How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts 9780520957190

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HOW RACE IS MADE IN AMERICA

american crossroads Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh

HOW RACE IS MADE IN AMERICA immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts

Natalia Molina

university of california press Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California An early version of Chapter 1 appeared as “The Power of Racial Scripts: What the History of Mexican Immigration to the United States Teaches Us about Relational Notions of Race,” Latino Studies 8, no. 2 (2010): 156–75. An early version of chapter 2 appeared as “ ‘In a Race All Their Own’: The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship,” Pacific Historical Review, May 2010, 167–201. An early version of chapter 4 appeared as “Constructing Mexicans as Deportable Immigrants: Race, Disease, and the Meaning of ‘Public Charge,’ ” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 17, no. 6 (2010): 641–66. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Molina, Natalia. How race is made in America : immigration, citizenship, and the historical power of racial scripts / Natalia Molina. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-28007-6 (cloth : acid-free paper)— ISBN 978-0-520-28008-3 (paper acid-free paper) 1. Mexican Americans—Social conditions—20th century. 2. Mexican Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century. 3. Immigrants—United States—History—20th century. 4. Citizenship—United States—History—20th century. 5. Race discrimination—United States—History—20th century. 6. United States—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. 7. United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy—History— 20th century. 8. Deportation—United States—History—20th century. 9. United States—Race relations—History—20th century. I. Title. E184.M5M587 2013 305.868'72073—dc23 2013018468 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro 100, a 100 post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

For Ian

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction

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part one. Immigration Regimes I: Mapping Race and Citizenship 1. Placing Mexican Immigration within the Larger Landscape of Race Relations in the United States

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2. “What Is a White Man?”: The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship

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3. Birthright Citizenship beyond Black and White

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part two. Immigration Regimes II: Making Mexicans Deportable 4. Mexicans Suspended in a State of Deportability: Medical Racialization and Immigration Policy in the 1940s 5. Deportations in the Urban Landscape Epilogue: Making Race in the Twenty-first Century Notes Bibliography Index

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times / 37 2. Mexican workers board buses for deportation / 124 3. Mexican workers arrested in rail yard / 133 4. The Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris and the Rev. Susan Frederick Gray / 151

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AC KNOW LEDGMENTS

George Lipsitz once told me that scholarship is done in solitude but not in isolation. I have found this observation to be as insightful as it is concise. In preparing these acknowledgments, I felt both overwhelmed and humbled recalling how many people generously shared their time and expertise with me. First, I want to thank American Crossroads series editors George Lipsitz and George Sánchez for their tremendous support. As when I worked with them on my first book, I am very grateful for their ability to suggest new ways for me to think about various aspects of my work. They drew my attention to deeper possibilities in sections of text that I had thought were ready for publication, showing me where more layers could be exposed and additional interpretations teased out. George Lipsitz helped at two critical stages: the first occurred when, after taking the first draft as far as I could, I asked for his help. He provided substantive feedback (and a long reading list) that strengthened the manuscript. After I completed another round of revisions, he read the manuscript again, and I also shared my new draft with George Sánchez. They jointly suggested further revisions in key sections. This book is all the better for their insight, suggestions, and support. I also acknowledge with gratitude the many invitations I received to present parts of the in-progress manuscript, including those from the Newberry Library Seminar in Borderlands and Latino Studies; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago; the Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Bologna; the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Denver; the Department xi

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of Chicano-Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine; the Latino/a Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the 2010 University of California International Migration Conference, hosted by UC San Diego; the American Studies Department at the University of Notre Dame; Université Paris Diderot; the Latino Studies Department at Williams College; the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers; and the conference Transnationalism and International Migration in Historical Perspective at the University of California, Los Angeles. Through these presentations, I was able to test ideas, field thought-provoking questions, and receive valuable feedback—all of which helped me move past pressure points in the manuscript and see the work from different perspectives. I also appreciate the responses I received at scholarly conferences, including those sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, the Western Historical Association, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. As grateful as I am for the valuable feedback provided at formal talks, I would have had nothing to present had it not been for the help of my generous friends and colleagues who listened, brainstormed, encouraged, and commented on the kind of early draft that is shared only with trusted individuals. In Bird by Bird, writer Anne Lamott recalls E. L. Doctorow’s observation, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Conversations with friends and colleagues via email, at conferences and invited talks, and over shared meals and coffee served to light my way. Thank you to Meg Wesling, Nancy Postero, Pablo Mitchell, Jose Alamillo, Laura Briggs, Scott Kurashige, David Serlin, Angela Garcia, John McKiernan-Gonzalez, Alex Stern, Gerry Cadava, John Alba Cutler, Anne Fabian, Mia Bay, Roger Waldinger, Nancy Green, Jason Ruiz, Mérida Rúa, Ondine Chavoya, Ana Rosas, and Faye Caronan. I would especially like to thank Ernesto Chávez, who, during an informal conversation at a conference, suggested the term racial scripts to name what I was describing. I am indebted as well to Vicki Ruiz, Miroslava Chávez-Garcia, and Kelly Lytle-Hernandez. They are not only remarkable historians but are also noble colleagues who share their knowledge without hesitation and with deep generosity. Last, I would like to thank the members of the best running group, In Motion Fit. At times I thought of calling this book What I Talk about When I Run to acknowledge how often I shared my ideas and progress with my Saturday morning running

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buddies. Those conversations forced me to make my arguments clear and compelling to a nonacademic audience. Throughout the writing process, as soon as I had something on paper, I reached out for feedback. So many people took time out of their own busy schedules to comment on chapters, including Matt Jacobson, George Lipsitz, Pablo Mitchell, Maria Montoya, John Nieto-Phillips, David Gutiérrez, Susan Chen, and Stevie Ruiz. Luis Alvarez read the entire manuscript and offered insightful comments just as I was about to plunge into major revisions. I also benefited greatly from the University of California Press’s editorial board review and from comments provided by two outside readers, who later identified themselves. Thus I am able to thank David Roediger and Monica Perales here by name. David Roediger’s review gave me new perspectives that revealed meanings and possibilities that I might otherwise have missed. I feel fortunate that Monica Perales, whose writing I’ve long admired, agreed to read the manuscript; her observations and suggestions strengthened the overall narrative. I’d also like to thank Ramón Gutiérrez for his keen editorial eye, his capacious knowledge of the field, and his unstinting generosity. He read every chapter, sometimes more than once, and though he is one of the busiest people I know, he treated my work as a matter of the utmost importance. Last, I thank Ian Fusselman and Katherine Mooney for their sharp editorial skills and gift for bringing clarity to complex ideas. They helped make the narrative more broadly accessible. This book was a labor of love. It took six years of research, the bulk of which I did at the National Archives in Washington, 2,694 miles from my home and family. The research would not have been possible without the help I received from archivists Bill Creech, Suzanne Harris, Rod Ross, and Marian Smith. I relied not only on their expertise, experience, and knowledge, but also on their kindness. They screened and pulled records for me in anticipation of my visits. Back at UCSD, Stevie Ruiz and Michael Aguirre spent many hours in the bowels of Geisel Library, searching through the thirty-reel microfilmed index of Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice records to help me prepare for each of my visits to the National Archives. I thank them both, along with my research assistants over the years, Sal Zarate, Rob Hernandez, Liz Bartz, and David James Gonzalez, who helped with many details, from locating an obscure newspaper article to photocopying documents.

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Searching for useful materials in the archived records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and making the most of the records requires a great deal of follow-up research. I often relied on the talented and extremely knowledgeable librarians at UCSD for help in my ongoing search for information. I would like to thank Elliot Kanter, Kelly Smith, Duff y Tweedy, Annelise Sklar, Gayatri Singh, Rebecca Hyde, and the interlibrary loan staff, all of whom provided generous assistance. Though not a librarian, my lawyer-husband Ian Fusselman helped me with legal research. I am deeply thankful for the financial support I received from various programs and institutions. I could not have done the extensive archival research the book required without the generous support of UCSD’s Academic Senate, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, and Latino Studies Research Initiative, and the Faculty-in-Residence program at the University of Bologna, Italy. I also had the opportunity to present a series of lectures as an American Studies Association delegate to the Japanese Association for American Studies conference in Tokyo, sponsored by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. I feel fortunate to teach at UCSD, where I have so many interlocutors among my students and colleagues. UCSD’s History Department is a good place to call home. Under the steady watch of Chair Pamela Radcliff, the department encourages intellectual dialogue and collegial support that made the completion of the book possible. I have the good fortune not only to be in public conversation with David Gutiérrez, Danny Widener, and Luis Alvarez in articles and books but also to have them as colleagues whom I could call on to test out ideas as they were simmering. I’d also like to thank my colleagues Cathy Gere, Rebecca Plant, and Nayan Shah for their insightful feedback and for inviting me to share my work in their seminars. I owe a special thank you to the perspicacious dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities, Seth Lerer, for creating the position of associate dean of faculty equity, which supports the important work our division does in the area of diversity. I now hold this position, which allows me to bridge my academic and administrative vocations. I am very pleased to have published both of my books with UC Press, particularly as part of the American Crossroads series, whose goal is to expand and deepen our understanding of race and ethnicity in the United States, today and in the past. My editor, Niels Hooper, has been a sort of

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publishing house sherpa, guiding me through the process of publication with expertise and kindness. His assistant, Kim Hogeland, answered every question I had, consistently demonstrating both patience and mastery. The production team at UC Press, Francisco Reinking, Pamela Polk, and indexer Victoria Baker, along with the publishing team at Westchester Publishing Services, headed by Michael Bohrer-Clancy, turned my manuscript into a book by executing dozens of steps that required the ability to simultaneously keep track of small details and the big picture. Thank you. I was raised by storytellers and I am grateful to them all. My parents, Mary Molina and Héctor Molina, express their unconditional love and belief in me every chance they get. My brother, David, is my true north. My Tia Vicky is more like a trusted friend than an aunt, and her daughter, Karla, is the sister I never had. Las familias Molina, Tavares, Perea, Pack, Diaz, Porras, Miranda, and Taylor form the touchstone of what I call home. My friends the Montez, Hilsdale-Sachs, and Wesling-Nichols families are the family that I made. In some cases, we share bonds that have held firm for decades. Their support both sustains and inspires me. Last, Ian Fusselman and Michael Molina respect and support my need to retreat, at times, into a different realm in order to do the research and writing that I hope will contribute to a more just world. When I emerge, they are always there for me, vibrant reminders of how fortunate I am. They are my everything.

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Introduction

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican immigration from 1924 to 1965 in order to understand how race and citizenship were constructed during this crucial period. I demonstrate that what was unique about these years was the emergence of what I call an immigration regime that remade racial categories that still shape the way we think about race, and specifically Mexicans. Through an examination of a diverse array of legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to the immigration regime, I offer historical answers as to why Mexican Americans are still not deemed fully American and are largely equated with illegality. The period between 1924 and 1965 is fascinating for anyone interested in the evolution of racial identities in the United States. From 1917 to 1924 a series of legislative acts reduced immigration to the United States by 85 percent. The year 1924 marks the passage of the capstone immigration act, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which limited the number of immigrants permitted entry from specific countries, thereby drastically reducing the entry of southern and eastern Europeans (mostly Jews), who were deemed inferior “breeds.” The Act also prohibited groups deemed ineligible for naturalization, specifically Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians, who were already facing severe immigration restrictions. The 1924 Immigration Act was the nation’s first comprehensive restriction law. It remapped the nation in terms of new ethnic and racial identities, specifically transforming denigrated European ethnics into “whites” while simultaneously criminalizing Mexicans as illegal workers who crossed into the United States without authorization. In the 1

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four decades that followed, immigration laws fundamentally shaped the parameters of race in America. I end my study in 1965, which ushered in a new immigration regime with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the quotas established by the 1924 Act. As someone who studies the history of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, I have always been fascinated by the fact that the policies and laws that circumscribed or altogether stopped immigrant labor from other nations placed no limits on immigration from Mexico. Anglo-Protestant elites in the Southwest needed low-wage Mexican laborers for a variety of jobs, including as factory workers to fuel mass production and as hired hands to toil in the rapidly expanding agricultural fields propelled by the growth of water projects. The onset of World War II brought a renewed need for even more laborers. Americans felt less politically threatened by Mexicans than by other groups because Mexicans were considered a transitory labor force. In addition, for the most part, Mexicans did not try to become citizens. Mexican labor was also controllable. Mexicans toiled in the lowest sectors of a segmented labor market with limited rights for little pay; if they did protest, unionize, or even try to leave a job, violence and terror were common tactics used against them by employers, law enforcement, and the border patrol. Significantly Mexicans were legally classified as white, and thus they could become U.S. citizens. Yet they were often not accepted as socially or culturally white. They attended segregated schools, lived in marginalized neighborhoods, and labored in dead-end jobs in a market stratified by race, all of which significantly affected their ability to accumulate resources and live a life without social or cultural restrictions. Even today, when I ask my students how many “races” there are, many struggle over how to categorize Mexicans. Are they a nationality, an ethnicity, a separate race, white? In this book, I demonstrate how the period 1924–65 ushered in a new regime of “race making” and shaped the ways we think about Mexicans today. Thus this book also provides a way for scholars to discursively map the elusive historical construction of race and account for its material consequences in policy, law, and everyday life.

relational notions of race The 1924–65 period was an era of race making for many groups, not just Mexicans. During this time we saw, for example, the Irish “become” white

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and the “heathen” Asians transformed into model minorities. Clearly many dynamic elements led to these transformations, and often the very same factors impacted separate racialized groups in different ways. In order to give appropriate weight to the multidimensional forces that helped to define racial groups, my approach to studying what Mexican meant at any particular moment is fundamentally premised on a theoretical understanding of race as socially constructed in relational ways, that is, in correspondence to other groups. Here I turn to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s formative book, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. The authors describe race as “always and necessarily a social and historical process” and refer to different moments of racial formation as “racial projects,” which they see as comprising both social structure and cultural representation. I think of social structure as being the “scaffolding” of race—the laws, customs, and policies—while cultural representation is more about the way we see and experience race, as well as its discursive element. Cultural representations may or may not rely on stereotypes, but even when they do not, they often still rely on certain assumptions, conscious or unconscious, some of which have become so commonplace that we think of them simply as common sense. An understanding of racial formation that leads to different racial projects is fundamental to understanding race as a relational concept because it allows us to analyze different racial projects happening at the same time or across time and shows why we need to examine how they are connected. By relational, I do not mean comparative. A comparative treatment of race compares and contrasts groups, treating them as independent of one another; a relational treatment recognizes that race is a mutually constitutive process and thus attends to how, when, where, and to what extent groups intersect. It recognizes that there are limits to examining racialized groups in isolation. While scholars agree that relational notions of race provide unique insight into racial formation, most studies of immigration, assimilation, citizenship, and racial identity focus on the experience of single national groups. Though this literature usually does not take a relational approach, or even a comparative one, it has yielded important insights resulting from an in-depth analysis of single groups, and this book builds upon that rich literature. For example, Chicana/o history was instrumental in challenging well-established immigration paradigms that embraced the dominant narrative of the United States as a nation that welcomed all immigrants and treated them equally. By challenging paradigms that viewed assimilation as a uniform, unidirectional

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process whereby foreign nationals became ethnic Americans, these works exposed the many structural and social barriers to political, economic, and cultural integration. Whiteness studies and critical legal studies examined the structural forces (e.g., Supreme Court decisions and immigration and naturalization laws) that script race. They analyzed white working-class racism, which ultimately allowed some national groups to assimilate into whiteness while others were excluded. Together these studies highlighted how race was socially constructed and why different racialized groups occupied various positions in the U.S. racial hierarchy. Still, when it comes to understanding racial formation, I believe much is to be gained by studying immigration without the restraints of a specific racial focus. By writing immigration history in a traditional manner, we tend to miss the extent to which immigration debates took into consideration the presence or absence of multiple immigrant groups and of African Americans. In other words, immigration debates were (and still are) about comparisons. When people in the early twentieth century discussed immigration, they perceived races in hierarchies, and they made their decisions about which groups to admit and which to restrict based on their past knowledge and experience with immigrants from various lands. The study of immigration thus begs for a relational approach. Starting in the 1990s, two historical monographs stood out as moving away from a focus on one particular group to better understand how race is made. In Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy, Tomás Almaguer examined the ethnically diverse history of California and argued that racial formation in California diverged from the prevailing black-white model of race. He examined the histories of Mexicans, Asians, and Native Americans and how they came to occupy different positions in what he terms a racial hierarchy. Neil Foley’s The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, based in central Texas, similarly examined Mexicans’ shifting position in a changing economic and labor system as they competed with poor whites and blacks jockeying for a better position in the evolving social order. Both books made clear that an understanding of what Mexican meant required appreciating the larger racial landscape surrounding them, which was a first step in paving the way for demonstrating that race is a relational concept, as I do in this book. More recently scholars across various fields have produced notable works that examine more than one racialized group, studying the history of rela-

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tionships between groups. These works have different goals. Some are interested in showing how different racialized groups formed alliances, acknowledging a shared history that would bring them together and that they could use as a basis to build a more just society. Others demonstrate that it was not only shared politics but also shared cultural spaces and practices that brought different racialized groups together, cultivating relationships that offered alternatives to the dominant culture and could lead to shared political agendas. Still other works have demonstrated the limits of those bonds. While racialized groups may each experience racism and discrimination, these experiences are varied and can pivot along lines of citizenship, class, language, gender, and sexuality, exposing the limits of such bonds. Moreover, at times, racialized groups even competed with one another in attempts to move up the racial hierarchy, even if it meant doing so at the other’s expense. These comparative histories have advanced our understanding of a larger racialized landscape, and this book builds on these insightful histories of conflict or cooperation by showing that shared histories not only served to racialize each group, but in the process, the racialization of one group affected the other, demonstrating that making race is a relational process. How Race Is Made in America shows how the racial construction of one group affects others, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes at a much later date. Take, for example, a typical Chicana/o (Mexican American) history survey course. Students are walked through major time line events, such as when, at the end of the U.S. War with Mexico in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo legally classified Mexicans as white and extended eligibility for U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living in lands ceded to the United States. This provision stood unchallenged until 1897, when a man named Ricardo Rodríguez went before the Texas federal district court to have his application for citizenship approved. At issue was whether Rodríguez was white or black, the criterion at the time for citizenship. The case, In re Ricardo Rodríguez, was a major civil rights victory, for had Rodríguez been ruled nonwhite and hence ineligible for citizenship, it would have stripped the voting rights of naturalized Mexicans, which included not just recent immigrants but many Tejano Mexicans. Mexicans’ racial and citizenship status was once again at issue in 1930, when they were scapegoated for U.S. financial woes in the Depression; in response, the U.S. census decided to list them as a separate race, “Mexican.” I agree with scholars who claim that the years 1848–1930 were pivotal in shaping the meaning of Mexicans legally, socially, and culturally. But I also

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argue that we need to understand how such meanings were formed in relation to other devalued and marginalized groups: blacks, Native Americans, and Asians, as well as whites. Thus in chapter 2, I put these events into conversation with Asian American history. I demonstrate how the moments of race making just described were shaped by the social, cultural, and political economy of the day and were also influenced by what was going on with other groups. I look at how Mexicans were racialized in relation to Asians; although efforts to deny Mexicans U.S. citizenship failed in 1897, these efforts were renewed after two Supreme Court decisions, Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), declared Japanese and Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship because they were not considered white, thus prompting nativists to hope that Mexicans might also be excluded from this narrowing definition. By looking at how ethnic and national groups entered the racial lexicon of the United States during the same period, one begins to see the relationships in racial thinking and the interconnectedness of specific racial categories. It is only by seeing race relationally that we better understand why and how Mexicans were racialized as white in 1897 but as a separate race in 1930. Together these histories highlight the complex history of how race was made in U.S. history. Before I move on, let me briefly define the use of the term that I will use throughout this book, racialized group. I use that term to emphasize the constructed nature of that category. Other scholars distinguish between race, ethnicity, and nationality, but as we can see in the Mexican example, groups could slip in and out of these categories, in one time period declared legally white yet in another viewed as a race of their own. The term racialized group underscores this contested and active process.

racial scripts A central goal of this book is to get us to see the connections among racialized groups. As such, I coin the term racial scripts to highlight the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another, even when they do not directly cross paths. Racial scripts function in three main ways. First, they highlight how racialized groups are acted upon by a range of principals, from institutional actors to ordinary citizens. Second, all groups are racialized, but we often do not recognize this shared process, and thus we fail to see their common connections. A racial

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scripts approach pulls the lens back so that we can see different racial projects operating at the same time, affecting different groups simultaneously. Thus studying racial scripts will help us more readily see connections between groups. Third, racialized groups put forth their own scripts, counterscripts that offer alternatives or directly challenge dominant racial scripts. Let me expand on each of these points. Racialized groups are linked across time and space: once attitudes, practices, customs, policies, and laws are directed at one group, they are more readily available and hence easily applied to other groups. For example, in chapter 3, I demonstrate that birthright citizenship was far from an uncontested right for Mexicans in the 1930s. Proposed legislation to limit birthright citizenship during the Depression was not only fueled by economic arguments to stem the flow of Mexican immigration (evident in the repatriation and deportation of nearly one million Mexicans) but also a longer struggle over birthright citizenship for African Americans and Chinese immigrants, dating back to the Dred Scott case (1857) and United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). Though the Scott ruling denied full birthright privileges to free blacks born in the United States, the Wong Kim Ark decision was based on a literal reading of the Fourteenth Amendment to grant birthright citizenship to Asians. Competing racial scripts from the past made birthright citizenship for Mexicans following the 1924 Immigration Act anything but certain. This powerful example demonstrates how racial scripts endure, both as cultural representations and as built into institutional structures and practices. I want to emphasize that I am not just trying to show the roots or the development of contemporary debates or the background to what is “really” important. Instead I want to show that the connections between the scripts in the arc of history demonstrate that no matter how discredited racial scripts become in any era, they are always available for use in new rounds of dehumanization and demonization in the next generation or even the next debate. The historian George Lipsitz calls this “the long fetch of history”; each time a racial script is invoked, it has a hidden power because, whether consciously or not, we tend to appreciate the force of past arguments. If we think of race in comparative and relational terms, we also see how these scripts draw on the experiences of other groups. Despite the passage of time and changes in social and cultural norms, what once served to marginalize and disenfranchise one group can be revived and recycled to marginalize other groups. Again the point is to show not just the deep roots of this debate but

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how the concepts used have long served to maintain a racial hierarchy that goes beyond just one racialized group. Studying racial scripts helps us see connections between groups and the corresponding impact of external forces. As Omi and Winant carefully explain, the racialization process involves both social structures and cultural representations, which they call a racial project. Yet when the average person thinks about race, he or she usually thinks only about the cultural representations, not the structures that help give rise to them. Take the word ghetto, for example. It conjures the image of a neighborhood that is dirty, dangerous, and in disrepair. Some might even blame the residents for being irresponsible and unproductive, even welfare cheats. The residents are often presumed to be African American. These dominant cultural representations circulate in movies, television shows, music lyrics, and the media. The structural reasons for the rise of ghettos are far less conspicuous. When we think of ghettos, we are not generally prone to consider the redistribution of federal government investment from the city core to the suburbs in the 1930s and the redlining of inner-city neighborhoods in subsequent decades, which prevented residents and business owners from receiving loans, hence denying them the ability to accrue wealth through property appreciation. Nor are we likely to point to unequal tax bases that favored the suburbs. The result is that we blame and stigmatize residents in these neighborhoods rather than seeking ways to improve the areas or even making sure that we do not continue to reproduce the same systems of inequality. Furthermore, because these structural forces are obscured, we fail to see how the same forces or processes can serve to racialize distinct groups. Again, let’s look at ghettos. The same forces that help produce ghettos also give rise to barrios, historically associated with Latinos. The ideas and images associated with ghettos are readily transferred to other racialized groups, in this case Latinos, keeping our eye on the racial representations rather than the structural or historical conditions that produced them. This is, in part, why, despite their commonalities, the residents of ghettos and barrios do not necessarily see an affinity with one another and at times display hostility, even violence, toward one another. Here is where a study of racial scripts can be helpful because they reveal the connections between racial projects. When we pull the lens back, we can see different racial projects occurring across racialized groups, thereby linking them, which helps us more readily see how racial categories are a social

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construction. By seeing these processes as scripts that can occur over and over, we expand our focus from just the representations to include the structural conditions that produced them. By seeing racial projects as connected, the groups themselves are more likely to see the similarities between them, which could lead to alliances. Of course, these scripts are not automatically uprooted from one situation to the next or simply transferred from one group to another. We must always take into consideration the conditions under which racial scripts emerge—the social structure, the material conditions, and the historical context—and bear in mind that there is not a uniform experience of racialization, which varies by national origins, immigrant status, skin color, language acquisition, and perception of foreignness, for example. Groups of color tend to primarily identify themselves in terms of their own unique culture and history instead of recognizing what they often have in common with other groups of color: class background. Historians have produced volumes trying to explain why the labor movement did not succeed in the United States, a developed, industrial capitalist country. The lack of a strong class consciousness in the United States more generally dates back to the early twentieth century, when the labor movement failed to gain much traction. Historically, racial difference has been one key division among the ranks of the working class. David Roediger and Eric Lott were among the first scholars to address how poor whites often embraced their white identity, thereby separating themselves from potential black allies by prioritizing a racial over a class identity. Understanding these racial divisions is key to understanding how a language of class failed to succeed in the United States. Without a focus on labor and class, we fail to see the similar ways in which racial projects and scripts repeat over and over again, racializing different bodies in different ways, which ultimately makes them vulnerable workers and in some cases deprives them of citizenship. Thus we fail to see how power uses differential racism to produce a divide-and-conquer strategy that makes groups less likely to seek alliances in the workplace or other spaces. Other landmark texts in U.S. history and American studies explore the contradictions between the tenets of U.S. democracy and capitalism’s need for labor. The historian Gary Gerstle, for example, argues that immigration restriction often had more to do with supporting the need for labor than with regulation for other reasons. It is precisely this need for labor that undercuts any potential for a homogeneous nation, argues historian David W. Noble, adding further that bounded nationalism is undercut by an unbounded

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need for international markets. The literary scholar Lisa Lowe locates this contradiction between capital and democracy in the figure of the citizen. In the abstract, all citizens are created equal; they live under equal conditions and have access to the same rights. But capitalism’s need for an exploitable workforce invariably leads to the need to make distinctions among workers, such as who can immigrate with their family, for what length of time they may stay, and whether they are allowed to become citizens: all ways in which immigration laws work in tandem with capitalist needs. As such, unlike traditional Marxist and liberal thinkers who argue that modern systems produce common oppressions, Cedric Robinson in his now classic text, Black Marxism, argues that, in fact, capitalism needs race and gender to create endless new forms of seemingly natural divisions that allow exploitation to take place. It is exactly this process that David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch explore in their study of the management of labor, spanning from the period of slavery to today. They reveal how labor management practices made racialized groups more exploitable by pitting them against one another and how these strategies contributed to a general racial knowledge of the groups. I argue that it is these distinctions, which immigration laws and practices help create, that make the workforce more exploitable. These scholars and I demonstrate the tensions between the nation’s need for cultural and political homogeneity, on the one hand, and the need to create an exploitable workforce, divided by race, class, and gender, on the other, thus making it more difficult for groups to see and appreciate their commonalities. Racialized groups put forth their own scripts and counterscripts. Just as racial scripts have a seeming persuasiveness, resistance too has a long fetch. In wellencoded egalitarian counterscripts, we can see that the process of racialization can be more important than the identity of who is being racialized, therefore enabling seemingly unlikely antiracist alliances to form based on similar, but not identical, experiences of racialization when groups recognize the similarity of their stories in the collective experiences of others. Thus counterscripts do not necessarily have to function at the level of high-profile actions, such as protests or community organizing, but can be encompassed in daily expressions of compassion and solidarity. Bringing forth histories of oppressed groups voicing their own narratives in ways that speak truth to power is a central tenet and goal of scholars of racialized communities, and this notion of counterscripts builds on that rich literature. Whether we are talking about slaves who stole food from their

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masters’ kitchens to survive, interned Japanese who refused to take loyalty oaths to the United States, or poor Mexican and Filipino farm workers who went on strike to try to earn a living a wage, they all resisted hegemonic power structures, often “turning hegemony on its head.” What a theory of counterscripts brings to the conversation is an entreaty to see how these practices of resistance, claims for dignity, and downright refusal to take it anymore cut across a range of communities of color, thus once again showing us how they are linked.

sites of inquiry In this book I argue that if we are to understand why we think about race and citizenship as we do, we must thoroughly examine immigration laws and practices because they structure and lend meaning to these concepts. Immigration laws are perhaps the most powerful and effective means of constructing and reordering the social order in the United States. They dictate who can immigrate and when, in what numbers, which social categories are most important to consider when prioritizing who may immigrate (e.g., family units), and more. Further, immigration laws give rise to subjective immigration practices. Stereotypes and misconceptions about race, skin color, religion, class, and sexuality can determine who is interrogated at the border and who is let in with an approving nod. Moreover immigration laws can reproduce and reinforce preexisting U.S. racial hierarchies. For example, as the historian Tom Guglielmo has shown, some groups are not eligible to be naturalized, while others are automatically “white on arrival.” Immigration laws work in tandem with other laws outside of the domain of immigration to further cement immigrants’ place in the national social order once they have settled in the United States. Laws such as those that dictate who is eligible to be naturalized continue to determine who has access to citizenship, both juridical and social, even after immigrants are established in the country. Thus we must fully analyze the role of government and government actors if we want to completely understand how these various social orders came to be. I also look at how alive immigration laws were. Bills did not simply pass quietly through the legislature and people did not simply live according to their dictum once they were enacted. Instead immigrants contested them, nation-states challenged them, politicians clashed over them, and low-level

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bureaucrats called their validity into question. As I show in chapters 1 and 2, even when they did not pass, immigration laws shaped daily practices, such as how people thought about and acted toward immigrants, and still effectively impacted how and where immigrants fit into the nation. As such, in order to fully understand racial formation, it is very important to know more about the legal, political, legislative, and cultural terrain during the period’s immigration regime. Therefore I turn to the sources that help us see how the immigration regime developed and, just as important, how people responded to it. These sources expose the development of the immigration regime stepby-step and decision-by-decision, from the local to the national level. Many changes in policy first emerged regionally, introduced by parties with stakes in these issues, and were then formalized into law or policy at the federal level. At other times, laws passed at the federal level but were implemented quite unevenly at the local level because of regional differences, such as labor needs, varying demographics, localized understandings of race, and proximity to the U.S.–Mexican border. Thus to look just at major immigration landmarks or events only begins to scratch the surface of how the immigration regime shaped U.S. society and, conversely, how U.S. society shaped the immigration regime. My analysis is based on exhaustive research of key archives of U.S. immigration. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) records located at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. are important sources for this project. A vast collection, the index alone comprises thirty microfilm reels. I scoured the index in order to locate watershed immigration policies and practices that shaped how we valued Mexicans as an immigrant group, especially in comparison to others. This archive is an invaluable resource for a project centered on how relational racialization is key to racial formation because it does not neatly separate immigrants by national origin. Instead it is loosely arranged regionally and chronologically, when it is orga nized at all. Thus while looking for records on Mexicans, one can see the full scope of INS activities, as well as the concerns of the general public and local and state governments evidenced in correspondence to and from the INS. The overwhelming sense one gets from those who sent letters, whether bureaucrats, citizens, lawmakers, agribusiness leaders, professors, or scientists, was that they fell back on prior knowledge, experiences, and historical narratives with other groups to define Mexicans racially. In short, their letters essentially reflect racial scripts on a micro level. Depending on the time period,

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region, and sociopolitical and economic context, Mexicans might be deemed white, nonwhite, black, or Indian, thus demonstrating the social construction of race. The INS archives are also invaluable in helping us see that Mexicans were far from passive objects of racialization. The archives contain the letters, depositions, and petitions of immigrants that, in effect, allow us to hear their voices. They also contain correspondence with the Mexican government that demonstrates how the Mexican government also influenced policy around Mexicans in the United States, helping to situate U.S. immigration policy within a globalist framework. Thus these archives are key in showing how racial formation happens through structural forces, such as immigration laws and INS policies, but also through immigrants’ lived experiences in their work, neighborhoods, schools, and organizations. In addition to the vast INS records in Washington, I also conducted research at regional branches of the INS to gain a better sense of how immigration issues played out locally, especially in cases where an issue was not reflected in the D.C. archives or I knew I could delve deeper. I also mined congressional papers, hearings, and the Congressional Record, the diary of the proceedings and debates of the U.S. Congress, in order to understand the rationale undergirding both the passage and the failure of immigration laws. In no way was the immigration regime a monolithic system. Just as lawmakers, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and judges within the system contested policies and practices, Mexican immigrants readily contested the system they entered. They turned to their own culture, community, history, and national narratives as sources of empowerment and resistance and put forth their own counterscripts. To understand how Mexican immigrants themselves understood these issues, I conducted research in archives containing immigrant rights leaders’ papers, the records of groups invested in immigration issues, and local government records. Collectively these archives demonstrate how immigration debates progressed at the local level, emphasizing the concerns and conceptions of individuals, communities, and organizations within the region.

orga ni zation of the book How Race Is Made in America is divided into two parts. Part I examines how Mexicans’ and Mexican Americans’ access to citizenship was challenged by

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attempts to place caps on Mexican immigration, proposals to change their racial classification from white to Indian to prevent them from naturalizing, and movements to prevent them from claiming their birthright citizenship. Chapter 1 develops the book’s theoretical framework by looking at the relational discussion about race as seen in debates around proposed legislation at the national level. Debates over Mexican immigration reveal that lawmakers as well as everyday citizens retooled dominant racial narratives and relied on selective memories of past periods of immigration in their evaluation of new arrivals. Drawing on legislative hearings, congressional investigations, and official reports and correspondence, as well as newspaper articles and sociolog ical studies, I investigate how a diverse array of people living in the United States judged and weighed the value of newly arriving Mexican immigrants. Yet even as the old understanding of race as a black–white binary construction was transformed to accommodate gradations of color, the end points of the hierarchy remained the same: black marked the bottom and white the top. Chapters 2 and 3 each demonstrate how relational notions of race influenced debates about immigration through an examination of two different modes of attaining citizenship. Chapter 2 traces challenges to Mexicans’ legal and racial status by various groups, including federal bureaucrats, nativist organizations, and everyday citizens. Early twentieth-century efforts to make Mexicans ineligible for U.S. citizenship, despite provisions in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, focused on the premise that Mexicans were neither black nor white; interest groups and politicians both strove instead to categorize Mexicans as Indian. These efforts intensified after the 1924 Immigration Act and two Supreme Court decisions, Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), which declared Japanese and Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship because they were not white. Underlying U.S. efforts to resolve Mexican immigration and citizenship issues was the ongoing problem of determining who could be considered white. Chapter 3 sheds light on the roots of the birthright citizenship debate. Historically matters of birthright citizenship have been discussed in conjunction with African Americans (the Fourteenth Amendment) and the Chinese (the 1898 Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision). In the twentyfirst century we see debates around birthright citizenship tightly connected to Mexican immigration. This chapter demonstrates how the two became linked, how relational notions of race were central to this correspondence,

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and how this debate was one way nativists attempted to write Mexicans out of citizenship. While part I looks at efforts to exclude Mexicans from citizenship in the 1920s and 1930s, Part II demonstrates how such practices continued in the  1940s and 1950s with efforts to make Mexicans deportable. After the mid-1940s Mexican Americans became a permanent and visible part of U.S. society. Their second-generation numbers eclipsed those of the immigrant generation. When Mexican American World War II soldiers returned home, they, like their African American counterparts, demanded democracy and equality. They waged and won civil rights battles, such as in the precedentsetting Mendez v. Westminster school desegregation case. Despite these affirmative steps that narratives of assimilation would have us believe would entrench groups into mainstream American society, Mexican Americans continued to be seen as outsiders. This narrative of Mexicans as not full citizens was continuously reinscribed and regenerated, raising the question of precisely how and why Mexican Americans were excluded from the popular narrative of the melting pot. Turning to deportation cases helps us understand this in part by looking at how Mexicans and Mexican Americans were continuously seen as not American and thus suspect. Chapter 4 examines an episode in 1940 in the Imperial Valley, when a group of Mexican workers, some of whom were known union activists, were classified as “likely to become a public charge” (LPC), a deportable offense. This chapter shows how these Mexicans were doing what Americanization programs had long advocated: they worked, spoke English, and used the services of public health clinics, but they also joined unions and were critical of their employers, the working conditions, and a political economy that left them little hope for advancement. As such, even though these workers had entered the country lawfully and had lived in the United States for years, because they were receiving treatment from the local clinic for a communicable disease, they were vulnerable to deportation. Officially designating Mexicans as LPCs discredited them at the same time that it circumvented any discussion of possible violation of labor rights or civil rights, both key aspects of government-sponsored reform efforts under way at the time. Chapter 5 looks at Operation Wetback, a campaign in 1954 by the INS to deport an estimated one million undocumented Mexicans. While studies of this campaign have traditionally centered on Mexican agricultural workers in rural areas, this chapter focuses on the deportation campaigns in Los

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Angeles that rounded up Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike and held them in public spaces in the city center. The Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born publicly protested the deportations, making links between Operation Wetback and the denial of civil rights, Japanese internment, segregation politics, and the hollow promises of citizenship. These protests demonstrated the power of relational notions of race when the groups themselves make the connections to see the ways in which power operates to destabilize rights for other groups. Together these chapters highlight the contradictory positions Mexicans continued to occupy in the United States. They were needed as laborers but not fully accepted socially or culturally. Ultimately the goals of this book are, first, to shed light on the obstacles Mexicans and Mexican Americans were forced to overcome to simply stay in the United States and also to bring into sharp focus the social, political, and cultural environment that ultimately prevented Mexican Americans from ever fully integrating into U.S. society; and second, to demonstrate the power of utilizing a relational approach to our analysis of race and, as part of this approach, to introduce the concept of racial scripts as a means of promoting our understanding of how society is predisposed (consciously or not) to utilize historical experience and stereotypes of past groups to define and circumscribe the place and role of future members of U.S. society.

part one

Immigration Regimes I Mapping Race and Citizenship

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chapter 1

Placing Mexican Immigration within the Larger Landscape of Race Relations in the United States

In 1930 Roy Garis, a professor of economics at Vanderbilt University, submitted his “Report on Immigration,” an intensive study of Mexicans in the United States, to Representative John Box of Texas, a diehard opponent of Mexican immigration. Box presented the report in the House of Representatives’ extensive hearings on three bills with the same goal: to place immigration quotas on countries in the Western Hemisphere, just as the 1924 Immigration Act had placed quotas on European countries. Reducing immigration from Mexico in par ticu lar was a major priority; one bill suggested limiting immigration from Mexico to 2,500 persons per year, a significant reduction from the average 57,346 Mexican arrivals to the United States between 1923–1926. The study was comprehensive, canvassing the Southwest, where the majority of Mexicans settled for work, and examining their economic, political, and social impact. Garis’s arguments carried great weight, and parts of his report were reproduced in the popular magazine Saturday Evening Post. Garis established in his opening paragraph that Mexican immigration would cause a long-term racial problem by linking it to slavery: “Abraham Lincoln once said that ‘this country could not endure half slave and half free.’ When one considers the present effects of immigration from the countries to the south of us, especially from Mexico, he is forced by the logic of the developments to conclude that the United States can not endure part citizen and part foreign.” Garis attempted to persuade his audience by explaining that while Mexican immigration provided a cheap labor source, it also had negative sociopolitical and cultural effects on U.S. society, just as slavery had. 19

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Garis also connected Mexican immigration to past immigrant groups. He cited both the commissioner general of immigration and the secretary of labor (the Department of Labor housed the Immigration and Naturalization Service) and concluded, “We barred the gate to Europe and closed the door to Asia, but the entrance to the South has remained open. The restrictive program is thereby virtually nullified, for to admit peons from Mexico and similar types of immigrants from the other non-quota countries while restricting European and excluding oriental immigration is not only ridiculous and illogical—it destroys the biological, social and economic advantages to be secured from the restriction of immigration.” Garis’s comments refer to how the 1924 Immigration Act most drastically affected Europeans, notably southern and eastern Europeans, whose immigration numbers were capped, and Asians, who were completely barred from immigration to the United States. Nativists sought to limit the large number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe because they were believed to pose social, political, cultural, and economic problems to the United States. To mitigate the perceived problems, Progressive-era reformers developed Americanization programs to assist with health, education, housing, and child and maternal welfare, but many of these programs were based on the notion that these immigrants were inferior to Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Immigrants who spoke out against the government, espoused socialist or communist politics, or organized in unions or political machines were seen as inassimilable and labeled enemies of the government. These attitudes intensified after the United States entered World War I in 1917 and fueled a “Red Scare.” The U.S. government perpetuated fear of immigrants by developing programs, such as a campaign led by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, which targeted immigrants as radicals, subversives, and communists and led to their arrest and, in some cases, subsequent deportation. The Ku Klux Klan, which had declined by the end of Reconstruction (1865–77), was revived in the 1910s and spread to the North, now targeting both blacks and immigrants (many of whom were Catholic or Jewish). The KKK espoused its tyrannical hatred against those they thought were destined to destroy the racial and religious homogeneity of the nation. Mexicans escaped much of this targeting of immigrants in the 1910s and early 1920s. They immigrated in smaller numbers, mainly to the Southwest, and a large number were sojourner laborers who worked for a season and

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then returned home to Mexico. This meant that they did not tend to settle down, join unions, naturalize, or vote. These reasons, coupled with the lobbying power of large-scale employers from agriculture and industry as well as diplomatic and trade interests, had ensured that no quotas were imposed on immigrants from countries in the Western Hemisphere. Capitalist needs eclipsed desires for a racially and culturally homogenous nation. But Garis’s analysis of the new racial order that would arise from changes to immigration policy prompted him to argue that Mexican immigration was just as threatening if not more so than southern and eastern European immigration. After the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, it was as if people looked around them and questioned why the United States had curtailed immigration from Europe and not from Mexico. In the aftermath of the passage of the Act, the discourse around Mexican immigration shifted, first, because the demographics of Mexican immigration had changed. In the two years leading up to the 1924 Immigration Act, Mexicans made up 10.9 percent of the total number of admitted immigrants; in the three years after passage of the Act, their numbers jumped to 16.1 percent; by 1927 Mexicans were second only to Germans in numbers of new immigrants. A long view of the 1920s reveals that in that period, Mexicans constituted over 11.2 percent of the total immigrants admitted to the United States. Second, Mexicans moved farther into the interior of the nation in search of work, farming sugar-beet fields in Denver, toiling in Chicago’s factories, and laboring in the steel mills of Pittsburgh. Third, while Mexicans had long been seen as a racially inferior but generally malleable workforce, now stereotypes of Mexicans as criminal, a social burden, diseased, and inassimilable intensified. As such, attempts to curtail Mexican immigration increased. In this chapter and throughout this book I argue that one of the key ways to establish Mexican immigration as a problem was to use racial scripts to compare Mexicans to racialized groups already familiar to Americans. As a result, Americans increasingly began to look at Mexicans through a relational lens. In the post-1924 period, both proponents and opponents of Mexican immigration regularly compared Mexicans to other racialized groups in order to portray them as more or less desirable. For opponents, these racial scripts provided a shorthand with which to construct Mexicans as inferior. It was common, for example, for white Americans to discuss Mexicans as “the Negro problem” of the Southwest. White Americans argued that Mexicans

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were not like them, and the best way to make this point clear was to compare Mexicans to other groups who had already been defined and established as nonwhite, nonnormative, and unfit for self-government. As Mexicans became thought of as another “other” and as outside the body politic, they were increasingly positioned alongside Indians, Asians, or blacks in immigration discourse. Discourses about these racialized groups were key in informing Americans what Mexican meant. When it comes to immigration, we understand each new “other” in relation to groups with which we are already familiar. As such, this chapter demonstrates a central premise of racial scripts: racialized groups are linked across time and space. Once attitudes, practices, customs, policies, and laws are directed at one group, they are more readily available for and hence easily applied to other groups. Both those for and against Mexican immigration drew on racial scripts, and paying attention to the conditions under which these scripts emerge— the social structure, the material conditions, and the historical context— explains what is at stake in a racial script. Mexican immigration was (and continues to be) primarily labor migration. The fact that Mexicans escaped the quotas of 1924 does not signal their acceptance as immigrants; instead they fulfilled the country’s need for low-wage laborers. Examining the long immigration debate era reveals that what was at stake was not the purported maintenance of U.S. racial purity but the need to manage labor. This gets at a key tenet of the history of the United States: despite the deep tradition of racial hierarchy and racial exclusion built into the American system, the dynamics of capitalist expansion always worked at cross-purposes to the goal of racial and cultural homogeneity. In other words, as the United States expanded both territorially and economically, the demand for labor almost always trumped the social desire to maintain racial purity. In this chapter I use the concept of racial scripts to examine the constructions of Mexican that emerged under a new immigration regime during post1924 immigration debates and that are still with us today. Specifically I examine the nearly two dozen bills proposed by the House and Senate restricting immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere from 1925, when many expressed their outrage that Mexican immigrants were not subject to the same quotas as Europeans, through 1930, by which time the Depression had set in and repatriations, voluntary and involuntary, and restrictions on visas severely curtailed Mexican immigration. I refer to this period as the long immigration debate era.

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These long, intense, and sustained conversations on race shaped the meanings of Mexican during this phase of the immigration regime (and for years to come). Historian Mae Ngai’s foundational work is key to understanding how the deportation policies developed during this period helped make some undocumented immigrants legal (such as European immigrants), while marking others as illegal (mainly Mexicans), even though Mexicans had escaped quota restrictions. Yet much more work needs to be done to better understand how the category Mexican came to be so demonized during the interwar period, and immigration policy and discourse is a rich site for this. Employing the concept of racial scripts, I widen my perspective to look at various other groups that were discussed in the hearings, debates, correspondence, and newspaper articles on Mexican immigration to argue that blacks, Indians, Asians, and colonial subjects had a strong presence in these forums to cue people on how to think about Mexican immigration, as if giving them a racial script. Thus racial scripts refer to more than just a stereotype. They show how power is always at stake in racial categorization and how, once formed, those racial categories can easily be transferred to new groups. To put it simply, racism builds on past racial acts. When looking at the history of Mexican Americans, we cannot point to landmark Supreme Court cases that clearly mark them as inside or outside legal or social citizenship, as we can for blacks and Asians. Mexicans have been considered legally white and eligible for naturalization since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Their racial exclusion is not marked in the same way as that of blacks and Asians, who were written out of whiteness and, at different points in history, citizenship, in absolute terms. Yet we need to learn to read race not just in the rulings but between the lines. Despite their access to citizenship, Mexican Americans’ indigenous background marked them as culturally nonwhite. It also linked them to Native Americans, who were not only seen as racially other but who had a different relationship to U.S. citizenship and civil rights because of their sovereignty and rights purportedly guaranteed by treaties, which were commonly violated. Thus we must turn to key periods, such as the long immigration debate era, rather than only landmark legal decisions to understand the racial formation of Mexicans in the United States. In the next three sections I examine racial scripts that reoccurred regularly during the long immigration debate era to argue that they contributed to negative cultural constructions of Mexicans, even in the face of failed legislation.

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the racialization of mexicans in the nineteenth century Before I examine racial scripts that circulated during the long immigration debate era, I turn to the longer racialization of Mexicans in the United States so that we may establish which scripts emerged in the nineteenth century that may have affected the racialization of Mexicans into the twentieth century and beyond. After the U.S. War with Mexico (1846–48), Mexicans entered the United States linked to two competing racial scripts: indigeneity and whiteness. The war and the ideology of Manifest Destiny that justified it highlighted Mexicans’ inferior racial position due to their indigenous roots. But in the aftermath of the war, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexicans residing in the acquired territories were offered U.S. citizenship, a privilege extended only to whites at the time. These conflicting scripts that simultaneously marked them as legally white but socially and culturally “other” and inferior would serve to complicate their status for generations to come. Moreover Mexicans were entering the nation at a time when other racial scripts were already in circulation and were written into the very fabric of American society. Racial difference had been codified in U.S. founding documents. The Naturalization Act of 1790 deemed only those considered “free white persons” to be eligible for U.S. citizenship. In addition, the Constitution continued to allow for slavery, including the importation of slaves, until 1808 (Section 9, Article I), while the fugitive slave clause (Section 2, Article IV) required that escaped slaves be returned to their owners. For taxation purposes, whites were counted as “whole persons,” but indigenous peoples were dismissed simply as “Indians not taxed” and slaves counted as “three fifths” of a person (Section 3, Article I). This systematic and institutionalized racism directed at blacks and Indians in relation to citizenship, property, and systems of unfreedom meant that when Mexicans were forcibly incorporated into the United States, they were stepping onto an uneven playing field. With this kind of ideological and institutional framework, racial scripts that deemed racialized bodies inferior were easily transferred to Mexicans once white Americans began to come into regular contact with them in the 1810s and 1820s, especially during the 1830s and the Texas War of Independence from Mexico, and then again, of course, during the actual war with Mexico, as well as in the framing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

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Indigenous Racial Scripts Manifest Destiny was used by politicians, officials, and journalists beginning in the 1840s to justify westward expansion. As an ideology it expressed a belief that those who were taking over the land were spreading democratic institutions for those who were not capable of self-government. Jingoistic politicians, journalists, writers, and citizens alike singled out Native Americans especially, and those of non-European origin generally, as not fit for selfgovernment. Furthermore they argued that Native Americans would eventually disappear in the Southwest after the U.S. takeover because they were not as biologically fit as white Americans. These claims extended to Mexicans because their indigenous heritage and largely feudal political economy marked them as racially backward. Thus Manifest Destiny served as a rallying cry to justify the U.S. War with Mexico. Interestingly the notion that Mexicans were racially inferior (and their being Catholic) also contributed to anti-imperialist politics. In other words, some Americans preferred to leave Mexico’s land off limits so that nonwhites would not have to be incorporated into the nation. As such, Manifest Destiny is inherently a racial ideology in that it pivots on ideas of who is deemed worthy of access to resources and fit for citizenship. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war, provided the United States with new land and also laid out the terms of citizenship for the 75,000 to 100,000 Mexicans living in the Southwest. Mexico lost nearly half of its territory, including all or part of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Continental expansion satisfied the U.S. need for more land for cotton production during slavery, highlighting how systems that worked to oppress groups were linked. Mexicans could choose to return to Mexico or stay in the United States. If they stayed, they could choose between Mexican and U.S. citizenship. If they did not declare a choice, within a year they would become U.S. citizens. Everything changed for Mexicans in the United States after the war. Overnight they went from living in Mexico to living in the United States and from being Mexican citizens to being U.S. citizens. Many lost their own land. In addition, their culture, language, and religion were now seen as inferior to those of white Americans. Various historians have looked at the aftermath of conquest and have detailed the ways that legal disenfranchisement

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and land dispossession and extralegal vigilante violence turned Mexicans into outsiders in what had once been their own land. Given their racial heritage, Mexicans were linked to Indians. U.S. policy toward Indians was marked by war, genocide, and the taking of Indian lands. Anthropologist Martha Menchaca demonstrates how hollow the category of citizenship was for Mexicans deemed more Indian than white. In California, for example, the state constitution contained a racial restriction that allowed only whites to vote. Because many Mexicans were of Indian descent or mestizos (of Indian and Spanish descent) this made the majority of Mexicans in California ineligible to vote. These moments shed light on how Mexicans formally entered the United States as citizens but remained in a subordinate racial position.

Whiteness as a Racial Script Because Mexicans were afforded U.S. citizenship, which was otherwise available only to whites, it is important to understand the meaning of whiteness during this period. Scholars such as Reginald Horsman and Matthew Frye Jacobson have demonstrated the many fractures in whiteness during the nineteenth century. White was not a monolithic category but a hierarchical one, with shades of whiteness. Anglo-Saxons were on top; Celts, Slavs, Jews, and Mediterraneans were below them. As Americans increasingly defined themselves against Mexicans through jingoism, popular literature, and foreign policy in the mid-nineteenth century, the label Anglo-Saxon began to incorporate these once stratified groups and came to be seen as a racial category. Anglo-Saxons were defined by what they were not: black, Indian, and, as the United States came into more contact with its southern neighbor, Mexican. After all, these groups were not considered white in any way, racially, culturally, or politically. The increasing rise and authority of scientific racialism only confirmed such beliefs. Thus the hierarchy of races shifted to include Anglo-Saxons, still on top, and Mexicans, Indians, and blacks below them. For Mexicans, access to whiteness often depended upon various factors, notably class and region. Mexicans were considered nonwhite because of their indigenous heritage, but access to resources, land, and money helped them move up the social hierarchy. As historian David Montejano has argued, “money whitens.” In his study of the Texas frontier, he found that Mexicans were not considered a monolithic group but were divided into

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landed and landless, with the landed finding more acceptance among Anglos. For the landless, performing low-scale, segmented labor helped solidify the notion of Mexicans as an inferior race. Similarly scholar Laura Gomez examines Mexicans’ “fragile claim to whiteness” in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. She demonstrates how Mexicans occupied an inbetween status; they were legally white, which served Anglo elites who wanted to lighten the demographics of their territory to increase its chances of statehood, but socially Mexicans remained a distinct racial group. Historian John Nieto-Phillips argues that New Mexicans themselves embraced a white identity in a move to distance themselves from a Mexican or indigenous past as a way to buffer themselves from the rapidly changing society that marginalized those groups. In Southern California beginning in the 1880s, local boosters developed a racial script, now referred to by historians as a “Spanish fantasy past,” as a way of erasing the region’s violent recent history. The Spanish fantasy past established a historical narrative for the region, projecting a romanticized Spanish past replete with images of charming señoritas and handsome caballeros on horseback. This idealized past masked the reality of the U.S. War with Mexico and the period of intense vigilante violence immediately afterward. This script left out Mexico’s rule in the region and also omitted Indian societies’ prominence before American, Spanish, or Mexican rule. This script was all the more powerful because it emerged at a time of demographic decline in the Mexican population. With Mexicans’ commensurately waning political power there were few challenges to this invented past. With the stroke of a pen, Mexicans were transformed from conquered subjects to picturesque denizens. As historian Bill Deverell gracefully writes, “In this imagery, a Mexican boy posed atop a burro selling flowers becomes less an indication of urban poverty than an unwitting actor in a period romance.” Taken in the aggregate, these historical moments demonstrate that what emerged from a politics of imperialism was a racial script of Mexicans as white in name only. Though Mexicans with access to resources may have had more success climbing the racial hierarchy, for the most part Mexicans were branded as inferior and unsuitable for self-government. These interweaving racial scripts of Mexicans as legally white but racially other codified their position as unequal citizens for generations to come. Moreover they gave rise to yet another racial script, one of unequal citizenship, which would shape how other groups entered the United States. Mexicans

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were the first racialized group to be granted citizenship. Until then, only whites had access to citizenship through birthright or naturalization. But Mexicans were not afforded the full benefits of citizenship. Stripped of their land and the economic and political wherewithal that accompanies land ownership, they were effectively denied equitable access to resources. In short, the Mexican American experience laid the groundwork for citizenship in name only.

the long immigration debate era In the 1920s white Americans were once again heatedly debating the place of Mexicans in U.S. society. It is during this time that we see how established racial scripts were adapted to support a depiction of Mexicans as outside of U.S. social membership despite the fact that their numbers were not restricted, they were citizens or eligible for citizenship, and they had a long history in the Southwest. I first discuss how and why Mexicans once again began to occupy a central place in American discourse and then explain why this period is crucial for understanding the long-term implications of the post-1924 immigration debates for the racial construction of Mexicans. After the U.S. War with Mexico, with the Mexican population in the United States on the decline and their subordinate position in the racial hierarchy solidified, Mexican immigration did not occupy a central place in public debate. But beginning in the 1910s the Mexican population in the United States increased for a variety of reasons, including fl ight from the  instability caused by the Mexican Revolution and, for those seeking work, the increased ease of transportation accompanying the expansion of the railroads. As Mexican immigration increased, so did methods to circumscribe Mexicans’ place in the United States. The passage of the 1917 Literacy Act increased immigration requirements, but these were aimed primarily at southeastern Europeans who sometimes attempted to enter the country through its southern border. Nonetheless the Act’s imposition of a head tax proved to be a financial burden for some Mexican immigrants, and many looked for places to cross the border away from the supervision of a border checkpoint to avoid paying it. With the creation of the border patrol in 1924, Mexicans experienced even more difficulty in crossing the border. Even though a limited budget and understaffing rendered the border patrol generally ineffec-

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tive during its first years, its existence signaled that Mexicans were not welcome in the United States. In addition, negative cultural representations of Mexicans circulated more readily. The image of Mexicans as carriers of disease that threatened both the health of the nation and its charity system and as a fertile population ready to overtake the nation resulted in humiliating medical inspections at border-crossing stations, making crossing the border even more punishing. Thus the post-1924 period marked a shift to new mechanisms of exclusion.

Birds of Passage or Mexican Invaders? In the 1910s and 1920s industry and agribusiness leaders in the Southwest who depended on low-wage laborers rallied against harsh immigration restrictions on Mexicans. They argued that Mexicans were not a threat to U.S. society because they were “birds of passage” who would work hard for low wages and then return to Mexico. But as immigration debates continued even after the passage of the 1924 Act, the notion that Mexicans, like blacks, were a population ready to spiral out of control was a popular racial script for portraying Mexicans as unsuitable newcomers. In these post-1924 debates about Mexican immigration, politicians and everyday citizens alike regularly raised the specter of slavery. They argued that, like slaves, the Mexican population would increase at unprecedented rates and create a multitude of problems. The emphasis on comparing Mexican labor to slavery reminds us that there is always something at stake when racializing a group. Slavery was a political economic system designed to extract the greatest profits for whites. Regarding blacks as racially inferior helped whites justify using them as slaves. The low-wage labor Mexicans engaged in in the Southwest was in no way comparable to slavery; the thread that runs through both political economies, however, once again places an emphasis on the profits for those at the top of the power structure while disregarding those doing the labor, showing the contradictions between capitalism and a liberal democracy. Thus comparing Mexicans to slaves was not just a racial comparison but was fundamentally about how to continue to fuel the political economy while maintaining a racial hierarchy. None other than the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Albert Johnson, employed the use of such racial scripts. Congressman Johnson served as the chairman for six consecutive sessions,

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from 1919 through 1931. He was also the president of the Eugenic Research Association. During this period he worked steadily to pass restrictive immigration legislation. He was the primary author of the 1924 Immigration Act, which he justified as a way to stem the tide against “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed.” After the passage of the Act, Johnson continued to use this racialized biological reasoning to support restrictive immigration. Johnson compared the situation with Mexican immigration to slavery to help enact quotas on immigrants from countries of the Western Hemisphere, including Mexico. In 1926, during an immigration hearing on extending quotas to Mexico, Johnson argued, “Who would have thought at the time that a fearful racial problem would have come, leading to a great war, from the introduction of those blacks? This committee knows that 1 person in every 12 in the United States is black skinned.” Johnson’s comments clearly are meant to invoke the image of a population explosion, which resonated with eugenic thinking of the time that advocated that only certain populations be allowed to reproduce (positive eugenics). He intensified the image of a population out of control, relying on racial scripts, by referring to “those blacks,” which brought to mind images not just of a significant black population but of miscegenation. In a later immigration restriction hearing, in 1930, Johnson presented a report to his congressional colleagues designed to sway them to join him in supporting the bill. Johnson quoted testimony from Dr. H. H. Laughlin, a leading eugenicist and director of the Eugenics Record Office. Laughlin was an ardent supporter of strict immigration policy and a frequent expert witness for anti-immigration forces in Congress. He argued against importing Mexican labor by using the example of slavery. According to Laughlin, during two hundred years of slavery, about 333,000 blacks had been forcibly brought to the United States. In 1930 blacks numbered approximately 10 million, thirty times their population when slavery was abolished. “That makes a racial problem of the first order, and it is extremely difficult to solve,” Laughlin argued, the implication being, of course, that Mexican immigration would result in a similarly intractable problem. Thus Mexican immigration could readily be identified as a major race problem by connecting it to slavery, which both Johnson and Laughlin attempted to recast as a population problem, not a labor solution.

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Other attacks on Mexican immigration came from those advancing arguments based on Mexicans’ perceived biological inferiority and inability to self-govern. C. M. Goethe was a prominent West Coast businessman, a eugenicist, and the founder of the Immigration Study Commission. Looking to extend quotas to Mexico, which he characterized as “pathetically hybridized,” he wrote to Representative John Garner of Texas to share his collected correspondence on Mexican immigration. Representative Garner in turn shared Goethe’s archive at the congressional hearings on Mexican immigration. One of the letters contained newspaper clippings that highlighted stories of white “girls” who married blacks and Koreans. Goethe asked if Mexicans might also have such intentions. He described the Mexican Indian’s “hopes of gaining for his children the precious genes of Nordics, that the latter may become mestizo,” and went on to ask, “Does our failure to restrict Mexican immigration spell the downfall of our Republic . . . ? Athens could not maintain the brilliancy of the Golden Age of Pericles when hybridization of her citizenry began. Rome fell when the old patrician families lost their race consciousness and interbred with servile stocks.” Goethe relied on past racial scripts once directed at Mexicans in the midnineteenth century to racialize a new generation of Mexican immigrants. He appropriated and recycled familiar Manifest Destiny claims to assert that Mexicans were biologically inferior due to their indigenous heritage. Unlike those who were in favor of Mexican immigration for their labor and had depicted Mexicans as “birds of passage,” Goethe depicted Mexicans as a miscegenation threat, a cultural representation that was untried in relation to Mexicans and not commonly circulated until the post-1924 period. He employed this racial script as Mexicans were becoming a more permanent population in the United States and thus represented a different kind of threat, especially given that they had access to citizenship. Similarly the notion of blacks as a miscegenation threat circulated widely in the post-Reconstruction era, during which blacks demanded social, political, and legal equality and whites fought to reestablish a system of social control to replace the slave system. Depictions of black men in particular as a miscegenation threat, followed up at times with lynchings, was a particularly violent and powerful way of circumscribing them. Antimiscegenation discourse and legislation was also directed at Asian men, purportedly to protect white women. Asian men’s lives were circumscribed by immigration laws that did not allow them to bring their families to the United States, as

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well as by the racism that limited where they could work, live, and recreate. These factors, combined with obstacles limiting the immigration of Asian women, meant that Asian men often lived in bachelor communities or engaged in transient labor. Though these conditions were not of the men’s own making, they gave rise to societal anxieties of an unattached and sometimes roving male Asian population that needed to be monitored and controlled. Depicting Mexicans as the new miscegenation danger demonstrates the power, utility, and multipurpose nature of racial scripts in that past depictions of men of color could so readily be transferred onto Mexicans. This sort of rhetoric came from the country’s elite but was employed readily by everyday people. Racial scripts served as shorthand to swiftly link Mexicans to other undesirable racial groups to garner support for the Box Bill. In 1928, in correspondence between George Clark Sargent, an attorney in San Francisco, and his congressional representative, W. E. Evans, Sargent expressed his support for the bill: “We already have a negro question in the southern states, which is going to take all the ingenuity of our best minds to solve. The Mexican peon is nine-tenths Indian, and would be a greater affliction than the negro.” By linking Mexicans to blacks, he suggested that if Mexicans were afforded the opportunity to become a permanent population, they would develop into yet another labor problem, thus requiring the establishment of systems of social control just as the South had done with the creation of Jim Crow laws beginning in the 1890s. By connecting Mexicans to blacks and Indians, he indicated that Mexicans too were racially inferior to whites. His emphasis on Mexicans’ indigenous background readily tapped into a racial script formed in the mid-nineteenth century that deemed Mexicans inferior because of their mestizaje (mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry). Sargent did not explain his claim, and, for all intents and purposes, he did not need to do so. That is the power of racial scripts. One does not need to explain such claims when a preexisting U.S. racial sensibility readily links these groups together. Both nativists rallying against Mexican immigration and employers who lobbied for their continued immigration regularly referred to Mexicans as “peons.” The word harkened to a past in Latin America, where the word referred to inferior, low-paid, unskilled laborers with few rights and little autonomy. But the term also invoked another system of labor coercion, debt peonage, which was instituted in the South with the abolishment of slavery,

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thus ideologically linking Mexicans to blacks as menial laborers. Peons, like blacks in the post-slavery South, were described as dependent and accused of undercutting the “free labor” engaged in by whites. Many opposed slavery not on moral grounds but for economic reasons, arguing that free labor was economically and socially superior to slavery. A central tenet of capitalism is that a worker is independent and free to negotiate labor contracts. Thus Mexican laborers were not just a “racial problem” but anathema to a capitalist economic system. Similarly, in a letter addressed to the editor of H. Patriot, the writer argued that those who were pro-immigration “urge[d] on behalf of the employment of this poor [Mexican] laborer similar reasons to those advanced for the bringing of negro slaves into the country, and if they are permitted to have their way they will curse the nation with another race problem. Better curb this menace while it is capable of being peacefully curbed, rather than wait until it reaches such proportions as will once more array one section of the country against another. There were wise men in the early days of our nation, men like Thomas Jefferson, men who saw the danger attending the entry into our country of an alien race. And there are wise men here today, men like John C. Box, who seeks [sic] to prevent the United States from repeating the mistake it made previous to 1808 of importing members of an alien race after which date (but all too late) Congress banned the importation of slaves.” 

This letter is interesting on various levels. The writer chooses to deploy his own version of history, one that upholds his narrative. He casts Jefferson as a bulwark against slavery, when in fact Jefferson owned over 650 slaves himself and is rumored to have fathered children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. The writer also claims that although Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808, this action was “too late.” What he decries is not the great tardiness in righting a moral wrong but rather that this slow response provided blacks with the opportunity to increase their numbers through reproduction. This line of thinking resonates with the arguments employed against Mexican immigrants in the late 1920s. Whereas prior opponents of  immigration had stressed that the Mexican population in the United States would increase through immigration, they now drew attention to the growing birth rates of Mexicans as a new means by which the population would increase. Influenced by eugenic discourses of the time, many people framed their concerns over immigration in terms of how an over-

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population of Mexicans might affect what they saw as the racial homogeneity of the nation.

The Deportable Mexican The cultural representation of Mexicans as noncitizens, and thus as a disposable population, was invoked over and over in immigration hearings. In the 1920s, especially after 1924, as we saw earlier, the rhetoric of Mexicans as “birds of passage” declined as their permanent population increased. Such a shift required new solutions in terms of how to deal with Mexican laborers, and deportation was increasingly offered as a ready solution. If Mexicans no longer willingly returned to Mexico at the end of their seasonal work, they could be forced to leave. Changes in immigration policy supported such thinking. The 1924 Immigration Act removed the statute of limitations on deportations for entering without a visa. More significantly historian Mae Ngai demonstrates how the Act was applied unevenly, allowing European immigrants to avoid deportations through loopholes while simultaneously enforcing the law against Mexicans and hence linking them to illegality. Lest the public not realize the advantages of a deportable workforce, leaders from various sectors strategically contrasted Mexicans with other racialized groups who had citizenship, mostly Puerto Ricans and blacks, as a way of highlighting Mexicans’ desirability. While the “birds of passage” ste reotype underscored that Mexicans would return home, the comments made by these leaders showed that if they did not go back, they could be forcibly removed, which would not be possible if they were U.S. citizens. Many of the most vocal supporters for Mexican immigration were agribusiness and industry leaders from California. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the businessman’s booster club in a city built on boosterism, actively fought restrictions on Mexican immigration, and in Dr. George Clements, head of the Chamber’s Agricultural Department, they had an ardent member and supporter. Clements highlighted Mexican laborers’ lack of citizenship as a strong advantage. He shifted attention away from biological notions of race that positioned Mexicans as inferior to highlight what made them desirable as laborers. In a letter to his representative, W. E. Evans, Clements wrote: Arguments have been offered in a vain endeavor to show the Mexican laborer as a menace to the blood stream of the United States. Since this source of labor is alien, it is controllable. Should this which is our present source of alien labor be

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closed to us we would be forced to employ Porto Rican Negroes who would without question complicate and threaten the biological problem as we see it, particularly since the hybrid negro while offering few identification marks as to his race has all the habits detrimental to his progenitors. Again, he is an American citizen, and once brought into the United States, the full obligation as such must be accepted by the United States.

Clements underscored Puerto Ricans as a biological threat, arguing that “while they all have negro blood within their veins, the greater part of them are without these physical markings which can only protect society. They are red-headed, freckle-faced, thin-lipped negro hybrids with all the vicious qualities of their progenitors.” Clearly, for groups such as Puerto Ricans and blacks, citizenship was a hollow privilege; it was repeatedly trumped by their race, which marked them as undesirable. Puerto Ricans’ second-class citizenship is highlighted by Clements’s characterization of the obligations of citizenship taking effect once one is in the United States, as if citizenship rights were limited to the country’s continental borders. He categorizes Puerto Ricans as foreigners, even though their homeland is a U.S. commonwealth and despite the fact that as of 1917 (with the passage of the Jones Act), U.S. citizenship had been conferred on all citizens of Puerto Rico. In addition, by emphasizing Puerto Ricans’ “negro” origins, Clements invoked a racial category that was denigrated in America. He played on this by portraying the Puerto Rican as a sort of racial Trojan horse, harboring “negro” characteristics that, though temporarily hidden, might emerge at any time. Clements’s remarks underscore how race and citizenship could be at odds and are important reminders that de jure citizenship did not guarantee social citizenship. Clements’s comments also demonstrate the stakes in a racial script. Although he characterized arguments that portray Mexicans as a biological threat as flawed, he took up the same racial script when portraying Puerto Ricans, thus demonstrating that what was at stake had much less to do with maintaining some sort of racial purity in the United States than effectively managing labor. He demonstrates that racial logic does not have to be logical. One can dismiss racial scientific reasoning for one group but then embrace it to disparage another. Other notable players highlighted Mexicans’ desirability by comparing them to groups that could not be characterized as “birds of passage.” Harry Chandler, the owner of the Los Angeles Times and a well-known proponent

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of Mexican immigration, testified at hearings before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization to extend quotas to Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere in January 1930. Chandler argued that, as Indians, Mexicans would be less of a problem than “any other people brought into the country,” such as Filipinos or Puerto Ricans. Unlike these other groups, he added, “our Indians [do] not make a problem.” Chandler’s comments reveal how one could also use racial scripts to portray a racialized group positively, if only for the self-serving purpose of continuing to guarantee a cheap labor force. As residents of a U.S. protectorate, Filipinos were considered “colonial subjects” and allowed to immigrate to the United States; Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens. As potential laborers, each group posed challenges. Furthermore he played on constructions of Mexicans as Indians, racialized groups who had been contained to a large degree through genocide, forced assimilation, and reservation policies, and thus were not seen as a looming threat. As a longtime resident of California, Chandler was likely referring to Indians in that state when he spoke of “our” Indians. This population had been colonized under the Spanish and made to work and live in the mission system established by the Franciscans, either by force or what the padres saw as benevolent assimilation. Their population had already seriously declined by the time of the U.S. takeover, so it is no wonder Chandler presented them as a benign population. This characterization had long been fueled by a nineteenth-century Spanish fantasy past that privileged depictions of gentle Indians in bucolic pastures in cultural texts, such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (published in 1884) over the reality of the violence inherent in the mission system and U.S. takeover. Chandler’s testimony before Congress demonstrated that mid-nineteenth-century racial scripts had a long shelf life, with the ability to influence policy well into the twentieth century. The same script that served to justify a U.S. takeover in one century ensured a cheap labor supply in another. Special interests, such as agricultural organizations, formed their own immigration committees to advocate on behalf of continued Mexican immigration; they used a similar comparative strategy and readily shared it with their elected officials. For example, in California the Ventura County Farm Bureau’s immigration committee chairman contended that if Mexican workers were not available, Puerto Ricans and blacks would fill the labor gap: “Negroes would create a much greater social problem and school problem than do Mexicans since the latter are not American citizens and a very large

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figure 1. “Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, dons a gay sombrero to receive greetings from his little Olvera Street friends.” Courtesy of Los Angeles Times 1938, photographic archive, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

percentage of them return annually to Mexico.” The Bureau highlighted two other important points: as noncitizens, Mexicans could more easily return to their home country and did not have the same rights as blacks (inequitable though they were). Ralph Taylor, executive secretary of the Agricultural Legislative Committee of California, delivered a comparable message to the California Farm Bureau Federation, but took it further. Referring to

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Mexicans, he argued, “Unlike the American or Porto Rican negro, he can be deported if it becomes necessary,” thus emphasizing the power the U.S. government could exert in controlling capital’s workforce. The comments left no doubt that “birds of passage” was not just a trope but a political reality, albeit a potentially forced one. Even if Mexicans successfully passed border examinations, paid head taxes, obtained visas, and found jobs and performed them well, they remained in a vulnerable limbo of being deportable. Consistently contrasted to blacks and Puerto Ricans based on citizenship status, Mexicans were cast as immigrants, which invariably led to a dominant perception of Mexicans as foreigners. Because distinctions were rarely made between Mexicans and Mexican Americans, it left the impression that all Mexicans, including Mexican Americans, were immigrants. Asian American studies scholars have skillfully demonstrated that a group constructed as “perpetually foreign” is seen as undeserving of citizenship rights and culturally marginalized. I would not argue that Mexicans are racialized as foreigners in the same ways (for reasons including that they are legally white and can sometimes pass for white), but with few counterscripts to challenge a dominant discourse of Mexicans as immigrants, we see, even today, assumptions and stereotypes that depict Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike as new arrivals.

Violence as Discourse Legislation was just one way to restrict Mexican immigration. Opponents also suggested violence. Those who had used violence before, such as the Ku Klux Klan, and even those who only knew this history of racialized violence, now advocated using such tactics on Mexicans. Such suggestions were in keeping with a long documented history of violence against Mexicans in the United States, including by the Texas Rangers, a loosely organized force that patrolled Texas from the 1830s into the twentieth century; the U.S. Border Patrol, which relied on legal and extra legal forms of violence in their dealings with Mexicans; and vigilantes who lynched Mexicans. One should note the ease with which people suggested violence as a form of control to lawmakers. It highlights a key tenet in racial scripts: that the tactics used against one racialized group can be readily transferred to another group. Racial scripts naturalize racist tactics when they get recycled and, in the process, appear justifiable. The fact that these tactics had been used before made them more familiar and thus placed them, if not necessarily within

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the realm of acceptable behavior, alongside actions that were permissible and without consequence; hence constituents felt comfortable sharing these ideas with their elected officials. Long before the controversies of the 1920s, those in the western United States had used both legal means and violence to suppress the Asian population, mostly Chinese and Japanese, and a minority Filipino population. These campaigns included the massacre of Chinese in 1871 in Los Angeles, the Alien Land Law Acts of 1913 and 1920 that prohibited Asian immigrants from owning land or leasing it for more than three years, and the development of various zoning laws aimed at circumscribing the businesses of Chinese business owners. This history of violence against and containment of Asians informed the views of Madison Grant, a leading eugenicist and the author of The Passing of the Great Race, in his 1923 letter to the House Immigration Committee chair, Albert Johnson. Grant built his case against Mexicans with very few words but great certainty, based on his credentials as a scientific “expert.” “Some friends of mine are collecting for publication the data about the Chinese Exclusion fight of fifty years ago,” he wrote to Johnson. “The case with Mexicans today is exactly the same as it was with the Chinese fifty years ago.” Support from Grant and other leading eugenicists of the time was key to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act’s restrictive legislation, and thus Grant’s words, which invoked the massacre of Chinese fiftytwo years earlier, carried great weight with the chairman. Others expressed views along the same lines. One resident of Los Angeles, Eva Martin, wrote to Chairman Johnson, “We are literally swamped with Mexicans, Japs, Chinese and Negroes. . . . More and more are being born here.” Her comments highlight the shifts in these immigrant populations increasingly settling in the United States and gaining citizenship. She did not, however, urge the passage of more restrictive legislation. Instead Martin proposed, “There should be a new Klan composed of all real Americans.” Linking racialized groups could provide people not only with a definition of what constituted a problem but also with what might serve as a solution. Organized opposition to Mexican immigration also came from Ku Klux Klan chapters. The Klan’s overt support of the Box Bill in 1928 is an example of how racial projects often overlap. The secretary of the Los Angeles chapter of the Ku Klux Klan wrote to the chairman of the House Immigration Committee to express his organization’s support for restricting Mexican immigration: “I am talking restriction of Mexican immigration to ever one [sic]

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I meet.” His letter suggests that mechanisms for controlling one population can also control others. Traditionally the Klan is associated with the South and with vigilante violence directed against blacks. In this case, the Klan was based in Los Angeles and worked openly and within the system to control Mexicans through legislation. They in fact became established in L.A. during the peak years of Mexican immigration and increased restrictions against Asians at the local, state, and national levels. These actions raise questions about the degree to which western politics, usually portrayed as relatively progressive, actually differed from southern politics, and serves as another example of how the lives of people of color are linked, which the concept of racial scripts stresses.

Whiteness as a Racial Script During this same time period, Mexicans and Mexican Americans fought back on various fronts, joining labor unions, choosing not to naturalize, and hoping that their children would not assimilate American ways, which they perceived as too permissive. But Mexicans also fought to be recognized as white because whiteness afforded them certain rights. Although they were legally white, they were clearly not afforded full social citizenship, and even their legal classification was at times contested. By fighting to be recognized as white, Mexicans were in a sense accepting the U.S. racial hierarchy. They were not challenging the terms of the debates but rather saying that they were on the right side of the color line. Their strategy was to combat the racism directed at them by protecting the rights they had. Mexicans were not often invited to participate in the debates on immigration during the long immigration era; thus we must turn to different sites to examine Mexicans’ responses and actions around these questions. Historians David Gutiérrez and Neil Foley have written about the largescale organizing in which Mexicans engaged through organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in Texas and California. Unlike most other Mexican organizations in the United States in the 1920s, whose main concern was immigrant mutual aid, LULAC’s mission was political. The organization aimed to help naturalized Mexicans and Mexican Americans to claim their rights as U.S. citizens. Formed in 1929 by Mexicans who had been born or come of age in the United States (including some who had served in the U.S. armed forces during World War I), LULAC

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pursued an agenda of assimilation, excluding from membership Mexicans who were not U.S. citizens. Confronted with the possibility of losing the little ground they had around citizenship rights, Mexicans fought back. Historian Mario Garcia tells the history of the move by the El Paso city registrar and the city health officer to change Mexicans’ racial classification from “white” to “colored” in El Paso in 1936. At the time, El Paso had a high white infant mortality rate, which would reflect badly on any city, but especially one such as El Paso that was working to establish itself as a health resort. With the help of LULAC, Mexicans in the city mounted a campaign against the reclassification and won. Because El Paso city officials had justified the reclassification by citing the precedent set by the U.S. Census Bureau to place Mexicans in a racial category of their own, the Mexican activists continued their fight in Washington, D.C., where they compelled the Bureau to once again classify them as white. Another history-making moment occurred in 1931, in Lemon Grove, San Diego, when school officials segregated Mexicans into a separate school. Enlisting legal counsel and the help of the Mexican Consulate, the Mexican community organized and took their fight to the Superior Court of California in San Diego. Roberto Alvarez v. The Board of Trustees of Lemon Grove School District was the first successful school desegregation court decision in U.S. history, predating the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. Mexicans fought discrimination through social and cultural means as well. Historian Gabriela Arredondo argues that the Mexican community in Chicago had a more ambivalent attitude toward remaining in the United States permanently and thus tended to turn less to civic participation, preferring to combat discrimination through everyday acts, such as joining sports teams and developing local festivals and parades. Arredondo also describes how Mexicans, cognizant of how racial positioning operated, tried to establish themselves as superior to blacks. For example, some Mexicans chose not to shop in black-owned stores or socialize with their black neighbors and Mexican children ignored black classmates on the playground. While these tactics may appear severe, Mexicans knew how racial scripts operated and that if classified as “colored” they would face severe consequences in areas such as housing, school, and employment discrimination, which many already experienced as a result of de facto segregation.

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the enduring power of racial scripts Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the “story of nationhood must be told over and over, because there is nothing natural about the nation or the fashioning of its predominant civic identities. Nations . . . [are] lived primarily through the techniques of narration and representation.” In the case of Mexican immigration, every new bill introduced on the subject, every hearing, every testimony became a way of telling who was and was not part of the nation. In order to establish whether or not Mexicans “belonged,” it was important to articulate who else did or did not belong. Aligning Mexicans with these groups brought into stark relief their place in the racial order. Anti-immigrationists appropriated America’s usable past, its failed racial experiments, and the specter of the racial other to advance their cause. Supporters of immigration countered with their own scripts of America’s racial past. To discuss Mexican immigration was therefore to reveal where groups stood in the U.S. racial order and to reinforce, justify, and naturalize that order. This chapter detailed the myriad ways in which opponents of Mexican immigration sought to block, curtail, and control Mexican immigration. The next chapter discusses how they fought this battle on a different front: naturalization. Like their efforts to control Mexican immigration, racial scripts were key in the efforts to deny Mexicans the ability to naturalize. Opponents marshaled legal cases and precedent to extend restrictive measures to Mexicans and exclude Mexicans from U.S. citizenship.

chapter 2

“What Is a White Man?” The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship

What is a White Man? This is a question which will presently begin to worry and perplex all persons with one-half of one per cent or more pigmentation in their skin. None of the existing rules of anthropologists and biologists henceforth count; a person is white if he is recognized by the “man in the street” as white. If he is not so recognized, he is to be considered black or brown or yellow or some other tint which makes it impossible for him to qualify for American citizenship.

So began an editorial published in The Nation in 1924. The editors were responding to recent Supreme Court decisions and pending cases that pivoted on understandings of race and citizenship. According to the Naturalization Act of 1790 and its revision in 1870, only those who were deemed white or black could become citizens, so there was much at stake in how one answered “Who is a white man?” The Supreme Court had ruled that neither Japanese persons nor Asian Indians were white in Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). Moreover since Section 13 of the 1924 Immigration Act restricted immigration to persons eligible for citizenship, an immigrant needed to be from a group considered white not just to naturalize but to even immigrate to the United States. Particularly after the Ozawa and Thind rulings, white supremacists saw an opportunity to nullify Mexicans’ eligibility for U.S. citizenship by insisting these landmark citizenship decisions made previous racial designations of Mexicans null and void. They hoped to apply the racial scripts designed for Asians and South Asians to Mexicans. The ultimate aim of the proponents 43

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was, of course, to shore up the definitional walls between what they saw as the essential distinction between white and nonwhite population groups, thereby putting even sharper teeth into the severe racial restrictions on both the naturalization and potential immigration of racially proscribed peoples. In the process Mexicans were placed into a third flexible racial category (after “black” and “white”) of “nonwhite.” This chapter provides a revealing look into various efforts by state and private actors to render Mexican immigrants ineligible for U.S. citizenship by having them officially categorized as nonwhite. Emphasizing the distinction between formal and informal regimes of race making in the period, I look beyond racial laws and formal institutions to explore how both low- and high-level bureaucrats and other functionaries of the state often interpreted and implemented race-making mechanisms from the ground up. While legislation and court rulings may have constituted the legal framework in which race and racial hierarchy were defined, those definitions were always subject to an inherently informal and ad hoc process of human interpretation and intervention that extended the complex process of racialization and racial definition beyond what was formally inscribed in the law. By the same token, other functionaries of the state sometimes operated from their own perceived self-interest, points of view, and interpretations of official policy. Consequently, while certain members of Congress, immigration bureaucrats, and lobbying groups were busily trying to shore up even more stringent and exclusionary definitions of race and citizenship, other members of the government—particularly those in the State Department and, in some cases, within the immigration bureaucracy itself—often worked at cross-purposes to these goals. I use underutilized archival resources to track challenges to Mexicans’ legal and racial status that arose in various arenas, including the federal Bureau of Immigration and Bureau of Naturalization (predecessors of the Immigration and Naturalization Service), West Coast nativist groups such as the California Joint Immigration Committee, the American Eugenics Society, and everyday citizens. The debates raged well into the 1930s, even after the collapse of the U.S. national economy led to large-scale deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Examining informal moments, such as immigration officers’ routine disregard for laws that allowed Mexicans to naturalize and letter-writing campaigns by nativist groups, as well as formal pivotal moments, such as the passage of legislation that affected Mexicans’

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access to citizenship, results in a fuller sense of how racial classifications form and are practiced.

tensions over race and citizenship leading up to the 1924 immigration act The question of Mexicans’ eligibility for U.S. citizenship has never been straightforward. As discussed in chapter 1, in the wake of the U.S. War with Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo established Mexicans’ eligibility for citizenship in 1848. Citizenship, however, was inextricably linked to whiteness at this time, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo never declared Mexicans to be white. Instead the treaty preempted the need to discuss race by making U.S. citizenship available to those Mexicans who remained in the annexed territories, basing their eligibility on their nationality, irrespective of race. The failure to link whiteness to citizenship for Mexicans would become the Treaty’s Achilles’ heel, providing an opening for those who sought to make Mexicans ineligible for citizenship for decades to come. A prominent example of contesting Mexicans’ right to U.S. citizenship occurred in 1897, when the Treaty’s provision extending eligibility for citizenship to Mexicans living in lands ceded to the United States was challenged in a Texas federal district court. The case, In re Rodríguez, arose when Ricardo Rodríguez, a Mexican who had lived in Texas for more than a decade, sought final approval of his application for naturalization. Local politicians expressed their opposition to Rodríguez’s petition, citing the racial restriction on citizenship that allowed only whites and blacks to naturalize. The efforts against the Rodríguez petition were part of a longer history of attempts to disenfranchise Mexicans in Texas. Eventually, however, federal judge Thomas Maxey sided with Rodríguez. The judge did not try to argue that Rodríguez was white, and he agreed that Rodríguez could be “classed with the copper-colored or red men. He has dark eyes, straight black hair, and high cheek bones.” Yet, Maxey argued, both the constitution of the Texas Republic and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo either “affirmatively confer[red] the rights of citizenship upon Mexicans, or tacitly recognize[d] in them the right of individual naturalization.” Thus Maxey upheld Rodríguez’s and, by extension, all Mexicans’ right to citizenship. As Mexican immigration increased during the 1910s, old questions regarding citizenship and race resurfaced. In the late 1910s the number of Mexican

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immigrants rose, partly because people were fleeing the Mexican Revolution and partly because U.S. programs encouraged Mexicans to immigrate to ease labor shortages created by World War I. The secondary literature on Mexicans in the United States has focused mainly on the Southwest because Mexicans have had a larger and longer presence in this area, but Mexicans were also recruited as laborers to Lincoln, Nebraska, St. Louis, Missouri, and elsewhere, and some sought to become citizens. We can learn much by viewing Mexican immigration outside of more familiar sites, especially in terms of how regional understandings of race and political economy played a role in determining “what is a white man.” Looking at immigration issues outside of the Southwest is also informative because strong regional economic factors could drive immigration policy. Proponents of Mexican immigration in the 1910s tended to be large-scale employers, particularly in the agribusiness and railroad industries, who depended on Mexican laborers. These “advocates” did not propose accepting Mexicans as full-fledged members of society. Rather they insisted that, because Mexicans were an inferior race, they were well suited for hard labor. Employers argued that Mexicans did not represent a threat to U.S. society because they were “birds of passage” who returned to Mexico when their labor was done. Because of this and because Mexican naturalization rates were low in the 1910s, employers did not belabor Mexicans’ racial status. While large-scale southwestern employers worked to develop cultural representations of Mexicans as nonthreatening, the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization’s regional officers outside the Southwest did not quite know what to make of them. Many of the officers had never before come into contact with Mexicans and were not sure how to categorize them racially. These officers, like most Americans at the time, understood race within a binary framework: a person was either white or black. In the Midwest and on the East Coast, immigrants in the 1910s were likely to have come from eastern or southern Europe. While not always readily accepted, such immigrants were, at the very least, “white on arrival.”  In the immigration officers’ view, Mexicans were perhaps best described as “chocolate.” Where, then, did they fit in the black-white paradigm? More important, since citizenship was extended only to whites and blacks, was a Mexican a white man? Because Bureau staff were required to state an applicant’s color on the naturalization forms, the question was imperative. Mexicans had claims to

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whiteness due to their Spanish ancestry, but they also had indigenous (“Indian”) ancestry, which was neither black nor white. Hence, Bureau staff reasoned, they must not be eligible for citizenship. Particularly when Mexican applicants “looked Indian,” naturalization officers found it difficult to characterize their color as white, and as a result they leaned toward denying them citizenship. As one officer noted in 1916, “The mere fact that [a] man may owe allegiance to Mexico does not relieve him of the requirement that he be either a white man, or an African, as I read the law.” Another officer believed a Mexican applicant to be ineligible because “his color would preclude association with whites.” For these bureaucrats, skin color and “common sense” trumped the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the federal court’s ruling in In re Rodriguez. There were also cases in which naturalization officers considered denying Mexicans citizenship based on their perception that the applicants were of African descent. These officers argued that some Mexicans were “mulatto,” of mixed white and black ancestry. Ironically, had such an applicant actually been a mulatto, that status would have guaranteed legal eligibility for citizenship. Still, at least some Mexican applicants who had been deemed mulatto by naturalization officers explicitly rejected this label, even though it would have secured their U.S. citizenship. Legal scholar Laura Gómez and historical anthropologist Martha Menchaca have demonstrated that the legacies of conquest, both Spanish and American, brought with them a racial order that placed whites at the top of the racial hierarchy; Mexicans may have striven to be included in this category. Legal scholar Ian Haney-Lopez has concluded that from 1878 until 1952 there were fifty-two racial prerequisite cases in which the petitioner had to establish his or her eligibility for citizenship. Of these, only one involved an individual who argued that he was black and hence eligible for citizenship. The other fifty-one plaintiffs sued to be declared legally white. The repudiation of mulatto status may have reflected applicants’ awareness that they were not black or their uncertainty regarding their full family history. Perhaps the applicants knew that citizenship without whiteness was hollow. Historian George Lipsitz has pointed out that, while whiteness may be a created identity, it has real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and opportunity. To identify with whiteness as such “is to remain true to an identity that provides [people] with resources, power, and opportunity.”

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Conceivably Mexicans may have also wanted to disassociate themselves with blacks because of their own internalized racism, as whiteness was also preferred in their home country. For their part, naturalization officers may have felt that categorizing Mexicans as white would make hollow the meanings, and hence the privileges, of whiteness. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris has argued that, “[in] ways so embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset—one that whites sought to protect and [that] those who passed sought to attain—by fraud if necessary.” Although Harris’s work focuses on African American history, these same issues of guarding the boundaries of whiteness, and of people trying to transgress these boundaries by passing for white, are key to understanding Mexicans’ quest to become full citizens. Regional officers proposed forwarding the cases of mulatto Mexicans to the Bureau of Naturalization for settlement, but some Mexicans denied them permission to do so. Given their own experiences with discrimination in Mexico, Mexicans who had spent even a short time in the United States would have recognized the entrenched and far-reaching discrimination against blacks. Thus an applicant’s refusal to be labeled a mulatto or “negro” could have been a conscious act to enter the United States closer to the top than the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Questions that arose out of naturalization procedures point toward the larger issue of the criteria people used to define race in the opening decades of the twentieth century. High-level officials within the Bureau of Naturalization who argued against Mexican naturalization turned to various sources of authority, including law, policy, and the historical record, to reinforce their arguments. Most often they referred to Section 2169 of the U.S. Revised Statutes, which states that “free white persons,” “aliens of African nativity,” and “persons of African descent” are eligible for citizenship. Since Mexicans did not fit at either end of this racial binary, some officials reasoned the statute did not apply to them. A court clerk in St. Louis, for example, appealed directly to the secretary of commerce and labor for clarification of what Section 2169’s reference to “white persons” meant. Specifically, the clerk wondered, did it cover “only those whose color is actually white or does it further include all persons of what is ethnologically known as the white or caucasian race?” That question would continue to be fervently debated in the next decade.

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the 1920s: a new racial order While the debates of the 1910s over Mexicans’ eligibility to naturalize did not culminate in the passage of legislation, they did serve as important precursors to the next decade’s contests. The controversy regarding Mexicans’ legal and racial status in the 1920s took place in a period of economic and social upheaval during which Americans were intensely worried about immigration. As discussed earlier, the Immigration Act of 1924 limited the annual number of immigrants from a specific country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States, based on 1890 census data. The law’s primary aim was to reduce drastically the large flow of southern and eastern Europeans. The Act also prohibited groups ineligible for naturalization from immigrating, specifically Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian groups, whose immigration was already severely limited by earlier efforts to protect the nation from the “yellow peril.” The 1924 Immigration Act did not restrict immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere. Thus Latin Americans continued to immigrate freely, providing cheap labor that made possible and profitable an unprecedented expansion in large-scale industry and agriculture. This boon to capitalism did not placate the many Americans who strongly disagreed with the exemption of Mexicans from the new restrictions on immigration. For many critics, Mexican immigrants presented a threat to the “purity” of the nation at least as great as, if not greater than, their counterparts from Europe. Even those who supported unrestricted immigration for Mexicans in order to meet the low-wage labor needs of the expanding U.S. economy endorsed the widespread view that Mexicans were a separate, inferior race. A new racial order was being codified in the United States during the 1920s. The existing white-black binary seemed hopelessly inadequate for the categorization of so many newcomers. Two important Supreme Court decisions, Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), contributed to the idea of a continuum of race by establishing a third category: nonwhite. As we shall see, these two cases involving Asians and South Asians, respectively, helped to shape the meaning of Mexican, demonstrating that Mexicans are racialized in relation to other groups, in this case Asians, who were (are) seen as nonwhite and foreign. In Ozawa v. United States the Supreme Court considered the case of Takao Ozawa, who had applied for naturalization with the support of a few

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close friends on the grounds that he was white. Ozawa, a resident of Hawai‘i, was born in Japan and had lived in the United States for twenty-eight years. He had attended the University of California at Berkeley. He and his wife sent their children to American schools, they attended a Christian church, and they all spoke English at home. In addition, his skin color was white. The U.S. district attorney for the District of Hawai‘i denied Ozawa’s petition on the grounds that as a Japanese man, he was not white and therefore not eligible for citizenship. Ozawa, however, did not give up and pursued his case until it eventually reached the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court also denied Ozawa’s petition. They argued that, according to scientific definitions of race, Ozawa was Mongolian, not Caucasian, and thus not eligible for citizenship. Justice George Sutherland delivered the opinion of the Court and addressed the issue of skin color. Sutherland argued that the “color test” was “impractical, as [color] differ[ed] greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette.” He went on to argue, “The federal and state courts, in an almost unbroken line, have held that the words ‘white person’ were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race.” But, as in many other cases revolving around race, Sutherland offered no hard and fast rules when it came to determining who was white. He conceded: The determination that the words “white person” are synonymous with the words “a person of the Caucasian race” simplifies the problem, although it does not entirely dispose of it. Controversies have arisen and will no doubt arise again in respect of the proper classification of individuals in border line cases. The effect of the conclusion that the words “white person” means a Caucasian is not to establish a sharp line of demarcation between those who are entitled and those who are not entitled to naturalization, but rather a zone of more or less debatable ground outside of which, upon the one hand, are those clearly eligible, and outside of which, upon the other hand, are those clearly ineligible for citizenship. Individual cases falling within this zone must be determined as they arise from time to time by what this court has called, in another connection (Davidson v. New Orleans, 96 U.S. 97, 104), “the gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion.”

Thus the Court offered no explicit definition of whiteness but instead described it as a border zone. The following year the Court ruled on another case regarding eligibility for citizenship, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. Bhagat Singh Thind was

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born in Punjab, India, and had lived in the United States since 1913. Like Ozawa, he also attended Berkeley. He had served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Unlike Ozawa, he was considered Caucasian according to anthropological definitions of race, thus meeting the criteria the Supreme Court had set forth in the Ozawa case. Nonetheless the Court ruled Thind ineligible for citizenship because he was not Caucasian in the “popular sense of the word.” In the Thind decision, Sutherland again delivered the opinion of the Court, stating that “a highcaste Hindu, of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar, Punjab, India,” was not “a white person within the meaning of section 2169, Revised Statutes.” Sutherland cited the 1911 Dictionary of Races or Peoples to support his ruling. The Dictionary, widely considered an authoritative source, was the product of the Dillingham Commission, named after Republican Senator William Dillingham of Vermont. Dillingham had headed a congressional task force established in 1907 to evaluate changes in immigration over the previous twenty-five years and to determine the present and future effects of immigration flows on U.S. society. Despite acknowledging the authority of the Dictionary, however, Sutherland stated that, in discerning the intent of the law (especially Section 2169) in the Thind decision, the Court had recourse to more than “the speculations of the ethnologist.” The case rested on twin certainties: the popular understanding of race held by “the common man” and the intent of Congress (as codified in Section 2169). The “words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech,” Sutherland wrote, “to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” Thus while the 1790 Naturalization Act had restricted citizenship to “free white persons” in an attempt to exclude blacks and American Indians from citizenship, immigration changed the population of the United States, and Supreme Court rulings were fundamental in continuing to expand the category of nonwhite to include racialized newcomers. These rulings opened the door to contesting the right of Mexicans to naturalize, and campaigns against and challenges to Mexicans’ right to U.S. citizenship proliferated in the late 1920s. The organizers of these campaigns argued that the Ozawa and Thind cases had “clearly foreshadowed” that Mexicans should be denied citizenship because they were neither white nor black. It was in this context of trying to establish, both legally and in everyday life, the definition of whiteness that many Americans began to question

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where Mexicans belonged. After 1924 officials in the Bureau of Naturalization (now independent of the Bureau of Immigration) were forced to address the status of Mexicans repeatedly. During the 1910s the Bureau had received occasional interdepartmental inquiries as to whether Mexicans were eligible for U.S. citizenship, but during the 1920s questions arose from within the agency itself. For instance, one junior officer wrote a twelve-page memo to his supervisors, which circulated widely within the Bureau before reaching the commissioner of naturalization, asking for clarification regarding Mexicans’ eligibility for citizenship. The junior officer cited three cases in which Indians had been found ineligible. United States v. Balsara (1910) declared that “American Indians [did] not belong to the white race.” In In re Burton (1900) the federal trial court denied the petition of an Indian born in British Columbia because “no provision [had] been made by Congress for the naturalization of Indians or other peoples of color or their descendants, except for Africans.” In re Camille (1880) found that a man whose father was a white Canadian and whose mother was an Indian from British Columbia was not eligible for naturalization because he was half Indian. Noting that the Supreme Court had cited In re Camille in its Ozawa ruling, the officer reasoned that, “the Supreme Court of the United States having referred to this decision in terms of approval, the racial ineligibility of petitioners for naturalization of Indian blood would seem to require no further discussion.” Interestingly the logic of this argument bypassed more recent developments regarding Indians much closer to home: the 1924 Citizenship Act had granted citizenship to Native Americans. While on the surface that Act seems to suggest that boundaries of citizenship were widening, in practice, it was interpreted then—and is remembered now—as a form of forced assimilation in which citizenship was extended in name only. Furthermore even before Congress passed the Citizenship Act, many Native Americans had achieved citizenship through treaties, military service, and receipt of land allotments. If Native Americans could gain citizenship through a political act, why could Mexicans not do the same through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? The fact that the junior examiner’s memo was widely circulated and made its way up the ranks speaks to how well his assessment resonated within the Bureau of Naturalization. In addition to inquiries from other government agencies and from its own staff, in the 1920s the Bureau of Naturalization began to receive requests from the public asking whether Mexicans were eligible for citizenship. Veselle

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Schaeffer from Dayton, Ohio, inquired whether mestizos (Mexicans of mixed Spanish and Indian race) could be naturalized, highlighting the fact that questions from the general public were not limited to those living in the Southwest. Moreover the fact that people in the Midwest were becoming more familiar with Mexicans (to the point of using the word mestizo) shows an expansion of understandings of race beyond a black-white framework. Schaeffer’s inquiry also demonstrates a point raised earlier: Mexicans were continually bring reinscribed as immigrants, despite their long presence in the United States. Of course, whether or not mestizos could be naturalized could not be answered within the limits of a black-white framework, since citizenship thus far had been conceived of as limited to those two groups. Where mestizos might fit remained difficult to pin down. In his answer to Schaeffer, Commissioner of Naturalization Raymond Crist explained that anyone with a preponderance of white or black blood could naturalize. In the absence of clearly defined institutional guidelines regarding where Mexicans belonged in the racial order, the fight to reposition them lower in the racial hierarchy intensified. The stakes were high: once firmly categorized as nonwhite, Mexicans would not only be excluded from applying for citizenship; they would be excluded from immigrating as well since Section 13 of the Immigration Act restricted immigration to persons eligible for citizenship.

strategies for making mexicans ineligible for citizenship Some nativist organizations made changing the ground rules for citizenship a top priority. The California Joint Immigration Committee (CJIC) led the campaign to redefine the status quo with respect to Mexicans. The CJIC was an umbrella organization representing some of the most influential interest groups in the state, including the state-level branches of the American Legion, the Federation of Labor, and the Native Sons of the Golden West. The CJIC had started out as the Asiatic Exclusion League and had cut its teeth as an influential lobbying group around the issues of Japanese exclusion and Alien Land Laws. The CJIC pursued its goals publicly, issuing press releases with headlines such as “Mexican Indians Not Eligible for American Citizenship.” Citing the Ozawa and Thind cases as decisions that applied to the “yellow” and “brown” races, respectively, the CJIC argued that, as members of the “red race,” Mexicans were also excluded from naturalization. The

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reference to the “red race” was most likely borrowed from the then-popular term for Native Americans, though, like the junior examiner in the Bureau of Naturalization, the CJIC conveniently ignored the fact that Native Americans had been eligible for citizenship since 1924. The bigger point seemed to be that the Ozawa and Thind rulings had defined particular groups as nonwhite, and the CJIC was determined that Mexicans should be consigned to that category as well, thus narrowing the scope of the racial script of whiteness. One strategy the CJIC used to advance its cause was to pressure Secretary of Labor James Davis, whose department oversaw the Bureaus of Immigration and of Naturalization, to use his influence with Congress to declare Mexicans ineligible to naturalize. Davis was no advocate of unrestricted immigration; he had favored including immigrants from the Western Hemisphere in the 1924 Immigration Act’s quota system. Even after that law passed, Davis continued to argue in the Department of Labor’s annual reports that quotas be applied to countries in the Western Hemisphere. In addition, the Department of Labor sponsored a 1925 study on “racial problems” in Latin America and the West Indies by Princeton economist (and eugenics enthusiast) Robert Foerster. Despite Davis’s interest in restricting Mexican immigration, he was not, to the disappointment of the CJIC, in favor of denying Mexicans the right to naturalize. In a February 1929 memo to Washington State Representative Albert Johnson, head of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Davis confirmed that Mexicans were eligible for citizenship, even as he characterized them as racially inferior. Less than two weeks later he carefully expanded that memo and sent it to California Senator Hiram W. Johnson, who chaired the Senate Committee on Immigration. Davis explained that Mexicans previously had not been placed under the quota system because of the need for their unskilled labor. He argued that the time had come to reassess Mexican immigration because it had increased dramatically and had engendered a host of problems, including threats to white job candidates, increased social ills, and heightened disease rates, all in a declining national economy. Davis’s proposed solution was to place Mexicans (and Canadians) on a quota system and to allow immigration only for seasonal laborers. In rendering his opinion, he carefully considered the position that Mexicans were not eligible for citizenship. He concluded:

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It is the view of this Department that native Mexicans cannot be denied permanent admission to the United States because of their ethnological status as a race. The Mexican people are of such a mixed stock and individuals have such a limited knowledge of their racial composition that it would be impossible for the most learned and experienced ethnologist or anthropologist to classify or determine their racial origin. Thus, making an effort to exclude them from admission or citizenship because of their racial status is practically impossible.

Vehemently disagreeing, the CJIC pointed out that although Davis contended it was impossible to classify Mexicans because of their “mixed stock,” he had also stated that out of 15 million Mexicans, five to six million were of “pure Indian stock” and seven to eight million were of “mestizo stock.” The latter observation seemed to support the CJIC’s argument regarding Mexicans’ status as Indians. From their viewpoint, if Mexicans were Indian, a fact the secretary of labor’s reference to mestizo stock seemed to concede, it was clear that they should not be eligible for naturalization. Davis’s failure to support the curtailment of naturalization prompted the CJIC to try a different strategy. California State Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb, a longtime advocate of exclusionary immigration policies, created a detailed memo briefing Senator Johnson on the topic, using Labor Secretary Davis’s argument as a straw man. Webb published this memo in pamphlet form to facilitate its dissemination to various government bodies and top immigration officials. V. S. McClatchy, an active member of the CJIC, looked for allies aside from the secretary of labor. He contacted Paul Armstrong, a high-ranking naturalization officer based in San Francisco, urging him to forward to Attorney General Webb an application for naturalization from a Mexican that would make a suitable test case. Instead of responding directly to McClatchy, however, Armstrong forwarded the letter to the U.S. commissioner of naturalization, adding that he, Armstrong, agreed with McClatchy that the time had come for a test case, “especially in view of the decisions of the Supreme Court in the Thind, Ozawa, and Toyota cases.” The commissioner was unsympathetic; he maintained that the issue of Mexicans’ eligibility for naturalization had been settled. Each of the main players in this campaign to make Mexicans ineligible for U.S. citizenship was a CJIC member. Attorney General Webb’s name and title were prominently displayed on the CJIC letterhead. Senator Hiram

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Johnson, also a CJIC member, knew McClatchy, Webb, and others well and had worked with them to pass legislation advancing their common goals. Moreover as California’s governor from 1911 to 1917, Johnson had signed into law the discriminatory Alien Land Law Act drafted by Webb, which prevented those ineligible for citizenship from owning or leasing land for more than three years. This law directly affected Asians, as they were not eligible for citizenship. These were not simply men with personal prejudices who held influential positions; these were kingmakers who used their positions of power and influence to create and perpetuate a racist infrastructure. Their actions emphasize a key tenet of racial scripts: in addition to shaping how we define, think, and act toward groups, racial scripts serve as a means of embedding racist attitudes into laws, policies, and institutions. Another important California-based group supporting a change in the status of Mexicans was the Native Sons of the Golden West (NSGW). Although a member organization within the CJIC, the NSGW also acted independently, applying to this new cause the same skills it had developed to restrict Asian immigration and limit the rights of those Asians already present in the United States. The NSGW pursued every opportunity to gain the attention and support of men in power, including members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, newly elected President Herbert Hoover, and Hoover’s newly appointed secretary of labor, William Doak. The NSGW used a three-pronged approach. First, they wanted to ensure that Congress did not overturn existing laws that made Asians ineligible for citizenship. This possibility had been raised as a way to preserve cordial diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan. Since the goal of both the CJIC and the NSGW was to expand the category of excluded aliens to include Mexicans, if the existing legal structure were overturned, the strategy would have foundered. This in turn would have jeopardized another NSGW goal: reducing immigration from the Philippines. As residents of a U.S. protectorate, Filipinos were considered nationals and thus exempt from the quota system. If Congress were to abolish the “ineligible for citizenship” category, there would be “no logical legal basis for restricting Filipino immigration without racial discrimination, or for cutting down Mexican immigration, without curtailing to the same or greater extent the more desirable immigration from Canada.” Clearly the NSGW understood that the legal practices directed at one racialized group could affect another. They also embraced the concept of racial hierarchies, as implied by

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their search for a strategy that would cut off the flow of Mexicans and Filipinos without restricting Canadians. The NSGW’s second strategy was, like that of the CJIC, to enlist the support of the Department of Labor. Given the force of Davis’s refusal to consider changing Mexicans’ racial classification, the NSGW may have hoped that by acting independently of the CJIC, they would be able to apply additional pressure on the Department. Moreover the replacement of Davis by William Doak in December 1930 may have raised hopes, given that Doak had been involved in developing deportation campaigns aimed at Mexicans during the early years of the Depression. But Doak proved resistant to the suggestions put forth by the NSGW. He reminded the group that the Supreme Court made legal decisions, not the Labor Department. An awareness of the Court’s power underlay the CJIC and the NSGW’s third strategy, which was to continue to pressure Department officials to bring a test case before the Supreme Court to settle the issue of race and citizenship. Eugenics organizations also supported restricting Mexican immigration by pushing forth a test case. The eugenics movement, prominent during this period, had lent scientific authority to the claim that southern and eastern European immigrants were ruining America’s “racial stock.” Eugenics organizations had played a pivotal role in the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, thus setting an important precedent for how racial science would influence immigration policy. Even after the law’s passage, they kept at this agenda, shifting their attention from ethnic European groups on the East Coast to Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. In 1930 the Committee on Selective Immigration of the American Eugenics Society (AES) proposed further restrictions on immigration on various fronts. They believed that the 1924 Immigration Act did not go far enough to ensure that “descendants of the colonists and early settlers” would dominate the population, so they proposed that existing quotas be reduced by half. They also proposed that numerical limitations be imposed on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, a proposal that was clearly meant to reduce Mexican immigration, and they supported the deportation of immigrants, a practice that became policy after the onset of the Depression. The AES had long applied eugenic reasoning in its quest to influence immigration policy and now lent support to the campaign to bring a test case that would conclude that Mexicans were ineligible for citizenship. It published an editorial in Eugenical News in 1930 calling for such a test case. The

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association was well aware that U.S. immigration control efforts, such as a decline in the issuance of visas and increased border control through the creation of the border patrol in 1924, had already decreased immigration from Mexico. In addition, by 1929 the Depression was already affecting the United States, and fewer Mexicans were attempting to immigrate given the lack of jobs and racist attempts to scapegoat them for the economic hard times. Nonetheless the AES argued that, since Mexicans had a “predominating amount of American Indian blood,” bringing a test case forward would “constitute a public service.” While the test case did not come to fruition, these nativist groups continued to pursue their joint and separate campaigns well into the 1930s.

mexican immigration on the policy front The strong lobbying power of large-scale employers, as well as diplomatic and trade interests, kept Mexicans from being included in the quota system throughout the 1920s. Nevertheless opponents continued to launch attempts to legislate restrictions on Mexican immigration. One of the most important immigration restrictionists in Congress was Representative John C. Box of Texas. Box was tireless in his efforts to rally anti-Mexican sentiment and to pass severely restrictive immigration legislation. He corresponded with academics, scientists, social workers, educators, and self-identified eugenicists. His basic message was that American employers were aiding the spread of a peonage system by hiring Mexicans, whom they clearly viewed as racially inferior. Box’s arguments may have persuaded many of his fellow Americans, but his attempts in 1926 and 1928 to shepherd legislation that would drastically limit Mexican immigration failed. The need to preserve diplomatic and trade relations with Mexico, as well as the State Department’s commitment to protecting American-owned oil properties there, proved more powerful than the strong anti-Mexican sentiment of Box, some of his fellow legislators, and assorted citizen groups. Interestingly he and his myriad allies vehemently maintained that Mexicans were an inferior race and of “Indian stock.” For example, in a congressional hearing to extend quotas to Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere, Box stated, “Practically all those crossing the border [from Mexico] are from Amerind stocks that no longer exist. These were eliminated at the conquest.” Yet they did not employ the CJIC’s strategy of claiming that Mexicans were Indians and there-

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fore not eligible for U.S. citizenship; instead they argued that Mexicans should be put on the quota system. Although restrictionist legislation repeatedly failed to pass, in 1928 the State Department engineered a significant reduction in Mexican immigration by instructing its consular offices in Mexico to curtail the number of visas issued. This change in policy was aimed at appeasing restrictionists and impeding future legislation to limit Mexican immigration. In a speech delivered at a 1930 conference on immigration, the head of the State Department’s visa office, John Farr Simmons, explained that completely cutting off immigration from Mexico would be a bad foreign relations move and hence a bad trade move. On the other hand, the State Department believed Mexicans were likely to become public charges and, given the Depression, wished to discourage their immigration. Still, he argued that Mexicans did not pose a serious threat, since the federal government could always deport them. With the consuls scrupulously following the new visa policy, legal immigration from Mexico decreased drastically. According to historian Mark Reisler, from July 1929 (the beginning of the fiscal year) to March 1930, visas issued to Mexicans fell by 75 percent as compared with the average number issued during the entire course of the prior five years. By 1930 the flow of Mexican immigrants had decreased dramatically. In 1929, the year following the change in visa policy, Congress approved another deterrent, Public Law 1018, which made crossing into the United States without a visa a misdemeanor with a penalty of up to one year in prison. The law also provided that anyone who was deported, then reentered, and was caught again would be charged with a felony and would face up to two years in prison. Congress also increased funding to the border patrol, adding to both its real and its symbolic power. This combination of decreased visas, increased penalties, and tighter patrolling was highly effective in reducing Mexican immigration. Nevertheless well into the 1930s restrictionists continued campaigning for a quota to be established for immigrants from Mexico and for an end to their eligibility for citizenship.

the test case Much as the question of immigration remained unresolved during the 1930s, so too did the question of eligibility for citizenship. Business interests consistently undercut the possibility of a monolithic, race-based approach to the

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question of Mexican immigration. Advocates for immigration may have agreed with opponents that Mexicans were of “inferior stock” and “not quite white,” but this shared perception made them no less zealous in ensuring that the immigration door remained wedged open enough to allow a steady flow of low-wage labor to continue. Two major turning points for Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in the United States occurred during the 1930s. The first was the Depression. The collapse of the U.S. economy triggered a dramatic change in the treatment of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Their marginal acceptance that had stemmed from their being a source of cheap labor disappeared as rapidly as the jobs they had been hired to fi ll. As jobs disappeared, so did the justification for allowing an open immigration policy with Mexico. Opponents of unrestricted immigration began insisting that Mexicans return home and followed up those demands with political pressure at the local, state, and national levels. These attitudes culminated in repatriation programs that sent large numbers of Mexicans, including U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, to Mexico. Los Angeles, for example, lost one-third of its Mexican population due to deportation and repatriation programs. The second major turning point was the rise of second-generation Mexican Americans as a politicized group. Depression-era deportation programs made it clear to the second generation and Mexicans residing in the United States that they could no longer move easily back and forth between countries, nor could they anticipate help from the Mexican government in protecting their legal rights while they were living in the United States. They increasingly turned to U.S. institutions, joining unions, demanding their rights as U.S. citizens, and often using organizations like the Congress of Spanish Speaking Peoples to channel their voices and give them greater political weight. And even as their efforts to naturalize were being challenged and their residency status threatened, they immersed themselves in U.S. popular culture, from fashion to dance halls. Many of these Mexican Americans fought on many fronts to continue being classified as white for they knew that whiteness afforded them rights. As the definition of whiteness continued to be contested in the 1930s, the CJIC, NSGW, and other nativist groups finally got what they wanted: a test case. In 1935 Judge John Knight of the U.S. District Court in Buffalo, New York, denied three Mexicans’ petitions for naturalization because they had a “strain of Indian blood.” Knight’s reasoning resonated with what was com-

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monly known as the “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with even one drop of “black blood” as black. This is yet another example of how racial scripts became embedded in the societal infrastructure. This form of nineteenthcentury scientific racism continued on well into the twentieth century through the use of such racial definitions, as the same formula for “making race” was extended to Mexicans. Knight’s ruling supported the original decision of naturalization examiner John L. Murff, who had denied the Mexicans’ petitions. Murff believed that “the only genuine Mexican is an Indian.” In Knight’s view, Mexicans were “outside the category” of aliens eligible for citizenship because they were neither white nor black. He also noted that, while In re Rodriguez had declared Mexicans eligible for citizenship, that ruling was no longer valid, given later Supreme Court rulings, presumably a reference to the Ozawa and Thind cases. One of the three denied petitions ruled on by Knight was that of Timoteo Andrade. Andrade had been living in the United States for twenty years when he filed a petition to become a naturalized citizen. He originally came from Lagos, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, a town connected to the United States through rail lines, thus facilitating immigration north. Andrade had lived in El Paso, Texas, for a time but had settled in Buffalo, New York, where he worked as a waiter. He had married Sara de la Cruz, also a Mexican citizen, in El Paso. Together they had three children, Michael, Maria, and Timoteo Jr., all born in the United States. He did not need a translator in his naturalization interviews, which demonstrated his fluency in English. His character witnesses were two white men, one a naturalized citizen, Thomas Harding, originally from England, the other an American named Bernard Malvern. They were both salesmen, and Andrade, as their customer, had established a relationship with them over the years. In short, many aspects of his life pointed to ways in which he had become integrated into American life in his twenty years of living in the United States. Andrade’s self-description in his declaration of intention to naturalize and the statements by his witnesses speak to the myriad ways we understand race as framed by nation, language, heritage, phenotype, history, culture, and desire. He described his physical features as the questions on the form required: he had black hair and brown eyes; his complexion was dark, but his “color” was white. Under race he listed “Spanish,” and under nationality he listed “Mexican.” When a naturalization examiner asked his witness, Thomas Harding, “What race of people do you consider him to be of?,” Harding

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replied, “Spanish.” When the examiner asked the other witness, Bernard Malvern, “Do you know what race he is?,” Malvern replied, “I always thought he was Mexican.” All of these descriptions spoke to various ways of gauging race. Such racial descriptions allowed a certain degree of fluidity in terms of racial eligibility for citizenship. What Andrade said in his naturalization interview, however, did not. After submitting his declaration of intention to naturalize, he underwent a preliminary examination, in which he told the immigration inspector that he had “Indian blood.” When asked how much, he replied, “Maybe I have seventy-five percent; maybe fifty.” Because one had to be considered white or black to naturalize, such an answer clearly raised questions about his fitness for citizenship. Knight denied the petition based largely on this testimony. Andrade appealed the denial. With the help of an attorney, he submitted further testimony that showed he was “in error” when he stated that he might have “fifty percent Indian blood” when perhaps it was more like “2 percent.” In a follow-up interview, Andrade was frank about why he answered in such a manner. “In Mexico, even if we have full Spanish blood, we say that we have Indian blood, because in Mexico we are all Mexicans,” he explained. “We are proud that we are Mexicans and we don’t like to be told that we have Spanish or French blood.” Although Andrade had moved to the United States twenty years earlier, his definitions of race were clearly shaped by nation-building projects in Mexico, suggesting that even once settled in the United States, he could live in and be affected by a U.S.-Mexican transnational world. After the Mexican Revolution, under President Álvaro Obregón (who served from 1920 to 1924), Minister of Public Education José Vasconcelos implemented a cultural education program aimed at refashioning Mexican identity. This program encouraged Mexicans to adopt a positive national identity centered on Mexico’s mestizo past. The mestizo was a product of Indian and Spanish blood, which together produced a stronger race, la raza cosmica, according to Vasconcelos. The goals of the campaign became popularized, especially through the arts and particularly by three famous Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera (1886– 1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896– 1974). Each artist prominently and proudly featured images of the Mexican mestizo in his work. In seeking a new life, or at least a new job, in the United States, some Mexican immigrants, like Timoteo Andrade, clearly carried with them the concept of raza cosmica.

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Ralph White, who was not the primary examiner in the interview, jumped in at this point and pressed Andrade on his self-identification as an Indian, to which Andrade again replied, “In Mexico, we hold [that] Mexicans, even if [we] have not Indian blood, we are proud that we descended from Indians.” White responded, “That was all right when you were in Mexico, but now [that] you are up here you have no reason to feel that way.” White’s comment signaled that the United States operated under a different racial ideology and that, should he wish to be naturalized, Andrade needed to get in line with it. Andrade’s mother, Maria Bera Andrade, was also brought in to give testimony on his behalf. Many of the questions directed to her asked about the family lineage: where relatives hailed from and what they looked like, “white” or “Indian.” “Describe the appearance of your father”; “Describe [your mother’s] complexion, color of eyes and hair”; “How tall was your father?”; “How tall was your maternal grandfather?”; “Do you know what racial blood [your father] was?” The questions could have come from any stock eugenics textbook of the time that linked race and physiognomy. Maria Andrade traced the family lineage to Spain and told of fair-haired relatives, but, like her son, she could not decouple race and nation and also spoke of being of the Mexican race. She summarized, “A Spaniard and a Mexican, I think they are about the same as to blood. We all speak Spanish,” which continued to leave the racial definition of Mexican unsettled. With new testimony to consider, the case was once again brought before Knight, who reiterated what he had stated in his original ruling: “Men are not white if the strain of the colored blood in them is half or a quarter, or not improbably, even less, the governing test always being that of common understanding.” That said, Knight reversed his original ruling and granted Andrade citizenship. According to historians Francisco Rosales and Patrick Espinosa, the political landscape played a key role in shaping Knight’s decision. The Mexican Embassy had protested Knight’s original ruling, directing the consulate in New York City to formally appeal the decision. In response, the State Department’s Latin American affairs specialist, Sumner Welles, assured the Mexican ambassador in Washington that Knight’s ruling would not stand and that Mexicans would be allowed to continue immigrating to the United States and naturalizing. As Rosales has aptly stated, “In this manner, a historychanging event did not take place.”

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beyond the andrade decision: making mexicans white The fight to make, or keep, Mexicans white continued on various fronts outside the courtroom. The same year the Andrade decision was issued, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that it would reverse its decision to classify Mexicans as a race of their own. For the first and only time, the United States placed Mexicans in a racial category of their own in 1930. Upon reversing its policy the Census Bureau announced that, “Persons of Mexican birth or ancestry who were not definitely Indian or of other nonwhite race were returned as white.” In line with the Census Bureau’s racial classifications, the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued Circular No. 111 in May 1937, instructing officers that Mexicans were to be listed as white and not as a separate race in all INS proceedings. The circular consisted of two simple paragraphs, which began, “The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce classifies Mexicans as white and in the interest of uniformity it has been determined to continue this practice in naturalization cases.” The circular also explicitly ruled out any objections to Mexicans’ eligibility that were based on Section 2169 of the Revised Statutes of the United States. Despite this restatement of policy, discrepancies in classifying Mexicans continued. Some INS officers and clerks listed Mexicans’ race as white in cases of naturalization but not in cases of immigration registration. This led the INS to issue yet another directive; Circular No. 140, issued in July 1937, stated, “Whenever the term ‘race’ is used in the case of any person of Mexican descent, handled in the Central Office or in the field, the classification should be ‘white.’ This applies to all forms, cards, circulars, and other papers.” The INS seemed to be trying to cast a net so wide and far-reaching as to preclude any need for further statements regarding the racial status of Mexicans. These renewed efforts to categorize Mexicans as white prompted criticism from within the INS. Charles Muller, the assistant district director of the New York office of the INS, contended that it was inappropriate to designate Mexicans who were “entirely or preponderantly of Indian extraction” as white. Muller backed up his argument by referring to Knight’s first ruling. Some immigration and naturalization personnel, although agreeing with colleagues such as John Murff, favored a more indirect form of resistance to

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categorizing Mexicans as white. They simply ignored the various departmental circulars, preferring to continue the practice of classifying Mexicans as a separate race, but without drawing attention to themselves. This more passive resistance sparked protest from external sources, including another formal complaint to the INS from the Mexican Embassy. Embassy officials also followed up when, despite assurances that immigration officers would comply with the regulations, they continued listing Mexicans as a separate race. In response, the INS made further bureaucratic changes and issued even more clarifying memos. LULAC also became involved in the fight to ensure that Mexicans be formally designated as white. During the 1930s LULAC officials wrote to and personally visited immigration officials to protest the continued listing of Mexicans as a separate race even though that practice violated INS policy. Not surprisingly, given their goal of assimilation, LULAC spokespersons shared the racial paradigm favored by many immigration officers: they readily concurred that some Mexicans were of the “Indian or Red Race” but argued that the “majority belong[ed] to the Caucasian or White Race.” Thus Mexicans “resented being classified as other than White.” An INS district director of immigration in El Paso responded to LULAC’s concerns. He argued that it was necessary to keep track of the “racial stock” of aliens to have an accurate picture of immigration. Because the U.S. Census Bureau classified Mexicans as white, the INS had been instructed to do the same “in the interest of uniformity” in naturalization cases. In matters of immigration, however, where there was no edict, Mexicans would continue to be listed, and thought of, as a separate race. When Edward Shaughnessy, the INS deputy commissioner, received word of this response, he quickly dispatched a letter to the El Paso office, informing the district director that Mexicans should be classified as white in all areas of INS work; there should be no contradictions between the agendas of the agency’s different operations. During the 1930s the INS and other government offices also fielded complaints from Mexicans living in the United States who had endured discriminatory treatment not only in immigration procedures at the border and naturalization processes in the states where they had settled, but in nearly all aspects of their daily lives. The experiences these letter-writers reported reveal that the same ideologies that compelled border personnel to list Mexicans as a separate race when they first entered the country followed

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these individuals throughout their lives in the United States. For example, Aurora Davalos, a Mexican woman from San Antonio, Texas, wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1941, describing the difficulties she and her family faced. She had witnessed her brother being denied access to public places, and yet he was still considering enlisting in the army now that the United States stood at the brink of war. Davalos questioned what it meant to fight for a country in order to preserve its rights when you yourself were denied those same rights. Davalos explained that she knew that individuals discriminated, and she had come to terms with this fact by dismissing them as “ignorant, narrow minded people.” But when she learned that the government classified Mexicans “in a race all their own,” she realized that such discrimination also existed at the institutional level. She was referring to government forms that asked an applicant to list his or her race as “White,” “Yellow,” “Black,” or “Mexican.” In the end, none of the Mexican naturalization cases made it to the Supreme Court, and in 1940 the issue became moot. The 1940 Nationality Act extended citizenship “only to white persons, persons of African nativity or descent, and descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.”

conclusion I have highlighted the many ways in which race has historically been fabricated. At the same time that Italians, Irish, and other European ethnics “became Caucasian,” there was a renewed effort to categorize Mexicans in a race of their own. Thus while the category “white” was malleable enough to include some groups, such as European ethnics, it was more rigid for others, such as Mexicans and Asians, in terms of immigration and African Americans under Jim Crow segregation. Such shifts serve as a reminder that, although citizenship may have been clearly defined in black and white terms, “black” and “white” and “Indian” could be unstable categories. We have seen how opponents of Mexican immigration tried to control it through immigration and naturalization policy. In the next chapter we will see how, when these options were not available to them, they attempted to overturn what many consider an inalienable right: birthright citizenship. Historically matters of birthright citizenship have been discussed in conjunction with African Americans (the Fourteenth Amendment) and the

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Chinese (the 1898 Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision). In the 1930s Mexicans’ (and Asians’) right to birthright citizenship began to be debated. In this examination previous racial scripts of who was entitled to citizenship were pivotal in helping people weigh whether or not Mexicans were deserving of citizenship.

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Birthright Citizenship beyond Black and White

In 2011 the Arizona State Senate defeated a bill that challenged the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision of automatic citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents are undocumented residents. The legislation was proposed a year after the passage of S.B. 1070, an Arizona law directed at Mexicans that made it a state crime to be undocumented. Around the same time that the Arizona legislature was deciding the fate of its Mexican immigrant population, a separate issue around birthright emerged. A group of opponents of President Barack Obama, popularly known as “birthers,” questioned his right to be president based on their erroneous belief that he is not a citizen of the United States. This theory had circulated before Obama was elected president, but it increased in its intensity after his election and became a key platform issue for Donald Trump as he tested his strength as a potential presidential candidate. These seemingly unrelated stories are very much connected, for the same question underlies both: Who is entitled to U.S. citizenship? In the case of immigrants, the effort to rescind their right to birthright citizenship clearly signals that they are not welcome members of U.S. society. In the case of President Obama, questioning his birthplace bypasses any need to discuss his policies or political record and instead challenges the legitimacy of his very capacity to lead the nation. Looking at these two movements together, we are also reminded that matters of birthright citizenship are not limited to one racialized group. In fact historically claims to birthright citizenship have encompassed and ideologically connected multiple racialized communities. 68

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In this chapter I examine the long history of birthright citizenship in the nineteenth century leading up to United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1896), which clearly stated who is eligible for birthright citizenship in the United States. I begin by reviewing some key federal legislation (e.g., the 1790 Naturalization Act and the Fourteenth Amendment) and Supreme Court cases (e.g., Dred Scott v. Sandford [1857]) that culminated in Wong Kim Ark in order to establish the long and contested history of the definition of and criteria for birthright citizenship. I then move forward in time and narrow the focus to look closely at two congressional bills designed to broaden the parameters of birthright citizenship. My discussion of this legislation, proposed in 1933, illustrates several points. In the wake of the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, women, more than men, came to symbolize what was wrong with immigration policy. Chapters 1 and 2 demonstrated the ways lawmakers tried to limit Mexicans’ access to U.S. citizenship primarily through changes in immigration and naturalization laws and practices. In this chapter we see yet another set of strategies for tightening the bounds of citizenship that directly targeted Mexicans alongside Asians: limiting American-born women’s ability to transfer their citizenship to their children born abroad. A focus on women and their reproductive capabilities demonstrates that in addition to regulating and policing immigrants at the nation’s borders and ports, both immigrants and their children would continue to be scrutinized even after they settled in the United States. This signaled a concern not just with immigrants but with their children, the second generation and beyond. Thus hearings on birthright citizenship in 1933, a key moment after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, demonstrate that issues of birthright citizenship remained far from settled. Despite the 1868 ratification of the seemingly unambiguously worded Fourteenth Amendment; the curtailment of Asian immigration achieved through the passage of exclusion acts in 1882, 1892, and 1902; the increasingly draconian measures of the 1921, 1924, and 1929 immigration legislation; and the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924, issues of who was fit to be a citizen continued to be hotly debated and contested. My analysis relies on the concept of racial scripts. As we shall see, judges, legislators, and other invested parties consistently made policies around birthright citizenship in relation to other racialized groups, particularly African Americans, in the early debates on the subject, and they rehashed the

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arguments every time a new immigrant group that was not accepted as white or black made claims to birthright citizenship. Legislators relied on racial scripts to help people understand where these groups fit in the country’s racial hierarchy and thus whether or not they were deserving of citizenship. Thus the legislation and rulings regarding birthright citizenship connected immigrants and blacks and, taken in the aggregate, established the long history of racial exclusion. Finally, the concept of racial scripts allows us to see as intimately linked the Fourteenth Amendment, the Wong Kim Ark decision, and the Cable Act of 1922 (passed to protect women’s citizenship if they married a foreigner), which are usually discussed separately as African American, Asian American, and women’s history, respectively. Collectively these moments reinforced and sometimes recalibrated the U.S. racial hierarchy.

the long history of access to u.s. citizenship U.S. citizenship can be attained by birth or by naturalization. Birthright citizenship is further subdivided into various categories, the broadest of which covers those who are born in the country (the legal term is jus soli, meaning “right of soil”) and those who are born elsewhere but who have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen ( jus sanguinis, “right of blood”). The first federal law to address citizenship was the 1790 Naturalization Act (“an act to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization”), which specified basic criteria—including that applicants must be free and white—and set forth a procedure for acquiring citizenship through naturalization: Be it enacted . . . that any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof on application to any common law Court of record in any one of the States wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least, and making proof to the satisfaction of such Court that he is a person of good character, and taking the oath or affirmation prescribed by law to support the Constitution of the United States.

Because subsequent laws governing citizenship developed separately and over time, eligibility criteria were sometimes unclear. This opened the door to legal challenges and judicial interpretations, making courts an important site for testing the parameters of citizenship. In the landmark case of Dred

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Scott v. Sandford (1857), Dred Scott, a slave, sued the widow of his owner for his freedom. The owner had moved Scott across states, first to Illinois and then to the Wisconsin Territory, both of which prohibited slavery. Various precedents held that slaves who lived in free jurisdictions became free. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in an infamous decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing for the majority, concluded that blacks were not citizens and thus could not sue in federal court: The words “people of the United States” and “citizens” are synonymous terms. . . . The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement [people of African ancestry] compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.

In short, the Dred Scott decision denied citizenship to all blacks, whether free or slave and whether born in the United States or elsewhere.

Applying Relational Reasoning to the Legal Interpretation of Citizenship The Dred Scott case is accorded landmark status because it established blacks as unfit for citizenship. It is also, however, a striking example of the relational way race is understood in the United States. When we look closely at the decision, we see that the Court established blacks’ unsuitability by comparing them to another racialized group, Native Americans. Justice Taney reminds the nation that the 1790 Naturalization Act “confines the right of becoming citizens ‘to aliens being free white persons.’ ” He emphasizes that historically Native Americans were seen as “free and independent people” and “regarded and treated as foreign Governments,” but they also were seen as “uncivilized” and “under subjection to the white race.” This made it necessary “to regard them as in a state of pupilage, and to legislate to a certain extent over them and the territory they occup[ied].” Because Taney categorizes Native Americans as foreigners, he argues that theoretically they could be naturalized—and then quickly adds that in their “untutored and savage

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state, no one would have thought of admitting them as citizens in a civilized community”: “No one supposed then that any Indian would ask for, or was capable of enjoying, the privileges of an American citizen, and the word white was not used with any particular reference to them.”  Thus it was not only blacks this case established as unfit for citizenship but Native Americans as well. Further, the decision equated citizenship, and in the process American identity, with whiteness. It also grouped Native Americans and blacks together in the category “nonwhite” and in opposition to whiteness and citizenship. The arguments in the Dred Scott ruling provide a striking example of how the connection between whiteness and citizenship, first stated formally in the 1790 Naturalization Act, was renewed and reinforced at other points in time and by institutions other than Congress in ways that expanded the category of nonwhite and in the process linked together groups racialized through disparate processes, such as imperialism, immigration, and slavery.

Legislating Citizenship Although over time Congress revised provisions of the 1790 Naturalization Act, the next major congressional effort to define citizenship did not occur until after the Civil War. The abolition of slavery in 1865 freed blacks but left their citizenship status ambiguous. Congress aimed to resolve this problem by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which imparted citizenship to all people born in the country, except Native Americans, who were explicitly excluded. With the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling in mind, many legislators feared that if this new legislation were legally challenged, it eventually would be declared unconstitutional. To avoid that possibility, Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared any person born or naturalized in the United States to be a U.S. citizen, but once again excluding Native Americans. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed the amendment in June 1866, and it was declared officially ratified by the states in July 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment did not address naturalized citizenship. Existing naturalization provisions were aligned with the new amendment through the 1870 Naturalization Act. This law broadened eligibility specifically to include persons of “African descent” along with free whites, but excluded all other persons. (Legally Mexicans qualified as white and were thus

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eligible for citizenship.) Therefore, while the new law granted blacks the right to naturalize, it did not establish equal access to citizenship for all.

Interpreting Congressional Intent The Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship to anyone born in the United States. However, because the amendment had been proposed in order to formalize blacks’ position in the nation, some interpreted birthright citizenship as extending to blacks only, meaning that no groups other than whites and blacks were eligible for citizenship. The Supreme Court justices themselves held this view, which they voiced in 1872, ruling in a set of disputes referred to collectively as the Slaughterhouse cases. These cases, involving New Orleans butchers, concerned alleged government interference in business owners’ freedom to conduct their normal operations. Though race was not an issue in the cases, in their discussion of rights generally the Supreme Court justices linked the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, arguing, “The main purpose of all the three last amendments was the freedom of the African race.”  Thus almost immediately after the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court narrowed its application. Twenty-five years later, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court again addressed the question of birthright citizenship. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents. As an adult, he visited China, and upon his return to the United States, immigration officials denied him reentry, citing federal immigration laws that restricted Chinese immigration. Ark’s presumed foreignness led officials to define his citizenship on the basis of his parents’ nationality ( jus sanguinis) rather than on the place of his own birth ( jus soli). When the case came before the Supreme Court, the majority concurred with Justice Horace Gray that Ark’s citizenship derived from his place of birth. The Court based its decision on a literal interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Approaching the ruling in the Wong Kim Ark case from a comparative and relational perspective, however, provides important additional insight: it shows us that birthright citizenship for Asians was made possible through the widening of an opening—the Fourteenth Amendment—that had been created as a means of providing citizenship to a different nonwhite group (African Americans).

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limiting birthright citizenship through legislation In the aftermath of the Immigration Act of 1924, and with the Depression raging, the issue of birthright citizenship was revisited yet again. In 1933 Congress debated two bills, H.R. 3673 and H.R. 77 (hereafter referred to as “the bills”). Both were drafted with the intention of allowing women with U.S. citizenship to transfer their citizenship to their children born abroad, thus potentially broadening the parameters of birthright citizenship. At the time the bills were introduced, only men could transfer their citizenship to their children born abroad. Because the bills presumably would give men and women the same rights, they were heralded as a step forward in terms of gender equality. The bills built on the Cable Act of 1922. That law, heralded as a major victory for women’s rights, ended the automatic loss of U.S. citizenship for women who married foreign nationals since 1907. Prior to passage of the Cable Act, women lost their U.S. citizenship if they married an immigrant because, under existing immigration law, they assumed the citizenship of their husband. Yet while the Cable Act was characterized as a significant advance on behalf of gender equality, it reentrenched racial barriers for nonwhites, both immigrant and U.S.-born. Women who were U.S.-born citizens but of a nationality not eligible for naturalization still could not regain citizenship lost when they married non-U.S. citizens. For example, a Japanese American woman who lost her citizenship by marrying a foreign national (usually a Japanese man) surrendered her citizenship forever. The bills were designed “to remove the last trace of inequality in the nationality act,” but dissenters questioned whether, in the process of recalibrating gender imbalances, racial gains would also (inadvertently) be made. They argued that to the extent the bills opened the door to renewed immigration, they would undermine the Immigration Act of 1924. That law not only drastically reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe but also prohibited groups ineligible for naturalization from immigrating, specifically Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian groups. Just as restrictionists worked hard to reinforce the definitional walls of whiteness in the post-1924 period by looking for a test case to make Mexicans ineligible for citizenship, they also actively fought against losing any ground in this area. They approached the hearings on H.R. 3673 and H.R. 77 determined to protect the

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victories they had accomplished. These bills, usually thought of as being about gender rights, therefore also must be viewed as inseparable from discussions of race, citizenship, and immigration. The bills’ opponents were men who had come of age during a period that saw the passage of some of the first race-based immigration laws, including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907–08 Gentleman’s Agreement (which drastically reduced immigration from Japan), and the 1924 Immigration Act. They were aware of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), which combined to declare Japanese and Asian Indians nonwhite and thus ineligible for citizenship. Yet when they read their morning newspaper or looked around as they rode street cars and dined out at restaurants, it seemed to them that neither legislation nor court cases had brought any significant change in the racial landscape. They still seemed to be surrounded by nonwhite immigrants. Worse, in their opinion, increasing numbers of nonwhites were second- (or more) generation residents who not only could claim citizenship but, more threateningly, were now poised to exercise the rights of citizenship. The 1930s saw the rise of the second generation. Chinese and Mexican populations that were once dominated by immigrants were increasingly composed of the second generation and beyond. Before 1900 the census did not even distinguish between Chinese and Japanese foreign- or native-born because most were foreign-born. By 1900, however, the Chinese American population reached 10 percent of the Chinese population in the United States. Arriving in later immigration waves, the Japa nese American population barely reached 1.1 percent of the Japa nese population in the United States in 1900. These U.S.-born Chinese and Japa nese populations grew quickly. The U.S.-born Chinese population doubled by 1910 (20.9 percent) and doubled again by 1930 (41.2 percent). This trend would continue throughout the decade, and the Chinese American population would eclipse foreign-born Chinese by 1940, 51.9 to 48.1 percent. The Japanese American population followed a parallel trajectory. In 1910 they were 6.2 percent of the U.S. Japanese population, but by 1920, when the Alien Land Laws that were directed at them were revised, they had risen to 30.1 percent and in 1930 barely missed eclipsing their foreign-born compatriots at 49.2 percent. By 1940 the U.S.born Japanese population would eclipse the U.S.-born Chinese population, at 62.7 percent. Similarly the U.S.-born Mexican population increased from 34.79 percent in 1920 to 56.6 percent in 1930.

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While in some ways the second generation too may have been perceived as foreigners and asked where they were from (“No, where are you really from?”), there were also significant differences between being foreign-born and native-born. The second generation had rights; they joined unions, voted, owned property, and gave birth to citizens. The 1940 census even began to keep track of the “potential voting population” by citizenship and race, underscoring that it was not just being a citizen but exerting the rights of citizenship that mattered. Stricter immigration policies could not prevent any of this from happening. These were birthright citizens who did not slip into the country through a metaphorical hole in a wall, as nativist rhetoric espoused, and opponents of the bills wished to ensure that no more gained access to citizenship through a loophole in the law. For example, in response to deportation programs during the 1930s, coupled with tighter border-control practices, as historian George Sánchez (1993) has shown, Mexicans and Mexican Americans who remained in the United States turned to the U.S. government with their concerns about civil rights and basic services, such as in housing, education, and health care. Though not to the same degree as Mexicans, Asians were also seen as taking the jobs of whites during the Depression. The Glendale Times, a local paper in Los Angeles County, ran a front-page article with pictures of white men pulling plows, with the headline “Unfair Competition Makes Slaves of Unemployed Men.” The article argued that “in the land of the free and home of the brave,” white men were reduced to this type of labor because Japanese farmers were allowed to farm the land and thus had forced white men to lower their standard of living. Residents of California wrote to President Roosevelt and the Immigration and Naturalization Service echoing these same sentiments. One woman from southern California argued that it was unfair to blame whites for not taking a job if it meant working alongside Asians, for “who would?” Another urged that Japanese should be deported because of the Depression and that, despite restrictive immigration laws, the Japanese population continued to “[increase] by birth [in] the Pacific States.” The rise of second-generation immigrants was the backdrop against which the House of Representatives conducted its public hearings on the two new bills. Little wonder, then, that Mr. T. E. Skinner, speaking on behalf of the Junior Order United American Mechanics, a nativist organization vehemently opposed to immigration, testified, “We are strictly opposed to any measure whatsoever that lets down the bars of immigration.” Lt. Col. U. S. Grant

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(no stated relation to President Ulysses S. Grant) argued that a child born abroad with U.S. citizenship rights could return to the United States and start a “line of immigration,” producing a “collateral line of relatives” of “extra quota people.” Grant represented the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies; founded in 1924 by John Trevor, a key architect of the 1924 Immigration Act, the orga nization supported tight immigration laws. Grant asserted that the scenario he sketched was a likely one, given that “in the case of some races, the number of children seems to multiply very rapidly.” These comments herald the return of the same kind of scientific racialism that helped bring about passage of the 1924 Immigration Act. Indeed the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies could boast of having the most prominent eugenicists of the day as officers, including V. S. McClatchy (honorary president), publisher of the Sacramento Bee and a high-ranking member of the Japanese Exclusion League of California; C. M. Goethe, a California eugenicist (honorary vice president); and, in New York City, Madison Grant (honorary vice president), who helped craft the 1924 Immigration Act and worked to pass antimiscegenation laws. These were men who consistently scanned the horizon for the next “new racial problem” and did not confine their discrimination to one racialized group. The dystopian scenarios Grant predicted were unlikely to occur if the proposed legislation passed. Both bills specified that parents had to have lived in the United States prior to the birth of the child born abroad in order for that child to be considered a U.S. citizen. One of the witnesses, Mrs. Burnita Matthews, an attorney representing the National Woman’s Party, which fought for women’s rights, took an empirical approach to the question of whether giving a woman the ability to transfer her U.S. citizenship to her children born abroad would lead to a significant increase in immigration. Using Department of Labor statistics on past immigration patterns, Matthews concluded that it would not. Judging from the scenarios presented during hearings, it was not just increased numbers of immigrants that raised concerns, but the suitability of the newcomers. Opponents were most fearful of particular types of immigrants, namely Asian (primarily Chinese or Japanese) and Mexican. One House representative argued that the proposed legislation increased “the probability of bringing in more of the Chinese and Japa nese, and ‘what have you,’ from those nations over there.” Representative Martin Dies (D-Texas) made clear that it was not white American women transferring their citizenship to

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their children that interested him. “Suppose a Hawaiian-Chinese American woman marries a Japanese,” he began. “They move to Japan. A child is born. That child would be an American citizen.” Ruth Taunton of the Business Women’s Legislative Council, which sought to establish equal rights for women in the workplace, argued in favor of the bill in order to rectify gender and racial inequities. To illustrate the kind of injustice the bills would eradicate, she offered two contrasting hypothetical cases: a Chinese boy born in the United States but raised in China and a white American woman who taught in China and married a British subject while there. The former would have more rights to return to the country with his children than would the latter. “This white woman . . . who has returned to make her permanent home here, cannot bring her little white child,” Taunton asserted. “This law discriminates against white American citizens in favor of yellow United States citizens,” she continued, building to her chilling climax: “You are turning away a white child and letting in a yellow child.” Taunton’s hypothetical example made clear that the women who supported this bill did so because they expected it would benefit white women who married not just any foreign nationals but white foreign nationals, and by extension, it would help their white children as well. No immigrant groups were invited to give testimony at the hearings, but preserved in the historical record is evidence of at least one letter from the members of the Chinese YMCA in San Francisco protesting the proposed changes. They argued that the change proposed would do “away with present rights of men citizens of Chinese decent [sic] and discriminates against women citizens of Chinese decent [sic].” It is worth noting that they defended the rights of both men and women, suggesting a certain level of gender equity in their agenda. Also, it stands to reason that such an organization would write to defend their rights as citizens. As historian Nayan Shah argues, the Chinese YMCA in San Francisco was a new type of organization, catering to second-generation Chinese Americans who sought to present themselves as modern, in part by cultivating a healthy lifestyle, so that they would more readily be recognized as citizens. One reason for the lack of common ground between proponents and opponents of the bills was the difference in their worldview. Opponents were mainly from the Pacific Coast and Texas, areas that received significant numbers of Mexican and Asian immigrants. The 1924 Immigration Act had not benefited these regions; it did not place quotas on immigration from

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Mexico, and Asians were already a visible presence before the Act imposed a permanent ban on their entry. Representative Charles Kramer (D-California) was explicit about his interests in the debates over the bills: the protection of “the Pacific Border States.” “I am particularly a watchdog to see that the foreign element, such as Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese are not brought into the situation.” Texas Representative Dies also emphasized the role of regional racial contexts, arguing, “To a great extent this is a local situation. The States that are on the border, California and Texas, are faced with that danger of having to let in every child that is born of aliens . . . and is entitled to vote, and his children may go back and marry Mexicans.” Thus long after the Supreme Court’s Wong Kim Ark decision and the enactment of various immigration restrictions, Asians continued to be viewed as a problem that needed to be contained. Restricting birthright citizenship also would offer another way to regulate the Mexican population within the country, along with introducing immigration quotas for Mexico and making Mexicans ineligible for naturalization. White Americans also expressed regional dissonance based on their own experiences. In a letter to President Roosevelt, Mrs. Lillian Schroyer explained that she knew the East Coast mentality because she was an “Eastern woman,” though she now resided in Glendale, a city in Los Angeles County. In her view, East Coast people did not “understand the menace the Japs are in California.” She claimed that the Japanese did not pay taxes but sent their children to public schools, who then sat beside white children whose parents did pay taxes. It is unclear why Schroyer said that Japanese did not pay taxes. What is evident is that she viewed Japanese as undeserving of any government services, especially in the midst of what she referred to as “this awful depression,” and that she viewed them as a threat in a host of ways, including because of their natural population growth and as a miscegenation threat. In contrast, some involved in the hearings who were from the East Coast apparently were unaware of the stakes of the debate. For instance, one of the members of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Representative Benjamin Focht (R-Pennsylvania) asked under what circumstances Chinese could become citizens in the first place, let alone possibly transfer citizenship to offspring. At minimum, Focht’s question indicates that he was not familiar with the Wong Kim Ark ruling. The fact that a man in his position was unaware that Chinese had a constitutional guarantee to birthright citizenship demonstrates how closely linked to whiteness (and blackness,

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though to a lesser degree) citizenship was. His question also demonstrates how Chinese, and Asians generally, continued to be reinscribed as foreigners.

prying open the doors of immigration: birthing citizens Previous to the 1924 Immigration Act, lawmakers worked to control immigration streams through measures such as immigration legislation, quotas, visas, and the establishment of the Border Patrol in 1924. By the 1930s it was not just immigrants that needed to be governed, but their children, who were U.S. citizens by birth though still perceived as not American enough.

The Chinese In the hearings the Chinese were portrayed as a population ready to explode, undermining every immigration restriction act directed at them since the 1875 Page Act. Andrew Furuseth, president of the International Seamen’s Union of America and a man who had the ear of prominent politicians, testified that he had seen cases on his ships in which children born in the United States to immigrant parents were used to pry open the doors of immigration for others: “This is the situation as we find it. A Chinese businessman comes here. He has his wife with him. He raises children here. Those children are sent back to China for education. . . . They marry in China. They are necessarily people of their environment and their associations. They are brought up in China and to every intent and purpose that can be conceived, they are Chinese. But one of those comes here. He is an American citizen, but cannot speak a word of English. He does not know more about America and its institutions than the man in the moon.” Furuseth’s scenario did not seem to have any independent reality. No one presented evidence, statistics, or even yellow journalism suggesting that such a situation was common or that anyone else was even concerned about a problem of this nature. Nor did the diegesis need to be factual; it resonated so clearly with past racial scripts of southern and eastern European immigrants flooding the country and outnumbering white Americans with their inferior “racial stock” that no one questioned its veracity. Others’ testimonies registered what birthright citizenship for Asians would mean more broadly. For example, in a brief presented at the hearings, the American Federation

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of Labor described scenarios of prolific Asian families passing down U.S. citizenship “ad infinitum.” Furuseth’s fears seem motivated purely by racism, not economics or job competition. He and others saw the racial threat as so dire that they proposed making it more difficult for parents to transfer U.S. citizenship to their children. The bills stated that a child born outside of the United States was a U.S. citizen if his or her father or mother was a U.S. citizen. Furuseth proposed that the bills instead require U.S. citizenship of both father and mother: “The proposition that a man who was born here may transmit his citizenship through a woman that is not born here leaves the door open so that you can largely destroy your Chinese exclusion act.” His comments reflected a long-standing, overriding concern that the Chinese were an aberrant population that needed to be controlled. Fears of a Chinese population explosion were a new aspect of a longstanding depiction of Chinese as sexually deviant. In the nineteenth century Chinese men were characterized as effeminate because of the kinds of work they engaged in, such as running laundries and being domestics. The fact that these men were the objects of widespread discrimination that left them with very few employment options was not taken into account. Chinese men were also singled out for living with other Chinese men (“bachelors”), a nonnormative domestic arrangement. Chinese women were routinely depicted as amoral and as prostitutes and therefore a threat to morality. The 1933 bills tapped an existing racial script but did so in a distinctly new way to address a new and deeply threatening condition, namely the existence of a rising second generation of Asian citizens. Previously Asian “hordes” had been seen as an external threat, justifying the need to raise the immigration bar. In the 1930s, as Asians increasingly gained citizenship through birthright, they became viewed as an internal threat. Thus, these discussions contributed a new dimension to the “Asian as perpetual foreigner” concept and fears of yellow peril. Immigration opponents feared the potential political power of this new class of American citizens. Existing legislation limited immigration, but these laws had no impact on the U.S.-born children of immigrants who had become citizens. Citing the example of Los Angeles, Representative William Traeger (R-California) raised the specter of an electoral Asian sleeping giant. He warned that there were “over 1200 registered Chinese who [had] gained their citizenship since the immigration law of 1894 excluded them.”

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In addition, “there was something over 600 Japanese who registered to vote in the last election at Los Angeles County.” It is not clear whether by “gaining citizenship” Traeger was referring to Chinese born in Los Angeles, according them citizenship by birth, or whether he was referring to people who had gained their citizenship through other means, such as military service. But the message was clear: even with highly restrictive immigration laws in place, undesirable immigrants, in this case Chinese and Japanese, remained a threat because they could impart the rights of citizenship to their U.S.born children.

Mexican Women As the conversation shifted to racialized citizens (versus immigrants), a new target of nativism emerged: the women who bore those citizens. Mexican women also became symbolic of what stood to be lost should women be allowed to transfer their citizenship. Throughout the late 1920s Mexican women became more central to depicting what was wrong with an open immigration policy with Mexico. Immigration restrictionists intensified their campaigns, identifying Mexican women’s reproductive capacity as another reason to end immigration. They argued not only that Mexican women had too many children but also that both mothers and their offspring were likely to end up needing charity. Mexican women were seen as dependent on free birthing and medical services and reliant on charity to support their newly expanded families. The belief that Mexican women were unusually “fecund” and anxieties over the potential for “race suicide,” the eclipsing of the white population, especially the middle and upper classes, by racialized groups, helped focus attention on birth rates during the 1930s. Until the mid-1920s the growth of the Mexican population in the United States had been attributed mainly to immigration. But with the increase in the number of Mexican women arriving in the country, the Mexican family (as opposed to the single, sojourning Mexican male) became the favorite target of those who advocated immigration reform. The representation of Mexican women at this time as excessive breeders signaled that not even deportation would be the solution most hoped it would be. Opponents of the bills would not be satisfied until racialized women were expelled from the nation, left without even the ability to transfer their citizenship to their children. “They bring their women, their children,” warned C. M. Goethe, a California philanthropist, conservationist, and eugenics advocate, adding that

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Mexicans were “a group that is most fecund.” Samuel Holmes, a Berkeley zoologist and eugenicist, echoed Goethe’s contentions in an article in which he cited a survey from San Bernardino, California, that found “three out of every eight babies born were Mexican.” “The menial laborers of today produce the citizens of tomorrow,” he warned in another article. The shift in focus from immigration flows to birthrate confirms the role fears about “race suicide” played in fueling immigration reform efforts. Representative Traeger, who was in his first month of office after serving for twenty-five years as deputy sheriff and then sheriff in Los Angeles, questioned “whether the ladies who [were] sponsoring this bill [had] studied the situation in California . . . since the depression.” After noting that in the wake of the Depression, large numbers of Mexican nationals were repatriating or were being deported to Mexico, “as many as 12,000 . . . in one month,” some accompanied by their U.S.-born children, Traeger explained the potential consequences of this reverse flow: “Suppose the female of the family remains in Mexico long enough to raise her own family. Then she is entitled to bring all of those back to the United States when they return.” His statement clearly dismissed the fact that U.S. citizens (the children) were being deported alongside the Mexican nationals (discussed further in chapter 5). Traeger’s decision to spotlight a woman in his scenario that conjured up images of a big family clearly signaled excess procreation as a particular transgression of nonwhite, Mexican women. He was not the first nor the last nativist to depict immigrant women in such a manner. This transgressive image of Mexican women was in keeping with past images of immigrant women as nonnormative. The first federal immigration act, the Page Law of 1875, which prohibited the entry of Chinese contract workers and Chinese prostitutes, relied on the assumption that all Chinese women wishing to immigrate to the United States were prostitutes. In the 1910s, during the Progressive era, reformers, often women themselves, targeted immigrant women as in need of rehabilitation and pressured them to take language and cooking classes to assimilate into American culture, based on the belief that their own cultures were backward. Though altruism often undergirded these programs, programs that focused on training immigrant women how to be proper mothers pointed to their deviance from accepted gender roles. Other programs and policies were far more nefarious. Laura Briggs demonstrates how birth control and sterilization were used to address issues of perceived overpopulation in the 1920s and 1930s in Puerto Rico. In Fit to Be

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Citizens?, I discuss how, during the Depression, Mexican women and men found themselves caught in the crosshairs of state-sponsored sterilization programs, which, like the arguments set forth in the debates over the bills, deemed them unfit to produce citizens. These racial scripts that circulated in the hearings and beyond were persuasive because they were not the first time they had been heard. It was precisely their derivative quality that made then familiar and readily acceptable to a nativist public. Finally, the debate over the bills is a prime example of how dynamic racial scripts can be when viewed in a broader historical context. Racial scripts arising out of nativist fears contributed to the view that only some groups were fit to reproduce, effectively grouping Asians and Mexicans together as equivalent, unfit immigrant groups. In the twenty-first century Asians are stereotyped as “model minorities,” while Mexican immigrants continue to be linked to images of deviant fertility and the culture of poverty. Nevertheless despite Asians’ more recent elevated status compared to Mexicans, they remain “perpetual foreigners.” The fears over their access to citizenship that were aired during the 1933 congressional hearings are a historical antecedent to contemporary versions that continue to construct them as not quite American. While a significant portion of the hearings was devoted to who should not gain birthright citizenship, Representative James Mead (D-New York) used the debate as an opportunity to argue for the inclusion of certain immigrants. Mead raised the point that under federal law, children whose parents were naturalized also became U.S. citizens when they came into adulthood, provided they were still living in the United States. He presented the case of a “well to do” German couple who were longtime residents of his district. They had adopted a German girl who was now fourteen and had attended American schools throughout her life. The couple had never told the girl that she was adopted, but they would have to do so soon because she would need to apply for naturalization. Could not adopted children gain the citizenship of their naturalized parents, Mead asked, just as the biological children of those parents could? Mead could see no objection to his request, “particularly if such a child was not of oriental birth.” The issue did not merit further consideration because the committee deemed cases of this type rare. Nonetheless Mead’s framing of the issue exemplifies the gradual acceptance of European immigrants as white, while Asians and Mexicans continued to be viewed as dangerously foreign and how legislators attempted to codify such attitudes into law.

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alien citizen children: the plight of birthright citizenship Though the hearings fell under the purview of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, many opponents of the bills viewed the matter as a problem of citizens, not foreigners. As noted earlier, a major concern of nativists at the time was how to contain the country’s growing population of second-generation immigrants. Nativists recognized that a more compelling argument supporting their anti-immigrant agenda could be made by focusing on those that would give birth to yet another generation of unwanted, inassimilable immigrants. Infants and children might readily evoke the sympathy of some, but young adults who could vie for jobs were the future parents of generations to come, and thus convenient targets. With the second generation an increasing presence, nativists needed to clearly establish that this group’s place in the racial hierarchy was unchanged, despite their status as citizens. To accomplish this, they discussed segregation, among other strategies, as a means to reinforce the U.S. racial hierarchy. Such discussions complicated prevailing notions of segregation shaped by black-white understandings of race. During this period Jim Crow practices separated blacks and whites in most public spaces, including schools, churches, dance halls, restaurants, restrooms, swimming pools, and water fountains. These were not just the politics of a region holding on tightly to the remnants of slave society. The Supreme Court had endorsed what Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing for the majority, termed a “separate but equal” policy in deciding the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. Emphasizing the impact of Jim Crow laws and segregation, W. E. B. Du Bois, the famous public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the black community, declared “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” Jim Crow segregation was not limited only to blacks, nor was it restricted solely to the South; it drastically affected all people of color in the United States. California in particular was seen as a bastion of diversity and equality, especially compared to the Jim Crow South, yet it too developed as a racially segregated state through both de facto and de jure segregation. For example, racially restricted covenants were written into the deeds of new housing developments, preventing white homeowners from selling their property to blacks, Mexicans, and Asians. Indeed, describing a visit to Los Angeles in

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1913, Du Bois commented, “To be sure Los Angeles is not Paradise, much as the site of its lilies and roses might lead one at first to believe. The color line is there and sharply drawn.”  Opponents of the bills couched their concerns about an increase in racialized child citizens in terms of how they would handle segregation among children. Representative Kramer, using Los Angeles, his own congressional district, as a case study, stated, “We have Japs and Hawaiian boys and girls attending the public schools, sitting in the same school, at the same benches with American children. . . . We are obliged to educate those Japs because they are born here and they become American citizens.”  Japanese children escaped some segregation owing to a school desegregation case dating back to 1906 in San Francisco. Even so, many California public schools were segregated through both de facto and de jure practices. Following up on this point, Representative Kramer asked attorney and bill advocate Burnita Matthews, “How would you feel if you had a daughter, and she was sitting alongside Chinese and Japanese boys in school every day during her entire career from the time she entered kindergarten, and went through school with several Japanese and Chinese boys? How would you feel toward that situation if you were a resident . . . a property owner and a taxpayer of California? . . . Don’t you feel that we are increasing the probability of bringing in more of the Chinese and Japanese, by reason of this bill?” As Kramer’s rhetoric indicates, opponents of the bills saw much at stake. In addition to fueling fears over miscegenation, passing the proposed legislation would mean an increase not in immigrants but in citizens. The chairman of the committee, Samuel Dickstein of New York, argued that it was not granting citizenship that was the problem but the absence of Jim Crow outside of the South. “You in California have not provided for [segregation]; that is the trouble,” he asserted. Dickstein’s comment points to how racial scripts could be employed by taking racial solutions that had already been established, in this case, Jim Crow segregation, and using them to manage and police new groups, in this case, Asians. Even with immigration acts and policies like the 1907–08 Gentleman’s Agreement already in place, we find lawmakers discussing ways to restrict the rights of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans through segregation practices such as separate schools, and through legislation that structured inequality, such as the Alien Land Laws. Citizens also wrote to their legislators and the INS to express their objection to the growing second generation of certain immigrants. In a letter to

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Frances Perkins, the secretary of labor, who oversaw the INS, Herbert Klingensmith, a resident of Sutter County, located north of Sacramento, urged her against loosening any of the quotas against Japan and strengthening restrictions against Mexico. To support his claim, he presented a list of reasons that rested on stereotypes of Mexicans as criminals and charity seekers and Japanese as unfair competition against white farmers because wives worked alongside their husbands in the fields. As evidence of the negative effects of immigration, he enclosed a class photo from his local public school. In it sat three rows of children, likely in about the third grade, smiling at the camera, standing up straight or leaning against each other, as friends tend to do. About half of the children are light-skinned blonds and and the other half are Asian and brown-skinned children. Klingensmith described the picture as “an example of the growing mongolian type that you can expect with any increase of this type of non-assimilating class of people.” The fact that the Asian children stood alongside their white classmates suggests that it was not just the presence of Asians but their proximity to their blond counterparts that made Klingensmith consider not just immigration a threat, but settlement. In fact he suggested that the United States “consolidate and assimilate those we can and deport the rest.” His fears and suggestions seemed to be in step with those of his representatives. It is no surprise people were so concerned with who had access to citizenship. Citizenship was not just an abstract concept but afforded people access to material resources. For example, concerns about the success of Japanese farmers and their increasing rates of landownership culminated in California’s Alien Land Laws in 1913. The law prevented those not eligible for naturalization (code for Japanese) from owning or leasing land for more than three years, effectively cutting Japanese farmers off at the knees because they were seen as economic competition for white farmers. These laws not only impinged on Japanese farmers’ economic opportunities but also had the effect of segregating where they could live and work. Japanese were able to circumvent these laws through various means, including putting the land in trust for their U.S.-born children. Opponents of the Japanese worked to close these loopholes, and in 1920 Californians passed an initiative to strengthen the Alien Land Law. The new law was much more detailed, making it far more difficult for Japanese immigrants to circumvent the law by placing their land in the name of their U.S.-born children, though Japanese Americans were still able to own land. Thus at issue was not only the psychological

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effects of racial integration should more Japanese citizens gain citizenship but what materials resources they might gain.

conclusion After delaying the bills for a year, the Senate eventually passed them in 1934. The event is now remembered as a breakthrough in the fight for equality for women; the memory of racial exclusion central to the debates has all but disappeared. Yet the debates help to demonstrate not only how central issues of race were to discussions of citizenship even when they were presumably “only” about women. They also show how race is not made in one key moment or even in a single, pivotal era but is continually reinforced and recalibrated. Fifty years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the racial ideology that undergirded that law was still alive and well. Legislation that addressed immigration or birthright citizenship opened the door for renewing and reinforcing a racial logic that had defined Chinese immigrants as inassimilable in the previous century. These laws and the resulting social and cultural environment helped shape racial scripts that continue to portray Chinese and Chinese Americans as perpetual foreigners, demonstrating the longevity of racial ideologies. The arguments mounted in opposition to extending birthright citizenship highlight a key tenet of racial scripts: racialized groups are linked across time and space. Cultural representations of Mexicans and Asians as unworthy of citizenship were central to these debates, demonstrating the transferability of racial scripts from one group to another. By understanding the power and longevity of racial scripts, we can uncover connections more than a century old, seeing how long-forgotten arguments in the Wong Kim Ark (1898) birthright citizenship case laid the foundation for the debates over “anchor babies” today (a pejorative term used to refer to children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents in hopes of securing the parents’ U.S. citizenship). The vitality of racial scripts begs the question: Who will be the anchor babies of tomorrow?

part two

Immigration Regimes II Making Mexicans Deportable

Chapters 1 through 3 demonstrated that because of the prevailing political and social belief that Mexicans were unfit to be citizens, there were attempts to denaturalize them, block their naturalization, change their racial classification, and strengthen structural barriers to restrict their access to U.S. citizenship. The next two chapters look at efforts to deport Mexicans, which not only prevented them from gaining citizenship, and even from being on U.S. soil, but added to the larger cultural understanding of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as outside and unsuitable for U.S. social membership. By studying this question through the lens of racial scripts, we see that it was not only Mexicans and Mexican Americans who were affected in this process but the racialized groups around them.

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chapter 4

Mexicans Suspended in a State of Deportability Medical Racialization and Immigration Policy in the 1940s

In 1940 U.S. Border Patrol agents in California’s Imperial Valley arrested and began deportation proceedings for Mike Gutiérrez, president of a local chapter of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Supporters of Gutiérrez and advocates of other Mexican workers arrested at about the same time and under similar pretenses accused the Border Patrol of acting on behalf of the Associated Farmers, a stridently antiunion growers’ organization. One of the most contentious parts of the conflict involved how the officers obtained the evidence for the arrests and deportation proceedings. There were claims that doctors at a public health clinic in a federal migratory camp furnished the Border Patrol with copies of the detainees’ confidential medical histories. These records enabled the agents to issue deportation warrants on the grounds that the workers were “afflicted with a loathsome and dangerous contagious disease” and therefore “likely to become a public charge” (LPC), although there was no evidence that Gutiérrez or others had a disease when they entered the United States, and the accused were employed and not seeking charity. Diagnosis had long been used as a form of medical racial profiling to further mark undesirable immigrant groups as outsiders. The use of disease as a basis for exclusion has been an explicit aspect of U.S. immigration policy since the nineteenth century. With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1891, anyone suffering from a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” joined the already barred “idiots” and “lunatics” as not eligible for entry. Additionally, in her work on the role of disease in spatial formation, Susan 91

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Craddock argues, “Disease is a particularly effective mechanism . . . because it does not just mark deviance. Used as accusation toward the already deviant, disease intensifies the rhetoric of hatred, fear, and blame utilized against undesirable populations. It shifts the quality of this rhetoric from the socially constructed to the medically legitimated, from a vaguely if forcefully defined rationale of difference to a rational basis for surveillance, control, and exclusion.” Gutiérrez and the others were initially apprehended because of their medical condition, and the grounds for deportation were those medical conditions rendering them LPCs. The “public charge” language originated in the 1882 Immigration Act, which prohibited entry to any “convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The 1891 Immigration Act expanded the phrase to “persons likely to become a public charge” (emphasis added) and also created the possibility of deportation on LPC grounds even after an immigrant’s initial arrival in the country: “Any alien who becomes a public charge within one year after his arrival in the United States from causes existing prior to his landing therein shall be deemed to have come in violation of law and shall be returned as aforesaid.” Subsequent immigration laws in 1903, 1907, and 1917 extended the period of jeopardy to two years, then three years, and then five years, respectively. Like a disease diagnosis, the LPC charge could be used to stigmatize undesirable immigrants. The dynamic and potent history of the LPC clause and the influence those in power could exert when they wielded it against immigrants long after they had settled in the country has, until now, been unexamined. The arbitrary, adaptable, and open-ended nature of the LPC designation created great uncertainty for all new arrivals, but Mexican immigrants were especially vulnerable. Unlike many other groups, residents of the Western Hemisphere were not subject to the strict quota system imposed by the Immigration Act of 1924 because of the lobbying efforts of large-scale employers who desired continued access to low-wage laborers. Also unlike other immigrants, neither large bodies of water nor thousands of miles of travel separated Mexican immigrants from their home country. Many Mexican laborers frequently crossed into and out of the United States, particularly in the Southwest, returning home to visit family and friends. Doing so incurred risk, however. The LPC clock started anew with each border crossing, and there were no legally defined criteria for establishing who was “likely to become a public

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charge.” Establishing that immigrants who occasionally visited Mexico were “afflicted with a loathsome and dangerous contagious disease,” even after years of living in the United States, as in the Imperial Valley cases, would mark them as LPC. This combination created a near-continuous potential for deportation that could eclipse all other aspects of Mexican immigrants’ identity (e.g., as workers, consumers, homeowners, neighbors, churchgoers, and longtime members of local communities). Lawfully admitted immigrants, and especially those who tried to maintain social networks on both sides of the border, could thus find themselves suspended between becoming American and becoming deportable. Mexicans were not the only immigrant racialized group living in the Imperial Valley, though they were by far the largest. In 1940 Mexicans composed 10 percent of the Valley’s total population of 59,740, while Japanese composed 2 percent, South Asians 1 percent, and Chinese less than 1 percent with a population of 218. These other groups faced discrimination, but because they did not have the same proximity to their homeland, they did not face the same deportation threat. In addition, as we see in the work of scholars such as Karen Leonard and Nayan Shah, certain groups were integrated into the Imperial Valley much differently than Mexicans. Both Leonard and Shah write of South Asian men marrying Mexican women, and occasionally white women, thus forming marriage alliances. They also formed business partnerships with whites. Therefore, unlike previous chapters that illustrate how racial scripts demonstrate the connections between racialized groups, this chapter highlights how Mexicans faced a distinct kind of racialization and enforcement shaped by structural forces particular to their immigration histories. While Asian immigrants were not targeted in 1940, medical racialization had served and would serve to stigmatize these same groups in the future, thus demonstrating how similar racial scripts could affect groups at different moments. In this chapter I draw on archival sources to examine how Mexican immigrants became deportable. There are gaps in what we know about the Imperial Valley deportations, both because the historical records are incomplete and because the players involved gave sometimes contradictory information. Many of the extant records reflect the perspective of officials of the United States Public Health Service, officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Border Patrol agents, not the views of the subjects of those records, namely, the workers who were deported. Despite

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these limitations, the records reveal the ways entrenched stereotypes of Mexicans as “diseased” merged with the long reach of the designation of “likely to become a public charge” to make these immigrants vulnerable to deportation long after they had crossed the border. In the process we also see how social transgressions (e.g., labor organizing, demanding rights) were presented as biological transgressions just when popular science was moving away from definitions of race as biologically rooted. Depictions of Mexicans as biologically inferior were not new. Since the mid-1800s, with the rise of Manifest Destiny as a discourse and ideology, Mexicans and Indians had been portrayed as a biologically inferior breed that would eventually die off. This cultural representation endured into the twentieth century. In the 1910s and 1920s Mexican immigrants were viewed as such a danger that the U.S. Public Health Service deloused Mexicans who crossed the border, bathing them in kerosene to ensure that they would not bring disease into the United States. To ensure that Mexicans would be included in later quota-based immigration legislation, it was imperative to depict them as undesirable and dangerous. Medicalized nativism was central to this effort. Biologically based negative representations, which had emerged early in the century and intensified during the mid- to late 1920s and the Great Depression, served as a key justification for the deportation of Mexicans. The rhetoric reached its zenith in the 1920s to the early 1940s, when notions of race, biology, and crime were combined to pathologize young male Mexicans and blacks as “deviant,” with institutionalization and forced sterilization seen as the solution. During the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, Los Angeles Sheriff Edward Ayres fixed the responsibility for the violence on the “inborn characteristics” of the “Mexican element,” which had a “desire to use a knife or some [other] lethal weapon.” Three years later the school district superintendent in Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County would make the argument that Mexicans needed to be segregated because they had “lice, impetigo, [and] generally dirty hands, face, neck, and ears” and did not have the “mental ability of the white children.” These moments of scientific racialization, which were often regionally produced, did not stay rooted in one place. Instead, as demonstrated earlier, these characterizations were incorporated into a more far-reaching understanding that helped to form a medicalized racial script of Mexicans as biologically distinct. Furthermore I argue that these deportations are an element of the historical production of deportability in the aftermath of the Immigration Act

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of 1924, which deliberately left the flow of Mexican immigrants unrestricted, to the frustration of many politicians and lobbyists. Constructions of subjects as illegal, diseased, and threats to the nation-state came together in such a way that provided a surefire formula for marking Mexicans as deportable. Historian Mae Ngai’s work shows that the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 widely established the concept of “illegal immigrant” by imposing numerical limits on immigration. (Southern and eastern European countries received the smallest quotas, and immigration from Asia was banned altogether.) According to Ngai, “One’s legal status now rested on being in the right place in the queue—if a country has a quota of N, immigrant N is legal, but immigrant N + 1 is illegal—and having the proper documentation, the prized ‘proper visa.’ ” This shift, she argues, was accompanied by disparate policies to help “make” and “unmake” illegal aliens. Ngai credits administrative discretion for determining some groups, mainly northern Europeans and Canadians, as “deserving” immigrants and others, including Mexicans, as “undeserving.” In addition, the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 and increased restrictions and fees on border crossing at the U.S.–Mexican border were incentives for many Mexicans to circumvent checkpoints when they crossed the border to seek work. As a result of all of this, Mexicans became linked to illegality. As the construction of Mexicans as both illegal and medical menaces increased, the government waged an aggressive campaign against labor activists, labeling them communists and anarchists. For labor activists who were immigrants or naturalized citizens, such accusations could result in denaturalization for those in the latter category and eventual deportation for all. These practices were ideologically in synch with a range of contemporary movements, from Americanization campaigns, launched in the wake of increased immigration (especially after the United States entered World War I), that demanded immigrants shed their ethnic identities and show they were “100 percent American,” to the fervently nationalistic, KKK-led assault on anyone not a white Protestant. The Palmer Raids of 1920 epitomized such politics. Attorney General Alexander Palmer spearheaded a high-profile campaign to arrest labor activists, leftists, and political dissidents, brutally targeting and criminalizing immigrant groups identified as enemies of the state. The raids were executed in cities across the nation. Those that came under suspicion for subversive activities were rounded up, arrested, and, in some cases, eventually deported.

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Daniel Kanstroom, a legal scholar and deportation history expert, calls these cases “ideological post-entry social control deportations.” He explains that, “stripped to its essentials, it was a prolonged struggle over the idea that non-citizens, no matter their status or length of residence, could be deported for ‘subversive’ thoughts and association.” The raids were characterized by their disregard for civil liberties and due process and eventually came to an end because of widespread criticism and protest, though the targeting of noncitizen labor activists did not end. By examining the 1940 Imperial Valley deportations, we are able to see another case of “ideological post-entry social control deportations.” By that time, labor and union rights had been dramatically altered due to the passage of New Deal legislation. Congress passed the most significant piece of labor legislation in the twentieth century, the National Labor Relations Act (commonly referred to as the Wagner Act), in 1935, promising workers the right to organize in unions without employer interference. Nonetheless, as historian Alan Dawley argues, “New Deal labor policy performed the amazing feat of raising the status of industrial workers while preserving their subordinate place in industry and society under the dominance of the modern corporation.” The Imperial Valley deportations signal a new means of identifying deportable groups in the wake of labor reform, offering a new framework for disciplining labor. While these deportations were officially based on charges of disease and LPC, they were actually yet another form of “post-entry social control deportation.” Both farmers and the Border Patrol had known for years about the clinic that served Mexican workers in the Imperial Valley (it was, after all, operated by the federal government), yet they had not targeted the site before. In a sense, arresting and deporting Mexican workers at strategic times was just one more version of growers calling in the Border Patrol to deport workers on payday, as had been done time and time again throughout the Southwest. But it was not just the deportation of Mexicans that was important here; it was the introduction of a new means of making Mexicans deportable.

the setting: california’s imperial valley, “the cradle of vigilantism” The Imperial Valley of the early twentieth century is remembered for taking large-scale farming to an unprecedented level, a development that was de-

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pendent upon the importation of water and labor. Before early twentiethcentury projects diverted water from the Colorado River, California’s Imperial Valley had been a desert. With the arrival of water, the area soon became a center for agribusiness. Labor was imported to support this growth, and the history of the Imperial Valley is marked by violent power struggles between the employers who wanted to dominate all aspects of their labor forces’ lives and the laborers who resisted. Growers banned together in a powerful, monolithic bloc known as the Associated Farmers to further their agricultural interests and to “combat subversive influences that might affect agricultural labor.” The Associated Farmers was a statewide orga nization and assumed powerful roles in labor, civic, and public spheres in the Imperial Valley. The Associated Farmers routinely worked with local law enforcement to maintain control over laborers. During the strikes that riddled the valley from 1929 to 1935, local law enforcement deputized growers and their supporters to contain strikers, often drawing from the ranks of local groups, such as the American Legionnaires, who were unabashedly antilabor. Word of a union meeting, or even a get-together of laborers, could lead to the gathering being broken up by local police and its deputized volunteers. Law enforcement officers and deputies alike resorted to legal and extralegal means to quash any attempts to organize labor, including instigating arrests that led to deportations. The Imperial Valley was dominated by a few very large and powerful growers who relied almost entirely on cheap immigrant, mainly Mexican, labor. S. Parker Frisselle, a leader in the Associated Farmers, enumerated the advantages of Mexican labor in a speech he gave at a growers’ convention: For certain types of piece-work, squat labor and field work we need the Mexican, as well as for the other types of labor that Americans cannot perform. We cannot afford to import the Filipino, for it costs $100 to bring in each one. . . . Furthermore we cannot handle the Puerto Rican and the Filipino as we can the Mexican. And if we do not want the Mexican, he can be deported . . . but if we do not want the Puerto Rican and the Filipino we are absolutely helpless, as they are American citizens. . . . We need the Mexican.

Despite their precarious position in the United States, Mexican and Filipino laborers formed the backbone of much of the labor orga nizing that resulted in walkouts and strikes in California throughout this period. Filipino workers were particularly noted for their full involvement in labor

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disturbances, forming labor coalitions, leading strike forces, and building a strong base for activism. Many of the earliest unions were modeled after Mexican mutual aid societies. One of the best-known groups, the Confederation of Mexican Labor Unions (Confederación de Uniones de Obreros Mexicanos), was founded in 1928. Th is orga nization was modeled after the Regional Confederation of Labor of Mexico, which sought both economic and social betterment for agricultural laborers. By 1930 the Communist Party also was involved in organizing farm labor in the Imperial Valley. The union the Party formed, known as the Agricultural Workers’ Industrial League (later renamed the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union), joined the Confederation of Mexican Labor Unions in its early struggles. In response to the Confederation of Mexican Labor Unions, “growers did not sit idly by ‘wishing’ for the union’s end. Instead, they prepared to escort it to the grave,” according to historian Mark Reisler. The Confederation’s association with the Communist Party made this union especially intolerable to growers. A large strike in the Imperial Valley in 1934 is emblematic of the strong resistance unions faced from agribusiness. Reisler reports that teargas was used on the strikers and that eighty-seven arrests were made for charges such as vagrancy and trespassing. District attorneys assisted in the effort to silence labor leaders by deporting them and/or imprisoning them under California’s criminal syndicalism law. Local law enforcement deputized growers and local American Legion members to help combat the strikers. The Los Angeles Times mockingly reported, “It’s a secret, but the vigilantes are really Legionnaires, and do they have fun!” The local Border Patrol helped to control the labor situation by deporting immigrant labor activists. Those who came under the purview of the county sheriff or the district attorney risked being turned over to the Border Patrol for deportation. When the Confederation of Mexican Labor Unions went on strike in 1928, employers and local authorities fought back. The district attorney himself “handed strikers to the Border Patrol for deportation.” In government hearings investigating the labor situation in the Imperial Valley, District Attorney Elmer Heald stated that the federal government was “ ‘doing its part’ by using the Immigration Department to terrorize and deport militant workers.” Just like local law enforcement, the Border Patrol had a history of being institutionally predisposed toward supporting the interests of growers.

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Kelly Lytle Hernandez argues, however, that the Border Patrol’s cooperation with local growers did not signal that the patrolmen were mere lackeys of agribusiness. Instead she poses a more nuanced reading of their relationship in which the local Border Patrol, whose ranks were often drawn from the community, earned the respect of local elites by their select patrolling of Mexican laborers. In turn, local Border Patrol officers, who often worked with skeletal support across vast stretches of the borderlands, might turn to farmers for backup when pursuing more dangerous cases, such as those involving smuggling. By late 1939 Congress was showing an interest in the Imperial Valley’s long history of racialized violence. A Senate subcommittee on labor relations, appointed in 1936 and headed by Senator Robert M. LaFollette, examined various aspects of farm labor in California. The committee opened base offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, with thirty-five employees, to support a widespread investigation. The Imperial Valley merited special attention. In December 1939 and January 1940 LaFollette’s committee held hearings to investigate the area’s labor-related violence and other negative conditions. The Associated Farmers were found to have engaged in blacklisting, espionage, and widespread coercion and violence. Despite these findings, very little real change occurred. Just four months after the committee’s hearings, immigration officials involved in the deportation of Mexican workers being treated at a public health clinic dismissed the possibility that the deportations could have been motivated by a desire to control labor.

the cases: disease and deportation In March 1940 the Border Patrol issued deportation warrants for four Mexican agricultural workers on the grounds that they had syphilis and were therefore LPCs. Syphilis is a communicable, sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum; manifestations in the first and secondary stages of the disease can go unnoticed or misdiagnosed, but since the early twentieth century, physicians have been able to detect syphilis before symptoms develop, using a blood test. The disease can be cured with treatment. The four Mexican workers, who had been patients at a public health clinic, came to the attention of the Border Patrol after labor organizer Mike Gutiérrez applied for renewal of his border-crossing card at an immigration

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office in the U.S. border town of Calexico, at the far southern end of the Imperial Valley. As proof of his continuous residence in the United States, Gutiérrez provided a public health clinic card, which showed that he was being treated for syphilis. The immigration inspector warned Gutiérrez that if he went to Mexico, he would not be allowed back into the United States because he would be considered an “alien with a loathsome and dangerous contagious disease.” The immigration inspector then contacted the office of the Border Patrol’s chief patrol inspector, located in El Centro, also at the southern end of the Imperial Valley. Officers Richard Williams and Byron Maxson, whose duties included investigating “domiciled aliens in the north end of the Imperial Valley,” as much as a hundred miles from the U.S.– Mexican border, were assigned to follow up on the Calexico inspector’s tip. Mike Gutiérrez was employed and was not attempting to enter the United States when the immigration inspector learned of his treatment for syphilis; he was just applying for renewal. Nevertheless the next day a Border Patrol agent went to Gutiérrez’s home at the northern end of the Imperial Valley and arrested him. Assistant Inspector Edmund Gies of the El Centro office, who initiated the deportation proceeding, stated that he did so because Gutiérrez had a “loathsome and dangerous contagious disease” at the time of his previous entry, which made him a “person likely to become a public charge.” Mike Gutiérrez was well-known in the Imperial Valley as a labor organizer, and it is probable that the officers were aware of his reputation before his arrest. He was a longtime resident of the Imperial Valley and had been arrested in 1934 when he was, in the words of the deputy sheriff with whom the Border Patrol coordinated during the investigation, “arrested with several other labor agitators for being a red and a trouble maker.” He spent five months in jail as a result. Such a record would not have been simply filed away. Associated Farmers branches throughout the state kept records on local labor organizers that included their photographs, complete with front and side views, and a history of their involvement in labor organizations, strikes, and arrests. Branches readily shared this information with local law enforcement in order to identify labor organizers. At the time, Imperial County had two public health clinics for the treatment of venereal diseases, located, roughly, at the Imperial Valley’s northern (Brawley) and southern (El Centro) ends. Together the clinics had 234 patients; of these, eighty-six were Mexican (36 percent) and forty-four were

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other “alien” (18 percent). The physician in charge of the venereal clinics, Dr. Paul Yingling, did not consider the Mexican population disproportionately affected by syphilis. Nor, apparently, had the Border Patrol been especially concerned by the presence of syphilis among immigrant workers. Officer Williams said he had been unaware of the existence of the Brawley clinic where Gutiérrez received treatment; it was located inside a federal migratory camp operated mainly for laborers. Following the arrest, however, Williams, accompanied by his partner, promptly went to the clinic to “devote an afternoon to seeing just how many affl icted Mexicans we had here and to investigate their immigration status.” After Yingling explained that he could not release patients’ records without first securing his supervisor’s permission, the Border Patrol agents “merely waited outside of the small building in which the treatments were being given and questioned the people as to their status as they arrived.” When Yingling became aware of the questioning, he asked that the agents stop, as it might scare away patients who were under treatment, thus undermining the clinic’s purpose. Yingling’s request came too late for three clinic patients (two men and one woman). According to Williams, the woman asked if she could get a second opinion because she felt she had been misdiagnosed. One of the two men explained that it was his first trip to the clinic and he had come simply to learn the cause of his illness. Williams explained that they could get a free second opinion from an INS doctor in Calexico. But, he warned, if the doctor determined that they had syphilis at the time of their previous entry, they “might” be subject to deportation. “All of them expressed a willingness to go,” he recounted. Williams and his partner transported the three workers to Calexico for an examination and then returned them to their homes in Brawley. The next day all three were issued deportation warrants and were taken into custody. Two of the three were deported to Mexico shortly afterward. Both Yingling and Dr. Warren Franklin Fox, the county health officer for the Imperial Valley, played roles in this outcome. On one hand, the doctors opposed some of the Border Patrol’s tactics. For instance, Williams asked Yingling to provide a written statement as to whether or not the patients had been afflicted with syphilis when they crossed into the United States. Aware that the border agents were trying to make a case against the patients based on the notion that they were infected at the time of crossing, Yingling’s supervisor, Fox, pointed out that “in syphilis it is extremely difficult to determine

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by a blood test the length of time the infection has existed.” Moreover he argued that “the use of the clinic record for deportation purposes would . . . defeat the purpose of the clinics which [was] stamping out of venereal disease.” He also asserted, “A person afflicted with syphilis who is a clinic patient and happens to be an alien should not have his treatment interrupted. . . . Another point has to do with the degree of infectiousness of the patient. If the patient has no open lesions he or she is not much of a menace to society.” The “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” clause was meant to prevent immigrants from spreading disease or becoming too ill to work and thus becoming public charges. Clearly this was not the case here. On the other hand, objections like these did not prevent either doctor from agreeing to cooperate with the Border Patrol. After Yingling and Fox met with Chief Patrol Inspector Richard Wells, whose position meant that he oversaw the case even though he was not directly involved in the initial investigation, Wells reported that Fox had agreed to “furnish the names of any patients who might be aliens taking treatment for syphilis or gonorrhea who should fail to cooperate with the clinic doctor in taking treatments as prescribed.” In order to accomplish this goal, Yingling stated that he would “pry” into the immigration status of their patients so that he would “be in a better position to report any cases to the Immigration Service.”

the reaction: protests and petitions As news of the deportations spread, the Mexican laborers’ plight garnered much attention and support from labor parties, many of them based in Los Angeles, because they believed the Border Patrol had singled out Gutiérrez due to his union involvement. The unions in the Imperial Valley had successfully coordinated with unions in Los Angeles in the previous years, so much so that it had caused the Associated Farmers to take notice and to strategize against these alliances. Some workers organized through their unions and others formed a new organization, the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers, to sound the alarm regarding what appeared to be illegal deportations. The organization brought together a multiracial group from different backgrounds, including screenwriters, municipal employees, and a minister. The news quickly spread, not just to other parts of Southern California but all the way to Washington, D.C. The Committee’s letter-writing and petition efforts understandably drew the attention of Frances Perkins, the

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secretary of labor, who was a strong advocate for workers; in fact she believed that the Department of Labor should have instead been named the Department for Labor. Perkins departed greatly from the politics of her predecessor, William Doak, who had once deported labor leaders to stall a union strike. Such attention precipitated an investigation. William Carmichael, INS district director for Los Angeles, was instructed to look into the situation. He assigned responsibility for investigating the problem to INS Inspector Dan Kuykendall in San Diego. Meanwhile the Los Angeles branch of the organization International Labor Defense (ILD) began raising funds to cover Gutiérrez’s legal expenses. According to the ILD, “Workers [had] been arrested, threatened with deportation and worse” in an attempt to block labor organizing in the Imperial Valley. The ILD, which had ties to the Communist Party, charged that the Associated Farmers were behind Gutiérrez’s arrest. “Do your part to preserve civil liberties by contributing now!” their flyers urged. Various unions, including the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) and the Hungarian Workers Organization, wrote to the secretary of labor asking her to investigate the deportation cases. Secretary Perkins presided over the Immigration and Naturalization Service and during this period was also overseeing one of the most infamous cases of government targeting and deportation, that of Harry Bridges, the leader of the ILWU, which was affiliated with Gutiérrez’s organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). (ILWU members were ardent supporters of Gutiérrez.) At the same time that the Imperial Valley deportations were occurring, the INS was attempting to denaturalize and deport Bridges, an Australian native who had lived in the United States since 1919, on the grounds that he had been in the Communist Party, thereby circumventing any discussion of his labor activism. Perkins acted cautiously in the Bridges deportation charges, so much so that some members of Congress saw her as a traitor and tried to impeach her. Where Congress saw a traitor, unions saw a possible ally. Lupe Gutiérrez (presumably not related to Mike Gutiérrez), secretary of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union Local 96, wrote, “The lot of the Mexican field workers is hard enough under the best of circumstances, but with the terrorism that is carried on against agricultural labor in Imperial Valley the situation becomes a disgrace and an outrage against humanity. We ask you

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to investigate immediately the role now being played in this miscarriage of justice by the Imperial Valley Immigration Ser vice.”  The ILWU characterized the clinics as being purposely established “as a means of deporting Mexican workers on the supposition that they are likely to become public charges.” In effect, they anticipated Foucault’s later critiques in which he not only discussed the discursive power of disease but also traced how it could manifest in punitive and exclusionary practices in everyday life. Others contacted Secretary Perkins to apprise her of the Imperial Valley events and to remind her how they conflicted with the public health agenda the federal government had set. Four Los Angeles residents, for instance, wrote to say that they had just read in the newspaper that Eleanor Roosevelt had spoken out in support of the “U.S. campaign to stamp out venereal diseases and urge[d] more educational work.” The Border Patrol’s actions in the Imperial Valley seemed to directly contradict the government’s stance on this subject. Other citizens and organizations sent petitions to Perkins to urge her to put a stop to the actions of immigration officials in the Imperial Valley. The ILD’s Hollywood branch, the Los Angeles branch of the Workmen’s Circle, and the Brawley branch of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (chartered as the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Workers Union) circulated copies of the same petition, which they sent to Perkins. Individuals not connected with the unions also signed petitions, reflecting broad support across racial, gender, and geographical lines. The petitioners charged that government-sponsored clinics, originally established as sites to improve the health of the population, now were permitting actions harmful to those same people. They protested INS officers’ use of patients’ records to identify Mexican workers as health threats and objected to the fact that such identification then became the basis for LPC status, making these individuals subject to deportation. The petition highlighted how elastic the designation LPC could be: the “charge [was] so broad that it could and [was] being easily abused, since no person can be assured that he will never become a public charge.”  The petition also raised the important point that, if immigration agents turned clinics into deportation sites, racialized communities would not seek medical services. The National Congress of Spanish Speaking Peoples, also known as El Congreso de Pueblos que Hablan Español, also formally protested the deportations. As a civil rights organization that addressed the concerns of Mexican immigrants and Mexican American citizens, El Congreso’s role was vital

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to the Mexican community in the United States at that time. Issues of racial disparities in health and housing were part of its civil rights agenda. Pointing out that disease in the Imperial Valley was “prevalent” and “respected no national lines,” El Congreso, like others who petitioned Secretary Perkins, maintained that using medical records to target Mexicans for deportation undermined the federal clinics’ essential goal of curbing disease rates. According to the telegram they sent to Perkins, fifteen Brawley clinic patients had been arrested. In protesting the deportations, El Congreso also underscored its own strength as an organization representing “110,000 Spanish speaking people.” The approach El Congreso used in registering their protest is revealing. They did not try to present the Mexican community as being without needs, which had been a common tactic among employers who did not want to risk losing their access to Mexican laborers. They were not “birds of passage” who worked for a time in the United States, returned to Mexico, and made it easy for the U.S. government to ignore them. Furthermore, in their capacity as a civil rights organization, they emphasized the obligations Secretary Perkins, as a government official, had to them as long-term residents and citizens. Finally, by invoking the strength of its numbers, El Congreso reminded the secretary that Mexicans were a powerful presence in the United States, with political power.

the investigation: a questionable focus With so much attention brought to the case, the INS began working toward the goal of establishing whether the Border Patrol had singled out Gutiérrez for deportation because of his union involvement and, if so, whether it had acted in collusion with the Associated Farmers. San Diego–based INS inspector Dan Kuykendall appears to have addressed these goals by focusing his investigative energies not on gathering information about those deported or the Border Patrol officers involved in the investigation but rather on discrediting the CIO members who made the initial allegations of bias. Kuykendall sought the aid of General Ralph Van Deman, a retired military intelligence officer who lived in San Diego. Though a private citizen, Van Deman nevertheless devoted much of his time to gathering intelligence pertaining to communists, socialists, pacifists, and strike leaders. According to Kuykendall, Van Deman’s “files regarding these people” were “quite complete.” In

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this case, the intelligence Van Deman provided concerned a woman from San Diego whose activities included efforts to build up organized labor in the Brawley area of the Imperial Valley and a recent stint as secretary of the International Defense League, the organization involved in raising funds to defend Mike Gutiérrez. The correspondence among Kuykendall, Van Deman, and William Carmichael, a Los Angeles-based INS official (to whom Kuykendall forwarded Van Deman’s report) is significant in that it reveals that although border agents denied initiating Gutiérrez’s arrest and deportation because of his ties to labor, their investigations focused only on individuals who were involved in labor organizing, describing them as “radical” and “communists.” In his final report, Kuykendall included more information on those who brought the allegations to light (specifically, T. R. Rasmussen, a CIO district president, and Josephine Woods, secretary of the United Fish Canneries Union, both of whom he described as linked to the Communist Party) than on the actual events. And in case Carmichael should want further information, Kuykendall suggested he enlist the help of Margaret Kerr, general manager of the anticommunist Better America Foundation, based in Los Angeles. Presumably the aid Kerr could provide would remain restricted to information concerning those who brought the allegations, since she had no apparent connection to the events that took place in the Imperial Valley. The INS investigation included six interviews. District Director Carmichael conducted four interviews, and Walter Miller (his title is not stated) conducted two. Most of the interviews lasted no more than ten minutes. Although the interview transcripts include mentions of “the aliens awaiting deportation” (referring to Gutiérrez and the three workers questioned outside the clinic), they were not interviewed. Similarly no one from the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers, which had helped bring the Imperial Valley events to the attention of authorities and which had undertaken fundraising aimed at freeing Gutiérrez, was interviewed. The names of five of the interviewees are already familiar: Yingling and his supervisor, Fox, and the Border Patrol agents Chief Patrol Inspector Wells, Assistant Inspector Gies, and Patrol Inspector Williams. Because of the question of possible collusion between the Border Patrol and the Associated Farmers, the sixth interviewee was Hugh Osborne, the secretary and manager of the Associated Farmers and a member of Imperial County’s Board of Supervisors.

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Assistant Inspector Ed Gies was among the first to be interviewed. Before Gies’s interview, an INS inspector named Patrick Farrelly contacted the investigators to warn them that those opposed to the deportations would also complain about Inspector Gies, whom they called a “stooge of the Associated Farmers” because they believed he carried out the orders of that organization. However, when questioned, Gies distanced himself not only from the Associated Farmers but also from knowledge of any kind regarding labor unrest, despite the fact that, by 1940, Gies had been stationed in Imperial Valley for ten years. When asked if he knew of labor problems in the area, he hedged, responding that he did not know of any “at the time.” When asked if he knew the purpose of the Associated Farmers, he answered that he did not. That claim is somewhat surprising, given that Gies certainly seems to have known Hugh Osborne. When Osborne was questioned, he testified that he had had regular contact with Gies during naturalization ceremonies, where Osborne, a member of the American Legion, was a frequent volunteer. The responses from Gies’s supervisor, Chief Inspector Wells, also distanced the INS from any seemingly inappropriate relationships with the agricultural industry. When the examining officer asked if he knew of any past labor problems in the Imperial Valley, “the only trouble that [Wells] could recall took place in November, 1939. . . . However, it wasn’t serious.” Neither Gies’s nor Wells’s responses are consistent with the Imperial Valley’s reputation as a site hostile to organized labor. When the examiner asked Wells directly if the Border Patrol was specifically targeting agricultural workers for deportation, the chief inspector responded with a string of cautiously worded statements:

q: It has been alleged that this service is effecting the wholesale arrest of the agricultural workers. Is this true? a: I would not say wholesale arrests. It is quite true that we are, and have in the past, arrested some farm laborers who were in the U.S. unlawfully. But I believe that the records would show that only a small percentage of the aliens apprehended in this subdistrict would be classed as farm laborers in the sense that they were actually employed on a farm at the time of apprehension in the Imperial Valley. Wells’s assertion that the aliens arrested by the Border Patrol could not be considered farm laborers because they were not employed as such at the time

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does not mean much given the seasonal nature of agriculture. In addition, local law enforcement had long used vagrancy laws as a way to control organized labor, arresting workers as vagrants and then setting a high bail. Such tactics paralleled strategies used against African Americans beginning in the post–Civil War period in regard to their right to bargain freely over wages. When Hugh Osborne was interviewed, INS District Director Carmichael asked him if there was any labor trouble in the Imperial Valley. Osborne replied, “No, we have had no labor troubles here for years,” and Carmichael did not continue that line of questioning. When asked about the Associated Farmers’ views on organized labor, Osborne produced a copy of the organization’s principles. These began with the claim that the “organization will use all of its power and influences for the protection: First, of the lawful rights of every man to join and be active in any labor organization he chooses.” The statement was meant to give the appearance that the Associated Farmers were in compliance with the Wagner Act, which promised workers the right to organize in unions without employer interference. Again, there were no follow-up questions from Carmichael. Given the organization’s notorious reputation and the fact that its alleged connection to the border agents’ actions was the precise focus of the INS investigation, it does not make sense (save due to political motivation) that Director Carmichael chose not to probe further into Osborne’s testimony.

the social and political construction of deportability The Imperial Valley arrests and subsequent deportations demonstrate one way in which a group can be made deportable, in this case by the local Border Patrol, which had a reputation for being predisposed toward supporting the interests of growers. I would like to emphasize the difference between the state of being deportable and the act of deportation itself, drawing attention to how a certain group, Mexicans in the Imperial Valley, is made more easily policed and deported. The case I have described could be viewed as one that simply involves a combination of efforts aimed at safeguarding the public: four Mexicans living and working in the Imperial Valley were deported because they had syphilis. However, it does not require much analysis to scratch the veneer of the professed goal of protecting public health and expose a different, and much less laudable, aim. The Imperial Valley arrests

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serve as a primer on the power that can be wielded by industry and the government under the auspices of public safety. The arrests speak to the broad capacity of the state to choose when and against whom to enforce certain laws. Using health as an analytical lens adds another important dimension to our understanding of the Imperial Valley cases. It reveals the development of a medicalized racial profiling that served to make Mexicans deportable. The Border Patrol agents’ quick move to investigate other patients at the public clinic where Gutiérrez had been treated almost certainly reflects an assumption that doing so would result in more arrests and subsequent deportations on the charge of being “afflicted with a loathsome and dangerous contagious disease,” which they could link to LPC grounds. The strategy was foolproof. Migrant laborers’ poor working and living conditions made them more vulnerable to disease, and the high population of single, male migrant workers and workers separated from their families increased the likelihood of the presence of sexually transmitted diseases in particular. Hence Mexicans were always suspended in the state of deportability as these conditions were the norm for low-wage, unskilled laborers of this time. In his book Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace,” historian Alan Kraut uses the metaphor of the double helix to capture the entanglement between Americans’ concern for health and their understanding of particular immigrant groups as more likely to be disease carriers. Other historians of race and science, including Nayan Shah, Alexandra Stern, and I, have looked at how similar perceptions of Mexican and Chinese immigrants led to tighter medical screening at borders and ports, as well as calls for stricter immigration policies. Historically syphilis drew particular attention, marking groups as “other,” especially during times of demographic or political change. In the early twentieth century, eugenicists (who believed that the human race could be improved through selective breeding) claimed that syphilis arose from bad genes. One way to lower the number of cases, the argument went, was to reduce “the bad gene pool.” Immigration restrictions, aimed mainly at southern and eastern Europeans, who were frequently described as “defective,” were meant to assist in that process. Thus eugenic organizations strongly backed the Immigration Act of 1924, which placed numerical limits on immigration, severely affecting southern and eastern European immigration and banning Asian immigration. Given the history of syphilis in the medical racialization of people of color, and given the precedent of associating Mexicans with disease in order to

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influence immigration policy, it is significant that Border Patrol agents chose to deport the Imperial Valley laborers by activating the LPC charge on the basis of disease. Charging Mexicans as syphilis carriers simultaneously discredited them and circumvented any discussion of labor rights or civil rights violations, both of which the federal government was championing at the time. Apparently the individuals that the Border Patrol rounded up were understood as not deserving of civil rights: they were just diseased Mexicans. Perhaps what most dramatically separated the Imperial Valley events from other immigration actions is that the deportations occurred after the workers had entered the country. They were not turned away at the border; they were not newcomers; they were not seeking charity. Yingling established that many of his clinics’ patients had resided in the United States for years, even decades. In one of the clinics, where forty-four Mexican patients were being treated, patients’ average length of residency in the United States was twenty-one years; not one had been in the United States for less than ten years. As one of those who opposed the deportations stated, most of those arrested had been “residents of Imperial Valley for a quarter of a century, some of them having lived in Imperial County before the Americans.”  This observation sharply contrasted with the boasts of agribusinessmen who proclaimed themselves the “pioneers” of the Imperial Valley, effectively erasing the Mexican and indigenous presence that preceded them. Other Mexican workers had come to the Imperial Valley after being approached by labor recruiters; they settled down and made friends, and some raised their families in the Imperial Valley. To then deport them ten, even twenty years after they had established their lives in the United States might be best described as a kind of violence. Medical racial profiling had already served to make Mexicans deportable. The LPC charge not only worked in tandem with this charge, but was another mechanism for marking Mexicans as outsiders. Just as the welfare state was being solidified under President Franklin Roosevelt, the LPC label reinforced stereotypes of Mexicans as charity seekers, dependent and undeserving of state resources. The LPC charge is significant, then, not only for the way it made Mexicans deportable but also in how it contributed to cultural representations of Mexicans as less than full citizens through narratives portraying them as undeserving and dependent. After all, the LPCs discussed here were able-bodied, employed men (with the exception of one woman) with a long history in the Imperial Valley.

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The fact that the law could be selectively and disparately enforced irrespective of length of residency placed Mexicans in a perpetual state of deportability. This precarious state undermined any stability Mexican immigrants achieved through the jobs they maintained, the friends they made, and the communities they formed. Being considered likely to have a disease or likely to become a public charge meant that one was always on the verge of being a public health threat and thus always on the verge of being deported.

conclusion In the end, the INS concluded that, while there was “friction” between the Associated Farmers and union organizers, “the investigation failed to disclose any evidence whatsoever of collusion between the Associated Farmers and any member of [the INS].”  Nonetheless the Imperial Valley deportations inform our understanding of how Mexicans continued to be viewed as diseased, dependent, and deportable long after they had settled in the United States. Racializing Mexicans and Mexican Americans in this way helped to create a racial script of both populations as deviant, dangerous, and outside the bounds of social membership within the United States. In addition, linking Mexicans to disease and LPC status positioned them as outside of the possibility of citizenship. By 1940 the second generation had begun to constitute a more dominant part of the Mexican population living in the United States. The LPC charge assumed the individual would become dependent on the state, whereas a good citizen is understood as an individual who is independent. In this way, Mexican men, even those who held U.S. citizenship, were constructed as unable to become full citizens. Disease was central to this construction. In the next chapter, I show that Mexicans continued to be made deportable in the following decade. This time, instead of focusing on a rural, comparatively isolated area, we move to an urban center, Los Angeles, where Mexicans lived alongside Mexican Americans, Asians, African Americans, and whites. By examining how deportations happened in this diverse setting, we see how the construction of Mexicans as deportable profoundly affected those around them.

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Deportations in the Urban Landscape

“Back to Mexico, Pancho,” read the caption under a front-page photo of four young Mexican men detained during the raid that inaugurated Operation Wetback. The local Southern California newspaper in which the picture appeared captured the tone of this INS campaign efficiently and effectively in two headlines: “U.S. Orders Calif. Mopup of Wetbacks” and “War Opened on Wetbacks.” Another raid was described as involving “a flying squad of 75 border patrolman and immigration officers . . . [who would] sweep through factories, into Skid Row saloons and hotels and ferret out illegal Mexican aliens in other Los Angeles locations.” The INS also sent undercover Mexican American agents into the field disguised as “illegal entrants” to “mingle with aliens,” listen to their plans, and “attempt with the aliens to elude our officers” as a way of “expos[ing] any weak spots in [the] present operation.” Operation Wetback was a militarized, aggressive, massive effort launched on June 17, 1954, in Arizona and California. The goal was to apprehend and deport one million undocumented Mexicans. With Operation Wetback, the U.S. government hoped to allay mounting concerns that undocumented Mexican immigration had reached a crisis point. In 1942 the United States and Mexico had collaborated in creating the Bracero Program, a guest worker arrangement that remained in effect until 1964. Over two decades the program brought four million Mexican men to the United States to work in agriculture and other industries, such as railroads, to fill World War II–related labor shortages. Along with these contracted workers, many undocumented workers also flowed into the country 112

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in search of jobs. Employers often chose to hire these men instead of the Bracero workers in order to avoid paying contract and transportation fees. Because of this subterfuge, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez argues that Operation Wetback was more than an effort to control Mexican undocumented immigration; it was also a “crisis of consent and control” between the INS and farmers who blatantly disregarded laws. After drawing readers’ attention to the launch of Operation Wetback with the headline “Dawn Raid Nets 57 Wetbacks,” the author of the newspaper article quoted earlier mused about the target of this new “non-shooting, different kind of ‘war’ ”: “Just what kind of a character is this celebrated border-jumper? . . . His crime?—Illegal entry into the United States. So back to Mexico Pancho must go. The tens of thousands of him.” It seems that “Pancho the Wetback” had “become to Uncle Sam something of a headache, socially and economically, and an international problem.” These statements reflect how mainstream America thought of undocumented Mexicans in the mid-1950s, when economic recession had eliminated the pressing need for immigrant labor. The article also bears witness to the intensification during this period of long-standing cultural representations of Mexicans as social burdens and criminals and highlights a stereotype that was redefined and solidified during the 1950s: the wetback. Border Patrol agents sometimes referred to Mexicans as “wets,” but in the 1920s and 1930s the term wetback appeared only occasionally in newspaper and magazine articles. The term grew more common in the 1940s, when, in connection with the Bracero Program, the numbers of undocumented immigrants rose and more Border Patrol officers focused on the U.S.–Mexican border. As Lytle Hernandez argues, it was during this period that “Mexican immigrant workers emerged as primary targets of the U.S. Border Patrol and . . . in the process, the U.S. Border Patrol shaped the story of race in America.” The use of wetback to refer to Mexican immigrants signaled the emergence of a new immigration regime of racialization and criminalization. The term had different implications from peon (see chapter 1), which was rooted in Mexican history and referred to inferior, low-paid, unskilled laborers with few rights and little autonomy. Wetback too was a racializing term but had a broader and sharper impact and was used much more widely and loosely to describe Mexican immigrants and even Mexican Americans. The term thus had the power to racialize an entire immigrant group, even beyond the first

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generation. It served to reactivate the notion of the Mexican as immigrant every time it was uttered and to criminalize Mexicans, since its genesis was associated with the characterization of active and intentional undocumented immigration. Wetback cued the listener that the subject was a law breaker and thus implicitly evoked an us-versus-them imaginary: “They are breaking our laws” or “These people are invading our country.” The use of the term was common throughout the 1950s and continued well into the 1980s. Newspaper articles readily used it interchangeably with Mexican immigrants in stories on crime, communicable disease, and deporting children. In the process, the media and the immigration offices and projects it reported on taught the public what Mexican meant in the era of this new immigration regime. Despite the INS’s confident predictions, Operation Wetback fell far short of its goal of deporting one million undocumented Mexicans. In Los Angeles, for example, the INS branch office aimed to deport one thousand “wetbacks” a day as part of its own local campaign, dubbed Operation Round-up. According to the Los Angeles Times, however, as of the fourth day of the operation, only 250 Mexicans had been shipped back to Mexico. The agency explained the lower than expected numbers by claiming that the campaign was so effective that Mexicans were either hiding at home or biding their time in Mexico until the raids ceased. There were also bureaucratic problems. On previous occasions, the Mexican government had readily participated in binational efforts to control migration, but it was unprepared to deal with the sudden increase in deportees now being funneled back to Mexico. By the end of the summer, only months after Operation Wetback had begun, its funding ran out. The campaign had netted 33,307 people, far short of the predicted one million. The INS continued to tout this number even though the one million apprehensions the agency attributed to Operation Wetback in fact spanned the entire fiscal year of 1954. The INS campaign is a prime example of how racial scripts come to be formed and perpetuated. Along with wetback the name Pancho ostensibly referred to undocumented Mexican immigrants; the power of racial scripts expanded the meaning of this term too, grouping together all Mexicans and Mexican Americans: documented with undocumented; those who had been here for five years with those whose families could trace their citizenship

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back for five generations; those who spoke only Spanish with those who could barely muster an hola in their forebears’ tongue. In order to better understand how the racial script of Mexicans as undocumented evolved during this period, this chapter examines Operation Round-up, the Los Angeles–based part of Operation Wetback. This local campaign detained Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike and held them in a makeshift detention center in Elysian Park, one of the city’s largest public parks (now best known as home to Dodger Stadium). The detention center was located in plain sight, just off the Pasadena Freeway, barely a mile from downtown Los Angeles and just blocks from an all-boys Catholic school whose student body included Mexican and Mexican American students. The decision to site the detention center in Elysian Park reflected a general awareness of the city as segregated both conceptually and geographically. Mexicans had a long history with Elysian Park, reaching back before the roundups. That history helped shape their sense of being both disenfranchised and displaced in Los Angeles, and even in the park they had called home. Prior to Operation Round-up, Chavez Ravine, part of Elysian Park, was a close-knit and self-sustaining residential community, a working-class, racially mixed but predominantly Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood. Residents felt betrayed when, beginning in 1951, the city used the power of eminent domain to seize the land for a public housing project, forcing residents to vacate their homes and abandon the neighborhood. The land was sold to Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, at a fraction of its worth as an incentive to move the baseball team west. In the meantime, the space that just a few years earlier had been a vibrant, thriving, workingclass Mexican neighborhood was now home to a detainment facility for Mexicans facing deportation. The advantage of studying how the raids played out in Los Angeles is that we see how they affected not only Mexican immigrants but other racialized groups as well. This wider effect was absent in other, more isolated areas in the Southwest that were targets of Operation Wetback. Southwestern farms typically were located miles from each other, so when the INS stormed a farm, the people at hand to witness or remember the raid were relatively few: the farmer-employer, the legally employed workers, and the undocumented Mexican immigrant workers (who were rounded up and deported). But

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when the INS looked for undocumented workers in Los Angeles, many racialized groups were caught in the crosshairs. Agents entered neighborhoods, workplaces, leisure spaces, and homes where undocumented Mexicans worked and lived alongside Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and other racialized groups. These raids shaped individuals’ sense of (not) belonging in the United States and contributed to the collective memory of racialized communities as yet another experience that marginalized them, both symbolically and materially. This chapter takes a step back to broaden our view. It focuses on the ways in which Operation Wetback and, more specifically, Operation Round-up in Los Angeles were a racializing force for other groups, as well as for their intended target. From this wider perspective we can see the impact such government-sanctioned programs had on the creation and reinforcement of racial scripts. Deportation politics affected the everyday lives of both Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Citizenship did not provide Mexican Americans with a significant buffer from the uncertainties and adversities that Mexican immigrants experienced. INS agents asked to see the papers of members of both groups when they rode on buses, worked on the factory line, or sat in bars. In the daytime agents raided their workplaces, and at night invaded their homes. Because racial profiling guided who was and who was not asked to show their papers, Mexican Americans were racialized along with Mexican immigrants as inherently unsuitable for U.S. citizenship. Operation Roundup and other anti-immigration efforts did much to define Mexican Americans’ place in society. As such, these efforts serve as yet another example of the power of racial scripts. Looking closely at Operation Round-up also makes clear the extent to which the deportation campaign affected other racialized groups in Los Angeles, such as African Americans and Japanese and Japanese Americans, some as silent witnesses and others as more vocal defenders of the rights of Mexicans. These other groups knew that the plight of Mexicans could easily be their own because they saw the connections between the raids, arrests, detentions, and deportations and race-making moments in their own communities. In so doing, they also recognized the connections between groups and perceived how racial scripts operated. Accordingly those who protested the raids offered scripts of their own to counter the degrading images of Mexicans that were promoted by the INS and that were prevalent in U.S.

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culture generally. Several local organizations mounted formal and informal objections to the raids and detainments that occurred in Los Angeles.

pushing back against operation round-up Perhaps one of the best ways to understand the scope of the impact of Operation Round-up is to examine the response from local grassroots and community organizations. The forceful efforts of the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (LACPFB), a local chapter of a national organization called the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, are especially instructive. The LACPFB recognized that Operation Round-up undermined the rights of all, not just Mexicans. Its efforts show the interactions among various groups as they worked together and on each other’s behalf, circulating petitions, protesting, picketing, passing out leaflets, and translating materials into different languages to broaden their reach. The LACPFB was formed in 1950, before the advent of Operation Wetback. It was a response to new immigration policies shaped by cold war politics that, in emphasizing the threat of enemies residing within the country, promoted domestic repression. Persons who offered left-wing or communist political critiques of the government were vilified as un-American, subversive, and dangerous. Anyone who was critical—or thought to be critical—of the state was vulnerable to the provisions of two repressive federal laws. The first, the 1950 Internal Security Act, gave the federal government the power to deport aliens who admitted to or were suspected of ever having joined the Communist Party. The second, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act), made possible the denaturalization of naturalized citizens if they were found to have been communist sympathizers. Anticommunist campaigns were often thinly veiled efforts to intimidate unionized workers. The LACPFB characterized the law “as an antiunion weapon, meant to weaken and destroy the trade union movement in the U.S.” Immigrants, even those who had naturalized, were particularly vulnerable because they could be denaturalized, deported, or placed in unlimited detention without benefit of trial. This aspect of the legislation prompted the LACPFB to label the McCarran-Walter Act a “Police State Law [used] to intimidate all the foreign-born.”

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The LACPFB’s general approach to deportation cases indicates that it was committed to coalition politics that cut across racial and ethnic as well as class lines. The organization stood ready to defend anyone who seemed to be a target of political persecution associated with the McCarran-Walter Act. For example, the LACPFB defended Milo Jovetich, who in 1954 was charged with having violated the Act. Jovetich was a Yugoslavian who had lived in the United States since 1924 and had a long history as a union member. The LACPFB also protested the deportation of a Korean man, David Hyun, arguing that he would meet physical punishment, possibly even death, if he was deported. These examples demonstrate that the LACPFB’s outreach, commitment, and activism were on behalf of a broad cross-section of the population, linked by their common vulnerability as immigrant workers. Operation Round-up drew a vigorous response from the LACPFB. By its own account, the organization “played no small part in rousing the entire city to protest the planting of a concentration camp right in the heart of Los Angeles, and the indiscriminate round up with planes and guns and roadblocks, as well as warrantless raids on homes and factories.” Redoubling its efforts against unfair deportations of both Mexican and other immigrants, the LACPFB spearheaded the legal defense of those detained in the sweeps and also led community-based protests. It organized picket lines at the Elysian Park detention center and at INS headquarters that attracted delegations of community and trade union members; initiated petitions decrying what it termed military-style tactics used by the INS; secured lawyers for those facing deportation; dedicated the organization’s office to aiding detainees twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; and wrote critical letters to INS Commissioner General Joseph Swing, demanding an end to the deportation campaign. Swing was newly appointed, having served in the armed services for thirty-nine years before he began his work with the INS. His prior military assignments included an expedition to Mexico against the revolutionary Pancho Villa, and he was part of the first unit to occupy Japan after the Japanese surrender, demonstrating a history of fighting against racialized groups. The LACPFB pointed out that Operation Round-up’s violation of Mexicans’ rights was not part of a “state of exception” but, quite the contrary, represented business as usual. Reviewing the nation’s long history of such actions, it noted that the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, purportedly passed to protect the country from alien enemies, were violations of free speech.

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Similarly it criticized the government’s role in the Palmer Raids (1919–20), in which immigrant groups had been brutally targeted and criminalized as enemies of the state. The LACPFB’s critiques demonstrate how the 1954 deportations, just one in a series of acts built into the very structure of U.S. democratic society, affected not only Mexicans but other groups as well. In other words, the LACPFB was reacting to racial scripts that served to marginalize and delegitimize all immigrant groups. The organization’s efforts went well beyond stopping deportations. It offered counterscripts, reframing prior characterizations of Mexicans as immigrants and interlopers and reminding the public that the Southwest had been part of Mexico until the U.S.–Mexican War (1846–48). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that marked the end of the war had ceded land to the United States, but it also had promised, in return, to grant citizenship rights to the Mexicans living in the ceded area. The LACPFB claimed that the United States never fulfilled its promise of full citizenship to Mexicans, and thus the government was in the wrong. In the area of civil rights, the organization took a firm stand and a broad view, dedicating itself to defending democratic principles and the civil rights of all. Thus the LACPFB promoted the common cause of racialized groups nationally as well as locally, fighting “for the right of the Mexican American and Negro peoples to first class citizenship, for abolition of the medieval punishment of deportation, and the preserving of American citizenship for all.” Of course, these causes were not interchangeable. Racial scripts played out differently according to various factors, including national origin and perceptions of foreignness. The background of the LACPFB’s executive director, Rose Chernin, speaks to how personal experiences of witnessing and fighting against injustices can lead to the kind of solidarity exhibited by the LACPFB. Chernin, a Russian Jewish immigrant, had a long history of battling social inequalities before she moved to Los Angeles in 1946. She felt compelled to return to political activism in Los Angeles after a cross was burned on her African American neighbors’ lawn. In 1950 she founded the LACPFB. Within a year she was arrested, along with eleven other left-wing political organizers, on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government. A few years later the INS unsuccessfully attempted to denaturalize her, charging that she had violated the Smith Act, which established that advocating Marxism or communism was tantamount to conspiracy to overthrow the government. Chernin and her colleagues also attracted the attention of the Congressional Committee

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on Un-American Activities, which launched an investigation of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and its local chapters, describing them as “the most dangerous area of communist activity in the United States.” Chernin’s background and life experience were not unique in the Los Angeles chapter. The original board of directors consisted of Charlotta Bass, a prominent leader in the African American community and publisher of the Los Angeles–based African American paper The California Eagle; Dorothy Marshall, a Catholic activist; and two judges—Robert Kenny, former California attorney general, and Stanley Moffatt. The Episcopalian minister Walter Mitchell of Arizona was the first honorary chairperson; he was soon joined by Reverend Stephen Fritchman of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Los Angeles. The LACPFB’s statement of principle was “None shall be asked from whence he came, but only ‘what can you do?’ ” Taken in the aggregate, the founding members were a diverse group with a social justice mission. Some members of the LACPFB fought for Mexicans not just because they saw injustice but because they had also experienced it themselves. Groups that we now tend to think of collectively as “white” were once considered to be distinct groups, such as Jews, Italians, Poles. As the historian David Roediger argues, these were “inbetween people,” “inbetween hard racism and full inclusion–neither securely white nor non-white.” Roediger points out that although this was not the type of racism experienced by African Americans, “it was an experience of racialization.” It was likely that they (or their parents) were first-generation immigrants. They may have immigrated through Ellis Island and faced the sting of an immigration inspector who checked them closely for signs of disease, which it was assumed they carried. Once settled, they also likely encountered Anglo-Saxon Protestant exclusion in the form of job, housing, and personal discrimination. Beginning in the mid-1930s these “inbetween people” gradually began their transition into whiteness. New Deal programs, such as the National Housing Act of 1934 and the Home Owners Loan Corporation, subsidized their transition into whiteness by allowing them to buy their first homes in desirable neighborhoods. Their homes would then appreciate in value, creating wealth they could pass on to their children, firmly establishing their families in the middle class. Such opportunities were denied to racialized groups. New Deal programs also offered safety nets, like social security. Participation in

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unions, which often barred African Americans and Mexicans, secured their jobs, medical insurance, and pensions, thus also facilitating this transition. But whiteness was obtained neither overnight nor in one generation. It was not simply handed over with the keys of a newly purchased home in the suburbs. Nor did the collective memories of these groups disappear once they moved into more desirable zip codes and drove to their secure jobs. Thus they not only understood the power of racial scripts; their lives had been shaped by them, for better and for worse. Shared experiences of discrimination produced affinities between the members of the LACPFB and those they supported, but because racism played itself out differently among the groups, there were also limits to such coalitions. They had all experienced racism, but not necessarily the same kind of racism. The mission of the LACPFB contrasted with the stated goals of prominent Mexican American groups. In Texas the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the G.I. Forum fought for the civil rights of Mexican Americans, but both viewed Mexican immigrants, especially the undocumented, as detrimental to their goals and thus did not include the rights or needs of immigrants in their organizations’ agendas (see chapter 2). Th is initial distancing and emphasis on separate interests began to subside somewhat, however, in the increasingly anti-immigrant cold war climate of the 1950s. LULAC and others began to recognize that the fates of Mexican American citizens and immigrants were one and the same as relevant government entities (such as the INS) increasingly failed to distinguish between them. Nonetheless during Operation Wetback some of these organizations worked with Border Patrol agents to help apprehend undocumented Mexican workers, fearing that negative cultural representations of this group would erode gains in the area of civil rights for Mexican Americans.

other responses to operation round-up The LACPFB was not alone in its efforts. Left-leaning activists in Los Angeles were another source of support. They had a history of demonstrating their willingness to organize across racialized lines and to fight against what they considered to be social injustice even when it did not directly affect them. One example occurred in August 1942, in response to the mishandling of the investigation and prosecution of the Sleepy Lagoon murder case. The police

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rounded up hundreds of Mexican youth and arrested twenty-two, all of whom were tried for one murder. Everyone—the media, police, prosecution, and judge—blatantly discriminated against the young Mexican defendants. This racism provoked a backlash that resulted in widespread public support from both inside and outside the Mexican American community. An interethnic coalition, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Fund, provided support and raised funds for the defense of the Mexican youth. Many others on the political left protested the Operation Round-up raids and deportations and the widespread repressive politics of the period. The Community Service Organization (CSO), a grassroots civil rights organization founded in Los Angeles, is one example of this local activism. The CSO, which also worked for voter registration and community empowerment, began as a diverse coalition that banded together to elect Edward Roybal to Los Angeles City Council office. In response to Operation Round-up, the CSO established a committee to meet with the local INS director, Herman Landon, to implore him to immediately cease the “wholesale manhunt.” The committee also questioned how the INS had managed to get permission to use a city park as a detention center. Another local organization, the Independent Progressive Party of Los Angeles, also forcefully critiqued the raids. Party members characterized Operation Round-up as a “desperate effort to solve an impending unemployment problem by totally false measures.” They predicted that the fallout from the raids would “harm relations between the United States and her nearest neighbor.” They also urged the INS to consider that it was harming not just individuals but families as well. It is not unusual for racialized groups to work together on behalf of shared social progress, though for self-preservation, these organizations did often have to act only on behalf of their own communities. What is rare is to be able to glean such connections from the extant historical sources, since histories of marginalized groups are not as likely to be preserved as are those of groups in power. In addition to evidence of shared effort, the LACPFB’s general mission and actions during Operation Round-up show the extent to which the organization recognized the power of racial scripts and worked against them.

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connecting shared histories to respond to operation round-up As part of its mission, the LACPFB reached out to a broad constituency. While the round-ups directly targeted undocumented Mexicans, the LACPFB framed the issue as one that ideologically linked the political struggles of multiple racialized groups. In an open letter to U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell (who, as head of the Department of Justice, oversaw the INS), the LACPFB wrote, “The insult to the 500,000 members of the Mexican American community implicit in your ’concentration camp’ orders is unmistakable and will be deemed as such by all minority peoples, Jews whose memories are still sharp as to the meaning of mass concentration camps, Japanese Americans who recall America’s shameful incarceration in relocation camps of thousands of Japanese nationals and native-born Americans of Japanese descent; as well as by fair-minded, Democratic spirited Americans as a whole.” The LACPFB felt that most Los Angeles residents, once they heard the organization’s messages, could be counted on to be “indignant at this treatment of minority peoples, some recalling the brutal treatment meted out to the Japanese American people, and the chronic discrimination against Negro people and Jewish people.” The LACPFB made clear that while the INS campaign was directed at Mexicans for now, it could soon be used to target other racialized groups. “Unless this policy of placing arbitrary power in the hands of one man [referring to Brownell] is changed and changed quickly—no one in California is safe—citizen as well as non-citizen,” pronounced immigration attorney Josef Widoff, who worked with the group. Widoff ’s words were prescient, for Brownell would go on to work against civil rights for African Americans. When fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered during a visit to Mississippi, after reportedly flirting with a white woman, Brownell refused to use the power of his office to investigate. It was this refusal that made the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other mobilizations seem necessary to African Americans. The LACPFB also called attention to the deplorable conditions of the Los Angeles detention center, describing it as a “large, wire fence–enclosed abandoned youth camp and playground in Elysian Park. . . . The wooden buildings needed to be re-furnished and the toilet facilities put in working

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figure 2. Mexican workers board buses in Elysian Park for deportation. Daily News 1954. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

order, along with patching holes in the fence. They expected to confine 1,000 deportees at a time, which they expected to round up per day.” Both the makeshift conditions and the dilapidation were reminiscent of the temporary internment camps that housed Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. Prior to these groups’ relocation to camps far from the

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West Coast, Los Angeles officials had turned well-known Los Angeles venues, such as the Santa Anita racetrack, into provisional internment camps. The stigmatization of Japanese and Mexicans in Los Angeles resulted in remarkably similar treatment of both groups; both were forcibly housed in inferior temporary lodgings (the Japanese before they were shipped off to internment camps, which were also shoddily constructed, and Mexicans while awaiting deportation), regardless of their citizenship status, particularly in the case of the Japanese who were systematically interned. These events are separated by almost a decade, but when looked at together, their similarities demonstrate how racial scripts not only help to inform our understandings of race but also how they help define acceptable responses to perceived racial crises.

counterscripting operation round-up Reactions of the Los Angeles African American Community The LACPFB succeeded in their efforts to draw the attention of and garner support from Angelinos. During one of the protests the organization sponsored at the Elysian Park detention center, members spoke to African American workers who had gathered at the entrance to the park. “It’s a damn shame,” said one man. “I know many of those people been here for a long time—some of them all their adult lives.” Another commented that it was “awful to see families broken up like that.” A third said, “Those are people who’ve worked hard and help[ed] to build this country.” As they witnessed the INS bringing in Mexican detainees, one of the men asked, “How can they call those Mexican people foreigners? This country was originally theirs. Wonder if those immigration cops realize how it makes us Negro people feel when they start kicking the Mexicans around?” The men’s comments imply that they recognized affinities between Mexicans and African Americans, perhaps as workers or as members of a group that had been subjected to state-sanctioned violence. These men readily offered counterscripts in response to the perceived injustice. They seemed to empathize with the detainees not just as workers but as members of another vulnerable racialized group. They noted that the detained Mexicans had lived in the United States a long time, had “worked hard and help[ed] to build this country,” and were still subject to deportation, even though “this country was originally theirs.” Their critiques also shifted the attention to

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the state and its role in perpetuating injustice. In doing so, they exposed the source of what was wrong: not the individuals involved but the system itself. They recognized their common experiences and highlighted the fact that injustices were not limited to their own community. In the process they challenged dominant assumptions of such aberrations stemming from within the communities. The mass deportations broke up families whose members had different citizenship and immigration statuses; some family members would be deported, while others stayed behind. Perhaps the African American men saw affinities between themselves and the Mexican detainees, given their own community’s history of labor and displacement. Since it was 1954, it is highly likely that these men were only one or two generations removed from slavery (which had been abolished in 1865 under the Thirteenth Amendment). Displacement too was likely to have been part of their collective memory. The need for labor during World War II encouraged black migration out of the South, and Los Angeles was one of the cities that African Americans migrated to in large numbers because of job opportunities in the defense industry. As a group whose recent ancestors had had no individual autonomy and no control over their own labor, and thus had to accept being routinely separated from their families, African Americans may have been especially sensitive to these issues. Also, as a people who had been forcibly moved to the United States for the purpose of slavery and then treated as second-class citizens even long after slavery had been abolished, they may have recognized an analogous historical path in the Mexican experience. Mexicans were now being deported from a place that once belonged to Mexico. The reference to “immigration cops” suggests an ideological link between the ways African Americans and Mexicans had been policed. Historically both groups had seen the police not as a source of protection but as a coercive force. In the post–Civil War period, a series of laws, referred to as black codes, were used to restrict African Americans’ mobility and right to bargain freely over wages. Vagrancy laws required African Americans to sign year-long contracts with white farmers or risk arrest and detention for long periods of time, during which they could be hired out to white farmers. Conditions for Mexicans in the Southwest were similar; they too could be detained under vagrancy laws, and according to Lytle Hernandez, beginning

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in the 1880s it was common for the Los Angeles prison to hire out its inmates, many of whom were African American and Mexican, to do such work as build municipal infrastructure. This mutual recognition of similar experiences helped groups make connections with one another and offer their own counterscripts. Though the episodes may have been distinct, the experience of disenfranchisement and marginalization were shared and resonated with these observers in powerful ways. As we saw in chapter 4, in the Imperial Valley, where agricultural labor was a vital necessity, local sheriffs worked closely with farmers to help make sure Mexican laborers did not leave their farms. While the Bracero Program was in place, Mexican contract workers who tried to escape the inhumanity of farmer-employers who subjected them to malnourishment, unfair pay, and substandard housing could be rounded up by the police and forcibly returned to the farms. Likewise it was not unusual for farmers to call in the INS on payday to avoid remunerating undocumented Mexican workers. The line between law enforcement and the INS was blurry. When Attorney General Brownell toured the U.S.–Mexican border in 1953, he met with federal, state, and local officials to discuss and assess the state of Mexican immigration. Those officials included William Parker, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and Mayor Poulson. The two warned Brownell of the social problems Mexicans engendered, and they predicted that the number of “wetbacks arrested” in Los Angeles would “probably show a 100 increase.” The following year that information filtered its way into the INS annual report, which noted that “aliens who entered the United States illegally are responsible for 75 percent of all crimes committed in Southern California.” Chief Parker was notorious for leading a department hostile to the city’s communities of color. Councilman Edward Roybal, who represented a racially and ethnically diverse eastside district, was sufficiently concerned that he set up a special committee composed of community leaders and interested parties to monitor activities by the LAPD that might result in civil rights violations. Sometimes the police literally were “immigration cops.” During Operation Wetback, the Border Patrol did not have enough agents to cover such a large territory; thus they relied on local law enforcement. In one raid in Orange County, located south of Los Angeles, a task force led by an INS agent

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consisted of one additional INS agent, two police officers, and three sheriff ’s deputies, two of them in uniform. The group used a panel truck and patrol cars to get to the site of the raid. On another occasion, during a raid in which five hundred Mexicans were apprehended, the East Los Angeles Sheriff ’s Station served as the launching point, and sheriff ’s deputies, LAPD officers, and the California Highway Patrol assisted federal officers with their dragnet. Even the staff of the California State Department of Employment, which presumably had nothing to do with law enforcement or immigration, took part. In these scenarios, those who were supposed to protect and serve and those whose role it was to deport were one and the same.

Reactions of the Los Angeles Japanese Community Other community members responded differently to the round-up of Mexicans. On June 28, 1954, the People’s Daily World ran a story about ten thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans who attended a reunion picnic for Japanese from Hiroshima. The event was held in Elysian Park. The article, which was sympathetic in tone, noted that the picnic had taken place annually for thirty years but had been suspended during World War II. This was the first year the picnic had resumed. Two survivors of the atomic bomb would be in attendance, both eighteen years old, signifying that they had been young children at the time the bomb was dropped. The article demonstrated an attentiveness to the many ways in which the U.S. government’s internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans fractured these communities, making it necessary for them to rebuild and reestablish connections in the postwar period. Strangely absent from the story was any discussion of the Japanese community’s response to Operation Round-up. Surely, with ten thousand people attending the Elysian Park reunion, the detention center could not have gone completely unnoticed. The LACPFB was working twenty-four hours a day to bring attention to the round-ups, and yet the article made no mention of any communication between the Japanese and Mexican communities. In a story published four days earlier, the newspaper had criticized reunion-goers for their apathy: “As the picketers marched, thousands of Sunday picnickers frolicked in the park in full view of the wire-enclosed stockade.” To understand what might have motivated the divergent public responses to the detention camp from African Americans and Japanese and Japanese

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Americans, it helps to know about changes these groups underwent in the postwar period. The experience of World War II and its aftermath motivated African Americans to work for social change. During the war, many African Americans sought a better life outside of the Jim Crow South; thousands migrated to the North and the West Coast in search of better jobs. Wartime industries, responding to federal regulations, offered new opportunities and better wages. Under an Executive Order, President Roosevelt created the Fair Employment Practices Commission to end discriminatory workplace practices and ensure equal wages; though understaffed and underfunded, the Commission offered some hope to African Americans and afforded them more opportunities in the workplace. African Americans also volunteered to serve in the military and were honored for acts of heroism. On the home front, they promoted a “Double V” campaign to channel the message that just as Americans would triumph over fascism abroad, they would vanquish racism at home. In the cold war era, African Americans’ long-standing quest for civil rights gained momentum. The U.S. government was eager to deflect Soviet criticism of domestic racial inequalities and thus yielded to certain demands. A new era of racial liberalism was spawned during this period, as evidenced by an emphasis on equal opportunity and attempts to rectify racial inequalities through antidiscrimination litigation and legislation. In addition, with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, African Americans made advancements on the legal front in the postwar period. In 1948, for example, in Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court ruled the government could not constitutionally enforce racially restrictive covenants. This enabled people of color to buy homes in areas that previously had been considered “white only.” The Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring an end to legal segregation in public schools, was handed down just one month before the launching of Operation Wetback. Both rulings were civil rights landmarks, but their implementation and enforcement would be long and slow in coming. Even though gains may have been limited, African Americans continued to hope and to work for a more equitable society. The Japanese had a categorically different experience in the postwar period. During the war they had been categorized as enemy aliens and interned, even though by this time over 60 percent of the Japanese population in the United States were American-born citizens. Following the war, Japan shifted from being an enemy to being an ally, and the United States thus made concessions

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to Japan. These included granting Japanese the right to naturalize under the McCarran-Walter Act (the same legislation that provided the basis for prosecuting immigrant laborers and activists as communists). In addition, some groups, such as the Japanese American Citizens League, tried to rehabilitate the image of the Japanese by putting forth a narrative about those who had remained loyal to the United States while interned and those who had served in the U.S. military. Nonetheless Japanese in the United States had to face enduring racism after the war. A 1944 poll taken in Los Angeles, for example, found that 65 percent of respondents not only supported the 1924 Immigration Act’s ban on Japanese but also favored deportation of those presently in the country. Japanese returning from the camps faced vitriolic words and hateful actions, as the experiences of the Sakamoto family make clear. Just hours before their return from internment in 1945, the Sakamotos’ farm home, located on land just north of Sacramento, was burned down. The family had three sons in the U.S. military and one who had died in service during the war. Until the end of the 1980s, the poor treatment of the Japanese community included an ongoing failure at the federal level to compensate for the loss of their property and savings during the three years of internment. Japanese and Japanese Americans are estimated to have suffered $400 million in property losses due to the internments. Under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Congress finally authorized reparations—which totaled only $37 million. These very different experiences of African Americans and Japanese— one group often perceived by the dominant culture as inferior but nonetheless American, and the other as forever foreigners regardless of their multigenerational presence in the United States—did not result in a unified effort toward change. One was building on the gains of the war; one was starting from behind, needing to prove they were American. These differing experiences illustrate a point mentioned earlier in relation to the LACPFB: While both groups experienced racism, it was not the same racism, and thus they would respond in different ways.

Reactions of Labor In addition to the more obvious cases of African Americans and Japanese, other groups clearly saw their fates linked with those of the Mexican detainees. These groups looked past the racial scripts that separated them and

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instead focused on what they had in common: their positions as workers. Of course, racialized experiences were still central to their lives. As Michael Denning argues in his examination of the role of the working class in the cultural front, “Ethnicity and race had become the modality through which working-class peoples experienced their lives and mapped their communities. . . . The invention of ethnicity was a central form of class consciousness in the United States.”  To a large extent, the voice of labor in California at this time was representative of a certain white ethnic experience, such as that seen in the LACPFB. The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union argued that Brownell and the INS superiors who were running the raids were the same people behind one of the most infamous cases of government targeting and deportation, that of Harry Bridges, the leader of the ILWU. The INS attempted to denaturalize and deport Bridges, an Australian native who had lived in the United States since 1919, on the grounds that he had been in the Communist Party, thereby circumventing any discussion of his labor activism. The ILWU criticized capitalism for its exploitation of workers and linked the demands of a capitalist economy to the timing of INS raids and round-ups, noting that no deportations took place “when pecans or avocados or oranges or lettuce leaves [were] ripening in the fields of the big corporate farms.” The People’s Daily World, which gave voice to workers’ concerns, also weighed in on Operation Round-up with editorials that depicted the INS as a handmaiden of capitalist interests. One editorial charged that Attorney General Brownell waged “a war of terror against Mexican workers because this is what the big growers want to keep their field labor intimidated and low-paid. In that sense, Brownell’s raids are an attack on all workers because if he succeeds, through this terrorism, in realizing the big growers’ aims, this will serve to depress wages for all workers, and renders rural union organization all the more difficult.” Thus from the perspective of unions and workers, the deportation policies of the 1950s went hand in hand with making a malleable and exploitable workforce.

“we don’t keep a record of their names” Operation Wetback and Operation Round-up involved aggressive sweeps through factories, agricultural fields, and neighborhoods. One newspaper

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described a raid in the Los Angeles–area town of Fullerton, home to orange groves and fruit-packing plants: “It’s a dawn raid. The objective: Snag ’em in their homes, their cars, shacks, garages, chickencoops, before they have a chance to leave for the day’s work in the plants and fields. . . . They [the authorities] spread out in pairs. Down this street, up that avenue, down this alley, in that garage, in this chickenhouse, in that car, this home. Swift, darting raids. Don’t give ’em a chance to know you’re coming. Hit ’em fast.” For some raids, buses—referred to as “mobile jails”—would be waiting to take Mexicans directly to the Elysian Park detention center. INS officials admitted frankly that in the heat of a raid, agents often could not differentiate between an “alien” and a “United States citizen” and that “usually these aliens [could] only be detected by trained Spanish-speaking officers.” The INS questioned, frightened, harassed, and detained everyone collected in the sweeps, regardless of citizenship status. In one raid, federal agents entered a workplace and arrested three men, one of whom was Juan Vasquez. Vasquez explained that he was a U.S. citizen, but the agents maintained that he was lying. According to an affidavit, someone else on the site told the agents that Vasquez had enlisted in the army and had taken the exam and was awaiting induction the following week. Once they had been arrested, detainees could be made to wait days before they were allowed to contact friends and family, if they were allowed to contact them at all. Records describe the experiences of a woman identified only as Mrs. Lopez who searched in vain for her husband, Salvador Lopez. When he did not return home from his job at a foundry (which was located next door to the Lopez home), Mrs. Lopez went looking for him at the Elysian Park detention center, city jails, and other detention facilities, but was unable to find him. When the LACPFB investigated on her behalf, an immigration agent responded, “We don’t keep a record of their names. . . . If he was picked up Monday, he was taken across the border Monday night.” Luckily Lopez’s relatives finally located him at the detention center on Terminal Island in the East San Pedro area of Los Angeles. For other, less fortunate Mexicans, deportation raids functioned more like a state-sanctioned, state-led disappearance program. Those who protested the arrests complained that even undocumented individuals should not be subjected to arrest and detainment without due process. In one case, immigration officers raided the East Los Angeles home of Hilario Duran Alvarez in the middle of the night. Alvarez informed

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figure 3. Mexican workers arrested in rail yard. Daily News 1953. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

the officers that he had met with attorney Josef Widoff the day before and that Widoff had advised him to present himself to the INS and ask for a voluntary departure, which he had made an appointment to do that very morning. The officers arrested him nonetheless. When his housemate, Jennie Leon, tried to gather information on Alvarez’s whereabouts, INS agents told her they

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“[knew] nothing about him.” Leon notified Widoff, who contacted the INS to let them know that he would represent Alvarez in his hearing. Later that same day, when Widoff followed up with the INS after receiving no news, he was informed that Alvarez had most likely already been deported. In a letter of protest to Attorney General Brownell, Widoff asserted, “It appears that all constitutional rights have been suspended in California and that homes are being entered without warrants of arrest and papers and documents and persons seized and arrested and driven out of the Country without any legal process or opportunity to exercise any legal or constitutional rights, and that no person of Mexican descent in California or surrounding areas is safe or secure; that a condition prevails here that is tantamount to marshal law and that no person has any guarantee that he can obtain a hearing under legal process to determine whether or not he has any rights to remain in the United States.” Like the LACPFB and others, Widoff argued that everyone in the United States, regardless of citizenship, is entitled to civil rights. Because of the dragnet approach of Operation Round-up, the INS also caught women and children in their sweeps. “Among those taken into custody were 12 women and four small children. The others ranged from fuzzycheeked boys in their teens to horny-handed field workers in their 50s and 60s,” stated a newspaper account of one of the first raids, in which five hundred people were arrested. The INS Los Angeles branch director, Herman Landon, maintained that agents were “concentrating on unattached aliens who came here in the last three years.” He asserted, “If any married men have been sent back in the present drive they must have told us they were single.” According to Landon, those with wives or children were released on their own recognizance or placed on Terminal Island. Presumably this would give their families a chance to say goodbye to them; others were shipped out swiftly to Nogales, Arizona, where they were briefly held before being deported to Mexico. Landon’s claim that the focus of the sweeps was on recent, single, male immigrants was not consistent with the dragnet approach or the fact that women, children, and men who had been in the country much longer than three years were also swept up in raids and not released. That children were subject to deportation along with their parents raises the question of what rights U.S.-born children actually had. Children’s citizenship rights were an issue during the Depression, as seen in the birthright citizenship debates and deportation policies (see chapter 3), and during the

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internment of the Japanese. One Los Angeles Times article noted that a oneyear-old U.S. citizen, Bobby Muñoz, was among the deportees. Beyond giving his age and a description of his family, there was no discussion about the fact that this child was a U.S. citizen and yet was being deported. The pragmatic need to keep the child with his family silenced any discussion of what is at stake when a sovereign state deports its own citizens. Clearly parents would not want to be separated from their children, but the complete lack of discussion around this issue provides a strong sense of how disposable Mexicans’ U.S. citizenship rights really were. The INS also threatened citizens and employers with charges of “harboring” if they assisted an undocumented person. A week into Operation Round-up, the People’s Daily World reported growing evidence that the immigration ser vice “was preparing to extend wholesale harassment against all of the Mexican people—U.S. native born and naturalized, as well as the so-called ‘illegals.’ ” Those who supported the Mexican and Mexican American community were put on notice. The INS warned employers that “protecting employees who are ‘wetbacks,’ or interfering with their arrest, [would] be considered harboring and such employers will be subject to prosecution.” The Justice Department had recently used this charge successfully in the conviction of individuals in San Francisco who were alleged to be communists. The LACPFB was directly warned of the dangers involved in helping Mexicans: “We [INS] understand that several Mexicans are coming to your office for advice. If you don’t notify the immigration service immediately upon their arrival, I want to warn you you will be breaking the law and will be subject to prosecution for harboring.” Mexicans had few people fighting on behalf of their civil rights as it was; had this kind of threat succeeded, Mexicans would have been stripped of the little protection they still had. The LACPFB’s office was located in the heart of East Los Angeles, a diverse community, but one with a considerable Mexican population. The INS kept the office under surveillance; that meant that anyone who was in the vicinity of the LACPFB could become a potential INS target. The raid that occurred on the first day of Operation Round-up took place in East Los Angeles. A team of two hundred “questioned and arrested scores on scores of aliens—on street corners, in factories, in foundries, in brickyards, in many other industrial plants, in private homes and in roadblocks.” Within a few days of putting the LACPFB on notice, the INS was a visible presence in

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East Los Angeles. Immigration agents stopped people on the sidewalks and not only questioned them but also followed them into stores as they did their shopping. Not surprisingly business owners soon reported a decrease in business. Such practices demonstrate the process by which not only populations become racialized but also the spaces, neighborhoods, and institutions associated with these groups. Government officials had singled out East Los Angeles in the past. The federal government’s Home Owners Loan Corporation, which offered government-sponsored home loans, described the area in 1939 as “literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements” that were “hopelessly heterogeneous” and thus rated it a bad investment risk. In 1953, just a year before Operation Round-up, the Division of Highways had unveiled plans to direct the Golden State Freeway through the east side of Los Angeles, destroying homes, parks, community centers, and neighborhoods in the process. Residents had loudly protested the plan though in the end, the highway was still built. The targeting of not just Mexicans but their employers and neighborhood institutions helped to make all Mexicans, regardless of generation, deportable. Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike lived in fear of being picked up and having their citizenship questioned. Those who lived in families with mixed statuses could be in violation of the law simply for living with or helping a family member. Because of the McCarran-Walter Act, naturalized Mexicans knew that they could be denaturalized and Mexican Americans saw that their citizenship offered them little protection in the flurry of the raids. To increase awareness of Mexicans’ plight, the LACPFB initiated a petition drive with the goal of collecting ten thousand signatures. The petitions were to be sent to Attorney General Brownell to protest “the current mass roundups of thousands of Mexican workers who [had] come here to find work and instead [had] been harassed, arrested, deported.” The petitions were in both English and Spanish and “protest[ed] the illegal actions of government agencies and . . . demand[ed] that Brownell [who had] sworn to uphold the Constitution and justice . . . stop these militarized police-state practices and act to give all who live and work here—citizen and non-citizen alike—full protection under the Constitution which was designed to protect all.” There were many significant aspects to this petition drive, beginning with the deadline date. The LACPFB chose September 16, Mexican Independence

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Day, as the target for finishing the signature gathering. The date symbolically linked self-rule not with the U.S. nation-state but Mexico, a country thought of as inferior to the United States. Additionally the basis of the petitioners’ appeal is significant. They cited democratic principles found in the U.S. Constitution to argue that the U.S. government was in the wrong, not the undocumented. Printing the petitions in both Spanish and English signaled outreach to the Mexican and Mexican American community. Given the intensity of the INS crackdown, signing a petition, which required including one’s address, could draw the unwanted attention of the INS; thus signing was an act of bravery and defiance. The LACPFB’s outreach did not, however, prevent the organization from criticizing some of the Mexican community’s institutions. During Operation Round-up the LACPFB sent an open letter to La Opinion, the city’s Spanish-language newspaper, faulting the paper “for accepting uncritically the word of U.S. immigration officials that the roundup of more than 20,000 deportees of Mexican descent have all been ‘according to law.’ ” While the LACPFB did serve the community and included Mexicans in their leadership, it was still risky, in terms of potentially straining alliances, for this cross-racial alliance to criticize the city’s Spanish-language paper. By September 1954 Operation Wetback, including local efforts like Operation Round-up, had concluded, and Border Patrol apprehensions dropped dramatically. But just as political deportations did not go away, neither did the LACPFB give up trying to change the discourse around deportations. In 1956 the organization published a thirteen-page leaflet entitled “Citizens without Rights,” which advocated a critical rethinking of the U.S. government’s treatment of immigrants and other disenfranchised groups. The pamphlet’s author was Harry Carlisle, a British-born screenwriter whom Rose Chernin had helped when he was accused of being a communist and threatened with deportation. In keeping with earlier LACPFB critiques that saw racism and inequality as ingrained in U.S. institutions, Carlisle argued that the McCarran-Walter–era deportations were not an aberration of U.S. law; they were part of a systematic exclusionary approach in evidence as early as the 1790 Naturalization Act. In addition, he traced evidence of “vigorous discrimination” back to slavery because, he argued, slavery and political deportations (though clearly in no way equal) were ways of controlling the labor force.

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conclusion In Operation Round-up and, more generally, Operation Wetback we see the power of the state wielded against communities of citizens and noncitizens alike. Unquestionably these campaigns harmed Mexicans and Mexican Americans, but in examining reactions to the raids and round-ups in Los Angeles, we also see that the government’s relentless and often lawless activities had certain positive effects. Those who opposed the INS recognized ideological connections with other aggrieved groups and stressed class alliances over racial politics. Disparate groups understood the broader implications of injustices directed at the Mexican and Mexican American community, oftentimes because they themselves came from aggrieved communities. The LACPFB and others organized formal and informal protests against the deportations, making links between Operation Wetback and a denial of civil rights, Japanese internment, segregation politics, and the hollow promises of citizenship, exposing the state’s involvement in racialization projects. The LACPFB’s efforts, in particular, resulted in diverse and progressive coalitions that appear light-years ahead of their time, even today. Such organizing also exposed the limits of the model of the color line. The color line presupposes a binary, historically black-and-white division. In spaces like multiethnic and multiracial Los Angeles, such a model did not suffice (and still doesn’t). The history of Operation Round-up demonstrates the multiracial and multiethnic dimensions that existed not only across groups but within them as well. INS officials sought to provoke divisions within communities by threatening Mexican Americans with harboring laws, which would have forced them to expose any undocumented family or friends or risk being arrested themselves. This chapter demonstrates that immigration issues can cut across a range of urban communities and immigration control practices (like deportations) are not linked only to borders but become part of people’s everyday lives, citizens and noncitizens alike, in shared urban spaces. In these spaces, groups take seriously the relational nature of race, recognizing the ways in which their histories, and their futures, are linked.

Epilogue Making Race in the Twenty-first Century

Throughout this book I have demonstrated that race is not made in just one moment or by just one powerful person or group. Instead race is created across time by various players who attach different (and sometimes contradictory) meanings to both cultural and structural forces. Yet despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. These themes are often molded and transformed, or even revived and recycled, by those in power to advance explicit and/or implicit agendas. The use of a relational lens deepens this understanding of race as made by revealing how easily racial scripts are adopted and adapted to apply to different racialized groups. This examination of the historical experiences of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans also demonstrates that racial regimes do not stay completely intact, nor do they entirely disappear. For example, we saw that, although the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo conferred citizenship on Mexicans living in the United States, in practice the widespread public perception of Mexicans as nonwhite often rendered them ineligible for citizenship. We saw, as well, that long after the nineteenth century had turned into the twentieth, Mexican continued to be imbued with negative meanings. Policies, practices, discourses, and representations portrayed Mexicans as deportable, diseased, dependent. These depictions contributed to long-lasting representations of Mexicans that persisted far beyond the reach of the immigration regimes that institutionalized such views. These examples demonstrate a powerful reality about race and racism: it succeeds by repetition. 139

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Racial scripts work in part because they are not wholly new. Their familiarity itself generates credibility, making ideas about race that might otherwise be considered outrageous or flagrantly racist seem normal. Racial scripts make it both possible and permissible to consider racist ideas as simply common sense. Just over forty years after its passage, the 1924 Immigration Act was drastically reformed by the Hart Cellar Act, commonly referred to as the 1965 Immigration Act. The 1965 Act’s supporters, including President Lyndon Johnson, expressed concern that existing immigration laws did not sufficiently embody American democratic principles. They argued that an overhaul of immigration policy was in order. The broader context of the mid-1960s debate over immigration was defined in important ways by the civil rights movement, which sought to end the country’s long history of racial discrimination, and by the cold war, which pressured the United States to strengthen its international image as a champion of a democratic way of life that stood in sharp contrast to communism. These overlapping domestic and foreign policy interests set the stage for a political consensus concerning the need for changes in immigration law. The 1965 Immigration Act ushered in a new immigration regime, which, like the 1924 Immigration Act, changed the face of U.S. immigration in powerful ways. Most notably the 1965 Act abolished the national quota system. It also established an annual ceiling of 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere. The Act continued the changes first established by the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which included the policy of giving preference to the family members of citizens (particularly parents, spouses, children, and siblings), as well as to immigrants with professional, technical, and other labor market skills deemed valuable to U.S. employers. Two major changes ensued in the years following the passage of the 1965 Act: immigration increased dramatically, and the countries of origin represented in the largest immigrant streams changed considerably. Most surprisingly immigration from Latin America and Asia expanded swiftly. Along with a major shift in immigration regimes, race relations in the United States were changing significantly at this time. Civil rights movements were reaching their apex, seeking an end to racism, demanding equal opportunity and the realization of the full rights of citizenship promised by the Fourteenth Amendment. The federal government responded in ways

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that marked a major change in how racial justice and discrimination would be addressed in formal channels. In addition to the passage of such legislative milestones as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, during the Johnson administration, the government began to enact affirmative action programs. These were aimed at increasing access to jobs and educational opportunities, with the goal of remedying past discrimination against aggrieved groups, particularly African Americans, but also other minorities, women, and the disabled. Johnson inaugurated many of these programs, and he explained his reasoning on the matter in a now infamous quote: “You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the start of a race and say, ’you’re free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair.” Americans have long been divided over whether or not the government has a duty, or even a right, to intervene in matters of equality and inequality. In the decades following the 1960s, some argued that antidiscrimination policies had swung too far from the center and were now resulting it what has been termed “reverse discrimination.” Such attitudes are evidenced in the Board of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Allan Bakke sued after the University of California at Davis twice denied him admission to its medical school. He claimed the university had violated his rights by admitting others under a minority quota system, while refusing him entry. The Supreme Court ruled in Bakke’s favor, concluding that the university’s decision denied Bakke his individual rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. By virtue of its being handed down by the highest court in the country, the Bakke decision effectively institutionalized the concept of reverse racism. After Bakke legal and social efforts aimed at ending affirmative action programs gained traction and continue to this day. This decision is part of a larger logic of color blindness that actively ignores, and thus further entrenches, systematic racial inequalities in the present.

racial scripts in a colorblind society Many people believe that we of the twenty-first century are past the overt racism and racialization that has plagued the United States from its earliest days as individual colonies. Some commentators believe the civil rights movement and affirmative action ameliorated the worst of the country’s past

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wrongs (such as slavery and Jim Crow segregation). Thus, they argue, there is no longer a need for a conversation about righting past wrongs or for initiating and maintaining affirmative action–type programs. Along these same lines, some people argue that mainstream America’s racial sensibilities have shifted to the point where, as a group, we have become “color-blind.” Since we no longer see “race,” we no longer judge others by their race. For this group, the election of President Barak Obama is evidence that we are now “beyond race.” In fact, according to this view, we are at the beginning of a new era of race making, or rather, of not race making. I join sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and others in rejecting these views of the present as a postrace era. In his insightful book, Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Bonilla-Silva presents extensive data from interviews that demonstrate how some whites, including those who would consider themselves progressive, and members of racialized groups who have benefited from what the historian George Lipsitz has termed a “possessive investment in whiteness,” can believe they are color-blind but still engage in racist practices. By uncovering collective practices that continue to perpetuate racism, Bonilla-Silva draws our attention to the normally hidden structural aspects of racism, showing us why ceasing to talk about race does not make race disappear. Even if as individuals we could succeed in willing ourselves to not see race, or at least to not act on our perceptions, the long reach of past racism in areas such as government lending, private real estate practices, zoning regulations, unequal access to health care, and disproportionate exposure to toxic environments is now institutionalized. This kind of structurally embedded racism affects nearly every aspect of our everyday lives, advantaging some of us and disadvantaging others with respect to how and where we live, work, learn, and play, as well as positively or negatively affecting our ability to accrue assets, manage our health, and sustain a good quality of life. This aspect of racism in America—the extent to which it is both invisible and everywhere—is why even when we think we are not talking about race, we are. Certain terms, such as inner city (ghetto) or preppy (white, uppermiddle class), and certain subjects, such as welfare (government handouts to lazy minorities), are so imbued with racial meaning that they can and do convey racist ideas and attitudes beneath a veneer of neutrality or objectivity. A recent controversy involving the New York Times provides an example of

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this kind of invisibly racist terminology, and one that is directly related to topics examined in this book. In 2012 the Times came under criticism for its continued use of the term illegal immigrant, and a public debate ensued. Other news organizations, such as CNN, ABC, NBC, and the explicitly conservative Fox News, had ceased referring to undocumented immigrants as illegal in response to both internal and external pressures. Critics, arguing that the term is offensive and that its repeated use dehumanizes immigrants, requested that the Times use other terms, such as unauthorized, immigrants without legal status, or undocumented. The Times’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, who represented the newspaper in many of these debates, defended the term as appropriate because it is “clear and accurate; it gets the job done in two words that are easily understood.” Explaining the Times’s resistance to dropping the terminology, she said, “It’s simply a judgment about clarity and accuracy, which readers hold so dear. . . . Just as ‘illegal tenant’ in a real estate story (another phrase you could have seen in Times articles or headlines) is brief and descriptive, so is ‘illegal immigrant.’ In neither case is there an implication that those described that way necessarily have committed a crime, although in some cases they may have. The Times rightly forbids the expressions ‘illegals’ and ‘illegal aliens.’ ” Sullivan’s argument divorces the term illegal immigrant from its historical production. The racial genealogy of the term can be traced back to its earlier iterations in previous immigration regimes, peon and wetback. The contention that the term is merely “brief and descriptive” also ignores the fact that in America, illegal immigrant is not race-neutral. The term, which once referred specifically to Mexicans, broadened to encompass all Latinos when, following changes in the 1965 Immigration Act, increasing numbers of immigrants from Central American, South American, and Caribbean countries arrived, searching for jobs or seeking refuge from war and political oppression. Likewise Sullivan’s argument ignores the fact that having been exempted from the quotas of the 1924 Immigration Act (thanks to the clout of barons of agriculture and railroads who needed the cheap labor), Mexicans were then turned into criminals with new border surveillance. The Border Patrol was created, initiating a new era of policing policies and practices that increasingly linked Mexicans to illegality. The term also fails to consider the decades following the 1920s, when debates, policies, and practices continuously reinscribed Mexicans as immigrants (regardless of the actual length of their residency or the status of their citizenship) or deemed them unworthy

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of citizenship. By papering over such a complex history, the term illegal immigrant does more to erase than to “clarify.” Moreover it is a descriptor that criminalizes immigrants. Prior to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, there was a one- to five-year statute of limitations for unlawful entry into the United States. With the Act’s removal of this statute, immigrants who lack documentation are suspended permanently in a state of deportability. Although unauthorized residence is a civil violation, it is often portrayed as an aberrant crime. The circulation of criminalization discourse gives rise to another negative stereotype, the immigrant as criminal, in much the same way that the use of peon did in the early twentieth century. Then, in midcentury, the LPC label wielded by officials in California’s Imperial Valley created a variant—the readily deportable, diseased Mexican—while INS raids throughout the Southwest solidified the notion of the Mexican as wetback. In her earnest, “color-blind” defense of the Times’s continued use of a racially charged term, Sullivan is by no means a lone voice. We also see the concept of color blindness at work in the explosion of immigration legislation that has been proposed since 2006, all aimed at overhauling current immigration policy. The first of these efforts, the Sensenbrenner Bill, set the tone for the many legislative proposals to come. In December 2005 Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) introduced H.R. 4337, a bill designed to dramatically change the consequences of undocumented immigration. Existing laws had already established undocumented immigration as a crime and endorsed the no-statute-of-limitation provision introduced in the 1924 Immigration Act (even though such a provision normally is reserved for a very small number of capital crimes, such as murder and kidnapping). Thus all undocumented immigrants live with the specter of deportation. The legislation Sensenbrenner proposed would have made undocumented immigration, such as overstaying a visa, a federal crime, specifically a felony, the highest type of offense in the criminal court system, on par with aggravated assault, arson, and rape. This change would transform the estimated 10 million undocumented immigrants into felons, making them permanently ineligible for citizenship. But H.R. 4337 did not stop there. The proposed legislation also sought to make it a federal crime to knowingly help any undocumented person. In so doing, that provision would place friends and family members in the untenable position of either having to turn in any undocumented person they knew or having to face the possibility that they

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would themselves be charged with a federal crime. The bill did not specify a par ticu lar immigrant group as its target; it was clear, however, from media coverage, political debates, and public reaction to the proposed legislation, that the bill was understood to be aimed at Mexicans living in the United States, a population of 8.5 million, 3 million of whom are in the United States illegally. Sensenbrenner’s Bill passed the House but died in the Senate. Despite its failure to become law, H.R. 4337 triggered a flood of copycat legislation. From 2010 through the spring of 2012 alone, state legislatures across the nation proposed 164 anti-immigration laws. The bills are similar to each other and reflect both the content and spirit of the Sensenbrenner legislation. This commonality is not surprising, given that some of the proposed laws have been crafted by anti-immigrant groups, most notably the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), or their content has been vetted by attorney Kris Kobach. Kobach helped devise the leviathan bill in the latest round of state legislation, Arizona’s anti-immigration Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act. Proposed as S.B. 1070, this legislation passed the Arizona legislature under its carefully crafted, race-neutral title in April 2010. It has since served as a model for laws in other states. Meanwhile Kobach, who is the secretary of state of Kansas, has acted as a consultant on numerous anti-immigration proposals in other states. He also serves as counsel to the Immigration Law Reform Institute, which is the legal arm of the virulently anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform. The other key source of model anti-immigration legislation, ALEC, is a powerful organization whose members include legislators and corporate leaders. Despite the group’s bill-crafting activities, the organization maintains that it is not a lobby. Because some of the immigration bills introduced in state legislatures originally were workshopped at ALEC meetings, the bills are strikingly similar; some even share the same name (gleaned from S.B. 1070). Significant funding for these state-level proposals can be traced to companies that own privately operated prisons. The private prison industry was a particularly strong supporter of S.B. 1070, suggesting economic motives behind that law. Critics of the country’s burgeoning prison system call it “the prison industrial complex” because of its rapid growth since the 1980s, an expansion that has far outpaced crime rates, indicating that this system is more likely about profits than about crime and punishment.

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Anti-immigration bills have been successfully enacted by legislatures in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah. Many of these new laws have been stayed when challenged in court by the federal government and/or civil rights groups. Even when they are short-lived, however, these kinds of laws are significant because they signal the emergence of a “new immigration regime,” marked, as in the past, by a long era of public and private debate about immigration. Unlike the debates that characterized the 1924 Immigration Act, of which Mexicans were the explicit target, today legislators propose bills that purport to be race-neutral efforts to strengthen law enforcement. That the underlying intent of the latest round of laws is quite different becomes evident when the “wrong” people are snared in this immigration net. Events following the implementation of a new law in Alabama provide a case in point. Alabama’s law, H.B. 56, was passed in 2011 as the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. This law stands out from the other Arizona copycat laws because of its draconian measures. It is regarded as the most severe of the state immigration bills that have passed to date. Among other provisions, it permits police officers to act as immigration agents. If, in the course of routine stops, police officers suspect persons of being undocumented, they are allowed to demand proof of their legal status. The law bars undocumented immigrants from receiving any public funding at the state level, which would include schooling and health care. Anyone who knowingly “aids or abets” an undocumented immigrant (a provision that could mean anything from hiring to living with or coming to the emergency assistance of such a person) is subject to prosecution. Law officers have the right to ask any person to produce identification to prove legal residence, and in situations involving driving, to produce a valid driver’s license. Supporters of the Alabama law (and others like it) argue that this legislation is race-neutral. The questionable nature of that contention was revealed in the aftermath of two traffic stops that occurred in Alabama in November 2011. In the first incident, an Alabama police officer pulled over the driver of a rental car that had improper tags on its license plate. The driver turned out to be a German Mercedes-Benz executive. (Mercedes-Benz operates a plant in Vance, Alabama.) He presented his German national identification card, but when he was unable to also produce a driver’s license, the police officer arrested him. A few weeks later a second foreign national executive was stopped by the police while driving. This time the driver was a Japanese man,

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Ichiro Yada, a manager from Honda, who was on an assignment at the company’s Alabama factory. The police stopped Yada at a checkpoint intended to catch unlicensed and/or undocumented Latino drivers. Even though he produced an international driver’s license, a passport, and a work permit, Yada was ticketed for failing to produce a U.S. government–issued license. These incidents would seem to confirm the race-neutrality of the state’s new law. The Alabama police apparently were ready and willing not only to stop non-Latino drivers but to ticket or even arrest them. It is what happened next that explodes the myth of neutrality. These cases caused a media uproar, making headlines nationwide. Why? After all, the ticketing, arrest, and even deportation of working-class and poor Latinos in Alabama (and elsewhere) do not make local news, let alone prompt national-level coverage. The November 2011 traffic stops were big news precisely because the drivers involved were not the type of person the law was meant to snare. In fact the two foreign nationals’ corporate connections heightened the outcry. Policing immigrants is considered acceptable, at least by those who support H.B. 56 and comparable legislation, when it catches Latino immigrants; it clearly is not considered acceptable, however, when foreign nationals who are connected to global capitalism become entangled in the immigration net. The key point here is that although the legal language of a law may be scrupulously raceneutral, enforcement is racialized. In practice American anti-immigration laws are applied overwhelmingly to Latinos. Another way to pursue this issue of racialized law enforcement is to contrast the media reactions to the Alabama incidents involving foreign businessmen with events that did not receive comparable attention. The stories on the former circulated much more widely than have stories involving civil rights violations of citizens of Mexican descent. In Maricopa County, Arizona, for instance, it has been shown that Latino drivers are five to nine times more likely to be pulled over than are non-Latino drivers. (The ratio varies by region within the county.) Officers routinely use “looking disheveled” as grounds for stopping drivers, along with the allegedly suspicious behavior of having passengers in the back seat of a vehicle, which officers claim can be an indication of human smuggling. Once pulled over, drivers and passengers might be arrested for “avoid[ing] eye contact” or for “appear[ing] nervous.” In one case, a sheriff stopped a U.S. citizen of Latino descent. He asked her to step out of her vehicle and then told her to sit on the hood of his car. When she refused that directive, he slammed her against his car three times. The

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woman was five months pregnant. She was cited for failure to provide identification. In another case, officers followed a Latina U.S. citizen as she was driving home, on the grounds that her license plate light was out. But the officers did not turn on their flashing lights or direct the woman to pull over. When the woman tried to enter her home, the officers pushed her to the ground, kneed her in the back, handcuffed her, and cited her for “disorderly conduct.” In 2012 the U.S. Department of Justice initiated a lawsuit against the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Department and its sheriff, Joe Arpaio, for what the government alleges is a “pattern of unlawful discrimination.”

racial scripts in a new immigration regime era What is the role of racial scripts in the new immigration regime? We have seen throughout this book how racial scripts serve to readily communicate and reinforce which immigrants are and are not worthy of inclusion in the nation. A stark contemporary example is Maricopa County’s ongoing “battle” against Latinos, citizens and noncitizens alike. County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has adopted a policy of “zero tolerance towards the criminal element.” “Fighting illegal immigration” is at the top of this agenda. Arpaio’s policies fail to distinguish not only between citizens and noncitizens but also between legal and nonlegal immigrants, those who have no criminal record and are employed but have overstayed their visas, and those who have committed crimes. Arpaio is extreme in his actions, but he is not alone. His actions are in keeping with the ever expanding connections between policing and immigration laws and agencies. Arpaio, who calls himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” is somewhat of a poster child for the anti-immigrant cause. His statements on the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Department website suggest that he is determined to deserve this title: “The Maricopa Sheriff ’s Office, headed by Joe Arpaio, is one of the most talked about and nationally recognized Sheriff ’s Offices in the country today. Why? Because we are innovative. No other detention facility in the country, state or county, has 2,000 convicts living in tents; no other county or state facility can boast of a gleaning program that results in costs of under 15 cents per meal per inmate; few others can say they have women in tents or on chain gangs.” Arpaio has ordered the installation of immigrant detention tent camps outside the county’s permanent detention facilities. The temperature in Arizona can reach over 110 degrees in the summer, with

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temperatures soaring much higher inside the temporary tents. The detainees are shackled and forced to wear prison stripes. Male prisoners are also made to wear pink underwear. Arpaio himself calls this makeshift prison a “concentration camp.” The tent encampment is fully surrounded by an electrified fence. The conditions within this temporary prison are so inferior that they have been protested by dozens of civil rights and immigrant rights groups and have been the subject of an Amnesty International investigation. As happened with the detainees awaiting deportation in the jerry-rigged camp in Los Angeles’s Elysian Park in 1954 during Operation Round-Up (see Chapter Five), these atrocities in Maricopa County did not take place behind the scenes in some hidden location. Arpaio’s “concentration camp” stands in plain sight, just outside of Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the country. Many of Arpaio’s tactics rely on racial scripts that readily communicate that those in the camp have not only committed a crime but are deviant in other ways as well. These signs are readily understandable to us because they revisit and revise past scripts, some of which are specific to Mexicans and some of which are not. By ordering Mexicans in the camps to wear widestriped prison uniforms, Arpaio encourages us to connect them to the Jews forced into Nazi concentration camps and to African Americans incarcerated in the convict leasing camps that were established in the South after the abolishment of slavery to ensure the continuation of a cheap labor supply. We recognize the color pink as female-gendered and thus as intended to emasculate male detainees who are forced to wear pink socks, underwear, and bracelets. The strategy also echoes a practice common in Nazi concentration camps, where gay prisoners were forced to wear a pink triangle on their uniforms. These distinct histories and particular material conditions remind us that racialization is not homogeneous; they are also evidence of the ways racial scripts produced throughout history can be borrowed and tailored for use in other settings and time periods.

counterscripts for a new immigration regime Just as we see old and new racial scripts circulating during this new immigration regime, we also see resistance. These counterscripts teach us about moments of possibility as longtime activists, first-time protesters, attorneys, religious leaders and church members, and an array of other people pursue common cause across the color line and also across citizenship lines. In a

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social and legal climate wherein an individual can become an outcast or the target of a public campaign or even be prosecuted for aiding an undocumented immigrant, citizens helping noncitizens draws attention to the humanitarian grounds for these efforts, as well as the civil rights grounds. This important aspect of protesting immigration legislation that criminalizes immigrants marks the work of Lydia Guzman, a Mexican American who lives in Maricopa County. Guzman developed an advocacy organization, RespectRespeto, to warn the undocumented community about immigration sweeps. She is willing to risk becoming a police target herself for coming to the aid of immigrants because she sees the Respect-Respeto warning systems as a way to protect families. The system helps to ensure that the children of detained or deported adults remain safe and cared for in their parents’ or regular caregivers’ absence. Mary Rose Wilcox, who serves on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, is a fourth-generation Mexican American, an outspoken advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, and a vocal critic of the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Department. Her actions led to her being targeted and falsely accused in a series of corruption charges. The judge who dismissed the case against Wilcox cited a connection between the county attorney, Andrew Thomas, and Sheriff Arpaio as having improperly motivated the charges leveled against her. These women are not alone in their efforts to expose injustice in Maricopa County. Various immigrant rights and civil rights groups, as well as religious delegations, also have protested the Sheriff ’s Department’s practices, particularly its tent prison. In 2012 a large delegation of Unitarian Universalists wearing shirts that read, “We are standing on the side of love,” massed in front of the tent encampment. The delegates chanted “We are with you” in Spanish and English, hoping the detained immigrants would be able to hear that pledge of solidarity. Others, like the punk rock band Desaparacidos, have spotlighted the abusive powers of the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Department and linked them to histories of extralegal violence by groups such as the KKK. In 2012 the band released MariKKKopa, a song in which they call out the routine practices of the Sheriff ’s Department, such as widespread round-ups of immigrants, disregard for warrants when searching immigrants’ homes (during raids conducted in the middle of the night), and the physical abuse of immigrants. These individual actors and groups are following in the antiracist tradition established by many before them who also fought back with counterscripts,

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figure 4. The Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris and the Rev. Susan Frederick Gray were part of a delegation of religious leaders who visited “Tent City,” Maricopa County, Arizona. Photo © 2012 Dea Brayden, Unitarian Universalist Association.

reaching across normally divisive barriers. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered for fighting for racial justice, but one of his last organizing efforts was the Poor People’s Campaign, which was designed to prompt the government to meet the needs of the poor in terms of jobs, health care, and housing. Malcolm X, a Nation of Islam leader who later founded the Muslim Mosque, was an avowed black separatist. In the years before he was assassinated, having been influenced by his experiences abroad, he began to embrace Islam’s universalism. As a result, his stance shifted toward a Third World movement approach similar to the politics of Che Guevara, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary. At various times unlikely alliances have formed in cities with diverse populations, such as Los Angeles. There, in the conservative climate of the cold war, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Jews came together to protect and advance their communities. More recently, in March 2010, University of California, San Diego students protested increasing budget cuts that threaten to price some students out of an education. Championing social and educational justice and demonstrating a keen awareness of interlocking systems of oppression, the students drew connections between issues of class related to the looming budget cuts and wider struggles,

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such as the drive to improve the racial climate on campus and better the working conditions of custodial staff made vulnerable under a contract labor system. Although immigration issues cut across a range of communities and interests, we often fail to perceive these links. When we allow connections to remain hidden, racial scripts are more likely to appear natural, a simple manifestation of “common sense.” Understanding the relational nature of race and exposing the links sustained by the use of racial scripts brings us one step closer to denaturalizing these scripts and, in the process, challenging the dominant narratives and power structures they support.

NOTES

introduction 1. Gerstle, American Crucible, 94–95. 2. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 3; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. 3. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 55. 4. The following are examples of such landmark texts: Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas; Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; Acuña, Occupied America; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors. 5. Haney-López, White by Law; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. 6. In 1990, seeing the need for more comparative and interdisciplinary studies, Ramón Gutiérrez and others at the University of California, San Diego founded the Ethnic Studies Department on that campus. Ramón Gutiérrez, Ethnic Studies, 157–67. 7. Robinson and Robinson, “The Limits of Interracial Coalitions”; Camarillo, “Black and Brown in Compton”; Bernstein, Bridges of Reform; Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed; Varzally, Making a Non-White America; Jun, Race for Citizenship; Johnson, “Constellations of Struggle”; Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race; Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left; Alvarez, “From Zoot Suits to Hip Hop”; Alvarez and Widener, “A History of Black and Brown.” 8. Following the lead of historian Ernesto Chavez, I use the term U.S. War with Mexico rather than the Mexican War or Mexican-American War. Chávez, The U.S. War with Mexico, ix. 9. Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark, introduction.

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10. There are many strong works that explain the cultural and structural components of the making of the ghetto: Self, American Babylon; Sides, “Straight into Compton”; Widener, Black Arts West; Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!; Hirsch and Mohl, Urban Policy in TwentiethCentury America. 11. For a powerful example of how racialization differs, see Kim, Bitter Fruit. 12. In It Didn’t Happen Here, Lipset and Marks put forth three broad reasons why the socialist movement failed to gain traction in the United States: the inability of socialist or labor political parties to penetrate the powerful two-party system; the lack of support of working-class political parties from the major union movement, particularly the American Federation of Labor (later the AFL-CIO); and a working class divided across racialized groups, religions, and region. See also Dray, There Is Power in a Union. 13. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Lott, Love and Theft. Many scholars of Chicano/a history argue that even if labor movements did not succeed, they significantly politicized and organized Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans alike. See Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American; Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights. 14. I am not trying to fetishize citizenship as some sort of panacea. Formal citizenship did afford people more rights and more access to resources, but there were still limits. On the problematics of citizenship, see Brown, States of Injury; Reddy, Freedom with Violence. 15. Gerstle, American Crucible. 16. Noble, Death of a Nation. 17. Lowe, Immigrant Acts. 18. Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference. On racial knowledge, see Burgos, Playing America’s Game. 19. In his examination of Chicana/o cultural productions, Lipsitz refers to experiences of shared recognition between groups as “families of resemblance.” Time Passages, chapter 6, “Cruising around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles.” 20. Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal; Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders; Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance; Feagin, The White Racial Frame; Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!; Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict; Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries. On thinking about resistance in terms of counterscripts, see also Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders. 21. Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark, 192. 22. For many powerful examples, see Luibheid, Entry Denied. 23. Guglielmo, White on Arrival. For more on commonsense understandings of race and immigration law, see Haney-López, White by Law. 24. On social citizenship, see Flores and Benmayor, Latino Cultural Citizenship.

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25. In 1891 Congress authorized the creation of the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration (renamed the Bureau of Immigration in 1895) within the Treasury Department. In 1903 this bureau was transferred to the newly formed Department of Commerce and Labor. On June 27, 1906, Congress expanded and renamed the existing Immigration Bureau to the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization (34 Stat. 596). In 1913, when the departments of Commerce and Labor divided, the bureaus were separated into the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization; both remained within the Department of Labor. The two merged to become the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1933. In 1940 Congress moved the INS to the Department of Justice (today, under the name of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, it is part of the Department of Homeland Security). For the purposes of continuity and familiarity, I use the agency name Immigration and Naturalization Service throughout the book. For an overview of the early history of the service, see “U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service - Populating a Nation: A History of Immigration and Naturalization,” http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/about/history/legacy/ins_history.xml.

chapter 1 1. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, H.R. 8702. On the number of Mexican immigrant arrivals to the US, see Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 268. 2. Ibid., 424. 3. Ibid. 4. Gerstle, American Crucible; Higham, Strangers in the Land. 5. Blee, Women of the Klan; Cohen, “ ‘The Ku Klux Government.’ ” 6. State of California, Mexican Fact-Finding Committee, 20–23; Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 183n4. 7. Vargas, Proletarians of the North; Arredondo, Mexican Chicago. 8. The bills proposed different formulas for restriction. For example, the Box and Harris Bill, commonly referred to as the Box Bill, proposed to extend the quotas to all Western Hemisphere nations. This meant that Mexico would be allowed up to 2 percent of its immigrant total of 1890, about 1,500. Representative John Box and Senator William Harris each introduced legislation in the House and Senate, respectively, to restrict immigration from Mexico. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 198–226.See also Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? 9. See Noble, Death of a Nation. 10. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 56–90. 11. Even once blacks attained legal citizenship, they still faced major legal obstacles to social citizenship, like the landmark Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed the “separate but equal” doctrine. 12. Mexicans’ right to citizenship, however, was tested in In re Rodriguez (1897). See De León, In re Ricardo Rodríguez; Haney-López, White by Law.

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13. Streeby, American Sensations, 169; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 210. 14. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny. 15. Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; Chávez, The U.S. War with Mexico; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors. 16. Gómez, Manifest Destinies; Chavez- Garcia, Negotiating Conquest; Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe; Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California; Menchaca, The Mexican Outsiders. 17. Menchaca, The Mexican Outsiders. 18. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny. See also Streeby, American Sensations, chapter 2. 19. The move from a hierarchy of whiteness to a monolithic group would go on for decades. See Roediger, Working toward Whiteness. Region also played a role in the whitening of certain groups, like the Irish, who were low in the racial hierarchy on the East Coast, but not on the West Coast. See Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy. 20. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas. 21. Gómez, Manifest Destinies. 22. Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood. 23. Bokovoy, The San Diego World’s Fairs and Southwestern Memory; Kropp, “ ‘All Our Yesterdays’ ”; Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe; McWilliams, Southern California; Starr, Americans and the California Dream. 24. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 28. 25. Some black leaders were critical of the Literacy Act because they saw the parallels between similar measures that had been imposed on them to restrict their rights after they had been granted citizenship, Hellwig, “Black Leaders and United States Immigration Policy.” 26. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American. 27. Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? 28. These images are still very much with us today, proving the extent to which they have become naturalized. Take the well-known example of the passage of Proposition 187, approved via referendum by California voters in 1994 to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving public benefits or services, including health care and education. (It was never implemented due to legal challenges.) Ostensibly Proposition 187 was directed at all undocumented immigrants, but within California’s political and cultural climate it was understood that the proposition’s primary target was Mexicans. The two public services most discussed were education and nonemergency medical care, specifically infant and maternal care. Thus Mexican women and children would have been disproportionately affected. See Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Women and Children First.” 29. U.S. historians debate what came first: slavery or racism. See Foner, Reconstruction; Jordan, White over Black; Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History.” 30. King, Making Americans, 171. 31. Daniels and Graham, Debating American Immigration, 23.

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32. The bill proposed extending quotas to Mexico, Cuba, and Canada, but the title of the hearings suggests Mexico was the focus of the bill. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, “Seasonal Agricultural Laborers from Mexico,” 39. 33. Eugenics thinking influenced a variety of issues in the early twentieth century, including miscegenation laws, immigration policy, sterilization laws, and IQ tests. See Pernick, Th e Black Stork; Roberts, “Who May Give Birth to Citizens”; Kline, Building a Better Race; Stern, Eugenic Nation; Chávez- García, States of Delinquency. 34. House immigration bill (H.R. 10343) was less restrictive than the Box Bill, but the majority of the Committee felt that it would be more easily implemented and thus recommended it. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, “Report 898 to Accompany H.R. 10343,” 11. 35. Ibid., 6. The prominent and prolific Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart echoed Laughlin’s comments in an academic journal, writing that Mexicans would “plague future generations very much as the South has suffered from the presence of inassimilable negroes,” “National Origins Plan for Restricting Immigration,” 481. 36. For more on Goethe, see Stern, Eugenic Nation, 68–70. 37. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, 165. 38. Ibid. 39. Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; Mumford, Interzones; Shah, Contagious Divides. 40. Letter to Representative W. E. Evans from George Clark Sargent, attorney, February 21, 1928, HR 6741-6454, Box 66, U.S. House of Representatives Records, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, DC (hereafter referred to as RG 233). 41. Foner, Reconstruction. 42. Letter to the editor, February 15, 1928, H. Patriot, H.R. 70A-F14.3, Box 490, RG 233. 43. Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. 44. On this shifting discourse, see Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? 45. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, chapter 2. 46. Letter to Hon. W. E. Evans, House of Representatives, from George Clements, M.D., December 27, 1927, H.R. 6465 in the 70th, Box 66, RG 233. 47. Letter to Hon. W. E. Evans, House of Representatives, from George Clements, M.D., December 27, 1927, H.R. 6465 in the 70th, Box 66, RG 233. 48. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, 67. 49. Chandler’s comments show that racial hierarchies are not created solely in the domestic realm but forged from colonial projects as well. For more on how imperial politics shape race in the domestic realm, see Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues.

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50. Letter to chairman of the Immigration Committee from Ventura County Farm Bureau, January 31, 1928, Box 491, RG 233, p. 1; letter to Congressman H. H. Barbour from Modesto Chamber of Commerce, January 19, 1928, Box 491, RG 233. 51. “Mexican Labor Lack Deplored,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1929, 19. 52. For example, see Kim, Bitter Fruit; Chan, Asian Americans; Lee, Orientals; Lowe, Immigrant Acts. 53. Carrigan and Webb, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States,” present evidence of 597 Mexicans lynched by mobs between 1848 and 1928. For more on lynchings in the U.S. West, see Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West. On the U.S. Border Patrol, see Lytle Hernandez, Migra! 54. On the Chinese massacre, see Light, “From Vice District to Tourist Attraction.” On zoning and Chinese vendors, see Lou, “Chinese American Vendors of Los Angeles”; Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? On the Alien Land Law Acts, see Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice. 55. Letter to Albert Johnson from Madison Grant, April 1, 1923, H.R. 70A-F14.3, Box 289, RG 233. 56. Letter to Albert Johnson from Eva Martin, Los Angeles, no date, H.R. 70AF14.3, Box 490, RG 233. 57. Letter to Albert Johnson from C. E. Snelson (handwritten signature unclear), no date (likely 1927–29, since this is correspondence associated with the 70th Congress), H.R. 70A-HR6741-6465, Box 66, RG 233. 58. According to one Los Angeles Times article, the KKK had been active in California since 1921. See “California Ku Klux in New Line Up,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1926. For more on the Klan in Los Angeles, see Flamming, Bound for Freedom, 194, 196, 199, 201–2, 204–5, 209–11; Garcia, A World of Its Own, 75–77, 91–92. 59. Monroy, Rebirth; Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; Ruiz, From out of the Shadows. 60. On whiteness, citizenship, and the law, see Haney-López, White by Law. For more on Mexicans and citizenship, see chapter 2. 61. Foley, The White Scourge; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors. 62. Garcia, “Mexican Americans and the Politics of Citizenship.” 63. Alvarez, “The Lemon Grove Incident.” 64. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago. 65. Singh, Black Is a Country, 19.

chapter 2 1. Editorial, The Nation, March 26, 1924, 330. 2. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to whites. With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and revision of the Naturalization Act in 1870, blacks also became eligible. For the links between whiteness and citizenship in early U.S. history, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.

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3. For more on common knowledge understandings of race in Supreme Court decisions, see Haney-López, White by Law. 4. In re Rodríguez, 81 Fed. 337, W.D. Texas, 1897. 5. The case was handed down in a lower district court and was therefore not binding in other courts. Nonetheless it has been hailed as a landmark civil rights case. On In re Rodríguez, see De León, In re Ricardo Rodríguez; Haney-López, White by Law. 6. On Mexican communities and changing demographics in the Southwest, see Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American. 7. See “Economic Development and Immigration, 1890–1920,” in Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 39–68. 8. Guglielmo, White on Arrival. 9. Chief examiner in St. Louis, Missouri, to commissioner of immigration, June 26, 1916, file 19783/155, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice (INS), Record Group 85, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. (hereafter RG 85). See also file 55639-617-A, RG 85. 10. Chief examiner in St. Louis, Missouri, to commissioner of immigration, June 26, 1916, file 19783/155, RG 85. 11. Most Mexican immigrants during this period were men. Thus it stands to reason that most of the naturalization petitions concerned male Mexican applicants. Nonetheless the situation raises the question of how whiteness, masculinity, and citizenship were linked, and if denying the petitions of these Mexican men operated to preserve not only whiteness but dominant understandings of masculinity. On race, citizenship, and masculinity, see Mumford, Interzones; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. 12. While Mexicans generally view themselves, and are viewed by others, as being descendants of Spaniards and Indians, many also have kinship ties with Africans. The Spanish colonists brought Africans to Mexico as slaves. 13. Menchaca, Recovering History; Gómez, Manifest Destinies. 14. Haney-López, White by Law, 49. 15. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, vii. 16. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1713. On the property value of whiteness, see Pascoe, What Comes Naturally. 17. Chief examiner in St. Louis, Missouri, to commissioner of immigration, June 26, 1916, file 19783/155, RG 85. 18. Alternatively these individuals may simply have wanted to avoid entanglement in more bureaucratic red tape. They may also have felt that it was better to go without U.S. citizenship than risk the possibility of deportation if their application was denied. 19. Naturalization Act of July 14, 1870 (amending Section 2169 U.S. Revised Statutes), 16 Stat. 254 (1870). 20. James R. Gray, clerk, U.S. District Court, St. Louis, Missouri, to the secretary of commerce and labor, January 1, 1907, file 19783/1–24, box 1572, entry 26, RG 85; Smith, “Race, Nationality, and Reality.”

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21. Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922). See also Haney-López, White by Law, 8–86. 22. Ozawa v. United States; emphasis added in first quote. 23. U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). The Court’s decision addressed the questions of race and of naturalization separately. See also HaneyLópez, White by Law. 24. The Commission issued its recommendations, which included a call for restrictive immigration standards to guard against any further influx of undesirable foreigners, in a forty-one-volume report. See The Dictionary of Races or Peoples, vol. 5, http://archive.org/details/dictionaryofrace00unitrich. 25. V. S. McClatchy to Hon. Robe Carl White, acting secretary of labor, September 4, 1929, file 19783/155, RG 85. 26. Commissioner of naturalization to the district director of Birmingham, Alabama, January 14, 1930, file 19783/155, RG 85. 27. Junior naturalization examiner to the district director of New Orleans, January 12, 1929, fi le 19783/155, RG 85. For more on the cases, see United States v. Balsara, 180 F. 694 (2nd Cir. 1910); In re Burton, 1 Ala. 111 (1900); In re Camille, 6 F. 256 (C.C.D.Or. 1880). 28. Junior naturalization examiner to the district director of New Orleans, January 12, 1929, p. 3, file 19783/155, RG 85, emphasis added. 29. Smith, “The INS and the Singular Status of North American Indians,” 134– 35. Japanese had also received citizenship because of their military ser vice. Salyer, “Baptism by Fire.” 30. Commissioner of naturalization to Veselle Schaeffer, February 26, 1928, file 19783/155, RG 85. 31. The issue of Mexicans’ continued right to immigrate comes up at various times in internal Bureau discussions. See file 5639-731-A, RG 85. 32. The Native Sons of the Golden West had a long tradition of targeting foreign residents of California. They had led state and local campaigns to restrict Chinese and Japanese and were instrumental in passing the state’s Alien Land Law Acts in 1913 and 1920. 33. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 47. 34. Press release, California Joint Immigration Committee, October 7, 1929, box 518, HR 71 A-F 16.4, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, RG 233. 35. Foerster, The Racial Problems Involved in Immigration from Latin America and the West Indies to the United States; James Davis, “One Hundred Years of Immigration,” New York Times, February 17, 1924. 36. Department of Labor to Albert Johnson, February 14, 1929, box 515, HR 71 A-F 16.1, RG 233. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. It is interesting to note that, because of their Spanish heritage, mestizo Mexicans were considered part white. Yet at the time, Spain was allowed a quota of only one hundred immigrants per year, which implies that they too were considered

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undesirable immigrants. On the quotas, see Congressional Record, 1929, 2 sess., vol. 70, p. 3535. 39. “Memorandum Relative to Communication Dated February 5, 1929, addressed by Secretary of Labor, Honorable James J. Davis, to Senator Hiram W. Johnson, Chairman of the Committee on Immigration, United States Senate,” prepared by U. S. Webb, file 19783/155, RG 85. 40. Paul Armstrong to commissioner of naturalization, September 20, 1929, file 19783/155, RG 85. Armstrong did not cite the Toyota case but he was likely referring to Hidemitsu Toyota v. United States (268 U.S. 402 1925), in which the United States canceled Toyota’s naturalization certificate on the grounds that it was “illegally procured” because he was Japanese. 41. Commissioner of naturalization to district director of San Francisco, October 3, 1929, file 19783/155, RG 85. 42. The Act had the practical effect of preventing the state’s Japanese residents from owning or leasing land for more than three years. For general information about Johnson, see “Hiram Warren Johnson (1866–1945),” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl ?index=J000140, accessed February 16, 2008. 43. Doak to Native Sons of the Golden West, October 27, 1931, file 55639-617-A, RG 85. 44. John T. Reagan, grand secretary of the Native Sons of the Golden West, to Doak, secretary of labor, October 10, 1931, file 55639-617-A, RG 85. 45. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 230. Doak was replaced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s newly appointed secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, in March 1933. 46. Doak to Native Sons of the Golden West, October 27, 1931, file 55639-617-A, RG 85; Native Sons of the Golden West to Doak, November 12, 1931, file 55639-617-A, RG 85. 47. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 83–90. 48. American Eugenics Society Committee on Selective Immigration, “Immigration Program,” Fifth Annual Report, 1930, file 55639-617-A, RG 85. A group of prominent eugenicists established the first eugenics organization, the American Eugenics Society, in 1921. The AES received the support of leading eugenicists throughout the United States and spread eugenic ideas to the wider public, thus becoming the foremost orga ni zation for eugenics education and advocacy in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. For more on the AES, see Barry Alan Mehler, “A History of the American Eugenics Society, 1921–1940,” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1989. 49. “Mexican Immigration,” Eugenical News 15 (1930): 13. 50. Ibid. 51. On the reasons that the legislation sponsored by Box and others failed in 1926 and 1928, see “The Politics of Restriction,” in Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 198–226.

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52. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization 53. “Copy of White House Press Release” regarding Mexican immigration, September 8, 1930, fi le 150.062, Public Charge/ 387-150.062, Public Charge/799, Visa Division Correspondence Regarding Immigration, 1910–39, box 38, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. (hereafter RG 59). 54. John Farr Simmons’s speech, chief of visas officer, State Department at Wilmington, Massachusetts, Conference on immigration (12 pages, handwritten), folder 6, Sen 71 A-F 11, Committee Papers Including Hearings, 71st Congress, box 93, Records of the U.S. Senate, Record Group 46, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. (hereafter RG 46). The number of Mexicans deported—mainly for entry without a visa—skyrocketed from 1,751 in 1925 to over 15,000 in 1929. See Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 67. 55. Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 215. 56. Ibid., 214–15. The full text of Public Law No. 1018 can be found in file 55639-731-A, RG 85. 57. Lytle Hernandez, Migra! 58. Political scientist Kitty Calavita has made this same point with regard to a later period. In Inside the State, a study of the INS, Department of Labor, and agricultural growers involved in the Bracero Program, Calavita examines the conflicting agendas of labor and immigration policy. The Bracero Program (1942–64) was a form of contract labor that U.S. and Mexican officials designed to bring Mexican workers into the United States temporarily. At the program’s end, the workers would be required to return to Mexico. Calavita notes the following blatant example of the competing agendas of immigration policy and labor demand: at the beginning of the Bracero Program, the INS legalized undocumented farmworkers already working in the United States. This move violated bilateral agreements, but it helped provide a readily available labor pool for growers. Calavita’s example reveals how capitalism’s need for labor could disrupt hegemony, in this case, a plainly visible racial order. 59. On the effects of the Depression on Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States, see Hoff man, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American; Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams; Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Monroy, Rebirth. 60. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 170. 61. Ibid., part 4, “Ambivalent Americanism.” 62. “Indian Blood Bars Mexicans as Citizens,” New York Times, December 12, 1935. 63. Judge John Knight also cited Morrison et al. v. People of State of California, 291 U.S. 82, 54, S. Ct. 281, which raised the question of Mexicans’ eligibility for citizenship, even though it was a case regarding the Alien Land Law of California, not a naturalization case. On the ruling, see “Indian Blood Bars Mexicans as Citizens.”

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The ruling is also discussed in Orenstein, “Void for Vagueness”; Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!, 127–28. In “Mexico, Mexican Americans and the FDR Administration’s Racial Classification Policy,” Patrick Lukens Espinosa has examined the case in the context of the Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor Policy and the State Department’s approaches to policymaking. 64. Jacobson gets at this instability of race beautifully in the opening of his book Whiteness of a Different Color, where he replays and analyzes a passage from Philip Roth’s Counterlife (1987) and the contestations over whether Jews constitute a race and who gets to decide that (e.g., anthropologists, census makers, or religious leaders). 65. “In the Matter of the Petition for Citizenship,” Petition 2272-P-24049, National Archives and Records Administration, Northeast Region (NYC) (hereafter Petition 2272-P-24049). 66. Ibid. 67. Cohen, Braceros; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home 68. An ardent supporter of the Mexican Revolution, Vasconcelos was also an educator, philosopher, and writer. In one of his most famous works, La raza cósmica (1925), he developed the idea that Mexico’s mestizos were, by virtue of their mixed ancestry, uniquely gifted, creative, and civilized. 69. Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican; Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs; Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo.” 70. Petition 2272-P-24049. 71. Ibid., emphasis added. 72. “Mexico Protests Ruling: Embassy to Appeal Citizenship Ban at Buffalo for Indian Blood,” New York Times, December 14, 1935. 73. Espinosa, “Mexico, Mexican Americans and the FDR Administration’s Racial Classification Policy,” 128; Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza! 74. Rodriguez, Changing Race, 83–84. 75. In 1933 the Bureau was reconfigured as the Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice. 76. Circular No. 111, May 15, 1937, file 19783/155, RG 85. 77. Circular No. 140, July 20, 1937, file 19783/155, RG 85. 78. Charles P. Muller to Immigration and Naturalization Service, August 27, 1937, file 19783/155, RG 85. 79. See file 19783/155, RG 85, for correspondence directed to the INS in July and August 1937, asking for clarification. 80. Immigration officers found that Circular No. 140 contradicted instructions on INS ship manifest forms and statistical punch cards, where “Mexican” was listed as a separate race. See radiogram, July 30, 1937, file 19783/155, RG 85. Follow-up circulars (numbers 145 and 154) and memos were issued with instructions on how to alter the punch cards to permit identifying Mexicans as white. See September 28, 1938, letter, file 19783/155, RG 85. 81. LULAC in El Paso, Texas, to Department of Labor Director, March 24, 1937, file 19783/155, RG 85.

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82. El Paso District Director G. C. Wilmoth to Modesto Gomez, LULAC treasurer, July 16, 1937, file 19783/155, RG 85. 83. Letters of this type that were addressed to other agencies or individual officials usually were forwarded to the INS. 84. Aurora Davalos to Eleanor Roosevelt, October 14, 1941, file 19783/155, RG 85. 85. Davalos’s concern was prescient, bringing to mind the “Double V Campaign” of the 1940s, which called for “victory at home, victory abroad,” in reference to civil rights for American blacks who fought in World War II but continued to be denied their civil rights at home. 86. Davalos to Eleanor Roosevelt. 87. Nationality Act of 1940 (54 Stat. 1137). Not until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 were all racial qualifications for naturalization removed. Chinese became eligible to naturalize with the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Persons from the Philippines and India were not eligible for naturalization until 1946. See also Smith, “Race, Nationality, and Reality.” 88. On how ethnic European groups became white, see Guglielmo, White on Arrival; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.

chapter 3 1. S.B. 1070 prompted widespread protests and boycotts. Stephen Ceasar, “Arizona Rejects Bills on Migrants,” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2011; Richard Oppel, “Arizona, Bowing to Business, Softens Stand on Immigration,” New York Times, March 19, 2011; Fernández, “SB 1070 Casts Shadow on Arizona’s New AntiImmigrant Bills.” 2. James Oliphant and Christi Parsons, “President Moves to End ’Sideshows’ over His Birth; The Persistence of ’Birther’ Theories That He Was Born outside the U.S. Prompts the Release of His Records,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2011. 3. For the full text of the Act, see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United _States _Statutes _at_Large/Volume _1/1st_Congress/2nd _Session/Chapter_3. Since 1790 the naturalization process has been revised many times. For an overview of the modifications, see Eileen Bolger, “Background History of the United States Naturalization Process,” Colorado Department of Personnel and Administration, June 18, 2003, http://www.colorado.gov/dpa/doit/archives/natinfo.htm. 4. Scott v. Sandford (1857) 60 U.S. 393; Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford. 5. Scott v. Sandford, 403–4. 6. Ibid., 420. See also Moran and Carbado, Race Law Stories. 7. Th is exclusion was confirmed by the Supreme Court in Elk v. Wilkins (1894). Nonetheless Native Americans eventually gained citizenship through other means, including the Dawes General Allotment Act (1887), the Indian Naturalization Act of 1890, and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. See Smith, “The

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INS and the Singular Status of North American Indians”; Smith, “The History of Indian Citizenship.” 8. The butchers cited the Fourteenth Amendment’s “privileges and immunities” clause (“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”) in suits challenging a monopoly granted by the state of Louisiana on slaughterhouses in New Orleans. 9. Scott v. Sandford (1857) 60 U.S. 393. 10. Thomas, “China Men, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and the Question of Citizenship”; Lee, At America’s Gates; Lee, “Birthright Citizenship, Immigration, and the U.S. Constitution.” 11. The bills also included a provision which stated that a child under eighteen whose mother had naturalized could also naturalize (H.R. 3673, 73rd Congress, first session; H.R. 77, 73rd Congress, first session). U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality. The bills had the same goals, but the wording was slightly different in each because H.R. 3673 was meant to amend the Revised Statutes pertaining to children and naturalization, while H.R. 77 would amend the March 2, 1907, law under which women assumed their husband’s nationality upon marriage (1–2). On the history of marriage and citizenship, see Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own; Cott, Public Vows; Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen; Smith, “Any Woman Who Is Now or May Hereafer Be Married.” 12. Various women’s groups wrote letters supporting the bills and testified at the hearings. These groups included the State Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of Mount Vernon, New York; Zonta International of New York City, a business women’s club; the National Association of Women Lawyers; and the Southern Women’s National Democratic Organization, New York City. 13. This explicit example of gender inequality codified a paradigm that assumed women took the citizenship of their husband. Th is was an extension of femme covert logic. On the Cable Act, see Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own; Cott, Public Vows; Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen; Smith, “Any Woman Who Is Now or May Hereafer Be Married.” 14. A series of acts amended the Cable Act piecemeal throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but racial restrictions against Chinese continued until 1943, when, under public pressure and faced with China’s changing role in global alliances, Congress repealed all of the prior Chinese exclusion acts (though restricting China to a quota of only 105 immigrants annually). For more on Asians and the Cable Act, see Volpp, “Divesting Citizenship.” 15. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 44, emphasis added.

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16. The following are foundational works that explain the importance of looking at how concepts of race and gender intersect: Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” 17. For example, in 1910 there were 221,915 Mexican immigrants in the United States (1.6 percent of the immigrant population); in 1920, 486,418 (3.5 percent); and in 1930, 641,462 (4.5 percent). In 1930, 38 percent (541,197) of the Mexican immigrant population was second-generation, and almost 19 percent were third-generation or later. Hitt and Longmore, “A Demographic Analysis of First and Second Generation Mexican Population.” 18. U.S. Bureau of the Census and Truesdell, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 19. 19. The population numbers for 1920 are census estimates since Mexicans were classified as white in that census. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 80. 20. Though the second generation had rights, racist practices could still block them from exercising their rights. On the changing roles of second-generation Mexican Americans, see Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American. 21. U.S. Bureau of the Census and Truesdell, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 30. 22. “Unfair Competition Makes Slaves of Unemployed Men,” Glendale Times, April 13, 1934, 1; letter to President Roosevelt from Mrs. Lillian Schrayes, April 14, 1934, file 55816-461, RG 85, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter NARA); letter to INS from John Haley, September 26, 1933, Los Angeles, file 55816-461, RG 85, NARA. 23. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 24. For more on the Junior Order United American Mechanics, see http:// bessel.org/jouam.htm, accessed April 10, 2011. 24. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 20. 25. Ibid. 26. Eugenicists such as Madison Grant, Harry Laughlin, and Charles Davenport offered expert testimony to this effect in the 1924 Immigration Act hearings. See King, Making Americans; Guterl, The Color of Race in America; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. 27. McClatchy and Japanese Exclusion League of California, Japanese Immigration and Colonization; Goethe, “Filipino Immigration Viewed as a Peril”; Goethe, “The Influx of Mexican Amerinds”; Grant, The Passing of the Great Race. 28. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citi-

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zens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 38. 29. Ibid., 37. 30. Ibid., 20. 31. Ibid., 50. 32. Telegram to Committee on Immigration and Naturalization from the Executive Committee of Chinese YMCA, April 12, 1934, RG 85, NARA. 33. Shah, Contagious Divides, 203, 208. 34. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 59. 35. Ibid., 42. 36. Mexican immigrants were especially vulnerable at this time, as the United States was in the grip of the Depression by 1933. For more on Mexicans during the Depression, see Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal; Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams; Monroy, Rebirth; Hoff man, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression. 37. For more on the effect of region on understandings of race, see my discussion of regional racial lexicons: Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 6, 12, 13. 38. Letter to President Roosevelt from Mrs. Lillian Schroyer, April 14, 1934, file 55816-461, RG 85, NARA. 39. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 25. 40. Ibid., 23. 41. King, Making Americans; Guterl, The Color of Race in America; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. 42. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 46. 43. Ibid., 23. 44. Leong, “ ‘A Distinct and Antagonistic Race’ ”; Shah, Contagious Divides; Salyer, Laws as Harsh as Tigers; Yung, Unbound Feet. 45. For more on these stereotypes, see Kim, Bitter Fruit; Chan, Asian Americans; Lee, Orientals; Lowe, Immigrant Acts. 46. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 42.

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47. Salyer, “Baptism by Fire.” 48. An early and influential piece on the history and significance of women within anti-immigration discourse is Roberts, “Who May Give Birth to Citizens.” 49. By 1920 the numbers of Mexican-born men and women living in the United States were becoming more even, 276,526 and 209,892, respectively, according to the U.S. Census. Cited in Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brow, 185n20. 50. Goethe, “Other Aspects of the Problem,” 767. 51. Holmes, “Peon Immigrants.” 52. Holmes, “Perils of the Mexican Invasion.” 53. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 41. 54. On the Page Law, see Luibheid, Entry Denied; Volpp, “Divesting Citizenship.” 55. Lewthwaite, Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles; Ruiz, From out of the Shadows; Deutsch, No Separate Refuge; Sánchez, “ ‘Go after the Women.’ ” 56. Briggs, Reproducing Empire, chapter 3. 57. Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, chapter 4. 58. On deviant cultural representations of Latina motherhood, see Chávez, The Latino Threat; Briggs, Reproducing Empire; Roberts, “Who May Give Birth to Citizens”; Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Women and Children First.” On the origins and fallacies of the model minority myth, see Chou and Feagin, The Myth of the Model Minority; Lee, Orientals, chapter 5, “The Cold War Origins of the Model Minority Myth.” 59. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 3. 60. On the construction of whiteness during this period, see Roediger, Working toward Whiteness; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Haney-López, White by Law; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. 61. On Jim Crow segregation, see Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow; Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights; Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 62. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. xli. 63. The literature on the racial politics of California is vast and rich. Titles include Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight; Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed; Davis, City of Quartz; Flamming, Bound for Freedom; Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race; Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions; Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven; Self, American Babylon; Sides, L.A. City Limits; Varzally, Making a Non-White America. 64. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Colored California,” Crisis, August 1913, 193–94. 65. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citi-

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zens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 25–26. 66. For more on segregation in California schools and this case in particular, see Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed. In some cases, Mexican children were not allowed to attend school with white children. Parents and civil rights leaders fought against application of the separate but equal policy in the public schools, leading to two landmark school desegregation cases: Roberto Alvarez vs. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District (1931), the nation’s first successful desegregation court case, and Mendez v. Westminster (1946), which also successfully challenged segregation in the schools. Both were precursors to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Alvarez, “The Lemon Grove Incident”; Ruiz, “ ‘We Always Tell Our Children They Are American.’ ” 67. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Relating to Naturalization and Citizenship Status of Children Whose Mothers Are Citizens of the U.S., and Relating to the Removal of Certain Inequalities in Matters of Nationality, 37. 68. Ibid., 38. 69. Letter to Frances Perkins from Herbert Klingensmith, June 16, 1934, file 55816-461, RG 85, NARA. 70. On the Alien Land Laws, see Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation; Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice; Aoki, “No Right to Own?”

chapter 4 1. Much of the narrative provided here is drawn from File 55854/100 B, Immigration and Naturalization Records, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as 55854/100 B). For information on the Associated Farmers, see Factories in the Field by Carey McWilliams, a lawyer, writer, and social reformer who described this growers’ association as a “sort of committee of vigilantes.” McWilliams also documented the brutal living and working conditions of workers on the nation’s increasingly large and industrialized farms. 2. See Immigration Act of 1891, 51st Congress, Sess. 2 (26 Statutes-at-Large 1084); Markel and Stern, “Which Face?” 3. Craddock, City of Plagues, 4. 4. See Sec. 2, Immigration Act of 1882, 47th Congress, Sess. 1 (22 Statutes-atLarge 214). 5. See Sec. 11, Immigration Act of 1891, 51st Congress, Sess. II (26 Statutes-atLarge 1086). 6. U.S. Bureau of the Census and Truesdell, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 546, 64, 67. 7. Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices; Shah, Stranger Intimacy, chapter 3. 8. For example, see Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; Park, “Perpetuation of Poverty through Public Charge”; Shah, Contagious Divides.

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9. I discuss the challenges of working with these biased and fragmentary archival materials and reading the extant records against the grain in Molina, “Sources of Silence? New Approaches to Finding Latina/o Subjectivity in the Archives,” Organization of America Historians, Seattle, March 2009. In addition to the references cited in this chapter, I consulted the following sources but did not find information on the Imperial Valley cases: the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Diego Tribune; the annual reports of the Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice; Department of Public Health of California biennial reports; National Labor Relations Board reports; the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) papers and the papers of Philip Murray and John Brophy, both CIO labor leaders, held at Catholic University; and records of the National Labor Board, the Labor Relations Board (Record Group 25), and the Department of Labor (Record Group 174), held at the National Archives. I also followed up on sources referenced in 55854/100 B in the Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice fi les at the National Archives, where I first located the Imperial Valley story. Many INS records have been lost, withheld, or expunged. 10. I do not mean to imply that other records or sources are any less biased, only that, in this case, there are outright contradictions and discrepancies in the sources. On the subjectivity of the archive, see Burton, Dwelling in the Archive and Archive Stories; Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance”; Trouillot, Silencing the Past. 11. Park, Race and Culture. See also Yu, Thinking Orientals. 12. Stern, Eugenic Nation, chapter 2. 13. Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, chapter 4. 14. Chávez-García, States of Delinquency. 15. “Statistics: The Nature of the Mexican American Criminal,” Sheriff Edward Duran Ayres, Foreign Relations Bureau, Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee Records, Department of Special Collections, UCLA, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030 /hb6m3nb79m/?brand=oac4, accessed October 25, 2011. 16. Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, Petitioners’ opening brief, September 20, 1945, pp. 20–26. 17. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 61. 18. Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A.; Mirel, “Civic Education and Changing Definitions of American Identity.” 19. Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 187. 20. Dawley, Struggles for Justice; Kanstroom, Deportation Nation. 21. Dawley, Struggles for Justice, 381. 22. Anthropologist Nicholas De Genova argues, “The legal production of migrant ‘illegality’ has never served simply to achieve the apparent goal of deportation, so much as to regulate the flow of Mexican migration in particular and to sustain its legally vulnerable condition of deportability, the possibility of deportation, the possibility of being removed from the space of the U.S.–nation state,” Working the Boundaries, 8.

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23. “The cradle of vigilantism” is McWilliams’s characterization in Factories in the Field. 24. Ibid.; Andres, “Power and Control in Imperial Valley, California”; Reisler, “Mexican Unionization in California Agriculture”; Weber, “The Organizing of Mexicano Agricultural Workers”; Gonzalez, “Company Unions, the Mexican Consulate, and the Imperial Valley Agricultural Strikes.” 25. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, “Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 55,” 20100. 26. Quoted in Reisler, “Mexican Unionization in California Agriculture,” 564. 27. Mitchell, Lie of the Land. 28. For more on immigrants, unions, and the Popular Front, see Denning, The Cultural Front. 29. Reisler, “Mexican Unionization in California Agriculture,” 566–67. 30. Andres, “Power and Control in Imperial Valley, California,” 250. Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights cites collusion among growers, border agents, and the INS during the 1930s that could lead to deportations. 31. Quoted in Reisler, “Mexican Unionization in California Agriculture,” 574–75. 32. Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams, 73; Andres, “Power and Control in Imperial Valley, California,” 268–69. 33. Andres, “Power and Control in Imperial Valley, California,” 264. 34. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, “Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 55,” 20188. 35. The Border Patrol would continue to cooperate with local law enforcement in the years to come. A notable example of this was its role in Operation Wetback in 1954 in the Southwest, in which large-scale roundups and deportations of Mexicans occurred through the coordinated and military-style efforts of the Border Patrol and local law enforcement. See Calavita, Inside the State; Lytle Hernandez, Migra! 36. Lytle Hernandez, Migra!, chapter 2. 37. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty, chapter 7; U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, “Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 55”; U.S. National Labor Board, “N.L.B. by Special Commission on Condition in Imperial County, California.” 38. Syphilis is marked by three stages. The primary stage can last ten to sixty days, during which a chancre (lesion) on the point of contact may appear. In the absence of a secondary infection, the chancre may heal without treatment. In the next stage of syphilis, a rash may appear and the patient may experience headaches, body aches, fever, and indigestion. A latency period, during which symptoms of the disease may disappear, follows this secondary stage. For some, the latency period can last decades; for others, it might last just a few weeks. In either case, although the symptoms are latent, the bacteria remain active, attacking vital organs, lymph glands, bone marrow, and the central ner vous system. The tertiary stage, which is characterized by external and interior tumors, is the most damaging. If syphilis spreads to the brain, it can lead to insanity and paralysis. Untreated, the disease can be fatal. See

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“Health Service Tells How to Control Syphilis”; “The Treatment of Syphilis”; Jones, Bad Blood. 39. Memorandum for the secretary from Commissioner James Houghterling, 55854/100 B. 40. Acting on tips was standard procedure. Williams and Maxson made from twelve to thirty arrests a month, and most were based on tips from informants. If a tip seemed reliable, the agent would contact his supervisor, who would get a warrant for an arrest. Such steps were taken in the arrest of Mike Gutiérrez (statement of Patrol Inspector Richard Williams, April 23, 1940, 55854/100 B). 41. Statement of Chief Patrol Inspector Richard Wells, April 23, 1940, 55854/100 B; memorandum for the secretary from Commissioner James Houghterling. 42. Statement of Assistant Inspector Edmund Gies, April 17, 1940, 55854/100 B. 43. Statement of Patrol Inspector Richard Williams. 44. McWilliams, Factories in the Field, 233–34. 45. It is not clear whether “alien” referred to foreign-born Mexicans, since there were also South Asians and Asians in the county. 46. Yingling referred to a recent survey that reported the following percentages of populations in the United States as infected with syphilis: whites (8 percent), “negro” (13 percent), Mexican (10 percent), and Filipino (13 percent). Given that the specific survey is not cited by name, its veracity is uncertain. According to Imperial County Health Officer Fox, Yingling estimated that, in addition to the clinic patients in treatment, there might be another five hundred cases of syphilis in the Imperial Valley (statement of Dr. Warren Franklin Fox, April 23, 1940, 55854/100 B). 47. Statement of Patrol Inspector Richard Williams. For more on federal public health ser vices during this period, see Grey, New Deal Medicine. 48. Statement of Patrol Inspector Richard Williams. 49. The patients’ names are redacted, a common practice. It was more common for the sending agency to have done the redaction in advance of turning over the records (statement of Patrol Inspector Richard Williams). 50. Statement of Patrol Inspector Richard Williams. 51. Memorandum for the Secretary from Commissioner James Houghterling. 52. Statement of Dr. Warren Franklin Fox. 53. Statement of Chief Inspector Richard Wells. 54. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, “Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 55,” 20106–7. 55. Letter to District Director William Carmichael from Inspector in Charge, Dan Kuykendall, April 13, 1940, 55854/100 B. 56. Downey, The Woman behind the New Deal, 203. 57. Ibid., 270–74. 58. Letter to District Director William Carmichael from Inspector in Charge, Dan Kuykendall. 59. Flyer, n.d., 55854/100 B.

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60. Petitions, letters, and telegrams to Frances Perkins from various unions, 55854/100 B. 61. Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal, 270–84. 62. Telegram to Frances Perkins, received April 27, 1940, 55854/100 B. 63. Letter to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins from Thomas Brown, secretary of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, May 6, 1940, 55854/100 B. 64. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. 65. Letter to Frances Perkins from Los Angeles residents, April 22, 1940, 55854/100 B. 66. Petitions to Frances Perkins, 55854/100 B. Petition signers included people from neighborhoods such as Hollywood, Santa Anita, and Arcadia. 67. Ibid. 68. Such patterns persist. In 1994 an overwhelming majority of California voters supported Proposition 187, which proposed denying public services to undocumented immigrants. While ostensibly directed at all undocumented immigrants, in California’s political and cultural climate the proposition was understood as primarily targeting Mexicans. Courts immediately barred the proposition’s implementation until all legal challenges were settled. Nonetheless the nativism and racism directed at immigrants, especially Latinos and Latino Americans, during the Proposition 187 campaign and its aftermath resulted in immigrants’ continued reluctance, and even refusal, to use public health ser vices or government insurance. See Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions, chapter 6; Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders. 69. For histories of El Congreso’s activities during the Depression, see Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?; Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American. 70. Telegram sent to Frances Perkins, April 9, 1940, 55854/100 B. 71. Van Deman’s files are extensive and were considered of sufficient importance to be transferred to the National Archives after his death. See Cherny, “Anticommunist Networks and Labor.” 72. Letter to District Director William Carmichael from Inspector in Charge, Dan Kuykendall. 73. Ibid. The woman’s name was redacted in Van Demen’s report. 74. Ibid. 75. Cherny, “Anticommunist Networks and Labor,” 28. 76. I base this estimate on the length of the transcripts, most of which cover three to four pages. 77. Associated Farmers officials often held additional positions of power. The newspaper Rural Observer ran repeated exposés of them. One article predicted that LaFollette’s committee would finally reveal just how powerful and high-placed the Associated Farmers leadership was: “The Associated Farmer story, when exposed, will start at the top and stay pretty close to the top all the way. It will be the hand of the railroads, the banks, the processors, canners, the utilities, the steamship companies.

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Here and there will be a farmer, but mostly it will be organized and hired vigilantism” Rural Observer, December 2, 1939. 78. Patrick Farrelly, immigrant inspector, memo to district director of San Francisco, marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” April 15, 1940, 55854/100 B. 79. Statement of Assistant Inspector Edmund Gies. 80. Osborne, April 23, 1940, file 56034/663, RG 85, Washington, D.C., NARA. 81. Statement of Chief Patrol Inspector Richard Wells. 82. Mitchell, Lie of the Land, 125–26. The use of vagrancy laws to control laborers has a long history. For the connections between slavery, post–Civil War forced labor, and today’s prisons, see Childs, “ ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’ ”; Foner, Reconstruction; Haley, “Engendering Captivity.” 83. Osborne, file 56034/663. 84. In Migra! historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez makes a similar point in relation to how the racial category “Mexican” became linked to illegality through Border Patrol surveillance procedures. In tracing the institutional development of the Border Patrol, she demonstrates how officers learned to police “brownness”—brown skin, dark hair—rather than crime. The literature on deportability is rich and crosses many disciplinary boundaries. Sociologist Monisha Das Gupta argues that “the state itself makes the deviant subjects it then punishes” Unruly Immigrants, 13. Legal scholar Daniel Kanstroom characterizes deportation “as a system of social control largely deployed against people of color” Deportation Nation, 72. 85. Stern, Eugenic Nation; Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?; Shah, Stranger Intimacy. 86. Both Shah, Contagious Divides, and Briggs, Reproducing Empire, beautifully demonstrate how syphilis is marked as a foreign disease. 87. See Wilson, “Bad Habits and Bad Genes.” In Eugenic Nation, Stern demonstrates that eugenicists were not fringe elements; the movement successfully influenced legislation. 88. The idea that Mexicans were likely to spread disease continued to shape immigration policies after 1940. In 1942, for instance, the United States and Mexico collaborated in creating the Bracero Program, a guest worker program, which lasted until 1964. The Bracero Program brought four million Mexican male farm laborers to the United States to fill labor shortages caused by America’s entry into World War II. Mexicans seeking to participate in the program were required to pass a physical examination by both U.S. and Mexican public health doctors. The exam included serological tests to check for venereal disease, chest x-rays to check for tuberculosis, psychological profiling, and a chemical bath. See Cohen, “Masculine Sweat, Stoop-Labor Modernity”; Driscoll, The Tracks North. 89. Twenty-three of the patients had lived in the United States for more than twenty years; five for more than thirty years; and one for fifty-three years (statement of Dr. Paul V. Yingling, April 23, 1940, 55854/100 B). 90. Letter to Frances Perkins from Executive Secretary of the Hollywood League, Regina Raglin, April 30, 1940, 55854/100 B. 91. See Katz, The Undeserving Poor; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.

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92. Report to the INS from District Director William Carmichael, May 1, 1940, 55854/100 B. 93. See Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American.

chapter 5 1. Norman Levine, “Dawn Raid Nets 57 Wetbacks,” Independent Press Telegram, June 20,1954, Herman Gallegos Papers, Department of Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University (hereafter cited as Gallegos Papers). 2. “Wetbacks’ Detention Camp Slated,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1954, 2. 3. Memo to INS commissioner from Herman Landon, district director, Los Angeles, October 8, 1954, 56364-45.2, RG 85, NARA. 4. On Operation Wetback, see Calavita, Inside the State; Cohen, “Masculine Sweat, Stoop-Labor Modernity”; Driscoll, The Tracks North; Rosas, “Flexible Families”; Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights. 5. Lytle Hernandez, Migra!, part 3. 6. Randle, “ ‘Wetback.’ ” 7. Ibid. 8. Lytle Hernandez, Migra! 9. On the early criminalization of Mexicans in the U.S., see Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity. 10. On social imaginaries, see Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries. 11. “10 Bus Loads of Mexicans Leave LA,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1954, 2. 12. Lytle Hernandez, Migra!, 185–86. 13. García, Operation Wetback; Lytle Hernandez, Migra!, 171–173; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Annual Report. 14. For studies on Los Angeles as a segregated city, see Davis, City of Quartz; Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis. For studies on linking race and space, see Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown”; Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place, “Section I: Social Imaginaries and Social Relations”; Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race”; Mumford, Interzones. 15. In the context of the cold war, public housing was deemed a socialist experiment. When Norris Poulson, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, canceled the public housing project he had touted in his campaign platform, the city did not return the land to the original residents. Parson, Making a Better World; Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, chapter 5. 16. A significant book on collective memory is Lipsitz, Time Passages. 17. The American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born began in 1933, in New York City, as an effort to support immigrants in cases where they believed they were being targeted by the government for leftist or communist politics. See Sherman, A Communist Front at Mid-Century. 18. Rose Chernin, “The Walter-McCarran Law Is an Anti-Labor Law,” in “Eighth Annual Conference of the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born,

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1958,” p. 5, Box 2, Publications (no file number), LACPFB Collection, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles. 19. Ibid. 20. Press Release, April 23, 1954, Box 3, folder 10, LACPFB Collection. 21. “Daily Fight to Stop Enforcement,” in “Fifth Annual Conference of the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, 1955,” p. 21, Box 2, no file number, LACPFB Collection. 22. Joan Cook, “J. M. Swing, Wartime Airborne Commander,” New York Times, December 12, 1984. 23. Agamben, State of Exception. 24. The raids, a high-profile campaign directed by then Attorney General Alexander Palmer, were an effort to arrest labor activists, leftists, and political dissidents. Morgan and Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, Shame of a Nation, 48. 25. Ibid. 26. Civil rights were an especially pressing issue at the time. Just one month before the U.S. government launched Operation Wetback, the Supreme Court had handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. 27. “Eighth Annual Conference of the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, 1958,” p. 10, Box 2, Publications (no file number), LACPFB Collection. Historians George Sánchez and Jeff Garcilazo have also examined the LACPFB’s role in Operation Round-up. See Garcilazo, “McCarthyism, Mexican Americans, and the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of the Foreign-Born,” 293; Sánchez, “ ‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews,’ ” 649–51. For an overview of the LACPFB, see Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors. 28. Hyman et al., Jewish Women in America. 29. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, Communist Political Subversion. 30. Los Angeles Committee for Defense of the Bill of Rights, Pride of a Nation, 2. 31. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness, 12. See also Guglielmo, White on Arrival; Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks. 32. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. 33. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; Roediger, Working toward Whiteness; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. 34. Bernstein, Bridges of Reform; Sánchez, “ ‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews.’ ” 35. David Gutierrez’s Walls and Mirrors is a key work on understanding the tensions between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. See chapter 5 especially, as it pertains to these groups in particular.

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36. On this cooperation, see Lytle Hernandez, Migra!, 174–76. 37. Alvarez, “From Zoot Suits to Hip Hop.” 38. When he achieved that office in 1949, Roybal became the first Latino in the twentieth century elected to the Los Angeles City Council. For more on the CSO see, Bernstein, “Interracial Activism in the Los Angeles Community Ser vice Organization”; Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American. 39. “Community-Wide Drive Fights Mexican ‘Blitz,’ ” People’s Daily World, June 21, 1954, 8. 40. Letter to Herman Landon, district director of immigration, Los Angeles, June 16, 1954, file 56364-45.6, vol. 1, RG 85, NARA. 41. Although the histories of marginalized groups are less common and more difficult to locate, scholars have nonetheless produced important historical works in this area. See, for example, Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance; Trouillot, Silencing the Past. For powerful case studies of how racialized groups worked together in Los Angeles, see Bernstein, Bridges of Reform; Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race; Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight; Sánchez, “ ‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’ ”; Sánchez, “Disposable People.” 42. Open letter to Attorney General Brownell from LACPFB, June 15, 1954, Box 3, folder 10, LACPFB Collection. 43. “Daily Fight to Stop Enforcement,” in “Fifth Annual Conference of the Los Angeles Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, 1955,” p. 21, Box 2, Publications (no file number), LACPFB Collection. 44. “Immigration Specialist Rips Swing’s Policies,” People’s Daily World, June 23, 1954, 6. 45. I thank George Lipsitz for making this point. 46. The director of immigration in Los Angeles, Herman Landon, made arrangements with the city to use this site. “Landon Alibis Anti-Mexican Blitz in Advance,” People’s Daily World, June 16, 1954, 3. 47. Daniels, Prisoners without Trial; Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy. 48. “More About Raid on Mexican Workers,” People’s Daily World, June 18, 1954, 6. 49. Childs, “ ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’ ”; Foner, Reconstruction; Haley, “Engendering Captivity.” 50. Lytle Hernandez, “Hoboes in Heaven.” 51. Galarza et al., The Burning Light. 52. “Brownell Pledges Wetbacks Action,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1953, A2. 53. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Annual Report, 31. 54. Schiesel, “Behind the Badge”; Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity. 55. American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, Our Badge of Infamy, 39–40. 56. Levine, “Dawn Raid Nets 57 Wetbacks.”

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57. “500 Nabbed by L.A. Wetback Raiders,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1954. 58. The San Francisco–based paper was also known as the People’s Daily World. “Daily” appears over the masthead ornament on January 1, 1938–April 27, 1945, and September 9, 1946–February 1, 1957. 59. “Hiroshima Survivors Unite at LA to Picnic,” People’s Daily World, June 29, 1954, 3. 60. “Landon Threatens ‘Unending’ Mass Deports; Pickets March,” People’s Daily World, June 22, 1954. The Los Angeles Times also covered the story (on the front page) with no mention of the deportation camps: “10,000 Japanese-Americans Attend Renewal of Annual Hiroshima Picnic,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1954, A1. 61. In another response to Soviet criticism, the United States sent African American jazz musicians abroad as cultural ambassadors, hoping to deflect some of the criticisms of racism. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World. 62. Three excellent books on racial liberalism: Bernstein, Bridges of Reform; Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions; Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed. 63. Daniels et al., Japanese Americans, 112. 64. Brilliant explores the different experiences of African Americans and Japanese Americans in the postwar period through an examination of major court cases, The Color of America Has Changed, 28–57. 65. “Home Burned Down,” September 20, 1945, newspaper clipping, file 55816461, RG 85, NARA. 66. Denning, The Cultural Front, 239. 67. Starr, Endangered Dreams, 220–21. 68. “Union Assails Anti-Mexican Brownell Blitz,” People’s Daily World, July 12, 1954, 3. 69. “Brownell’s Terror,” People’s Daily World, June 22, 1954, 5. 70. Levine, “Dawn Raid Nets 57 Wetbacks.” 71. “500 Nabbed by L.A. Wetback Raiders.” 72. Memo to INS commissioner from district director, Los Angeles, October 18, 1954, file 56364-45.2, RG 85, NARA. 73. “Immigration Specialist Rips Swing’s Policies,” People’s Daily World, June 23, 1954, 6. 74. “We Don’t Keep a List of Their Names,” People’s Daily World, June 28, 1954, 3. 75. Jennie Leon’s affidavit, June 18, 1954, file 56,364-41.11, RG 85, NARA. 76. Letter to Herbert Brownell from Josef Widoff, June 18, 1954, file 56,364-41.11, RG 85, NARA. 77. “500 Nabbed by L.A. Wetback Raiders.” 78. “10 Bus Loads of Mexicans Leave LA.” 79. Ibid. 80. “500 Nabbed by L.A. Wetback Raiders.” 81. “Harboring Threat Leveled at Mexican Community Groups,” People’s Daily World, June 25, 1954, 6. 82. Ibid.

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83. “New Service Aids Mexican Victims,” People’s Daily World, June 28, 1954, 3. 84. Deutsch et al., “Contemporary Peoples/Contested Places,” 641; Lipsitz, Time Passages, 137; Sánchez, “ ‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews,’ ” 637. 85. Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, chapter 6. 86. LACPFB Press release, August 5, 1954, Box 3, folder 10, LACPFB Collection. 87. “Anti-Mexican Blitz Legality Challenged,” People’s Daily World, July 15, 1954, 6. Similarly historian Luis Alvarez argues that La Opinion was a source of some of the most seething criticism against Mexican American youth during the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in June of 1942, The Power of the Zoot, 54–55. La Opinion did not report on Operation Round-up; it covered Operation Wetback in Texas and referred to deportations in California. La Opinion, July 15, 16, 17, 18, 1954. 88. Lytle Hernandez, Migra!, 169. 89. Hyman et al., Jewish Women in America. 90. Carlisle, Citizens without Rights. 91. That tactic has a recent counterpart in the Sensenbrenner Bill (2005), which sparked historic May Day protests. “Illegal Immigration Could Be a Felony: House Republicans Push Legislation That Defies Bush’s Guest-Worker Plan, under Which Criminals Are Not Eligible for Legal Status,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2005, A27; “Bill on Illegal-Immigrant Aid Draws Fire,” New York Times, December 30, 2005, A24.

epilogue 1. For histories of the civil rights movement beyond black and white, see Maeda, Chains of Babylon; Oropeza, Raza Sí!, Guerra No!; Chávez, Mi Raza Primero!; Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights. 2. President Lyndon Johnson, Howard University Commencement Address, 1965. 3. University of California Regents v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265. 4. Grutter v. Bolliger, 539 U.S. 306,123 S. Ct. 2325, 156 L. Ed. 2d 304, 2003 U.S.; Fisher v. University of Texas, 631 F.3d 213 (2011). 5. Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.” 6. For example, see Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place; Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists; Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness”; Quadagno, The Color of Welfare; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Katz, The Undeserving Poor. 7. Margaret Sullivan, “Readers Won’t Benefit If Times Bans the Term ‘Illegal Immigrant,’ ” New York Times, October 24, 2012, http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes .com /2012/10/02/readers -wont-benefit-if-times -bans -the-term-illegal-immigrant /?smid=tw-share, accessed February 27, 2013. See also Margaret Sullivan, “Is ‘Illegal Immigrant’ the Right Description?,” New York Times, September 24, 2012, http://

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publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/is-illegal-immigrant-the-right-description /, accessed February 27, 2013; Margaret Sullivan, “Immigration Reporter Julia Preston’s Views on ‘Illegal Immigrant,’ ” New York Times, September 26, 2012, http://pub liceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/immigration-reporter-julia-prestons-views -on-illegal-immigrant/, accessed February 27, 2013 8. Lytle Hernandez, Migra!; Ngai, Impossible Subjects. 9. “Illegal Immigration Could Be a Felony: House Republicans Push Legislation That Defies Bush’s Guest-Worker Plan, under Which Criminals Are Not Eligible for Legal Status,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2005, A27; “Bill on IllegalImmigrant Aid Draws Fire,” New York Times, December 30, 2005, A24. The bill criminalized not only friends and family members but also clergy and teachers who might drive undocumented workers to the hospital, for example. People who employ undocumented workers as their housekeepers, busboys, and gardeners or hire them as construction workers, break the law every day, but the bill did not target them. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo examines the ways laws are established to hold immigrant workers, not their employers, responsible, Domestica, chapter 8. 10. Mexico’s National Council of Populations, September 2001. 11. According to its website, “ALEC . . . provides a venue for earnest discussion on important economic issues. ALEC does not lobby in any state. Its model bills and resolutions are public policy resources for state legislators.” See http://www.alec.org /about-alec/frequently-asked-questions, accessed March 5, 2013. 12. Laura Sullivan, “Prison Economics Help Drive Arizona Immigration Law,” National Public Radio, October 28, 2010. For intersections between immigration detention systems and prisons, see Hernandez, “Undue Process”; Escobar, “Neoliberal Captivity.” 13. Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Gilmore, Golden Gulag. 14. Critics argue that police officers do not receive immigration detention training and that departments are already overburdened, raising questions about the effectiveness of this provision of the law. Also the law has a strong chilling effect: undocumented immigrants who might otherwise act as witnesses to crimes, or those who are themselves victims of crime, would be too intimidated to go to the police for fear of deportation. 15. A series of lawsuits has resulted in parts (but not all) of the law being blocked or stayed. Richard Fausset, “Alabama Enacts Anti-Illegal-Immigration Law Described as Nation’s Strictest,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com /2011/jun/10/nation/la-na-alabama-immigration-20110610, accessed February 25, 2013; Brooks, “No Juan Crow!” 16. Stephen Ceasar, “Case Adds to Scrutiny of Alabama Immigration Law,” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 2011, A16; Arian Campo-Flores and Timothy Martin, “Law Tests Alabama’s Appeal: Detention of Foreign Workers Raise Concerns over Anti-Illegal Immigrant Measure,” December 3, 2011, A3, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204397704577074522691850312.html, accessed February 15, 2013. (Content available with subscription or purchase.)

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17. United States v. Maricopa, no. CV-12-00981-PHX-ROS (D. Ariz. Dec. 11, 2012). 18. Until the end of 2011, his department was formally partnered with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement through ICE’s 287(g) program, which grants local authorities a tremendous amount of power by essentially deputizing state and local law enforcement agencies to engage in immigration control within their jurisdictions. “Arpaio’s America,” editorial, February 5, 2009, New York Times, A26; “The 287(g) Program: A Flawed and Obsolete Method of Immigration Enforcement,” American Immigration Council, accessed March 2, 2013, http://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/. 19. “About Us,” Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office, http://www.mcso.org/About /Default.aspx, accessed February 27, 2013. 20. On how Mexican immigrants are constructed as criminal and irrecuperable, see Escobar, “Neoliberal Captivity.” 21. Haley, “Engendering Captivity”; Childs, “ ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.’ ” 22. “Arpaio’s America,” A26. 23. Lawrence Downs, “In Arpaio’s Arizona, They Fought Back,” The New York Times, July 21, 2012. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.; Michelle Yates Deacon, “Religious Delegation Visits Tent City,” UU World, June 24, 2012, accessed March 2, 2013, http://blogs.uuworld.org/ga/2012/06 /24/religious-delegation-visits-tent-city/. 26. The band’s website is http://www.desaparecidosband.com/.

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INDEX

affirmative action, 141–142 African Americans: birthright citizenship and, 7, 70–73; and cold war, 178n61; Dred Scott and, 70–72; labor unions and, 120–121; lineage of, and Mexican citizenship, 47–48, 159n12, 159n18; Mexican attitudes towards, 41, 47–48; as miscegenation threat, 31; naturalization and, 72–73; and Operation Round-up, 116, 123, 125–128, 129, 130; pathologizing of, 94; population, fear of, 29, 30, 157n35; as racialized group, in discourse about Mexicans, 22, 23, 24, 32–38; and syphilis, 172n46; unequal citizenship of, 23, 155n11; vagrancy laws and, 108, 126–127; and World War II, 126, 129, 164n86. See also civil rights and civil rights movement; discrimination; prisons; racism; slavery; white-black racial binary Agricultural Workers’ Industrial League, 98 Alabama, 146–147, 181n15 ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), 145, 180n11 Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), 118 Alien Land Law Acts (1913, 1920), 39, 53, 56, 75, 86, 87–88, 161nn33,43 American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, 77 American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born, 117, 175n17 American Eugenics Society (AES), 57–58, 161n48 American Federation of Labor, 53, 80–81, 154n12

American identity, as white, 72 Americanization programs, 20, 95 American Legion, 53, 97, 98, 107 “anchor babies,” 88 Andrade, Timoteo, 61–63 anti-imperialism, 25 Arizona: anti-immigration legislation, 68, 145, 146, 147–149, 181n18; tent prisons, 148–149, 150, 151 Ark, Wong Kim, 73 Arpaio, Joe, 148–149, 150, 181n18 Asians: birthright citizenship and, 7, 69, 73, 77–82; medical racialization and, 93; as miscegenation threat, 31–32; as “model minorities,” 2–3, 84; naturalization rights, 164n88; as nonwhite, 43, 75; as perpetual foreigners, 38, 80, 81, 84, 88; as racialized group, 22, 23; scapegoated in Depression, 76, 87; second generation and beyond, 75; segregation and, 86, 87; unequal citizenship of, 23; violence and law used to suppress, 39, 40. See also Asians, exclusion of Asians, exclusion of: 1924 Immigration Act, 20, 39, 49, 74, 75, 79, 130; Alien Land Law Acts, 39, 53, 56, 75, 86, 87–88, 161nn33,43; Chinese Exclusion Act, 39, 69, 75, 81, 88, 164n88, 166n14; Gentleman’s Agreement, 75, 86; Page Act, 80, 83; racial scripts and, 20, 56–57, 88 assimilation, 4, 20, 26–27, 40, 83, 95, 156n19 Associated Farmers, 91, 97, 99, 100, 102, 106–107, 108, 111, 173n77

199

200

.

index

Bass, Charlotta, 120 Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (2011), 146–147, 181n15 birthers, 68 birthright citizenship, 14–15; African Americans and, 7, 70–73; Asians and, 7, 69, 73, 77–82; children born abroad, 77–78, 81; Dred Scott decision and, 70–72; jus soli vs. jus sanguinis, 70, 73; Native Americans and, 71–72, 165-166n7; nativist attempts to limit, 76–77, 82–85; Operation Round-up and, 134–135; as “prying open the doors,” 80–84; racial scripts and, 7, 69–70, 80–81, 88; regional factors and, 78–79; suitability of newcomers and, 77–78; twenty-first century issues of, 68 black as racial category, 48, 60–61, 70–73, 158n2 black codes, 126–127, 149 Board of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 141 border-crossings: fees for, 95; medical inspections at, 29, 94, 174n88 Border Patrol, U.S.: clinic patients targeted by, 96, 99–101, 102, 104, 108–111; creation of, 28–29, 58, 69, 95, 143; doctors cooperating with, 102; funding of, 59; and “illegal aliens” as term, 95; and Imperial Valley deportations, 91, 95, 96, 98–101, 102, 104, 105, 106–111, 127, 172n40; and local law enforcement, 98, 127–128, 171n35, 181n18; Mexican American support groups and, 121; and Operation Round-up, 127–128, 135–136; and payday deportations, 96, 127; supporting interests of capitalists, 91, 98–99, 102, 105–108, 111, 127; tips and, 100, 172n40; violence by, 38 Box Bill (1928), 32, 39, 155n8 Box, John C., 19, 33, 58–59, 155n8 Bracero Program, 112–113, 127, 162–163n59, 175n88 Bridges, Harry, 103, 131 Brownell, Herbert, 123, 127, 131, 134, 136 Brown v. Board of Education, 129, 169n66, 176n26 Cable Act (1922), 70, 74, 165n14 California: school desegregation and, 41, 169n66; voting rights in, 26. See also

Imperial Valley; Operation Round-up; Proposition 187 California Joint Immigration Committee (CJIC), 53–57, 58–59 Canadian immigration, 56–57, 95 capitalism: exploitable workforce vs. democracy and, 9–10, 29, 131; and “free labor,” superiority of, 33; law enforcement supporting, 91, 98–99, 102, 105–108, 111, 127. See also labor force Carmichael, William, 103, 106, 108 Catholic Church and Catholics, 20, 25, 36, 120 Census, U.S., 5, 41, 64 Chamber of Commerce, 34 Chandler, Harry, 35–36, 37, 157n49 Chernin, Rose, 119–120, 137 Chicago, 41 Chicana/o studies, 3–4, 5–6, 154n13 children. See second generation Chinese and Chinese Americans: birthright citizenship and, 7, 73, 77–82; in Imperial Valley, 93; legal means and violence used to suppress, 39; naturalization rights, 164n88; population of, 75; and school segregation, 86; stereotyped as sexual deviants, 81. See also Asians; Asians, exclusion of Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 39, 69, 75, 81, 88, 164n88, 165n14 Chinese YMCA, 78 citizenship, eligibility for: immigration law and, 11; legal, vs. social citizenship, 23, 24, 27, 35, 52, 155n11; LULAC as political support for, 40–41; and material resources, access to, 87–88; military ser vice creating, 52, 82, 160n30; perpetual foreignness and, 38; taxation and, 24; as threat, 31; unequal citizenship, 27–28, 35, 119; whiteness as defining (see white as racial category). See also birthright citizenship; foreigners, people treated as perpetual; naturalization Civil Liberties Act (1988), 130 Civil Rights Act (1866), 72 Civil Rights Act (1964), 141 civil rights and civil rights movement: cold war and, 129; counterscripts of, 150–152; and Immigration Act of 1965, 140; LACPFB and, 119; Operation Round-up and, 176n26; prisons and, 149, 150, 151; race relations and, 140–141; Emmett Till

index murder, 123; undocumented persons and, 132–134; World War II and, 129 class: ethnicity as form of, 131; and fear of “race suicide,” 82; lack of consciousness of, 9, 154nn12–13; and whiteness, assimilation into, 26–27 Clements, George, 34–35 cold war, 121, 140, 178n61. See also communism colonial subjects, 23, 36, 47 color-blind society and racial scripts, 141–148 Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers, 102–103, 106 communism and communists: denaturalization of, 95, 117, 131; deportation of, 95–96, 117; “harboring” charges, 135, 138; LACPFB targeted, 119–120; unionized workers and, 95–96, 117; World War I and, 20 Communist Party, 98, 103, 106, 117 Community Ser vice Organization (CSO), 122 comparative treatments of race, 3–6 Confederation of Mexican Labor Unions, 98 Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities, 119–120 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 103, 105 Constitution, U.S., 24 counterscripts: and Arizona tent prison, 149–150, 151; and civil rights movement, 151–152; defined, 10–11; and Operation Wetback/Round-up, 116–117, 119, 125–128; and shared recognition between groups, 10–11, 149–152, 154n19 criminality: harboring charges, 135–136, 138, 144–145, 146, 150, 180n9; “illegal immigrants” as term and, 143–144; as immigration restrictionist stereotype, 87, 94, 113–114, 127; as racial script, 149. See also illegal immigrants cultural representations: biological inferiority, 25, 94; defined, 3; increase in negative, 29; stereotypes and assumptions and, 3; vs. structural forces, 8–9 Davis, James, 54–55, 57 Dawes General Allotment Act (1887), 165n7 debt peonage, 32–33 deportation: as advantage in workforce, 34–38, 97; continuous potential for, as context, 92–93, 111, 136, 144, 170n22; the Depression and, 57, 60, 83; fear of

.

201

increasing population and, 82–83; of labor activists (see labor activists); on payday, 96, 127; penalties for reentry following, 59; statute of limitations removed, 34, 144; of suspected communists, 95–96, 117–118. See also deportation, Imperial Valley and; Operation Round-up; Operation Wetback deportation, Imperial Valley and, 91–111; archival sources and, 93–94; Border Patrol and, 91, 95, 96, 98–101, 102, 104, 105, 106–111, 127, 172n40; disease/medicalized racial script and, 91–94, 96, 99–102, 104–105, 108–111, 172nn38,46, 175nn88–89; labor activists and resistance to, 102–105; of labor activists, as ideological post-entry social control, 96, 97–99, 100, 105–111; length of residency of deported persons, 110, 175n89. See also likely to become a public charge (LPC) Depression: deportation and, 57, 60, 83; scapegoating and, 5, 58, 76, 79, 87, 167n36 Dictionary of Races or Peoples, 51 Dillingham Commission, 51, 160n25 Dillingham, William, 51 discrimination: affirmative action and, 141–142; felt by white “inbetween people,” 120–121; Jim Crow laws and black codes, 32, 66, 85–86, 126–127, 129, 141–142, 149; “reverse,” 141; and stereotypes of Chinese men, 81; whiteness embraced in response to, 40–41, 47–48, 65–66. See also racism disease: deportation and medicalized racialization of, 91–94, 96, 99–102, 104–105, 108–111, 172nn38,46, 175nn88–89; equated with “likely to become a public charge,” 91, 94, 100, 102, 104, 144; segregation rationalized via, 94; as stigmatization, 92–93, 94–95, 100, 120 Doak, William, 56, 57, 103 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 7, 69, 70–72 Du Bois, W.E.B., 85–86 East Los Angeles, 135–136 Elk v. Wilkins, 164n7 El Paso, Texas, 41 Elysian Park, 115, 118, 123–125, 124, 128, 175n15, 177n46 employers, “harboring” charges and, 135–136, 180n9. See also capitalism ethnic studies, 3–4, 5–6, 70, 153n6

202

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index

eugenics, 157n33, 162n49; and Europe an immigration restriction, 57, 109; and Mexican immigration restriction, 33–34, 57–58; and miscegenation, 30; and population numbers, 30, 77. See also nativists and nativism; scientific racism Europeans: deportation loopholes for, 34; immigration quotas for, 20, 28, 49, 74, 109; racialization of “inbetween people,” 120–121; and racial scripts, recycling of, 80; unequal enforcement of laws and, 95; as “white on arrival,” 11, 46, 66, 84 Fair Employment Practices Commission, 129 family immigration preference, 140 Filipinos, 36, 39, 56–57, 97–98, 164n88, 172n46 foreigners, people treated as perpetual: Asians, 38, 80, 81, 84, 88; Mexicans, 34, 38, 53, 76, 84, 88, 111, 113–114, 143–144; Native Americans, 71–72 Foucault, Michel, 104 Fourteenth Amendment (1868), 7, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 140, 141, 158n2, 165n8 Garis, Roy, 19–20, 21 gender: equality of, bills to produce, 74–75, 77, 78, 88, 165–166nn11–14; exploitable workforce and, 10 Gentleman’s Agreement (1907–8), 75, 86 Gies, Edmund, 100, 106, 107 Goethe, C.M., 31, 77, 82–83 Golden Gate Freeway, 136 Grant, Madison, 39, 77 Grant, U. S., 76–77 Gutiérrez, Mike, 91, 92, 99–101, 103, 105–106, 109, 172n40 harboring charges, 135–136, 138, 144–145, 146, 150, 180n9 Hart Cellar Act (1965 Immigration Act), 2, 140, 143 H.B. 56, 146–147, 180n15 health care: clinic patients, deportation of, 100–102, 104–105, 172n46; denial of, to undocumented workers, 146, 156n28, 173n68 Hemings, Sally, 33 Hidemitsu Toyota v. United States, 55, 161n41 Holmes, Samuel, 83

Home Owners Loan Corporation, 136 Hoover, Herbert, 56 Horsman, Reginald, 26 H.R. 3673 and H.R. 77 (“the bills”), 74–88, 165–166nn11–13 H.R. 4337, 144–145 illegal immigrants: as construction, 71n22, 95, 114–115, 143–144; New York Times and use of term, 142–144 immigrants. See foreigners, people treated as perpetual; illegal immigrants Immigration Act (1882), 92 Immigration Act (1891), 91, 92 Immigration Act (1924), 1–2; aftermath of, and Mexican immigrant numbers, 21; Asian exclusion, 20, 39, 49, 74, 75, 79, 130; eugenicist support for, 109; Europe an quotas, 20, 28, 49, 74, 109; and H.R. 3073 and H.R. 77, 74–75; and “illegal immigrant” as concept, 95; immigration restricted to those eligible for citizenship, 43, 49, 53; primary author of, 30; reforming of, 140; and scientific racism, 77, 167n26; statute of limitations removed, 34, 144; uneven enforcement of, 34, 95, 111; Western Hemisphere and lack of quotas in, 19, 22, 36, 49, 54, 78–79, 92. See also quotas on immigration Immigration and Nationality Act (1952, McCarran-Walter Act), 117, 118, 130, 136, 137, 140, 164n87, 175n18 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 2, 140, 143 Immigration and Naturalization Ser vice (INS): and racial classification of Mexicans, 46–48, 52–53, 64–66, 163n80. See also Border Patrol, U.S.; Bracero Program; Operation Wetback immigration law: anti-immigration bills since 2006, 144–147; contestation of, generally, 11–12; regional effects on, 12; unequal enforcement of, 34, 95, 111, 147–149. See also deportation; disease; likely to become a public charge (LPC) immigration regime, defined, 1 Imperial Valley: as agribusiness center, 96–97; population of, 93; public health clinics of, 100–102, 104–105, 172n46. See also deportation

index Indian Citizenship Act (1924), 52, 164–165n7 Indian Naturalization Act (1890), 164–165n7 In re Ricardo Rodríguez, 5, 45, 61, 159n5 Internal Security Act (1950), 117 International Labor Defense (ILD), 103, 104, 106 International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), 103–104, 131 Irish immigrants, 2–3, 66 Italian immigrants, 66, 120 Japanese American Citizens League, 130 Japanese and Japanese Americans: and Alien Land Laws, 39, 53, 56, 75, 86, 87–88, 161nn33,43; birthright citizenship and, 77–78, 79, 82; Gentleman’s Agreement (1907–8), 75, 86; in Imperial Valley, 93; increasing numbers of, 75, 76; internment of, 124–125, 128, 129–130; in military, 130; naturalization rights, 130; and Operation Round-up, 116, 123–125, 128–130; Ozawa v. United States, 6, 14, 43, 49–50, 51, 52, 53–54, 55, 61, 75; postwar racism experienced by, 130; and school segregation, 86; as “unfair competition” for jobs, 87; violence used to suppress, 39 Jefferson, Thomas, 33 Jewish people, 20, 120, 123, 149 Jim Crow laws and black codes, 32, 66, 85–86, 126–127, 129, 141–142, 149 Johnson, Albert, 29–30, 39, 54 Johnson, Hiram W., 54, 55–56 Johnson, Lyndon, 140, 141 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. See Immigration Act (1924) King, Martin Luther Jr., 151 Knight, John, 60–63, 64 Korean immigrants, 118 Ku Klux Klan, 20, 38, 39–40, 95, 150 labor activists: denaturalization threat to, 95, 117, 131; deportation of, 95–96, 97–99, 100, 105–111, 117–118; and Operation Round-up, 130–131; resistance to deportations, 102–105; unlimited detention of, 117; violence against, 99 Labor Department, U.S., 54–55, 57 labor force: exploitation of, 10; Filipinos as, 36, 97; need for, capitalism and, 9–10, 29, 131; racial scripts and, 36; skilled, as

.

203

favored, 140. See also capitalism; labor force, Mexican labor force, Mexican, 2; as “birds of passage” workers, 20–21, 29, 31, 34, 35–36, 38, 46, 105; as deportable, 34–38, 97; need for, and lack of quotas on, 21, 49, 58, 92; need for, and support for immigration, 46, 59–60, 112–113, 131, 162n59; need for, vs. racial purity concerns, 22, 35; programs encouraging immigration, 46, 162n59; recruiters and, 110; transportation improvements and, 28 labor unions: African Americans and Mexicans barred from, 120–121; American Federation of Labor, 53, 80–81, 154n12; anticommunist repression as pretext for intimidation of, 95–96, 117–118; Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 103, 105; nativism and, 53, 80–81; resistance to deportations by, 102–105 LaFollette, Robert M., 99, 174n77 land disposession: Alien Land Laws and, 39, 53, 56, 75, 86, 87–88, 161nn33,43; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and, 25–26, 28, 119 Landon, Herman, 122, 134, 178n46 La Opinion, 137, 179n87 Laughlin, H. H., 30, 157n35 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 40–41, 65, 121 likely to become a public charge (LPC): context of deportability created by, 92–93, 144; disease equated with, 91, 94, 100, 102, 104, 144; legally defined criteria, lack of, 92–93; origination of term, 92; period of jeopardy and, 92; State Department policy and, 59; as stereotype, 82, 87; as stigma, 92; unequal citizenship and, 110. See also deportation Literacy Act (1917), 28, 156n25 local law enforcement: Border Patrol cooperation, 98, 127–128, 171n35, 181n18; growers supported by, 97, 98, 100; as immigration agents, 146, 180n14; vagrancy laws used by, 98, 108, 126–127, 174n82. See also capitalism Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (LACPFB), 117–121, 122, 123–125, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136–137, 138; “Citizens without Rights,” 137 LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), 40–41, 65, 121

204

.

index

Manifest Destiny, 24–25, 94 masculinity, whiteness and citizenship and, 47, 159n11 McCarran-Walter Act (1952, Immigration and Nationality Act), 117, 118, 130, 136, 137, 140, 175n18 McClatchy, V. S., 55, 56, 77 medical racialization: and deportations, 91–94, 96, 99–102, 104–105, 108–111, 171–172nn38,46, 174nn88–89; as explicit policy, 91–92; as racial script, 93, 94; and unique discrimination, 93 Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, 14, 94, 169n66 mestizos, 26, 32, 53, 55, 62–63, 160–161n38, 163n68 Mexican Americans: deportation programs and, 60; and popu lar culture, 41, 60, 62; school segregation and, 41, 87, 169n66; support groups of, rejecting Mexican immigrants, 121. See also second generation and beyond Mexican-American War. See U.S. War with Mexico Mexican government and immigration, 13, 63, 65, 114 Mexican Revolution, 28, 46, 62 Mexicans as separate racial category, 5, 6, 41, 64. See also nonwhite as racial category military ser vice: African Americans and, 129, 164n85; citizenship via, 52, 82, 160n29; Japanese persons and, 130 miscegenation, 30, 31–32, 79 mulatto status, 47–48 NAACP, 129 National Congress of Spanish Speaking Peoples, 60, 104–105 nationalism, 9–10 Nationality Act (1940), 66 National Labor Relations Act (1935, Wagner Act), 96, 108 Native Americans: as biologically inferior and unfit for self-government, 25, 94; citizenship denied to, 52, 71–72, 164–165n7; citizenship granted to, 52, 54, 66; colonization of, 36; lineage of, and Mexican eligibility for citizenship, 47, 52–54, 55, 58–59, 60–63; lineage of, and Mexican identity, 62–63, 163n68; lineage of, and Mexicans as culturally nonwhite, 23, 26, 32, 36; as perpetual foreigners,

71–72; as racialized group, in discourse about Mexicans, 22, 23, 24, 36 Native Sons of the Golden West (NSGW), 53, 56–57, 161n33 nativists and nativism: and birthright citizenship, 76–77, 82–85; desire to redefine Mexicans as nonwhite, 6, 53–58; European quotas sought by, 20; labor unions and, 53, 80–81; medicalized, 94; peonage argument, 32–33; and population growth of second generation, 75, 76–77, 79, 81, 82–84, 85, 166nn17,19; and reproduction, fears about fitness for, 69, 82–84; segregation favored by, 85–88. See also eugenics naturalization: African Americans granted, 72–73; denaturalization, 95, 117, 131, 136; and H.R. 3073 and H.R. 77, 165n11; and immigration law as controlling social order, 11; In re Rodríguez and, 5, 45, 61, 159n5; Japanese immigrants granted, 130; and white-black racial binary of citizenship, 46–48, 49, 53, 159n12. See also nonwhite as racial category; whiteness Naturalization Act (1790), 24, 43, 51, 70, 71, 72, 137, 158n2 Naturalization Act (1870), 72–73, 158n2 New Deal, 96, 120 noncitizens. See foreigners, people treated as perpetual nonwhite as racial category, 43–44, 139; Asians placed in, 43, 75; Dred Scott decision and, 72; establishment of, 49; expansion of, 51; Native American lineage and, 23, 26, 32, 36; nativism strategies for, 6, 53–58; “one-drop rule,” 60–61; restriction of immigration and, 53; skin color and, 50 Obama, Barack, 68, 142 Obregón, Álvaro, 62 O’Malley, Walter, 115 “one-drop rule,” 60–61 Operation Round-up, 116–117, 124, 133; African Americans and, 116, 123, 125–128, 129, 130; as business as usual, 118–119; citizenship disregarded in, 114–115, 116, 131–132, 134–135, 136, 137, 138; counterscripts and, 116–117, 119, 125–128; and due process, lack of, 132–134; Elysian Park as detention center for, 115, 118, 123–125, 124, 128, 177n46; “harboring”

index charges as threat to community, 135–136, 138; Japanese residents and, 116, 123–125, 128–130; labor activists and, 130–131; LACPFB and resistance to, 117–121, 122, 123–125, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136–137, 138, 176n17; law enforcement and, 127–128, 135–136; left-leaning activist resistance to, 121–122; as local Los Angeles program, 114, 115; other racialized groups as affected by, 115–117, 123–130; petition drive against, 136–137; as racializing other groups, 116; racial profiling and, 116; and racial scripts, 114–117, 116, 119, 122; women and children caught in, 134–135. See also Operation Wetback Operation Wetback, 112–138; and Border Patrol cooperation with local law enforcment, 127–128, 171n35; Mexican American support groups and, 121; and racial scripts, 114–117; wetback as racializing term, 113–114. See also Operation Round-up Osborne, Hugh, 107, 108 Ozawa, Takao, 49–50 Ozawa v. United States, 6, 14, 43, 49–50, 51, 52, 53–54, 55, 61, 75 Page Act (1875), 80, 83 Palmer, Alexander, 95, 176n24 Palmer Raids, 95–96, 119, 176n24 Parker, William, 127 peon as term, and peonage, 32–33, 58, 113, 143, 144 Perkins, Frances, 102–103, 104, 105 Plessy v. Ferguson, 85, 155n11 Polish immigrants, 120 population: of Imperial Valley, 93; increase of second generations, 75, 76–77, 79, 81, 82–84, 85, 166nn17,19; syphilis cases in, 172n46 population of Mexicans in the U.S.: and anti-immigration laws post-2006, 145; decline of, following U.S. War with Mexico, 27, 28; numbers of Mexican immigrants, 21, 166n17, 168n49; rise of, in 1910s, 28, 45–46; second generation and beyond, 82–84, 166n17; as threat, racial script of, 29, 30, 33–34, 156n28, 157n35. See also quotas on immigration Poulson, Norris, 127, 175n15 poverty culture, perception of, 84

.

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prisons and prisoners: as industry, 145; as labor force, 127, 149; and unequal enforcement of laws, 148–149, 150 Proposition 187 (California), 156n28, 173n68 public housing, 115, 176n15 Public Law 1018 (1929), 59 Puerto Ricans, 34–38, 35, 83, 97 quotas on immigration: abolishment of, 140; for Asians, 165n14; for Europeans, 20, 28, 49, 74, 109; “illegal aliens” constructed via, 95; for Mexicans, desire for, 19, 30, 54, 58–59, 79, 94, 155n8; as percentage of existing population, 49; Western Hemisphere, lack of, 19, 22, 36, 49, 54, 78–79, 92 race, construction of: INS archive illustrating, 12–13; multiplicity of influences on, 139; and period of text, 1–2. See also black as racial category; Mexicans as separate racial category; nonwhite as racial category; racialization; racial scripts; white as racial category race-neutrality. See color-blind society “race suicide,” 82, 83 racialization: defined, 6; and need for exploitable workforce, 10; of white “inbetween people,” 120–121. See also medical racialization; racial scripts; scientific racism; specific groups racial projects, defined, 3 racial scripts: and colorblind society, 141–148; “common-sense” of racism created by, 38–39, 47, 51, 80–81, 140, 152; and connections between groups/external forces, 8–10; criminality, 149; defined, 6–7; and disease, 29, 111; and indigeneity, 24, 25, 27, 32; labor force guaranteed through, 36; laws and policies embedding, 56, 61; medical racialization as, 93, 94; nationhood and, 42; and nonwhite as category, 43–44; Operation Wetback/ Round-up and, 114–117, 116, 119, 122; population numbers as threat, 29, 30, 33–34, 156n28, 157n35; sexual and reproductive transgression by nonwhites, 83–84; Spanish fantasy past, 27, 36; stakes in, 35–36; as undocumented, Mexicans as, 114–115; whiteness as, 24, 40–41, 72. See also counterscripts; racial scripts, and linkages across time and space

206

.

index

racial scripts, and linkages across time and space: “anchor babies,” 88; Asian exclusion, 20, 56–57, 80–82, 88; biological inferiority, 27, 31, 32, 94, 116; birthright citizenship, 7, 69–70, 80–81, 88; defined, 7–8, 22, 139; European quotas, 20; internment, 125; Mexicans compared with other groups, 21–23, 32–33, 34–38; miscegenation, 30, 31–32, 79; prison, 149; segregation, 86. See also foreigners, people treated as perpetual racism: color-blind myth and, 141–148; as “common-sense,” racial scripts constructing, 47, 51, 140, 152; as divide-and-conquer strategy, 9; institutional/structural, 142; internalized, 48; “reverse,” 141; as shared, but different types, 120–121, 130; of white working-class, and assimilation, 4. See also discrimination; racialization; racial scripts; scientific racism raza cosmica, 62–63, 163n68 regional factors: and birthright citizenship, opposition to, 78–79; as effect on immigration law, 12; race and political economy and, 46; scientific racialization and, 94; and whiteness, access to, 26, 156n19 relational notions of race: and birthright citizenship, 73; comparative treatment of race distinguished from, 3–6; defined, 2–3; and Dred Scott decision, 71–72; literature survey of, 4–5; as mutually constitutive process, 3, 139; and Operation Round-up, 138; and racialization of Mexicans, 6; and racial projects, 3. See also racial scripts reproduction, nativist scrutiny of, 69, 82–84. See also population resistance. See counterscripts Rivera, Diego, 62 Roberto Alvarez v. The Board of Trustees of Lemon Grove School District, 41, 169n66 Rodríguez, Ricardo, 5, 45 Roosevelt, Elanor, 104 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 129 Rosales, Francisco, 63 Roybal, Edward, 122, 127, 177n38 S.B. 1070, 68, 145 schools: denial of attendance to children, 146, 156n28, 173n68; segregation/desegration, 41, 86, 87, 129, 169n66, 176n26

scientific racism: and European quotas, 57; and medicalized racial scripts, 94; as nonlogical, 35; and “one-drop rule,” 61; and physiognomy, 63; and population anxiety, 77; as racial script, 61; and whiteness as racial script, 26, 50. See also eugenics Scott, Dred, 71 second generation and beyond: citizenship rights exercised by, 75–76, 81–82, 166n20; H.R. 3073 and H.R. 77 and, 165n11; and limitations on birthright citizenship, 69; Operation Round-up and, 134–135; as perpetual foreigners, 76, 113–114; population increases of, 75, 76–77, 79, 81, 82–84, 85, 166nn17,19; segregation and, 41, 86–87, 169n66; and warning systems about raids, 150. See also birthright citizenship Section 2169 (U.S. revised statutes), 48, 51, 64 segregation: favored by nativists, 85–88; Jim Crow laws, 32, 66, 85–86, 126–127, 129, 141–142, 149; medicalized racial scripts as rationalization for, 94; and Operation Round-up, 115; restrictive covenants, 85, 129; and schools, 41, 86, 87, 129, 169n66, 176n26; “separate but equal,” 85, 155nn11, 169n66 Sensenbrenner, James, 144–145 sexual transgression, 83–84 Shelley v. Kramer, 129 skin color, 47, 48, 50 Slaughterhouse cases, 73, 165n8 slavery: abolition of, 72; deportation and, 137; Dred Scott and denial of citizenship to, 70–72; and Mexican deportations, 126; in Mexico, 159n12; racial inferiority beliefs and, 29; used as scare tactic, 19, 29, 30, 32–33. See also discrimination; Jim Crow laws; vagrancy laws Sleepy Lagoon murder case, 121–122 South Asians, 75, 93, 164n88; United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 6, 14, 43, 49, 50–51, 53–54, 55, 61, 75 Spanish ancestry, 46–47, 160n38 Spanish fantasy past, 27, 36 State Department, U.S., 58, 59, 63 stereotypes: and birthright citizenship, fear of, 81; criminality, 149; cultural representations and, 3; disease as, 94; immigration regime and, 11; immigration restriction and, 21, 87; of perpetual

index foreignness, 38; of perpetual neediness, 110; repetition of, 139–140. See also racial scripts sterilization, forced, 83–84, 94 structures, social, 3–4, 8–9, 142 Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act (2010), 145 Swing, Joseph, 118 syphilis, 99–102, 108, 109–110, 171–172nn38,46 Taney, Roger, 71–72 taxation, 24, 28 Texas, 38, 45, 78–79. See also In re Ricardo Rodriguez; LULAC; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Texas Rangers, 38 Thirteenth Amendment, 73, 126 Till, Emmett, 123 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848): challenges to, 45, 47; citizenship/ whiteness for Mexicans and, 5, 23, 24, 25–26, 27, 45, 52, 119, 139; land disposession and, 25–26, 28, 119; nationality and, 45; whiteness implied but not declared in, 45 Unitarian Universalists, 120, 150, 151 United States v. Balsara, 52 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 6, 14, 43, 49, 50–51, 53–54, 55, 61, 75 United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 7, 14, 67, 69, 70, 73, 79–80, 88 U.S. War with Mexico (1846–48), 5, 24, 25, 119, 153n8 vagrancy laws, 98, 108, 126–127, 174n82 Vasconcelos, José, 62, 163n68 vigilante violence, 25–26, 27, 38 violence: against labor activists, 99; Asian population suppressed via, 39; medicalized racial script and, 94; recycling of tactics as racial script, 38–40; unequal enforcement of laws, 147–148 visas: crossing without, 59; overstaying, as felony, 144; reduction of issuance of, 58, 59, 95; statute of limitations for overstaying, removal of, 34, 144 voting rights, 26, 81–82, 141 Voting Rights Act (1965), 141

.

207

Wagner Act (1935), 96, 108 water, 97 Webb, Ulysses S., 55–56 wetback, as racializing term, 113–114, 143, 144 white as racial category: Caucasian race, 50, 51; classification of Mexican citizenship/ whiteness, 2, 5, 23, 24, 25–26, 27, 45, 52, 119, 139; declassification/reclassification of Mexicans as, 5, 41, 64; “free white persons,” 24, 48, 51, 70–72; INS and determination of, 46–48, 52–53, 64–66, 164n81; privileges of, protected by exclusivity, 48; skin color and, 47, 48, 50; as unstable category, 66; voting rights and, 26. See also Europeans; nonwhite as racial category; white-black racial binary; white identity; whiteness white-black racial binary of citizenship: Fourteenth Amendment and, 73; vs. multiethnic dimensions, 138; and naturalization of Mexicans, 46–48, 49, 53, 159n12 whiteness: Anglo-Saxon as term and, 26; assimilation into, 4, 26–27, 156n19; and color-blind myth, 142; as hierarchical category in 19th c., 26; “inbetween people,” racialization of and transition to, 120–121; and labor activism, 131; and Mexican-American identity, 27, 40–41, 47–48, 60; as racial script, 24, 40–41, 72; working-class, 9, 154n12 Widoff, Josef, 123, 133–134 Williams, Richard, 100–101, 106, 172n40 women: assumed to be prostitutes, 83; Operation Round-up and, 134–135; scrutiny of reproductive capacity of, 69, 82–84. See also gender World War I, 20, 46, 95 World War II, 15, 66, 164n85, 174n88; African American migration and, 126, 129; internment of Japanese during, 124–125, 128, 129–130 X, Malcolm, 151 Yingling, Paul, 101–102, 106, 110, 172n46 Zoot Suit Riots, 94, 179n87

american crossroads Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh 1. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, by José David Saldívar 2. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, by Neil Foley 3. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound, by Alexandra Harmon 4. Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War, edited by George Mariscal 5. Immigration and the Political Economy of Home: West Indian Brooklyn and American Indian Minneapolis, 1945–1992, by Rachel Buff 6. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, by Melani McAlister 7. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown, by Nayan Shah 8. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934–1990, by Lon Kurashige 9. American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture, by Shelley Streeby 10. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, by David R. Roediger 11. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, by Laura Briggs 12. meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, by Rosa Linda Fregoso 13. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles, by Eric Avila 14. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Tiya Miles 15. Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, by Herman S. Gray 16. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, by Paul Ortiz 17. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, by Alexandra Stern 18. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, by Josh Kun 19. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, by Laura Pulido 20. Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939, by Natalia Molina 21. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore 22. Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California, by Peter La Chapelle 23. Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, by Adrian Burgos Jr. 24. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II, by Luis Alvarez 25. Guantánamo: A Working- Class History between Empire and Revolution, by Jana K. Lipman 26. Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian-American Diaspora, by Sarah M. A. Gualtieri 27. Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908–1969, by Andrew J. Diamond 28. In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy, by Anna Pegler-Gordon 29. Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, by Kelly Lytle Hernández

30. Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California, by Daniel Martinez HoSang 31. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West, by Nayan Shah 32. The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand and Segregation in Postwar Philadelphia, by Matthew F. Delmont 33. Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line, by Theresa Rundstedler 34. Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.- Canadian Borderlands, by Kornel Chang 35. States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System, by Miroslava Chávez-García 36. Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles, by Gaye Theresa Johnson 37. Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia, by Andrew Friedman 38. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, by Natalia Molina