The Price of Eggs in China (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Asians in California

Traditionally, U.S. history books have discounted the history of Asians in the United States and have focused instead on the path that European settlers followed, first to the New England colonies and then across the continent to the Pacific. In fact, there is evidence that Chinese admiral Zheng He reached North America seventy-two years before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. It is well documented that Filipinos working on Spanish galleons traveled to North America in 1587, fifty years before the British settled Jamestown. Since the Philippines were colonized by Spain, there were Filipinos in all of the Spanish communities, including Mexico, the southern United States, and the area that became California. A Filipino colony, the first Asian community in North America, was established in the Louisiana bayous in 1781. Soon, more Chinese men moved to the continent. Prohibited from gaining citizenship, many associated with the criminal element, such as the over two hundred men of Chinese descent who were documented in the 1760s as living on Calle de los Negros, a notorious center for illicit dealings in what later became Los Angeles. Around this same time, travel from China to Hawaii became common, and sailors frequently continued on from the islands to locations along the Pacific Coast, a practice that continued well into the twentieth century.

In the nineteenth century, U.S. businesses imported hundreds of thousands of Asian workers, mostly from China. Although these workers were not slaves, they could not apply for citizenship either, and so they were made to work for wages that were about half the going rate for Europeans. Approximately 90 percent of the workers on the Transcontinental Railway, built between 1864 and 1869, were Chinese.

By the time that Portsmouth Square was established in 1847 in what became San Francisco, there was already a strong Chinese presence in the area. The discovery of gold two years later led to the California gold rush, which drew many people from all over the world, including tens of thousands from China.

Throughout the twentieth century, Asian immigration to the United States continued. Most Asian immigrants came from China, which should not be surprising given that the Chinese population has always been many times that of all of the rest of Asia put together. Starting in the 1950s, Chinese emigration was curtailed by strict rules imposed by the communist government. Around that time, wars with Japan (1941-1945) and North Korea (1950-1953) made the United States an inhospitable place for Asians, slowing immigration.

The Immigration Act passed by Congress in 1965 raised the limits on Asian immigrants but also added restrictions that favored the middle class over the poor, which shifted the demographic of immigrants to more developed countries.

In the early 2000s, nearly one third of citizens of Asian Pacific descent lived in California. The Asian population increased about 30 percent between 1985 and 2005. This rate of growth was expected to continue as international travel became increasingly easy and employment opportunities attracted new immigrants.