Customer Reviews

Immigration at the Golden Gate: Passenger Ships, Exclusion, and Angel Island

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Barde looks at Asian immigration at San francisco Bay from several different perspectives: the immigrant experience getting there and ashore, the Chinese community, here and in China, the steamships and the shipping companies, the ships themselves, and the immigration agents, again both here and in Asia. He reproduces first person and primary source documents, often at length, conveying a sense of immediacy to the reader: maps and plans, transcripts of lengthy interrogations of a woman who was detained at Angel Island for an astonishing 20 months; the journal of an incorruptable immigration official. The author lets the story tell itself, and the text is refreshingly free of moralistic observations. Schwendinger's Ocean of Bitter Dreams makes a good companion book. Ocean of Bitter Dreams: Maritime Relations Between China and the United States, 1850-1915.

IMMIGRATION AT THE GOLDEN GATE: PASSENGER SHIPS, EXCLUSION, AND ANGEL ISLAND draws intriguing contrasts between the immigration gateways of Angel Island on the West Coast and Ellis Island on the East, exploring differences between the two entry points, considering their different roles, and providing a history of the Angel Island Immigrant Station which operated from 1910-1940, when public hostility to newcomers posed a threat to the new California immigrants. Any college-level collection strong on either general American immigrant experience or California history in particular must have this.

Diane C. Donovan

California Bookwatch