Chinese-Mexican relations in Chinatown are interesting to examine. In 1871, Hispanics were a whopping one third of the 500 mostly White mob that lynched 18 men in the Chinatown Massacre. However, Mexicans themselves were targets of mob lynching and racial violence, coming out of the backdrop of the Mexican War. Mexicans and Chinese people lived in close proximity throughout the late 1800s in Sonoratown and Chinatown a.k.a. Calle De Los Negros respectively, however it was a contested space where Mexicans outnumbered them and held on violently to thier carved out space in the growing influence of White America. In 1850, 75% of residents has Hispanic surnames and there were only 2 Chinese residents, by 1870, that was 37.7%.


An early instance in 1873 showing this contested space was when two teenage Mexican men Moreno and Barelas were heading down Main Street to a bathhouse in Sonoratown. The men came across Lee Long and another Chinese man and cried out  “Where you going John?”, to which the Chinese man replied “Go to hell you son of a bitch!” and this led to a physical altercation and later a trial where the Mexican teenagers were let off. 
John Chinaman was a common taunt and steryotype that separated Chinese Americans from White American identity. The instance shows how Mexican immigrants felt posessive of thier space and intolerant of thier close neighbors despite shared struggles. 

Only 40 years later, through industrial revolution and modernization, in 1910, Chinese residents where helping Mexican Americans go to the border, relying on knowledge from smuggling during the Chinese Exclusion Act. Journalists still focused on dividing the two groups. Afraid of violence from these bands of Mexicans that came "by the hundreds" to squat on the streets and in the homes of Chinatown, L.A police hastily searched as many as they could.

"That thousands of Mexicans would find shelter in Chinatown with the assistance of Chinatown residents [...] seemed to baffle journalists. The Herald reported that Chinese merchants had “banded together,” clearing “basements and buildings formerly occupied by the [O]rientals to make room for the bands of armed Mexicans.”6 Such evidence of transracial intermingling—and the possibility that Mexicans and Chinese could potentially unite surreptitiously and quite rapidly for political action—destabilized the ideological association of race with place, and more specifically, the spatial imaginaries that often characterized the urban spaces that came to be known as Chinatown and Sonoratown" (Quintina).

Although the plaza was always a shared space throughout the late 1800s into the early 1900s, White reporting often focused on one or the other and not on the interaction between the two groups. However, the reality was that both shared a lot of similarities. 

"Both spent time in the plaza, they attended schools together, and often frequented the same shops and restaurants. Despite their shared spaces and close proximity, residents themselves also created spatial boundaries along racial lines in their settlement patterns and everyday interactions. In the plaza itself during the 1910s, for example, Mexican men often sat in the benches on the western side discussing the Mexican Revolution, while Chinese men gathered around “the Wall” to read news that was posted on the bulletin board" (Quintina).

Cited: 

Quintana, Isabella Seong-Leong. “National Borders, Neighborhood Boundaries: Gender, Space and Border Formation in Chinese and Mexican Los Angeles, 1871-1938.” Deep Blue Repositories, 1 Jan. 1970, https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/78955.

Zesch, Scott. The Chinatown War Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871. Oxford University Press, 2012.