Through Argentine Supreme Court cases, this article focuses on legal constructs of women's citizenship and identity in Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the Supreme Court consistently denied having done so, its jurisprudence created dependent citizenship for married Argentine women, conflating a wife's identity with that of her spouse in both domicile and nationality cases. Using concepts of consent, knowledge, and obligation found in liberal political theory, judges and legal scholars justified a married woman's dependent citizenship as the reasonable consequence of her own independent choice. Yet the law--not a woman's choice--expatriated her. The Supreme Court's conception of a unified marital identity subsumed a married woman's nationality under her husband's citizenship and reinforced her legal subordination to him. She was, at the same moment, both Argentine and not Argentine, depending on the particular issue at hand and her husband's national status.

On a hopeful September day in 1912, Gim Pon, a twenty-five year old Chinese man from Canton, boarded the steamship Siberia in Hong Kong harbor to sail west across the Pacific. The Siberia docked briefly in San Francisco, but Gim Pon's destination, and that of seven fellow Chinese travelers, was not California but the northern Mexican state of Sonora. In the early twentieth century, thousands of men like Gim Pon immigrated to Mexico, boosting the Chinese population there from slightly over 1,000 in 1895 to more than 24,000 in the mid-1920s. Sonora, which hugs Arizona at the United States/Mexico border, was a popular destination, and hosted the largest Chinese population of any Mexican state through the 1920s. Once in Sonora, Gim Pon adapted to life in Mexico: he changed his name to Francisco Gim, learned Spanish, and became naturalized as a Mexican citizen on February 27, 1920. Most importantly, he formed a family with Julia Delgado.

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Sonoran women who organized anti-Chinese auxiliaries in the immediate postrevolutionary years participated in Mexican women's movement into the public sphere from a more constrained role in the private spaces of home and church. While a particular ideal of womanhood imposed on women a duty to defend country, race, and gender—increasingly in the public sphere—the lack of suffrage constrained women's political participation. At least two Sonoran women, María de Jesús Váldez and Emélida Carrillo, imagined the vote for women, a vision in which women's suffrage depended on and was instrumental to racial hierarchy and discrimination against Chinese. As leaders of anti-Chinese committees, chineras, pelonas, voters in newspaper contests, and Independence Day Queens, Sonoran women acted both within and against evolving notions of ideal Mexican womanhood, an ideal that was gendered, racialized, and classist. Women's anti-Chinese activism in Sonora complicates the story of women's enfranchisement in Sonora.