The Chinese-Mexican Cuisine You'll Only Find Along the Northern Border Lisa Morehouse - KQED News
go to original March 29, 2015

In the Fortune Garden kitchen, chefs speak to each other in Cantonese, and waiters give orders in Spanish. (Vickie Ly/KQED)

If you ask people in the city of Mexicali, Mexico, about their most notable regional cuisine, they won’t say street tacos or mole. They’ll say Chinese food. There are as many as 200 Chinese restaurants in the city. North of the border, in Imperial County, the population is mostly Latino, but Chinese restaurants are packed. There are dishes in this region you won’t find anywhere else, and a history behind them that goes back more than 130 years.



It’s not just on the plates where cultures combine. In the Fortune Garden kitchen, the cooks speak to each other in Cantonese. The waiters speak Spanish and English.

There’s a specific reason for all of this, according to Professor Robert Chao Romero.

“The restaurants you see now are remnants of the Chinese population that used to fill the U.S./Mexico borderlands in Mexicali and in Baja California,” he says.

...“The Chinese invented undocumented immigration from Mexico,” says Romero, smuggling in with coyotes or guides hired to lead people across the border, “and smuggling with false papers, on boats and trains. The infrastructure for that was all invented by the Chinese.”

In fact, today’s Border Patrol grew out of the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors, created to keep Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. At the same time, the Mexican government welcomed Chinese immigrants to go to the sparsely populated border region, to work on farms and in mines and canals. Many Chinese immigrants settled in Mexicali, becoming grocers, merchants and restaurant owners. Others managed to smuggle across and make lives in the U.S.

Read the rest at KQED News

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