Ruth Mandujano López starts her book Steamships across the Pacific with, as seems almost de rigueur now for almost any book about Latin American-Asian relations, with the history of the Manila Galleon, but for her, this is a point of comparison and departure.
Until recently, it was widely accepted that links between Mexican and Asian ports had ceased or, at best, become irrelevant as of 1815, when the famous 250-year-long route between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico was shut down as the latter became independent from Spain.

Although López frames her book around, as the subtitle has it, “Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914” (in, that is, the age of steam), the six different trips and boats she discusses act as a window into a half-century of Mexico’s interactions with China and Japan.
Although this history didn’t end with the last Manila Galleon, it did however seem to more or less go to sleep for a half-century:
… the last of the galleons sailed in 1815, leaving the continent’s relationship dependent on irregular transpacific crossings as well as those via the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Regular north Pacific routes did not restart until 1867, this time aboard steamships. Colorado, a purpose-built 3,728-ton, 340-foot-long side-wheeler, was the first.
And that’s where López picks the story up: Hong Kong has replaced Manila as the primary entrepot, San Francisco has replaced Acapulco as the main American Pacific port, steam had replaced sail, Britain has replaced Spain as the main foreign power in East Asia, Japan is open to commerce, rail links across Mexico and Panama mean that ships no longer need to go round the Horn, Hawaii is a regular port of call … and the Mexican “Eagle dollar” has replaced the Spanish peso as the silver coin of choice in Asian trade.
The story she tells is somewhat stop and go. Mexican Pacific ports, rather than being gateways to Asia as they had been, became waystations on the Panama-San Francisco run. Yet Mexico was one of the countries that sent a scientific expedition to observe the transit of Venus in 1874, something they performed in Yokohama. The Mexicans were in fact “the first state-sponsored team to publish their results”, but “eventually the international scientific community would realize that none of the teams’ measurements improved on the original, inaccurate seventeenth-century calculations,” giving the story a somewhat wry ending.
Much of Mexico’s relations with China had to do with immigration, something which Mexico wished to encourage at the time; this was often held up due to the lack of formal relations between China and Mexico. Once this was overcome, Mexico’s policy was challenged by the US who (then as now) believed that Chinese migrants would land in Mexico only to cross illegally in the US (having passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882). Mexico’s relative welcome to Chinese immigrants was tempered by anti-Chinese sentiment, which boiled over in particularly violent fashion in during the Mexican Revolution:
The most horrendous episode—and the worst act of violence experienced by any Chinese diasporic community in the Americas during the twentieth century—happened in the northern city of Torreon. In May 1911, after Maderista forces took hold of the city, they killed 303 Chinese and 5 Japanese and caused close to $850,000 of damage to their businesses.
Migration went into reverse and “by 1940, only 4,859 Chinese lived in Mexico.”
This story was been covered in detail in Hugo Wong’s America’s Lost Chinese: The Rise and Fall of a Migrant Family Dream. Somewhat less-known are Mexico’s relations with Japan, who sent (it is hard to imagine now) government-sanctioned “colonists” to establish a “Japanese colony” in Mexico at the end of 19th century with the objective of developing agriculture. It did not go well.
More significant, perhaps, were Mexico’s negotiations to establish diplomatic relations with Japan, which demanded that Mexico renounce the “extraterritoriality” it had previously conceded to Western countries; Mexico initially demurred, not because it favored this imperial policy, but because it didn’t wish to annoy the US and other Western powers by breaking ranks. This changed when the US realized that everyone else was benefiting at its expense:
General Alexander C. Jones, the US consul in Nagasaki in 1881, presented the argument as follows: “the United States opened the country to the commerce of the world. Yet England and France have reaped the fruits . . . while the United States, her nearest neighbor and best friend . . . virtually does nothing.”
In 1888, the US Government proffered the view that
“the interests of the United States would not be affected at all if Mexico conceded Japan the reciprocity that she wants in regards to the [extraterritorial] jurisdiction.”
Mexico then broke the dam; Japan then proceeded to “renegotiate Japan’s unequal treaties”.
In the 19th century and beyond, companies in Hong Kong and father afield were capitalized in “dollars Mex” despite Mexico having little direct presence in Asia. But little is not the same as none. Steamships across the Pacific helps fill this gap.
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