Nineteenth-Century Oakland Chinese Businesses (Methods IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH‪)‬

Although Chinese Americans were integral to local and regional infrastructure development since the 1850s, researchers have given little attention to Oakland Chinatown in favor of San Francisco across the bay. This trend, however, is beginning to change; with rich history and minimal previous work completed, Oakland is an ideal place to engage in historical research, documentary and archaeological, for envisioning the lives of nineteenth-century Chinese American individuals and communities. Additionally, with recent (re)development trends in downtown Oakland, individual interest combined with archaeological research complying with Environmental Protection legislation form the impetus to make Oakland's rich Chinese heritage public knowledge. This has spurred additional research, including my own, which investigates the nineteenth-century community through archival work. This research is aimed at a number of purposes: to help formulate a nomination proposal for a National Register Historic and Archaeological District for all nineteenth-century Oakland Chinatowns; to push developers and the City Council to sensitively treat potentially significant sites on future development areas; to augment archaeological analyses; to inform the interested public of the Chinese presence outside of the extant Oakland Chinatown core at Eighth Street and Webster; and to provide a methodological model that other researchers investigating historic Chinatowns can follow. (1) My work is based on mapping raw data drawn from four primary archival sources: the Wells, Fargo & Co. 1882 Directory of Chinese Business Houses; Oakland Sanborn Fire Insurance maps of 1889, 1902, and 1912; the National Archives Chinese Immigration files Index of Chinese Businesses Partnerships in California Cities and Towns and its files for Oakland; and Oakland City directories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using these sources in conjunction with each other, I created a map with this data to investigate the spatial distribution of Oakland Chinese businesses. (2)