She is a historian of race and migration in the United States , specializing in asianAmerican History. Chinese must go. Fmaps the tangled relationship between local racial violence, and u. S. Imperial ambitions. Williams earned her b. A. From Brown University and phd in history from stanford. I believe he just spoke at sanford this afternoon. Thank you, beth, for coming and speaking this evening with us. David has worked as a social worker in San Franciscos chinatown with atrisk youth before starting his business in 1981 in exporting Consumer Products to mexico. He sold his business in 2003 and retired at the end of 2005. So now we get to work with david all the time, which is really lovely. David has a passion for building communities, social change, and improvements, Youth Education , the arts. He actively participates in the following nonprofit. The chineseamerican community fund, the dance troupe, the academy of chinese performing arts, so many places. I think the center for asianamerican media as well. So much of what david does is linking to other people. Oftentimes email goes around that says, come to this event. Thats the really lovely thing of both beth and david is the sense of openness, community and being ones guest. So, you are all our guests this evening. We thank you for that. Im going to hand over to beth to present first. David will present second, then it is your turn to ask questions. Well have roving mics. We suggest to please use the mic as im doing right now. Right in front of your safe your face so it is very clear. So we can all hear you. Many people have challenges with their hearing. I always say, we dont have 20 20 hearing. Enjoy the program. Enjoy this evening. And im going to hand it over to beth. Thank you. Beth thank you. [applause] can you hear me . Yes. Ok. So first i wanted to just thank patty and the California Historical society for having me , for having both of us. Im particularly excited to come here in part because the archive here is amazing. And as a history nerd, i spent time here as a student back in graduate school and i came here this summer. Its such an amazing collection here. Its an amazing place. Its an amazing place to work. Im also excited to be here tonight because i have family here, and my family is not sick of me talking about this book so much that they didnt come. So its very, very nice. Ok. So before what im going to do is give you a taste of the book that i wrote that came out just last year. But first i want to say a few words about why i wrote it. Its about chinese exclusion in sort of a broad way. Chinese exclusion is something that touched me before i even knew what it was. I mean, probably, like many of the people in this audience, you may also have been touched by chinese exclusion. For those of you dont know, chinese exclusion was a period of ban on all chinese immigrants. It lasted from the 1880s until the 1940s. And i think that in this sort of an audience, in the San Francisco audience, most of you know that this had a profound effect not just on the chineseamerican community, but also on our Immigration Laws even to this day. So i really learned something about chinese exclusion just through my familys experience and my grandfather, who came through angel island when he was just nine years old. Him just talking about those experiences gave me a sense of this history. But what i didnt get along the way was any sort of education about chineseamericans or chinese exclusion in Elementary School or secondary school. And so when i went to college, i took asianAmerican History and i learned some. But i found the more that i learned, the more questions i had. I wanted to know more than just the chinese exclusion existed, but to really understand the meaning of it. And what question really drove this book in particular was about the role of violence in the making of chinese exclusion and also in the shaping of chineseamerican communities. So the question that drove this project was, why was there so much violence against the chinese in the u. S. . And why has it gotten so little attention from historians . When historians do write about antichinese violence, they tend to write about it in what i found to be be a dissatisfying way, a sort of disturbingly flat story of either victimization, how these chinese communities were victimized by violence, or , you know, all about resistance, without sort of stopping to think about what this violence meant in a more complicated way. So this is the book that i set out to write. A more systematic look at antichinese violence in the late 19th century. And so today what im going to do is give you sort of a dip in and out of the book a little, moments. So im going to read a little bit, talk, and show you images from it as well. Ok. So they left in the driving rain. 300 chinese migrants trudged down the center of the street, their heads bowed to the elements and the crowd. They were led, followed, and surrounded by dozens of white men who were armed with clubs and pistols and rifles. As if part of a grim parade they were encircled by spectators who packed the muddy sidewalks,. Peered fromwalks, peered outways, and of secondstory windows to get a better view. One of the chinese tried to protest but later he remembered the mob answering in a single voice. All the chinese. You must go, everyone. So this incident took place on november 3, 1885, in tacoma, which was in washington territory at the time. But in some ways this particular time and place doesnt matter , because this story, the story of the expulsion of the chinese, was recreated in so many places. So in the period in 1885 and 1886, the chinese were driven out or there were attempted expulsions in, i found at least 168 communities across the u. S. West. Sometimes these purges involved racial violence in its most basic and brazen forms. That is, physical force motivated by racial prejudice and intended to cause bodily harm. But once, sort of, that violence had been meted out in particular areas, then it didnt take so much to drive the chinese out of town. Once that threat of violence was real, the chinese started to be expelled from communities based on intimidation or harassment or boycott. Other, sort of, things that we may not always see immediately see as a formt i of racial violence as well. Let me show you a few images to give you a sense of this. This is i attempted to map the sites of antichinese violence and this gives you a sense of their spread. This is only over the course of about 14 months. These are places that attempted to expel the chinese in the mid 1880s. They center, these dots center around essentially where the chinese were in the west. Thats sort of the basic pattern we see here. This is an image from one of the deadliest of these expulsions , which occurred in rock springs, where at least 27 people were murdered. But the expulsions also drove out the rest of the chinese out of town. This is an image again from harpers weekly that shows the attempted expulsion out of seattle. In seattle it was not entirely effective. Here we see white americans on both sides, both the part of the mob but then also the force of law and order attempting to end this expulsion. Here is a little closer to home in san jose. This is the burning of the original chinatown in san jose , which occurred in 1887. You can see spectators in the front. So, things like this, where arson was a very common tactic in expelling the chinese. But often in the newspapers they would just say, well, you know, chinatown lit on fire and they would suggest it was the chinese themselves that had lit their community on fire. Here is some of the chinese houses in tacoma which i was talking about a minute ago , before the expulsion. You can see in this below this image it says, the few chinese shacks in the foreground were burned in 1885. This is also from tacoma. This is a commemorative photograph that was taken after the expulsion by the leaders, the vigilantes at organized that organized the expulsion of the chinese from tacoma. I think it is very striking that they decided to get together in a photograph and to make very public their involvement in this expulsion. It is particularly interesting who is in this image. It is not just the fringe people of town. We have, for example, the sheriff, the mayor, the head of the fire department, a probate judge, leading men within the Tacoma Community that were involved. I often get a question on who is the woman and child, which are very striking. As far as i can tell, the answer is that shes the wife of the newspaper man in town and so my guess is that hes behind the camera and shes standing in to represent him in this image. Im going to back up on that. Ok. So historians often claim that racial violence is fundamental to the making of the United States. But when they do so theyre not usually thinking about the chinese. Instead, theyre thinking about other violent processes. Colonization, enslavement, segregation. So antichinese violence is routinely left out of those larger narratives, even when people are talking about violence in the United States. I think part of this has to do with numbers. There were comparatively fewer chinese in 19th century america. It was only the census in 1880s says about 105,000 chinese in all of the u. S. , although they were concentrated here in california. And there were fewer chinese and fewer still actually lost their lives to violence. In this period, 18851886, i was able to count 85 men who perished during this peak of violence. But these numbers dont really capture the extent of violence, in part because it was not the violence was not always recorded, deaths were not always recorded, but also theres a lot of this violence was not intended to be fatal. These were expulsions, trying to drive people out as opposed to murder them. There were also a lot of violence against chinese that happened both before and after this period. Im going to show you one which i accidentally showed you or for a second there, a disturbing image, so i meant to warn you before i did. This gives you just an extent of the violence. In 1887, this is a little after and its not part of the expulsion. The citizens of colusa, california took this commemorative photograph of hong di and his lynching. So there was moments when antichinese violence turned very violent and fatal in ways that we recognize in other forms of racial violence. But this is not the norm. So i think that the violence in part is not understood because it is expulsions as opposed to things like this, like lynching. But i also think this can be explained by the violence itself. That the violence in many ways was effective. You know, that chinese were pushed to the sort of outer recesses of american society, and with that, American History and memory during this period. So successful expulsions often left very little behind. Even in the way of memory. And we can see this in tacoma, for example, where there was no chinatown or chinese in tacoma after the expulsion. Only just recently they put together what they call a reconciliation park to mark where the chinese once were. But it is part of this effort, this attempt to find descendents of the original chinese but couldnt find any. So thats how effective this violence could be. So i think that this history in part has been neglected because its been misunderstood. You know, that the violence the antichinese violence is not sort of a weak imitation of racial violence elsewhere. It was a distinct phenomenon that must be understood on its own terms. And so what im going to do today is not talk as much about what caused the violence but more about its consequences, just to and what im going to do is talk start at the local level. And in general at the local level, i argue that antichinese violence was designed to create racial boundries, you know, to draw lines within communities across the geography of the west, it also within communities and within the economy. And there is many ways to im this, im what but im going to talk just about one way today, which is the literal drawing of lines and the mapping of chinese communities. So how is it that violence affected how where people could live, where they could work within the west. And to do that i look at a bunch of sources. This is my these are some of my favorite sources. This, if you have never seen one, is an insurance map. So the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company went around to towns all over the United States and made map like this. Theyre amazing, and you can find them many, many places, and they did so in order to insure people against fire damage. Because, you know, they wanted to know what structures had been there before any fires happened. In general, the sanborn Fire Insurance maps were much more interested in whether it was a wood house or a brick house as opposed to who lived there, but with the exception of the chinese. So the sanborn insurance map part everyingly, chineseoccupied building on them. They dont mark any other racial group across the u. S. Only the chinese. And as far as i can tell, the sanborn, the descendents wouldnt let me into their archives. But as far as we can tell, what we why they would have marked chinese is because there was an assumption that just being chinese was increased the risk of fire. That this was just their occupancy alone was a fire risk. So but for me what this means is that i can map the presence of chineseoccupied buildings, and often the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company would come through every few years and sometimes they happened to map a community right before and after violence, expulsions, and this allows me to see what it looks like. So an example so theres different patterns we see in these maps. In eureka, california, where there was a very successful expulsion for those of you can see, in the center here it has marked out chinatown and written across it is vacant. Chinatown, which is only the square block, is vacant after the expulsions. In other places, ive used the sanborn insurance maps to then build my open map to give you a sense. In riverside, california, if we map before and after the expulsion riverside we see that the chinese population has not moved too far. Theyve move from the center of whats known as the square mile of riverside, the original community, to the outskirts of town. So this has been an expulsion, but a short one. And in places like seattle where the violence was not as effective, what we see is the reduction in the number of chineseoccupied buildings, and sort of their proxmity is tighter and closer. There is other ways we can look at the change in the built environment. Where could Chinese People live. In tacoma we have redress hearings, we have lists of the buildings that have been burned. And then here is from a chinese urgents notebook in seattle merchants notebook in seattle, and he catalogs in the side of his notebook the camps lost, that is workers camp in washington territory. So, the expulsions in general moved the chinese from places that they knew to places where they didnt know. From communities where they were known, to communities where they were not known. So i think of it as the violence turned to what were neighbors, People Living in these communities for long periods of time, into strangers, both figuratively and literally. For some chinese this process was a process of segregation. So, lots of chinese, probably descended on000, San Franciscos chinatown, fleeing Rural Communities when where they were being expelled and finding safety in numbers. But also in some places was an experience of isolation, where chinese were driven out of western communities and went to the midwest. Four to the south, where there were very few chinese but there was also less violence. So this process of expulsion reified thewords, chinese as outsiders, as strangers and as aliens in american society. So now i want to talk about the National Consequences of this expulsion. Because not only did the expulsions make the chinese alien in the context of their local communities, it also helped to cement the idea of alienage. What is an alien in modern america at the same time . And im talking there, im shifting from more of the more metaphorical and social to the legal here. I will backup for second. Historians have spent a lot of time thinking about citizenship, when citizenship was born. One of the thing that is historians spend a lot of thing talking about is the 14th amendment. Back in the news again. The 14th amendment not only granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved people. It also gave citizenship new meaning. It gave new rights, and it pledged federal protection of those privileges and immunities. That was 150 years ago in 1868, was the 14th amendment. But as it did this and cemented citizenship, it also bridged, i think, a lot of new questions about what alienage was going to mean in america. So i link this process of chinese exclusion and antichinese expulsion to this moment when the United States was making citizenship this newly valueable status within society. And so it became more important to draw those lines about who should stay outside. And so as citizenship became more of a clear and fundamental concept in our society, i think it left open lots of big questions. You know, who is an alien in america . Who is not a citizen . What aliens would be allowed into the nation . What power did the government hold to exclude and expel unwanted aliens . What rights did an alien possess . What could unauthorize aliens to who possess those same rights . The chinese were not americas first aliens. First immigrants. But America First drafted national answers to these questions for the explicit purpose of excluding the chinese. And so, as the state and the public made the chinese into sort of the epitome of alienage, a process that was born in these local communities as well as in the federal level, they were starting to delineate what it meant to be an alien in american law and practice. And there is some irony to this, because at the moment in which the congress is in the process of inventing the modern american citizen in order to give black men rights and at the same time theyre inventing modern american alienage in order to exclude the chinese. Its a complica