What happened to Stockton’s first Asian enclaves?

In the 20th century, downtown Stockton established itself as a cultural and commercial hub for Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley. But, over decades, misguided and racially biased projects deliberately destroyed this ethnically diverse and inclusive urban core.

Only recently have the city and state started to look into remedying the harm they did to the people of color who lived and worked in that five-by-five block of Stockton and made it home. This work, part of a larger national racial reckoning, includes exploring paths toward restorative justice in Stockton, such as a recent project by Caltrans, the state transportation agency behind the Crosstown Freeway, or State Route 4, which tore through the heart of downtown Stockton’s Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Manila neighborhoods in the 1960s and ’70s.

Asian immigrants first arrived in Stockton when it was a jumping-off point for the Gold Rush. Later, as the area established itself as a shipping and food processing hub for the Central Valley’s growing agricultural mega-economy, they came as farmworkers and low-wage laborers, along with their families. The work fueling the “nation’s breadbasket” was brutal and backbreaking, the type of employment that many whites refused to do. Alongside Latinos, Asians became a significant portion of this labor force by the early 1900s, building levees, farming the land, harvesting crops, and canning produce.

As the Asian population in Stockton grew, residents put down more permanent roots. Chinatown came first, in the 19th century, with several hundred residents building restaurants, hardware stores, grocery stores, and gambling houses; Japantown followed, boasting 150 businesses at its peak in the 1930s; and Little Manila came last, establishing a distinctive community all its own by the early 20th century with dance halls, barbershops, and grocery stores.

Each enclave was vibrant and distinct, but intersected with the others as well, creating a five-by-five block neighborhood flush with life, and filled with ethnic organizations, religious institutions, and communal gathering spaces. These communities forged a strong sense of home and belonging in Stockton. However, racial segregation and government policies created substandard living conditions. Discriminatory redlining laws prevented Asians from buying property in surrounding white neighborhoods, which meant they had to crowd into a tiny area. With few economic opportunities available to them, Stockton’s Asian population had to work low-wage jobs, and could often only afford to live in crowded low-cost boarding houses or poorly maintained hotels.

Despite the racial disparities they faced, community members experienced the enclaves as a vital home. Reflecting on Little Manila in the 1950s, one Filipina resident told us: “I never was fearful ever, of going down around the El Dorado Street area and its vicinity, because that, to me, was like the only place where I saw so many Filipinos, and it was like going home, you know, for a lot of Filipinos because that’s where they met long lost friends.”

But by the mid-20th century, people who did not live downtown considered the Asian enclaves to be “undesirable slums” that were contributing to what seemed to be a declining central business district. Meanwhile, white households and businesses left Stockton for the suburbs. Local officials could have invested in preserving and strengthening existing neighborhoods to prevent people from moving away. But it was easier and more convenient to scapegoat their Asian neighbors downtown, already weakened by decades of discrimination.

In 1956, under the banner of progress, the city of Stockton formed the West End Redevelopment Project. With a stated intention to make “a community of which its citizens can be proud, rather than apologetic,” it set out to “revitalize” downtown by clearing out the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino enclaves, and replacing them with mainstream retailers.

It was around this time, too, that the Division of Highways, the state transportation agency, now known as Caltrans, was selecting a route for the proposed Crosstown Freeway—part of an unprecedented infrastructure development project to modernize the Golden State’s roadways.

A sign of Chinatown in downtown Stockton. Courtesy of Wayne Hsieh/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

The Crosstown Freeway would link Interstate 5 and Route 99, facilitating the movement of trucks between the two highways, and would connect the suburbs to downtown. The Division of Highways considered a number of options for the freeway’s placement, including one route through white neighborhoods north of downtown Stockton. But in the end, as in so many places around the state and country, the agency chose the path through communities of color, dooming the three Asian enclaves.

According to the Division of Highways’ 1958 Master Plan Study, the agency picked the route through the ethnic enclaves to help expedite the West End Redevelopment Project’s plans to raze Stockton’s “slums” in favor of mainstream commercial development. The choice was also politically expedient; the agency knew Asian American residents lacked the knowledge, expertise, and political power to fight city hall, state agencies, and federal funders to stop the “progress” that would disproportionately impact their communities.

The one-two punch of redevelopment and the building of the Crosstown Freeway destroyed hundreds of homes, and displaced over a thousand people living in the Asian enclaves. Such losses were not just physical. Losing Little Manila, Chinatown, and Japantown meant an end for community—shuttering gathering places such as stores, cultural centers, and social clubs that had drawn people together from throughout the region.

Residents of Stockton’s Asian enclaves had no choice but to disperse, throughout San Joaquin County and beyond. Some fought to rebuild what they had lost downtown, but it was an uphill battle. Japanese Americans raised money to relocate the Buddhist Church of Stockton, for instance, but moving it away from its original central downtown location severed its historical and spiritual ties to Japantown. The Chinese community built the Lee Center in 1970 on Washington and El Dorado Streets, hoping to create a symbol of Chinese presence in Stockton and to replace low-income housing and commercial space that had been destroyed by the freeway. But financial difficulties forced it to close after only a few years of operation. The Filipino community had somewhat more success, building the Filipino Center in 1972 to restore lost housing and commercial space, and banded together to help those most impacted by the freeway, like the manongs, elderly male farm laborers who’d made Little Manila their home.

Today, Asian organizations in Stockton such as Little Manila Rising and the Chinese Benevolent Association still fight to tell their history, and rebuild the essence of what was lost. Amid recent demands for racial justice throughout the nation, government agencies—including Caltrans—are also talking about remedying past harms. Caltrans has proposed a Stockton Downtown Transformation Project to revitalize Asian enclaves in Stockton that the Crosstown Freeway upended. In a big step, the agency is acknowledging its role in bisecting communities north and south of the freeway.

In the past, officials excluded the Asian community from having a meaningful voice and role in government plans. This time around, Caltrans promises to “collaborate with the downtown communities such as… Little Manila Rising” to provide “improvements that will help restore the once vibrant cultural identity and community.”

It’s too early to know if such rhetoric will prove to be tokenism or materialize as real restorative justice. Seeking redress will take grassroots efforts by community groups and businesses—and the cooperation of the same state agencies that tore through these neighborhoods in the first place.

The post What Happened to Stockton’s First Asian Enclaves? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s hard to tell a city’s story. In many cities, there’s a tension between pointing with pride and bowing in shame.

Los Angeles—where I have lived and worked for most of my life, including my years as an elected official—has long preferred the civic booster side of its identity, promoting itself as a city of the future. But L.A. also struggles to face the dark, violent, and racist episodes in its past.

One of the bloodiest nights in Los Angeles history took place 150 years ago, on October 24, 1871, when at least 18 Chinese (about 10 percent of L.A.’s Chinese population at the time) were slaughtered by an angry mob of Angelenos. Why does almost no one know about it today? Why didn’t I, the first Asian American on the L.A. City Council, know this history until less than a decade ago?

Los Angeles was an unremarkable Far West town of about 5,700 residents in 1871, overshadowed by its larger and more sophisticated neighbor to the north—the Gold Rush center of San Francisco. Yet despite its small population, L.A. already had a mix of ethnic and cultural origins and influences, with Spanish and Mexican settlers, newer arrivals of European origin including French, Germans, Italians, and Irish, some African Americans, and Indigenous peoples who preceded everyone else.

In 1871, L.A. had about 172 Chinese residents, mostly single men who fled famine and social disorder in southern China in hopes of making money in mining and railroad construction jobs. The wages earned by Chinese workers—doing arduous, extremely dangerous jobs—tended to be much lower than the pay for white workers. After the mining jobs disappeared and the transcontinental railroad line was completed in 1869, Chinese workers fanned out across the West. Some ended up in Los Angeles, taking low-paying jobs as cooks, vegetable peddlers, laundrymen, or houseboys. Other Angelenos looked down on the Chinese, who were scapegoated for problems ranging from sanitation to low wages.

L.A. was considered the most lawless town west of Santa Fe. And Calle de los Negros, a one-block-long alley just north of present-day Civic Center, near Olvera Street and Union Station, was the worst part of one of the worst towns in the West. Amidst the bars, gambling and opium dens, and brothels of Calle de los Negros were the homes and businesses of L.A.’s Chinese pioneers.

In the late afternoon of October 24, 1871, a gunfight broke out on Calle de los Negros between two gunmen from rival Chinese factions, injuring a police officer and a white rancher and former bar owner. The rancher, Robert Thompson, died of his wounds. As word of the shootings and the fatality spread across the town, about 500 vigilantes converged on Calle de los Negros to seek revenge.

By the end of the night, at least 15 Chinese were hanged and three Chinese were shot to death. Chinese-owned businesses were vandalized and looted, resulting in estimated losses of $40,000 (around $1 million in 2020 dollars). Eight rioters were found guilty of manslaughter, but all the convictions were later overturned.

Some Chinese refused to go down quietly. Business owner Wing Chung demanded that the City Council pay $6,530.34 in restitution for his losses on the night of the massacre. After the City Council failed to respond, he sued the city. The next year, after the City Council levied a new license tax, 14 out of 15 Chinese laundrymen refused to pay.

A few years later, the buildings around Calle de los Negros were demolished and the Calle obliterated—entirely wiped off the map. Many of the Chinese were uprooted, resettling on the other side of Alameda Street, where the community thrived for five decades until the construction of Union Station forced more relocations in the 1930s.

While little is known about the lives of most of the massacre victims beyond their names and occupations, researchers have uncovered the story of Chee Long Tong, a Chinese doctor who treated both Chinese and non-Chinese patients and was probably one of the best-known Chinese in Los Angeles. Like all of the other lynching victims, Dr. Tong had no connection to the gunfight that triggered the massacre. But some details of his life are known, such as the location of his home and examination room (just off Calle de los Negros), his ownership of an employment brokerage business that placed Chinese in local jobs, the fact that he had a wife, and his tragic attempts to persuade the vigilantes to spare his life.

The Los Angeles massacre was a harbinger of other horrific anti-Chinese incidents in California and across the western states in the 1870s and 1880s. At least 200 California communities, including Fresno, Pasadena, and Riverside, carried out forced expulsions of the Chinese. One of the most shameful took place in 1885 in Tacoma, Washington, when a large mob forced 150–200 local Chinese to march eight miles through heavy rain to take a train out of town. Afterward, the mob torched Tacoma’s Chinatown, leaving no physical traces behind. That same year, the single most brutal anti-Chinese attack in U.S. history was triggered by white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, who were angry about the willingness of Chinese miners to work for lower pay. The white miners killed at least 28 Chinese, wounded 15, and subsequently looted and burned all 79 houses in Rock Springs’ Chinatown.

While Los Angeles never witnessed another massacre like the 1871 attack on the Chinese, the city’s history has been marked by eruptions of racial violence. These tend to fade from our collective memory. Many current Angelenos know something about the violence that started in South Central Los Angeles following the verdict in the Rodney King beating case in 1992, but recollections of the 1965 Watts riots are less distinct. And our memories of the 1943 Zoot Suit riots, when white sailors, soldiers, and marines attacked Mexican American and African Americans in East L.A., have faded even further.

But almost no one has ever heard of the massacre of the Chinese in 1871, even in Los Angeles—despite the fact that it remains the largest massacre of Chinese in California history and the largest mass killing of any kind in Los Angeles history.

I’m one of the Angelenos who was born and raised in L.A. and never heard a word about the 1871 massacre. My parents and grandparents were active in L.A.’s Chinatown for many years, but never said anything to my sisters and me about the history of Chinese being lynched by an angry L.A. mob. The massacre wasn’t taught in schools or mentioned in the media or history books.

L.A.’s barbaric treatment of the Chinese in 1871 was met not with official condemnations or apologies, but with muffled silence. And then forgetting. To the extent that they knew about 1871, older generations of Asian Americans may have chosen not to dwell on negative stories from the past.

The first time I ever heard about the 1871 massacre was in 2012, when I was asked to write a review of The Chinatown War by Scott Zesch, the definitive account of the tragedy. Writing the book review etched the incident into my adult consciousness. But I didn’t feel a sense of urgency until current events connected the dots between the past and the present.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Chinese and other Asian Americans have begun to feel as if they are walking around with targets on their backs. The escalation of epithets like “China virus,” and the sporadic physical and verbal harassment of women and senior citizens, seemed to have reached a peak with the shootings of six women of Asian descent in Atlanta in March 2021.

Just a few weeks later, in April 2021, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti released a far-sighted report reviewing the city of Los Angeles’ track record recognizing both the tragic and the triumphant episodes of local history. One of the report’s recommendations called for redressing the lack of public commemoration of the 1871 massacre of the Chinese.

I was one of many Asian Americans who instinctively saw the connection between the 1871 vigilante killings and, in 2021, the continuation of attacks on Asian Americans, which rose 76 percent in L.A. County over the past 12 months alone. We resolved to seize the moment to do something about it.

In June, Mayor Garcetti’s chief design officer, Christopher Hawthorne, convened a steering committee of community representatives—which I am co-chairing—to start figuring out how to create a suitable public memorial to the 1871 massacre. A formal process will be launched to invite designers and artists to submit their ideas, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. One possible outcome our group has discussed would be an alternative to the conventional statue-on-a-pedestal approach, setting out a pathway of physical memorials along a “constellation” of massacre-related sites connecting Calle de los Negros, the lynching sites, and perhaps even symbols of mercy and reconciliation.

There may be some skeptics who assume that an 1871 memorial will appeal only to the Chinese community, or who doubt the value of rehashing sad stories from the past. The best response is to create a unique memorial that dusts off the people and the places of 1871 Los Angeles and brings them to life.

Ultimately, I hope that the memorial, like the story itself, offers shreds of hope. At least a few citizens in 1871 Los Angeles gave sanctuary to some of the Chinese fleeing the violence, sheltering them in their homes or businesses. Even at the bleakest of times, against all odds, there are people who try to do the right thing.

The post After 150 Years, Is L.A. Ready to Remember the Chinese Massacre? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Here’s one technique I’ve used: get them to play cards.

For many years, I’ve drawn on my experience as a medical professional, and as an immigrant, to help elderly Chinese Americans and their families reckon with the challenges of death. And I’ve come to believe that the lessons from our work apply not only to other Americans but also to other societies and cultures around the world.

I first came to the United States at age 23 to fulfill the American need for nurses. I was trained as a nurse in Taiwan, completed my U. S. nursing training at De Anza College in Cupertino, obtained my RN license, and earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from San Jose State University. After graduation, I cared for elderly patients with major depression and other mental illnesses at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. In 2001, I moved to the Sacramento area to work as a public health nurse. Ten years later, I was again recruited by El Camino Hospital and I worked in their out-patient program (OATS) until I retired in 2014.

As a graduate student at San Jose State, I started a program for Chinese elders at Catholic Charities in San Jose. I was struck by the prevalence of depression among the people who attended the program, and spent quite a bit of time developing strategies to get them to talk about things that were bothering them. That made me wonder how I could do more to help people with loneliness, anxiety, suicidal tendencies, and a whole variety of other end-of-life problems.

I also noticed some differences. Most American families honor the medical wishes of their elderly, but many Chinese families I encountered were more likely to make decisions as a family unit, on behalf of their elderly relatives—even if the outcome was not what those relatives might have wanted. Often, there was little conversation about the older person’s desires—and sometimes the dying person wasn’t even informed of the condition he or she was facing. Children, out of a sense of filial piety, didn’t want their loved ones to become anxious about their prognosis. Thus, the family often decided, almost by default, that the older person should be kept alive, no matter what.

I’ve experienced such dilemmas personally. In 1999, my father, who lived in Taiwan and had terminal cancer and pneumonia, was taken to the hospital. When I talked to the doctors there about a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, they refused to comply, informing me that a DNR was illegal there. As a result, my dad spent a year in intensive care undergoing unnecessary and often painful procedures before he died. Since my dad had never talked to his five children about his medical wishes, at the end—like most Chinese families—we felt we had to do everything to keep him alive even though it was hard to see him suffering. (Since that time, Taiwan’s laws have changed; in 2011, Taiwan’s Hospice Palliative Care Act was amended to include advance directives such as do-not-resuscitate.)

On my way back to California, I decided to do something about improving advance care planning for Chinese Americans so people could make their own medical decisions. Many people had never heard of the Advance Health Care Directive (AHCD), and those who did might have had trouble completing the form because it was only in English.

In 2005, I decided to form the Chinese American Coalition for Compassionate Care, made up of colleagues and health care providers who wanted to be better educated about the experiences and desires of Chinese Americans at the end of life. Some of my friends told me I would give up in less than a year, and that building an organization on such a taboo subject would not be easy. They said that Chinese would not open up to asking for help with end of life issues. But we persevered. CACCC become a nonprofit corporation in 2007. Today, our coalition includes more than 150 organizations and some 1,400 individuals. Agencies who partner with the coalition provide their resources and support to assist our volunteers with our events and trainings.

In 2005, friends told me that building an organization on a taboo subject would not be easy, but now our coalition has 150 organizations. Image courtesy of Beth Baugher.

The Coalition helps to educate people about advance care planning for their later years and also about palliative and hospice care. We train hospice and hospital volunteers, and educate health care professionals serving Chinese Americans. Once trained, they often become hospital ambassadors and hospice volunteers. The most important work we do is helping people start the end-of-life conversations, between patients and family and families and health providers. We do not only focus on the dying; we also encourage those who are still young and healthy to complete their AHCD, so no one will have to guess what they want done when the time comes.

We are a volunteer organization, with only three part-time staff. But we’ve made an impact by pursuing novel strategies for engaging the community. One advantage we have is that we speak both English and Chinese and know the culture of the people we’re serving.

The biggest challenge for us has always been to get people to open up and share their end of life concerns and preferences. A new approach to this problem was CACCC’s Heart to Heart cards, which we created and trademarked in 2014, after being inspired by the Coda Alliance’s “Go Wish” cards, to help people discuss end of life issues in English. People of many cultures enjoy playing cards, and Chinese and Chinese Americans have a long tradition of opening up over card games.

The Heart to Heart cards can be used to play poker, but more importantly, they can be used to discuss end-of-life issues. The cards contain statements about issues that Chinese consider important in the last days of their life. This helps them become aware of more options, options they might not think of without a reminder. They can also use the two jokers to discuss issues not on the cards. Each of the four suits represents a different end-of-life concern. Hearts represent spiritual concerns, diamonds financial issues, clubs social needs, and spades physical necessities. In the game, players pick 12 cards, three from each suit, and then are asked in the course of the game to identify their three greatest priorities for the end of their lives. These card games are typically played at events called the “Heart to Heart Café,” where we serve tea and pastries and encourage participants to discuss end of life issues. (I was inspired by the Death Café, an idea out of England that encourages conversations about death in another context.)

At first, people often are slow to embrace the cards and open up, but eventually, they all start talking, often in detail. Some talk about the prayers they want said at the end, or their desire to die at home; others about which rituals they prefer at their funeral. The card games, which are limited to eight people at each Café table, are followed by efforts to bring together elderly people and their younger relatives so they can talk through their end-of-life wishes, while also sharing memories and good wishes for each other. Often, when there is time, Café facilitators help participants complete their AHCDs to ensure that the knowledge they’ve gained is not lost in the complexities of life.

While I started this work in California, word got out quickly. Soon we were traveling statewide, and then to Boston and New York, to teach others how to host the Cafés. The cards and Cafés have become an integral part of the trainings we do for hospice and palliative care volunteers and medical professionals. Since the cards are in English and Chinese, we’ve also had interest from people of Vietnamese, Japanese, Indian and Latin American heritage, who are adopting both our coalition model and some of our conversation techniques.

In recent years, I’ve encountered interest in this approach from China itself. This past spring, I went to Wuhan for the third time in three years to hold Heart to Heart Cafés and end-of-life education courses at four hospitals and at symposia where leaders came from several provinces. China ranks low in global surveys of the quality of end-of-life care, and the country realizes it has to do better. In the last few years, we have witnessed considerable progress countrywide.

Not everyone can have a good death. But you can have a better death if you find a way to talk about it, long before you’re facing it. Doing advance care planning and completing an Advance Health Care Directive are the best gifts we all can offer ourselves and our loved ones.

The post To Have a ‘Better Death,’ Play With These Cards appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The law was draconian and racist. It was also, often, ineffective. The Chinese population in the U.S. actually grew in total numbers during the census years of 1890, 1930, and 1940. Thousands of Chinese immigrants successfully challenged exclusion or tailored migration strategies to fit the demands and exploit the loopholes of exclusion laws.

Leading this steady resistance to exclusion was Y.C. Hong, a largely unsung but important figure in the Los Angeles Chinese community. Hong was a government lobbyist, an immigration attorney who worked on at least 7,000 cases, and a leader in the larger cause of Chinese-American rights when they had very few.

Chinese immigrants started coming in large numbers in the mid-19th century when the gold rush increased the need for laborers in California. White union groups, believing that the Chinese were taking their jobs and depressing wages, stoked anti-Chinese sentiment, hysteria, and ignorance on the West Coast. Politicians got votes by denouncing Chinese people—who had very little political representation. These groups considered the Chinese immigrants too culturally foreign to assimilate. In an argument typical of the time, Congressman William Piper justified the anti-Chinese sentiment by saying, “[Chinese people] have monopolized menial labor and many of the lighter mechanic arts, thus depriving American boys and girls of opportunities of employment.” He described Chinese women as “nearly all slaves in conditions and prostitutes by vocation,” whereas the men were, according to him, “abandoned and dangerous criminals, opium smokers, and gamblers.”

Hong found his vocation because of this kind of rhetoric. Born in San Francisco in 1898, You Chung “Y.C.” Hong was the son of Chinese laborers who probably migrated to the U.S. before 1882. After serving as a translator at the Bureau of Immigration, Hong attended night classes at USC to study law. In 1923, he was one of the first Chinese-Americans to pass the California state bar. The combination of practical learning at the bureau and academic learning at USC steered his subsequent career. From a poor family, and standing just 4-feet-6-inches tall because of an injury he suffered as a baby, Hong had the strong-willed optimism that can come from overcoming adversity.

In addition to serving as president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, testifying before congressional committees about Chinese-American rights, and trying to sway politicians by befriending them, Hong helped immigrants fight back hard against exclusion. Some cases used a legal loophole in the Exclusion Act and subsequent legislation: Foreign-born sons and daughters of Chinese-American citizens were entitled to U.S. citizenship. As a result, Chinese immigrants challenged exclusion by claiming to be offspring of Americans. Some of them were indeed children of citizens, but others, eager to start a new life here, changed their names, identities, and family history to become “paper sons and daughters.”

Y.C. Hong with other members of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Members, which defended Chinese-American civil rights at a time when public sentiment was overwhelmingly anti-Chinese, circa 1928.

 
Throughout the Chinese Exclusion years, immigration attorneys helped with these and other tactics (though Hong never knowingly promoted the use of a false identity). Since any strategy involved reams of paperwork and navigating a complicated situation in a language most of these immigrants did not understand, Hong’s services became indispensable.

Typically, a Chinese immigrant had to undergo grueling verbal interrogations and intrusive physical examinations. In 1940, Hong represented 27-year-old Wong Keen, who was asked 205 questions, including one that required him to describe his house in China down to the skylights in the bedrooms and a mill in the parlor. Of course, immigration inspectors didn’t really care about the mill in the parlor. The hearings were designed to be tedious and repetitive, with many detailed questions, so that inspectors could find inconsistencies in immigrants’ answers and deport them for lying. Dubious science could achieve the same objective. One of Hong’s clients was deported after a “study” of his bone structure determined that his age was different than the number he had provided.

All this took time and resources. Chinese immigrants typically brought very little with them on their perilous, cramped journeys in steerage aboard transpacific steamships. They had to endure waits of weeks or even months at immigration stations—San Pedro Immigration Office for L.A., Angel Island for San Francisco—until they could get their individual hearings. During that time, they were held, separate from other arrivals, in jail-like detention centers. The lucky and prepared ones could hire an immigration attorney (Hong provided an installment plan) or even give bribes. They might finally be allowed entry. Others were deported and sent back to China.

Y.C. Hong business card, circa 1928. The characters read: “These blessings I wish for my compatriots: businesses that flourish, fortunes smoothly sought, and once that is done, safe and speedy passage home.”

 
There were so many immigrants coming from China—and so many of them had realized that they could make legal challenges—that immigration inspectors operated with a huge backlog, and immigration laws became more stringent and complex in response to the challenges. The Bureau of Immigration was created in 1895 in large part to deal with the enforcement of Chinese Exclusion. With Chinese plaintiffs flooding federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1905 barred these courts from hearing Chinese admission cases—leaving them solely in the hands of immigration officials.

Despite the difficulty of enforcing the Act, its model of immigration exclusion based on national origin was adopted and applied to other immigrants deemed undesirable by the U.S. government (other Asians, some groups from Southern and Eastern Europe)—in continued attempts to preserve a nativist “American” identity. Legislation of this sort lasted until the repeal of Exclusion in 1943 and the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. On June 18, 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives issued a formal resolution of “regret” for the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Chinese miners work alongside miners of other ethnicities in Auburn, California, circa 1852. Fortune-seekers from around the world migrated to northern California following the discovery of gold in 1848.

 
Cultural effects of the Act lingered for decades. Negative stereotypes of Chinese continued to be widespread in the U.S. well into the 20th century. Many Chinese families were forced apart; others had to adopt assumed identities in order to stay in the country and even passed their assumed identities on to children and grandchildren, leaving blanks in family histories. (Some Chinese Americans trying to recover their true identities today have gone back to China to trace roots and family relations, or used the National Archives and archives at the Huntington Library—where I work—to uncover immigration history.) Professional employments outside of Chinatowns stayed closed to Chinese-Americans for a long time. And U.S. history continued to ignore the Chinese-American role in building America.

But people like Hong should be remembered—for a long, diligent record of resisting racist exclusion policies through legal and political action. This steady work now provides inspiration and example. “Those of us who have achieved acceptance through our economic or intellectual status should be the ones to lead the way in breaking down unfair barriers,” he wrote in a 1963 essay.” As long as there are some of us considered still unacceptable politically, economically, or socially, it remains a dangerous situation for all Americans, regardless of race, creed or ancestral origin. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.”

The post The Lawyer Who Beat Back a Racist Law, One Loophole at a Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Indeed, a closer look at Chinese immigration in the past and present shows not only how much public attitudes have changed in the last century, but also how fickle such shifts in attitudes can prove.

Although many of today’s Chinese immigrants are graduate students and wealthy investors, Chinese immigration has a long history in the United States and many of the earlier immigrants were considered the lowest of the low-skilled workers coming to America. Chinese sailors were among the crew on a ship that arrived in Baltimore in 1784. Chinese immigrants were living in New York City as early as the 1830s. And Chinese gold seekers were among the thousands who flocked to California during the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century. By 1870, there were 64,000 Chinese in the United States, most of them in California, and almost all of them from the Pearl River Delta region outside of Canton (Guangzhou) in southern China. They were indispensable laborers who helped to build the nation’s first transcontinental railroad as well as farmworkers who turned California into the agricultural empire that it is today.

But Chinese immigrants also faced a tremendous amount of hostility, despite amounting to only a small fraction of the total foreign-born population in the United States in the late 19th century. The Chinese were labeled undesirable and impossible to assimilate. They were charged with taking away jobs, corrupting white women, and threatening American civilization. Chinese were harassed, beaten, and driven out of small towns and big cities throughout the American West. A regional movement to exclude Chinese immigrants turned into a national one. The rallying cry of “The Chinese Must Go!” came to be heard on the sandlots of San Francisco as well as in the halls of Congress.

And in 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers, prohibited all Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens, and allowed only select classes of Chinese to apply for admission. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the country’s first immigration law that singled out an immigrant group for large-scale exclusion based on race. And it led to wide-scale discrimination in U.S. immigration policy that resulted in the exclusion of almost all Asians from our country before World War II.

While the act was in effect—from 1882 to 1943—Chinese immigrants became America’s first “illegal” immigrants. Chinese immigration drastically dropped, though it never totally stopped. Many of those who did continue to come resorted to false papers (like my own grandfather), fraudulent identities, and even long and dangerous routes across the U.S.-Mexico border. We know that those who arrived in San Francisco in those years faced harsh interrogations, humiliating medical examinations, and long detentions in the crowded and unsanitary barracks on Angel Island, arguably the nation’s first immigrant detention center, located in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. The hundreds of poems that Chinese immigrant detainees left behind on the barrack walls on Angel Island are testament to their anger, frustration, and hardship, but also their perseverance and hope.

In the past fifty years, Chinese immigration has undergone a dramatic transformation. The landmark 1965 immigration Act ended national origins quotas favoring immigration from Europe over other parts of the world and established preferences for professional and skilled workers. At the same time, China’s subsequent economic modernization and new global outlook have revived and diversified the flow of immigration from China.

From 1960 to 1990, the Chinese population in the U.S. nearly doubled every decade. In 1960, there were just under 100,000 Chinese-born immigrants in the United States. In 2010, the Census reported over 3.3 million adult Chinese-Americans. Making up the largest group of Asian-Americans and the largest ethnic Chinese population (including Taiwanese) outside of Asia, Chinese-Americans represent 24 percent of the our nation’s adult Asian population.

Working-class Chinese immigrants continue to come, and Chinese-Americans are represented at both ends of the economic spectrum, but when people tend to think of Chinese immigrants, whether from the Mainland, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, they tend to think of the highly skilled and educated who arrive—the entrepreneurs, professionals, scientists, and students. Indeed, in 2010, Chinese Americans had higher median annual personal earnings than the general U.S. population.

Chinese immigrants may not be scrutinized and debated in the same way that undocumented low-skilled Mexican immigrants crossing the border are these days, especially in Washington, but it would be a mistake to assume that America has fully embraced Chinese and other Asian immigrants. Their growing numbers, economic power, and presence have already raised concerns and anxiety. Some Americans resent having to go to a doctor who has a foreign accent, for example, or having their kids compete with talented foreign-born (and even second generation Asian-American) students for spots in college or in the workplace. In other words, Asian-Americans may serve as “models” for other minorities, but they also upset the existing status quo by out-competing whites, too.

There could be even more resentment if China’s national wealth and strength becomes more pronounced globally, and more explicitly opposed to American interests. There are unfortunate precedents in this country of immigrants being treated unfairly based on the actions of their countries of origin, with the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II being the most notorious, but hardly the only, example. In 1999, Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee was unfairly accused of spying for the People’s Republic of China. Could there be even more episodes like this in the near future?

As we consider how Chinese immigrants have gone from being the most excluded immigrants to the most numerous, we should recognize what has changed and what has not. Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans are growing in number. They are often held up as examples of America’s “good” immigrants. But they and other Asian-Americans remain vulnerable to domestic anxieties and global economic shifts and political struggles. How far have Chinese and other Asian-Americans really risen? And during a time of increasing xenophobia and concern about a newly powerful China worldwide, how easily might they fall?

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