Mixed Race Studies

Are You Ready for the Census?

Sacramento Daily Union
Volume 19, Number 2862 (1860-05-29)
page 1, column 4
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

On the first of June, Friday next, the various Deputy Marshals in the different portions of the State will commence their labors in taking the census of the United States, which mast be completed by the first of November.   The Marshals are required by the Act of Congress to separate their districts into subdivisions containing not over 21,000 persons, unless inconvenient boundaries are made by so doing. Each Assistant must make a personal visit to each dwelling house and each family in his subdivision, make monthly returns to the U.S. Marshal, and within one month after the time specified for the completion of the enumeration, furnish the census returns to the County Clerk. For the purpose of giving information to the public, we publish the following list of questions which it will be necessary to answer. This list can be cut out and the answers prepared in anticipation of the call of the taker:

The age of each, sex and color, whether white, black or mulatto.

Profession, occupation or trade of each male person over fifteen years of age.

Value of real estate owned.

Place of birth, naming the state, Territory or country.

Married within the year.

Attend school within the year.

Persons over twenty years of age who cannot read or write.

Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane or idiotic, pauper or convict.

Name of owner, agent or manager of the farm.

Number of improved acres.

Number of unimproved acres.

Cash value of farm.

Value of farming implements and machinery.

Live stock on hand June 1st, 1860, viz.: Number of horses, mules and asses, working oxen milch cows and other cattle, swine and sheep.

Value of live stock.

Value of animal slaughtered during the year.

Produce during the year ending June 1st, 1860, viz: Number bushels wheat, rye, Indian corn, oats, beans and peas, buckwheat, barley, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, pounds of wool and pounds of tobacco.

Value ore land products in dollars.

Gallons of wine, value of produce of market garden, pounds of butter, pounds of cheese, tons of hay, bushels of clover seed, pounds of hops, pounds of flax, bushels of flaxseed, pounds of maple sugar, gallons of molasses, pounds of honey and beeswax, value of home made manufactures.

Name of corporation, company or individual producing articles to the annual value of $500.

Name of business, manufacture or product.

Capital invested in real estate and personal estate in the business.

Raw material used, including fuel, viz : Quantities, kinds, value, kind of motive power, machinery, structure or resource.

Average number of hands employed, viz : Male, female, average monthly cost of male labor, average monthly cost of female labor. Annual product, viz: Quantities, kinds, values.

Name of every person who died during the year ending June 1st, 1860, whose usual place of abode was in the family, the age, sex and color, whether white, black or mulatto, married or widowed, places of birth, naming the State, Territory or country, the month in which the person died, profession, occupation or trade, disease or cause of death.

In connection with the subject of taking the census in this State; the San Francisco Herald says:

The compensation fixed by the Act is two cents for each person enumerated, ten cents a mile for necessary travel—to be ascertained by multiplying the square root of the number of dwelling houses in the division by the square root of the number of square miles—ten cents for each farm fully returned, fifteen cents for each establishment of protective industry, two percent, for social statistics, upon the amount allowed for the enumeration of population, and two cents for the name of each deceased person enumerated.  The United Stales Marshals are allowed to employ superintendent clerks, and such other clerks, with the consent of the Secretary of the Interior, as they may deem necessary. In regard to compensation for all these officers, the Act of Congress has been amended so far as it applies to California, Oregon, Utah, and New Mexico, and it may be increased according to the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior, Indeed he has already expressed the opinion that the remuneration is inadequate, and has given assurances that so far as the law applies to California the rates named above shall be quadrupled.

It is estimated that our population at this time exceeds 700,000, and it Would not surprise us if the census should exhibit a still larger number. With a representation in Congress under this enumeration, the influence of California will be so vastly increased we may no longer be compelled to listen to complaints of inattention and neglect. It may occur that we shall have an equal representation with Kentucky, Tennessee and Illinois.

It has been estimated that the census of 1860 will exhibit a total population in the United States of 81,500,000 souls, of whom 27,000,000 are whites. “To be apportioned on this population,” writes a statistician, “are two hundred and thirty-three representatives. Of this number, it is estimated, the Southern States will have eighty-two, being a decrease of seven; the Middle States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware will have fifty-nine, being a decrease of five; New England will have twenty-five, being a decrease of four; while the Western States will have sixty-seven. being an increase of fourteen.”

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego [FitzGerald Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 99, Issue 4 (2013)
pages 1285-1286
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jas672

David FitzGerald, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Diego

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. xiv, 239 pp.)

I recently bought a house in San Diego whose records included a 1945 racial covenant stating that houses in the neighborhood would never be sold or occupied to “persons not of the white or Caucasian race.” The original owners would have been distressed to learn that the house was sold to me by a Jewish and Vietnamese American couple and that one of the Mexican kids on the block boasts of learning Amharic from his Ethiopian classmates. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.’s book helped me understand the historical changes on my own street and draw broader lessons about U.S. immigration and ethnicity.

Guevarra, a fourth-generation Mexipino from San Diego, makes major contributions to scholarship on the history of immigration to California and the history of San Diego as he tells the forgotten story of ethnic mixing of thousands at Filipinos and Mexicans. Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and public records, he explains how a hostile racial atmosphere anchored in discriminatory law and hiring practices brought these two marginalized populations together. After the U.S. colonization…

Read or purchase the review here.

Afro-Chinese Wedding

San Francisco Call
Volume 78, Number 147 (1895-10-25)
page 4, column 2
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

STOCKTON, Cal., Oct. 24.—Chu Gun, a local Chinese sport, was to-day married to Irene Wilson, a dashing octoroon girl. The entire population of Chinatown celebrated the affair this evening.

Hapa Japan 2013

Los Angeles, California
2013-04-02 through 2013-04-06

A free Festival Celebrating Mixed-Race and Mixed-Roots Japanese People and Culture!

Come join us at Hapa Japan 2013 from April 2-6, 2013 in Los Angeles for a concert featuring emerging hapa artists, a comedy night at East West Players, readings by award-winning authors, a historical exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum, film screenings of great documentaries, and a 2-day academic conference at the University of Southern California.

For more information, click here.

Beyond Selma-to-Stonewall

The New York Times
2013-01-27

By including gay rights in the arc of the struggle for civil rights — the road “through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” — President Obama linked his presidency to ending antigay discrimination and underscored the legal wrong of denying gay people the freedom to marry.

 “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law,” Mr. Obama famously said in his second Inaugural Address, “for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

Now that Mr. Obama has declared that he believes denying gay people the right to wed is not only unfair and morally wrong but also legally unsupportable, the urgent question is how he will translate his words into action. To start, he should have his solicitor general file a brief in the Proposition 8 case being argued before the Supreme Court in March, saying that California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional…

…ust a day after the inauguration, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, said that while Mr. Obama supports same-sex marriage as a policy matter, the president still believes it is an issue for individual states to decide. That was Mr. Obama’s formulation when he first announced his support for same-sex marriage in May, and even then it made no sense, except perhaps as political cover approaching the general election campaign.

Marriage is traditionally regulated by the states, but there are constitutional limits on what states may do. The Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia prevented states from forbidding marriages between interracial couples like Mr. Obama’s own parents…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Eric Garcetti invokes Latino-Jewish ancestry in mayor’s race

The Los Angeles Times
2013-01-02

Michael Finnegan

Working a recent breakfast gathering of business owners in Northridge, Los Angeles mayoral contender Eric Garcetti introduced himself in Hindi when a Sikh businessman approached.

A few hours later, Garcetti donned a colorful Peruvian headpiece with ear flaps as he spoke Spanish with immigrants on the steps of City Hall, part of a show of solidarity for designating a stretch of Hollywood’s Vine Street as “Peru Village.”

After lunch, Garcetti joined rabbis at a City Hall menorah lighting. Wearing a yarmulke, the Hollywood-area councilman sang Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, English and Spanish. “Toda la familia,” Garcetti said as the group huddled for a photo.

A top contender to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Garcetti prides himself on his ease with the city’s diverse cultures. He sees his mixed ancestry (“I have an Italian last name, and I’m half Mexican and half Jewish,” he says) as a powerful part of his appeal in a city where voters for decades have split along racial and ethnic lines in mayoral elections…

Read the entire article here.

Review: Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Southern California Quarterly
Volume 94, Number 4 (Winter 2012)
pages 492-494
DOI: 10.1525/scq.2012.94.4.492

Alex Jacoby

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in Sun Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 256 pp.)

In the last decade there lias been an increased recognition of the need for multiethnic studies to letter understand the processes of racialization and community formation beyond a simplistic binary. Important works by Peggy Pascoe, Moon-Kie Jung, Scott Kurashige, Laura Pulido, Mark Wild, and others have contributed innovative research, methodological approaches, and theoretical ideas to facilitate this comparative analysis. Joining this wealth of new scholarship is Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, a social history of the interplay and imbrication of Mexican and Filipino communities in San Diego during the first half of the twentieth century. The author, Rudy Guevarra Jr., is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific Studies at Arizona State University, and this monograph is an extension of his dissertation project. He argues that, as a reaction to being marginalized and facing segregation, both ethnic groups…

Read or purchase the review here.

How “Commonsense” Notions of Race, Class and Gender Infiltrate Families Formed across the Color Line

Sociology Mind
Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2012)
pages 75-69
ISSN Print: 2160-083X
ISSN Online: 2160-0848
DOI: 10.4236/sm.2012.21010

Eileen T. Walsh, Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Fullerton

This research presents data from in-depth interviews of sixty adults in Southern California who have formed families across the black/white color line. In a societal context where normative family formation remains mono-racial, many adults in multiracial families manage their social performances to mitigate the stigma associated with their unusual family pattern or to challenge social expectations associated with race, class, and gender. Their stories reveal how they deploy strategic exaggerations of gender and stereotypes of social class in their day to day lives. These deployments operate to manage social interactions when confronting commonsense expectations about what it means to be a man or woman who trespasses the color line in family formation.

Read the entire article here.

Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 108
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Cornet Room (Sheraton New Orleans)

Chair: Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles

Papers:

• “‘I Do Not Know at Times What To Do, Everything Turns Out Wrong’: Mixed Children Negotiating Anglo and Californio Worlds in Post-Conquest California” / Erika Perez, Loyola Marymount University
• “Major E. C. Watkins’ Frustrating Adventure: Defining Family in the Post-Civil War North American West” / Anne Hyde, Colorado College
• “The Man Who Talks Not: John L. Clarke and the Politics of Mixed-Race Identity in Montana, 1900–50” / Andrew R. Graybill, Southern Methodist University

Comments: Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The 2000 U.S. census revealed that an increasing number of Americans identified themselves as multi-racial and the recent 2010 census indicates the same trend. President Barak Obama’s 2008 election also called into question debates about multi-racial identities and the validity of racial categories given the long history of intimate mixing in the United States. This panel attempts to historically situate processes of identity-formation by people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in North America, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that some mixed-race and multi-ethnic individuals and families struggled against mainstream racial discourses that discouraged any acceptance of complex identities. Some mixed individuals faced pressures to select and perform one racial identity in public and even within their communities and families. However, the research of this panel demonstrates that individual identities remained contested, negotiated, and in some cases fluid, especially in the American west where racial paradigms extended beyond black and white to include Native Americans and Mexicans in the evolution of racial categories and ideologies.

The first paper by Erika Perez evaluates how the offspring of Spanish-Mexican and European ancestry struggled to find their niche in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of California in the wake of the Gold Rush. Mixed offspring soon discovered that their options for social mobility were shaped largely by gender, class, education and racial identity, and despite the presence of a European or Anglo-American father, this did not necessarily guarantee mixed offspring success in a changing social climate in American California. While mixed girls experienced increasing social and marriage options in California society, their brothers expressed fear and frustration that they would never attain the success of the previous generation. Anne Hyde’s paper demonstrates how U.S. bureaucrats and policy-makers of Indian affairs attempted to impose their own concepts of gender and the nuclear family upon Native American communities towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, Hyde shows that these bureaucratic efforts were contested by indigenous-influenced meanings of family and kinship, thereby contributing to confusion about racial categories, legal identities, and legitimacy in Indian country. Finally, Andrew Graybill’s paper tells the story of one man, John L. Clarke, a Montana artist, who held fast and firm to an Indian identity throughout his life and in his art despite the potential for him to lay claim to some white privilege because of his marriage and mixed heritage. Although other members of Clarke’s family claimed an “in-between” identity, affirming both their Indian and European roots, he remained determined to express himself as an Indian. As this abstract makes clear, all of these papers touch upon identity-formation and developing ideas of race in the North American borderlands and how this process was not always geared towards assimilation but entailed great complexity and negotiation among mixed individuals and even members of the same family. Members interested in racial identities, borderland studies, and the American West will find this panel useful.

The Color of Change: Voting Rights in the 21st Century and the California Voting Rights Act

Harvard Latino Law Review
Volume 15 (2012)
pages 184-231

Joanna E. Cuevas Ingram
University of California, Davis

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 AND THE CALIFORNIA VOTING RIGHTS ACT
• II. U.S. SUPREME COURT DECISIONS ON FEDERAL VRA STANDARDS
  • A. Heightened Burdens of Proof for Potential Plaintiffs
  • B. Post-Racial Penumbras
  • C. The Politics of Containment: Post-Racial Opposition to Voting Rights Remedies
  • D. The Full Spectrum of Voter Discrimination: “Multiracial” Identities and Multiethnic Members of Protected Voting Rights Classes
• III. FEDERAL VRA STANDARDS: CIRCUIT COURT DECISIONS ADDRESSING MULTIETHNIC/MULTILINGUAL COALITIONS
  • A. The Majority View: Recognition of Coalition Plaintiffs
  • B. The Minority View: Non-Recognition of Coalition Plaintiffs
• IV. MULTIETHNIC/MULTILINGUAL COALITIONS IN CALIFORNIA AND THE CVRA
  • A. Multiethnic/Multilingual Coalition Voting Blocs in California
  • B. Impediments and Rewards for Compliance
• V. CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.”

— César Chávez, Address to the Commonwealth Club of California (November 9, 1984).

In the twenty-first century, we have witnessed the rise of a post-racial national political narrative, particularly as the population in the United States has become increasingly multilingual and multiethnic. This narrative has been fashionably employed by cultural critics, media personalities, elected officials, attorneys, and even courts in an attempt to check the unprecedented surge in the political power of the diverse demographic, allowing these public figures and institutions to gloss over statistically sound cases of voter disenfranchisement in an attempt to dilute or contain what are fast becoming “minority-majority” voting districts.  Under Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) of 1965, illegal vote dilution can be found where an electoral standard, practice, or procedure results in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or color, including those instances where it can be demonstrated that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the state or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a protected class of citizens under the VRA…

…D. The Full Spectrum of Voter Discrimination: “Multiracial” Identities and Multiethnic Members of Protected Voting Rights Classes

Opponents of minority coalition claims under Section 2 seem to make another secondary, and offensive, intimation: the idea that multiracial identity itself could frustrate the purpose and practical application of the VRA.

This argument rings hollow after the Bartlett decision, however, particularly given the fact that the U.S. Census Bureau had established clear guidelines in 2000 for data interpretation based on responses that included one or more, two or more, and four or more race/ethnicity selections. Over the last decade, the Census Bureau has developed some incredibly advanced digital statistics on racial demographics by census tract The Bureau continues to maintain relatively accurate analyses of voting patterns and polls for individual groups as well as aggregate groups; data that is readily available online to any inquiring mind.

While more young Americans today do identify as multiethnic, multiracial, or mixed race, self-identification alone does not mean that individuals who so identify believe that they live in a presently post-racial society, nor does it mean that multiethnic or multicultural individuals do not experience any discriminatory treatment. Furthermore, nor does it signify that they are no longer considered members of a protected class or minority group. In fact, many individuals who identify as multiethnic and multiracial speak to the diversity of experiences each person may encounter in equal access to employment, education, housing, health care, insurance, business loans, and other social indicators of discrimination, including access to the political franchise. Increasingly, several scholars who identify as multiethnic and multiracial have worked to craft a discourse of resistance, encouraging individuals, regardless of how they identify, to embrace the complexity of their experiences and heritage by challenging the dominant social, cultural, and political structures that perpetuate white supremacy and racial segregation.

Further, opponents’ arguments that the 2000 Census would complicate litigation projections for local jurisdictions ring hollow; the standards set forth by the Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) in March 2000 established a coherent framework for the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) in evaluating claims for the purpose of the Voting Rights Act and other remedies designed to address both systemic racial discrimination and individual discriminatory treatment. The 2000 OMB standards, although arguably problematic in dealing with social constructs such as race, have sought to provide a clear framework to respond to systemic discrimination and to accommodate the groundbreaking transformation that the 2000 and 2010 Census have taken in allowing respondents to check more than one ethnicity/race. The rules set forth by the OMB and applied by the DOJ would in fact alleviate any perceived difficulties in meeting the Gingles requirements:

Pursuant to those rules, DOJ will allocate any multiple-race response in which “White” and one of the five other basic categories were checked to the minority race that was checked. Thus, the numbers for each minority race will consist of the total of (i) the single-race responses in which only that minority race was checked; and (ii) the multiple-race responses in which only that minority race and “White” were checked. DOJ will allocate the remaining multiple-race responses—those in which two or more minority races were checked, either along with “White” or without it—to a category called “Other Multiple-Race.” If it finds that a jurisdiction’s “Other Multiple-Race” category contains a significant number of responses that reflect a particular multiple-race combination, it will allocate those responses alternatively to each of the minority races in that combination.”

When it comes to the question of Hispanic or Latino identity, the DOJ has expressed its intention to continue to treat individuals who identify as Hispanic or Latino as members of a distinct minority group for the purpose of enforcing the Voting Rights Act. If the DOJ finds that a significant number of the individuals in the jurisdiction have identified as members of this ethnic category and one or more minority racial groups, it will allocate those responses alternatively to the Hispanic or Latino category and the minority race(s) checked. For example, if the DOJ finds that a significant number of responses checked both Hispanic or Latino and Black or African-American, it will allocate the first of those responses to the Hispanic or Latino category, the second to the Black or African-American category, and so on. While other scholars have confirmed that the DOJ will also have to use the OMB allocation rules in enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, they have also posited that the courts are not bound to follow the guidelines as established by the executive branch…

Read the entire article here.