Chinese migrants flock to Mexico in search of jobs, a future and, for some, a taste of freedom

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Despite her high-paying job in the tech industry, Li Daijing didn’t hesitate when her cousin asked her to help run a restaurant in Mexico City. She packed her bags and left China for the Mexican capital last year, with dreams of a new adventure.

The 30-year-old from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, hopes to one day start an online business importing furniture from her home country.

“I want more,” Li said. “I want to be a strong woman. I want to be independent.”

Li is part of a new wave of Chinese migrants leaving their country in search of opportunity, greater freedom or better financial prospects at a time when China’s economy is slowing, youth unemployment remains high and its relations with the United States and its allies have deteriorated.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of the China’s New Migrants series, an Associated Press look at the lives of the latest wave of Chinese emigrants settling abroad.

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As U.S. border patrol has arrested tens of thousands of Chinese at the U.S.-Mexico border over the past year, thousands are making the Latin American country their final destination. Many hope to start their own businesses, taking advantage of Mexico’s proximity to the United States.

Last year, the Mexican government issued 5,070 temporary residency visas to Chinese immigrants, twice as many as the previous year, making China third behind the United States and Colombia as a source of migrants granted such permits.

A deeply rooted diaspora that has developed strong family and business networks over the decades makes Mexico attractive to new Chinese arrivals; so does the growing presence of Chinese multinationals in Mexico, which have established themselves to be close to markets in the Americas.

“A lot of Chinese people started coming here two years ago, and these people need to eat,” says Duan Fan, owner of Nueve y Media, a restaurant in Mexico City’s upscale Roma Sur neighborhood that serves spicy cuisine from Sichuan, his native province.

“I opened a Chinese restaurant so people could come here and eat like they would at home,” he said.

Duan, 27, arrived in Mexico in 2017 to work with an uncle who owns a wholesale business in Tepito, near the historic center of the capital, and was later joined by his parents.

Unlike previous generations of Chinese who came to northern Mexico from Guangdong province in southern China, the new arrivals are more likely to come from all over China.

Data from the latest 2020 census from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography show that Chinese immigrants are mainly concentrated in Mexico City. A decade ago, the census recorded the largest concentration of Chinese in the northernmost state of Baja California, on the U.S.-Mexico border across from California.

The arrival of Chinese multinationals brings an influx of “people from eastern China who are more educated and have broader international experience,” said Andrei Guerrero, academic coordinator of the China-Baja California Center for Studies.

In a middle-class Mexico City neighborhood, Viaducto-Piedad, near the city’s historic Chinatown, a new Chinese community has been growing since the late 1990s. Chinese immigrants have not only opened businesses, but also created community spaces for religious events and children’s recreation.

Viaducto-Piedad is recognized by the Chinese themselves as the true “Chinatown” of Mexico City, said Monica Cinco, a specialist in Chinese migration and executive director of the EDUCA Mexico Foundation.

“When I asked them why, they said it was because we live here. We have Chinese-friendly stores, beauty salons and restaurants that cater to Chinese people,” she said. “They live there, there is a community and several public schools in the area have a large Chinese population.”

In downtown Mexico City, Chinese entrepreneurs have not only opened new wholesale stores but also taken over dozens of buildings. They have sometimes become a source of tension with local merchants and residents, who feel that the expansion of Chinese companies is crowding them out.

At a mini-market in a bustling downtown neighborhood selling Chinese goods such as dried mushrooms and vacuum-packed spicy duck wings, Dong Shengli, 33, said he moved from Beijing to Mexico City a few months ago to help run some friends’ shop.

Dong, who has since found a job at a major wholesaler of counterfeit sneakers and designer clothing, said he had worked at China’s National Energy Commission but was persuaded by friends to come here.

He plans to explore business opportunities in Mexico, but China continues to beckon. “My wife and parents are in China. My mother is old, she needs me,” he says.

Others are leaving China in search of greater freedom. One such person is Tan, 50, who gave only his last name out of fear for the safety of his family back in China. He arrived in Mexico this year from the southern province of Guangdong and found a job for a few months at a Sam’s Club. Back home, he has had to work odd jobs, including at a chemical plant and writing articles for magazines during the pandemic.

But he chafes at what he describes as a repressive atmosphere in China.

“It’s not just the oppression in the workplace, it’s the mentality,” he said. “I can feel the political regression, the retreat of freedom and democracy. The consequences of all this are making people really perverted and sick. So life is very difficult.”

What caught his attention in Mexico City were the demonstrations that often invade the city’s main avenues, proof, according to him, that the freedom of expression to which he aspires exists in this country.

At the restaurant where she still works in the trendy Juárez neighborhood, Li said Mexico was a land of opportunity for her and other Chinese who don’t have family in the United States to help them settle. She said she left China in part because of the competitive work culture and high real estate prices.

“In China, everyone saves money to buy a house, but it’s really expensive to have one,” she said.

Confident and with an infectious smile, Li said she hoped her skills as a sales promoter for Chinese tech giant Tencent Games would help her advance in Mexico.

She says she hasn’t met many Chinese women like her in Mexico City: newcomers, young and single.

Most of them are married and move to Mexico to be reunited with their husbands.

“Coming here is about facing something unknown,” she said.

Li doesn’t know when she’ll be able to implement her ambitious plans, but she has ideas: she imagines, for example, that she could get chairs, tables and other furniture at a good price in Henan province. In the meantime, she’s selling furniture imported to Mexico by a Chinese friend on the e-commerce platform Mercado Libre.

“I’m not married, I don’t have a boyfriend, I’m alone with myself,” she said, “so I’m going to work hard and struggle.”

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