Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

By Julian Lim

With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether.

Using a variety of English- and Spanish-language primary sources from both sides of the border, Lim reveals how a borderlands region that has traditionally been defined by Mexican-Anglo relations was in fact shaped by a diverse population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469635507

Julian Lim

Julian Lim is assistant professor of history at Arizona State University.

Book preview

Porous Borders

The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History

Andrew R. Graybill and Benjamin H. Johnson, editors

EDITORIAL BOARD

Juliana Barr

Sarah Carter

Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Cynthia Radding

Samuel Truett

The study of borderlands—places where different peoples meet and no one polity reigns supreme—is undergoing a renaissance. The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History publishes works from both established and emerging scholars that examine borderlands from the precontact era to the present. The series explores contested boundaries and the intercultural dynamics surrounding them and includes projects covering a wide range of time and space within North America and beyond, including both Atlantic and Pacific worlds.

This book was published with support provided by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Porous Borders

Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

JULIAN LIM

The University of North Carolina Press  Chapel Hill

© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charis and Lato by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lim, Julian, author.

Title: Porous borders : multiracial migrations and the law in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands / Julian Lim.

Other titles: David J. Weber series in the new borderlands history.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2017]

| Series: The David J. Weber series in the new borderlands history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017019371 | ISBN 9781469635491 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469635507 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Immigrants—United States. | Immigrants—Mexico. | Emigration and immigration law—United States. | Emigration and immigration law—Mexico. | Racially mixed people—United States. | Racially mixed people—Mexico.

Classification: LCC E184.A1 L54 2017 | DDC 305.9/06912073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019371

Jacket illustration: Mexicans being searched in El Paso, ca. 1915 (courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-21246).

Portions of chapter 4 were previously published in Immigration, Asylum, and Citizenship: A More Holistic Approach, California Law Review 101, no. 4 (2013): 1013–77. Used here with permission.

For my grandmothers,

Myong Kun Hwang and So Dal Cho,

who carried their families across so many borders

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Empires and Immigrants

2 A Promiscuous Crowd

3 Hunting for Chinamen,

4 Forged in Revolution

5 "Razas no gratas" and the Color Bar at the Border

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations, Maps, and Tables

Illustrations

Troy Steam Laundry advertisement, 67

Yaqui Indian Girl (Herlinda Wong Chew), 81

Photograph attached to the deportation order of Jew Sing, 107

Noted Apache scouts, 129

Apache scouts, 1918, 132

Chinese refugees, 142

Maps

1 U.S.-Mexico border, 3

2 El Paso in 1900, 74

Tables

1 El Paso city population, 1880–1910, 43

2 Racial composition of El Paso, 1900, 1916, and 1940, 49

3 1900 El Paso census enumeration by city ward, 76

Acknowledgments

My journey while writing this book has been long and circuitous, but I have been fortunate to meet and work with extraordinarily generous and smart people along the way. Words cannot fully express how much I appreciate the help, advice, and friendship that I have received over the years, but hopefully this will be a good start. And, in time, I hope to return some of the generosity and kindness.

I am extremely grateful, first of all, to have been trained as a historian by María Cristina García and Derek Chang. Without their guidance on matters of immigration and comparative race studies, I would not be where I am today. They are incredible mentors, embodying for me an inspiring combination of intellectual rigor, academic passion, and commitment to students. In addition, they are wonderful people, and their humor, support, kindness, and trust helped to get me through the more challenging moments. Raymond Craib and Michael Jones-Correa also provided essential guidance, criticism, and encouragement from the moment I knocked on their doors as a first-year graduate student. I hope the pages of this book positively reflect the deep influence all four of these teachers have long had on me. Needless to say, any errors or misinterpretations that remain are my own.

This book would have been impossible without the support of the knowledgeable and ever-patient archivists and staff at several libraries and archives around the United States and Mexico. In particular, I would like to thank Christian Kelleher for his help when he was still archivist at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin; Tony Black and Laura Saegert at the Texas State Archives; Laura Hollingsed and Claudia A. Rivers at the C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department at the University of Texas, El Paso; and the archivists and staff at the El Paso County Historical Society and the El Paso Public Library. The passion for local history in El Paso runs deep, and I owe a great thanks to Anna Fahy, Fred Morales, and Carmen Stearns for sharing their stories of the region with me, providing an invaluable glimpse into how local El Pasoans experience the border and the two cities straddling it. I also owe thanks to the myriad staff and archivists who made my research possible at the Archivo General de la Nación and the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada in Mexico City, Mexico; the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley; the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the National Archives in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and College Park; and the libraries at Cornell University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Arizona State University, Tempe. Clay Javier Boggs, Ann Gillespie, and Adrian Morales provided me with essential research assistance, retrieving and reviewing documents in El Paso, Mexico City, and Washington, D.C., when I could not be there myself. I also thank Shannon Brosnan-Hernandez, Nicole Cortés, Makiba Foster, Rachel Mance, Kathie Molyneaux, and Akele Parnell for all their library and administrative support during my time at Washington University in St. Louis.

I am indebted to numerous institutions and programs that financially supported my research and writing over the past several years: the Department of History, Graduate School, American Studies Program, and Latino Studies Program at Cornell University; the Organization of American Historians (Huggins-Quarles Award and OAH-IEHS John Higham Travel Grant); the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation research fellowship at the Huntington Library; the School of Law and the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis; the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College and University Teachers; and Arizona State University, Tempe.

Over the course of researching and writing this manuscript, I have also become indebted to an extended group of scholars who have generously taken time to assist and encourage me. Early on, Maceo C. Dailey, Madeline Hsu, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, and Julia Schiavone Camacho graciously let me talk to them about my project and my research plans, and provided helpful guidance as I went into the archives. Many others, including several scholars whose works have deeply influenced my own, provided invaluable feedback and kind support, for which I am deeply thankful: Katherine Benton-Cohen, Jason Oliver Chang, Deborah Cohen, Grace Peña Delgado, David Gutiérrez, Ryan Hall, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Karl Jacoby, Benjamin Johnson, Linda Kerber, Erika Lee, Karen Leong, Mary Lui, James Nichols, Andrés Reséndez, Robert Chao Romero, Vicki Ruiz, Judy Salyer, George Sánchez, Nitasha Sharma, Jeffrey Shepherd, Rachel St. John, Samuel Truett, Judy Wu, and the participants in the 2015 Association for Asian American Studies Junior Faculty Workshop. Legal scholars at Washington University, LatCrit, the University of California, Davis, and the Denver Sturm College of Law provided another vital source of encouragement as well as critique, and I owe great thanks especially to Gabriel Jack Chin, Adrienne Davis, Deborah Dinner, John Inazu, Kevin Johnson, Daniel Kanstroom, Stephen Lee, Stephen Legomsky, Laura Rosenbury, Bertrall Ross, Brian Tamanaha, Karen Tani, Rose Cuison Villazor, and Leti Volpp. I also hold the warmest regards for Andrea Friedman, Iver Bernstein, Peter Kastor, Alexandre Dubé, and Sonia Lee for their mentorship as I balanced writing with teaching and going on the tenure-track market.

I am especially grateful to complete this book surrounded and supported by my colleagues at Arizona State University. In the short time that I have been here, the community of scholars in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies (SHPRS), the School of Social Transformation, the School of Transborder Studies, the American Studies Working Group, and the Migration Reading Group have both challenged and supported me, pushing me to refine my arguments and analysis as I completed revisions on the book manuscript. The intellectual exchange and professional guidance provided by my colleagues in SHPRS have been invaluable, and I am thankful to have so many doors that I can knock on for advice on teaching, research, and navigating the administrative bureaucracy at this huge institution. In particular, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Matt Garcia, Catherine O’Donnell, Matthew Delmont, Christopher Jones, and Pen Moon for their advocacy and support of my work. Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Don Fixico, Gayle Gullett, Paul Hirt, Anna Holian, Kyle Longley, Laurie Manchester, and Hava Samuelson have also been wonderfully generous colleagues. Many others in SHPRS, including Alexander Aviña, Jon Barth, Volker Benkert, Richelle Hubbell-Hudson, Victoria Jackson, Josh MacFadyen, Lindsey Plait Jones, Leah Sarat, and Jennifer Stanley have provided camaraderie and comfort at necessary times, and I look forward to deepening our friendships in coming years.

There are others who have supported me and my work in more subtle but absolutely necessary ways. I never would have started on this path into academia in the first place were it not for Kathryn Abrams and Ian Haney López at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. They were the first two professors I ever had who suggested an academic career for me, and they have been staunch supporters ever since. I will always be thankful to them for helping this first-generation college (and then law school) graduate from a working-class immigrant family to envision herself as a professor someday.

Of course, I never would have survived graduate school without the fellowship and antics of my friends. For me, Cornell University and Ithaca will forever be tied to Javier Fernandez, Hilary Merlin, Gregg Lightfoot, and Brent Morris—they were with me from the beginning, and we celebrated the highs and struggled through the lows together. I miss you guys tremendously. Jessica Harris, William and Ginia Harris, Jorge Rivera Marín, Suyapa Portillo, Michael Schmidli, and Emma Willoughby also helped to make the basement of McGraw Hall, Collegetown, and the Ithaca Commons a warmer and more fun place to call home for a while. Thankfully, Emma Kuby and Brian Bochelman, Chris and Kelly Cantwell, and Rebecca Tally have remained in my post-Ithaca life as well, continuously providing invaluable support and empathy. I am so happy to have you guys in my corner, even if it is from afar.

Hoan Huynh, Lisa Kim, Hyun Lee, and Erica Ng have followed my academic adventures from the beginning, and I am grateful that they still think my work is interesting. Leilani Buddenhagen, Sylvia Gale, Alistair Jones, and the Sunday Supper Stars embraced me warmly in Austin, and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz and Suyapa Portillo provided great company while we researched together at the Huntington Library. The friends that I found in St. Louis—Matt Bodie, Pat and Flannery Burke, Lee Cagle, Andrea Campetella, Deborah Dinner, Carolyn Dufault, Danielle Dutton, Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff, Bryan Lammon, Sonia Lee, Cortney Lollar, Goldburn Maynard, Martin Padilla, Jason Peifer, Marty Riker, and John Turci-Escobar—provided countless words of encouragement and support, and I am fortunate to count them as my associates and allies. In Phoenix, I am glad to be in the company of Roger and Angela Mantie, as well as Shobak and Lisha Kythakyapuzha. I hope our friendships deepen over many more hikes and explorations of the greater West.

I owe special thanks to the University of North Carolina Press and the various individuals there who guided this book to publication. It is an honor to have this book included as part of the David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History, and I am immensely grateful to the reviewers for their careful readings of the manuscript and suggestions for improving the book. I was delighted that Andrew Graybill, Charles Grench, and Benjamin Johnson saw promise in my project and it has been a pleasure to fine-tune my arguments, polish my writing, and push the book to publication with their guidance. The Clements Center for Southwest Studies also provided a generous subvention for the production of the book, for which I am very thankful.

I am, of course, most grateful to my family. My sister and brother-in-law, Judy and Jake Kerber, constantly celebrate my achievements and inspire me to try to make the world better in my own way. My parents, Wook and Kum Lim, never imagined I would choose to take this long path into academia, but have always supported my decision and have helped me make it this far by offering much-needed child care and a well-balanced diet during some busy moments of research and writing. My in-laws, Robert, Sandy, Mark, and Lori Schmelz, have always shown interest in my work and provided warm encouragement. I suspect they have wondered what has taken me so long, but hopefully this book will answer some of their questions.

I first stepped into the archives in Texas when I was four months pregnant with my first child. Now she is reading thick books of her own, while her six-year-old younger brother staples together sheets of paper to write his own version of a graphic novel. It has not been easy to research and write with two young children, but their exuberance is infectious and they have kept me sane through the process. Though they may not have intended it as such, their constant demands for attention and help and playtime gave me the necessary breaks from writing that, in the end, kept my writing going.

Finally, Peter Schmelz has been the best friend, partner, and coparent that I could have asked for. He has always believed in me, and his confidence in and commitment to me has never wavered. He makes our family louder, smarter, more curious about the world, bigger in every way. I am grateful that we are steering this ship together, and cannot wait to see where we take it next.

Porous Borders

Introduction

In 1883, the San Antonio Daily Express published a series of letters written by special correspondent Hans Mickle. The reporter was exploring parts of the new transcontinental railway that ran across the American Southwest, connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles to New Orleans. As he followed the route that raced westward across Texas from San Antonio, he entertained his readers with descriptions of the foreign landscape and the assorted passengers that caught his attention, including the Chinamen who filled the cars on their way back west, he presumed, to San Francisco and China. Mostly, however, Mickle wrote about El Paso, which according to his report was the most western point in Texas, and is Texan only in name, as, in almost everything else, it has few Texan characteristics. If not characteristically Texan, though, El Paso came to represent something even grander for Mickle, for at the extreme head of an extensive valley, in a pass flanked by high and rugged mountains, he found himself standing in what he called the Future Immense.¹

The future immense that men like Mickle imagined was that of a vast American empire, rising out of the hard desert ground at the nation’s very limits. Before the 1880s, El Paso had been a minuscule border town sitting at the western edge of Texas, comprised mostly of Mexicans and a few American merchants, and overshadowed completely by the more populous and industrious Mexican city of El Paso del Norte immediately across the Rio Grande. However, the railroad’s arrival in El Paso in 1881 carved a new path of iron and steam into the western Texas and northern Chihuahua landscape that forever altered the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The infusion of capital and industrial machinery radically transformed the remote and seemingly barren terrain, replacing sand and mesquite with mine shafts, metal tracks, rails, and loud engines that radiated in all directions from the international borderline.² As money, natural resources, and commercial products crossed borders and seemingly flowed to every corner of the continent, the junction at El Paso and El Paso del Norte—renamed Ciudad Juárez in 1888—became the region’s economic hub and international trade depot. Moreover, an interlocking network of tracks and trains—the thunderous symbol of modern life—tied together the 1,954-mile span of land that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, pulling the American East closer to the West, even as it fused together the destinies of the people living on both sides of the border.

The real engine driving this future immense, of course, was a human one, as unprecedented numbers of immigrants descended on the border. Within ten years of the railroad’s arrival, El Paso alone grew from a mere 736 residents to 10,338, with an estimated 7,846 Anglo-Americans, 2,069 Mexicans, 810 Colored, and 344 Chinese by 1889. By 1900, the U.S. federal census takers reported a diverse population of nearly 14,000 in the city’s three main wards and more than 25,000 in the county.³ The demographic explosion would not be limited to El Paso. Anglo-American, European, African American, Mexican, and Asian immigrants swelled towns and counties all across the vast length of the border, from Texas to California; Cochise County, Arizona, for example, grew from 9,251 people to 34,591 between 1900 and 1910, while Baja California Norte tripled from 7,583 in 1900 to 23,537 by 1921.⁴ Landlocked though it was, the border became a major immigration thoroughfare for all kinds of people drawn from various corners of the globe. Indeed, though traditionally defined in terms of Mexican–Anglo-American relations, the borderlands were in fact traversed by a multiethnic and multiracial population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.

This book presents a history of the multiracial U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and explores the various contestations over citizenship and belonging that diverse migrants raised by their movements to and through the border. Located at the westernmost point of Texas and right on the international line, El Paso in particular lay at the crossroads of multiple boundaries that attracted a variety of immigrants during this period (see map 1). In addition to the U.S.-Mexico border, El Paso also marked the limits of Jim Crow, which ended where the city met New Mexican territory.

As massive political, economic, and social transformations swept through both the United States and Mexico from the 1880s onward, countless Mexican, Chinese, and African American men and women thus came to view the El Paso-Juárez border as a unique gateway to opportunity. There, African Americans might finally find refuge from the violence of Jim Crow, and Chinese immigrants could find some relief from the anti-coolie exclusionist campaigns of the Pacific coastal regions, while Mexicans could escape the grinding poverty and dispossession experienced under the Porfirian government’s modernization programs. As Robin Kelley has explained, the desire to leave Babylon, if you will, and search for a new land tells us a great deal about what people dream about, what they want, how they might want to reconstruct their lives.⁵ Or as James Scott has observed regarding earlier states, the threat of the ungoverned periphery … was that it represented a constant temptation, a constant alternative to life within the state.⁶ For black, Chinese, and Mexican men and women, the El Paso-Juárez border held a similar attraction for a time, offering multiple peripheries that exposed the limitations of segregation laws, exclusion policies, and capitalist desires for a captive workforce. At the nations’ border, variously racialized and subordinated people converged, finding in the borderlands more space to pursue economic, political, and social opportunities that were denied them elsewhere on the basis of their race and class.

MAP 1 U.S.-Mexico border (drawn by Ezra Zeitler).

In the process, moreover, they gave new meaning to cross border mobility, blurring the lines of race and identity in the borderlands. As they lived, worked, and played in close quarters, intermarried, and formed new alliances across racial boundaries—frequently to get safely past national boundaries—they enunciated, as Alicia Schmidt Camacho might say, a collective desire for a different order of space and belonging across boundaries.⁷ Creating an alternative borderlands community that overlapped but was not synchronous with the nation-state, Mexican, Chinese, and black men and women came together, gathered, and mixed.⁸ In the polyglot and nonwhite mongrel spaces that defined southern El Paso, for example, or the multiracial Chinese smuggling rings running all along the border, diverse peoples came together to form new social relations and identities, laying bare the incoherency of race, nation, and borders, and powerfully challenging dominant ideas about moral and racial order in the United States—ideas that demanded not only the protection of white supremacy, but equally as important, the clear segregation of the races.

For American and Mexican elites, of course, this would not do. To literally minimize multiracial contact in the borderlands—and thereby reestablish racial order—local and national elites harnessed the power of immigration law to clarify race at their nation’s periphery. American officials led the way, vigorously enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts at the border. The exercise of state power to regulate immigration entailed, as immigration officials soon discovered, not only policing the mobility of Chinese immigrants but also mastering the racial landscape of the borderlands. The necessities of determining which border crossers fell within the boundaries of the Chinese Exclusion Acts thus produced racial differentiation at the border, beginning the difficult process of disentangling the diverse threads of the multiracial borderlands.

Mexico would soon follow suit, distilling its own national identity during the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years through the exclusion of Chinese and black persons from its borders as well. Chinese immigrants who had redirected their migrations to Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a result of the U.S. anti-Chinese immigration policies now faced increasing anti-Chinese restrictions and expulsion campaigns in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. African Americans seeking refuge in Mexico to escape the oppressive legal and extralegal violence of Jim Crow in the United States found themselves similarly barred from crossing the Mexican border, having been designated during the same period as "razas no gratas (unacceptable races). Meanwhile, Mexican immigrants who had previously encountered little obstacle in crossing the border ran up against not only stricter immigration laws that policed and restricted their emigration from Mexico and their entry into the United States, but also massive deportation schemes that removed large numbers of Mexican immigrants already in the United States to Mexico. The racially open borders" of the 1880s thus hardened by the 1930s into much more racially discriminating boundaries—locally, nationally, and internationally. As racial ideologies migrated across national boundaries, it became more difficult for racialized bodies to do the same.

Ultimately then, this book is not simply a history of recovery. It is also a history about erasure—a history about how the multiracial past has become so hidden, erased from the geographical and historical landscape of the borderlands and the nation itself. These multiracial worlds were not so extraordinary—they spanned distances and time, persisting well beyond the years covered in this book. But they became much less visible to Americans and Mexicans by the mid-twentieth century, marginalized as an anomalous and insignificant blip in the development of national identity. In 1815, Thomas Jefferson had answered the question, What constitutes a mulatto by our law? by using an elaborate mathematical equation comprised of "a, pure negro crossed with A, pure white, their child represented by h (half blood), and subsequent white partners denoted by B and C. The second crossing" of h and B produced the calculation: "a/4 + A/4 + B/2 and called the offspring q (quarteroon) being 1/4 negro blood. The third crossing" between q and C produced: "q/2 + C/2 = a/8 + A/8 + B/4 + C/2, and he called this offspring e (eighth), who having less than 1/4 of a, or of pure negro blood, to wit 1/8 only, is no longer a mulatto, so that a third cross clears the blood."⁹ If the determination of racial identity and the computation of what it took to clear the blood proved a dizzying exercise, by 1930 racial lines were cleaned up, made much more simple. The category of mulatto, which had appeared on the U.S. census between 1850 and 1920, was removed from the census in 1930, the decade in which this book ends. In addition, Mexican was created as an entirely new racial category, breaking with the common practice of counting Mexicans as white in all previous censuses. Census officials now instructed enumerators that all persons born in Mexico, or having parents born in Mexico, who are not definitely white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese, should be returned as Mexican.¹⁰ Structuring the census to reflect the racial understandings and desires of the majority white American population, U.S. officials tried to clean up the racial lines around whiteness, endorsing the one-drop rule and collapsing any mixing with blackness into Negro, while expelling and creating a whole new category for Mexicans. By 1930, all suggestions of race mixing were officially erased.

Highlighting the ways in which immigrants and officials from both the United States and Mexico negotiated the contested space of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from 1880 to the 1930s, the pages that follow show how the multiracial borderlands were ultimately reformed by the racial ideologies and immigration policies emanating from both sides of the border. These forces transformed messy multiracial alliances and identifications into more discrete, segregated, and orderly racial identities and relations. By the end of the period under study here, the borderlands became simultaneously multi-raced, through segregationist ideologies, and monoracial, as each state used the international border to reinforce the construction of a racially coherent and uniform national identity. There would continue to be Mexican, black, and Chinese persons in both the United States and Mexico, but the lines between the groups would be much more clearly drawn. And placed at the peripheries of American and Mexican national identity—the former idealizing an Anglo-Saxon whiteness and the latter romanticizing an indigenous past—they would all in their own way become peoples without a nation.

Multiracial Approaches

Since the 1980s, historians of the American West have increasingly emphasized the centrality of racial diversity to the region, while highlighting the complicated, constructed, and at times fluid nature of race relations and identities more broadly around the United States.¹¹ As white Americans worked their way across the western and southwestern frontier, they were by no means the first to step onto those lands. Not only were Native Americans and Mexicans already there, increasing numbers of Chinese and African Americans had joined the rush of white pioneers into the territories. In 1850s California, African American gold miners worked alongside the Chinese, Latin Americans, and Europeans, and even within a small predominantly black community called Little Negro Hill, black miners could be found socializing with Chinese, Portuguese, and white miners.¹² When a few Pima Indians entered Don Sing’s grocery store near Casa Grande in Arizona and browsed for something sweet to eat, the Chinese American merchant was able to make a suggestion in plain Pima. He had grown up with Pimas and Papagos and could helpfully recommend a strawberry preserve: Go ‘ep sitoli we•nags ‘ida (This is pretty good; it has syrup on it).¹³ Mexicans such as Guadalupe Garcia lived near Chinamen and worked for them sometimes in their garden. Garcia was at the house of the Chinamen nearly every day, sometimes asking for vegetables.¹⁴ And in Dallas in 1877, it did not seem so extraordinary that William Wells would ask his Chinese coworker Chin Chang to go [with him] and see some girls, including the negro woman named Annie Shaw.¹⁵ Living, working, and playing side by side, such persons could sometimes transform what initially may have been economic relations into other social relationships of empathy, compassion, and affection, including marriages and extramarital unions that significantly altered the neat lines thought to be necessary between the races and nationalities. In 1881, when a white widow by the name of Mary Lee and a Chinaman named Lee Jim were arrested in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, for their interracial union, reports of their case became a cause célèbre and generated sufficient public outrage and criticism to repeal Wyoming’s antimiscegenation law.¹⁶

In conducting research for this book, I have had to dig deep into the dusty, sometimes untouched bins of several archives, and even more deeply into the reservoir of patience and determination of the staff and researchers at several different archives and libraries around the United States and in Mexico. Unfortunately, the evidentiary traces of multiracial interactions are often buried deep below the documentary surface. They happened, but frequently went unacknowledged and unrecorded in the published sources on which historians heavily rely to recapture the public and social life of a past community—the daily newspapers, published records of municipal governments, printed city guides, and public commentaries of local leaders and civic organizations. To the extent that such documents can be located, much of the records filter interracial encounters through the gaze of the elite and more powerful members of society, who controlled what was seen and how it was seen.¹⁷ Care must be taken, then, in using newspaper accounts, for example, that recorded and reproduced interracial moments largely for the entertainment of other white Americans, turning them into public spectacles that frequently exoticized racialized others. From our position today, there is also no way to recapture the experiences of those who fully opted out of familiar identities, whose traces are obscured by intermarriage or an Anglo husband’s name, or who were simply overlooked by confused census takers. And lastly, archival practices themselves slow down the research of multiracial histories since the archives are rarely organized to capture such mixed practices from the past. Rather, documents relating to racial minorities are predominantly arranged by race and ethnicity, limited almost always by a narrow focus on the internal dynamics of the particular racial group or the group’s relation to the larger white community.

The work of the historian intent on recovering the multiracial past is hampered then by both substance (the lack of documentation in the first place) and method (how the records are organized and rendered meaningful—or conversely, are buried—in archival collections and, by extension, national narratives). The archive, in other words, physically reproduces the ideology of racial differentiation and segregation that this book addresses. In the archive, we see the legacy of the traffic-habits, as Benedict Anderson might say, that were created by the state to suppress and obscure multiracial identities and relations.¹⁸ The difficulty of researching multiracial history today in the archives is a direct product of the processes of racial differentiation, segregation, and exclusion that occurred in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands a century ago, aided to a significant degree by means of immigration law and practices from both sides of the border.

Deep within the recesses of the archives, however, the multiracial past emerges. The portrait of the borderlands that I present in this book resulted, fortunately, from stumbling enough times upon the random legal case, the isolated newspaper passage, or the occasional reference in a turn-of-the-century diary, and by piecing all of these disparate parts together with the scattered data of census records, city directories, maps, and immigration records. We may only be able to recover a glimpse of this dynamic past, but as this book reveals, Mexican, Chinese, and black men and women carved significant new paths in the late nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Their migrations were shaped by dramatic economic transformations and political developments on both sides of the border, but once in the borderlands, they also traversed new racial and social boundaries. Moreover, they did so in ways that complicate traditional studies of interethnic and interracial relations premised on binary oppositions, frequently framed by the dominant black-white paradigm of U.S. history, and emphasizing (usually) white men on top and one single other nonwhite group at the bottom. By the turn of the twentieth century, black-white relations did not automatically or inevitably set the parameters of racial interactions. In the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as well, Anglo-Mexican relations did not absolutely control the social and racial landscape. Multiracial coexistence, of course, did not necessitate multiracial equality. But the fragility of multiracial relations need not force the historical framing of race solely in terms of narrow binaries, cultural isolation, political separatism, or social segregation. Even within ghettos, barrios, reservations, and Chinatowns, people of diverse ethnoracial backgrounds forged dynamic relations—both cooperative and contentious—that warrant serious investigation.

This book broadens conventional understandings of the border and immigration—which have traditionally focused on Mexican immigrants—and asks how the historical narrative changes when we also address the Chinese and African Americans who joined the movement to settle the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.¹⁹ In the past decade, historians from both sides of the border have paid increasing attention to the history of the Chinese and African Americans in Mexico and the borderlands, but much of this work has proceeded along separate, independent tracks.²⁰ Few have ventured to bring all of the various groups together into one narrative analysis.²¹ My project shows how the different historical currents from the West and the South resonated with those of the borderlands, and provides a synthetic analysis that combines the historical queries of African American, Asian American, and Latino studies.

The goal, all the while, is not simply to document that black and Chinese pioneers were there too, but rather to illuminate the tensions, contingencies, and complexity at play in borderland communities and in the identities of people living between nations. The study of mixed-race experiences in the United States has flourished in the past three decades, so much that recent scholars working in the field have branched out into a more critical studies approach, one that places mixed race at the critical center of focus. As described by the organizers of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, first issued in 2014, under this new critical mixed-race studies approach, multiracials become subjects of historical, social, and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis.²²

Focusing on the diverse populations of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands therefore affords us an opportunity to better understand broader historical processes that transformed the borderlands from 1880 to the 1930s; focusing on their migrations, in turn, allows us to better see their role in the shaping of the border and nation. For although historians of immigration in the United States have well established the intersections of race and immigration law in defining citizenship and belonging, the emphasis thus far has been on how immigration law racialized specific groups in specific ways—how, in other words, U.S. immigration law has racially constructed Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, or turned Mexican Americans into wetbacks and illegal aliens. Because of their seemingly automatic status as citizens, meanwhile, African Americans are rarely mentioned in immigration studies at all. As this book shows, however, Mexican, Chinese, and black migrations in the borderlands were not always so easily compartmentalized, and they intersected and mixed in ways that confounded and challenged elite sensibilities on both sides of the border. The success of immigration law in the borderlands can be measured, then, not only by how it racialized different groups in different ways but also by how it demanded total differentiation to begin with, and thereby helped to make multiracial relations as a social phenomenon itself problematic and dangerous to the nation and national identity.

Transnational Perspectives and the State

At the same time, by paying attention to the varied experiences of Mexican, Chinese, and black migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, my project also emphasizes how actors on both sides of the border brought the attention of the state to race and multiracial populations. Borderlands history has come a long way since Herbert Eugene Bolton’s romantic tale of the Spanish American frontier, which has been challenged significantly by Chicana/Chicano scholars emphasizing ethnic Mexicans’ experiences of conquest and struggle on both sides of the border. In addition, Americanists and Mexicanists alike have reenvisioned a more hemispheric history of the borderlands that does not stop at the geopolitical border, while recent studies of indigenous groups have erased those Westphalian borders altogether, showing how the Comanches and Apaches, for example, powerfully imposed their own notions of sovereignty and territoriality over Europeans, Americans, and Mexicans in the borderlands well into the late nineteenth century.²³ Whether one subscribes to Gloria Anzaldúa’s plural, mixed borderlands personality or Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron’s more rigidly fixed systematic "borderlands into bordered lands" approach, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands clearly raise central questions about not only contact and conflict or resistance and accommodation, but also hybridities and boundaries and the spaces between empires and nations.²⁴ Studies of various borderlands have thus offered compelling reorientations of traditional, state-centered national histories, working powerfully to undermine the supposedly obvious territoriality claimed by modern states.²⁵ Borders have been dismantled, imperial outlines redrawn, and assertions of national power have been forced