Bureaucratic Intimacy: Religious Formation and the Alien Land Law Contracts of Migrant Muslim Farmers in early 20th century California

After the passage of the Alien Land Law of 1913 in California, the well known statute excluding Asians from land ownership as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” South Asian migrant farmers found a variety of contractual loopholes to keep their lands and livelihoods. While scholars have written many social histories of these creative workarounds, this paper attempts to understand how they shaped Asian American religion -- specifically, Asian American Islam. Using archival materials, I examine how this period’s land lease contracts between South Asian migrants, white lawyers, and white business people produced bureaucratic intimacies that were normatively rich and socially complex, shaping these individuals’ deeply personal modes of relating to land, ownership, and the state. The paper will show that, by giving early South Asian Muslim migrants an American secular vocabulary of economics, these legal encounters were crucial in their story of immigrant religious formation.