Property relations: alien land laws and the racial formation of Filipinos as aliens ineligible to citizenship

ABSTRACT

Because Filipino Americans are racially categorized as Asians today, many scholars presume that they were automatically included within the provisions of the alien land laws at the time of their legislation. The following article suggests that the racial status of Filipino Americans, during this early period, was much more ambiguous. Instead, most Americans perceived Filipinos in relation to Native and African-Americans. The Alien Land Laws (1913–1952) were, together with anti-miscegenation laws and the Tydings-McDuffie Act, a regime of legal policies that eventually transformed Filipinos into Asians by 1934. Meanwhile, their racial ambiguity provided early Filipino immigrants with significant opportunities to challenge their exclusion in American society, and especially the alien land laws.

KEYWORDS:

• Filipino Americans
• racial formation
• African-Americans
• alien land laws
• citizenship

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Michael Omi. Much of the foundation of this article was formed while assisting him with his course on Asian American Politics at U.C. Berkeley. Also, I am particularly grateful for the feedback that I received from Rick Baldoz on an earlier draft, as well as the insights from my colleagues Anantha Sudhakar, Christen Sasaki, and Grace J. Yoo on later iterations of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Several scholars were quick to suggest that the land exclusion immediately pertained to Filipinos. See for instance Chan (1991, 39), Espiritu (2003, 13); and España-Maram (2006, 41). Baldoz (2013, 102–106) provides a more nuanced discussion on the exclusion of land ownership and its impact on Filipino laborers in Washington State as an example of the blurred legal status of Filipinos in the USA.

2. Other states included Arizona (1917); Washington, Texas, and Louisiana (1921); New Mexico (1922); Idaho, Montana, and Oregon (1923); and Kansas (1925). Together with California, these states contained about 90% of the Japanese American population in the continental USA by 1920. During World War II, five states, including Arkansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Utah, and Wyoming, also passed similar land statutes.

3. Ocampo (2016), for example, suggests that both the historical legacy of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines and contemporary racial formation in US society pulls many Filipino Americans away from asserting a panethnic racial identity that might align them with other Asians and instead feel more comfortable identifying with Latinos in the USA.

4. Referred to as the Insular Cases (1901–1914), this series of US Supreme Court opinions determined the citizenship status for subjects inhabiting the colonial territories of the USA. The name is in reference to the ‘insular' territories acquired after the Spanish-American War, including the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.

5. Kramer (2006) argues that once citizens of the incorporated territories became legally codified as US Nationals, denying them full-citizenship status, the US federal government could not be found guilty of violating international jurisdiction. While at the same time, it could maintain jurisdiction over both its new territories since colonial subjects had legally become ‘possessions' or ‘wards’.

6. Omi and Winant's (1994, 55–56) foundational concept of racial formation describes the manner in which racial projects structure societies and everyday experiences.

7. See Baldoz (2013) for an in-depth analysis of the process through which this transformation occurred.

8. Tyner (1999) specifically examines the manner in which eugenics discourse found its way into state and federal debates contesting the effect of Filipino immigration on miscegenation and labour competition in the USA.

9. Palumbo-Liu (1999, 36) credits the sociologist E. A. Ross for coining the phrase in 1911, when the prolific eugenicist claimed that the ‘incredible recuperative powers of the Chinese, who had “a special race vitality”' was an explanation for their remarkable ability to succeed with little means in the USA. The Chinese, according to Ross, possessed a ‘special resistance to infection and tolerance of unwholesome conditions of living’.

10. Others scholars along with Lowe (1996), who detail the racialization of Asian Americans as foreigners both historically and in the contemporary period, include Tuan (1998) and Wu (2003).

11. Both Biolsi (2004) and Wagoner (1998) describe how the further expansion westward required a policy of assimilation that attempted to mold Native Americans into more ‘civilized' ways of life and thus become citizen-subjects. The Dawes Act of 1887 would displace Native Americans onto reservations and free-up land for the speculation and appropriation by Anglo-settlers, while simultaneously, stripping Native Americans of their hunting and fishing customs and other cultural underpinnings viewed as uncivilized by white culture. Although the Act provided certain citizenship rights, Native Americans continued to be perceived, legally, as wards of the federal government since the federal government continued to maintain strict control over every aspect of Native American life.

12. Judges in both the Terrace and Porterfield cases were careful to emphasize that the land laws did not employ racial criteria to discriminate against Asians since the use of explicit racial language would have been unconstitutional. Lawmakers purposefully kept themselves from framing the alien land laws within the language of race in order to protect themselves from charges of racial discrimination. However, it was and continues to be legal to discriminate individuals on the basis of their non-citizen or alien status.

13. The creation of Jim Crow laws was a direct result of attempts to regulate the bodies and activities of black men and women and reorder the American South after Reconstruction. See Gilmore (1996) for a historical analysis of Jim Crow laws and the emergence of southern progressivism and political activism amongst African-American women and white women.

14. In 1935, Cannery Workers’ and Farmers’ Labor Union Local 18257 successfully lobbied to keep the bill from reaching a vote. Protestors argued that the bill violated the principles of the USA. Constitution arguing that, ‘to dictate to whom one should marry or not marry is obviously detrimental to our right' (Philippine American Chronicle, 1935).

15. Alfafara vs. Fross, 26 Cal2d. 358. See also Mabalon (2013, 245) to contextualize Alfafara's case within his role as a leader in San Francisco's Filipino community.

16. De Cano et al. vs. State of Washington, 110 P.2d 627, 631 (Wash. 1941). DeCano, a Filipino community leader who emigrated to Seattle, Washington, is discussed in more depth in both Nomura (1986) and Baldoz (2013, 109–111).