A Chinese Ghetto? Immigrant Residential Segregation in 19th Century San Francisco

Hannah Postel , Princeton University

Foundational theories regarding immigrant segregation and assimilation were formed with an eye to the wave of early 20th century European arrivals in the United States. Between 1850 and 1913, almost 30 million immigrants moved to the United States in search of a new home, including hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants (Abramitzky et al 2016). However, to date the literature has focused almost solely on new European arrivals. This paper aims to incorporate Chinese immigrant residential patterning into foundational segregation theories, focusing on 1880 San Francisco. Though qualitative literature suggests Chinese segregation may be very high, anecdotally outstripping other groups, other narratives posit that most newly arrived immigrant groups followed similar residential patterns at the time. The paper employs novel spatial archival data to measure these trends and assess how seminal segregation theories apply.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 195. History, Demography, and Racial Inequality