Heavenly Bodies, Earthly Remains: Chinese El Pasoans, Funerals, and the Borderlands Archive, 1882-1917

• In Event: The Body Adrift: Borders, Race, and Resistance from the Rio Grande to the Pacific

Abstract

How do we make for tangible life between the violent records of borderlands archives, these apparatuses of knowledge formed by colonial plunder, biopolitical methods of bodily control, and capitalist transformations of land into property? Centering Chinese epistemologies of celestial belonging through an analysis of their highly public funeral processions in late 19th and early 20th century El Paso, Texas, this essay argues that borderlands Chinese communities flexed their autonomy by organizing collective identity around something much more expansive than their tenures laboring on the railroad. El Paso is home to the oldest surviving Chinese cemetery in the state of Texas, a product of the city’s extensive fraternal networks that strove to declare their worldly permanence and envision a unique vision of belonging beyond the narrow lens of nationhood and citizenship. Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese migration continued across the US-Mexico border. The marking of the Chinese migrant bodies was foundational to the development of our “modern” border technologies–including passports, surveillance systems, border patrol, detention centers, and the contemporary Chinese American subject itself. This essay provides a reading of the emergent necropolitical state along the US-Mexico border through the ontologies of Chinese settlers and migrants. Rather than “rescue” the silent Chinese voice from history, I read along the archival grain, per Ann Laura Stoler, to reveal the contradictions of capital and the liberal state, intervening in the narration of Chinese American histories.

Author

• Rivers Liu, University of Texas at Austin