An interactive public memorial and augmented reality experience focused on Santa Cruz’s Chinatown by Huy Truong, Susana Ruiz, and Karen Tei Yamashita

Watermarks of the Last Chinatown is an interactive public memorial in the form of a site-specific augmented reality experience that 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.

How To Experience the Artwork

Download from the Apple Store (Android version forthcoming). This is a site-specific app designed to be experienced in Santa Cruz, California. The app will guide you to the site of the last Chinatown, 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!

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.