In the history of the Chinese in America, the border has caught our attention and held it. Chinese migrants’ attempts to cross the border, and America’s attempts to stop them, is the story that historians have told and retold. But long before the Chinese faced the first exclusion laws, and long afterward as well, they endured a racial regime within America every day. This book is the history of that racial regime and the lives it touched.Article continues after advertisement
Arriving on California’s shores in the 1850s, Chinese migrants entered a young nation with an old tradition of white dominance. White Californians did not agree on what to do with these “exotic” newcomers, but they were certain that the Chinese did not belong. Set apart by their race, religion, and supposedly slavish tendencies, the Chinese could not be enfolded into the nation as others would be…They had no future in America, or at least that is what lawmakers hoped.
To make it so, western states, territories, and towns enacted anti-Chinese laws. Laws and legal customs regulated the ability of Chinese people to work, operate a business, own property, testify in court, seek education, and form families. For the Chinese, these laws were both more and less than they appeared on paper; more because of the unspoken level of violence that could lie behind them, less because many failed to withstand Chinese resistance…
