1. Introduction

In this book, migration networks to Mexico and the extension of the Chinese market to the Latin American country are considered as the result of an intersection between strategies of survival and strategies of growth. The book starts with an ethnographic vignette, an interaction with one of the Chinese women traders that were met during field research. She was, among all interviewees, the one who had the most difficult conditions in Mexico City; our short interaction deeply affected the course of the analysis, for as much as it was short, it was charged with meaning. The vignette reveals different aspects that are dealt within this research: gender inequalities, labor migration, discrimination, the intersection of gender, class and race, but also resilience, family, and belonging. It also situates the uneven positions of the research subjects, as much among each other and according to the economic and social capital that migrants possessed upon arrival in Mexico as with myself in my position as “researcher.” The ethnographic research tools are also briefly introduced here: it draws information from a migration pattern that has had little visibility among academics and policy makers: the migration of Chinese women to Mexico, particularly of women working in the popular markets of Mexico City.