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Many cities throughout the United States have a distinct neighborhood known as Chinatown. Chinatowns are ethnic enclaves, which are defined areas in a city with a high concentration of an ethnic group and thus a unique culture set apart from the larger city. To the inhabitants of the city, these ethnic enclaves may exist without much thought of the historical, or modern, reasons for their presence. However it is important to look at the reasons behind their existences and how these areas, like Chinatowns, relate to broader ethnic and race issues in the United States. By examining the history of Chinese immigration as well as some of the reasons why these distinct neighborhoods exist one can better understand modern Chinatowns and their importance in cities across the United States.
It is important to first examine the historical reasons for the growth of ethnic enclaves, particularly Chinatowns, found in numerous cities around the United States. The history of Chinese immigration is deeply tied with the creation of Chinatowns. Chinese immigration to the United States began in the first half of 1800s when “Chinese immigrants fleeing a faltering Qinq Dynasty came to California” (Hathaway, 44). Though the first Chinese immigrants originally planned to return back to their homeland, many of them “stayed on in the United States” and immigration then spread to different parts of the country (Hathaway, 44). As immigration increased and the Chinese population grew, laws began to be enacted in response. The most famous of these laws is the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first law to put major restrictions and quotas on Chinese immigration. Following the Chinese Exclusion Act, other laws were passed to further restrict immigrati...
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...of Place: Representations of Salinas’ Chinatown.” Oral History Review 37.2 (2010): 225-234
Hathaway, David, and Stephanie Ho. “Small but Resilient: Washington’s Chinatown over the Years” Washington History 15.1 (2003): 42-61
Kanazawa, Mark. “Immigration, Exclusion, and Taxation: Anti-Chinese Legislation in Gold Rush California” The Journal of Economic History 65.3 (2005): 779-805
Lin, Jan. Reconstructing Chinatown. University of Minnesota Press, 1998
Margulis, Harry. “Asian Villages: Downtown Sanctuaries, Immigrant Asian Reception Areas, and Festival Marketplaces.” Journal of Architectural Education 45.3 (1992): 150-160
Yee, Mary. “The Save Chinatown Movement: Surviving Against All Odds.” Pennsylvania Legacies 12.1 (2012): 24-31
Zhou, Min. “Returns on Human Capital in Ethnic Enclaves: New York City’s Chinatown” American Sociological Review 54.4 (1989): 809-820
One particular ethnic group that suffered severe discrimination was the Chinese people. They first came to America for several reasons. One of them was the gold rush in California in 1849, in which they were included in a group of immigrants called the “Forty-Niners” (179). From gold mining, they switched to other jobs with resulted in the rise of anti-Chinese sentiments. People felt that Chinese people were taking the jobs away from them, because Chinese people worked for much smaller salaries that businesses preferred. This mindset gave way to the creation of The Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882, which prohibits more Chinese immigrants from coming to America. In addition, the act states “no State or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship”. Like the Naturalization Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act was created to hinder Chinese people from becoming citizens so that America could remain homogenously white (186). It also aimed to stop Chinese people from establishing a bigger community in the country in hopes of eliminating the threat of competition to their white counterparts (186). Like African-Americans, Chinese people were considered racially inferior and have struggled to prove that they were worthy to be called true Americans, rather than
Nayan Shah is a leading expert in Asian American studies and serves as professor at the University of California. His work, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown explores how race, citizenship, and public health combined to illustrate the differences between the culture of Chinese immigrants and white norms in public-health knowledge and policy in San Francisco. Shah discusses how this knowledge impacted social lives, politics, and cultural expression. Contagious Divides investigates what it meant to be a citizen of Chinese race in nineteenth and twentieth-century San Francisco.
Tachiki, Amy; Wong, Eddie; Odo, Franklin, eds. (1971). Roots: An Asian American Reader. University of California, Los Angeles Press.
This nation was relatively stable in the eyes of immigrants though under constant political and economic change. Immigration soon became an outlet by which this nation could thrive yet there was difficulty in the task on conformity. Ethnic groups including Mexicans and Chinese were judged by notions of race, cultural adaptations and neighborhood. Mary Lui’s “The Chinatown Trunk Mystery” and Michael Innis-Jimenez’s “Steel Barrio”, provides a basis by which one may trace the importance of a neighborhood in the immigrant experience explaining the way in which neighborhoods were created, how these lines were crossed and notions of race factored into separating these
Throughout history, Americans have always been intimidated by immigrants. The idea of an immigrant coming to America and easily being able to get a job scared Americans. Americans feared that good jobs would be taken from hard working Americans and given to immigrants for less pay because they required less money to live on or were used to no wages or lower wages in their Country of origin. People would immigrate to America in search of a better life, and often times they could find homes and jobs that made them want to stay. A melting pot is described as being a mixing of different cultures into one universal culture. In Erika Lee’s, The Chinese Exclusion Example, immigrant exclusion helped re-define the melting-pot
-Despite the already severe legal and social restrictions on Asian immigration, some European Americans felt that immigration should be forbidden altogether with a specific Asian Exclusion Act. In arguments which seem familiar to modern followers of the immigration debate, Asians were accused of taking white jobs and causing social
Frank Chin, growing up specifically in Chinatown in San Francisco, experienced a very different set of cultural prejudices and bias...
Dumenil, Lynn, ed. "New York City." The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History. N.p.: Oxford UP, 2012. Oxford Reference. Web. 8 Apr. 2013.
When the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law in May 1882, it was followed by a rapidly decreasing amount of new immigrants to the United States. Regardless of problems that the United States attempted to solve with the Act, violent massacre and persecution of Chinese people in the United States continued. Because of this, many Chinese immigrants that did stay in America continued on for years to receive prejudice and racism in the labor market and cultural society. This then continued to force many Chinese immigrants further and further down the path of segregation and into the protection of Chinatowns and poverty, counteracting the great American idea of the “melting pot.”
The Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted to curb the influx of Chinese immigrants seeking work in the failing post-Civil War economies. The Chinese settlers created enclaves in many West-Coast cities; the most famous of these being the “China-Town” in San Francisco. Anti-Chinese sentiment grew from the Nativist policies of Denis Kearney, his Workingman’s Party, and California statesman John Bigler. White power organizations fought against Chinese immigrants as well, specifically the Supreme Order of Caucasians in April 1876 and the Asiatic Exclusion League in May 1905. They stated that Chinese laborers had driven wages down to an unacceptable level,[1] Resultantly, they fought against the rights of Chinese Immigrants, many of whom had been natur...
This is evident in the persistence of elderly characters, such as Grandmother Poh-Poh, who instigate the old Chinese culture to avoid the younger children from following different traditions. As well, the Chinese Canadians look to the Vancouver heritage community known as Chinatown to maintain their identity using on their historical past, beliefs, and traditions. The novel uniquely “encodes stories about their origins, its inhabitants, and the broader society in which they are set,” (S. Source 1) to teach for future generations. In conclusion, this influential novel discusses the ability for many characters to sustain one sole
She chooses to cite only academic publications, Canadian governmental documents, and local newspaper articles in her long list of sources, none of which provide perspective from the people around which the article is centered; the Chinese. This highlights the key issue within the article; whilst Anderson meticulously examines how Chinatown is simply a construction of white supremacists, she ignores what life was actually like for the area’s inhabitants, and how the notion of ‘Chinatown’ may have become a social reality for those living in it. By failing to include sources written by those who lived in Chinatown during the time or live there now, she misses the notion of Canadian-Chinese agency and its potential willingness to thrive and adapt in an environment she deems simply a hegemonic construction. Barman’s sources are all encompassing from varying perspectives. This may be due to the fact that she wrote the article 20 years after Anderson’s, during a time in which history was beginning to be viewed through a culturally-relativistic lens.
Millions of immigrants over the previous centuries have shaped the United States of America into what it is today. America is known as a “melting pot”, a multicultural country that welcomes and is home to an array of every ethnic and cultural background imaginable. We are a place of opportunity, offering homes and jobs and new economic gains to anyone who should want it. However, America was not always such a “come one, come all” kind of country. The large numbers of immigrants that came during the nineteenth century angered many of the American natives and lead to them to blame the lack of jobs and low wages on the immigrants, especially the Asian communities. This resentment lead to the discrimination and legal exclusion of immigrants, with the first and most important law passed being the Chinese Exclusion Act. However, the discrimination the Chinese immigrants so harshly received was not rightly justified or deserved. With all of their contributions and accomplishments in opening up the West, they were not so much harming our country but rather helping it.
Asian American movement starts off by addressing the community living concerns that they live in. In California the movement starts in San Francisco’s China town where activist held meetings at Commodore Stockton Auditorium and Portsmouth Square (Wei 13). The meeting held on August 17 in 1968 was held all day long for Bay Area Chinese American students to give them information about Chinatown (Wei 13). The information that was given to the students were poor housing and health, unemployment, “negative” education (Wei 13). After the meeting there was a march down Chinatowns Main Street (Wei 13). Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action (ICSA) created a youth center in Chinatown, where it gave a home to the Free University of Chinatown Kids.
Retrieved March 21, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://english.peopledaily.com. Chinatown Online is a wonderful site with an abundance of information about China. http://www.chinatown-online.com/. Henslin, J. M. (1999). The Species of the Species. Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach (4th ed.).