A community becomes ‘Visible’
Museum exhibit explores local Chinese American experience
Chinese immigrants built the railroads, launched thriving businesses and overcame rampant racism to thrive in this high desert home of mountains and mesas.
“From Invisible to Visible: The Chinese American Experience in Albuquerque” explores that heritage in the Keleher Gallery of the Albuquerque Museum.
Peppered with photographs of weddings, gourmet grocers and festivals, the exhibit features loaned works from the area’s Chinese-American community. An 1886 poster from the Library of Congress depicting Uncle Sam kicking a Chinese immigrant back into the ocean looms above a wedding tea set, a calligraphy set and a martial arts sword, exposing the discrimination many immigrants faced here.
“You have the symbol of U.S. patriotism kicking the Chinese out,” said Rebecca Prinster, the museum’s associate curator of history. “It’s for a (laundry) detergent.”
Chinese immigrants faced claims that they took American jobs, leading to congressional passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a law designed to keep them out of the country. In New Mexico, lawmakers amended the state constitution to prevent Asians from owning property in 1921. This amendment remained intact until 2006.
In response, Chinese Americans became civil rights pioneers. The Chinese American Citizens Alliance, founded in San Francisco in 1895, is the oldest Asian American civil rights group in the country. Their activism led to the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943.
In the 1880s, Albuquerque’s railroad-driven population boom drew Chinese-born residents
searching for work. By the early 1900s, Albuquerque’s first Chinese American community had been driven out of existence, but new arrivals re-settled the community.
In 1918 Edward Gaw founded Fremont’s Fine Foods grocery store, which operated until 2012. During the Great Depression, the Wing Ong family operated grocery stores in the Barelas area, later expanding to downtown’s Chung King Cafe. After World War II, they founded the popular New Chinatown Restaurant.
Today, about one of every 230 Albuquerque residents is of Chinese ancestry, Prinster said. Many work at the state’s national laboratories and at the University of New Mexico.
Siu Wong came here from California in 1978. A retired optometrist, Wong loaned the tea service used at her wedding.
The wedding tea ceremony signifies purity, stability and fertility, she said.
“In the tea ceremony we honor our parents and our relatives by serving them tea,” Wong said. “They in exchange will give us gifts of money or jewelry.”
An American jade necklace loops next to the porcelain.
Jade signifies good luck, long life and happiness, Wong said.
This year Albuquerque’s New Mexico Chinese School of Arts and Language is celebrating its 40th anniversary. The institution has helped teach more than 1,800 local residents to speak, read and write Chinese.