Passion, Violence, and Asserting Honor

South Asian migration to North America has been part of a broader international movement of peoples since the 1790s. Sailors, servants, peddlers, and merchants from Madras, Bombay, and Bengal appear periodically and fleetingly in memoirs, customs registers, census records, and newspaper accounts from ports on every North American coast from Salem, Massachusetts, to New Orleans, and from Victoria, British Columbia, to Mazatlán, Mexico. In the 1890s, charismatic Hindu and Buddhist spiritual teachers and anti-imperial crusaders arrived to speak at gatherings in Boston, New York, and Chicago, the most famous being Swami Vivekananda, who addressed the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. On the cusp of a new century, turbaned Sikh royal artillerymen traveled across Canada by train from Montreal to Vancouver after participating in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in London in 1897. They encouraged other Punjabi soldiers in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore to seek labor and business opportunities in North America. In 1899, four Sikhs disembarked at San Francisco's Pacific Mail Docks, catching the attention of onlookers and a reporter, who appraised them as the "most picturesque group" of "fine-looking men." Bakkshlled (sic) Singh, who spoke English fluently, was singled out as "a marvel of physical beauty. He stands 6 foot 2 and is built in proportion." The four men planned to seek their fortunes in California before returning to their homes in Lahore.

Such worldly, cosmopolitan, adaptable South Asian travelers thrived in settings across the globe. They were seen as dashing, resourceful, and hardworking. The military self-discipline and masculine prowess of Punjabi men was widely praised. Their demeanor, dress, beliefs, and habits were depicted as exotic and curious, but rarely as threatening.

These appealing romantic perceptions of cosmopolitan men shifted rapidly in the first decade of the twentieth century, when more than 9,000 South Asian migrants arrived in Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia. Many crossed over the border to Washington and Oregon and later migrated directly to Seattle and San Francisco. Orchards and farms, railroad and road construction, and timber mills and salmon canneries employed South Asian male laborers for weeks, months, and even years at a time. Beginning in 1904, first several hundred and later a thousand or more South Asian men arrived annually on the docks in Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco. The newcomers faced concerns and fears similar to those generated in previous decades by the steady arrival of Chinese and Japanese laborers. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada and the United States, political debate and cultural narratives characterized migration from Asia as an "invasion," "subversion," and unwelcome "amalgamation" that threatened the establishment of European "civilization" in the Western territories and states. White Americans and Canadians feared labor competition, interracial marriage and sexual seduction, and disease and immorality believed to be introduced by Asian male workers. Fears of Chinese men kidnapping white women and addicting them to opium and of Japanese and Filipino men courting and seducing naïve European immigrant and other white women had simmered in political debates, fiction, and newspaper reports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The discursive frenzy around the need to protect white women and girls from various ethnic Asian men prompted miscegenation legislation throughout the West. From 1907 to 1913, the inclusion of the formerly exoticized and attractive South Asian men in this frenzy became evident as mobs drove South Asian workers out of numerous towns and cities in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. Alongside accusations of unfair labor competition with white workers, politicians and newspapers circulated stories about women and children who had been indecently harassed. The claim of defending honor dovetailed with broader assertions that the presence of South Asian men demoralized white working families.

Two encounters of interracial association graphically illustrate the tension between attraction and fear that percolated in rumors that were used to justify driving-out campaigns and riots in Pacific Northwest and Northern California towns. Darrah Singh was shot dead on the stairway of the Spokane Rooming House in Vancouver on October 22, 1907. Police arrested his drinking partner, English-immigrant Edward Bowen, running down Cordova Street minutes after shots rang out. Six years later, on October 4, 1913, on the shoreline south of Richmond, California, dockworkers found Rosa Domingo's battered nude body anchored by weights at the end of a long wharf. Her Portuguese immigrant family accused Said Ali Khan, who lived nearby and had courted Rosa, of her murder. His disappearance set off a statewide manhunt.

Based on newspaper accounts, the murders of Darrah Singh and Rosa Domingo were interpreted as crimes of passion. They book-ended a volatile seven-year period of driving-out campaigns and rising political agitation for immigration restriction and the removal of South Asians in western North America. These specific and sensational cases served as morality tales distributed to white audiences of the perils of stranger intimacy and interracial contact that incited passion and deadly violence. Both the possibility and the fear of interracial associations became freighted with dangerous and harmful consequences, also articulated in labor polemics, political oratory, and legal appeals. The presence of South Asian migrant men and their contact with white Americans and European immigrants elicited fascination, attraction, interest, and anxiety. Indexing both personal harm and social danger, the murders seemed to presage the potential disintegration of society.

Mob violence targeted South Asian workers. The breakdown in law and social order unleashed monstrous behavior. White men destroyed bunkhouses, stole possessions, beat South Asian men, and drove them out of town. The mob's extremes of cruelty and humiliation could not readily be rationalized and required allegations of depravity that blamed victims and absolved the rioters. Mob violence was not judged on the basis of individual crimes even when there were arrests for disorderly conduct. These arrests were rarely prosecuted, and the prosecutorial and policing system, so disturbed by the breakdown of law and order, readily forgave and forgot the violent transgressions. Vigilantes slipped into a convenient anonymity, and the victims of violent attacks were forced to...