Chinese American

In the 1860s, when Chinese labourers immigrated to the United States to build the Central Pacific Railroad, a new population with both physical and cultural differences had to be accommodated within the racial worldview. While industrial employers were eager to get this new and cheap labour, the ordinary white…

Only a few hundred Chinese lived in the state in 1850, but two years later one resident out of 10 was Chinese; most performed menial labour. Irish labourers arrived during the railroad construction boom in the 1860s. The Irish, French, and Italians tended to settle in San Francisco. As…

…demand for the exclusion of Chinese labourers, who worked for lower rates of pay than did “whites.”

Chinatown, which is the best-known Chinese community in the United States, is also probably the least understood minority community in the city. The colourful shops and restaurants of Grant Avenue mask a slum of crowded tenements and sweatshops that has the highest population density in an already densely populated city.…

The Chinese immigrants, who had settled in the area in small numbers in the early 1800s, first arrived in appreciable numbers in the 1870s to work in service jobs and in the lumber industry, which paid them substantially less than their European-descended counterparts; in later years…