ENVISIONING INCLUSION IN THE HEARTLAND: CHINESE LABORERS, MERCHANTS, AND STUDENTS IN THE MIDWEST UNITED STATES, 1880S-1910S

Situated in the Chinese restriction and exclusion era (1875-1943), this dissertation sheds light on the “inclusion” of Chinese laborers, merchants, and students around the turn of the twentieth century primarily in the states of Illinois and Indiana – an often-overlooked locale in the studies of Chinese American and US immigration history. “Inclusion,” in this context, is not about racial equality or social justice; instead, it denotes a recognition and acknowledgement that Chinese continued to come and live within the United States despite restrictive and exclusionary laws against them. Conceptualizing those three groups of Chinese as US residents inside the country, I argue that their domestic interactions both within and beyond their own Chinese circles yield a productive site of inquiries into race relations and immigration bureaucracy that were not always symmetrical to the exclusionary functions of the border around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. In fact, “inclusion” and “exclusion” are contrary but not contradictory in the making of a “gatekeeping” nation state. They are in conflict yet intertwined, and they set the trajectories of Chinese im-/migration experiences into the US further apart from the other groups. Nevertheless, their lived experiences in the US Midwest proved the continuity of their collective belonging in a land where they lived and a country that they called home.