“Hunting for Chinamen”

Through a close, on-the-ground reading of U.S. immigration records and newspaper accounts, this chapter shows how Chinese immigrants repeatedly improvised new cross-racial strategies to gain entry into the United States during the era of Chinese Exclusion. Their actions not only forced local immigration officials to continually adjust their own practices in response, but to focus increasing attention on racial differentiation. In the process of distinguishing Chinese from Mexican, and rooting out smuggling rings that depended upon the cooperation of Chinese sponsors and immigrants, Mexican guides, and black railroad workers, these street-level bureaucrats not only enforced U.S. immigration law, but did so through practices that rendered multiracial relations and identities suspect and illegitimate. Moreover, as immigration officials and the immigrants they sought to police drew the attention of the federal government to the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border, they brought the American state into the borderlands. The chapter thus connects local enforcement practices at the border with the broader goals of federal immigration law and nation-building at the turn of the century.

Empires and Immigrants

This chapter frames the nineteenth century borderlands as a theater of movement that had long been marked by imperial contestations and diverse migrations. Native American, colonial, Mexican, and American migrations shaped the region, keeping territorial boundaries porous, and racial and national identities blurred. Following the transformation of the indigenous borderlands to a capitalist borderlands, the chapter traces the seismic demographic shift that drove the region’s rapid industrialization; as the borderlands connected into national, transnational, and global circuits of migration, and oceanic lines fed back into railway connections, white, black, Mexican, and Chinese immigrants descended on the border from all directions. Focusing on the multiple boundaries that intersected at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border – namely, the international boundary as well as the limits of Jim Crow that ended where Texas met New Mexico – this chapter shows how and why the late 19th century borderlands looked so promising for these diverse groups. It begins to develop a transborder framework for understanding immigration, emphasizing how the narrowing of economic opportunities, political rights, and social freedoms in both the United States and Mexico contributed to such diverse men and women coming together in the borderlands.

Epilogue

In November 1993, the editors of Time magazine devoted an entire issue to the dramatic transformations in American society following the 1965 passage of the Hart-Cellar Act, which had finally abolished the national origin quotas introduced in the 1920s and opened the way for increased immigration from Asia and Latin America. Turning their attention to what they dubbed as “America’s Immigrant Challenge,” the contributors to the issue responded to the visible changes in “the very complexion of the country, the endless and fascinating profusion of peoples, cultures, languages and attitudes that make up the great national pool … constantly fed by new streams of immigrants.”...

“Razas no gratas” and the Color Bar at the Border

This chapter examines the hardening of the border during the 1920s and 1930s, and the more expansive racially restrictive immigration regimes that developed from both sides of the border. As the United States shifted its focus from excluding Chinese immigrants to targeting Mexicans, Mexico enacted its own set of immigration policies to marginalize and bar Chinese and African-American movement to Mexico. Using NAACP papers, government correspondence, and immigration records from both U.S. and Mexican archives, this chapter provides a fresh perspective on the experiences of African Americans in Texas who felt the double blow of exclusion at the U.S.-Mexico border: the exclusions of Jim Crow and Mexico’s indigenismo. Providing a more integrated understanding of Chinese, black, and Mexican experiences at the border, the chapter ultimately emphasizes the shared venture between the Mexican and U.S. nation-states in controlling race, immigration, and the nation during the first half of the twentieth century. As racial ideologies and immigration policies migrated across national boundaries, it became more difficult for racialized bodies to do the same. And not only was their multiracial presence physically marginalized within the landscape of the borderlands, they were removed altogether from the nation’s identity and history.

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.”...

A Promiscuous Crowd

Focusing on the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border, this chapter demonstrates how Chinese, Mexicans, and African Americans blurred color lines to create dynamic social environments as well as new legal dilemmas in the borderlands. Drawing upon local newspapers, legal documents, city records, maps, and census materials, the chapter illuminates the various freedoms that non-white people struggled to realize together – particularly in work, public spaces, homes, and marriages. But the chapter also shows how the realities of multiracial life in the borderlands encountered the pressures of an escalating ideology of racial purity and segregation in the United States, culminating in the migration of black-Mexican families across the border into Mexico. Such de-facto expulsions would be a preview of the massive legal expulsions that were yet to come.

Forged in Revolution

This chapter analyzes the multiracial intersections of the Mexican Revolution, using the case of Pershing’s Expedition into Mexico in 1916 1917 to explore the escalating importance that both states attached to race, immigration, and citizenship in the borderlands. South of the border, military service clarified the citizenship status of African Americans while Mexicans and Chinese immigrants found themselves caught in a dangerous space between two states – one state (Mexico) that could not sufficiently protect them from revolutionary violence and another (the United States) that remained uncertain about whether to protect them at all. As U.S. immigration officials tightened the border against thousands of men, women, and children fleeing for their safety and security, the power of the U.S. state became more clearly visible in the borderlands. This chapter analyzes how people caught between revolution and exclusion renegotiated their relationship with the state. In desperate straits, Mexican immigrants reconstructed their identities from political refugees to desirable laborers, while Chinese immigrants re-branded themselves as deserving refugees rather than excludable laborers. The chapter thus elaborates the ways in which immigrants and officials refined the distinctions between the diverse groups in the borderlands.