A Chinese American activist reflects on racism, inequality, and the historical foundations of U.S. power, arguing that Mexico’s sovereignty and social transformation offer an alternative to the American imperial model.

This article first appeared atHeraldo USA. Meizhu Lui is a co-founder of theMexico Solidarity Project

A Chinese American activist reflects on racism, inequality, and the historical foundations of U.S. power, arguing that Mexico’s sovereignty and social transformation offer an alternative to the American imperial model.

As a Chinese family in the United States, we were shouted at by random people on the street: *“Go back to your country!”*Born in the United States, I thought I was home. When my mother spoke, I saw how her English, with a Chinese accent, made people treat her as if she were stupid. My father was running in place on a treadmill at work, while whites moved up the promotion ladder ahead of him.

Our teachers and the media proclaim that the United States is the most democratic society in the world and that it holds as a truth that all people are created equal. But my lived experience taught me something else. The reality, my father advised me, was that “you have to work twice as hard to be equal” if you have the wrong skin color.

According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 5.5 million people are of Chinese origin. When U.S. citizens believe that everyone is equal, they can be led to believe that any racial inequality is due to the natural superiority of whites. That prevents working-class whites from allying with their racialized fellow workers to obtain a fairer share of the wealth they produce for the working class. And so I became determined to dismantle racist structures; prejudices grow out of the way society is structured.

Alongside Native American, Black, Mexican, and white women, we examined the laws and policies enacted throughout U.S. history that embedded racial inequality in American society. For Chinese people, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was pivotal, making real the demand that we*“go back to our country.*” Thousands of low-wage Chinese agricultural and railroad workers were attacked, deported, and barred from returning. The brutal displacement my ancestors endured is being repeated today in the United States against migrants, most of them Mexican.

But racism goes beyond borders. In elementary school, we sang*“America the Beautiful”:*“God shed his grace on thee / And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” We breathed the myth into our small mouths that God gave the good and brotherly United States the right to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The only thing standing in the way was Mexico. In an illegal war, nearly half of Mexico was annexed by force. The United States secured its route across the continent, the Southwest’s rich natural resources, and the labor of the Mexican people who still lived on that land. Annexation**“made America great”;**without it, the United States could not have become the global hegemon.

To this day, Mexico is described as a backward nation that needs not only the United States’ civilizing influence but also its military power to eradicate the cartels that, we are told, govern Mexico. People often forget that the Mexican Constitution of 1917 is far more democratic and egalitarian than the U.S. Constitution, that Mexico gave refuge to fugitive slaves from the United States, and that the iconic American cowboy learned his trade from Mexican vaqueros. Why, even in television westerns, would cowboys say “Adiós”?

More to the point, Americans know little about the inspiring changes that have taken place in Mexico since Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the presidency in 2018. Observing the global landscape, my comrades and I saw that Mexico was an inspiration to the world for putting into practice a principle we could only dream of: “for the good of all, first the poor,” and for standing firm in the face of blatant harassment from the United States. Since then, we have agreed that defending Mexico’s sovereignty is one of the most important things U.S. activists can do to throw a wrench into the gears of the U.S. imperialist machine. That is how The Mexico Solidarity Project was born.

Meizhu Lui’s experiences as the daughter of Chinese immigrants and as a single mom led her to focus on addressing inequalities based on race, gender, and immigration status. A hospital kitchen worker, she was elected president of her AFSCME local. She coordinated the national Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, and co-authored The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide. Liberation Road, a socialist organization, has been her political home.

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