Feminist studies
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4.3-ShahNayan.2011.Chapter5IntimateTiesandStateLegitimacyinStrangerIntimacy.pdf
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© by Nayan Shah
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shah, Nayan, – Stranger intimacy : contesting race, sexuality, and the law in the North American West / Nayan Shah. p. cm. — (American crossroads ; ) Includes bibliographical references and index. ---- (cloth : alk. paper) ---- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Foreign workers—North America. . Migrant labor— North America. . Sex and law—North America. . Citizenship—Social aspects—North America. I. Title. HD.S .'—dc
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction
. Migration, Capitalism, and Stranger Intimacy
. Passion, Violence, and Asserting Honor . Policing Strangers and Borderlands . Rural Dependency and Intimate Tensions
. Intimacy, Law, and Legitimacy
. Legal Borderlands of Age and Gender . Intimate Ties and State Legitimacy
. Membership and Nation-States
. Regulating Intimacy and Immigration . Strangers to Citizenship
Conclusion: Estrangement and Belonging Notes Select Bibliography Index
Intimate Ties and State Legitimacy
+e institution of marriage has been a linchpin for debates about morality, kinship, belonging, and citizenship. +rough conquest, territorial expansion, and encouraging labor migration, empire-states and nation-states have con- fronted diverse intimacies and struggled to establish the legitimacy of intimate ties. +e administration of legitimacy occurred in legislation, in judicial tri- als, and in registration and licensing procedures. In liberal rule-of-law states, judicial trials, in particular, are a flashpoint of controversy and debate over government legitimacy. Judges and attorneys attempt to fit the particular cir- cumstances of individual cases into the categories of monogamous marriage, concubinage, bigamy, polygamy, and sodomy. In European and European- settler nations and colonies, within the hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate relationships, Christian monogamous marriage often stands alone as the norm against an array of allegedly deviant intimacies that ranged from polygamy to sodomy. Liberal states have insisted on the universality of marriage. Despite widespread social and cultural differences, treaties have mutually recognized heterogeneous intimate ties sanctioned by empire-states and nation-states. In the capitalist political economy, marriage has become perhaps even more cen- tral as the translatable alliance of social standing for the legitimate distribution of land, labor, wealth, and status.
U.S. and Canadian women’s historians and legal historians have demon- strated that the incorporation of land and people through conquest, slavery, and migration forced governments to confront variable situations of intimacy and kinship. Recent scholarship has amplified how the histories of conquest,
. colonialism, migration, and capitalist extraction made the U.S. West a frenetic site for social experimentation and regulation. State and provincial govern- ments in western North America created laboratories for legitimizing inti- mate ties and kinship, and “factories” for manufacturing gender roles and race definitions.
In governing multicultural societies, U.S. and Canadian courts and admin- istrations developed knowledge of customs, religions, and institutions, and classified social relations and people by ethnicity, race, and religious iden- tity. Judges and attorneys sifted through local customs to understand how a particular marriage was religiously sanctified or legitimated by community acceptance. In the process, a steady stream of questions arose in adjudicat- ing marriage relationships. Was the social bond and duty maintained by the couple’s sharing of a household or by the vows they exchanged? Was it possible that the marriage could be dissolved by divorce, by the distance or length of time the couple were apart, or by abandonment?
2e legislative regulation and judicial administration of marriage widened considerably in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with proliferating new standards of marriage age, race, and the contractual obligations of mar- riage licensing. How did South Asian male migrants and their female partners negotiate the power of the courts in regulating marriage? Some couples side- stepped racial restrictions of marriage licensing by applying in more favorable jurisdictions. Spouses, kin, and communities handled problems that arose from cohabitation, plural marriage, and abandonment outside the courts. However intractable disputes or failed arrangements necessitated that spouses and kin avail themselves of the courts and fit their problems into the legal categories of divorce, bigamy, and inheritance rights. 2e legal judgments over marriage legitimacy balanced ever-changing systems of race taxonomies, the judge’s appreciation of traditional custom, and the exercise of humanitarian sympathy.
In court cases, the evaluation of a person’s capacity for respectable legitimate marriage influenced the distribution and organization of land, labor, wealth, and status. 2e transmission of property, citizenship status, and immigrant entry was configured under the logic of marriage, respectable family forma- tion, and the clear designation of dependents and heirs. 2e local adjudication of disputes over marriage and property reveals how the flexible interplay of sympathy and taxonomy shape the micropolitics of justice.
2e complexity of these issues is apparent in the distribution of an estate in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in . 2e estate case appeared straightforward;
, , . two women, Soledad Garcia Jubala of New Mexico and Nami Singh of Punjab, each claimed to be the wife of a deceased man, Julio Jubala, and the heir to his estate. However, the simple dispute unleashed examples of diverse marriages and how they were lived and interpreted across three decades. A court dispute spawned inquiry into the life history of a migrant, the variety of his intimate ties, and the court’s determination to judge legitimacy among a contentious sea of community standards, religious practices, and state sanctions. /e inquiry confronted different understandings of marriage age, fidelity, and the require- ments for cohabitation and consummation, and entertained debates over how to interpret abandonment or the validity of divorce. /e debates produced by the marriages of Julio Jubala and his alleged spouses on two continents generated a rich legal field on how liberal secular government honored the particularities of diverse marriage customs, as well as creating rules, standards, and boundaries that corralled diverse marriages into an observable and man- ageable universal system.
Diversity in religious customs has frequently been at odds with the stan- dardization of state legitimacy of marriage. In the United States, state legisla- tors, federal bureaucrats, missionaries, and social critics created and defined the standard of Christian monogamous marriage and shored it up against an array of putatively deviant unions. As Nancy Cott has argued, assertions of differences of race and civilization buttressed the superiority of the mar- riage norm: the “marital non-conformists most hounded and punished by the federal government were deemed ‘racially’ different from the white majority. /ey were Indians, freed slaves, polygamous Mormons (metaphorically non- white) and Asians. Prohibiting divergent marriages has been as important in public policy as sustaining the chosen model.” Christian monogamous mar- riage occupied the normative heart of the continuum, and veering away on either side were an array of sexual-relations “horrors” and “female degradation.” Knowledge of non-normative intimate ties circulated culturally among evan- gelical Protestant Christians in North America, and in what the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has so dramatically called “characteristic atrocities” of Asia and Africa, including “concubinage and polygamy; bride sale; . . . consecrated prostitution and sacrifice; . . . [and] child marriage,” as well as sodomy, in all its possible non-procreative forms.
My purpose is to understand the government management of intimate ties as a process that simultaneously shores up the norm and scrutinizes deviant unions. Despite the prevailing administrative, political, and cultural
. ratification of Christian monogamous marriage as the underlying norm of legitimate unions, government agents and judges confronted a diversity of intimate ties in localities. In the judicial and administrative handling, some ties were made either legible, visible, and legitimate or illegible, invisible, and illegitimate to the state. At the same time, other possible ties emerged that had local sanction through kinship and community support. Stray details within the court transcript and other legal documents undermined the certainty of judicial decisions and attorneys’ briefs.
Canadian and U.S. immigration laws made it nearly impossible for South Asian women to immigrate. Nonetheless, in the early twentieth century, a handful of South Asian women negotiated immigration barriers and migrated to Canada and the United States to join their husbands. Unlike the hand- ful of highly visible South Asian women in Vancouver who were married to economic and community leaders, the five Punjabi families in Northern California in Yuba City, Loomis, and Orangevale were relatively isolated and less able to create women’s networks among themselves. In British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, a number of South Asian men married white and European immigrant women. However, anthropologists and historians have estimated that the overwhelming majority of South Asian men married Mexican immigrant and Mexican American women in Southern California, Arizona, and Texas from the late s through the s. :ere were also several instances of marriages with African American women in California and in the Southeast, Northeast, and Great Lakes regions.
In the late s, the labor market and marriage networks followed similar paths connecting South Asian male migrants who came to the Imperial Valley from the Northwest and Northern California and Mexican women and chil- dren who had fled the turmoil of the Mexican revolution and arrived in El Paso, Texas. From there they migrated and worked in the booming cotton fields of newly irrigated borderlands near El Paso, southern New Mexico, and Imperial County, California. :e channels of migration were carved by the Southern Pacific passenger railway routes, which brought Punjabi and Japanese men from coastal California across the desert Southwest and into contact with Mexican men and women. White and African American rural migrants from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri joined them, migrating by railroad
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. to harvest cotton. 0e spread of cotton culture to the San Joaquin Valley in California in accelerated the interstate movement, with diverse workers coming seasonally to harvest the cotton, while others remained permanently.
Karen Leonard has examined patterns of South Asian men marrying Mexican sisters, cousins, mothers, and daughters in El Paso and in the San Joaquin Valley and Imperial County, California. 0e convergence of migra- tion routes, associations developed through agricultural land-leasing part- nerships, and recruited labor crews on newly irrigated commercial farms sustained these marriages. In Imperial County, the migration patterns and marriage networks of the Alvarez family converged with South Asian men’s partnerships and friendships. 0e Alvarez family had fled the turmoil of the Mexican revolution. Doña Petra Alvarez, three of her daughters, Antonia, Anna Anita, and Ester, and her son Jesús arrived by train in El Paso in . Learning of work opportunities in California, they quickly made their way by train to Imperial County, where the family settled and picked cotton on the Edwards ranch in Holtville for two South Asian tenant partners, Sher Singh and Gopal Singh. Within months, twenty-one-year-old Antonia had mar- ried thirty-six-year-old Sher Singh and eighteen-year-old Anna Anita had married thirty-seven-year-old Gopal Singh. 0e intensity of same- gender ties among both South Asian men and Mexican and Mexican American women tended to promote rapid serial marriages, often with significant age differences between men and women. An older widowed daughter of Doña Petra’s, Valentina, followed her family to El Centro with her four daughters. Valentina married Rullia Singh in October . A month later, Alejandrina, her fourteen-year-old (stated on the marriage certificate to be eighteen) daughter had married a South Asian friend of Rullia’s, a man who went by the American name of Albert Joe. 0e youngest Alvarez sister, Ester, married Harnam Singh Sidhu in Arizona in . As Karen Leonard has observed, strong women’s networks developed from Mexican kinship ties and were “reinforced and expanded by marriages to Punjabi [men], settle- ment in particular localities and childbearing accompanied by compadrazgo [co-parenthood, godfather status] ties.” 0e significance of compadrazgo rela- tionships adapted Catholic baptism rituals and the naming of godparents to intensify and multiply kinship ties between adults in these mixed-heritage marriages between Mexican Catholic women and Punjabi men, predomi- nantly Sikhs, but some of them Hindus or Muslims. 0e shared socializing and economic responsibilities of co-parenting and jointly raising children
, , . sutured and sustained business alliances between men and combined them with cultural, kinship and spiritual ties sustained by Mexican and Mexican American women to create novel, dense, deeply familiar joint-family ties that interwove into a “Mexican-Punjabi” community.
Prohibitions on interracial marriage, which were unevenly legislated and varied by territory and state, stymied legitimate unions for Asian migrants. Miscegenation laws were neither universal nor systematic. As Peggy Pascoe has argued, anti-miscegenation laws “in the West, not the South, reached their most elaborate, even labyrinthine development, covering the broadest list of racial categories.” As Pascoe has demonstrated, miscegenation law was a “kind of legal factory for defining, producing and reproducing racial categories.” 3e recognition of different races and legislative amendments state by state in the Western states produced the multiracial pattern of white supremacy adapted by Georgia and Virginia in the s. Miscegenation law was a “national” and “multiracial . . . project of white supremacy rooted in white purity” that “placed non-Whites in structurally similar subordination to Whites,” as if all social groups not identified as “White” presented the “same threat to whiteness.”
In Canada, there were no laws that specifically prohibited marriages between different races, but as Constance Blackstone has argued, there were laws in western Canada that prohibited white women from working for Chinese or Japanese men. Yet even without explicit prohibition, marriages between South Asian men and white and European immigrant women were infrequent. Politicians and moral reformers anticipated that social preju- dices would hamper the frequency of interracial marriages. In the first three decades of South Asian migrant settlement in British Columbia, there were a dozen marriages registered between white women and one black woman and South Asian men. 3e majority of women had migrated to British Columbia as children or young women. 3eir parents and their birthplace origins illustrate a diversity of British and North American origins, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Houston, Texas; from Hawaii to the Philippines; and from Niagara, Ontario, to Scotland, England, and Wales. Some of these marriages had the support of the bride’s parents and were consecrated in ceremonies in Protestant churches. For instance, in Victoria in and , Baptist and Presbyterian ministers married several white brides—Margaret Banloo and Alice Markle, both aged twenty-two, and Maude Alice Crowley, aged twenty-four—to South Asian men. 3e South Asian men, some of whom were widowers, worked as ranch- ers, farmers, and mill workers in or near Victoria and Vancouver.
. In rare instances, white women married South Asian men in a newly
established Sikh temple (gurudhwara). 0e first Sikh wedding ceremony in Vancouver was between Bhai Munsha Singh and Annie Wright at a gurud- hwara there on April , , seven months after they had registered their marriage at the Vancouver courthouse. Teja Singh, a Sikh scholar educated at Cambridge University in Britain and Columbia University in New York, performed the wedding ceremony in the afternoon, and both the bride and groom were renamed in the presence of an assembly of devout Sikhs. Bhai Munsha Singh was given the new name of Gayan Singh and Annie Wright was renamed Labb Kor. Vancouver Sikhs invited Teja Singh, who lectured extensively on Sikhism in North America, to help educate the general pub- lic, who were hostile and ignorant of Sikh values and spiritual practices. Teja Singh took the opportunity of the wedding ceremony to relate the meaning of Sikh marriage vows closely to Protestant cultural norms. He explained that “marriage was a divine union of two souls and not a mere carnal bond,” and that the duties of both spouses were faithfulness, loyalty, and being “strictly monogamous” in “thoughts and action.” 0ey were to achieve “peace and har- mony” by “sacrificing . . . personal tastes and inclinations to each other.” Teja Singh also had the couple vow to “live by the Sikh religion” and perform all the birth, marriage and death ceremonies” of their children according to “Sikh rites.” Teja Singh’s work in Vancouver extended far beyond officiating ritu- als at the gurudhwara and presenting public lectures; he established two key community institutions by drafting the by-laws and legally registering the gurudhwara’s administrative organization, the Khalsa Diwan Society, and a closely linked real estate and investment company, the Guru Nanak Mining and Trust Company. Both institutions became critical to the development of Sikh community and to its public presence in British Columbia.
Despite the lack of barriers in British Columbia, marriages were more fre- quent in the agriculturally intensive border regions of the southern United States with Mexico. Migration streams, work relations, and social experience of race shaped marriage patterns. In the Pacific Northwest, even though there were no miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriages in British Columbia or Washington State, there were few licensed marriages of South Asian men with white women. Legal acceptance did not mean that county clerks readily issued marriage licenses—they might curtly refuse to provide one, without offering any explanation to the humiliated couple. Hostility of
, , . relatives, neighbors, and ministers also dampened pursuit of the legal legitimacy of marriage. /e small numbers of registered marriages paralleled work and social relations in the Pacific Northwest that reduced social opportunities and limited contact between men and women. In towns like Bellingham, Astoria, Linnton, and Gate in the Pacific Northwest, and even in cities like Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and Sacramento, labor camps and boardinghouses social- ized working men across racial lines, but also isolated them into a homosocial public world. South Asian men had contact with other transient and immi- grant workers and laborers, contractors and employers, and shopkeepers. South Asian laborers were unlikely to meet and become familiar with white American and European immigrant women, except for the very few they encountered in retail and service positions. Encounters were guarded. /e hostility of white society was expressed in driving-out violence, most vehement and frequent in Vancouver, Washington State, and Northern California, and interaction was limited to highly regulated and scripted suspicion. Fear of labor competition and rumors of insolence and disrespect toward white women crystallized racial- ized perceptions of South Asians as a sexual threat, corresponding to white fears of black, Japanese, and southern European men. In the Pacific Northwest, the rare romances and marriages that did occur were isolated, and therefore they did not create new heterosocial social networks enabling other meetings, romances, and marriages between South Asian men and European immigrant, white Canadian, or white American women.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, miscegenation laws that first prohibited white-black marriages and white-Indian marriages in the U.S. southeastern states were amended in western states to prohibit white-Asian marriages. /e first laws in the United States that specifically prohibited mar- riages between white and Chinese spouses emerged in Nevada in , Idaho in , and Oregon in . /e race category of “Mongolian” enlarged the scope of prohibited groups to include Japanese and Korean in Arizona in , in California in , and in Utah in .
/e multiplication of race and national prohibitions contributed, as Peggy Pascoe has observed, to “adding the race and gender pair of white women / Asian men to the project of protecting white womanhood,” and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and South Asian men all figured in “miscegena- tion dramas” that “circulated in newspaper accounts of Asian men and white women attempting to marry.” As Pascoe has eloquently argued:
. No doubt these dramas captivated readers partly for the enticing lure of the for- bidden, the new and exotic possibilities they pitted against traditional morality. But no matter how many readers may have fantasized about choosing interracial romance over legal propriety, there was no mistaking the moral of these stories—or their political effects. By reinforcing the impression that the function of miscegena- tion laws was to preserve the purity of white womanhood, miscegenation dramas closed off avenues of change. By showing young white women that their protec- tion depended on the loyalty to their race, and by encouraging officials to pass and enforce miscegenation laws, miscegenation dramas served white supremacy by racializing and sexualizing Asian American men in relation to white women.
Although the legal scholars Hrishi Karthikeyan and Gabriel Chin explain that the state’s predisposition to segregate blacks and the visible Asian population was the best predicator of coverage by anti-miscegenation laws, demographics and racially discriminatory laws and policies were frequently disconnected.
By the s and s, the greatest concentration of South Asians was in California, but their numbers and visibility in the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Imperial Valleys did not lead the California legislature to target “Hindu” or “Asian Indian” specifically in miscegenation prohibitions, even when they racialized Filipinos as “Malay” in . Legislators intent on preserving white racial purity and supremacy confidently presumed that prohibitions against “Mongolian” races would curtail marriages between South Asian men and white women. Two southern states, Virginia in and Georgia in , spe- cifically prohibited marriages of “Asiatic Indians” and white persons. Arizona, the only western state to do so, added “Hindu” to its marriage prohibitions in . <e specificity of ethnic and racial identities did not, however, completely determine whether marriages were licensed and legitimate.
Racialization of Asian immigrants was neither automatic nor coherent in the United States. Deenesh Sohoni challenges the assumption that mem- bers of different Asian ethnic groups were originally grouped together based on their perceived racial characteristics. Analyzing how racialization oper- ated in federal naturalization rulings and state miscegenation laws, Sohoni argues that racialization concepts distributed people from Asia into at least three racial categories—“yellow–Mongolians, brown–Malays, and white Caucasian–Asian Indians.” In the s, however, law and administration consolidated a unified racial category of “Asian” or “Asiatic” and emphasized a presumed and shared incapacity for social and political assimilation to North
, , . American societies. Proscribing social integration for people denied natural- ized citizenship based on a circular and self-perpetuating category of racial difference constructed “Asians” as a distinct, inassimilable race through immi- gration and naturalization laws and anti-miscegenation legislation.
Despite the potent fear that none of them could be socially integrated into U.S. society, Asian immigrants forged personal and domestic ties with other migrants they encountered and persisted in seeking legitimacy in their ethnic and local communities, as well as the legitimacy of local, state, and federal jurisdictions when necessary and plausible. Karen Leonard has tabu- lated marriages of South Asian men to white, Mexican, and black women in Imperial County from to , with half of the marriage licenses obtained in Southern California and the other half in Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. Marriage licensing became a powerful and invisible tool for judg- ing a couple’s fitness for marriage. Marriage reformers effectively undercut the popularity of common law and community-sanctioned marriages by demanding stringent regulations for licenses. By , reformers had “turned marriage licenses into the sole gateway to legal marriage” and made local officials “the society’s first line of defense against unwanted marriages.” By the s, they turned “marriage license clerks into the gatekeepers of white supremacy”—, marriage-license issuers spread across the United States, “a virtual army of bureaucrats perfectly positioned to enforce state miscegena- tion laws.”
:e routine, ordinary, and invisible power of marriage licensing produced a ritual practice underscoring the state and the law’s role in the public affirma- tion of marriage. “:e process of licensing applied to every couple who wished to marry, stewarded couples through the public ritual of obeying the law and provided the state with the perfect opportunity to emphasize the contrast between couples who could—and could not—claim the privilege of mar- riage,” Pascoe writes. Moreover, it afforded a “routine means” of enforcing race prohibitions “well outside the glare of publicity that surrounded sensational miscegenation dramas in the public press.” Even in states where interracial marriages were legal, local officials could discourage them and thereby “fos- ter the social invisibility of interracial sex and marriage by, in effect, erasing interracial couples from national marriage statistics, reinforcing the common impression that, with or without laws to prevent them, interracial marriages were extreme rarities.” :e “denial of license operated as a kind of public sham- ing ritual performed by state and local officials.”
. In California, Arizona, and Texas, county clerks did use the category of
“Mongolian” to prohibit some marriages, but they frequently relied upon assessments of “color” and complexion rather than “race” to approve licenses between South Asian grooms and Mexican brides. In many western localities, these marriage prohibitions were irregularly enforced and creatively bypassed by individuals, clerks, and judges to suit local conditions. Although most couples were married in Imperial County, the county clerk sometimes posed difficulties, which led brides and grooms to apply for licenses elsewhere. San Diego County and Yuma County were the closest alternative and frequent destination for marriage licenses. For instance, although Bagh Singh Chotia and Grace Stove met and lived in Imperial County, they traveled to Yuma, Arizona, to marry in . In July , when California legislation man- dated a three-day waiting period between application for a marriage license and issuance, there was a decline in marriages in California and increases in Nevada and Arizona, particularly Yuma. 7is flow of out-of-state marriages with South Asian men, however, contributed in to the Arizona legislature adding the categories of “Hindu” and “Malay” to their prohibitions to marry- ing whites, thereby curtailing the frequency of marriages with South Asian and Filipino grooms in Yuma and elsewhere in Arizona.
Dozens of marriages between Mexican and Mexican American women and South Asian men also took place in the vicinity of El Paso, Texas, especially at Canutillo and San Elizario in the El Paso river valley, where Sikhs farmed cotton, as well as in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where there were no waiting- period restrictions and no race prohibitions against marriage. In December , in the El Paso County Courthouse, sixteen-year-old Felicita Soto, born in Austin, married thirty-year-old Harnam Singh Dhillon. 7eir courtship and marriage was sutured by labor partnerships and kinship networks in southwestern Texas, which, in turn, stimulated and sustained their migration to Imperial County, California, by , where they raised the first of four children. Adapting to changing laws and the varying racial classification by county court clerks, South Asian men and Mexican women met and received marriage licenses in different locations in the Southwest, from El Centro and Yuma to El Paso, and families were sustained by a network of information about work opportunities and community support shared by both South Asian men and Mexican and Mexican American women.
7e state and social regulation made Asian and Mexican immigrants into perpetual nomadic subjects. Despite and perhaps because of their nomadic
, , . subjectivity, they became adept at evading state-imposed restrictions on prop- erty ownership, marriage, and other forms of belonging. By pursuing marriages in states without white-Asian marriage prohibitions, or working with county clerks who observed similarities that accorded with commonsense understand- ings of color difference, or orchestrating marriages offshore, they were able to undercut or evade the racial taxonomies of state-licensed marriage. However, the state’s role in legitimatizing or repudiating intimate ties was not limited to the issue of marriage and birth certificates. It could also intervene when ques- tions of citizenship status at the borders or inheritance arose.
A court case in the Rio Grande Valley town of Mesilla, New Mexico, raises compelling questions about the state’s interpretation of marriage in terms of ethnic, religious, and race differences. On the night of December , , forty-five-year-old Julio Jubala was instantly killed when the truck he was driv- ing was struck by a northbound freight train at the Mesilla Park crossing. At the probate hearing in April , two women claimed to have been his wife, one in Mesilla, Soledad Garcia Jubala, whom he had married in , and the second in India, Nami Singh, who claimed that they had been married in . Because of the claim of a first marriage in India, a fairly routine probate case after a tragic death became a civil suit that played out over two continents and over three years in the New Mexico court system.
As the attorneys tried to probe and justify the competing claims of the two women, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the marriage in India came under dispute. Especially in the early twentieth century, U.S. courts were sometimes confronted with adjudicating the legitimacy of marriages consecrated in India. Although accounts of marriage customs in British India such as dowry, child brides and grooms, zenanas (harems), and sati (widow immolation) circulated widely in the print culture of American evangelical Protestants in the late nineteenth century, it was not until the migration of male labor- ers from Punjab in the early twentieth century that the legitimacy of mar- riages consecrated in India became a political or legal issue in localities in North America.
After verifying the identity of the deceased, Julio Jubala of New Mexico, as the same man as the Jawala Singh whom Nami Singh married in Punjab in , who had left India in , Nami Singh’s attorneys introduced
. immigration documents and testimony from family and friends to show that Julio/Jawala had arrived in Mesilla, New Mexico, in after stops in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Mexico. Nami’s attorneys introduced testimony that verified that the marriage had been properly consecrated and recognized in British India. 1e New Mexico District Court enlisted the U.S. consul in Karachi in British India to depose witnesses in Punjab. 1e consul summoned Nami Singh, her father, Jawala’s father, and a Brahmin priest. 1ey testified that the parents had arranged the marriage; Nami had been twelve and Jawala eleven when they married in a Hindu ceremony in her home village on June , . Nami declared that the bride and groom “had not seen each before the day of the ceremony,” which was typical of arranged marriages. After the ceremony, she had lived in Jawala’s father’s house for six years. Jawala’s father explained that “at the time of the marriage of my son to Nami, neither party were of puberty age,” and three years later, after reaching puberty, they assumed the “relations of man and wife”—a euphemism for having publicly sanctioned sexual relations. Subsequently, they lived together for approximately three more years before Jawala Singh left for the United States.
International treaties obliged the United States to recognize legitimate unions in Britain and its empire. 1e details of a properly arranged match, pre- adolescent age of the bride and groom, and the timing of sexual consumma- tion were the narrative of legitimacy produced by Nami’s attorneys. However, these very same details were deployed by Soledad’s attorneys as indicators of a morally “repugnant” and thereby illegitimate system of marital unions.
Long-distance migration and the protracted separation of spouses and fam- ilies across the Pacific created a different sense of time, marital duty, and the significance of kin networks in forging bonds of communication for Jawala’s family in India. 1e distance and the length of time away were “perfectly nor- mal procedure,” according to Nami’s father, who claimed that at the time that “many Sikhs were leaving the Punjab for America to seek employment.” Although Jawala Singh had not written much to his family, his father received “news of his whereabouts and activities” from a network of “friends, neighbors, and acquaintances” who had also migrated to the United States. Villagers in Punjab kept tabs, principally by telegram and mail, on their relatives scat- tered in California and the U.S. Southwest. 1e same network had delivered news of Jawala’s death by telegram within days, and had, within weeks, sent reports of the estimated value of his estate and information regarding local
, , . attorneys. From the perspective of Nami’s family, Julio/Jawala had aban- doned neither her nor them.
Marriage customs in India were not, however, timeless. In the late nine- teenth century, a “Hindu marriage” between religiously observant Sikhs fol- lowed Hindu Brahmin tradition and was consecrated by a Hindu Brahmin priest, and the marriage between Jawala Singh and Nami had been conse- crated in . Nonetheless, in turn-of-the-century Punjab, although slowly and unevenly, relatively “fluid pluralist traditions were being replaced by more uniform and exclusive Sikh, Muslim and Hindu paradigms.” Hindu and Sikh religious reform movements had gained momentum in the late nine- teenth century and the process of standardizing and differentiating sectarian marriage ceremonies had the backing of the British colonial state, even though the necessity of creating distinctions appeared to have more salience for reli- gious leaders and urban elites than for many villagers. In pursuit of a purified and bounded Sikh identity, Sikh reformers championed new marriage laws that created state recognition for differentiating Sikh and Hindu rituals and ceremonies and vesting legitimating authority with the appropriate respective institutions. As Doris Jakobsh and Prem Chowdhry have demonstrated, this reform of Sikh marriage rituals also consolidated the authority of male reli- gious leaders over communal traditions of women’s popular rites and boister- ous traditions in marriages and key life-cycle events. 7ese permutations of social transformation in marriage ceremonies and legitimacy in British colo- nial India were well beyond the concern and expertise of the New Mexico judiciary. Whatever critical commentary the American judges had about the customs and practices of marriage, they were obliged by international treaties to recognize a legitimate marriage consecrated in British India.
7e distance and decades of separation created waves of silence and insight throughout the Sikh diaspora. Migrants kept some details of their intimate and social lives secret, while revealing others to kin at home, as well as to friends and kin who had also migrated. 7ese fluctuating crests and eddies of silence and partial knowledge were most striking in who possessed knowl- edge about each union and where they lived. Julio/Jawala’s friends and rela- tives from Punjab who worked in the Rio Grande Valley testified that they were aware of his dual marriages. For instance, when an El Paso friend, Bood Singh, quizzed him about having two wives, Julio responded, “[T]here will be no trouble. I have a wife in both countries.”
. Julio was even intent on persuading Bood to do the same and marry a
“beautiful girl” locally in addition to Bood’s wife in India. Bood argued that it was against the law to marry unless you divorced your first wife in India. Julio said, “[Nobody knows] I am married. Here you can marry here too; nobody tell it to the courts.” However, Jawala was careful to keep the knowledge of his marriage in India secret in his home in New Mexico. His cousin Delip Singh, who had attended Nami and Jawala’s marriage ceremony, became reac- quainted with Jawala in when they met at an El Paso horse corral. After Delip learned of Soledad, Jawala begged him to keep his marriage to Nami secret, saying, “[D]on’t tell it so my Mexican wife will know it.”
If Jawala’s practice of plural marriage was controversial among his friends and relatives in the United States, it is unclear whether the disputes between Jawala and his friends arose from a moral value of monogamous marriage in the Sikh and Hindu traditions or economic fears. 6e fear of losing land through the dissolution of marriages in community property states such as New Mexico and California haunted many Punjabi men in the early twenti- eth century. For some, the handful of divorces from marriages with Mexican American women that had resulted in the loss of land and savings served as a cautionary tale of the danger of marriages to women in the United States.
6ese promises of silence were kept; in Punjab, no one admitted to know- ing of Soledad, and in New Mexico, no one but Punjabi village kin and friends in the United States knew about Nami. Yet with Jawala’s untimely death, all the secrets exploded. His neighbor Udam Singh corresponded with his uncle who lived in the same village as Jawala’s father, Nathu Singh, about his death, his wife, and the value of his estate. Nathu Singh sent telegrams to his nephew Delip Singh in El Paso and Bhooja Singh in Yuba City to investigate the death. Bhooja Singh, Jawala’s paternal uncle, was a pivotal and controversial character in the trial. He lived in Sacramento County, but was in close touch with Jawala and traveled frequently to New Mexico. Bhooja was instrumental in alerting Nami Singh of her husband’s death and securing an attorney in El Paso to represent her; according to Jawala’s friends, Bhooja had pressured them to oppose the marriage with Soledad Garcia in . Soledad testified that Bhooja had proposed marriage to her shortly after Julio’s death. She rebuffed him, but he was approaching her through a tradition of remarriage, karewa, common in Punjab where a brother, paternal cousin, or paternal uncle of the deceased claims the widow as his wife. As Prem Chowdhry has analyzed, this tradition was popular in agricultural communities to retain property within
, , . the husband’s patriarchal family, as well as to ensure support of the widow by a man’s heirs, especially since widow remarriage was generally problematic. However, it undermined a woman’s independent ownership of property and was practiced with little regard for the express wishes of the widow.
5e overwhelming evidence of Nami’s legitimate marriage provoked Soledad’s attorneys to argue that Julio must have divorced Nami prior to his marriages in the United States. In questioning Nami’s family, they discovered however, that divorce was not a legitimate option in Sikh and Hindu communities in British India. Both fathers were adamant that marriage under “Hindu reli- gious rites” did not recognize “divorce granted to either party.”
Soledad’s attorneys, nevertheless, insisted that Jawala had petitioned for divorce sometime during his travels in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Mexico. 5ere was no documentation of divorce between Jawala and Nami in New Mexico records, however, and divorce was not permissible in Mexico until .
Neither could one argue that Jawala was unfamiliar with divorce proceed- ings, since a record search by the court revealed that he had been legally mar- ried in to a Maria Fierro and subsequently divorced her in . 5is marriage was a footnote to the estate case, but it exemplifies a submerged his- tory of marital disputes in interracial marriages that surfaced to public view through divorce suits. Divorce petitions required evidence of “irreconcilable differences” and ascribed “fault” to one or both of the spouses. Frequently, both spouses accused each other of violence and mental anguish to justify the extraordinary circumstances of dissolving a marriage. Maria and Julio Jubala’s marriage was rocked by allegations of domestic violence. In , Maria had filed a complaint in civil court that Julio had “choke[d], beat[en] and bruise[d] her,” causing her to have “black and blue spots and swollen places on her head and neck,” and she testified in during her divorce proceedings that he had become increasingly violent and abusive. Julio described his difficulties with Maria to his friend Udam charging, “that woman is fighting always, so I am going to divorce.”
Divorce was far more frequent among these marriages between South Asian men and the Mexican, white, and black women they married in the Southwest than the U.S. national average. In the county with the largest number of
. marriages, Imperial County, California, Karen Leonard has tabulated that there were fifty-nine divorce petitions from to involving first- generation husbands from India, stemming from the marriage disputes of forty-five cou- ples. Over a decade of Maria and Julio’s marriage, there were several petitions for divorce filed at the Dona Ana County Courthouse in Las Cruces.
Maria had been born in the U.S. territory of New Mexico, and Mexican American heritage like hers figured in only percent of divorce suits. 3e vast majority—nearly three-quarters—of the wives who appeared as defen- dants in such divorce petitions were first-generation Mexican immigrants. Over percent of these divorce petitions were contested, more than triple the national average of percent. Wives on average filed three-quarters of American divorce petitions, but in Imperial County, with the largest propor- tion of South Asian men who married in the United States, the men filed percent of divorce petitions.
It was Maria who filed the divorce petition. After a particularly vicious fight on September , , she accused Julio of “violently” putting her out of their home and calling her “vile and indecent names.” She claimed that he had struck her “in the face and head, jerked her and beat her, tore her dress and used profane and abusive language.” According to her testimony, Julio “cussed her up,” struck her in the face, and “dragged her by the hair.” She left him and went to live with her father in the adjacent community of Tortugas. Neither Julio nor his legal representative appeared in court during the divorce hearings to contest Maria’s allegations of violence and beatings, which Maria believed were a consequence their inability to have children. In court, she claimed that Julio had told her that he despised her because she was “too old” and unable to “get any children.” Although she had started other divorce cases before, she had withdrawn them after Julio made entreaties and promised a better mar- riage. In the end, Maria’s case against Julio was uncontested. Neither he nor his lawyer appeared at the court hearing, and the judge validated the negoti- ated settlement without his presence.
Court records from Oregon to New Mexico are littered with divorce peti- tions involving South Asian men. Even the fiercest accusations of physical and mental abuse did not necessarily, however, result in a divorce decree. For instance, a rough-and-tumble marriage and accusations of mutual neglect and violence played out in the courtroom in Astoria, Oregon. Soba Singh and Pauline, his Belgian American bride, met in Oregon and crossed the border to Vancouver, Washington, to marry on March , . 3ey lived
, , . in Astoria, where Soba worked for the Hammond Lumber Company, which employed a number of South Asian men. /e couple lived in a rented house that Soba claimed that he had furnished. He said he had tried to make their married life “congenial,” but the financing of household consumption resulted in fierce disputes. In a pattern similar to that found among men in Imperial County, it was the husband, Soba, who seven months after their marriage filed a complaint for divorce, after Pauline fled Astoria for her mother’s home in Portland. Soba accused Pauline of unprovoked “cruel and inhuman treatment,” saying that in “fits of pique and temper,” she had pulled his hair, struck him, and cursed him with “vile language.” Soba Singh was mortified when Pauline exclaimed in public that she had “married him just for his money” and “did not love or care for him,” a sentiment allegedly expressed in the food she cooked for him and her refusal to dine with him. He accused Pauline of denying him the “many delicacies and choice viand[s]” that she bought with his money and instead feeding him “poor and cheaper” foods. She allegedly ridiculed him for “not being a white man,” and refused “to eat at the same time or table” with him, claiming that “her white skin” precluded her from eating with “a black man.” Soba represented himself as a “considerate,” responsible, “kind” husband despite this abuse.
In her counterpetition, Pauline Singh claimed that she had “tried to be a dutiful and true wife,” but that Soba Singh was a jealous, neglectful, and violent husband who was a “ginger [sic] addict.” She admitted that she had pulled her husband’s hair to force him to apologize “for having called her a son-of-a-b.” However, she countered that his physical and verbal abuse far outweighed her actions. Several times, Soba had falsely accused her in “vile language” of infi- delity. In the heat of argument, he would brandish a revolver, “grab her by the throat,” and demand that she confess to adultery. She had fled to her mother in Portland, fearing that “her life was in danger.” She demanded per month in alimony, arguing that despite his alleged “ginger addiction,” he was a “strong, able-bodied man and in regular employment.” Two years later, despite the accusations of violence, humiliation, and neglect recorded in public, hostilities subsided and the two reconciled. /e judge dismissed the suit, after receiving assurances that the couple had “amicably settled their differences.”
It was even more difficult to pursue divorce when there were young children and the spouses’ cohabitation was necessary for economic survival, particularly in the duties involved in agricultural cultivation and labor coordination. When Nellie Khan petitioned for divorce from Walayat Khan in Sacramento,
. they had three children, born since their marriage in Los Angeles. 1e family migrated frequently following harvests and farm-laborer opportuni- ties from Brawley in the Imperial Valley to Willows in the Sacramento Valley. In April , near Walnut Creek, Sacramento County, Nellie reported, her husband had “beat, slapped, kicked, and bruised” her and “their infant child,” which she held in her arms, and thrown her out of the house. His “cruel, bru- tal, insulting and vicious” treatment led her to fear for her life and the safety of her children. As the wife of a labor contractor and migrant worker, Nellie Khan was acutely familiar with the contracting system’s demands for unpaid labor and the variable income it provided. She had used this knowledge both to demonstrate her fidelity toward her husband, following “him from place to place” in California and working “in the fields for many hours each day,” caring for the family, and “cook[ing] for a large number of men,” and to support her demands for alimony and circumvent her husband’s ability to hide assets and the proceeds of informal contracts. In addition to requesting that the court order Walayat to pay half his monthly income in alimony payments of and grant her complete care and custody of three minor children, she sug- gested the means for the court to locate community property. Her attorneys made a motion to put a restraining order on Manual Patrick, a Walnut Creek farmer, in his payment of to Walayat Khan. 1e success of the motion led to a swift reconciliation, perhaps aided by her attorney’s pessimistic coun- sel that the court would be unable to enforce alimony payments, and that irre- spective of the decree, Nellie and her children would be exceedingly vulnerable in a divorce. By April , , the two had settled their differences and were living together again, resulting in the dismissal of the divorce suit.
Jaget Singh and his Jamaican-born wife Alice, the daughter of South Asian and African parents, had married in Guantánamo, Cuba, in May , and subsequently immigrated to the United States, like many others who had dis- embarked at ports from Baltimore to Jacksonville, Tampa, and New Orleans since , including Chinese, Japanese, and Syrian migrants. Jaget and Alice joined his brother Mehar in California, where they found work in the farm- laborer circuit and lived for most of their married life. 1eir separation in November was precipitated by a fight in their Stockton boardinghouse, where, Alice alleged, Jaget had jumped on her, beaten her, and cursed her until Stockton police officers intervened. Alice had just lost her daughter, who had been born in Jamaica in . She feared that her husband would appropriate their savings and personal property, convert the property into cash, and take
, , . the money to India to build a house and purchase land. When Jaget Singh failed to appear in court in Stockton to contest Alice’s claims, she was awarded the divorce by default.
Divorce cases often emerged after several petitions. 0e interwoven ties of multiple marriages of women from the same family and men’s business part- nerships sometimes precipitated tension between couples, sometimes enabled reconciliations. In in El Paso, Matilde Sandoval married Kehar Singh Gill, and they promptly moved to Imperial County. Although Sandoval’s mother and sister had also married Sikhs, Matilde’s marriage to Kehar did not last. Within a year, he filed for divorce in El Centro, claiming that Matilde had humiliated him in front of a South Asian friend and refused to keep house and cook for him. Her behavior outside of the house was even more disturbing to his values and expectations of a wife. Her shopping trips in town included purchases of dresses and makeup, which she wore to dances without him. Kehar viewed Matilde’s desire for autonomy to participate in a public culture of socializing, beauty, and business, and her belief that male dancing partners did not equate to infidelity, as a threat to the marriage and defiance of his exclusive authority over her public social circulation among men. In the heat of arguments about morals and behavior, Matilde had threatened to leave Kehar, and she fled to visit her mother in New Mexico. At the urging of her mother and sister, she returned, however, and they reconciled in . Marriage tensions persisted, despite the efforts of Matilde’s relatives and their husbands’ business and social ties with Kehar. In , Kehar filed for divorce again, and this time they officially divorced. 0e contested suits indicate that couples fought fiercely for the values of their marriages and the survival of their partnerships, whether to hold poverty at bay, for the sake of their depen- dents, or to preserve kinship or community ties.
0ere was no debate over the legality of the marriage of Julio Jubala / Jawala Singh to Soledad Garcia. A marriage certificate was produced that revealed that six weeks after his divorce from Maria Fierro, the forty-two-year-old Julio had married Soledad, who was barely aged sixteen and nearly four months pregnant, in March . She married with the permission of her father, Domingo Garcia, who worked on Julio’s farms. Julio and Soledad had three daughters in quick succession; the first, Alicia, was born five months after their
. marriage. Esther and Julia soon followed. When Julio died, Soledad was preg- nant with their first son, who was named Manuel.
Curiously, Nami Singh’s attorneys did not raise moral suspicions about the context of Soledad’s marriage. Neither they nor the judge commented on her youth, her father’s economic relationship with the groom, the generational dif- ferences in their ages, or the advanced state of her pregnancy on their wed- ding day. Apparently as an issue of the law, Soledad’s father’s permission and the proper legal documentation allayed any doubts about the morality of the marriage and offered it irreproachable legitimacy. 1ese issues appear as stray details in the court transcript and were never raised in the court record by the historical actors at the time. Documentation from marriage, birth records, and other civil suits reveals details that heighten the ambiguity of Soledad and Julio/Jawala’s marriage, especially in relation to the claims made about the legitimacy of Jawala’s marriage to Nami.
1e principle of sanctioning the first monogamous marriage and the pro- hibition on bigamy influenced District Court Judge James B. McGhee’s deci- sion in . McGhee wrote that “the testimony is overwhelming that the claimant, Nami Singh, was lawfully married to the deceased in India.” 1e precedence of Nami’s marriage, no evidence of divorce, and the principle of marital monogamy guided his decision. Since Nami had married Jawala/Julio first, she was entitled to inherit. Judge McGhee knew that his ruling would “deprive the Dona Ana county widow, who married the deceased a few years since, [of ] her share of the property, and that it invalidates her marriage.” In following the rule of law on the precedence of marriage and abiding by the governing principle of monogamy, the district court had put the estate’s property in jeopardy, and thereby put the Mesilla widow and her children at the mercy of government financial support. Under the Alien Land Law, however, Nami Singh’s status as an “Asiatic alien” prohibited her ownership of the estate’s acres.
Soledad’s attorneys made an aggressive appeal to the New Mexico Supreme Court on grounds of the immorality and illegitimacy of Hindu marriage. 1ey argued that New Mexico was not “bound by a law or custom that is repugnant to its established public policy; and the Hindu child marriage [performed in India by a Brahmin priest] . . . is repugnant to the established public policy of the State of New Mexico.” 1e effect of Judge McGhee’s decision would make Soledad Jubala “nothing more than a concubine and that would in the same breath bastardize the four innocent children”; the decision would take
, , . away five-eighths of Jubala’s estate and “give it to a woman who contributed nothing to its accumulation.”
Soledad’s attorneys inveighed against what they subsequently called “infant marriage” and its affront to New Mexico’s age-of-consent laws passed from to , which required parental consent for marriages of males under the age of eighteen and females under the age of fifteen. 5ey insisted that the New Mexico Supreme Court must stand in solidarity with the British impe- rial government’s crusade to eliminate the “custom of child marriages” in India and its “evil effects.” 5ey speculated that if the New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the judgment, the floodgates would open to deviant marriages, and New Mexico would be forced to recognize “polygamous marriage,” “incestuous marriage,” and “infant marriages of year olds” if they were valid elsewhere. 5ey argued that the sanctioning of “Hindu” marriages disrupted the “stan- dards of morals in every Christian nation.”
In July , the New Mexico Supreme Court reversed the lower court decision and found in favor of Soledad Garcia Jubala. Speaking for the court, Judge Blair argued that there was “insufficient evidence to overcome pre- sumption that alleged marriage have been dissolved when deceased married in U.S.” 5e court accepted Soledad’s attorneys’ position that in order to marry in the United States, Jawala had to have divorced somewhere. 5ey raised doubts as to the validity of Nami’s marriage or whether it had been truly consummated, insinuating that marriage rituals between prepubescent individuals were nullified by the presumed inability to consent or have sexual intercourse. Judge Blair denied any “unequivocal proof ” that “the marriage in India, if it ever existed, was a bar to legal marriage in New Mexico.”
Blair accused Nami Singh of making “no effort to communicate” with the deceased in twenty years and said that she had “asserted no claim or right of wife during his lifetime, but her interest, or that of others ostensibly in her behalf, became apparent only when the opportunity arose after his death to claim a community interest in an estate she had no part in earning. In the meantime he had married [the] appellant and reared a family of four chil- dren.” Blair linked the right to “community interest in an estate” to participa- tion in the earnings of the estate or in the rearing of children as evidence of a woman’s unrewarded labor. In their unsuccessful appeal for a rehearing, Nami’s attorneys claimed that Julio/Jawala had owned all his property prior to his marriage to Soledad, “Soledad brought him nothing . . . and helped him acquire nothing.” Of course, both sides ignored the real property value of
. Julio/Jawala’s marriage to and divorce from Maria Fierro, through which he had capitalized his position in Mesilla.
0e State Supreme Court’s reversal in July made Soledad Jubala the “legal widow” of Julio Jubala and the recipient of his estate of acres, valued at ,. She did not remain a widow for long. 0ree weeks after the con- clusion of the suit, at the age of twenty-one, she married twenty-three-year- old Enrique Tellez of San Miguel, New Mexico.
In both the lower and Supreme Court rulings, the judges had to delegiti- mize one union in order to recognize another, since bigamy was impossible to countenance. Soledad’s attorneys contended that the specter of Hindu “infant marriage” practices would disrupt the standards of the “Christian nation” of the United States. 0e category of “Hindu marriage” drew analogies to an array of deviant marriages and resurrected heated political debates on nonmo- nogamous and family-brokered marriages.
In nineteenth-century political, moral, and legal debates, U.S. politicians and social critics characterized Mormon polygamy as an “Asiatic custom” and “Mohammedan barbarism” that enshrined a principle of female servitude. In the early twentieth century, arranged marriages were a flashpoint of anxi- ety in U.S. immigration policy. Newspapers, missionary journals, and public policy debates emphasized the “coerced will” of Japanese picture brides and eastern European Jewish child brides. 0ese marriages were also labeled as Asian “uncivilized customs” that undercut American sexual modernity, liberal- ism, and the superiority of Protestant Christian values. 0e idea of “Hindu marriage” also enlisted the idea of “Asiatic” difference to define marriages arranged by parents between their children as coercive, nonconsensual, and potentially open to polygamy. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. nation-state had intervened to prohibit and punish plural marriage as a Native American, Mormon, Muslim, and Chinese religious practice and social custom and enjoined marriage laws on the state level to categorically deny government legitimacy to polygamy. 0is prohibition was also inscribed into immigration and naturalization laws, and as a condition of immigration entry to the United States and naturalization to U.S. citizenship, immigrants had to offer oaths to neither condone nor practice polygamy. Comparatively, polygamy was also the object of contentious state regulation in the British Empire’s management of intimate ties in India and of South Asian indentured and voluntary migrants in its African and Caribbean colonies.
, , . In the probate case of Julio Jubala, the New Mexico Supreme Court had
resoundingly determined that the U.S. registered marriage was legitimate and deepened a commitment to a core norm of Christian monogamous mar- riage. Yet from the perspective of Nami Singh and her kin and community in Punjab, the U.S. system was disquieting. In prioritizing licensed Christian monogamous marriage, the New Mexico Supreme Court countenanced the abandonment of women in “deviant marriages.” From the perspective of her family, Jawala had not abandoned Nami. However, the New Mexico Supreme Court decision made her an abandoned wife. Had the marriage failed? Or did the courts implicitly have to presume and condone that Julio/Jawala had aban- doned his wife for the convenience of the state’s monogamous marriage imper- ative? Otherwise, Jawala/Julio’s two marriages in Mesilla would be perceived as serial concubinage. Although never explicitly stated in any of the testimony, it would be conceivable that concubinage was precisely how Jawala/Julio’s rela- tionship to Soledad was perceived in his community in Punjab during the trial. /e Sikh/Hindu customs of the Punjabi village would not accept that a secular marriage license or even a Christian ceremony in the United States could trump a marriage bond solemnized by a Brahmin priest and witnessed by their families and communities. Nami’s attorneys’ first settlement offer in probate was to split the estate between the legitimate wife, Nami, and his four children by Soledad. /is offer appeared to be a tacit acceptance of Soledad as a “concubine” who had no rightful claim to inherit. However, her children with Jawala might be potential heirs, despite their “illegitimacy” in the eyes of the community in Punjab. From their perspective, Soledad could have been a tem- porary concubine, a “necessary” provider of comfort and care to a man working far from his home village. Such a concubine could also potentially produce heirs who might be recognized in both the succession of property and lineage. Migrant men having wives and children on either side of the ocean was fairly common in both European and Asian migrations to the Americas in the late nineteenth century. From the perspective of both home and host societies, it was usually when the migrant man died and his property was disposed of that the implications of plural families had to be confronted legally and socially.
Even as South Asian men, along with southern and eastern European and Middle Eastern men were burdened with a reputation for multiple wives, the charge of bigamy could also be made against their spouses. In , in Imperial County, a seventeen-year-old white woman was charged with bigamy. Eva
. McKee Singh married a white man as a strategy of escape from her first mar- riage to Bhagat Singh in her hometown of Muskogee, Oklahoma, on September , , with the permission of her father. 1e Southern Pacific Railway con- nection between Oklahoma and Imperial County facilitated transit for work and marriage between the two localities. After her marriage to Bhagat Singh, she traveled with him to Imperial County, but she became dissatisfied with her “mode of life,” and within a month, she “deserted him and married a white man,” George G. Fariss. Eva Singh pled guilty to the charge of bigamy. Probation Officer Swanson interviewed the “wayward girl” Eva and concurred with her “excuse” that the second marriage would “free her from the Hindu.” Swanson recommended that Judge 1omas W. Leahe, of Muskogee, “a friend of the girl’s father,” take custody of Eva and “take her home to her own people.” 1e Imperial County judge agreed to the “solution,” effectively putting an end to both mar- riages, and gave her a suspended three-year sentence. 1is case was easier and necessary to prosecute because of the physical proximity of Eva’s two spouses. It also effectively repudiated Eva’s capacity to engage in any marriage and ironi- cally returned responsibility for her volition in intimate relations to her father, who had given his permission for her unhappy marriage to Bhagat Singh.
1e prosecution of bigamy could take several decades to reach its target, as demonstrated in several divorce cases in British Columbia. Judges would order the annulment of a second marriage when the bride learned of a previous marriage in Canada. For instance, in March , a British Columbia judge annulled the marriage between Adele Lorrain Gujar and Harry Gujar Singh after Adele discovered that her newly wed husband had never divorced another white woman, Helen Taylor, whom he had married in in Revelstoke, British Columbia, and from whom he had subsequently separated.
Julio Jubala’s death precluded his prosecution for bigamy. Determining inheritance frequently emerged in probate courts when immigrant men died in North America, however, and when there were no permanent local repercus- sions, the courts reluctantly recognized bigamy. In San Joaquin County, when Dalip Bir Singh, a farm worker, died in , the probate court liquidated his personal property and investigated his heirs in India for the distribution of , in cash. As a young man in Punjab, Dalip Bir Singh had married two women, Jiwi Kaur and Harnam Kaur. His dual marriages were recognized in his village, and the women shared a household with his male kin. 1e second marriage was probably an instance where Dalip remarried a widow of a male family member in order to keep property within the patriarchal family. 1e
, , . lower court recognized the first wife and turned over the full inheritance to her. 0e attorneys for both women appealed, arguing that since the distribution was in cash and not California real estate, and the women lived abroad, there was no harm in recognizing a marriage custom that was legitimate abroad. 0e superior court agreed, recognized both women as heirs, and distributed the inheritance equally. Similarly, when a Chinese merchant died in British Columbia on a business trip in , the estate was divided between two women whom he had legitimately married and lived with in China. 0e Canadian gov- ernment reluctantly agreed to honor Chinese law and recognize both women in the distribution of the estate. In both of these instances, since both claimants were outside the country, the distribution of cash between two wives did not undermine monogamous marriage in Canada or the United States.
0e Julio Jubala inheritance dispute could be interpreted as an example of the courts supporting local heirs to ensure that the decision would not make the disinherited a local public welfare problem. Yet in the case of the estate of an Imperial County Sikh farmer who thrived in the s and s and whose fortune three widows contested after he died intestate in , the result did not favor either of the American wives. 0e Imperial County superior court discounted the claims of two Mexican American women who asserted that they had been married to the deceased and were thus entitled to inherit his estate. Both women stated that they were raising children. “Finally a widow and children in India sent a claim, and a local Punjabi agent appeared to argue on their behalf. After lengthy correspondence and a detailed examination of the mail of the widow in India, the estate was awarded to her.” 0e state’s purpose contradicted the approach taken by the New Mexico Supreme Court, which scrutinized and rejected the legitimacy of Indian marriage out of hand. Confronted with two women and children at home, the Imperial County court opted rather to send the money to the woman and her children abroad. 0is action avoided having to select either Mexican American woman as the rightful spouse and deal with the problem of bigamy in Imperial County.
Canadian provinces and U.S. states tolerated marriage customs that were recognized by the British in India and by the government of China, even when they contradicted the rules of marriage in North America. 0ese examples of diverse marriages that were recognized and tolerated by the U.S. and Canadian jurisdictions reveal a quality of the secular state’s authority rather than an endorsement of religion. As Talal Asad argues, “from the point of view of secularism, religion” can be confined “to private belief and worship or
. engaging in public talk,” but does not make “demands on life.” 0e boundaries of “legitimate” religious activity become increasingly limited by the very regis- tration and adjudication practices of the modern nation-state, which aims to “regulate all aspects of individual life—even the most intimate,” such as birth, death, or marriage. Tensions arise when spiritual movements and secular states contest the definition and legitimacy of life activities.
Even when religious groups attempt to militate against secular power, they are locked within the parameters set by the secular state. In the s, after Mexican law made marriage an entirely civil contract and required civil registration for legal marriage, religious ceremonies lost legal standing and also popularity. In an effort to combat the secularization of Mexico and the irrelevance of Catholic sacraments of marriage to Mexico’s official registra- tion of marriage, the U.S. National Catholic Welfare Council in the s and s, stepped up campaigns to “rectify” civil marriages for immigrants from Mexico who lived, worked, and raised families in the southwestern United States. In the El Paso region during the Depression, Catholic lay leaders and social workers developed contacts with Mexican immigrant women through the charitable distribution of flour and clothing. 0e National Catholic Social Welfare representative would convince the couple of the necessity of “rectifica- tion” and conferring the Church’s legitimacy on the marriage. Parish priests would follow up in order to “marry in Catholic sacrament those Mexican Catholic and non-Catholic couples who have never been married” or who had “resorted to a civil ceremony.” In , among the cases of couples to be interviewed and “rectified” were “Juan Singh (Hindu)” and Trinidad Reyes, who lived in San Elizario, Texas, and had been married by a justice of the peace in El Paso, Texas, on July , . Yet even as the Catholic Church created new rituals to consecrate marriages that had already been registered, the U.S. government recognized secular marriage licenses issued by Mexican courts as proof of civil marriage for purposes of immigration, naturalization, inheritance, and social welfare benefits. 0e U.S. and Mexican states clearly asserted authority over the regulation of marriage, kinship, and reproduction. 0e state could both benignly authorize monogamy as a “Christian value” as well as ignore the Catholic marriage ceremony or “rectification” ritual because it was irrelevant for its purpose of recognition for national membership and social welfare distributions. 0e Catholic Church, on the other hand, cam- paigned to bring baptized Catholic women into the life-cycle rituals of their families by rectifying marriages and encouraging the enlistment of Church
, , . authority in the sacraments recognizing legitimate birth (baptism), adulthood (confirmation), marriage, and death (extreme unction). It accepted the space that the secular liberal society had carved out for the role of “religion” in society through law and registration.
Janet Jakobsen argues that, paradoxically, “sexual regulation is such a passion” in U.S. politics because it is “constitutive of secular American free- dom.” Following the meanings of freedom through the framework of the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation, and the self-discipline of market capitalism, Jakobsen argues that sexual freedom is intertwined with the mar- ket, property relations, and the regulatory frame of marriage. In all of these cases of contested religious sanctification and civil certification of marriage, “the free individual is the individual whose sexual activity is regulated in mar- riage—a relation earnestly enforced by the reformer.” In the United States, even as Christian values are endorsed in the secular institution of marriage, the secular state enlists and selects what attributes of religion it is willing to endorse and certify as it consolidates “sexual imagination of marriage into the center of national life.”
In the New Mexico court case concerning the estate of Julio Jubala / Jawala Singh, “Hindu marriage” emerged as an “uncivilized” custom, of ambiguous morality, that compelled children to enter into marital union, and therefore could not be treated as a reliable social contract in the United States. In rela- tion to the status and rights of women, the customs of societies from East to West Asia were equated with “Asiatic barbarism.” In particular, parentally arranged marriages were perceived, not as contractual relationships between consenting adults, but rather as transactions for purposes of status and eco- nomic consolidation.
Intimate publics are forged through the materiality of bourgeois property relations and through the theatricality of the intimate conjugal couple. Robyn Wiegman probes the “property logic of liberal personhood” by which the mod- ern state “recognizes and confers personhood on the basis of contractual rela- tions” and accords the capacity to be a “responsible agent” to the state, to other citizens, and to noncitizen dependents. :is process of mediating between private life and state recognition orders and organizes socialized affect, kin- ship, and economic relationships.
. Amy Dru Stanley has emphasized the significance of contractual eco-
nomics in securing rights and state and social recognition of personhood in both labor and marriage contracts in the post-emancipation United States. Despite evidence of a variety of intimate ties, “marriage” is presumed to be a “universal descriptor of conjugal relations” that reworks the proper connection between “man and woman, kinship and family and encapsulated the conflicts and contradictions of European colonial and settler society.” 3e property logic underscores the development of ethical humanity and the establishment of individual male autonomy.
Julio Jubala / Jawala Singh was able through successful engagement with con- tract, marriage, and property-management relations to navigate the social and legal landscape of Dona Ana County effectively for twenty years until his death in . He was never charged with bigamy or made subject to proceedings under New Mexico’s Alien Land Law. As a successful farmer, he was able to seek assis- tance from the county clerk, lawyers, and bankers to obtain and retain property. He managed two marriages simultaneously, as he boasted to his Punjabi friends in El Paso. 3e New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the idea that Julio Jubala had a de facto divorce from Nami Singh, assuming that his marriage in India had been dissolved, even though there was no documentation to support this.
From the very beginning, the suit in New Mexico was about the owner- ship of land and the legitimate claims of inheritance. As the case moved from probate hearing to civil suit in the district court in Las Cruces to the New Mexico Supreme Court hearing in Santa Fe, a spiral of claims and questions about the ownership of the land emerged. Julio Jubala succeeded as a farmer in Mesilla because he was able to manipulate New Mexico laws regulating prop- erty. Marriage to Mexican American women appears to have been the strategy Julio used to hold and accumulate farmland and circumvent the restrictions of the state’s Alien Land Law, modeled on the California law passed in , which was approved by the New Mexico electorate in as a constitutional amendment prohibiting an “alien, ineligible to citizenship under the laws of the United States” from owning or leasing land in New Mexico. Chinese immigrants were explicitly denied naturalized citizenship, being neither “white persons” nor “persons of African nativity.” 3e U.S. Supreme Court fur- thermore handed down decisions in and that denied “white person” status to Japanese and “Hindus” respectively. In the same period, federal courts conferred “white” status and therefore the ability to be naturalized and become property holders on Syrians, Lebanese, Sephardic Jews, Turks, and Persians.
, , . 0e courts’ role in divorce proceedings was to determine the unsustain-
ability of the marriage, as well as to devise a plan for the distribution of property, custody and care of minor children, and the payment of alimony. In community-property states such as California, Arizona, and New Mexico, husband and wife formed a legal partnership, agreeing that all goods accu- mulated would be divided equally when death or divorce ended the partner- ship. However, the husband had greater authority to control the partnership’s property and could sell property without the permission of the wife, while she could not do likewise. Maria Fierro experienced this liability firsthand when she unsuccessfully sought an injunction against Julio Jubala’s selling of a piece of property in while they were still married.
Community property law and Julio’s familiarity with local officials enabled him to continue to acquire land even after the Alien Land Law applied to “Hindus.” Julio Jubala’s attorney had manipulated the divorce settlement to Maria Fierro in in order to retain ownership of acres of land; instead, he ceded her all their personal property, made her a cash settlement, and prom- ised to build her an adobe home. Maria was concerned with domestic security in the aftermath of the divorce. Julio cornered the capital-producing property for his future economic viability. J. F. Nevares, the Dona Ana county clerk, who admitted to handling “business” for Julio, including administering real estate transactions and certifying marriage and naturalization petitions, refused to comment on how Julio dodged the enforcement of the Alien Land Law.
A little more than a week after Julio’s death, Soledad approached the Probate Judge Luis Martinez to appoint Nevares as the administrator of the Jubala estate in probate. Nevares managed the farms, paid the wages, and invento- ried assets. Julio had been running a thriving business, growing hay, cotton, alfalfa, and cantaloupes on acres. He employed half a dozen men season- ally and rented some of his land to the Stanley Fruit Company. In addition to farm equipment—tractors, hay compressors, plows, and corn crushers—Julio had eight mules, eight mares, four horse mules, and fifty chickens among his livestock. Under Nevares’s management, the estate harvested thirty-five bales of cotton (valued at ,) and sixty tons of hay (valued at ). Julio was a savvy businessman; before his death, he had engineered a contract for the state highway between Las Cruces and Organ, New Mexico, to be built on his property, for which he would receive payments totaling ,. In addition to the value of harvests, equipment, future payments, and bank deposits, the personal property of Julio’s estate alone was valued at ,. 0e appraisers,
. Pablo Salcido (a blacksmith who worked for Julio) and Domingo Garcia, Soledad’s father, valued the three tracts of real estate at ,.
Race and citizenship requirements for property ownership in New Mexico and the United States threw another wrinkle into the lawful inheritance of the estate. Soledad’s attorneys argued that New Mexico’s Alien Land constitu- tional amendment made it impossible for Nami Singh to inherit Julio/Jawala’s real property. Nami’s attorneys countered that treaty rights between the United States and Great Britain enabled Nami Singh to own land temporarily as a British citizen. According to a commercial diplomatic treaty between the two empire-states, which included imperial possessions in India, both British and U.S. citizens could inherit real estate in the other state’s jurisdiction as long as that property was disposed of within three years.
Citizenship and the possession of land were contentious issues in New Mexico. In the early twentieth century, New Mexico land had been leveraged away from Mexican American families through taxation burdens and inter- marriage with Anglos. Among a handful of successful Asian immigrants, Julio Jubala acquired land before and during his marriage with the Mexican American Maria Fierro and retained it through the subsequent divorce. Soledad’s attorneys and the Supreme Court judges framed Soledad Garcia Jubala as the local woman, whose claim to the land might be drawn away by the claims of the foreign woman, Nami Singh. It was a twist to the more famil- iar story of how marriage to white men by Native American and Mexican American women had led to the “leaking out” of land from indigenous com- munities in the Midwest and southwestern territories. During Julio’s mar- riage with Maria, the property had been consolidated, but after his death, it “leaked” back to a Mexican American family through his widow’s inheritance. Soledad’s own citizenship status by virtue of U.S. birth was jeopardized by her marriage to Julio Jubala, an immigrant racially ineligible for naturalization. Within weeks of winning the suit, through her marriage to Mexican American Enrique Telles, Soledad regained her citizenship status and the land on which her father had labored. Elsewhere along the border in the s, in Southern California and Arizona, federal authorities and state district attorneys denied Mexican immigrant women naturalization after they had married South Asian men, and in several instances in California, they actively forced women to cede land title and leases under Alien Land Law provisions.
<e ability to be mobile, to own property, and to claim national membership were constrained by the evaluation of the intimate ties. Legal judgments about
, , . marriage and inheritance drew cultural justifications from moral and civiliza- tional differences, but enforced these distinctions on a terrain of uneven and incommensurate racial taxonomies that bisected laws of marriage, landowner- ship, and citizenship. Judges and attorneys played out taxonomies and sympa- thy in the process of adjudicating disputes. At the New Mexico Supreme Court, Soledad’s attorney’s appeals to sympathy for a “Dona Ana County widow,” whose marriage has been delegitimized by the court and whose status had been summarily transformed from “widow” to “concubine,” persuaded the judges to doubt the legitimacy of the “Hindu child marriage.” Unlike the district court’s imperative to solve the local problem when presented with evidence of Nami Singh and Jawala Singh’s marriage in India, the New Mexico Supreme Court wrestled with the precedent produced by the discursive formation of “Hindu marriage” and its analogous legal impact on a host of deviant marriage tradi- tions—the fearful cascade to “infant marriage,” polygamy, and incest. Moral sympathy for Soledad’s plight and the concerns about unwittingly validating “repugnant” foreign customs shaped the New Mexico Supreme Court’s scrutiny of whether Nami Singh’s marriage had ever been “consummated” or “dissolved” to make her claim irrelevant to Julio Jubala’s estate. Justice Blair’s decision cast dubious light on Nami Singh’s motives and the legitimacy of her relationship with Julio/Jawala. She and her “Hindu marriage” became Julio/Jawala’s “past,” with no relevance to the future distribution of his legacy and property.
It was through the juridical and administrative practices of governance from the local to the national scales, that racial and sexual classifications developed their shapes. As Ann Stoler has argued, the imperatives of “taxonomic states” were charged with “defining and interpreting what constituted racial member- ship, citizenship, political subversion and the scope of the state’s jurisdiction over morality.” Overall consistency of details and universal applicability of these taxonomies and hierarchies was less significant than the “sorting codes” and “technologies” that shaped the “circuits of knowledge.” 4e legal case in Mesilla first did the work of performing and offering particular detail that intensified knowledge of the array of racialized immoral and degenerate sexual activities and relationships. 4e Mesilla case confirmed suspicions about the cavalier disregard of U.S. prohibitions against polygamy among Asian and Middle Eastern migrants. Even where polygamy was tightly regulated or pro- hibited, the histories of transoceanic migration produced unsettling anxieties about the moral and social dangers of widespread concubinage as a counterfeit of legitimate marriage.
. 0e adjudication in court of marriage, divorce, and estate claims did double
duty as well by consolidating and subtly diversifying the norm into a multicul- tural array underpinned by a shared value of monogamy. 0e court judgment in the Mesilla estate case deployed Christian marriage as an eternal social commitment and duty in a sea of transitory sexualities and encounters and the legal container for legitimate sexual activity. Civil registrations of marriage and divorce orders in localities in Canada and United States endorsed a secu- lar version of monogamous marriage as the norm of legitimacy. At times, the container of illegitimate ties explicitly or implicitly engaged bigamy and adul- tery. 0e standard of monogamous marriage encompassed tolerance zones. By time, place, and circumstance, certain customs and practices could be grudg- ingly accepted or cast beyond the boundaries of the norm. Concubinage might be tolerated in the “frontier” of state expansion and outposts of empire, but as societies became settled and property inheritance imperatives increased, the state exerted pressure for informal relationships to be “regularized” and “for- malized” into marriage. Similarly, both concubinage and female prostitution were understood as “necessary evils” of empire, settler colonialism, and mass labor migration, tolerated as practices that would purportedly forestall male- to-male sexual relations.
In the Mesilla case, the international and imperial circuitry of customs and practices embraced British imperial administrators, Anglo-American mis- sionaries, and U.S. attorneys. “Hindu marriage” oscillated from “uncivilized,” because of practices of concubinage and pubescent brides, to “civilized” enough, as analogous to the monogamous marriage standard in North America. In the Mesilla case, a Hindu marriage abroad became the reservoir of intolerable contradictions to the fidelity of a local registered marriage that had produced four heirs. 0e particular context shaped how “Hindu marriage” was contin- gently viewed within and outside the norms of American society. Legitimating or delegitimating intimate ties, moreover, was a diagonal process that unfolded through a similar sliding scale of norms and deviance in British colonial India and elsewhere in the British, French, Dutch, and U.S. empires, where South Asian migrant laborers added to the mix of “races” necessary to sustain inten- sive capitalist cultivation and resource extraction.
Marriage has been both unstable and yet central to the production of citizenship and peculiarly entangled in the formation of racialized property- owning citizenship in the western United States. Nevertheless, how the norm of marriage was refracted through religion, ethnicity, and race is an important
, , . historical problem. Charting the comparative use of “sorting codes” in the gov- erning strategies of the state, which shifted from taxonomy to sympathy, alerts historians to the variable dynamics of race and morality that compound and confound any easy hierarchy of sexual deviance. Legislatively and judicially, the state approached the variety of sexual and intimate relationships by recog- nizing both particular practices within a conduit of sympathy and irreconcil- able differences that had to be disallowed.
Notwithstanding the narrow interpretive parameters of judicial and prison records, an investigation of government management of sex, race, and moral- ity reveals hints of the histories that are lost and fragmented yet embedded within the history of the state. 1e Julio Jubala estate case carries suggestive detail about the telegrams and letters that were part of the communication network between Punjabi villages and U.S. towns. 1e meanings of the social institutions of marriage and kinship in Punjab were incommensurate with the emerging norm of legitimate marriage in the United States and British colo- nized India. For people from villages in Punjab, marriage had durability, dura- tion, and ties that were far more expansive than the courts entertained. While the judges saw unwarranted influence in the actions of Jubala’s uncle, father, and cousins, these men imagined family expansively as a broad umbrella of kin, rather than limited to a spousal pair and the progeny of the marriage union. In Punjabi villages, social and material well-being had broadened to deploy male kin across continents to mobilize resources for the collective use of dependents clustered in natal households. 1e adhesive of kinship adapted to migratory dispersal and intensified protections among migrant men whose ties to kinship systems, villages, and caste operated against the authority of the state. Such adaptive networks held women closely enveloped in the natal household system and distrusted women at the peripheries whose indepen- dence from that particular kinship system could be marshaled by their fathers, siblings, community leaders, and the agents of the state. 1e outcome of the inheritance of Julio Jubala simultaneously strengthened the worldviews of both the injustice of meddling family and the injustice of a prejudiced state.
International migration complicated the interstate negotiation of regulat- ing and legitimating marriage and kinship. Nation-states, empire-states, and colonized states attempted to decipher, judge, and recognize marriage, kinship, and adoption ties within a general framework of monogamous and consensual marriage and blood and contractual kinship. 1e challenge often came when state agents either anticipated or were confronted by conflicts of intimate ties
. that migrants had forged in the disparate, transnational localities in which they lived. Marriage, its variability, maintenance, and dissolution, became the key grounds of state intervention. Conflicts over inheritance and sexual behavior outside of marriage revealed the tensions and the commitments by which international migrants managed and understood kinship, cohabitation, responsibility, and affection, often at variance with ascribed community norms and state definitions. At the turn of the century, the United States and the British Empire intensified marriage certification and legitimating kinship pre- cisely because of their value in making intimate personhood the access point of political membership. In the process of judging legitimacy, courts and bureau- crats assembled an array of racial labels, assumed gender roles, and moral and sexual judgments to frame the human subjects who had to pass through both national borders and the distribution of migrants as disposable transients or valuable settlers.
However, for the liberal state, the stakes of judging intimate ties had tre- mendous consequences for crafting human society. It was not just a matter of governing “Hindu marriage” as either a site of deviancy or of reform. Nor was it only how “Hindu marriage” was placed among a continuum of unions that were categorically non-normative. 0rough their “deviance,” these non- normative unions normalized and centralized Christian monogamous mar- riage as the only legitimate intimate union. 0e dynamics of compassion and judgment of intimacy demonstrate how the categories profoundly shaped the human subject. 0e evaluative process of assessing innermost character, judg- ing the pathways of sexual and domestic relations, and defining the capacity to be a property-owning citizen provided what appeared to the administrators to be both a broad canvas and restrictive criteria of being human. 0rough this processing of intimacy, the state was elaborating a vision of society and polity and its legitimate participants.
. – . R. W. McCoy, letter to Superintendent Henry Drum, November , ; Chan-
nan Singh, Washington State Penitentiary Files, Washington State Archives. . Kisken Singh, , Grays Harbor County , Washington State Archives
Southwestern Branch, Olympia, Washington. . Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Lichtenstein, “Good Roads”; Childs, “Angola, Convict
Lease”; Miller, Crime. . Terry, American Obsession; Chauncey, Gay New York; Heap, Slumming. . Warner, Trouble with Normal; Boag, Same-Sex Affairs. . Grbich, “Body in Legal 4eory,” in At the Boundaries of the Law, ed. Fineman
and 4omadsen, p. . . Tomlins, “Subordination, Authority, and Law.” . For a parallel process of tracking sociological knowledge and the racialized sex-
ualization of African Americans, see Ferguson, Aberrations in Black. . Canaday, Straight State; Kunzel, Prison Intimacy.
. 4e literature on this historical problem is vast. Cott, Public Vows; Volpp, “Depen- dent Citizens and Martial Expatriates”; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth; Merry, Colo- nizing Hawai’i; Hartog, Man and Wife; and Berry, Pig Farmer’s Daughter exemplify different interpretive and methodological approaches.
. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell; Adelman and Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders”; Gitlin, “On the Boundaries of Empire,” pp. –; Deutsch, “Landscapes of Enclaves,” in Power and Place, ed. White and Findlay, pp. –.
. Cott, Public Vows, p. . . Brumberg, “Ethnological Mirror,” in Harris and McNamara, Women and the
Structure of Society, pp. –. . La Brack, Sikhs of Northern California; Dua, “Racialising Imperial Canada.” . Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, pp. –. . Bald, “Overlapping Diasporas”; La Brack, Sikhs of Northern California; Leonard,
Making Ethnic Choices. . Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, p. . . Taylor, “Again the Covered Wagon,” p. . . Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, p. . . Ibid. Imperial County Recorder’s Office, marriage licenses, : ; : ; Albert
Joe and Alejandrina, age given as eighteen, : . . Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, p. . . Pascoe, “Race, Gender and the Privileges of Property,” in Over the Edge, ed. Mat-
sumoto and Allmendinger, p. . . Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, pp. –. . Blackhouse, Colour Coded. . GR , British Columbia Marriage Registrations, British Columbia Archives;
Baboo Singh and Maude Alice Crowley, July , , Victoria, roll B ; Biaram Singh married Alice Markle November , , Victoria, roll B; Jagot Singh
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– . married Mamie Freeman, Vancouver, May , , Vancouver, roll B; Buchan Singh married Margaret Banaloo, March , , Victoria, roll B; Chinta Singh married Zelda Inez Wattam, December , , Vancouver, roll B; Banta Singh married Cecila Victa, October , , Vancouver, roll B; Harry Singh married Matilda 2ompson, July , , Naksup, roll B; Mongal Singh married Ethel Finlay, May , , New Westminster, roll B; Arjen Singh married Rachel Ollie Minor, June , , Vancouver, roll B.
. Kesar Singh, Canadian Sikhs, p. . GR , British Columbia Marriage Regis- trations, British Columbia Archives. Joseph Munsha Singh married to Annie Wright, August , , Vancouver, Microfilm roll B .
. Sohoni, “Unsuitable Suitors”; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally. . Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, p. . . Karthikeyan and Chin “Preserving Racial Identity.” . Pascoe, What Comes Naturally. . Sohoni, “Unsuitable Suitors,” p. . . Ibid., pp. –. . Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, pp. –; Grossberg, Governing the Hearth,
pp. –, ; Vernier et al., American Family Laws (), : . . Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, pp. , . . Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices; Volpp, “American Mestizo.” . Raj Kaur and Bagh Singh Chotia, RG , file /– and –, U.S. National
Archives, San Bruno, CA. . For an early example, see “Hindu Weds White Girl by Stealing Away to Ari-
zona,” El Centro Progress, April , , cited in Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, p. . Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, p. .
. Felicita Soto Dhillon, RG , file /–, and Besanta Singh Dhillon, RG , file /–, box , U.S. National Archives, San Bruno, CA.
. Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices; Luibhéid, Entry Denied; Ting, “Bachelor Soci- ety”; Lui, Chinatown Trunk Mystery. Wu, “Asian American History and Racialized Compulsory Deviance.”
. “ Julio Jabala Killed by Train at Mesilla Park Crossing,” Las Cruces Citizen , no. (December , ): ; “Killed by Train,” El Paso Times December , .
. “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” Supreme Court of New Mexico, no. , New Mexico Supreme Court Law Library and Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
. Ibid., pp. –. . Ibid., pp. . . Ibid., pp. , . . Ibid., pp. –, –. . Leonard, “Flawed Transmissions?” p. . Oberoi, Construction of Religious
Boundaries. . Jakobsh, Relocating Gender in Sikh History, p. ; Chowdhry, Veiled Women. . “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” p. . . Ibid., pp. , –.
. – . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., pp. –. . La Brack, Sikhs of Northern California, pp. –. . “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” pp. –, –. . Chowdhry, Veiled Women. . Divorce was possible, however, in Muslim communities. But neither the attor-
neys nor the judges researched the code of marriage and divorce in British India. . “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” p. . . On December , , at the age of twenty-seven, he had married twenty-
eight-year-old Maria Fierro in her hometown of Guadalupe, New Mexico. Dona Ana County, New Mexico, Marriage Record Book , p. . According to these records, Julio Jublio was born in “Las Indias.”
. Maria F. Jubala v. Julio Jubala, divorce petition, petitioners’ exhibit , 4ird Judicial Court of Dona Ana County, New Mexico, case .
. “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” Supreme Court of New Mexico, no. , p. .
. Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, –. . Maria F. Jubala v. Julio Jubala. . Soba Singh v. Pauline Singh, case , Clatsop County Circuit Court, Asto-
ria, Oregon (filed October , ), plaintiff ’s complaint, pp. – . Ibid., answer and cross complaint, pp. –. . Nellie P. Khan v. Walayat Khan, Sacramento Superior Court, file , April
, , Sacramento Archives and Museum Center Collection. . RG , /B/A and /, U.S. National Archives, College
Park, MD. India Office, Public and Judicial Department Records, Ld L/P&J, ser. , : –, British Library, London.
. Alice Singh v. Jaggitt Singh or Jaget Singh, San Joaquin Superior Court, ; Federal Census. Contra Costa, California, Bradford Track, Antioch, supervisor district , enumeration district , sheet -A.
. Alice Singh v. Jaget Singh, San Joaquin Superior Court, . . Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, pp. –; Hartog, Man and Wife. . Julio Jubala and Soledad Garcia registered their marriage on March , .
Dona Ana County, New Mexico, Marriage Record Book , p. ; “Property Settle- ment Agreement between Julio Jubala and Maria P. Jubala,” February , , “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” pp. –.
. “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” p. . . Ibid. p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. – . Ibid. . Ibid., pp. , –. . New Mexico Supreme Court, “In re Jubala’s Estate,” N.M. . . “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” pp. –.
– . . Ibid, p. . . Ibid. . Ibid., pp. –. . “Soledad Jubala Wins Suit,” Las Cruces Daily News, June , . . Enrique Tellez and Soledad Garcia registered their marriage on July , , in
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Nineteenth-Century Men”; Hartog, Man and Wife. . People v. Eva McKee Singh alias Eva Marie King, Superior Court, Imperial
County, California, Criminal Case (October ). . British Columbia Divorce Court Orders GR , vol. , no. , roll B.
See also GR , Singh Attar Mahil to Hazel Catherine Mahil, vol. , record , roll B; Olive Myrtle Mule (falsely called Olive Myrtle Mall) and Rattan Singh Mall (also known as Attar Singh Mahil), vol. , no. , roll B.
. In re Estate of Dalip Singh Bir, Harnam Kaur et al., appellants vs. Florence E. Boyes, respondent, California Appellate, nd ser. ( January ); P.d .
. Yew v. Attorney General, Dominion Law Reports (). . Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, p. , Probate Case , Office of the County
Clerk, Imperial County, California, . Probate Case . . Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. . . National Catholic Welfare Council Bureau of Immigration, Annual report on
marriage rectification, –; Cleofas Calleros, Mexican border representative, El Paso, Texas, letter to Rev. Fr. Manuel Moreno, March , , Marriage General Cor- respondence folder, National Catholic Welfare Council Bureau of Immigration Col- lection, ser. , box , Center for Migration Studies, Staten Island, New York.
. Asad, Formations of the Secular, pp. , . . Jakobsen, “Sex + Freedom?” p. . . Ibid., p. . . Cott, Public Vows; Haag, Consent. . Wiegman, “Intimate Publics,” p. . . Ibid., p. . . Stanley, “Conjugal Bonds”; id., From Bondage to Contract. . Plane, Colonial Intimacies, p. . . Constitution of the State of New Mexico .. . Haney-Lopez, White by Law; Jensen, Passage from India. . Jensen, “Farm Families Organize”; R. E. Clark, “Management and Control of
Community Property in New Mexico.” . “In the Matter of the Estate of Julio Jubala,” pp. –. . Ibid., pp. –.
. – . Ibid., pp. , , . . In , before the development of the Elephant Butte irrigation district, His-
panics had owned percent of the farmland in the Rio Grande Valley, but by , landownership was percent Anglo, with Hispanic and Asian tenants leasing. See Jensen, “Farm Families Organize,” in Essays in Twentieth-Century New Mexico History, ed. DeMark, pp. –; I. G. Clark, “Elephant Butte Controversy.”
. Perdue, Cherokee Women; Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers; David Chang, Color of the Land.
. Cott, Public Vows; Volpp, “Dependent Citizens.” See note . . Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen, p. , and documentation there. . Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, pp. –. . Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p. ; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, p. ;
Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men.
. Hakim Singh was also referred to as Hakim Singh Hundel or Hakim Singh Jagirdar, both affixed last names referring to the family’s status as owners of property. His sons’ names were Atma, Iqbal, Teja, and Janmeja. 8eir cause was not as celebrated in the Canadian and Indian community press as the cases of Sikh men returning with their wives and children. Singh, Canadian Sikhs and Komagata Maru Massacre, pp. , , ; Canadian immigration agent Malcolm Reid, Vancouver, letter to MP Henry Herbert Stevens, Ottawa, May , ; Minister of the Interior William James Roche to Stevens, Ottawa, July , ; Jagpal, Becoming Canadians.
. Mongia, “Historicizing State Sovereignty”; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; Amrith, “Tamil Diasporas.”
. Jung, Coolies and Cane; Peck, “Reinventing Free Labor.” . Lee, At America’s Gates; Fairchild, Science at the Borders; Shah, Contagious
Divides; McKeown, Melancholy Order. . “Compulsory Passport Regulation,” Proceedings A, June , nos. –. Lake
and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. . Mongia, “Historicizing State Sovereignty”; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the
Global Colour Line. . Gardner, Qualities of a Citizen, p. . . McKeown, Melancholy Order, pp. , –, . . Christian Schwarz, Victoria, letter to Minister of Interior F. Oliver, Ottawa,
December , , Library and Archives of Canada, Immigration Branch, RG , vol. , file , pt. ; “Vancouver’s Black Hole of Calcutta,” Vancouver World, Novem- ber , ; “Nelson Petitions against Hindus,” Vancouver Province, November , ; “Col. Whyte Denies Hindoo Story,” Vancouver World, November , ; “Hin- dus Try to Sleep Out of Doors” and “City Officials Move to Assist Hindus,” Vancouver Province, November , ; Daily News Advertiser, November , ; Vancouver
