[On Valentine’s
Day, I gave a Fitchburg
State University Harrod Lecture on my book in progress: Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to
Define America. These histories and stories couldn’t be more important
to me these days, so I wanted to spend the next couple weeks highlighting some
of them. Starting with this year’s version of my annual
non-favorites series, focused on exclusionary moments from across American
history. Add some of your least favorite histories, stories, or figures for a
crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances!]
On three dark
and destructive moments of 1930s anti-Filipino discrimination.
1)
The 1930 Watsonville riots: Anti-Filipino
sentiments had been on the rise in the United States since (ironically) the
initial US
occupation of the islands during the Spanish American War, as illustrated
by this bigoted and ugly 1899
Boston Sunday Globe political cartoon.
But they boiled over in the first year of the Depression, and the California
city of Watsonville became in January 1930 the starting point; a popular Filipino
dance hall became the target of a marauding group of more than 500 angry white
townspeople, and the conflict spread throughout the city over the next four
days. Soon enough the tension and violence
would likewise spread to many other California cities and communities, endangering
Filipino Americans and their allies for many subsequent months. Exclusion stems
from many sources and follows many paths, as the week’s examples have proved
time and again; but in this case overt, communal violence set the stage for the
later, more legal forms I’ll detail below.
2)
1934 and 1935 laws: As far too often in our
histories, federal laws mirrored and extended these exclusionary sentiments
toward an American community. The first such law was 1934’s
Tydings-McDuffie Act, which ostensibly set the stage of Filipino
independence from the United States but mostly focused on banning Filipino
immigration to the US. As one of the law’s sponsors put it, ““It is absolutely
illogical to have an immigration policy to exclude Japanese and Chinese and
permit Filipinos en masse to come into the country … they will come in conflict
with white labor … and increase the opportunity for more racial prejudice and
bad feelings of all kinds.” And since that law did not directly impact
the hundreds of thousands of Filipino Americans already in the country, the
following year saw the Filipino
Repatriation act of 1935, which provided subsidized, one-way travel for
Filipino Americans to return to the islands, as well as ending family
reunification policies and otherwise making it more difficult for the existing
community to endure and grow. Taken together, these two laws were at least as
discriminatory and purposefully destructive as the Chinese Exclusion Act and
its aftermaths.
3) Judge Lazarus’s bigoted narratives: Communal
violence and xenophobic laws are two central prongs of American exclusion, and
the third—bigoted narratives about an existing American community—was present
in these 1930s moments as well. Ruling in a San Francisco court case in which a
Filipino man was accused of fraternizing (consensually) with two white women,
in violation of the state’s anti-miscegenation laws, Municipal
Court Judge Sylvain Lazarus ruled, “This is a deplorable situation. It is a
dreadful thing when these Filipinos, scarcely more than savages, come to San
Francisco, work for practically nothing, and obtain the society of these girls.
Because they work for nothing, decent white boys cannot get jobs.” Lazarus
would go on to defend his position, adding, “Basing my conclusions on years of
observation, I regret to say that there is probably no group in this city,
proportionate to its members, that supplies us with more criminal business than
the local Filipino colony.” Linking a community so thoroughly to both sexual
and criminal “savagery” is a vital element to excluding them from national
narratives and identity, and the words and work of a figure like Judge Lazarus
were frustratingly influential in creating such links.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other anti-favorites you’d highlight?
I am a retired physician (M.D.) living in a assisted-living facility (Montville, NJ). The staff here are 100% Filipino, and they are making plenty of money while providing poor services. We are abused and neglected, as if we were trash. Only Filipinos are allowed employment. This is illegal, but no one seems to care. Most of the staff have green cards or passports. Why is there such support for there actions when American citizens are being treated in this way?
ReplyDeleteMark Germine, MD, MS