February 2025 Chinese Truck Farmers Laura Ng

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Chinese immigrants in inland Southern California labored on Chinese-operated truck farms known locally as “Chinese gardens.” These vegetable farmers provided a variety of fresh produce to Chinese and non-Chinese urban residents. A landscape archaeology analysis of Chinese-operated farms around the cities of Riverside and San Bernardino reveals that Chinese truck farming shaped the built environment in both the United States and China, anti-immigration laws impacted the movement of Chinese laborers without American citizenship the most, and that vegetable farms became part of a racialized landscape where harassment by law enforcement was common. Chinese truck farmers made invaluable agricultural contributions to inland Southern California and created alliances with non-Chinese landlords, but ultimately their visibility on the landscape made them continual targets of race-based exclusion.
Bio: Laura Ng is a historical archaeologist who researches late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese migrants and their transpacific lives. These migrants often lived in segregated communities, but they also migrated back and forth between the U.S. and villages in the Pearl River Delta region of China. Laura is currently investigating racism and transnationalism at Chinese truck farms in Southern California and at the Evanston and Rock Springs Chinatowns in rural Southwestern Wyoming; the latter two sites are community-engaged projects conducted in collaboration with Dr. Dudley Gardner and Chinese American descendants.