On a square in Mexico City’s former Chinatown, a clock erected in 1927 commemorates the Chinese Nationalist government’s gratitude for the local Chinese community’s support of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary cause. The immediate origins of this community go back to the mid-nineteenth century, when, as elsewhere in the Western hemisphere, Chinese immigrants were brought in to fulfill the country’s labor needs. A reliable estimate of the number of Chinese in Mexico today does not seem to be available; it would probably be difficult to obtain, due partly to a substantial proportion of illegal immigrants (some of whom eventually move on to the United States), and partly because of issues of definition — for many descendants of the early immigrants have blended into the mainstream of Mexican society and no longer identify themselves as Chinese (Hu-DeHart 1998: 256–258). Even so, it seems safe to assume that the Chinese in Mexico now number several times the (possibly inaccurate) figure of 10,000 reported for 1967 (ibid., citing He Mingzhong 1967): a recent news story gives the current Chinese population of just the northern border town of Mexicali as 35,000 (Associated Press 2005). Consequently, a Sinologist visiting Mexico may feel a Chinese cultural presence in many places. In spite of Mexicans’ justified pride in their own cuisine, Chinese restaurants are popular; following cues from their peers in the US, many young males adorn their bodies, clothes, and belongings with the emblems of Chinese martial arts (including dragon tattoos and fantasy “Chinese” characters); and the presence of “Fengshui stores” even in provincial locations such as Oaxaca is evidence to a popular fascination with the magical potency of the mysterious East.

    This fascination, in Mexico, has a long history, and it takes unique and often surprising forms that, in turn, constitute a fascinating facet of Mexican culture. For instance, in the magnificent eighteenth-century church of La Profesa, two blocks west of the Zócalo in downtown Mexico City, a pair of huge Late Qing export-porcelain vases are displayed on both sides of the main altar. Their painted decoration of warrior figures from popular opera strikes one as being more than mildly incongruous with the sanctuary’s dignified (albeit at times slightly morbid) Christian iconography. An esthetically sensitive Sinologist might, furthermore, be tempted to comment disparagingly on the clash between the (by Chinese standards) poor and hideously kitschy execution of the vases and the fine artistic quality of the Mexican-made church furnishings. But such pedantry would miss the point: undoubtedly, those who placed the Chinese vases near the altar of La Profesa valued them not as works of art, but because they stand out. Perhaps, these vases were perceived as embodiments of Mexican connections to far-away places, their placement in the church symbolically appropriating the resources of those exotic locales to the purposes of Roman Catholic worship.

    I was unable to find out the circumstances under which these two vases were placed in La Profesa — given their late date of manufacture, one imagines that a parishioner might have donated them to the church at some time during the twentieth century. However, there is evidence that, in Mexico, imported Chinese porcelain was already being displayed in Christian religious settings more than two hundred years ago. For instance, the painting of the “Cristo de Chalma” by the eighteenth-century painter Pedro Calderón, now in the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City, shows a crucifix on an altar flanked by pairs of candles and flower bouquets. The latter are placed in octagonal vases of Late Ming or Early Qing manufacture (Kuwayama 1997: 22, fig. 9) that are decorated with floral motifs. Perhaps this choice of motifs is significant; one wonders whether the warrior figures seen on the vases in La Profesa, derived as they are from performance genres that were suffused with “pagan” religious content, would have been deemed acceptable for display in church settings during Colonial times, when the Holy Inquisition was bent on squashing even the slightest soupçon of unorthodoxy.

    While the late Qing vases in La Profesa were probably brought to Mexico by Chinese traders directly from China, the earlier vases depicted in Calderón’s painting had reached Mexico by way of the Philippines. A Spanish possession since the mid-sixteenth century, the Philippines were administered from Mexico. Between ca. 1573 and 1815, galleons laden with the riches of the New World — principally silver — left Acapulco for Manila regularly, returning with Chinese products that had been brought to Manila by Portuguese traders from Macao, and most of which, from Acapulco, were shipped overland to the Atlantic coast and onward by ship to Spain. Even though Mexico was, thus, only a relay station in a much longer transportation network, considerable amounts of Chinese goods, especially silk and porcelain, remained in the New World. Today, significant collections of Ming and Qing porcelain that reached the country from Manila can be seen, e.g., at the Museo del Virreinato at Tepotzotlán — a picturesque former monastery in the northern suburbs of Mexico City — , at the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City, and at the Museo Bello in Puebla.

    Also included among the items with Chinese connections that have been preserved in Mexico since Colonial times are devotional ivory carvings. They were mass-produced in the Philippines by artists of Chinese origin, who based some of them on traditional non-Christian image types. Figures of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, for instance, are hardly distinguishable from those of the feminized Bodhisattva Guanyin觀音; some images sold as “Virgins” in Colonial Mexico may actually have been made as Guanyin figures. It was obviously difficult for Chinese artisans to gauge the taste preferences, let alone the iconographic requirements, of the distant recipients of their manufactures. As Lothar Ledderose (2000: 97) has observed in connection with export porcelain, a deliberate iconographic vagueness in the choice of decorative motifs facilitated the acceptance of exported objects abroad. To ensure commercial success, trade objects needed to be imbued with a generalized exotic aura — they had to be visibly different from ordinary local products, yet without demanding an insider’s knowledge of their culture of origin.

    The esthetic appeal of the Chinese imports inspired local imitation. On low-fired Spanish-style fayence (alfareria) vessels from Puebla — a major pottery-producing center during Colonial times as well as today — Chinese-style ornaments appear throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Kuwayama 1997). Such artistic borrowing (which was paralleled in other crafts, such as textile making) started surprisingly early — apparently at least a century earlier than in Europe, where chinoiserie is mostly an eighteenth-century phenomenon. Whether and to what extent the China fashion in European decorative arts was inspired by Mexican-made objects taken to Spain is as yet unexamined; in any event, the possible role of Mexico as one source of the Chinese artistic impact on Europe should not be overlooked.

    It would be a gross mistake to assume that the presence of trade goods implied any degree of intercultural understanding. Indeed, the conception of China and its inhabitants in colonial Mexico was exceedingly confused. One remarkable instance of this involves, once again, the city of Puebla, still rich in monuments from the colonial era. In the former Jesuit church of La Compania, one finds, on the west wall of the anteroom of the sacristy, the small (ca. 20 by 30 cm) tombstone of Catarina de San Juan, a seventeenth-century woman known to local legend as “La china poblana,” the Chinese woman of Puebla. The Latin inscription reads (my translation):

    To God, the Best, the Greatest. This tomb encloses the virgin Catarina de San Juan, venerable in Christ, which Mogor gave to the world and Angelopolis to Heaven, after having been loved by God and men for the bounty of her virtues. She was illustrious of royal blood, yet humble and poor in servitude. She lived for 82 years. At her death she was praised by the people and the clergy, on the eve of the Feast of the Three Kings [= Epiphany] in the year 1688.

    Of the two place names in the inscription, “Angelopolis” (“City of Angels”) simply means Puebla: the city’s official name is Puebla de los Angeles. “Mogor” renders “Mongol;” it here refers not to the Mongolian steppelands — still ruled during the seventeenth century by tribal leaders descended from Genghis Khan — but to the Great Mughal empire of India, whose rulers, though Persian-speaking and of Turkic rather than Mongol ancestry, also claimed descent from the Imperial Mongols.

Catarina’s tombstone

    Consultation of two biographies of Catarina that were published shortly after her death (summarized in Tibón 2003, Palou 2003) makes it abundantly clear that “La china poblana” was not Chinese at all — not even in the extended sense of being a member of an ethnic group that (like the Mongols of Inner Mongolia) would be officially regarded today as part of the Chinese Nation (Zhonghua minzu 中華民族). Born somewhere on the coast of India and originally named Mirrah, she was captured at a tender age by Portuguese pirates, who baptized and renamed her, took her to Manila, and sold her as a slave to a ship captain from Puebla, Miguel de Sosa. She arrived in Puebla in ca. 1622. When her master died two years later, his will set her free on condition that she continue to serve his widow as long as the latter was alive. Soon afterward, Sosa’s widow also passed away, and Catarina became the domestic servant of a priest, Pedro Suárez. She married the priest’s “Chinese” slave, Domingo Suárez, and saved up all her money to buy his freedom. But allegedly the marriage was never consummated. Instead, Catarina, who had experienced visionary encounters with Christ ever since her conversion to Christianity, lived the life of a holy woman, attending mass several times a day and doing good works all about Puebla — praying with the sick, exorcising the “possessed,” and comforting the dying. In an interesting article, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns (2003) speculates that, in doing so, she may have been emulating — consciously or not — Hindu patterns of sanctity that she absorbed as a child in India.

    A native speaker of an unidentified South Asian language, Catarina never learned Spanish properly. This surely added to her mysterious aura, making it easy for her biographers to embellish their accounts. The authors, Alonso Ramos and José del Castillo Graxeda, both were Jesuit priests who had been Catarina’s confessors. They evidently hoped to present her to the church as a candidate for canonization as a saint. Rather than reporting the facts of history, their voluminous accounts (Ramos’s biography originally comprised three 400-page volumes!) take much of their narrative content from the conventions of the established “Lives of Saints” genre. For instance, their insistence — also voiced in the tombstone inscription — on Catarina’s lifelong virginity is probably no more than a pious trope; likewise, the account of her royal parentage is probably fictitious, motivated by the desire of adding dramatic contrast to her vita and of heightening her value as a Catholic trophy. The obvious parallels to the more familiar lives of a host of other saintly princesses in the history of Catholicism may have enhanced the credibility of the biographies in the eyes of popular believers.

    The higher Church authorities, however, would have none of all this. As early as 1691, the Inquisition prohibited the circulation of any images of Catarina, and her biographies were banned because they “contained useless and improbable revelations, visions, and apparitions that were full of contradictions and inappropriate, indecent, and foolhardy comparisons, smacking of blasphemy” (as quoted in Tibón 2003: 11). The real motive for this interdiction probably lay in the ongoing power struggle between the Dominicans, who were in control of the Inquisition, and the Jesuits, to whom Catarina had entrusted her soul. That Colonial Mexico was never to have her Asian-born saint is probably due, not to anti-Asian prejudice, but in large measure to the decline of Jesuit influence, culminating in their expulsion from Mexico in 1767. While the Castillo biography was later reprinted, only a single copy of one volume of the Ramos biography seems to have survived. Over the years, Catarina’s tombstone continued to keep alive the dimming memory of her good deeds, spawning various folk legends that are even less verifiable than her biographers’ accounts.

The main façade of the Church of La Compania

    Why was Catarina known as “La china poblana?” The answer is that chino, “Chinese,” was used in colonial Mexico as a generic designation of any person of Asian origin. Though Indian-born, Catarina herself, in one of her conversations with Jesus recorded by Ramos, referred to herself as una bozal china, “an ignorant Chinese woman.” Likewise, her “Chinese” husband Domingo Suárez had been born in the Philippines. True enough, the establishment of Manila as a hub of Transpacific trade coincided with the first wave of large-scale Chinese emigration out of the impoverished and overpopulated southeastern coastal regions of China to Southeast Asia during the late Ming dynasty. There was a sizable Chinese community in Manila, and the slave market in that city did supply the New World (Zavala 1994: 289–292; 313; 342–345). Rustomji-Kerns (2003: 23) gives a figure of between 40,000 and 50,000 slaves imported from Asian countries into Mexico during the 17th and 18th centuries. But it is not at all certain that the ancestors of these individuals — or, for that matter, Domingo Suárez’s ancestors — had come from China. In his comprehensive history of slavery in New Spain, Silvio Zavala (1994: 343–345) has tabulated 27 documented instances of slaves brought to Mexico from Manila between 1614 and 1696, stating their area of origin wherever known; places mentioned include the Malabar Coast of India, Cochin (Southwest India), Bengal, the Philippines, and even Angola (no doubt by way of Goa and Macao) — but not China. Of course, there could have been Chinese among those who crossed the Pacific, but the word chino was applied indiscriminately to individuals of a wide variety of ethnic origins. Hence, we cannot know whether the “Chinese” barbers from Manila, whose presence is documented in Mexico City as early as 1635, and whom Evelyn Hu-DeHart (1997: 256) considers as an early instance of Chinese settlement in the New World, were actually Chinese. My own suspicion is that the number of ethnic Chinese present in colonial Mexico may well have been close to zero.

    If Chinese immigrants or their descendants had been a visible element in the multiethnic population of eighteenth-century Mexico, one would expect them to have figured in the “Casta paintings,” sets of oil paintings — mostly by anonymous artists — depicting the multifarious racial mixtures in the Mexican population (Katzew 2004). But these fascinating visual records only show Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans and the outcome of their mixed marriages; people of Chinese, and indeed any Asian, origin are conspicuously absent. But interestingly, some people in the Casta paintings are labeled as chinos: for some of the various and mutually contradictory schemes of racial classification then current used this word to refer to individuals who were three-quarters Amerindian and one-quarter Black. (The child of a Black and an Amerindian was called a lobo, “wolf;” the child of a lobo and an Amerindian was a chino [Katzew 2004: 192].) This usage of “Chinese” would be inexplicable unless one considers that those designated by colonial Mexicans as chinos were for the most part of South and Southeast Asian origin. The skin color of certain categories of people of mixed African- Amerindian parentage was apparently deemed similar to that of such (non- Chinese) chinos, prompting the use of that term as a racial classification. It is apparent that the term chino exclusively denoted — or at any rate had come to denote by the eighteenth century — the perception of a person’s color, rather than of his or her ethnic, cultural, or geographic origins. (The usage of the term lobo for people of “gray” skin illustrates the same mentality in an even more drastic way.) By classifying humanity in this way, Colonial Mexico could produce its own “Chinese” even without actual input from East Asia!

From male Negro and female Amerindian offsprings Lobo

    But the misunderstandings only start here. Through a lexical legerdemain, the saintly Catarina de San Juan, la china poblana, who is known to have dressed in an austere outfit similar to a nun’s habit, came to be seen as the originator of a colorful, richly sequined dress of the same name — china poblana — which was worn by lower-class women in Mexico during the early 19th-century, and which later on, especially during the twentieth century, was adopted as the quintessential Mexican national dress for women. The connection between the two chinas poblanas was first drawn by local historians in Puebla during the mid-nineteenth century (traced by Tibón 2003), and the alleged “Chinese” origins of Mexican national dress are still widely touted today (see, e.g., Hu-DeHart 1997: 256). In fact, however, the whole notion is completely spurious. Aside from china, “Chinese woman,” there is a second, unrelated word china, of Quechua origin, with a base meaning of “female animal,” which was used in the Spanish colonies of the New World to refer to women of humble status (Tibón 2003: 13–14); and “poblano” means not only “from Puebla,” but also “folk, village-related.” As a fashion term, china poblana means nothing more or less than “a village lass” — here used metonymically to refer to her dress. In both usage and connotation, this happens to be an exact equivalent of the German word Bauerndirndl (“peasant girl”), which, when used as a fashion term, designates an item of peasant clothing latterly adopted as national dress in Bavaria. The word Dirndl (now mostly used to refer to a particular kind of dress) is a dialect diminutive of Dirne, “woman,” a word that now carries somewhat pejorative connotations in High German, similar to china in the Spanish-speaking New World. In both cases, the usage of the same expression to refer to a person as well as to the dress typically worn by that person illustrates how “clothes make a woman.”

    Canards all these... yet these later examples pale in comparison with what one encounters when one steps even further back into Mexico’s Prehispanic past. Chinese elements have long been noticed in the native civilizations of Mesoamerica. A Sinologist visiting the superb Museo de Antropologia in Mexico City, or any local archaeological museum, is everywhere confronted with “Chinese-looking” representations of humans, iconography that reflects mythical conceptions comparable to some found in East Asia, calendrical similarities, and structural parallels like that of the Maya glyphs to Chinese fangkuaizi 方塊字 (both use multicomponent rectangular units comprising phonetic and signific components). At the end of the day, however, most if not all attempts to explain such parallels in terms of Precolumbian cultural contact belong to the realm of “Fantastic Archaeology.” Some serious archaeologists (e.g. Wauchope 1962; Williams 1991) have taken great pains to invalidate the logic or use of evidence used by those proposing such ideas. Today, most academic experts believe that the alleged transoceanic parallels either are accidental or reflect a similar stages of sociocultural evolution. Even so, unsubstantiable ideas about Precolumbian contact between the Old and New Worlds continue to arouse strong popular interest; a case in point involving China is a recent bestselling book claiming that the great eunuch-admiral Zheng He’s 鄭和 (1371–1435[?]) fleet reached the shores of the New World 71 years before Columbus (Menzies 2002).

    At the very least, however, the tremendous confusion — briefly outlined above — surrounding the Colonial Mexican reception of Chinese cultural elements shows that one frequently-used antidiffusionist argument is fallacious: namely, the notion that if a certain cultural element had indeed reached the New World from China, one would expect it to be associated with something like its original Chinese cultural connotations. This clearly was not the case with Chinese-made items that are documented to have been shipped to Mexico during the Colonial epoch, during a time when contact, albeit indirect, was regular and frequent. It follows that such transmission of contextual elements is even less likely to have occurred during the Precolumbian epoch, when such contact would have been haphazard and intermittent at best.

    While I remain unconvinced by any of the scenarios of Precolumbian long-distance maritime communication proposed to date, I would like nevertheless to acknowledge the serious scholarly character of some of the work done on this issue (for a particularly careful exercise of the kind, see Marschall 1972), and I continue to regard it as a legitimate topic for serious research. I note, furthermore, that in all instances I am aware of that involve Chinese connections, that the argument fails not necessarily because of any intrinsic implausibility, but on account of gross inaccuracies in the non-Sinologist authors’ handling of their Chinese data. Aside from an early (and highly fanciful) effort by Wei Juxian (1970), no credible scholar with an expertise in matters Chinese has tackled such topics from the Chinese end. One may hope that someone will do so in the future.

    In the meantime, the popular fascination with hyperdiffusionistic theories in the United States and elsewhere is in itself an interesting sociological topic. Why do people wish to believe in such credulitystraining ideas? A partial answer may be that they can serve to de-center orthodox accounts of history and thereby empower disenfranchised groups. Even if not factual, such invented scenarios can give selfesteem to members of discriminated minorities, and they can be a useful antidote to the triumphalism common in Western Civilization discourse — an attitude that Columbus’s discoveries, even if they really were pioneering, certainly do not justify. Like the exotic Orient in the Colonial Mexican imagination, fantastic account of Precolumbian explorers reaching the New World from Africa and East Asia are, above all, “good to think.”

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Palou, Pedro Ángel. 2003. “La Puebla de Mirrah-Catarina.” In De Orellana (ed.) 2003: 18–19. Rustomji-Kerns, Roshni. “Las raíces olvidadas de Mirrah-Catarina.” In De Orellana (ed.) 2003: 20–31.

Tibón, Gutierre. 2003. “Las dos chinas: Catarina de San Juan y la atractiva mestiza.” In De Orellana (ed.) 2003: 8-16.

Wauchope, Robert. 1962. Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wei Juxian衛聚賢. 1970. Zhongguo gudai yu Meizhou jiaotong kao 中國古代與美洲交通考, vol. 1: Zhongguoren faxian Meizhou中國人發現美洲. Hong Kong: Shuowen she.

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Picture Acknowledgements

1. & 2. Chinese Ceramics in Colonial Mexico. (University of Hawai’I Press.)

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Zambo.jpg

6. http://www.ifccsa.org/poblano.html