ASA 115, Week 3, Neil Castro

Delano Manongs (Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong) that helped create the Farm workers Strike in the 1970s

In Week 3, we are looking at how policies can actually effect people of mixed races and by "inter-grouping" together created confusion of other ethnicities which ultimately grouped all Asian ethinicities into one single race, In "Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws and the Construction of Asia" by Deenesh Sohoni, she delves into the policies of Racial laws that influenced America. She talks how Asians were immigrated to America during and after the civil war as the government and other businesses needed cheap labor since the civil war made African Americans  achieved their "freedom" from slavery. This influx of new people which the author derived form Delgado's Critical Race Theory (CFT) which are socially constructed races (i.e Orientals) from "social" or "economic" pressure to create policies to separate whites from non whites. Thus it created anti-immigration  laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act. They also wanted to make sure that intermarriage was not "diluting" the whiteness within America. They want again to preserve power to whoever is in power thus making anti-miscegenation laws to who ever was Chinese, Mongolian, Malay, or Asian Indian. All of this was alleviated when these law were gone but in order to dramatically remove it, Asians had to be grouped into one singular race in order to show strength in numbers.

Intermarriage was really tough in America so becoming mixed race became a black mark. People didn't want to show that they were racially mixed because they were shown that if you are born with an Asian man to a White/Black woman in America then you might be excluded to certain benefit or even be put in jail because of intermingling with other ethnicities. It created the bachelor's society in Central California with the manongs because of these anti-miscegenation laws thus creating more hardship to whoever was mixed race Asian during that time.