Rock Springs Massacre of 1885
Hard life of Chinese immigrants
Moving to the West
The Chinese Immigrants moved to the west, just before the California Gold Rush. They were mainly laborers and entrepreneurs. "Between 1865 and 1867 the Central Pacific Railroad Company hired more than 10,000 Chinese, many of them former miners, to build the western half of the first transcontinental railroad" (Zhao). More than 10,000 Chinese men were hired to make the first transcontinental railroad. They worked with unskilled and skillful tasks to make a decent wage. But, they were extremely lower than the white laborers.
The Massacre of 1885
More than 90% of Chinese Immigrants were men who left behind their wives and children at home to move to find better opportunities for their families. After 1860, Chinese Immigrants were harassed and violated by the western people. "By the time the United States enacted the CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT in 1882, about 125,000 Chinese lived in the United States; the majority of them resided on the West Coast." (Yung).They were forced to leave their jobs in the manufacturing industries. In 1877, San Francisco mob attacked and left twenty-eight Chinese people dead.
"Beginning with the Chinese immigration to California during the Gold Rush, towns and states on the West Coast had devised numerous laws to deprive Chinese of their livelihoods, to segregate them in schools and neighborhoods, and generally to make their lives in the United States so miserable that they would leave" (Landman). Congress has passed the Page Act in 1875, the prohibition of Asian Immigrant laborers and suspected women prostitution. The immigrants were judged and wrongfully punished by the economy and the westerns.
Chinese Immigrant Song
Works Citied
Zhao, Xiaojian. Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Landman, James H. "Chew Heong v. United States: Chinese Exclusion and the Federal Courts."Social Education 71.7 (2007): 360+. General OneFile. Web. 5 Feb. 2016.