What constitutes a migrant to be American in San Francisco? In the book “Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906” written by Barbara Berglund, focuses on all parts of the history of how San Francisco developed throughout the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s. In this book, the author discusses all cultural frontiers that had to be crossed to accommodate every person that had migrated to San Francisco. Migration to San Francisco was big during these times because of the start of the gold rush, many people migrated there especially people from other countries. People in San Francisco marginalized the migrant people. During these years San Francisco went through so many events which included a great fire that …show more content…
But in 1849, the California’s state constitution made an official ruling that Mexicans could apply and get a citizenship just because they were categorized as “white” and Native American could not get it because they were not considered white. After this court ruling happened there was another one that happened in 1854. The name of this case was “People v. Hall” (Berglund 7) which in the ruling the California Supreme court ruled that immigrants that came from China were considered Indians and not white which meant that they could also not apply for citizenship. This was a significant event because it showed how the hierarchy of the social level class worked and how you were judged just based on the person’s ethnicity. Based on the previous rulings politicians and legislators started to divide the population into white people and not white people so in other words they started to segregate per a person’s ethnicities and the social hierarchy began. The social hierarchy was ruled by elite men trying to rule over everybody in San …show more content…
“…the boldness of a tourist…and the ways tourists scrutinized the Chinese and spoke to them could only be considered acceptable in a situation in which tourists viewed the toured upon as their inferiors.” (Berglund 107) In this China town tourism was a big business, it was the only way whites and Chinese could interact with each other without it being a big deal. While on these tours whites used to observe everything that Chinese did which included opium dens. Some tourists used to join the Chinese men while they were preparing the opium and they used to smoke it with them. Another things Americans used to attend and observe was the theater, they used to get sat on the stage. Whites used to go in there to observe what Chinese entertainment was like, but also the Chinese used to observe how whites were reacting to the play being showed. They also used to go to their worship places and they used to believe their religion was inferior. “… whether or not they truly understood what they were seeing- correlated directly to certain social and racial traits of the Chinese.” (Berglund