Chinatown and the Railroad Workers Who Did Not Stay
Near Fresno, California
The Central Pacific Railroad that founded Fresno was built in significant part by Chinese laborers. Tens of thousands of Chinese workers, most of them from Guangdong Province, had built the transcontinental railroad's western segment in the eighteen sixties, blasting through the Sierra Nevada and laying track across the Nevada and Utah desert. When that work was done, many of them moved into Central Valley railroad construction, agricultural labor, and the small economies that grew up around the rail towns. Some of them came to Fresno.
By the eighteen eighties, Fresno had a Chinese quarter, a cluster of businesses and residences in the blocks near the railroad that served the Chinese population of the city and the surrounding agricultural districts. The businesses were the kind that the Chinese community sustained in virtually every California railroad town: laundries, restaurants, grocery stores that stocked the specific ingredients the community needed, labor contracting offices that connected Chinese agricultural workers with farm operators across the valley. The quarter was a service economy built to serve people who were legally excluded from most other economic participation.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two had prohibited Chinese immigration and barred Chinese nationals from naturalizing as American citizens. Chinese residents who had been in California for decades remained legally stateless, unable to vote, unable to own land in their own names in some jurisdictions, unable to bring family members from China. They built stable community institutions under those conditions and maintained them for generations.
The Fresno Chinatown that existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was reduced by fire, urban renewal, and demographic pressure over the mid-twentieth century. What remains as of current documentation is limited compared to the original community. The history of Chinese labor in the San Joaquin Valley, including the specific contributions to railroad construction and agricultural development, is documented in the scholarship but largely absent from the physical landscape of Fresno's downtown.
