Phil 160

Phil 160

ASAM 340
February 21, 2011
Race, Intermarriages, and Anti-Miscegenation Laws: Early Filipino Family Formations
Group Proposal: Due Next Monday
Questions:
- How did the dominant U.S. society (e.g., legal systems, popular thought) affect pre-war Asian family formations?
- How did early Asian immigrants attempt challenge and resist these U.S. institutions and social norms/popular thoughts?
- What different types of Asian American family formations existed?
- Individual groups challenge these laws.

“Traditional (heterosexual) families”
Gender Ratios (Mainland U.S.)
- 1920: 1 Filipina/19 Filipinos
- 1930: 1 Filipina/14 Filipinos
- 1937 LA Survey
o 29 intraethnic (within ethnicity) Filipino couples
o 48 children with Filipino father and Filipina mother
o Competition with Mexican worker
o Came as students
Filipino intermarriages
Women of color
- Prior to 1933 – African American women
- Post-1933- Mexican and Mexican American women
White women
- British, Irish, Russian, Jews
o Daughters of “Dust Bowlers”
o Worked at taxi-dance halls (dance club)
What “race” are Filipinos?
Socio-biological view of race
- Johann Blumenbach. On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1776)
- Five human types
o Caucasian, the white race
o Mongolian, the yellow race
o Malayan, the brown race
o Ethiopian, the black race
o American, the red race
People v. George Hall
- Hugh Murray, Chief Justice, CA. Supreme Court
- Chinese could not testify against a white person in court
- 1850 Criminal Proceedings Act
- “No Black or Mulatto person, no Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man.”
- Chief Justice Murray
o Indians = Asiatics
o Chinese = Indians
o “the same rule that would admit them to testify would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship, and we might soon see them at the   polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.”
o Chinese could not testify for or against a white person in a court...