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Chapter 2 Toward Exclusion American Popular Songs on Chinese Immigration, 1850–1882 The discovery of gold in 1849 sparked a tremendous worldwide wave of migration to California that included numerous songwriters and performers. Some came as part of the Gold Rush but found music to be more profitable than mining. Others saw an opportunity among the mining camps and growing cities and came as part of professional minstrel troupes from major East Coast cities.There were a few talented individuals who wrote music in their spare time, which they later published. Chinese immigrants, attracted by many of these same opportunities, began arriving in California in substantial numbers. This historic convergence of people marked an important point of contact between Chinese immigrants, miners, and musicians, all of whom struggled to understand one another and the unique circumstances in which they found themselves.To appeal to California audiences, composers and performers tried to translate the hopes and anxieties of miners into music. They sang about the hardships faced in the gold fields, local politics, and interactions among the many people who came to California. What emerged was a music that fundamentally re-imagined the Chinese in that it departed from the tradition of at least a century of European exoticism and novelty, and treated the Chinese as an immigrant group in the United States. Before the form evolved into a four-person minstrelsy troupe, blackface, the practice of caricaturing African Americans, had started during the 1830s with performers such as George Washington Dixon and Thomas “Daddy” Rice. Both Dixon’s Zip Coon and Rice’s Jim Crow were characters who contributed to stereotypes of African American men and addressed the anxieties of the emerging white working classes. Jim Crow was a happy slave who danced, sang, and enjoyed life on the plantation. By staying in his place (in the South and on a plantation), he was not a threat to anyone, especially white workers in the North. On the other hand, Zip Coon was a free black living in a northern city, a dandy who failed miserably at putting on airs and acting sophisticated. This caricature ridiculed groups up and down the social ladder, 30 mocking powerful community elites as well as African Americans. Over the next few decades, blackface’s repertoire of characters expanded in response to social and political movements—suffrage, abolition, and immigration, especially by the Germans and Irish—so that the possibility that blackface could include Chinese immigrants was in place by the 1850s.1 In California, with the growing numbers of Chinese during the 1850s and 1860s and the resultant tensions and conflicts, songwriters began to use these immigrants as musical subjects. Performers, influenced by blackface minstrelsy, were well aware of the lyrical and musical devices as well as those of gesture, costuming, and makeup that could be used to mark Chinese immigrants as inferior.Yellowed-up actors became the norm on the stage, limiting the theatrical opportunities for the Chinese in much the same way that blackface excluded African Americans until the 1870s. Their songs, with some exceptions, helped to define and circulate anti-Chinese sentiments throughout the Far West. Following the common practice of the day, songwriters tended to develop new lyrics for well-known popular melodies, most notably from blackface minstrelsy itself, rather than create new musical works. These melodies could easily be reworked and would be well known to audiences. Although the trajectory of attitudes was unclear during the Gold Rush, songs about the Chinese helped to codify stereotypes and expressed fears that led ultimately to exclusionary legislation.2 By 1870, these songs from California had circulated throughout the United States, growing from a regional phenomenon into part of a national response to Chinese immigrants. Music was not the only forum that dealt with Chinese immigration but was part of a broader spectrum of media that addressed the issue. Only a small proportion of the Chinese population lived east of the Rocky Mountains, yet they became a potent national political symbol, helping to define the boundaries of American identity and to symbolize the distinctiveness of the Far West. Savvy politicians eagerly exploited anti-Chinese sentiments to shore up support from labor organizations and Western voters. By making a scapegoat of the Chinese, they supposedly helped to resolve labor problems without legislating against factory owners and other capitalists.3 Anti-Chinese sentiments were also part of a broader process of creating and defining national identity and settling questions about citizenship during the nineteenth century...

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