Implicit in Taney’s logic was that the United States should not hold territories unless they would eventually become states.113 From this vantage point, the western territories all were temporary territories: American citizens residing there might for a while be only federal citizens, but once the territory achieved statehood, they would hold both state and federal citizenship. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexicans in the federal territories were similarly situated to white settler citizens in that they held federal but not state citizenship (though the settler citizens had formerly held state citizenship).114 The case arguably enhanced the rights of Mexican Americans living in federal territories. That may not at all have been the Court’s goal. But Taney was so determined to invalidate the Missouri Compromise that he was willing to open the door to an expansion of the rights of the newly incorporated Mexican Americans—or at least he did not expressly reject the implication.
Racial stratification in the nineteenth century was closely linked to questions of citizenship and inclusion in the polity.115 Membership in non-white racial groups corresponded to degrees of exclusion from citizenship (understood as having both state and federal elements), the ability to become a naturalized citizen, and enfranchisement for men of color. Moreover, these more strictly legal dimensions of citizenship corresponded to racial groups’ more general level of inclusion and belonging in American society.116 For instance, over the course of the nineteenth century, white Euro-American men greatly improved their citizenship position with the lifting of property and other (nonracial) restrictions on the franchise. By the end of the century, white men and women who immigrated from Europe had full access to American naturalization and held (or could hold) both state and federal citizenship, and white men generally held federal and state political rights without regard to property ownership.117 Each non-white racial group faced a different mix of formal and informal barriers to equality.
A mixed picture emerged for African Americans, as their fortunes shifted greatly over the course of the half century before 1900. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Scott v. Sandford, neither free nor enslaved blacks possessed federal citizenship, which meant virtual exclusion from the American polity. Even in the northern states where slavery was banned, blacks did not hold equal civil rights. According to political scientist Rogers Smith, in most northern states, blacks possessed legal rights (such as the rights to property, to liberty, and to sue in court), but they did not have full political rights (such as voting and running for office).118 With the enactment of the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution, however, African Americans received full federal citizenship and African American men received the right to vote. And, in 1870, Congress amended the naturalization laws to allow immigrants of African descent to become American citizens.119 But with the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, the limits on African Americans’ inclusion in American society reappeared in a more familiar form.120 The Court’s distinction between political rights and social rights legitimated state and local efforts to further white supremacy by segregating blacks from whites in all facets of American life. (We will return to this case later in this chapter.) By the turn of the century, despite the Civil War and the amendments to the Constitution, black racial status reflected the paradigmatic instance of racial inferiority and subordination in the United States.
American Indians’ racial status can be understood as more ambiguous. Indians certainly were viewed as non-white and as racially inferior.121 Moreover, status as a member of an Indian tribe was, over the course of the nineteenth century, an impediment to U.S. citizenship.122 Racial status as Indian, tribal membership status, as well as local contexts interacted to determine the extent to which Indians, individually or as part of particular tribes, participated as state citizens.123 The Chinese faced different roadblocks to citizenship than either blacks or Indians. Actively recruited from thousands of miles away to be laborers, they could not become citizens no matter how long they had lived in the United States. After Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers were barred from entering the United States.124 The Chinese were viewed as racial others and were largely excluded from political rights and from even being part of society.125
Compared to these groups, the citizenship status of Mexican Americans might well have been enviable. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexicans held American citizenship—more legalistic than real, second-class yet still desirable citizenship. Mexicans gained this “collective naturalization” at a time in American history when only white immigrants could naturalize. As a result, the treaty’s citizenship provisions can be read as conferring white legal status on Mexicans. In California and Texas, some Mexican American men possessed state and federal citizenship and participated as fully enfranchised members of the polity. But state lawmakers in both states also made sure that not all Mexican American men did. Whiteness was defined locally, by law and custom. Frequently, local practices and institutions excluded Mexican Americans from full rights. This likely fell more harshly on the majority of Mexican Americans who were predominantly indigenous and of lower economic status.
For Mexicans in New Mexico, who substantially outnumbered Euro-Americans, the mechanisms blocking full inclusion varied. New Mexico’s Mexican Americans were excluded from full rights via the limitations of federal citizenship and the subordinate status of federal territories as compared to states. Nonetheless, Mexican American men in New Mexico, and some in California and Texas, participated on an equal footing with Euro-American men in terms of formal political rights. Moreover, the rights of Mexican Americans as federal citizens living in a federal territory were arguably strengthened by Scott v. Sandford, the same Supreme Court case that so unequivocally excluded both free and enslaved blacks from the polity. The logic of the Court’s ruling in that case was to enlarge the scope of citizenship rights of nonblacks living in the federal territories. The unintended consequence was that the rights of Mexican American citizens in the federal territories also were expanded. This meaning of the Dred Scott case, however, was never tested in the legal system since there was so little time between the Court’s decision and the Civil War.
Race, Law, and Contrasting “One-Drop” Rules
As legal scholar Ian Haney López has noted, one of the first laws passed by Congress after it ratified the Constitution was to limit naturalization to “free white persons,” meaning that only white immigrants to the United States could become citizens.126 In the wake of the Civil War, amid the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, Congress amended the law to allow white persons as well as “persons of African nativity or African descent” to become American citizens.127 In 1848, more than 115,000 Mexicans were collectively naturalized under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. We have explored the resulting paradox—that the collective grant of American citizenship in some senses conferred legal whiteness on Mexicans as a group with a distinctly non-white history. Now we turn our attention to the fates of Mexicans who sought U.S. naturalization after 1848. Were Mexicans to be allowed to become American citizens, given that naturalization was limited to whites until 1870 and after that to whites and blacks only?
Two caveats are in order. First, the two-thousand-plus-mile U.S.–Mexico border was more symbolic than real in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.128 Substantial numbers of Mexican nationals crossed the porous border without any difficulty whatsoever, as did Americans entering Mexico.129 Historian George Sánchez has described the social construction of the border, arguing that procedures to regulate Mexican immigration did not become institutionalized until the 1940s.130 Prior to that time, Mexicans entered the United States freely and blended into Mexican American communities, in many cases without perceiving formal naturalization as necessary or desirable.
Second, naturalization occurred at the local level and very rarely resulted in the kinds of court records studied by legal scholars (typically, appellate decisions).131 As a result, we c
annot with confidence know how Mexicans who sought naturalization fared in these various jurisdictions. We do know that, at least in particular contexts, the federal law limiting naturalization to blacks and whites often made little difference. In my research on nineteenth-century New Mexico courts, for example, I routinely came across uncontroversial instances of the court’s naturalization of Mexican nationals as American citizens. But we cannot extrapolate from New Mexico to other parts of the country; in other places, formal racial restrictions likely were used to prevent certain classes of Mexicans from becoming U.S. citizens.
The only precedent-setting legal case involving a Mexican seeking American naturalization is In re Rodriguez, decided by a federal judge in Texas in 1897. The essential logic of Rodriguez was that Mexicans were white enough, despite not being truly white. The case emphasized the prior collective naturalization of Mexican citizens in 1848 as setting the precedent for finding that Mexicans are white persons, given that the law then limited naturalization to white persons. But the social context probably was more important in determining the outcome of the case. Largely because of the exclusion of Chinese workers from the American labor market beginning in 1882, the United States, and especially certain industries in the Southwest and West, faced a labor shortage.132 For more than two decades, Japanese immigrants filled this void, but when that flow was cut off in 1907, Mexican immigrants were recruited to replace them.133 In the early decades of the twentieth century, Mexican immigrants became the workforce of choice for a wide range of agricultural and industrial sectors of the U.S. economy.134
Judge Thomas Sheldon Maxey began his opinion in Rodriguez by acknowledging “the delicacy and gravity of the question” presented, a candid admission about the delicate racial issue presented in the case and its likely broader impact.135 We can only speculate as to how Maxey’s own experience, as a native of Mississippi and veteran of the Confederate Army, may have influenced his estimation of the importance of the case or his resolution of it.136 His requests for additional briefing may indicate that he was disturbed by the degree to which local politicians and the press had inserted themselves into the case. According to historian Arnoldo De León, Euro-American politicians in San Antonio openly sought it out as a “test case,” hoping they could block any widespread Mexican naturalization in order to stem the rising numbers of Mexican American voters.137 In any event, Maxey ruled in Rodríguez’s favor, against the interests of the Euro-Americans seeking to have Mexicans declared unfit for naturalization because they were not white.
Rodríguez had lived in San Antonio, Texas, for ten years prior to his application for citizenship; the court records do not indicate where in Mexico he was born. According to Judge Maxey, Rodríguez was illiterate in English (we do not know whether he was literate in Spanish);138 the record does not say, but it seems that Rodríguez testified in English. Maxey described Rodríguez as “lamentably ignorant” and as “a very good man, peaceable and industrious, of good moral character, and law abiding.”139 Rodríguez’s racial phenotype and ancestry are discussed in some detail in the case. Rodríguez testified that he was a “pure-blooded Mexican,” which carries with it great irony given the mestizo racial character of the Mexican people as part Spanish, African, and indigenous.140 Maxey interpreted Rodríguez’s statement to mean he did not have ancestral “relation to the Aztecs or original races of Mexico.”141 Yet Maxey and other Euro-Americans present in court viewed him as “looking Mexican,” meaning having dark skin and Indian features.142
The opinion suggests that Maxey was quite perplexed with the case. He acknowledged, on the one hand, that “if the strict scientific classification of the anthropologist should be adopted, he would probably not be classed as white. It is certain he is not an African, or a person of African descent.”143 But he rejected the idea that social-scientific views of race were the appropriate measure.144 He similarly rejected the idea that Mexicans were non-white because they were racially similar to American Indians, saying forcefully that “the dissimilarity [between Mexicans and American Indians] is so pronounced.”145 Instead, Maxey’s strategy ultimately was to emphasize the laws that gave Mexicans political rights, suggesting that these laws had earlier conferred white status on Mexicans.146 Maxey suggested that his choice to treat Mexicans as “white” for purposes of the naturalization law was natural and legally inevitable.147 But he reached this conclusion by ignoring law and custom that indicated, with at least equal force, that Mexicans were anything but white.
Consider two of the laws upon which Maxey relied—the 1836 constitution of the Republic of Texas and the 1845 Texas state constitution. The 1836 document conferred citizenship on all men except “Africans and their descendants” and “Indians,” thereby including Mexicans by default.148 When Congress voted to annex Texas as a state in 1845, it incorporated the former Mexican citizens who were at that time citizens of Texas. Both instances elide the vigorous, ongoing debate at the time about Mexicans’ racial status. For example, in the context of the implementation of these provisions, some Mexicans were deemed not white enough—or too Indian and/or too black—to become Texas citizens.149 Similarly, while the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo did not itself contain racial restrictions, racial prerequisites were included in the constitutions of several states carved from the Mexican Cession lands, as well as in the federal legislation creating the New Mexico Territory.150
Rodriguez is perhaps surprising in that, as historian Mae Ngai puts it, “Mexicans were thus deemed to be white for purposes of naturalization, an unintended consequence of conquest.”151 The case becomes less startling if one pays close attention to the larger forces swirling around immigration—the cutting off of Chinese immigration in 1882 and Japanese immigration in 1907, and the reform of immigration law that followed in later decades. The exclusion of Chinese and Japanese laborers created a labor shortage that Mexicans were filling at the time Rodriguez was decided. Euro-American elites were divided on how to confront this new reality. No doubt influenced by the racism and xenophobia that had driven out Asians, some wanted to prevent Mexicans from voting and in any sense becoming Mexican American (like the San Antonio politicians who objected to Rodríguez’s naturalization application). Others wanted the United States to remain attractive for Mexican workers.
In 1917, Congress passed a major immigration bill that consolidated the anti-Chinese efforts into a virtual ban on immigration from any Asian country (creating the so-called Asiatic barred zone).152 In the same law, Congress created the first exception for temporary Mexican workers—sojourners who would be allowed into the United States as contract laborers for a limited period of time. Actively recruited by employers and U.S. government agents, more than four hundred thousand Mexicans entered the United States in this fashion to work in the 1920s.153 For these workers, naturalization was not an option; the United States invited them only as temporary workers and did not give them the choice to become permanent citizens. If the 1917 immigration law permitted some Mexicans the opportunity for short-term economic improvement, it also constituted a huge exception to the naturalization opportunities created by Rodriguez.154
We have explored the significant wedge that whiteness constituted between Mexican Americans and Pueblo Indians. By allowing Mexican Americans legal whiteness while denying it to Pueblo Indians, American colonizers strengthened their position and disrupted a potential alliance between two native groups. In the larger American racial order, what effect did granting Mexicans legal whiteness—in cases like Rodriguez—have on African Americans and on Mexican/black relations? The formal “white-enough-to-naturalize” status afforded by Rodriguez encouraged many Mexican Americans to further distance themselves from blacks and other non-white groups. In this context, any group or person seeking equality appreciated the extent to which it paid to be perceived as white (or white enough) under the law. For many Mexican Americans, that meant distinguishing themselves from blacks, but also from Indians, the Chinese, and the Japanese, depending on the region.
In this way, New Mexico’s racial order came to influence the evolving national racial order.
Indeed, by the turn of the century, we can perceive mutually reinforcing racial logics involving blacks and Mexican Americans. For blacks, Plessy heralded the onset of the entrenchment of the one-drop rule: one drop of African ancestry was sufficient to confer black status, and black status signified a host of legal and social disabilities. For Mexican Americans, a kind of reverse one-drop rule was in play: one drop of European ancestry (Spanish in this case) was sufficient to confer some modicum of white status, and thus a host of corresponding legal rights.155 The silence in American public discourse about the reverse one-drop rule as it governed Mexican Americans is significant. To talk openly about the way the one-drop rule operated for Mexicans would have exposed the tensions and contradictions in the racial order. In this respect, collective silence about the reverse one-drop rule for Mexicans helped perpetuate the subordination of blacks, even as it promoted Mexican Americans’ liminal status as “off-white.”
Another result of this dynamic was to view American race relations as involving white-over-black subordination, to the exclusion of the subordination by whites of other non-white groups. This allowed for the more total subordination of blacks. Intermediate racial groups like Mexican Americans were bought off with honorary white status and so became complicit in policing the one-drop rule for African Americans. Finally, Mexican access to the white category promised an easier path into legal whiteness for other groups. If Mexicans had been admitted, how long could whiteness be foreclosed to groups like the Irish, Italians, and Jews?156
When, instead of ignoring it, we examine closely the reverse one-drop rule, the American racial system seems far more fluid and malleable than typically portrayed. Instead of revealing a racial regime consisting of rigid categories (such as the one-drop rule operating to define blackness), we begin to see the contours of an American racial system in which racial mobility is possible—a kind of “passing” at the group level. Identifying Mexicans’ trajectory as off-white allows us to see with more clarity the movement of other off-white groups into the white category in the early and middle twentieth century, rather than continue to obscure these patterns under the “ethnic” or “immigrant” rubric. A common rhetorical move has been to characterize dynamics involving African Americans as “racial” and those involving Mexican Americans as “ethnic” (or as “immigrant”). Yet the Mexican American case tells us a great deal about the American racial order. Moreover, it challenges us to stop uncritically reproducing the standard account of race in the United States, which without disruption furthers white supremacy.
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