Terminal Identities: The Racial Classification of Immigrants in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Death Records

Abstract

Death certificates are a means of assessing the racial classification of foreign-born Americans that is based neither on a set of formal racial identification criteria nor self-identification. Instead, local informants typically report the race of decedents. According to a sample of 1,884 records filed between 1859 and 1960, individuals born in China were progressively less likely to be identified by racial terms (e.g., white or yellow) and more likely to be identified by their country of origin (e.g., Chinese). The opposite is true for those born in Mexico or Puerto Rico, who are less likely over time to be identified as Mexican or Puerto Rican and more likely to be identified with a racial term—typically white. Most of the records analyzed are from southern states (n = 1,335), although an additional 548 records, primarily from Illinois and Ohio, are compared to the southern records. In some cases, white identity can serve as a mark of racial confusion, acting as a default or neutral identity rather than a mark of privilege. Conversely, it can represent a status that is actively striven for to provide freedom from discriminatory treatment. It serves primarily as the former for those born in China and the latter for those born in Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Keywords

immigrants racial identity racialization

Death certificates are a means of assessing the racial classification of foreign-born Americans that is based neither on a set of formal racial identification criteria nor self-identification. Instead, local informants typically report the race of decedents. According to a sample of 1,884 records filed between 1859 and 1960, individuals born in China were progressively less likely to be identified by racial terms (e.g., white or yellow) and more likely to be identified by their country of origin (i.e., Chinese). The opposite is true for those born in Mexico or Puerto Rico, who are less likely over time to be identified as Mexican or Puerto Rican and more likely to be identified with a racial term—typically white. In this study, I analyzed records mostly from southern states (n = 1,335), although an additional 548 records, primarily from Illinois and Ohio, are compared to the southern records. In some cases, white identity can serve as a mark of racial confusion, acting as a default or neutral identity rather than a mark of privilege. Conversely, it can represent a status that is actively striven for to provide freedom from discriminatory treatment. Whiteness serves primarily as the former for those born in China and the latter for those born in Mexico and Puerto Rico.

The black/white binary has long influenced the racial classification of Americans. This binary has been particularly important in the racialization of immigrants to the southern United States, raising the question of how those with no previous ties to black or white racial communities in the United States would be identified by native-born residents. Ian Haney-Lopez (1997) documents many of the often contradictory ways in which immigrants from regions such as Asia and Latin America are racially identified according to law. More difficult to determine is how those outside institutions such as the government or legal system identified immigrants a century ago. Local communities confronted with groups readily identified as neither white nor black either generated new categories—such as yellow in the case of many Chinese immigrants—or forced immigrants (including some Chinese) into the category of white. When applied to Asian and Latin American immigrants by local community members, whiteness can simultaneously serve as a symbol of racial confusion and as a means of escaping discrimination. Its valence depends on the relative social position of a particular immigrant group at a given time in history.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fluid times for racial categorization in the United States, especially for immigrants. This is the time during which groups such as the Irish and Jews were “becoming white” (Ignatiev 1995; Jacobson 1998); the boundaries of whiteness expanded to include more than white Anglo-Saxon Protestants within its ranks. At the same time, anti-immigrant sentiments against groups such as the Chinese were being codified into law (Johnson 1998). In some states such as Louisiana, elaborate procedures for classifying gradations of blackness held sway (Dominguez 1993). The evolution and application of racial identities have been outlined throughout American history by scholars, especially for the native-born (Wander, Martin, and Nakayama 2005). In particular, government classification schemes and legal cases have been analyzed to assess the prominent racial divisions during a particular time period (Haney-Lopez 1997; Nobles 2000).

Less is known about the ways in which localized, micro-level understandings of racial terms and categories applied to Americans born outside of the United States or Europe changed over this time period or the extent to which race, gender, or class influenced these understandings. While enumerators of the census between 1850 and 1870 were U.S. marshals exercising their best judgment about the race (and criminality) of respondents (Magnuson and King 1995), by the late nineteenth century, census takers were trained to assign individuals to racial categories based on a set of clearly articulated criteria that often changed from one administration to the next. Individuals did not self-report race until the second half of the twentieth century. While the racial classification of the foreign-born in government documents such as the census is one important reflection of temporal understandings of racial categories, it is less indicative of the ways in which individuals in a given community might classify each other.

Death certificates are one means of assessing the racial classification of foreign-born Americans that is not based on a set of formal racial identification criteria or self-identification. In fact, the race assigned to an individual on a death certificate has been demonstrated to contradict self-assignment in analyses from the past 40 years, with American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians most likely to have disagreement between self and other identification (Arias et al. 2008). Pre-1960 death certificate classifications are more likely to reflect community understandings of race than self- or “official” identifications. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each state had its own version of the death certificate; in a number of states, these included a blank for a write-in response for race. While the form was standardized across states by 1933 (Hanzlick 1997), race was still an open-ended question until 1960. Race was typically assigned by an informant, sometimes a family member or acquaintance of the deceased, in other cases from hospital records. As the race question during this time period was open-ended rather than forced choice, the actual terms used to describe the race of deceased individuals can be compared across time and space for specific subgroups. Some states provide information about the occupation of the deceased, which enables one to broadly determine whether racial identification is associated with a measure of class. While the analysis of death records precludes a detailed, contextualized understanding of the use of racial categories evident in socio-historical studies, it has the merit of enabling one to detail the evolution of racial categories across a wide range of places and times in addition to allowing the comparison of immigrant groups from different countries to each other.

Between 1859 and 1960, individuals born in China were increasingly less likely to be identified by racial terms (white, yellow, etc.) and more likely to be identified by their country of origin (Chinese). The opposite is true for those born in Mexico or Puerto Rico, who are less likely over time to be identified as Mexican or Puerto Rican and more likely to be identified as white. Most of the records analyzed are from southern states (n = 1,335), although an additional 548 records from outside the South are compared to them (all states used in the analyses are listed in the Appendix). Occupation typically makes little difference in racial identification, with a handful of exceptions (e.g., laborers born in Mexico and Puerto Rico being much more likely to be identified as white), nor does gender have an impact on identification.

The national origin group of Chinese immigrants during this time period become a distinctive racial identifier, perhaps reflecting foreign-born residents’ increasing familiarity to the native-born population as well as the racialization of the term Chinese. When classified as belonging to a race rather than to a nation of origin, the Chinese were more likely to be classified as white in the South than as Oriental or yellow. The strength of the dichotomous racial classification scheme in the South during the late nineteenth century resulted in Chinese immigrants’ status as “not black” to result in a classification of white—a distinct “Chinese” racial group only emerged over time.

At the same time, a reverse process was in effect for Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrants. Mexicans were increasingly identifying as white during the early twentieth century, especially in areas with relatively small Mexican populations beyond Texas and California (Mora 2014). Despite official attempts to classify Mexicans as a racial category distinct from white in 1930, friends, family, and hospital personnel increasingly preferred the white designation. Puerto Ricans, too, became more commonly classified as white as the twentieth century unfolded.

These findings suggest that for the Chinese, white racial classification may have reflected a confusion about how to identify this new, exoticized population on the part of local communities. White may serve as the default category for groups whose standing in the racial order is unclear. For Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, white serves as a marker of the increasingly successful effort on the part of elites to de-racialize the categories of Mexican and Puerto Rican in an effort to defuse discriminatory laws and practices. White can thus be a mark of a group’s racial liminality as much as it can be a marker of privileged acceptance—the opposing trends in white identification among a group currently considered Asian versus two groups currently considered Latina/o reflect the use of whiteness in these two different ways.

Racial Classification in the United States

Racial classification has been an object of interest in both official and informal realms in the United States since the advent of the nation. The U.S. government in particular has been especially concerned about classifying its residents according to race, the manifestation of which can be clearly seen in the disputes about racial categories on the census form (S. M. Lee 1993; Mora 2014). These disputes are hardly unique to the United States; in particular, Brazil has long relied on classifications in official statistics to bound fluid and relational notions of race into three categories (Telles 2006). South Africa notoriously categorized those not readily classified as black or white into a colored category. Morning (2012) finds that 63 percent of censuses from around the world classify respondents by race or ethnicity, with many of those countries in North and South America and Oceania.

Census enumerators in the United States are given careful instructions about how to place individuals into specific preordained categories, categories that potentially impact the allocation of government resources. These categories have varied tremendously over time (for a chart detailing these changes, see Rodriguez 2000:83). Chinese were first counted separately in 1870, and Mexicans were counted separately in 1930 but were then (re)considered white, in part due to the objections of the Mexican government (Prewitt 2005). The “racialization of nationality” was part of an effort by officials to demarcate certain foreign-born populations as “never (having) a permanent place in America” (Prewitt 2013:62).

While these classifications may not neatly align with racial self-identification, they do provide a window into the ways in which dominant understandings of race have changed over time. Indeed, racial classifications for the same individual on different censuses can change dramatically (Saperstein 2012). In addition, the racial classification imposed by others (as opposed to self-identification) might more accurately reflect the social barriers—or lack thereof—that individuals must navigate in their daily lives (Penner and Saperstein 2013). Socially imposed classifications also reflect community-based understandings of racial identity in a way that self-identification may not. In a study of individual-level changes in racial identification between 1979 and 2002, Saperstein and Penner (2012) demonstrate the connection between shifting social statuses, such as marriage and unemployment, and racial categorization. Rather than necessarily determining status, they argue, race is sometimes itself determined by social status.

Categories such as Mexican have typically been treated as ethnic categories rather than racial ones, but such terms are as much a reflection of the American racial order as they are about processes of immigration (Gomez 2007). Dowling (2014) persuasively argues that Mexicans’ claims of whiteness are connected to a rejection of “racial-othering” rather than an embrace of white identity.

In sum, there is a long history among foreign-born groups of whiteness periodically representing privilege and periodically representing a loss of resources, both cultural and in some cases material. The role whiteness plays varies according to a host of factors such as immigration law, the actions of ethnic organizations, and the desires of immigrants to position themselves as “not black” as the only identity available to them. The extent to which each form of whiteness is primary for each of the three immigrant groups in this study is detailed in the following.

Chinese

Much of the early immigration to the South from China was for the purpose of agricultural labor; they sometimes arrived as Spanish speakers via Cuba (Desai and Joshi 2013). Over time, Chinese workers began leaving the fields to work in laundries and restaurants in urban areas (Chow 2007). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, the United States limited immigration from China to a few categories such as merchants and students (Bronstein 2013), with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) prohibiting the immigration of laborers who might be in competition with white workers. In addition, only merchants were permitted to bring their families to the United States from China. At this point, fewer than 1,000 Chinese had migrated to the South (Chow 2007). Reflecting the anti-Chinese sentiment of the time, the U.S. census had begun separately classifying Chinese from other races in 1870 as a way of explicitly demarcating the Chinese as non-citizens (S. M. Lee 1993; Prewitt 2013).

The Chinese in the Jim Crow South occupied a status that was simultaneously “not white” and “not black” (Bow 2013). In the late nineteenth century, they were often regarded as curiosities. As they gradually left work on plantations in Louisiana, they were actually viewed somewhat favorably in the New Orleans press as they might replace the “immense surplus of lazy, loafing negroes” (Cohen 1984:136). In Georgia, Chinese immigrants were not viewed as especially threatening, especially when compared to their counterparts in California; nonetheless, a rigid boundary (eventually codified into law) prevented Chinese men from marrying white women (Bronstein 2013). Georgia’s anti-miscegenation law barring marriages between whites and Chinese or “Mongolians” passed in 1927—the full list of groups whites were prohibited from marrying in Georgia at this time was: “Caucasian, Negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other non-Caucasic strain” (Pascoe 1996:59). The other southern states to pass laws barring marriage between whites and “Mongolians” were Mississippi (1892) and Virginia (1924) (Sohoni 2007). The interstitial situation of the Chinese in the South sometimes played out in ironic fashion.

The Supreme Court case Gong Lum v. Rice (1927) ruled that Chinese Americans were not white but “colored,” despite Gong Lum’s assertion that he identified himself and his daughter, whom he sought to enroll in a white school, as Chinese (Desai and Joshi 2013). Despite this ruling, authorities in Georgia tacitly permitted Chinese students to attend white schools while at the same time maintaining strict anti-miscegenation laws (Bronstein 2013). Meanwhile, in Mississippi, the Chinese had steadily moved toward a white identity, juxtaposed as they were to the “Negro” population (Loewen [1972] 1988). Both Mississippi (Loewen [1972] 1988) and Georgia issued driver’s licenses to the Chinese born that listed “W” as the race, perhaps reflecting official confusion over how to racially classify Chinese immigrants (Bronstein 2013). Whatever race they might be proactively assigned, they were consistently considered not black in everyday life (Bronstein 2013).

However, the experiences of daily life could vary enormously from state to state within the South, as is demonstrated in interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. A Chinese laundry owner in Georgia could be fully assimilated while a Chinese laundry owner in South Carolina could be totally isolated (Bow 2010). Even when accorded white status, Chinese were still excluded from full participation in the polity and continued to experience discrimination (Bow 2010).

Mexicans

There has been considerable debate about where Mexican Americans fit into the American racial structure in the early twentieth century, with many authors settling on some version of an intermediate position between whiteness and non-whiteness (Foley 1999; Fox and Guglielmo 2012). During this time period, the identification of those born in Mexico as either Mexican or white varied from year to year, place to place, and by individual characteristics such as social class (Fox and Guglielmo 2012). As Gomez (2007:83) puts it, Mexicans were “legally White, socially Non-white.” Contestations over the consideration of Mexican as a race reflected the opposing interests of eugenicists (who believed that Mexicans were a race separate from whites) and the U.S. State Department (who wanted to grant Mexican Americans the status of white to facilitate Americans’ access to Mexican labor markets) (Calderón-Zaks 2011). While there was a general trend toward the exclusion of Mexicans from the actual benefits of whiteness, variability in their racial classification nonetheless remained (Fox and Guglielmo 2012).

Xenophobic and eugenicist attempts to cast Mexicans in the United States as undesirables were reflected in a 1925 study by a Princeton economist: “His proposal? ‘To call this stock Mexican’ to avoid continuing ‘the common practice to speak of this stock as white, for its basis is more copper than white’” (Calderón-Zaks 2011:333). Visas for Mexicans were substantially reduced between 1924 and 1930, with visas implicitly awarded to lighter-skinned immigrants (Calderón-Zaks 2011). In response to the inclusion of the Mexican category on the census and the 1936 Social Security forms, Mexican American organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) pushed strongly for Mexicans to be included in the white category on all vital records (Calderón-Zaks 2011).

Most of the Mexican-born living in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century were concentrated in the Southwest, but there were a number of Mexican American communities scattered throughout the South. In New Orleans, Mexican immigrants enjoyed many of the cultural and educational benefits of whites, with even sharecroppers eventually gaining relative acceptance into the white community by the 1940s (Weise 2008, 2012). They were also not residentially segregated from whites, indeed in some cases claiming that they had successfully escaped the discrimination against Mexicans that existed in Texas (Weise 2008). Some Mexican elites in New Orleans downplayed race per se and emphasized “culture and class” to affiliate with whiteness (Weise 2008).

Mexicans in several states in the Jim Crow South actively pursued classification as white, primarily by requesting the Mexican Consulate to intervene in matters of their classification as being on the “black” side of the color line (Weise 2012). As a result, there was a “whitening” of their status during the first half of the twentieth century that unfolded very differently than it did for their counterparts living in the Southwest (Weise 2012).

Puerto Ricans

Puerto Ricans began migrating to the American mainland in significant numbers after the 1898 Treaty of Paris transferred control of the island from Spain to the United States. Early attempts to recruit Puerto Ricans as low-wage laborers established small communities in Hawaii, Florida, and Louisiana; however, most Puerto Ricans settled in New York City throughout the early twentieth century (Whalen and Vázquez-Hernández 2005). As of 1950, almost 83 percent of Puerto Ricans living in the United States were located in New York, although there were approximately 4,700 Puerto Ricans who had migrated to Florida and Louisiana, the states in the South (along with Texas) with the largest concentration of Puerto Rican residents (Whalen and Vázquez-Hernández 2005).

In contrast to Mexicans, Puerto Ricans were citizens of the United States after the passage of the Jones Act in 1917. American government officials sometimes asserted that Puerto Ricans were of European background; in contrast, they put forward an image of Filipinos as a distinctly nonwhite race of “Malays” (Duany 2002), hence marking Puerto Ricans as white in comparison. In sharp contrast, anthropological reports on native Puerto Ricans used many of the same racialized terms applied to Filipinos, such as “primitive” and “superstitious,” as well as writing of Puerto Ricans as being of African appearance (Duany 2002:70). By 1948, however, a reporter in Ohio answered his own question: “Are Puerto Ricans predominantly Spanish, predominantly Negro, or what?” with the assurance to his readers that they “were not ‘Negro’” (Whalen and Vázquez-Hernández 2005:229).

The proportion of the Puerto Rican population identifying as white within Puerto Rico increased dramatically during the first half of the twentieth century, from 62 percent in 1899 to 80 percent by 1950—the other racial options were black and Mulatto (Loveman and Muniz 2007; Montgomery 2011), a more restricted range of racial categories than typically employed throughout most of Latin America. Shifting identifications were reflected in the contested racial classifications in the 1920 census as Puerto Rican enumerators would ignore directives about the constitution of whiteness only to have their work corrected by supervisors (Loveman 2007). The gradual whitening of the Puerto Rican population in the early twentieth century mirrored that of Latin America, in general, as elites pushed for this classification (Loveman 2007).

Key Questions

Research on the complicated history of racial classification among U.S. immigrants suggests the following questions:

Research Question 1: How frequently are Chinese, Mexican, and Puerto Rican immigrants identified as white on death records?

Research Question 2: What factors influence white identification for each group?

Research Question 3: How have the rates of white identification changed over time?

Data

In the United States, death certificates have historically been administered by states and municipalities. Although Congress mandated that states maintain thorough records of all deaths at the turn of the twentieth century, states varied in the speed with which they complied with the directive. States such as Massachusetts had complete coverage of its population by 1841 while Georgia did not collect death certificates for its entire population until 1919 (National Office of Vital Statistics 1954).

Each death certificate is completed by two individuals, a physician and a funeral director. After the physician certifies the cause of death, the funeral director collects information about the decedent from an informant and completes the rest of the form (National Office of Vital Statistics 1954). Informants are typically relatives (Moriyama, Loy, and Robb-Smith 2011; Rothwell, Freedman, and Weed 2014), although in some cases information may be obtained by the funeral director from sources such as military or hospital records or other individuals with knowledge of the decedent. It has always been the responsibility of the funeral director to submit the certificate to the state Vital Records Office.

Aside from name, sex, age, and cause of death, the information collected on death certificates varied over time and across states well into the twentieth century. Some states collected data on occupation, parental names and birthplaces, names and relationships of informants, marital status, and race. While all certificates named the county in which the death occurred, the level of detail about the place of residence and the location of the death varied. Among the states that asked for the “race or color” of the decedent, the question was always open-ended—there was never a set number of categories from which the informant chose, and no instructions or examples were provided that encouraged the use of particular terms. No official race categories, such as those on government forms like the census, were provided or applied to death certificates. In 1900, the Census Bureau instructed each reporting area to use a recommended form that included a standard set of personal information as well as a standard reporting procedure for the cause and circumstance of death. All states issued certificates that contained this information by 1933 (Rothwell et al. 2014).

Unfortunately, most compilations of death certificates, such as those maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cover only the past several decades. Other records exist as microfilm in archives, which makes the comparison of a large number of records across geographic locations difficult. However, a substantial number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century death certificates have recently been transcribed and in some cases digitized and are searchable by place of birth.¹ While the transcribed records do not include cause of death, which has been demonstrated to be related to racial identification in contemporary records (Noymer, Penner, and Saperstein 2011), many of them include information about occupation, marital status, and the source of the demographic information on the certificate. Comparing the identified races of those born outside the United States—in particular the largest non-European immigrants from China, Mexico, and Puerto Rico²—lends insight into local understandings of how race changes over time and space as well as how these shifts correlate with changing official categories of race.³

These publicly available death records have been transcribed and in some cases digitized for the purpose of aiding with genealogical research (FamilySearch 2017). Each database of death certificates is searchable by country of birth of the decedent. The coverage of the transcriptions is uneven; some states do not have any records transcribed at all, while others do not have a record of decedent race. Every state in the southern United States with transcribed records was included in the analysis, as was a random sample of all of states with transcribed records. In addition, two states without transcribed race data but with scanned microfilms were included in the analyses (Ohio and Texas). The complete list of databases included in the data set analyzed in this article is in the Appendix.

A total of 1,884 records were located, copied, and converted by the author and a research assistant into a new, unique Stata data set. The basic information included for all of the records is name, birth date, death date, sex, place of birth, and place of death. The variable frequencies are provided in Table 1. Reflecting the sex composition of their respective communities, only Mexicans have a significant number of female decedents (33 percent); the other groups are each over 85 percent male. Sex can be expected to influence racial classification in different ways depending on the group in question. Chinese females, for example, were racialized as especially undesirable and unassimilable (C. Lee 2010).

Table 1.

Frequencies of Variables Used in Analyses by Place of Birth (Total N = 1,690).

	Percent	Mean	N
China			720
Sex (female)	10.1
Death date		1927
South	47.0
Anglo	8.5
Informant co-ethnic	73.2		403
Age (ln)		3.9	685
Married	54.0		385
Mexico			767
Sex (female)	33.3
Death date		1932
South	88.1
Anglo	21.0
Informant co-ethnic	58.4		173
Age (ln)		3.7	395
Married	65.7		172
Puerto Rico			203
Sex (female)	13.8
Death date		1931
South	100
Anglo	12.3
Informant co-ethnic	28.2		110
Age (ln)		3.5	159
Married	46.9

Records from the South were oversampled as this region had the historical position of receiving relatively few immigrants from Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America than did other states; in addition, the dichotomous black/white racial classification system rendered the choices about immigrant racial identification particularly interesting. While non-southern states also had a black-white binary, this racial hierarchy arguably played less of a role in structuring social life. For example, only 3 percent of the population in the Midwest and 1 percent of the population in the West in 1930 was black, while 28 percent of the population in the South Atlantic states were (Gibson and Jung 2002). No Puerto Rican decedents were available in the databases from outside the South, while the majority of Chinese were from outside the South. All records were coded for “Anglo” decedents, or those who were born abroad of American parents. In cases where the parents’ place of birth was not recorded on the death certificate and the names of the decedents were not associated with the country of origin by the coders, the names were entered into a database that reports surname frequency across countries.⁴ If the birth countries were listed as one of the three countries with the highest incidence of the surname, it was recoded as “non-Anglo.” A total of 11 of 226 names initially coded as Anglo were recoded as non-Anglo after consulting the database. The rationale for treating the Anglo names separately in the analyses is that these decedents are quite likely to have been identified by themselves and others as Americans who happened to have been born abroad, hence subject to a fundamentally different experience of identity formation and construction than other immigrants from these countries. While any surname method is likely to be less effective for married women who typically take the name of their spouses, females are a small proportion of the sample, and rates of racially heterogamous marriages were quite low during this time period, so the issue of using surname as a proxy for parental nativity is likely to be minimal in this case. In total, 85 percent of those coded as Anglo were identified as either black or white, including all but eight of the Anglo female decedents.⁵

Unfortunately, the name and/or relationship of the informant on the death certificate was not transcribed by FamilySearch. However, records from some states were scanned as images and available for public viewing. Although not searchable, when matched to the transcribed records, an informant name and, more rarely, an informant’s relationship to the deceased can be determined. If the surname of the informant matched the name of the decedent or was noted to be a relation of the deceased, the record was coded as “informant relative.” If the surname of the informant was associated with the same national origin of the decedent (using the same rules as for coding for Anglo described previously), the record was coded as “informant co-ethnic.” Both of these methods are likely to lead to false positives (e.g., Rodriguez is a friend rather than a relative) and false negatives (Smith is actually daughter of Rodriguez rather than non-relative or non-co-ethnic), but they nonetheless facilitate the broad categorization of records reflecting the racial categories employed by officials versus friends and relatives. Ultimately, there were no significant differences between the size of the effect of the informant relative and informant co-ethnic variables, so the broader co-ethnic informant variable was used.

Occupation is listed in 1,089 of the records (Table 2). As occupation was also a write-in response on death certificates, the occupational categories used here are based on the mention of the key word defining the occupation; for example, “Laundry” includes “laundryman,” “laundry,” and “launderer.” Reflecting their occupational distribution in the South at the time, Chinese decedents were most commonly laundry workers, although significant numbers are also merchants, cooks, and other restaurant workers. Mexicans are most commonly laborers and housewives, reflecting the greater number of female Mexican decedents; Puerto Ricans are likely to be laborers. These occupations are not always evenly distributed across states; for example, Georgia and Ohio have a greater proportion of Chinese merchants than does Florida or Illinois, reflecting the different labor market positions of each group in different parts of the country.

Table 2.

Occupations by Birthplace (Percentages).

	China	Mexico	Puerto Rico
Laundry	38.3	.0	.0
Laborer	2.4	6.8	43.8
Housewife	2.4	7.8	5.9
Cook	6.7	.9	1.5
Merchant	5.8	.1	1.0
Shopkeeper	2.2	.0	.0
Farmer	1.1	4.7	1.0
Restaurant	9.0	.1	.0
Student	1.4	.3	.5
Cigar maker	.1	2.0	.5
Seaman	.4	.8	3.0
Soldier	.4	.0	5.9
Clerk	1.4	.5	.0
Other professional	1.9	2.1	2.5
Other semi-skilled	.7	1.8	4.4
Other unskilled	1.8	6.9	5.4
None listed	23.8	65.9	23.7
Total N	720	767	203

Results

Racial Classification

The racial identification of those with non-Anglo names in the sample reflects one remarkable similarity across all three groups: 36 percent to 42 percent of decedents are identified racially by their national origin, such as Chinese, Mexican, or Puerto Rican (Table 3). Over half of Mexicans are identified as white while 11 percent of Chinese are identified as white. Only 10 percent of Puerto Ricans are identified as black, nonetheless the largest proportion of any group. Forty-eight percent of Chinese are identified with a racial term used to refer to Asians (e.g., yellow, Mongoloid, Chinaman). The proportion of Mexican immigrants identified as white stands in sharp contrast to the 4 percent of Mexican-born individuals identified as such in the 1930 census (Fox and Bloemraad 2015), further highlighting the need to consider sources other than official government counts when assessing how local populations racially classify community members.

Table 3.

Racial Identification across National Origin Groups, Non-Anglo Names (Percent).

Country of Origin	Nation	White	Black/Colored/Negro	Asian/Oriental/Mongoloid/Yellow	Other/None	Total N
China	36.1	10.9	.0	48.4	4.6	659
Mexico	42.1	53.0	2.5	.0	2.5	606
Puerto Rico	39.9	49.4	10.1	.0	.6	178
Total N	631	549	37	328	62	1,607

The specific terms used to racially identify members of each group vary not only within states (Bronstein 2013) but also according to region. Legislation reflects this categorical uncertainty, as the six anti-miscegenation laws passed by states against the Chinese refer to them as Mongolian in three of the cases and as Chinese in the other three (Sohoni 2007). For the Chinese, terms such as Oriental, Mongolian, and especially yellow are more likely to be used outside the South (Table 4). Southern death records are more likely to use the term white to racially identify decedents born in China (even after excluding those with Anglo surnames from consideration). This is in keeping with Loewen’s ([1972] 1988) observation that the Chinese in Mississippi were often classified as white to contrast them with the black population.

Table 4.

Terms Used to Describe Race of Chinese-Born, Non-Anglo Names.

Term	South		Non-South		Significant t Test
Term	n	Percent	n	Percent	Significant t Test
Chinese	133	44.9	105	28.9	***
Yellow	60	20.3	178	49.0	***
White	46	15.5	27	7.4	***
Mongolian	23	7.8	13	3.6	**
Chinaman	14	4.7	10	2.8	*
None	6	2.0	7	1.9
Asian	9	3.0	1	.7	**
Oriental	3	1.0	6	1.7
Total N including other terms	296		363

Note: Other terms with N < 5: brown, Chinaman/yellow/white, Chinese Mongolian, Chinese yellow, chop suey, dark, Mongelese, Mongol yellow, olive, somewhat dark, yellow Chinese, yellow Mongolian.

p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Among Mexicans, white is actually as likely to be used as the term for race in death records filed inside the South as outside it (Table 5). White is the racial descriptor for 54 percent of Mexican decedents outside the South and 53 percent within the region. In contrast to the Chinese, there is no evident attempt to racially identify Mexicans as white to clearly distinguish them from blacks unique to the South (although Fox and Bloemraad 2015 find that there is a regional difference in citizenship rates). There is not as much regional variation in the specific terms used for Mexicans as there is for those born in China with one small exception—American is the term used to describe race for three of the Mexico-born who died outside the South but for none who died within the region. It should also be emphasized that the death records do not include California, a place where Mexicans were racialized in more profound ways than in most of the rest of the country.

Table 5.

Terms Used to Describe Race of Mexican-born, Non-Anglo Names.

	South		Non-South
Term	n	Percent	n	Percent
White	287	52.9	34	54.0
Mexican	231	42.5	26	41.3
Colored	11	2.0	0	.0
Spanish	5	90.0	0	.0
Total N including other terms	543		63

The terms used to describe the race of Puerto Rican decedents were less varied than those used to describe the other groups; only five terms appeared on death certificates, the vast majority of which were Puerto Rican and white (Table 6). The other racial descriptors, Colored, black, and Negro, were not often used. In half of the cases in which one of these terms appeared, the decedent had an Anglo name. No Puerto Rican death records were located in states outside the South.

Table 6.

Terms Used to Describe Race of Puerto Rico–born, Non-Anglo Names.

Term	South
Term	n	Percent
White	88	49.9
Puerto Rican	70	39.6
Colored	11	6.2
Black	5	2.8
Total	177

Predictors of White Identity

Logistic regression analyses of the predictors of white racial classification on death certificates reveal several interesting patterns that vary by national origin group. In each model, the coefficients represent the likelihood of white being written in as the racial classification on death certificates. Two models are run separately for each national origin group. The first includes the three variables that exist for the full sample, while the second includes all remaining variables that are theoretically relevant. A control variable for Anglo surname is included in each model as these decedents are likely to have been born abroad to American parents.

The results of the model for the full sample indicate that the likelihood of those born in China to be termed white as opposed to any other term decreases over time (Table 7). This suggests that the Chinese are forming into a distinct racial group over time. Perhaps as familiarity with the Chinese increases among the native-born, the emergence of Chinese as a distinct race occurs. As was the case with the bivariate analyses, the Chinese-born are much more likely to be termed white in the South, perhaps a reflection of the racial confusion that this group engenders in areas sparsely populated by them.⁶ This is the only effect that remains statistically significant in the full model—age, marriage, and the ethnicity of the informant do not play a significant role in determining white racial assignment. However, direct comparisons between the two models should not be made given the dramatic decrease in sample size between the model for the full sample and the model including all independent variables.

Table 7.

Results of Logit Model Predicting White Identity.

Independent Variables	China		Mexico		Puerto Rico
Independent Variables	Model 1	Model 2	Model 1	Model 2	Model 1	Model2
Date of death	−.02*	−.02	.02*	.13**	.07***	.05*
	(.01)	(.03)	(.01)	(.04)	(.01)	(.03)
Southern state	1.00***	1.52***	.30	1.75+	na	na
	(.26)	(.39)	(.31)	(1.01)
Female	−.08	−.62	.14	.45	.85	.18
	(.77)	(1.11)	(.18)	(.48)	(.64)	(.99)
Informant a co-ethnic		26.43		178.98**		−4.77
		(66.95)		(63.48)		(106.70)
Informant × death date		−.01		−.09**		.00
		(.03)		(.03)		(.06)
Age(ln)		−.29		.63		1.04
		(.59)		(.50)		(.91)
Ever married		.50		−.56		−.49
		(.39)		(.58)		(.74)
N	659	335	606	114	177	73
Pseudo R²	.04	.10	.01	.15	.18	.31

Note: Includes control for Anglo surname.

p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

The trend in racial identification over time is quite different for the Mexican-born. Mexicans are significantly more likely to be racially identified as white than as Mexican—or any other racial term—over time (Table 7). The Census Bureau’s inclusion of Mexican as a race on the 1930 census does not appear to have influenced localized identifications on death records as decedents were less likely to be identified by the national origin term in 1930 and thereafter. Unlike the Chinese case, there is no substantial effect of southern region on white racial identification. Notable among all three groups is the large effect of ethnicity of informant for Mexican-born immigrants; co-ethnics are much more likely to identify decedents as white than as any other race. This likelihood only increases over time. The interaction effect between informant and death date (α = –.09) indicates that while all co-ethnic respondents are more likely to identify decedents as white than are non-co-ethnic respondents, the extent to which co-ethnic respondents make this identification increases over time. Perhaps generated by a sense of the negative stigma of being racially identified as Mexican, Mexican American informants may have identified their relative or friend as white for status gains or to facilitate burial in an Anglo cemetery. As recently as 2016, a cemetery in Texas would not allow non-Anglos to be buried there (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund 2016). However, as with the Chinese, there is a large decline in sample size between Models 1 and 2, so direct comparisons between the two should be made with caution.

As there is no sample of Puerto Ricans from states outside the South, only the date of death and sex are included in Model 1 (Table 7). As with Mexicans, Puerto Ricans are much more likely to be termed white as the century progresses. Puerto Ricans thus seem to be gradually incorporated into the racial classification scheme of the South rather than being identified as their own unique racial group.

While occupations are provided for only a subset of the sample, there are sufficient numbers to compare racial classification by the most common occupations for each group. Table 8 presents the frequency of specific racial classifications for occupations having more than 10 members for each national origin group (only for those with non-Anglo surnames). The most striking relationship between occupation and white identity is the significantly greater likelihood of housewives being identified as white; only Mexican and Puerto Rican laborers were less likely to be identified as white. This suggests that community members associated whiteness and class status for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans but were less likely to for Chinese.

Table 8.

Percent White Identity by Occupation.

	China	Mexico	Puerto Rico
Housewife	41.2*	85.0***	75.0**
Student	20.0
Cook	12.5
Laborer	5.9	36.5***	25.8***
Laundry	10.1
Cigar maker		85.7
Domestic		33.3
Soldier			66.7**
Farmer		62.5
Shopkeeper	37.5
Clerk	20.0
Merchant	16.7
Restaurant	6.2
Seaman
Total	12.6	62.3	35.4
N	501	154	113

Note: Includes occupations with 10 or more decedents.

p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Among the Chinese, one especially notable finding emerges—housewives are more likely to be classified as white than any other occupation. This suggests that women are more likely than men to be white; however, there was no significant influence of sex on the likelihood of being identified as white in the full sample. The greater likelihood of housewives to be identified as white could reflect a combination of their relative high standing in the community and their relatively infrequent interaction with the broader public. Women have been (and continue to be) especially likely to be judged more attractive if they have lighter skin (Glenn 2008). Given the fact that presumably high status merchants are no more likely to be identified as white than other groups, the correlation between attractiveness and skin color for women seems likely.

While there are occupational data for fewer Mexicans than Chinese, there are nonetheless several occupations that have sufficient numbers to compare (Table 8). Particularly striking is the degree to which laborers are more likely to be identified as Mexican rather than white compared to any other occupational group. Housewives and cigar makers are overwhelmingly likely to be identified as white. The identification of housewives as white transcends gender as women in the total sample are no more likely to be identified as white than men. In the case of Mexican racial identification, there are strong suggestions that class status is related to racial identification. The same is true for Puerto Ricans, where housewives and soldiers show dramatically higher rates of being identified as white than do laborers.

Discussion

There is clear variation between white identification and nonwhite identification among all three national origin groups. Identifications vary from individual to individual and follow different patterns across time. While some of these patterns mirror those evident in official government documents such as the U.S. census, others map less neatly onto what we know about how members of these groups were identified during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is especially true for the southern United States, where most attention has (understandably) focused on black/white classifications. Groups born outside the United States mainland were a small but important presence in the South, in many cases exoticized and serving as a source of racial confusion.

The most notable pattern in the findings is that the group in the sample considered as the broad racial group Asian today—Chinese—are increasingly likely to be identified as a national origin group rather than as white, yellow, or Mongoloid. Eleven percent of Chinese in the sample were classified as white, the lowest share of any national origin group. The likelihood of Chinese being classified as white was greatest in Tennessee and Georgia, perhaps prompting clarification from Georgia legislators in 1927 specifying that Chinese were nonwhite rather than white (Bronstein 2013). The racialization of the term Chinese was implemented on a large scale by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which in contrast to earlier laws using racial terms for Chinese immigrants (e.g., Mongoloid), explicitly barred Chinese laborers from entry to the United States (Schlund-Vials, Wong, and Chang 2017).

The opposite pattern was true for the two groups considered Hispanic or Latina/o today. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were more likely to be racially identified by their nation of origin earlier in the twentieth century and more likely to be identified as white by the middle of the century. This follows the trends found in census data in Puerto Rico, in which respondents were more likely to be classified as white over time. However, the shift in classification in the United States lagged behind the identification in the Puerto Rican censuses, where the major shift occurred between 1910 and 1920 (Loveman and Muniz 2007)—a period when the Puerto Rican–born in the United States were more likely to be identified as Puerto Rican on their death certificates than white.

The greater prevalence of the racial identification of Mexican is most likely related to local understandings of the classification of individuals who had immigrated to the United States. Over time, despite enduring enormous discrimination throughout the Southwest (Hattam 2007), Mexicans were typically considered white by friends, family, hospital officials, and funeral home directors. This appears unrelated to the one-time inclusion of Mexican as a racial category on the 1930 U.S. census—fewer Mexican-born individuals were identified as Mexican in the 1930s than in preceding years.

Eventually, an interplay between ethnic organizations and government generated the pan-ethnic category Hispanic (Mora 2014). The Mexican and Puerto Rican cases illustrate the efforts of ethnic organizations to impact both indigenous understandings of race as well as official classifications, as is the case with the more recent establishment of the Hispanic category. Both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were racially identified by their national origin groups with some regularity during the late nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth. It was only after strong efforts by Mexican and Puerto Rican elites and organizations (ambivalent though they might have been) to push for classification as white that this shift occurred, especially in the South (Gross 2007; Loveman and Muniz 2007).

The case of immigrants from China is quite different. The widespread use of the term white to describe a non-negligible number of Chinese corresponds with the greater use of “Other” terms to describe them, terms such as dark or olive. Rather than representing greater acceptance by the native-born white population, early identification of Chinese as white may have reflected a general confusion about how to racially classify these immigrants, especially in the South. As the size of the Chinese population became greater—along with their increasing visibility in the press and the legal realm—their distance from whiteness and their coalescence into a distinctive racial group followed. Whiteness, in this case, was a mark of racial confusion rather than privilege.

Conclusion

This disjuncture between official racial counts of the foreign-born and the racial classifications in death records reflects two phenomena. One is that the “race” question on a death certificate at this time in history was open-ended—there were no decisions to be made about which box to check. Instead, the race invoked on death certificates is reflective of local understandings of race, whether it be family members, co-ethnics, or other community members. Second, someone else is providing the racial identity rather than the individual themselves. A member of the local community must pause, reflect on the best racial descriptor to apply, and articulate the specific term. While there may be some cases in which family members of the decedent tried to select a socially valued racial identity for the individual, there was no significant difference in classifications between co-ethnics (based on ethnicity of name) and non-ethnics for all groups except those born in Mexico. This suggests that the information on death records is capturing a generalized, albeit local, understanding of how foreign-born individuals are racially understood.

The changes in racial classification over time are a reflection of “boundary shifting,” or changing criteria for membership in one category versus another. While previous studies of changing racial identifications across census administrations have had to adjudicate between changing individual identifications and changing group definitions (Loveman and Muniz 2007), the changes in racial classifications on death certificates are independent of individual choice across time. Since the identification of race on the death certificate is not being made by the individual, changes over time are not connected to shifting personal identities but rather to changing understandings on the part of community members.

While death certificates have several advantages over other records of racial classification, they nonetheless provide limited information for determining the reasons one racial identifier is chosen over another. The limited data on occupations do suggest that for Mexicans and Puerto Ricans at least, there is a correlation between socioeconomic status and race, with laborers less likely than housewives or those in the niche occupation of cigar making to be identified as white. As more death records from across the South become digitized, clearer links between status and racial identification can be made. The digitization of additional records will also help to offset the main disadvantage of this data set compared to the census—a small sample size. Nonetheless, this analysis can serve to bridge some of the findings that emerge from historical case studies with “official” racial classifications.

The racial classifications of the foreign-born in the United States during the early twentieth century change across time and space. Collectively, the data on Chinese, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans confirm the well-established finding that race is not a static signifier, especially for those who are not neatly classified according to a black/white binary. However, there are several additional patterns that emerge, reflecting differences in indigenous understandings of race over time as well throughout different regions of the country. For instance, Chinese in the South are more likely to be considered white than Chinese outside the South, who are more likely to be identified with the racial terms yellow or Oriental. All three national origin groups witness their racial classifications change over time—national origin terms become racial terms for the Chinese, while the two Latina/o groups are increasingly identified as white.⁷ These findings suggest that indigenous understandings of race do not track neatly with census classifications, legal cases, or elite discourse. Instead, racial classifications on death certificates suggest that the racial demography of a community as well as its temporal location structure the malleable, socially constructed category of race.

In particular, these results suggest that whiteness may serve different functions among different groups at different points in history. Whiteness can be a symbol of racial confusion, serving as a default or “not black” identity. It can also serve as a privileged category actively striven for by members in a a group in the hopes of transcending discrimination.

Footnotes

Appendix

Databases catalogued at http://familysearch.org used in analysis. Indices based on data collected by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Some databases cover overlapping years for the same states. This is due to the organization of the transcription projects by FamilySearch. Any duplicate records were removed from the database created for this project.

South

Alabama, 1881–1952

Alabama, 1908–1974

Florida, 1877–1939

Georgia, 1914–1927

Georgia, 1928–1939

Louisiana Jefferson Parish, 1850–1875

Louisiana, 1894–1956

North Carolina, 1906–1930

North Carolina, 1931–1956

South Carolina, 1915–1943

South Carolina, 1944–1955

Tennessee, 1914–1955

Texas, 1890–1976

Virginia, 1853–1912

Non-South

Hawaii, 1862–1919

Illinois, Cook County, 1878–1922

Illinois, Cook County, 1878–1939

Minnesota, 1866–1916

Ohio, 1908–1953

Utah, 1904–1956

Washington, 1907–1960

Wisconsin, 1867–1907

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Susannah Leong for research assistance and Rebecca Sandefur for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

Author Biography

Monica McDermott is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, having received her PhD in sociology from Harvard University in 2001. She is the author of Working-class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations (2006), an ethnographic study of interracial interactions and white identity in Atlanta and Boston. She has also conducted participant observation research in new immigrant destinations, focusing especially on the impact of the Immigrant Rights marches of 2006 on the attitudes of native-born whites toward Latina/o immigrants. In addition, she has authored articles on white racial identity and attitudes, race and neighborhood contexts, and the black middle class.

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