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Chapter Seven

“THE ROAD OF HOPE”

Asians and Mexicans Find Cracks in the System

THE dynamic economic expansion of the West and Southwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century opened cracks in the system of sojourner pluralism for East Asian and Mexican sojourners, a substantial portion of whom became settlers. Although the circumstances of the two groups were different in several respects—the Asians lived far from home for many years, often in a highly insulated bachelor society surrounded by a totally foreign culture—many in both groups found the boundaries of sojourner pluralism, while restrictive, permeable. As a consequence, there was more mobility for them and especially for their children than for black Americans. Most blacks could not move from town to town or open up a laundry, a restaurant, or any other small business that served whites without threatening an entire social system.

Cracks in the System: The Chinese

Probably most of the sojourners from China who stayed in the U.S. performed relatively servile or menial work all their lives, but a significant minority became independent businessmen or farmers. A major opportunity to acquire land in Hawaii, an opportunity not available in California, resulted from the tradition of racial and ethnic intermarriage in the islands. Many Chinese married local native Hawaiian women and became rice farmers, an industry they soon dominated. Many others left the plantations for Honolulu, where they became skilled workers and small entrepreneurs. Of the 692 firms listed in the Honolulu Business Directory in 1886, 219 were Chinese-owned.¹

Conditions generally were more restrictive in California, where Chinese miners were expelled from many towns and were compelled to pay a foreign miners’ tax, originally designed to keep Mexican and Chilean miners away, later assessed only on the Chinese.² Nonetheless, the booming, diversified economy of the West created many possibilities for entrepreneurial activity, even for the despised and extremely poor Chinese immigrants. After the building of the Central Pacific Railroad, on which some ten thousand Chinese worked, many sought employment in agriculture and construction, others became cooks and laundrymen. Soon, Chinese were engaged in all sorts of capitalistic activities. In 1880, 11.8 percent of the Chinese in San Francisco either were merchants themselves or were employed by them. Laundrymen were another 10 percent, and independent skilled craftsmen over 7 percent.³ As early as 1890, the Chinese had twice their share of shopkeepers on the mainland relative to the general population, and by 1920 more than three and a half times their share.⁴ In that year, 48 percent of all Chinese in the U.S. were in small business, 27 percent providing personal services, and 11 percent in agriculture.⁵

For six or seven decades, Chinese were active participants in California’s agricultural development, as cooks, tenant farmers, or vegetable peddlers, and also as owner-operators of farms and as commission merchants, positions that gave them considerable control over their own lives.⁶ Their entrepreneurial drive proved remunerative in an economy where production of raw materials was more important than manufacture of finished goods. Individuals with little capital but a great deal of energy and a willingness to take risks could achieve a measure of economic success.⁷

In acquiring capital to start a business, individual Chinese were often helped by the huiguan, local associations based on organizations that had existed in China for hundreds of years or, in Hawaii, by immigrants from the same district. Led by merchants, the huis, as they were called, performed social and charitable functions, mediated disputes, and provided protection. Some of them functioned as rotating credit associations to aid members in going into business for themselves. Hui members would put a certain amount of money into a common pool. Then they would compete by some method, often by lot, for the right to use the entire sum to start a small business. Members would meet again the next month, and those who had not yet had their turn would continue the process until every member of the hui had a chance to use the pool.⁸

Even without assistance from huis, Chinese laborers often were able to bid up the price of their labor because the supply of workers in the late nineteenth century was still relatively short in times of rapid economic expansion. Once having amassed a small amount of capital, an entrepreneur could quickly establish a business with a limited but sure Chinese clientele, in which his familiarity with the language enabled him to serve customers in ways difficult or impossible for whites. There are thousands of stereotypical stories of such entrepreneurship: Lee Bing began working as a dishwasher and janitor in the Walnut Grove Hotel, then took the place of a Chinese cook and received an increase in salary from $20 to $60 a month, which eventually enabled him to save enough money to buy a restaurant of his own in partnership with another Chinese man. Subsequently, he became a partner in a hardware store and a drugstore, and bought a share in the Shang Loi gambling house, where he served Chinese only.⁹

The Chinese also were able to establish niches in the agricultural economy of California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Chinese renter of land in the Sacramento Valley in the 1870s, knowing his value to the owner of the land, would insist on hiring two or three Chinese to help him at wages of at least $1 a day.¹⁰ The whites may have dominated all sectors of the economy, but they had to call on Chinese middlemen to help them recruit and manage Chinese labor because industrial and agribusiness expansion accelerated so rapidly.¹¹ And the labor was paid relatively well. For example, in the 1870s and 1880s, when a farm laborer could save $8 to $15 a month, Chinese who rented land actually earned more than whites who rented land in the South and much more than blacks.¹² When other industries expanded, the price of their labor was bid up, as in the canneries of Contra Costa County, California, where they earned more than white women.¹³

Merchants in all kinds of businesses and entrepreneurs in vice industries could accumulate capital and develop a sense of self-direction impossible for all but a few African-Americans under caste pluralism.¹⁴ After passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts and as agriculture became more diversified, the labor of Chinese was more valuable than before, with growers depending on them for their skills as pruners of fruit trees and as fruit packers.¹⁵ At one point in 1884, farmers agreed to bring in blacks to replace Chinese hop pickers who were striking in Kern County, but on second thought the farmers decided against what they saw as a dangerous experiment.¹⁶

The main opportunities both in Hawaii and on the West Coast were not in agriculture; they were in the dynamic, expanding nonagricultural economy of the fastest-growing portion of the U.S. Capitalism itself undermined the structure of sojourner pluralism as it applied to the Chinese, even when the overwhelming majority thought of themselves as strangers. When more married and established families, they, and especially their children, became ethnic-Americans with a stake in the larger society.

A growing number of Chinese developed strategies for claiming citizenship, the most important of which was to assert citizenship by birth or by “derivation.” The U.S. Supreme Court had decided in 1898 that a person born in the U.S. of Chinese parents was an American citizen by birth, and therefore eligible for reentry after visiting China. Two years later, the Court ruled that the wives and children of Chinese merchants were entitled to come to the U.S.¹⁷

Those decisions increased the number of Chinese admitted as citizens between 1920 and 1940 to 71,040, compared to only 66,039 aliens. When records were burned in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, many Chinese were able to allege, even if some fraudulently, that they had been born in the U.S. Once armed with citizenship, a father could claim citizenship for his Chinese-born children too. After subsequent trips to China, the father upon his return would report the birth of a son or two (more than four hundred sons to one daughter were reported). Often extra sons were reported, opening such slots for sale to boys who had no family connections in the U.S.¹⁸

With the admission of women in the early twentieth century and some intermarriage (particularly in Hawaii, where it was extensive), the ratio of Chinese males to females, while still one-sided, went steadily down between 1900 and 1930, when one of every five Chinese in the U.S. was a female.¹⁹ With a more stable family and community life, the Chinese and their children established organizations typical of those created by European immigrants and their children in the process of ethnic-Americanization.

The earliest organizations were fraternal, such as the Native Sons of the Golden State, founded in San Francisco in 1895 and renamed the Chinese-American Citizens’ Alliance in 1905. It grew rapidly in membership, with branches in a half dozen cities in the East and Midwest by 1915. With its primary headquarters in San Francisco, it fought against discriminatory immigration laws and segregation in the public schools and encouraged Chinese-Americans to participate in politics. In 1924, the CACA began publishing The Chinese Times in San Francisco in Chinese, and eleven years later American-born Chinese founded The Chinese Digest in the same city, the first Chinese-American newspaper in English. By 1921, five Chinese YMCAs and three YWCAs had been established. Many Chinese-Americans celebrated Independence Day and Thanksgiving, the great holidays of the civic culture.

After the First World War, Chinese-Americans became much more active politically, successfully defeating anti-Chinese politicians and conducting an effective campaign in support of Roosevelt’s candidacy in 1936. By then, the sojourner period was over. The majority of the Chinese in the U.S. had been born here. Chinese-Americans had been elected to many offices in Hawaii and even on the West Coast, and in 1954, in a typical example of ethnic-Americanization, a Chinese-American Democratic club was established as a counterpoint to the CACA, which had become markedly Republican.²⁰

Cracks in the System: The Japanese

A substantial portion of the Japanese who remained in the U.S. also broke the bounds of sojourner pluralism. As with the Chinese, the Japanese in California were to some extent able to control the labor supply desired by white farmers, who preferred to lease their holdings to Japanese tenants as a way of obtaining a steady stream of labor and of turning over to the tenants the responsibility of procuring workers.²¹ Small businesses emerged with the transfer of immigrant labor from white-owned enterprises to those of Japanese entrepreneurs, who entered businesses that required virtually no capital, such as the leasing of orchards. By 1909, the most common Japanese businesses in California were labor contracting, lodgings, and restaurants.

Entrepreneurial capitalism worked for a large number of Japanese sojourners—who had an advantage over the Chinese in being able to put women and children to work, too—partly because of economic growth in Hawaii and especially in California, but also because of their frugal habits. The issei operated farms that were much smaller than the average, but every inch of land was used. Community cooperation was exemplified in the tanomoshi, rotating credit associations, whose members often came from the same prefecture in Japan.²² The tanomoshi, which literally means “to ask for help,” constituted a mutual aid system, like the Chinese hui, in which individuals contributed money to help members save, invest, and obtain credit, a system particularly helpful since banks frequently refused loans to the Japanese. With the help of tanomoshi, Japanese men started small businesses in Hawaii and on the mainland,²³ including rooming houses, restaurants, and laundries, which catered mainly to Japanese, relied upon Japanese suppliers, and were serviced by Japanese workmen. Like several other immigrant groups, the Japanese used credit associations as an effective adaptation of a homeland institution.²⁴

In addition to credit unions, the Japanese organized employer and professional associations. By the 1920s, thirty-six farmers’ organizations combined to form the Japanese Agricultural Association and California Farmers’ Cooperative in northern and central California. Other lines of work had corresponding associations, for example, a southern California Japanese Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Association of fewer than fifteen members, which nonetheless published a journal.²⁵

Like Jewish immigrants on the East Coast in the early 1900s, Japanese entrepreneurs worked with slight profit margins, and they often failed. Also like the Jews, a surprising number surmounted prejudice and hostility by generating business activity among their own kind. In southern California, Japanese growers sold to Japanese wholesalers, who sold to Japanese retailers. The growers obtained financing from the wholesalers instead of from banks, and looked to the wholesalers for fertilizer, seed, and equipment in return for the produce they raised.²⁶

Even in Hawaii, where the economy was much less diversified, the Japanese could not be kept in the lowest-status jobs on the plantation. By 1901, they had gone into fishing and rice planting and dominated the coffee farms of Kona on the big island of Hawaii. The Japanese moved into skilled and semiskilled trades on the plantations; by 1901 their participation in the mechanical trades was extensive. Although their average wage was below that of Hawaiians and Portuguese and considerably below that of Caucasians for the same work, especially on the plantations, many took their new skills to Honolulu and other towns. Between 1890 and 1910, the percentage of Japanese working as laborers went down from 92 percent to 67; it was only 58 percent in 1920. Ten years later, there were 1,835 Japanese retailers in Hawaii, operating 49 percent of the retail stores of the territory.²⁷ Although the Japanese still had slightly more than their share of common laborers among the gainfully employed nationally, their mobility in Hawaii appears to have been approximately like that reported for immigrants in northeastern and midwestern cities.²⁸

As with the Chinese, there were thousands of anecdotes of creative entrepreneurship in the face of prejudice and the legal impediments of sojourner pluralism. One Okinawan man quit work on the plantation and invested his small savings in a ramshackle store that sold soft drinks. In 1925, his wife obtained a license to drive a taxi, becoming the first woman taxi driver on Maui. When their turn came to receive money from the tanomoshi, they built a house to put up guests for the night and served them breakfast and lunch. Their next step was to borrow $2,000 and open a gasoline station, and after that, in 1928, they established a mortuary.²⁹ That Okinawans could overcome the restrictions of sojourner pluralism revealed the extraordinary possibilities of entrepreneurial capitalism, even in the plantation-dominated, oligarchically controlled territory of Hawaii, for they had to overcome prejudice against them by Japanese from the inner islands of Japan, the Naichi, as well as the hostility of the whites. Capitalism, which had brought the Okinawans and the Naichi to Hawaii and California, where they were expected to remain in servile jobs until they were no longer wanted, paradoxically offered them a way out of those jobs.

Under the 1907 U.S.-Japan agreement, in which the government of Japan agreed to restrain emigration, the Japanese already in the U.S. were able to send for picture brides. Once they had wives and children here, they behaved much more like European settler immigrants, seeing possibilities for the future and investing their energy and capital “kodomo no tame ni” (for the sake of the children).³⁰ Like the Chinese, Japanese settlers found ways to bend and evade the rules of sojourner pluralism. Some Chinese purchased land in California, bypassing the Alien Land Law by setting up corporations for those eligible to own land who owned it in name only.³¹ Japanese settlers used straw buyers among whites and turned ownership over to their children, who, having been born in the U.S., had all the rights of citizens; thus settlers got around laws in twelve states that prohibited aliens who were ineligible for citizenship from owning agricultural property.

Once most of the Japanese in the U.S. had become settlers, they began to create the typical institutions established by other ethnic-Americans, including ethnic newspapers and civic and political clubs. Their own cultural predispositions encouraged self-restraint, but, with the birth of Japanese-American children, even some issei (the immigrant generation) became involved in American-style protest movements. An issei newspaper editor, Fred Makino, founded The Hawaii Hochi in 1912, a journal that took enormous pride in protecting Japanese culture while, at the same time, asserting the full rights of Japanese-Americans as Americans. Makino’s militancy was seen as un-American by the haole oligarchy in Hawaii, but it was quintessentially American and un-Japanese in its insistence that the American promise of equal rights be extended to the newcomers from the Far East just as it had been to the newcomers from Europe, an attitude that stimulated in the nisei generation increasing participation in integrated churches, Scout organizations, and other community groups. It also led in the 1920s to formation of many organizations in Hawaii and California, with names that usually included “loyalty league” or “citizens’ league.” These groups combined into a national Japanese-American Citizens’ League in 1930.³² The Japanese had begun to provide yet another example of Tocqueville’s maxim that patriotism grows by the exercise of civil rights.

Cracks in the System: The Mexicans

The situation of Mexican sojourners was much more complex than that of the Asians. Large numbers came in legally as well as illegally, and, unlike the Asians, those who had immigrated lawfully could choose to become citizens. All Mexicans living in the territories acquired from Mexico in the treaties of 1848 and 1853 following the Mexican War had been granted citizenship. In 1897, a U.S. district court ruled that the skin color of Mexicans was irrelevant to the issue of naturalization. The vast majority, however, had no interest in citizenship. Why bother to become an American citizen when the land one loved, the land of family, language, and la raza (the people or race) was so close by? Partly for this reason, the economic and social mobility of Mexican sojourners and even of Mexican-Americans was slower than that of immigrants and their children from Asia. The success of second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans was, however, disguised by aggregate statistics because large migrations of Mexicans continued to enter long after Asian immigration had been reduced to a trickle. Mexican-Americans began to develop roots and loyalties in the U.S. Many did not want to be identified with Mexican immigrants. By the 1920s and even more in the 1940s, there were signs of geographic and economic mobility for Mexican-Americans more typical of Euro-American populations than of native-born black Americans.³³

Two out of three Mexican men were either farm laborers or other laborers in 1930; one in fifteen was a craftsman. When workers moved to nonborder states, especially to Colorado, Illinois, and Michigan, where the pay was better for farm work, there were also opportunities to obtain other kinds of jobs. By 1928, Chicago had a small middle class of Mexican-Americans and some Mexicans who had begun life in the U.S. as manual laborers and had then established more than two hundred businesses.³⁴ By 1948, some workers in California were earning $2.83 a day picking beans, others $5.50 a day in the steel industry in Chicago, still others, from $8 to $14 a day as bricklayers in Texas.³⁵

Despite hardships and prejudice, possibilities for entrepreneurial activity existed for Mexicans who became settlers. It was difficult to break sojourner habits, but many of them did, and as with the Chinese and Japanese, there are countless stories of Mexican immigrants, illegal and legal, who succeeded against the odds.

One young man who crossed the Rio Grande at the age of fourteen was apprehended by la migra (the Immigration Border Patrol) and was deported. But he soon crossed the river again, and this time eluded capture, teaching himself English at night while washing dishes, picking cotton, and cleaning floors during the day. By the time the law caught up with him ten years later, he had an American wife, a home, and a good job. Given sixty days to get his Mexican papers in order, he reentered the U.S. legally, eventually became a citizen, and sent all of his five children to college.³⁶

There was even the possibility of breaking out of the system of sojourner pluralism in south Texas, where it was enforced more rigorously than anywhere else. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, migrant families followed the cotton harvest from the Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas, up the road to Robstown to El Campo, Hillsboro, or perhaps Waxahachie in west Texas and then to the final destination in Petersburg or Lubbock. The work was grueling, from sunup to sundown, especially in Hillsboro. The mosquitoes were fierce in El Campo, the water extremely salty in Robstown, and babies there became ill. The firetrap shacks in which most migrants lived were infested by ants, yellow jackets, cockroaches, and rats. Yet, some of the migrant workers called the road from Edinburg to Lubbock “the road of hope,” and it was in such a migrant family that Jesus Luna grew up, going to school only sporadically because the family moved with the harvests and the authorities were lax in enforcing the school attendance laws. Young Jesus told his parents that if they left to travel the road of hope once more he would remain in Edinburg with one of his aunts and attend school there. His mother and father decided to stay. Because mother and father and all four children had worked at picking cotton over the years, Jesus’s father was able to stay put in Edinburg and purchase two lots and a truck. Jesus became an excellent student, and later, to the pride of his parents, attended college and graduate school. The Luna family were no longer sojourners, and in 1973 Jesus reported, “Dad and Mom now take an interest in how the children are doing in school and who is running in local politics.”³⁷

The Lunas and other Mexican settlers saved and invested for the sake of the children, building communities of Mexican-Americans and Mexicans called colonias, the largest of which was in Los Angeles, where more than 200,000 Mexicans had settled. Between 1900 and 1940, hardly a town of any size—Delano, Hanford, Brawley, Sacramento, San Diego, Fresno—failed to acquire its Mexican colonia on the weathered side of the railroad tracks.³⁸ As more Mexican nationals became settlers, economic mobility increased for themselves and especially their children. By 1950, when two-thirds of the Mexican-origin population in the U.S. had been born there, the proportion of craftsmen had more than doubled over 1930, and the percentage of sales, clerical, and professional employees had almost doubled.³⁹ By 1970, less than one-quarter of all Mexican-Americans were employed in relatively unskilled occupations, and almost as many were employed as craftspersons. Fewer than one percent were professional workers in 1930; one in twenty was a professional worker by 1970.⁴⁰

Comparisons between Mexican-American men born in the U.S. and Mexican-born men showed that, despite the restrictions, many of the children of those who settled were able to go beyond them. More than 15 percent of the Mexican-born men were employed as farm laborers, less than 8 percent of the sons, and 3 percent of the grandchildren. The second generation of Mexican-Americans born in the U.S. had a median education of 11.1 years, two years more than for first-generation U.S.-born Mexican-Americans and almost double that of Mexican nationals in the U.S. (5.8 years).⁴¹

Thomas Sowell observed in 1981 that wherever there was a settled Mexican-American community, the income was much higher than in areas where there were a higher proportion of newcomers and transients. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in metropolitan Detroit, for example, earned more than double the income of Mexicans in the metropolitan area of Laredo or Brownsville, a substantial gap even when wage differentials between those cities were taken into account.⁴² Overall, family income for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans was much less than the national average in the post-Second World War years; but comparisons of aggregate statistics were misleading. Family income was down for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans for many reasons. Labor-force participation rates among Mexican-American females was much lower than for either black or white women, thereby reducing household income. The Mexican-American and Mexican populations together were much younger than the average in the U.S., also reducing reported household income.

Actually, the incomes of Mexican-Americans age twenty-five and up were very close to the incomes of other Americans at the same educational level. When the American children and grandchildren of Mexican immigrants went to school and learned English, they performed well and later showed the occupational mobility so often seen among the children of immigrants generally. Later, however, in the 1980s, some disquieting statistics emerged about increased segregation of Mexicans and other Hispanic-Americans in the U.S. public schools and about a growing dropout rate for children from Spanish-speaking homes. But the general conclusions on mobility for Mexican-Americans in the postwar era was unambiguous: legal aliens had more success than illegal aliens; settlers did better than sojourners; and the grandchildren and children of immigrants did better than their parents.

Opportunities for Blacks and Asians and Mexicans Compared

In explaining the relative success of immigrants compared to African-Americans, some scholars have stressed the internal resources of the immigrants themselves, particularly their cultural values.⁴³ Others, such as Stanley Lieberson, have emphasized the vast difference between the opportunities presented to blacks and immigrants.⁴⁴ An examination of the experiences of the sojourners from Mexico and Asia who became settlers in the U.S. makes it obvious that both factors were important.

The Chinese transplanted the huis from China to the U.S., where they often provided an excellent means of capital formation to encourage entrepreneurship. The Japanese had the tanomoshis, and dozens of Mexican-American mutualistas (mutual aid societies) were formed in the U.S. in the early 1900s to provide assistance to families in need, mediate disputes, and organize social activities, although, unlike the huis and tanomoshis, they were not used to provide capital to form new enterprises.⁴⁵ The cultural emphasis by the Japanese and the Chinese on savings, frugality, and self-restraint undoubtedly preserved capital in a way that spurred economic mobility for the second and third generations. The pride of all three groups in their own versions of la raza—a strong sense of peoplehood based on a distinctive history and culture—undoubtedly encouraged self-confidence in facing prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. The fact that these immigrants had made the decision to emigrate and then the extremely important decision to stay and raise their children in a new country also reflected a sense of direction and control over their lives. Internal resources were important to the immigrants, but there also was a vast difference between the opportunities presented to them and those available to native-born American Indians and blacks. No matter how badly they were disparaged or how strong was the intention to confine them to servile jobs, there were large cracks in the system of sojourner pluralism that did not exist under the rules of caste. Segregation was imposed far more rigidly on blacks; the immigrants received help from foreign governments in dealing with the hostility of employers; many white teachers and social workers encouraged the children of immigrants. Immigrants’ belief that through their actions they could improve life chances for their children and their children’s children gave them a tremendous psychological advantage over African-Americans, who had inherited at least a half dozen generations of subjugation under caste and whose own actions for self-improvement were blocked at almost every turn.

By the early 1900s, when Jim Crow laws were being enforced vigorously against African-Americans in the South, attempts to segregate Mexicans and Asians in the West and Southwest had ambiguous results. The African-American press reported that all Mexicans and Asians were permitted to ride in whites-only streetcars and trains and attend first-class theaters in the white sections, at the same time that even well-educated, prominent blacks could not.⁴⁶ All schools in the South attended by blacks were segregated right up to the mid and late 1950s. Until the civil rights movement, parents had no hope of change. But by 1905, the policy of the board of education in San Francisco to segregate Chinese high school students had already broken down when Chinese parents threatened to boycott the elementary school and cause a significant loss of state financial aid. In the following year, President Theodore Roosevelt, under pressure from the imperial government of Japan, condemned San Francisco’s policy of keeping Japanese students from the public schools. Within a few years, they were attending those schools, and by 1920 the vast majority went to schools with whites.⁴⁷

Segregation of Mexican-American children in the public schools of California and the Southwest was fairly well established by the mid-1920s, but it was done through the assignment of school districts rather than by state law, and it was not uniformly applied, as it was for blacks in the South. In California, some districts chose not to separate children of Mexican descent, and even in segregated districts some Mexican children were allowed to attend white schools.⁴⁸ In Texas, where discrimination against Mexicans was the most severe of anyplace in the country, the vast majority of Mexican and Mexican-American children went to segregated schools, but not as a matter of law as was true for blacks.⁴⁹ In Houston and other cities, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans sometimes created their own parochial schools, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Houston, which, unlike the segregated black public schools everywhere, established high expectations for the students and made rigorous demands on them.⁵⁰

The realities of informal or unofficial segregation were cruel: Mexican-American children were turned away from white swimming pools; Mexican-Americans were sometimes denied service at good Anglo restaurants; and Mexican-Americans were discouraged from moving into better neighborhoods. But when these established patterns of discrimination against Mexicans in Texas conflicted with American war goals in 1944, the Texas legislature passed the Caucasian Race Resolution, naming Mexicans and Mexican-Americans officially as Caucasians and indicating that all Caucasians, including Mexicans, should have equal rights in public places of business and amusement.⁵¹ Twenty-five years later, scholars would show that except for Puerto Ricans, the levels of Hispanic-Anglo segregation generally were much lower than for blacks and whites, and were reduced over time. Whereas a rise in socioeconomic status was associated with a weakening of residential segregation nationally for Mexican-Americans, it was not for blacks.⁵²

The children of Asian immigrants were even less segregated in schools and neighborhoods than those of Mexicans. In Hawaii, extensive intermarriage between haoles and Hawaiians made virtually impossible any establishment of racially segregated public schools. With the introduction of a normal school to train teachers in Hawaii in the early twentieth century, many Chinese and Japanese parents urged their children to attend and become teachers. By the mid-1920s, Asian-American youngsters were attending schools in largely integrated settings, and almost 15 percent of schoolteachers in Hawaii were of Chinese origin, more than double the proportion of the Chinese population in the islands. They taught in non-segregated schools, in contrast, for example, to Chicago, where by 1934 only 2.5 percent of the public school teachers were African-American, although teaching in a city already 7 percent black.⁵³ Efforts by whites to segregate the Japanese in California and other mainland states were remarkably unsuccessful, not only in schools but also by neighborhoods. As early as 1915, a national study reported that only one-third of the nisei respondents lived in predominantly Japanese-American neighborhoods. The proportion of nisei living in mixed neighborhoods or mainly non-Japanese neighborhoods subsequently increased in every subsequent decade without exception.⁵⁴

Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos even escaped the antimiscegenation statutes of several mainland states, probably because they were difficult to enforce, but also because they were not made to apply to them by the courts in every state. In Louisiana, for example, the state supreme court in 1938 decided that African ancestry was the only definition of color.⁵⁵ In a subsequent decision, the court made it plain that to be a Filipino was not to be colored, but white. It made no difference that some Filipinos had much darker skin color than some African-Americans. That was, of course, the whole point of caste, to confine people by blood lines (not by color alone) in a subjugated status.⁵⁶

The foreign national status of the sojourners also gave them a measure of protection native-born black Americans did not have. On several occasions Asian governments and Mexico intervened in order to help their nationals in the U.S. Even the earliest Chinese sojourners received some protection under the Burlingame Treaty between China and the U.S. (1868), which promised that Chinese subjects visiting or residing in the U.S. should “enjoy the same privileges, immunities and exemptions in respect to travel or residence, as may be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation.” The treaty did not prevent atrocities against the Chinese, such as the killing of twenty-one in Los Angeles in 1871 and the massacre of twenty-eight in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885. But it occasionally helped, as when the Chinese minister to the U.S. protested the lawless treatment of Chinese nationals in Seattle and the federal government responded by threatening to send federal troops to protect them,⁵⁷ and when in 1905 communities in China organized to boycott American goods to force improvement in the treatment of Chinese in the U.S.⁵⁸

Treaty rights were relied upon by a federal circuit court to strike down some of the most blatant anti-Chinese provisions in California’s constitution and in laws that had been passed in 1880. One such law authorized local authorities to prevent Chinese from obtaining licenses for business and occupational purposes; another barred them from commercial fishing. “To exclude the Chinamen from fishing in the waters of the state …” said the federal court, “while the Germans, Italians, Englishmen, and Irishmen, who otherwise stand upon the same footing, are permitted to fish … is to prevent him from enjoying the same privileges as are ‘enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation.’”⁵⁹ In 1900, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Chinese merchants had treaty rights to bring wives and minor children into the country.

An agreement in 1885 for the importation of Japanese agricultural workers provided for the right of inspection by the Japanese government, and at least one inspector warned against the coercive methods of plantation managers.⁶⁰ In 1906, the year when President Roosevelt intervened under pressure by the Japanese government to stop the segregation of Japanese and Japanese-American students in the San Francisco schools, he also dismissed an entire battalion of native-born black troops without honor and disqualified its members for service in either the military or the civil government merely because of some allegations made against certain of its members.

Mexican nationals could not depend upon a strong government to intervene on their behalf, but Mexico City did try to protect its emigrants in the years following the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Mexican consular officials often played an important role in the social, cultural, and, to some extent, political lives of the Mexican population in California. In 1918, a Mexican consul, after investigating the Spreckles Sugar Company and finding that the men in the camps worked open-ended hours for irregular pay, poor food, and unfit housing, pushed Spreckles, which badly needed the Mexican workers, to negotiate a new contract calling for increased pay.⁶¹ Other consuls took comparable action. When a road-building firm in Hayden, Arizona, went bankrupt in the course of a construction project, the Mexican consul in Tucson gained some of the wages owed to Mexican men by obtaining a lien on the employer’s property.⁶² In other cases, Mexican officials helped migrant workers and families receive unemployment compensation, severance pay, and death benefits.

The proximity of workers to their home country meant they could maintain an open and lively interest in homeland politics. Mexicans in the U.S. in 1928 flocked to hear Mexican presidential candidate José Vasconcelos speak out against the racism of American labor unions and the anti-Mexican activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Periodically, Mexican officials criticized the federal government’s deportation methods and intervened on behalf of Mexican citizens in the U.S. in cases involving racial school segregation; they even helped Mexican farm workers build labor unions in southern California.⁶³

Support also came for foreign nationals and their children from a great many social workers and teachers who looked upon the immigrants and especially their children as material to be molded into American citizens. Children of immigrants were preached to about the possibility of success, sometimes even when their parents followed the migrant path or lived in a slum barrio because progressive teachers were always anxious to participate in the Americanization of the children of immigrants. The best that the white teachers or social workers in the South who tried to help blacks could do was to encourage them to adapt to the system of racial caste. Blacks in the South who had wonderful, dedicated African-American teachers could expect success only within the segregated system of caste. Children might become teachers themselves someday, or ministers, or even in a few exceptional cases lawyers or doctors, but all the people for whom and with whom they would work would be black. Even in the North, white teachers often thought it unrealistic to try to encourage their black students. An often-repeated anecdote about Malcolm X probably was typical. When he told his high school English teacher in Lansing, Michigan, that he would like to be a lawyer, the instructor urged him to be realistic. He quoted him as saying, “A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be.”⁶⁴ American history had a different meaning for African-American children than for the children of immigrants. Blacks who heard teachers talk about the American ideal of equality and the American dream of success knew better than to believe them. One black woman, writing about an elementary school history lesson in North Philadelphia around 1930, remembered, “school was dreadful.… We heard that George Washington never told a lie, that the Indians were savages, that … slaves were happy, because they were brought here to be civilized.”⁶⁵ How, she asked, could she believe books and teachers that told blatant lies?

The progressive haole teachers at McKinley High School in Honolulu, often called “Tokyo High” in the 1920s and 1930s, constantly pressed the American dream of success on their Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Korean students. For many of them the dream seemed real. In a survey of seventh- and eighth-grade pupils at seventeen plantation schools in 1929, 8 percent of the youngsters said they wanted to be engineers, 11 percent doctors, lawyers, or teachers, 8 percent farmers, 12 percent businessmen, and only 1.7 percent laborers. At Kauai High School, more than 60 percent Japanese-American and less than 5 percent haole, half of the male students said they wanted to become professionals and another 20 percent businessmen. One boy, hoping to become a teacher, wrote, “When my father came from Japan, he was handicapped in his work. I intend to go to school to get an education and lead a better life and live up to the ideals of an American.”⁶⁶

Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez remembered that his nun teacher read from the biographies of early American presidents and that the red and white poster over the nun’s desk said, “Open the doors of your mind with books.”⁶⁷ Rodriguez’s father had come as a sojourner (he really wanted to move on to Australia) and found unskilled work in San Francisco in a cannery and later in a warehouse. The supervisor hated Mexicans, and Chinese, too, and there was no union. Like the father of Jesus Luna, Rodriguez’s father put his son in a school where teachers stimulated his imagination and ambition, leading him eventually to a Ph.D. and success as a writer.

There were even exceptional teachers who tried to show respect for the cultural backgrounds of their young ethnic pupils, something that almost never happened for black children. Ernesto Galarza, who came to the U.S. during the Mexican Revolution in 1910, wrote that children in his school were marched from the playground to the principal’s office “for calling someone a Wop, a Chink, a Dago or a Greaser.” At Lincoln elementary school in San Francisco, “making us into Americans did not mean scrubbing away what made us originally foreign.” The teachers actually tried to pronounce the children’s names correctly in Spanish or Japanese, and at that school no one was scolded or punished for speaking in his native tongue on the playground.⁶⁸

In many schools in Hawaii and on the mainland, however, children were made to feel ashamed of their backgrounds. At the other extreme from Galarza’s experience were schools and teachers that showed no respect for Mexican language and culture and who treated Mexican-American children as inherently inferior.⁶⁹ In Starr and Duval counties in Texas on the Mexican border, Mexican-American children went to schools that probably were as segregated and otherwise impoverished as most of those in the South; and those children had the added handicap of coming from homes in which English was not commonly spoken. But many who stayed put long enough in any one school probably met at least one teacher along the way who told them that by trying hard they might become successful in a world beyond the confines of their barrios or colonias.

The children of immigrant sojourners also often were encouraged by social workers in the church or settlement houses. Priests and secular social workers warmed to the task of shaping the newcomers into Americans.⁷⁰ Nothing comparable existed for African-Americans to the network of settlement houses and other organizations that participated in the Americanization movement in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and despite the relentless cry of “yellow peril” heard from whites during the three decades that preceded the Second World War, Japanese and Chinese in cities and towns sometimes were seen as fit material for Americanization. The International Institute in San Francisco organized a Japanese girls’ club and taught Japanese women about American politics. As early as 1927, its Japanese Center published a bulletin with columns in both English and Japanese to help immigrants and their children adapt to and succeed in American life; similar efforts were made to work with the Chinese, Mexican, and Filipino communities.⁷¹ The Japanese in San Francisco may have had available the citizenship pamphlet published by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1920, which included a Japanese version, presumably for the nisei (already citizens by virtue of having been born in the U.S.), who were urged to vote, run for office, and serve as jurors.⁷²

One of the most striking differences between the situation of sojourners and their children throughout the first half of the twentieth century and that of blacks in the South was the opportunity for sojourners to organize to demand better working conditions. In a striking phrase, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1900 reported that Chinese workers were becoming “Americanized to the extent of enforcing such demands in some cases through the medium of labor organization.”⁷³ The immigrants struck against bad conditions and low pay, something unthinkable for the black sharecroppers and tenant farmers of the South. As soon as Japanese workers learned about the annexation of Hawaii and were made aware that they were covered by American laws, they organized strikes that compelled a general wage increase of about 10 percent.⁷⁴

The relative powerlessness of black workers in the South was signified by a series of events in the first few years of the century. In 1903, when Jim Crow policies governed the AFL-CIO, Mexican workers joined Japanese laborers in a strike in Ventura, California. In 1905, the year after an outbreak of an epidemic of race riots, W. E. B. Du Bois met with a group of African-Americans in Niagara Falls, Canada, to draw up a platform to demand freedom of speech, recognition of the basic principles of human brotherhood, and respect for the black working man. In the same year, a group of Japanese actors in Hawaii wrote and produced three plays protesting the condition of workers there, one of which stressed the opulence of the plantation manager. Although the sheriff of Oahu arrested five of the seven actors in the company, audiences in Honolulu saw the dramas.⁷⁵ It was a kind of demonstration of ethnic resistance and solidarity on the spot that was impossible for blacks in the South if they wanted to work (or even live).