Heterosovereign Power and Buried Life: American Jurisprudence and Filipino Punishment in the 1933 Cecelia Navarro Murder Trial

From the late spring to the midsummer of 1933, the grisly murder of Cecelia Navarro, a young woman buried alive by fellow Filipino Americans on the charge of infidelity, captured headlines all over Northern California. Peppered with shocking details of torture in a “Filipino cult,” readers became transfixed on the strangeness of the Navarro murder trials, and the crises of the Filipino community that came to light: the abduction of Filipina women by Filipino men; punitive nationalist organizations; and secret trials beneath the purview of the local courts. This paper reconstructs the Navarro murder trials via the multiply vexed experiences of Filipina migrant women during the Great Depression, and the shifting discourses around Philippine sovereignty and migration exclusion that led to the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act. I argue that Filipino migration exclusion and Philippine independence emerged out of local anxieties around migrant women’s politics that coalesced as legal and extralegal anti-Asian racism in the American West. While these debates between American and Filipino jurisprudence took place along the concomitant exclusion and legal racialization of Filipino migrants, they were undergirded by two competing forms of reproductive futures: the violent uprisings for a white settler California; and the integrity of the heteropatriarchal Filipino family in a diaspora living and working on stolen land. I term this racial-sexual nexus of imperial and subimperial power “heterosovereignty”: the diasporic creation of intramural political regimes through the imposition of heteropatriarchal family structures and reproductive futures via multiscalar (interpersonal, organizational, extra/legal) forms of sexual violence and discipline.