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On October 24, 1871, after one white life was lost in the crossfire of Chinese gang warfare in Chinatown, Los Angeles, a riot of 500 white Los Angelenos murdered eighteen Chinese, seventeen of whom were entirely innocent. The madness was partly swift angry vengeance, but mostly an act of brutality that, Zesch argues “seemed like fun. They thought they could get away with it because their victims were people who didn’t matter.” (Zesch 219) Decades of pent-up racial resentment against the influx of Chinese immigrants caused such acting out as a celebratory trip to saloons after victims had been hung, mutilated, or shot. Chinese immigrated to San Francisco, and then to Los Angeles thoughout the middle of the nineteenth-century, where businesses sprang up and internecine Chinese turf war was common. The massacre, Zesch argues, was inspired by the local Los Angeles press’s longtime stories about the prostitution and violence engaged in by the immigrant community, and seeing a fellow white caught in the crossfire fit well into this narrative. Furthermore, the press highlighted the dangers posed to white male labor with the influx of migrants. Small businesses, a lynchpin in the Chinese immigrant experience, were looted as well as local communities in the outbreak.
Zesch is not a full-time academic, and his background as a historical novelist comes through strongly in The Chinatown War. It is interesting that the book was called The Chinatown War instead of The Chinatown Massacre; this is because Zesch paints the landscape in the decade-plus leading up to the main event as a drawn-out struggle of which October 24 was a boiling point. Nothing happens in a vacuum, but without the full scope of violence and lawlessness that plagued this part of the old American West, Los Angeles, a place not for the weak of heart, the event in question would not be so informative to historians. The general lawlessness of the times is on display, where vigilance committees, sometimes featuring officials themselves, took the place of structured law. Only twenty-five men were indicted, and eight were given short sentences for manslaughter. While this result was obviously not indicative of justice at work, Zesch earlier in the book points out that justice and cosmopolitanism was served more often than we might think in the Los Angels , with many Chinese Americans becoming recognized members of the community and bringing their cases to court, with the exception of testifying against whites.
Although one reviewer from the University of Nevada noted that Zesch’s lack of specialty Asian-American comes into play, the Chinatown War does an excellent job of making use of sources available to us, particular court records from the Huntington Library and newspapers. Another reviewer says that the dearth of sources on early Chinese immigrants was not as bad as Zesch made it out to be. As one of our classmates noted, the book bears a great similarity to A Misplaced Massacre, not only in its depiction of racially-based mob violence but in how it brings its narrative into the present. (yaremenkolena) Both are little known today; marked by plaques but not widely known. Zesch’s work is also reminiscent of Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes in its analysis of how different groups interact within limited space with what was, at best, an emerging system of law and justice. Who remembers remembers events and how reveals much about a nation’s framework for understanding itself. The question is: what IS the meaning of this event? Scott Zesch refers to it as “The Riot That Didn’t Change a Damned Thing.” (Zesch 213) The press and law simply went back to their normalized sensationalist routines. Zesch attempts to connect the event to modern day hate crimes as well. It is also important to remember what happens when mob mentality reigns, particularly when there are complicated histories of entirely different groups attempting to occupy the same space.
Bibliography
Zesch, Scott. The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.