Contemporary liberal philosophers have spent considerable time defending a public reason liberal politics in which citizens publicly deliberate about laws and policies but bracket their private moral, philosophical, and religious worldviews when doing so. Instead of their parochial worldviews, citizens in the public forum are to deliberate about laws and policies using public reason - principles, values, and inquiry guidelines that all citizens can accept as free and equal.

The current literature, however, makes oversimplifications in two areas, causing it to neglect serious obstacles facing a public reason liberal politics. First, the literature oversimplifies the idea of a worldview, causing it to underplay the epistemic obstacles that face citizens in setting aside their parochial worldviews in politics. Second, the literature oversimplifies the elements that go into arriving at a political solution, causing it to overlook the inability of public reason to arrive at and publicly justify answers to some political questions.

This dissertation avoids these oversimplifications and, subsequently, offers a refined version of a public reason liberal politics that addresses the obstacles that these oversimplifications originally masked. First, in light of a more detailed understanding of a worldview, a public reason liberal politics must work into its procedures formal segments in which participants exchange and attend to worldviews. Second, in light of a more detailed understanding of the elements that go into reasoning to a political solution, a public reason liberal politics must work into its theoretical structure a convergence conception of public justification that can inform deliberative processes capable of reaching publicly justified political outcomes when public reason is incomplete.

Founded at the turn of the twentieth century, the irrigated colony at Mexicali, Baja California was established by Chinese farmers and merchants as a cotton-growing enclave. This dissertation recuperates the marginalized history of this community's development and uncovers why this historical narrative has been erased. I use a diverse array of U.S. and Mexican archival sources to examine the frontiers of U.S. imperialism, explore Mexican racial formations, and trace changes to a trans-national Chinese community.

Through different types of historical evidence I make four arguments. First, that a trans-Pacific conceptual framework helps to better understand the role that Chinese communities played in the formation of the U.S.-Mexico border. I details how the conquest of Mexico and imperial aggression in East Asia allowed the U.S. to usurp the colonial circuits of the trans-Pacific Spanish Galleon trade. Through the simultaneous assault in Asia and Mexico the Pacific became crossed with pathways that encouraged the Chinese to settle in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Second, that migrating Chinese merchants and farmers were central to the development of Mexicali. I illustrate how their expertise in China's cotton industry prepared them well to turn the desert border region into an irrigated colony. I trace their transnational geographies and social networks of this diasporic Chinese community in order to show how Mexicali became a Chinese place. Third, I contend that the racial boundaries of post-Revolutionary Mexican nationalism considered the Chinese community in Mexicali an immanent threat. I describe how definitions of what the one-time president, Abelardo Rodriguez, called "genuine Mexican colonization" racially segregated the economic development and political integration of Baja California. Lastly, I demonstrate how a series of racial programs of Mexicanización sought to undermine the Chinese community and expunge them from historical narratives of the region. Baja California historiography, Mexicali's public spaces, and a museum illustrate different modes of erasure and reconfiguration in narratives about the history of Mexicali's Chinese community.

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