This history, largely unknown but relevant to the fight for immigrant rights and other working-class struggles today, is brought to life in a two-part documentary, Ancestors in the Americas, produced by filmmaker Loni Ding for television.

As told in Part I, Coolies, Sailors and Settlers: Voyage to the New World, the early Asian immigration to the Americas goes back to the 17th century, when barbers in Mexico are recorded as complaining about competition from the Chinese. Asian sailors, including Filipinos, Malays, Asian Indians, and Chinese, voyaged on trading ships between Asia and the Americas. Some jumped ship, creating communities of Chinese in Mexico, and settlements of Filipinos in Louisiana.

The first big wave of Asian immigration took place in the second half of the 19th century when London, Paris, and other colonial powers were consolidating their empires.

As the film describes, the colonizers were never able to take direct control of China. But in the early 1840s, as a result of China's defeat in the Opium War, they were able to force China to give up Hong Kong and make other concessions.

The film takes you to the site where the war began, the museum in Canton built at the place where the Chinese in l841 destroyed huge piles of opium that was being introduced into China by British traders. Using as an excuse the refusal of the Chinese to accept the opium, the British military attacked, forcing the Chinese to turn over sections of their port cities for use by the colonizers.

From the early 1800s on, steps were being taken to end the African slave trade. As a substitute, British, Spanish, American, and other colonial powers organized the infamous “coolie trade”—a harsh system of indentured servitude that brought Asians to work on their plantations and enterprises in the Americas.

Hundreds of thousands of Asian Indians and Chinese were "recruited," often kidnapped and taken to work in Cuba, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana, and other colonies. In this hugely profitable business, the ships used were modeled on African slave ships, with many perishing on the four- to five-month journeys. The workers mutinied on 1 out of every 11 voyages, with some of the mutinies succeeding.

Details of the inhuman conditions faced by the Chinese in Cuba are recorded in the testimony of these workers given to a commission sent from China in l874 to investigate. This testimony is quoted in the film, describing workdays of 21 hours, inadequate food, beatings, and widespread refusals by the Spanish plantation owners to free the workers when their labor contracts ran out.

“They spoke out at great risk, leaving their history for generations to come,” a narrator says, adding that many of these Chinese joined in the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain.

Part II, Chinese in the Frontier West: An American Story, begins with the first big wave of Chinese coming to the United States during the 1849 gold rush. Slavery still existed then and Native Americans and Mexicans were being dispossessed of their lands and excluded from citizenship rights. The film details how the racist laws and practices used against Blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans were also directed against Chinese, who were not allowed to become citizens or to testify in court.

Chinese workers played a central role in the last half of the l9th century in the economic development of the West. They were a third of the miners, built the transcontinental railroad, constructed the levees and irrigation channels that allowed agriculture to flourish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta and, in the l880s, became a majority of agricultural workers in California.

They were also subjected to exorbitant special taxes and made into scapegoats, blamed for unemployment and the bad job conditions most workers faced.

During the economic depression of the l870s, violent attacks against the Chinese escalated. In l882 U.S. Congress passed the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act, reducing Chinese immigration to a trickle. The law was repealed in 1943.

Ancestors in the Americas highlights the history of resistance by the Chinese to these racist attacks—the many legal cases for justice, a strike of railroad workers for equal pay, the uprising by the people of Canton who beat the coolie trade “recruiters,” and the mutinies on the ships.

“Our story is told crossing centuries of time and many oceans,” the film's narrator says at the beginning. “I am on this voyage with you seeking America’s past and her present.”

The film encompasses sweeps of history not taught in schools—a history that needs to be told to help advance today's struggle for immigrants' rights.

Both parts of Ancestors in the Americas are available from the Center for Educational Telecommunications (CET). Ordering information can be found on its website: www.cetel.org or by writing to loniding@sonic.net.
 
 
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