Porfirio Rubirosa: Race, Masculinity and Mobility

A post made to Twitter June 8, 2015.

It’s been over fifty years since “the glamorous” Porfirio Rubirosa last graced the international night scene with his Dominican charm, yet many are still reminiscing on the life and times of the famous playboy. Porfirio Rubirosa Ariza, known by family, friends and close acquaintances as “Rubi,” was born January 22nd, 1909 to Pedro Maria Rubirosa (a general) and Ana Ariza Almanzar (the granddaughter of a Spanish general) in San Francisco de Macorís, Dominican Republic. A Dominican by chance and a Parisian by choice, Rubi would become the most infamous playboy of the 20th century. Between 1932 and 1965, Rubi married five times and maintained numerous affairs with the world’s wealthiest and most famous women–most notably, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Regarded as the great “Latin Lover” of the 20th century, Rubi is best remembered for his charisma, charm and Creole handsomeness. But how did Rubi, a non-White Dominican man with no particular skills (acting, business or otherwise), come to enjoy the highlife appreciated by Frank Sinatra, Aly Khan and the like?

Prof. Paravisini-Gebert and Prof. Woods-Peiro attempt to answer this question in their forthcoming e-book, Porfirio Rubirosa: Race, Masculinity and Mobility. In assisting them with this research, I’ve learned that Rubi was an exception to the rule- though most obviously a person of mixed race, Rubi was not understood to be Black. During a time when race served as a basis for discrimination and genocide in both the U.S. and Europe (though it still does today), Rubi managed to marry four White, non-Dominican women: Danielle Darrieux, Doris Duke, Barbara Hutton and Odile Rodin. The racialization of Rubi as Latin rather than Negro was particularly crucial for his social mobility: it allowed him to pass as non-Black and thus, gave rich, White women the green light. Though Rubi was well aware of his own Blackness–he often sported Panama hats and protected his face with honey–his race was hardly noted by the press. In fact, Langston Hughes observed: “So I have not seen in the colorful obituaries of the late Rubirosa in the American press, any reference to race. Had he been an American citizen by birth, the headlines probably would have read: NEGRO PLAYBOY DIES.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor and Rubi

Rubi was not only exoticized because of his race, however. He was also rumored to possess an appreciable genital endowment. Indeed, his first wife, Flor de Oro Trujillo (El Jefe’s daughter and Rubi’s only Dominican wife), confessed that “In time, he began to make love to me in different ways, but when it was over my insides hurt a lot” (Levy 2005:48). The rumours and whispers of this endowment contributed to Rubi’s hyper-masculinization–if there had been any doubts about Rubi’s masculinity, and in particular his ability to please women, Flor’s and other women’s anecdotes confirmed his tíguerismo. It also helped that Rubi was sporty and interested in the fast life–he was an avid polo player and a terrible race car driver, but a race car driver nonetheless. Having led a fast, dangerous life [both socially (he was named in several divorce cases and involved in various crimes) and physically], many have deemed Rubi’s 1965 car crash death “a fitting end.” Fifty years later, however, Rubi’s charisma and playboy ways have gone unmatched and it seems that many are still asking, where are the glamorous playboys of yesteryear? Continue reading →

Peer- and Self-observation as Professional Development: Teacher Learning Across Linguistic, Cultural and Preparation Differences in a Dual-immersion Bilingual Education School

The Overarching Project:

This summer I worked under the supervision of Professor Cann on a project that studies what co-teachers from different cultural, linguistic, and preparation backgrounds can learn from one another in a dual immersion education setting. The participatory action research (PAR) project itself, a professional development intervention program, was conducted in the spring of 2015 at a rural, K-11 bilingual school in Costa Rica, with two teams of co-teachers (each with one U.S. teacher and one Costa Rican/Tican teacher). In the first week of my internship, I conducted interviews with teachers and former administrators in order to document a brief history of professional development at the school. In conjunction with the school’s bilingual coordinator, I dedicated my time to conducting a preliminary analysis of qualitative data – including interviews, surveys, field notes, and audio recorded sessions – to see 1) what teachers can learn from one another in a professional learning community (PLC) and 2) the benefits of such a process. These efforts went towards writing two proposals in hopes of presenting research findings at the American Educational Research Association conference in 2016.

Brief Summary of Results:

The PLC session data revealed that through peer observation, teachers learned new strategies for student engagement. These strategies include different ways of teaching a particular lesson, reading instruction strategies, and classroom management techniques, as well as when to implement these strategies. Some teachers identified specific strategies in their peers’ practice that they were interested in implementing in the classroom. These included developing more routines in their classroom, attempting new language-based activities, addressing the class as a whole, and focusing on time efficiency, among other strategies. After adapting strategies from other teachers and implementing them in their own classrooms, some teachers expressed desire to change the adopted strategy to suit their particular teaching style.

Anonymous, Respondent 4, Feedback Survey

In the process of examining student writing, teachers were able to reflect on their own expectations of student writing and what they value in writing. When analyzing student writing samples, most teachers commented on sentence structure, idea development, and clear expression of ideas. Some teachers also noted the students’ honesty in answering the prompt and staying on topic. Tican Spanish teachers in particular, however, commented on the aesthetic of the work, such as handwriting, and grammar, such as accents. After working together, they realized the importance of relating class material to the student’s lives in order to keep students interested in their writing.

In listening to other teachers discussing their observations, they were able to notice aspects of their own teaching through their peers’ eyes, such as effectiveness of their own classroom instruction and the power of classroom culture. Teachers also reported that the benefits of this process (and by extension, the PLC group), were: being able to become familiar with peers on a “deeper professional level” (Anonymous Respondent in Feedback Survey), recognizing the best practices and applying them, and becoming comfortable with being observed.

Looking Ahead

What teachers can learn from one another through PLCs in a bilingual context is an understudied realm of bilingual education. Thus, we aim to continue this project with the teachers themselves as the lead facilitators of the program. In addition, we hope to present our findings at the 2016 AERA conference in order to share our findings.

Anonymous, Respondent 1, Feedback Survey

Capturing Canterbury Cathedral

Art historians have long grappled with the challenge of describing, measuring, and representing medieval architecture. Though hundreds of these buildings have been standing for as many years, few records exist of their construction and what drawings have been made rely heavily on simplification and idealization of lines and shapes. In order to measure the buildings, historians had to rely on rulers, plum bobs and string – which is tedious and less than accurate. With the recent development of new technologies, however, today’s art historians have the ability to accurately measure these magnificent constructions.

Canterbury’s 3D point cloud in Cyclone, a program used to slice the data into manageable sections (the bright colors are due to an intensity mapping mode, rather than scan color)

Professor Andrew Tallon uses laser-scanning technology to scan medieval buildings. With this method, a laser beam measures the distance to each point it hits as it sweeps around the building. These measurements are then mapped in a virtual 3D space as points corresponding in color and location to what they hit – creating a three-dimensional model of the building comprised of millions of tiny data points. From this data, we can trace exact ground plans and section views, based on the fabric of the building itself rather than half-measured, half-deduced information. This new exactness in measurement allows us to capture the reality of the buildings as never before.

In this project, I used the data from this laser-scanning technology to create the first accurate sections of Canterbury Cathedral’s choir, presbytery, and Trinity Chapel.

Canterbury’s apse and high altar

Why Canterbury? This building is particularly interesting to look at among medieval buildings because of clear progression of style and method with different architects and a uniquely well-documented history of construction, as well as its social and political history as the site of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. In 1174, when a fire destroyed the Glorious Choir, the monks of Canterbury hired William of Sens to reconstruct the choir, though after he fell from the scaffolding a few years later, the monks replaced him with William the Englishman as new architect. The development in design between the two master builders and even within each one’s contribution is evident in the building’s construction. Not only is this clear progression of ideas evident in the building, it is documented by Gervase, a contemporary monk thought to have been involved in the construction. Such documentation of the building process is incredibly rare, and helps us understand the thought processes and ideas of the builders and monks at the time. In this way, the building presents a unique opportunity to read changes in ideas, aesthetic, and method in actual data of the building as well as from a rare account of the architectural progress of the building by someone involved. Furthermore, its long role as a pilgrimage site for Thomas Becket gives it a historical significance that makes Canterbury a fascinating building to study, both architecturally and historically.

Rev. Robert Willis’ 1845 section of the choir after and before the fire of 1174

To date, there has been no accurate representation of the building. Most art historians have based their studies off of Reverend Robert Willis’ account of the building from 1845. This account, detailed though it is, is limited because of the inaccuracy of measurement and representation. Historians are unable to examine the actual reality of the building based on Willis’ account, as it does not represent the building as it has shifted and settled over the centuries.

This project changes this. With laser scanning technology, we are able to document the real dimensions of Canterbury Cathedral to an accuracy of several millimeters. The laser scans create millions of data points in a virtual 3D space that can be sliced, rotated, and moved through, allowing us to examine the building as never before – as an accurate three-dimensional model on a computer screen. However, at this stage, the data is only a cloud of points – intriguing to explore, but often unclear and difficult to read. In this project, I converted the Canterbury point cloud into usable section views by tracing the data in AutoCAD.

Data slice through the choir with drawing overlay

Data slice through Canterbury’s choir with drawing overlay

Doing this, however, is not as easy as connect-the-dots. At times the data was confusing as to what the points might represent, or in places where the laser was blocked, I was forced to extrapolate what it might look like by exploring the 3D points renderings and comparing that to spherical panoramic images of each of the scanning locations. One of the greatest challenges I faced with this project was trying to represent three dimensions in two – a challenge when, for example, vaults project in a curve into our space. In addition, no part of the building is perfectly lined up – columns are out of line, arches are at odd angles to each other. Often, I was faced with a decision between accuracy and clarity. At times, in order to show something useful in the sections I drew, it required the elimination of a detail or collapsing several section planes into one. In this sense, though these new drawings’ measurements are more accurate than ever before, the drawings are nonetheless filtered in order to create as understandable a section as possible – a dilemma impossible to solve in this type of representation.

Even with these challenges, these section drawings of Canterbury Cathedral are the most accurate to date. With these new sections, art historians can study the building based on real data rather than simplified models of the building. Not only are drawings such as these useful for studying the building in an art historical sense, they are also useful for upkeep and maintenance. For example, laser scanning can reveal points of weakness in the building caused by the thrust of the vaults and which columns or buttresses are working against that stress. Both in physical and historical analysis of Canterbury Cathedral, the greater accuracy of these scan-based drawings is the key to a better understanding of the building.

This project resulted in the first three accurate section views of Canterbury, but the work is far from finished – Canterbury has yet to have an accurate ground plan drawn, and exact elevation drawings would also be a first. A simple three-dimensional model based on this data would also be a powerful tool to study the building in new ways. Those will be the next stages in this project, where we use laser-scanning technology and AutoCAD to capture Canterbury Cathedral as never before.

The completed drawing of Canterbury’s Trinity Chapel: vaults are light pink to indicate their projection into space. White lines mark what could not be read from the laser scan and had to be estimated.

For a glimpse of how laser scanning technology is used to analyze buildings, take a look at the National Geographic article on Professor Tallon’s analysis of the National Cathedral.

Urban Water Development and it’s Cultural Effects

This project is really a multifaceted one, complicated and interwoven with stories of tension and emotion as only Anthropology can unveil. The work consists of hiking and surveying around the sites of two reservoirs owned by the City of New York. These reservoirs, one in the Catskills and one just south of Poughkeepsie, are far far (50-125 miles) away from the city they supply. The construction of these reservoirs in the late 19th-early 20th century involved massive land acquisitions by the city, displacing whole towns full of buildings and people. This invasion helped foster a culture of distrust in those still living around the reservoir. Our project then is to untangle the connections and histories of the area, to figure out what happened, what is happening, and what could be done to fix some of the bridges that were burned long ago.

Our primary method for digging up and reconstructing the past is Archaeology (although we don’t do any actual digging). The team travels to New York City owned land, policed by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, and surveys the sites, looking for any signs of previous or current cultural activity. My specific job on this project is as the field photographer. I take high-quality digital images of everything we find and then database the images so that we can draw connections and conclusions from our field data. We have found that many city owned sites, although advertised as “virgin forest,” are riddled with cultural artifacts of past land use. Using the artifacts we find we can piece together a better picture of what was culturally happening in the area and how it affects those living there today.

The Culture of Competition

Competition weaves a thread between all individuals who are associated with it: parents, coaches, referees, and competitors. The manner in which this thread is comprised influences what happens on the field in the heat of competition; interestingly enough, each individual that’s involved with a team, though s/he may never put on a uniform, holds a personal stake in the success or downfall of any team.

Over 21 million youth are involved in playing travel sports (The Aspen Institute, 2014).

Over 21 million youth are involved in travel sports (The Aspen Institute, 2014).

Throughout the course of this year, I followed three youth travel teams. This summer, I had the opportunity to focus my efforts mainly on observing the practices and games of a high school basketball girls travel team. Lauren Wiebe (Ford Scholar for Professor Chris Bjork) and I conducted ethnographic research at the team’s practices and competitions, taking note of everything that I heard and saw while at their events. I began to pick up on the patterns of interaction that existed between each individual of the organization, whether that was a parent, a coach, or a player. Slowly, I became part of their community and witnessed firsthand the culture of competition in youth travel sports. My ethnographic research culminated in gathering information on parents’ expectations of their children in athletics as well as their degree of involvement in these programs. Professor Bill Hoynes, my faculty mentor, and Professor Chris Bjork are handing out our surveys to more parents over the summer to gather more responses before we analyze our data in the fall.

Many parents see athletic participation as a stepping stone to get into college,

Many parents see sports as a stepping stone to get into college, with the hopes of seeing their child receive an athletic scholarship.

One of the biggest attractions in becoming involved with competitive travel sports programs is the allure of gaining an athletic scholarship to cover the cost of receiving a college education. My individual research this summer was centered around determining the effects of travel sports on collegiate recruiting. I interviewed eight athletic administrators, college coaches, and club directors from around the country to begin collecting information for a chapter that focuses on collegiate recruiting in Professor Hoynes and Professor Bjork’s future book. Travel teams are viewed as the “necessary evil,” as they are essential for providing the visibility required in the recruiting identification process, but come with making large financial sacrifices. Future research will be conducted within this year to further explore issues of access within travel sports and how travel sports impact the student-athlete population at colleges throughout the United States.

Evaluating Food Justice Initiatives

migrant farmer

This summer I undertook a project under the supervision of Canidce Lowe Swift that evaluated existing initiatives for food justice. In this case, we studied a small facet of the food justice world, which was justice for farm workers. To do this, I conducted participatory observation by interning with the Rural and Migrant Ministry (RMM). This is a nongovernmental organization that works for equality and justice for rural and migrant workers in the Hudson valley, in partnership with other branches that work for the larger New York area. Migrant farmers are those farm laborors who might move from farm to farm each season or each year, sometimes from other parts of the country, and often from other parts of the world. My first goal was to understand the conditions that create inequality for migrant workers. What governmental and social attitudes exist now that contribute to the extreme poverty that many migrant farmers live in? These issues include issues of immigration documentation, language barriers, lasting effects of slavery, and racism which manifest themselves in coercive and oppressive labor conditions. We also aimed to understand the existing projects that the RMM is undertaking in terms of achieving political and social change. How does the organization address the multifaceted issues facing farm workers? I studied, therefore, the political demonstrations, organizations, and actions that are coordinated by the RMM. In addition, I became involved with several different projects within the RMM, which included a very large focus on empowering youth who come from rural or migrant families. Lastly, I studied the function of the office as a case study for the demographics who are involved in working for justice, wether farm workers themselves were present, and how this may or may not have affected the organizations efficacy. Overall, I discovered that the group does and incredible amount for empowering voices for the future, and for attempting to influence policy. The RMM, however, was at times out of touch with the diverse groups of peoples that comprise farm laborers, often have a limited base for their own research due to the way in which the workers make connections within the farm community, and undertake very little poverty relief type aid. However, I see the last issue as the difference between charity work and social justice work, or good distribution versus empowerment. This fall I am continuing my work with the RMM for both personal and academic reasons, hoping to understand these issues for further research with my professor, and for understanding my role in social justice initiates in the future.

The Cost of Financial Crises: A Sectoral Analysis

My Ford Scholars project this summer was focused on the effects of different types of financial crises (systemic banking, exchange rate and sovereign debt crises) on sectoral value added and employment. Even though a large amount of literature has been dedicated to exploring the impact of crises on the overall level of output, only few papers research the changes in the individual sectors. In this context, the paper “The Cost of Financial Crises: A Sectoral Analysis” provides a relevant contribution to the existing literature by estimating the magnitude of the effect of crises on agriculture, industry and services.

Working with Professor Islamaj, we collected data on sectoral value added and employment from the World Bank and the Groningen Growth and Development Center database and used Stata (a statistical software) to perform analysis on the effect of the occurrence of crises episodes in both emerging markets and developing economies. The data on crises is obtained from three main data sources – Levi-Yeyatti and Panizza, Leavan and Valencia, and Reinhart and Rogoff. The preliminary research showed evidence that banking crises lead to longer recoveries in sectors heavily dependent on external finance. Furthermore, exchange rate crises do not have as severe effect on sectors that are primarily export-oriented because currency depreciation increases firms’ competitiveness. Our results are consistent with these hypotheses.

Another method of determining the differences in the cost of financial crises across sectors is by looking at the duration and amplitude of the sectoral “episodes”, where duration is defined as the time period during which sectoral value added decreases and similarly, amplitude is defined as the change in value added in the year following the occurrence of a crises. The two tables below show our findings. The industrial sector is more severely affected by debt and banking crises, with drop in output lasting 0.588 and 0.524 years on average. However, the results for amplitude show a larger negative impact of banking crises compared to debt crises (1.47% and 0.55% respectively). In addition, banking crises leads to an increase in the value added of agriculture and a decrease in the service sector. Interestingly, value added in the three sectors increases after the occurrence of a currency crises.

Table 1: Crises Duration

Table 2: Crises Amplitude

My involvement in the project consisted primarily of carrying out a literature review on previous papers researching similar and related topics, obtaining and organizing data, and writing do-files (text files containing commands to be executed by the statistical software Stata).

Embodying Compassion in Buddhist Art

Embodying Compassion in Buddhist Art: Image, Pilgrimage, Practice

This coming spring, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College will host an exhibition centered on the topic of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Professor Lucic and I spent the summer working on planning and research for this exhibition, a multifaceted job.

Research was an important part of my work as a Ford Scholar, particularly finding and organizing research on the various works of art. The bibliography of the exhibition’s catalog was a huge undertaking. The process of creating and editing a bibliography of this size is extremely time consuming, but also very important, as the sources that we cite will be useful for people trying to find further information on these works. This exhibition features an incredible collection of works from all over the world, and will therefore be very important for scholars or students trying to gain a further understanding of imagery of Avalokiteshvara.

One large part of my work was correspondence with various organizations regarding rights for reproductions of images of the works that we would be using in the catalog. The complexity of the bureaucratic aspects of organizing an exhibition was a surprise to me as a student of Art History. Negotiations regarding the conservation of works of art, the cost of transportation or care, the reproduction of images and the credit given to organizations took up a lot of my time. This was extremely interesting, particularly because it was a first glimpse in to the reality of working in the art world.

I also had the chance to collaborate with Professor Lucic on the creation of a website and smartphone application related to the exhibition, which will be released with the catalog and exhibition. Work on the website, smartphone application, catalog, and exhibition is ongoing, as Professor Lucic works with a class of Vassar students in her seminar, Embodying Compassion in Buddhist Art: A Curatorial Training.

Relationship between Level of Integration and Firm’s Competitiveness

This summer I have been working with Professor Evsen Turkay on the project that studies the relationship between a firm’s competitiveness and the level of integration between the upstream firm and downstream firm. We define the level of integration by evaluating how closely up and downstream firms are interrelated. The more interrelated the firms are, the higher level of vertical integration. Our hypothesis has been that, because higher level of vertical integration implies more information exchanges between the upstream and downstream firm, the better chance it will be for the upstream firms to avoid uncertainty and risk in research and development because they have better information about what products are being demanded at the moment. As a result, they tend to be more competitive and will take up more market share than other firms.

We started our research by getting the market information of lithium-ion battery industry (upstream firms) in which we discovered that: 1. Although U.S. has been the top-notch developer of technology in this area, Asian firms took the largest market share. 2. Asian firms seem to be more vertically integrated than the U.S. firms. 3. Other kind of advantages of Asian firms, such low labor costs, do not take a huge share in entire cost of production. 4. Other costs in production, such as material costs, are not basically the same for firms all over the world. All the information allows us to make the corollary that level of vertical integration decides the outcome of such unbalanced market share.

Then we took automobile industry (electric automobile industry) as the downstream firms of our research and found the market share of those automobile manufacturers. We then researched the relationship between those electric car manufacturers and lithium-ion battery providers and classified their relationships according to closeness of their corporation from the degree 0 to 3. “3” represents the greatest level of integration, usually the relationship between a mother firm and its subsidiary and “0” represents basically no close relationship between up and downstream firms. We discovered that in the downstream market, the firms which have at least some kind of vertical integration (degree range from 1.5-3) for example, joint venture and some research agreement takes up 78% of the market share which shows the advantage of such high vertical integration and affirms our hypothesis. We also looked through small electronic markets such as cellphone market, laptop market, and tablet market, which also use lithium-ion batteries and got the same result.

Improvement that should be Made and Afterwards: all the hypothesis and corollary we got above requires too many assumptions that are shouldn’t be ruled out in the real world. We have tried to eliminate them through more careful research on price, unit cost, research and development costs of those upstream firms and hoped to fit them in the model that professor Turkay constructed. However, we were not able to do so because most of such information is commercially confidential. We also discovered that, there could be other factors that cause the resulting market share even though we have eliminated many of them. Next step will be to find more factors that will probably affect the outcome of our research and find other ways of searching those data.

Knowledge Spillovers and Illegal Production: The Case of Opium Production in Mexico

It is believed that opium production in Mexico began in the late 19th century and trafficking to the U.S. in the early 20th century. While illegal drug production in Mexico has been under the spotlight for a longtime, immigration knowledge spillovers on such activities are a rather unique way to look at this issue. This summer I worked with Professor Sarah Pearlman and her co-author Emily Owens on a research project focusing on the role that knowledge spillover from Chinese immigration to Mexico played on the development of Mexican opium production.

From reviewing relevant history papers and literatures, we have gained insights about factors contributed to Chinese immigration to Mexico and its geographical distribution. After the British abolishment of slave trade in 1830s, the United States received a large amount of Chinese laborers due to Gold Rush and First Transcontinental Railroad. However, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricted the entry of Chinese to the United States. Chinese population, especially in California where over 80% Chinese born population in US resided in 1880, experienced a dramatic drop in terms of both total and percentage population. In the meantime, modernization movement in Mexico created domestic labor shortages, resulting in more welcoming immigration policies such as offering citizenship to Chinese migrants. As a result, Chinese population in Mexico showed consecutive increase and reached peak on 1920, according to historical census data from the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGI) in Mexico.

(Total number of Chinese immigrants in Mexico; Source: INEGI)

We analyzed INEGI’s census data from 1895 to 1940 in STATA. We found out that northern states were target destinations of this inflow of Chinese immigration in Mexico, while the majority of total national population at that time was located in the south near Mexico City. Due to social and economic ties between Chinese immigrants in the US (especially California) and Mexico, as well as the fact that Mexico was the first step of illegal entries to the US for some Chinese immigrants, most of destination states are boarder States. For instance, Sonora is at the south of Arizona and Baja California is next to California. We have constructed maps to visually illustrate this concentrated distribution by merging GIS information into STATA

Interestingly, our preliminary assessment of opium poppy cultivation trends in Mexico shows that many popular destinations of Chinese immigrants are now major opium producing states. Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa are top states in terms of poppy plant seizures according to Mexican government records in 2005. Since current poppy cultivation is influenced by field visibility, effectiveness of law enforcement, eradication efforts and other factors as poppy cultivation became illegal in 1926, we looked back to historical data about poppy cultivation, preferably before 1930. From Penafiel Yearbook of Mexico obtained from archives in UCLA library, I found municipal level agricultural census of various crops, yet poppy was not recorded. These census data may help us in comparing distributions of poppy and plant whose suitability is similar to poppy. I also found state level opium production from the same documents. Meanwhile, we are trying to construct an index of agro-climatic suitability for poppy in order to locate areas in Mexico that are naturally suitable for poppy cultivation. To aid the research I consulted geography professors and collected maps from atlas and some GIS files.

Although up till now the relationship between immigration and opium production in Mexico remains unclear, throughout the summer we have well traced Chinese immigration inflow to Mexico and understood reasons of this migration, which are essential fundamentals for future research on this topic.