies, 48 state policies, 49, 61, 110, 133 state public policies, 48 political intermediaries, 50 popular economy networks of popular economy, 3, 19, 29, 43–45, 47, 57, 73, 144, 179, 182, 204, 217, 225, 226, 231, 239, 246, 257, 260 politicized and conflictive popular markets, 46 popular commerce, 30, 53, 55, 57, 67, 176, 194, 212, 218, 245, 252 popular dynamics, 1, 262 popular economy and migration, 44 popular economy networks, 3, 20, 65, 200, 209, 218

popular marketplaces, 11, 28 popular organization, 2, 12, 15, 42, 50, 51, 61, 124, 210, 266 Portes, Alejandro, 7, 22, 24–26, 42, 194, 196, 197 power asymmetries, 197 power regimes, 22 power relations, 2, 45, 53, 112, 114, 156, 205, 212, 255, 262, 267 power relations and hierarchical economic organizations, 212 power structures, 2, 14, 22, 26, 42, 46, 60, 73, 178, 201, 202, 259 PRC (People’s Republic of China), 109, 111, 120, 175 precarization of labor, 130 private sector, 91

R racism (racist-inspired propaganda), 7 remittances (remittance systems), 5, 19, 24, 30, 190, 191, 223, 225, 240 repatriation, 119 resistance, 27, 30, 177, 190, 197, 203–205, 212, 225, 240, 252, 255, 262 forms of resistance, 29, 45, 114, 177 resistance strategies, 111 see agency; vulnerability retail, 11, 26, 68, 118, 133, 135, 136, 153, 162, 172, 173, 231, 238, 249 Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins, 22, 23, 25, 69, 191–193, 237 right to the city, 26, 102, 197

INDEX

S Sassen, Saskia, 22–24, 179, 190–194, 197, 198, 201, 236, 255 self-governance, 46 self-governance mechanisms, 43, 49 self-governance practices, 42 Shanghai, 81, 84, 131, 133, 135, 150, 214 slum, 45 small business owner, 5 small-scale wholesale, 20, 209, 238 Smith, Michael Peter, 22, 72, 100, 101, 181, 194–197 social and economic structures, 144, 157, 212 social development, 48, 109, 232 social gaps, 132, 165 Sonora, 4, 6, 155 spaces of globalization, 12, 195, 247 spaces of opportunities, 14, 26–28, 30, 43, 45–47, 53, 72, 73, 144, 149, 156, 177, 217, 239, 240, 250, 258, 263 Special Economic Zones, 5, 87, 136 strategies of growth, 14 strategies of survival, 12–14, 21, 31, 94, 179, 227, 246, 253, 255, 259, 261 street vending in Mexico City, 249 street vendors street-vending, 79 street vending in Mexico City, 249 street vendors’ organization, 2, 28 see leader structural inequalities, 12, 111, 122, 144, 226 survival alternative circuits of survival, 22, 23, 179, 193, 194, 201, 216–218, 239, 255, 256, 258 family survival strategies, 54 spaces of survival, 28, 102, 238

279

strategies of survival, 12–14, 21, 31, 94, 179, 227, 246, 253, 255, 259, 261 struggles for survival, 3, 13 survival in popular markets, 61 survival strategies, 22, 44, 54, 155, 229, 246 symbolic constructions, 47, 60, 110, 118, 136, 161, 200, 205, 210, 224, 246, 253, 267 social and symbolic differentiation, 202 symbolic construction of difference (and identification), 213 see gender T Tepito, 15, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28–30, 41–43, 46–51, 53, 54, 56, 58, 61, 63–66, 68, 71, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83–85, 88, 92–97, 100, 101, 131, 134, 143, 145, 149, 156, 169, 172–174, 176, 192, 194, 201, 208, 209, 215, 228, 231, 236, 240, 247, 251, 263 from China to Tepito, 73, 234 Tepiteñes , 20, 21, 47, 54, 55, 63–66, 80, 87, 94, 102, 196, 211, 218, 234, 266 Tepito’s commercial networks, 174 Tijuana, 120, 133, 155, 207, 221 Toisan, 154 traditional “female” industries, 135, 167 traditional migration patterns traditional family migration patterns, 155 traditional migration patterns to Mexico, 245 traditional migration process, 180 traditional networks of migration, 154

280

INDEX

translocal translocal connectivities, 95, 189 translocality(ies), 190, 212, 237 translocal networks, 95, 192, 212, 229 translocal relationships, 5 translocal social bridges, 155 translocal spaces, 18, 229 transnational actor of transnational articulation, 67 transnational articulations, 25, 26, 67, 226, 229, 237, 240 transnational business, 80, 216 transnational connections, 25, 256 transnational entrepreneurs, 25 transnational formation, 21, 22, 72, 190, 195, 247, 256 transnational information networks, 14 transnational life, 67 transnational lived experiences, 24 transnational networks, 24, 194, 212, 229, 247 transnational partnerships, 73 transnational social field, 25, 67, 100, 115, 194 transnational social spaces, 14, 24, 25, 65, 72, 182, 190, 195, 196, 201, 220, 226, 229, 237 transnational city, 237, 240 transnational family enterprise, 30, 191, 227, 229, 256, 262, 263 transnationalism, 24, 115, 194, 197 transnationalism from below, 25, 197 transnational motherhood, 18, 218, 220, 223, 225, 256 trans-Pacific social space, 196 trust, 5, 7, 18, 30, 65, 175–177, 206, 207, 209–211, 215, 251, 267 commerce and trust, 212 feminized networks of trust, 253

hybrid idiom of trust, 190, 210

U United States, 4–7, 10, 15, 41, 44, 47, 61–63, 66, 84, 112, 117, 119, 148, 149, 154, 165, 218, 252 urban growth, 10

V vecindad, 77, 96, 97, 99, 100 vulnerability, 19, 27, 73, 111, 202–205, 210, 253–255 positions of inequality and vulnerability, 57 vulnerabilities and resistances, 201, 225, 255

W weak ties, 61, 207, 218, 239 wealth distribution, 44 WeChat, 222, 223, 266 Wei, Guoying, 110, 124, 125, 130, 133–136, 144, 148, 162, 164 wholesale, 11, 80, 82, 101, 135, 136, 153, 162, 172, 174, 231, 238, 249 World Trade Organization, 91

X xenophobia, 3, 43

Y Yiwu, 13, 20, 28, 30, 63, 77–79, 81, 83–85, 87, 88, 90–95, 100, 101, 128, 167, 192, 201, 219, 222, 227, 228, 230, 234, 237, 251, 262

INDEX

market-oriented city, 78 Yiwu and Tepito, 78, 80, 81, 85, 228, 231, 232, 259 Yiwu International Commodity City, 78, 82

281

Z Zhejiang, 13, 28, 77, 87–91, 95, 99, 130–132, 136, 148, 150, 214, 228, 233, 262 Zhou Enlai, 78 Zhou, Min, 112, 113, 117, 128