The Last Chinatown (working title)
“Just south of the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Cruz, California, had four distinct Chinatowns throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, today that history remains virtually forgotten, the lives, legacies, and labors of the residents of these Chinatowns removed from our collective memory. This work responds to this historical vacuum. This is a place-based public experience bringing light to the historical erasure of Santa Cruz’s last Chinatown through photography, augmented reality (AR), and holographic filmmaking. ”
The rhetorical temperature surrounding public memorials in the United States has reached an epoch, opening a public dialogue that has allowed individuals across the United States and internationally to question our communal mythology, our collective identity, and foreground the dichotomies of historical erasure. These conversations not only offer the question of who should be memorialized but also ask the question of what can be a memorial.
Since 2018, this project has organically evolved in different ways as we learned more about these specific histories and integrated co-creation approaches. To see documentation of our ongoing development, see here.
“This project is informed, inspired, and springs from previous work by dancer and choreographer Cynthia Ling Lee.
Lee’s “Lost Chinatowns: a Solo Show” (2018) is a dance-theatre work where she embodies characters spanning a century of Chinese presence in Santa Cruz.”
The Last Chinatown will exist as an augmented reality public memorial accessible through mobile phones as an app, at the site in Santa Cruz where the last Chinatown stood (currently the Aude Castagna Galleria between River St. and Front St.). This important but not well-known site, in the heart of downtown Santa Cruz, is just a couple of blocks away from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), and we have partnered with the MAH to help promote and exhibit the work. The Last Chinatown engages two overlapping constituencies of the MAH: elders with direct lived experience of Santa Cruz's last Chinatown and Asian American activists who are striving to make a home in this white-dominated place.
Much of California’s history is connected to the history of Chinese immigrants, who were fundamental in building its infrastructure, furthering its economy, and enriching the state with their culture. However, Chinese contributions to the history of the Golden State have been obscured by widespread racist and colonial understandings of history. Chinese immigrants were low-paid laborers who were denied a path to citizenship, could not create families due to anti-miscegenation laws, could not own property, and were victimized by violent acts. Mostly men, these immigrants were not given a voice and stood at the margins of a society that was keen to take their labor without giving anything back. Chinese immigrants were confined to the limits of the California Chinatowns, where they often shared the space with other individuals who had been marginalized by the infrastructures of white supremacy. The rents were cheap because they were precarious sites subject to repeated floods and fires.
As George Ow Jr., an elder and pillar of the community and George Lee’s nephew, explains through his holographic interview, Santa Cruz saw four Chinatowns, each one disappearing and the next one rebuilding through tremendous upheaval and community resilience. This work makes visible the role that Chinese and Chinese Americans have played in the making of the Golden State through the lens of one specific historical Chinatown site. In this historical framework, the locus of the Chinatown becomes a space of inquiry where established California histories can be challenged, creating visibility and recovering a multifaceted past. Chinatowns 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 contexts.
The project weaves together Santa Cruz’s history of anti-Asian violence with the recent upswell of grassroots AAPI activism. This is a clip of an interview with Kellee Matsushita-Teng, a local AAPI activist, educator, and farmer in Santa Cruz. Kellee discusses her work preserving culture through seeds that are significant to communities of the Asian diaspora. Three streams of volumetric video are captured using Azure Kinects and Depthkit software.