This special issue of Pacific Historical Review , “Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” is guest edited by Miroslava Chávez-García and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz. The articles in the collection reflect the primacy of gender and intimacy as tools of analysis in recovering the experiences of women of Spanish-Mexican and Mexican origin in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century borderlands. As the authors demonstrate, using gender and intimacy, along with race, ethnicity, class, and culture, allow for the recovery of women’s personal and family lives and how they intersected with the economic, political, and social transformations of the region. The result is nuanced understandings of how women negotiated and resisted state-based, patriarchal ideologies and practices that sought to limit their lives and those of their families. The special issue includes a preface from Marc S. Rodriguez, this introduction, and articles by Celeste Menchaca, Erika Pérez, and Margie Brown-Coronel.

This article explores the status of R.C. Gorman (Navajo) within the art community of San Francisco, California, in the 1960s. Using Gorman’s personal papers, the article addresses how his queer identity, Navajo heritage, and Native urbanization contributed to his production of world-renowned art. Gorman’s representation of strong Navajo women, which made him a universally recognized artist, stemmed from his own exploration of gender performativity and homoeroticism while living in an urban gay mecca. Moreover, Gorman’s use of both resources in the city and the southwestern Indian art market allowed him to forge a successful art career. A formative figure in the Native American Fine Art Movement, Gorman’s experiences in San Francisco suggest that indigenous creative practices challenged a dominant interpretation and construction of the inferiority of American Indians.

This article analyzes Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy in tandem with Angeles Monrayo’s Tomorrow’s Memories . While both America Is in the Heart and Barrio Boy are considered foundational texts in ethnic studies, Tomorrow’s Memories (which offers Monrayo’s personal reflections about life as a Filipina in Hawai‘i and California during the 1920s) is less well known. Each of these books highlights a young narrator who is migrating under U.S. empire. Their narratives underscore the protagonists’ constant movement through the U.S. West in the search for labor and education, their growing independence from the core family unit, as well as their evolving political consciousness. A comparison of the books enables us to consider how gender shapes migration, place, and space, especially because Monrayo’s experience illuminates the male privilege of Bulosan’s and Galarza’s protagonists.

This article takes a broad look at the Pacific Ocean in relation to Chinese migration. As trade, consumption and capital flows followed migrants, powerful networks were woven and sustained; in time, the networks fanned across the Pacific from British Columbia along the West Coast of the United States to New Zealand and Australia. The overlapping personal, family, financial, and commercial interests of Chinese in California and those in Hong Kong, which provide the focus of this study, energized the connections and kept the Pacific busy and dynamic while shaping the development of regions far beyond its shores. The ocean turned into a highway for Chinese seeking Gold Mountain, marking a new era in the history of South China, California, and the Pacific Ocean itself.

Prostitution became a thriving business in Japan and Japanese migrant communities in the western United States in the last years of the nineteenth century, and Japanese reformers organized against it on both sides of the Pacific to protect Japan’s reputation as a “civilized” country. By 1920 Japanese prostitution had visibly declined in Pacific Coast cities, whereas it continued to be a regular feature of public life in Japan. This article examines the emergence of transpacific reform networks in the 1890s as well as the different ways the reform movements developed in the two Pacific regions after 1900. It argues that transnational and comparative approaches are not in opposition to but complementary to one another in the historical study of prostitution, social reform, and international migration.

On December 23, 1910, the S.S. Mongolia arrived at the Port of Honolulu with 119 Filipinos aboard. The treatment of these passengers resulted in vigorous debates about Filipino labor mobility that impacted U.S.-Philippine relations, Hawaiian business needs, and health policies, as well as continental U.S. labor and sugar interests. From January through April 1911, officials in Washington, D.C., and the Philippines worked hard to stem fears about the health of Filipinos and maintain both the flow of these workers to Hawai‘i and the U.S.-Philippine political-legal relationship. Despite extensive regional protests, the acquisition of labor for sugar plantations and the preservation of U.S.-Philippine colonial ties ended up prevailing over nativist fears about the health and growing numbers of Filipinos in the United States.