Race and Immigration in the Multiracial Us-Mexico
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THE “FUTURE IMMENSE”: RACE AND IMMIGRATION IN THE MULTIRACIAL U.S.-MEXICO BORDERLANDS, 1880-1936 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Julian Lim August 2013 © 2013 Julian Lim ABSTRACT THE “FUTURE IMMENSE": RACE AND IMMIGRATION IN THE MULTIRACIAL U.S.-MEXICO BORDERLANDS, 1880-1936 JULIAN LIM, Ph.D. CORNELL UNIVERSITY 2013 This study examines the multiple meanings of citizenship and belonging that emerged in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from 1880 to 1936. The project focuses on El Paso, Texas, the region’s leading hub of economic activity and immigration during this period. Locating El Paso at the crossroads of multiple boundaries – among them the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the limits of Jim Crow, which ended where El Paso met the New Mexico Territory line – I trace the movements of Mexican, Chinese, and African-American men and women to the El Paso-Juárez region. This project presents a new study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, as diverse people crossed various borders in search of economic opportunities and freedom from popular and institutionalized racism. The project’s purpose is twofold. First, I examine the developments in immigration law and policy that transformed both the United States and Mexico during these years. Analyzing the emergence of racially restrictive immigration policies in Mexico as well as the United States, the project addresses a variety of legal, social, political, and economic changes affecting migration on both sides of the border as well as across it, including the shift from Reconstruction to Jim Crow in the United States, the modernization programs of President Porfirio Díaz and revolution in Mexico, anti-Chinese exclusion campaigns on both sides of the border, and a global economic depression. Second, I show how racialized people used national borders to renegotiate questions about their capacity for “belonging” in the United States and/or Mexico, thereby forcing redefinitions of citizenship and national identity. I argue that although the border harbored multiple perils, it also offered great promise: through it, Mexican, black, and Chinese subjects often challenged the constructions of their non-whiteness and improvised their own democracy. Integrating sources from both regional and national archives in the United States and Mexico, my project demonstrates the unique ways in which marginalized people used their cross-border mobility to blur the lines of state power and identity in the borderlands. Ultimately, however, the project demonstrates the incremental processes of immigration law-making from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and highlights the ways in which bi- national immigration laws merged at the border and reshaped multiracial alliances into more discrete, segregated race relations. It presents a legal and social history of how the borderlands underwent a sweeping transformation, whereby the “open borders” of the 1880s hardened into much more racially discriminating boundaries – locally, nationally, and internationally – by the 1930s. In the process, as racial ideologies migrated across national boundaries, it became more difficult for racialized bodies to do the same. And as the United States and Mexico each developed more stringent detention, deportation, and exclusion policies based on race, multiracial relations and people were not only made less visible within the national body politic, but were removed from the boundaries of national identity altogether. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Julian Lim was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. She received her B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998. After working as a paralegal at a San Francisco law firm for two years, Julian entered law school at the University of California at Berkeley and received her J.D. in 2003. She worked as an attorney in Buffalo, New York for one year, but then decided to pursue her combined interests in law, history, and academia by entering the Ph.D. program in the history department at Cornell University in 2004. She received her M.A. in history in 2007. While completing her dissertation, Julian also taught as a visiting assistant professor of law at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law from 2010-2012. iii DEDICATION To my family, near and far iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My path to this manuscript and its completion has been long and circuitous, but every moment has been wonderful (even if I did not appreciate it as such at the time). 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, guidance, 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 Maria Cristina Garcia and Derek Chang. They are incredible mentors, embodying for me an inspiring combination of intellectual rigor, academic passion, and commitment to students. Plus, they are wonderful people, and their humor, support, kindness, and trust in me helped me to get through the more challenging moments. Raymond Craib and Michael Jones Correa also provided essential guidance, criticism, and encouragement throughout the whole process, from the moment I knocked on their doors as a first-year graduate student to the completion of this dissertation. It has been a pleasure to work with these four professors, and I hope the pages of this manuscript positively reflect the deep influence they have had on me. Needless to say, any errors or misinterpretations that remain are my own responsibility. Of course, this project would not have been possible without the support of the knowledgeable and ever-patient archivists and staff at several libraries and archives around the United States and Mexico. Christian Kelleher at the University of Texas at Austin was especially helpful and friendly as I set off to research this project, back when all I had was a vague outline of a dissertation topic, and had to wander without any clear direction through the v papers of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Laura Saegert and Tony Black at the Texas State Archives helped me to navigate my way through boxes and boxes of previously unopened late-nineteenth century court dockets and case files, and their generosity of time and attitude kept me going when the dust of the crumbling papers kicked my allergies into high gear. In El Paso, I found a wealth of knowledge and information both inside the libraries and outside. The staff at the C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department at the University of Texas at El Paso – and in particular Claudia A. Rivers and Laura Hollingsed – were exceedingly helpful and efficient, as were the 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 Carmen Stearns, Anna Fahy, and Fred Morales 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; Cornell University; and Washington University in St. Louis. Adrian Morales and Clay Javier Boggs provided essential research assistance to me, retrieving documents for me in El Paso and Mexico City when I could not be there myself. I also thank Rachel Mance and Kathie Molyneaux for all their help and efficiency during my time at Washington University. I owe a great debt to several institutions and programs that financially supported my education, research, and writing over the past several years. Through fellowships and teaching assistantships, the history department at Cornell University generously funded my education and vi training so that I could focus on my coursework and dissertation research. Additional fellowships and research grants from the Graduate School, American Studies Program, and the Latino Studies Program at Cornell made it possible for me to make research trips to Austin, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. The Organization of American Historians also provided crucial support for my dissertation research in El Paso with a Huggins-Quarles Award, and generously subsidized my travel with an OAH-IEHS John Higham Travel Grant so that I could present some of my research and receive invaluable feedback at the 2010 OAH conference. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation allowed me to not only pursue my research in the beautiful setting of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, but to do so with a community of stimulating scholars by my side. And the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law provided necessary financial support as I worked toward completing my dissertation. My time as a visiting assistant professor there enabled me to bring my interests in law and history together again, and provided an engaging and supportive community that helped me to refine and deepen my own understandings of the history that I present in this manuscript. Over the course of researching and writing this manuscript, I have also become indebted to an extended group of scholars who have generously taken the time to assist and encourage me.