Forbidden Love: Race, Citizenship and The American Family

Dr. Rose Cuison-Villazor's research on Forbidden Love highlights the ways that military, immigration, and other federal officials restricted the ability of Japanese women and American men to marry during the U.S. government’s occupation of Japan (1945 to 1952). In so doing, Forbidden Love reveals the federal government’s central role, alongside state actors, in obstructing interracial marriages and reinforcing a racial caste system in the United States. Using a complex web of immigration laws, military policies, and citizenship rules, the federal government actively policed the borders of the heart—and what it meant to be a family, a citizen, and an American.

Rose Cuison-Villazor is Professor of Law and Chancellor's Social Justice Scholar and Director, Rutgers Center for Immigrant Justice, Rutgers Law School.

Sponsored by the Immigration History Research Center, The Binger Center for New Americans, the History Department and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota.