442: Immigration advocate Herlinda Wong Chew, the ‘Chinese Boss Queen’

Asylum rush away from Pancho Villa’s attack on Juárez 

Wong Chew’s grandson David Chew tells JoySauce that he could only speculate, but not conclude for certain, that his grandmother favored the Mexican Revolution’s fight against the country’s government at the time. She can be found posed in postcard photographs with bandoliers crossing her chest (one of which is archived in Photographing the Mexican Revolution Commitments, Testimonies, Icons by John Mraz). In Pancho Villa : intimate recollections by people who knew him, historian Cleofas Calleros recalls Wong Chew among young traders who crossed the bridge from El Paso’s Smeltertown to the revolutionaries’ Mexican encampment to sell goods to revolutionaries in May 1911.

However, Wong Chew and her family existed in a precarious space during the Mexico Revolution. Their store provided supplies to the forces of U.S. General John J. Pershing in his expedition—which inflamed a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Mexico—to capture Pancho Villa, an instrumental rebel leader of the revolution that ousted dictator and then-President Porfirio Díaz. Compounding their position, anti-Chinese persecution permeated Mexico and characterized much of its mestizo racial nationalism. Anti-Chinese groups sloganed, “United we will eliminate the Chinese from Mexico” and a 1904 El Paso Herald entry opined, “if Chinese immigration to Mexico continues it will be necessary to run a barbed wire along our side of the Rio Grande” (a sentiment now echoed in the “build the wall” slogans of the United States’ state-sponsored xenophobia against Latino immigration). In May 1911, Mexican rebel forces and Torreón civilians murdered more than 300 Chinese men, women, and children in the Torreón massacre, and it was only in 2021 that López Obrador, then president of Mexico, apologized for the massacre.

Two pivotal connections helped Wong Chew and her family flee from what would be known as the “Third Battle of Ciudad Juárez” in 1919. The first was that—according to family lore—La Garantia was next to a cantina frequented by Villa’s scouts. One or more of them connected with the Chews and warned them about Villa’s rebel forces’ plan to attack Juárez.

The second was that Wong Chew and her husband had established a rapport with U.S. immigration officials since she often obtained crossing cards to cross the border for shopping purposes. Wong Chew requested that about 200 of her community members be allowed to cross the border to seek temporary asylum in El Paso. The officials initially balked at the size of her request. Yet, she successfully negotiated. They required her and her party to wait at the south end of the Santa Fe bridge before the first gunfire. With two children in her arms, Wong Chew and her party hurried across the international bridge as bullets crackled in the air. The Gateway Hotel in El Paso sheltered them. On June 20, 1919, the El Paso Times named her the “Queen of Chinese Refugee Boss.”

The "El Paso Times" labeled Wong Chew as the “Queen of Chinese Refugee Boss.”

Courtesy of David Chew

Immigration service

Having access to books on immigration thanks to her connection with U.S. immigration officials, Wong Chew researched a path to bypass the barriers of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. She found that merchants were permitted to enter legally into the United States, so in February 1922, she and her family immigrated to El Paso through Calexico, California, one of the few legal ports of entry, and they became legal residents—although she was likely never naturalized. In February 1923, Wong Chew and her husband opened The New China Grocery Company in El Paso. Their business expansion acquired one building in what was said to have been her move to prevent a Chinese gambling house from being established.

The New China Grocery Company in El Paso.

Courtesy of David Chew

Presence in China

While Wong Chew’s ideology regarding the Mexican Revolution might be fuzzy, David Chew is more certain about his grandmother’s Chinese politics. The Dec. 14, 1921 El Paso Times reported that then-Chinese-President Sun Yat-Sen sent Wong Chew an official appointment as the Spanish-English secretary of the Chinese Nationalist league in Juárez. She fundraised for the Nationalist Party of China from El Paso and Juárez. On Aug. 4, 1939, the El Paso Herald-Post noted that she performed war relief work in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

In her final trip to China in the late 1930s, Wong Chew was shocked to discover Mexican women, abandoned since China did not recognize their marriages to Chinese men, begging on the streets of Canton. In the words of the “El Paso Trailblazer” piece in Password, Wong Chew “gathered information on approximately seventy women in the Canton area,” sought the nearest Mexican consul, kept the women informed about health care access and legal benefits, and arranged for these women and their children to return to Mexico.

Passing and Legacy

While attempting to recuperate from an illness at age 45, Wong Chew continued her business until her death on Aug. 1, 1939 in a sanitarium in Portland, Oregon. Her legacy in immigration has branched off through her children and grandchildren, including Texas judges Linda Lee Chew, Patricia B. Chew, and David Chew. Her image also lives on in an AA+PI heroes mural in Austin, Texas. 

Herlinda Chew’s photo from an Aug. 4, 1939 "El Paso Herald-Post" obituary.

newspapers.com