Connie Young Yu and Barre Fong have created an online exhibit titled The Geary Act Project which focuses on late 19th century “Certificates of Residence” required to be carried by Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. to prove that they were legal residents and not in violation of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Geary Act Project is a reminder of homegrown federal anti-immigrant policies that threatened specific communities with jail and deportation if they did not comply with registration.
In the course of my research on late 19th and early 20th century Chinatowns and Chinese truck farms in Inland Southern California, I found that the Geary Act criminalized all Chinese in the U.S. by allowing “Chinese Inspectors” from the Bureau of Immigration to indiscriminately question any Chinese person they saw. These Chinese Inspectors were not averse to using violence and often gained the help of local police to conduct surprise raids on Chinatown and Chinese truck farms; historian Erika Lee noted that these federal immigration enforcement officers were referred to as “Chinese catchers.”
I wrote about some of the Chinese immigrants caught up in this deportation regime for The Geary Project and you can read my article here: https://www.thegearyactproject.com/copy-of-special-projects
Leave a Reply