The Chinatown-International District: Three Communities, One Neighborhood

Within approximately twelve city blocks on the south edge of downtown Seattle, three distinct Asian American communities built overlapping lives over more than a century, arriving for different reasons, facing different systems of exclusion, building different institutions, and sharing the same streets throughout.

The Chinese community arrived first, in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, drawn by railroad construction and the domestic-labor economy. They built laundries, restaurants, and small businesses along Washington Street and Maynard Avenue. In February of eighteen eighty-six, as you have heard, a mob marched them to the waterfront. The community rebuilt in the same blocks. The Chinese Exclusion Act and its successors kept the population small; the community that rebuilt was tighter and more institutionally organized than the one expelled.

Japanese immigrants began arriving in significant numbers in the eighteen nineties, settling in the same district and establishing businesses, churches, and associations. By nineteen forty-two, the Japanese American community was the largest Asian American population in the district and one of the most economically established. Executive Order nine zero six six dispersed it within days of March nineteen forty-two. Families returned after the war to find their businesses occupied, their property sold, their community organizations dissolved. They rebuilt again.

Filipino workers began arriving in the nineteen twenties, recruited as a labor force for the Alaskan salmon canneries that Seattle provisioned and staffed. They wintered in Seattle between cannery seasons, establishing a strip along King Street that their community called Manilatown. Filipino men faced explicit exclusion from white Seattle neighborhoods, from intermarriage with white women under Washington's antimiscegenation laws until nineteen thirty-seven, and from employment protections available to white workers. The cannery unions they built were among the most racially integrated labor organizations in the pre-war Pacific Northwest.

The Wing Luke Museum on South King Street, founded in nineteen sixty-seven, is the only museum in the United States dedicated to the pan-Asian American experience of the Pacific Northwest. It holds the oral history archive for all three communities: the interviews, the photographs, the documents that each community produced and preserved when the official record was not paying attention. The neighborhood it documents was not created by any community's preference. It was created by exclusion: by the covenants and ordinances and legal mechanisms that told Asian Americans in Seattle where they were permitted to be. The communities that found each other in those twelve blocks built something out of that constraint that outlasted the constraint itself.