In March 2022, civil rights coalition Stop AAPI Hate revealed that it had tracked nearly 11,000 hate acts against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from the beginning of COVID-19 restrictions to December 2021. Chinese Americans—disproportionately the subject of xenophobic rhetoric—reported the most incidents of any ethnic group, and women accounted for more than 60 percent of the findings. The pandemic was a “portal,” wrote novelist Arundhati Roy, “a gateway between one world and the next…” that “forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.” Yet here in the United States, the coronavirus revealed a different kind of passageway, between the 19th and 21st centuries, one in which simmering prejudices against Chinese Americans had again made them targets of racist scapegoating and violence.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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Prior to the pandemic, scholars and advocates had shown how anti-Chinese legislation and bloodshed in the American West had magnified the racial violence of the post–Civil War and Reconstruction eras. In California, mobs of mostly white men launched more than 200 assaults on Chinese Americans between 1849 and 1906. Much like the southern vigilantes who attacked Black communities, killers in the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest relied on mass terror. A century and a half later, COVID-19’s probable origins in Wuhan, China, led right-wing voices to blame the disease’s spread on Chinese Americans and to racialize them anew as perpetually foreign.
Today, however, two western cities seek atonement and understanding. Los Angeles and Rock Springs, Wyoming—separated by 850 miles and gaping political chasms—both witnessed mob violence targeting Chinese immigrants in the 1870s and ’80s. For years, locals have worked to resurface these stories, as only trace physical evidence remains, and to do more than install placards on the ground or the sides of buildings. The different yet complementary approaches being taken by L.A. and Rock Springs may change how we confront histories of violence and exclusion in our communities.
LOS ANGELES: 18 MEN LYNCHED
I am not a descendant of the Chinese diaspora, but I have had the privilege of helping plan and of participating in the L.A. and Rock Springs commemorations. I study and advocate for the reparative qualities of memory work. Like so many others, I passed through years of schooling in Southern California before I learned about either massacre. As a Mexican American living in L.A., I’ve seen my encounters with our multiracial city core grow more fraught with time. I’ve learned to peel back the concocted fantasies of the Spanish-Mexican pueblo to look for entanglements between the original Gabrielino-Tongva peoples, the Chinese, and my own ancestors.
L.A.’s 1871 massacre was a cruel union of white and Mexican “justice.” After rival Chinese gunmen shot three bystanders during a street fight on October 24, a mixed-race mob tortured and lynched 18 Chinese men and plundered thousands of dollars in money and goods. The mob’s victims were innocent of any wrongdoing. They belonged to an emerging community of domestic laborers, seasonal workers, and tradespeople who made their homes at the edge of the city’s original plaza. Relative to their arrival in Northern California, Chinese immigrants had only recently begun settling in the Southland. In fact, many migrated here to escape the antagonism and dangers of work in the Sierra Nevada.
Initially, Anglo Angelenos proved content to exploit these newcomers entering a frontier landscape rife with open-air violence. For more than a generation, Anglos and Californios had turned to extrajudicial punishment to settle disputes and preserve honor. During the massacre, they deployed the same repertoire against an unfamiliar “other” to commit the largest killing in modern L.A. history. At least 37 indictments were issued afterward, yet only 10 men went to trial, 8 were convicted, and all had their sentences overturned.
Until recently, our knowledge of how Chinese Angelenos grieved in the aftermath was scant. Archives can tell us only so much about their world, with written records lost to upheaval on both continents. Here and elsewhere, stories of early Chinese Americans often survive in the landscape and in the memories of their descendants. Still, trauma, losses of transpacific ties, and traditions of silence around the sufferings endured in this era—the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and remained in place until 1943—further erased wisdom about this period.
Deliberate attempts among white boosters to bury the L.A. massacre exacerbated collective forgetting. Yet between 1872 and 1908, residents of L.A.’s Chinatown organized triennial public ceremonies known as Chiao or Ta Chiu. These Taoist rituals sought to soothe the souls of the victims, affirm Chinese American belonging, and offer peace to aggressors. Through these ancestral practices, participants spoke back to white supremacy and expressed hope.
BANYAN TREES
Ahead of the massacre’s 150th anniversary in 2021, the City of Los Angeles worked with Chinese American civic, cultural, and business leaders to craft a public framework for commissioning a memorial. The 1871 Memorial Steering Committee, with which I was involved, paid careful attention to the massacre’s expansive geography, including lynching sites, sanctuary houses, and graveyards. Freeways and government buildings—fitting symbols of systemic power and displacement—now conceal the murders’ imperceptible landscape. We searched maps and memoirs for information, acknowledging their limits in revealing who did what and where that night. We found four decades of newspaper coverage of the Chiao festivals that conveyed new layers of information about how Chinese Angelenos conducted reparative rites.
In summer 2022, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs invited artists, architects, and designers to submit ideas for the new memorial. An expert panel selected six design teams, from which it chose artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and writer Judy Chui-Hua Chung as the winning duo. The pair had only recently learned the story of 1871. Their design called for a grove of silvery sculptures of banyans, trees native to the victims’ homeland, to line the memorial site: the massacre’s epicenter along Los Angeles Street. They offered secondary markers to show how the violence spread from Chinatown, including benches denoting rootedness. And they proposed engravings and a retrospective mural to contextualize the massacre in Asian American history. The hopefulness of their in-progress design mirrors the optimism of Chiao practitioners generations ago, reminding us of Chinese American resiliency through the exclusion period and beyond. The project insists that knowledge is healing.
ROCK SPRINGS: 28 WORKERS MURDERED
In Wyoming’s coal country, knowledge is still emerging from the earth. I first visited Rock Springs in 2023, guided by archaeologist Dudley Gardner and colleagues of mine from the National Park Service. Sandstone petroglyphs translate the region’s deep history, attesting to more than 12,000 years of human movement and settlement. When U.S. Army surveyor Howard Stansbury discovered bituminous coal here in 1850—ensuring that the transcontinental railroad would pass through the region—the land belonged to the Shoshone people.
As a western historian, I’ve often imagined what Rock Springs looked and felt like back then. Yet there are limits to what I can envision. The scholars leading the remembrance here know the land in such different and profound ways. Gardner has spent four decades researching Chinese communities in Wyoming Territory and advocating for public recognition of the 1885 massacre. Laura Ng is one of the few Chinese American archaeologists studying the experiences of the Chinese diaspora in the United States. Together, they understand the textures of everyday life—the tastes, the objects, the social arrangements—and their reading of what persists beneath the surface challenges generations of historical silencing.
Founded in 1868, Rock Springs sprouted from one of the earliest mining operations in Wyoming. The Union Pacific Railroad, beset by financial troubles, controlled the industry throughout the territory. The first Chinese contractors arrived in Rock Springs in late 1875, hired to replace striking white miners. They created a self-reliant community, today buried beneath a Catholic church, a schoolyard, and parking lots.
By early 1885, the long-simmering anti-Chinese movement in Rock Springs had intensified. White workers accused Union Pacific of showing Chinese laborers preferential treatment, including safer and more profitable jobs, and the local chapter of the national Knights of Labor union fanned their fury. That summer, the Knights and Union Pacific reached an impasse over the Chinese presence, and violence seemed imminent. On September 2, a fight erupted between the union workers and a Chinese group over a room assignment; that afternoon, vengeful gangs entered Rock Springs’ Chinatown. Mobs of white miners murdered at least 28 residents and burned roughly 80 buildings.
After the attack, hundreds of Chinese workers fled west to Evanston, where immigrants had settled Wyoming’s first Chinatown in 1869. Within a few days, Union Pacific loaded the survivors onto trains and took them back to Rock Springs with an army escort. None of the perpetrators faced charges. The Chinese rebuilt their community, and military garrisons rose nearby. In their testimonies to the Chinese consulate, survivors laid bare their humanity and rights in ways that defied racist characterizations of them as unfeeling or exploitable. Their words held power. For the first time, the United States agreed to pay indemnities to China for violence against its citizens.
But 1885 marked a national turning point in the anti-Chinese movement. That year, historian Beth Lew-Williams argues, it evolved from a political campaign into a violent one in which “local white community members terrorized their Chinese neighbors until they left town.” Even so, the Rock Springs massacre helped convince congressional skeptics that enforcing laws of exclusion was more politically expedient than vigilante murder.
HISTORIC HONORS
Today, that national significance means that archaeological sites in Rock Springs and Evanston are eligible for designation as national historic landmarks, the highest honor for historic properties in the United States. This federal recognition carries different meanings from an artistic or reflective memorial. Nominations must demonstrate that properties meet certain criteria to convey their importance in U.S. history. Archaeological sites having a “high potential to reveal significant information about the past” can be considered, even without visible surface evidence. Of more than 2,600 existing NHLs, only 7 have known associations with Chinese American history.
With Gardner and Ng, I am collaborating on the NHL nomination in an election year filled with anti-immigrant vitriol. Yet this form of memorial acknowledges that we still have so much to learn. Cultural deposits preserved in the soil—contextualized with descendant stories and in reparative hands—can tell us more. The unseen may yet fill our reckonings with humility and respectful curiosity. It can speak to lingering silences.
Together, the commemorations underway in Los Angeles and Rock Springs ask and answer. They create new records to run with the land. In forcing us to confront the invisible, they remind us of lingering portals and our power to choose a different path.•
Laura Dominguez is a historian of race, heritage, and place-keeping. She currently serves as a National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow.
