Events

Event Description

Mexican Migration and Bureaucratic Race-Making at Angel Island Immigration Station

During Angel Island Immigration Station’s operation (1910-1940), hundreds of Mexicans arrived there via oceanic voyage in attempts at gaining entry into the United States. These Mexican migrants experienced both their migratory routes and the immigration restrictions and expectations at Angel Island in profoundly different ways as compared to the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who crossed into the United States across the U.S.-México land border during the same era. As these Mexican migrants encountered the bureaucratic apparatus in place at Angel Island, bureaucrats and migrants navigated the contradictory ways that Mexican racialization was understood at the time in the United States. Arguing that immigration officials at Angel Island played an active role in classifying migrants as of the “Mexican race” decades before this was an operative racial category at the federal level, this talk explores the ways that locally-stationed bureaucrats served as agents of race-making and racial theorizing.