“Paper More Precious Than Blood”: Chinese Exclusion Era Identity Documentation Processes and Racialization of Identity Data

ABSTRACT

This project interrogates the United States’ national fixation on the answer to the question: Who are you? In this article, it is posed that identity documentation practices arising out of the Chinese Exclusion Act era cast identity as an empirical and immutable phenomenon, specifically in response to the racialization of American-born Chinese settlers as duplicitous, through the mechanisms that information is collected, the actual information itself, and the cross-references or connections created between cases. Through tracing this lineage, racialized identification data is identified and theorized as part of hegemonic data regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese Exclusion Act
• data
• identity documents
• critical data studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have included “so-called” in my reference to the nation-state of the United States to acknowledge that it exists on the ancestral and unceded territories of many Indigenous peoples who are the traditional stewards of the lands that form Turtle Island (what is known today as North and Central America) and to whom the land must be returned. See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012), https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.

2. Fae Myenne Ng, Bone (New York: Hachette Books, 1993), 9.

3. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, San Francisco District Office, “Return Certificate Application – Tsung, Moy Dip 12,017/528” (1913), Return Certificate Application Case Files of Chinese Departing, 12/14/1912–12/3/1943, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives at San Francisco (RW-SB), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/176910940#.YrNUOXsUhEk.link.

4. Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 7.

5. Ibid., 9.

6. Ibid., 10.

7. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 67.

8. Ibid., 70.

9. Ibid., 75.

10. Ibid.

11. Beth Lew-Williams, “Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented,” Modern American History 4, no. 2 (2021): 115, https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2021.9.

12. Robertson, The Passport in America, 172.

13. Ibid., 173.

14. Ibid., 175.

15. Ibid., 176.

16. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (20^th Anniversary Edition): Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 29.

17. Lew-Williams, “Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants,” 115.

18. Ibid., 117.

19. Department of Justice, “Return Certificate Application – Tsung, Moy Dip 12017/528”

20. Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2009), 4.

21. Ibid., 4.

22. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, San Francisco District Office, “Return Certificate Application – Kee, Sam Hoe 12017/3031” (1913), Return Certificate Application Case Files of Chinese Departing, 12/14/1912–12/3/1943, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives at San Francisco (RW-SB), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/176910955#.Ysh2U__uGtA.link.

23. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, San Francisco District Office, “Return Certificate Application Case File of Chinese Departing – Bruce Lee (12017/53752)” (March 5, 1941), Return Certificate Application Case Files of Chinese Departing, 12/14/1912–12/3/1943, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives at San Francisco (RW-SB), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/5720262#.YsXavyrTpiM.link; Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, San Francisco District Office, “Return Certificate Application – Louie Wing (12017/39653)” (July 11, 1930), Return Certificate Application Case Files of Chinese Departing, 12/14/1912–12/3/1943, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives at San Francisco (RW-SB), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/177145007#.YtYAtLt5i9k.link.

24. Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America, 31.

25. Department of Justice, “Return Certificate Application Case File of Chinese Departing – Bruce Lee (12017/53752)”

26. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, San Francisco District Office, “Return Certificate Application – So Ho One Pang (12017/10738)” (April 1918), Return Certificate Application Case Files of Chinese Departing, 12/14/1912–12/3/1943, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives at San Francisco (RW-SB), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/177105093#.YtX9bG3kq1M.link.

27. Ibid.

28. Department of Justice, “Return Certificate Application – Tsung, Moy Dip 12017/528”

29. Ibid.

30. Department of Justice,“Return Certificate Application – Kee, Sam Hoe 12017/3031”

31. Ibid., emphasis added.

32. Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 12.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 163.

35. Adam Gaudry, “Insurgent Research,” Wicazo Sa Review 26, no. 1 (2011): 114, https://doi.org/10.5749/wicazosareview.26.1.0113.

36. Ibid., 115–16.

37. Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Revised and expanded ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 74.

38. Ibid., 76.

39. Nathan Jurgenson, “View From Nowhere,” The New Inquiry (blog), October 9, 2014, https://thenewinquiry.com/view-from-nowhere/.

40. Linda Tuhiwai Smith 1950-, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 44, https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/999841792502121.

41. Jurgenson, “View From Nowhere.”

42. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 2.

43. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 590.

46. Cassius Adair, “Licensing Citizenship: Anti-Blackness, Identification Documents, and Transgender Studies,” American Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2019): 589.

47. Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” in Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, PMLR, 2018), 2, https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of California, Los Angeles.

Notes on contributors

Kai Nham

Kai Nham (he/they) is a queer and trans Chinese-Vietnamese son of a refugee from Vietnam and immigrant from Hong Kong and is deeply interested and committed to how our communities can imagine and build new worlds for ourselves. His research interests include how information infrastructures help build and maintain trans of color care webs, as well as the development of grassroots and community-based interventions and technologies to resist violence and build new futures.