Malays, Not Mongolians

Brian: Today on the show, we’re gonna explore stories of love and romance that transcend class, race, and gender.

Joanne: We’ll discuss how female blue singers expressed a black queer identity in the 1920s.

Nathan: We’ll hear about how some people circumvented laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

Brian: And, we’ll also learn about a moral panic that gripped wealthy families in the Gilded Age.

Nathan: In 1932, Salvador Roldan walked into the county clerk’s office in Los Angeles and asked for a marriage license. He and his fiancee, Marjorie Rogers, wanted to get married but there was a problem.

Rachel: They went to the registrar and they were denied a license.

Nathan: That’s scholar Rachel Moran.

Rachel: There had been an opinion by the state attorney general saying that the anti-miscegenation law barred Filipinos from marrying whites because they were Mongolian.

Nathan: Roldan was a Filipino man and Rogers, a white woman. So, according to California’s anti-miscegenation law, that meant they couldn’t marry.

Rachel: Anti-miscegenation laws were statutes that prohibited marriage across racial lines and so, for example, 38 states at various times had anti-miscegenation laws so they were not just in the South. They also weren’t just for blacks and whites. Many people think only black-white relationships were regulated but 14 states regulated intermarriage with Asians, and 7 states intermarriage with Native Americans. There’s a 300 year history, give or take, of anti-miscegenation laws in the United States.

Nathan: Moran says state governments regulated interracial marriage for many reasons. Of course the overarching reason was to control the color line but the details of each statute varied according to a state’s geography and racial make up.

Rachel: So when you look at the South, you see black slaves working along white indentured servants and there’s a deep concern that if there are relationships, it’s going to muddy the line between black and white and slave and free and in the West, where later you saw regulation with Asians, there was again this concern that Asians might intermarry, become attached to the United States, want to remain in this United States rather than just being temporary laborers and so anti-miscegenation laws became a way to keep a low wage labor force in tact, isolate, treated as un-assimilible, and ineligible for citizenship.

Nathan: But for Filipinos like Roldan, living in California in the 1930s was a bit different.

Rachel: Well what’s so interesting about the Filipino experience in California was an overwhelmingly male migration to do work but they were considered American nationals because the Philippines had become and American territory. They had been taught in American flag schools so they were steeped in the belief in American democracy, the rights of the individual, and the freedom and equality that would define us as an authentic democracy. So when they arrived, for example in Los Angeles, they felt free to go to dance halls to socialize with white women, Mexican women, and basically have relationships and they didn’t think this was any problem. So when there was push back, for example there were riots, the Filipino community mobilized in a way that other communities did not. They hired lawyers to litigate the denial of marriage licenses and when they defended themselves, they said we were taught that we were American and therefore we have the same rights as any other American.

Nathan: So when the registrar denied Roldan and Rogers, the couple decided to do something about it.

Rachel: They didn’t give up! They didn’t say, oh well then, we won’t get married. Instead they decided to fight it and they benefited from the mobilization of the Filipino community around this effort.

Nathan: And with the help of the Filipino community, Roldan and Rogers took the case to court. But their lawyer didn’t actually challenge the constitutionality of California’s anti-miscegenation law. Now, according to California’s law, Mongolians couldn’t marry whites.

Rachel: At the time there’s an anthropological account of race and I think the categories are treated as monolithic and so the idea that these categories are separate and distinct and therefore have to be all enumerated in order to be covered, is one of the reasons the Filipino community is actually able to challenge the law because the attorney general basically says common sense tells me that the legislature intended when it used the classification Mongolian, to include Filipinos.

Nathan: But the lawyer said according to the scientific racial categories that influence the anti-miscegenation law in the first place, Filipinos weren’t actually Mongolian. They’re Malay.

Rachel: And so they used that scientific authority to undercut the attorney general’s sense that of course the legislature wanted to include Filipinos. So what they’re basically saying is it’s not an exception, the legislature didn’t cover us so we’re not prohibited unless the legislature explicitly says so using the scientific racial category that applies to us which is Malay. You can’t say that all Asians are Mongolian, right? You have to use our category because the legislature chose to use Mongolian and that doesn’t include Filipinos. We’re not within that racial category. And in a sense they’re saying if you really wanna exclude us from marrying, you need to say it explicitly on the face of the statute.

Nathan: Roldan and Rogers won their case and obtained a marriage license. The ruling was upheld and Filipinos were legally classified as Malays but three days after the California Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, the state legislature struck back.

Rachel: Within three days of the decision’s upholding this interpretation, the state legislature amends the statute and includes Malays as one of the categories. It happened very quickly. Today we think that legislatures can’t get anything done, they’re in gridlock, they’re paralyzed, but at that time they could move pretty quickly and they did.

Nathan: Now even though Roldan and Rogers were married, their union was seen as illegal in the eyes of the law.

Nathan: But the story doesn’t quite stop there.

Rachel: Yes, it’s very interesting because the Filipino community doesn’t say alright, we lost before the California legislature, we’re done. No, one thing they did was continue to marry particularly Mexican women who had a similar appearance in terms of their color and so registrars didn’t challenge these marriages because the Mexican women were not seen as authentically white and therefore they were permissible even though as a formal matter by law they were white. The other thing that Filipino men did was to go with their white brides to another state like Utah, for example, and they would marry there where there were no restrictions and when they came back, California gave full faith and credit to those marriages and so they said well, we have a legitimate marriage license and you honor those marriage licenses so we’re married in the eyes of the law.

Nathan: So this is the case form 1933 and it isn’t until Loving v. Virginia, 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws around the country are ultimately struck down. But what’s happening in this three decade period between the case in California and what becomes the Loving decision?

Rachel: Well you know what’s very interesting is that California’s Supreme Court became the first state high court sensory construction to strike down anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional but no other court followed suite. Some legislatures started to get rid of these laws on their own, annulling them, but the laws remained intact, particularly in the South, until 1967 and there were a couple of challenges before then but the court didn’t want to engage, for example, there’s a case involving a Chinese Seaman in the 1950s and he says, I shouldn’t be subject to anti-miscegenation laws that will invalidate my ability to naturalize by marrying an American citizen and the court says it’s 1950s and we just decided Brown versus the Board of Education and we’re facing all kinds of resistance and Brown must stand and we don’t want anything to disrupt the integration of schools under Brown versus the Board and so they basically don’t take the case. They decide it’s too difficult at that moment politically. In the words of one of the justices, one bombshell at a time is enough.

Nathan: Now in the case of Brown versus the Board of Education, you have the movement towards massive resistance that emerges in response, that tries to fight back against desegregation measures and then there are multiple decades of pushback with people joining private clubs, opting out of certain public schools. In the Loving case, I’m curious, is there any kind of social or political reverberation that comes in the wake of this landmark ruling and is there a way to track what kinds of changes the Loving decision really helped to make permanent in American society?

Rachel: Well I think the first thing that really strikes people about Loving is that when the first interracial couple went to marry in Virginia, they did so without incident. It was very peaceful. There really was no massive resistance of the type that you’re describing after Brown and you might ask yourself why is that? And I think part of it is that there was no feeling that people were being forced to integrate. Marriage remained a free choice and so it was almost a laissez-faire approach. We won’t interfere but we won’t make you get married across racial lines and so probably if you saw any kind of reaction it happened more informally after you were married. You were trying to find a place to live where you could be accepted or you were walking down the street and people thought you were very unusual. So there were undoubtedly social pressures that both deterred people from intermarrying and effected the experience of intermarriage but it wasn’t happening because of formal restrictions and behavior by the registrars anymore.

Nathan: So, mind if I ask you a personal question?

Rachel: Sure.

Nathan: So, I’m actually part of a family that could be described as interracial, going way back to the 19th century, in fact. The historian Martha Hodes actually writes about one of my fore bearers, an interracial relationship between the Caribbean and New England and I gather that you similarly have that background of a kind of mix of these groups that are considered to be partly of different racial groups. It certainly impacted my research in ways that I didn’t always expect, and I’m curious if you had any relationship between your own biography and the research questions that drove what you then turned to study in this case?

Rachel: That is right. My father was Irish, my mother is of Mexican origin and they married in the early 1950s at a time when I think the relationship bordered on anti-miscegenation and when they were getting ready to marry, the minister said what about the children? Because the assumption was we wouldn’t really fit in anywhere and I think, throughout my life, because of my parents’ marriage, I did see issues of race and ethnicity playing out very differently than I might have if I’d been in a sort of household that was a conventional household where people had married within their own race and ethnicity. My mother also had grown up in Mexico and so I had a sort of transnational quality as well and writing the book, I think, became a vehicle for figuring out the deeper meaning of things that I had seen and I think I went from the narratives to trying to get a deeper meaning. A kind of way of understanding the world through broadening my awareness that other groups had been effected, there had been an entire history. It wasn’t just about my family and growing up in my family.

Nathan: Rachel Moran is a law professor and Dean Emeritta at the UCLA School of Law. She’s also the author of the book, Interracial Intimacy: the Regulation of Race and Romance.