Petaluma Chinatown Unearthed — Facing the Past for a Better Future exhibit at The Petaluma Historical Library & Museum coincides with the renaming of the city's Center Park to "Historic Chinatown Park" in recognition of the contributions of the early Chinese Community in the area.
I stopped by the Museum on a breezy Thursday afternoon to take in the exhibit, expertly curated by Petaluma Old Chinatown Memorial Park Ad Hoc Committee, with support from The City of Petaluma, the Asian American Pacific Islander Coalition of North Bay, the Asian American Alliance of Marin, Japanese American Citizens League, Petaluma River Park and several more key partners.
Area resident, film maker, story teller and former business owner of Petaluma Pie Company Lina Lin Hoshino played a key role in preparing and presenting this important exhibit.
Artifacts, maps, clothing and historical records transport visitors through a time portal to the early days of Petaluma as a frontier town — uniquely from a Chinese perspective, between the 1860s and 1890s.
A companion exhibit called Chinese Pioneers: Power and Politics in Exclusion Era Photographs provides a history of the social and judicial disenfranchisement of Chinese Californians—as well as moments of Chinese agency and resilience in the decades before and after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
The exhibits run through June 8th, 2025. The Museum is located at 20 4th Street in historic downtown Petaluma and is open Thursday through Sunday 10 am to 4 pm.
A walking tour of Chinatown Unearthed takes place from the museum on June 1st, 2025 from 2 pm to 3.30 pm. It is sold out.
I've written about the cultural groups that settled early Petaluma in my non-fiction books, Fog Valley Crush and Fog Valley Winter. Since these two books were published there has been much new focus on expanding the spotlight on the Coast Miwok people who were here first and whom the land belonged to originally for thousands of years, as well as those not widely focused on who toiled and devoted their lives to make this place what it has become.
Here's an excerpt from my 2026 book Fog Valley Winter — Chapter 23
Of all the immigrant groups who settled in California during the Gold Rush era, it was the Chinese who struggled with the deepest cultural gulf between themselves and most other immigrant groups in their assimilation into American life . . .
It was the struggling peasant farmers of the Chinese masses who were desperate enough to voyage to California to pan for gold, being worked ragged in brutal conditions in mines and on the railroads.
Whatever small amounts they were able to earn in the Gold Rush, this amounted to considerable sums of money over months and years, when sent back to impoverished family in China. Patience was a virtue — if they survived to tell their tale.
Thousands suffered through years of prejudice and gruelling blood, sweat and tears with the sole goal of someday returning to their ancestral homeland to be surrounded by the simple comfort of relatives.
A song from old San Francisco's Chinatown expresses this desire in direct terms: "I am returning home with purses and bags stuffed full. Soon I will see my parents' brows beaming with joy."
The Chinese community in Petaluma emerged within the fledgling frontier city, with its own stores, restaurants, laundries and warehouses. Most of the Chinese who lived in Petaluma in the 1880s were young men in their late teens or twenties. They held tight to their customs and their hopes to one day return home.
Though largely peace loving, industrious, kind and frugal, the Chinese were often vilified for cultural habits among some, those of smoking and gambling.
An archeologist I met on a tour of the Old Adobe across town had talked to me about his experience of the Chinatown excavations in Petaluma's now Theatre Square in the 1990s. He had been adament that the opium problem in Petaluma had been on a small scale at most. "It likely didn't amount to much more than the habits of a few old men," he said.
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Still, a number of Chinatown shanties were torn down in 1911 for the development of the McNear Building. By that time, most residents of Chinese heritage were driven out by racist scapegoating. It's important today to note and recognize the locations of Chinese owned businesses, boarding houses and wash houses in the downtown Petaluma area. Present day controversy abounds over the planning proposal for a six-story boutique hotel on the site of several long-forgotten Chinese owned businesses. The site was later utilized as a gas station for many decades.
I hope whatever resolution results from a potential city-wide referendum on the project enables the site to eventually be developed into some kind of positive space for the community to embrace. What can we learn from this history as a community during a turbulent and diversive present period in our history?
These wholesome recipes are interwoven with ideas and inspiration for advocacy and attainable sustainable living, alongside personal anecdotes and stories from family, friends, and collaborators who share a special connection to Toluma Farms.
women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. The animals and team at Toluma Farms are 95% female, and one of Tamara and Jessica’s main goals for Feasts on the Farm is to inspire and encourage others to consider the long and hard road of farming.
Their search for a working land property led them to a 160-acre former cow dairy in Tomales that had fallen out of production. In 2003 they purchased the land and committed themselves to stewarding it and restoring it to the state they believed it was in when originally cared for by the Coast Miwok Tribe.