Gold Mountain Turned to Dust: Essays on the Legal History of the Chinese in the Nineteenth-Century American West by John R. Wunder (review)

With this collection of ten essays, John R. Wunder joins a very short list of scholars who have sketched the legal history of Chinese migrants in nineteenth-century America. It is a small field, but one full of strong work. Notable texts include Hudson Janisch's 1971 dissertation "The Chinese, the Courts, and the Constitution," Charles McClain's In Search of Equality (1994), and Lucy Salyer's Laws Harsh as Tigers (1995), as well as law review articles by Gabriel J. Chin and Kerry Abrams.

Most of these scholars—including Janisch, Salyer, Chin, and Abrams—have primarily focused on how Chinese migrants challenged America's exclusion and naturalization laws. As Chinese plaintiffs fought for the right to enter the United States, remain within it, and become U.S. citizens, they helped to define fundamental legal principles that still hold in modern U.S. immigration law. Therefore, the legal history of Chinese exclusion, as these authors have shown, holds strong relevance across multiple fields and disciplines.

McClain and Wunder, in contrast, are more concerned with the treatment of Chinese under state and local laws. McClain's monograph primarily examines how Chinese plaintiffs tested discriminatory civil laws in urban California. He covers a large number of precedent-setting cases, describing these Chinese legal challenges as a "search" for civil and immigrant rights.

Wunder pushes beyond the scope of McClain's work in several important ways. He extends the history of local and state laws beyond California to the greater American West, including the states and territories of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico. Given the overrepresentation of California in Chinese American history more broadly, this is a vital contribution in and of itself. He also goes beyond urban centers like San Francisco to explore rural areas and mining towns. And although he is interested in the Chinese fight for civil rights, he also pays considerable attention to criminal and civil cases that are not immediately recognizable as civil rights struggles. These cases concern everything from murder to theft to property disputes to adoption.

The essays, nine of which were first published between 1981 and 1995, represent the culmination of a three-decades-long research project. It is easy to see why this project took a long time. County- and state-level legal records have been unevenly preserved and remain scattered across dozens of archives. Moreover, Wunder did not only consult legal records, he also attempted to fill in the surrounding social history through newspaper reports and secondary sources. Three of his essays are broadly thematic: one catalogues anti-Chinese violence, one considers the right to give evidence, and one compares homicide conviction rates in several California counties. Three more focus on landmark court cases: People v. Hall (1854) and the right to testify in California; Territory of New Mexico v. Yee Shun (1884) and the right to testify in New Mexico; Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) and the right to equal protection. The remaining four essays focus on the rate of reversal by territorial and state supreme courts (in the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, Montana, and the Southwest, respectively) as a metric for discrimination against Chinese plaintiffs. At times, these essays show their age, but they also offer many insights for those unfamiliar with Wunder's work.

Despite a new preface, Wunder largely leaves open the question of what these essays mean when taken together. Here a thoughtful foreword by Luping Zhu steps in: "The Chinese throughout the West fought aggressively against discrimination and injustice" (p. xii). Along the way, they tested U.S. legal concepts that went far beyond immigration law, including natural rights, state sovereignty, due process, equal protection, and dying declarations. The Chinese encountered regional variation in their legal rights. They faced greater discrimination...