The New Yorker:

Since the earliest days of the Republic, American citizenship has been contested, subject to the anti-democratic impulses of racism, suspicion, and paranoia.

By Michael Luo

They were proud citizens of a country that did not want them. It was Independence Day, in 1895, in San Francisco’s Chinese quarter. Men with long braids who were dressed in traditional Chinese attire hobnobbed inside a building on Clay Street that was decked out in bunting and American flags. The men, who were all born in the United States, and spoke fluent English, were helping to inaugurate a new organization, the Native Sons of the Golden State. As throngs jammed the street in front of the building, the Native Sons fired off Roman candles, pinwheels, and rockets, in celebration of America’s birthday. The next morning, an article published on the front page of the San Francisco Call reported that the men were all “anxiously waiting for the next election, so they can exercise their right to vote.” The writer imagined politicians mingling “in the dens in Chinatown in order to win the ‘American-cooly vote’ ” and predicted that “Chinese hands may come to cast the ballots that decide elections.” The article’s alliterative headline betrayed the newspaper’s scorn: “posing as patriots.”

When I first came across the article, while researching my book, “Strangers in the Land,” which was published last month, the Native Sons’ display struck me as both admirable and foolhardy. For much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, anti-Chinese bigotry had been roiling the West Coast. In 1882, Congress passed the first in a series of laws restricting Chinese laborers from entering the country. When Chinese immigrants continued to arrive, finding ways around the measures, white residents in dozens of communities up and down the Coast banded together to drive out their Chinese neighbors. Federal lawmakers had also recently inflicted a new humiliation on Chinese residents, requiring them to register themselves and be photographed, or risk arrest. Led by the Six Companies, a conglomeration of Chinese mutual-aid associations, Chinese residents across the United States had defied the law. Leaders of the anti-Chinese movement had called for mass deportations, only for federal officials to conclude that the government lacked the resources to carry them out. The Six Companies retained a legal team that helped to advance a case to overturn the registration requirement, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, just to lose. By early May, 1894, a hundred and six thousand eight hundred and eleven Chinese residents, including nearly seventy thousand in California, had registered with the federal government.

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