 Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. It's my pleasure this afternoon to introduce you to Dr. Anna Pigler Gordon, who will be talking about her new book in a conversational format with me. In studying and researching my first book about immigration of photographic identification and the ways that photographs were used to identify and regulate different groups of immigrants, I came across this image of a Chinese woman at Ellis Island. In studying and researching, even though I included this image in my book, I wasn't really thinking about Asians at Ellis Island. And just to look at this image in a little bit more detail, I think it's fascinating because the way that she is represented is really to try to make her look more Asian. That Ellis Island is in the background, but it's cropped. And it looks with some of these details along the roof edge line and some of the sort of bozart design in the back, almost sort of in some ways like oriental architecture. And so I think this image is very sort of orientalizing. It's trying to make this unknown woman. We don't know her name. But to make her look as though she is sort of in China rather than at Ellis Island in the United States. And if I just go to the next image, I think you can see sort of where she is actually standing, which is at that kind of alongside that canopy on that front lawn that we see here. And if anyone has been to Ellis Island, I think this will be very familiar to you. So I saw this image, but my first book really focused on looking at Chinese immigrating into the United States through Angel Island, through the San Francisco and through the West Coast. And then I also looked at European immigrants being regulated and photographed as they came through Ellis Island. And I looked at Mexican immigrants as they came across the US-Mexico border. And one of the librarians at the Ellis Island Library where I located this image made the comment that the presence of Chinese at Ellis Island has been, this is a direct quote, has been curiously overlooked. And as I was sort of thinking about this, I realized that I had done the same thing myself in my first project. I had sort of associated different groups of immigrants with particular locations and assumed that somehow that was where they belonged. I had sort of set up these different histories of immigration in my mind. And of course, that's partly how we told the history of immigration. So it's perhaps not surprising that I did that. But in this book, I really wanted to challenge that and to sort of think about how we can think about immigration differently, how we can think about Asian exclusion and Chinese exclusion differently. And also how we can think about Ellis Island differently as well. Yeah, thank you. Just one quick question about that image. So this was taken by a white American photographer and that's, so when you talk about orientalizing, you're talking about the ways that the West sees the East right through this orientalist lens to exoticize, right? He was trying to exoticize this woman and therefore kind of selectively crop to this image. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that idea that that was very common in the late 19th, early 20th century when that image was taken and perhaps still too common today that sort of East is East, sort of West is West, never the twain shall meet that it's not possible to imagine sort of Asian Americans as Americans in the United States. So even though she was arriving at this iconic place in American history, Ellis Island, he didn't show her in that way. He sort of showed her, exactly as you said, exoticized almost only possible to understand her as a Chinese woman in China almost. I mean, that's at least what I see in that image that it just doesn't look like Ellis Island. He can't imagine her being an American. Yeah, very interesting. So I wanted to shift the conversation a little bit to talk about, I know that you did a lot of archival work obviously for this book, and I was wondering how specifically you used the National Archives in exploring these issues and doing research for your book. Yeah, absolutely. So both my book projects relied heavily on immigration case files in the National Archives. So in the first book, I went to California to look at Chinese exclusion files because they're very important and they're very extensively preserved at the archives in San Bruno. But I also went to the National Archives, what's sometimes called Archives One in downtown Washington, D.C. on the Mall. For this book, I went to the National Archives Northeast region, which is in New York, and I'll just show one image from that. Oops, go through this. This is, for example, one of the case files that I found there. And that was, you know, it was really a little bit more tricky because unlike the Chinese exclusion files in San Francisco where people had done a lot of research and so they had already been reviewed, not many people at all had done research on Chinese arrivals in New York. So for each of those, I had to sort of write in advance and suggest which case files I might want to look at so that the archivists could look through them really carefully and make sure there wasn't any personal sort of medical information or other identifying information that should not be shared publicly. Another just kind of interesting story about that is I started this project quite a while ago and when I started, the archives are located in a different area from where they are now. They were actually located in a federal building in the sort of SOHO area underneath a current federal immigration detention center. So that was very strange because I was writing about the detention of immigrants at Ellis Island and I was in the floors below the detention of immigrants today. The archives during the time that I was doing the research moved to their current location which is at the customs house opposite Battery Park right at the sort of tip, the southern tip of Manhattan. And that put a little bit of a pause in my research because I couldn't access them while they were the files while the National Archives was going through this very complex process of actually reviewing all of the files that they had there. But thankfully I was able to get back in and then that was fascinating as well because the customs house was actually one of the locations where the original Chinese office, the Chinese bureau that regulated Chinese where that was housed and sort of enforced the Chinese exclusion laws. So again, it was more historic but I was sitting in the same kinds of rooms where Chinese exclusion officials may have sat and interviewed potential arrivals. So I've really felt like a sort of weight of history when I was doing this research. And I also was able to go to the National Archives and College Park because they have an extensive still picture division where some of the pictures that I used in my book came from but they are also the site for Japanese internment files. And so a little bit to my surprise that became part of my story about Ellis Island or I shouldn't say it's not my story, the story that I was able to tell about Japanese New Yorkers who were interned at Ellis Island. And so that was sort of, I went to College Park as well. So I covered a lot of ground and a lot of different archives and at each place, the archivists were extraordinarily helpful in navigating these very complex files. And so I'm very, very appreciative to them and to the work of the National Archives in preserving these records. Yeah, fascinating. So I wanna back up a little bit. I hear there were audio aids a little bit. I hear there were audio issues early on and we should probably recap a little bit for people who might not have been able to hear from the beginning. So I don't know, we don't wanna kind of rehash everything but I had asked you how you came to study Asian American history without an obvious family connection like I might have as a Chinese American and how you came to this project. So do you mind kind of giving a capsule version of that again? Absolutely, yeah. So I came to study Asian American history because I myself was an immigrant and the way that I was regulated in my photographic identity documentation on my green card, I was required to show my ear, which was something that was required of the very first Chinese women who immigrated under exclusion rules. And then for how I came to this project, that was because I had seen a photograph of a Chinese woman arriving at Ellis Island and even though that should have told me that there were Chinese and Asian immigrants at Ellis Island, it took me until my second book to actually realize that it was important to dig into that history and to study that because in my first book, I had sort of really focused on Asian and Chinese arrivals on the West Coast, which is I think a pretty common way that we think about American history is to assume most Asian immigration. Well, most Asian immigration is through the West Coast, but it's just, I think, important for us to see other sites of migration as well and sort of what that might tell us. Definitely. Yeah, my grandfather came into Canada. So not in a totally legal way. Of course, during exclusion, there weren't really many legal ways to come in. But yeah, so your comment about sort of West Coast versus East Coast leads me to my next question, which has to do with, yeah, Ellis Island of course is very famous for welcoming European immigrants for being a destination for European immigrants while Angel Island is associated with Chinese immigrants. You talked a little bit about Chinese exclusion before. I think that's a really important part of this issue. So the question I wanted to ask you is what changes about Asian American history when we shift our focus to Ellis Island from Angel Island? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I would say everything changes. Spoiler alert. But I think one thing, of course, we see it first is the experiences of Asian migration are much broader in scope than we thought before. Like your grandfather, like many individuals, not everyone's story starts in San Francisco. And so it's not just broader. It's more varied. So different people in different locations have different experiences. But I also think it was in some ways more limited and more contested at Ellis Island and in New York than it was on the West Coast. So just to sort of, you know, think that through a little bit more. So I mean, Chinese and other Asian immigrants have long traveled to New York and it has been recognized as one of the major centers outside of the West Coast. And US officials stationed in the city have long work to exclude Chinese immigrants. I mean, just as at other ports of entry, there was a Chinese division in New York and it was formed by the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. And that was 10 years before Ellis Island was built. And so that was one of the reasons actually why it was in the customs house is because initially it was customs officials who regulated Chinese immigration. But at Ellis Island, it wasn't central to exclusion. So really, you know, historians have shown how at Angel Island, officials took the existing exclusions which were already really harsh, right? They assumed they presumed that no Chinese person and then later on, as this was extended to other groups, they presumed that no Asian people were allowed entry unless they met some very limited criteria that would mean that they were able to enter. That's really different from European immigration, right? Where the presumption was you were allowed to enter unless you met some limited but increasingly expanding criteria that said you couldn't come in. So that was just really important to begin with. And of course, the reason for this is it's sort of nativism but it's also specifically anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism, you know, what we might say today, anti-Asian hate. And so the presumption was that Asian immigrants should not be allowed into the United States for various racist reasons. On the West Coast, there was a lot of popular support for that idea. And in fact, it was the West, you know, individuals on the West Coast who really pushed for Chinese exclusion and officials in immigration stations on the West Coast who enforce those laws really harshly, rejecting as many Chinese and other Asian immigrants as they could and just really developing the rules so that they went beyond what was actually required even under the law and the law was really strict and then they went beyond that as well. That was different in New York. So what I found in those New York case files was that in fact, the interrogations of Chinese arrivals were much more cursory than at other stations. In San Francisco, these went for pages and pages. They could last for days. And New York, they were like maybe three pages. There was just one sitting maybe half an hour. Also, the detention times were shorter. In San Francisco and particularly after 1910 at Angel Island, they could last for weeks or months. Some people even for years as they were detained and fighting for their ability to come into the United States. But in New York, there were typically a matter of days. And in fact, sometimes they were really quick. If there were certain individuals, they would say, and if someone representing a Chinese immigrant would actually write to the immigration officials and say, so-and-so is arriving this evening. I hope that you can keep the office open so that you can admit them quickly. And they were admitted on the day that they arrived. And in these letters, they would say, please show them the respect that you show other immigrants. Nobody said that in San Francisco. There was no respect for Asian immigrants in San Francisco. But at Ellis Island, where the default was to be very efficient in processing, the vast majority of people who came in were European immigrants, right? And they were treated with respect. It seems that that had a kind of knock-on effect to the treatment of Asian immigrants. But even more importantly than that, Chinese really fought to get that respect. They worked with immigration officials and they tried to influence various aspects of the immigration hiring process. So to make sure that the interpreters were acceptable to the Chinese community, that was something that they worked very hard on and that they were successful at. And I think one of the reasons why that happened was because there was a smaller community. So it was sort of possible to do that. Chinese and to some extent also actually other Asians, Japanese and other Asians coming through Ellis Island were more elite. They were more likely to be merchants or students rather than citizens, U.S. citizens who were working as laborers, for example. And they were more likely to come as non-immigrants. So that's something to come back to later. Like if they were students, they wouldn't be considered immigrants who settled. The other thing I think was important was that they were able to ally with non-Chinese New Yorkers. And they really did that. They reached out to non-Chinese partly because perhaps they were a smaller community and they got the support of white and black pastors and people working with the Chinese community to say that they thought the Chinese exclusion was wrong and that they thought if it was going to be implemented, it should be implemented fairly or in a more restrained and respectful way. Just one other point actually. So there was a Chinese bureau and the immigration bureau handled all other Asian cases in New York. That was different at Angel Island. The Chinese officials handled all Asian cases. I should say the Chinese division officials, they were white Americans and very anti-Chinese. But in New York, it was the immigration bureau that handled all cases except Chinese. And so, for example, Japanese exclusion was introduced in 1907 and national immigration officials regularly wrote to Ellis Island complaining that they had lax regulation of Japanese rivals is that you're not completing the forms in an accurate and detailed way. And when they did that, the New York office wrote back and said, oh, well, we're concerned that if we enforce the law in the way that you're telling us, it might offend Japanese arrivals. And so we really do see a difference in how exclusion was implemented. The way we've told the history and it's still true for the vast majority of arrivals was that this wasn't just a racist law. It was implemented in racist ways and really harsh ways that denigrated Chinese and other Asians to try and enforce this idea that they were inferior, un-American, it should not be allowed into the United States, which is what, frankly, at that time, most Californians including immigration officials and legislators and others believed. But that happened slightly differently in New York. And it's not to say that it was a perfect system at all. It was still very difficult for Chinese arrivals, very difficult for other Asian arrivals, but they were able to exert some more control and to demand some more respect because of the very different conditions at Ellis Island. Thank you. That's fascinating. I'm more familiar with Angel Island and have visited the barracks with the poetry carved in the walls. And it's very obvious how much of an infrastructure there was for detaining Asian immigrants and others, but primarily Asian immigrants on Angel Island. There's the geographical separation, the stories of being there for months before being interrogated, some people taking their own lives because of that. And so to hear the differences, not that Ellis Island was perfect, but that there was a very different approach and also a different response, I guess, on the part of the local officials. It's really interesting to hear that contrast. So this kind of leads to the question, if an Asian immigrant had a choice, it seemed like they would have been better off going to Ellis Island instead of Angel Island. So how did Asian immigrants end up going through Ellis Island as opposed to Angel Island? How did they end up given geography, where Asia is in relation to California, how would they end up going in through Ellis Island? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to share a map that I actually created for the book that sort of shows that a little bit. I do want to say that before I say that, and this is interesting to rate that just because the officials at Ellis Island were more respectful, it doesn't mean that they were more lenient. They actually did enforce the law and similar numbers, in some cases actually higher numbers were rejected at Ellis Island than at Angel Island. But I think what that shows us is you can enforce the law fully and you can do it respectfully and many Chinese immigrants just understood that and they actually said that they preferred going to Ellis Island not because they would have necessarily a greater chance of entry but because in fact they would be treated appropriately and their cases would be considered fully rather than being treated very harshly. But to think about how did they arrive, so absolutely Asians arrived in New York City from many different points. Many of the immigrants who lived in New York would choose to travel, if you can see at the top left, to Vancouver and then across on the railroad along the northern US-Canada border until they got to Halifax, then they would take another ship along the East Coast to New York and so one individual I mentioned in the book Chin Yuen Singh took this route in 1894 and he lived in New York and he was returning to New York so he decided to come this way because if he had to bring witnesses or have family members visit, he could do that much better if he came through New York rather than sort of entering the United States in California. In fact though immigration authorities denied his claim because they found evidence that he had worked as a laundry man in Connecticut and so he wasn't exempt from exclusion as he claimed to be and so they deported him. The vast majority, the greatest number of people of Asian immigrants actually arrived from the Caribbean and I think that's another part of the history that we don't really tell is that there was a substantial Chinese presence and actually also Asian Indian presence in the Caribbean as a result of labor recruitment. So by 1917, South Asians, Asian Indians formed about 80% of all immigrant laborers in the British colonial Caribbean, particularly Trinidad. They would if they wanted to immigrate to the United States it would make sense for them to immigrate from the Caribbean to Ellis Island. Chinese also worked in that area, especially Trinidad, Jamaica and Cuba but they also came from, we can see here, parts of Peru and also from Mexico. So one example there is Chinese Trinidadian Lawrence Joseph Akao he arrived at Ellis Island in 1927. He was the sales representative for the Federal Rubber Company of Illinois and he owned the Trinidad Auto and Cycle Supply Company which is why he did business with the Federal Rubber Company of Illinois and that was the case in which the Federal Rubber Company wrote to Ellis Island officials and said, please show him every courtesy and admit him promptly and he was admitted the day that he arrived. The last kind of major group of Asians who arrived at Ellis Island were those who had worked or studied in European countries prior to arriving in the United States and so many of these arrivals didn't stop in New York they just used it as an entry point but I have a number of examples of those folks who traveled from Europe. There were a smaller number, particularly later on in the 1940s and 1950s once we have air transportation who actually did fly say from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta and they flew through Europe to New York City but that was definitely a smaller number. Most people were engaged in what we call secondary migration. I love this map because it illustrates the Chinese diaspora the multiple routes of migration, the multiple places that Chinese have settled or transited through. It's not just China to the US as a lot of people imagine it. That's fascinating. I think you answered this in part already but I was wondering what changes about our understandings of Ellis Island when we view it from the perspective of Asian immigrants and Asian American history. I think there's a lot more to say about Ellis Island so let me actually just come back to some of these files that I found and you can see here some of these individuals coming through New York. Let me go back to this first one. As we talked about Ellis Island was the largest port of immigration. It received the largest number of European immigrants, almost 70% of all European immigrants. But even for European immigrants, it isn't really a symbol of immigration in many ways. It was built to regulate arriving immigrants in response to the concerns about the dangers of large scale European immigration. We think of it as a sort of immigration station but it might be more accurate to call it an immigration regulation station and to some extent a detention and deportation center. Most histories of Ellis Island just focus on the period from 1892 when the station opened in 1924 when European restrictions were introduced and the numbers of European immigrants dropped. But a lot of my book focuses on the 1920s until the island was closed in 1954. What I argue is that it really was a detention and deportation station during that time. For a wide range of groups including Chinese, so you can see here this is a deportation card for Wang Zhu who lived in New York and was arrested and deported through Ellis Island. There were large numbers of individuals who were actually housed at the station. So in 1917 Ellis Island had sleeping and dining accommodations for up to about 2,000 detainees. But by the 1920s when there were a series of, the Chinese community in New York was becoming much more established and there were a series of raids on that community. In some cases like in 1925 in one night 600 individuals were seized in one raid and 300 were ordered, deported. And in the lower left you can actually see there are a small number of Chinese eating. Dining facilities weren't segregated but in fact sleeping facilities were segregated and there were three dormitories or three sets of dormitories, men and women and there was a dormitory for, so two dormitories, men and women reserved for Chinese, two for whites and one room for other immigrants of color. And but by the 1920s there were actually, I mean these 2,000 slots for sleeping accommodations were filled every night. And one of the immigration officials noted at this time, and this is a quote, the deportation of aliens is rapidly becoming one of the most important functions of the immigration service. And an immigration advocate talked about Ellis Island as America's chief deportation depot. And so here's just an image of Chinese young men who were being detained on the island. And I wanted to show you this map from the immigration bureau because as you can see by 1951 it describes INS detention facilities, not immigration facilities and Ellis Island is one of those detention facilities. So, I think it's important for us to understand that Ellis Island is a symbol of immigration, but it was also a really important site of detention and deportation. Yeah, thank you. So we have less than 10 minutes left and I have two questions so you can kind of just decide which, how long you want to spend on each. But my next question is one chapter of your book focuses on Japanese Americans during World War Two. And that seems to be a different perspective than we hear about Japanese incarceration on the West Coast. Where are Japanese New Yorkers being interned on Ellis Island? Yeah, so I think this is one of the clearest examples of how Ellis Island is a detention center. You know during World War Two, before the focus turned to Japanese Americans on the West Coast, immediately upon the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese nationals were rounded up across the country. So, you know, citizens, Japanese citizens who were sort of immigrants to the United States were rounded up, including in New York. And so I do have and I will just share some couple of photos of those individuals being, oh sorry, there's a few here, say, here's some of Japanese residents on their way to Ellis Island. And they were detained there throughout the war. And I think one of the key things here is that Ellis Island was already set up as a detention center. So it wasn't hard for the immigration authorities to, you know, they'd already been rounding up Chinese and these major raids that I talked about. And so it wasn't hard for them to work with the FBI to round up Japanese in much the same way and to bring them to the station where there were already large numbers of sort of beds and dormitories waiting for immigrants to be detained. And so I think that, you know, that really shows us how Ellis Island have become a detention center in the way that on the West Coast actually, you know, they took time to build the war relocation terms in which to house Japanese Americans in a, you know, completely unconstitutional sort of violation of their rights. But it was a little different on the West Coast because they were using models of immigration law and also using immigration detention centers that had already been established. Thank you. Yeah, your work clearly is making important interventions into sort of assumptions that many people have about Asian American history or American history. So my final question is a little bit broader. So you're a historian of immigration. But a lot of your work in this book challenges how we think about immigration more broadly. What are some of the ways we need to think differently about immigration. Yeah, thank you. Because this is as we started when we were talking this is sort of, you know, Asian American history is so important and it's so important to center that in American history, but not just to kind of add new stories, but also because when we tell those stories it also transforms how we understand American history. The first thing I would say is that as historians, we often quite terror centric maritime historians talk about how we tend to think that the only stories that are important. The stories that we tell about people on land so that was actually why I have these photos and maybe I'll just go back quickly to all of these sailors, because in fact sailors bringing stowaways but also working as sailors and living in and sort of moving to the United States they're really important part of the history of settlement, particularly in New York. And there weren't many immigrants that were not many Asian immigrants arriving through New York. But there were lots of Asian non immigrants right people who defined as non immigrants by the immigration bureau and that included I mentioned students earlier, but sailors were very large numbers that were between four and 8000 examinations sailors every year. There were, you know, maybe 2000 2500 Asian Indian sailors about 2000 to 3000 Filipino sailors we hadn't talked about Filipinos yet but they're an important part of the Asian community in New York. So it's important for us to understand that it's not just things that happen on land that are important but maritime history is important. And it's not just immigrants who understood to be settlers right but non immigrants are also oftentimes, even though perhaps initially they're not thought of. It's a subject to study for immigration history because literally they are described as non immigrants and immigration historians study immigrants, but in fact, non immigrants can be an important source of settlement. We shouldn't only study people who settle. But it's also important for us to acknowledge that some people who we might not assume would settle like sailors actually are really important site of settlement and of immigration to the United States. So, yeah, I'm hoping that with this book project, I sort of help us rethink some of our assumptions about about Ellis Island about Asian exclusion but also about immigration history more broadly. Yeah, no certainly it's been a pleasure. I've talked with you throughout the development of this project but it's really nice to hear how everything's come together and the amazing contributions it's making to the field to multiple fields. So I were out of time but thank you so much for sharing your work today. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate this opportunity. Thank you to the National Archives which has been so important to, you know, my ability to actually sort of find these stories and to be able to share them. It's been really wonderful. Thank you.