Not a Californian: The Shaping Ethnic Communities of Chinese Migrant Workers in California

Yao-Tai Li
Sociology
UC San Diego

This project continued archival research for the third chapter of the grantee’s dissertation on the medical inspection of immigrants by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) at Angel Island during the Chinese exclusion era (1882-1943). The dissertation remapped a legacy of biological dispossession within global histories of racial slavery and colonialism to reveal a landscape of disease central to U.S. nation-state formation. Each chapter focused on a “living laboratory”, or site of scientific experimentation on dehumanized objects of study in the service of empire. This project remapped the California coast as a key site to show the state, the western U.S. and even the Pacific Ocean are part and parcel of these global histories, enacting a long-established relationship between politics, biology, race, gender and sexuality to regulate immigration and rationalize the unethical treatment of human subjects.