Asian American History

REFERENCES

Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. New York: Twayne, 1991.

Cruz, Adrian. “There Will Be No ‘One Big Union’: The Struggle for Interracial Labor Unionism in California Agriculture, 1933–1939.” Cultural Dynamics 22:1 (2010): 29–48.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2015.

Takaki, Ronald T. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Rev. ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.

NOTE

1. In my attempt to verify this reference to an “East Indian” found in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, I contacted the Virginia Historical Society. The reference to the “East Indian” is not confirmed because the commenter never identified, specifically, the list to which s/he referred. However, the reference to a “Turk” is confirmed. In Cavaliers and Pioneers, Volume 1, a “Mr. Georg Menifye” reflects his patent for 1,200 acres in James City County. The transaction was dated February 25, 1636. Menifye—a name that appears to have been spelled many ways—received the land in return for transporting 24 persons from England to Virginia. Among those persons was “Anth. (a) Turk”—apparently referring to someone named only as Anthony, who was known as a Turk.

FACTORS OF CHINESE MIGRATION

By 1800, China faced a bleak future. Its military was weak and unable to protect its people from Western colonial powers. Its rulers and cultural consciousness was too strong to surrender to the political visions of Chinese modernizers. According to Benson Tong, “in the absence of modernization, its people were forced to look elsewhere for a livelihood”; thus began the movement of Chinese migrants to America (2000, 22). Tong argues that “China’s educated elite spent so much of their time and energy trying to attain the status and prestige of the scholar-official class that it had to sideline endeavors that might have fostered economic and technological change” (2000, 22). The Chinese economy was lackluster, and the spirit of entrepreneurship was dulled due to a combination of factors—no government investment in infrastructure for trade; high government taxes; and a lack of private investments. In addition, the Qing court and the feudal system was in decline (Chen 1980, 7). This made China susceptible to internal rebellion and external invasion by Western colonial forces.

Population growth and pressure exacerbated China’s inability to protect its people from internal and external pressures. By 1800, the population of China totaled 300 million, representing a twofold increase since the 1660s (Tong 2000, 18). Agricultural land did not develop with this population growth, because so much of China consisted of arid and mountainous land. Between 1661 and 1812, the population increased by more than 100 percent, while arable land had increased by less than 50 percent (Tong 2000, 18). For instance, in the southern maritime province of Guangdong, one of the fastest-growing provinces in China, population growth increased by 79.5 percent, while China’s total national average increased by 47 percent between 1787 and 1850 (Tong 2000, 21). Population growth became a significant social, economic, and political problem for China because the economic system did not develop, and the impact of the global Industrial Revolution was not significantly felt. The displaced Chinese, the poor, and the unemployed had to result to social vices, such as banditry or rebellion, or move to survive: unrest and suffering was widespread. Against such a backdrop, both migration and emigration became viable, even necessary possibilities for survival.

Population growth exacerbated harsh economic conditions. The British Opium Wars of 1893–1842 and 1856–1860 forced China to pay large indemnities to the Western imperialist colonial powers, and it drained the Chinese spirit as opium was illegally smuggled into China to advance British economic interest. For years, China successfully pushed back Western influence and kept them out of China’s market. However, by the early nineteenth century, British smugglers “had opened the market wide” by introducing the addictive narcotic—opium—that penetrated all sectors of Chinese society, from the poor laborer to the social elites of the gentry class (Chang 2004, 14). The impact of forced illegal opium trade in China had a totalizing destructive effect. Iris Chang describes the impact, noting, “Whether they smoked opium through a pipe or sucked it in tablet form, heavy addicts fell into a near-comatose stupor, gradually decaying into living skeletons … Millions of Chinese were wasting away, slowly dying from the poison” (2004, 14). The Chinese government attempted to stop the importation of opium into China but did not succeed. The Qing court assigned Lin Zexu, a special commissioner, to stop the smuggling of opium into China. Lin confiscated 20,000 chests of opium and destroyed it out at sea. In response, the British government launched a series of attacks against China. This provided Britain a reason to force open China’s doors: British forces captured one port city after another: Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), and Ningbo, Shanghai, and Nanking (Nanjing). In 1842, Britain imposed the Treaty of Nanking, which forced China to open five of its ports (Canton, Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai) to international trade, pay a total of $33 million in indemnities, cede Hong Kong to Britain, and allow the opium trade; this would be the first of many unequal treaties China would be forced to sign (Chen 1980, 8–9). More importantly, instead of importing opium from India, and to keep profit at home, poppies were brought into China. “Soon poppies were blooming all over the country. Chinese opium production soared, and Indian imports dropped, as Indian opium could not penetrate the interior. Domestic opium proved to be an immeasurably worse problem than the Indian” (Huang 2001, 108–10). Other Western powers followed on the heels of Britain’s example in “ravaging, humiliating, and exploiting enfeebled China” (Chen 1980, 8). The United States claimed its share of China and its riches through the Treaty of Wangxia, which gave it most-favored-nation treatment in trade and extraterritoriality (exemption from Chinese laws) for American nationals in China, and the right to be tried by the U.S. consular court. With each defeat, China was burdened by new indemnities, which the Qing court squeezed from the people.

The Western invaders, and later Japan, drained the Qing dynasty of silver, which resulted in the Qing government’s high taxation on the peasant farmers, who were unable to pay their taxes, which resulted in them losing their land. Once displaced from their land, they were unable to find employment elsewhere because China’s industrial sector was underdeveloped, a result of foreign competition imposed on China after the Opium Wars had undermined domestic industries such as silk production. In fact, Guangdong produced many mass-produced goods, but cheap foreign goods flooded the local markets, limiting the demand for Chinese-made goods such as premodern Chinese handicrafts (Chen 1980, 8). The rapid growth of the colonized islands of Macao and Hong Kong, by as early as the mid-1850s, captured much trade from Guangdong. By 1870, free trade and competition from other coastal ports in China exacerbated the unemployment rate for the urban proletariat in Guangdong. Unemployment, high taxation, growing population pressure, and natural disasters such as flooding deepened the problems of hunger and poverty in the Guangdong province. Tong notes that one flood in Guangdong was so severe that, according to one imperial account, the “rivers and the sea and the streams, have joined in one sheet over the land for several hundred li [one li equals a third of a mile]” (2000, 23). The hardest-hit population was subsistence-based peasantry, who also bore the heaviest taxation. These immigrants defied Chinese law, since the Ming and Qing dynasties forbade overseas travel under punishment of death (Chen 1980, 10–11). They were willing to take the risk in light of the turmoil in the economy, hostile ecological and climatic conditions, overpopulation, and oppression by their government and invaders, which led to destitution and deprivation. All they needed to do was reach the Portuguese colony of Macau or the British colony of Hong Kong and then, away from the reaches and jurisdiction of the emperor, hop on a ship headed for California’s gold country.

GOLD MOUNTAIN DREAMS

The greatest outflow of Chinese immigrants occurred between the 1840s and 1900. An estimated two and a half million people left China, and went to Hawai‘i, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, the West Indies, South and Central America, and Africa. During this early period, the majority traveled to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and the mainland United States. Civil unrest and political and military chaos pushed Chinese immigrants out of their country to seek sanctuary elsewhere. Virtually all the Chinese who emigrated came from only five small regions in the two provinces of Fujian and Guangdong and the island of Hainan. Three of the groups settled mainly in Southeast Asia, while the other two traveled across the Pacific to Hawaiʻi and the United States. A vast majority of the first wave of Chinese immigrants who landed in California during the nineteenth century came from Guangdong Province. The Guangdong natives in the United States can, in turn, be divided into three subgroups, each speaking its own Chinese dialect. According to Chen, from the 1840s to the turn of the century, the main sources of emigration to the United States were: (1) Sam yup (sanyi) people who came from three districts—Nanhai, Panyu, and Shunde, including Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province—in the Pearl River delta; (2) Sze yup (siyi) inhabitants who hailed from four districts—Xinhui, Taishan, Kaiping, and Enping; (3) other areas of Guangdong Province, including Hua Xian, Sanshui, Sihui, Qingyuan, Zhongshan, Zhongxin, Boluo, Dongguan, Baoan, Huaji, Guangning, Gaohe, Yangchun, Yangjiang, Guanghai, Mei Xian, and Jieyang; and (4) Hong Kong (1980, 17–18). Murray Lee notes, “Between 1848 and 1881, 95 percent of the over 300,000 Chinese who came to America were Cantonese” (2011, 17).

To the Cantonese migrants, emigration represented a means for a better life in the face of population pressure, economic hardship, political upheaval, religious persecution, and natural disasters. Although aspiring immigrants had many places to choose from, places where gold had been reportedly discovered—most notably California, Australia, and the Fraser River valley of British Columbia—were the most alluring. “Gold Mountain” was more than just a designation; it was an aspiration, an idea for riches and renewed life. Gold Mountain was any place, not just California, where gold or money or work were available; where wealth was possible.

GAM, GOLD

The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 provoked a distant gaze toward the West Coast. This includes the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia as well. Australia was also a central object of the gold gaze. San Francisco was known as “Old Gold Mountain” (Jiujinshan) while Australia was known as “New Gold Mountain” (Xinjinshan). Between 1848 and 1882, waves of Chinese migrants came to California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho in search of gold, predominantly from the southern provinces of Guangdong (also known as Canton) and Fujian. Although their search was for gold, many ended up in coal mines, railroad construction, and service work (e.g., as cooks, laundry workers, and shopkeepers). Chinese pioneers began to establish Chinatowns, either by necessity or by choice, and started to recreate and reproduce a perception of community. A high percentage of these immigrants were young men in their working prime, chosen by their families to journey to Gold Mountain (Mandarin, Jinshan; Cantonese, Gam San), overblown with hopes of making it rich and returning home after several years aboard. San Francisco was a major port of entry for Chinese migrants during the early period of the gold rush. Jack Chen notes that three Chinese migrants arrived in San Francisco in 1848, followed by another 323 in 1849, and 450 in 1850 (1980, 11). According to Ronald Takaki, by 1851, there were 2,716 Chinese immigrants residing in the United States; by 1852, there were 20,026 (1989, 79).

In 1876, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company began regularly scheduled runs between Hong Kong and San Francisco. As a result, between 1870 and 1883, an average of 12,000 Chinese migrants were arriving through the port of San Francisco each year. Before the steamship, the voyage of 7,000 miles took from 55 to 100 days. With the advent of the steamship, and the famous China route that began in 1867 and lasted until the turn of the century, the time taken to reach San Francisco was shortened to weeks. The steamships could hold more passengers than the traditional sailing ships. Emigration was further encouraged when the price of the tickets for the steamship dropped threefold. By 1870, 63,000 Chinese immigrants were living on American soil—between 75 and 80 percent living in California, with sizable communities in Idaho, Montana, and other areas in the Southwest and New England. For this reason, along the West Coast but primarily in California, there were many Chinese communities of various sizes, as far south as Baja California and San Diego, and northward to Vancouver, Canada.

A major pull factor in their decision to leave their villages for distant lands since the late eighteenth century was the exaggerated tales of the riches of America, on Gold Mountain. The people of Guangdong had been exposed to American influences by way of Yankee traders and missionaries. Early Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century who chose to journey to Gold Mountain were known as gam san haak (Cantonese for “travelers to Gold Mountain”) and found only hek fu (“taking in pain”) (Takaki 1998, 80; Tong 2000, 21). Prejudice, disfranchisement, and social exclusion marked their daily existence and Gold Mountain dreams. This movement of Chinese laborers is concomitant with the rise of the global capitalistic economy. Tong notes, “the global expansion of European and American capitalism had necessitated the movement of workers, capital, and technology across borders so that investors and businesspeople could tap into the natural resources and markets of the underdeveloped countries. The eventual immigration of those from Guangdong to Gold Mountain was part of a larger diaspora that involved as many as 2.5 million between 1840 and 1900” (2000, 22–23). It was, as Murray Lee describes, “part of a worldwide Chinese migration pattern” (2011, 17).

EARLY IMMIGRATION

The travelers were mainly poverty-stricken young men. Some of them were married, were generally illiterate, or had very little schooling, but all were inspired by the tales of Gold Mountain and had dreams of gold. There was not just gold to be mined, but employment opportunities as well. The Chinese entered into contract, a form of forced slave labor to afford their passage to Southeast Asian countries, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and the mainland United States. For example, arrangements for their Pacific passage were made by an emigration broker, a labor recruiter who represents the sugar plantation owners in Hawai‘i. They were offered “free passage” to the island in exchange for their labor. The terms of the contracts usually lasted five years and included shelter, food, and medical care. On a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana, Chinese laborers signed their contracts with their thumbprints, stipulating:

1. The worker owes the recruiter $100, for travel, which is to be deducted from future wages;
2. The contract was for five years, with a month wage of $7;
3. Working hours were from sunrise to sunset, with one hour off for breakfast and lunch;
4. At cane-pressing time, the height of the season, workers had to work at night. Workers get 50 cents for six hours of night time work;
5. The workers also had to do domestic work in the homes of the plantation owners (Chen 1980, 25).

The other way to finance their passage was through the “credit-ticket system.” Here, a broker would loan money to the migrant, who would later pay off the loan with interest out of his earnings. The Chinese laborers fell victim to the “coolie trade” because they were exploited under the terms of their contacts and treated harshly, no better than African slaves kidnapped and forced into labor through coercion in Cuba, Peru, and elsewhere in the Americas (Jung 2006, 34). Thus, mixed in with “gold seekers” were “freedom seekers.” Jack Chen says, “Among the earliest immigrants in 1848 were twenty-five Chinese who, finding themselves tricked into near slavery in Peru, escaped to freedom in America and joined the Gold Rush” (1980, 13).

Chinese emigration also included merchants. They were venture capitalists seeking new opportunities in a foreign land (Kwok 1988, 16). Like the peasant laborers, this class of people were also mostly, if not all men. Single women did not travel alone to distant foreign lands. The married ones often stayed home to care for their families and elders. They also stayed behind because the family simply could not afford their passage. Because husbands and sons were separated from wives and families, the Chinese migrants are described as sojourners. Sojourners are people on the move, involved in temporary migration, who plan to eventually return to those they left behind. “During the first decade of immigration to the United States as many as a third of them did so” (Tong 2000, 25). This practice, known as “return migration,” also characterized turn-of-the-century European immigration to the New World. However, two-thirds of the Chinese migrants remained—for legal, financial, or personal reasons—in the United States, to live, work, and settle.

HAWAI‘I SUGAR PLANTATIONS

Before 1900, Hawai‘i was an independent monarchy. Hawai‘i’s lucrative sugar industry entered the world market in the 1940s, replacing small local farms with plantation fields, improved refinement of sugar processing, and increased output (Okihiro 2009, 115). Historian Gary Okihiro notes that “By 1846 there were eleven sugar plantations, two run by Chinese who were pioneer sugar producers, and sugar exports advanced quickly from 4 tons in 1836 to 180 tons in 1840 and nearly 300 tons in 1847” (2009, 115). Hawai‘i’s sugar industry was fueled by the growing population of California and Oregon. The American Civil War also fueled the development of Hawai‘i’s sugar industry, as the North was cut off from the South’s raw material. The North thus became a steady market for higher-priced imported sugar and cotton (Okihiro 2009, 115). In the 1850s, the price for a pound of sugar in the North increased from 6.95 cents to 10.55 cents. In 1864, it reached its peak at 17.19 cents (Okihiro 2009, 115). This created a great demand for sugar and, by extension, sugar plantations. The need for cheap labor surely influenced the sugar plantation owners’ recruitment of contract workers from China, the Pacific Islands, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines as well as Puerto Rico, Europe, and California. Starting around 1852, the plantation owners imported Chinese laborers in large numbers.

CHINESE IN HAWAI‘I VERSUS CALIFORNIA

The experience of the Chinese in Hawai‘i is much different than their co-ethnic experience over on the mainland. Chinese laborers in Hawai‘i were more likely to have their wives with them. According to Eleanor Nordyke and Richard Lee, in 1900, of the 25,767 Chinese in Hawai‘i, 3,471, or 13.5 percent were female, but of the 89,683 Chinese on the U.S. mainland, only 4,522, or 5 percent, were female (1989, 209–10). One reason for the differences in sex ratio is the ethnic makeup of the two groups of immigrants. The Chinese in California were mainly Punti, whereas most of their counterparts in Hawai‘i were Hakka. Hakka society did not practice foot-binding, and Hakka women had greater freedom of mobility. Moreover, the immigration conditions and policies also affected the sex ratio difference between Hawai‘i and the mainland. Since 1864, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser expressed angst about the predominantly male Chinese population and encouraged plantation owners to import Chinese women, as a way to control the men and the social problems and vices that result from a bachelor society—a society of single, unmarried men. The plantation owners believed that Chinese women could be used to control the men, better than any regulation that they can enforce. The plantation owners saw that Chinese women were strong instruments that could be used to control the Chinese men. Women who immigrated to Hawai‘i did so under the same circumstances as Chinese men: labor contracts. They were supposed to engage in “light labor” only and not be separated from their husbands. Chinese women were paid less than their male counterparts.

CHINESE WOMEN IN HAWAI‘I VERSUS CALIFORNIA

The combination of missionary concern and employer self-interest did not encourage the immigration of Chinese women into the mainland, as it had in Hawai‘i. In fact, the opposite occurred, because employers viewed Chinese male laborers as sojourners, as temporary and migratory. California employers wanted a workforce of single men. They wanted a mobile workforce that could move from one location to the next for construction and harvesting. Chinese men therefore worked on the railroad and as migrant farm laborers. The differences in gender ratio of the Chinese community in Hawai‘i and California influenced the way they were perceived: on Hawai‘i, they were not seen as competitors in the labor market, whereas in California, they were. This difference in perception led the Chinese to become a racialized group, and thus, targets of prejudice, hostility, and violence. By the 1880s, the white community in California represented 87 percent of the population and saw Chinese women and their families as a threat to white racial purity and what they considered to be a “white man’s country.”

Besides coming as wives, Chinese women were also imported to America and forced into the lucrative prostitution trade, regardless of the final destination: Hawai‘i or California. Chinese prostitutes lived and worked as slaves to their owners and usually did not survive more than six years. The prostitutes ranged in age from 16 to 25. The majority could not read the terms of the contracts they were forced to sign with their thumbprint. The lowest-level prostitutes were forced to work and live in cribs, rooms no larger than four by six feet. They were forced to sell themselves to poor laborers, teenage boys, sailors, and drunks for a little as 25 to 50 cents. If infected with disease, they were left to die and thrown out. Prostitutes forced to work in the mining camps lived short, harsh lives. Prostitutes who revolted were physically punished. Some would try to run away, but their owners would track them down because they were highly valued. Their condition was, in large measure, a result of the demographics of the society, immigration policies, and economic restrictions.

Chinese women were viewed as exotic curios on the East Coast, but things were different on the West Coast as gold started to run low with increasing competition. The rising hostility toward Chinese immigration on the West Coast correlates with the racialized and debased descriptions of Chinese women in the media. In 1870, of the 3,536 Chinese women in California, 2,157, roughly 60 percent, were prostitutes. Because the Chinese population in California consisted mostly of men, Chinese prostitutes were in high demand. The Chinese prostitute problem was employed to fuel anti-Chinese sentiments, and it resulted in the passage of the 1875 Page Law. The Page Law was designed to halt the flow of Chinese prostitutes to America, who were seen as a great threat to white manhood, health, morality, and family life (Tong 2000, 28). “Chinese men, bereft of family life and denied conjugal ties, sought prostitutes or baak chai (a derogatory Cantonese phrase for ‘one hundred men’s wife’)—as they did opium smoking and gambling—for entertainment. Applied stringently, the Page Law excluded wives and single women with legitimate claims. Immigration officials believed that prostitutes typically posed as wives, sisters, or daughters of sojourners already in America. Officials consequently assumed that all Chinese women seeking entry into the United States were potential prostitutes” (Tong 2000, 28).

In San Francisco, Chinese prostitutes became the first immigrant group in the host society to be targets for removal or confinement in geographic locality. This movement to isolate Chinese prostitutes in the municipality of San Francisco extended into a larger effort to isolate all Chinese in the United States. By the mid-1890s, an unexpected health concern made it possible for city health officers to force the Chinese into a specific geographical locality. The bubonic plague provided them with the reason they needed to isolate the Chinese.

The Burlingame Treaty (1868) between China and the United States repealed the century-old prohibitory emigration law of the Qing government and secured the right of Chinese to open and voluntary migration to the United States. More importantly, the treaty offered Chinese immigrants in America, equal protection of all legal rights enjoyed by other foreigners residing in the United States. By the early 1870s, the U.S. federal courts interpreted that the treaty also provided for the rights of the Chinese to live and work in America. The treaty’s spirit of equality and fair treatment for the Chinese was soon overturned as anti-Chinese sentiments along the Pacific Coast swelled.

ANTI-CHINESE EXCLUSION, 1840–1882

Gold on Gold Mountain was not as plentiful as the embellished tales described. The very first wave of Chinese immigrants who landed in the port of San Francisco were viewed favorably, as celestials and strangers who eventually will become good Americans. When California celebrated its admission into the Union in 1850, the Chinese participated in the ceremonies alongside whites. Justice Nathaniel Bennett declared that even though the Chinese were born and raised under different governments, that day, they stood as brothers, respected as equals, who share one country, one hope, and one destiny (Takaki 1998, 80). This quickly changed as the nativist cry got louder and louder. White miners demanded that the Chinese, along with the Mexican, Hawaiian, French, and Chilean miners, be banned from mining. “Within just several years of the discovery of gold, 2,400 Chinese, an estimated two-thirds of the Chinese in America, were laboring in the mines of the American West” (Tong 2000, 32). Competition intensified, and the Chinese miners became the targets of hostility and faced rigid racial prejudice from competing white miners as well as from local and state governments. The best example of this is the California state legislature’s passage of the Foreign Miner’s Tax of 1852, which was chiefly enforced against Chinese miners, who often had to pay more than once (Chinn, Lai, and Choy 1969, 24). In theory, the Foreign Miner’s Tax was ostensibly imposed on all miners who did not desire to become naturalized citizens. Lawmakers knew, of course, that the Chinese could not gain citizenship, since the 1790 Nationality Act excluded nonwhites from being able to become a naturalized citizen. The Foreign Miner’s Tax remained intact until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1870. By that time, the state of California had collected $5 million from the Chinese, a sum representing 25–50 percent of the state revenue. In 1855, the California state legislature passed a law known as “An Act to Discourage the Immigration to this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof.” This law imposed on the master or owner of a ship who imported people ineligible to become naturalized citizens a landing tax of $50 for each passenger who arrived by ship.

By the late 1850s and early 1860s, there were 24,000 Chinese miners, two-thirds of whom were mining in California. Many of the Chinese miners organized themselves into small groups, composed of up to 40 members, while others formed their own companies. Most of the Chinese miners were also independent prospectors. Chinese miners in Yuba County obtained their placer claims through preemption rather than purchase. Chinese miners filed a required application in the county’s record’s office and marked the boundaries of their claim in the preemption claim procedure.

As a result of exclusion from mining, and of gold becoming scarcer during the mid-1860s, the Chinese left the mines and ventured into fishing. Eventually, Chinese fishing activities stretched from the Oregon boundary down to Baja California and also along the Sacramento River delta. By the 1870s, a number of them concentrated on catching and processing shrimp in the San Francisco Bay, while others collected abalone off the coast of Southern California. A large portion of Chinese immigrants established their residence along the California coast and began the business of gathering, drying, and exporting seafood resources, namely seaweed (Ulva), kelp, and abalone back to China. One of these thriving communities was in Cambria, San Luis Obispo County. Prior to the official establishment of the little community of Cambria in 1866, the Chinese immigrants in California were already living along the coastal bluffs in San Luis Obispo County. The Chinese seaweed farmers found the rocky coastal area of San Luis Obispo County ideal for their trade. The Ulva (a sea lettuce) already grew but competed with many other forms of algae. In order to encourage luxurious and fast growth, the Chinese made sure the rocks preferred by the Ulva were plentiful and strategically placed to receive the full benefit of wave action and sun. The selected rocks were thoroughly cleaned by scorching or burning, originally accomplished by pine shavings smoldering in a wire basket held against the rocks. In later years, a blow torch was used, eliminating the job of scraping the dead algae away.

RAILROADS

Besides the venture into the fishing industries, large numbers of Chinese workers were employed in the railroad industries. In February 1865, 50 Chinese workers were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad to help lay the tracks for the transcontinental line leading east from Sacramento. The Chinese laborers were praised by Leland Stanford, the company’s president, and Charles Crocker, the company’s superintendent, as hardworking, amiable, and quiet—workers who can learn any skill quickly and efficiently. They even went as far as to suggest that Chinese workers were more productive and reliable compared to white workers. The Chinese laborers were trained for all aspects of railroad construction, including blasting through mountains, driving horses, and handling rocks with picks and shovels. Animosity and hostility from white railroad laborers developed, which resulted in their demand that the company stop hiring Chinese laborers.

Within a two-year period, the company employed 12,000 Chinese laborers, roughly 90 percent of their workforce. The railroad employed the “dual wage system,” paying Asian workers less than white workers as a means to keep wages for both groups low. The dual wage system results in “ethnic antagonism” whereby white workers demanded restrictions on Asian workers, which later resulted in immigration exclusion. Not only were the Chinese laborers fast workers, but their employment saved the company a lot of money because the Chinese laborers were paid $31 a month, while their white coworkers were paid $45 a month. Because the Central Pacific managers wanted to accelerate construction, they forced Chinese workers to work through the winter of 1866. Time was a big concern for the company because the amount of payment it received in land and subsidy from the federal government was determined on the miles of tracks they were able to build. The Chinese workers lived and worked in tunnels under the snow. Snowslides and landslides occasionally buried the camps and crews. In the spring, the thawing corpses, motionless, with shovels and picks in their hands, were discovered. That spring, Chinese workers went on strike and demanded eight-hour days and $45 a month: 5,000 workers went on strike. The strike was advertised through a Chinese-language print. The Central Pacific managers blamed their rival Union Pacific for masterminding the strike. This allowed them to negate the possibility that the Chinese workers were capable of acting on their own benefit and behalf. As a possible solution to the Chinese strike, the Central Pacific sent a wire to New York, inquiring about the feasibility of sending 10,000 blacks to replace the striking Chinese (Takaki 1998, 86). Superintendent Crocker responded to the Chinese strikers by cutting off their food supplies, which worked because weeks later, virtually imprisoned in their camps on the mountains of the Sierras, the starving strikers went back to work. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed ahead of schedule. The completion of the transcontinental railroad is a symbol of America’s Manifest Destiny. The construction of the Central Pacific Railroad line was a Chinese achievement, but this fact remains unnoticed and invisible.

AFTER THE RAILROAD

Released from railroad construction, the Chinese laborers moved into agriculture. In California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin River delta region, they constructed irrigation channels, reclaimed swamplands, and built the levees, dikes, and ditches. As tenant farmers or sharecroppers, the Chinese introduced new varieties of fruits and vegetables for the local markets. The majority were laborers who toiled in orchards, vineyards, and hop fields. By 1870, the Chinese constituted 18 percent of all farm laborers in California; by 1880, they represented 86 percent of the agricultural laborers. The dual wage system was also employed in this industry. Employers paid Chinese laborers lower wages than white workers. The Chinese workers were trapped in a racially based dual wage system, where they were paid less than white workers for doing the same job. In 1880, Chinese pickers in Santa Clara County, California, went on strike, demanding increased compensation for the fruit they harvested. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act reduced the supply of Chinese farm laborers, so they recognized the increased need for their labor and demanded higher wages as a result.

Other ex-miners began working in the salmon canneries on the coastal bays and streams from central California to western Alaska. “In Alaska in 1902, the peak year of Chinese employment there, over 5,300 of the cannery work force of 13,800 were Chinese” (Newell 1988, 636). Others traveled to the Pacific Northwest after being recruited to build the North Pacific line or to run lumber mills. Still others worked in small businesses—laundries, restaurants, and dry-goods stores owned by Chinese merchants. During the 1870s, Chinese workers were recruited to replace the emancipated black slaves for plantation work and railroad building in the southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. The Chinese did not stay on the plantations long. As early as 1871, the New Orleans Times notes that Chinese preferred to work in the small trades and industries in the city rather than toil in the fields. By 1880, there were a recorded 50 Chinese in Mississippi, 133 in Arkansas, 489 in Louisiana, and 95 in New Orleans, working as laundryman, cigar makers, shoemakers, cooks, and woodcarvers. Chinese workers were also recruited to the Northeast, specifically Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, as scabs to break striking shoemakers, steam launderers, and cutlery makers—most of whom were Irish immigrants. By then, there were 500 Chinese in New York, and about 900 in Boston (Tong 2000, 33).

San Francisco, also known as Dai Fow (Cantonese for “Big City”) became a city with employment opportunities. “Ethnic antagonism,” which pitted one ethnic group against another to keep wages low, resulted in anti-Chinese sentiments and violence against them, drove many into self-employment. The Chinese laundry was chief among them. The Chinese laundryman was an American phenomenon. It does not exist in China; in fact, there were no laundries in China during that period. Back in China, women do the washing, not men. Opening a laundry in the United States required little capital because the materials were simple: a stove, trough, dry room, sleeping area, a sign, and some English skills. Besides low capital-investment demands, the Chinese were pushed into this line of work because it was one of the few that were open to them besides restaurants. In 1900, one out of four employed Chinese males worked as a laundryman.

After the railroad and mining, the Chinese population became an urban population because many were “driven out” of rural areas as a result of economic competition and racial discrimination. San Francisco’s Chinese population went from 2,719 in 1860 to 12,022 in 1870. Similarly, Los Angeles’s Chinese population went from 605 in 1880 to 1,817 in 1890 (Tong 2000, 33). In the 1870s, the urban Chinese population moved into manufacturing and once again found themselves caught in a racially segregated labor market with low wages. Often Chinese laborers occupied menial positions in the woolen mills, paper mills, knitting mills, and tanneries, while European Americans took the skilled jobs. In instances where they held the same position as whites, they were paid less for the same work. In the early 1880s, Chinese men earned one dollar a day as factory workers, while white men earned two dollars (Tong 2000, 34).

Throughout much of this early period, anti-Chinese sentiments informed much of the public policies and popular racism that discriminated against the Chinese living in America.

1882–1965

By 1882, the Chinese population in the United States was about 110,000, or one-fifth of one percent, of the total U.S. population. When Chinese laborers were no longer needed, political agitation against the Chinese intensified, and the U.S. Congress enacted a series of very harsh laws, beginning in 1882, that were designed to exclude Chinese immigrants and deny their naturalization rights and basic civil liberties (Lee 2011, 298). In the spring of 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur. Section 14 of the Act declares, “hereafter no State court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship; and all laws in conflict with this act are hereby repealed.” Section 15 states, “That the words ‘Chinese laborers,’ wherever used in this act, shall be construed to mean both skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining.” By 1888, the act was extended to include all Chinese, not just laborers. It was renewed by the Geary Act of 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first U.S. law ever passed to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race, which later was extended and expanded to include other Asian immigrants, such as the Japanese, Koreans, and Indians. The exclusionist policies led to an immediate and sharp decline in the Chinese population: from 105,465 in 1880, to 89,863 in 1900, to 61,639 in 1920.

This demographic decline resulted in the steady disappearance of Chinatowns throughout the United States. For example, the Chinese communities in California towns such as Cambria, Riverside, Yosemite, Hanford, Mendocino, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo slowly disappeared as the remaining Chinese moved northward to San Francisco or southward to Los Angeles, two cities with major Chinese centers and more possibilities for employment. Chinatown communities in Evanston, Wyoming; Silver City, Idaho; and Walla Walla, Washington, gradually disappeared as well. It is estimated that by 1900, nearly 45 percent of Chinese immigrants resided in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the same time, those years witnessed an increasing number of Chinese American families, which resulted in a new generation of acculturated English-speaking Chinese Americans who grew up between the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1880s, cities and towns with a Chinatown were scattered throughout the West, though the Chinatown might consist of only a street or a few stores and its inhabitants might number only a few hundred. Eventually, these enclaves disappeared altogether. By 1940, only 28 cities with Chinatowns could be identified; by 1955, only 16. Enforcement of the exclusion laws by immigration officials resulted in additional exclusionary measures that doubly hindered Chinese immigration, but also reinforced the popular conceptions and construction of the Chinese as “Orientals,” “perpetual foreigners” who threatened the American landscape.

RESISTANCE TO ANTI-CHINESE HOSTILITIES

In response to the systemic decimation and exclusion, the Chinese Six Companies, also known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), who advocated for Chinese rights in the United States, sent a letter to President Ulysses Grant in 1876, reminding the president of the Chinese contributions to America’s development and expansion. The Chinese Six Companies also publicly denounced mob violence against the Chinese. The Chinese also employed the U.S. court system in their protest. In 1855, Chan Yong applied for citizenship in San Francisco’s federal district court and was denied citizenship on the basis of the 1790 Naturalization Law, which limited naturalization rights to “whites” only. Since the Chinese were not “white,” they were therefore unable to become naturalized citizens. In 1862, Lin Sing sued the San Francisco tax collector, challenging a $2.50 capitation tax levied on the Chinese on the basis that it was unconstitutional. The California Supreme Court, in Lin Sing v. Washburn, ruled that while the Chinese could be taxed as “other residents,” they could not be set apart as “special subjects of taxation” (California Supreme Court 1906, 534–85). This was a victory for the Chinese as the California Supreme Court ruled in their favor based on the fact that the state law was unconstitutional.

In 1868, the Chinese Six Companies lobbied for inclusion of a provision to protect the Chinese immigrants in America, in the negotiations between the United States and China. They argued that federal protection of the Chinese would protect Chinese lives and properties in the United States, but also promote Chinese investments in the country and promote trade between America and China. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 recognized the “free migration and emigration” of the Chinese to the United States as visitors, traders, and permanent residents (Odo 2002, 31). It also provided the Chinese with rights and privileges of movement and residency as subjects of the “most favored nation.” The flow of immigration (encouraged by the Burlingame Treaty) was stopped by the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese population in the United States gradually declined until the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 with the passage of the Magnuson Act. Anti-Chinese sentiments and discrimination extended to the top ranks of the U.S. government; in 1888, President Grover Cleveland, who supported the Chinese exclusion, pronounced the Chinese “an element ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare” (Spence 1991, 215).

The Civil Rights Act of 1870 contained language that included the Chinese in America. This act nullified the decision in People v. Hall (1854), which made it illegal for Chinese to testify against a white person in court (Odo 2002, 19). On August 9, 1853, George Hall, a white miner, accompanied by his brother and one other man, assaulted and robbed a Chinese placer miner on the Bear River in Nevada County, California. Ling Sing left his tent after hearing the sound of gunfire and was shot and killed by Hall. The sheriff arrested Hall and his companions. Hall was later tried and found guilty based on the testimony of three Chinese witnesses. The judge sentenced Hall to death by hanging. However, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, Hugh Murray, overturned the conviction on the basis that “Asiatics” were “Indians” and therefore unable to testify against a white man in court. Murray argued that “Asiatics” long ago traveled over the Bering Strait and “descended” into Indians. Indians were not allowed to testify in court against a white man, so since “Asiatics” (in this case, the Chinese eyewitnesses) were Indians, they too, cannot testify in court against a white man.

DRIVING OUT THE CHINESE

Fear of the bubonic plague at the beginning of the twentieth century fueled anti-Chinese sentiments and the efforts to “drive them out” or to confine them to a certain geographic locality (Pfaelzer 2007). In 1894, the plague was found in Canton and Hong Kong. In 1896, the San Francisco board of health ordered that all passengers arriving from China and Japan be detained and quarantined because the plague was present there. Two cases of the plague discovered in Honolulu’s Chinatown resulted in the removal of 4,500 Chinese into a quarantine camp. In San Francisco, there was suspicion that a Chinese man died of the plague because his autopsy revealed enlarged lymph nodes, so Surgeon General Walter Wyman ordered San Francisco’s Chinatown to be placed under quarantine. Health and city officials immediately cordoned off Chinatown and forbade travel outside of California without a certificate of health. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment that resulted from economic competition and racism coupled with the fear of the bubonic plague resulted in large-scale efforts to “drive out” the Chinese residents in smaller rural townships, most often by burning down their places of residence. This pushed Chinese immigrants to urban areas such as San Francisco.

1906 SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE, ANGEL ISLAND, AND PAPER SONS

Due to exclusionary immigration laws, the majority of Chinese men in the United States believed they would never be able to bring their wives and or family to America. However, on April 18, 1906, things changed. Early that morning, an earthquake shook the city. Fires broke out and destroyed much of the city along with the municipal records. Without records, the Chinese living in the United States could claim they were born here and thus were citizens who could sponsor their wives and children in immigrating to the United States. Before the earthquake and fire, the number of Chinese women remained around 5 percent or less of the total Chinese population. According to Takaki, in 1900, there were 4,522 Chinese women living in America. After the earthquake and fire, Chinese women began arriving in much larger numbers: in 1910, 219 women arrived; in 1915, 356 women arrived; in 1920, 573 women arrived; in 1922, 1,050 women arrived; and by 1924, 1,893 women arrived. In the years 1907–1925, roughly 10,000 Chinese women came to the United States (Takaki 1998, 235). A 1924 immigration act stopped the inflow of Chinese women because it prohibited entry of immigrants who were ineligible to become citizens, and the act also instituted a permanent quota that provided preferences to immigrants from certain parts of Europe.

Meanwhile, Chinese sons were also entering the United States. U.S. law stipulated that children of American-born citizens were automatically granted citizenship status, even if they were born in foreign countries. These Chinese children of self-proclaimed American-born Chinese fathers were legally allowed to enter the United States. Many sons came, while others were imposters known as “paper sons” and sometimes “paper daughters.” Immigration officials knew of the paper sons and did not trust that all Chinese women were wives of Chinese American men, so they were detained at Angel Island.

Angel Island is the largest island in the San Francisco Bay. Nearly 300,000 immigrants passed through Angel Island Immigration Station during its heyday. Angel Island Immigration Station’s goal was to exclude the entry of Chinese, then Japanese, Koreans, Indians, and other Asian immigrants. While detained on Angel Island, real sons and paper sons, along with mothers and wives, were asked a series of questions to determine whether or not the kin relationship was real or fake. According to Robert Barde, questions were asked such as: What is your mother’s name? What kind of feet does she have? Had your father any brothers or sisters? What are their names? What is the name of your father’s or husband’s native village? How long has he been away? How many floors did your house have? On what floor did you live? What feast did you celebrate? Who attended the celebration? (2008, 29–36).

IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II

For Chinese immigrants, living in America was difficult. Attempts to settle and create families was not easy, especially with the passage of alien land laws that made it illegal for immigrants ineligible to become naturalized citizens from buying and owning real estate. In 1913, California passed its first alien land law (the Webb-Heney Bill). This law also stipulates that aliens ineligible for citizenship may not lease land for agriculture for terms longer than three years. This, along with violence and attacks fueled by anti-Chinese sentiments, pushed Chinese laborers out of the agricultural industries and into the urban ghettos of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and into the 1940s, Chinatowns in urban communities grew and became tourist economies. Their survival in Chinatowns was forced, as they were not allowed to make homes elsewhere in the United States. The majority were also employed in self-service industries such as restaurants, laundries, and so on. American-born Chinese children were also forced to attend segregated schools.

World War II and the postwar period witnessed great social changes for Chinese living in America. The United States and China became allies during World War II, which brought about changes in restrictive immigration policies that resulted in the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 with the passage of the Magnuson Act. The Magnuson Act repealed 61 years of official racial discrimination against the Chinese. This allowed for a modest increase in Chinese immigration, especially after the Chinese Communist revolution of 1949 sent many Chinese in search of refuge abroad. The postwar period was also when Chinese gained naturalization rights and, eventually, the end of antimiscegenation laws prohibiting the marriage of a Chinese to a white person. The culmination of progressive social change was realized with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which lifted national origin quotas and allowed for large-scale Chinese immigration to the United States to resume.

The Chinese immigrants’ first wave was fairly homogenous in that they came from the Pearl River delta region of Canton China, and consisted mostly of men. In addition, most were sojourners with peasant backgrounds and low levels of education. There was a small merchant class in the mix. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 transformed the homogenous Chinese American society into a heterogeneous one, reflecting diversity in religious, social, economic, educational, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds. The majority before 1965 spoke Taishan and Canton dialects. Today, there is an increase in Mandarin, Chaozhou, Fujianese, Hakka, and Shanghai dialects among the Chinese American populations whose countries of origins include mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. There is also a sizable sector of the population who are ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia (mainly from Vietnam and Cambodia) who entered the United States as refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Chinese immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore come from higher social-cultural backgrounds with higher educational levels. As such, they tend to enter into professional white-collar jobs.

A gender imbalance was evident in the male-to-female ratio in the Chinese American communities. The passage of the Page Law in 1857 made the gender imbalance even more distinct. During and after World War II, more and more Chinese immigrants were admitted into the United States as war brides. After the Communist victory in China in 1949, hundreds of refugees and their families entered the United States as political refugees. The overall increase in Chinese women led to the increase in American-born Chinese between the 1940s and 1960s. As such, in 1960, over 60 percent of the Chinese American population was American-born. Further indications of growth are evident in the increase in population by 28.5 percent from 2000 to 2006.

REFERENCES

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FACTORS OF JAPANESE MIGRATION

During the Meiji period, thousands of people were displaced because their land was taken out of cultivation or their homes were taken away. By 1870, the U.S. Census indicates that 55 Japanese immigrants were living in the United States. In 1880, the U.S. Census shows 148 Japanese immigrants living in the United States, 86 of whom resided in California. Most of this early immigration was considered illegal by Japanese law. Pressure from its growing displaced population resulted in the Japanese government lifting its ban on emigration and allowing Japanese laborers to go to Hawai‘i to work on sugar plantations starting in 1884. On January 8, 1900, the first group of 27 Okinawans arrived on the shores of Honolulu on the SS China (Nakasone 2002, xi). The Japanese laborers went to Hawai‘i and the United States as contract laborers. They signed contracts for agricultural employment in exchange for passage. As such, they were like the Chinese who were mostly dekaseginin, or “sojourners” who were young men who intended to work for a limited time and then return to Japan with their earnings from aboard.

Since Chinese laborers were excluded from immigration with the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, businesses on the mainland United States were in need of cheap labor as well. Eight years after Chinese exclusion, there were 2,039 Japanese living in the United States (Fryer 2010, 371): two decades later, there were 72,257 Japanese in America (Takaki 1989, 180). San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland were major ports of entry for Japanese immigrants. Roughly 76 percent of the Japanese immigrants settled along the Pacific Coast: this trend continued for four decades. There were sizable populations of Japanese immigrants in Colorado, Utah, and New York, where the population reached 1,000 (Fryer 2010, 371).

Early Japanese immigrants remained primarily single and male. In the 1900 U.S. Census, 23,916 of 24,326 Japanese immigrants were male and only 410 were female. The ratio of women to men shifted when after 1908, the United States and Japan signed the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” that restricted the migration of unskilled laborers from Japan to the United States, but did not cut off the migration of wives or family members of permanent residents. The period from 1908 to 1924 was dominated by the arrival of “picture brides.” These were women who migrated to join husbands they had married either during a return trip to Japan or by proxy. This period also initiated the rapid growth of the second generation of Japanese Americans and the growth of Japanese American communities.

Though the Japanese immigrants were aware of the experience of the Chinese before them and hence attempted to do things differently, they inherited much of the resentment directed toward the Chinese because both were Asian and nonwhite. Even so, the Japanese transitioned from being dekaseginin to citizens, in light of nativist perceptions that to be American is to be “white.”

HAWAI‘I SUGAR PLANTATIONS

Since the 1850s, sugar was king in Hawai‘i. According to Gary Okihiro, the number of plantations growing sugar in Hawai‘i grew from 20 in 1875 to 63 in 1880; sugar export increased from 25 million pounds in 1875 to 250 million pounds in 1980 (2009, 115–16). Starting in 1852, Chinese contract laborers were recruited to work on the plantations. By 1865, the Chinese laborers were leaving the plantation for other work. As well, Japanese laborers were recruited to replace the Chinese, and over time, they became the largest group of plantation workers. Stanley Easton and Lucien Ellington note that on May 17, 1868, the Scioto left Yokohama for Honolulu with 148 Japanese: 141 men, six women, and two children. There were “samurai, cooks, sake brewers, potters, printers, tailors, wood workers, and one hairdresser” (Easton and Ellington 2011). The plantation owners pitted the ethnic groups against one another to keep wages low. Japanese laborers were brought in to replace the Chinese laborers who attempted to demand high wages and better living conditions. Korean and Filipino laborers were later brought in to replace Japanese laborers who also demanded higher wages and better living conditions. All Asian laborers were subordinate to the white plantation managers and foremen, even though Asian laborers constituted roughly 70 to 85 percent of the workforce (Takaki 1989, 138). Contract laborers continued until 1900, when federal law terminated that practice. Immediately, planters formed the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association to systematically keep wages low through wage fixing agreement (Takaki 1989, 141).

JAPANESE IN HAWAI‘I VERSUS CALIFORNIA

Unlike the Chinese workers before them, a significant percentage of Japanese women workers immigrated over with the men. Despite the harsh conditions, immigrant workers established ethnic communities. Plantation owners pitted the Chinese workers against the native Hawaiian workers, the Japanese workers, and white workers by paying them different wages for the same work. On Hawai‘i, the Japanese were not a minority group, but on the mainland, they were. Japanese immigrants were needed as laborers in Hawai‘i. Because fertile land was owned by the “Big Five” corporations, and small business opportunities such as retail stores were operated by the plantations, the Japanese population in Hawai‘i focused on unionization and organized labor strikes to improve their social and economic standards of living. Japanese workers, Gary Okihiro contends, “saw themselves in class terms and recognized that their strength lay in collective action” (1991, 42). Japanese American labor organizations led to the island’s largest sugar strikes in 1909 and 1920.

Things were different over on the mainland. Takaki argues that the Japanese discovered certain possibilities that existed on the mainland to a greater extent than on the islands: opportunities for small businesses and small farms (1989, 180–97). The first Japanese-owned farm in California was established on May 27, 1869. Followers of Lord Matsudaira Katamori established the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony on 600 acres on the Sacramento River at Placerville (Zhao 2009, 14). They introduced mulberry trees, silk cocoons, tea plants, and bamboo roots to California. In less than two years, the colony failed because the dry California weather was not conducive to their cultivation.

In California, the Japanese immigrants were aware that the Chinese immigrants attempted to be a part of the general economy in manufacturing and trade occupations, which provoked anti-Chinese violence, policies, and ultimately exclusion. The Japanese therefore withdrew from manufacturing and entered instead into related enterprises. So, instead of shoe manufacturing, they were into shoe repair (Takaki 1989, 198). Thus the Japanese focused on entrepreneurial opportunities such as restaurants, barber shops, billiard halls, saloons, and grocery stores, and operated buses and delivery wagons because labor unions were among the staunchest opponents of Japanese inclusion. In fact, their members belonged to anti-Japanese organizations such as the Asiatic Exclusion League, whose mission was to protect white workers by excluding all Japanese and Koreans from coming to the United States. Other nativist groups, like the Sons of the Golden West, the Grange Association, and the American Legion pressured politicians to deport Asian immigrants and to segregate them into ghettos of laboring underclass (Tateishi 1984, xiv). Despite the racial economic exclusion, the Japanese immigrants focused on ethnic enterprise and by extension ethnic solidarity as a viable means of livelihood (Takaki, 1989, 180). However, their success only fueled anti-Asian, anti-Japanese sentiments even though they developed ethnic community and economy for survival. Even more cyclical and frustrating is the nativist conclusion that the Japanese immigrants were unassimilable because they developed ethnic communities and economies.

The Japanese immigrants faced a lot of racism and social prejudice. Some, as Takaki notes, were called “chinks,” revealing that they inherited the anti-Chinese sentiments. Additionally, they were also called “Yellow Jap” or “Dirty Jap” and were told to “go home” (Takaki 1989, 181). They were refused service at restaurants and in barber shops, and found it difficult to rent homes or buy houses. According to Lon Kurashige, the real issue was not the number of Japanese immigrants in the United States at the time, but rather the assumption that they were cheap labor that would undermine the “standard of living for white workers, propelling American society into a downward spiral of economic, moral and racial degeneration” (2002, 17). Moreover, “[t]he rhetoric, and the resulting anti-Japanese policies, embodied the worst sort of paranoia in American politics, as even states with few Japanese or any other residents of color took pains to secure the future of their white populations” (Kurashige 2002, 17).

Japanese farming in the late nineteenth century was fueled by industrialization coupled with the nationalization of the railroad, and modernization as exemplified by the refrigerated car, which resulted in an increase need for fresh agricultural produce. In addition, the development of California’s irrigation system with water from Colorado also spurred Japanese farming (Street 2004, 520). Historian Sucheng Chan notes that by the “first years of the twentieth century, fully two-thirds of the Japanese in California (about 16,000 individuals) earned a living as farm laborers” (1991, 38). In 1900, the federal census recorded only 29 Japanese leased land in California; by 1910, that number jumped to 1,816 (Street 2004, 517). Japanese farmers belonged to prefectural associations, known as kenjinkai, and agricultural associations, or nogyo kumiai, who pooled their resources together to form tanomoshi, or credit-rotating systems, that allowed members to have the capital needed to start a small business or farm. One big factor in transforming the Japanese population from dekaseginin, or sojourners, to settlers was their entry into agriculture and utilization of mutual-support systems, which allowed them to coordinate crop production, fix prices, exchange information, provide financial assistance, arbitrate disputes, stabilize rent, and establish marketing organizations (Kurashige 2002, 19; Street 2004, 520).

JAPANESE IMMIGRATION, EXCLUSION, AND CITIZENSHIP

Japanese American communities faced increasing restrictions against immigration, citizenship, property, and basic civil rights over the first four decades of the twentieth century. First, as Japanese immigrants began entering the United States, they found a society already ordered by racial hierarchies, segregation, and the recent passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It did not take long for Japanese immigrants to become targets of race-based attacks and exclusionist efforts to cut off immigration from Japan. In 1902, white workers successfully got the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 extended, and wanted to include the Japanese.

On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco municipal school board directed all school principals to send Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students to “Oriental Schools.” This action led to an international geopolitical event as the government of Japan voiced their protest to Washington. Washington was careful in its dealing with Japan because it was a rising military power in Asia. President Theodore Roosevelt forced the San Francisco municipal school board from segregating Japanese American children, which allowed them to attend school with white children. However, Roosevelt agreed to the Gentlemen’s Agreement, signed in 1907 and implemented in 1908, which restricted the migration of unskilled laborers from Japan. Furthermore, Roosevelt prohibited Japanese laborers holding passports for Hawai‘i, Mexico, or Canada from re-migrating to the U.S. mainland. The state of California agreed not to pass overtly anti-Japanese legislation in the future. Roger Daniels points out that the Gentlemen’s Agreement was “sold” to Californians as “tantamount to exclusion,” but it was not. Instead, under its terms, the Japanese American population would double in less than 20 years because Washington agreed that Japanese already residing in America could send for their wives and family members left behind (Daniels 1988, 126). However, by 1924, the immigration policy changed, banning entry to all aliens ineligible to become citizens, which ended all Japanese immigration. The Immigration Act of 1924 is considered to be the ultimate triumph of the Native Sons of the Golden West (Kimball and Noel 2005).

Laws and discriminatory policies were passed that further politically racialized the Japanese as “Other” and noncitizen. In 1913, the California legislature passed a law that denied Japanese residents the ability to own property. Japanese immigrants were able to subvert that law by purchasing property in their children’s name since they were born in America and were thus American citizens according to the 14th Amendment and United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). Many Issei parents purchased land in their children’s names. When tested in court, the California State Supreme Court upheld the right of even the youngest Nisei, second-generation children, to own property as a right of citizenship. The test case involved two-year-old Tetsubumi Yano, who was born in the United States to Japanese immigrant parents. Yano’s family owned 14 acres of land in her name, and the court ruled that Yano’s parents should be allowed to serve as her guardians (Estate of Tetsubumi Yano [1922] 188 Cal. 645, 648). This only angered many white Californians and fueled a call for a total ban on Japanese immigration. By 1920, however, a new anti-Japanese legislation corrected that loophole. The right to own property, or to establish a home, a business, or farm, was directly tied to the rights of the Issei to become naturalized citizens.

CITIZENSHIP

In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in Takao Ozawa v. United States that Japanese immigrants were not eligible to become naturalized citizens. Takao Ozawa immigrated to the United States in 1894 as a student, graduated from Berkeley High School and then attended the University of California at Berkeley. He was a self-described “assimilated” American who primarily spoke English in his home. In October 1914, Ozawa applied for U.S. citizenship at the U.S. District Court in Hawai‘i. The court rejected his application on the grounds that he was of the Japanese race, and not white. Ozawa filed a lawsuit that gradually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court’s ruling in November 1922 declared that first-generation Japanese Americans, the Issei, were ineligible of becoming naturalized citizens.

The 1870 Naturalization Act limited naturalization rights to only “white persons and persons of African descent.” Ozawa did not challenge the constitutionality of the law; rather, he sought to have Japanese classified as “white” (Haney López 1996, 56–57). Ozawa told the court, “My skin is white, I am a white person. I’ve lived in this country more than twenty-eight years. I deserve citizenship” (Haney López 1996, 58). Unable to become a naturalized citizen, Ozawa’s right to be fully American was compromised.

In 1913, California passed its first Alien Land Law, restricting aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land. The law was challenged in the courts, so it was amended several times and was replaced in 1920. The Alien Land Law expanded to states throughout the West from 1920 to 1923 to include a ban on long-term leases or rental of land to aliens ineligible for citizenship. These laws specifically targeted Asian immigrants. Japanese farmers were prohibited from owning land until after World War II, when the Supreme Court declared California’s Alien Land Law unconstitutional in Oyama v. California (1984).

JAPANESE WOMEN IN AMERICA

Japanese women in Hawai‘i and on the mainland had double duty: they had to work the fields as well as do the house work. Many immigrated to the United States as “picture brides.” Picture bride marriages originated with arranged marriages that had their origins, within aristocratic circles, and in the samurai class during feudal times, before the modern Meiji Era in Japan. It became accepted even among peasants in rural communities. With the introduction of photography from the West, exchanging photos introduced couples when it was difficult to meet in person. This also allowed the “go-between” or nakōdo to bring a photograph. This could save embarrassment if one party were rejected; the matter could then be quietly resolved.

Japanese immigration to Hawai‘i, in the earliest period between 1885 and 1910, included four times as many men as women. When the men in Hawai‘i wanted to begin families, they returned to their villages and had families arrange marriages. But the trip was long and expensive, and many wrote their parents to find suitable wives or asked nakōdo for assistance. Go-betweens generally conducted research to ensure the socioeconomic status of the intended couple, their educational backgrounds, and their family histories. The peak period for this “picture bride” practice was after the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907–1908, which restricted Japanese laborers from entering the United States until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned entry to “aliens ineligible to citizenship” and virtually ended all immigration from Japan.

The Gentlemen’s Agreement significantly increased in the number of Japanese women who immigrated to Hawai‘i and the U.S. mainland (Daniels 1988, 126). Over 20,000 picture brides were married to Japanese men in Hawai‘i in absentia through families back home or nakōdo and the years from about 1910 to 1924 are often referred to as the “picture bride period” or yobiyose-jidai, “the period of summoning families” (Daniels 1988, 126). The influx of picture brides marked the transition from a society of largely single male transients to communities of permanent residents, especially on the West Coast. Due to the high levels of Japanese women immigrating to the United States, Washington asked Japan to stop issuing passports to picture brides in 1921, with the “Ladies Agreement.”

In 1900, out of the total population of 24,326 Japanese immigrants in the United States, only 985 were female (24 males for every female). By 1910, the female population had increased to 9,087; by 1920, there were 22,193 women. Of course, not all the arranged marriages succeeded. In some cases, men sent photos from years earlier to disguise their ages or even photos of younger friends. Some grooms never showed up at the immigration station. In other case, women arrived as kari-fūfu (temporary spouse) simply to gain entry into the United States. Many immigrants then remarried. The system allowed adventurous women to join the workforce at a time when labor immigration was restricted but spouses were still allowed. The exclusion act of 1924 closed this loophole almost entirely until well after World War II ended in 1945. In the meantime, the picture bride system permitted a large and flourishing community of Japanese American families to develop in the United States.

THE JAPANESE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE AND WORLD WAR II

The bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on the morning of December 7, 1941, marked a bitter turning point in Japanese American history. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the exclusion of Japanese—including Okinawan—Americans from the West Coast. The order granted the federal government the ability to create military zones, including the authority to remove individuals—mostly American citizens and residents of Japanese descent—from areas that were deemed threats to national security. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identified and captured Japanese American community leaders from California, Oregon, and Washington—states that were designated critical zones of national security. These early detainees, arrested by the FBI as early as December 1941, were sent to facilities such as the Department of Justice internment camps in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Crystal City, Texas; and Fort Missoula, Montana. They were held without bail, without being formally charged, and without knowing what crime they were being accused of committing.

On March 18, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9102, establishing the War Relocation Authority (WRA) for the purposes of relocating Japanese Americans named in Executive Order 9066. In total, 112,000 Japanese Americans were forced to leave their homes and property and move into government detention facilities euphemistically called “Assembly Centers” and “Relocation Centers.” They were sent to 10 camps located in far-flung regions, each housing 10,000 to 20,000 Japanese Americans: Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas; Gila River and Poston, Arizona; Manzanar and Tule Lake, California; Amache, Colorado; Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; and Heart Mountain, Wyoming (Gesensway and Roseman 1988, 44). The relocation began in the summer of 1942 and was completed by November. The Japanese American evacuees “boarded decrepit, sluggish trains. … Their journeys lasted up to ten days. Black shades covered the train windows day and night. … Their movement was restricted to a narrow strip alongside the train by armed guards, who aimed guns” at them (Gesensway and Roseman 1988, 43–44). All facilities were surrounded by barbed wire and military guard towers. The WRA described the relocation center as a “pioneer community” that offered its inhabitants basic housing and federal government protection (Gesensway and Roseman 1988, 44). Remarkably, Executive Order 9066 did not relocate Hawaiian Japanese, who made up nearly one-third of the population of the islands where the attack took place.

Some individuals were placed under government control in a variety of other facilities ranging from Department of Justice internment centers to segregation facilities and even federal penitentiaries. Additionally, 2,264 individuals of Japanese ancestry were sent by 12 countries in Latin America for detention in the United States during the war: 1,800 of them were Japanese Peruvian (Gardiner 1981). While the exact purpose of this international transfer of individuals was unclear, common speculations included a plan to use Japanese Latin Americans for hostage-exchange purposes.

The relocation of Japanese American families marked an end to Japanese American farmers. The Western Growers Protective Association supported the order as it meant the elimination of competition (Okihiro and Drummond 1992, 171). In their absence, Japanese American land and property were simply taken over by other farmers and families. After the war, only a few were able to return to their property, restore their farms, and reestablish their businesses.

Several years after the initial relocation, public opinion began to shift concerning the need for incarcerating Japanese Americans who never demonstrated any disloyalty to the United States. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who approved the proposal to organize an all-Nisei combat team in 1943, withdrew his support of Executive Orders 9066 and 9102 in 1944, claiming that the relocation program was based on misinformation and public hysteria (Coombs 1992, 90).

To date, scholars still debate the terminology that best describes the facilities used to detain Japanese Americans. Although the word internment is commonly used to refer to the confinement of all Japanese Americans, only those aliens arrested by the FBI and held under the authority of the Department of Justice were housed in internment camps. During the war, some had already begun using the term “concentration camp” to describe the facilities that held the majority of Japanese Americans; but today the use of this term is less common due to its close association with the death camps that housed Jews and other groups targeted by Nazi Germany for extermination. Other common terms are detention facilities, confinement centers, or virtual prisons, but none are precisely accurate. What scholars can agree on is the power that the government wielded by creating facilities that were extra-legal and outside the boundaries of U.S. constitutional law.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND REDRESS

After World War II, Japanese Americans worked hard to restore their lives and recover from the devastation of having been imprisoned without due process and without having been charged with any crimes. Many did not want to talk about their experiences. Nisei became notorious for keeping their wartime experiences from their sansei children. However, it is the sansei generation who would fight for their rights, and the rights of their elders, to be recognized and treated as fully American.

The social and political climate during the postwar period was one of civil rights and ethnic pride. While the JACL was disparaged for cooperating with the U.S. government in all of their policies during World War II, lawyers and lobbyists for the JACL worked diligently to overturn laws banning interracial marriage, legalizing segregation, and restricted rights to citizenship and immigration based on race. The end of race-based immigration quotas following the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act allowed immigration from Japan to be restored; yet the number of new Japanese immigrating to the United States remained low due to a booming postwar economy in Japan. Those Japanese who did immigrate to the United States after the war often came because of family ties, such as marriage to a U.S. soldier, and became the first generation of Japanese immigrants no longer barred from naturalized citizenship due to racial discrimination and restrictions.

From the late 1960s through the 1970s, the JACL, the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, the National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR), and Japanese American politicians such as Senator Daniel Inouye, Senator Spark Matsunaga, Congressman Norman Mineta, and Congressmen Robert Matsui, lawyers, and activists worked unstintingly to achieve redress for Japanese Americans interned during the war. Some, like the NCJAR, sought redress through the courts, while others lobbied Congress. On April 20, 1988, after years of hard work, the U.S. Senate passed the Civil Rights Act by a vote of 69–27 (Daniels et al. 1992, 221). The act acknowledged that the U.S. government had committed a grave injustice against all those who were interned. Each surviving individual received a tax-free payment of $20,000 as a token payment for the losses incurred because of their internment. Some people returned the checks out of protest, arguing that money could never repay them for all that they had suffered and lost. One of the most significant outcomes of redress was the resurgence of stories about internment camp experience from the Nisei generation. Oral history projects boomed as people began talking more openly about what really happened during the war, including conflicts over the draft resisters, the loyalty questionnaire, those who answered “no-no” to the loyalty questionnaire, those who renounced their citizenship, and about the collaboration between the JACL and the government. Having achieved redress, many Japanese Americans felt vindicated and could finally tell their stories to children and to the public without feeling shame or guilt. As well, the redress campaign brought the generations together.

NOTE

1. A later version of Question 27 asked Japanese American women if they were willing to serve in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps or the Army Nurse Corps. And a narrower version of Question 28 asked Issei if they would obey “the laws of the United States” and not “interfere with the war effort.”

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FACTORS OF KOREAN MIGRATION

Following on the heels of Chinese and Japanese immigration to the United States, Korean immigrants were similar and different in several ways. They were fewer in numbers: compared to the 50,000 Chinese who arrived between 1853 and 1900, and the 18,000 Japanese who arrived between 1885 and 1907, approximately 7,200 Koreans arrived between 1903 and 1905. Then, an additional 2,600 arrived between 1905 and 1924, 600 of whom were political refugees and students who were involved in the anti-Japanese independence movement. Similar to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants before them, Korean immigrants did not have the intentions of permanently settling in the United States (Choy 1979, 77).

The history of Korean immigration to the United States developed in three waves. The first wave unfolded in two phases. The first phase occurred between 1903 and 1905 and consisted primarily of male laborers for the plantations of Hawai‘i; in total, roughly 7,226 laborers arrived (I. Kim 2004, 13). Following on their heels were 1,100 “picture brides”—Korean brides who were brought to the United States in arranged marriages through the exchange of pictures, from 1910 to 1924 (Park 1997, 8). The second wave unfolded from 1951 to 1964, during the post–Korean War period. In total, 14,027 Koreans arrived; they consisted of young Korean women married to American service personnel, their children, and Korean War orphans—many Amerasians fathered by American servicemen—adopted by American families (S. Kang 2002, 46; Park 1997, 8). This included a small number of students and professional workers. The third wave occurred as a result of the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 and consisted mainly of Korean immigrants who came over for “family reunification.”

THE KOREAN WAR AND THE SECOND WAVE

Korea was liberated from Japan on August 15, 1945, at the end of World War II, only to be divided at the 38th Parallel by the United States and the Soviet Union, leading to the emergence of two rival states on the Korean Peninsula—the U.S.-backed government of Syngman Rhee in the south and the Soviet-backed government of Kim Il Sung in the north. The newly divided competing governments both claimed authority over the entire peninsula. On June 25, 1950, the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north launched a surprise attack on South Korea, which ignited a costly, bloody, three-year conflict known as the Korean War (1950–1953). The Korean War is often viewed as the “Forgotten War” because it is overshadowed by World War II and the Vietnam War. Three million civilians lost their lives during the three-year period (Kwon and Lee 2009, 12–13). Additionally, two million Korean troops were killed or severely injured in the battlefield. The Korea Red Cross reported that 10 million family members were separated; countless left homeless and orphaned. The war ended in a truce. No peace treaty has ever been signed, and to this day, Korea remains divided.

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FACTORS OF INDIAN MIGRATION

The voyage from India to the United States was costly and long. The Punjabi pioneers who decided to leave India sold land or borrowed money from relatives to pay for their passage to Canada and the United States. First, they traveled by train over land to reach the port of Calcutta. There, they boarded a steamship for an 11- to 12-day journey to Hong Kong. From Hong Kong, they boarded another ship that carried them across the Pacific Ocean for another 18- to 19-day journey. The first significant wave of Indian immigrants from British India arrived in 1898. Between 1898 and 1903, an average of 30 Indian immigrants arrived in the United States. Between 1904 and 1906, it increased to 250 annually (Hess 1969, 61). Then, as Indians were targets of persecution in Canada, the number of Indians arriving in the United States increased dramatically: in 1907, 1,072, and in 1908, 1,710 (Hess 1969, 61).

FIRST WAVE

During this period, the Punjab region was undergoing rapid modernization, which displaced many people from their land. At this time, the Punjab state of India was used to growing cash crops such as indigo instead of food crops for the British colonial empire, which lead to famine for many farmers. In order to support their families, the youngest sons of families were encouraged to immigrate to the United States to locate work to support their families in India. There were 6,800 or so Indians who settled in the western region of the United States between 1899 and 1914 (Leonard 1992, 24). They constituted a relatively homogenous social group in that nearly 80–90 percent were Punjabis who were mostly men, spoke Punjabi, practiced Sikhism, and come from the martial caste and landowning families. However, they were portrayed as illiterate and backward. They were called “Hindoo” in America, which means they come from “Hindustan” or India, and illustrates how little Americans knew about India and Indians.

Similar to the Chinese immigrants before them, the Sikh workers first immigrated to work on the railroads, and then in agriculture as a result of Chinese and Japanese exclusionary policies. They were pushed by famine in their homeland, while some came as students. Still, others immigrated to work for India’s independence from the yoke of British colonialism. Like the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants before them, Indian immigrants were also willing to work for low wages. In the mid-1860s, Indians were considered as a potential source of labor on the sugar plantations of Hawaiʻi, which was dropped by 1884 when Japan decided to permit immigration to the islands (Takaki 1989, 294). Nevertheless, by 1900, there were 2,000 Sikhs living in the Pacific Northwest and working in the lumber industry (Ciment 2010, 315). A timber mill in Astoria, Oregon, was nicknamed “Hindu Alley.” Additionally, a few hundred Indians worked in lumber mills in Bellingham, Washington. By 1907, nearly 2,000 Indians, virtually all men, worked on the Western Pacific Railroad. In 1910, 1,782 Indians were admitted, mostly in San Francisco (Hess 1974, 580). “One particularly well documented Indian work group was led by Tuly Singh Johl and helped build the Marysville railway station in California” (Koritala 2011). At the same time, thousands migrated to California to work in the agricultural industry. According to the 1910 census, there were 5,424 Indian immigrants living in the United States, and about half, 2,742, residing in California (Hess 1974, 580). In 1912, the Sikhs established their first gurdwara in Stockton, California. Because of discriminatory laws, immigration from India ended in 1917. Karen Leonard notes, “Federal policies and laws included the 1917 Barred Zone Act, which barred most Asians from legal immigration; the 1924 National Origins Quota Act, which set a quota of only 105 immigrants per year from India; and the 1923 U.S. Supreme Court Thind decision, which declared Indians to be Caucasians but not ‘white’ and therefore ineligible for U.S. citizenship” (2011, 975). Even so, Takaki notes that by 1920, some 6,400 Indians had ready entered the United States (1989, 294). The numbers dwindled between the 1920s and the 1960s as virtually no Indians immigrated to the United States.

A significant number of Indians in the early wave served in the British military in China, Southeast Asia, East Africa, Lebanon, and other places. “Punjabis serving overseas learned about the opportunities in the western United States” where it was reported that men who earned 16 cents a day in India could earn $2 a day in the United States (Leonard 1992, 30). Passage was possible via steamships that linked Hong Kong to the Philippine Islands and Canada, the United States, and Mexico. A pull factor among the first wave community were tales of the ability to earn money and obtain land in the United States. As such, immigration overseas, especially to the United States, was preferred to internal migration to other parts of India. Leonard notes, “An emigrant from the Punjab to the United States who had returned to his village asserted in the late 1920s that in America a man could do as he pleased; there was plenty of land and plenty of money” (1992, 30).

CHARACTERISTICS OF EARLY INDIAN IMMIGRANTS

Similar to the other Asian immigrants before them, Indian immigrants were predominately men: like the Chinese before them, they were primarily younger men in their 20s with little education. Some were married but came without their families, which resulted in the formation of a bachelor society. Moreover, like the Chinese, Indian immigrants who left the Punjab during this period intended eventually to return home with material riches to support their families. Antimiscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriages with white women, so the early Punjabi men married Mexican women. Leonard notes, “the Punjabi men and Mexican women looked racially similar to the county clerks issuing marriage licenses. The bi-ethnic couples produced many children, children with names like Maria Jesusita Singh, Jose Akbar Khan, and Carmelita Chand. These ‘Mexican-Hindu’ children, mostly Catholic and bilingual in English and Spanish, called themselves Hindus and were extremely proud of their Indian heritage” (2011, 975). Through marrying Mexican women, some Punjabi farmers were able to subvert the 1913 Alien Land Law in California because they put their wives’ or U.S.-born children’s names on the deeds. Tinaz Pavri documents that by “1920 Asian Indians owned 38,000 acres in California’s Imperial Valley and 85,000 acres in the Sacramento Valley” (2011). Jawala Singh, who left Indian in 1905 and later became a wealthy farmer in the United States, earned the nickname “the Potato King” (Singh 2011, 1004).

The Mexican women who married Punjabi men were mainly younger women who were also farm laborers. They met each other while working in the fields and developed relationships that later resulted in marriage. In Northern California, between 1913 and 1946, 47 percent of Punjabi men married Mexican women; in central California, 76 percent of them married Mexican women; in Southern California, 92 percent married Mexican women (Takaki 1989, 310). Punjabi-Mexican unions were termed “Mexidus,” which refers to a combination of Mexican and Hindu that misrepresents the identity of the immigrant Indian men, who were primarily Sikhs (Arora 2010, 344). The early community thus reflected a cultural mix of Punjabi and Mexican traditions, languages, foodways, and customs. Their children were raised to speak Spanish and English, practice the Catholic faith, and interchange Mexican tortillas for Indian rotis. It is estimated that nearly 500 Punjabi-Mexican unions took place in the early twentieth century (Lindel 1991, B1). However, children of the Punjabi-Mexican marriages tended to marry non-Indians, thus gradually leading to the disappearance of the first Indian American community (Watts 2010, 316).

In California, Punjabi immigrants mostly lived in rural areas and worked in agriculture. Since agricultural work was seasonal, they moved in small groups, with a ‘boss man’ who spoke English best and negotiated work on the group’s behalf (Leonard 1992, 32). The formation of the small groups of Punjabi farmers originated as they departed India, but maintained while in the United States as a result of the absence of women in their community. “These democratic groupings—consisting of members who shared a common language, values, heritage, and sense of purpose—served as surrogate families for the lonely Punjabi men far from home, security, and loved ones” (Singh 2011, 1002). They moved around in groups, harvested different corps and performed various types of agricultural work during different times of the year. In the winter months of December and January, they pruned trees. “The Asian Indians moved around a great deal during the year because they contracted farm work for cultivating and pruning grapes or fruit trees, planting and harvesting rice, picking grapes and fruit” (Takaki 1989, 303). They worked 10 to 14 hours a day. They colluded with other workers (e.g., Japanese) to deliberately slow the pace of their work in order to extract more wages for their labor. Some Punjabi bookkeepers conspired with the “boss man” to alter the figures in the books whereby they claimed 60 men worked, when only 50 did (Takaki 1989, 304–5).

INDIAN STUDENTS AND FREEDOM FIGHTERS

In 1885, the Indian National Congress was established. The majority of the members were English-speaking educated Indians who wanted to decolonize India. The Indian National Congress encouraged a small number of students to emigrate in order to study in American universities and work for India’s independence. At the start of the twentieth century, about 100 Indian students studied in college and university campuses across America. During the summers, it was common for Indian students in California to work in the agricultural fields and orchards together with their compatriots. Similar to Koreans who worked on revolutionary activities, some Indian students, together with a small group of Indian immigrants who migrated to America as “political refugees” from British rule, saw the United States as the ideal place to mobilize for India’s independence. The independence “movement” was known as Ghadar, which means “revolution” or “mutiny” in Punjabi and Urdu. They also published a weekly newspaper by the same name, and various revolutionary materials in English, Urdu, and other Indian languages (Hess 1974, 585). The first issue of Ghadar declared, “Today there begins in foreign lands … a war against the British Raj. … What is our name? Ghadar. What is our work? Ghadar. Where will ghadar break out? In India. The time will soon come when rifles and blood will take the place of pens and ink” (Brown 1948, 299). It began in 1907 as loose party meetings among the migrant farm workers and graduate students. The Ghadar Party, initially the Pacific Coast Hindustan Association, was formed in 1913 in the U.S. under the leadership of a 28-year-old Hindu Har Dayal, with Sohan Singh Bhakna as its president. Sikh American activist and scholar Jaideep Singh says, “the Ghadar Party … was a remarkable collective venture, which bridged the divisions among Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims in the South Asian American community” (2010, 360). The “Potato King” Jawala Singh helped found the Ghadar Party and the gurdwara in Stockton, and “was eventually arrested and imprisoned by the British for attempting to foment revolution in India” (Singh 2011, 1005). The mobilization for a free India in the United States was a formidable task. Indicative of the challenge to their efforts is an address President Theodore Roosevelt made at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., on January 18, 1909, where he expressed his support of British imperialism in India. The president said,

In India we encounter the most colossal example history affords of the successful administration by men of European blood of a thickly populated region in another continent. It is the greatest feat of the kind that has been performed since the breakup of the Roman Empire. Indeed, it is a greater feat than was performed under the Roman Empire. Unquestionably mistakes have been made; it would indicate qualities literally superhuman if so gigantic a task had been accomplished without mistakes. It is easy enough to point out shortcomings; but the fact remains that the successful administration of the Indian Empire by the English has been one of the most notable and most admirable achievements of the white race during the past two centuries. On the whole it has been for the immeasurable benefit of the natives of India themselves. Suffering has been caused in particular cases and at particular times to these natives; much more often, I believe, by well-intentioned ignorance or bad judgment than by any moral obliquity. But on the whole there has been a far more resolute effort to do justice, a far more resolute effort to secure fair treatment for the humble and the oppressed during the days of English rule in India than during any other period of recorded Indian history. England does not draw a penny from India for English purposes; she spends for India the revenues raised in India; and they are spent for the benefit of the Indians themselves. Undoubtedly India is a less pleasant place than formerly for the heads of tyrannical States. There is now little or no room in it for successful freebooter chieftains, for the despots who lived in gorgeous splendor while under their cruel rule the immense mass of their countrymen festered in sodden misery. But the mass of the people have been and are far better off than ever before, and far better off than they would now be if English control were overthrown or withdrawn. (Roosevelt 1909, 2078–79; emphasis added)

The Ghadar movement was able to acquire weapons from Germany during World War I. On the morning of March 6, 1917, the plans for an armed rebellion against British rule was foiled when federal agents seized a large quantity of evidence with the arrest of Chandra K. Chakravarty—an organizer of the revolt—in New York for violating U.S. neutrality laws (Brown 1948, 307). In general, Americans were not publicly aware of Indian nationalism until after Pearl Harbor, when America sought Indian cooperation against Japan (Hess 1969, 72). By 1946, Washington became convinced that a free India would be an important ally for the United States. As a result, Congress passed the Luce-Celler Act, which allowed 200 immigrants from India to enter each year. In 1940, the Muslim League, which was established in 1906 and worked with Indian National Congress for a free India called for not only independence, but also a separate Muslim country. The Hindu nation would keep the name “India” and the Muslim nation would be called “Pakistan.” In 1947, after India and Pakistan became separate countries, the quota was divided evenly between them.

RACIAL TENSION AND RACIST ACTS

The growth of the Indian community was accompanied by resentment and discrimination. Just as the Asian immigrants did before them, Punjabi immigrants competed with white Euro-American workers in the lumber mills of the Pacific Northwest, the Western Pacific Railroad, and the growing California agricultural economy. Although Punjabi immigrants had a reputation of being good workers, they were paid less than their white Euro-American counterparts. The popular press schemed with the Asiatic Exclusion League’s mission to exclude Asian migration, which, combined with the economic anxiety of the loss of white jobs, resulted in the Collier running a headline warning of a “Hindoo Invasion” 10,000 strong, or Herman Scheffauer’s essay published in the Forum, “The Tide of Turbans,” which reported 5,000 Indian immigrants whom he depicted as “dark, mystic race,” and warned the people of the Golden State that this invasion was in its infancy. The ripe anti-Indian sentiment materialized into angry and violent assaults on Indian communities throughout the Pacific Coast.

ANTI-HINDU RIOTS

White Euro-American lumberjacks saw Punjabi workers as a threat because mill owners preferred to hire at a lower wage, and for their work ethics. On September 4, 1907, the anti-immigrant sentiments erupted into violence, with people on the streets shouting “drive out the cheap labor.” A mob of 500 white Euro-American lumberjacks—who were recent immigrants from Europe—forged their way to the area where Punjabi Americans rented their rooms. The Punjabi men were pulled from their rooms and beaten on the streets. They were beaten and their belongings looted. In total, the mob forced nearly 700 Indians to flee. The Bellingham Herald published an editorial the following day, in which the author not only condemned the mobs, but espoused racist anti-Indian sentiments, saying, “No amount of specious argument will justify the acts of the mobs.” However, it would go on to express deep seeded anti-Indian sentiments, saying,

The Hindu is not a good citizen. It would require centuries to assimilate him, and this country need not take the trouble. Our racial burdens are already heavy enough to bear. … Our cloak of brotherly love is not large enough to include him as a member of the body politics. His ways are not our ways; he is not adaptable, and will not in many generations make a good American citizen. (“Hindus Hounded from City,” Bellingham Herald, September 5, 1907; Gallagher 2007)

Invoking a similar spirit, a letter written by Adolphus W. Mangum Jr., a soil scientist who lived in Bellingham dated September 8, 1907, says,

These Hindos are very undesirable citizens. They are dirty and mean and will work for wages that a white man can’t live on. I am not in sympathy with the laboring men who started this riot, because they ought to mob the mill men who hire these laborers rather than mob the Hindos themselves. If the mill owners did not hire them, they would not come here in such crowds. They are worse than the Japs and China-men and have caused trouble ever since they began to be numerous. The Japans and China-men have flooded this county and it begins to look like they intend to take possession of everything out here. (South Asian American Digital Archive)

The Asiatic Exclusion League blamed the Indians for the riots, citing their willingness to work for lower wages, and their “filthy and immodest habits,” which “invited reprisals” (Hess 1969, 62).

Other riots against the Indian immigrants erupted in Aberdeen, Washington, on September 8, 1907; Boring, Oregon, on October 31, 1907; Everett, Washington, on November 2, 1907; Marysville, California, on January 27, 1908; and St. John, Oregon, on March 21, 1910. In each case, the white Euro-American mobs killed, injured, and robbed the “Hindoos” and drove them out of town. The public anti-immigrant sentiments were fueled, in large part, by the Asiatic Exclusion League (formerly the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League) and provided a powerful catalyst for racist policies that restricted Indian Americans from being “fully American.”

The Asiatic Exclusion League was established on May 14, 1905, in San Francisco. Originally, its targets were Japanese and Korean immigrants that expanded to include immigrants from India that resulted in its renaming. The Asiatic Exclusion League’s expressed mission was to foster hostile sentiment against Asians in order to exert pressure of the U.S. government to restrict Asian immigration. They were successful. According to Leonard, a 1909 federal immigration commission’s investigation declared, “the Hindus are regarded as the least desirable, or, better, the most undesirable, of all the eastern Asiatic races which have come to share our soil” (1992, 24). A 1920 report to the California State Board of Control reiterated this theme, saying “The Hindu is the most undesirable immigrant in the state. His lack of personal cleanliness, his low morals, and his blind adherence to theories and teachings, so entirely repugnant to American principles make him unfit for association with American people” (1992, 24). The impact of the exclusionary policy kept the Indian community in the United States small. Prejudice coupled with xenophobia made it difficult for Indian immigrants (i.e., Punjabis) to gain admittance to the United States. According to Gary Hess, there was an increasing rejection rate of Indian applicants by the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. Before 1907, less than 10 percent of applicants for admission were rejected. In 1907, 28 percent were rejected (1974, 580). “Between 1908 and 1910, some 1,130 Indian arrivals were rejected” (Hess 1974, 580). Between 1911 and 1913, 50 percent or more were denied entry (Leonard 1992, 30).

Throughout 1910, the Asiatic Exclusion League targeted the removal of San Francisco commissioner of immigration Hart H. North. They claimed that North was incompetent and benefited from allowing cheap Indian laborers entry. The League and local San Francisco newspapers alleged that North allowed Indians who had communicable diseases entry via Angel Island. The League gathered a petition signed by 1,800 Californians, which they submitted to the commissioner general of immigration as well as to President William Howard Taft (Hess 1969, 62). This resulted in North’s resignation at the encouragement of Washington officials, and stronger enforcement of immigration restriction at San Francisco. In 1911, some 517 Indians were admitted and 861 were rejected. In the next five years, fewer than 600 Indians were admitted, culminating on February 4, 1917, when Congress passed the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, which effectively barred immigrants from India. The act expanded the list of undesirables banned from entering the country, which included homosexuals, idiots, criminals, epileptics, insane persons, alcoholics, beggars, polygamists, anarchists, and so on. It also banned immigrants over the age of 16 who were illiterate. It included a designated “Asiatic Barred Zone,” which included most of Asia and the Pacific Islands. Before this, only the Chinese were excluded. Although President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the act in 1916, it passed Congress with an overwhelming majority the following year. A direct result of the anti-Indian policies decreased the size of the Indian communities in the United States. Between 1908 and 1920, 3,453 Indians were denied entry, mostly on the grounds that they were likely to become “public charges” (Takaki 1989, 296). Between 1911 and 1920, approximately 1,400 Indians left the United States voluntarily, and an additional 235 were deported (Hess 1974, 582). By the 1940s, the Indian population in the United States decreased to 2,405, with 60 percent residing in California.

INDIANS, NOT WHITE BY LAW

Indian eligibility for naturalization was still in question after the passage of the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act. The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted U.S. naturalization and citizenship rights to the “white race” only, which effectively excluded Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants from naturalization. But, Indians were, anthropologically speaking, “Caucasian.” Indian immigrants challenged the definition of “whiteness” in the courts, thereby exerting their right to be American. The Asiatic Exclusion League advocated for the deportation of the remaining Indian immigrants. However, some have already become naturalized citizens based on historic and anthropological evidence that Indians are “Aryans.”

In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, rendered a restrictive interpretation of the Naturalization Act of 1790 that declared only “free, White persons” can become naturalized citizens. Thind was born in the Punjab in 1892. By 1912, he had settled in Seattle, Washington. During World War I, he served in the U.S. Army, similar to Korean American Easurk Emsen Charr. Thind was a light-skinned, high-caste Sikh immigrant who not only served in the U.S. Army but also earned a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1920, Thind applied for citizenship in Oregon and was challenged by the U.S. Bureau of Naturalization. Prior to Thind’s attempt, Indians applying for citizenship yielded mixed results as some courts classified them as “white” while others did not. For instance, in the 1910 United States v. Balsara and the 1913 Ajkoy Kumar Mazumdar decisions, the courts held that Indians from India were “Caucasians” and therefore entitled to be legally considered as “white persons” eligible for citizenship under the 1790 law.

At first, Thind was successful and was granted citizenship by the federal district court in Oregon. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court heard its first racial prerequisite case, Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922). In the Ozawa decision, the court denied naturalization rights to Japanese immigrant Ozawa, ruling that “white” was synonymous with “Caucasian.” This seemed to bode well for Thind’s case because, as an Indian from India, he was technically “Aryan” and therefore “Caucasian.” However, Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte was convinced that Indians were not white and he challenged the successful naturalization of some Indian Americans. Thind’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and there the court conceded that Indians were “Caucasians” and that anthropologists considered them to be of the same race as white Americans, but argued that “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences.” Justice George Sutherland wrote the unanimous opinion of the court, saying:

What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood. As so understood and used, whatever may be the speculations of the ethnologist, it does not include the body of people to whom the appellee belongs. It is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white. The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation. (1923)

The Thind decision also led to successful efforts to denaturalize some who had previously become citizens. “Between 1923 and 1926, the naturalization certificates of nearly sixty Indians were cancelled” (Hess 1969, 69). In addition, between 1920 and 1940, some 3,000 Indian immigrants returned to India. The Thind decision also made California’s 1913 Alien Land Law more potent, which impacted Punjabi Americans from establishing family and community.

SECOND WAVE

By 1946, Congress recognized that India would soon be independent and a major world power. The India Welfare League and the India League of America, advocates of Indian immigration and naturalization, successfully maneuvered the Luce-Celler Act through Congress, which President Harry S. Truman signed on July 2, 1946. The Luce-Celler Act allotted India an annual quota of 100, which ended nearly 30 years of exclusion; and it made it possible for Indian immigrants to become American citizens, thereby reversing the Thind decision. In 1957, largely with support from Anglo and Mexican American voters, the first Sikh American senator, Dalip Singh Saund, was elected to Congress representing California’s Imperial Valley. Similar to many early Indian immigrants before him, Saund came to the United States from the Punjab at age 22. After he earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1924, Saund broke his promise to his parents to return to India after receiving his degree and stayed in the United States to work as a foreman on an Indian American–owned farm in the Imperial Valley. Saund was involved in efforts to repeal the Thind decision. He applied for naturalization and received citizenship in 1949. While more educated and professional Indians began to enter America, immigration restrictions and tight quotas ensured that only small numbers of Indians entered the country prior to 1965. Between 1947 and 1965, roughly 7,000 immigrants from India, and 1,500 immigrants from Pakistan arrived in the United States. They include family members of the earlier Indian immigrants who became naturalized citizens, in addition to wives of Punjabi men who had returned to India to marry.

Large waves of migrants from India were pulled by changes to immigration quotas that passed with the 1965 Immigration Act. With this act, the quota system limiting the number of immigrants allowed into the United States was changed to allow entry for 20,000 people from each country annually. This was the first time that migrants from Asian nations had access equal to European migrants. The post-1965 wave of Indian immigrants are not rural people, instead, they come from urban areas, are highly educated professionals who migrate with their spouses and children. Nearly 40 percent of all Indian immigrants who have entered the United States in the decades after 1965 arrived on student or exchange visitor visas. In terms of ethnicity, the new Indian immigrants are much more diverse than the first wave: They come from all over India and speak many languages which reflects the 19 major vernacular languages in India. The most numerous regional groups are Gujaratis, Punjabis, and Malayalis.

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FACTORS OF FILIPINO MIGRATION

Substantial numbers of Filipinos arrived in the United States in three distinct waves: The first wave is from 1903 to 1935; the second wave unfolds between the 1940s and 1950s; the third wave is the post-1965 arrivals. The Philippines had been a Spanish colony since 1565. The Spanish colonial government recorded approximately 124 revolts throughout the islands between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (Bautista 1998, 34). By the middle of the nineteenth century, native Catholic priests began openly criticizing and defying the Spanish clergy while educated Filipino elites such as national hero Jose Rizal critiqued Spanish abuse in his writings. The accumulation of protests, resistances movements, growing nationalism, and patriotism brewing in secret societies and among the peoples resulted in the Philippine Revolution that began in August 30, 1896 (known as the Tagalog War by Spain), in which Filipinos engaged in military battle against Spanish troops. Filipino revolutionary leader and nationalist Andrés Bonifacio led the Katipunan, an anticolonial secret society. Internal power struggles among the revolutionaries coupled with the military superiority of the Spanish colonialists led to the defeat of the Filipino revolutionaries.

The United States intervened in the Philippines as a result of the Spanish-American War (April 12 to August 13, 1898) that ignited on February 15, 1898, when the battleship USS Maine exploded in Cuba’s Havana Harbor killing 266 sailors (Offner 2004, 56). Filipino resistance fighters became allied with the United States, and together they defeated Spain. On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay, which undermined Spanish control over the entire colony (May 1983, 354). Exiled Filipino independence leader Emilio Aguinaldo declared Philippine independence making it Asia’s first democratic government (Rodell 2005, 15). While Aguinaldo was attempting to establish an independent sovereign nation-state, President William McKinley was “becoming interested in acquiring the Philippines” (May 1983, 354–55). President McKinley interpreted the annexation of the Philippines as a “gift” from God and a moral “responsibility” of a benevolent United States, saying,

When I next realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps I confess I did not know what to do with them … I thought first we would take only Manila; then Luzon; then other islands … And one night late it came to me this way … (1) That we could not give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient-that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we not leave them to themselves—they are unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s wars; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. (1899; reprinted in Watts and Israel 2000, 193–95)

President McKinley expressed a form of “racial imperialism” that guided U.S. foreign and domestic policies with respects to people of color whom whites considered barbaric and thus incapable of self-government (Ngozi-Brown 1997, 43–44). On December 10, 1898, Spain and the United States completed negotiations for the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the Spanish-American War (Pérez 1998, 22). The Treaty of Paris negotiations excluded Filipino representation, whereby “Spain merely transferred (at the price of twenty million dollars) its colonial power to the United States” (Yeo 2011, 37). On February 6, 1899, the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty and the United States annexed the Philippines. The United States subsequently fought a three-year war to suppress the Philippines’ struggle for independence, known as the “Philippine Insurrection” or Philippine-American War of 1899–1902 (Tuason 1999). During the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt was lieutenant colonel of the Rough Rider Regiment, which he led on a charge at the battle of San Juan. In 1900, Roosevelt expressed the justification of U.S. colonization of the Philippines as a “History” of westward expansion, in accepting the nomination as vice president, saying, “To grant self-government to Luzon under Aguinaldo would be like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief” (cited in Judis 2004, 62). American forces responded to Filipino counterinsurgency with a “scorched earth policy, widespread use of torture, and using the latest military technologies, in mass killings of civilian sympathizers” (Abraham 2006, 674). The Philippine-American War resulted in millions of casualties, destruction of cities, and the territorial annexation of the Philippines. The geopolitical relationship between the United States and the Philippines set the political and economic parameters for the significant migration of Filipinos to the United States.

FIRST WAVE

After the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain in 1898, Filipinos arrived in Hawai‘i and the continental United States for work and education. Two categories of Filipinos arrived during the first wave: students and laborers. In addition, indigenous Filipinos were exhibited at two world fairs. U.S. occupation of the Philippines allowed Filipinos to come, as Steffi San Buenaventura notes, with “ ‘ward’ status without citizenship rights … a very convenient solution to the problem of not having to assimilate a ‘barbarous’ people living in a distant U.S. territory in the Pacific” (1998, 7). Filipinos who journeyed to the United States from 1903 to 1935 reflect a movement of “subjugated ‘nationals’ who were highly motivated to pursue their expanded colonial boundaries abroad” (San Buenaventura 1998, 21).

INDIGENOUS FILIPINOS

Indigenous Filipinos—Igorots, Moros, Tinguianes, Negritos, and others—were transported to the United States as living exhibits in the world fairs in St. Louis in 1904 and the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition 1908. According to the manager of the Igorot Village at the St. Louis World Fair, there were 114 “natives” consisting of Igorots and Tinguianes (Hung 1904, 36). Christopher Vaughan describes the popularity of the Igorot exhibit, saying,

Mounted on display the fruits of the United States’s recent embrace of colonial empire, the sprawling, forty-acre Philippine Reservation featured separate exhibits for tribes from throughout the archipelago’s more than seven thousand islands. The ‘civilized’ Visayans, despite offering hourly theatrical and orchestral performances—concluding with ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ sung in English by the entire village—went relatively ignored in comparison to the Igorots, whose ceremonial dances, near-nakedness, and daily consumption of dog stew captured headlines and the entertainment dollars of fairgoers. Gate receipts at the Igorot concession nearly quadrupled the total for the Visayans and tripled that of the colorful Moros. (1996, 222)

The Igorot exhibit presented a clear and sharp contrast between the civilized Americans and the savagery of the Filipinos. Perhaps for this reason, nonindigenous Filipinos have muted and silenced the experience of indigenous Filipinos, as Igorot American scholar Mark S. Leo suggests:

[T]he Filipino American “mainstream” refers to the dominant Tagalog-speaking, Catholic, and hetero-normative Filipino American community. These people originate from various areas of the Philippines ranging from Manila in Luzon, Cebu City in central Visayas, Ilocos Norte, and Ilocos Sur. Although Filipinos from these areas have their own distinct regional dialects, they are fluent in Tagalog and have been heavily influenced by Spanish and American colonialism. Igorots are from the mountainous region—also known as the Cordillera. The Cordillera are indigenous to the Philippines, and successfully resisted three hundred years of Spanish colonialism. As such, Igorot American identity does not conform to the mainstream historical narrative or identity of homogenous pan-Filipino America. (2011, 3–4)

Although it is beyond the scope of this present work to explore, contemporary indigenous Filipino American communities, especially among the youth, are engaged in efforts to write themselves into the historical experiences of the Filipinos in America.

PENSIONADOS

Five years after the Spanish-American War, Governor General William Howard Taft’s government through the Philippine Commission passed the Pensionado Act of 1903. The goal of the act was to “educate and bind current and future Filipino leaders to the American colonial administration” (Dela Cruz and Agbayani-Siewert 2003, 46). They were welcomed as “trainees in democracy who would eventually return to their islands, carrying the message of democracy to their own peoples” (Melendy 1974, 521). Under this act, pensionados, or Filipino students, were selected to study science, mathematics, engineering, technology, law, government, business, economics, and so on at American high schools and colleges/universities and were expected to return to the Philippines upon graduation to rebuild their nation (Posadas 1996, 38). These students were sponsored by the colonial government and received fellowships with stipends (pension; hence, pensionado). By 1907, there were 180 pensionados studying across the United States (Okamura 1995, 429).

During this period, the colonial government was building the educational system in the Philippines, which under Spanish rule was limited to the elite population. After the University of the Philippines was established in 1908, the system of sending students to the United States was in large part abandoned until 1919, when the need was felt for more men and women with highly specialized training and the pensionado system was again put into practice (Marquardt 1945, 138). By 1912, 209 pensionados obtained degrees from American institutions of higher learning (Salamanca 1968, 91). The program lasted until the outbreak of World War II: 500 students arrived during the first two decades of the program (Esguerra 2011, 710). In total, there were roughly 700 students studying in the United States during the program’s tenure (Orosa 2005, 2). Mario Orosa documents his father’s journey to the United States as a pensionado:

[I]n August of 1906, my father Vicente Ylagan Orosa became a pensionado, one of only seven appointed that year. Several months short of his seventeenth birthday, he successfully hurdled the examinations, was plucked from his home town of Bauan, Batangas and went to America. … [He spent his] first … year at the Cincinnati Technical School in Cincinnati, Ohio (where I now live). … He then transferred to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana where he spent the next four years and earned a degree in civil engineering. … In the US, the great earthquake of San Francisco happened in April and when Vicente’s ship landed in San Francisco on September 10 like the previous batches of pensionados, he would have witnessed the devastation there. From San Francisco, my father would have traveled by train across the United States, crossing the Rockies, the plains states and the prairies of the Midwest before arriving in Cincinnati. The entire trip from Bauan to Cincinnati would have taken at least four weeks by boat and train. This trip today takes 24 hours. (2005, 2–3)

The pensionados were intelligent, as noted by W. W. Marquardt, pensionado student director from 1919 to 1923, who said, “In competition with American students they clearly proved their intellectual capacity and won far more than their share of recognition in Phi Beta Kappa and scientific honorary societies” (1945, 138). Upon their return to the Philippines, they were required to serve the government for the same number of years they spent abroad (Young 1982, 220–21). By 1910, the majority of the students who arrived in the first phase had returned to the Philippines and acquired positions with the government in various administrative, cultural, and economic areas or became university professors; and later, some became entrepreneurs (Espiritu 1995, 3–4). In addition, some took positions as teachers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers (Posadas 1996, 38).

Besides the government-sponsored pensionados, about 14,000 non-government-sponsored students, who were inspired by the success of the pensionados, journeyed to the United States between 1910 and 1938. They arrived independently and without funding from the colonial government. They too did not intend to stay in the United States, but rather to return to the Philippines to become civil servants. They worked as unskilled laborers while attending school, which made completing their educational goals nearly impossible. In addition to the demands of school and work, they faced discrimination. With the advent of the Great Depression, they abandoned their goals of education and dropped out entirely. These “proud young men, whose families had shipped them off with flags flying, they could not—would not—return home as ‘failures’ ” (Posadas and Guyotte 1990, 27). While Filipino students traveled to the U.S. mainland, their laboring compatriots immigrated to Hawai‘i as plantation workers.

FILIPINOS IN HAWAI‘I

Throughout the nineteenth century, Filipino peasants, while under Spanish colonial rule, became landless sharecroppers. This situation continued under U.S. colonial rule. Poverty-stricken peasants migrated internally in the Philippines in search of food and work. Meanwhile, the plantation economies of the United States needed a source of cheap labor, which resulted from the exclusion of Chinese laborers via the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; Korean laborers halted when the Korean government stopped emigration in 1905 due to the mistreatment of Koreans in Hawai‘i and Mexico as well as Japanese laborers via the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908. In addition, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean plantation workers were striking or threatening to go on strike, such as the 1909 strike by Japanese plantation workers on Oahu. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA), representing 30 plantations located on the islands of Maui, Oahu, Kauai, and Hawai‘i, initiated a policy and practice of employing as many different ethnic groups as they could so as to pit one group against another (cited in Sharma 1980, 95). Filipino migration to Hawai‘i was largely a private HSPA undertaking, albeit with government support (Sharma 1984a, 582). In fact, they were the first to recruit labor from the Philippines (Baldoz 2011, 13). Filipino subjects, as “Asians,” were located outside of the exclusion laws because they were simultaneously “nationals” or “colonial subjects” of the United States since 1898. Their unique legal status allowed them to travel freely between the Philippines and the United States, which made them attractive to the Hawaiian sugar plantation owners. Yen Le Espiritu notes, “because the Philippines was a ‘ward’ of the United States from 1905 to 1935, the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association … could rely on the assistance of American colonial officials there” (1995, 5). Beginning in 1906, and by the early 1920s, Filipinos comprised the largest segment of the plantation workforce in the islands.

The Philippine government tried to discourage HSPA from recruiting Filipino laborers because they needed the labor for their own growing sugar industry (Sharma 1984a, 582). The HSPA employed aggressive tactics and offered migrants free round-trip passage. The targeted recruitment of Filipino workers was so successful that by the mid-1920s, the HSPA stopped offering free round-trip passage as an incentive. By 1926, the HSPA stopped recruiting altogether. Espiritu says: “Hopeful migrants not only were willing to pay their own passage, they even bribed the recruiters to assure being chosen. Some educated people tried to pass themselves off as illiterates in order to circumvent HSPA policy to recruit the physically strong and the less educated, who were thought to be more likely to remain on the plantations and perform the menial work they were hired to do” (1995, 6). Thus, between 1926 and 1928, “unsolicited boatloads” of Filipino workers arrived, and by 1931, the HSPA ceased recruiting altogether (Sharma 1984a, 583).

The HSPA recruiting efforts were first concentrated in central Luzon and central Visayas; after 1915, it shifted to the Visayan Islands and then to the Ilocano region in northwestern Luzon. In a 1916 Report of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, the commissioner wrote, “Plantations have to view laborers primarily as instruments of production. Their business interests require cheap, not too intelligent, docile unmarried men” (cited in Sharma 1984a, 583). The HSPA viewed Asian laborers as a mere commodity and likened them to “cattle upon the mountain ranges” or “jute bags from India” (Sharma 1980, 94–95).

The ethnic composition of the plantation laborers changed drastically with the importation of Filipino laborers. In 1902, Japanese laborers comprised 73.5 percent of the plantation workforce (Okihiro 1991, 59). By 1915, they comprised 19 percent of the plantation workforce and the Japanese 54 percent. By 1930, the Japanese laborers decreased to only 19 percent, and the Filipinos increased to 70 percent of the workforce (Sharma 1980, 97; San Buenaventura 1996, 75). By 1931, the Filipino population in Hawai‘i reached its peak with more than 63,000, which represented 17.1 percent of the islands’ people (Sharma 1984a, 586). Between 1906 and 1934, an estimated 118,556 sakadas, or contract laborers were recruited to Hawai‘i: “103,513 were men, 8,952 women, and 6,091 children” (Posadas 1999, 15). Many of these early sakadas did not intend to settle in the United States. Instead, they planned on returning to the Philippines with their savings to buy a plot of land and establish a family, but the high cost of living and the economic exploitation they experienced made it difficult for them to save enough to realize their dream. It was also difficult for them to return to the Philippines as failures. The sakadas left the Philippines because they suffered severe economic displacement and dislocation that resulted from the colonial capitalists’ focus on agricultural export (i.e., sugar). In addition, they were landless, were indebted to local “bid men” (caciques), were charged high interest rates, and had crop failure due to typhoons and periods of seasonal drought. Staying in the Philippines meant no job or food; leaving, even for low wages, was a “better” option. Although financial circumstances in Hawai‘i were difficult, there were countless Filipino laborers who “collectively sent enormous sums [of remittance] home but who were unable to save for their return passage” (Sharma 1984a, 586).

FILIPINOS ON THE U.S. MAINLAND

Filipino laborers also resisted their oppressive conditions by leaving the plantations altogether. From the mid-1920s through the 1930s, more than 50,000 Filipinos headed for the continental United States or returned to the Philippines. One-third journeyed to the U.S. mainland from Hawai‘i, “many having been blacklisted for their alleged participation in the 1924 strike” (Espiritu 1995, 8). By 1935, 58,281 workers had returned to the Philippines, while 18,574 (many as families) moved on to the U.S. mainland (Sharma 1984a, 585–86). In addition, Filipinos who were encouraged by American teachers with tales of riches and unlimited opportunities in the United States skipped Hawai‘i altogether and headed straight to San Francisco (Mabalon et al. 2008, 7). Rick Baldoz notes that by the mid-1920s, “emigration from the Philippines had gained internal momentum, fueled by a series of factors: the evolution of the transpacific imperial zone as a major political-economic hub, the steady flow of remittances from nationals working abroad, and targeted recruitment by global steamship companies eager to profit from the transpacific traffic of steerage passengers” (2011, 13). Upon arriving at San Francisco, they were swept up, piled into taxicabs, and charged $65–$75 rides to Stockton—the gathering place for Filipinos as they came to America; the same trip by bus or train cost $2 (Mabalon et al. 2008, 7; Takaki 1989, 316). Although the majority of the arriving Filipinos in the 1930 found employment in the fields of the American West, roughly 25 percent found work in hotels, homes, and restaurants as domestics, janitors, valets, drivers, gardeners, cooks, busboys, bellboys, elevator boys, dishwashers, and waiters (Gonzalez 1998, 29–30; Takaki 1989, 316–17).

Census figures indicate that the number of Filipinos in California increased in both scale and velocity during the 1920s, from 2,674 to 30,470. The influx of Filipinos filled a labor vacuum that was created in California with the passage of the Alien Land Law of 1920 and the Immigration Exclusion Act of 1924 (Christiansen 1979, 66). The Alien Land Law prohibited Japanese immigrants from leasing or owning land, which caused many Issei to give up farming. “According to a report compiled by the Japanese Consulate, there had been 995 Japanese farmers in the delta in 1920, but 575 of them left the region within three years. Issei laborers, too, had to go elsewhere, reducing their number from 750 to 400 between 1920 and 1925” (Azuma 1998, 169). The remaining Japanese farmers worked as foremen who received fixed salaries from white landlords, thereby evading the Alien Land Law. California farmers had to find other workers to perform the seasonal tasks in the fields and orchards, which was compounded by the 1924 Immigration Exclusion Act that excluded Japanese immigrants; Filipinos provided them release.

Filipino workers labored in the fields of California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Colorado. Roughly 60 percent of the Filipino laborers in California worked in agriculture (Takaki 1989, 318). They moved from one place to another in search of work—Salinas, Manteca, Stockton, Lodi, Fresno, Delano, Dinuba, San Luis Obispo, Imperial, and Sacramento. They were seasonal migrants who moved around cutting spinach and picking strawberries in California; then traveled to Montana, where they topped beets; or Idaho, where they dug potatoes; or the Yakima Valley in Washington, where they picked apples; or in Oregon, where they hoed hops (Takaki 1989, 319). The majority of the Filipino population were single men and predominately Catholic. Church officials on the West Coast became concerned with their “moral rectitude,” since they were without family and relied on drinking, gambling, and dancing at halls for entertainment. In response, the archdioceses of Seattle and San Francisco created Filipino Catholic Clubs that severed as a social meeting place, but also assisted them in finding housing, jobs, and schools; provided burials; and offered money for those who wanted to return to the Philippines (Burns, Skerrett, and White 2000, 263). Moreover, Filipino immigrants established mutual assistance associations based on language and regional similarities; for example, “Ilocanos, Tagalogs, Pangasinans, and Visayans formed their own associations” as a means to maintain cultural traditions and to provide mutual aid to members (Espiritu 1995, 11).

Similar to their experience on the plantations of Hawai‘i, Filipino laborers in the American West battled oppressive working conditions, low pay, and various other forms of exploitation and discrimination: Here, too, they resisted though organized labor moments. As pay and working conditions declined during the Great Depression, many Filipinos believed unions could help them. For example, in 1929, asparagus workers earned $4.14 per day. By 1934, they earned $3.30 per day (Jiobu 1988, 50). Since the American Federation of Labor (AFL) refused to organize Filipinos, believing they would take jobs from white Euro-American workers, in 1933, D. L. Marcuelo, a Filipino businessman in Stockton, California, established the Filipino Labor Union, or FLU (Bacon 2008, 209). In August 1933, the FLU called a strike against lettuce growers in the Salinas Valley demanding better working conditions and higher wages. At the time, 40 percent of the agricultural workforce was Filipino. The growers used Mexicans to break the strike. Although the strike ended when local vigilantes burned the camp to the ground and forced the strikers to flee, the FLU gained credibility with the AFL. By 1936, the AFL granted a charter to the Field Workers Union, Local 30326—a combined Filipino-Mexican organization. In 1940, the AFL chartered the Federated Agricultural Laborers Association, a completely Filipino union. In 1959, the AFL established the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), with a largely Filipino union to organize grape pickers in the San Joaquin Valley. The movement was led by two Philippines-born men—Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz. They worked and competed with César Chávez and his National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Together, they mobilized enough strikers that by September 1965, they called for a strike to demand higher wages. The following year, the AWOC and NFWA merged to form the United Farm Workers (Bacon 2008, 210). In their 1969 proclamation they wrote, “Grapes must remain an unenjoyed luxury for all as long as the barest human needs and basic human rights are still luxuries for farm workers. The grapes grow sweet and heavy on the vines, but they will have to wait while we reach out first for our freedom. The time is ripe for our liberation” (Huerta 1969).

FILIPINOS AND THE U.S. NAVY

Immediately after the United States annexed the Philippines, it acquired Spanish military posts, including Subic Bay, and established several U.S. military bases on the islands during and after the Philippine-American War (Yeo 2011, 37). Thus, the U.S. Navy recruited Filipinos into service. In 1901, President McKinley signed an executive order that authorized the navy to enlist 500 Filipino stewards (Burdeos 2010, xii). Filipinos were the only Asian ethnic group to serve in the U.S. military without U.S. citizenship. Throughout the 1930s, 4,000 Filipinos served, but U.S. Navy policy relegated them to being stewards (mess boys who waited on officers), a position that was previously occupied by African Americans (Jiobu 1988, 50). For Filipinos without education and special skill, and no immediate relatives in America, the U.S. Navy was an opportunity for a better life (Oades 2005). A career in the U.S. Navy offered a viable alternative to poverty experienced by most Filipinos: even a steward’s pay placed them among the top 25 percent of wage earners in the Philippines.

In 1918, Congress stipulated Filipinos who served in the U.S. military for three years can petition for naturalization (Reinecke 1996, 2). Eligibility for citizenship meant that Filipino immigrants can become land and home owners as early as the 1920s, while virtually all other Asians were prohibited from citizenship and thus land ownership for another 30 years. With the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, Philippine independence was recognized, but there was a transition period of 10 years that would allow the United States to maintain its military bases on the islands. The act changed the legal status of Filipinos from “national” to “alien,” and a quota of only 50 Filipinos were allowed to migrate to the United States. However, the U.S. Navy received a waiver to continue recruiting Filipinos even though they were now considered foreign citizens.

Even after the Philippines gained formal independence in 1946 after World War II, the U.S. military installations remained, and the 1947 Military Bases Agreement allowed the United States to leave five major bases and at least 20 minor military installations for 99 years at no cost, and to continue to recruit Filipinos for U.S. military service (Schirmer and Shalom 2000, 98). With the advent of the Korean War in the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy was allowed to enroll “up to two thousand Filipinos per calendar year for terms of four or six years” (Espiritu 1995, 15).

FILIPINOS AND WORLD WAR II (1939–1945)

In 1942, President Roosevelt signed executive orders that allowed Filipinos to enlist for military service without citizenship. This decision was based on the sheer need for manpower. In the spring of 1942, Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced the formation of the First Filipino Battalion, made up entirely of Filipino troops and a mix of Filipino and white officers. Because of the large number of Filipinos volunteering for service, the battalion was reorganized as the First Filipino Regiment on July 13, 1942, in Salinas, California. Months later, on October 14, the Second Filipino Regiment was created, and it was activated at Fort Ord, California, on November 21, 1942. By the end of the war, about 7,000 Filipino men had volunteered for service in the U.S. Army.

World War II was an important turning point for Filipinos in America. The United States and the Philippines became allies during the war, which decreased anti-Filipino sentiments as more and more Filipinos displayed their loyalty to the United States. During the war, Filipino Americans serving in the U.S. military were granted the rights to become naturalized citizens beginning in 1943.

On July 2, 1946, Congress passed the Luce-Celler Bill (also known as the Filipino Naturalization Act and the Indian Immigration and Naturalization Act) that permitted the naturalization of all remaining Filipinos in the United States. The act granted Filipinos and Indians the right to become naturalized citizens and established a quota of 100 persons for each country. The act specifically granted Filipinos who arrived before 1934 the right to become naturalize citizens: 10,764 Filipinos did just that. Despite the quota, Filipinos employed other means to migrate to the United States. Filipino war brides and nurses accounted for a large number of Filipino women who emigrated after the passage of the Luce-Celler Bill. The Military War Brides Act of 1945 and the Fiancées Act of 1946 allowed for the migration of Filipinas. Approximately 118,000 spouses and children of U.S. servicemen migrated to the United States (Posadas 1999, 28). In addition, the Exchange Visitor Program (EVP) administered by the State Department in 1948 offered Filipino nurses the unique opportunity to pursue postgraduate study in American hospitals (Choy 2003).

In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act provided family reunification to Filipinos who were U.S. citizens (native born or naturalized) even beyond the quota of 100 Filipinos who were allowed entry into the United States every year. Perhaps the major change to Filipino immigration came in 1965 with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated national origins quotas, relieved occupational shortages (specifically health care professionals), and achieved family reunification. Ten years after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, more than 230,000 Filipinos immigrated to the United States, which doubled the 1960 population. In the years after the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1990, Filipino immigrants continued to come to the United States mainly for family-sponsored and employment-based categories.

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FACTORS OF VIETNAMESE MIGRATION

The pre-1975 Vietnamese migrants residing in the United States were largely comprised of students, professionals, and war brides (Vu 2003, 140). According to the U.S. Census, from 1951 to 1975, this “pre-fall” group totaled a little more than 20,000. Many of these Vietnamese students joined efforts to promote a positive public image of Vietnam as not just a site of war, but as a culturally rich and beautiful country. In addition, they criticized American foreign policy in Vietnam that turned their country upside down, leaving thousands homeless and injured. At the same time, they espoused U.S. support of the Republic of South Vietnam.

Dinh Hoa Nguyen, one of these pre-1975 students, migrated to the United States in 1948 to pursue a doctoral degree in English education (1999). Although Dinh Hoa Nguyen returned to Vietnam after he completed his degree, he returned to the United States in 1965 and settled here permanently. Another student, Long Nguyen, studied at the University of California at Berkeley while pursuing a doctoral degree in political science from 1968 to 1973. Prior to 1968, Long Nguyen was a student activist who organized protests against the Ngo Dinh Diem government (1955–1963) and the Nguyen Van Thieu government (1967–1975). As a student in the United States, Long Nguyen continued his activism and participated in anti–Vietnam War protests. In 1973, he returned to Vietnam and stayed, believing the Communist Party’s proclamation that patriotism and nationalism together can lead to a coalition government that would rebuild Vietnam. He would change his position, as life conditions under communist rule were inhumane. Thus, Long Nguyen risked life and escaped successfully by boat in 1979. The experiences of Dinh Hoa Nguyen and Long Nguyen validate Vu Pham’s contention that Vietnamese American history must be dated before 1975. However, they also illustrate a connection to the post-1975 refugee migration movements.

In 1930, Ho Chi Minh created the Vietnamese Communist Party, consisting of nine members. During World War II, the Japanese invaded Vietnam and forced the French out. During this time, Ho Chi Minh was a prisoner in China, and he was released with the hope that he would return to Vietnam and create a resistance force to fight against the Japanese. Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in 1941 and created the Vietnam Independence Solidarity League which was better known as the Viet Minh. In 1944–1945, famine struck Vietnam, causing one million Vietnamese to starve to death (Schulzinger 1997, 18). The leader of the Viet Minh armies, Vo Nguyen Giap, led his forces against the Japanese in North Vietnamese villages and liberated tons of food. This food was then given to the peasant population, gaining the support of the people in the coming struggles. During the “August Revolution” of 1945, the Viet Minh captured power in major cities; they captured Hanoi on August 19, then Hue on August 24–25. On August 24, Emperor Bo Dai abdicated and became “Citizen Vinh Thuy” (Chan 2006, 31). On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh stood before a crowd of 500,000 in the center of Hanoi and announced the birth of the Communist-run Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He started his speech by citing the United States’ Declaration of Independence, and then went on to denounce the French, claiming “they have built more prisons than schools … They have drowned our revolution in blood … They have forced upon us alcohol and opium in order to weaken our race” (Schulzinger 1997, 19).

At the close of World War II, the Provisional Government of the French Republic restored colonial rule of French Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam); thus they reentered Vietnam and immediately started fighting against the Viet Minh. Communist forces battled it out with nationalist forces in the First Indochina War (December 19, 1946–August 1, 1954). The fight between Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh forces and the newly created Vietnamese National Army, who had the support of the French and the United States, lasted eight years. The French held the cities, while the Viet Minh dominated the countryside. In order to gain support from the peasant population, the Viet Minh redistributed land previously held by the French to the peasants and began a literacy campaign. The Viet Minh forces, who were composed of only a few thousand in 1945, numbered more than 200,000 by 1950, including many guerillas and armed civilians. Also, the membership of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1946 consisted of 20,000, while it grew to 700,000 by 1954.

The death knell for the French occurred with their embarrassing defeat against the Viet Minh at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954: after fighting for 55 days, the besieged French garrison was captured: “eleven thousand French troops still alive and uninjured surrendered” (Chan 2006, 41). While this was unfolding, an international conference at Geneva, Switzerland (April 26–July 20, 1954), was already underway, the purpose of which was to settle issues on the Korean peninsula and in Vietnam, and to restore peace in Indochina. The meeting ended with a document known as the Geneva Accord, signed in July 1954, which temporarily spilt Vietnam into two zones at the 17th Parallel: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, governed by the Viet Minh and backed by China and the Soviet Union; and the Republic of South Vietnam, backed by the United States. The Geneva Accord stipulated that people who wished to move from north (governed by Communists) to south and vice versa could do so within a 300-day period. Between 1946 and 1948, some 55,000–70,000 ethnic Vietnamese from Cambodia and Laos fled to Thailand to escape the fighting between the French and Vietnamese Communist forces (Chan 2006, 42). According the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), with the establishment of the Communist government in the north, “more than a million people moved south in the years 1954–56” (UNHCR 2000, 80). Among them, nearly 800,000 were Roman Catholics. Conversely, those in the south who supported the communist moved north: some 130,000 were transported north by Polish and Soviet ships.

American policy toward an independent South Vietnam first took shape after the Geneva Accord. In a letter to South Vietnam’s new leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, dated October 1, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained the rationale for his support of South Vietnam: “The purpose of this offer is to assist the Government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means. … Such a government would, I hope, be so responsive to the nationalist aspirations of its people, so enlightened in purpose and effective in performance, that it will be respected both at home and abroad and discourage any who might wish to impose a foreign ideology on your free people” (Eisenhower 1954).

THE SECOND INDOCHINA WAR

The United States entered Southeast Asia with the goal of preventing the spread of communism worldwide. American policymakers developed the “Domino Theory” as a justification for their involvement. This theory states that if South Vietnam fell to the Communists, then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, India, and Pakistan would also fall like dominos. The Pacific Islands and even Australia could be at risk. As such, the United States pledged unlimited support in South Vietnam’s fight against the northern Communists.

On August 4, 1964, in response to American surveillance along its coast, North Vietnam launched an attack against the USS Turner Joy and the USS Maddox, two American destroyers on call in the Gulf of Tonkin. The first attack occurred on August 2, when three North Vietnamese boats charged the Maddox and fired torpedoes at it. On August 4, the Maddox, now joined by the Turner Joy, “allegedly” attacked during a stormy night. On August 5, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered retaliatory attacks against North Vietnam and asked Congress to pass a resolution to give him broad powers to take “all necessary measures to repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” (Jones 2009, 145). Known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, it was passed by the Senate 88–2, and by the House of Representatives 466–0, on August 7, 1964. With this solution, the United States engaged in an undeclared war for nearly 11 years, popularly referred to as the Vietnam War (or the Second Indochina War). To date, there is no evidence that the second attack ever occurred, which many critics have argued is a conspiracy theory to escalate U.S. military actions in Southeast Asia, which had steadily increased since 1961 (Moise 1996, 226).

President Johnson first authorized an air war to destroy North Vietnam’s ability to arm insurgency in South Vietnam. By 1965, the United States had 540,000 troops in Vietnam fighting against the Communists. The United States began bombing in southern Vietnam, which forced thousands of peasants from the countryside into the southern cities. Instead of helping to free the south’s people of communism, the U.S. presence drove the peasants closer to the Viet Cong. In January 1968, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, during the Lunar New Year called Tet, attacking 36 out of 44 provincial capitals, 66 county seats, and many military bases for four weeks, until they were beaten back. The Tet Offensive was a defeat for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, whose armed units were virtually decimated. However, it was a major psychologically demoralizing defeat for the United States that fueled doubts about the war and the wisdom of continued fighting. At this point, the United States was spending $2 billion per month on the war, and the death toll of American troops continued to rise. The shift in public perception of the war was crystallized by Walter Cronkite, the avuncular CBS anchor, who exclaimed as he watched footage of the fighting, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this damned war!” Confronted with a war that he could not end and win, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not run for a second term. Promising an end to the war, and an honorable exit out of Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon won the presidential election of 1968.

NIXON’S VIETNAMIZATION

Upon taking office in 1969, President Richard Nixon and his advisers introduced a new strategy called Vietnamization that was aimed at ending American involvement in Vietnam without looking as if South Vietnam had been abandoned. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird first used the term in March 1969, following a visit to South Vietnam. The Nixon administration’s Vietnamization plan provided for a measured, phased withdrawal of American troops coupled with efforts to transfer all military responsibilities to South Vietnam, leaving it to take over its own defense. This would allow the United States to leave the war-torn region with its honor intact. Nixon announced his Vietnamization strategy to the American public in a nationally televised speech on November 3, 1969. He emphasized how his approach contrasted with his predecessor’s strategy that relied on American troops, money, and resources. Nixon stated, “The defense of freedom is everybody’s business, not just America’s business. And it is particularly the responsibility of the people whose freedom is threatened … In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace.”

In January 28, 1973, the United States negotiated a treaty with North Vietnam in Paris. During the next two months, the United States dismantled its bases, exchanged prisoners with the Communists, withdrew American combat troops, and declared the Vietnamization process complete. In his final report before leaving office that month, Secretary of Defense Laird declared the Vietnamization process completed: “As a consequence of the success of the military aspects of Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese people today, in my view, are fully capable of providing for their own in-country security against the North Vietnamese.” However, on April 30, 1975, Communist troops entered the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City: South Vietnam fell to Communist forces.

FIRST WAVE OF VIETNAMESE REFUGEES

Immediately after South Vietnam fell to Communist forces, the United States worked quickly to withdraw its remaining diplomatic personnel and military advisers. Thousands of Vietnamese who had close association with the South Vietnamese regime or the American military and embassy scrambled to flee. They feared reprisals by the Communists, against whom they have been fighting. Media images of this period reveal the chaotic circumstances and environs of this period as it portrayed Vietnamese clinging to the skids of helicopters on top of the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon. Already enforced during this period was Operation New Life (April 23–November 1, 1975), which processed 111,919 Vietnamese refugees through Guam. The Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which passed on May 23, 1975, provided $305 million for the State Department and $100 million for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to run Operation New Life (“Indochina Refugees” 1975). While most refugees were processed on Guam, others went through U.S. government bases in the Philippines and Wake Island in the northern Pacific Ocean. More than 130,000 Vietnamese refugees were evacuated by air and by sea during the last few days of April 1975. This included 2,600 orphans and abandoned children who were evacuated under Operation Babylift (April 3–26, 1975). Early on, one of the airlifts ended in tragedy on April 4, 1975: sadly, nearly 150 people died in the crash, including 78 children.

This first wave consisted of refugees who were members of the social and political elites: they spoke English, were generally educated and Westernized, had political connections, and came from wealth. They included high-ranking soldiers, professionals, civic service workers, and those who had worked with American personnel or companies, ethnic Vietnamese who were educated in the United States, and individuals with family ties in the United States. The first wave consisted mainly of Roman Catholics and ethnic Vietnamese. Their resettlement was well funded in part due to America’s sense of moral responsibility for the displacement of the Vietnamese refugees. However, according to Kimberly Kay Hoang, the U.S. government did not account for nearly 1.5 million “high-risk potential victims” who were former soldiers, police, and civic service workers, which included roughly 60,000 families who had been employees of the American embassy and 30,000 counterterrorist agents and many others who had worked with the CIA. They were at risk because the United States did not destroy their personnel files; as such, the Communist government captured a large portion of them and forced them into reeducation camps for 3–15 years (Hoang 2013, 1365). After their lease or escape, the reeducation camp detainees left Vietnam, either by boat, or via land to neighboring countries.

SECOND WAVE OF VIETNAMESE REFUGEES: THE “BOAT PEOPLE”

The second wave of refugees left Vietnam from 1978 to 1989. In the two years after the Communist victory, relatively few people escaped Vietnam, because the new authorities announced that certain groups of people (e.g., elected officials, employees of various counterinsurgency, religious leaders, intellectuals, military officers, the middle class, and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese) would be taken to reeducation camps located at “New Economic Zones.” According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than a million people were placed in reeducation camps. There they were forced to till uncultivated land and admit to crimes against the new Communist state.

In light of these punitive measures, middle-class people and merchants, both ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese, began to escape by sea. At first, the American public did not hear much news about them because their numbers were small. The country of first asylum also wanted to keep their arrival as quiet as possible because they feared a larger exodus and influx if people in Vietnam found out that their compatriots managed to successfully escape and seek refuge. By late 1977, as the number of boat refuge-seekers increased—reaching an average of 1,500 refuge-seekers a month—Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, unable to accommodate refuge-seekers, began to push boats back to sea. Pressured by the international community for its moral and social responsibility for this plight, the United States responded through legislation. For example, the passage of Public Law 95-145 allowed refugees to change their status from “parolee” to “permanent resident” because it was apparent that they would not be able to return to their home countries. To counter the humanitarian crisis, President Jimmy Carter ordered the Seventh Fleet to seek vessels in distress in the South China Sea. A sizable percentage of refugees coming from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were of ethnic-Chinese backgrounds, speaking either Cantonese or the Chaozhou dialects.

From 1978 to 1989, ethnic Chinese Vietnamese were persecuted amid international power struggles, increasing ethnic tensions, changing Vietnamese government policies that force Vietnamese citizenship and, by extension, military duty, and changes in economic policies. Fear of being pushed into the jungles resulted in 160,000 ethnic Chinese from all over Vietnam migrating to China’s southern provinces (Chan 2006, 73–74). By the end of this exodus, nearly a quarter million Chinese Vietnamese had returned to China (Chan 2006, 74).

According to Sucheng Chan, the vast majority of boat people from southern Vietnam landed in Malaysia, while many who escaped from the north found a shorter route to Hong Kong, which eventually came to house the second-largest number of boat people. In May 1975, Hong Kong encountered its first batch of roughly 4,000 boat people, who were picked up by a Danish ship in the South China Sea. In 1976, only 191 refuge-seekers reached Hong Kong; 1,007 made it in 1997; and by 1978, nearly 9,000 arrived by small boats. Some were ethnic Chinese Vietnamese merchants who were able to utilize their contacts in Hong Kong to arrange for their passage. By spring 1979, Hong Kong housed 17,000 boat people (Chan 2006, 77). Sucheng Chan notes:

The local people resented them tremendously because the Hong Kong government was very tough in the way it handled would-be refuge-seekers from the People’s Republic of China: Hong Kong’s border guards caught and deported them to the Chinese mainland without mercy. By allowing the Vietnamese boat people to stay, its critics said, the Hong Kong government was following a double standard, showing far greater leniency to the refuge-seekers from Vietnam than those from China. Members of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council were also angry: They felt that Great Britain was doing nothing to relieve Hong Kong, its crown colony, of its burden, yet gave the colony no authority to deal with the situation on its own. Despite these complaints, no one foresaw that the worst was yet to come. (2006, 77)

The trafficking of refugees became a lucrative business in Vietnam and resulted in an international refugee crisis. The massive influx of new refugee-seekers placed greater and greater pressure on the limited resources in Hong Kong, which resulted in changing policies. A conference convened by UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim in Geneva on July 17–19, 1979, along with the participation of the United States, Great Britain representing Hong Kong, and ASEAN countries all agreed that something had to be done to assist the country of first asylum (e.g., Hong Kong). The Geneva Conference resulted in immediate change, although the Hong Kong government became increasingly bitter because it was shouldering 35 percent of the boat people but was only allocated 13 percent of the resettlement to countries of second asylum slots. “Between July 1979 and July 1982, more than 20 countries—led by the United States, Australia, France, and Canada—together resettled 623,800 Indochinese refugees” (UNHCR 2000, 86). The Vietnamese boat exodus continued throughout the 1980s. It is estimated that nearly 10 percent of the boat people were lost at sea, fell victims to pirate attacks, drowned, or died of dehydration.

The United States responded to the international refugee crisis by increasing its intake of refugees to 168,000 per year. Soon afterward, Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980 as a way to facilitate the resettlement of refugees. The act, in Section 201, defines a refugee as:

[A]ny person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such a person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular racial group, or political opinion.

The Act established the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services to administer the domestic resettlement program. Under the resettlement program, refugees can receive cash assistance, medical assistance, and supportive services intended to ease their initial adjustment to the United States, with the goal of facilitating for their economic self-sufficiency. Henceforth, a sizable portion of Chinese Vietnamese refugees have arrived in the United States after spending time in Hong Kong or the Philippines, among other countries of first asylum. Refugees who escaped by boat were known as “boat people” and were predominately Viet Hoa, or ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese. In addition, they tended to be males, Buddhists, less wealthy, less capable in the English language, and less educated. Overall, this group of refugees were relatively young and had been urban workers in Vietnam. By the late 1980s, international willingness to accept and resettle all Vietnamese refugee-seekers was waning, and resettlement numbers were barely keeping pace with the rate of refugee arrivals in countries of first asylum. The United States accepted 44,500 Vietnamese boat refugees in 1979; 95,000 in 1980; 86,000 in 1981; 44,000 in 1982; and 20,000 each year until 1986 (Hoang 2013, 1366).

The second-wave refugees differ from the first wave in several ways. Their passage was longer, riskier, and harsher as they fled by foot through jungles to nearby seaside towns to make their final escape by boat. These boats were poorly constructed, overcrowded small fishing boats that carried upwards of 300 refuge-seekers. Their journey at sea lasted from a few days to several weeks, wherein many got sick, suffered dehydration, and fell victim to Thai pirates who pillaged their belongings and captured and raped young girls before leaving them to die. Those who attempted to flee through Cambodia were killed by the Khmer Rouge or Vietnamese soldiers. While there are no conclusive figures on the number of refuge-seekers who died, reports estimate that anywhere between 10 percent and 50 percent died in the process.

THIRD WAVE

In June 1989, a second international conference on the Indochinese refugee crisis was held in Geneva, and a new agreement was established known as the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA). The CPA reaffirmed some of the elements of the 1979 agreement, specifically the commitments to preserve first asylum, to decrease clandestine departures and encourage legal migration, and to resettle refugees to third countries. It also contained some new elements, such as a guarantee to institute regional refugee status determination procedures and repatriate those whose applications were rejected.

By the late 1980s, another wave of refugees consisted of individuals who came through federal government–sponsored programs, namely the Orderly Departure Program (ODP), the Humanitarian Operation Program (HOP), and the U.S. Homecoming program. The aim of these programs was to provide Vietnamese migrants an alternative to dangerous clandestine departure by boat or over land. Be that as it may, many Vietnamese migrants continue to leave by sea out of desperation and fear of persecution from the Communist government. Vietnamese Americans with U.S. citizenship can employ ODP and HOP to sponsor their family left back in Vietnam because ODP and HOP provided for family reunification. In addition, former U.S. government or company employees and former reeducation camp detainees were allowed entry under ODP and HOP. Many Vietnamese Americans who arrived with the first and second wave used their status as newly naturalized U.S. citizens or their permanent resident status to sponsor remaining family out of Vietnam.

By 1989, 165,000 Vietnamese had been admitted to the United States under the ODP. By 1997, 458,367 had been admitted (Table 6.1). Registration for ODP ended in 1994, but in 2005, the United States and Vietnam signed an agreement that allows individuals who were qualified to register, but could not do so before the program ended, an opportunity to do so. Overall, under ODP, Vietnamese refuge-seekers were resettled to over 40 countries worldwide, including a few thousand who resettled after 1997. Since the 1990s, political prisoners and their families comprise the largest categories of Vietnamese migrants to the United States. Another group that faced serious adjustment difficulties are the Amerasians, or “war babies”—individuals fathered by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam during the war—who came under the Homecoming Act implemented in 1989.

Sources: Compiled for the author from Courtland W. Robinson, Terms of Refuge (London: Zed Books, 1998) and UNHCR (Statistical Yearbooks, 1994–2012).

RESETTLEMENT AND COMMUNITY FORMATION

When considering the resettlement and community formation of Vietnamese refugees, it is important to note the iteration of migration waves that they arrived with, as funding for resettlement and general attitudes about Vietnamese refugees changed that impacts integration into American society, both positively and negatively. First-wave Vietnamese refugee resettlement and community formation unfolded in spite of a lingering consciousness of guilt among Americans for losing the war in Vietnam, which fueled humanitarian concerns and efforts to help displaced refugees. The “rescue psychology” among Americans was strong, as revealed in the generous aid the U.S. government allocated for Vietnamese refugee resettlement. The government also instituted other programs and policies that distinguished Vietnamese refugees from other immigrant groups in order to assist with their resettlement and integration into American society. Many of the first-wave refugees received help from “voluntary agencies” (VOLAGs), which provided additional resources and funding in areas such as housing, English-language classes, and employment training.

The Chinese Vietnamese refugees living in the United States today entered during the second-wave period between 1978 and 1989. Like many refugees before them, the Chinese Vietnamese refugees had to be processed and resettled in America. Upon arriving in the United States, Chinese Vietnamese refugees were first sent to four government reception centers located at Camp Pendleton, California; Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania; Fort Chaffee, Arkansas; and Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. There, they were interviewed by VOLAGs and matched with countrywide sponsors. They were initially distributed across all 50 states to minimize the negative impact of a refugee population. Despite the government’s attempt to disperse the refugee population, as a result of tertiary migration from other states, California emerged as a concentrated center. In Southern California, a sizeable population of Vietnamese refugees reside in Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego. In Northern California, they are located in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose. Unlike the refugees who fled during the first wave, Chinese Vietnamese refugees did not benefit from America’s guilty conscience; rather, they entered during a period of economic recession caused by a decline in the real estate market and high employment rates coupled with a weakened American automobile industry, which translated into “compassion fatigue.” Anti-refugee Americans invoked the popular question of the day: “Why are we taking care of the refugees from Indochina, and not our own people?” (See Taggart Siegel’s [1987] film, Blue Collar and Buddha.) Experiencing more economic and adjustment issues, some younger Vietnamese Americans joined youth gangs and engaged in criminal activities.

Economic competition among recent Vietnamese refugees and unemployed white Americans have increased racial conflict and policies. Some of the most extreme reactions occurred along the Gulf Coast states. In Texas, a conflict developed between Galveston and Corpus Christi Vietnamese shrimpers who competed with traditional Texas shrimpers. Non-Vietnamese shrimpers viewed Vietnamese shrimpers as competitors who did not respect the rules and ethics of their trade, which, coupled with the decrease in shrimp prices, resulted in anti-Vietnamese/anti-refugee violence and sentiments. Texas shrimpers and fishermen complained that Vietnamese fishermen would move in on a school of fish that another boat was already “working” on; unload their shrimp without paying the $50 “unloading license”; shrimp out of season, and use illegal fishing nets (Virgilio 1991, 61). In 1979, some Texas shrimpers accused the Vietnamese of “dirty tricks and unfair tactics” to get an edge in the shrimp market. As a result, local members of the Ku Klux Klan burned the boats of Vietnamese shrimpers and made threats on their families (Bennett 2004). Tensions reached a climax in 1979 when Vietnamese shrimpers fatally shot a Caucasian crabber, Billy Joe Aplin. For two years, Vietnamese shrimpers reported that Aplin had stolen their crab traps, threatened them, and assaulted them, but no arrest was ever made. The two Vietnamese individuals were tried for murder and acquitted based on a claim of self-defense. Similarly, in Biloxi, Mississippi, fistfights broke out between Vietnamese shrimpers and white shrimpers. The local shrimp industry printed and sold bumper stickers that read, “Save Your Shrimp Industry: Get Rid of Vietnamese, Contact Your Local Congressmen” (Arden 1981, 387).

Today, over 22 states have a “Little Saigon” business district or community. The oldest, largest, and most prominent Little Saigon is located in Orange County. The Little Saigon community originally started emerging in Westminster in 1978. The inspiration for the creation of Little Saigon first started while several businessmen were housed together at Camp Pendleton Marine Base in San Diego, where they set up shops and restaurants. Later, it was relocated to a lower-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles and quickly spread to the adjacent city of Garden Grove. Since 1978, the nucleus of Little Saigon has long been Bolsa Avenue, where early pioneer real estate developer Chinese Vietnamese Frank Jao built the highly popular Asian Garden Mall. By the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, Orange County’s Little Saigon became a destination secondary migration among Vietnamese immigrants who wanted to live among other Vietnamese Americans and have the cultural comforts of “home.”

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Upon arriving to America, many refugees felt ambivalent about their situation. They were also ambivalent about their experiences in Hong Kong. Overwhelmed by the new environment, they felt like fish out of water, and they struggled with survivor’s guilt. Even so, for Chinese Vietnamese refugees, their dual ethnicity and ability to speak both Chinese and Vietnamese proved to be useful. Mrs. Lâm says, “The main problem coming to America was the language barrier because neither me nor my husband spoke English, which limited our job opportunities to working for our own kind who spoke either Vietnamese or Chinese.” Mrs. Kim recalls,

When I first came to the United States, I lived with my sisters in the Tenderloin [an urban district of San Francisco]. I was afraid to do anything because I did not know how to speak English well and I did not know the area. However, when I found that there were other Vietnamese in the community as well, I felt much better because whenever I was lost, I was able to ask for directions and most importantly, I was not an outcast of the community.

After securing lodging in the new environment, one of the first priorities was to find work. Many moved to neighborhoods known to have Vietnamese or Chinese immigrants. For instance, Mrs. La says, “The Tenderloin was the Vietnamese version of Chinatown. It was the center for all the Vietnamese refugees, mostly because of the cheap rent for the apartment, so we moved there.” In seeking employment, Chinese Vietnamese quickly realized their inability to speak English kept them from high-paying jobs, but they felt fortunate that they could work as service workers in Chinese restaurants or sweatshops. Kevin, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American, recalls his grandmother saying, “I was lucky to have work. I was an old woman, but I could still sew.”

A survey conducted by Caplan, Whitmore, and Bui (1985) in the early 1980s shows that among the Southeast Asian refugees in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, and Orange County, the Chinese-Vietnamese refugee population tended to be older than the Lao and the Vietnamese, with an average age of 33 years. They were also not as proficient in English compared to other Indochinese refugees. Economically, compared to the ethnic Vietnamese, the Chinese Vietnamese refugees were less likely to be in the labor force, had a lower median monthly income, and no employment and health and retirement benefits, and were more likely to be dependent on government welfare programs. Overall, the Chinese Vietnamese were invariably at a disadvantage in terms of economic integration.

On the other hand, the Chinese Vietnamese were able to develop good relationships with other Chinese businesspeople in the United States because of common languages. Over the years, such ethnic economy has grown in size. Chinese Vietnamese now have a monopoly in the Asian grocery business, primarily because established corporations are unprepared to serve Asian customers, especially the growing, relatively affluent Asian population with a demand for Asian goods. But they are at the same time facing competition from other Asian immigrants from Thailand, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

FROM REFUGEE TO AMERICAN BORN

There are four distinct stages in the development of Vietnamese and Chinese Vietnamese communities in America. The first stage was the wave of exiles who fled Vietnam immediately after the fall of Saigon in 1975. These exiles were primarily from middle-class backgrounds, were Catholic converts, had English proficiency, and worked with the U.S. government before Saigon fell. The communities they built tended to revolve around manufacturing in California and around fishing in the Gulf Coast (e.g., Texas, and Louisiana). The second stage included refugees who arrived between 1979 and 1982. The majority of these refugees were Chinese Vietnamese, popularly called “boat people,” arriving in large numbers. They were members of the petit bourgeoisie, were rural poor of a lower socioeconomic status, and had scant or no English skills. They were scattered by resettlement, but secondary migration led them to California and Texas, to already established Vietnamese refugee communities. The third stage occurred after the 1980s. This stage was community-oriented, based on the flourishing of ethnic businesses, civic organizations, and other community social structures that were established to serve the immigrant refugee population. The fourth stage reflects the development since the 1990s, when 1.5- and second-generation Americans mature and become politically active. Their parents—refugees who fled Vietnam after 1975—began to become naturalized citizens and politically active themselves, once they acknowledged that their dream of returning to Vietnam was no longer realizable.

Similar to many immigrants before them, the first- and second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese Americans struggle to balance themselves between the forces of traditions and the new American ways, between being Chinese, Vietnamese, and American. Their parents feel this anxiety, as Mrs. Pham laments, declaring, “My first impression of America is that it is too free. Kids are raised with no traditions and moral values … Young women are running away and getting pregnant. Boys are joining gangs and dropping out of school. America has little discipline.” Both parents and children point to language barriers as the source of their intergenerational conflict and misunderstanding. Susie, a 1.5-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American who arrived when she was five years old, states, “Linguistic obstacles are by far the root of all problems in my family because it contributes to the domino effect of more problems such as changing roles within our family, stress, and anxiety about us being too American.”

Another compelling example of the rift created by the language barrier between the 1.5 and second generation and their parents is evident in Nancy’s statement:

The generation gap between my mother and me are obvious. I mostly speak English. I do not know how to cook a full meal. I speak my mind whenever I feel like it. I do not know much about my Vietnamese and Chinese traditions. My mother on the other hand can whip up a meal in thirty minutes. She also holds her emotions in, instead of talking about it. It is frustrating because she expects me to know, but I can’t read her mind.

For the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese Americans, their development was further challenged through their encounters with racism. Hoang, a 1.5-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American, says, “I went to kindergarten like everyone else. However, the first school I went to was full of Chinese immigrants, so it felt normal, like being at home. Later, after we moved, it was different and I started hearing chants like ‘Ching chong Chinaman sitting on a bench.’ ” Interestingly, both parents and their children are aware of the cause and source of their intergenerational conflicts. Michael, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American, says, “My mother thinks differently than I do because we grew up in two different environments. I would not say that I identify with my mother’s experiences, but rather understand her struggles. I have never gone through what she went through, but I get understand her struggle and for that I appreciate her sacrifice.” Similarly, Barbara notes, “My mom loves her children like a lioness protecting her cubs. Although she understands that children in America have no respect for elders like the children in Vietnam. The main factors that contribute to the clash between child and parents are first and foremost, linguistic reasons and then cultural reasons.” When Barbara and her mother get into arguments, she admits, laughingly, to saying, “This isn’t Vietnam, Mom; get use to the American culture. … so just chill out.”

MAINTAINING CULTURE, MAINTAINING SELF

Children who grow up in households with first-generation refugee parents expressed their childhood experiences positively, indicating that their parents have been successful in transmitting traditional values, morals, and customs to them, even though they may rebel against them. Victoria, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American says, “Practicing filial piety is learning to respect and care for those around you, especially your elders. My parents taught me to respect and care for those around me, especially my elders. My parents taught me to respect and obey the older generation and to care for the parent as they get older.” Conversely, Minh, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American says he learned how to be an American by watching several popular American TV shows. He says,

I didn’t have my parents or anyone as a set role model but instead I had the actors and characters on TV to learn from. Everything I learnt about how to act or how to think came from TV shows and most of the time it was white character or it was the “American way.” The way I dressed came from the commercials; the way I talked came from Saved by the Bell; the way I treated others from Barney; my sense of right and wrong came from Power Rangers; and what I know about sex, came from the media.

Many of the 1.5 and second generation said that their parents did not talk to them about important topics such as sex and birth control, and that they had to rely on their schools and friends to learn about it. They also said that much of what they learned about social values and norms was indirectly through the hierarchical nature of their family structure, which emphasized respect for the elders that included their parents and their older siblings.

DEVELOPMENT OF 1.5- AND SECOND-GENERATION CHINESE-VIETNAMESE AMERICAN IDENTITIES

Among the 1.5- and second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese Americans, the process of identity formation is complex and complicated, revealing that for them, identity is fluid, flexible, and ever changing. Justin, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American, expressed a very assured identity as American, saying, “There is no question about it: I am a genuine American citizen, California-grown, and no one can touch that.” While Sherwood indicates a more nuanced and sophisticated explanation of his multiple identities, saying:

I have my own challenges growing up as a 1.5-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American. I speak Cantonese, English, and understand Vietnamese. I celebrate Chinese New Year and American New Year. I listen to Asian music and American music. My identity is very fragile and conditional in terms of my experiences. I was born Chinese Vietnamese in Saigon. I consider myself absolutely Americanized but as I grow up, clashes between the American culture and Chinese-Vietnamese culture makes me question my identity time and time again.

Along a similar vein, expressing the difficulties of “fitting in” and “making friends,” Robert, a 1.5-generationer, says, “Being a 1.5-generation Chinese-Vietnamese American, I strive to be accepted in my community as Chinese, Vietnamese, and American.”

One prevailing theme that most experienced and articulated is the struggle to form and understand their identity. This is brilliantly expressed by Bao, a second-generationer who says, “My whole life has been a constant juggle of three identities and it doesn’t help that it changes so drastically according to each situation such as going to Chinatown, Little Saigon, or connecting with my relatives back in Vietnam, or attending a football game. One can say having a triple identity doesn’t amount to a hindrance but instead acts as a benefactor because it opens you up to more opportunities.” As stated above, identity formation is a process—fluid, flexible, and changing—which is well illustrated in Tiffany’s comment:

Like most Vietnamese American teens it is difficult to meet the expectations of parents while attempting to assimilate into the American culture. When I started elementary school, my parents enrolled me in Chinese school at the same time. At this time, I thought my identity was Chinese American. Later, I realized that I was not only following Chinese traditions, but also Vietnamese culture and traditions. I not only had to assimilate to the Chinese and American cultures, but also the Vietnamese culture.

LIVING AMONG MULTIPLE WORLDS: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND ASIAN AMERICAN PAN-ETHNIC IDENTITY

The post–World War II era ushered in the countercultural and civil rights movements that began to question the normative vision of American social life. The American way of life was not limited to Protestants, whites, males, heterosexuals, and middle-class households. Assimilation favored socially constructed notions of “white” identity, by excluding people with dark skin, non-European ancestries, and limited incomes—in particular Asian immigrants. The civil rights movement demanded practical changes in public policy and a transformation of American national self-identity, insisting there were manifold and legitimate alternate ways of being American. One result of this vibrant period was the creation of the homogenous taxon “Asian American”—coined by historian and activist Yuji Ichioka—which was initially used to describe the politically charged group identity in the ethnic consciousness movements of the 1960s through the 1970s.

There are discontinuities, tensions, and disadvantages between the ethnic-specific Asian identity (e.g., Chinese-Vietnamese American) and pan-ethnic Asian American identity. The goal and mission of the ethnic consciousness movement of the civil rights era emphasized the individual community’s rights and abilities of self-determination. The pan-ethnic Asian American identity, while strong in numbers and hence politically significant, depresses the interest of individual groups and, consequently, downplays an individual community’s self-determination at the expense of the larger pan-ethnic Asian American community. Ironically, this in itself is a hegemonic process of homogenization that the Asian American civil rights activists protested and fought against because it denied individuals and their respective communities a means of self-determination.

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CAMBODIA: FACTORS OF MIGRATION

France, like other colonial powers, drained wealth, resources, and labor from its colonies and offered very little in return. France wanted to secure trade routes with China for its silk and tea, which is why they encouraged mountain tribal people, especially the Hmong of Laos, Vietnam, and southern China, to grow opium poppies as their sole cash crop. The French then purchased all the opium that was produced. Because Cambodia’s geography was not suitable for cultivating poppy, growing opium was not encouraged. France, like England, Portugal, and Holland, gained economic influence and power by trafficking opium into China, spreading addiction, and causing social and political decay. Besides opium for trade with China, France was also interested in the rubber, gems, teak, and spices that Indochina offered.

French rule in Indochina lasted almost 100 years, until 1954. French control of Cambodia was an adjunct to its control and interest in Vietnam, having incorporated Cambodia into its protectorate in 1863. By 1884, all of Vietnam was under French control, and in 1893, Laos also became a protectorate of France. Laos and Cambodia were granted greater autonomy than Vietnam, because they had fewer natural resources.

Under French rule, the Cambodian god-king held only nominal power. In 1904, for political reasons, the French backed one line of the royal family, the Sisowath line, which pushed King Norodom’s heirs aside. No more than 40 years later, the French switched their support back to the Norodom line, again, for political reasons. In 1941, 19-year-old Prince Norodom Sihanouk was declared king, under the assumption that Sihanouk would be easy to manipulate and control because of his youth; however, this was not the case (Chandler 1983, 137–52).

Shortly after the young prince became king, Japan invaded and conquered Indochina, controlling the area from 1941 to 1945, through the end of World War II. Japan allowed Cambodia to be ruled by its young king, under the supervision of the Vichy French government. When Japan lost the war in 1945, it also lost control and domination of Indochina. But under the principle that Asia should be ruled by Asians, Japan urged Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos to declare independence. France returned to its former rule, attempting to regain control of its territory in Indochina, albeit acting against a worldwide objection to colonialism. From 1945 to 1954, Sihanouk capitalized on the change in the political climate and worked skillfully to apply pressure on the French through the worldwide disfavor, in an effort to gain independence for his Royal Kingdom of Cambodia (Kampuchea). Sihanouk became prime minister of Cambodia in 1952, appointing his own cabinet, and promising to gain independence within three years. In 1953, the French gave Sihanouk control over the Cambodian armed forces, the judiciary, and foreign affairs. However, France continued to control the Cambodian economy. On November 9, 1953, Sihanouk claimed independence from France.

It should be noted that even though Sihanouk played a key role in Cambodia’s struggle for independence from France after World War II, the Viet Minh (or Viet Cong) guerrilla forces, who challenged France’s colonial claim over Indochina, set the stage for his success. For decades, Viet Minh forces placed both economic and military strain on France’s resources. On May 7, 1954, the Viet Minh won a decisive victory over the French, after a 57-day siege that resulted in the surrender of more than 10,000 starving French troops at Diem Bien Phu. This catastrophic defeat for France shattered the remaining public support for the first French–Viet Minh Indochina war. Growing international pressure, coupled with the cost of years of guerrilla warfare, forced France to give up its colonial control and claim of Indochina. In 1954, at the Geneva Conference, Cambodia was granted full independence—along with Laos and Vietnam.

SIHANOUK AND INDEPENDENCE

Concerned that his position and power as king would be weakened after the election, Sihanouk abdicated the crown in 1955 and declared his father, Norodom Suramarit, king in his stead. Sihanouk established the People’s Socialist Community (the Sangkum Reastr Niyum) and won every parliamentary seat in the election of September 1955 through legal means. For the next 15 years, Sihanouk would dominate politics in Cambodia, serving as prime minister until his father’s death in 1960. Because no new king was named, Sihanouk became head of state.

In 1956, Sihanouk accepted U.S. military aid. In the early 1960s, although he feared Vietnamese communists, he was deeply concerned about Thailand and South Vietnam, who were both allies of the United States. When the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was murdered in a coup backed by the Americans, Sihanouk was shaken. Thus, he claimed the United States’ CIA was masterminding a plan to overthrow him. By 1963, Sihanouk rejected the U.S. military and economic aid, and in 1965, he broke ties with Washington and sided with North Vietnam, the Viet Minh, and Communist China (Clymer 2004, 107–27). Sihanouk granted the North Vietnamese army use of Cambodian territory in their fight against South Vietnamese forces and the United States.

As the Vietnam War escalated, Sihanouk was concerned that hostilities would spill over into Cambodia. So in June 1969, he restored relations with Washington. However, his ability to balance relationships between the right and left, and among the United States, North Vietnam, and China, soon became precarious. Internally, support for his policies and his tolerance of the Viet Minh occupation of Cambodia’s borders diminished. People from within his own government, the urban elite, and the military began to voice their opposition. Working under the principle of “search and destroy,” the U.S. military secretly began to bomb the Cambodian countryside in March 1969. The clandestine bombing targeted the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Laos and Cambodia. The bombing destroyed villages, created countless refugees, and also pushed Viet Minh forces deeper into Cambodia. General Lon Nol claimed that there were as many as 40,000 Viet Minh soldiers on Cambodian soil. The bombing killed thousands of civilians and left hundreds of thousands homeless and refugees.

Because of the turmoil caused by U.S. military intervention, Cambodia’s economy was stagnant by 1970; this, coupled with famine from an unsuccessful harvest, created unrest and discontent among the peasants. However, the majority of Cambodian peasants still considered Sihanouk a modern-day god-king. By comparison to the tragic events to come under the Khmer Rouge, many Cambodians today consider Sihanouk’s era to have been the “golden age” (Chandler 1983, 190). Others blame his totalitarian rule as the cause of many of Cambodia’s problems: an immature political system, intolerance of pluralism, and a lack of national debate. During Sihanouk’s March 18, 1970, trip to France, General Lon Nol—albeit reluctantly, but with support from the United States—led a bloodless coup d’état that ousted Sihanouk (Becker 1986, 114). In April 1970, Lon Nol abolished the monarchy and established the Khmer Republic. Days later, Sihanouk established a government in exile, the National United Front of Kampuchea, seeking support from his old enemy—the Khmer Rouge. This move surprised many, because for years, Sihanouk had denounced and suppressed their activities, and had even derisively dubbed them “Khmer Rouge” (Red Khmer). Little did he know that he was laying the foundation for the Khmer Rouge victory that would come five years later.

THE LON NOL ERA

The newly formed Khmer Republic had many problems that required immediate attention: bankruptcy, a collapsing economy, famine, internal corruption, a Communist-backed civil war, Vietnamese aggression, U.S. retaliation, and an inability to control its own fate in its neighbor’s escalating war. To make matters worse, many villagers and peasants did not support the new republic because their loyalty lay with the royal family and their ousted prince Sihanouk. The Khmer Republic maintained control for five terrible years, in large measure due to the economic and military aid from the United States and Thailand, who both feared a Communist takeover of the region.

From the beginning, the Lon Nol regime declared its neutrality in the region, while trying to maintain an anti-Communist campaign, which garnered support from the United States. Lacking support from the peasants, riots broke out in protest of his administration. In response, Lon Nol accused them of being inspired by the Viet Minh, legitimating his brutal suppression of them. Without foresight, Lon Nol was driving the peasants to join the Khmer Rouge, who, until that time, had numbered only a few hundred. Lon Nol also utilized the Cambodian fear of the Vietnamese by branding all Vietnamese within Cambodia members of the Viet Minh, demonstrating the Khmer Republic’s hatred of the Vietnamese and Communists.

In June 1974, the United States withdrew its forces from Cambodia, reducing the Khmer Republic’s control to only larger towns and cities, and only half the countryside. It was inconceivable that the Khmer Republic, backed by the United States, would lose to the Khmer Rouge, as it did on the morning of April 17, 1975. Two weeks before the fall of Saigon, roughly at the beginning of the Cambodian New Year, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh as victors, with wide popular support and an increase in territorial control. Many of the Khmer Rouge cadres and soldiers were under the age of 15. That year would become Year Zero, ushering in a new phase of Cambodian history by eliminating its past cultures and traditions. Year Zero was a new start, a new beginning, marking a complete revolution of what it means to be Khmer, revolutionizing Khmer life with the hopes of making Cambodia a self-sufficient nation.

KHMER ROUGE

The Khmer Rouge regime, Democratic Kampuchea (DK), lasted from April 1975 until January 1979. It would become one of the most radical and brutal periods in world history (Etcheson 2005, 4). Under the leadership of a Paris-educated schoolteacher, Pol Pot (formerly Saloth Sar), and Chinese-Khmer Khieu Samphan (president of DK from 1976 to 1979), the Khmer Rouge attempted to transform Cambodian society into a Maoist peasant agrarian cooperative. Since 1903, the Khmer Rouge worked to gain peasant support—unsuccessfully. However, after Lon Nol ousted their prince, Sihanouk joined forces with the Khmer Rouge, eliciting support from the peasantry. Although Sihanouk hoped to use the Khmer Rouge to regain his power and kingdom, he became its pawn, instead giving the Khmer Rouge legitimacy and increasing peasant support.

Immediately after the Khmer Rouge swept into power, currency was abolished and postal services were suspended. Convincing people that the Americans were about to bomb the cities, the cities were abandoned, and the borders were closed. Urban dwellers, merchants, ethnic Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese Cambodians, along with other elites, were executed or sent to labor and reeducation camps (Chandler 1999). Survivors report that during this period, people who wore glasses were executed because they represented intellectuals, beautiful Cambodian women were forced to marry malformed Khmer Rouge veterans, and there were no dogs in the countryside because hungry Cambodians ate them due to the shortage of food (Becker 1986, 162). What followed was four years of starvation and slavery. The total number of casualties of the Khmer Rouge genocide remains a topic of debate: Vietnamese sources claim three million deaths, while others estimate one to two million deaths. Historians have called it the “Cambodian Holocaust,” a pogrom of ethnic cleansing and societal reform that continues to haunt many survivors and their descendants (Chandler 1999).

The Khmer Rouge state of Democratic Kampuchea was toppled on December 25, 1978, after Vietnamese forces entered Phnom Penh to address the Khmer Rouge murder of hundreds of ethnic Vietnamese along the Vietnam-Cambodia border region. This, however, did not mean freedom for the people of Cambodia; instead, it set the stage for two decades of war in Cambodia. Cambodia was “liberated” from the Khmer Rouge’s pogrom, but tens of thousands of Cambodians continued to endure Khmer Rouge terror. The Khmer Rouge established military camps at the Thai border, where they forced refugees into the camps and subjected them to systematic violations of their human rights. The Vietnamese finally withdrew from Cambodia in 1989, leaving their client regime, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, to fend for itself against the Khmer Rouge and their allies. For several decades, the Khmer Rouge haunted the Cambodian landscape and people through war crimes and crimes against humanity. Thus, since 1975, the stage was set for the massive global movement of Cambodian refugees, the remaking of Cambodia as a modern nation-state, and the formation of Cambodian Americans and their communities.

LAOS: FACTORS OF MIGRATION

Contemporary Laos has its roots in the ancient Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang, established in the fourteenth century under King Fa Ngum. For 600 years, Lan Xang, “The Kingdom of a Million Elephants,” had political, cultural, and social influences reaching into present-day Thailand as well as over all of modern-day Laos. After centuries of gradual decline, Laos came under the domination of the Court of Siam from the late eighteenth century after separating into the three separate kingdoms of Luang Phrabang, Vientiane, and Champassak (Bowman 2000, 456–58). In 1827, the king of Vientiane, Chao Anouvong, led a war against Siam to reclaim autonomy for Laos, but his failure sustained the gradual decline. In the late nineteenth century, Luang Phrabang became a French protectorate under the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1893, and the rest of Laos came under the direct rule of France (Lee 1970). Laos is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia and is bordered by China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma (Myanmar).

Major rebellion against the French colonialists did not begin until after World War II. Japan, which began having influence over Laos in 1941, finally took full control of the country from the French in March 1944. In 1945, the Luang Phrabang prince, Chao Phetsarath, declared Laos an independent kingdom and formed a group known as the Lao Issara, or “Free Lao” (Goldstein 1973, 68). Free Lao strongly opposed French occupation on nationalist, not communist, grounds, while some people supported the French because they thought Laos was not ready for complete independence. Chao Phetsarath’s half brother, Chao Souphanouvong, called for armed resistance and sought support from the Viet Minh, an anti-French nationalist/Communist movement led by Ho Chi Minh. Chao Souphanouvong’s political group later became the Communist Pathet Lao “Lao Nation.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, a “Secret War” raged between the U.S.-backed Royal Lao government and the Pathet Lao, a Communist, nationalist political movement closely associated with the North Vietnamese Communist movement (Johnson 2004, 134). Known as the American Central Intelligence Agency’s “Secret War” against the Pathet Lao, the war resulted in a massive bombing campaign in Laos (Osornprasop 2012, 186–88). During the early years of the war (the mid-1960s), young Hmong males were used for reconnaissance, but as the war became protracted, Hmong involvement grew to the point where the Hmong were active fighters—fighting against the Pathet Lao Communist forces (Fredriksen 2012, 191–92).

Between 1962 and 1973, the United States dropped as much as five million tons of cluster bombs on Laos in defiance of the 1962 Geneva Accord that recognized Laos as a neutral zone (Porter 2005, 49–53). The North Vietnamese also blatantly violated the 1962 Geneva Accord (Westmoreland 1995, 39–44). The devastating campaign of 580,000 bombing missions was the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. By 1973, an estimated 200,000 people lost their lives in the conflict, whether they were in combat or were combatants, not civilians, killed in bombing, and nearly twice as many were wounded.

By 1975, when the Pathet Lao gained control of the country after violating the 1973 peace agreement, which resulted in the establishment of a coalition government in Laos, Laos was rife with internal ethnic strife and had gained the distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in history. Individuals who served in the Royal Lao Army served the U.S. military—such as the Hmong—or who were considered a threat to the new Pathet Lao government were subsequently held in the Lao gulag “reeducation” labor camps called “seminars” in rural Laos (McGregor 2008, 84). Some remained in these camps for well over a decade. Many died from malnutrition, disease, sickness, and mistreatment. Those who were fortunate enough to survive were left with various forms of long-lasting trauma. Some survivors have written vivid accounts of their experiences living in reeducation camps, which illustrate a dark period in Lao history.

As a result of the “Secret War,” hundreds of thousands of Laotian refugees, about 10 percent of the population at the time, fled their homeland between 1975 and the early 1990s, many of them immigrating to the United States. The majority of Laotian and Hmong refugees who fled Laos spent time in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before settling in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, France, French Guiana, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. These camps held the promise of escape from war, but more often delivered a reality of poverty and violence. Some camps were also organizing bases for insurgent groups fighting against the Lao communists.

REFUGEES FROM CAMBODIA AND LAOS

The passage of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 allowed for Southeast Asians who had been closely associated with the U.S. military in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to receive passage to the United States. Later on, the Refugee Act of 1980, sponsored by Senator Edward M. Kennedy and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, admitted more Southeast Asian refugees—in particular, the “boat people” from Vietnam (many were ethnic Chinese Vietnamese), Khmer Rouge survivors from Cambodia, and multiethnic Laotian refugees of Laos.

In 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ended Khmer Rouge rule. However, the Khmer Rouge’s pogrom had claimed the lives of between 1.5 million and 3 million Cambodians—about one-third of the entire population. Over 100,000 Cambodians fled to the Thai border following the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Refugee camps were established by the United Nations, and over the next decade, Cambodians were allowed to resettle in other countries, primarily the United States.

The first wave of Cambodian migrants to the United States included the fortunate 4,600 Cambodians who managed to flee the country just before the 1975 Khmer Rouge takeover, and who were comprised mainly of former government officials and those with associations to the United States. As such, the composition of the first wave reflected an educated, urbanized, and middle-class refugee population (Mortland 2010: 78).

The second wave took place following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. The majority of these refugees were from the rural areas of Cambodia, where there was less access to formal education. Many in this wave were also ethnic Chinese Cambodians who survived the genocide (Haines 2010, 17). By 1990, 147,708 Cambodian refugees had resettled in the United States. The United States normalized its relations with Cambodia in 1991, but it was following the United Nations–supervised elections in May 1993, that diplomatic relations with the United States was fully reestablished with an embassy (Thayer 2012, 97). Since then, efforts by Cambodian Americans to sponsor relatives left behind in Cambodia have resulted in some new immigrants to the United States. A small number of Cambodian immigrants have also arrived as spouses of Cambodian American and other U.S. citizens, adopted children, and arrived on their own on tourist, student, business, or missionary visas. Since 2000, “visa marriages” among Cambodians and Cambodian Americans have also been common (Thompson 2013).

Between 1975 and 1979, approximately 22,000 Laotian refugees arrived in the United States. The majority of these earlier refugees were relatives of Laotians who were employed by the U.S. Information Service, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or the U.S. embassy in Vientiane. Between 1979 and 1981, 105,477 refugees arrived in the United States. Additionally, between 1986 and 1989, 52,864 Laotian refugees arrived in the United States. Unlike the first waves, they were mainly farmers and villagers who were not as educated or as ready for life in an urban setting. Laotian refugees continued to immigrate to the United States from the 1980s to the early 1990s, albeit in small numbers.

Because the Hmong had become targets in their own land, they began to migrate out of Laos, across the Mekong River into Thailand. For many years, Hmong leaders and their often fragmented families were kept in refugee camps in northern Thailand. In the camps, some families had to wait for years before they were granted permission to resettle in another country. Unlike the 150,000 Vietnamese who were immediately evacuated in April 1975, as “allowed by the United States under the ‘parole’ power of the U.S. Attorney General” (Chan 1994, 49), Hmong refugees did not receive that same privilege. During this period, only 3,000 Hmong refugees were granted asylum under the Refugee Assistance Act of 1975. Nevertheless, the Refugee Act of 1980 eventually opened the door for all refugees. By the mid-1990s, Hmong refugees had resettled in France, Canada, Australia, and other countries, with roughly 90 percent of them relocated to the United States (see Table 7.1). Then in 2004, 15,000 Hmong refugees from Wat Tham Krabok Temple in Thailand were relocated to the United States. Ban Vinai was the largest of the camps that held Hmong refugees. At Ban Vinai, the water was often bad, food was scarce, and the living conditions were crowded (Long 1993). By the early 1980s, Hmong families who could demonstrate their participation in the war were obtaining immigration status to the United States. In the years that followed, many Hmong refugees made their way to the United States.

ADJUSTING TO LIFE IN AMERICA

Most Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong arrived in the United States as refugees who had experienced the trauma of war, genocide, and poor living conditions in refugee camps. Refugee resettlement was enabled by the passage of the federal Refugee Act of 1980, which included a domestic policy of refugee assistance through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). This included assistance with housing, English courses, job training, health care, and financial support. Unfortunately, the federal resettlement program was uneven and unsystematic. By the early 1980s, the decline of the auto industry and ensuing economic recession resulted in systematic underfunding for refugee resettlement. Cuts in federal spending-cum-funding therefore covered only a fraction of the cost faced by states, counties, cities, and institutions responsible for assisting with refugee resettlement. “Voluntary agencies” (VOLAGs), such as churches and other charitable organizations, were also involved in the sponsorship, resettlement, and support of Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Vietnamese refugees. These civil society groups were strongest during the early period, 1975 to the mid-1980s, as “compassion fatigue” slowly impacted this aspect of resettlement resources for the refugee populations.

Sources: Compiled for the author from Courtland W. Robinson, Terms of Refuge (London: Zed Books, 1998) and UNHCR (Statistical Yearbooks, 1994–2012).

The ORR attempted to spread Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian refugees in cities and towns across the United States so as not to overburden the institutions and resources of any single area. This policy of dispersal proved to be ineffective and slowed the pace of integration into American society, as resettling them together, in strong communities, would have provided the refugee population cultural, moral, and social support through networks, cultural familiarity, and ability to collectively experience displacement and replacement together. However, secondary migration resulted in Long Beach, California, making it a Cambodian destination. Long Beach had a small yet established prewar Cambodian community, which assisted in the resettlement of new arrivals. As more and more Cambodians moved into Long Beach, it became a destination for those seeking to reunite with long-lost family members, relatives, and friends. Moreover, Southern California’s weather and generous welfare assistance programs made Long Beach the place to be. Unlike the Cambodians, Laotian refugees live in geographically diverse communities. The largest concentration lives in California, in particular Sacramento, San Diego, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Other sizable communities live in Texas, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and Oregon. The Hmong communities are largest in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

STORIES OF SURVIVAL

A Cambodian American recalls her passage to America, and her initial impressions. She says,

One of my sisters had gotten to America and she sponsored us to come to America too, but first we had to go to another camp in the Philippines. Then we moved to San Francisco, to the Tenderloin, but my mom and dad could not stay there because it was too crowded and my mom got upset because she saw homeless people and was sick all the time. So we moved to Stockton. When I got there I went directly to high school. It was very difficult because I did not know English. (Indochinese Housing Development Corporation 2001, 31–32)

A similar narrative is expressed by a Laotian female who stayed in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before arriving in California in 1981:

When we got to America they sent us to live in Ukiah. It’s four hours from San Francisco, up North. And the people that sponsored us were called Ten Thousand Buddhist temple. They were I think a Chinese Buddhist Temple. They were the people that sponsor us to come to the U.S. So we went there and we stayed there for three months … They had like maybe two or three hundred refugees, also living there at the same time. (Indochinese Housing Development Corporation 2001, 60)

In her memoir, Kao Kalia Yang describes her experiences in the refugee camp as a child:

Ban Vinai refugee camp was a dirty place. Dust particles flew high in the hot wind. Young women held pieces of cloth over their noses when they walked in the noon sun to pick rations for their families in a patch of designated ground. The cotton prints of their tube skirts swooshed in the air. Young men narrowed their eyes and breathed through their noses, drawing the dirt in, eyeing the groups of women … Little boys and girls ran around as they did in every other part of the world where there is little to do and many people to look after them. The dust went into my throat, got into my nostrils. When I blew my nose on the inside corner of my shirt … I saw black dirt on the fabric. Somehow the dust turned black inside my nose when in the air it looked orange … I couldn’t ask an adult why and how the dust changed its color inside my nose. Ban Vinai refugee camp was a place where kids kept secrets and adults stayed inside themselves. (Yang 2008, 55)

Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong refugees faced a wide range of challenges as they adjusted to life in the United States. These challenges included problems of lingering postwar trauma; schools that were ill equipped to meet the unique cultural, academic, and linguistic needs of Cambodian and Laotian refugee students; lack of needed social services; gang involvement and conflicts with other ethnic minority gangs; early marriage; and welfare dependency. For Cambodian Americans, the issue of forced deportations of nonnaturalized citizens has remained a current critical issue. On March 22, 2002, Cambodia and the United States entered into a repatriation agreement. The agreement broadly established that Cambodia would fully cooperate in the repatriation of their own nationals from the United States. The Cambodian American community, and some 1,400 young men and women who had been ordered deported to Cambodia, for the first time faced the prospect of the forced return of family members to the country that they had fled just three decades earlier.

Changes in immigration laws in 1996 greatly impacted the Cambodian American community. Making matters worse was the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, which made the U.S. government leery of all noncitizens. Before 1996, judges had discretion in deportation cases; after 1996, the policy was draconian, and judges no longer had discretion. Cambodian refugees who maintained their permanent alien status and did not become naturalized citizens were particularly at risk. Many refugees did not become naturalized citizens because of English-as-a-Second-Language issues. Younger Cambodian Americans who committed petty crimes while teenagers were targets of the new policy. Immigration reform made deportation mandatory for all legal permanent residents who were sentenced to a year or more for “aggravated felonies,” “moral turpitude,” or use of controlled substances. Judges had no discretion in individual cases and could not consider his/her prison experience, rehabilitation, attitude, behavior, ties to family, and length of time living in the United States.

NOTE

1. In this chapter, the use of the term “Laotian” refers to someone who comes from Laos. The word “Laotian” is problematic and not generally accepted by scholars or people with the diverse communities. Khamchong Luangpraseut differentiate “Lao” as referring to members of the Lao ethnic group, while “Laotian” refers to anyone who comes from Laos. Luangpraseut’s classification is contested for being “Lao-centric.” As such, most people from different non-Lao ethnic groups prefer to be called by their own groups’ ethnic group names, like Hmong, Iu Mien, Khmu, Tai Dam, Tai Lue, and so on. However, some will clarify by saying they come from Laos, or are “Laotian” when speaking to people who are unfamiliar with Laos and its diverse ethnic and cultural groups. The present government in Laos officially recognizes 49 ethnic groups and many more subgroups in Laos. Before 1975, 68 ethnic groups were recognized. The Lao, Tai Dam and Tai Lue speak languages in the Tai-Kadai linguistic family, the Hmong and Iu Mien speak languages in the Hmong-Iu Mien linguistic family, the Khmu language is in the Mon-Khmer linguistic family, and the Lahu and Akha speak languages in the Tibeto-Burman linguistic family. It is generally recognized that the native peoples of Laos all speak languages and dialects within these four language groups. Many Lao Isan people from Northeast Thailand, a territory once linked to the Lao Lan Xang Kingdom, also live in the United States.

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FACTORS OF BURMESE MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, there are 91,085 Burmese Americans who self-identify as “Burmese alone.” Additionally, 9,115 identified as Burmese with one or more other ethnicity or racial identity, which makes the total Burmese American population 100,200. However, this total might not represent the actual population size because many ethnic groups who come from Burma (present-day Myanmar) might not identify as “Burmese,” but rather with their ethnic-specific reference. Approximately 70 percent of Burma’s 50 million in population are comprised of “ethnic Burman.” But, there are more than 160 ethnic groups in Burma; for example, Shan, Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Chin, Rohingya, and so on. Burma was colonized by Britain since 1886 following three Anglo-Burmese Wars (1882–1885) and, for a short period from 1942 to 1945, by Japan.

Since the end of colonialism, Burma has struggled with civil unrest. On March 2, 1962, a Burmese general named Ne Win seized control of the government and instituted military rule. After Ne Win’s takeover, he nationalized all private enterprise and shut down the universities that resulted in a flight of middle-class and upper-class Anglo-Burmese, who were culturally mixed of British and Burmese. Many of them spoke English and practiced Christianity. In addition, there were ethnic Burmans, Indians, and Chinese, and who were students, professionals, and doctors. The migration of this cohort coincided with the elimination of quotas for migrants from Asia with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. More migrants from Burma arrived after the August 8, 1988 (known in Burmese as shiq ley lone, or “four eights,” 8/8/88), uprising to protest Ne Win’s rule and advocate democracy. The Ne Win regime responded by killing many protestors, after which it installed a military junta that resulted in a flight of political refugees from Burma. The refugees fled to refugee camps in Thailand along the Burma-Thai border. Many of them resettled in Fort Wayne, Indiana; Los Angeles and San Francisco, California; New York City; and Washington, D.C. From 1977 to 2000, 25,229 Burmese migrated to the United States. This figure does not include Burmese migrants who arrived to the United States via other countries, such as Chinese-Burmese going through Taiwan, or Indian-Burmese going through India and Nepal.

After the terrorist attack in New York City on September 11, 2001, the USA Patriot Act prevented any of the Burmese on the Thai or Bangladeshi borders from entering the United States as refugees from 2001 to 2005. The act excluded refugee status to anyone who had provided “material support” to any known or suspected terrorists. As a result, many Burmese refugees were eliminated from immigrating as refugees because they provided water, food, and sometimes housing to guerrilla fighters. Additionally, the Patriot Act defined the Karen as “terrorists” and banned them from even applying for refugee status. In 2005, the United States offered to resettle Burmese refugees residing along the Burma-Thai border. In 2006, the State Department waived the part of the Patriot Act that prevented 9,300 ethnic Karen from entering the United States because of their association with rebels who wanted democracy in Burma. It also lifted restrictions on material support for the Karen, Chin, and Karenni. Besides the area of Fort Wayne, other areas such as St. Paul, Minnesota, and Utica, New York, are also home to large Karen and Chin populations. From 2006 to 2009, more than 50,000 Burmese refugees were admitted.

Similar to the post–Vietnam War refugees, the resettlement of Burmese refugees relied on support by nongovernmental organizations, VOLAGs, such as Catholic Charities, and other religious organizations. For example, in the Fort Wayne area, refugees are placed in the care of Catholic Charities, which receives about $425 or so to provide housing, furniture, food, and job placement assistance. Unfortunately, the lessons of poorly funded resettlement programs did not inform the resettlement of refugees from Burma. As a result, Burmese refugees struggle to integrate and adapt to their new life in America, as illustrated in the documentary Nickel City Smiler: From the Jungle to the Streets, which chronicles a refugee’s flight out of Burma and new life in Buffalo, New York. In Nickel City Smiler, Smiler Greely says, limited resettlement resources and programs make it impossible for him to become middle-class Americans. Christine Su notes that less sizable populations of ethnic Chin refugees reside in Spokane, Washington, and Atlanta, Georgia; their resettlement was assisted by various churches, such as the Baptist, Catholic, Church of the Nazarene, and Pentecostal groups (2013, 1300).

FACTORS OF INDONESIAN MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT

Prior to the 1950s, there were few Indonesian migrants living in the United States. Beginning in the 1950s, small numbers of Indonesian migrants arrived as students. The International Cooperation Administration (ICA; since 1961, it is known as the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID) administered scholarships to medical faculty at the University of Indonesia in 1953 to study at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1956, the ICA funded the teaching staff of the Bandung Institute of Technology to study at the University of Kentucky. Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, roughly 60,000 Indos, or Dutch Indonesians who are people of mixed Dutch and Indonesian heritages, arrived in the United States as refugees following the Indonesian National Revolution (1945–1949). Dahlia Gratia Setiyawan notes that this group of Indonesians primarily resettled in South California, with sponsorship and assistance from VOLAGs (2011, 517).

In the 1960s, various political and ethnic conflicts erupted in Indonesia, which sent several thousand Indonesians, the majority of whom were Chinese Indonesian, to flee to the United States. Between the 1970s and early 1990s, small groups of Indonesians, such as the Batak of Sumatra, Minahasans of Sulawesi, and several thousand Tionghoa families, immigrated to and resettled in the United States. However, the highest concentration of Indonesians migrated to the United States between 1997 and 2001, and they included Indonesians from major urban centers such as Jakarta and Surabaya, and smaller rural villages such as Malang in East Java, and Manado in North Sulawesi; and sizable Tionghoa, Javanese, and Minahasans groups in addition to smaller numbers of other ethnic groups, such as the Acehnese (Setiyawan 2011, 518). Indonesians were fleeing interethnic and religious violence that erupted during the transition from the Suharto regime when tensions between Muslims and Christians, and Tionghoa and ethnic Indonesians were acute. Yet, others left for job opportunities as a result of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and educational reasons. As such, many entered the United States with a tourist visa and worked as day laborers. Among them, some were successful in applying for asylum and changing their status to permanent resident, and eventually become naturalized citizens. However, the majority remained undocumented, or imigran gelap (illegal aliens).

Following the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, many refugees from Aceh came to the United States. The recent Acehnese immigrants joined the earlier asylum-seekers who resettled in the United States in the late 1990s: the majority is located on the East Coast. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, there are approximately 63,383 self-identified Indonesian Americans. However, an additional 31,887 individuals identified as Indonesian mixed with one or more ethnic and racial groups. The total estimated population is 95,270. The majority of Indonesian Americans reside in large urban centers, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, New York, and Chicago.

FACTORS OF THAI MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT

Unlike refugees from Southeast Asians who entered the United States seeking asylum as a consequence of the Vietnam War, Thais generally did not come to America in search of political freedom. Thai migration to the United States was virtually nonexistent before 1960. Interactions with U.S. armed forces in Thailand during the Vietnam War is one primary factor of migration because Thais became more aware of the opportunity for migration to the United States. By the 1970s, roughly 5,000 Thais had immigrated to America. The Thai migrants during this period consisted of professionals, especially medical doctors and nurses, and business entrepreneurs. During this period, the migrants were either ethnic Thai or Chinese Thai, and the gender ratio was three women to every man. These included Thai wives of U.S. military personnel and civilians: many of them were ethnic Lao or Thai Isaan, because the military bases were located in the northeastern Isaan region. According to Megan Ratner, the 1980 U.S. Census recorded concentrations of Thai near military installations, especially Air Force bases, in certain U.S. locales (2014). The passage of the 1987 American Homecoming Act allowed for mixed-heritage Thai-American children born of U.S. military personnel to immigrate to the United States, usually with their Thai family members.

The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act allowed for increased immigration from Asia, so Thais with the economic resources to do so took advantage of the educational and employment opportunities in the United States. The 1965 act also established a preference for skilled labor. For example, a shortage of nurses in the United States made it possible for skilled Thai nurse-migrants to enter to work and live. In the late 1960s, the American government provided Thai nurse-migrants Green Cards as soon as they landed on American soil.

The 2010 U.S. Census estimates that there are 237,583 Thai Americans who identify as Thai or Thai mixed with one or more ethnic and racial groups. The first wave of Thai migration in the United States occurred between 1969 and 1972, when 10,093 Thais arrived. Since 1972, 3,000–5,000 have entered the United States annually. Between the 1980s and 1990s, roughly 100,000 Thais entered the United States. Similar to the Indonesians, they came to escape the collapsing economy in Thailand, which has continued to struggle. Many of them arrived as undocumented immigrants who entered on tourist or student visas, and work in low-paying and low-skill jobs. Many end up working within the ethnic Thai economy as cooks, servers, and dishwashers in Thai restaurants, often being paid below the minimum wage. Even so, they send remittance to Thailand to assist their families back home. Those who entered with student visas prior to 1984, and overstayed their visas, were given the opportunity to petition to change their status to permanent resident. As a permanent resident, they can eventually apply to become a naturalized citizen. However, after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1984, this path toward legalization became impossible. According to Jenjira Yahirun, marriage migration continues to be a primary method of immigration for Thai women, because the large sex tourism industry in Thailand, a legacy of the Vietnam War, soon became a popular venue for Western men seeking Thai wives (2011, 2105).

In 1999, the Los Angeles City Council designated a stretch along Hollywood Boulevard “Thai Town.” This reflects the high concentration of Thai Americans who reside in Southern California. Many first-generation Thai Americans are small business owners: gas stations, beauty parlors, travel agencies, grocery stores, and the popular Thai restaurants. A sign of Thai American community formation is the establishment of wats, or Buddhist temples. “Today 105 wats can be found scattered throughout North America in 32 states, including six temples in Canada” (Perreria 2011, 1110). Nearly 30 percent of the temples are located in California (http://www.dharmanet.org).

The development of Thai Buddhism in America unfolded in two phases. Initially it was a top-down formation spearheaded by royal, ecclesial, and civil authorities in Thailand who, in the mid-1950s and 1960s, sought to expand Thai Buddhism beyond its geographical and national borders (Perreria 2011, 1110). During that period, Thailand envisioned itself as a “world center of Buddhism.” As such, it funded the development of the first transnational Thai temples under royal patronage in India in 1959 with the construction of Wat Thai Buddha-Gaya, and then in the United Kingdom in 1965 with Wat Buddhapadipa. There were also plans to construct a Thai temple in New York’s Staten Island, but the plan was aborted due to complications.

Simultaneously, a group of Thai immigrants and American-born Buddhists successfully formed the Buddhist Study Center in New York as a legal entity in 1965 (Perreria 2011, 1110). This event, followed by the 1972 establishment of the first and largest Thai temple in Los Angeles, foreshadowed a new bottom-up, lay-centered approach to the institutionalization of Thai Buddhism in the United States. “In June 1971 a mission of Thai monks led by Ven. Phra Dhammakosacharn arrived in Los Angeles, and lay people began to raise funds to purchase land. In 1972, land was donated and construction began on a main hall, a two-story Thai-style building that was completed and dedicated in 1979” (Cadge 2005, 27). The bottom-up approach maintained close links with Thai royalty and high-ranking civil servants, but was financed and led by the growing Thai immigrant population in America. Wendy Cadge notes, “Buddha images for the shrine hall and two sets of scriptures were carried to the United States by monks and lay people from Thailand, and in 1979 His Majesty the King and Her Majesty the Queen of Thailand presided over the casting of the principal Buddha image for the temple at Wat Po (officially called Wat Phra Chetuphon, or the Monastery of the Reclining Buddha) in Thailand” (2005, 27). Throughout the 1970s, Thai immigrants established Thai temples in several metropolitan areas: Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco. This expansion necessitated the formation of the Council of Thai Bhikkhus in 1977, who acted as liaisons for the missionary monks coming from Thailand to serve the growing community (Cadge 2005, 27).

Because the majority of Thais in Thailand, America, and within the Thai diaspora are mainly Buddhist, Buddhist rituals and beliefs are key to being Thai in America. In Buddhist custom, people can go to a temple any day to offer food to the monk(s), as a part of religious practice called thumbun, literally meaning making merit. Buddhist monks (and nuns) are the most serious Buddhist learners and practitioners, providing a role model of Buddhism for common people. In addition to conducting Buddhist rituals, monks are supposed to lead and teach the way of Buddhism. Although there are some Thai-American-born monks, the majority of monks in the United States are invited from Thailand. Currently, there are more than 482 Thai monks in 105 temples across America.

Todd LeRoy Perreria provides five reasons why Thai contribution to Asian American and American culture is “significant” given their relatively small population size and short immigration history:

1. The long history of cordial relations between Thailand and the United States provides an important framework for considering the context in which Thais migrated to America.
2. The diverse demographics of Thais, spread out across the United States. Thais have never been forced to live or work in isolated inner-city ghettos.
3. The majority of Thais immigrated to the United States after passage of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act. Antidiscrimination and affirmative-action measures help to create a cultural climate more tolerant of ethnic diversity.
4. The incorporation of Thai heritage and traditions to mainstream American via interracial marriages, cuisines, and popularity of Buddhism in America.
5. Thais have demonstrated a high degree of civic engagement and willingness to share and celebrate their culture with non-Thais (Perreria 2004, 2008, 2011).

FACTORS OF MONGOLIAN MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT

A few Mongolians resided in the United States prior to World War II, and they were mainly academics. In 1949, Dilowa Gegeen Khutukhtu, a Khalkh Mongol and “living Buddha,” entered the United States as a political refugee via India. From 1951 to 1952, roughly 1,000 Kalmyks, or Western Mongolians, were admitted into the United States. The Kalmyks are ethnic Mongols whose homeland of Kalmykia is located in Russia, near the western shores of the Caspian Sea. Some 2,000 Kalmyks left their homeland as refugees following the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Kalmyks escaped from Russia by way of the Black Sea. After landing in Turkey, they journeyed to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and some traveled as far as Czechoslovakia and France. In 1945, after the surrender of Germany, Kalmyk refugees went through hard times in Europe.

In August 31, 1951, the U.S. Congress granted Kalmyks permission to immigrate to the United States as Europeans. Between December 1951 and March 1952, 571 Kalmyks arrived in the United States (Tsend 2014). Additional family members and individuals migrated to the United States afterward. They resettled in New Jersey and established Buddhist temples. After this period, small numbers of Mongolians migrated to the United States. The fall of Communism in Mongolia in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, made it possible for Mongolians to migrate. Many went to China, whose economy was booming for employment opportunities, and a few hundred Mongolian migrants a year made their way to the United States. Besides Kalmyks, small numbers of Mongolians from Inner Mongolia, China, Taiwan, and India also arrived in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. Many of them were scholars and Buddhist monks seeking political asylum (Kohn 2011, 812). Since the 1990s, the primary purpose for immigrating is to improve economic and educational opportunities. As of 2000, the U.S. Census estimates there were roughly 3,500 Mongolian Americans residing in the United States. By 2010, that number increased to 18,344.

Early Mongolian migrants resettled on the East Coast around Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City and then relocated to the other cities. Kalmyk Mongol immigrants settled in Lakewood and Freewood Acres, New Jersey, and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Henochowicz 2011, 823). The International Refugee Organization furnished a special grant to several civil society groups, notably the Tolstoy Foundation and the Church World Service, on behalf of the Kalmyk Mongolians, to cooperatively work together to help them locate new homes and resettle. Recent Mongolian immigrants settle in communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, as well as traditional East Coast communities in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New Jersey, as well as in Chicago.

FACTORS OF NEPALI MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT

Significant Nepali migration to the United States occurred in the early 1950s when Nepal’s borders were open to the outside world; before this, Nepal maintained relative isolation. In 1975, 56 Nepali immigrants arrived to the United States. The number of migrants from Nepal remained below 100 per year through 1996 (Miller 2014).

A gradual increase in Nepali migrants to the United States since the 1990s is primarily due to the introduction of the Diversity Immigration (DV) lottery, or Green Card lottery that awards up to 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States (Greer 2011, 851). The diversity lottery was established through the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act and conducted under the terms of Section 203(c). In 1998, 226 Nepali were winners of the DV-1999 lottery, and 593 won in the DV-2010 lottery. The 2000 U.S. Census estimates that 11,715 Nepali Americans were residing in the United States. By 2010, the U.S. Census reported an increase of the overall population to, 51,907 self-identified Nepali Americans, or 59,490 Nepali Americans who are mixed with one or more ethnic and racial groups. Significant communities of Nepali Americans exist in large metropolitan areas such as New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Portland, Gainesville, and St. Paul. Sizable numbers also live in various cities of California.

FACTORS OF BHUTANESE MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT

Bhutanese Hindus of ethnic Nepali origin have resided in Bhutan for generations: they are estimated to be one-sixth of the population of Bhutan and are also known as Lhotshampas, or “People of the South” (Laenkholm 2007, 59). In 1989, the government of Bhutan implemented a series of nationalist regulations to suppress Lhotshampa culture, restrict the Nepali language, and tighten citizenship requirements under a policy called “One nation, One people” (Evans 2010, 26). Since then, a small trickle of them have fled to Nepal. In September and October 1990, Lhotshampas engaged in civil protest of new state policy imposed by the government that severely curtailed the cultural and religious liberties of Bhutanese people of Nepali ethnicity. In the aftermath of this peaceful demonstration, they were deprived of their Bhutanese citizenship, arbitrarily arrested, and detained (Ridderbos 2007, 1). By the 1990s, Bhutanese refugee flight became an international refugee crisis. Hence, by the early 1990s, resettlement programs were initiated, and over 60,000 refugees resided at United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)-organized refugee camps in Morang and Jhapa districts of eastern Nepal (Chase 2012; Singh 1992). UNHCR’s primary duty is protecting and supporting refugees during their time of displacement while working toward one of three durable solutions: (1) voluntary repatriation to their country of origin; (2) local integration in their county of asylum; or (3) resettlement in a third country that agrees to offer residency status (UNHCR 2011). If attempts toward repatriation and local integration fail, third-country resettlement may be pursued, in which case the UNHCR begins working to relocate refugees through a number of partnerships with countries that operate their own national resettlement programs. Under such an arrangement, the United States has admitted over three million refugees since 1975, more than all other receiving countries combined, mostly through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) (U.S. Department of State 2013).

For nearly two decades, an estimated 100,800 to 130,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees remained in seven refugee camps (Goldhap and Thimphu 2009, 50). While in the refugee camps, they are entirely dependent upon the international community for their survival because they are restricted from any income-generating activities. In 2000, Nepal and Bhutan reached a repatriation agreement, but as of this writing, none had yet been allowed to return. In October 2006, the United States announced its willingness to resettle up to 60,000 refugees (Ridderbos 2007, 1). In 2007, UNHCR worked with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to resettle Bhutanese refugees to third countries. By 2013, “[t]he United States of America [had] accepted the largest numbers (66,134), followed by Canada (5,376), Australia (4,190), New Zealand (747), Denmark (746), Norway (546), the Netherlands (326) and the United Kingdom (317)” (“100,000 Milestone for Bhutanese Refugee Resettlement” 2014). As of 2014, more 8,000 refugees remain in camps awaiting resettlement (“75,000th Bhutanese Refugee off to US for Resettlement” 2014). One community of approximately 600 Bhutanese refugees lives in Burlington, Vermont (Chase 2012, 47), another vibrant community resides in the San Francisco Bay Area (Jeung, Jeung, Subba, and Gurung 2012); and a third lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Smith 2013).

FACTORS OF TIBETAN MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT

Similar to the Mongolians and Nepali who share their Buddhist faith, Tibetan migration to the United States is relatively recent. Few high-status Tibetans and living lamas, or living Buddhas, arrived in the United States before World War II to teach at American universities. The Tibetan diaspora takes shape in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet and, after defeating the small Tibetan army, seized control of the remote high-plateau civilization nested in the Himalayas (Katsiaficas 2013, 106). The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, remained in Tibet for approximately 10 years after the Chinese invasion (Sherab 2011, 1134). In 1959, the Tibetans rebelled against the Chinese, but were defeated by the People’s Liberation Army, killing more than 87,000 Tibetans (Shakya 1999, 45). On March 17, 1959, the Dalai Lama, members of his government, and roughly 80,000 Tibetans fled to India (Shakya 1999, 42–45). They sought political asylum in India, Nepal, and Bhutan and announced the formation of a Tibetan government-in-exile (Katsiaficas 2013, 112–14). Since 1959, 54 refugee settlements have been established in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. It is estimated that more than 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet (Katsiaficas 2013, 113).

In 1959, 1961, and 1965, the United Nations passed three resolutions on Tibet expressing concern over human rights violations (Shakya 1999, 52–90). The global Tibetan diaspora consider this government-in-exile, based in Dharamsala, India, to be the singular legitimate government of Tibet and its people. It is estimated that well over 120,000 Tibetans were living in exile by the late 1990s, including some 5,000 living outside of the Indian subcontinent (Miller 2014). Currently, large numbers of Tibetans continue to flee their country in order to escape Chinese occupation, persecution, internal displacement, and forced assimilation to the Sino-cultural world. Many of these exiles depend on the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), foreign nongovernmental organizations, VOLAGs, and the governments of India, Nepal, and Bhutan for assistance.

The exodus of Tibetans in 1949 was fueled by the Chinese occupation of Tibet: though the majority resettled in neighboring India, some made their way to the United States as political refugees. According to the 1990 U.S. Census, there were 2,185 Tibetans residing in the United States (Miller 2014). There might have been earlier Tibetans (as well as Mongolians and Nepali immigrants) before 1949, but since they were classified as “Other Asian” by the U.S. Immigration Bureau, it is not possible to ascertain the exact figure. Most, if not all, Tibetan Americans have entered the United States as refugees. The Refugee Act of 1980 makes it possible for individuals to enter the United States as refugees if there are humanitarian concerns. Arrangement for their transportation to the United States are usually organized through the International Organization for Migration, which also facilitated the resettlement of post–Vietnam War Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees from 1975 to the 1990s. The Immigration and Naturalization Service admits the refugees officially to the United States at the point of entry, and relies on support by VOLAGs to assist the new arrival with housing, schooling, and employment. As part of the Immigration Act of 1990, 1,000 displaced Tibetans were given special immigrant visas and have since resettled throughout the United States (Miller 2014). Tibetans, classified as “citizens” of China, were not eligible to participate in the 1998 DV-99 diversity lottery (Miller 2014).

While 40 percent of the Tibetan American population resides in Southern California, many communities have been established in other urban centers such as New York City; Washington, D.C.; Seattle, Washington; and Portland, Oregon. Tibetan Americans have formed strong communities in Northern California as well, primarily in Berkeley. In 2014, the Tibetan Association of Northern California (TANC) purchased property and established a center in Richmond. TANC says, “It belongs to each and every Tibetan. It is your home and our home. We want to turn it into a roaring place of activities of all things Tibetan” (TANC 2014). TANC estimates that there are 2,000 Tibetans residing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

FACTORS OF PAKISTANI MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT

Pakistan as a nation-state was created in 1947. However, Muslims from India, in the region that is now Pakistan, arrived with the first wave of Hindu and Sikh immigrants who worked as agricultural laborers and as miners in California, Oregon, and Washington. Today, Pakistani immigrants make up the second-largest group of South Asians, following Indians, and the second-largest Muslim community, following Iranian Americans, in the United States. The experiences of early Pakistani immigrants in the United States mirror the experiences of Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus who arrived in large wave in the early twentieth century. In 1907, some 2,000 Indians, which include Muslims who are most likely from today’s Pakistan, worked alongside Sikhs, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean laborers. They worked on the Western Pacific railway in California, and afterward, they moved into agricultural work. Like other Indians, they became targets of the Asiatic Exclusion League that was organized in 1907 to advocate the expulsion and exclusion of Asian workers. Due to antimiscegenation laws, immigration exclusion, and the nonexistent Muslim women immigration, early Pakistani men married Mexican women to establish families. It was only in 1947 that the U.S. Congress passed a bill allowing naturalization for Indians. According to reports from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, between 1947 and 1965, there were 2,500 Pakistani immigrants who entered the United States: the majority entered on student visas. They remained in the United States upon graduation.

The 1965 Immigration Act ended national quotas, and it is after this that Pakistani immigrants, from the newly formed nation-state has steadily grown in the United States. Unlike the earlier immigrants, the post-1965 Pakistani immigrants were urban, well educated, and professional. Many of them had come from cities such as Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Lahore, and were familiar with Western culture and ways of living. However, the dependents and relatives that they have since sponsored for permanent residence in the United States in the years after 1965 have tended to be characterized by lower levels of education. It is during this period that a distinct Pakistani community in America takes shape. The 1990 U.S. Census shows 100,000 Pakistani Americans residing in the United States. By 2005 the Pakistani population doubled to 210,000. The 2010 U.S. Census reveals more dramatic growth with 363,699 self-identified Pakistani, and 409,163 who identified as Pakistani or mixed with one or more ethnic and racial groups. New York City is home to the largest concentration of Pakistani Americans: the 2010 U.S. Census indicates that 194,000 Pakistani live there, primarily in the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn.

As Muslims, Pakistani Americans face unique challenges. Rabia Kamal notes that in 2000, the U.S. Census added a new racial category, “Middle Eastern,” and people of Pakistani descent have been included in this category because of their shared religious faith: Islam (2011, 956). Furthermore, Pakistani Americans, although they share cultural practices and history with Indians, are partial to identifying with Pakistan, not India. “This is due to a history of antagonism between the two nations in the post-colonial Subcontinent” (Kamal 2011, 956).

2010 AND ONWARD

According to the 2010 U.S. Census (Table 8.1), 17.3 million people, or 5.6 percent of all people in the United States, identity as “Asian alone” or “Asian in combination with one or more other races.” Since 2000, the Asian American population grew at a faster rate compared with all other ethnic and racial groups in the country. This demographic trend, in large measure, is a byproduct of changes in immigration policies since the end of Second World War, which ushered in the counter-cultural movements that began to question the normative perception and conception of American social life and brought with it a reevaluation of the expectation that immigrants would assimilate into mainstream society.

The civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s did not merely express dissatisfaction with racial and prejudicial beliefs and public policies, but it also revealed a deep-seated quandary with the principle of assimilation. To the extent that the American way of life was normatively white and middle-class, it was unfeasible for various segments of the population to ever become completely “American.” The imagined consensus promoted by those who favored assimilation could only be sustained by excluding people with dark skin, non-European ancestries, and limited incomes—in particular Asian immigrants. The civil rights movement not only insisted on sensible changes in public policies, it also demanded a transformation and reconstitution of American national self-identity; it insisted that America recognize and reconstitute itself to be a pluralistic society, and that there were manifold and legitimate alternative ways of being American. This produced the pluralistic attitude of American life, one that resembled a “salad bar” indicating that Americans and American life are multifarious culturally, religiously, linguistically, ethnically, politically, sexually, socially, economically, and nationally. Between 1882 and 1965, exclusionist ideologies gave way to the melting pot attitude, which then gave way, starting in the 1980s, to the ideology of cultural pluralism which continues to dominate public discourse surrounding issues of multiculturalism and diversity.

Source: 2010 U.S. Census, http://www.census.gov/

The Asian American experience in the United States continues to grow, not only in terms of population size, but in terms of regional, linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity. Asians were in the United States. They continued to be here, and will continued to come to the United States. As such, Asian Americans, from the first wave to the next wave, will continue to reshape and redefine the American mosaic.

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Cheah, Joseph. “The Function of Ethnicity in the Adaptation of Burmese Religious Practices.” In Emerging Voices: Experiences of Underrepresented Asian Americans, edited by Huping Ling. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

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Jeung, Joan, Russell Jeung, Jiwan Subba, and Bina Gurung. Needs and Aspirations of Bhutanese Refugees in Northern California. Alameda: Bhutanese Community in California, 2012.

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Adopted Korean Connection, 67

Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), 99

Agriculture industry: Chinese immigrants in, 17–19; Filipinos in, 96–100; Japanese immigrants in, 33; Korean immigrants in, 52–56

Ahn Chang-ho, 57, 59

Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, 91

Alaskeros, 100

Alien Land Law, 24, 35, 62, 74, 82, 98

Allen, Horace N., 52–54

All-Together Protecting the Nation Society, 58

American Civil War, 11

American Federation of Labor (AFL), 99

American Legion, 32, 101

Angel Island, 22–23

Anglo-Burmese Wars, 160

Anti-Chinese hostilities, 20–22

Anti-Filipino sentiments, 100–102

Anti-Filipino violence, 102–4

Anti-Hindu riots, 78–81

Anti-Japanese sentiments, and Koreans, 60–61

Antimiscegenation laws, 62, 104–5

Aplin, Billy Joe, 129

Arthur, Chester A., 19

Asian American pan-ethnic identity, 135–36

Asian Americans: and American Dream, xiii; coining of the term, 135; experience in the United States, xi; limited rights of, xi–xii; new, 159–75; studies, xii

Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Chan), xi

Asian Indians. See Indian Americans

Asiatic Barred Zone Act, 80–81, 100

Asiatic Exclusion League, 32, 79–81

Assembly Centers, 37

August Revolution, 119

Australia: gold discovery in, 8; Hmong refugees in, 149; Indochinese refugees in, 126; New Gold Mountain, 8

Baak chai, 12

Baldoz, Rick, 98, 100–101

Barde, Robert, 22–23

Battle of Dien Bien Phu, 119

Bellingham Herald, 79

Bennett, Nathaniel, 13

Bhakna, Sohan Singh, 77

Bhutanese migration, 167–68

Bishop, Janine, 66

Black, Hugo, 44

Boat people, 123–27. See also Refugees, Vietnamese

Bo Dai, 119

Bonaparte, Charles J., 82

Bonifacio, Andrés, 89

Brands, H. W., 103

British Opium Wars, 4–5

Buddhism, Thai, 163–64

Burlingame Treaty, 13, 20

Burmese migration, 159–61

California: Alien Land Law, 35, 62; anti-miscegenation law, 105; Chinese immigrants in, 7, 9, 11; Chinese miners in, 15; Chinese women immigrants in, 11–13; economy, 102; Filipinos in, 98–99; Indian immigrants in, 73–76; Japanese immigrants in, 32–34; Little Saigon in, 130; Mexicans in, 104; Tibetan Americans in, 170

California Civil Code, 104

California State Highway Commission, 45

California Supreme Court, 105

Cambodia: independence and Norodom Sihanouk, 142–43; invasion by Japan, 141; invasion by Vietnam, 148; and Khmer Rouge regime, 145–46; and Lon Nol era, 143–45; migration to the United States, 140–42; refugees from, 148–49; and Viet Minh forces, 142

Cambodian Holocaust, 145

Cambodians: adjusting in the United States, 149–52; reasons for migration, 140–42; refugees, 148–49; survival stories, 152–54; in the United States, 139–54

Carter, Jimmy, 124

Central Pacific Railroad, 15–17

Chakravarty, Chandra K., 78

Chan, Sucheng, xi, 33, 61, 125

Chang, Iris, 5

Chang In-Hwan, 60

Chan Yong, 20

Chao Anouvong, 146

Chao Phetsarath, 146

Chao Souphanouvong, 146

Charr, Easurk Emsen, 63–64, 81

Chávez, César, 99

Chemulpo, Treaty of, 51

Chen, Jack, 8, 10

China: and economic limitations, 3; employment in, 6; immigration from, 6–8; opium trade in, 5; population growth, 4–5

Chinese Americans and anti-Chinese hostilities, 20–21

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA). See Chinese Six Companies

Chinese Exclusion Act, 17, 19–20, 24, 30, 33, 94

Chinese immigrants: and agriculture industry, 17–19; and fishing industry, 15; in Hawai‘i sugar cane plantation, 9–11; migration to the United States, 3–6; miners’ exclusion from California mining industry, 13–15; searching for work in gold mines, 6–8; in the United States, 3–25; and World War II, 23–25. See also Asian Americans

Chinese Six Companies, 20–21

Chinese-Vietnamese Americans, 132–35

Chinese women: forced into prostitution, 12; in Hawai‘i versus California, 11–13; immigration after San Francisco earthquake, 22–23; sugar plantation owners views on, 11. See also Women

Chinks, 32

Choi, Anne Soon, 58

Chong gak, 61

Chon Myong-won, 60

Church World Service, 166–67

Citizenship, restrictions on Japanese Americans, 34–35

Civil rights, and Japanese Americans, 45–47

Civil Rights Act, 14, 20, 46

Cold War, 139

Compassion fatigue, 129

Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA), 127

Comrade Society, 59

Coolie trade, 10

Cooper Act. See Philippine Bill

Coram nobis, 45

Credit-ticket system, 10

Crocker, Charles, 15, 17

Cronkite, Walter, 121

Cruz, Adrian, xii

Cruz, Philip Vera, 99

Culture, and Vietnamese refugees, 133–34

Dai Fow, 18

Dalai Lama, 169

Daniels, Roger, 34

Davis, Sylvester, 105

Dayal, Har, 77

Declaration of Korean Independence, 61

Dekaseginin, 30, 33

Deshler, David W., 53–54

Dewey, George, 89

DeWitt, Howard, 103

Dien Bien Phu, battle of, 119

Dilowa Gegeen Khutukhtu, 165

Dinh Hoa Nguyen, 118

Dirty Jap, 32

Discrimination: against Indian community, 78; and Indian immigration, 74; against Japanese, 34; against Japanese Americans, 43; racial, against Chinese, 18, 24; and U.S. naturalization policies, 63

Diversity Immigration (DV), 167

Dole, Sanford B., 53

Domino Theory, 120

Draft resisters, and Japanese Americans, 42–43

Dual wage system, 16

Eastern Indians. See Indian Americans

Easton, Stanley, 31

East-West Development Company, 53

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 120

Ellington, Lucien, 31

Emigration: and Burlingame Treaty, 20; and Chinese merchants, 10; Korean, to Hawai‘i, 55–57, 94; from Philippines, 98; sources to the United States for Chinese, 7; and steamship ticket prices, 8–9

Employment, in China, 6. See also Agriculture industry

Endo, Mitsuye, 45

Espiritu, Yen Le, 94–95

Ethnic antagonism, 18

Exchange Visitor Program (EVP), 108

Executive Order 589, 55

Executive Order 9066, 37–39

Executive Order 9102, 37, 39

Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, 43, 45

Fa Ngum, 146

Ferguson, Charles K., 60

Fiancées Act, 108

Field Workers Union, Local 30326, 99

Fifth Amendment, 44

Filipino Catholic Clubs, 99

Filipino Labor Union (FLU), 99

Filipinos: and antimiscegenation laws, 104–5; considered as aliens, 101; education system, 92–94; first wave of migration, 90; in Hawai‘i, 94–97; indigenous, 90–92; and plantation life, 96–97; in salmon canneries, 100; on the U.S. mainland, 97–105; and the U.S. Navy, 106; and World War II, 106–8

First Filipino Battalion, 107

First Filipino Regiment, 107

First Indochina War, 119

Foreign Miner’s Tax, 14

Forgotten War. See Korean War

Forum, 78

442nd Regimental Combat Team, 39–41

14th Amendment, 34, 45, 62

Franco-Siamese Treaty, 146

Fully American, xi–xii, 35, 46, 79

Geary Act of 1892, 19

General Accounting Office (GAO), 140

Geneva Accord, 120, 147

Geneva Conference, 125–26

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 30, 33, 55, 62

Ghadar movement, 76–78

Ghadar Party, 77

Gold Mountain. See California

Goodman, Louis A., 42

Grange Association, 32

Grant, Ulysses, 20

Great Depression, 93, 99, 102

Greely, Smiler, 161

Hakka society, 11

Hall, George, 21

Han dynasty, 117

Hangukgye migugin, 51

Hart-Celler Act, 24

Hawai‘i: annexation of, 53–54; Chinese immigrants in, 11; Chinese sugar plantation workers in, 9–11; Chinese women immigrants in, 11–13; Filipinos in, 94–96; Filipino women in, 96; Japanese sugar plantation workers in, 30–32; Japanese women immigrants in, 35–37; Korean sugar plantation workers in, 52–56; plantation management in, 96–97

Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association (HSPA), 31, 53, 94–96

Hearn, Lafcadio, 87–88

Hein, Jeremy, 140

Hek fu, 9

Hess, Gary, 71

Hindoo Invasion, 78

Hirabayashi, Gordon, 44

Hirabayashi v. United States, 43, 44

Hoang, Kimberly Kay, 123

Ho Chi Minh, 118–19

Holt Adoption Agency, 66

Homecoming Act, 128

Hot Wars. See Second Indochina War

Hulbert, Homer, 54

Humanitarian Operation Program (HOP), 127–28

Ichioka, Yuji, 135

Igorots, 90–92. See also Indigenous Filipinos

Immigrants. See specific immigrants

Immigration: from China, 3–25; Chinese and World War II, 23–25; and coolie trade, 10; and credit-ticket system, 10; and employment opportunities, 9–10; from Japan, 29–47; restrictions on Japanese Americans, 33–34

Immigration Act of 1924, 34–36

Immigration Act of 1965, 46, 52, 72, 83, 171

Immigration Act of 1990, 108, 170

Immigration and Nationality Act, 163

India League of America, 82

Indian Americans: naturalization restrictions for, 81–82; overview, 71–72

Indian immigrants: characteristics of early, 74–76; first wave of migration, 73–74; second wave of migration, 82–83; students and freedom fighters, 76–78

Indian independence movement. See Ghadar movement

Indian National Congress, 76, 78

Indian Naturalization Act, 62

India Welfare League, 82

Indigenous Filipinos, 90–92

Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, 122, 148

Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), 119

Indonesian migration, 161–62

Inouye, Daniel, 46

International Cooperation Administration (ICA), 161

International Organization for Migration (IOM), 168

International Refugee Organization, 166

Internment camps, 39

Issei, 29

Itliong, Larry, 99

Jackson, Robert, 44–45

Jae (or Chae) Pil, 57

Jaisohn, Philip. See Jae (or Chae) Pil

Jao, Frank, 130

Japan, Treaty of, 57

Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 42, 46

Japanese Americans: and citizenship restrictions, 34–35; and civil rights, 45–47; described, 29; draft resisters, 42–43; exclusion of, 37; experience and World War II, 37–45; and immigration restrictions, 33–34; internment camps for, 39; labor organizations, 31; No-No Boys, 41–42; relocation of, 38–39; service during World War II, 39–41

Japanese immigrants: in California, 31–33; in Hawai‘i, 31–33; in Hawai‘i sugar plantations, 30–31; in the United States, 29–47

Japanese women: as picture brides, 35; population in the United States, 36–37

Jinshan, 3

Johl, Tuly Singh, 73

Johnson, Lyndon B., 121

Jones, George Heber, 54

Kamal, Rabia, 172

Kanghwa, Treaty of, 51, 56

Kari-fufu, 36

Katipunan, 89

Kenjinkai, 33

Kennedy, Edward M., 148

Khieu Samphan, 145

Khmer Rouge, 143–46, 148

Kibei, 29

Kim, Hyung-soon, 55

Kim, Lili, 52

Kim, Richard, 58

Kingdom of Hawai‘i. See Hawai‘i

Korea: and anti-Japanese sentiments, 60–61; and Durham W. Stevens assassination, 59–60; independence movement, 57–59; and Japanese colonization, 56–57; overseas adoption from, 65–67; and picture brides, 61–62

Korean American Adoptee and Adoptive Family Network, 67

Korean immigrants: eligibility for naturalization, 62–64; and Japanese colonization of Korea, 58–59; recruited as sugar plantations’ workers, 52–56; restricted from American citizenship, 62–64

Korean Independence Movement: and anti-Japanese sentiments, 60–61; and Durham W. Stevens assassination, 59–60; overview, 57–59

Korean National Association, 59

Korean National Herald, 59

Korean War, 106; brides, 66; introduction, 64–65; and overseas adoption from Korea, 66–67

Korea Red Cross, 65

Korea Review, 54

Korematsu, Fred, 44–45

Korematsu v. United States, 43, 44–45

Ku Klux Klan, 129

Kundan, 59

Kurashige, Lon, 32

Laird, Melvin, 121–22

Lampton, L. E., 104

Lan Xang, 146

Lao-centric, 154n1

Lao Nation, 146

Laos: migration to the United States, 146–47; refugees from, 148–49

Laotians: defined, 154n1; in the United States, 146–54

Le, Long S., 118

Lee, Murray, 7, 9

Lee, Richard, 11

Leo, Mark S., 92

Leonard, Karen, 74

Lhotshampas, 167

Lind, Andrew, 53

Ling, Dave M., 42

Lin Sing, 20–21

Lin Sing v. Washburn, 20

Lin Zexu, 5

Little Saigon, 130

Long Nguyen, 118

Longue durée approach, xi

Lon Nol, 143–45

Loving v. Virginia, 105

Luang Phrabang, 146

Luce-Celler Act, 72, 78, 82–83, 107–8

Magnuson Act, 20, 24

Mangum, Adolphus W., Jr., 79

Manilamen, 87

Marquardt, W. W., 93

Marriage migration, 163

Matsudaira Katamori, 32

Matsui, Robert, 46

Matsunaga, Spark, 46

Mazumdar, Ajkoy Kumar, 81

McCarran-Walter Act, 108

McKinley, William, 89

Methodist Episcopal Church, 77

Mexican-American War, 62

Mexidus, 75

Meynell, Richard, 103

Migration: Bhutanese, to the United States, 167–68; Burmese, to the United States, 159–61; Cambodian, to the United States, 140–42; Chinese, to the United States, 3–6; Filipino, to the United States, 88–90; Indian, to the United States, 72–73; Indonesian, to the United States, 161–62; Japanese, to the United States, 29–30; Korean, to the United States, 52–64; Mongolian, to the United States, 165–67; Nepali, to the United States, 167; Pakistani, to the United States, 170–72; Thai, to the United States, 162–65; Tibetan, to the United States, 168–70; to the United States from 2010 onwards, 172–75; Vietnamese, to the United States, 118–20

Military Bases Agreement, 106

Military War Brides Act, 108

Mineta, Norman, 46

Mining industry, exclusion of Chinese from, 13–15

Mongolian migration, 165–67

Moon, Hyung June, 52, 62

Murphy, Frank, 44

Murray, Hugh, 21

Mutual Aid Society, 58

Mutual Salvation Society, 58

National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, 46

National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR), 46

National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), 99

Nationality Act, 14

National Japanese American Citizens League, 42

National Origins Quota Act, 74, 100

National United Front of Kampuchea, 143

Native Sons, 101

Naturalization Act, 35, 63, 81, 101

Naturalization Law, 20

Nepali migration, 167

Ne Win, 160

Newly Rising Alliance, 58

New Orleans Times, 18

Ngo Dinh Diem, 118, 120, 142

Ngo Quyen, 117

Nickel City Smiler: From the Jungle to the Streets, 161

Nikkei, 29

Nisei, 29, 41–42, 46

Nixon, Richard M., 121–22, 140

Nogyo kumiai, 33

No-No Boys, 41–42

Nordyke, Eleanor, 11

North, Hart H., 80

Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), 126, 149–50

Okihiro, Gary, 10–11, 31

Omi, Michael, xi

100th Infantry Battalion, 39–41

Operation Babylift, 123

Opium: production and trade in China, 5; trafficking, 140

Orderly Departure Program (ODP), 127–28

Oriental Schools, 33

Orosa, Mario, 93

Oyama v. California, 35

Ozawa, Takao, 34–35, 81

Pacific Coast Hindustan Association, 77

Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 11

Pacific Mail Steamship Company, 8

Page Law, 12–13, 24

Pakistani migration, 170–72

Pak Yong-man, 59

Paper daughters, 22

Paper sons, 22–23

Paris, Treaty of, 90

Park Yong Man, 57

Pathet Lao, 146–47. See also Chao Souphanouvong

Patterson, Wayne, 64

Pavri, Tinaz, 74–75

Pearl Harbor bombing, 37

Pensionado Act, 92–94

People’s Socialist Community, 142

People v. Hall, 20–21

Perez, Andrea, 105

Perez v. Sharp, 105

Perreria, Todd LeRoy, 165

Phi Beta Kappa, 93

Philippine-American War of 1899–1902, 90

Philippine Bill, 100

Philippine Commission, 92

Philippine Insurrection, 90

Philippine Revolution, 89

Philippines: acquisition by the United States, 90; annexation by the United States, 90; education system in, 92–94; emigration from, 98; pensionados, 92–94; and Spanish-American War, 89–90

Picture brides, 30, 35–36, 61–62

Plantation industry. See Agriculture industry

Plessy v. Ferguson, 105

Politics: color-conscious race, xi–xii; of identity and Asian American pan-ethnic identity, 135–36

Pol Pot, 145

Population: decline in Chinese, and Chinese Exclusion Act, 19–20; growth in China, 4–5

Portsmouth Treaty, 57

President Coolidge, 102

Punjab (India): migration from, 73–74; modernization, 73

Punjabi community. See Sikhs

The Purple Heart Battalion. See 100th Infantry Battalion

Qing dynasty, 3, 5–6

Quota Law, 101

Racism: against Chinese, 21–22; against Chinese-Vietnamese Americans, 133; against Indian immigrants, 78; against Japanese, 32; against Korean War brides, 66; and Vietnamese refugees, 129–30

Railroads: and Chinese workers, 15–17; dual wage system, 16

Ratner, Megan, 162

Refugee Act of 1980, 126, 148, 149, 169

Refugee Assistance Act, 149

Refugees, Vietnamese, 122–28; community formation for, 128–31; and culture, 133–34; first wave, 122–23; resettlement under ODP, 127–28; second wave, 123–27; third wave, 127–28; trafficking of, 125–26

Relocation Centers, 37

Report of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, 95

Resettlement: and Bhutanese migration, 167–68; and Burmese migration, 159–61; and community formation for Vietnamese, 128–31; and Indonesian migration, 161–62; and Mongolian migration, 165–67; and Nepali migration, 167; and Pakistani migration, 170–72; and Thai migration, 162–65; and Tibetan migration, 168–70

Resettlement, for Vietnamese refugees, 128–31

Return migration, 10. See also Migration

Rhee, Syngman, 57, 59

Rizal, Jose, 89

Roberts, Owen, 44

Rohrback, D., 104

Roldan, Salvador, 104

Rolph, James, 105

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 37, 40

Roosevelt, Theodore, 33, 55–57, 90

Royal Lao Army, 147

Russo-Japanese War, 56–57

Sakadas, 95

Salmon-packing industry, and Filipinos, 100

Salvador Roldan v. Los Angeles County, 104–5

Salyer, Lucy, 63

Sam yup (sanyi), 7

San Buenaventura, Steffi, 90

San Francisco: Chinatown, 7, 21; and Chinese migration, 8, 19; and Chinese prostitutes, 13; earthquake, and Chinese women immigration, 21–23; employment opportunities in, 18; Koreans in, 56; Mongolian immigrants in, 167; municipal school board, 33; Old Gold Mountain, 8

San Francisco Chronicle, 59–60

San Francisco International Airport (SFO), 151

Sansei, 29

Sara, Choe, 61

Saund, Dalip Singh, 83

Scheffauer, Herman, 78

Schwellenbach, Lewis B., 103–4

Scioto, 31

Second Filipino Regiment, 107

Second Indochina War, 120–21, 139

Secret War, 147

Selective Draft Act, 63

Self-Strengthening Society, 58

September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, 154, 160

Shortridge Amendment, 101

Sihanouk, Norodom: appointed as Cambodia’s prime minister, 141; and Cambodia’s independence, 142–43; declared as Cambodia’s king, 140–41

Sikhs: described, 72; and marriages to Mexican women, 74–76; in railroad industry, 73

Singh, Jaideep, 77

Singh, Jawala, 75, 77

Sino-French War, 117

Sino-Japanese War, 56

Sojourners, 10

Sons of the Golden West, 32

South Asians. See Indian Americans

Spanish-American War, 89–90

SS China, 30

Stevens, Durham W., 59–60

Stimson, Henry, 39, 107

Stone, Harlan Fiske, 44

Strangers from a Different Shore (Takaki), xi

Sugar plantations: Chinese working in Hawai‘i, 9–11; Japanese working in Hawai‘i, 30–31

Sutherland, George, 82

Sutter’s Mill, 8

Swami Vivekananda, 71

Sze yup (siyi), 7

Taft, William Howard, 80, 92

Taft Katsura Agreement, 57

Takaki, Ronald, xi, 8, 31–32

Takao Ozawa v. United States, 34–35, 81

Tang dynasty, 117

Tanomoshi, 33

Tenzin Gyatso, 169

Tet Offensive, 121

Thai Buddhism, 163–64

Thai migration, 162–65

Thai Town, 163

Third World Liberation Front, xii

Thoreau, Henry David, 71

Thumbun, 164

Tibetan Association of Northern California (TANC), 170

Tibetan migration, 168–70

Tolstoy Foundation, 166

Tong, Benson, 3, 6, 9

Tongihoe, 59

Tongnip Hyophoe, 57

Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 121

Treaty: of Chemulpo, 51; of Japan, 57; of Kanghwa, 51, 56; of Paris, 90

Truman, Harry S., 42

Tydings-McDuffie Act, 101, 106

United Korean Society, 59

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 120, 123, 168

United States: annexation of Philippines, 90; Asian Americans’ experience in, xi; Cambodians in, 139–54; Chinese in, 3–25; Filipino laborers in, 97–100; immigrants’ role in, xii; Japanese in, 29–47; Koreans in, 51–67; Laotians in, 146–54; new Asian Americans in, 159–75; South Asians in, 71–83; Vietnamese in, 117–36

United States v. Balsara, 81

United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 81–82

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 34

USA Patriot Act, 160

U.S. Navy, and Filipinos, 106

USS Gaelic, 54

USS Maddox, 120–21

USS Maine, 89

USS Turner Joy, 120–21

Vaughan, Christopher, 91

The Vedanta Society, 71

Viet Minh, 119

Vietnamese: American born, 132–33; first impressions of United States, 131–32; migration to the United States, 118–20; and racism, 129–30; refugees first wave, 122–23; refugees second wave, 123–27; refugees third wave, 127–28; and Richard Nixon, 121–22; in shrimp industry, 129–30

Vietnamese Americans: birth of, 118; in criminal activities, 129; language barriers with parents, 133; naturalization of, 127

Vietnamization, 121–22

Vietnam War, xi, 162

Visa marriages, 148

Voluntary agencies (VOLAGs), 128–29, 170

Vo Nguyen Giap, 119

Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony, 32

Waldheim, Kurt, 125

War Powers Act, 44, 45

War Relocation Authority (WRA), 37–38

Watada, Ehren, 42

Welch Bill, 101

Welch Repatriation Act, 102

Western Growers Protective Association, 38–39

Western Pacific Railroad, 73, 78

White supremacy, xii

Wilson, Woodrow, 81

Winant, Howard, xi

Wirin, Abraham Lincoln, 42

Women: Chinese, immigrants in California, 11–13; Chinese, immigrants in Hawai‘i, 11–13; Chinese, immigration in San Francisco after earthquake, 22–23; Filipino in Hawai‘i, 96; Japanese, immigrants in Hawai‘i, 35–37; Philipo, in Hawai‘i, 96

World Parliament of Religions, 71

World War II: and Chinese immigration, 24–25; discrimination against Japanese Americans, 43–45; and Filipinos, 106–8; and Japanese American experience, 37–45

Wyman, Walter, 21

Yahirun, Jenjira, 163

Yangban, 55, 64

Yano, Tetsubumi, 34

Yasui, Minoru, 43–44

Yasui v. United States, 43–44

Year Zero, 145

Yellow Jap, 32

Yi Dynasty, 52

Yonsei, 29

Young and Old Alliance, 58