Richmond, California, a small industrial center north of Oakland and just east of San Francisco, expanded from a prewar population of 23,000 to more than 100,000 permanent residents in 1942. While Henry J. Kaiser's shipbuilding corporation advertised for—and city leaders sought—white skilled labor, military realities and expanding Allied production needs encouraged the hiring of unskilled African American, indigenous, and Chinese American men and women in unprecedented numbers. While the early struggles of workers to find housing and adequate services in Richmond and the East Bay more broadly have been clearly documented by historians, a legacy of continued substandard housing and services disproportionately affected minority workers and their families. Redlined, or denied rental applications because of race through legal policy and unofficial neighborhood agreements, minority workmen and women disproportionately remained in substandard housing even after the construction of federally funded housing units. Exposed to industrial pollutants, urban waste, and human effluent despite the efforts of both humanitarian-minded industrialists and local, state, and federal government officials, these minority groups faced racial and class-based challenges during World War II home front production, which have been overshadowed by the triumphant image of Rosie the Riveter and the total war victory of that “greatest generation.” Research in the Bancroft Library, the Richmond Museum, and other archival databases demonstrates how public contracts became sources of private money for industrialists, leading to the development of facilities that public funds could not support, and thereby reducing the quality of life for minority residents.

Scholars have chronicled the racialization of American Chinese and the trailing consequences for local racial hierarchies and national immigration policy. In this essay, I instead explore how American Chinese understood themselves in terms of race, and how they reckoned other Angelenos' social identities. This is the first step in a necessary effort to broaden our sense of Chinese immigrants as subjects rather than objects when we address issues of race and history during the nineteenth century. Attempting to piece together an American Chinese racial worldview, this essay tacks back and forth between several bodies of published scholarship and archival research focused on Chinese legal activism and testimony in Los Angeles during the 1870s and 1880s. Immigrants from the Pearl River Delta left a place where boundaries among local groups had become racialized even as most locals held similar, categorically negative, racialized views of European-descended people. American Chinese, like others in the broad Pacific Chinese diaspora, carried with them to North America specific institutions that nurtured the maintenance of a variegated racial landscape. I argue that although American Chinese in Los Angeles remained connected to these racial identities on multiple levels, they nevertheless built economic and social relationships across this racial divide.