Invisible People, Chinese Gold: Chinese Immigrants in Pacific Coast Fishing Industries, 1882–1930

During the 1850s and 1870s, before the Chinese Exclusion laws, Chinese immigrants established prosperous shrimping and abalone fishing industries along the California coast and conducted trade between U.S. and China. Yet scholars have generally assumed that Chinese immigrant fisheries soon declined after the promulgation of the Chinese Exclusion Law and California state laws that were barring “aliens” from fishing in coastal waters. Little is known about how Chinese immigrants contributed to developing the Pacific Coast fishery during the Exclusion era. My paper will utilize fishery as a case study of how the Chinese immigrants’ work contributed to a transnational and global economy by restoring the historical narratives of Chinese fishermen, middle-class labor contractors and merchants, and cannery workers. Fishing families discovered alternative industries in squid fishing and adjusted the labor structures. Elite Chinese merchants and labor contractors provided monetary and human capital and utilized their identity privileges and community networks to provide the fishermen and contract workers employment opportunities. And the cannery workers were engaged in a prominent industry contributing to the early development of the Pacificwest region. My work explores how forces of racism and capitalism advanced by industrialization led to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, yet the Chinese immigrants were able to maintain a transnational economic and diasporic network to restore an ethnic economy.