Early in the twentieth century, some three hundred Chinese immigrants were massacred over the course of three days. It is considered the largest slaughter of Chinese people in the history of the Americas, but more than a century later, the facts continue to be elusive, mistaken, and repressed. This historical excavation echoes in an age of violence and xenophobia.
[Herbert] takes on the dishonesties and self-deceptions that can keep the politics of an entire country rotten all the way down ... The book is both vivid and enthusiastically researched, examining each piece of available evidence to establish what must have happened at every stage and how it was obscured, then and later. Herbert re-creates the history of Torreón and its Chinese community, how they thrived and who saw them as an economic threat. (He favors all kinds of local color; the book’s title, rather brilliantly, is the nickname of the soccer team’s home stadium.) Here and there, he’ll allow his research to slip into empathic identifications ... Or he’ll offer a passing flash of self-revelation, just enough to place himself within the society he’s describing.
... a history lesson, a personal travelogue, a journalist’s notebook, and a disquisition on the nature of violence and the meaning of community ... the author proves an engaging, earthy tour guide whose seeming digressions into both past and present serve to underpin our understanding and illuminate his analysis of events ... For U.S. readers not steeped in history lessons of the Mexican Revolution, Herbert offers multiple guideposts...The chronology in the back of the book is both helpful and revealing.
... after the buildup (and garbled metaphors), what Herbert trundles out is fairly straightforward: a dense, detailed narrative of the massacre — although not without a few flourishes ... It’s the unearthed American connection to the massacre that is Herbert’s most interesting contribution ... The great strength of Herbert’s book, written with such shame and fury, is that it is not framed as epitaph but as dispatch from a live crime scene, attentive to the silences, the still seething resentments, relinquishing nothing to history.
