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African and Mexican Americans As 'Racial Problems' in Early 20Th ‘This Ruinous Element’: African and Mexican Americans as ‘Racial Problems’ in early 20th Century California Margarita Aragon Goldsmiths College University of London Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Sociology February 2013 1 I affirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Signed ________________________ Date__________________ 2 Acknowledgments I would first like to thank my supervisors, Ben Gidley and Brett St. Louis, without whom I literally would never have been able to do this. I will always be grateful for their support, encouragement, and mentoring. They have helped me not only with this thesis but also to grow as a sociologist. I hope that this work does them justice. I also thank my mother for her immense support, not least of which includes proofreading every page of this project. I doubt anyone will ever enjoy reading it as much as she has. Thanks also to my husband (who has enjoyed reading it a little less) for the many, many weekends and evenings in which he has taken care of our children and done all the cooking and cleaning on his own so that I could work. I also appreciate my sister and all of the others who have helped in this regard: my mother-in-law Ginie, Ruby, Anne, and Lena. I thank my father for giving me my first lesson in sociology. Finally, I thank my children, Aella, Gabriel and Peter. You have made this take twice as long but have made life along the way immeasurably more enjoyable. I hope that if you read this one day, you will be proud. 3 Abstract This thesis explores the contrasting practices and discourses through which African and Mexican Americans were managed and marked as supposedly racial populations. It focuses primarily on Los Angeles and on the first four decades of the 20th century. This focus, however, often shifts temporally and widens geographically, as I excavate the historical roots of each of these processes. I argue that the rigid exclusion of African Americans and the more flexible boundaries placed around Mexican Americans cannot be understood as resulting from variant racial differences but must be examined within the specific historical and material conditions from which they emerged, namely slavery, on the one hand, and conquest and immigration, on the other. After an initial consideration of these circumstances, I trace their ideological and practical consequences in three areas. First, I examine how black and Mexican people were inversely defined within the regime of racial classification and anti- miscegenation law. Next, I examine how black and Mexican ‘difference’ was spatially imposed in the city of Los Angeles. Finally, I consider how patterns of collective violence, and the related segregatory practices of the World War II military reinforced substantially different social boundaries around each group. I base this examination upon a wide range of primary sources, including official documents such as court transcripts, congressional hearings, and FBI reports, as well as popular and academic works from the period. Underlying my argument is the notion that race is produced within historically specific social relations; as such, it demands rather than provides explanation. Though historical in perspective, I believe the questions raised here, and the approach with which I attempt to answer them, will be relevant to more recent debates about the workings of racism, particularly those that focus on multiethnic contexts. 4 Table of Contents 1. Introduction: Neither Equal nor Negro.......................................................................... 7 1.1 Caste and ‘Semi-Caste’....................................................................................................................7 1.2 ‘And is this difference of no importance?’ ..........................................................................13 1.3 Freedom and Bondage: ‘To rule us out is to make us an exception’ .......................17 1.4 ‘…May another not be added’: Comparative analysis of racisms and the legacy of slavery........................................................................................................................................................22 1.5 Theorising race and racism in a multiethnic context ....................................................24 1.6 Conceptualising other ‘Others’ ................................................................................................29 1.7 Whiteness, motor of racism ......................................................................................................32 1.8 The generalisation of blackness as racialness ..................................................................33 1.9 Inflations and conflations of whiteness...............................................................................36 1.10 ‘Inserting mark and name’......................................................................................................40 1.11 ‘Peculiar to the white race’ .....................................................................................................42 1.11 Looking forward..........................................................................................................................44 2. Methodology ...........................................................................................................................46 2.1 Race as ideology and racism without alibi..............................................................................46 2.2 Approaching the field.....................................................................................................................54 2.3 In the archive.....................................................................................................................................56 2.4 The Materials ....................................................................................................................................62 2.5 A note on terminology...................................................................................................................67 2.6 A note on the politics of comparison ........................................................................................71 2.7 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................73 3. Mexicans and African Americans in the Shadows of Slavery................................74 3.1 Toxic ground: Slavery and the Mexican immigration debate.....................................75 3.2 ‘Has the past no parallel in the way of the slave cargoes from Africa?’.................79 3.3 ‘The cancer of the South’ ............................................................................................................83 3.4 On Aliens, Natal and National...................................................................................................89 3.5 Family, Work and Honour .........................................................................................................92 3.6 As Marked Populations...............................................................................................................98 3.7 In national and geographic terms ....................................................................................... 104 3.8 As citizens...................................................................................................................................... 108 3.10 Conclusion: Legacies of slavery, legacies of conquest ............................................. 118 4. Racial Classification and Miscegenation Law: African and Mexican Americans in the ‘Negro’ and ‘White’ ................................................................................................... 120 4.1 ‘The result is confusion’........................................................................................................... 121 4.2 ‘A sickening mixture’: Mexicans and legal whiteness................................................. 123 4.3 The One-drop Rule: white Blacks, black Whites, and the law of hypo-descent128 4.4 ‘Mexicans are Mexicans, just as all blacks are Negroes’: ‘passing’ and infra- group differences............................................................................................................................... 132 4.5 Anti-miscegenation law and the ‘intention of permanency’.................................... 137 4.6 Mexicans and intermarriage: ‘Good melting pot material’....................................... 143 4.7 ‘What is a Negro?’: Perez v. Lippold and California’s miscegenation statute... 150 4.8 Conclusion: Caste and ‘semi-caste,’ or, The black man rides Jim Crow in Georgia .................................................................................................................................................................... 155 5 5. ‘The Golden Era is Before Us’: Building the Walls of the Los Angeles Ghetto158 5.1 ‘For White People Only’ and the evolution of Watts ................................................... 159 5.2 After Watts: Some theoretical reflection.......................................................................... 163 5.3 The ‘Mexican Colony’ ................................................................................................................ 169 5.4 Black Los Angeles....................................................................................................................... 173 5.5 ‘Racial Problem Headaches’..................................................................................................
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