Bodie's Chinatown: The Workers the State Park Doesn't Feature

Bodie at its peak was a city of several thousand people, and a significant portion of them were Chinese.

The Chinese district sat on the eastern edge of Bodie at the height of the mining boom in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. Chinese workers performed the most hazardous underground labor: the drilling, the blasting, the work that required going into the deepest and least ventilated parts of the shafts. They lived in segregated quarters, were excluded from most of the sixty-five saloons, and were barred from most of the social institutions that defined Bodie's public life. The researcher and historian Jan MacKell Collins has documented Bodie's Chinese community in her work on the town's history.

By eighteen eighty-five, the community was largely gone. The organized anti-Chinese violence that erupted through California mining towns in the eighteen eighties, combined with the economic collapse of Bodie itself, drove them away. The timing of departure tracks almost exactly with the worst period of anti-Chinese agitation in California history, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two.

The California State Historic Park that preserves Bodie today has the church, the schoolhouse, the assay office, the Swazey Hotel, the Miner's Union Hall. The site of the Chinatown on the town's eastern edge is not marked. There is no interpretive sign. The structures are gone.

This is not an oversight that requires a villain. It is simply the record of what a society decides is worth preserving and what it allows to disappear. Bodie's church is in better condition than any building in its Chinese district because the church had someone fighting for it.