CHAPTER 1

Laying the Foundation

Central to racial thinking is not only the notion that the categories of white, black, brown, yellow and red mark meaningful distinctions among human beings but also that they reflect inferiority and superiority, a human Chain of Being, with white at the top and black on the bottom. Determining racial identity was about raising some people up that chain to put others down; enslaving some people to free others; taking land from some people to give it to others; robbing people of their dignity to give others a sense of supremacy.

—ARIELA J. GROSS, What Blood Won’t Tell*

The Complicated Case of Race

From Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. DuBois, and Frantz Fanon to Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Robin D. G. Kelley, these scholars and countless others have laid the groundwork for much of what we know about race, difference, and inequality in the United States. No race scholars can call themselves such without having read transformative works like The Souls of Black Folk, All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, but Some of Us Are Brave, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed.¹ When it comes to social movements, Black scholars once again created formative works such as The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Race, Reform, and Rebellion, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, and Sisters in the Struggle.² Finally, when specifically examining school desegregation, Michael Klarman and Richard Kluger may be among the most cited, but Waldo Martin, Vanessa Siddle Walker, James D. Anderson, and Derrick Bell are just as critical to the canon. All of these scholars and more are the originators of what I call “Black Foundationalism.”³

While Black Foundationalist scholars settled into their hard-fought spaces in academia, they inspired Latiné, Asian American, and Indigenous scholars to ask hard questions of their own communities. First, where were we during the Abolitionist Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, and the Voting Rights Movement for Women? Did we sit on the sidelines, watch the marches go by, and benefit from the hard work of Black activists? Second, where do our experiences belong in the Black/White binary discussion of race? Studies on racism, discrimination, educational inequality, health disparities, wealth disparities, and poverty are usually examined through a Black lens and inevitably compared to the lives of Whites. Where do the experiences of non-Black populations fall in these discussions? Scholars such as George Sánchez, Judy Yung, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn were among the early pioneers to begin answering these questions.

Another pivotal aspect of Black Foundationalism was the creation of African American and Black studies departments demanded by Black students and scholars.⁴ Those activists inspired other racial groups to demand the creation of Chicano and Latino studies, Native American studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies departments.⁵ These spaces would produce even richer scholarship that was representative of the worlds intellectuals and protesters were attempting to transform. An unintended consequence of this structure, however, was the building of deep disciplinary divides that very few scholars traversed.⁶ Feminist scholars of color attempted to unite these areas in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color.⁷

A growing community of legal scholars who developed Critical Race Theory would intentionally build bridges between disciplines. They differed from their counterparts outside the legal field in one particular way: the founding CRT scholars were a mixture of Black, White, Latiné, Asian American, and Indigenous individuals. Derrick Bell, Cheryl Harris, and Kimberlé Crenshaw were among the pioneers, but so were Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Neil Gotanda, and Gary Peller. CRT was intended to be an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and inclusive intellectual space before those concepts became the nomenclature of higher education.

As CRT spread into other disciplines, the lives and experiences of African Americans again became central to the discussion of racial inequality in the United States, reinforcing the Black/White binary study of race.⁸ CRT scholars have critiqued the Black/White binary, with some even problematically describing it as “hegemonic in nature.”⁹ The prominence of CRT analysis on Brown alone further perpetuates the racial binary.¹⁰ Put simply, CRT could not capture the experiences of all people of color. As a result, the theory grew “branches” that were clearly connected with the base, but necessary to grow the field. Latiné, Asian American, Indigenous, and like-minded scholars proposed and developed the following branches: Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit), Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit), and Native American Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit), to name a few (Figure 1.1).¹¹

CRT and its branches interrogate the profound differences and meaningful similarities in how the Tape, Piper, and Mendez families were racialized from 1885 to 1954. These plaintiffs were never quite worthy of the rights afforded to Whites, and they were not able “to depict themselves and their problems by analogy to Blacks.”¹² Ultimately, examining these cases solely through a Black/White binary limits the analysis of race and fails to capture the differential racial experiences of Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinés in the United States.

The Problem with the Chains, Spectrums, and Hierarchies

Legal scholar Ariela Gross offers a vivid description of “a human Chain of Being” that identifies the top and bottom of the chain as White and Black, respectively. However, the analogy does not discuss the placement or positions of the other racial links within the chain. While the Gross’s analogy delivers a strong visual for the U.S. racial hierarchy, it supports the notion that Asians, Native Americans, and Latinés have a fixed placement and position within the binary of Black and White, inferiority and superiority, or enslaved and free. The same is true when describing race with hierarchies and spectrums.

Yet what Tape, Piper, and Mendez demonstrate is that racial positions are much more flexible. The Black part of the binary will always be constructed against the White part, but Asians, Native Americans, and Latinés are ultimately constructed against both.

Because it puts race at the center of analysis, CRT was supposed to be a solution for explaining these differences. However, as legal scholar Robert Chang explains, “Critical race theory claims that race matters, but has not yet shown how different races matter differently” and, I argue, similarly.¹³ I contend that the Black/White binary fails to fully acknowledge or meaningfully capture the experiences of non-Black racial groups. Race scholars are often left to wrestle with where to place the experiences of Asian American, Indigenous, and Latiné people, organizations, and communities. Legal scholars have critiqued the paradigm since the creation of CRT, identifying its limitations through discussions related to constitutional law, school desegregation, interracial marriage, and immigration law.¹⁴

Sociologists, too, have struggled to even define these racial groups. They have also used static language to describe the position of non-Black racial groups, employing phrases such as “a racial middle,”¹⁵ “racial ambiguity,”¹⁶ “Honorary Whiteness,”¹⁷ “a Caucasian cloak,”¹⁸ a “racial continuum,”¹⁹ “Partly Colored,”²⁰ and “middleman minorities,”²¹ just to name a few. But these characteristics center Whiteness and rank non-Blacks’ racial position as less problematic than being Black. It is as if this racial middle represents the Goldilocks equivalent of racism that is not too hard, not too soft, but “just right.” Some sociologists have even proposed using color, not race, to analyze inter-and intraracial experiences between and among people of color.²² I respectfully disagree. Colorism merely sidesteps the complexity of race and fails to acknowledge how the Black/White binary obscures, excludes, and even renders invisible the experiences of the “middleman minorities.”

Even Omi and Winant, the creators of racial formation theory and the concept of racial projects, acknowledge that a “bipolar racial discourse tends at best to marginalize and at worst . . . eliminate other positions and voices in the ongoing dialogue about race in the U.S.A.”²³ Despite Omi and Winant’s call to explore a variety of racial projects, a majority of the sociological and CRT studies on race focus on the Black experience in the United States and the role of White supremacy in maintaining African Americans’ economic, social, and cultural inequality. This, however, is not a shortcoming.

Foregrounding of research of Blackness in America is deserved, necessary, and relevant, as it reveals the development, growth, and long-lasting effects of systemic racism in the nation. No other racial groups in the United States were systematically stolen from their countries, shipped across an ocean, and separated from their families to become property and build a burgeoning economy from which they would never benefit. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the New York Times Magazine 1619 Project, explained that the goal of the project was “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”²⁴

Even so, centering the Black experience does not preclude non-Black racial groups from contributing to the narrative. If anything, Black scholars have invited these stories and challenged race scholars to explore the complex relationships between and within these groups. In The Conservation of Races, W. E. B. DuBois wrote, “There is no reason why in the same country and on the same street . . . that men of different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation.”²⁵ In Black Feminist Thought, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins invites scholars to find “points of connection that further social justice projects” between historically oppressed groups.²⁶ Finally, Dr. Neely Fuller Jr. reminds us, “If you do not understand White supremacy—what it is, and how it works, everything else that you understand will only confuse you.”²⁷ This book is an acceptance of the invitation and the challenge put forth by DuBois, Collins, and Fuller by applying the interdisciplinary, inclusive, and intersectional framework of CRT and its branches to the study of race and the school desegregation movement.

Adding the experiences of Latiné, Asian American, and Indigenous people, families, and communities to the civil rights narrative illustrates the efficacy of White supremacy and its destruction of the principles of racial equality. It provides evidence of the manner in which White supremacy has permeated, affected, and disenfranchised every non-White racial group in the United States. It is no coincidence when similar issues appear in different racial communities. Discussing the social, historical, and legal construction of race in a comparative historical manner, however, requires recognizing the invisibility, complexity, and racial flexibility of non-Black communities.

Using newspaper accounts, judicial records, and secondary research, I show how the racial flexibility of the Tape, Piper, and Mendez families worked both for and against them socially and legally. To accomplish this goal, I summarize the scholarly development and relevant literature of CRT, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and TribalCrit, as well as their analysis of race. Understanding these theoretical branches allows me to apply the relevant tenets of AsianCrit to Tape, TribalCrit to Piper, and LatCrit to Mendez to demonstrate the unique positions of Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latiné communities along the racial hierarchy over time. Most importantly, I will answer the questions about Latinés’, Asian Americans’, and Native Americans’ role in the fight for educational equality and their place within and outside the Black/White binary.

In discussing these cases, I consider the advice of Gross, who interrogates race through antimiscegenation laws. “We cannot take their legal strategies,” she explains, “as a direct reflection of their actual beliefs about their racial or national identity.”²⁸ Claims of citizenship, for example, should not be conflated with calls for Whiteness. Examining the historical record, interviews, and transcripts provides a very different picture of how these plaintiffs understood their racial identities and class positions. These plaintiffs, I argue, present a much more complicated narrative than Whiteness versus racial pride, assimilation versus authenticity, and peril versus preferential status. The overall goal is to provide historic evidence of the racial flexibility afforded to Asians, Native Americans, and Latinés in California that was not available to the other ninety-plus Black plaintiffs who fought segregated schools for over one hundred years.

Exploring the social, legal, and historical construction of race through Tape, Piper, and Mendez disrupts a linear story line that cleanly connects the cases through time. Race as constructed within each case and among all three is, in a word, complicated. As a result, challenging the Black/White binary requires race and legal scholars to embrace this complexity. In an early critique of the Black/White paradigm, legal scholar Juan Perea explains, “Paradigms have limitations. . . . Among them is the tendency to truncate history for the sake of telling a linear story of progress.”²⁹ Adding to and comparing the experiences of Chinese Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans in the story of school desegregation in the United States undeniably adds curves, twists, and turns. Ultimately, however, this results in a more profound understanding of the complicated structure of race in America. To provide an example of this complexity, I summarize the development and research of CRT and its branches.

Critical Race Theory and Its Branches

The overall focus of CRT scholars is “studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”³⁰ Depending on the author, there are eight to ten tenets of CRT. These, of course, developed over time as scholarship in the field has grown. The original studies of CRT were more theoretical and descriptive, interrogating the role of the NAACP in Brown, the function of antidiscrimination laws, the purpose of affirmative action, the promises of the U.S. Constitution, the value of Whiteness, and the intersections of race and gender.³¹ The foundation of CRT, as articulated by Derrick Bell, is to recognize that changes in racial policies are rarely born from a desire to right past wrongs. Such policies, he explains, are shaped by capitalism and the White elite’s desire to maintain and limit access to status and privilege.

To illustrate CRT, Bell used Brown v. Board of Education as his point of analysis.³² He theorized that the culmination of the 1950s civil rights changes had little to do with attempting to right the wrongs of Jim Crow. Instead, it had to do with the fact that two major wars had ended, the Cold War was a growing reality, and the United States needed to win “the loyalties of uncommitted emerging nations, most of which were black, brown, or Asian.”³³ The racial injustices occurring in the country played out on the world’s stage and could compromise U.S. interests abroad. Prior to Brown, the United Nations General Assembly had unanimously adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. As the so-called bedrock of democracy, the United States needed to address its own violations of human rights because, according to Bell, “the interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interest of whites.”³⁴ While controversial at the time, his assertions have since been supported in the literature.³⁵

Bell’s initial work not only outlines the genesis of CRT but also demonstrates how, since its inception, the Civil Rights Movement generally and school desegregation specifically have been a point of departure for scholars in this area of study. As “revisionist historians,” CRT specialists comb through popular U.S. narratives to find hidden aspects of a story, and “to understand the zigs and zags of Black, Latino, and Asian fortunes [by looking] to things like profit, labor supply, international relations, and the interest of white elites.”³⁶

The following tables identify the corresponding and distinctive tenets of CRT and its branches. The first outlines the founding authors, significant writings, watershed case law, and civil rights organizations and leaders generally affiliated with each theory (Table 1.1). The second table lists the tenets of each branch (Table 1.2).³⁷ It is not designed to be all encompassing, only to offer a snapshot of the similarities and differences of CRT and its offshoots. In my subsequent analysis, I will apply the theories to the facts of Mendez, Tape, and Piper.

DEVELOPMENT OF LATCRIT

Early LatCrit scholar Juan Perea used equal protection cases such as Mendez, Lopez v. Seccombe (1944), and Hernández v. Texas (1954) to discuss the absence of Mexican Americans within CRT scholarship. Each of these lawsuits involved issues relevant to Black communities as well.³⁸ Mendez involved segregated schooling; Lopez, segregated swimming pools; and Hernández, jury exclusion. Despite being classified as White in the U.S. Census, Mexican and Mexican American communities in the West and Southwest experienced a de facto Juan Crow, a Mexican version of de jure Jim Crow practices in the South that were socially rather than legally enforced.³⁹ These cases, however, were not necessarily decided, legally speaking, on race. Instead, the attorneys in the Mexican American cases relied on descent and nationality to frame their equal protection arguments, revealing how race is constructed differently between Black and Latiné communities.

In Hernández, for example, an all-White, all-male jury indicted the plaintiff for murder. The plaintiff and his attorneys argued that the indictment was tainted due to jury discrimination because no jurors were Mexicans. The State of Texas argued that, because Mexicans were considered legally White, no actual exclusion occurred. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), representing Hernández, agreed that Mexicans were White but argued that the discrimination was based on descent or nationality. This decision was no doubt strategic. Had the organization alleged racial inequity its claim would have been thrown out, as in previous Texas cases like Ramirez v. State (1931) and Carrasco v. State (1936) that tried to prove racial discrimination.

While the strategy worked well enough to make it to the Supreme Court, it added to the confusion of where to “place” Mexicans. In fact, as legal scholar Ian Haney López reveals in his research on Hernández, the Supreme Court patently refused to refer to Mexicans as a race or color.⁴⁰ Instead, justices determined that discrimination was based “other differences from the community norm” that “might define groups needing the same protection.”⁴¹ The court relied on the following evidence to determine that Mexicans were a “group needing the same protection”:

First, people in Jackson County, Texas, routinely distinguished between “white” and “Mexican” persons. Second, business and community groups largely excluded Mexican Americans from participation. Third, until just a few years earlier, children of Mexican descent were required to attend a segregated school for the first four grades, and most children of Mexican descent left school by the fifth or sixth grade. Fourth, at least one restaurant in the county seat prominently displayed a sign announcing, “No Mexicans Served.” Fifth, on the Jackson County courthouse grounds at the time of the underlying trial, there were two men’s toilets, one unmarked, and the other marked “Colored Men” and “Hombres Aqui” (“Men Here”). And finally . . . there was the stipulation that “for the last twenty-five years there is no record of any person with Mexican or Latin American name having served on a jury commission, grand jury or petit jury.”⁴²

In examining “differences from the community norm,” Haney López correctly concludes that the court was inadvertently arguing that being Mexican was a social construct.⁴³ Even though the evidence was congruent with practices associated with racial discrimination, Mexicans were still considered White, and the court refused to recognize discrimination based on race. Mexicans were, in a sense, trapped in a racial limbo born of the Black/White binary.

These cases reveal the inability of original CRT to fully capture the racialized experiences of Mexican Americans. Furthermore, CRT could not provide a theoretical explanation for why the court determined race was not an issue in Hernández yet two weeks later rendered its decision on Brown using similar social evidence. Traditional CRT did not have a scholarly space for a group that was “legally White, but socially Mexican.”⁴⁴

The differences between the racialized experiences of Mexican Americans and African Americans do not stop there. African Americans, for example, did not have international connections with whom the United States needed to maintain strong relationships. They did not have the United States initiating “Good Neighbor” policies that designated Mexicans as White in order to assuage a foreign government’s concern that their citizens were experiencing discrimination.⁴⁵ They did not have international worker programs like the Bracero Program, which was critical to the agricultural economy of the United States. Nor did African Americans have the political pull of needing to “make nice” with countries with which it was necessary to maintain relations advantageous in times of war. This irregular treatment and influence from a foreign government could not be captured in the Black/White binary that developed within CRT, thereby inspiring the creation of LatCrit.⁴⁶

Since the appearance of Perea’s and Haney López’s groundbreaking work, LatCrit scholars from a variety of traditions have continued to examine issues unique to the Latiné population.⁴⁷ Scholars have explored such matters as Mexicans and Whiteness,⁴⁸ immigration and citizenship,⁴⁹ racial tensions between Black/Brown communities,⁵⁰ and research focused on Latiné populations beyond Mexicans, such as Puerto Ricans⁵¹ and Cubans.⁵² Most relevant to this project, however, is the LatCrit scholarship related to the Civil Rights Movement, segregated schooling, and the unique position of Latinés within the Black/White binary. Mostly historians, legal scholars, and ethnic studies experts have produced such research.

Arguing that Latiné people in the United States are more disadvantaged than African Americans, Eduardo Luna uses Mendez to point out the erasure of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the U.S. civil rights narrative.⁵³ Luna writes, “The Civil Rights Movement and discourse on race/ethnic relations are almost inextricably intertwined with, and exclusively focused on, the contributions and experiences of Blacks. . . . Black historical legal experiences are positioned on center stage, and the experiences of other minority groups are relegated to secondary and inferior roles as stagehands.”⁵⁴ While I do not agree with Luna’s participation in what Angela Davis refers to as the Oppression Olympics, I do appreciate his observation regarding the invisibility of Latiné contributions to civil rights. However, Luna’s remarks run the risk of providing fodder for anti-Black sentiment to grow.

Perea, like Bell, interrogates whether cases like Mendez resulted in better legal protections and improved schooling for Mexican Americans.⁵⁵ In addition to identifying continued discrimination based on race, he also argues that when examining issues related to Latiné populations, one must consider discrimination based on language. “Language discrimination,” Perea asserts, “is race discrimination.”⁵⁶ As such, it can be applied to Asian Americans as well. The challenge, of course, is that not all of these ethnic groups are necessarily bilingual.

Other noted scholars have explored segregated Mexican schooling in Texas, as addressed in Independent School District v. Salvatierra (1930);⁵⁷ Arizona, as concerns Gonzales v. Sheely (1951);⁵⁸ and unpublished cases in California, such as Alvarez v. Lemon Grove (1931).⁵⁹ None of this research, however, is analyzed through the lens of sociology, nor does it consider intersectional aspects such as gender and class. This is notable because intersectionality is such a critical component of both CRT and LatCrit. All of the studies, however, wrestle with the racial positioning of Mexicans, and most conclude that Mexicans availed themselves of or embraced their status as Whites, or distanced themselves racially from the civil rights efforts of Black organizations like the NAACP. This limited analysis, which defines the Mexican experience as conforming to the Black/White binary, often overlooks the ambiguous place Mexicans inhabit on the racial hierarchy.

CLOAKS, WEDGES, AND WHITENESS: MEXICANS AND RACE

The treatment of the racial identity of Mexicans is largely built around the argument that this group is related to and assimilated into Whiteness. Sociologists of race and ethnicity and CRT scholars borrow heavily from one another. For example, CRT scholars have adopted sociological concepts such as colorblind racism,⁶⁰ racial formation theory and racialization,⁶¹ and White racial frame.⁶² Through these scholarly connections, many CRT scholars agree that “each disfavored group in this country has been racialized in its own individual way and according to the needs of the majority group at particular times in history.”⁶³ There are three very specific ways Mexicans and Mexican Americans were racialized: (1) possession of a Caucasian Cloak, (2) formation of a wedge racial group between Black and White, or (3) adoption of some generic form of Whiteness.

Gross explains that Mexicans both denied and challenged Whiteness with the selective deployment of a “Caucasian Cloak.”⁶⁴ On the one hand, they deployed it to assert their civil rights. If they were indeed White, then they were equal to Whites and should be afforded the same treatment as Whites. On the other hand, White institutions used the cloak to shield themselves from allegations of racism and discrimination, arguing, “Because you [Mexicans] are White, it is not possible to discriminate against you.” It was a cloak whose convenience depended on who used it, thereby adding to the racial tug-of-war that Mexicans experienced in the West and Southwest.

The Caucasian Cloak was also very much classed. Mexican American organizations such as LULAC and the American G.I. Forum (AGIF) comprised mostly middle-class, well-resourced members who distanced themselves from Black civil rights efforts and argued for Whiteness. For example, AGIF founder Hector García, in an effort to avoid an association with Black civil rights efforts, declared, “We are not and have never been a civil rights organization” and wrote in another letter, “If we are white, why do we ally with the Negro[?]”⁶⁵ Historian Mario García explains that “both middle-class and working-class Mexican Americans joined LULAC, but the middle class dominated leadership positions.”⁶⁶ Their leadership, too, made several efforts to distance themselves from Black communities, declaring, “Tell these Negroes that we are not going to permit our manhood and womanhood to mingle with them on an equal social basis.”⁶⁷

Considering class also reveals that arguing for Whiteness was not necessarily available to all Mexicans. The working-class Mexican farmworker whose skin was bronzed in the burning sun could not wear the cloak. Instead, he was indio, mestizo, cafécito, or whichever of the several descriptors were deployed by Mexicans to describe darker skin. This mixture of race and class further complicates the race of Mexicans, whose colonized history represents a continuum of color and class made up of both light-skinned, wealthy, landowning elites and the dark-skinned, poor farmworkers who labor on it.⁶⁸ Despite the fact that Mexicans included the full racial spectrum, many scholars continued to focus on the construction of and proximity to Whiteness.⁶⁹

In her analysis of the racial status of Mexicans in nineteenth-century New Mexico, legal scholar Laura Gómez attempts to capture the complexity of Mexicans’ racial position, but still uses Whiteness as a measure. Gómez agrees with general characterizations that Mexicans constituted an “in between” racial group that represented a sort of “racial ambivalence.”⁷⁰ She, however, uses the phrase “off white” and describes Mexicans as a “wedge racial group” in her analysis of the racial status of Mexicans in New Mexico during the nineteenth century.⁷¹ In her study, off-white denotes a racial subordination that comes from being almost White. The phrase “wedge racial group” captures how Mexicans distanced themselves from members of races that were lower on the hierarchy, namely Native and African Americans. In a sense, the racial position of Mexicans functioned as a double-edged sword, cutting down Whiteness while simultaneously cutting away color.

Other scholars regularly use the phrase “becoming White” to describe the racial legal journey of Mexicans in the United States, almost suggesting that Whiteness was available to, or could be achieved by, all Mexicans.⁷² Quoting James Baldwin, legal scholar Daniel Aaron Rochmes argues that by asserting Whiteness, Latinés were hiding behind “a curtain of guilt and lies.”⁷³ By limiting his analysis to legal arguments, Rochmes misses out on the evidence that could come from the litigants and community members for whom Whiteness was a foreign and inapplicable concept. This, I argue, is what much of the literature on Mendez misses: the assertion of a racial identity and the complexity of color within Mexican communities.

The research is also largely constructed in response to rejection by Whites. For instance, consider Perea’s concept of the pobrecito syndrome.⁷⁴ This syndrome appears in teachers’ handbooks that describe Mexican students as “lazy” and “dirty and diseased,” and that share stories of instructors who refused pupils’ hugs “without first inspecting their hair for lice.” In their review of the segregated school system of Oxnard, California, David G. García, Tara J. Yosso, and Frank P. Barajas use excerpts from school board meeting minutes to discuss how school officials identified “the brightest and the best [and cleanest] of the Mexican children” by using class and race markers such as hygiene and skin tone.⁷⁵ The authors argue that clean, lighter-skinned Mexican children represented a more resourced group and were therefore, in the eyes of White school administrators, worthy of praise and preferential treatment.

The race literature about Mexicans lacks the counternarratives and construction of “brownness,” as well as the coalition-building efforts between various race-based organizations, including the NAACP.⁷⁶ The agency and community building that developed within the legal battle for educational equality is understudied, limited, or unreported.⁷⁷ Much of the evidence presented comes from handbooks, testimonies, and articles written by Whites about Mexicans, not from the community or people themselves. Furthermore, the literature has not progressed much further than exploring and misinterpreting Whiteness as a legal strategy. Even the Mendez plaintiffs and their attorney have been mischaracterized as embracing Whiteness.⁷⁸ In chapter 5, a review of the transcripts, letters, and interviews reveals a much more complex story of racialization and provides insight into how the plaintiffs racially characterized themselves.

DEVELOPMENT OF ASIANCRIT

AsianCrit was developed at approximately the same time as LatCrit. Just as LatCrit challenged the Black/White binary, so, too, did AsianCrit. Since both theories were advanced at approximately the same time, several scholars wrote about LatCrit and AsianCrit together to articulate their aligned interests, such as language discrimination, restrictive immigration policies, and exclusion from the U.S. civil rights narrative.⁷⁹

Early scholars of AsianCrit Mari Matsuda, Robert S. Chang, and Angelo N. Ancheta introduced and developed this area of study by examining Japanese American and Hawaiian claims for reparations, immigration and nationalization, treatment of Asian Americans during times of war, and deployment of the model minority myth.⁸⁰ In contrast to Asians, African Americans were, generally, involuntary immigrants who were denied reparations, not characterized as “the enemy” during times of war, and constructed in direct opposition to the model minority myth.

Similar to Asians, Latiné communities experience language discrimination, unfair treatment under immigration legislation related to their labor, and a connection to a country outside of the United States. Latinés and Asians both represent culturally diverse nationalities; however, Latinés are largely Spanish speaking, whereas Asians are multilingual, both between and within different groups.⁸¹ Both theories address racial tensions with Black communities. These differences and similarities provide an explanation for the much-needed development of AsianCrit.

AsianCrit scholars have also used civil rights issues and the Fourteenth Amendment as a point of analysis. Much of the scholarship regarding the Fourteenth Amendment centers on citizenship rights and racial classification. To discuss these issues, AsianCrit specialists rely on sociology. Ancheta, for example, embraces racial formation theory as well as the concept of racialization.⁸² “The racialization of Asian Americans,” he explains, “has taken on two primary forms: racialization as non-Americans and racialization as the model minority.”⁸³ As a case in point, challenges to the “Americanness” of Chinese people in the late 1800s began once it was clear that Chinese miners and railroad workers were going to remain in the United States even after their work was completed.

Because the Chinese were characterized as foreign and presented a threat to labor, courts were reluctant to apply the Fourteenth Amendment, resulting in several unfavorable findings involving Chinese plaintiffs. Also, a series of tax cases and legislation taxed Chinese miners and merchants unequally compared with White miners and merchants. An example of the type of legislation passed began with the following wording: “an Act to protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the state of California.”⁸⁴

One of the earliest Asian American civil rights cases that came before the Supreme Court, People v. Hall (1854) involved the right for Chinese to testify as witnesses in legal proceedings. The court ultimately held that the Chinese, as non-Whites, were similar to African Americans and prevented from testifying against whites.

Like Mexicans, Chinese citizens in the United States enjoyed a certain protection from having a foreign government intervene on their behalf. A Chinese consulate was located in San Francisco, local Presbyterian churches hired a lawyer and former judge to lobby the California state legislature, and treaties were negotiated between the United States and China that declared China a “most favored nation.”⁸⁵ The “most favored nation” status ended once the Pacific Railroad was completed in 1869 and Chinese workers stayed in the United States. What followed was a series of anti-Chinese laws and ordinances that ultimately resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.⁸⁶ As a result, the Chinese found themselves fighting for the right to attend White schools (e.g., Tape v. Hurley [1885]) and to be afforded protections under the Fourteenth Amendment (e.g., Yick Wo v. Hopkins [1886]).

While this is, admittedly, a brief summary of the history of nineteenth-century discriminatory practices against the Chinese in California,⁸⁷ AsianCrit scholars argue that this legacy of discrimination is often concealed by the contemporary myth of the model minority, and reinforces a foreign, monolithic narrative of Asian Americans.⁸⁸ Unlike African Americans and Latinés, Asians in America are characterized as a population to whom things happen rather than a community that makes things happen. As Sohyun An explains, AsianCrit scholars want to change the civil rights narrative to include events such as the 1903 Japanese farmworker strike; legal challenges to immigration laws such as U.S. v. Wong Kim (1898) and U.S. v. Singh (1923); and cases involving Japanese Americans who were unjustly, illegally, and unconstitutionally interned in concentration camps, such as Hirabayashi v. U.S. (1943) and Korematsu v. U.S. (1944).⁸⁹

AsianCrit researchers write to transform the U.S. narrative of civil rights to be more inclusive of the experiences of different racial and ethnic groups in America. Chang observes, “The discourse on race and the law is not as rich or complete as it might or should be. . . . To focus on the black-white paradigm is to misunderstand the complicated racial situation in the United States. It ignores such things as nativistic racism. It ignores the complexity of a racial hierarchy that has more than just a top and bottom.”⁹⁰ Most relevant to this project, however, is the AsianCrit work regarding school desegregation efforts. In addition to McClain’s and Kuo’s research on nineteenth-century discrimination case law in California, historians, ethnic scholars, and journalists have more recently expanded the Black/White binary of segregated schooling to include the experiences of Asian Americans in the South.⁹¹

This historical data has yet to receive direct sociological treatment. This may be due in part to the small number of cases involving Asian American plaintiffs, as well as the contemporary emphasis on the model minority myth and Asian American achievement.⁹² Considering that AsianCrit also purports to value intersectionality, much of the literature is presented through the singular lens of race. As the next section reveals, AsianCrit scholarship is largely dedicated to exploring the placement of Asians within the U.S. racial hierarchy.

MINERS, MODELS, AND MIDDLEMEN: ASIAN AMERICANS AND RACE

The focus of AsianCrit on race, it seems, is twofold: to challenge the construction of Asians as (1) perpetual foreigners who do not belong, and as (2) honorary Whites who are used to demonstrate the failures of other non-White groups to achieve “American success.” From research on the “yellow peril,” represented by miners and miscegenation,⁹³ to modern-day members of “the racial bourgeoisie,”⁹⁴ the racial identity of Asians has been perhaps the most marked by extremes. Once again, heavy borrowing occurs between CRT intellectuals and sociologists represented in the literature.⁹⁵ Combining social science definitions of racialization and law, CRT scholars argue, “The dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs” of the dominant society.⁹⁶

This differential racialization of Asian Americans according to shifting needs is most apparent in the legal treatment and fluctuating favored status of the Chinese. The concept of “yellow peril,” for example, has been applied to the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese during times of war and perceived economic threat;⁹⁷ the Chinese in the 1800s;⁹⁸ antimiscegenation laws;⁹⁹ and Japanese American concentration camps.¹⁰⁰ The group that represented the yellow peril changed according to the favored status of the home country, as demonstrated in the treatment of Filipinos,¹⁰¹ Koreans,¹⁰² and South Asians.¹⁰³ Fear of labor competition underlying the idea of yellow peril lay behind the 1982 death of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man murdered by two White men laid off from an auto plant, as well as English-only laws and restrictive immigration laws.

The challenge, however, is that AsianCrit scholarship has characterized yellow peril, forever foreigner, and model minority as separate, historically distinct processes. What I contribute to the literature is to show how within one family, the Tapes, all three characterizations can and do exist, often simultaneously. The siloed way AsianCrit is applied runs the risk of creating even more dichotomies within dichotomies. Furthermore, I add to discussion of race by also considering the role of class. As a wealthy, “Americanized” Chinese American family, the Tapes demonstrate how their class failed to protect them from discrimination but also allowed them to sue the school district, as well as challenge the social norms associated with the Chinese of the late 1800s.

DEVELOPMENT OF TRIBALCRIT

TribalCrit is the most recent addition to CRT and is still developing a scholarly repertoire. While Brayboy generates the nine tenets associated with TribalCrit, he is not the only scholar to explore the intersections of race and law within Indigenous communities.¹⁰⁴ Other scholarly contributions in the area of TribalCrit include Torres and Milun’s article on the Mashpee Indians, as well as anthropologist Circe Sturm’s work on blood politics within the Cherokee Nation.¹⁰⁵

A pertinent aspect of TribalCrit is that Native Americans have had a “complicated relationship” with the U.S. federal government.¹⁰⁶ This circumstance adds a layer to traditional CRT, which generally only examines race and racism, not political identity. According to Brayboy, Native Americans occupy a “liminal space” that results in possessing a “joint status as legal/political and racialized beings.”¹⁰⁷ TribalCrit also acknowledges the overriding and lasting effects of colonization that disappear with the mythical narrative of “the vanishing Indian.”¹⁰⁸ These dual layered identities, he argues, are often oversimplified into a singular racialized status.

Native Americans’ political, legal, and racially defined relationships lie at the heart of TribalCrit. Because the political and legal relationship is codified, controlled, and legally defined through the Constitution, treaties, and federal statutes, it sets Native Americans apart from African American, Latiné, and Asian American communities.¹⁰⁹ In essence, according to the government, if you are not federally recognized, you do not exist; your identity is not real. “Federally recognized” is the term most often used when listing tribes. No other racial group in the United States has this federal requirement to be acknowledged.¹¹⁰ Because of these interlocked political, legal, racial, and social definitions of who is or is not Native American, discussions about these individuals’ race is limited. There are social, legal, and racial “tests” of authenticity. There are concerns related to assimilation and loss in the fight of cultural survival. Worse yet, there are no questions at all, and Native Americans are significantly absent from discussions of race in the United States.

AUTHENTICITY, ASSIMILATION, AND ABSENCE: NATIVE AMERICANS AND RACE

Currently, definitions of who is or is not a “real Indian” vary and are politically, legally, and socially determined. Some individuals who can prove through blood quantum evidence that they are at least one-quarter Native American are issued a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB). Individuals who cannot obtain this document are pejoratively called members of the “Outalucks” or the “Wannabe Tribes.”¹¹¹ Of course, the blood quantum method of identification is not the only way to be recognized. Each tribe/nation has its own requirements for identification, such as matriarchal lineage, paternal descent, tribal vote, residency, or direct lineage, to name a few.¹¹² Then there are the social definitions of authenticity, such as language fluency, connections with traditions, and level of assimilation of White settler culture.

Tuhiwai Smith argues that Indigenous identities are regulated by the government to its own benefit rather than that of Native Americans. According to TribalCrit, this is a threat to autonomy and self-determination.¹¹³ Tuhiwai Smith writes, “Legislated identities, which regulated who was an Indian and who was not . . . who had the correct fraction of blood quantum, who lived in the regulated spaces of reserves and communities, were all worked out arbitrarily (but systematically), to serve the interests of the colonizing society.”¹¹⁴ There were also legally created rules related to landownership that ultimately led to (1) the “removal” of countless Native Americans from their sacred homes and spaces and (2) the reclamation of lands by the government once a tribe lost its federal recognition. This tenet, Brayboy argues, is a result of White supremacists’ definitions of landownership, Manifest Destiny, and the Norman Yoke.¹¹⁵

In addition to legislating identities and legally defining landownership, nowhere is the government’s intent to wipe out an entire population’s history, livelihood, and future more apparent than in educational policy. Brayboy explains: “Education in its many forms is imbued with power: power to control young people’s bodies, epistemic engagement, curriculum and teaching; power to best determine how education and schooling are utilized and to what end; power to control what kinds of knowledge is shared—or not—when, and where.”¹¹⁶ The goal of the education system established for American Indians was never to empower but to assimilate. “The history of American Indian Education,” Brayboy writes, “can be boiled down to three simple words: Battle for power.”¹¹⁷

In this battle for power, the development of a scholarly narrative from within Indigenous communities is paramount. Yet in reviewing the sociological and legal scholarship on CRT, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and civil rights efforts, what clearly emerges is the invisibility of research on Native American education and civil rights efforts. Research on or about Indigenous populations is, comparatively speaking, underrepresented in the sociology of race and ethnicity and in critical race scholarship.¹¹⁸ This reduced presence therefore results in reduced power and recognition.

Conducting adequate research presents another impediment to producing Indigenous scholarship. There exists a lack of formal archives filled with materials generated from specific Indigenous nations. The formality of archival research leaves little room for collective memory and stories passed from one generation to the next. It also fails to consider history that has been “lost or deliberately erased,” as historian Jacqueline Fear-Segal and sociologist Susan D. Rose encountered in researching the thirty-nine-year history of Carlisle Indian schools.¹¹⁹ Unless methodologies are decolonized and come to accept the oral traditions of Indigenous populations, such investigation will remain a challenge. Therefore, my contribution to this literature is simply to expand on it by analyzing Piper through the lens of TribalCrit and identifying its unique contributions to the scholarship on race. This requires telling the story of Piper as found in archival material (a.k.a. the paper) and as told by members of Paiute Nation in Owens Valley (a.k.a. the people).

Critical Race Theory Meets Controlling Images

The second part of my theoretical framework requires blending theories related to Patricia Hill Collins’s controlling images with Evelyn Higginbotham’s concept of the politics of respectability.¹²⁰ Together, within these stories of school desegregation, Collins and Higginbotham make it clear that gender, class, and age play just as salient a role in education as race does. In fact, they are inextricably connected. The plaintiffs are more than just Chinese, Paiute, and Mexican American individuals. They are Chinese, Paiute, and Mexican American fathers, mothers, and daughters who, in part because of their middle-class status, generated a sympathetic image that portrayed a sense of worthiness not only within the court of law, but also in the court of public opinion.¹²¹ Change any one of these social characteristics, and a different story emerges. Had poor unmarried mothers whose teenage sons were rejected from attending all-White schools brought the cases, would they have been taken as seriously? Whether or not the choice of plaintiffs was intentional, the fact that the fathers were entrepreneurs married to “homemakers” who brought suit on behalf of their accomplished young daughters was meaningful. It was particularly relevant at a time when the Chinese were excluded, Native Americans were forcibly assimilated, and Mexican Americans were subject to the Juan Crow policies of California. These similar story lines showcase how the enduring markers of race, gender, and class inequality subsist across different racial groups during historical periods of heightened racial animus.

To explore this meaning, I briefly describe the research related to controlling images. Next, through secondary research, I identify the criminalized, sexualized, and piteous controlling images associated with Chinese American women and girls in the late 1800s, Native American women and girls in the early 1920s, and Mexican American women and girls in the 1940s. Through analysis of primary documents—newspaper articles, interviews, and court transcripts of each case—I demonstrate how, through the politics of respectability, these plaintiffs and their attorneys constructed a counternarrative to the controlling images of their time. While I did not uncover direct evidence that suggests plaintiff selection was legally strategic, the cases’ respectability narratives are theoretically and empirically relevant to the study of school desegregation.

The Power and Purpose of Controlling Images

Focusing specifically on Black women, Collins identifies and explains how the controlling images of mammies, matriarchs, jezebels, and welfare queens were used in popular culture to disempower, sexualize, criminalize, and disenfranchise Black women. More insidious than stereotypical, “controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life.”¹²² I would add that such images also make social injustice appear to be deserved, allowing society to blame the victims for their dire circumstances and immorality. This strips away the sense of worthiness and humanity necessary to confer human rights and basic dignity on individuals.

“Within U.S. culture,” Collins explains, “racist and sexist ideologies permeate the social structure to such a degree that they become hegemonic.”¹²³ The strongest way these ideologies disseminate in society is through popular culture by inundating the American imagination with relevant images. As bell hooks argues, popular culture is the “primary pedagogical medium for masses of people globally who want to, in some way, understand the politics of difference.”¹²⁴ Feminist and critical race scholars have identified other gendered controlling images across all forms of media, including but not limited to advertising,¹²⁵ film,¹²⁶ comic strips,¹²⁷ television, and other forms of communications, but they use the phrases “myths” or “stereotypes” to describe them.

There is debate regarding the difference between “controlling images” and stereotypes. While Collins does not explicitly explain the difference, her phrase considers not only the cultural aspects of representations, but also the power such imagery has in shaping policy, justifying oppression, and generating discriminatory practices. I contend, however, that controlling images and stereotypes are more complementary than interchangeable or divergent. Stereotypes are the historically generated descriptive terminology often dismissed as false representations. Controlling images, however, denote an understanding that such representations, while false, possess a power to shape/influence the social structure that results in very real consequences.

Much of the scholarship on controlling images focuses on the specific challenges they pose to Black women, such as the representations of jezebel, mammy, and welfare mother. Sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza, one of the few scholars to specifically discuss controlling images, examines film and television to demonstrate that controlling images are not only raced, but also gendered and classed. In her book Race and Racisms, Golash-Boza identifies the controlling images that are Black, gendered, and classed, including the working-class bad bitch, the bad black mother (BBM), and the thug or gangsta, or Black rapist.¹²⁸ Taking her analysis a step further, she identifies the controlling images of the butterfly, dragon lady, and threatening foreigner for Asian Americans; the squaw, princess, and savage for Native Americans; and the hot-blooded Latina, maid, and greaser/bandito for Latinés.¹²⁹ While Golash-Boza generates a more inclusive list of controlling images, there is still room to identify even more by adding age to the intersectional analysis.

Collins and Golash-Boza identify gendered and classed images, but neither scholar considers the role of age and the possible controlling images related to Black, Latiné, Native American, and Asian girls. The interdisciplinary field of girlhood studies provides useful guidance for explaining how innocence equates with Whiteness. Similar to scholarship on race, much of the research on girlhood studies examines childhood within literature,¹³⁰ zines,¹³¹ film and television,¹³² historical international media culture,¹³³ education,¹³⁴ and visual culture.¹³⁵ Because girlhood studies is firmly rooted in the Black/White binary, most of the controlling images identified in the literature are confined to Topsy-pickaninny-Sambo caricatures that are constructed against the innocence and respectability of White girlhood, as represented by Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Shirley Temple. It is this construction of racially opposite girlhood that is germane to this study.

In her study on racial innocence, cultural historian Robin Bernstein provides the most compelling explanation for the purpose of girlhood controlling images. Using decidedly sociological language such as “racial projects,” “performance,” and “scripts,” Bernstein asserts, “Childhood figured pivotally in a set of large-scale U.S. racial projects. . . . Performance, both on stage and, especially, in everyday life, was the vehicle by which childhood suffused, gave power to, and crucially shaped racial projects. Childhood in performance enabled divergent political positions each to appear natural, inevitable, and therefore justified.”¹³⁶ Innocence, she explains, is constructed through Whiteness. Quoting from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bernstein captures the opposing positions embodied in Topsy and Little Eva (see Figure 1.2): “There stood the two children, representatives of the two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor. They stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric [sic], born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!”¹³⁷ She observes that racial girlhood represents a line dividing the worthy from the unworthy and the innocent from the immoral. This analysis provides the language necessary to understand how Mamie, Alice, and Sylvia, as representatives of their race, had to portray a certain innocence that mimics White girlhood notions of beauty, intelligence, and purity.

The Presence and Pervasiveness of Controlling Images

Examining the secondary research on women and children of color in popular culture reveals more controlling images and affirms their historical roots. In this section, I identify prevailing controlling images that emerge from secondary research on Asian, Native American, and Mexican American women and girls, as well as the historical period relevant to each case. Table 1.3 summarizes the prominent controlling images, and Table 1.4 summarizes the literature from which they emerged.

PAGANS, PROSTITUTES, AND POOR CREATURES

The relevant period for Tape is the mid-to late 1800s, as Chinese immigration to the United States increased, giving rise to controlling images of Chinese women and girls as pagans, prostitutes, and poor creatures. The presence of Chinese women in San Francisco was small and limited, as there were only 7 women for every 4,018 men in San Francisco.¹³⁸ As Chinese immigrated, their labor transformed from a necessity to a threat.

Probably one of the most powerful images of the Chinese in general is that of the heathen. Decades of anti-Chinese sentiment identified the Chinese as “immoral and diseased heathen, and unassimilable aliens.”¹³⁹ In 1870, for example, noted American author and poet Bret Harte published a poem in the Overland Monthly called “The Heathen Chinese.” The poem became so popular, as did the phrase, that the New York Globe published it twice.¹⁴⁰ As the image below demonstrates, the Chinese of California were characterized as lazy, drunk, violent, and completely hedonistic (see Figure 1.3).

It is at this intersection of time and space that missionaries expressed their deep commitment to enlightening “heathen” Chinese women. Historian Wendy Rouse Jorae, in her research of children in Chinatown, demonstrates how missionaries frequently “contrast between light and dark, cleanliness and filth, or heathenism and Christianity” in their work.¹⁴¹ A reformer wrote of visiting a Chinese home,

Setting aside all feelings of loathsomeness born of the repulsive act of this filth and darkness, I entered upon the task of illuminating a soul of corresponding degradation, speaking to her of God’s love, pure air and sunshine, contrasting these with her present surroundings. Each succeeding visit found a growing appreciation of my words, ‘till finally she became as thoroughly nauseated with her surroundings as myself. Today we find her in a cheerful room at 822 DuPont Street, which she has thoroughly cleaned, whitewashed and papered.¹⁴²

Such diary entries reveal that heathen Chinese women, while filthy, savage, and diseased, were nonetheless salvageable and, if trained properly, fully capable of becoming part of respectable American society. Instead of using the phrase “heathen,” I will use the synonym “pagan” to describe this controlling image.¹⁴³

The next most pervasive controlling image is that of the Chinese prostitute. According to historian Ronald Takaki, locals called prostitutes “lougeui (‘always hold her legs up’) and baak haak chai (‘hundred men’s wife’).”¹⁴⁴ In the 1870s, most of the prostitutes were either stolen by a brothel owner or sold by their parents “for as little as $50 and then resold in America for as much as $1,000.”¹⁴⁵ Without legal or diplomatic representation, they entered into service contracts with clauses like this one: “If Ah Ho shall be sick for any time for more than ten days, she shall make up by an extra month of service for every ten days’ sickness.”¹⁴⁶ Due to menstrual cycles, illnesses, or even unwanted pregnancies, such stipulations extended contracts indefinitely.¹⁴⁷ According to historian Judy Yung, Chinese prostitutes were characterized “in books, magazines and newspapers as . . . ‘reared to a life of shame from infancy’ . . . [and] . . . guilty of disseminating vile diseases capable of destroying ‘the very morals, the manhood and health of our [read White] people.’”¹⁴⁸

The final controlling image most prevalent in the narrative about Chinese women and girls is that of the pathetically poor creature. These figures were called mui tsai, which in Cantonese means “little sister.”¹⁴⁹ The mui tsai were largely responsible for serving the home in any capacity an owner saw fit, including caring for children, cleaning the home, and being “on call” at any time of the day or night.¹⁵⁰ Under a Confucian ideology, these young girls were to be submissive and obedient to their “father at home . . . husband in marriage . . . and eldest son when widowed.”¹⁵¹ Furthermore, because these girls could not carry on the family lineage, they were at risk for being “sold, abandoned, or drowned during desperate times.”¹⁵² This fact largely explains why mui tsai were mostly little girls. Census data confirms that in 1880, the time closest to the Tape trial, many Chinese children in San Francisco were either at home or working as servants, cooks, or gardeners (see Table 1.5).¹⁵³

At this time, the benevolent, maternal missionaries rallied to “rescue” these poor creatures. According to historian Peggy Pascoe, the most powerful image in missionary writings, literature, and reports is that of the “Chinese slave girl.”¹⁵⁴ Missionary women answering the call to rescue young girls sold into domestic service capitalized on this portrayal. Determined to interrupt the “hateful practice of buying and selling their [Chinese] women like so much merchandise,” missionaries often made these girls the target of their rescue operations.¹⁵⁵

The controlling images of the pagan, the prostitute, and the poor creature represent two distinct and extreme representations of Chinese women and girls. Chinese women are sexualized and criminalized, while Chinese girls are infantilized. In chapter 3, you will find that Mamie Tape, as the lead plaintiff of Tape v. Hurley, was neither. Instead, she occupied a respectable position where she was too young to be a sexual object or a hardened criminal and too wealthy to be a poor creature.

SAVAGES, SQUAWS, AND SACRIFICIAL MAIDENS

The relevant period for the Piper case is from 1887 to 1924, when the controlling images of Native American women included savages, squaws, and sacrificial maidens.¹⁵⁶ These years were marked by two significant and related events relevant to this case: the Dawes Act of 1887 and the creation, implementation, and subsequent failure of Indian boarding schools. All of these efforts were ultimately made to assimilate, dissolve, or destroy tribal nations and transform Native Americans into “American” citizens.¹⁵⁷

In considering this change in U.S./tribal educational policy, one must also consider the cultural climate in which such programs were generated and transformed. Due in large part to the interdisciplinary field of Native American studies, new scholarship has emerged on cultural representations of Native Americans, ranging from children’s toys to films. These kinds of portrayals provide insight into the “relationship between media content and cultural schemas.”¹⁵⁸ Furthermore, “exploring the cultural continuities and changes that are an intricate part of critical periods in history furthers our understanding of the interconnections between symbolic and social relations.”¹⁵⁹ A review of the literature on cultural production of Native American imagery allows us to consider the social relations that emerge in the struggle for educational equality.

Much of the scholarship on stereotypical representations of Native Americans assumes the figure in question is male.¹⁶⁰ Nevertheless, there are a number of studies that focus specifically on women and children. In Killing the Indian Maiden, women’s studies scholar M. Elise Marubbio analyzes over thirty-four films in which Native American women appear.¹⁶¹ While she names a variety of “types,” including the squaw, the hag, the celluloid princess, and the sexualized maiden, her analysis of thirteen films made between 1908 and 1931 is devoted to Native women depicting “the helper” and “the lover.” Marubbio observes that both portrayals are “innocent, attached to an exotic culture, and linked to ritual and the American landscape; she [the helper or the lover] yearns for the white hero or western European culture; and she sacrifices herself to preserve whiteness from racial contamination.”¹⁶² These representations symbolize both “the possible merging of the two [cultures] and the differences between them.”¹⁶³ The main difference between the two, Marubbio explains, is that the helper figure is usually killed, while the lover figure takes her own life.

Helper films such as The Broken Doll (1910), Red Wing’s Gratitude (1909), and Iola’s Promise (1912) set up a savage/civilized dichotomy in which a White settler or settlers help an Indian maiden who is abused by her tribal family. In return for their kindness, the helper warns the benevolent Whites of an impending attack at the hands of her tribe. Her reward for this act of heroism is death. In the ensuing melee, she is tragically killed, usually by her own kind. “The sympathy created for the Indian girl . . . reinforces how very dangerous Indians are to each other and, by extension, to whites.”¹⁶⁴

Lover films, on the other hand, seem to follow the story established by playwright Edwin Milton Royle in The Squaw Man. The play opened in New York in 1905, became a national touring show in 1906, and returned to Broadway in 1907 and 1908.¹⁶⁵ Cecil B. DeMille adapted the plotline in three feature-length films. Marubbio summarizes one of them, The Kentuckian: Story of a Squaw’s Devotion and Sacrifice (1908) as follows:

The text tells us “Ward Fatherly is the son of a wealthy and indulgent Kentuckian” who finds himself in trouble for killing a man in a duel. He escapes to the “Western frontier, whither he has gone incog, working as a miner.” Here he meets a young Indian girl, who rescues him when “a couple of low-down Redskins” knife him. “She drags the wounded Kentuckian to her tipi and nurses him back to health. The inevitable happens—they are married. A lapse of several years occurs and we find the little family—the Kentuckian, his Squaw, and a little son—living in blissful peace.” A friend arrives to give Ward the news that he has inherited his father’s estate and must return immediately to the East. “He feels, on the one hand, that he cannot take his Squaw back and introduce her into society of his set, and on the other, he knows it would break her heart to leave her. No, no. He must give up all and stay where he is. . . . The Squaw realizes the situation. She must, for her love for him, make the sacrifice, which she does by sending a bullet through her brain, thus leaving the way clear for him—a woman’s devotion for the man she loves.”¹⁶⁶

While the reasons differ, in all three films the “Indian girl” kills herself to set her lover free and give her mixed-race child the chance to live in “civilized” society. These films identify the emotional, physical, and cultural price to be paid when social boundaries are crossed. Only the death of the Native character resolves the problem and restores racial order.

It is also important to remember that these films were made during great policy changes regarding Indian schools. At the time, “federal Indian policy maintained a distinct paternalistic attitude toward Native Americans, who were lagging in the evolutionary march from savagery to a more civilized state.”¹⁶⁷ These kinds of films highlighted the miserable failure of the assimilationist policy of the federal government. Furthermore, these movies celebrated “a mythic paradigm of the frontier West.”¹⁶⁸ Within this myth, “the Celluloid Princess stands metonymically for Native American acquiescence to the sovereignty of the United States . . . and her death [represents] an unavoidable consequence of western expansion and conquest.”¹⁶⁹

Scholars have also found a wealth of information in children’s picture books. Mary Gloyne Byler, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of North Carolina, analyzed six hundred books for young readers that were specifically about Native Americans.¹⁷⁰ While I have yet to find her original research, Byler’s introductory remarks are often reprinted in scholarly analysis about Native representations in juvenile literature.¹⁷¹ Her critique gives me an idea of the kinds of types reflected in children’s books. She concludes,

There are too many children’s books about American Indians. There are too many books featuring painted, whooping, befeathered Indians closing in on too many forts, maliciously attacking “peaceful” settlers or simply leering menacingly from the background; too many books in which white benevolence is the only thing that saves the day for the incompetent, childlike Indian. . . . Non-Indian writers have created an image of the American Indian that is almost sheer fantasy . . . sustaining the illusion that the original inhabitants deserved to lose their land because they were so barbaric and uncivilized.¹⁷²

Finally, the diaries, photography, and newspaper accounts of the children of Carlisle Indian School provide yet another form of cultural object to identify controlling images. As previously explained, beginning in the late 1800s and into the early 1920s, the renowned Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania spurred the growth of industrial schools around the country. These institutions were dedicated to developing an Indian women’s education program that corresponded with the overall mission of Indian schools. Many of the students were young Indian girls who were taken from their homes and families on the reservation, placed with White families, housed in boarding dorms, and taught to become good homemakers to help their future husbands fully assimilate.¹⁷³ This transformation from “savage to civility” was captured in a series of famous before-and-after photographs (see Figures 1.4 & 1.5).

In her reading of these famous photographs, visual arts scholar Laura Wexler outlines how the school successfully transformed its “Native girls” into imitations of middle-class White women. Wexler describes how “the spontaneous and revealing postures of the first image are long gone . . . overridden by the imperative to dress up the Indian children in White children’s outfits, place their hands upon White children’s games, set their limbs at White children’s customary angles . . . [creating replicas] of the ideal image of Victorian girlhood.”¹⁷⁴

In their book on a girls’ basketball team from the Fort Shaw Indian School, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith provide numerous accounts of the public’s fascination with young Indian girls.¹⁷⁵ Contemporary descriptions of the girls are mythical, almost reverent, and definitely pleased with the “progress” these formerly savage youths demonstrated under the guidance of White caretakers. In observing the players’ schoolwork, a journalist for the local newspaper noted, “[It was] a great surprise to those . . . who have been more used to thinking [of] the Indian and the scalping knife than . . . of the Indian and the slate and pencil.”¹⁷⁶ While these young girls were in a very different part of the country from Alice Piper, it is telling that they possessed the heavy responsibility of changing the minds of the public. One display of academic excellence, it seems, was enough to transform these young savages to schoolgirls.

While these young Native basketball players demonstrated that it was possible to be “civilized,” they were also allowed to be celebrated and even desirable. Under a headline that touted a game as “White Girls against Reds,” another local reporter wrote, “What . . . may be said [about] a team of Indian girls?”¹⁷⁷ He went on to describe the athletes as “strong and lithe” as well as “comely,” predicting, “A great number of white boys will cheer for the dark-complexioned maidens,” a combination of “half-breeds” and “full-blooded” Indians.¹⁷⁸ It seems the young women’s complexion and blood status were important, perhaps explaining why White boys would applaud. Interracial interactions between White men and Indian women were commonplace and even normal.¹⁷⁹ Young White boys could cheer on Indian maidens, but would they be encouraged to support mulattos, mestizos, or Mongolians?

More recently, Fear-Segal and Rose have invited readers to experience intimate, sometimes painful firsthand accounts of life with the Carlisle Indian School.¹⁸⁰ In describing the Carlisle school, Scott Momaday writes, “It is a kind of mythic memory in the American mind. Perhaps it is an extension of the Wild West, which is so gaudy and predictable in the dime novels and stock Hollywood films. The crucial difference, of course, is that the Indians who take the field are not fabled warriors like . . . Sitting Bull. They are children.”¹⁸¹ To save this “savage race,” the philosophy was to begin the assimilation progress early and educate children about respectability as represented by Whiteness. In one account after another, Fear-Segal and Rose capture the singular failure this experiment represented when it came to America’s policy toward Indigenous people. This was the fiasco that preceded Piper. Attorneys for the Native American Legal Rights Fund (NARF) described the impact of these boarding schools in the following manner:

Cut off from their families and culture, the children were punished for speaking their Native languages, banned from conducting traditional or cultural practices, shorn of traditional clothing and identity of their Native cultures, taught that their cultures and traditions were evil and sinful, and that they should be ashamed of being Native American. . . . They returned to their communities . . . as deeply scarred humans lacking the skills, community, parenting, extended family language and cultural practices of those raised in their cultural context.¹⁸²

The closure of Indian boarding and industrial schools left behind children who represented proverbial sacrificial lambs, stripped of their innocence and culture for the so-called greater good.

Like the helper and lover images in Hollywood films, these young girls represent the sacrifice White society required for them to be deemed acceptable, worthy, and pure. However, instead of sacrificing themselves through tragic death or suicide, these young girls were required to sacrifice their families, homes, and customs in order to “kill” their tribal identity and affiliations for the promise of equal opportunity. Photographs, newspaper accounts, and Indigenous reclamations provide examples of the Native American struggle for legitimacy in the eyes of White America. These young women represent a fraction of the thousands of Indian children who tried, but ultimately “failed,” to adopt the norms, values, beliefs, and definitions of “civilized” society.¹⁸³ In chapter 4, I explain that these experiences provide insight into the low expectations for Indian children’s educational achievement and high expectations for their assimilation and denial of their Indigenous heritage and identities, providing important insight into the relevance of Piper.

MAMACITAS, MALINCHES, AND MENTALLY INFERIOR

The relevant period for Mendez is from the late 1920s to 1948. Massive immigration from Mexico and major changes in United States–Mexico relations involving the Mexican repatriation efforts of 1929–1930, the 1939 Good Neighbor Policy, and the Bracero Program of 1942 characterize these years. Mexican Americans’ high levels of participation in World War II also mark this era. Furthermore, two significant events dominate Los Angeles newspapers just before the Mendez trial: the 1942 criminal trial of People v. Zamora, also known as the “Sleepy Lagoon murder case,” and the infamous 1943 Zoot Suit Riots.

As for Mexican American women and girls from the 1920s to 1940s, I rely on the analysis of women’s studies, American studies, and Chicano studies scholars and historians to identify and describe the mamacita, malinche, and mentally inferior controlling images. As with Chinese women and girls, scholarship shows how Mexican women and girls were racially othered with sexualized, criminalized, and infantilized controlling images.

The first and probably most well-known controlling image is that of the “spicy senorita,” or the mamacita. Sociologist Clara Rodriguez explains Hollywood’s hunger for this figure in her review of Latinos in film and one Mexican actress in particular: Lupe Vélez.¹⁸⁴ Because Vélez was bilingual, she was one of the few Mexican actresses able to cross over into American films in the 1940s as the industry moved from silent movies to “talkies.”

A comedic actress, Vélez played a character that spoke in highly exaggerated, broken English and was prone to fits, temper tantrums, and frequent outbursts in Spanish. The press described her as “just a Mexican wild kitten.”¹⁸⁵ A simple review of the titles of her films demonstrates the popularity of Vélez’s mamacita persona: The Girl from Mexico (1939), Mexican Spitfire (1940), Mexican Spitfire out West (1940), Mexican Spitfire’s Baby (1941), Playmates (1941), Mexican Spitfire at Sea (1942), Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (1942), Mexican Spitfire’s Elephant (1942), and Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event (1943). Her character, Carmelita, was a “hot-blooded, south-of-the-border Latina” and a “feisty, in-your-face hot tamale, defiant of traditional conventions and seemingly independent of male and industry controls.”¹⁸⁶

The next controlling image is that of the pachuca or the malinche. In Mexican folklore, La Malinche was an Indigenous woman who helped the Spanish conquer Mexico by serving as translator to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and offering her body as the vessel for creating a new mestizo (mixed) race. The term malinche refers to troublemakers, race traitors, and temptresses. Historian Catherine Ramirez identifies the 1940s zoot suit–wearing pachucas of Los Angeles as the modern-day malinches.¹⁸⁷

In 1940s Los Angeles, the public was very familiar with the zoot suit because of the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder case and the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. In a time when the country was rationing heavily for the war, the zoot suit was considered excessive, indulgent, and unpatriotic. Pachucas, female zoot-suiters, were also subject to public scrutiny. They were not only criminalized but also highly sexualized by the White and Mexican press. The pachucas’ general look involved tight-fitted clothing, ratted bouffant hair, and heavy makeup with dark lipstick. As Ramirez explains, “They appeared to betray middle-class definitions of feminine beauty and decorum.”¹⁸⁸ The women were also undesirable within the Mexican community. In an article from the local Spanish-language newspaper, La Opinión, a writer reported, “Las malinches wore ‘falda negra y muy corta’ [very short black skirts], that they painted their faces—in particular their lips and eyes—‘en una manera escandalosa’ [in a scandalous manner] and that they punctuated their racy ensembles with a bushy head of matted hair soaked in grease.”¹⁸⁹ What the newspaper described was the fact that the controlling image of the malinche violated the politics of respectability among Whites and Mexicans.

The final controlling image, and the most damaging one to the pursuit of educational desegregation, is that of the mentally inferior Mexican child. This image dominated the discourse on education in the 1940s. Juan Perea explains how teachers used genetic determinism to conclude that Mexican American children are less intelligent than White children. He calls this the pobrecito syndrome, writing, “Mexican American students are considered to have low intelligence and inferior academic potential, as measured by ‘intelligence tests’ of questionable validity.”¹⁹⁰ He further demonstrates how the mentally inferior stereotype continues to manifest even today: “Current research demonstrates that Latino students continue to be tracked toward vocational and technical courses . . . [and] are systematically overrepresented in classes for the educable mentally retarded.”¹⁹¹

The supposed mental inferiority of Mexican children also arose from a perceived lack of cleanliness (i.e., the dirty Mexican stereotype). Historian George Sánchez describes the reasoning behind the dirty Mexican stereotype as written in a 1929 manual called Americanization through Homemaking: “Sanitary, hygienic, and dietetic measures are not easily learned by the Mexican. His [sic] philosophy of life flows along the lines of least resistance and it requires far less exertion to remain dirty than to clean up.”¹⁹² Perea also describes how the persistence of these attitudes even years after Mendez, stating, “Many Anglo teachers and parents advocated for mandatory baths for ‘dirty Mexican kids because it will teach them how it feels to be clean.’¹⁹³

Like the controlling images of Chinese American women and girls, the mamacita, malinche, and mentally inferior figures are also sexualized, criminalized, and pitiable. Applying these images to Tape, Piper, and Mendez reveals the way the families involved in the cases contradicted the conventions of their time, particularly when you add class to the analysis. Therefore, these plaintiffs throw into question the observation by Toni Morrison that “definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” In these cases, it appears that the families and their attorneys, by adhering to the politics of respectability, might have exercised a limited form of agency in projecting their public personas.

Fighting Fathers, Missing Mothers, and Pretty Little Plaintiffs

Situating the Tape, Piper, and Mendez families within the proper sociological context requires a foray beyond poverty and pity into middle-classness and the intersectional politics of respectability. For example, we learn from Brown that gender and class mattered. For years, the explanation for selecting Oliver Brown as the lead plaintiff was that the decision was alphabetical. If that were the case, then Briggs, Belton, or Bolling would have been the lead case. Briggs, however, involved young Harry Briggs Jr. and his working-class parents who were forced to move to Florida as a result of racial intimidation. Belton comprised two cases brought forth by two mothers, Ethel Louise Belton and Sarah Bulah, on behalf of their daughters. Bolling was also brought by a mother, Sarah Bolling, on behalf of her junior high school–aged son Spotswood Bolling Jr. In an interview, Linda Brown recalled that her father was selected because he was the only man among the plaintiffs, as well as a minister, thus serving the politics of respectability.¹⁹⁴ These gender and class dynamics in Brown guide my reading of the role of gender, race, age, and class in Tape, Piper, and Mendez with regard to not only the lead plaintiffs, but also their parents.

The fathers in Tape and Mendez were consistently highlighted in historical accounts of the cases. Joseph Tape was prominently featured in the Daily California Alta. Even though he played a critical role in building the suit and testifying in court, Gonzalo Mendez was always identified in the newspapers as one of five fathers involved in the proceedings. However, Pike, the father in Piper, was not as prominent in newspaper accounts of the case. Nevertheless, the three fathers’ presence in the media and role in the court cases might simply have been the result of an already patriarchal society where men were legally recognized as “the head of the household.” Yet the prevailing controlling images for men of color were rarely that respectful. Mexican, Chinese, and Indigenous men were characterized as violent, sexualized, emasculating, or savage.¹⁹⁵ In these legal cases, they were cast in the much more relatable masculine role of the protective, loving father. Class played an unspoken role, however. Joseph Tape’s, Gonzalo Mendez’s, and Pike Piper’s socioeconomic status transformed them into protective, loving, middle-class fathers defending their daughters.

Where are the mothers in this story line? Historically, mothers have been and continue to be critical, often tragic figures in social justice narratives. Their images are permanently etched in historical memory. Mamie Till wailing over the casket of her murdered son Emmett. A widowed Coretta Scott King sitting in a pew and comforting a young Bernice. An utterly despondent Lily Chen being shuffled out of a courthouse where the murderers of her only child, Vincent, received an insultingly light sentence—a $3,000 fine and three years of probation. An inconsolable Luz Salazar barely able to stand by Ruben’s casket after his death at the hands of the Los Angeles during the National Chicano Moratorium March. Collectively, these mourning mothers became the reluctant reminders of the consequences of racial hatred. They transformed their tragedies into movements.

In school desegregation cases, though, the mothers are decidedly missing. Leola Brown appeared in a public family photograph, but she was never quoted in a newspaper or photographed with Linda. In fact, the public did not hear from Leola Brown Montgomery until the sixtieth anniversary of the case during an interview with Linda Brown.¹⁹⁶ Similarly, Mary Tape, Annie Piper, and Felícitas Mendez were relegated to a behind-the-scenes supportive role when their contributions were just as valuable to the success of their cases. They wrote letters, organized families, worked tirelessly, and launched movements. In the meantime, their daughters, Mamie, Alice, and Sylvia, occupied a harsh spotlight as central characters in their very public legal proceedings. Exploring the role of these fathers, mothers, and daughters reveals a significant shortcoming in the scholarship of school desegregation: the lack of an intersectional analysis. Deploying an intersectional approach deepens our analysis of the theater behind the school desegregation movement. The marked presence of the fathers, the absence of the mothers, and the impermeable innocence of the lead plaintiffs all contributed to an elaborate performance of respectability.

The fathers were cast as men who fought for the rights of their little girls. Mothers were conspicuously absent. I argue that it is not coincidental that the lead plaintiff in each case was a little girl. In all the proceedings, younger boys were available to serve as lead plaintiffs. There was Frank for Mamie, and Gonzalo for Sylvia. Alice was the only girl out of the original seven plaintiffs in her case. If, theoretically, youth could evoke more sympathy, then why were these boys overlooked? I suggest that the thought of little Mexican, Indigenous, and Chinese boys sitting next to little White girls stoked the very public horror over racial mixing. Young girls were less threatening, perhaps innocent, and definitely not as dangerous. The Tape, Piper, and Mendez daughters were Americanized replicas of racial innocents who could be rescued from immorality and inferiority. Newspapers, interviews, and transcripts concerning Tape and Mendez yielded the most information on the families. Though a few articles were published about Piper, those reporters discussed the case in a very general way and unfortunately omitted the description necessary to ascertain how Pike, Annie, and Alice Piper were perceived by the public.¹⁹⁷ Still, the Piper opinion and photographs of Alice Piper later in her life are very telling, providing some material about the family generally and Alice specifically.

What my research demonstrates is a pattern of criminal and sexual controlling images for women and pathetic, inferior, and victimized controlling images for girls. In exploring “patterns of representation and modes of portrayal across gender, age, [and racial] groups,” I follow research similar to that of sociologists Ashley Mears, Shyon Baumann, and Kim de Laat.¹⁹⁸ This effort helps race and civil rights scholars consider the “cultural continuities and changes that are an intricate part of critical periods in history [that] further our understanding of the interconnections between symbolic and social relations.”¹⁹⁹ Within chapters 3 through 5, I demonstrate where and how these images were used in and around the cases. More importantly, I show how, through the display of middle-class respectability and youthful innocence, the plaintiffs and families were able to sustain a respectable position between the problematic and the pathetic racialized, gendered, and “low-class” imagery. With the theoretical scaffolding of Critical Race Theory, its branches, and controlling images firmly in place, I can outline the book’s structure.