Chinese Gold (1985 book)
Chinese Gold: The Chinese In The Monterey Bay Region. This exhaustive history by Sandy Lydon was published in 1985 by Capitola Book Company. Chinese immigrants were the first Asian group to come to California and to Santa Cruz County in significant numbers, beginning in the early 1850s. Immigrants were recruited in China by labor contractors, mainly from southern areas of Guangdong (formerly spelled Canton, Hong Kong, and Kwangtung) province, then came by ship to San Francisco and other West Coast ports. From there, the labor contractors distributed them to job sites. They answered a need for manual labor in mining, railroad construction, and agriculture - especially in the expanding sugar beet fields.
Along the coast, independent groups of fishermen settled after finding their way across the Pacific in their own fishing boats. The largest such community in Santa Cruz County was at what is now New Brighton State Beach, at the eastern edge of Capitola. The area was once known as "China Beach". Another Chinese fishing village grew up near the mouth of the Pajaro River. Other Chinese harvested abalone along the north coast, where boats were not needed.
Many also found work as cooks, launderers, and domestic servants - especially later as they got too old for hard manual labor. In 1882, the Chinese Immigration Act banned immigration to the US by Chinese laborers (although exceptions were made for merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats), so no more young workers came in legally. When Japan began to allow emigration for the first time in 1887, labor contractors found a new source for immigrant labor, and young Japanese began to replace Chinese laborers. Early chapters of Lydon's later book, The Japanese in the Monterey Bay Region (1997 book), explore similarities and contrasts between the Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
In towns like Santa Cruz and Watsonville, Chinese immigrants formed small "Chinatown" neighborhoods, both to be near their jobs and neighbors who spoke the same language, and also because few Anglo landlords wanted them as tenants. Santa Cruz had four different Chinatowns, and the last was nearly deserted by December of 1955, when the flooding San Lorenzo River and subsequent redevelopment erased all traces.
Chinese residents were forced out of their first neighborhood in the town, to a new neighborhood built just across the Pajaro River by developer John T. Porter, which became known incongruously as "Brooklyn". Like the last Santa Cruz Chinatown, Brooklyn was undesirable as an Anglo residential area because the low-lying riverside land was prone to rainy-season flooding.
