Amount Awarded: $17,459
Angel Island in San Francisco Bay was the main U.S. entry point for Asian migrants between 1910 and 1940, yet it receives only a fraction of the attention given to its European migrant port counterpart, Ellis Island in New York. In our earlier “Exhuming Voices of the Past” project we digitized hundreds of pages of interrogation transcripts, letters, and poems created by Angel Island detainees. The new project uses Collective Qualitative Analysis (CQA) to read this rich material together and to highlight the lived experiences of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Indian, and Korean migrants. The stories add texture to Asian-American history, echo themes in Asian American Histories of the United States, and show how early exclusion policies shaped everyday lives. Sharing these voices will broaden public knowledge and contribute to the international scholarship on migration history.