The Capabilities of Tangible Civic Memory

Following the recommendation of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group in 2019, the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs began to develop a memorial construction project to honor the victims of the massacre. Since its inception, the project has followed an idea-generation process that includes community engagement and civic conversations. 

Over 175 design submissions were received by the city, which were reviewed by a selection panel consisting of art and architecture professionals, public officials, and community leaders. The process has made a point to prioritize community voices and provided six projects $15,000 each to develop their proposals further and gather community feedback. By early 2023, visual artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and writer Judy Chui-Hua Chung were selected to advance their proposal centered on the artistic depiction of petrified tree trunks to symbolize the victims. 

“While we are memorializing a massacre that reveals the long history of anti-Asian violence, we are also acknowledging that Asian Americans have been deeply rooted here since the beginnings of this city, state and country,” Leong and Chung said in a joint statement to the Los Angeles Times. 

Funded through the Mellon’s Monuments Project Presidential Initiative, their vision of the memorial draws inspiration from banyan trees that guard the entrances of Guangdong villages, where many early Chinese immigrants to Los Angeles originated. The memorial will depict the timeline of the massacre with eighteen petrified trees, rendered from concrete, each symbolizing a victim. The designers plan for the roots of these trees to become functional benches, inscribed with massacre details alongside the pavement text.  

The memorial is set to be located primarily along the 400 block of North Los Angeles Street—which is close to the historical site of the massacre and also near the Chinese American Museum, a collaborator that is providing project direction. The memorial will be connected to secondary sites as well through a walking tour enriched with multimedia content produced by Leong, Chung, and other collaborators.  

With support from external funders, Leong and Chung aim to include smaller installations throughout twelve secondary sites within a one-mile radius of the memorial, marking the areas where additional violence occurred in 1871 or served as sanctuaries where neighbors sheltered and aided Chinese residents.