Angel Island, The Ellis Island of the West
Chicago: The Woman's American Baptist Home Missionary Society, 1917.
Softcover. Good. 6.75" x 5," 104 pp, illustrated, in original wrappers. A scarce and early first-person account of a visit to the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, where immigrants to the United States -- the majority from Asia, but also some from Mexico and Russia -- where detained and interrogated between 1910 and 1940. Over the decades, approximately 175,000 Chinese and about 60,000 Japanese immigrants in total were detained there under oppressive conditions. "Because the [Chinese] Exclusion Act and its revisions limited Chinese immigration to certain skilled occupations while also allowing entrance to the children of U.S. citizens, elaborate steps were taken by Chinese immigrants to masquerade as practitioners of qualifying vocations or as the “paper sons” and “paper daughters” of Chinese Americans. The immigration authorities’ rigorous efforts to expose fraud resulted in protracted, exhaustive interrogations and related interviews of corroborating parties that sometimes kept the immigrants captive on the island for weeks or months" (Britannica). Mary Ellen Bamford (1857-1946), was sympathetic to Asians seeking to enter the United States and visited Angel Island several times as part of a missionary group that distributed bibles in several languages, offered English lessons, and helped immigrants settle into communities when they made it through the detention phase. Her book describes the describes the journey to the island, the facilities, and the people she met there, with separate sections on Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Korean immigrants. It includes illustrations from photographs, as well as a few color plates, most showing different Chinese flags. A good copy only; ex-library, with discard markings, call number at spine, card pocket at rear and bit of a musty odor. Some chipping to wrappers, small archival tape reinforcement to rear joint. No non-digital copies located in OCLC.
Item #23858
Price: $275.00