“In Due Time”: Narratives of Race and Place in the Western United States

Abstract

This chapter historicizes discussion of race relations in the West, to undermine the salience of biracial and bi-regional narratives so prevalent in the scholarly literature and popular imagination. It outlines the ways in which race has been constructed in the West and reveals a series of transformations that break into several larger historical periods. The 1882 Chinese exclusion act, which went through a series of renewals and revisions until its 1904 revision, which extended exclusion indefinitely, represented what is often called the first immigration restriction based on race. During the economic slump of mid-1880s, the series of violent race riots against Chinese throughout the West gave notice that legal bans on immigration were too limited for many whites. In granting white women the vote, the male political elite of the territory believed that white women would surely wish to protect themselves from ravages of “race” and their votes would give democrats the balance of power and end radical Republican influences.