Alien Land Law

While heading south toward the Mojave National Preserve, my friends and I noticed a strange glow crossing the sky and joked that it must be a spacecraft coming to pick us up. Aliens, we called ourselves. The four of us—from the Philippines, Singapore, Brazil, and China—were the only non-U.S. members of this field research trip, among seventeen students and faculty from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The legal term “alien” first came to me in social security registration paperwork. Before long, it became a code word among my immigrant friends. Words hold power. This word, which constantly reminds us that we live here on temporary, restricted terms, becomes something different when we claim it as part of our identity. Each time we call ourselves “aliens,” we gain some control over who we are.
My excitement of visiting the desert was tempered by unease over an expected art project. Before registering for this trip, Mojave, to me, was mainly a computer operating operation system—a flat, template desktop image. Although I read about the area's history, including the stories of the Mohave tribe, before our departure, I knew those materials would not become my “handy tools” for instant art-making. I was wary of the artist-as-tourist mindset, yet also concerned that I might end up as the silent Asian artist in the group. How does one even begin to interpret a place that feels so foreign?
Our field research team arrived at the Preserve at night, just a day after a full moon. The Preserve was bathed in bright, pure white light, accentuated by the eerie red glow of our vans' tail-lights. A water tank and two portable toilets stood at the end of the campsite, backed by rock hills, looking almost like a space station.



Daytime in the desert was designated for hiking, petrograph hunts, and delicate photography practices. At night, without proper equipment for night photography, I stopped trying to capture clear shots and began experimenting with my iPhone 13 camera. With the long exposure algorithm, rather extraterrestrial visual effects emerged: landscapes in motion, dunes speeding by, blurred visitors, ghostly light trails, and the glow of Las Vegas in the distance. As I looked at these images, I felt a strange sense of connection with the landscape—a bond forged through alienation.
On the way back to Santa Cruz, we stopped at the National Chavez Center, where we saw an exhibition about Cesar Chavez's long fight for immigrant labor and civil rights. A brief mention of the “Alien Land Law” caught my attention. Passed in 1913, The California Alien Land Law “prevented Asian immigrant farmers from owning land in California.” For a moment, the phrase “Alien Land Law” drifted my mind to images of the Mojave's alien landscapes. It was only later that I read about the broader history of “alien” as a legal term beyond 1913 and the territory of California.





On May 3, 1913, California enacted the Alien Land Law, barring Asian immigrants from owning land. California tightened the law further in 1920 and 2923, barring the leasing of land and land ownership by American-born children of Asian immigrant parents or by corporations controlled by Asian immigrants. These laws were supported by the California press, as well as the Hollywood Association, Japanese and Korean (later Asiatic) Exclusion League and the Anti-Jap Laundry League (both founded by labor unions). Combined, these groups claimed tens of thousands of members.
Though especially active in California, animosity for Asian immigrants operated on the national level too. In May 1912, President Woodrow Wilson wrote to a California backer: “In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration I stand for the national policy of exclusion (or restricted immigration)... We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race... Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve, and surely we have had our lesson.”
California did not stand alone. Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming all enacted discriminatory laws restricting Asians' rights to hold land in America. In 1920, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed various versions of the discriminatory land laws — and upheld every single one. Most of these discriminatory state laws remained in place until the 1950's and some even longer. Kansas and New Mexico did not repeal their provisions until 2002 and 2006, respectively. Florida's state constitution contained an alien land law provision until 2018, when voters passed a ballot measure to repeal it.
Excerpted from the Equal Justice Initiative's A History of Racial Injustice.https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/may/3
