URBAN MIGRATIONS AND EARLY 20TH CENTURY COMMUNITIES

THE SEGREGATION OF CHINESE IN SAN FRANCISCO

BY STUDENT

Throughout American history, various cities experienced an influx in immigration. This blog-post particularly focuses on Chinese immigration to San Francisco. I would especially like to highlight the hardships Chinese people faced, and try to illustrate how they were viewed by their white neighbors. Chinese immigration raises a few questions pertaining to the political, social and economical isolation of their community, and how these processes led to spatial segregation. This leads to one general but significant question: how does the segregation of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco impact our society today?

Chinese people in the late 1800s and early 1900s were among the most discriminated minority in San Francisco. They were thought of as filthy and dirty beings, and were frequently referred to as subhuman by anti-Chinese leaders. People that associated with the Chinese were looked down upon (Brooks 2009, 11). Many Chinese at this time started isolating themselves and only interacting with their own kind because they felt unsafe living in a society where they constantly faced violence and discrimination. Due to the dominant white majority, and the desire to keep white ethnic groups dominating, , political leaders started to enforce laws and policies that ultimately left the Chinese no choice but to move to what is now called Chinatown in San Francisco. Some of the policies enforced included the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was implemented in an attempt to decrease Chinese immigration to the United States (Brooks 2009, 18). Additionally, at the time of the gold rush, the foreign minor act was enacted, and required payment from foreigners in order to search for gold (Brooks 2009, 16). Furthermore, an additional policy was passed which made the Chinese illegible to receive American citizenship (Brooks 2009, 18). Whites set up policies to prevent the Chinese from congregating in majority-white places. As a result of this political inequality, social segregation and economical deficit, the Chinese had no choice but to become spatially segregated in Chinatown, where they lived in complete and utter poverty. 

Many say that history tends to repeat itself. I truly believe that stereotypes that minority groups face will never be completely diminished and therefore I think its important for us to immerse ourselves and understand the hardships minority groups such as the Chinese in San Francisco faced living in poverty in a segregated area. We are the result of history, the history that shaped America socially, politically, and economically. What baffles me the most is the way the Chinese in Chinatown, specifically business owners found a way to benefit from their undeserving poverty by creating those slum tours (Brooks 2009, 31). People going on the slum tours may get the wrong impression of the Chinese, who masked their atrocious living conditions with smiles and cheers. Because although the Chinese who lived there seemed happy to the tourists during those tours, the tours do not reflect the sorrow and enormous difficulties the Chinese encountered in their everyday lives. When first learning about the slum tours, it appeared to be an adequate way to demonstrate to others what hardships the Chinese face on a daily basis in hopes of making people want to take action, and make a change. I was wrong. The whites, and the Chinese that lived in Chinatown only wanted to make these slums a tourist attraction in order to collect more money and hopefully improve their living conditions. Since America is a melting pot, I find this topic of segregation toward minority groups really interesting and contradictory. We live in a society that learns about segregation but does not experience it the way it has been in the 1900s; I think the impact that this history brings is by making people (especially Americans) change their ways in order to create a more diffuse and non-segregated society. In addition, this topic really fascinates me because I am an immigrant. I immigrated to the United States from Israel when I was 13, and had to face the difficulties of learning a new language, and adapting to a new culture. Although, I did not face all the challenges and inequalities the Chinese faced, I can still empathize with their hardships, and can only hope that history does not repeat itself.