About the Project

In 2008, members of the Chinese American community of Salinas approached CSU Monterey Bay faculty to develop an oral history project on the history of Chinatown. Through a partnership between CSUMB and the Asian Cultural Experience (A.C.E.), students and faculty in the Oral History and Community Memory- Service Learning class began conducting video interviews with members of the Chinese American community. Each year since, the class has expanded its ethnic focus to mirror the waves of immigrant laborers and merchants who lived and established businesses in and around Chinatown: the Chinese in the 1860s, the Japanese (1890s), the Filipinos (1920s), Mexicanos (1910-1950s), African Americans (1950s). With urban renewal in the 1970s, Chinatown gradually became home to the homeless.

The idea of a virtual walking tour was sparked by the public tours of the neighborhood that Mr. Wellington Lee offers on various occasions and by the rich collection of stories that we have recorded. Since 2008, we have recorded and archived more than 125 hours of videotaped oral histories. The interviews are archived in the California State University Monterey Bay Oral History Archive and by the Asian Cultural Experience. The interviews will also become part of the historical holdings of the Salinas Chinatown Cultural Center and Museum.

A virtual tour broadens the reach of Chinatown’s unique story, making it accessible to a wide variety of audiences. The people who inhabited the buildings and streets of the neighborhood are your tour guides. As you wander through the streets and pause before the buildings and empty lots, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Mexicanos emerge to describe the bars, grocery stores, tofu shops, homes, labor camps, boarding houses, barbershops, herbalists, pool halls, gambling parlors, Tongs, places of worship, dance halls, and brothels. Stops along the tour convey the transformative history and energy of this place, as narrators from different ethnic groups variously remember how locales changed from a Chinese general store into a Filipino pool hall, or a boarding house into a tofu and barber shop, or a labor camp into a hotel. The narratives also speak to the human relationships forged in the lived space: memories of the war and the Japanese internment, encounters with soldiers from Fort Ord, stories of mothers’ generosity toward all in the community, and stories of ethnic separation and intermingling.

This walking tour can be taken from an armchair or on-site in Chinatown, using a mobile device. The platform combines Google Maps with an Layar, an augmented reality application. The tour is an open design, allowing for new stories and images to be added at any time. The webpage was designed as a portal for the walking tour but also as an historical repository, archiving full oral history interviews, an historical timeline, historical maps, and an interactive site that allows visitors to add their own stories and memories.

This project has involved several hundred people – narrators, student interviewers, student and professional videographers, digital designers, content selectors, experimental filmmakers, multimedia producers, community and academic consultants, and evaluators. This oral history walking tour was made possible through the ongoing collaborative support of the Division of Humanities and Communication, the Service Learning Institute, the Department of Cinematic Arts, the Center for Academic Technology, the Department of Information Technology, and the Office of Grants and Contracts at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB). Web design and content development were made possible by grants from Cal Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Community Foundation of Monterey County.