Brokers between worlds: Chinese merchants and legal culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1852--1925

This dissertation explores the efforts of Chinese Americans in the Pacific Northwest to use the legal system that oppressed them to challenge and protest their treatment. Three factors produced the will and cultural resources necessary for Chinese plaintiffs to challenge discrimination in the federal courts. First, Chinese merchants constructed a labor-contracting regime that taught them to use civil litigation and form relationships with local white attorneys. The structure of the labor contracting agreement meant that merchants brokered the employment of the majority of the Chinese population in the Pacific Northwest and legally, as well as politically, spoke for the interests of their workers. Second, elites in the white and the Chinese community championed the use of courts to resolve disputes, from commercial transactions to racial discrimination. The prioritization of legal solutions allowed merchants and lawyers to consolidate power within their respective communities: Chinese merchants vis-à-vis the larger community of Chinese laborers and elite attorneys vis-à-vis the political struggle over the extent of organized labor's participation in city politics. Merchants' legal knowledge and contacts with elite lawyers structured the legal experience of the majority of the Chinese population from the 1870s until the first decade of the 20 th century. Third, local immigration officials constructed a deportation regime after 1888 that criminalized established patterns of overseas Chinese settlement such as maintaining families in China, working as contract laborers, and living within the city limits of Seattle or Portland. Immigration officials' harassment made every Chinese person a potential illegal immigrant and deepened the Chinese community's reliance on the legal expertise of Chinese merchants.; The personal papers of Chinese merchants and their attorneys and the more than 2,500 unpublished case files involving Chinese Americans in Seattle and Portland form the backbone of this study. By examining the diverse circumstances that brought Chinese Americans to law, instead of solely those involving constitutional or immigration questions, this dissertation seeks to construct a social history of legal resistance that emphasizes the class relations that shaped Chinese American society in the Pacific Northwest.