From China to Tepito: Chinese women's experience with commerce in a Mexican street market

• In Event: New Chinese Immigrants to Urban Latin America: Migration and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper analyzes the migration of Chinese women to Mexico City and their participation on different levels in the dynamics of Latin America’s foremost street market: Tepito. The women in question work in this market as importers, wholesale vendors or petty street vendors; they come from different backgrounds and had different access to education and work in China and abroad. However, their insertion into this market was for all of them a response to their lack of opportunities back in China. While the market of Tepito has been largely studied as a space where formal and informal economies and local political strategies
come together, the participation and contributions of Chinese migrants and specifically of Chinese women in its dynamics, although crucial for the market’s growth in the last two decades, have not been thoroughly studied. Through a gendered perspective of migration and labor, I analyze how Chinese women have integrated into a thoroughly local space of commerce; how their participation has continuous effects in both economic and social dynamics in informal markets –popular markets-; and how they articulate Mexico and China through their interactions with local vendors. I look at the ways in which Chinese migrant women in Mexico, facing diverse levels of marginalization, have built new opportunities for themselves in these specific urban economic spaces and in doing so have had impacts on local development and on the construction of transnational commercial networks.

Author

• Ximena Alba Villalever