Overview

This multimedia commemorative event includes a thirty minute immersive multimedia learning/performance presentation featuring oral narrative, a mix of Chinese and Western instrumentalists playing structured improvisation on contemporaneous Chinese and American music in LA, and a video visual artist drawing on historical photos to recover the neglected history of the LA Chinatown massacre.

This will be followed by a 30 minute Scripps community dialogue about forgotten histories of mass violence, also  reflections on how exclusionary violence persists in LA , followed by collective thinking about how begin to process of reconciliation by recognizing and respecting different histories.

The two paired performances are presented by the Chinese American Museum and El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument in collaboration with Scripps College.

 

Historical Background

The 1871 LA Chinatown Massacre was one of the worst cases of mass race lynching on the West Coast.  Seventeen Chinese men and boys, including a popular doctor, were shot, hanged and burned by an angry mob of about ten percent of the total LA population of the time near Olvera Street.