This study investigates anti-Chinese violence in the American West—focusing primarily on events in the Arizona Territory between 1880 and 1912—and the role of diplomatic relations between the United States and China in tempering the worst excesses of that violence. Recent scholarship asserts that the Chinese rarely suffered lynching and were commonly targeted for other types of violence, including coercion, harassment, and intimidation. Building on that work, this study advances a definition of racist violence that includes a broad spectrum of attacks, including the threat of violence. While affirming that such “subtler” violence achieved many of the same objectives as the “harsher” violence, it seeks to explain why whites used such radically different and less openly violent methods against this minority and explains why this difference mattered. Using these insights to interrogate the complex relationship between the United States and China, this essay shows that Chinese diplomatic influence stifled anti-Chinese mob violence by white Americans. It argues that this relationship denied white racists the same agency against the Chinese immigrants as they possessed against other racial and national minorities and thus forced them to “choose” the “subtler” acts of violence against this group rather than those usually employed against these others.

This essay examines newspaper articles published in California’s Imperial Valley during the mid-twentieth century that reported stories of braceros (guest workers) and undocumented workers suffering accidents, engaging in intra-ethnic violence, falling prey to criminals, and drinking excessively. These news articles, which often cast Mexican migrants as (potentially) criminal, racialized braceros and their undocumented counterparts as outsiders and undeserving. Collectively, these news articles demonstrate that Mexican migrants experienced what Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois describe as a violence “continuum” that connects structural, everyday, and symbolic violence in overlapping and intersecting ways. The alcohol abuse and interpersonal violence so common among braceros and undocumented migrants cannot be separated from the structural and symbolic violence that these men confronted in the Imperial Valley. Migrant workers’ structural vulnerability—which placed them in harm’s way while they worked, during times of leisure, or along the migration route—was the cause, but also a byproduct, of the antisocial behavior that some men adopted to cope with their exploitation. Though scholars have long considered the conditions that I here categorize under structural, everyday, and symbolic violence, I argue that by employing the concept of a continuum of violence we can better account for the wide range of experiences that braceros and undocumented migrants encountered in the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

Continued railroad investment and the development of national highway transportation infrastructure factored heavily into the development of American communities during the twentieth century. Seligman, Arizona, is one of these communities, located on a major railroad route (Santa Fe Railway) and a former U.S. federal highway (U.S. Route 66). The town of Seligman was created by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway as a service stop and switchyard. At its founding, few roads served the community. Seligman later became a community linked to others by an auto-trail, the National Old Trails Road, and then by a paved federal highway. Through much of the postwar period, Seligman was a thriving travel center hosting significant Santa Fe Railway operations and a robust auto-traveler and tourist service industry. In the early 1980s, however, the community experienced a rapid decline. Looking at the period from 1910 to 1985 and examining what caused this dramatic transformation, this article argues that just as the construction of railroad operations birthed Seligman, the dismantling of railroad operations in the town delivered a death blow to its economy while benefiting larger communities like Barstow, California. Although the diversion of highway travelers off of Route 66 and away from town by the I-40 bypass hurt Seligman businesses, it was the loss of railroad workers’ local spending that put its economy in decline. This argument is discussed within the additional context of the social history of the community, the effects of infrastructure disinvestment on communities, and the limits of successor industries (like tourism) to support these communities.

The story of the people who sailed the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Hawai‘i, Samoa, and points beyond is well documented, yet historians have neglected the voyages themselves and what the travelers encountered on the five-day to five-week journeys to their destinations. Those who crossed the Pacific recorded their thoughts about the sea creatures they discovered, the birds that followed the ships, and the potential of American expansion to the islands. They gossiped about their shipmates, celebrated the change in time zones, and feared the sharks that swam near the vessels. The voyagers had little else to distract them from the many miles of endless water, so they paid attention to their surroundings: nature, people, and shipboard activities. The adventures on the ships enlivened their travels to the islands of the Pacific and proved to be an opportunity to expand their personal horizons, as well as their hopes for the United States.

The 1970s was a time of growing government repression, incarceration, and subsequent radical activism across the United States and Mexico. This is reflected in the migration, incarceration, and organizing efforts of José Jacques Medina, a Mexican activist who fled to the United States to escape political persecution after his involvement in the 1968 student movement in Mexico City. After the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) apprehended and incarcerated Medina inside an immigration detention facility in El Centro, California, activists, inspired by radical movements such as the Black Panther Party and the Third World Left more broadly, organized to gain Medina political asylum and avoid deportation. This story of radical transborder organizing highlights the connections between the carceral state and migration, prison movements and migrant rights. It also exposes the increasing power of the detention and deportation regime in the United States as the INS collaborated with federal agencies such as the FBI to repress political dissent and control migration.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Robert P. Shuler, head of Trinity Methodist Church, rose to fame in Los Angeles as a tireless evangelical muckraker. Shuler, via Bob Shuler’s Magazine and his popular radio station KGEF, charged that many powerful Angelenos were involved in various vice pursuits—drinking, drug use, even prostitution—and that the city’s image as a moral, middle-class metropolis was just a facade. Using Shuler’s writings, Los Angeles City Council files, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce minutes, and local newspapers, I argue that Shuler headed an alternative grassroots power structure in Los Angeles, founded during Prohibition. In those years, Shuler’s efforts found a receptive audience among the many midwestern migrants who had arrived in Los Angeles during previous decades. The city had once rigorously enforced alcohol restrictions, but in the 1920s, police officers and political leaders often protected illegal leisure activities. City leaders eventually retaliated against the preacher, and his power precipitously declined after the end of Prohibition, but for a time Shuler held a unique power to shape local public discourse. This essay reveals one of the battles over Los Angeles’s public image that shaped the city’s prewar rise.