Professor Beth Lew-Williams of Princeton appears in Aoki Center series

The Aoki Center had another amazing event this week, which brought to life racial justice in Western history.

The Aoki Center with the UC Davis History Department in the Free People of Color Seminar Series featured Professor Beth Lew-Williams of Princeton. She presented a work in progress titled "Mary Chinaman: Trafficking, Runaways, and the Law in the American West." The paper considers the experience of female Chinese runaways in the 19th-century U.S. West. By focusing on their fugitive movements — what they wished to escape, how they fled, and where they sought refuge— the chapter examines the multiple and intertwining forces that conditioned Chinese women's lives.

This is part of a larger book project on the legal regulation of race and alienage in the American West. While previous scholarship has focused on how federal law “excluded” the Chinese from the nation and erected immigration controls at its borders, this book will ask how local and state law “included” the Chinese within the political economy and forged a racial regime in the interior.

Born and raised in Davis, Beth Lew-Williams is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American history. Her book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018), maps the tangled relationships between local racial violence, federal immigration policy, and U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia. Her next book project, tentatively titled John Doe Chinaman: Race and Law in the American West, considers the regulation of Chinese migrants within the United States during the 19th century.

I was pleased to hear about Lew-Williamson’s latest project. I am a fan of her book, which is relevant to some of my current scholarship.