Reading Resilience: Immigrant Wall Markings in Angel Island as Counterarchive

Between 1910 and 1940, Angel Island detention center on the California coast “processed” thousands of immigrants from Asia, mainly from China. Today, Angel Island serves as an archive and research center for the preservation of the traces of lives that were marked by the carceral violence meted out by the US State out on this small island prison, not far from its more well-known neighbor, Alcatraz. Studies to date have focused on the treatment of detainees at Angel Island or have tried to recuperate the voices of those once detained there. This study shifts the focus onto the politics of archiving by revealing a dialectic of archival power exercised by the State and a counter-archive of resistance constituted by the detainees. The State archived detainees through carceral capture, interrogation, record keeping, and immigration processing. The detainees established a counter- archive in the form of poems, names, and statements that they marked on the walls that confined them. These intimate and personal markings counter the archival violence of the State, allowing us to “read” the resilience and resistance of the immigrants against the State’s narratives about them. These markings tell us that detainees acted quite literally against the walls of their prison and the words of their examiners. The detainees transformed the prison walls into an inscriptive surface on which they articulated a counter-archive of resilience at the heart of State power.

PS Note: Arunima Datta and Jonathan Fardy will be co-presenting