Counting Chinese People in a Catholic Country : Religious Difference, Racial Discrimination, and the 1930 Mexican Population Census
Of more than 16.5 million individuals counted in the 1930 Mexican population census, 97.7% identified as Catholic. While the strong anticlerical provisions of the 1917 Constitution and the federal government’s violent enforcement campaigns constructed the postrevolutionary Mexican state as highly secular and antagonistic to religion, in the professed identity of its population, Mexico was a Catholic country. Chinese persons in northern Mexico, however, whether immigrants or native-born, did not identify as Catholic in numbers even approaching 97.7%. The Chinese population was religiously different, much more religiously diverse.With religion as the analytic lens, this article explicates the 1930 census as an act of governance. Even the formally anticlerical Mexican state and the violence it employed to that end conceded a question on the population census to the religious identity of its population. Not surprisingly, the official census struggled conceptually with a definition of religion and, practically, with a multiplicity of Chinese faith-traditions and lived experience. Chinese people did not tally cleanly. Nonetheless, through the religious identity question and its limited statistical analysis, a state-sponsored conception of religion emerged from the census. Meanwhile, the aggregate census data created a demographic picture of the Chinese population in Sonora in 1930 as both more Catholic and less religious than others imagined it to be. In its religious demography, the Chinese population looked much more like the rationalist non-believers of Mexico’s educated elite than like the rest of the Mexican population.The religious diversity of the Chinese population, as revealed in the 1930 population census, provides context for the pernicious discrimination Chinese people faced in northern Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Whatever their actual religious identity, and however they practiced their beliefs, popular perception differed. Newspapers and books presented Chinese as religiously Other—Confucian, Buddhist, non-religious, non-Catholic—an otherness that fueled prejudice against them, even in the officially anticlerical Mexican state. Religious and racial prejudice reflected and reinforced each other in virulent fashion culminating in the state-sponsored expulsion of Chinese people and their families from Sonora in 1931 and 1932
Year of publication: |
2019
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Authors: | Augustine-Adams, Kif |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
Subject: | Mexiko | Mexico | China | Ethnische Diskriminierung | Ethnic discrimination | Religion | Bevölkerungsstatistik | Demographic statistics | Katholizismus | Catholicism |
Description of contents: | Abstract [papers.ssrn.com] |
Saved in:
Extent: | 1 Online-Ressource (1 p) |
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Series: | |
Type of publication: | Book / Working Paper |
Language: | English |
Notes: | Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments October 3, 2019 erstellt Volltext nicht verfügbar |
Source: | ECONIS - Online Catalogue of the ZBW |
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014103863
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