ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces immigration and anti-miscegenation histories in the US West. It shows how gendered and race-based exclusions to immigration, naturalization, and marriage at the turn of the twentieth century worked collectively to mystify and then to police racial families in the region, especially for Chinese and Chinese Americans. It spotlights how racial abstractions of Chinese and the gendered and racial restrictions to immigration and family formations worked ideologically and materially to shape the nation’s cultural and racial constitution. In doing so, this chapter reveals a genealogy of racial discourses in the US West, showing how early mystifications of Asians as sexually corrupt and as a threat to US society inform contemporary abstractions of migrants at the US–Mexico border as sexually deviant and criminal, images which inform recent efforts to police immigrant families in the area.
