A Landscape Archaeology of Dispersed Chinese American Communities in the Southwestern Urban Frontier

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Historically, Chinese Americans in the Southwestern United States were less visible than their West Coast counterparts, as only a handful of Chinatowns existed in the region. Although Chinatowns were few and far between, Chinese Americans often formed dispersed communities where they often labored on vegetable farms or operated grocery stores. In the late 19th century, at the beginning of the formation of the urban frontier, evidence of discontinuous Chinese American landscapes can be found in cities such as Tucson, AZ and San Antonio, TX. Chinese Americans in the urban frontier might have appeared to be isolated from each other, but a diasporic examination of remittance landscapes and deathscapes reveal that dispersed Chinese communities in the Southwest maintained strong kinship ties and transnationally oriented lives. In addition, Chinese farmers and grocers often lived in neighborhoods where they were culturally entangled with Whites and Mexican Americans, and sometimes Indigenous communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow