| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82. By Najia Aarim-Heriot. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xvi, 289 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-252-02775-2.)

Racial Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans in Western America, 1848–1890. By Arnoldo De León. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. x, 150 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8263-2271-9. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8263-2272-7.)

In the last decade, the scholarship of U.S. ethnic history has developed within a comparative perspective. Rather than just analyzing the history of any one racial-ethnic group in relationship to the power of the dominant group of Euro-Americans, historians are situating their narratives in a context of interethnic hostilities, the politics of race, and commonalities of experiences. Such is the case for the books under review here.

Najia Aarim-Heriot's book offers a revisionist understanding of the origins of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. To that end, she argues that Euro-Americans, particularly politicians and policy makers, relied on existing black-white relations to define the treatment and later the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. She notes that from the beginning Chinese underwent "Negroization" (p. 3). Both African Americans and Chinese immigrants in the period leading up to passage of the landmark Civil War legislations were ineligible for citizenship and could not testify in civil and criminal cases. Both groups, having received the label of undesirable and slave labor, were also excluded from the free labor ideology. Yet differences existed in their experiences: By the close of the Civil War African Americans made progress toward securing civil rights, but Chinese did not. Unlike African Americans, Chinese immigrants found economic opportunities in California, even as they were deemed the greater threat of the two groups.

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