I am a Man

A few Stats: Mississippi {one of the poorest states in the nation} in the 2000 census had a population of 2.85 million people, and Louisiana +/- 4.5 million. In that census, 3,099 residents were Chinese, and there was a total Asian population in Mississippi of 18, 262 people. Very small in comparison to the population totals. At that time 61.4% of the state's population was White, and 36.3% was Black.
Here is a snapshot-timeline of Chinese history in the U.S. :
Today, Chinese Americans make up the largest Asian population in the U.S., totaling 2.5 million.
Chinese immigrants first flocked to the United States in the 1850s, eager to escape the economic chaos in China and to try their luck at the California gold rush.
When the Gold Rush ended, Chinese Americans were considered cheap labor.
They easily found employment as farmhands, gardeners, domestics, laundry workers, and most famously, railroad workers.
In the 1860s, it was the Chinese Americans who built the Transcontinental Railroad.
By the 1870s, there was a widespread economic depression in America and jobs became scarce.
Hostility had been growing toward the Chinese American workers.
By 1882, things got so bad that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, virtually banning all Chinese immigration into the United States.
It was only in 1943, when China became America's ally in World War II, that congress finally repealed the Exclusion Act.
Even then, Chinese immigration was still limited to a mere 105 people a year.
In 1965, all restrictions were lifted and the Chinese started to arrive in America in huge numbers.
The first Chinatowns started appearing in U.S. cities as far back as 1900.
I Am a Man
This famous phrase on placards during the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis was designed to render visibility in the national landscape for underserved Black laborers, who at that moment were "invisible in plain sight". One could ascribe the same phrase to the Chinese living on and near the Mississippi Delta, in the central heartland and upper midwest, not solely in major coastal cities where we imagine them to be in residence, and in business. The clip from the PBS doc Chinese Immigration in your Media folder references "old-time Chinese who knew their place". What does it mean to know your place? Where is "your place" if you are "othered", or deemed "subaltern" in relation to the dominant culture? And, how do you get to be somebody with such low population numbers and poor representation in government/business?