Full Citation

Title: Embracing Isolation: Chinese American Geographic Redistribution during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2013

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first race-based immigration restriction in American history. It prohibitedthe entry of Chinese laborers and legitimated a host of new discriminatory policies and practices that circumscribedthe activities of Chinese Americans residing in the country. This paper explores the geographic responses of ChineseAmericans to the harsh new reality ushered in by the law. Using data from the IPUMS and ICPSR digitized censusfiles, hand-coded entries from published census volumes, and Exclusion-era Chinese case files, this paper describesand analyzes for the first time the forces that shaped the geographic redistribution of the Chinese Americanpopulation in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.I reject the standard view that Chinese Americans were confined to Chinatowns during Exclusion and documentinstead their wide geographic dispersion. Chinatowns in the West shrank. This was true of those in big cities likeSan Francisco, Portland, and Oakland but also of those in smaller places such as Stockton, Sacramento, and Butte.Many Chinese returned home. Others left for cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and South. While new Chinatownsoutside the West were established, I show that much of the migratory flow out of the West was directed towardsmaller cities without Chinatowns.I model Chinese American locational choices in terms of three motivations: a desire to live in their own ethniccommunities, the need for remunerative employment, and the contrasting preferences of solitary male sojourners andco-habiting families raising children. Multivariate regression analysis suggests that the community motive played astrong positive role throughout the Exclusion Era, with larger Chinatowns especially attractive, but, during the periodof Chinese population decline, its influence on geographic distribution was outweighed by the employment motive.Discrimination coupled with good access to capital and labor led the Chinese to embrace laundry and restaurantservice. Chinese Americans dispersed throughout the country in an effort to locate near potential customers, oftenbecoming the only person of their race living in their community. Success on Gold Mountain came at the price of anunparalleled degree of social isolation. Beginning in the 1920s, the recovery of the Chinese American populationimproved the economic viability of Chinatowns and offset the centrifugal effect of laundry and restaurant employment.

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Carter, Susan

Conference Name: Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

Publisher Location: University of California, Berkeley

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity

Countries: