Transcript - "Angel Island: History and Movement"
February 2, 2023 -- CRG Angel Island Forum Series
Listen to "Angel Island: History and Movement" with Erika Lee.
LETI VOLPP: Good Afternoon and welcome to our event, "Angel Island History and Movement" with Professor Erika Lee. Before we begin let me say that there's live captioning available if you locate the button on the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.
I'm going to begin with the land acknowledgment.
We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin (Hoo-Choon), the ancestral and unseated land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo) speaking Ohlone people the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma (Muh-wek-muh) Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley Community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in Consistent with our values of community and diversity we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the University's relationship to native peoples by offering this land acknowledgment we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
My name is Leti Volpp and I'm the Director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. We are thrilled that you can be with us for today's event which is the first of three public lectures forming the Center for Race and Genders Angel Island Forum Series. The series was designed to accompany the campus-wide project a year on Angel Island organized by the Arts and Design Initiative and the Future Histories Lab. Professor. Today's event will be followed by another public lecture on February 2nd with Professor Elliot Young on "Criminalizing Migration and Detention: Chinese at Angel Island and McNeil Island Prison", and then followed on February 23rd with Professor Nayan Shah on "Bodily Defiance and Immigrant Detention".
Many thanks to the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative for co-sponsoring these events. Let me now introduce our featured speaker for today.
I am so thrilled that we get to hear from none other than Professor Erika Lee. Professor Lee is currently Regents Professor, the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, and the Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Where she also and she also serves as the President of the Organization of American Historians. As of the summer, Professor Lee is moving to join the faculty of Harvard University as the inaugural Bae Family Professor of History. Professor Lee is the author of four award-winning books in U.S. immigration and Asian American history they include, "At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943" that was published in 2003. Sorry I held up the wrong book. This is at America's Gates. Also "Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America " co-authored with Judy young and published in 2010. A third volume "The Making of Asian America: A History" published in 2015, with another edition published in 2016. And most recently "America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States" published in 2019, and already reissued in 2021. I will not read the entire list of honors and awards that Professor Lee has received as the list is extremely long. But let me say how privileged we are to have Professor Lee join us today.
She will begin with a lecture and then there will be an opportunity for Q&A. Please post your question or comment into the Q&A button on the bottom of the screen and we will endeavor to ask it of Professor Lee at the close of this event.
Thank you. Without further ado I'm going to turn this over to Professor Erika Lee.
ERIKA LEE: Hey everybody. Thank you Professor Volpp for that wonderful introduction. I'm so pleased to be with you if only virtually.
I was a UC Berkeley a graduate. I wish I could be with you in person.
I'm first going to share my screen and then I also want to share a land acknowledgment. First can someone just let me know that the what you're seeing is the PowerPoint presentation and that that all looks good.
Great, thank you.
I join you from Minneapolis just outside of the University of Minnesota which is located on Dakota land. Today many indigenous peoples including the Dakota and Ojibwe from throughout the state of Minnesota called the Twin Cities home. As a migration scholar I think it's incredibly important for us to acknowledge that the migration and settlement of immigrants and refugees to the United States has been part of the same U.S. settler-colonial practices that have displaced indigenous peoples and dispossessed them.
The study of our immigration and resettlement must acknowledge these intersections, consequences and ongoing legacies. I've been tasked, I'm the, I think I'm the first lecturer for this series and I've been tasked with sharing I think a general overview of the history of immigration on Angel Island. But I also want to leave us with some questions that we might consider in this current era of immigration restriction, and xenophobia, and racial reckoning.
But first, I want to begin with one of the things that I think has made the Angel Island Immigration Station and the immigration experience on Angel Island so tangible and so important for so many people, and especially visitors to the island. And that is the poetry. The poetry that has been discovered, carved deeply into the walls, and doors, and sometimes other places within the immigration station.
This following poem is one of thousands that were carved into the walls of the detention barracks. The men's detention barracks at the Angel Island Immigration Station. And it reads, "I clasped my hands and parting with my brothers and classmates. Because of the mouths or because of hunger, I hastened to cross the American ocean. How was I to know that the western barbarians had lost their hearts and reasons? What kind. With a. With a hundred kinds of oppressive laws they mistreat us Chinese."
This anonymous Chinese poet speaks to us from a hundred years ago and it serves as a useful starting point for for us today. I think that his poem helps to not only introduce us to the history of immigration through Angel Island. How this history is a history of systemic racism and xenophobia in the United States, but also how this is a history of resistance, organizing. He and so many others who remain anonymous were not silent, nor were they passive, they fought for their voices to be heard to seek entry into the United States and equality once here. Lastly the fact that this poem has been preserved on the barracked walls, and that Angel Island is now a National Historic Landmark, and it recently opened up a new Museum. Also shows how the site the immigration station site is serving, continues to serve as a central place of memory and history, but also reckoning with injustice today.
And I hope we'll get a chance to talk about some of those contemporary themes later in the program.
Professor Volpp held up the um the book that I co-wrote with my dear friend and colleague the late Professor Judy Yung, who I think um continues to be the scholar, community historian and activist best associated with the history of Angel Island Immigration Station. As many of you may know she began her career as a community librarian in the San Francisco Public Libraries, the Chinatown Branch. She was recruited into doing oral histories along with historian Him Mark Lai, poet Genny Lim, and we'll talk a little bit more about their efforts in the 1970s and 80s.
But it was my great privilege to first study with Judy when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley and she was a professor at UC Santa Cruz. She graciously volunteered or agreed to be a member of my dissertation committee, and then I served as a research assistant for her and we remained close as we worked together as volunteers on the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation board in the 1990s, early 2000s.
Of a set of organized activities and activism around preserving the historic site and and working towards gaining that National Historic Landmark status that the station received in 1998. And then around 2005 or so I was beginning to think about how in 2010 the Immigration Station would be I don't know if you can use the word celebrating but commemorating a hundred years, you know since the Immigration Station opened late January of 1910.
And I wondered whether it might not be a good time to revisit that history, and to employ, and to use some of the new historical sources that scholars were just beginning to to get access to, including thousands, tens of thousands of immigration records that had just been recently released and have made available the National Archives located in San Bruno, California. These were records that I had been very familiar with having spent days and weeks and months in the National Archives as part of my dissertation research that had focused on Chinese immigration.
But I realized that every time I was finding a file that pertain to the entry or admission application of a Chinese immigrant I was also picking up an immigration file from someone from Japan, from Pakistan, from Australia, from Italy there were so many different stories interrelated histories that we hadn't yet focused on. And so in 2005 I I started reaching out to focus at the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and asked, Is anybody planning on doing more research or more programming around the Centennial coming up? And they had said Judy has you know been thinking about this as well, why don't you, why don't you two talk.
And so one spring afternoon we gathered at Felicia Lowe's house. Felicia Lowe being the legendary documentary film maker, a producer of the classic documentary "Carved in Silence" which is about the Chinese immigrant experience on Angel Island and especially told through the poetry. And then the book that would later become " Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America" was hatched in her living room and we worked on it for the next five years and we're so privileged to be part of the Centennial celebrations in 2010. So this is one of the results of that research the book, but also the restored barracks the restored site around the historic barracks. We partnered with this book. We partnered with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation to celebrate that history to help fund it through proceeds of the book as well. And one of the key findings that we wanted to share with readers was that great diversity of immigrants and immigrant experiences, experiences of detention, deportation, incarceration, that I had begun to see when I was doing research at the National Archives.
And we found that from 1910 to 1940 Angel Island and San Francisco served as an entry point for over half a million people representing 80 different countries. Two-thirds of the newcomers came from China and Japan, but there were also immigrants from India and Korea, Russia, Mexico, the Philippines, Germany, Spain, Italy, Guatemala, El Salvador, Australia, New Zealand, etc. We also found that the the ways in which the government framed the purpose of the Angel Island Immigration Station was one that never really lived up to the framing that the government intended it to be.
We found government documents that that promoted Angel Island as the so-called "Ellis Island of the West" but of course our research found that the two islands and their purposes and their treatment of immigrants was in fact very, very different. Ellis Island enforced American immigration laws that certainly restricted but never excluded outright, by category, by national origin European immigrants. But Angel Island on the other hand was of course the chief port of entry for immigrants from Asia, and as such enforced unequal discriminatory immigration laws that singled them out for long detention periods, as well as immigration exclusion.
So just to give a little bit of context and and some numbers Ellis Island processed over 12 million people during its 60-year history whereas Angel Island processed half a million people in a 30-year period. So the scale is is much different. Only 20 percent of immigrants were detained on Ellis Island while 60 percent were detained on on Angel Island, so there we see the dramatic disparity. 98 percent were admitted successfully after one to two days of detention on Ellis Island, while on Angel Island the Chinese immigrants counted their detention time in weeks, and months, and even years. They had a surprisingly high admission rate given the Chinese Exclusion laws one that was 93 percent, but this is only after very long protracted and expensive legal battles.
Our research also focused on this is a photograph of Angel Island when it opened in 1910. And of course this building the administration building no longer exists it it was lost in a fire in 1940, but you can see the barracks, as well as the hospital building that has recently reopened. Our research also focused on the actual enforcement, and the people behind the enforcement of immigration policies on Angel Island.
And I in particular was fascinated in diving into biographies, newspaper reports, but also the day-to-day administrative decisions of many of these immigration officials that I got to know much too well, and trying to track their motivations, their policy decisions, the precedence that they they put in place. These immigration officials called themselves, they identified themselves, they labeled themselves as "The Nation's Gatekeepers" and they had the power to admit or deny, to include or exclude, to deport immigrants. When Angel Island first opened there were about 30 immigration service employees, so a very small force, but by 1920 there were 137. This is about the peak of the immigration service on Angel Island. And their actions, their policies really formed the basis for the modern immigration service.
We know that as soon as immigrants disembarked from the steamships and then took one of the smaller Angel Island cutters to the immigration station that they were first taken for medical examinations. And these were not applied evenly across immigrant groups. It really depended on your race and your national origin. Asians and particular Chinese men were singled out for the most invasive and humiliating medical examinations. And many of the many of our legal medical exclusions that were written into law were formed out of and based on immigration officials desire to exclude as many as possible on Angel Island. After the medical examinations they were put before a Bureau of Special Inquiry. These were long and intensive interrogations, often about minute details regarding family backgrounds, their family relationships their geographic details of their places of birth. And again these interrogations were not applied evenly it was very much depended on which immigration policy was the immigrant being processed under, but also for Chinese in particular, these interrogations were extremely intensive some lasting eight hours a day over several different days.
Answers of of applicants that were given during these interrogations were then cross-examined compared to the answers asked, or the sorry the questions asked of their so-called witnesses. And so just for example, for Chinese applying for admission under the exclusion laws, the exclusion laws barred Chinese laborers, this is from 1882 to 1943. It did allow Chinese immigrants who qualified under certain exempt categories, merchants, teachers, students, travelers and diplomats, to apply for admission. It wasn't a guarantee , but you could you could apply for admission. And then as a result of legal challenges by Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans, the wives and children of merchants, as well as the wives and children of U.S.-born citizens of Chinese descent, were also allowed to apply for admission.
But there were additional qualifications. So for example. U.S. citizens of Chinese descent and Chinese Merchants were required to have two White witnesses testify on their behalf. This meant not only asking two White individuals, to you know. at whether they'd be willing to to serve as a witness. But also that meant really taking off a whole day of work, getting on one of the ferries that would have left San Francisco. For example, going out to the island, spending a day on the island, and then traveling back. And maybe the case wasn't going to be heard that day or maybe it took longer. I mean these were great Investments, that these witnesses had, to had to be willing to make in order to verify the status the exempt status of Chinese immigrants and Chinese American citizens. This was not required of other immigrant groups.
Because so many of these cases took so long this meant that immigrants were detained overnight, for weeks, months, sometimes years. In crowded barracks that had never been, had had not been built to withstand the, the great numbers of immigrants that ended up being detained for so long at the Immigration Station. The Chinese made up the overwhelming majority around 70 percent of the detainee population at the immigration station. The average stay was two to three weeks, the longest of all immigrant groups. But again many stayed on the island for months and even years. We have found that the longest attention was just over two years.So this is sort of the an overview of the process of immigration.
But what Judy and I really were interested in as social historians were the lives the experiences of of individuals and of communities in particular. And Judy you know had done quite a bit of research and oral histories of Chinese immigrant detainees beginning in the 1970s, but by the 1990s we knew that there was so much more to discover. And one of the things that really facilitated our research was the the burgeoning interest of so many in their own family histories.
And so I'm going to share a number of family histories that we were privileged to to learn about in partnership with those families and with with communities. We did what historians do in terms of that traditional historical, archival research, and research and published sources, as well as oral histories. But we also had a team of of community-based volunteers, representing various different communities, who came in and helped us keep track of and and form a database of immigration files. But also helped us to establish relationships with individuals and and with families.
And so this next story is one that came out of friendships with a some family members who shared with us their ancestors immigration file. And it's the story of a woman named Soto Shee. This is a story, it's a tragic story, so I do want to give a little bit of a warning. Soto Shee. Soto Shee's experience on Angel Island was not something that we had access to her file had been hidden away. Deliberately hidden away and put behind some restrictions. We had to ask family members, family members first found it after filing a freedom of information request and then it was shared with us by her children. This is a story that demonstrates first the toll that immigrant detention took on many but also as I hope will become clear resilience out of tragedy.
Soto Shee arrived at the Immigration Station from Hong Kong in late July of 1924. She came with her seven-month-old son, Soon Din. Whose photo you can see her on this slide, as well. While in detention, and let me add that the conditions at the barracks as you saw from that previous slide were crowded. They were unsanitary. Chinese and other detainees consistently complained to immigration officials about better food, better sanitation, better conditions. But as the records show because these complaints were consistent year-after-year-after-year, year improvements were slow if, if they came at all. Soto Shee and Soon Din were in detention at the Chinese women's barracks that are now in the hospital. And while in detention a little Soon Din got gravely ill and he died suddenly. His body was sent back to San Francisco for burial, but Soto Shee was required to remain behind in detention. She was grief stricken, she was distraught. She pleaded with immigration officials to be allowed to go into San Francisco to be with her husband. We saw in the immigration file a very poignant appeal written by her lawyer detailing just how much distress she was under. And then we saw on the next page the reply of the immigration official which was just a one-liner and it said "We see no undue detriment in this case. She remains at the immigration station." Three weeks after her son died, Soto Shee tried to commit suicide. The Immigration Station matron found her in the women's bathroom after she had tried to take her life by hanging. And the matron took her to the hospital. Her life was saved. Soto Shee's husband renewed efforts to get her admitted into the country, and she was eventually allowed to leave the immigration station and start a new life in San Francisco.
When we published "Angel Island" in 2010, this is all that we knew of Soto Shee that her time on the island was one of imaginable despair and tragedy, but that she had been able to leave the immigration station and, and go to San Francisco. Then as we began to talk about the book around the country Judy and I noticed something a little odd at every talk we gave whether it was in San Francisco or New York or LA or DC we were approached by various people who said that they were Soto Shee's family many, many descendants. Children and grandchildren, and sometimes even great-grandchildren. And after talking to them we learned more about what happened to Soto Shee she went on to raise eight children, she lived to be 96 years old, and as the stories that we heard about her from, her children and grandchildren, she she never forgot those early days on Angel Island. But she went on to build this enormous family that continued to be proud of what she had done and the sacrifice that she had made for this new life in the United States.
Soto Shee's Angel Island ordeal and the many Chinese poems written and carved into the barracks walls by angry, frustrated, and homesick immigrants are powerful reminders of the costs and hardships of immigration under such a discriminatory regime. But they are also evidence of resistance and perseverance. We know that there were so many Chinese poems either preserved on the walls or published in newspapers before they were destroyed. But in recent years and especially as the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation has preserved the, the buildings there have been many more inscriptions that have been discovered. Writings in Russian, and Spanish, and Italian, in Punjabi, and Korean, English, German, and Japanese. Photographs that we've collected revealed the global character of immigration through Angel Island. We know that between 1915 and 1920 for example non-asians represented approximately one-third of the immigrants applying for admission at the Port of San Francisco. The largest groups included Russians and Mexicans, who came to the United States seeking refugee from revolutionary violence and disorder. Japanese so-called "Picture Brides", Japanese, sorry Chinese "Paper Sons", Sikh and Filipino laborers, and Korean, Russian and Jewish refugees.
But we knew very little about these immigrants, and so we again dove down deep into the archives, we combed through newspapers and letters, published accounts, and we sought help from various community members. Some of the maps and blueprints that we found also showed us that racial and gender segregation policies were strictly enforced at the Immigration Station to keep both Whites and Asian, men and women separate from each other. And at the new museum, that is part of the hospital building, they have recreated the whites and Asian entry or signs above the two different doors . So you can see that recreated today.
So we knew that there was this great diversity, but we also knew about gender and racial segregation. And diving more deeply into those questions of how hierarchies are embedded in and practiced through immigration policy. We wanted to share a few more of these experiences that illustrate the ways in which inequality gets reinforced through immigration policy.
For example, the first person recorded to be admitted into the country from Angel Island was a man named Wong Chung Hong. He was a Chinese merchant who applied for admission into the country in January of 1910. As this photo shows his, he's got richly embroidered robes, he had immigration documents from the Chinese government and the U.S consulate. His genteel appearance all convinced immigration inspectors of his upper class merchant status. He was admitted after three days at the Immigration Station.
Contrast that to the story that we learned about and investigated of Mexican immigrant Esther Lopez, her husband Catarino, and their children who were unanimously excluded as likely to become public charges. Meaning that immigration officials believe that they would become dependent on welfare. Immigrant inspectors thought that the family had quote a very poor appearance, that the husband in particular would not be able to support the family. Catarino was described as thin and scrawny looking, and not at all rugged. You know, so do a gender analysis of that description. Esther was in her last trimester of pregnancy and they assumed that she would be unable to work. While detained at the Immigration Station, Esther gave birth to twins at the station hospital, this is the only recorded birth of twins that we have come across. The family Sacramento relatives launched a defense after immigration officials denied the family entry. But immigrant inspectors would not be swayed. The Lopez family was deported back to Mexico after three months at the Immigration Station.
This again we just read this immigration file and we could tell that story from the perspective of their plight at the Immigration Station. But we wanted to learn more especially about that early Mexican and Mexican-American community in Northern California at that time.
And so I started to dive into anything that I could read about the subject for that early 20th century and one of the classics that some of you may be familiar with was is Ernesto Galarza's "Barrio Boy", an autobiography that that many of us read an undergraduate and just as a well-known early Mexican-American autobiography. And so in looking through that one day I realized that he had visited the Immigration Station as a young boy, and that he had written about it. And here's this passage that he he included. He described how he's visiting his cousins but that they were a family that had just been recently deported. "So it was hello and goodbye in one afternoon." He wrote, " The man in uniform had merely shown us some papers but he had not told us why... I [silently] called him all the names I could think of like gringo pendejo (idiotic foreigner). My uncle said "Es una injustica." Our hopes had been denied and our joy in turned into sadness by people we were powerless event to question."" It turns out that Ernesto Galarza and and Esther Lopez were cousins. That he was on the island visiting them just before they were being deported. And of course Galarza would later become a well-known Chicano historian and activist. So I like to think that that early experience and that family history dating back to Angel Island had some role to play in his later activism.
Immigration officials also treated women differently from men. They were routinely excluded as public charges, and also asked intrusive questions about their sexual lives, while men were not. The right to enter was based upon whether or not their husbands could support them. Their own ability to support themselves was not considered relevant.
Take the case of Rose Lewis, a White English woman married to Emil Lewis, a Black ship steward from the island of Mauritius, near South Africa. And this is where we'll see race, gender and class intersecting. In 1918 she was excluded as a person likely to become a public charge, after her husband was excluded for being illiterate. Which is under the Immigration Act of 1917, literacy was a requirement for admission. She argued in these beautifully written cursive letters to immigration officials that she had been working as a stewardess. She was firmly in control of supporting herself and that she and her husband were only passing through the United States on their way to Canada anyway. But immigration inspectors failed to change their minds, the couple and their seven-week son, seven-week old son were detained on Angel Island for six months while their case was being processed, and then they were deported back to Hong Kong.
Even U.S. citizens sometimes got caught up on Angel Island and its detention machine. This is a photograph of Goso or "Karl" Yoneda. He was born in the United States but educated in Japan known as a "Kibei". He had left Japan to avoid conscription into the Imperial Army, after 16 days crammed in a steerage quarters he finally arrived in San Francisco. This is in the 1920s, but he found that his cousin who was required to come and testify on his behalf was working and could not take the time off to come to the island. Yoneda would spend the next two months locked up on Angel Island. To pass the time he read newspapers and books, he wrote Japanese poems in his diary. And he wrote one about his Angel Island experience that was published in his autobiography later called, "Ganbatte".
This is one of the poems that he also published in the San Francisco Nichibei newspaper, the Japanese language newspaper in 1927. And he used a pseudonym her, "Angel Island--what a beautiful name. But there are no Angels here. Only nameless immigrant prisoners. Tears in my eyes have dried up. After several days of incarceration. No more tears of sadness, no more tears of anguish. I hear sounds of different voices from the next cells. Chinese, Russian, Mexican, Greek and Italian. Voices of sorrow,, ostalgia, rage and passion." Finally the Youneda's cousin showed up at the station after a brief interview he was released from the Island, but again that early experience on Angel Island at the immigration station must have shaped some of his labor activism in later years. He is best known um as Karl Yoneda, a fearless labor activist.
Approximately 1,000 Koreans also sought admission through Angel Island. They were mostly young men, political refugees, there were also some Korean "Picture Brides". Among them was the family pictured here. Whang Sa Sun, his wife Chang Tai Sun, they were fleeing harsh Japanese colonial rule. They had disguised themselves they stole across the northern Korean border into Manchuria. And from there they made their way to Shanghai and under disguise as Chinese citizens and booked passage on an American steamer going to San Francisco. All of this intrigue, escape and disguise was important because Japan had annexed Korea they were controlling the border, they would, they were not letting Koreans emigrate abroad. Whang Sa Sun and Chang Tai Sun arrived without any visas or any documentation. They told immigration officials that they were students and that they had left Korea before Japan had annexed it in 1910.
They tried to circumvent the Asian exclusion laws, and they were only able to do so because they had the help and assistance of community members, the Korean National Association, which was lobbying the U.S. State Department to recognize Koreans, as basically political refugees rather than as Asians excluded by the exclusion laws. And they were successful 95 percent of Koreans were admitted after a short stay on Angel Island. But again these numbers are very very small.
Whang Sa Sun settled in San Francisco. He opened up a dry cleaning shop. He became the minister of the Korean Methodist Church, and a leader in the Korean Independence Movement. Korean American nationalists and and anti-colonial activists are not the only ones who got their start on Angel Island.
Many Indian nationalists also did as well. The majority of South Asian immigrants who came to the United States they were mainly, they mainly practiced the Sikh religion they were mainly from the Punjab region and present-day Northwest India and Pakistan. Had left their their homelands to escape British colonialism and poverty. But by the time they came to the United States around 1908 through 1910, the anti-Asian exclusion movement was in full force. The Chinese had been excluded in 1882, Japanese and Koreans in 1908.
By 1910, local activists in San Francisco that had already formed what was called the Japanese Korean Exclusion League, they changed their name to the Asiatic Exclusion League to better target the so-called Hindu Invasion. This is a cartoon published in the San Francisco Daily News in 1910, that tried to illustrate the danger of immigration from South Asia. It shows them as subhuman and impoverished. As cheap laborers who were being welcomed into the United States by greedy railroad industrialists, but whose unending immigration would would eventually become a hostile takeover of the United States. These cartoons were incredibly popular throughout the United States about immigration at the time. These public attitudes about South Asian, South Asian immigration had a real impact on Angel Island. South Asians had the highest rejection rate of all groups at the immigration station from 1908 to 1920. 66 percent of all South Asian applicants were rejected usually on the grounds that they would become public charges. Few of them had the financial resources to hire lawyers, like the Chinese, to appeal their decisions. Nor were there any ethnic organizations to assist them, like the Korean national league or the Korean churches, and the British government which ruled over India could not be counted to support Indians abroad.
One of the family stories that continues to, that we discovered during this research, and that continues to live on and to have an impact is the story of Vaishno Das Bagai, his wife Kala, and their three young Sons. They arrived from Pesjawar in present-day Pakistan in 1916. Vaishno was a well-educated man from an upper class family. Immigration officials were very suspicious, and very surprised to see an entire family come because most really, nearly all South Asian immigrants who came were were male laborers. And they were planning on using the same harsh interrogation practices, and getting ready to exclude them as public charges, like they were doing with other South Asians. But Vaishno was prepared he had come with twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. And once he showed that to immigration officials, lo and behold they were allowed to enter the United States. Vaishno had come explicitly because he was in the Ghadar Independence Movement, this is a movement that advocated for the overthrow British rule in India. He also wanted his children to grow up in what he believed to be a free country. He adopted Western manners, he bought a home he started a successful business it was called, " The Guy's Bazaar" on Fillmore Street in San Francisco.
He became a naturalized U.S. citizen but 13 years after his arrival in the United States Vaishno was bitterly disappointed in his adopted homeland. Fellow Indian nationalists were arrested and deported from the United States. South Asians were prevented from owning land or property due to the California Alien Land Laws, and then after the Supreme Court decision in Bhagat Singh Thind, ruled that South Asians could not become naturalized citizens. Bhagat was stripped of his naturalized citizenship. Feeling trapped and betrayed he committed suicide in 1928. He published a letter in the San Francisco Chronicle publicizing his plight criticizing the United States I think hoping to impact change he wrote, "I came to America hoping to make this land my home... But now they come and say to me I am no longer an American citizen. Now what am I? We cannot exercise our rights. Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and bridges burnt behind." After Vaishno's death, Kala struggled with everyday tasks, of surviving in a new land, caring for her three young boys. They as a family had faced a lot of discrimination, including in Berkeley, California. They had bought a house they were about to move in and their White neighbors prevented them from from actually moving into the home. They were protesting and they refused to let the family in. But after Vaishno passed away Kala became involved in the community. She focused on raising her children and helping newcomers, new Indian immigrants in the United States. All of her sons went on to college. And soon after the ban that barred South Asians from nationalized citizenship was lifted in 1946, Kala and her sons became U.S. citizens.
There are other stories of Jewish refugees who found their first days in the United States through Angel Island. This is the story of Alice Edelstein who arrived in 1939 1940. And there's also the stories of Filipinos who arrived first as U.S. Nationals who were not subjected to the Asian exclusion laws, and the later as colonial subjects. One of the stories that we focused on was Eliseo Felipe who arrived in 1933. And was able to just get off the boat and enter the United States, but then after the United States passed its Filipino exclusion law known as the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1935, he had a more difficult time. He eventually made into the United States. He volunteered for the U.S. Army during World War II and was granted U.S. citizenship. but other Filipinos were not as lucky. The Angel Island was also the site of the Filipino Repatriation Movement in which close to 3,000 Filipinos in the United States were sent back to the Philippines through the immigration station.
In 1940, a fire destroyed the Angel Island Immigration Administration building and all immigration processing was moved back into San Francisco, into the city. The immigration buildings that were spared in the fire were abandoned and slated for demolition until 1970.
When a California state park ranger named Alexander Weiss was looking through the barracks looking at the walls and rediscovering the Chinese poetry in the detention barracks. This discovery helped to drive community-driven historical activism this is the book cover of "Island Poetry" and history of Chinese immigrants on Angel Island this is the book and the research that Judy Yung, and Him Mark Lai, and Genny Lim were involved in publishing this book in 1980. And then in 1998, we were able to secure National Historic Landmark status for the immigration station.
And in 2009 the barracks were restored after a massive preservation era effort and the site was reopened.
Angel Island has recently driven many efforts to recognize and reckon with our history of racism off the island in the years since that that reopening. First, was the 2012 Statement of Regret, Congressional Statement of Regret, regarding the Chinese Exclusion Act.
And then more recently parts of Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, California were renamed for Kala Bagai. This is the result of efforts of community activists, especially those involved in the South Asian Radical History Tour of Berkeley, California. They lobbied the city and nominated Kala for the renaming effort. And in 2020 that effort was successful. And you can go and visit Kala Bagai Way, it's just across from the Shattuck Avenue BART station.
And I want to end by simply asking a couple of questions. I believe that Angel Island of course was important in its own time but that it remains vitally important today. We have read in recent newspaper headlines and on the news that the Biden, the Biden Administration is trying to reform immigration policies it's created a new program to parole up to 30,000 people from Venezuela, from Cuba, from Nicaragua but at the same time it has kept in place many Trump-era policies, that so many of us have fought against. This includes the Title 42, public health policy, put in place by the previous administration that allows the United States to immediately expel asylum seekers coming across from Mexico. And that even though there are no public health justifications, this is what the Trump administration had first used to implement this rule, this policy remains in place.
So we're left to conclude that despite many campaign promises, that the Biden Administration is not committed to dismantling what he described as inhumane immigration policies of his predecessor. Instead he is letting xenophobia and racism fuel immigration policy today. So my two questions to end with are. How does the history of Angel Island take on renewed meaning in the midst of ongoing and normalized xenophobia? And how is the immigration station still a site of resistance combining history, memory and reckoning with racism today?
Thank you so much. I know I've gone over a little bit of time, but I hope we can get to some of your questions as well. Thank you.
LETI VOLPP: Thank you so much Erika. This was absolutely wonderful to hear. All of the wealth of your information and research about Angel Island.
Maybe I could start. We just have a few minutes for questions, but I'll start with one. Which is, I wonder if you, I feel like the the work that you did with Judy Yung has tried so hard to show the heterogeneity of what happened at Angel Island? And I wonder, a few thoughts about the ways in which the focus on the poems written in Chinese, as well as the ways in which the legal architecture this is a quoting you the legal architecture of U.S immigration law was essentially formed around Chinese immigrants, if there's a way in which that has occluded other functions of Angel Island, so that for example we think of it not just as about exclusion but also as a side of deportation. For example of Filipinos, right after the independence of the Philippines, and if that's a broader issue where there's a way in which there's a kind of assumption that we think of the racialization experience of Asian Americans as about exclusion period, and/or that we think about immigration as characterized by exclusion, as embodied by Chinese immigrants and that that enable that doesn't enable us to see what other things have been happening in the context of immigration or specifically with Angel Island.
ERIKA LEE: Yeah. I think that's a a great question. It's not just exclusion, it's also deportation, it's of course detention, it's also repatriation, so forced um forced deportation. You know they called it, the U.S. government called it the Filipino Repatriation Program, as if it was voluntary of course it was forced. It's also as the Bagai family story reveals it's a story, it's a history of denaturalization. Of literally going after with an arrest warrant, and with a government case after nationalized citizens. I recently went back to the archives just a few months ago to finally see if I could identify any of the court records, or any other records related to Vaishno Bagai denaturalization and I found, and what was called what is called an equity case. A a legal order, USA vs. Vaishno Das Bagai, where they charge him with illegally obtaining naturalizationship. Falsely claiming that he was white, when in fact he was a Hindu.
So this is, I think you know, I I think that you're right, the focus on the poetry has always been an entry point. It is probably one of the reasons why largely you know the National Historic Landmark status was bestowed. It's what is often teachable, it's it's, it brings visitors to the station every year, but it is obviously just one part of that story. And I hope that we can keep on focusing and keep on discovering. There you know, 80, 000 files so I encourage all of your students to go to San Bruno and start looking through more of those immigration files to help us recover even more of these histories.
LETI VOLPP: Thank you. Just two more questions.
One of them surfaced actually a couple people.
I'm sorry my camera keeps freezing. I'm going to turn off, but you can hear me.
The fact that there were these twins born on Angel Island, we know that the 14th Amendment says all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens. Nonetheless it seems as if these children were not granted U.S .citizenship presumably because there's this legal fiction that even if you're here, if you're in a detention center like Angel Island, they pretend that you're still physically outside. It doesn't confer this idea that you're actually born on U.S. territory. But I was curious to hear if there was anything about that in the file?
And then the last question from Susan Moffett, actually links very closely to the what you were just observing about Kala Bagai Way, and questions about how we memorialize history? What history do we remember? Susan's question is, "What would it take for Angel Island to become as well known as Ellis Island, and for its historical lessons to be more widely shared? Only a small fraction of visitors to Angel Island visit the Immigrant Immigration station, and even many Bay Area residents don't know this history."
ERIKA LEE: Yeah, excellent questions.
The file for Esther Lopez does not include any discussion of citizenship of the twins. But that would be an excellent research path is to examine birth records.I do not know the answer of that, of where any birth records of those who were born at the immigration station, where they would be. Whether they would be at the same place as other you know births recorded for the city of San Francisco.
And then to Susan's question. It's a matter of money and it's a matter of history. So Ellis Island, the immigration museum, has done a better job of of combining the "We Built America" ethos and the entry to, the patriotic, you know, entry to America story. With Ellis Island's history of detention and deportation, as well. But as you know our nation likes to, and thrives on the celebratory stories. And it's harder to do that with the Angel Island history. If we're going to tell it truthfully, and realistically, so there's that part. But another aspect of it is, it comes down to money. You know the, the ferry takes you to that one place on the island. You still have to hike uphill, or take a tram to the immigration station. Whereas with Ellis Island there are many, many companies that take you to see the Statue of Liberty, and then to Ellis Island. And you just get off the boat and you the museum is right. There so there's access, there's that. As well as, as well as just you know money to expand exhibits and programming, and things like that. But that's why this program this year-long program focusing on Angel Island is so, so important. We need to replicate this nationally.
LETI VOLPP: Thank you that's so interesting. To think about the tours that go from Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island, and just what sorts of broader narratives that feeds into.
Well, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation. We're so grateful that you took this time to be with us today.
And yeah without that, this is the conclusion of the webinar. Be well everybody.