Mackenzie's ''concern'' was that they could not adapt and integrate society
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It’s really fascinating to see how South Asian men, Latina women and Afro-American women built a community when it can seem at first sight that they did not have much in common besides being the Other in the eyes of white Americans. Initially, it was in the context of the restrictive laws that did not allow the Punjabi farmers to bring their wives and children to America that some Punjabi men chose to have relationships with racialized women (Leonard, 62). There was a strong prejudice against Punjabi men and men of color in general marrying white women (Leonard, 62). Indeed, around 1920 in California, some laws prohibited mixed-race marriages (Leonard, 63).
According to law Professor John S. Caragozian, this regulation criminalized interracial marriages and was in place since 1850 (Caragozian, 1) But despite that, interracial marriages were still happening. Karen Leonard writes that around the 1920’s ‘’ Marriage licenses soon were issued routinely to Punjabi men and Hispanic women.’’ (63) Eventually marriages between Punjabi men and Latina women became a pattern, rather than an exception (Leonard, 63). Punjabi men were working in the cotton fields. For some Mexican women and their families, it was while fleeing the Mexican Revolution and working in the same cotton plantations in Texas and California or doing domestic work that they met the South Asian man who would later become their spouse (Leonard, 63).
Another interesting thing is that the men were older than the women in most cases. Leonard writes that on average when they would get married to Punjabi men, Mexican women were twenty-three and their spouses were thirty-five (68). Maybe we can assume that like the Punjabi men who were working in Canada (Ward, 80), many of the ones who came to America were married back home so even if their age of marriage to Mexican women seems old, it was probably not their first marriage. She also mentions that for the South Asian men who would marry Latinas, the difference in religion between them and their spouses did not seem to be an issue, contrary to how it was back in India, for example (Leonard, 68).
It was interesting to me to see that both men and women could benefit from those kinds of alliances. For example, Leonard mentioned that sometimes when a Hispanic woman would marry a Punjabi man, it allowed her to suggest Punjabi men to other women from her family or broader community. (Leonard, 69-70) It kind of became a familial thing. When one woman would marry a South Asian, it would open the door for her sisters to do the same and vice versa with Punjabi men. For the poor Mexican families, marrying off their daughters was a way that allowed the family to be in a better financial situation (Leonard, 69-70). For the Punjabi men marrying those women was a way for them to create a family and have a woman to help them and accompany them through daily life by cooking and cleaning, amongst other things. It is mentioned in the text that one woman who was previously married and had children from that relationship decided to marry a South Asian man considering that he was a nice man and that getting married to him would be a means for her children to have a father figure to take care of them (Leonard, 70).
After reading this extract from Karen Leonard’s work and the other from Peter Ward’s White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in British Columbia, we can easily critic Mackenzie King’s assumptions when he said "that the native of India is not a person suited to this country, that, accustomed as many of them are to the conditions of a tropical climate, and possessing manners and customs so unlike those of our own people, their inability to readily adapt themselves to surroundings entirely different could not do other than entail an amount of privation and suffering…’’ (Ward, 83) In his speech, the former prime minister of Canada is talking about South Asians in Canada, but I think that these kinds of assumptions about racialized people must have been similar in the United States. In my opinion, it’s not that South Asians (and other racialized groups) would not have been able to live with white people but rather that some white supremacists obsessed with their whiteness did everything they could to prevent or restrict and sometimes even criminalize (like the legislation against interracial marriage did) multiculturalism and people cohabiting with each other regardless of their ethnicities.