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The history of Chinese Americans or the history of ethnic Chinese in the United States includes three major waves of Chinese immigration to the United States, beginning in the 19th century. Chinese immigrants in the 19th century worked in the California Gold Rush of the 1850s and the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s. They also worked as ...
But as Wong notes, the railroad is an ambivalent symbol for Chinese Americans, since it represents both the American dream of mobility, luxury and power but also the historical difficulties of the Chinese workers, who often had no choice but to take railroad jobs and who were never allowed the sort of mobility the railroad offered to Anglos.
Chinese immigration to America in the 19th century is commonly referred to as the first wave of Chinese Americans, and are mainly Cantonese and Taishanese speaking people. About half or more of the Chinese ethnic people in the United States in the 1980s had roots in Taishan, Guangdong, a city in southern China near the major city of Guangzhou ...
In the 1870s, the growing number of Chinese immigrants entering the United States to earn money, working first in gold mining and then laying new railroads, faced increasing opposition from white ...
After slavery was abolished in the United States, Chinese laborers were imported to the South as cheap labor to replace freed Blacks on the plantations.Many of the early Chinese laborers came from sugar plantations in Cuba and after the transcontinental railroad was completed, California also contributed to the labor supply.
Chinese workers made up 90% of the West Coast railroad workforce, but their contributions are often “rendered invisible,” former state Sen. Richard Pan said.
In June 1867, two thousand Chinese Transcontinental Railroad workers participated in a general strike (a collective action) for a week along the Sierra Nevada range, demanding better working conditions. [1] By 1867, the Central Pacific Railroad workforce was composed of 80-90% Chinese laborers and the rest were European-Americans. [2]
In the 1850s, Chinese workers migrated to the United States to work in gold mines, take jobs in agriculture and factories, and built railroads in the American West. [3] More than 10,000 workers built the railroad tracks in the American West by hand, 80% of whom were Chinese migrant workers. [4]