Hidden in Plain Sight: Remapping Spatial Networks and Social Complexity of the Chinese Immigrant Mining Diaspora in Southern Oregon

Summary

Like other aspects of Western historiography, the story of the Chinese diaspora in the gold fields has been circumscribed by exotic tales of vice, violence, and alienation.  The legacy of frontier rhetoric has continued to impact scholarship through assumptions of scarcity, isolation, and discrimination.  While discriminatory laws and racial tensions certainly impacted the lives of the nineteenth century Chinese living in southern Oregon, they did not wholly define them.  This paper will describe an attempt to map the spatial and social distribution of Chinese immigrants across southern Oregon in an attempt to better contextualize the Jacksonville Chinese Quarter within the larger mining landscape for which it was created and served.  In this attempt to individuate the southern Oregon experience of Chinese immigrants, we hope to also gain insight into the permeability of the assumed ethnic enclaves, and the ways the population resisted and persisted in the area for decades. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Being Chinese: Current Scholarship on the Chinese Diaspora in 19th-Century North America   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 319