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130  When Felipa Castro met Ciriaco “Pablo” Poscablo in San Diego, little did she know the impact their marriage would have on their family for generations to come. Born and raised in Baja California, Mexico, Felipa migrated with her family to Tijuana, then made her way north to the Otay Mesa area in the South Bay region of San Diego County during the early 1930s. Her future husband, Ciriaco, arrived in San Diego in 1924 from his hometown of Calasiao, in the province of Pangasinan, Philippines, via the U.S. Navy. Their courtship was brief, and they filed for a marriage license in 1938. What is interesting to note about their marriage is that on their license she indicated she was a “Mexican Indian,” despite the fact she was light enough to be considered white. Felipa, however, made sure she was not perceived as white. Rather, Felipa consciously chose to indicate on their marriage license that she was Mexican Indian in order to marry her Filipino husband. In doing so, she resisted the racial restrictions of the time that prohibited miscegenation between whites and nonwhites.1 She had to assert her Mexican Indian identity in order for the marriage to be recognized by the state. Her choice to identify as “Mexican Indian” reveals an ironic twist of following the legal codes that opposed miscegenation between Filipinos and whites; this also affected light-skinned Mexican women after 1933.2 As the historian Peggy Pascoe notes in her book What Comes Naturally, in an effort to uphold racial segregation, miscegenation laws were implemented and enforced to prohibit the mixing of whites with nonwhites. Some of the earliest miscegenation laws in the United States—a consequence of white enslavement of Africans—were passed in Maryland and Virginia in the 1660s, prohibiting interracial marriage and cohabitation between blacks and whites. Other states followed suit with their own versions of the miscegenation law, which were maintained up until the Civil War. During the post–Civil War period, fear of miscegenation led to another onslaught of legal barriers and social pressures, which spread to the Western states and other territories in the Southwest.3 Filipino-Mexican Couples and the Forging of a Mexipino Identity c h a p t e r 5 In these geographic regions, racial formations and the banning of interracial intimacies went beyond the black-white binary of miscegenation laws. California, and the U.S. Southwest, for that matter, had a complex multiracial makeup that also included indigenous peoples, Mexicans, Filipinos, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. These large multiracial populations challenged the foundations of these legal barriers, which were already inconsistent at best. Miscegenation laws, however, were adapted to prevent all nonwhites from marrying whites, “despite wide difference in their individual racial formations and specific structures of oppression.” By 1933 Filipinos were also included into the fold of “the unmixables.”4 From the 1860s to the 1960s, the American legal system maintained that interracial marriage was “unnatural,” so prohibiting these unions through miscegenation laws became paramount to legally maintaining white supremacy. Yet as Pascoe notes, the “unnatural” argument was more about the interlocking notions regarding the social conceptions of race, maintaining white supremacy and its political implications for the country, which was absorbing large populations of nonwhites as the United States extended its empire continentally and transnationally. Marriage became “the foundation for the larger racial project of white supremacy and purity.”5 It was a social institution that had many implications as it pertained to property rights, citizenship, and the choice of whom to love. Issuing a marriage license also meant producing racial definitions, which were to be upheld by county licensing clerks. Pascoe notes that their job at racial “guesswork ” and their power to grant or deny marriage licenses based on someone’s race made them the gatekeepers of white supremacy and purity.6 In order to circumvent this sort of racial profiling and the uncertainties of miscegenation laws regarding Mexicans (since some had skin complexions that were less threatening to whites), Felipa chose to assert her nonwhite ancestry as a Mexican Indian, jettisoning her ability to be mistaken as white. She thus manipulated the absurdity of miscegenation laws to marry Pablo, since legally California did not prohibit the marriages of Filipino men to Mexican women.7 Although Felipa and Pablo’s marriage was not meant as a political statement, it had political ramifications by resisting the miscegenation laws of their time as part of what Maria Root...

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