Presidential postdoctoral scholar receives 2025 Immigration and Ethnic History Society award for outstanding dissertation

Jian Gao, a presidential postdoctoral scholar of history at the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, has received the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society for his dissertation, “Crossing Borders, Creating Networks: Chinese Mexicans’ Journeys of Longing and Belonging, 1900s–1950s.”

The dissertation, which began as his undergraduate honors thesis, reconstructs the transnational lives of Chinese migrants who lived between Mexico, China and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. It combines Gao’s interest in Latin American culture and history with a desire to address the lack of Asian American history highlighted during his education.

Using a rare archive of transnational family letters, the project draws attention to migrant emotions by revealing emotional vulnerabilities, family love, intimate concerns and strategies for household management.

“The project challenges a prevailing stereotype that characterizes Chinese people, especially men, as stern and emotionless,” Gao said, “revealing instead a rich emotional world marked by longing, affection, and care.”

This work is the foundation for his book manuscript, “Journeys of Longing and Belonging: Migration and the Modern Chinese Mexico,” which is currently under review at the University of North Carolina Press, under the David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History.

We spoke with Gao to learn more about his project.

Note: responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.

Question: Your dissertation’s abstract states that it challenges the use of accounts produced by anti-Chinese activists and government officials. How did you go about finding sources to refute these ideas?

Answer: The existing historiography heavily relies on accounts produced by anti-Chinese activists and government officials, which tend to dehumanize Chinese migrants and cast them primarily as passive victims. These sources provide only fragmented and distorted representations of Chinese lives, and I have always wanted to find accounts that can humanize the Chinese Mexicans and their families. I wanted to center their voices and foreground their emotions as they navigate through various challenges associated with border crossings, racial violence, family separations and rising geopolitical tensions on the global stage. To do so, I networked with many stamp collectors, most of whom had envelopes but not the letters. Eventually, I found one who had the letters, and together we uncovered hundreds of family correspondences exchanged between China, Mexico and the United States. These letters detailed the personal lives, struggles and strategies of Chinese families as they confronted racial discrimination, exclusionary policies and geopolitical uncertainty.

Q: Why has this narrative been absent from research for so long?

A: The voices of these migrants have long been omitted due to the destruction of their records during anti-Chinese violence, institutional neglect and linguistic barriers that rendered Chinese-language sources inaccessible to many historians. Many scholars working on this topic are not fluent in Chinese, an added obstacle for accessing and interpreting sources written by migrants themselves. Many crucial documents, such as family letters, are not preserved in state-run archives and instead reside in private collections, which require patient, often serendipitous social networking to locate. The process of traveling to these countries, negotiating access to private holdings and paying for scanned copies can be prohibitively expensive and require constant grant writing and sustained financial support, which isn’t always possible for researchers.

Q: What are your hopes for the future of this project?

A: I hope it encourages others to think expansively about migrant histories — especially those that cross national borders and defy conventional archival constraints. Following migrants’ letters, networks and journeys allows us to write fuller, more inclusive accounts of the past. At the same time, these histories have important implications for the present day. As migration and border control remain pressing global issues, this project offers historical perspective on how ordinary people have long navigated — and resisted — the constraints of exclusionary policies and racial hierarchies. It reminds us of the deep emotional and familial tolls of racial violence and forced separation, as well as the resilience and creativity of migrant communities who persist in building lives across borders.