The Fall 2025 semester is essentially over at Grinnell College, so I will use this opportunity to write a recap on the research team’s various activities.
In mid-October, I attended the Rural Chinatowns and Hidden Sites: Chinese American History in the Deep South and Midwest Conference in Memphis, TN. The meeting included a field trip to Greenville and Cleveland in Mississippi to visit Chinese American sites across the Mississippi Delta where I was able to spend time with Susan Brownell, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Emmi Dunn-Bahurlet, a Memphis-based community historian. Many conferences speakers and attendees were residents and/or descendants of the Mississippi Delta.
In November, student researcher Jorge Salinas ’26 and I attended the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference in Alpine, TX. We presented a paper titled, “Migration Palimpsests in West Texas: The Archaeology of Nineteenth Century Chinese Railroad Camps at the US-Mexico Border.” The trip was funded by the Skiles Family, whose ranch includes the 1882 Langtry Chinese railroad worker camp where research for the paper was conducted. We also met Kinley Coyan, local West Texas rancher, who we plan to collaborate with in the future to record Chinese railroad laborer camps from the same time period.
As for the Wyoming Chinatowns archaeology project, Dr. Dudley Gardner paid us a visit in mid-October when he dropped off artifacts from past field seasons of the Rock Springs and Evanston Chinatown excavations. There wasn’t enough room in his truck to bring everything, so Paul Hoornbeek also made a trip to Wyoming to pick up even more previously excavated artifacts.
Throughout the semester, student research assistants Luis Lopez ’27 and Avajane Lei ’28 continued their summer work cataloging artifacts from the 2025 Rock Springs Chinatown field season. Not all artifacts were aesthetically pleasing to sort through and identify, especially large piles of rusted metal fragments.
In addition, my research on transnationalism between Wo Hing village and the San Bernardino and Riverside Chinatowns, was featured in a new historical archaeology textbook and a blog post written by a Chinese American descendant. Thank you to Dr. Adrian Praetzellis and Art Wong for reading and citing my dissertation. In Art’s case, thank you for reading my dissertation multiple times!! Below are links to their work.
“Historical Archaeology in a Nutshell” by Adrian Praetzellis
“Deciphering My Dad’s Rice Bowls” by Art Wong
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