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Pacific
Immigrants
Los Angeles Chinatown, Apablaza Street, ca 1900
Archaeologists like Roberta
Greenwood have pioneered the study of immigrants arriving in North America
across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic Ocean. Chinese sojourners helped
east meet west as they laid mile after mile of railroad track, and built
the cities of the West. Greenwood recognized that the physical remains of
past Chinese and other ethnic communities often survive just below city
pavements.
Greenwood has spent much of her career connecting these archaeological
remains with the people who left them behind, then linking the specific
stories of these places to larger historical concerns. Her work and that
of the urban archaeologists she has trained and inspired revealed a continent-wide
trend in the siting of immigrant communities on land of low value or high
hazard, often nearest the place of first arrival. The sequence of ethnic
groups moving into and out of these communities does not tell a happy story,
chronicling as it does the history of the most economically and politically
“scapegoated” groups. We cannot always celebrate the history
that archaeology offers us, but neither can we ignore it.
Projects in the Book
(Click on bold link to view an excerpt)
Roberta Greenwood – The Chinese in the
Cities of the West
