Interrogating Community Memory: Oral History and Community Archives in Boston's Chinatown

Drawing from my doctoral research on postwar changes in Boston’s Chinatown, this paper discusses my use of oral history methods and community archives to understand how Chinese residents, activists, and community leaders experienced and participated in postwar urban renewal in Boston’s Chinatown. State planning and development records only help me tell part of this history, since the experiences and perspectives of Chinatown residents, activists, and community leaders who challenged the state’s plans are absent in official archives. To unearth the hidden experiences of these Chinese residents and advocates, I have embedded myself in the Chinatown community over the past three years. Attending community events and participating in organizing campaigns have allowed me to gain the trust of and develop relationships with people later who became community informants and interview subjects. Using oral history methods to interview displaced Chinatown residents, community elders, and longtime activists has given me information about how they made sense of urban renewal and responded to it. My community involvement also helped me gain access to previously unexamined private collections of photographs, letters, notes, and ephemera that are missing from official records. Kept in closets, shoeboxes, filing cabinets, and basements of private individuals, these community archives contained materials that allowed me to piece together the experiences and perspectives of ordinary Chinese people and the activities of community activists and neighborhood organizations. Using these snapshots of community memory, I argue that Chinese Americans understood urban renewal in Boston’s Chinatown as an extension of the governmental projects that created and perpetuated the policy of Chinese Exclusion, and that both their resistance to and participation in urban renewal were strategies for claiming physical and metaphorical space in America.