The Roots of a Forgotten Massacre

In 1911, some three hundred Chinese immigrants were murdered in the northern Mexican city of Torreón. Afterward, their bodies were mutilated, looted, and dumped in a mass grave. More than a century later, a fog of confusion and denial surrounds the massacre. Misinformation and racism abound, and the residents of Torreón remain reluctant to discuss the event. In his new book, The House of the Pain of Others, Julián Herbert sets out to investigate this forgotten atrocity. Below, he examines the roots of anti-Chinese racism in early-twentieth-century Mexico.

Torreón in 1911. Public domain.

Most historians—including both the most scrupulous, such as Chao Romero, and the less rigorous, for example, Juan Puig—take for granted that in Mexico there was a clear correlation between attitudes toward the Chinese diaspora and social class. They establish the notion that Sinophobia arose informally among the poor after the Torreón massacre in 1911. They then theorize that ideology evolved, became formalized, and contaminated the middle class through a sort of anti-Chinese conference (attended mostly by small-business men) that took place in Magdalena, Sonora State, on February 5, 1916. Romero suggests these developments were never supported by the ruling class.

This reading of the situation systematizes the historical discourse but does not reflect reality. Its first fallacy is that a minority ideology, originating among the poorest people in the country, ascended the social ladder at a speed greater than that of any other revolutionary concern.