Angel Island Immigration Station Research Articles

INVESTIGATING THE EVOLUTION OF CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURE THROUGH THE LENS OF CHINESE AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS

This article explores the evolution of Chinese American literature in tandem with the historical experiences of Chinese immigrants in the US. Through an analysis of key events such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Angel Island Immigration Station, as well as the contributions of notable authors like Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, this article highlights the resilience and cultural richness inherent in Chinese American literature.

Disability, Space, and Racial Injustice: Life Writing at Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910–1940

Abstract This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anonymous poetry composed by Chinese migrants and inscribed onto the walls of the men's barracks of the US Immigration Station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, 1910–1940. Scholarship in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies has approached this body of work as a modern reinvention of traditional Chinese poetic forms within a US context. This study considers the men's barracks a protest space created under disabling conditions of confinement, and it demonstrates how Angel Island detainees critiqued the racialized and ableist systems of social control that operated at the station. The poets attest to undergoing invasive imperial regimes of bodily inspection and medicalized racial exclusion, and they document lived experiences of chronic illness, depression, and the anguished temporality of detention space. As corpus of disabled life writing by early Asian American and Asian diaspora writers, Angel Island poetry offers wider access to non-English historical vocabularies of disability as well as environmental and holistic understandings of embodied conditions beyond Western diagnostic models. As a built environmental archive and a National Historic Landmark, Angel Island is a significant cultural site for exploring how race and disability operate concurrently as social constructions.

엔젤섬이민국의 가려진 이야기: ‘깨어진 꿈’

Angel Island Immigration Station: the Hidden Stories on the Wall - Angel Island Immigration Station;Chinese Exclusion Act;Paper Son and Daughter;Chinese American Immigration History;U.S. Immigration History

The Role of the Public Historian: An Interview with Donna Gabaccia

Research Article| October 01 2017 The Role of the Public Historian: An Interview with Donna Gabaccia Erika Lee; Erika Lee Erika Lee is Distinguished McKnight University Professor, the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, and Director of the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of three books and dozens of articles and book chapters on Asian American and immigration history, especially the history of immigration policy in the United States. Her 2015 book, The Making of Asian America (Simon & Schuster), won the 2015 Asian Pacific American Award for literature from the American Library Association. At the IHRC, she directs the Immigrant Stories digital storytelling and archiving project (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities) and manages the #ImmigrationSyllabus project. She was the recipient of the 2016 Pioneer Award from OCA—Asian Pacific American Advocates and the 2015 Immigrant Heritage Award from the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Donna Gabaccia Donna Gabaccia Donna Gabaccia is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and past Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of fourteen books and dozens of articles on immigrant class, gender, and food studies in the United States; on Italian migration around the world; and on migration in world history. Her 2015 book Gender and International Migration (Russell Sage Foundation), co-authored with sociologist and demographer Katharine M. Donato, was awarded an Honorable Mention from the American Sociological Association’s Znaniecki Prize. Her previous book, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton University Press), won the 2012 Theodore Saloutos Prize from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. Her work in public history earned her the 2013 University of Minnesota Outstanding Community Service Award for Faculty and the 2012 Society of American Archivists’ Hamer-Kegan Award for the Immigration History Research Center Project, “Digitizing Immigrant Letters.” In 2008–2009, she was President of the Social Science History Association. She is currently Chair of the Executive Board of the Toronto Ward Museum. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in history and women’s studies, focusing on migration, gender, and diasporas in world history, digital history, and gender in the kitchen. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2017) 37 (1): 70–77. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.1.0070 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Erika Lee, Donna Gabaccia; The Role of the Public Historian: An Interview with Donna Gabaccia. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2017; 37 (1): 70–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.37.1.0070 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Performing the Angel Island Centennial

This article investigates the centenary celebrations of the Angel Island immigration station (off the coast of California) in order to think through how this site configures the island in relation to issues of Chinese migration, time and tourism. Moving through four interrelated performance events – a dance-theatre piece, the tour of the station, theatrical re-enactments of detainee interviews and the exhibition of a junk – the author identifies and elaborates a concept of fugitive temporality and related insular phenomena that come into relief through the twining of performance and memory. These phenomena include the production of boredom and intimacy as well as the construction of an antipodal imaginary. These phenomena thus become different optics to think through insularity in relation to the social reproduction of Chineseness and Americanness.

A secret reservoir of values: the narrative economy of Angel Island Immigration Station

An interest in narrative has done much to shed light on our understandings of geography. Studies linking narrative to nation building, the making of place, identity, the region, the spaces of health, heritage, and environmental history, give some indication of the breadth at which geographical scholarship has been pushed forward by an applied interest in stories. This article attempts to develop such work with a particular focus on the performative capacities of narrative; how stories might work towards various recuperative outcomes. It discusses the revision of historic tours around Angel Island Immigration Station, a California State Park property and National Historic Landmark with reference to the term narrative economy. The Immigration Station plays host to a narrative economy where stories circulating around the site acquire value on the basis of their factual content and their compatibility with a set of approved messages. Some of these stories are disputed and devalued so as to distinguish them from factual ‘histories’ produced by recently commissioned research. The article considers how heritage sites negotiate tensions between the burden of representational accuracy and the need to function more broadly as platforms for liberatory intervention.

Materialising Memory at Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco

This paper presents an object-centred account of the politics of memory at a National Historic Landmark: Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco. Once a port of entry and detention for Chinese immigrants arriving in the United States, the Immigration Station exists today as a historic site managed by California State Parks who are in the midst of implementing a new interpretive programme with a mission to: ‘turn a history of exclusion into a future of inclusion’. The discussion fixes on three objects located within the park which play an important role in the representation of the site's past despite being labelled as ‘noncontributing’ in the site's National Historic Landmark's nomination. The biographies of a bronze bell, a granite monument, and a group of wax mannequins as sketched out here suggest novel ways to be sensitive to the many and often unexpected contributions brought by the materiality of an object in practices of remembrance.

Detention at Angel Island: First Empirical Evidence

Between 1910 and 1940 the Angel Island Immigration Station was the primary port of entry for Asians into the United States, the place of enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other anti-Asian immigration policies. Even in the absence of substantiating data, it is frequently asserted that almost all entering Chinese were detained at Angel Island and that they were detained for weeks, months, even years. This article presents the first empirical evidence on how long people arriving at San Francisco were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station. The use of newly discovered data on passengers of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (PMSS) for the period 1913–19 adds an empirical basis to our understanding of how immigration laws were administered in classifying and detaining aliens seeking to enter the United States, which arrivals were detained at Angel Island, and for how long. Results show that many Chinese were not detained at all; there was great variation in length of detention for Chinese who were detained; only some of this variation can be explained by the type of exempt status claimed for admission under the Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese arrivals had an even higher incidence of detention; and many detainees were either non-Asian, had come on ships from Central or South America, or were not immigrants at all.

Detention at Angel Island

Between 1910 and 1940 the Angel Island Immigration Station was the primary port of entry for Asians into the United States, the place of enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other anti-Asian immigration policies. Even in the absence of substantiating data, it is frequently asserted that almost all entering Chinese were detained at Angel Island and that they were detained for weeks, months, even years. This article presents the first empirical evidence on how long people arriving at San Francisco were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station. The use of newly discovered data on passengers of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (PMSS) for the period 1913-19 adds an empirical basis to our understanding of how immigration laws were administered in classifying and detaining aliens seeking to enter the United States, which arrivals were detained at Angel Island, and for how long. Results show that many Chinese were not detained at all; there was great variation in length of detention for Chinese who were detained; only some of this variation can be explained by the type of “exempt” status claimed for admission under the Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese arrivals had an even higher incidence of detention; and many detainees were either non-Asian, had come on ships from Central or South America, or were not “immigrants” at all.

A place to remember: scaling the walls of Angel Island immigration station

This paper considers the restoration and presentation of Angel Island Immigration Station, a federal facility in the San Francisco Bay that between 1910 and 1940 worked to prevent the arrival of Chinese laborers to the United States in accordance with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The production of Angel Island Immigration Station as a national historic landmark is delineated through the social construction of scale. I discuss efforts to achieve a leap in the scale of the site's significance and how this brings forth new management regimes that change the format of the interpretation there. In particular, narrative construction, landscape design, and revised tours, insert a standardized story of Chinese exclusion into the national memory. This paper shows how the imperative to increase the scope of recognition—to petition nationally for status and funds—requires a repackaging of stories to affirm popular American ideals of freedom over those that challenge the nation's persecution of Chinese immigrants.

Migration-Related Resources on the World Wide Web

Angel Island: Life in Detainment . Often called the Pacific Gateway or the Island of the West, Angel Island was a stopping point for the majority of Asians who immi grated to the United States. The International Channel maintains this site, focusing on immigrants' experiences while detained at Angel Island. Separate pages address living conditions, medical examinations, and interrogation, while another investigates the poetry some immigrants carved into the walls of the facility. Angel Island: Stories, Photography, and Poetry: . This web site, sponsored by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, offers a look into the history of the island and into the experiences of those who traveled through it. It addresses such issues as the Open Door Policy, the Coolie trade, Asian railroad workers, and the virulent racism many Asian immigrants faced. Arduini and Pizzo: An Italian-American Family History: . A family's decision to rediscover its roots becomes an educational opportunity for all. Created by Frank Arduini in 1994, this site records the histories of the Arduini and Pizzo families?two Italian immigrant clans joined in marriage in 1947. Arduini includes over thirty stories and eighty photographs on his pages, offering a very personal view of what it is like to build lives and legacies in a new country. Ellis Island Photography, 19004920: . Part of the Keystone-Mast Collection of the California Museum of Photography, this site contains numerous photos taken at Ellis Island during the great waves of immigration in the early twentieth century. The collection includes images of the structure and makeup of the Ellis Island facility, as well as photos of immigrants undergoing various examinations and questioning. This site provides an excellent resource for jump-starting discussions on the immigrant experience. Immigrant Ship Transcribers Guild: . Founded only a year ago, the Immigrant Ship Tran scribers Guild (ISTG) now has over five hundred volunteer members who translate, decipher, and transcribe the passenger lists of immi grant ships to the United States. Currently available online are the lists for nearly two thousand ships dating back as far as the mid 1600s. Teachers and students can easily navigate and search the site for names, dates, ports of departure, or ports of arrival. Learning About Immigration Through Oral History: . This lesson plan, part of the Library of Congress American Memory Collection, uses the oral histories of contemporary immigrants in east central Illinois to teach students the process of historiography and give them an understanding of our nation's ethnic diversity. The plan uses selections from the American Memory online collection as well as print and video resources. The lesson can be geared toward high school or middle school classes, spans several curricular areas, and can comprise either a short unit or a semester-long study. Learning, and Earning, Their Stripes: . The text of this site originally appeared in the Washington Post in 1996. It includes an article describing the controversial process of U.S. citizenship testing and a list of one hundred questions that the Immigration and Naturalization Service gives prospective citizens to prepare for their naturalization exam. Having students take the test provides an nice introduction to issues of citizenship and immigration.

Island of Immortals: Chinese Immigrants and the Angel Island Immigration Station

Research Article| April 01 1978 Island of Immortals: Chinese Immigrants and the Angel Island Immigration Station H. M. Lai H. M. Lai Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (1978) 57 (1): 88–103. https://doi.org/10.2307/25157818 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation H. M. Lai; Island of Immortals: Chinese Immigrants and the Angel Island Immigration Station. California History 1 April 1978; 57 (1): 88–103. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25157818 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1978 California Historical Society Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Cerebrospinal Meningitis at Angel Island Immigration Station, Calif

Cerebrospinal Meningitis at Angel Island Immigration Station, Calif