In this molten social landscape, people were transgressing both moral and spatial boundaries, living where they were said not to be “at home,” where fair-skinned adults and children “did not belong.” Below the purview of government surveillance and its documentary practices—birth certificates, housing permits, and legal declarations of male paternity— had emerged a muddled social space occupied by men and women with “light hair,” and by “blue-eyed” children who were vagrants or beggars, living homeless or in hovels on the outskirts of European neighborhoods or in native compounds.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 856