Where were Hispanic and Asians during US segregation?

by GReal523

I only ever see people talk about the Black-White segregation, but where were the Hispanics, Asians, and other ethnicities during segregation?

AlicesRestaurant1993

The US has a long history of discriminatory policies that enforced segregation socially, politically, legally, and economically, going beyond a racial binary. At around the time Jim Crow segregation was formalized, in 1882, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. While contested in the courts over the next several decades, the act was pretty continuously upheld until WWII and limited the number of Chinese people allowed to immigrate to the United States. This was both in response to and ultimately stoked anti-Asian sentiment more broadly (law can feed social response). At around the same time, through homestead policies and opening "The Frontier," the US also stoked fear and racism against, in particular, Mexican Americans in the late 1800's and early 1900's. While the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo granted Mexican Americans living in annexed territory US citizenship, Anglo settlers took land, especially land that had previously been used for communal sheep grazing, and transitioned public into private property. As part of a new economy with limited access to credit, Mexican Americans were forced into new types partido agreements - some compare this to sharecropping - that forced people deeper and deeper into debt. These aren't separate eras or issues of discrimination - it's happening at the same time.

These earlier forms of legal and economic disenfranchisement laid the groundwork for future forms of discrimination, which certainly included formal segregation but also included things like criminalization (adding more police to specific neighborhoods, criminalizing particular drugs but not others, and, most notably, sending eugenic-minded case-workers to check in on people of color and sometimes separate families). This is a long history and I can't really do it justice on a reddit post. But if you're interested in further reading, Nayan Shah has a really wonderful book called Contagious Divides. There's also Linda Gordon's fantastic book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction and Gordon Chang's groundbreaking book, The Chinese and the Iron Road.

This is a really good question that speaks more to how history is taught in classrooms and less to the actual experience of non-white people experiencing segregation and discrimination. Classes tend to segment history - one week about the Civil War but not slavery, skip reconstruction, one week about the Progressive era, skip eugenics and race massacres, one week about the Great Depression, skip New Deal policies that excluded people of color, WWII, skip Japanese internment, and then of course the myth that the Civil Rights movement ended discrimination. Some history classes still perpetuate both that myth and the myth that history ended in 1970. For more, John Oliver has a great segment on US History from August 2, 2020. This method of teaching presents a version of history that's certainly more comfortable for white Americans (children and their parents), but really leaves out a more nuanced understanding of how race has worked and works in the US socially, politically, legally, and economically. When we segment history in this way, we promote a fallacious view that the past is the past and we don't have to deal with the consequences of that past - not our problem. And this kind of segmentation also promotes a view that various parts of the past are segmented even though they're deeply tied. This just isn't really how history works. A history classroom that's more attentive to a broader arc of history would have gone beyond the binary to explain, for example, how segregationist policies against Chinese Americans in the West in particular essentially set the framework for Jim Crow.

Not only are we still dealing with the consequences of Jim Crow segregation, we still live in deeply segregated societies, and discrimination doesn't follow a binary (for this we need only look at the increasing hate crimes against Asian Americans this past year, but also historically). Segregationist policies are really baked into our system and have a long history. They are not on a racial binary, but instead shift with time to accommodate new expressions of hegemony (this includes shifting definitions of who even is white). So to answer your question simply, Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans were very much discriminated against under Jim Crow and still are.

DanKensington

The subreddit firmly believes that there is no such thing as the 'final' answer to any question, so anyone willing to write up a post of their own is quite welcome to do so. For the meantime, we do have some previous posts dealing with other ethnicities; these two look at Asian-Americans dealing with America's institutional racism:

For the Arab side of things, u/Prufrock451 examines their legal status.

bitjazzy

While we wait for a response, you may want to read this response to a similar question from the FAQ.

rocketsocks

Hooboy. Rest assured, no single post (nor even 100 books) could satisfactorily answer this question, it's a big topic, I'll try to just touch on a few key details.

Much like black Americans many other ethnic groups (hispanics & latinos, asians, indigenous peoples) were treated as second class citizens and denied basic rights on either a de facto or de jure basis. For example, segregation was common across the US. Many businesses refused service outright to non-whites and many businesses that served non-whites often had secondary entrances or separate sections for non-white patrons. Many towns had "sundown laws" that prevented non-whites from being able to live or stay overnight in them. Many larger cities had various forms of red lining that limited non-whites to certain sections of town. These included things like "racial covenants" in deeds which prohibited both ownership and residence by non-whites on land. Rule of law and "justice" was also ubiquitously denied to all non-whites. Folks who were the victims of a crime would rarely be able to get the criminal justice system to do anything about it, and folks who were accused of crimes against whites were often subjected to summary street justice in the form of either lynching or police violence or harassment.

OK, this is a big subject so I'm going to switch up to just providing examples of events or situations which should help paint a picture.

Let's start with the "Mexican Repatriation" of the 1930s. During the Great Depression there was great resentment against latinos in America and this led to an organized mass "deportation" of anyone who looked latino in what can only be called an act of ethnic cleansing. Supported by all levels of government and working in coordination with private groups up to 2 million individuals were rounded up and forcibly deported based on the their appearance and regardless of their citizenship status. It's unknown how many birth-right US citizens (allegedly guaranteed citizenship by the US constitution) were forcibly deported during this time. Some of the operations that were part of this program were paramilitary raids of neighborhoods (in Los Angeles, for example) followed by cursory and casual token legal proceedings and then forced removal to Mexican territory. While the program ended in 1936 it had echoes in later actions such as the forced interment of Japanese-Americans and in 1954 "Operation W--back" which forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of ethnically Mexican individuals with little concern for their legal citizenship status.

Prior to 1875 the US effectively had open borders during peace time, anyone could enter the country and become a permanent resident. During the mid 19th century there was a huge influx of East Asians from especially Japan and China due to the instabilities at home in those countries and the demand for labor in the US due to the gold rushes on the West Coast and the races to build railroads. The backlash resulted in the first restrictions of immigration to the US with the Page Act of 1875 which then took more concrete and expansive form in the "Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882", effectively banning almost all immigration of ethnic Chinese and Japanese people to the US. Initially intended to be just a 10 year "freeze", the act was extended multiple times and was not fully repealed until the civil rights era. As the act came into force it also met with a huge groundswell of anti-asian sentiment which was expressed in the form of organized violence and harassment. There were numerous massacres committed against asian-American communities across the US during the 1880s (such as Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885 and Hells Canyon, Oregon in 1887). This wave of violence and the limitation of legal immigration resulted in many "chinatowns" becoming very insular and self-protective through the turn of the century through the early 20th century.

Lasting up through the 1970s there were several forms of anti-latino eugenics in the US including forced or questionably voluntary sterilization of women. This occurred substantially in Texas and California and extensively in Puerto Rico where roughly 1 in 3 women were sterilized in the mid-20th century.

By the 1910s it had become common practice for the INS to require all "Mexicans" wanting to enter the US to pass through traumatizing, humiliating, and dangerous disease control protocols. These included being stripped naked (men and women) and having their bodies and their personal effects subjected to chemicals ranging from kerosene and vinegar to cyanogen and zyklon-b (yes, that zyklon-b). In 1917 a 17 year old woman (Carmelita Torres) refused the treatment out of the belief that the guards were photographing women when they were naked (and out of fear of the dangers of the treatments, which had killed over two dozen individuals in the previous year when the gasoline they were being "bathed" in was ignited), she was both denied entry and refused a refund which resulted in a protest from her and the other women on her bus. This spiraled into a 3-day long riot, but ultimately no change occurred and the disinfection processes remained basically unchanged through the 1950s.

And, of course, there is the fairly well known example of Japanese internment during WWII, firmly establishing Japanese-Americans as second class citizens then and for decades afterward. One of the biggest long-lasting impact of internment was the widespread theft of Japanese-American farms, businesses, and land during WWII, which many will say was one of the driving forces for internment in the first place. The Japanese-American farmers had the benefit of generations of farming expertise, especially on small plots of land, so their farms were far and away the most productive (and most profitable) on the West Coast at the time, and almost all of their farms were effectively stolen during internment and never given back. There was a token reparations payment made in the '80s as an apology but it was a tiny fraction of the value of what was stolen even then, with today's appreciation of real-estate prices the current value would be astronomical.

On paper the 14th Amendment (1868) gave all American citizens (and nominally non-citizen residents) equal protection under the law, in practice almost all non-whites were treated as second class citizens, most especially those of African descent and indigenous peoples but those of Asian or latin-american heritage fared no better. They were excluded from opportunity, rights, the ability to own property or live in many neighborhoods and some entire towns and systematically subjected to racial harassment and violence (up to and including murder) from authorities and white citizens. It is as shameful that these things happened as that they continue to be whitewashed out of most history curricula in American schools.