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"This collection marks an important intervention in the history and historiography of 'race, ' ethnicity, immigration, and citizenship in the United States. The essays offer important and provocative rationales for thinking through these complex issues from a broader comparative and critical perspective."--David G. Gutierrez, author of "Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity"

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Racial TRANSFORMATIONS

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Latino and Asian Racial Formations at the Frontiers of U.S. Nationalism Nicholas De Genova..........................................................................11. Colonial Vision, Racial Visibility: Racializations in Puerto Rico and the Philippines during the Initial Period of U.S. Colonization Gary Y. Okihiro...........................232. Inverting Racial Logic: How Public Health Discourse and Standards Racialized the Meanings of Japanese and Mexican in Los Angeles, 1910-1924 Natalia Molina.....................403. Getting the Measure of Tomorrow: Chinese and Chicano Americas under the Racial Gaze, 1934-1935 and 1942-1944 Victor Jew........................................................624. The Limits of Interracial Coalitions: Mndez v. Westminster Reexamined Toni Robinson and Greg Robinson.........................................................................935. The Political Significance of Race: Asian American and Latino Redistricting Debates in California and New York Leland T. Saito..................................................1206. Joining the State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Junot Daz and Chang-rae Lee Andrea Levine.....................................................................................1477. The Passion: The Betrayals of Elin Gonzlez and Wen Ho Lee Crystal Parikh.....................................................................................................170Bibliography.......................................................................................................................................................................209Contributors.......................................................................................................................................................................221Index..............................................................................................................................................................................223

Chapter One

Racializations in Puerto Rico and the Philippines during the Initial Period of U.S. Colonization

Gary Y. Okihiro

Racialization changes over space and time and the differential locations of subjectivities, of self and other. Racialization, thus, is clearly a historical process of social construction. Both Puerto Ricans and Filipina/os were racialized differently under the successive colonial regimes of Spain and the United States, even as Filipina/os and Puerto Ricans held distinctive racialized ideas of themselves during those historical periods. Those variations emanated from, among other things, the ethnic, class, and gender positions of Puerto Ricans and Filipina/os and the subject positions of business, military, government, and intellectual Spanish and U.S. elites.

In this essay, I survey the racializations (and their apparent absence and transparent presence) among the colonizers of the colonized during the first few years of the U.S. occupations of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. I do not consider the racializations that occurred during the war of conquest, which might suggest differential treatments of the U.S. enemy. In Puerto Rico, the United States fought a nineteen-day campaign-which some called a "picnic"-in which three Americans died and the troops were allegedly bombarded with cigars and bananas, whereas, in the Philippines, the United States waged a bloody four-year war of attrition that involved 200,000 U.S. troops and resulted in 4,300 American and more than 50,000 Filipina/o deaths.

What seems obvious from this review is the comparative lack of interest on the part of the U.S. colonizers in Puerto Rico's peoples as contrasted with their prodigious fascination with the peoples of the Philippines. Perhaps Sidney Mintz's insight about anthropology's neglect of Caribbean peoples generally and globally is operative here in the particular case of Puerto Rico. Mintz astutely observed anthropology's valuation of the native and the exotic and its consequent neglect of the migrant and the familiar. The indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, perceived as vanished, and their cultures, seen as Westernized and as transplantations, have, thus, carried scant cachet within the discipline. Similarly, it seems, Puerto Ricans in the United States have been simultaneously racialized as a visible other and rendered invisible within the U.S. social formation, as pointed out by the linguist Bonnie Urciuoli. "For decades," writes Urciuoli, "research, media, and public entertainment have either ignored Puerto Ricans or portrayed them as a social problem," despite the fact that they have lived in U.S. cities since at least the 1890s. Another part of that erasure has been the divergent racialization of darker-skinned Puerto Ricans as blacks and lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans as whites within the dominant U.S. binary of color.

Contexts of Empire

Those narratives of peoples, women, and workers of the new possessions carried special significance for many whites in the United States. The late nineteenth century, the years of this discussion, was a troubling period in U.S. history. The 1890 U.S. Census declared an end to the frontier, the manifest outlet for continental expansion and mythical ground for democracy and rugged individualism. Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian of the frontier, summed up the implication of the Census report. "This, then, is the real situation: a people composed of heterogeneous materials, with diverse and conflicting ideals and social interests, having passed from the task of filling up the vacant spaces of the continent, is now thrown back upon itself, and is seeking an equilibrium," he wrote in 1896. "The diverse elements are being fused into national unity. The forces of reorganization are turbulent and the nation seems like a witch's kettle."

Among those "diverse elements" were the 25 million immigrants, or more than four times the total of the previous fifty years, who streamed to the eastern and western shores of the United States between 1865 and 1915 and who originated, not from familiar Britain or Northern Europe, but from Italy, Greece, Poland, and Russia in the Northeast and from China, Japan, Korea, India, and the Philippines in the West. They flocked to the U.S. Northeast and West, where captains of industry, in cities and fields, accumulated fortunes by monopolizing land, resources, and capital. Racial, ethnic, and class conflicts boiled and bubbled in this "witch's kettle." In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act because, in the framers' words, "the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof." In 1886, police killed four strikers in Chicago, and the next day a bomb killed seven police officers and injured sixty-seven other people. The Haymarket Square bombing came to symbolize to many Americans the alien menace posed by Southern and Eastern Europeans, immigrants, radicals, and anarchists. "These people are not American," a Chicago newspaper reported of the Haymarket strikers, "but the very scum and offal of Europe."

In a letter dated 14 May 1892, the editor and writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich...