{"id":66898,"date":"2015-05-05T08:51:15","date_gmt":"2015-05-05T13:51:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=66898"},"modified":"2015-08-13T20:56:49","modified_gmt":"2015-08-14T01:56:49","slug":"ethnic-enclaves-and-the-chinatown-you-never-heard-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/05\/05\/ethnic-enclaves-and-the-chinatown-you-never-heard-of\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chinatown of the American South"},"content":{"rendered":"

When one thinks of American Chinatowns, they usually think of San Francisco and New York, but at one time the third largest Chinatown in the U.S. was in Louisiana. It’s story is an example of\u00a0how economics and geopolitics shape the growth of ethnic enclaves.<\/p>\n

After the\u00a0American Civil War ended legalized slavery in the U.S., Southern planters faced the challenge of finding labor to work their crops. It was common to employ the same black men and women who had been enslaved, now as sharecroppers or wage laborers, but the planters were interested in other sources of labor as well.<\/p>\n

At nola.com<\/a>, Richard Campanella<\/a> describes how some planters in Louisiana turned to Chinese laborers. Ultimately, they hired about 1,600 Chinese people, recruited directly from\u00a0China and also from California.<\/p>\n

This would be a doomed experiment. The Chinese workers demanded better working conditions and pay then the Louisiana planters wanted to give. There was a general stalemate and many of the Chinese workers migrated to the city.<\/p>\n

By 1871, there was a small, bustling Chinatown just outside of the French quarter and, by the late 1930s, two blocks of Bourbon St. were dominated by Chinese businesses: import shops, laundries, restaurants, narcotics, and cigar stores (some of the migrants had come to the U.S. via Cuba). Campanella quotes the New Orleans Bee<\/em>:<\/p>\n

A year ago we had no Chinese among us, we now see them everywhere… This looks, indeed, like business.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Big Gee and Lee Sing, New Orleans 1937 (photo courtesy of nola.com<\/em>):<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Other residents, it seemed, welcomed the way the\u00a0Chinese\u00a0added color and texture to the city. Campanella writes that “New Orleanians of all backgrounds also patronized Chinatown.” Louis Armstrong, who was born in 1901, talked of going “down in China Town [and] hav[ing] a Chinese meal for a change.” Jelly Roll Morton mentioned dropping by to pick up drugs for the sex workers employed in the nearby red light district.<\/p>\n

A strip club<\/a> now inhabits the old Chinese laundry; none of the original Chinatown businesses remain. But it held on a long time, with a few businesses lasting until the 1990s. All that’s left today is a hand-painted sign for the\u00a0On Leong Merchants Association at 530 1\/2 Bourbon St.<\/p>\n

\"13\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For more, get\u00a0Richard Campanella’s book,\u00a0Geographies of New Orleans<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When one thinks of American Chinatowns, they usually think of San Francisco and New York, but at one time the third largest Chinatown in the U.S. was in Louisiana. It’s story is an example of\u00a0how economics and geopolitics shape the growth of ethnic enclaves. After the\u00a0American Civil War ended legalized slavery in the U.S., Southern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":66899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,23635,253,2125,1772,285,1759,23665,341,76],"class_list":["post-66898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economics","tag-economics-history","tag-history","tag-immigrationcitizenship","tag-nation-china","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-asianspacific-islanders","tag-raceethnicity-history","tag-ruralurban","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/04\/28.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66898"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67710,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66898\/revisions\/67710"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}