The Third-Largest Chinatown in California

The Chinese workers who came to Stockton in the eighteen fifties arrived from Guangdong province into a city that was already prosperous and already hostile. California's anti-Chinese legislation preceded the federal Chinese Exclusion Act by years. But by eighteen eighty, Stockton was home to the third-largest Chinese community in California, and that community had built an economy inside the limits of what the law allowed.

They worked the delta. Chinese laborers built the levee and drainage systems that converted the tule marshes of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into farmable peat islands, one of the largest reclamation projects in California history. They grew vegetables, operated laundries, ran restaurants, and established family association halls that functioned as community governments, banks, and dispute-resolution bodies simultaneously. The association halls were the center of a community that had no other institutional recourse.

The Chinese Exclusion Act passed in eighteen eighty-two and cut the pipeline of new arrivals. What remained was a community that adapted: existing residents could not become citizens, could not own land in their own names under California's alien land laws, and could not bring most family members from China. They stayed anyway, and built what the law permitted.

Those restrictions remained in force for decades, and California's alien land laws were not struck down until the middle of the twentieth century. By then the community that had reclaimed the delta had been waiting for citizenship for a long time.