Discrimination in Public Health
Sewage System
In the late 1870s, after great insistence from health officials, the city of Los Angeles installed a municipal sewer line through the main residential areas of Los Angeles. However there were a few notable exceptions – Chinatown was among them. When Walter Lindley was appointed as the city’s health officer in 1879, he published his first report on the conditions of LA that needed to be improved for the city to achieve proper health. Among them was to finish the municipal sewer line. He estimated that this would take only a year. However, it would be more than thirty years before the municipal line was fully installed in Chinatown. For these thirty years, Chinatown residents were exposed to the diseases that often travel through raw sewage, while the rest of Los Angeles was not. This fact “elicited no apparent concern from health officials”, who only showed concern for the public health of Chinatown when it affected white Angelenos (1).Living Conditions and Cubic Air Acts
Chinese residents, especially men, lived in boarding houses and lodging houses. These men lived in very tight spaces, where 200-300 men could live next to a corral. 15 men (and sometimes families) would sometimes live in a single room. Rent was expensive for these residents, so living together in tight quarters meant cheaper rent overall. Sometimes, individuals would even sleep in the kitchen area. These spaces themselves were put tightly together, so little space was available in the Chinatown area. These living spaces themselves were overall in a bad state. Inadequate ceilings meant residents succumbed to cold weather, hot weather and rain. Wooden fire escapes were the only entrance and exit for the building, for a place with dozens of people living in one place (2). This led them to be susceptible to emergencies. However, many of the issues with the buildings in Chinatown were the fault of landlords, not their tenants, most of whom were not Chinese nor residents of Chinatown themselves. Overall, these spaces meant bad living conditions, putting these residents at risk for disease due to its close and inadequate quarters.Los Angeles health and housing authorities used overcrowding as a way to stigmatize and demean Chinese residents. The Los Angeles Housing Commission considered Chinatown’s houses as the “lowest” form of housing problem, emphasizing the space’s neglect and demeaning these individuals. In response to overcrowding, the LA Housing Commission destroyed 56 of these homes because of their state to “help” the issue, yet only built 7 homes afterwards (2). This meant residents were required to move and overcrowding only got worse. Los Angeles housing authorities demeaned residents living in overcrowded homes without investing into creating safer and more homes. These houses were criminalized under the Cubic Air Act, which required 500 cubic feet of space per person in the name of "public health." However, this Act was applied exclusively towards Chinese residents and their housing.
Produce Peddling
In the early 1900s and 1910s, produce peddling became a major source of income for a number of Chinese men, almost all of whom lived in Chinatown. Even then, fresh produce was an important aspect of health, and health officials were majorly concerned with getting fresh produce out to Angelenos. Reports from the city’s health officials show attempts to police and constrain Chinese peddlers, not allowing their “filth” to leave Chinatown. As such, Chinese vegetable sellers did not sell in the city’s main market places, where other vegetable peddlers sold their fresh produce. These main market places were heavily invested in by the Los Angeles Board of Health Commission. For example, in 1913, the Board paved the marketplace street to make it easier for salesmen to hose down their stands.Chinese peddlers, on the other hand, sold their vegetables door to door or at a designated spot in Chinatown (1;2). Due to poverty and lack of investment compared to the main markets, Chinese sellers often had to store their vegetables in wooden corrals, where they sometimes lived or kept their horses. This configuration was soon noticed. In 1912, LA hired their first fruit and vegetable inspector, Frank Mefford. He largely focused on cracking down on the sanitation of Chinese vendors, despite his own note that all of the city’s marketplaces were unsterile. In 1914, he commissioned his first arrest of Chinese vegetable peddlers, calling it “the beginning of the crusade” against Chinatown. In the LA Times, journalists wrote about how the produce was “exposed to the filth and stench of the stables of Chinatown…carrying disease germs” (3). Mefford later ordered the demolition of their stalls, promising to build them back. Of the 56 demolished, only 8 new ones were built, and they were not built in the city marketplace with the other vendors, but instead in Chinatown, where the city could contain the purported “filth” of the vegetables (1). Although vegetable peddling may not seem explicitly related to the public health of Chinatown, the situation of these produce salesmen demonstrates how stigmatized residents of Chinatown, and especially Chinese immigrants, were and the investment in health infrastructure that they received.