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demospectator · 2 years ago

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“The Vanguard of the Chinese Division,” 1898. Photograph by Isaiah West Taber for The Wave magazine (vol. XVII, no. 5), January 29, 1898. The Chinese contingent of the Golden Jubilee Procession of 1898 turning westerly from Kearny onto Market Street.

Crashing the Party: When SF’s Chinese Road-tested Parade Strategy for Civic Celebrations

The Chinatown community’s celebration of the Lunar New Year with the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area on a rain-soaked evening in February, 2023, serves as a reminder about why the annual institution of the parade exists at all.

Parades and public events have been used throughout history as a means of promoting community identity and expressing political or social views. As I have written elsewhere, the modern version of the Chinese New Year parade traces its beginning to 1953 when a handful of Chinatown’s business elite designed that year’s Lunar New Year parade to represent more than an ethnic festival.

“There were grave concerns that the Chinese will be rounded up and put in camps,” cultural historian David Lei told NBC News back in 2018. “Memories of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WW II were fresh in the minds of Chinatown’s leaders. By 1949, the Chinese were the enemies because China became Communist … [s]o this was their platform to do some good for the community. It was to survive in Chinatown. Tourism was a big thing, so this was a big tourism push.”

The sponsors of the 1953 parade deliberately reminded participants of Chinese Americans’ loyalty to the United States, the community’s anti-communist sentiment, and their efforts to reach out to mainstream American society during the Korean War. Chinese American veterans of World War II and the Korean War marched at the front of the parade in validation of the community’s patriotism.

The political and business calculations of 70 years ago may have comprised the impetus for staging the public event. However, the modern parade also represented a revival of the parade as a tested public relations strategy learned by the urban Chinese pioneers throughout the last half of the 19th century to take advantage of the natural curiosity and interest of non-Chinese in the community’s festival life.

“Chinamen Celebrating Their New-Year’s Day in San Francisco” (Harper’s Weekly, March 25, 1871) from the collection of the California Historical Society. The accompanying article reads in part as follows: “Our illustrations on page 260 will give the reader a vivid idea of the way in which the Chinese keep their New-Year’s Day in San Francisco. Their year commences on the 18th of February, but the festivities continue for several days, to the great annouyance [sic] of the poeple [sic], as the principal diversion is the constant explosion of fire-crackers and bombs. Some rather amusing as well as annoying incidents occurred during the festival, as shown by our artist in the street scene. One unhappy man, driven wild by the racket in front of his house, tries to drive off his annoyers by throwing water on the crowd; and some ardent specimens of Young America are engaged in a hand-to-hand tussle with young heathen Chinese, whose pigtails afford a point d'advantage of which the young rascals make full use.”

This year’s Chinese New Year parade marks not only its 70th year but also the 125th anniversary of the San Francisco Golden Jubilee parade of 1898 -- one of the earliest examples of Chinese participation in a citywide event to gain recognition and acceptance as a part of American society.

The purpose of the San Francisco celebration of the Golden Jubilee of 1898 was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the California Gold Rush of 1848 and to celebrate the city's growth and prosperity. The event was organized as a parade and featured a variety of floats, bands, and other attractions, showcasing the city's cultural and economic achievements. The Golden Jubilee was seen as an opportunity to celebrate the city's past and to look ahead to its future with optimism and hope. The event marked a significant moment in the history of San Francisco and an affirmation of the city's place as a thriving center of commerce, culture, and innovation.

Historian Mark Robertson wrote about the Golden Jubilee in 2012 as follows:

“California’s Golden Jubilee and Mining Fair (CGJ) was held in San Francisco from January 24 to March 5, 1898. In the midst of the accelerating Yukon gold rush, a rebounding regional economy, and San Francisco’s growing preeminence on the Pacific, a disparate coalition of associations representing San Francisco’s “commercial-civic elite” transformed a private legacy of commemoration into a mass civic celebration.[1] The legacy of remembering James W. Marshall in San Francisco reveals that as the anniversary approached, conflicting imaginings of the city’s past and future were made to be reconciled for the sake of shared civic gain. By looking at the ways in which the ideas of profit and promotion prompted the coalition of commercial-civic elite in 1897-98 (led by Mayor and politician James D. Phelan and flanked by the San Francisco Miners’ Association, the Society of California Pioneers, and the San Francisco Merchants’ Association) to transform this small, parochial private commemoration of James W. Marshall’s discovery of gold into a mass civic celebration of San Francisco’s economic growth, social development, and the city’s position in an expanding American empire, we can better understand how massive celebrations like the CGJ reinforced and reoriented California’s Pioneer Myth within the context of a new international mining frontier and the city’s progressive insurgent leadership of the late 1890s. . . .”

In the late 19th century, the Chinese residents of San Francisco faced significant challenges, including racial discrimination and exclusionary laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Golden Jubilee parade provided an opportunity for the Chinese to showcase their cultural heritage and demonstrate their loyalty to the United States, despite facing challenges and discrimination. As plans for the Jubilee proceeded apace, the San Francisco Call reported in its January 18, 1898, issue about Chinese interest in its parade as follows:

As a close-knit and well-organized community, the Chinese community’s participation in the parade represented a collective effort under the apparent umbrella of a “United Parlor of the Native Sons of the Golden State.” They put together a colorful and elaborate float, which featured traditional Chinese dragon and lion dances, and was designed to demonstrate the beauty and richness of Chinese culture.

Chinese participation in the parade provided an opportunity to showcase Chinese contributions to American society, particularly in the fields of agriculture, fishing, and transportation. Participation in the parade represented a means to demonstrate the significant role the Chinese had played in the city's economy and development.

A portion of the Chinese contingent in the Golden Jubilee parade of January 1898 marches past onlookers and a row of buildings on either Kearny or Market Street. Photographer unknown (from a private collection).

The public reaction to Chinese participation in the Golden Jubilee Celebration of 1898 in San Francisco is not well documented (and research is continuing). At the time, Chinese faced significant discrimination and prejudice in California and across the United States. However, the celebration provided an opportunity for the Chinese community to come together and show their contributions to the city, potentially eliciting positive reactions from some members of the public. Additionally, the celebration allowed members of the Chinese community to express their pride in their cultural heritage and connect with other members of the city's other communities.

Chinese participants in San Francisco’s Golden Jubilee parade of 1898. Photographer unknown (from the Julia Morgan Papers collection of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo).

Fortunately, the Chinese parade division was filmed by cameraman Frederick Blechynden for Thomas A. Edison, Inc. The film, dated March 10, 1898, shows not only the Chinese but perhaps the earliest motion picture depiction of the US and state flags. (See below: “Chinese on Parade” March 10, 1898 (from the Julia Morgan Papers collection of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and the Library of Congress here: https://www.loc.gov/item/00694278/).

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"Chinese on Parade" is a short film directed by Thomas Edison and was released on March 10, 1898. It depicts a parade of Chinese people in San Francisco, California. The film runs for approximately 50 seconds and is one of the earliest examples of documentary-style film-making. The film is considered an important historical document, showcasing the portrayal of Chinese people in American popular culture at the time. It is believed to have been shot using Edison's kinetoscope, an early motion picture device that used a strip of perforated film.

The Chinese participation in the San Francisco Golden Jubilee parade of 1898 marked a significant event in the history of the Chinese American community in the city and state. For perhaps the first time, Chinese Americans’ desires to be recognized and accepted as part of American society and to showcase their cultural heritage and contributions were projected into the mainstream of city life. The community would replicate its tactics for another successful appearance a decade later during a prize-winning entry to the city’s Portola Festival parade in October 1909 (as I write here).

The winning formula for civic engagement endures to this day. Enjoy the parade.

Chinese parade dragon (no date). Photographer unknown (from an album by Arthur O. Eppler in the collection of the California Society of Pioneers). Based on the appearance of the trees at the left of the frame and the cable car tracks, the location could be Kearny Street at the intersection with Clay Street.

#Chinese division Golden Jubilee of 1898 #San Francisco Golden Jubilee celebration of 1898 #United Parlor of the Native Sons of the Golden State #California Golden Jubilee and Mining Fair #Isaiah West Taber #Arthur O. Eppler

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fatehbaz · 2 years ago

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Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of “home geography.” [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [with US forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines, and elsewhere]. [...] [T]hey recorded far more aggressive views of “home” in terms of what/where/whom it included and what/where/whom it excluded, both within and beyond the immediate borders of the United States. Thanks to “home geography” as an imperial pedagogic tool, white, well-to-do, literate American children not only lived in the safety of homes (housing their immediate families, but also, symbolically, the nation), but many of them also learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] On the one hand [...] “home” became ever more closely associated with whiteness, literacy, hygiene, heteronormativity [...]. This turned school geography into a site where exclusionary, exceptionalist views of the world took root in childhood. [...] [C]hildren could also imagine what other homes and non-homes looked like, could fantasize about who lived in a home [...].

Consequently, the cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals), show great degrees of nativism and racism. As relatively marginal scraps in a multitude of records that I understand as scripts of empire, children’s cognitive maps further mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...].

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Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy (and the violence it promoted [...]) found its place outside formal education, in children’s lives outside the classroom. [...] In return, playing with dissected maps was designed to keep children [...] informed about the world the United States was keen on entering and colonizing; it invited children to assume a unique, complex role. Children would [...] vacillate between seeing themselves as cartographers in charge of the chaos of the various pieces and as reinscriptive cartographers who strove to restore the whole map out of its pieces. [...] After all, [...] well before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. [...]

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Given the frequency with which juvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles, children’s involvement in composing scripts of empire confirms that what motivated them to design geographical puzzles involved more than mere showing off of the basics of geographic literacy. [...] And this is best registered in the letters children wrote to Harper’s Young People and St. Nicholas, but also to other juvenile periodicals of the time (such as the long-livedYouth’s Companion). In these letters, we encounter American children writing about the towns and cities they come from and about their travels or studies abroad. [...] [I]t was their assumption that “(un)charted,” non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, as well as entry and inclusion in the American household, and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/“savagery,” meaning that it would become the colonizers’ responsibility/burden to “restore” them [...].

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Sánchez-Eppler does something particularly generative for childhood studies: [...] “Raising Empires like Children” centers the study of US Empire on childhood as an inherently political project. She convincingly argues that empires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations. [...] [I]t is critical to study these records to find out how empires (what I characterize as “multigenerational power constellations”) survived by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed. [...] [T]he study of childhood as a highly politicized [...] category of dependence in the 19th century opens doors to [...] engagements with the ways childhood as an allegedly innocent, ambivalent project of growing up corroborated, was shaped by, and gave shape to the empire as an inescapably violent, racialized project.

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All text above are the words Mashid Mayar. As transcribed in an interview conducted and published by M. Buna. “Children’s Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar.” LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022. At: lareviewofbooks dot org/article/childrens-maps-of-the-american-empire-a-conversation-with-mahshid-mayar/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

#abolition #ecology #imperial #colonial #victorian #multispecies #indigenous #geography #temporal #naturalization of borders #tidalectics #caribbean #victorian and edwardian popular culture #pedagogies of empire #black methodologies #intimacies of four continents #geographic imaginaries #cartographic pedagogies #ongoing chicago discussion

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