THE “FUTURE IMMENSE": RACE AND IMMIGRATION IN THE MULTIRACIAL U.S.-MEXICO BORDERLANDS, 1880-1936 JULIAN LIM, Ph.D. CORNELL UNIVERSITY 2013 This study examines the multiple meanings of citizenship and belonging that emerged in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from 1880 to 1936. The project focuses on El Paso, Texas, the region’s leading hub of economic activity and immigration during this period. Locating El Paso at the crossroads of multiple boundaries – among them the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the limits of Jim Crow, which ended where El Paso met the New Mexico Territory line – I trace the movements of Mexican, Chinese, and African-American men and women to the El Paso-Juárez region. This project presents a new study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, as diverse people crossed various borders in search of economic opportunities and freedom from popular and institutionalized racism. The project’s purpose is twofold. First, I examine the developments in immigration law and policy that transformed both the United States and Mexico during these years. Analyzing the emergence of racially restrictive immigration policies in Mexico as well as the United States, the project addresses a variety of legal, social, political, and economic changes affecting migration on both sides of the border as well as across it, including the shift from Reconstruction to Jim Crow in the United States, the modernization programs of President Porfirio Díaz and revolution in Mexico, anti-Chinese exclusion campaigns on both sides of the border, and a global economic depression. Second, I show how racialized people used national borders to renegotiate questions about their capacity for “belonging” in the United States and/or Mexico, thereby forcing redefinitions of citizenship and national identity. I argue that although the border harbored multiple perils, it also offered great promise: through it, Mexican, black, and Chinese subjects often challenged the constructions of their non-whiteness and improvised their own democracy. Integrating sources from both regional and national archives in the United States and Mexico, my project demonstrates the unique ways in which marginalized people used their cross-border mobility to blur the lines of state power and identity in the borderlands. Ultimately, however, the project demonstrates the incremental processes of immigration law-making from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and highlights the ways in which binational immigration laws merged at the border and reshaped multiracial alliances into more discrete, segregated race relations. It presents a legal and social history of how the borderlands underwent a sweeping transformation, whereby the “open borders” of the 1880s hardened into much more racially discriminating boundaries – locally, nationally, and internationally – by the 1930s. In the process, as racial ideologies migrated across national boundaries, it became more difficult for racialized bodies to do the same. And as the United States and Mexico each developed more stringent detention, deportation, and exclusion policies based on race, multiracial relations and people were not only made less visible within the national body politic, but were removed from the boundaries of national identity altogether.

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The “Future Immense”: Race And Immigration In The Multiracial U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1936

A Diplomatic History of the United States.

Gilded Age Cato: The Life of Walter Q. Gresham

An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century.

"After the ball has started rolling downhill it will be difficult to tell when it will stop."' So wrote shipping magnate R. P. Schwerin to President Theodore Roosevelt on July 13, 1905, about a decision by Chinese merchants to boycott American goods coming into China. Three weeks later, a worried Reverend J. M. W. Farnham, a prominent Presbyterian missionary in Shanghai, wrote the President that the boycott "if carried out to its logical sequence will drive out every American and subsequently every foreigner."2 To a jubilant Chinese lawyer in Shanghai, however, the boycott was the "beginning of a new era." "If we succeed in getting justice from America now," he told a reporter, "we may then boycott the nation that forces opium down our throats, and the others that grab our provinces."3

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3639528

The Chinese Boycott of 1905-1906 Reconsidered: The Role of Chinese Americans

During the summer of 1915, while President Woodrow Wilson sought an agreement with the factional chiefs to end the Mexican civil war, the U.S. State Department asked the American Red Cross to accept responsibility for relieving threatened starvation in many areas of Mexico. Well aware of desperate conditions in areas of heavy fighting, Red Cross officials agreed to offer a helping hand, but did so reluctantly because of the problem of organizing relief in areas controlled by military chiefs. Unfortunately for millions of suffering Mexicans, Red Cross relief efforts were terminated within a few months by the Constitutionalist government of the First Chief, Venustiano Carranza, because of his fear of American intervention. This study examines the Wilson administration's sincere but frustrated effort to help suffering Mexicans. Historians of Mexican-American relations during this period have concentrated on Wilson's meddling in the factional strife but have ignored American efforts to organize a humanitarian relief program.' Fighting at various points south of the border during the insurrection of Francisco Madero against President Porfirio

Helping Hand or Intervention? Red Cross Relief in Mexico, 1915

SHORTLY AFTER Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham took office in March, 1893, the Chinese minister, Tsui Kwo Yin, asked the government of the United States to accept a constitutional test of the Geary Act, the new Chinese exclusion law. Minister Tsui explained that the Chinese "Six Companies" had employed several prominent attorneys to prepare a case challenging the registration and deportation provisions of the act and asked Secretary Gresham to have Attorney General Richard Olney schedule the case with the Supreme Court sometime before it adjourned in May. The Chinese had decided to challenge these provisions on the ground that they violated the rights of Chinese residents in the United States and because the American government had ignored China's claim that congressional prohibition of Chinese immigration was a violation of the Angell Treaty of 1880.1 Rather ironically, the steps initially taken by Tsui early in 1893 eventually led not to a modification of the exclusion legislation, but to its acceptance by China in a new treaty. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 had given the Chinese the right to migrate freely to the United States, but in 1880, this right was curtailed by the Angell Treaty in order to allow the American government to "suspend" the immigration of Chinese laborers. In 1883 and 1884, Congress had passed legislation putting the so-called "exclusion" policy into effect. However, because Chinese laborers managed to enter illegally, an attempt was made to prohibit their migration

The Gresham-Yang Treaty

One of the most distinguished scholars on China has pointed out that there is no study of Sino-American relations as seen from the Chinese side. American historians, he notes, have concentrated on those Far Eastern problems of the greatest interest to Americans.' While his observation was intended as a general criticism of the historiography of Sino-American relations, it seems most appropriate when considering our handling of the diplomacy of the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations. In dealing with their diplomacy with China, historians have concentrated on the efforts to protect American treaty rights, promote American trade, maintain the Open Door, and preserve the balance of power in the Far East. As a result, China's grievances against the United States over enforcement of the "exclusion laws" and violations of the Gresham-Yang Immigration Treaty have been largely overlooked.2 Given the extensive correspondence with the Chinese legation on the enforcement of the treaty, it is difficult to understand how American historians could have ignored China's grievances. An examination of the notes, many of which were not printed in Foreign Relations, reveals that China considered the question her most important issue with the United States. The diplomatic record also reveals that Chinese Minister Wu Ting-fang cleverly

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3637705

The Abrogation of the Gresham-Yang Treaty

intervention was the disposal of hundreds of private claims that had been accumulating prior to and during the strife in both countries. In 1868 Andrew Johnson and Benito Juarez responded with a treaty calling for the adjudication of such claims by a joint arbitration commission. Unfortunately, this convention opened up a splendid opportunity for unscrupulous individuals to defraud both governments. The commission weeded out most of the fraudulent claims, but among the exceptions was the claim by La Abra Silver Mining Company against Mexico, which mushroomed into a dispute of international notoriety that lasted into the Theodore Roosevelt administration. Honor and

Fraud, Honor, and Trade: The United States-Mexico Dispute over the Claim of La Abra Company, 1875-1902

ON DECEMBER 3, 1894, Henry Cabot Lodge, the junior senator from Massachusetts, introduced a resolution asking that the state department send to the senate all the correspondence from American diplomats in China dealing with the protection of Japanese subjects. Specifically, the senator wanted to know whether, during the Sino-Japanese War, there was an understanding with the Chinese government as to the assistance that American officers might render to the Japanese who had elected to remain in China. He also wanted to know whether Chinese officials were ignoring American officers who sought to protect Japanese subjects and whether the American consul general at Shanghai had delivered two alleged Japanese spies to Chinese officials for execution.'

George E. Paulsen

Papers

Helping Hand or Intervention? Red Cross Relief in Mexico, 1915

The Gresham-Yang Treaty

The Abrogation of the Gresham-Yang Treaty

Fraud, Honor, and Trade: The United States-Mexico Dispute over the Claim of La Abra Company, 1875-1902

Secretary Gresham, Senator Lodge, and American Good Offices in China, 1894