Void for Vagueness

When a "white" woman and a "Negro" man successfully sued to marry in a landmark 1948 case called Perez v. Sharp, they made California the �rst state to overturn a miscegenation statute. But despite how most historians read Perez, this victory did not center on the Fourteenth Amendment. Rather, it hinged on the liminality of the woman in question-whose background was Mexican American. Although Andrea P�rez's in-between status was not discussed explicitly in the ruling opinion, it is essential to the opinion's logic. This article frames Perez within the larger history of P�rez's life and of Mexicans' racialization in California, arguing that the state's miscegenation law collapsed as early as it did because by 1948 the bureaucracy that sustained it could not manage the problem of the hybrid.