Where in the world did Chinatown come from? (Los Angeles) I didn’t really give much thought to it until it was brought up in class. I thought it was just a place to attract tourist, to give them something diverse. Little did I know on how it came to be. While reading Fit to Be Citizens by Natalia Molina, I discovered just how Chinatown formed.
During the late 1800’s Los Angeles was a city with the majority of its citizens being white, the first immigrants who came along were Chinese. At the time there were diseases spreading and white people refused to believe that they carried it so the blame would be put on the Chinese. It was so easy for them, like the media we have today back in those days they had writers who believed that white was the superior race. Writing outrageous claims such as the Chinese are dirty people and that they carry diseases were very easy claims to make. This idea of fear and ignorance played along played a huge role.
During my reading I found three of the eight steps of genocide. The first one was classification. The cities most prominent leaders classified the Chinese as dirty by calling Chinatown, Chinatown nuisance. They would enforce negative comments to the public to make it known that others should avoid them. The next step was dehumanization. Chinese citizens were dehumanized by the 1870’s public health officials made sure that “Chinese” meant depraved and disease ridden. The last step I noticed was polarization. City officials made sure that anyone who was Chinese would be segregated from white people so that they could not be sick. They would all need to live in Chinatown so that they wouldn't spread small pox or any other disease.
I was amazed by how ignorant people were back than to believe that all Chinese people could be such a huge threat. It must have been easy to blame others because they looked different from white people and came from foreign soil. The sad part is that we still have media like this where the news will minorities look like the bad guy and focus on putting crimes that involve a Mexican or a African-American.
On the second chapter it talked about other immigrant coming into Los Angeles, referring to Japanese and Mexicans but focusing more on Mexicans. When Mexican immigrants migrated into Los Angeles they were already looked down upon for being different. They were not worthy to be treated as Americans. They were referred to as aliens which they are still being called upon today. It is a very dehumanizing name to call anyone, I don’t believe that just because someone is coming from a different country that they should be refer to as an alien, that term for immigrants should be removed. White people believed that immigrants were naturally dirty so they carried diseases “They concluded that Mexicans were a “class who habitually shunned water.” Pictures were even posted by health officials of Chinese and Mexican people, followed by a caption warning others to watch out for them because being in contact with them would make you ill. This made it easy for people to shun the immigrants, this is how these communities such as Chinatown formed to begin with because of being segregated from others.
Reading all this made me think of my life. In the neighborhood that I live in today it is full of Mexicans and I’m Mexican however I look white and I get talked down upon and dirty looks by others a lot of the times. It really makes me feel disappointed on how there is still racial tension in this world and made me ask myself, if white people never segregated different races from them would there even be communities such as Logan and Chinatown?
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