Surviving Sources and Affirming Anxieties
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Criminal cases like the ones presented by Nayan Shah in “Adjudicating Intimacies on U.S. Frontiers” tend to be more present in historical records than cases of consensual gayness and nonmonogamy. Specifically regarding Gate and Mesilla, one reason for this may be because they affirmed the widespread negative perspectives on South Asian migrants in Canada and the United States during the early twentieth century. Jawala Singh/Julio Jubala and the Sing brothers appear as sexual transgressors, perpetuating the anxieties held by white Americans over the corruption of monogamous heterosexual marriages that characterized the “moral purity” of a Protestant America (Shah 134). Stories like these are the ones that get publicized, printed in high numbers, and preserved through sensationalism. It is unsurprising, then, that attractive headlines like “Hindu Weds White Girl by Stealing Away to Arizona” from 1918 were written in the first place (Leonard 63).
Shah demonstrates how Soledad’s attorneys used such negative depictions of South Asians to their advantage. The preadolescent ages of Nami and Jawala Singh at the time of marriage, the arrangement, and the timing of sexual consummation were argued to make the marriage illegitimate. Because these qualities opposed American Protestant and liberal values, Nami was not considered his “real” wife and legitimate inheritor (Shah 121). To white audiences, Singh/Jubala’s two wives represent the dual loyalties that Asian immigrants were feared to have. South Asians were seen as incapable of becoming part of the nation because of a refusal to let go of the values of their home countries. As an editor in the Vancouver News-Advertiser wrote: “It is impossible to make Canadians out of immigrants whose customs, traditions and habits forms an insurmountable barrier between them and the Canadianization” (Ward 90). Nami's existence in this trial only proved that South Asian migrants would always have ties to their homeland that would prevent them from conforming to Western sexual and family mores.
South Asians were also seen as invading the workplace by the white working class or “flooding the province with cheap Asiatic labour” (Ward 83). Despite Verma’s success in getting Don Sing acquitted by approximating him to the ideal American Protestant husband, the other two Sings were still convicted. Fears of sodomy and rape in the workplace were solidified by this story, in which the Sings not only sexually penetrated a white man they worked with, but nonconsensually penetrated the workplace with their presence. This case only confirmed fears that South Asian men brought sexually violent behaviours with them overseas that threatened white workers on the most personal level.