Watermarks of the Last Chinatown
“A place-based public history artwork, accessible through mobile phones at the physical site in downtown Santa Cruz, CA where the last Chinatown stood. This interactive and embodied experience merges past and present by weaving together augmented reality, documentary filmmaking, oral histories, gameplay, historical fiction, archival photography, and volumetric video. Created by Huy Truong, Susana Ruiz, and Karen Tei Yamashita.”
This iOS app is designed to be experienced in person in Santa Cruz, California. Download the app and let it guide you to the site of the last Chinatown–swept away by the overflowing San Lorenzo River on Christmas night 1955–across the street from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH).
Please be advised that the area may have a community of vulnerable, unhoused, and marginalized people. We recommend you go on this journey with a companion. You will be pointing your mobile device's camera in various directions and may be perceived as taking photos of unconsenting individuals. Please be courteous and aware of your surroundings. Also, you’re on an active city street, so safety first and please watch where you’re walking.
The first 100 players to unlock the Dragon Gate can visit the MAH lobby for their reward!
Download the site-specific app from the Apple Store.
This project has organically evolved in many different ways since 2018. To learn about previous iterations and see documentation, see here and here.
Watermarks of the Last Chinatown speaks to the rich narrative landscape of Santa Cruz through the lens of historical erasure with a focus on its last Chinatown. The project includes interviews with community members, historical photographs, virtual recreations, and a performative interpretation of an original story by Yamashita. The work incorporates documentary, holographic film, and gameplay and is experienced on mobile devices at historically important sites in downtown Santa Cruz to render visible the lives, legacies, and labors of those who lived there.
As part of the project, Truong and Ruiz worked closely with a number of history-makers and leaders in the Santa Cruz AAPI community, including George Ow Jr., an elder and one of the last residents with memories of living in the last Chinatown. As Ow explains, Chinatown may have been a ghetto, but it was also a haven not only for the Chinese but for Black people, Mexican people, Filipino people, and other groups for whom it wasn’t safe or legal to live elsewhere in Santa Cruz. Thus, Chinatown in Santa Cruz and Chinatowns across the country were not a space solely devoted to marginalization, but a place where Chinese culture and traditions could be preserved and passed down from generation to generation, as well as revised and transformed in diasporic and multicultural contexts.
The artists are deeply grateful for the contributions and participation of George Ow Jr., Georgina Wong, Geoffrey Dunn, Tam Welch, Kellee Matsushita-Tseng, and Cynthia Ling Lee.