To “Feel” History: Angel Island Immigration Station

Detained in this wooden house for several tens of days, 
It is all because of the Mexican exclusion law which implicates me.
It’s a pity heroes have no way of exercising their prowess.
I can only await the word so that I can snap Zu’s whip.

From now on, I am departing far from this building 
All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me.
Don’t say that everything within is Western styled.
Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage.   

– Poem 135, author unknown, as written on walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station    

These lines are among hundreds of poems and inscriptions carved into the walls of the Angel Island detention center. They record the trauma, frustration, dreams, and humanity of those imprisoned on Angel Island.    

From 1910 to 1940, more than 300,000 individuals, the majority from China and Japan, were detained off the coast of San Francisco, within sight of the land they had hoped to call home. While Ellis Island stands as a testament to the welcome immigrants from Europe found on America’s shores, Angel Island is a searing reminder of the opposite—and how that vital narrative was nearly lost.    

After the closure of the Immigration Station, the site lay abandoned for two decades. In the 1960s, the State of California developed a plan to demolish the facilities and turn the area into a campground and recreational park.    

The site—its dual histories of human cruelty and human courage—would have been forgotten. But in 1970, a park ranger exploring the old barracks saw the poems, igniting an outpouring of activism and advocacy that has led to the creation of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation (AIISF).    

Poetry preserved a past that should never have been forgotten.    

As AIISF Executive Director Edward Tepporn has said, “Place matters because it allows us not only to remember, but to feel the history.” Today, the site serves not only as a museum and historic landmark, but as a place to consider our nation’s present and future, too. The station has become a site of pilgrimage––where former detainees, descendants, and community members can come to grapple with, commemorate, and reclaim the spaces and stories as their own. Exhibitions, tours, and programs invite visitors to explore ideas around movement, exchange, and belonging—and to grapple with how the legacy of racism and exclusion continues to drive United States immigration policy. And amid the current wave of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia, the lessons of our shared history grow particularly urgent.    

 As of October 2021, Mellon has supported two key projects for AIISF: transforming outdoor areas at the site that welcome visitors into the space and enhancing the Angel Island Immigration Museum’s digital storytelling-related technology infrastructure and programming, making a geographically isolated site accessible to many more people. These capital, infrastructure, and programmatic elements will enable AIISF to facilitate a richer, more accurate understanding of history and to reach more people—online, onsite, and in hybrid formats.    

 Tepporn has shared that accessibility remains a significant challenge for the site. To reach the Immigration Museum, visitors must first be able to afford a ferry ride from mainland San Francisco, and then walk a little over a mile to the site itself. These barriers lend a particular urgency to the museum’s digital efforts. As AIISF recognizes, making places truly accessible means investing in the infrastructure to include those who cannot reach them physically.    

 Since Angel Island is a state park, effective stewardship of the site depends upon a high degree of coordination between AIISF and California State Parks. This close and trusted partnership with California State Parks has helped AIISF prioritize accessibility and build the processes and systems over 40 years to ensure that the site can be visited and experienced by more and more individuals.    

Migration—forced and chosen—is a fundamental human story, spanning continents and eras. HiP’s grant to AIISF helps preserve and deepen our understanding of the complex histories of those who came to our shores in search of opportunity and equality. The poetry of Angel Island asks us to confront our collective failure to ensure dignity and humanity to migrants over the generations—and to advance the work of welcome and inclusion today.