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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 ...
For example, in the 1860s, the Central Pacific Railway hired thousands of Chinese immigrants for some of the deadliest jobs, from working with explosives to scaling cliff faces.
Such tents were typical of working-class accommodations on the frontier for all immigrant workers although (non-Chinese) foremen, shift bosses, and trained railwaymen recruited from the UK were housed in sleeping cars and railway-built houses in Yale and the other railway towns. Chinese railway workers also established transient Chinatowns ...
In February 1866, R.S. Chilton, the commissioner of U.S. immigration argued in his report to Congress that under the 1862 act prohibiting coolie trade, importation of Chinese labor to the South should be prohibited and southerners should instead work out contracts with freed Blacks. However, because the commissioner associated Chinese ...
In the 1850s, Chinese workers migrated to the United States, first to work in the gold mines, but also to take agricultural jobs, and factory work, especially in the garment industry. Chinese immigrants were particularly instrumental in building railroads in the American West, and as Chinese laborers grew successful in the United States, a ...
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]
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.