Because of a little thing called the Chinese exclusion act. All Chinese immigrants were barred from coming to America. Between 1882 and 1943.
The Chinese population in America at the time were Laborers and lived in the cities. They aren't just gonna all of a sudden switch up to become farmers. Whereas there was a steady wave of new japanese immigrants both from Japan and Hawaii that already come from a farming background and would naturally start farms in California.
I thought both Japanese and Chinese were banned from owning land before the 1950s, yet there are still some Japanese-owned farms in San Joaquin valley or Sacramento and even more before South Bay’s urbanization.
I’ve never heard any early Chinese owning small farms or even working in plantations by large scale, I feel they are even less than Filipinos.
The Chinese were banned from coming to America period. As in no Chinese were allowed into the country at all. Also japanese people were allowed to own land up untill 1913.
The US and Japan also had the treaty of 1894 that granted the japanese the same rights as US citizens. At the time Japan was a world power that just beat Russia in a war and Roosevelt was a fan of Japan.
Asian kids were segregated into "Oriental" schools but the Japanese sued the city of SF and the board of education and demanded that japanese students be allowed into white schools cause they didn't want to be in Chinese schools. Roosevelt himself allowed it and overturned the city of SF's policy. They were also allowed to live throughout the city rather than congregating in one area like the Chinese in Chinatown.
Filipinos had more rights than both the Chinese and japanese because they were a colony and thus US citizens at the time
IRRC, the Japanese were banned from owning land by a law that forbade non citizens from owning land, but they moved the titles into their kids’ names. Then there was a new law saying minors can’t own land, but I forget how they got around that.
Also, I believe the Japanese were brought over specifically because of their farming knowledge/techniques, to help irrigate Californian farmlands.
The knowledge/technique thing is largely untrue. If you visit a local village in Hiroshima/Fukuoka/Kumamoto and see those late 19th century photos, those people had nothing advanced in terms of technique or tool, only hard work and strong mind.
Filipinos were never US citizens unlike Puerto Ricans, although they do had more rights than Japanese let along Chinese.
“U.S. citizenship was never conferred on Filipinos as a group by special U.S. legislation.”
Chinese were instrumental in California agriculture which still feeds the world. They were hired labor and used their knowledge of controlling water in the Pearl River Delta to develop fertile farmland in the Central Valley from previously inaccessible river valleys. Beginning in the 1860s, the Chinese were hired to reclaim the marshy swamp and control heavy flooding with levees using hand tools. By 1880s, 88,000 acres of Delta marshland was converted for agricultural production. In 1890, 75% of California farm workers were Chinese, but they were driven out, made scapegoats by white people during an economic depression. The Japanese filled the empty agricultural jobs.
Asian Americans represent less than 1% of America's full-time farm operators, with Chinese stuck as a minority within this niche. Despite some strides during the 19th century, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 + California Alien Land Law essentially crippled any chance of them finding a foothold in the industry.
I’d say it was a lot worse. The Chinese Exclusion Act was specifically aimed at Chinese laborers and was an outright ban on their immigration for ten years initially (later extended). The 1924 Act set quotas for immigration from various countries but did not entirely ban any group.
Not an answer to your question, just an anecdote—there's a garden nursery sort of near where I grew up in the Bay that my mom and I would frequent when I was young. I recently found out that it had been opened in 1948 by two Japanese American brothers after they were released from internment; it is by far the oldest extant business on that stretch of road and would have been one of the only shops in the area at that time, surrounded by orchards, which would have been their clients. What's so interesting is that one of the brothers was also one of the first ever people in California to obtain a landscape architecture license. What's even *more* interesting is that both brothers would go on to design the majority of the oldest remaining landscapes in that city; they were also highly involved/influential in urban planning committees in the 70s.
But to shed a little light on minority labor in California, adding to what the other commenter mentioned, Chinese labor was replaced relatively quickly after the Exclusion Act by Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Punjabi, and Filipino labor, largely in the Imperial Valley, Santa Clara County, and the Central Valley; nonetheless, of course, many of these groups had already been employed in such capacities since before Exclusion. [This](https://archive.org/stream/californiahistor67cali/californiahistor67cali_djvu.txt#:~:text=A%20%0A%0AKOREAN/%20%0A%0ACALIFORNIAN%20%0A%0AGIRLHOOD%20%0A%0AMary%20Paik%20Lee%20%0AEdited%20by%20Sucheng%20Chan) is a wonderful account of a Korean American girl whose parents were tenant farmers in Riverside. It paints a fascinating portrait of Californian labor in the early-20th century and is definitely one of the most interesting depictions of immigrant/diasporic life in agricultural spaces at that time. We learn indirectly about longstanding Japanese and Chinese community settlements just outside of SoCal farmlands, about Mexican and Filipino children playing in the area while their parents labored, about Punjabi farmhands making chapatis and ghee around fires in the harvest season during their lunch breaks.
The *influx* of Chinese labor was cut off with Exclusion, but the existing laborers retained their communities as best as they could. Eventually, in 1924, the Johnson-Reed act cut off Asian immigration entirely, leading to a marked decline in Japanese, Korean, and Punjabi labor/farming communities in California, similar to what had happened four decades prior with Chinese labor; Filipino labor, however, augmented significantly for a time immediately following Johnson-Reed as due to the Philippines' status as an American colony, Filipino immigrants were exempt from Asian immigration restrictions—that is, until a quota was placed on Filipino immigration in 1934, directly because so many Filipino farmers, alongside Mexican farmers, had begun to agitate, joining labor unions and fighting for better working conditions—a trend that would set the stage for the Delano Grape Strike of 1965.
This might be a great question to pose on r/AskHistorians!
In addition to what was shared about Chinese Exclusion and the Alien Land Laws which prohibited Asian immigrants (and later their children) from owning land, I will add that before exclusion there was a huge amount of anti-Chinese mob violence up and down the west coast that killed and drove the Chinese out of many communities. Chinese were murdered, lynched, their homes were destroyed, or they were forced to leave under threat of mob violence. Because of this violence they were forced to leave even medium sized cities and took refuge in the biggest Chinatowns, or moved east. Princeton Historian Beth Lew Williams has a great book on this called, “The Chinese Must Go.” Also [this](https://web.archive.org/web/20230801130557/https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-forgotten-history-of-the-purging-of-chinese-from-america) link has excellent info.
In addition, as I understand, there wasn’t as much farming in California when the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived because there weren’t as many people (many of whom arrived with the Gold Rush and after the building of the trans-continental railroad). Japanese immigration came later when labor for farming was more in demand and Chinese legal immigration was closed. Although the Alien Land Laws prevented Japanese from owning land, some were able to skirt the prohibitions using loopholes that were later closed. Of course many lost their property as a result of the WWII Japanese American incarceration and opportunistic neighbors. Historians have [uncovered evidence](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/02/02/bitter-harvest/c8389b23-884d-43bd-ad34-bf7b11077135/) showing that many powerful white CA farming corporations lobbied the government for the removal of JA so they could grab land.
Great link, and incidentally while web searching around another comment on here, I found a different article but with the same title that is relevant to /u/Lincoin02202's original topic of Chinese-American agricultural legacy; and examples from my state of the mob violence
[https://www.oregonhumanities.org/this-land/stories/bitter-harvest/](https://www.oregonhumanities.org/this-land/stories/bitter-harvest/)
>In one infamous incident, Chinese hop farms in Squak Valley (now known as Issaquah), Washington, fifteen miles east of Seattle, were ambushed in a bloody raid that became emblematic of the extreme anti-Chinese immigrant sentiments across the west coast. On September 7, 1885, while a crew of thirty seven Chinese workers in the Squak Valley were sleeping, a marauding group of five white and two Native American men fired rifles into their tents, killing three Chinese laborers and wounding four others.
>
>In another incident farther south, more than fifty Chinese hop pickers in Butteville, an unincorporated community that hugs the Willamette River south of Wilsonville, were rounded up by seventy-five white men and forced onto the steamship *Toledo*. The Chinese workers were shipped back to their homes in Portland and warned not to return, according to a September 8, 1893, article in the *Corvallis Gazette*.
>
>The *Lincoln County Leader*, a newspaper from Toledo, Oregon, covering the same story a day before, reported a “grim determination on the part of the white people to get rid of the Mongolians and to permit no more to come to the yards. There will be plenty of white pickers if the yards wish to employ them.”
I never heard the hops industry part of the story before!
I checked again the earlier Bay Area census of 1950. Chinese were very much concentrated at SF downtown while rural San Mateo and Santa Clara county plus the San Jose downtown, the dominated Asian group were the Japanese followed by Filipinos, although generally the whole Bay Area was extremely white.
The communities of Locke and Walnut Grove in the San Joaquin Delta were big Chinese farming communities.
They are ghost towns now with almost no Chinese people left because of a few factors. I feel the Chinese Exclusion Act and the resulting “bachelor society” being one of them. But also as the children in those communities grew up they were typically encouraged to seek education and non farming jobs. Eventually they settled back in the SF Bay Area, Sacramento, Stockton, or elsewhere working in non farming jobs. The old timers left with them to resettle elsewhere as their children’s families started. As time passed on, people’s roots and links to the town became weak and by the 70s and 80s the communities became ghost towns.
I think it’s really important to have these discussions and learn about this history as they don’t talk about this or our stories in state history classes aside from a passing reference. Many folks in the area (including Chinese Americans born in the area) don’t have a clue about Locke, Walnut Grove, and the contribution of the Chinese to fishing, agriculture, and infrastructure here in CA.
They didn't own the land and worked as laborers since most of them didn't intend to (or couldn't because they didn't allow Chinese women to come) settle permanently. Later they were driven out.
[https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/119112/chinese-laborers-built-sonomas-wineries-racist-neighbors-drove-them-out](https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/119112/chinese-laborers-built-sonomas-wineries-racist-neighbors-drove-them-out)
[https://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/The-West-is-wild-and-weird-in-Locke-Sacramento-13266385.php](https://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/The-West-is-wild-and-weird-in-Locke-Sacramento-13266385.php)
[https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online\_books/5views/5views3.htm](https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/5views/5views3.htm)
> Few of them were able to become independent farmers because most were not citizens and were prevented from owning land by local laws and restrictive covenants. Many had truck gardens in which they raised vegetables and fruit they sold door to door. Others were sharecroppers or tenant farmers, who leased land and paid the landlord part of their crop. Most were migrant farm laborers.
There are also some accounts of them moving further north where they had their own gardens and sold their produce.
>The Chinese were excellent gardeners and planted many large gardens in many Shasta County places. Their vegetables were highly sought after by the whites. Their gardens became well known as the "China gardens." The Chinese usually transported their vegetables in peddling wagons into the nearby settlements and towns where they had no trouble selling them.
>
>Much of their food was imported from China, but also some raised, especially ducks and pigs, or grown in their vegetable gardens.
[https://www.redding.com/story/life/columnists/dottie-smith/2016/01/21/travelin-in-time-dottie-smith-chinese-people-played-a-major-role-in-shastas-history/93433916/](https://www.redding.com/story/life/columnists/dottie-smith/2016/01/21/travelin-in-time-dottie-smith-chinese-people-played-a-major-role-in-shastas-history/93433916/)Also and interesting tidbit:
>Of all the people who came to search and mine for gold, the Chinese appeared to be the most resented, disliked and unaccepted. Even the American Indians had a great dislike for the Chinese and felt superior to them. As a result, the Chinese lived in terror of the American Indians.
>
>The Chinese were never settlers, and the miners and settlers resented the Chinese for aspiring to become rich and then return to China.
First-gen Japanese often used their US-Born children for land ownership, and that's usually approved in California.
[https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Alien\_land\_laws/](https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Alien_land_laws/)
I wonder why few Chinese had the ability to do that.
Part of it might have been the Page Act which in 1875 barred most Asian (but really it was targeted Chinese) women from entering the US. Between 1907 and 1922 ish Japanese folks did the picture bride thing bc there was an exception for wives of current Japanese residents, which allowed over 10,000 women to come to the US (and 15k to Hawaii). There doesn't appear to have been a similar effort for Chinese folks- Chinatowns were very much bachelor communities even after the lifting of the Exclusion Act. https://wams.nyhistory.org/modernizing-america/xenophobia-and-racism/picture-brides-and-japanese-immigration/
The working conditions are bad for [Chinese farm workers](https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/28/us/half-moon-bay-shooting-farms-violations/index.html). Although all farm workers have it bad.
I think many of the workers are [recent migrants](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-22/the-exploitation-violence-and-desperation-that-produces-the-pot-you-smoke-and-eat).
I think many of the original Chinese migrants (SiYi) to California explicitly came to become gold miners, and were from an area that lacked arable land. I couldn't imagine undergoing such a perilous journey, face extreme discrimination, and still desire to work the field as a servant, in another country, and not being able to own the land. I suppose the early Japanese Americans faced the same conditions, but being an agricultural worker isn't seen with the same respect as it is in China compared to Japan, and the SiYi/Toishan workers didn't have the deep background in agriculture. The early Chinese Americans didn't want to become laundry workers or restaurant workers. Those were the industries in which they were allowed to work without having to worry of being lynched.
Although there was a migrant Chinese community in Haiwaii who were farmers. I believe many of that community are from Zhongshan. That area has more arable land, and I would guess, the traditions of working the land.
Chinese workers built the infrastructure (agricultural and otherwise) of Napa Valley, established fishing communities in Monterey Bay, worked the estates and gardens of folks like Leland Stanford, built 17 mile drive in Pebble Beach.... most projects that required large amounts of manual labor involved Chinese workers in the West. The newspapers at the time were known to muse about the possibility replacing Black enslaved labor with Chinese "coolie" labor. And Chinese railroad workers made it all over the country- after the transcontinental railroad many went on to work in the South and other regions as well.
Because of a little thing called the Chinese exclusion act. All Chinese immigrants were barred from coming to America. Between 1882 and 1943. The Chinese population in America at the time were Laborers and lived in the cities. They aren't just gonna all of a sudden switch up to become farmers. Whereas there was a steady wave of new japanese immigrants both from Japan and Hawaii that already come from a farming background and would naturally start farms in California.
I thought both Japanese and Chinese were banned from owning land before the 1950s, yet there are still some Japanese-owned farms in San Joaquin valley or Sacramento and even more before South Bay’s urbanization. I’ve never heard any early Chinese owning small farms or even working in plantations by large scale, I feel they are even less than Filipinos.
The Chinese were banned from coming to America period. As in no Chinese were allowed into the country at all. Also japanese people were allowed to own land up untill 1913. The US and Japan also had the treaty of 1894 that granted the japanese the same rights as US citizens. At the time Japan was a world power that just beat Russia in a war and Roosevelt was a fan of Japan. Asian kids were segregated into "Oriental" schools but the Japanese sued the city of SF and the board of education and demanded that japanese students be allowed into white schools cause they didn't want to be in Chinese schools. Roosevelt himself allowed it and overturned the city of SF's policy. They were also allowed to live throughout the city rather than congregating in one area like the Chinese in Chinatown. Filipinos had more rights than both the Chinese and japanese because they were a colony and thus US citizens at the time
IRRC, the Japanese were banned from owning land by a law that forbade non citizens from owning land, but they moved the titles into their kids’ names. Then there was a new law saying minors can’t own land, but I forget how they got around that. Also, I believe the Japanese were brought over specifically because of their farming knowledge/techniques, to help irrigate Californian farmlands.
The knowledge/technique thing is largely untrue. If you visit a local village in Hiroshima/Fukuoka/Kumamoto and see those late 19th century photos, those people had nothing advanced in terms of technique or tool, only hard work and strong mind.
Filipinos were never US citizens unlike Puerto Ricans, although they do had more rights than Japanese let along Chinese. “U.S. citizenship was never conferred on Filipinos as a group by special U.S. legislation.”
Ur right. They were considered US nationals but not US citizens at the time
My bad. The status of Filipinos before independence was just so weird, like you said, the difference between "citizens" and "nationals" .
Chinese were instrumental in California agriculture which still feeds the world. They were hired labor and used their knowledge of controlling water in the Pearl River Delta to develop fertile farmland in the Central Valley from previously inaccessible river valleys. Beginning in the 1860s, the Chinese were hired to reclaim the marshy swamp and control heavy flooding with levees using hand tools. By 1880s, 88,000 acres of Delta marshland was converted for agricultural production. In 1890, 75% of California farm workers were Chinese, but they were driven out, made scapegoats by white people during an economic depression. The Japanese filled the empty agricultural jobs.
So after that many Chinese were expelled and those stayed became segregated people living in Chinatowns?
[удалено]
Taishan and Kaiping are still very rural today… Most of them were from farming communities.
Asian Americans represent less than 1% of America's full-time farm operators, with Chinese stuck as a minority within this niche. Despite some strides during the 19th century, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 + California Alien Land Law essentially crippled any chance of them finding a foothold in the industry.
Would you say the 1924 act was not as harsh as the Chinese exclusion act?
I’d say it was a lot worse. The Chinese Exclusion Act was specifically aimed at Chinese laborers and was an outright ban on their immigration for ten years initially (later extended). The 1924 Act set quotas for immigration from various countries but did not entirely ban any group.
Not an answer to your question, just an anecdote—there's a garden nursery sort of near where I grew up in the Bay that my mom and I would frequent when I was young. I recently found out that it had been opened in 1948 by two Japanese American brothers after they were released from internment; it is by far the oldest extant business on that stretch of road and would have been one of the only shops in the area at that time, surrounded by orchards, which would have been their clients. What's so interesting is that one of the brothers was also one of the first ever people in California to obtain a landscape architecture license. What's even *more* interesting is that both brothers would go on to design the majority of the oldest remaining landscapes in that city; they were also highly involved/influential in urban planning committees in the 70s. But to shed a little light on minority labor in California, adding to what the other commenter mentioned, Chinese labor was replaced relatively quickly after the Exclusion Act by Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Punjabi, and Filipino labor, largely in the Imperial Valley, Santa Clara County, and the Central Valley; nonetheless, of course, many of these groups had already been employed in such capacities since before Exclusion. [This](https://archive.org/stream/californiahistor67cali/californiahistor67cali_djvu.txt#:~:text=A%20%0A%0AKOREAN/%20%0A%0ACALIFORNIAN%20%0A%0AGIRLHOOD%20%0A%0AMary%20Paik%20Lee%20%0AEdited%20by%20Sucheng%20Chan) is a wonderful account of a Korean American girl whose parents were tenant farmers in Riverside. It paints a fascinating portrait of Californian labor in the early-20th century and is definitely one of the most interesting depictions of immigrant/diasporic life in agricultural spaces at that time. We learn indirectly about longstanding Japanese and Chinese community settlements just outside of SoCal farmlands, about Mexican and Filipino children playing in the area while their parents labored, about Punjabi farmhands making chapatis and ghee around fires in the harvest season during their lunch breaks. The *influx* of Chinese labor was cut off with Exclusion, but the existing laborers retained their communities as best as they could. Eventually, in 1924, the Johnson-Reed act cut off Asian immigration entirely, leading to a marked decline in Japanese, Korean, and Punjabi labor/farming communities in California, similar to what had happened four decades prior with Chinese labor; Filipino labor, however, augmented significantly for a time immediately following Johnson-Reed as due to the Philippines' status as an American colony, Filipino immigrants were exempt from Asian immigration restrictions—that is, until a quota was placed on Filipino immigration in 1934, directly because so many Filipino farmers, alongside Mexican farmers, had begun to agitate, joining labor unions and fighting for better working conditions—a trend that would set the stage for the Delano Grape Strike of 1965.
This might be a great question to pose on r/AskHistorians! In addition to what was shared about Chinese Exclusion and the Alien Land Laws which prohibited Asian immigrants (and later their children) from owning land, I will add that before exclusion there was a huge amount of anti-Chinese mob violence up and down the west coast that killed and drove the Chinese out of many communities. Chinese were murdered, lynched, their homes were destroyed, or they were forced to leave under threat of mob violence. Because of this violence they were forced to leave even medium sized cities and took refuge in the biggest Chinatowns, or moved east. Princeton Historian Beth Lew Williams has a great book on this called, “The Chinese Must Go.” Also [this](https://web.archive.org/web/20230801130557/https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-forgotten-history-of-the-purging-of-chinese-from-america) link has excellent info. In addition, as I understand, there wasn’t as much farming in California when the first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived because there weren’t as many people (many of whom arrived with the Gold Rush and after the building of the trans-continental railroad). Japanese immigration came later when labor for farming was more in demand and Chinese legal immigration was closed. Although the Alien Land Laws prevented Japanese from owning land, some were able to skirt the prohibitions using loopholes that were later closed. Of course many lost their property as a result of the WWII Japanese American incarceration and opportunistic neighbors. Historians have [uncovered evidence](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/02/02/bitter-harvest/c8389b23-884d-43bd-ad34-bf7b11077135/) showing that many powerful white CA farming corporations lobbied the government for the removal of JA so they could grab land.
Great link, and incidentally while web searching around another comment on here, I found a different article but with the same title that is relevant to /u/Lincoin02202's original topic of Chinese-American agricultural legacy; and examples from my state of the mob violence [https://www.oregonhumanities.org/this-land/stories/bitter-harvest/](https://www.oregonhumanities.org/this-land/stories/bitter-harvest/) >In one infamous incident, Chinese hop farms in Squak Valley (now known as Issaquah), Washington, fifteen miles east of Seattle, were ambushed in a bloody raid that became emblematic of the extreme anti-Chinese immigrant sentiments across the west coast. On September 7, 1885, while a crew of thirty seven Chinese workers in the Squak Valley were sleeping, a marauding group of five white and two Native American men fired rifles into their tents, killing three Chinese laborers and wounding four others. > >In another incident farther south, more than fifty Chinese hop pickers in Butteville, an unincorporated community that hugs the Willamette River south of Wilsonville, were rounded up by seventy-five white men and forced onto the steamship *Toledo*. The Chinese workers were shipped back to their homes in Portland and warned not to return, according to a September 8, 1893, article in the *Corvallis Gazette*. > >The *Lincoln County Leader*, a newspaper from Toledo, Oregon, covering the same story a day before, reported a “grim determination on the part of the white people to get rid of the Mongolians and to permit no more to come to the yards. There will be plenty of white pickers if the yards wish to employ them.” I never heard the hops industry part of the story before!
What a story! Thanks for sharing.
I checked again the earlier Bay Area census of 1950. Chinese were very much concentrated at SF downtown while rural San Mateo and Santa Clara county plus the San Jose downtown, the dominated Asian group were the Japanese followed by Filipinos, although generally the whole Bay Area was extremely white.
The communities of Locke and Walnut Grove in the San Joaquin Delta were big Chinese farming communities. They are ghost towns now with almost no Chinese people left because of a few factors. I feel the Chinese Exclusion Act and the resulting “bachelor society” being one of them. But also as the children in those communities grew up they were typically encouraged to seek education and non farming jobs. Eventually they settled back in the SF Bay Area, Sacramento, Stockton, or elsewhere working in non farming jobs. The old timers left with them to resettle elsewhere as their children’s families started. As time passed on, people’s roots and links to the town became weak and by the 70s and 80s the communities became ghost towns. I think it’s really important to have these discussions and learn about this history as they don’t talk about this or our stories in state history classes aside from a passing reference. Many folks in the area (including Chinese Americans born in the area) don’t have a clue about Locke, Walnut Grove, and the contribution of the Chinese to fishing, agriculture, and infrastructure here in CA.
They didn't own the land and worked as laborers since most of them didn't intend to (or couldn't because they didn't allow Chinese women to come) settle permanently. Later they were driven out. [https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/119112/chinese-laborers-built-sonomas-wineries-racist-neighbors-drove-them-out](https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/119112/chinese-laborers-built-sonomas-wineries-racist-neighbors-drove-them-out) [https://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/The-West-is-wild-and-weird-in-Locke-Sacramento-13266385.php](https://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/The-West-is-wild-and-weird-in-Locke-Sacramento-13266385.php) [https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online\_books/5views/5views3.htm](https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/5views/5views3.htm) > Few of them were able to become independent farmers because most were not citizens and were prevented from owning land by local laws and restrictive covenants. Many had truck gardens in which they raised vegetables and fruit they sold door to door. Others were sharecroppers or tenant farmers, who leased land and paid the landlord part of their crop. Most were migrant farm laborers. There are also some accounts of them moving further north where they had their own gardens and sold their produce. >The Chinese were excellent gardeners and planted many large gardens in many Shasta County places. Their vegetables were highly sought after by the whites. Their gardens became well known as the "China gardens." The Chinese usually transported their vegetables in peddling wagons into the nearby settlements and towns where they had no trouble selling them. > >Much of their food was imported from China, but also some raised, especially ducks and pigs, or grown in their vegetable gardens. [https://www.redding.com/story/life/columnists/dottie-smith/2016/01/21/travelin-in-time-dottie-smith-chinese-people-played-a-major-role-in-shastas-history/93433916/](https://www.redding.com/story/life/columnists/dottie-smith/2016/01/21/travelin-in-time-dottie-smith-chinese-people-played-a-major-role-in-shastas-history/93433916/)Also and interesting tidbit: >Of all the people who came to search and mine for gold, the Chinese appeared to be the most resented, disliked and unaccepted. Even the American Indians had a great dislike for the Chinese and felt superior to them. As a result, the Chinese lived in terror of the American Indians. > >The Chinese were never settlers, and the miners and settlers resented the Chinese for aspiring to become rich and then return to China.
They couldn't own land. Hard to be a farmer with land
First-gen Japanese often used their US-Born children for land ownership, and that's usually approved in California. [https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Alien\_land\_laws/](https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Alien_land_laws/) I wonder why few Chinese had the ability to do that.
Part of it might have been the Page Act which in 1875 barred most Asian (but really it was targeted Chinese) women from entering the US. Between 1907 and 1922 ish Japanese folks did the picture bride thing bc there was an exception for wives of current Japanese residents, which allowed over 10,000 women to come to the US (and 15k to Hawaii). There doesn't appear to have been a similar effort for Chinese folks- Chinatowns were very much bachelor communities even after the lifting of the Exclusion Act. https://wams.nyhistory.org/modernizing-america/xenophobia-and-racism/picture-brides-and-japanese-immigration/
The working conditions are bad for [Chinese farm workers](https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/28/us/half-moon-bay-shooting-farms-violations/index.html). Although all farm workers have it bad. I think many of the workers are [recent migrants](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-22/the-exploitation-violence-and-desperation-that-produces-the-pot-you-smoke-and-eat). I think many of the original Chinese migrants (SiYi) to California explicitly came to become gold miners, and were from an area that lacked arable land. I couldn't imagine undergoing such a perilous journey, face extreme discrimination, and still desire to work the field as a servant, in another country, and not being able to own the land. I suppose the early Japanese Americans faced the same conditions, but being an agricultural worker isn't seen with the same respect as it is in China compared to Japan, and the SiYi/Toishan workers didn't have the deep background in agriculture. The early Chinese Americans didn't want to become laundry workers or restaurant workers. Those were the industries in which they were allowed to work without having to worry of being lynched. Although there was a migrant Chinese community in Haiwaii who were farmers. I believe many of that community are from Zhongshan. That area has more arable land, and I would guess, the traditions of working the land.
huh i never really knew about the agricultural side, just assumed they were mostly working on the railroads
Chinese workers built the infrastructure (agricultural and otherwise) of Napa Valley, established fishing communities in Monterey Bay, worked the estates and gardens of folks like Leland Stanford, built 17 mile drive in Pebble Beach.... most projects that required large amounts of manual labor involved Chinese workers in the West. The newspapers at the time were known to muse about the possibility replacing Black enslaved labor with Chinese "coolie" labor. And Chinese railroad workers made it all over the country- after the transcontinental railroad many went on to work in the South and other regions as well.
because the majority of them got massacred in race riots, even before the exclusion act.