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Title: Article Navigation “Chinamen” and “Delinquent Girls”: Intimacy, Exclusion, and a Search for California's Color Line

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: In December 1904 the state of California charged two Chinese men with the statutory rape of two white sisters in the rural town of Loomis. A month later, all-white juries swiftly convicted Ah Lung of assaulting thirteen-year-old Hattie Lucas and Ah Woon of raping fifteen-year-old May Lucas. The men spent the next seven years in San Quentin State Prison, and the sisters spent the remainder of their youth at St. Catherine's Home and Training School for “delinquent” girls. In these bare facts lies little intrigue. At the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, local policing of racial boundaries was at its height. The nation was deep into the Chinese exclusion era (1882–1943), a time when federal agents fought to end migration from China and when local white communities worked to segregate the Chinese in the U.S. West. According to historical scholarship, the Chinese were divided from the white community by a system of legal codes and cultural norms that constricted Chinese movement, conduct, and power based on their assumed racial difference. In other words, a color line existed: men such as Lung and Woon were not supposed to know girls such as May and Hattie, let alone know them intimately. In that context, the conviction and imprisonment of Lung and Woon seem utterly familiar: state officials, alerted to extreme infractions, successfully restored the racial regime.

Url: https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/104/3/632/4655064

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Authors: Lew-Williams, Beth

Periodical (Full): The Journal of American HIstory

Issue: 3

Volume: 104

Pages: 23

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Race and Ethnicity

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