-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.cetel.org/part1.html Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.cetel.org/part1.html">Ancestors in the Americas: Part 1, Coolies, Sai�</A> ----- Part 1. COOLIES, SAILORS AND SETTLERS Voyage to the New World Coming soon: Video clips of Part 1 "Today and for over two hundred years, Asians have been a part of the life of the Americas. How did these many people get here? What was it like for those who came first? What would they tell us, if they could speak?" - Narrator Most people think of Asians as recent immigrants to the Americas, but the first Asians--Filipino sailors--settled in the bayous of Louisiana a decade before the Revolutionary War. Asians have been an integral part of American history since that time. COOLIES, SAILORS AND SETTLERS explores how and why people from the Philippines , China and India first arrived on the shores of North and South America, and it portrays their survival amid harsh conditions, their re-migrations, and finally their permanent settlement in the New World. The film travels across oceans and centuries of time to trace the globally interlocking story of East and West--from a village in Guangdong Province and Spanish military barracks in Manila to a Chinese cemetery in Havana and the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where early Asian imports are on display. The first program of ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICAS introduces the "documemoir" approach that characterizes the series. This approach stretches the traditional documentary genre in order to represent an inaccessible past and imagine what life was like for these early voyagers to the West. The dramatic voice and presence of the Asian Everyman narrator represents the Asian perspective throughout the film, capturing the first-person perspective of those who experienced this history. In seeking out his own story, he guides us in examining and interpreting historical records, and his voice conveys a drama and passion often absent in conventional historical narratives. "Asian emigration had as much to do with developments in Europe as it did with developments in the Americas or in Asia. Overseas migration was part of European colonizing efforts in different parts of the world." - Professor Sucheng Chan In looking for the source of Asians in the Americas, the film points to Western expansionism and the self-serving idea that the "white man's burden" was to "save" the barbarian masses of the world. Thus, the West colonized much of Asia as well as the New World, a move vividly illustrated in the film's mapping of these global movements. "Asia was always on the Western mind," observes scholar Gary Okihiro. Both Columbus' nautical quest for Spain and, three centuries later, Lewis and Clark's exploration of the Northwest Passage--on assignment from Thomas Jefferson--were journeys undertaken in search of a direct route to Asia and with it, wealth from global trade in textiles, spices, crafts, porcelains, silk and tea. At the center of early trade with Europe and the New World was the Philippines. As far back as the 17th century, Filipino sailors worked on Spanish galleons which plied trade routes between Spain's two colonies: Manila in the Phillipines and Acapulco in Mexico. Typically a third to half of their crews jumped ship upon hitting port. Some of the Filipinos who left their ships in Mexico ultimately found their way to the bayous of Louisiana, where they settled in the 1760s. The film shows the remains of Filipino shrimping villages in Louisiana, where, eight to ten generations later, their descendants still reside, making them the oldest continuous settlement of Asians in America. "America may think immigrants always come to get something from America, from the West, and take it away, but really it was very different....Long before Asians immigrated, when East met West, it was the West that came to us." -Narrator In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Western powers, and especially the young American republic, depended upon the "China trade" to build their economic strength. During this period China was considered to be very rich and powerful, while the fledgling American republic was relatively poor and weak. The richest man in the world of that era was the Canton merchant Houqua, who earned his fortune on nothing more than trading in Chinese tea. In a Massachusetts museum we see a vast display of paintings, porcelains, furniture, textile and silver work made by skilled Chinese craftsmen for the world's markets. In the collection made for the U.S. market is the set of china engraved with "J" for Thomas Jefferson. Merchants from America and China enjoyed cordial relations for some time, but these golden years did not last. Of the commercial trade items between China and the West, tea became the most important, as its popularity grew throughout Great Britain and the thirteen colonies. The British imported far more tea than they could export goods to China, creating a trade imbalance. When the trade deficit grew devastatingly large by the 1830s, England, with help from some well-known Americans, began growing and smuggling opium from India&mdashwhich was under British control&mdashinto China, where it was sold to pay for tea. "Great family fortunes were made from the opium trade. Their names read very much like a who's who in America: the Cushings, the Cabot family, Delano, as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Perkins, as in the Perkins Hall at Harvard." - Professor Dilip Basu As Chinese opium addiction grew to catastrophic proportions in the early 19th century, China's government moved to bring the illegal trade to a halt. In the film, we see a broad plaza which leads to the museum where China's struggle against the opium trade is commemorated. After appeals to Queen Victoria yielded nothing, the presiding Imperial Commissioner confiscated and destroyed more than two million pounds of opium found in the western warehouses at Canton. For this, the British went to war, concocting an excuse with which American leaders, including former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, fully concurred. These Opium Wars, begun in the 1840s, resulted in debilitating losses for China. Ports previously banned to foreigners were forced open for trade and Western presence, and Hong Kong and Kowloon were annexed by Britain. The most immediate consequence was China's devastating loss of control over the emigration of Chinese, which resulted in their large-scale shipment as indentured laborers to the Caribbean and South America. After the abolition of the African slave trade in the British empire in the early 1800s, there was a shortage of labor in the New World. South China became the West's favored destination to find replacement laborers to export to their New World colonies. Britain also exported laborers from its own colony, India. More than a quarter million Chinese and half a million Asian Indians were shipped to the New World between the 1840s and 1870s under a "new system of slavery" where Asians replaced African slave labor. We meet Lau Chung Mun in Guangdong Province, China, who tells how his grandfather and two great uncles were "bought and sold like pigs" to work in Cuba. Villagers were lured, kidnapped, tricked with worthless contracts, and loaded onto coolie ships modeled on African slave ships, suffering the same "middle passage". Their bare chests were painted with letters to mark their destinations: "P" for Peru, "C" for Cuba, and "S" for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). "We labor 21 hours out of 24 and are beaten....On one occasion I received 200 blows, and though my body was a mass of wounds I was still forced to continue labor.... A single day becomes a year.... And our families know not whether we are alive or dead." -Testimony of Chinese plantation laborers, China-Cuba Commission Report, 1874 Upon arrival in the sugar plantations of Cuba or in the toxic guano pits off the coast of Peru&mdashwhere they faced brutal exploitation without rights, and worked long hours, lashed and shackled&mdashthe lives of the "indentured coolies" differed from that of slaves in name only. It was unlikely that they would ever see their homes again. As awareness of the conditions grew, many new workers resisted. The records tell of frequent mutinies on the ships. The exploitation of coolies became so well known that the Chinese government sent representatives to Cuba to question the coolie workers directly. The China-Cuba Commission Report in 1874 preserves for posterity the testimonies of the workers who bravely gave witness to their inhumane treatment and conditions. "There was no peace....One voyage in every 11 had a mutiny....Bands of us threw ourselves upon them: Release us or we will burn the ship! We have nothing to lose....Thirteen times we succeeded and gained our freedom." - Narrator In Cuba today we also meet descendants of those who stayed and brought generations of countrymen to Cuba. Among the early coolie laborers were those who fought alongside Cuban plantation laborers in the uprisings to achieve liberation from Spain in the late 19th century. We see a Cuban monument to the "Chinos mambises," memorializing the "brave Chinese" who fought in that insurrection and remained to make new lives on the island to which they had been unwillingly brought. We see racially mixed Afro/Spaniard/Chinese Cuban people in the streets of Havana today, and Spanish/Chinese names on the tombstones of the large Chinese cemetery in Havana. Asian Indian coolies, facing similar hardships, were taken from their home areas in coastal Calcutta and Madras and sent to the plantations of other British colonies: Trinidad, Jamaica and British Guiana. We hear the plaintive songs of the departing Asian Indian coolies, and see how the villagers of a fishing town set up clay gods in the sand facing the ocean to beseech protection for those who went to sea. "We survived, took root and made a home."- Narrator Some descendants of these Chinese and Indian workers later re-migrated north to the United States. The film takes us to New York, where numerous Indo-Guyanese have settled, forming a large community in Queens. We also meet Fabiana Chiu, a 4th generation Chinese from Peru, whose ancestors possibly labored in Peru, loading ships with the toxic guano that fertilized the farms of the world. As an Atlantic port city, New York also received some of the first Asian arrivals in the early 1800s, long before California's Gold Rush. Sailors and traders of the China trade became part of the port culture that formed in this city teeming with immigrants. We learn that many Chinese men in NY took western names and married Irish women, and see how the American popular press took note of these pairings, with their mixed-race offspring. By program's end we have come to understand that the earliest Asians arrived in North America by many routes: via Mexico, South America and the Caribbean, and finally, to California, during the Gold Rush. The film concludes by showing a young Chinese man preparing for the voyage to California's "Gold Mountain" in the mid-1800s. Almost simultaneously with the arrival of coolies in the Caribbean and South America this "Gold Mountain" hopeful will arrive by another route in another part of the Americas. He is full of expectation, believing he will return to those who await him. Unlike the coolies who came before him, he will not lose control of his destiny. He is determined to be a free man. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The series continues in Part 2 - CHINESE IN THE FRONTIER WEST: An American Story. ===== Part 2. CHINESE IN THE FRONTIER WEST An American Story Coming soon: Video clips of Part 2 "Leaving their villages in China, they journeyed far, with only each other and the power of memory.... remembering families an ocean apart...remembering how to make a home on the soil under their feet....With spirit and strategy they fought for their place in America." -Narrator The second part of the ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICAS series unfolds with the arrival of Chinese on the West Coast during the Gold Rush, not as coolies laboring in the bleak outposts of the New World's plantations and mines, but as free men embarking for "Gold Mountain." Pushed by hard times at home, they arrived full of hope for wealth and for an auspicious return to their homeland. An early scene in CHINESE IN THE FRONTIER WEST: An American Story imagines a Chinese man's departure from his wife and homeland. We see the young wife silently braiding her husband's long queue (hair), perhaps for the last time. Setting out, like so many others, the traveler glances back at her over his shoulder. What does the future hold for them and their descendants? The close-up on his face, a recurring image in the film, captures an intensely personal moment in a new chapter of world history. Could these Chinese pioneers, who came seeking gold, have imagined the pivotal role they would play in building the American west? Or that they would challenge and change laws that would eventually reshape our nation's definition of who is an American? How little their contribution was understood at that time...how little it is known even today. CHINESE IN THE FRONTIER WEST uncovers a surprising and complicated web of relationships&mdasheconomic, social, cultural and legal&mdashbetween 19th-century Chinese immigrants and other white and nonwhite pioneers who came to America's western territories from all parts of the globe. "Let us consider the vile coolies, who like craven beasts work the goldmines only to return to their native land and bring no profit to our state." - John Bigler, California governor 1852- 1856 The film's narrative reveals the strength of these American ancestors, who, upon arrival, met with unremitting suspicion and hostility, yet managed to sustain their embattled community and culture, and help build a nation. The Chinese were the first nonwhite foreigners who arrived en masse of their own free will, unlike shackled African Americans, who were brought as slaves, or Native Americans, who were decimated in their own land. Yet like these other non-white peoples, Chinese immigrants were prevented from owning property or becoming citizens. They were also subject to violent attacks and new laws enforced only against them, such as the Foreign Miner's Tax. Despite this treatment, we see how during the three decades encompassed by the film (1850-1882), Chinese labor became an essential underpinning in the developing economy. In taxes from gold mining alone, the Chinese contributed up to 50% of the state's total revenue by 1860. In addition to working on the transcontinental railroad that eventually linked the frontier west to markets back east, Chinese laborers hand-built aqueducts to transport water and timber, bridges and flood-control levees, and some of the first wineries in the state, where they carved the storage caverns and constructed massive stone buildings. The Chinese also reclaimed swamp land and transformed the Sacramento delta into one of the world's great farming lands. By 1870, three quarters of the agricultural work force at every level in California were Chinese. "As it turned out, California's economic development in the 19th century could not have been accomplished without the Chinese. And I can say this unequivocally." - Professor L. Ling-chi Wang Many of their contributions can still be seen today in rural California, as the film shows. Yet, their contributions are missing from most historical records, such as photographs of the building of the railroad and standard textbooks on the development of the west. None of their contributions were perhaps more long lasting and significant to all Americans than their struggles to advance civil rights for themselves and the immigrants that followed. Denied the basic right of citizenship, the Chinese forged an alternative route to becoming Americans: they relentlessly pursued their rights in America's courts. They turned to the justice system precisely because they understood and believed in the American promise of equality and freedom. "People always say, well, the Chinese always cling to their culture, that they never assimilated, they never really learned about America... but in terms of resisting discrimination against them, they very much assimilated. >From the early 1850s, they started making use of the American judicial system when such a system did not exist in China." -Professor Sucheng Chan As a mostly male community that had organized itself to survive, Chinese workers sent money back to China, to their wives, families and villages. But their collective well-being in America was repeatedly attacked through ordinances, acts and court rulings designed to make life more difficult. These included the 1854 Foreign Miner's Tax and the 1862 Police Tax, as well as court decisions such as People vs. Hall, which cast them as inferior to whites and denied them the right to testify against any white person, even an accused murderer. It was natural for them to ante up a portion of their earnings to fight these discriminatory laws. They hired seasoned lawyers and challenged almost every law or court case enacted against them, sometimes with great success. The hundreds of cases they brought in the 19th and early 20th centuries helped establish legal precedents across life's broad spectrum, from livelihood and education to immigrant rights and citizenship. "It's hard to think of a single law perceived by the Chinese as discriminatory, that they did not challenge in court." -Professor Charles McClain And what about Chinese women? As the film shows, Chinese women customarily did not leave home. Furthermore, the frontier hardships and often violent discrimination suffered by Chinese men in America were hardly promising conditions for family life. Records suggest about one third of the early Chinese arrivals were married, even though the ratio of men to women in the Chinese community was at one time as high as 27 to 1. In the resulting largely male, so-called "bachelor" Chinese community in America, a few Chinese men saw a business opportunity and imported Chinese women whom they pressed into prostitution. While prostitution was a general feature of the frontier west, the existence of Chinese prostitution gave Congress an excuse to pass the Page Law in 1875, specifically aimed at preventing Chinese women&mdashincluding family members of Chinese immigrants&mdashfrom entering the U.S. Not until 1970, almost 100 years later, following the major overhaul of immigration laws in 1965, did the Chinese community finally achieve a normal gender ratio of one man to one woman. Towards the end of the film, we ask: What if Chinese women had been permitted to come and they could have had families? How would this history have been different? Standing on a coastal stretch not far from Monterey, historian Sandy Lydon shows us a "Chinese America that might have been." He explains that here, in 1853, Chinese men and women built an American community of Chinese families, where women comprised over 40% of the population, and mothers, children and grandparents were all part of the social fabric. Where other pioneers saw Point Alones as useless economically, the Chinese envisioned and built a thriving export industry of dried abalone, abalone shells, seaweed, dried fish and squid. They were able to succeed because white Americans at the time were not interested in fishing occupations, and they lived in the midst of a more tolerant Hispanic community. Although the Chinese were displaced by the turn of the century, they still managed to build families of three generations standing, and to create some wealth from uninterrupted entrepreneurial resourcefulness. "And so we basically extended the promise of the American dream to a much wider range of human beings than the founding fathers may have had in mind." -Professor Sucheng Chan By the late 1800s, centuries of seafaring and labor migration had led these resilient immigrants from South China to build a new home in a new land, despite the intense discrimination they faced for many years to come. As scholar Sucheng Chan notes, through their determined collective efforts, they not only helped build the frontier, they also challenged our nation to "make the word 'American' more international in scope, to encompass people from all parts of the world." But the struggle of Asian immigrants for their rightful place in America was far from over, as we see in the next program. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The series continues with Part 3 - CROSSING THE CONTINENT, CROSSING THE PACIFIC (to be completed in Fall 2000) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ home | about cet | about Loni Ding | cet productions resources | newsletter | order | site credits | contact us ancestors | guides | documents | book | tell stories | discover ancestors people & places | reviews & awards | series credits | about documemoir | interview Copyright 1998. Center for Educational Telecommunications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. 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