unhistorical:May 15, 1911: The revolutionary forces of Francisco Madero massacre over 300 Chinese re
unhistorical:May 15, 1911: The revolutionary forces of Francisco Madero massacre over 300 Chinese residents of Torreón, Mexico.In late 1910, with defeated Mexican presidential candidate Francisco Madero at its head, a diverse coalition launched what would unravel into the decade-long Mexican Revolution. Its fundamental consensus was that the regime of President Porfirio Díaz, which represented the dregs of colonial legacy, elitist Europeanism, and foreign collusion over the interests of Mexico, must be deposed. Underlying these basic grievances was the even more fundamental, yet infinitely more complex, question of what the new Mexican nation should be. The thirty-four year-long Porfiriato dictated its national and social aims based on a strict positivist vision of progress, privileging all that was European and modernization in the image of the European. The questions facing those who now sought to overthrow Díaz were therefore charged with issues of race, xenophobia, and lo mexicano and mexicanidad. As the new revolutionary Mexico emerged - a nationalist Mexico, which now embraced the ordinary middle and lower classes and Mexico’s indigenous populations over the European-aligned upper classes - fissures elsewhere fractured violently open. Some 10,000 to 40,000 Chinese resided in Mexico by 1910. President Díaz had hitherto welcomed both foreign capital and the cheap labor provided by this stream of Chinese migrants. As was the pattern across the Americas, the Chinese lived and labored in mostly isolated cultural enclaves. At the same time, many Chinese workers managed to accumulate some capital and open businesses both large and small. By the time of the Mexican Revolution, a strong anti-foreign sentiment - directed at not only Americans but Asians who, like the Americans, appeared to be profiting and thriving at the expense of ordinary Mexicans - was clearly brewing. Between May 13 to May 15, as Díaz’s exit became imminent, maderista troops took the northern city of Torreón, and in the process massacred an estimated 303 Chinese in addition to 5 Japanese residents who became conflated with the Chinese population. Lebbeus R. Wilfley described in his investigations of the massacre that “soldiers shot them as they would rabbits for sport and for practice in marksmanship,“ and then after the “carnival of slaughter ended [the soldiers] … robbed the dead.” A mob of over 4,000 civilians accompanied the soldiers and, incited by calls to “exterminate” this alien population of exploiters and profiteers, attacked Chinese businesses and slaughtered indiscriminately, despite some individual efforts by civilians to protect them. The massacre ended by order of Emilio Madero, who then placed survivors under military protection, but the sentiment remained. While the scale of violence that took place at Torreón was never repeated, attacks against Chinese property and individuals continued through the revolution. In the years following, calls for exclusion or expulsion escalated, and the Chinese government, itself confronting foreign encroachment across the Pacific, could do very little to protect its overseas nationals. -- source link