Beyond Border Spectacle:Oral History and Everyday Meaning in Chinese Mexican Tucson
Given the time and place, Lee Goon and Jesus Valencia formed what some may have considered an unusual friendship.1 At the turn of the twentieth century, immigration restriction laws hardened racial lines between Chinese migrants and settled residents. They further inspired violent Sinophobia in the American [End Page 459] Northwest, California, Peru, Canada, and Mexico.2 Conditions, though, were decidedly different in Tucson, Arizona, where social and political forces did not succumb to anti-Chinese movements, although apprehension existed between migrants and settled residents. At first, necessity and practicality drew Valencia and Goon together. Valencia, a Mexican landowner and proprietor of a grocery store, hired Goon, a migrant from China and erstwhile resident of San Francisco, to take over the day-to-day operations of his market in south Tucson. "And that's how they met," recalled Mary Malaby, a Tucson resident of Chinese and Mexican descent and the granddaughter of Lee Goon and the great-granddaughter of Jesus Valencia, in an oral history conducted by the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center (TCCC). The daily routine of running a neighborhood business strengthened the bond between the two men and unintentionally united the Lee-Valencia families by blood. When Valencia neared retirement age, the Mexican landowner transferred his market to Goon, who then summoned his teenage son from China for help in the store. Lee Hop worked at his father's market, and there he met and entered an intimate relationship with Valencia's granddaughter, Maria Trujillo. "And that is where the family came together," recounted Malaby, the oldest child of Hop and Trujillo.3 Although the intimate relationship between Lee and Trujillo persisted for several years, it ultimately did not withstand the social pressures of an unsanctioned union and the obligations of familial duty and personal honor that weighed heavily on both.
The Lee-Valencia family story is neither exceptional nor locally drawn, for it bore the imprint of the transpacific-borderlands world in which Tucson played center stage. From without, resilient migration networks transported Chinese persons such as Lee Goon and Lee Hop to the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, where commercial life [End Page 460] occasioned bonds of friendship and blood with long-time Tucsonenses (Mexican Tucsonans). From within, personal bonds knitted Chinese migrants in Mexican barrios (neighborhoods), thereby constructing a community that departed from the usual practices associated with the Chinese diaspora elsewhere, as a group of dispersed people who remained oriented to China to preserve a collective identity.4 Instead, in the absence of ample kin associations and a robust diasporic network on which to depend, Chinese migrants in Tucson, such as Lee Goon, created strong ties with Mexicans such as Jesus Valencia to embed themselves and their families in southern Arizona. Transnational ties were not wholly severed as Lee Hop's migration attests, but cross-national linkages only partially explain the affective family ties and social dynamics affixing Lee Goon's family in Tucson over several generations. The other critical dynamic lay in unexpected relations with Tucsonenses, engagements that significantly helped to anchor Lee Goon's family in Tucson, as they did other Chinese migrants who made Tucson their home in the first three decades of the twentieth century.5
The dominant historical narrative of southern Arizona and the greater U.S.–Mexico border region obscures the importance of quotidian relations, whether affective kin, kith, or interethnic bonds, including those connecting the Lee and Valencia families. But these stories, and the history they point to, have never been more crucial to understanding how people came together from vast distances, created communities under unusual circumstances, and remained despite harsh immigration and racialized regimes that contrived against such outcomes. Attention to everyday relations enlarges our view of nurtured bonds among closely knitted communities, urging a rethinking of familiar categories: alien and citizen; illegal and legal; Mexican and American; and civilized and savage. Dual categories, for example, reify divisions created in black-letter [End Page 461] law while moving backward in time to confirm presuppositions. This approach to history writing, we contend, helps to produce what the anthropologist Nicholas De Genova has termed "border spectacle," a performance of legal and racialized exclusion whereby repetitive imagery and discursive formations choreograph a theater of "illegality" and inhumanity.6 Further, we add, border spectacles occlude transnational histories that were, and those that could have been. In opposition, the world of Chinese migrants in Tucson was shaped by the convergence of transpacific networks and local arrangements, showing that, in often indirect ways, a wide range of collective practices deepened social interactions with Mexicans and preserved a sense of social fluidity in the region. The configuration of relationships had profound consequences for Chinese Tucsonans. In the absence of American citizenship by naturalization, day-to-day relationships gave value to a type of civic belonging that had less to do with the essential qualities of citizenship (such as voting and holding elected office) than with creating families, peddling vegetables, and asserting local political rights. By the mid-1920s, when exclusionary nationalism took hold in the region, ties of mutual trust and neighborhood bonds began to erode, and after the mid-1930s, nativism racialized Chinese, Mexican, and Chinese Mexicans as permanent outsiders or alien-citizens.
Oral histories attend to divergent meanings of the past, including the entwined relations between Chinese and Mexican Tucsonans. Following scholar Wendy Brown's treatment of Michel Foucault's concept of genealogy, we understand and apply oral history as a method to capture the past as a "field of eruptions, forces, emergences, and partial formations."7 As a lens through which to view the inconspicuous past, oral histories defy categorization and work to counter the silences and biases of the archive, thus producing generative epistemologies neither inclined to reinforce narratives of historical rupture nor those in continuity with the past. In Silencing the Past, historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot's insights about the "silences and mentions" relegating the Haitian Revolution to the sidelines of French history extend to Chinese bonds with Mexicans: conventional borderlands histories have all [End Page 462] but silenced the closeness of neighborhood and affective attachments with Mexicans, which openly challenged laws and practices casting them as pernicious aliens.8
Tucson Oral Histories and Multiethnic Communities
In amplifying the voices of interethnic families and societies, oral histories can help scholars reconsider the legal and racial binaries that often dominate historical perceptions of the greater U.S.–Mexico borderlands region, and Tucson in particular. As historian Daniel James states, "Oral sources can also take us beyond the limits of existing empirical data … [and] opens up a social and cultural universe beyond the realm of official statistics."9 At their most fundamental level, oral histories comprise recorded interviews between an interviewer and a narrator around a specific topic or a life history. Yet, through the process of long-form life histories conducted by a skilled interviewer and an engaged narrator, scholars can use oral history methods to glimpse the social structures and processes of the peoples and communities they study. Few other historical methods can provide quotidian insights into the roles of husbands and wives, familial relationships, and sexual intimacies both within and outside of committed partnerships. Likewise, memories of childhood told to interviewers can reveal sometimes seamless cultural blending or formative encounters with discrimination.
Collected between 2017 and 2019 with members of Tucson's Chinese Cultural Center, the "Tucson Speaks! Finding Place, Finding Home" oral history project revealed personal histories of deeply rooted, interethnic relationships between Mexican, Chinese, and Indigenous peoples brokered over generations. Adding to the limited, but rich, archives of Asian-descent peoples living in Arizona, these eight long-form, recorded interviews make visible the vibrant, interconnected social and cultural networks that bound communities in borderland spaces like Tucson, often absent from archival records. Unedited, raw interviews provide insight into individual and community understandings of racial hierarchies, a narrator's personal identities and value systems, their roles as part of multiple [End Page 463] family units, their place within their local community, their sense of belonging, and their relationship to the state at large and their understanding of citizenship. During these sessions, interviewees not only forge their own understandings of historical memory, but they also disclose portraits of family formations within the broader context of transpacific-borderlands spaces and nationalism that other sources cannot. Once recorded, historians analyze, deconstruct, and recast these oral texts within their historical context, as we have done with the Lee-Valencia story.
While memories can be imprecise, the true strength of the method is less about the chronology of events and more about their meanings. As historian Alessandro Portelli argues, "what is really important is that memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings … these changes [in memory] reveal the narrators' effort to make sense of the past and give a form to their lives."10 An oral history is not a complete, perfect source; in fact, it is quite the opposite. Because of the fragmented nature of memory, oral history sources feel incomplete by nature and leave a lingering feeling of countless stories left untold or even unremembered. Even so, without these oral histories, rich stories like Mary Malaby's about the social relationships that begot her family provide borderlands scholars with a history they would have missed otherwise. As Portelli argues, "historical work excluding oral sources (where available) is incomplete by definition."11 Under the guidance of a skilled interviewer, long-form oral histories can transform Malaby's recollections into a fuller mapping of local relations and power structures. Animated by oral history praxis, a historian can take Malaby's narrative and reconstruct the intricate webbing of daily choices fronterizos (borderlanders) made to counter, circumvent, or navigate a multitude of state policies. Interviews with narrators like Malaby point toward the many local accommodations negotiated in borderland spaces like Tucson. From tales of business partnerships and friendships transcending discriminatory property laws to memories of family resilience and strength in the wake of long-standing anti-miscegenation laws, stories like Malaby's become simultaneously transnational and local as fronterizos navigated multiple identities. [End Page 464]
Mary Malaby with portrait of Lee Goon in the background. Courtesy of the George and Mary Malaby Family Collection.
Several scholars of Arizona history have successfully used oral histories in fruitful ways. For instance, Mary Logan Rothschild and Patricia Preciado Martin used oral records to catch the commonplace stories, whether of Arizona women or of predominantly ethnic Mexican ranching and mining communities from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries in southern Arizona.12 [End Page 465] Barbara Kingsolver used oral histories to showcase the kinetic lives of miner's wives and female labor organizers in Arizona in the 1980s.13 Culling oral accounts to sketch Mexican community struggles, Gloria Holguín Cuádraz unveiled narratives of ethnic Mexican resilience as multigenerational families navigated Southwest Cotton Company life in the camps of Litchfield Park in the Salt River Valley from 1916 to 1986.14 Historian Lydia Otero has blended oral history and archival research to capture how Arizona's nonwhite communities navigated post–World War II urban renewal projects that sought to erase multiethnic neighborhoods like La Calle in south Tucson.15 Through extensive oral history work, Otero recorded the stories of Mexican, Mexican American, and Chinese communities in Tucson while historical institutions like the Tucson Heritage Foundation and the Arizona Historical Society continued to highlight an Anglo-centric, pioneer narrative of Arizona's settlement. With urban renewal projects that cast Tucson's ethnic neighborhoods like La Placita as blighted areas, Otero's work highlights how, if not for oral sources, institutional memory had the power to erase the Mexican community's foundational contribution to the town's development altogether. The Arizona Memory Project database, managed by the Arizona State Library, features several oral history projects including the "Capturing Arizona's Stories" project, which makes searchable oral history interviews donated by communities across the state.16 Collections like the "Perspectives of the Past: Pima County Oral History Project and Archive Tucson" feature publicly accessible interviews with Tucson-area residents that trace stories of change and resilience in the mid- to late twentieth century.17 While these accounts are rich and complex, few collections house interviews conducted with people of Asian descent [End Page 466] living in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands.
Chinese communities, in particular, comprised a significant part of daily life within this region. The most notable collections that foreground Chinese voices in Arizona include Sara Bush's Arizona's Gold Mountain: Oral Histories of Chinese Americans in Phoenix and the Desert Jade Woman's Club recordings. Bush's Arizona's Gold Mountain is a collection of the written summaries of nine interviews conducted with Chinese Americans living in the greater Phoenix area.18 The Desert Jade Woman's Club collection comprises a selection of sound clips with former members of the Woman's Club, taken from longer interviews.19 According to the Oral History Association, the professional organization for oral historians, the method comprises four key tenets: oral histories should be extensive, collaborative, unaltered, and accessible to scholars and communities for future use.20 While rich and informative, Bush's Arizona's Gold Mountain and the Desert Jade recordings are not accessible to scholars as unedited, long-form oral recordings, thus limiting their usefulness for future scholarship.
Marked by a lengthy and cooperative process, oral histories showcase the dynamic relationship between an informed interviewer and an engaged narrator. Crucially, oral histories function as archival products that should not only contribute to the primary interviewer's personal project, but they also need to endure beyond their initial purpose as open, unedited sources for future generations of scholars. With this understanding, the most versatile windows into Chinese life in border communities like Tucson remain the Esther Tang and Thomas Tang transcripts housed at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson and Tempe, respectively.21 Both files contain over an hour of raw interview data. The Tang life histories provide invaluable glimpses into everyday life in the borderlands. Conscious of this archival gap, the oral history project [End Page 467] "Tucson Speaks! Finding Place, Finding Home" records the voices of a southwestern Chinese community, whose roots reach as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.22
Discussions with Chinese Tucsonans and Chinese Mexicans like Raymond Lim, another "Tucson Speaks!" narrator, revealed complex marriage and intimate partnership arrangements between his grandparents, Lee Kwong and Lai Ngan. With their lives spanning China, California, Sonora, and Arizona, Lee Kwong and Lai Ngan worked to stabilize both family and fortune amid growing Sinophobia in the late nineteenth century. Stories like Mary Malaby's show how anti-miscegenation laws shaped not only her parents' lives but also her own relationship with her eventual husband George Malaby, an ethnic Mexican. Childhood memories of the frequency of non-traditional, multiethnic families and neighborhoods reflect the historical presence and current persistence of ethnic fluidity in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands. Through community-based oral history projects like "Tucson Speaks!," children and grandchildren like Mary Malaby and Raymond Lim have shared stories of their ancestors like Lee Goon, Jesus Valencia, Lee Kwong, and Lai Ngan that reach back across multiple geographies.
Transnational Ties
When he stepped off the passenger steamship at the port of San Francisco, Lee Kwong entered a country on the precipice of civil war. Called to serve in his newly adopted country, Lee enlisted in the U.S. Navy in May 1862.23 Two months later in July of that same year, desperate for Union soldiers, the U.S. Congress passed an act that stated that any foreign-born male living in the United States not yet naturalized at age twenty-one could enlist and earn full citizenship if they could prove at least one year's residency.24 [End Page 468] Lee would serve for three years on a Mississippi River gunboat and mail vessel as a cabin boy, one of the few jobs open to nonwhite soldiers.25 He was shot five times in service to his country.26 In discussing his grandfather Lee, Raymond Lim noted, "Because he was in the Civil War, later on he was granted a citizen. They gave him citizenship in the United States."27 In 1874 in St. Louis, Missouri, Lee Kwong filed for and received his naturalization papers, which gave him the ability to cross national borders as a citizen in an era of increasing Sinophobia. Lee crossed state and international borders throughout his life. For Chinese migrants like Lee and his family, movement and mobility became a way of life until they settled in southern Arizona. In the late nineteenth century, the porousness of the U.S.–Mexico border allowed Chinese men like Lee Kwong, now naturalized through military service, to move unhindered across national borders. But with Chinese exclusion laws (1882), his legal status yielded to racial markers of difference. Raymond Lim recounts how his grandfather negotiated citizenship in the face of Chinese Exclusion: "And so he was a citizen. And then because of the Chinese Exclusion Act—They [the federal government] revoked his citizenship. So they took it away from him."28
To escape the mounting Sinophobia in California, Lee Kwong took his oldest son Percy and moved to La Colorada, Sonora, to run and operate a gold mine in the early 1890s, leaving behind his wife and two children in San Francisco. Raymond Lim recounts his grandfather's decision to move to Sonora, "After he went to Mexico and he worked and he learned how to make cigars … then, I guess he got the urge to go hunt for gold so he had a little gold mine down there, and then that's when he took … the oldest kid down to Mexico."29 Migration networks accommodated men originating from south China, but they also obliged women and children who lived along the Pacific Coast of the United States. When Kwong's wife, Lai Ngan, left San Francisco for Sonora under extreme duress, for example, she accessed the migration network for Mexico. Ngan boarded a steamer for Guaymas, Sonora, with [End Page 469] her daughters, Carmen and Aurelia, to track down Kwong, and their son, Percy, after two years of separation.
Leaving home was not an easy decision for Ngan, but childhood experiences might have prepared her for transnational travel. Ngan was born and raised in San Francisco. After her father retired from the Chinese opera in 1883 and returned to Hong Kong, and until her marriage to Kwong, Ngan's maternal aunts cared for her. Before her father's retirement, she had accompanied her father to Chinese theaters in Hong Kong and had become familiar with, and perhaps confident about, the challenges of crossing the Pacific Ocean bound for China. These earlier travel experiences came in handy for Ngan as a married adult. When she married Kwong, she was fifteen years old, and he was thirty-five. For a while, the bond of shared family experiences kept the marriage whole, but in the face of hardship and a twenty-year age difference, Kwong left San Francisco with Percy for the fabled mines of Sonora, abandoning his wife and two daughters. Although she withstood the separation for a while, Ngan was undeterred by her unfamiliarity with the Spanish language and her lack of knowledge of the specific whereabouts of her husband and son in Sonora.30
According to Raymond Lim, "My grandmother knew he was down there so she took off and went to look for him … she spoke a little bit of English, but I don't know how much. Didn't speak any Spanish … the only word that she knew was agua (water)."31 The three intrepid travelers found Kwong and Percy in La Colorada, a small mining town south of Hermosillo. The couple reunited and over the next ten years, Ngan worked in a Chinese-owned shoe factory, conceived four more children with Kwong, and witnessed the futility of her husband's mining scheme. In 1903, not wanting her children to become Mexican citizens, Ngan moved her family to Nogales, Arizona, where she tended a small store. There, in the store, her husband sold Chinese lottery tickets.32
Once they were in Nogales, local webs of support absorbed Ngan and her family into a small but supportive Chinese community. There, she and Kwong were never without jobs or without the [End Page 470]
Lee Kwong, his son Percy, and daughter Carmen standing behind seated man at La Colorada mine near Hermosillo, Sonora. Photo by Marian Lim. Tucson Chinese Collection, MS1242, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
help of neighbors. When Ngan and her family crossed back into the United States, several hundred Chinese had already traversed the line between Arizona and Sonora, although a few had stopped for interminable stretches of time in Arizona border towns. Despite federal exclusionary laws, the family was able to live transnational lives and join communities in California, Sonora, and Arizona.
By the early twentieth century, Lee Kwong resided in San Francisco, where anti-Chinese sentiment was strong.33 After living in Sonora for some years, Kwong returned to San Francisco in 1907. In 1908, Kwong attempted to vote in a local city election. However, local officials barred him from voting because he was Chinese, a naturalized citizen of the United States in the height of exclusionary laws, and because he had been living in Mexico. Later in 1909, U.S. district Judge John J. de Haven signed an order cancelling the naturalization Kwong had held since 1874. After Lee Kwong's death in 1913 in San Francisco, Ngan remarried, left San Francisco, and joined her daughters and son in Tucson, Arizona, in 1918.34 [End Page 471]
Lai Ngan and her friend Doña Garcia. Photo by Marian Lim. Tucson Chinese Collection, MS1242, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
Lee Hop Grocery and Meat. Courtesy of the George and Mary Malaby Family Collection.
[End Page 472]
Mixed-Race, Intimate Unions
Despite its multiethnic composition, discriminatory legislation permeated borderlands towns like Tucson, most visibly in matters of property and marriage. For Chinese migrants like Lee Goon and Lee Hop, the deeply rooted ties with Tucsonenses ultimately anchored their communities and families. Soon after his arrival in Tucson in 1908, Lee Goon blended into southern Arizona's multiethnic landscape. Settling in Barrio Ochoa, Lee Goon found community and put down roots in the town's southside, eventually opening a small grocery store.35 Mary Malaby remembers how her grandfather Lee Goon, a Chinese national, formed his close and intimate friendship with Jesus Valencia, a prominent rancher and grocery store owner: "I guess [my grandfather] had a little money and he wanted to start a store, but he ran into Valencia … and [my grandfather] worked at the Valencia store … while Valencia … worked at the ranch."36 For years, Lee Goon ran and operated the California Grocery in south Tucson while Jesus Valencia operated the California Meat Market. This symbiotic relationship between a Chinese merchant and a Mexican property owner represented a fundamental building block of community life in borderlands communities like Tucson. By 1913, Lee Goon was managing two grocery stores, including one under his own name two streets over from California Grocery. While Lee Goon established himself as a merchant in Tucson, he frequently traveled from Arizona to China in order to visit his wife and children still living there.
Malaby's own father, Lee Hop, was the first of Lee Goon's children to journey from China to Tucson. Arriving in Tucson in 1926 while in his late teens, Lee Hop attended school in the barrio and quickly adapted to life in Arizona by learning to speak English, Spanish, and Tohono O'odham.37 After three years, Lee Hop ended his formal education and transitioned to owning and managing his grocery store, Lee Hop Grocery at 1600 S. 6th Street in downtown Tucson, which earned him an exemption from the Chinese exclusion laws that targeted unskilled laborers.38 But by [End Page 473] the time Lee Hop readied himself for the life of a merchant in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Arizona legislature had passed the Alien Land Law of 1921, which "prohibited aliens ineligible for citizenship from purchasing Arizona realty." Under the 1921 law, Arizona state legislators, like those in other states, specifically targeted Asian migrants as a class of people explicitly barred from citizenship under exclusion laws.39 Although the Alien Land Law prohibited "any alien ineligible for citizenship," including Afghanis and British Indians, from owning land, the provision had its greatest impact on ethnic Japanese farmers whose family-based strategies for agricultural production competed with Anglo growers.40 Thus, by preventing landownership or leasing for Japanese farmers, the Alien Land Law paved the way for Anglo-controlled agricultural regions in the Salt River Valley.41 In Tucson, Chinese merchants like Lee Goon and Lee Hop still thrived despite the imposition of the Alien Land Law. In fact, Chinese merchant listings in the Tucson city directory grew annually.42 Sometimes, Chinese store owners leased land or storefronts from Mexican and Anglo Tucsonans to sidestep state restrictions, which could account for the persistence [End Page 474] of long-standing relationships like Lee and Valencia and an economically stable Chinese Tucson community.
The coupling of Chinese men—whether with Chinese or Mexican women—continued to be the most challenging experience of daily life. Extended separation, the norm for both merchants and laborers living in the United States, not only created a tremendous strain on Chinese marriages but also forced the Chinese to reconstruct their families in response to immigration and anti-miscegenation laws. There were exceptional situations, but these circumstances were favorable and unusual. Most Chinese men faced formidable barriers in bringing their Chinese wives into the United States. Newly arrived Chinese women faced the challenge of a mandated court appearance to prove marriage to a "lawfully domiciled Chinese merchant." Chinese women made up 12.6 percent of the U.S. Chinese population in 1920 but constituted less than 10 percent of Tucson's Chinese population.43 In Tucson, married Chinese men faced legal barriers in their attempts to facilitate the legal entry of their Chinese wives, and single Chinese men often struggled in their efforts to marry Mexican women in Arizona. Residential proximity with Mexicans, considered "white" by Arizona law, complicated day-to-day relations between residents in El Barrio. In 1901, Arizona lawmakers passed a second and harsher anti-miscegenation law that prohibited "all marriages of persons of Caucasian blood, or their descendants, with negroes [sic], Mongolians or Indians, and their descendants."44 According to territorial law, it declared all such marriages "null and void," and those solemnizing mixed marriages were subject to fines of up to $300 dollars and imprisonment up [End Page 475] to six months.45 Faced with legal prohibition, marriages between Chinese men and Mexican women remained rare in the first two decades of the twentieth century.46 Ten years later, the territorial census listed three women—two Mexican and one French—living with Chinese men. Between the three families, there were eleven children of mixed-race parentage. Although there was an increase in the number of Chinese children, the two Mexicans listed in the 1900 census were the same women listed in the 1910 census.47
Despite their reputation as excellent providers, most Chinese men in Tucson remained unmarried. For laborers—who made up the vast majority of Chinese in Tucson—the prospect of marriage was less likely than for merchants. Combined with a skewed gender ratio, harsh anti-miscegenation laws forced most Chinese men in Tucson to live a bachelor's life. Rather than pursue social integration through marriage ties with Anglos, the Chinese continued to assert themselves in Tucson society through daily interactions with Mexican residents. Lily Olivares married Frank Valenzuela in 1923. Olivares and Valenzuela lived with his parents in Tucson until Valenzuela abandoned her even though she was pregnant with their daughter Stella, and had another child by Valenzuela, Sylvia.48 When Olivares later married her second husband, Raymond Liu, her two daughters born to Valenzuela kept their biological father's surname. Raymond Liu raised Sylvia and Stella Valenzuela from the time they were infants, despite his wife's past relationship. "That's the only papa they know," proclaimed Lily Liu about her children's relationship with Raymond Liu.49
Besides legal barriers, life in the transpacific borderlands for Chinese migrants and their Mexican spouses also meant defying social customs and coping with cultural ruptures that followed. Shortly after Lee Hop opened his own grocery store in Barrio Ochoa in the early 1930s, he started a courtship with Maria Antonia [End Page 476] Trujillo, a young Mexican Tucsonan. Born in 1916, Maria was the youngest daughter of Guillermo Trujillo, a Mexican national and railroad worker, and Juana Valencia, a homemaker and daughter of Lee Goon's longtime friend Jesus Valencia. In 1933, Lee Hop and Maria Trujillo entered a committed partnership and started a family together despite anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting their union.50 For nearly a decade, Lee and Trujillo built a life together in south Tucson and raised their nine children. "We all lived in the back of the store," recalled Malaby, Lee and Trujillo's oldest child.51 However, census data and city directories for years following 1933 list Maria Antonia Trujillo as a single woman living with her mother, Juana (née Valencia) Trujillo and a few children as the years progressed.52 Mary Malaby's own birth certificate, dated 1934, lists Maria Antonia Trujillo as a sole parent with the father's information left blank.53 In the eyes of the state, Trujillo appeared to be a single Mexican mother living with her parents, while city directories presented Lee Hop as a single Chinese merchant living alone in Tucson. Malaby's childhood memories show how Lee and Trujillo eluded state scrutiny of their unsanctioned union. Separate addresses provided an effective paper shield for the interracial couple and their children who lived behind their family store like many grocery owners at the time.
Life for the Lee-Trujillo family grew even more complicated after 1937 when Lee Hop's father, Lee Goon, retired as a merchant in Tucson and returned to China to live out the rest of his days. Upon returning to China and under Chinese cultural customs, Lee Goon secured a Chinese bride for his son Lee Hop despite the ever-growing family his son had built in Tucson. For Lee Hop, Maria Trujillo, and their young children, this action presented a major complication for their family. While the family stayed together for several more years, the pressures of an unsanctioned union coupled with Lee Hop's familial duties in China caused an irreparable fissure in the Lee-Trujillo household. For a time, Lee balanced his duty to his wife and eventual child in China with the needs of his [End Page 477] wife and children in Tucson. But the strain of a legally unsanctioned marriage combined with an awareness of her partner's duel life in China weighed heavily on Trujillo. According to Mary Malaby, the cultural tension caused a breaking point in her family: "Well, my mother left us afterwards, because my father couldn't marry her because he was married in China." Left with nine young children, Lee Hop brought his wife over from China hoping she would help care for his Arizona family. Upon arrival in Tucson, Lee's Chinese wife appeared resentful of her new home, her new role as a grocer's wife, and her new blended Chinese Mexican family. "The kids were still young, so he brought his wife and son from China … and then, she didn't like the kids either! So my father said, 'Get the hell out of here too!' And then he sent her somewhere else too … [And] he stayed with all the kids," recounts Mary Malaby. After about a year of living as a newly formed family, Lee decided to send his Chinese wife and son back to China.54
The cultural rupture caused by the Chinese custom of multiple families and legal restrictions forced Lee Hop to struggle to find a stable footing for himself and his blended family. But Lee Hop and his family ultimately found support in the form of Juana Valencia Trujillo and her family. Despite her daughter's decision to separate from Lee Hop, Juana Valencia Trujillo considered Lee Hop and his children her family. For a time, Mary Malaby and her sister Stella lived with Juana Trujillo in Tucson's Second Ward on 22nd Street. "She was an angel, but very strict with us," Malaby says about her grandmother. Likewise, the rest of Lee Hop's children lived under the guardianship of their Valencia-Trujillo tias (aunts), who all lived within walking distance from Juana Trujillo's home. "The family was always very close because we always had the parties at [my grandmother's] house," Malaby declared with a chuckle. Later, when Mary Malaby and her sister Stella married, they both assumed guardianship of their younger siblings.55
Importantly, the reinforcement of the Lee-Trujillo familial ties showcased how ethnic Mexican neighbors anchored immigrant communities at the same moment Chinese migrants contributed to Mexican economic lives in transpacific borderlands spaces like Tucson. As Mary Malaby states, "Because [my father] had a lot of [End Page 478] money, [if] the [Valencia-Trujillo] family, you know, needed something, my father would help. He was really good about it because he loved my grandmother a lot. I think he loved my grandmother more than any other son … so the families were all together."56
The complexities of daily life often shaped the identities of second-generation Chinese Americans and existed outside the parameters of Arizona law. Children of mixed heritage like Mary Malaby and her siblings grew up caught between two identities. On the one hand, the state of Arizona read them as racially Chinese, or nonwhite, while they navigated day-to-day life in their local community as culturally Mexican. The significance of this split in identity featured more prominently in the lives of Mary Malaby and her sister Stella when it came time for them to marry their non-Chinese partners. Although they were not exempt from racial tension or discrimination in Tucson, many Chinese were able to marry Mexican and Anglo partners despite Arizona laws by securing marriage licenses in states like New Mexico or across international lines into Mexico. Mary Malaby shares how she and her sister Stella sidestepped Arizona's anti-miscegenation laws to marry their non-Chinese partners: "Both of us got married in Mexico. And we could [live] married after that, you know. But, I said, 'Maybe it's not legal because it's Mexico?' So, we got married again in New Mexico. We got married twice! George and I got married twice!" In fact, Mary and her husband George, a Mexican American, married three times. Two years prior to Arizona court's overturning of the state's anti-miscegenation law in 1962 and seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Malabys remarried in Tucson on January 1, 1960.57 The Malabys' decision to remarry in Tucson came weeks after Pima County Judge Herbert F. Krucker declared Arizona's anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional in December 1959. On December 28, the Pima County court clerk issued the first interracial marriage license between Japanese American Henry Oyama and Anglo American Mary Anne Jordan.58 [End Page 479]
Mary and George Malaby's Tucson wedding. Courtesy of the George and Mary Malaby Family Collection.
The Malabys received their own Arizona marriage license a few days later.59 Malaby's story highlights the myriad ways borderlanders negotiated legal restrictions and reveals how impositions of the state sometimes mattered little in shaping individual choices or their personal happiness.60 [End Page 480]
Chinese Mexican Community Life in Tucson
The ethnicity of second-generation Chinese in Tucson did not remain calcified in a fixed set of customs and practices received from the first generation; rather, a blended ethnic identity emerged that was Mexican, American, and Chinese. During the early 1920s, this identity extended to embrace many aspects of Mexican culture. According to anthropologists Florence and Robert Lister, most "American born Chinese moved into the Hispanic barrio where most [first-generation Chinese] had also moved."61 As Tucson's Mexican population shifted to the southern part of the Old Pueblo, the Chinese merchants and their families followed.62 Grocery stores served as important spaces of refuge and relationship-building for multiethnic communities. Tucsonan Patsy Lee, a former high school teacher, recalls that economic pressures and Anglo prejudice forced many of Tucson's Chinese families, including her parents, into Mexican neighborhoods like El Barrio: "another thing was prejudice where we couldn't go to the white neighborhoods, so we opened a grocery store in the Barrio."63
Although first-generation Chinese in Tucson forged an economic niche for themselves as small-scale merchants or service workers, and although the number of Chinese-owned businesses increased during the 1920s, the wealth generated by this small community was not sizable.64 Mary Malaby recalls how her father Lee Hop combined his limited schooling with an informal credit system to broker multiethnic community relationships: "He went to Ochoa School … I think he went for three [years] and that's all … but he knew Papagos and Mexicanos … he got the language really well. Everybody knew him and he knew their names because [End Page 481] they had a card."65 For grocery store and business owners like Lee Hop, the credit system between Chinese merchants and Mexican and Indigenous families made visible the intimate relationships established within neighborhoods and barrios.
The experiences of Don Wah were representative of the early Chinese merchants in neighborhoods in the Old Pueblo.66 Before his arrival in Tucson in May 1899, Don Wah worked as a cook for the Southern Pacific Railroad, but he moved from that occupation to business ownership. Wah established a bakery and then a grocery store in the Mexican and Chinese section of Tucson, between Convent Avenue and Main Street. For Wah, civic participation extended beyond mere appearance. As his daughter, Esther Don Tang—Wah's third daughter and a second-generation Chinese Tucsonan born in 1917—recalled, Wah was fond of reminding his family, "The community is the extension of your home."67 Wah's activities contrasted with the far more segregated experiences of Chinese in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles.68 Chinese enterprises like Wah's tended to be modest in size. Wah's grocery store was small and a walled curtain often separated the Wah family's living space from its working space. "The store itself … was perhaps twelve feet by twelve feet and immediately at the back of the store there was a cloth curtain and as you went in, there was a bedroom," Tang recalled. "We didn't have many rooms and there were about three of us, I remember, in one bed, and my oldest sister, Rose, she had some sort of boxes with a plank board and a mattress on top of that."69 [End Page 482]
The Don family, whose second business was a grocery store at the corner of Convent Avenue and Jackson Street, depended on their children, the eldest sons and daughters, not only to help with basic chores but also to facilitate customer interactions with fluency in English. Esther Don Tang recalled her family's early years in Tucson as a time when "everybody … worked hard." Describing her childhood years, Tang remembered her days in the little barrio grocery. "We were a big family—nine girls and one boy—and we all had to help. … It didn't matter how young you were. When we started school we also stocked the shelves, we dusted them and when we got a little older, we would make change."70 They also depended on the trustworthiness of their customers. With such practices and relationships, Chinese grocers flourished. Tang recalled customers buying their groceries: her mother would mark the amounts they owed in the cartera (payment notebook) and return the cartera to the customer. As Tang recalls, on payday everyone would return to the store to settle their accounts. "That was really trust!" she reminisced fondly.71
Many proprietors expanded their businesses by hiring nonfamily labor and purchasing trucks with an icebox in the cab to ensure fresh and cooled produce. As in the rest of Tucson, the economies of Chinese and Mexicans entwined. This entanglement would take on particular poignancy as the fortunes of one group rose and the other fell. The Don family transported groceries to, among many other places, Marana, where Mexican migrant workers labored in cotton fields. Mexican migrant families survived somewhere between a bare subsistence and abject poverty, and Chinese grocers and merchants absorbed unpaid debts left by these families. Growing up, Patsy Lee remembers how her parents, and other Chinese grocers, extended credit to Mexican community members and how this system facilitated everyday life in Tucson: "The biggest thing was that we gave them credit … my friends would come in and sign—my friend, Jose, he could barely write … he was only six years old, but he'd walk home with about ten dollars' worth of groceries just by [End Page 483] signing his name … it went just like that."72 Regardless, Chinese and Mexican families both large and small faced economic hardships from their position in the labor market—as migrant farmers, small-scale merchants, or consumers.
Knowing that the migrant farmers had little money, Don Wah continued to truck groceries into Marana, never complaining about unpaid debts. Other Chinese grocers and merchants in Tucson also continued to serve Mexican migrant farmers in the nearby agricultural areas, and other working-class Hispanos who lived in the neighborhood. With its diverse population of business proprietors, farmworkers, sales clerks, and vendors, El Barrio expanded south and west of downtown even as commercial and cultural activities between Chinese and Mexican residents continued to thrive on and near South Meyer Street.73 Next to Mexican merchants offering staple items, Chinese vendors also sold rice, beans, tea, and silks. El Cortez Market at the center of El Barrio was the home of a Chinese-Mexican deli.74 Mexican food became a means of forming bonds both within and outside the Chinese community.
As with many communities in the borderlands, cultural crossover and established traditions became the norm for many families. Raymond Lim and his daughter Dana remember the family tradition of tamale making. Their mother and grandmother started this family tradition. Marion Lee, the daughter of Lee Kwong and Lai Ngan, organized the women in her family to get together for a tamelada, or tamale-making day. "She was an excellent cook. We used to have green corn tamales. Oh, boy, that was really good!" Lim recalled, smiling. Shared culinary traditions mirrored the relative normalcy of multiethnic families and histories in border communities like Tucson. The local Tucson staple of Chinese chorizo represented much more than a curious food fusion. "We didn't know how to keep up with it. … We sold tons of [Chinese] chorizo. … It was just a big production," reflected Ray Quen about his days as a butcher and grocer in Tucson in the early 1900s. The borderland staple symbolized the dynamic, multiethnic community of Tucson [End Page 484]
Mary Malaby and Lee Hop. Courtesy of the George and Mary Malaby Family Collection.
and the results of cultivated neighborhood relationships between Mexicans and Chinese along the border. For community members like Lim and Quen, recollections of making Chinese chorizo, green-corn tamales, or owning grocery stores represented more than just a regional fare or economic necessity; these memories highlighted the centrality of Tucson as an important hub of Chinese families and larger community engagement.75
Today, the southern border region of Arizona is a modern-day flash point of American nativism. Nevertheless, the history of Tucson's Chinese and Mexican communities posit a different understanding of the importance of everyday negotiations and bonds in borderlands spaces. While policies of zero tolerance and family separation guide current responses to the so-called immigration crisis, the history of the Tucson Chinese and Mexican community reminds us of the cultural malleability and porousness of the Arizona-Mexico borderlands. In efforts to rebuild these liminal spaces, academics reflexively turn toward state archives, yet the [End Page 485] discreet and sometimes extra-legal maneuverings necessary for survival in the borderlands cannot be found in the state archive alone. Sole reliance on official records may replicate state narratives. This practice may work to conceal countless, nuanced day-to-day interactions representative of the borderlands life and history. Oral texts, however, may unshroud quotidian experiences, thus expanding our understanding of different ways of knowing through family histories. Life histories tell us that belonging can be adaptable and negotiable even in the face of social and legal exclusions, and that deep friendships and mutually favorable partnerships bound communities together regardless of people's legal status. Aided by long-form oral histories, social historians can balance the spectacles of death and violence reflexively associated with the Arizona-Mexico border. Stories like Mary Malaby's demonstrate that even amid increased nativism, legal restrictions might influence individual choices, but they do not define them. [End Page 486]
PRISCILLA M. MARTÍNEZ is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California–Santa Cruz, working on a dissertation tentatively titled "By Land and by Sea: Indigeneity, Mestizaje, and Nationalism at the Western-Pacific Borderlands from 1824–1934."
GRACE PEÑA DELGADO is an associate professor of history and the former director of graduate studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz and the author of Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (2012).
Footnotes
1. We would like to send a special thank you to the wonderful archivists Rachael Black and Perri Pyle and volunteer Sandy Chan at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson, Carlos Lopez at the Arizona State Library, and Jennifer Shaffer Merry at the Arizona Historical Society in Tempe for their hard work and responsiveness to our pleas for help amid shelter-in-place restrictions. This article would not have been possible without your assistance. We would also like to thank Robin Blackwood, Patsy Lee, and Susan Chan at the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center for their help and insight in gathering the oral histories referenced in this article. We are truly grateful to our project's narrators like Mary Malaby and Raymond Lim for welcoming us into their homes and sharing their family histories. We would also like to thank Lee Malaby for his extensive help in culling through the Lee-Malaby Family Archive for additional photos and documentation. These oral histories were also made possible through several public history fellowships awarded by the Humanities Institute and the Research Center for the Americas at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a community grant awarded by the Southwestern Foundation for Education and Historical Preservation.
2. For examples of violent Sinophobia, see Beth Lew Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2019); Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Exclusion, and Localism at the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Stanford, Calif., 2012); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Acts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Benjamín Narváez, "Becoming Sino-Peruvian: Post-Indenture Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Peru," Asian Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (2016): 1–27; Kornel Chang: Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.–Canadian Borderland (Berkeley, Calif., 2012); and Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (Urbana, Ill., 2014).
3. Mary Malaby, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, March 12, 2018.
4. For an example see, Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, Calif., 2000); and Laurence JC Ma and Carolyn Cartier, The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity (New York, 2002).
5. There are several scholarly works on the Chinese in Tucson, including three seminal articles in the Autumn 1980 Journal of Arizona History (hereinafter JAZH). See specifically the work of Michael Fong, "Sojourners and Settlers: The Chinese Experience in Arizona," JAZH 21 (Autumn 1980): 227–56. Other notable scholarship includes Florence C. Lister and Robert H. Lister, The Chinese of Early Tucson: Historic Archaeology from the Tucson Urban Renewal Project (Tucson, 1989); and Li Yang, "Lee Wee Kwon: Chinese Grocer in Tucson, 1917–1965," JAZH 52 (Spring 2010): 33–50.
6. Nicholas De Genova, "Spectacles of Migrant 'Illegality': The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion," Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (2013): 1180–98.
7. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, N.J., 2001), 117.
8. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995), 26.
9. Daniel James, Dona Maria's Story: Life, History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, N.C., 2000), 122.
10. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, N.Y., 1991), 52.
11. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, 55.
12. See Mary Logan Rothschild, Doing What the Day Brought: An Oral History of Arizona Women (Tucson, 1992); Patricia Preciado Martin, Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women (Tucson, 1992).
13. Barbara Kingsolver, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996).
14. Gloria Holguín Cuádraz, "Artist's Statement: Unearthing and Recovering Memories in a Company Town: Litchfield Park, Arizona," Chicana/Latina Studies 11 (Fall 2011): 9–17.
15. Lydia Otero, La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwestern City (Tucson, 2010).
16. For more information, consult the Arizona Memory Project website, especially "Capturing Arizona's Stories," https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/asacapture (last accessed August 13, 2020).
17. For more Tucson-specific oral history projects, see "Perspective of the Past: Pima County Oral History Project," available online at https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/pimacent (last accessed August 13, 2020). For Archive Tucson, see https://www.archivetucson.com/ (last accessed August 13, 2020).
18. Sara Bush, Arizona's Gold Mountain: Oral Histories of Chinese Americans in Phoenix (Tempe, Ariz., 2000).
19. For the Desert Jade Woman's Club, see https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/djwc (last accessed August 13, 2020).
20. For a summary of oral history's core principles, see the Oral History Association's website, https://www.oralhistory.org/oha-core-principles/ (last accessed August 13, 2020).
21. Esther Tang, interviewed by Pam Stevenson, March 20, 2001, Arizona History Makers Oral History: In Our Own Words: Reflections and Recollections, PP-OHI, Box 22, Folder 15a, Arizona Historical Society (hereinafter AHS), Tempe; Thomas and Lucy Tang, interviewed by K. Trimble, April 20, 1978, AV 0412-07, AHS, Tucson.
22. "Tucson Speaks! Finding Place, Finding Home" oral history project is maintained by the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center's History Program, see https://www.tucsonchinese.org/chinese-history-tucson/ (last accessed August 13, 2020). As of May 2020, Tucson Speaks! contains eight long-form, unedited oral history interviews with nine different narrators. These interviews will be available on the project website set to launch winter 2020, see www.tucsonspeaks.org. Currently, the project is open-ended, with further interviews planned in 2021.
23. Carol A. Shively, ed., Asian and Pacific Islanders and the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 2015), 175; Yang, "In Search of a Homeland," 343.
24. Act of July 17, 1862, Ch. 200, §21, 12 Stat. 594, 597.
25. "Old Chinaman Union Soldier," Riverside (Calif.) Daily Press, July 23, 1909.
26. "Chinese Civil War Veteran to Vote," San Francisco Call, July 23, 1909.
27. Raymond Lim, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, August 28, 2017.
28. Raymond Lim, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, August 28, 2017.
29. "Aged Chinese Serve 3 Years in Civil War: Order Cancelling Naturalization Certificate Signed," San Francisco Call, August 19, 1909.
30. Raymond Lim, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, August 28, 2017.
31. Ibid.
32. "Information Relating to the Family of Lee Kwong and Lai Ngan from Interview with Marian Lim," February 27, 1979; and two other documents authored by Marian Lim, the fifth daughter of Lai Ngan and Lee Kwong, Folder 38, MS 1242, AHS.
33. "Chinaman to Vote in Next Election," San Diego Union, July 24, 1909.
34. Yang, "In Search of a Homeland," 337–46.
35. "Lee Hop: East Met West," Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), June 9, 1974; "Chinese Grocer Part of Our History," Arizona Daily Star, August 21, 2001.
36. Mary Malaby, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, March 12, 2018.
37. "Lee Hop: East Meet West," Arizona Daily Star, June 9, 1974.
38. Mary Malaby, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, March 12, 2018.
39. Ronald E. Lowe, "The Arizona Alien Land Law: Its Meaning and Constitutional Validity," Immigration and Nationality Law Review 2 (1978–1979): 153. California passed a similar law in 1913 while New Mexico and some other western states barred immigrants from property ownership in the early 1920s. In all, fifteen states passed alien property laws. In Masaoka v. California (1952), the Supreme Court struck down all state alien land laws by upholding the earlier California lower-court decision, Fujii v. California (1952). In Fujii, the California Supreme Court ruled the state's 1920 Alien Land Law, and those passed in other locales, violated the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause. See Edwin E. Ferguson, "The California Alien Land Law and the Fourteenth Amendment," California Law Review 35 (March 1947): 61–90; and No author, "The Alien Land Laws: A Reappraisal," Yale Law Journal 56 (Jan. 1947): 1017–36.
40. The general wording—"ineligible for citizenship"—worked to exclude all Asians from owning or leasing land since "the right of a person to become a naturalized citizen … shall extend only to white persons, persons of African nativity or descent, and descendants of races indigenous to the Western Hemisphere." US Public Laws, Chapter 876, October 14, 1940 §703 p. 1140. In 1943 and 1946 Chinese and East Indians were granted eligibility to naturalize. Until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down alien land laws in 1952, the legislation applied to almost exclusively to the Japanese people.
41. Jack August, "The Anti-Japanese Crusade in Arizona's Salt River Valley, 1934–1935," Arizona and the West 21 (Summer 1979): 114–15. At the passing of the bill, the Tucson Citizen nicknamed the legislation the "anti-Jap land bill." "Anti-Japanese Land Bill Is Passed by Upper House, As Bar to Owning Lands in Arizona," Tucson Citizen, February 1, 1921. For the text of the Arizona Alien Land Law see Charles F. Curry, "Alien Land Laws and Alien Rights," House of Representatives, 67th Cong. 1st Sess., Doc. No. 89, pp. 36–37.
42. See Tucson city directories, available online in "U.S. City Directories, 1821–1989," indexed database and digital images, at www.ancestry.com (accessed August 5, 2020), for years 1921 (pp. 275–76), 1923 (pp. 447–48), 1924 (pp. 326–27), 1926 (pp. 349–51), 1928 (pp. 462–63), 1930 (pp. 366–67).
43. 1920 U.S. Census, Pima County, Tucson, Arizona, Census Schedules, T623, rolls 50 and 51.
44. In 1901, chairman George P. Blair introduced this harsher anti-miscegenation law titled "An Act to Revise and Codify the Laws of the Territory of Arizona, with Reference to Marriage and Divorce," in Arizona. See The Revised Statutes of Arizona Territory: Containing Also the Laws Passed by the Twenty-First Legislative Assembly, the Constitution of the United States, the Organic Law of Arizona and the Amendments of Congress Relating Thereto (Columbia, Mo., 1901), sec. 6, p. 3092. See also Sal Acosta, Sanctioning Matrimony: Western Expansion and Interethnic Marriage in the Arizona Borderlands (Tucson, 2016); Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America," Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 44–69; Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (Stanford, Calif., 2004); Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); and Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton, N.J., 2005).
45. Revised Statutes of Arizona, sec. 11, p. 3097. By stipulating marriage laws in this way, legislators placed a person of mixed heritage in an untenable situation. If the individual descended from a Chinese father and Mexican mother, by extension of the law he or she was prevented from marrying a white person or other Mexican, or another person of mixed heritage. In effect, this person could not legally marry any Arizonan.
46. Lister and Lister, Chinese of Early Tucson, 5.
47. 1910 U.S. Census.
48. Lily Olivaras Valenzuela Liu, oral history interview, July 5, 1984, Southern Pacific Railroad Project, AV-0001-15, 6, 8, 15, 19, 21, AHS.
49. Valenzuela Liu, oral history interview, 15, 26.
50. "Lee Hop: East Met West," Arizona Daily Star, June 9, 1974.
51. "Chinese Grocer Part of Our Community," Arizona Daily Star, August 21, 2001; Mary Malaby, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, March 12, 2018.
52. 1940 U.S. Census, Tucson, Pima County, Arizona, roll m-t0627-00111, p. 6A, enumeration district 10-31.
53. Birth Certificate for Mary Trujillo, August 15, 1934, State File No. 504, Arizona State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Tucson, Pima County, Arizona.
54. Mary Malaby, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, March 12, 2018.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Journal of the Senate, Twenty-fifth Legislature of the State of Arizona, Second Regular Session, 1962 (Phoenix, 1962), 199, 335; Journal of the House … Twenty-fifth Legislature, Second Regular Session, (Phoenix, 1962), 467; Acts, Memorials and Resolutions of the Second Regular Session of the Twenty-fifth Legislature of the State of Arizona, 1962 (Phoenix, 1962), 22.
58. Roger D. Hardaway, "Unlawful Love: A History of Arizona's Miscegenation Law," Journal of Arizona History 27 (Winter 1986): 386.
59. Marital License for George and Mary Malaby, January 1, 1960, Office of the Clerk of the Superior Court, Pima County, Arizona.
60. For more on the discreet arrangements of borderlanders and westerners see Anne F. Hyde, "Mixed-Race Families and Strategies of Acculturation in the U.S. West after 1848," in On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest, ed. David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio (Berkeley, Calif., 2012); Grace Peña Delgado, "Neighbors by Nature: Relationships, Border Crossings, and Transnational Communities in the Chinese Exclusion Era," Pacific Historical Review 80 (Aug. 2011): 401–29; Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley, Calif., 2017); and Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2017).
61. Lister and Lister, Chinese of Early Tucson, 12–13. They also pointed out that "with penetration of a Hispanicized territory came gradual acquisition of Spanish, merchandising skills necessary to cultivate a consumer base there, and occasional intermarriage with Hispanic women" (p. 12).
62. Tucson Citizen, February 18, 1925, and February 22, 1935, Eleventh Annual Rodeo Edition, Chinese Section; Arizona Daily Star, February 20, 1937, and March 24, 1991.
63. Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, "TCCC History Program," March 25, 2014, available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZTwEhHCU18&t=474s (last accessed August 15, 2020).
64. Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican, 135.
65. Mary Malaby, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, March 12, 2018. In this quote, the use of "card" is referring to the unofficial credit system. Customers would have an account card or a record of purchases in a store ledger.
66. Don Wah was born with the name Dong Wah. According to his daughter, Esther Don Tang, her father changed his name because the new name was easier for Americans to pronounce and remember. See "In the Matter of the Identity of Dong Wah," p. 5, Folder 1, Box 12, MSS 94, Esther Don Tang Collection (hereinafter EDTC), Arizona Historical Foundation, Hayden Library, Arizona State University (hereinafter ASU), Tempe, Arizona.
67. Esther Don Tang, undated speech, "Good Morning Friends," p. 2, Folder 1, Box 12, EDTC, ASU.
68. See Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York, 1993); Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Norman, Okla., 2000); Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley, Calif., 2006); and Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley, Calif., 2001).
69. Abraham Chanin with Mildren Chanin, "Esther Tang: A Chinese Success Story," in This Land, These Voices: A Different View of Arizona History in the Words of Those Who Lived It (Flagstaff, Ariz., 1977), 206.
70. Esther Tang, Tucson Oral History Project (hereinafter ETTOHP), p. 9, AV-0505–16; Tang, undated speech, p. 2, EDTC, ASU.
71. ETTOHP, 10; Tang, undated speech, p. 3, EDTC, ASU.
72. Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, "TCCC History Program," March 25, 2014, available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZTwEhHCU18&t=474s.
73. Speech of Harry Gin, "Remembrances from Tucson's Chinese Community," Don Wah Biographical File, p. 13, AHS. On the resettlement of Mexicans in the South Meyer District, see Thomas E. Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854–1941 (Tucson, 1986), 186; Lister and Lister, Chinese of Early Tucson, 16.
74. "Biographical Sketch of Don Chun Wo," Don Chun Wo Biographical File, p. 5, AHS.
75. Raymond Lim, interviewed by Priscilla Martínez, August 28, 2017.
