Mindful Masquerades: Que(e)rying Japanese Immigrant Dress in Turn-of-the-Century San Francisco

Abstract

In 1900oo an actor sporting a hat and suit appeared on stage at the California Theater near San Francisco's Union Square. Singing Rag Time Mixes My Brain, the performer, who might have appeared to be a man, actually was a woman named Mary Marble. While she sang about nonsensical slang that fuddled the brain, her presence as a woman in man-drag likely signaled an additional mix[ing] of the brain. Gender impersonators such as Marble particularly delighted theatergoers at the turn of the century.' Not far from the applause of the California Theater, recent immigrants from Japan gathered for a group photograph in Golden Gate Park. Nearly all of the thirtysix men wore Western-style outfits, three-piece ensembles of white collared shirts, buttoned vests, and matching blazers. Some had topped their outfits with ties or tailored hats. The event marked an important moment for these neatly dressed men.2 Though separated by only a few miles, Mary Marble and the young immigrant men appeared worlds apartone of performance and recreation and the other of community building in a harshly anti-Asian city. As much as the two realities appeared to exist on separate planes, they in fact shared one terrain, for they both enacted mindful masquerades. As performers beguiled audiences in their gender transformations, Japanese immigrants deliberately donned Western dress in hopes of transforming themselves into Americans. Together, they revealed coexisting ideologies of passing and privilege that grew complicated along the axes of gender and race. By taking on deliberate presentations, both groups manipulated their identities visually to mask a perhaps physically unchangeable part of themselves. Gender illusionists who successfully passed as a different gender made gains at the box office. Japanese immigrants who wore Western dress less successfully transformed their race, despite their American appearance. Ironically, local

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