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How pork allowed earliest Chinese immigrants to find success amid structural racism in America, build self-reliant community

  • Beyond nutrition, butcher shops often provided important social safety net for early immigrants
  • Evidence suggests they may have even provided banking services within Chinatown

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To establish a sense of community and familiarity in their new surroundings, Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles in the 19th century established pork butcher shops within their communities.
Photo: SCMP composite/Shutterstock/urn: cambridge.org

The US is famous for being a land of immigrants, but its history is also defined by its xenophobic and racist past.

The Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882 was the first race-based immigration restriction the country passed, and it would be followed with increasingly draconian updates until the law was repealed in 1943.

During that period, a large Chinese population decided to stay in the US and often tried to forge their future in the years after completing jobs building America’s railroad system.

Those people faced steep odds and would have faced intense racism along their path. But they built a resilient and stable support system. One such example was a complex Chinese economic network in Los Angeles built around pork butcher shops.

A recent study published in American Antiquity, a peer-reviewed journal, focused on Chinatown in Los Angeles and analysed how the “economy of pork” created a nutritional and financial safety net that allowed the Chinese community to circumnavigate the institutional racism they faced in the US.

Jiajing Wang, an anthropological archaeologist at Dartmouth College in the US and study author, told the Post: “Pork has long been a staple food for most Chinese migrant communities, so this business provided them with a stable source of protein.

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