Chinese In Minnesota

"Sherri Gerbert Fuller provides us with a rare look at Chinese immigrant lives and aspirations in Minnesota, proudly reclaiming their voices as part of our great American heritage. I was delighted to read this book."--Iris Chang, author of "The Chinese in America " Minnesota's first Chinese settlers, fleeing racial violence in California, established scores of businesses after they arrived in the late 1870s. Newspapers eagerly published reports of their activities, including New Year's festivities, marriages, and restaurant and laundry openings. Beginning in 1882 federal laws banning Chinese immigration and denying citizenship put particular pressure on the community. Sherri Gebert Fuller relates the story of the Chinese from these early days to the 1960s when a new wave of immigrants, including students, businessmen, and professionals from China and Taiwan, began to bring new energy and issues to the community and a flourishing of ties between Minnesota and China.

A seventeen-year-old Chinese American in Minnesota and her family tread a balance between the Far East and Middle West.

A seventeen-year-old Chinese American in Minnesota and her family tread a balance between the Far East and Middle West.

A culinary tour to the cuisines of Asia as they have appeared on Minnesota tables over the decades, the distinctive flavors of faraway homes with a midwestern twist.

Reframing the conversations around race and identity, a talented photographer offers a prism through which to explore our modern era of cultural uncertainty.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

In 1862, four years after Minnesota was ratified as the thirty-second state in the Union, simmering tensions between indigenous Dakota and white settlers culminated in the violent, six-week-long U.S.-Dakota War. Hundreds of lives were lost on both sides, and the war ended with the execution of thirty-eight Dakotas on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota--the largest mass execution in American history. The following April, after suffering a long internment at Fort Snelling, the Dakota and Winnebago peoples were forcefully removed to South Dakota, precipitating the near destruction of the area's native communities while simultaneously laying the foundation for what we know and recognize today as Minnesota. In North Country: The Making of Minnesota, Mary Lethert Wingerd unlocks the complex origins of the state--origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange. Moving from the earliest years of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the western Great Lakes region to the era of French and British influence during the fur trade and beyond, Wingerd charts how for two centuries prior to official statehood Native people and Europeans in the region maintained a hesitant, largely cobeneficial relationship. Founded on intermarriage, kinship, and trade between the two parties, this racially hybridized society was a meeting point for cultural and economic exchange until the western expansion of American capitalism and violation of treaties by the U.S. government during the 1850s wore sharply at this tremulous bond, ultimately leading to what Wingerd calls Minnesota's Civil War. A cornerstone text in the chronicle of Minnesota's history, Wingerd's narrative is augmented by more than 170 illustrations chosen and described by Kirsten Delegard in comprehensive captions that depict the fascinating, often haunting representations of the region and its inhabitants over two and a half centuries. North Country is the unflinching account of how the land the Dakota named Mini Sota Makoce became the State of Minnesota and of the people who have called it, at one time or another, home.

The Minnesota Historical Society Pamphlet Collection contains pamphlets and printed ephemera relating to Chinese history and culture, Chinese American Associations, CAAM Dance Theatre, Midwest China Center, the Asia Pacific Wings Festival (kite flying), Chinese New Year celebration (1993), University of Minnesota Chinese faculty and student associations, etc. Materials are in Chinese and English.