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Discrimination in Public Health

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Starting in the late 1870s, Los Angeles city health officials made it their purpose to try to “contain” Chinese immigrants, and their purported diseases to the area of Chinatown. In doing so, they created much worse health conditions for Chinatown residents and created further stigma around the neighborhood and its inhabitants. In the following paragraphs, we will outline a number of specific examples in which Chinatown residents and Chinese immigrants were discriminated against via the guise of public health, or were subjected to poor health conditions.

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.

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  1. Public Health Kathryn Dullerud