Community Collaboration is Commemoration at the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters

Veronica Peterson

Community Collaboration is Commemoration at the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters

Year: 2020

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Arming the Resistance: Recent Scholarship in Chinese Diaspora Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Models of community archaeology generally use collaboration as a foundation for a future commemoration. In practice, the process of collaboration is itself an act of commemoration. The Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters, on Stanford University’s campus, is a site where Chinese employees lived as they worked across Stanford family lands from the 1880s to 1925. In what comes as a surprise to many current students and staff, the Chinese employees were instrumental to the creation and maintenance of the University’s most iconic landscapes, like Palm Drive and the Oval. Inviting stakeholders into the research design and establishing an initial engagement plan that allowed for multiple and multi-scalar community interactions has foregrounded the people at the heart of the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters. This review of building a collaborative, community archaeology project examines how every interaction, conversation, and event commemorates the lives of the Chinese workers who resided in the Arboretum.