New Mexico’s Alien Land Law

In 2006, a measure to annul section 22 of Article II of the New Mexico state constitution was brought before voters. The amendment had held, since 1921, that “aliens” who were considered ineligible for U.S. citizenship could not buy or own land in New Mexico¹. While the wording of the amendment did not mention any particular group, it was written and practiced with the targeting of the state’s Japanese population in mind. The amendment was repealed by the 2006 vote, but it remains as a relic of anti-Japanese sentiment in New Mexico and reveals much about the implicit and explicit racialization of citizenship and what it means to be considered a citizen of New Mexico and the United States.

1. Curry, Charles F. Alien Land Laws and Alien Rights (U.S. Government Printing Office:1921), pg. 68. ↩

Agriculture, economy and “immorality”

The anti-Japanese thought that led to the Alien Land Law in New Mexico seems to have started, or at least first gained traction, in Doña Ana County in Southern New Mexico. According to scholar Jamie Bronstein, “the impetus to exclude Japanese from property ownership in New Mexico originated… among Anglo American truck farmers who resented having to compete with a handful of successful Japanese farmers”¹. Economic competition had begun to bear down on agriculturalists in the area, and visibly foreign Japanese immigrants were a convenient scapegoat.

This sentiment is prevalent in local newspapers the years following up to the state constitutional amendment: one November 1919 article in the Las Cruces Sun News stated that the Japanese are “naturally opposed to the American… in color and… in thought”². Another Las Cruces article published a month earlier pointed out the positive traits of the local Japanese population, but then painted those traits as a threat to the region in order to object to the immigrants’ settlement: if Japanese agriculturalists were diligent in their work, they were simultaneously overly competitive and conniving; if the local Japanese valued family and common community, they also valued family to the point of exclusion³.

These ideas and accusations illustrated an unforgiving picture of Japanese immigrants that was taken up throughout New Mexico before culminating in the 1921 amendment to the state constitution.

This sentiment, exemplified in the above quote from the Las Cruces Sun News, soon spread from Doña Ana County to the rest of the state; the end result was proposals and discussions of restricting Japanese immigrant access to economic success based on ideas of immorality and inherent un-American qualities⁴. Then, in 1921, New Mexican voters approved section 22 of Article II.

How Japanese farmers came to New Mexico

Japanese migrants first came to New Mexico in small numbers, with only about 250 Japanese in New Mexico by 1920 according to scholar Masakazu Iwata; however, their presence in local agriculture quickly became significant¹. In the Las Cruces area, “the Issei entered farming… purchased land and operated on an extensive scale”, building livelihoods within communities rather than remaining on the margins². They brought with them farming knowledge and practices that stood out from white American farmers, which resulted in Japanese migrants introducing new vegetables to the region and successfully controlling their crop rotation and production; their developed knowledge and adaptability granted them economic success and stability³.

When the Alien Land Law was written into New Mexico state constitution, the lives of many Japanese agriculturalists changed: it suddenly became much more difficult to find economic success, even more so than when Japanese migrants were facing discriminatory sentiment from much of the public.

1. Iwata, Masakazu. Planted in Good Soil: A History of the Issei in the United States Agriculture (P. Lang:1992), pg 702. ↩

2. Iwata, Masakazu. Planted in Good Soil: A History of the Issei in the United States Agriculture (P. Lang:1992), pg 703. ↩

3. Iwata, Masakazu. Planted in Good Soil: A History of the Issei in the United States Agriculture (P. Lang:1992), pg 705. ↩

New Mexican values in the early 1900s and their consequences

By 1921, New Mexico had only been recognized as a U.S. state for 9 years. Before and after it was recognized as a state, an enduring wish for many of the white Americans settling there was to “establish the territory and state as recognizably American,” according to Bronstein¹. This idea of visibility attached to reputation deeply informed the values and actions of New Mexicans: any practice and any person that was considered non-American (read: non-white) was at best inscrutable and at worst malignant. New Mexico also looked to other states to inform their own decisions: California law at the time was explicitly anti-Asian, so New Mexicans sought to emulate what they saw as a righteous American initiative: New Mexican newspapers reported on anti-Asian California law, such as an article in the Mesilla Valley Democrat that stated that California’s Alien Land Act was “a matter of much importance to New Mexico in particular”².

This resulted in a culture of racial exclusion, where Japanese migrants, seen as perpetual foreigners with immoral, un-American ways, “resided in the land but at the same time were permanently excluded from its social fabric”³.

1. Bronstein, Jamie. Sowing Discontent: The 1921 Alien Land Act in New Mexico (Pacific Historical Review:2013), pg 364. ↩

2. The Mesilla Valley Democrat. Alien Land Act (The Mesilla Valley Democrat:1887), pg 1. ↩

3. Bronstein, Jamie. Sowing Discontent: The 1921 Alien Land Act in New Mexico (Pacific Historical Review:2013), pg 364. ↩

Japanese American Response

Many families were forced to adapt and work around this new law, including the Nakayama family, who moved to Doña Ana County in 1918. They rented farmland, working while saving to purchase their own. However, by the time they had enough money in 1928, the amendment prohibiting the purchase of land by persons ineligible for citizenship had already been in place for seven years. The Nakayamas decided to purchase the land in their then-twelve-year-old-son, Carl’s, name. He reflects on this difficulty in the above quote⁵. In this way, the dream of owning a farm was “partially realized”⁶.

The response to the law and the prejudice surrounding it was also met with protest from Japanese Americans. One Japanese American farmer, Ben Shimada, responded publicly to the accusations about Japanese values and their detriment to American society: he said that it was his “duty to answer and refute all the charges… lest the public may be misled”⁷. This resilience continued from the 1910s to the wartime of the 1940s: the Nakayama farm was boycotted due to state-backed suspicion and mistreatment of Japanese Americans. Families had to continuously insist that “[their] consciences [were] clear… [they] haven’t done anything to hurt [their] government, and [they] love [their] country as much as anybody” ⁸.

The meaning of citizenship and its lasting impact

These events of discrimination and prejudiced ideas are not unique to New Mexico or even the southwest. The way that the concept of visible American-ness has been built and framed, both socially and legally, puts on display the foundation of U.S. citizenship that is heavily influenced by and entrenched in hierarchies of race and class. The 1921 amendment of the New Mexico constitution is a reflection of both New Mexican and widely American views of citizenship and belonging that linger to this day, and it acts as a clear example of the fluidity that can be applied when determining who is the “other.”

The amendment reinforced a definition of citizenship that used whiteness and property ownership as markers of legitimacy and belonging. By targeting “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” a category that excluded many Asian immigrants due to federal laws that simply did not allow for them to become citizens, it tied the right to own land and participate fully in the economy to racialized eligibility for citizenship. These ideas did not emerge in isolation: they were built upon earlier narratives that framed Japanese immigrants, and more widely Asian immigrants, as unassimilable and fundamentally un-American. This labeling paved the way for broader acceptance of discriminatory policies, making exclusion appear not only justified but necessary to protect American national identity.

By World War II, these ideas had already been normalized, allowing for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans to be rationalized under the guise of security. The same logic that had allowed for restricted land ownership now expanded into more extreme forms of state control.

The pervasiveness of these ideas was further exemplified in 2002, when an attempt was made by Asian American activists to repeal the amendment⁹. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, public anxieties and rhetoric shifted toward new perceived threats, and the figure of the “other” was redefined once again, this time targeting Muslim and Middle Eastern communities. The failure of this first repeal shows how flexible yet enduring these boundaries of belonging can be; even when the original targets of exclusion have changed, the underlying structure that defines citizenship through race, perceived difference and perceived loyalty remains the same. In this way, the 1921 amendment is not simply a relic of the past but is part of an ongoing pattern in the United States in which legal and social structures continuously redraw the lines of inclusion and exclusion in response to shifting fears and prejudice, while maintaining the same base hierarchies that value whiteness and wealth above all.

Further exploration of how the citizenship of immigrants in the United States is often a process that is constantly influenced by these hierarchies can be found in Aihwa Ong’s article Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making (1996) in the journal Current Anthropology. This article brings this context to immigrant history primarily post-World War II.