MOCA TALKS with Laura Ng
Archaeological Research on the Rock Springs Chinatown: Daily Life Before and After the 1885 Chinese Massacre
October 1, 2025, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm
$10 General Admission | $5 Student and Senior Admission | Free for MOCA Members
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to an insightful conversation with Laura W. Ng, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Grinnell College and a historical archaeologist specializing in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese migrants and their transpacific lives.
Railroad work and coal mining brought Chinese laborers to rural southwestern Wyoming starting in the 1870s. The Rock Springs Chinatown was constructed by the Union Pacific Coal Company as part of a racialized landscape intended to segregate Asian immigrant coal miners. At the same time, Chinese laborers were scapegoated for white unemployment, which culminated in the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Newspapers emphasized that Chinese laborers were foreigners because they were “heathens” and sent remittances to China. Within this context, a fight broke out between white and Chinese coal miners in Mine #6 and white miners led a mob that brutally attacked Chinatown and its residents. The mob burned most of the Chinatown structures down and at least 28 Chinese were murdered.
Drawing on the burn layer from the massacre as a time marker, and in collaboration with Chinese American descendants, Professor Ng will discuss how archaeological excavations provide tangible insight into silenced histories of Chinese immigrant labor, transpacific migration, and racial exclusion.
About Laura W. Ng
Laura W. Ng is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Grinnell College in Iowa. She is a historical archaeologist who researches late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese migrants and their transpacific lives. Laura is currently investigating archaeologies of racism and transnationalism at the Evanston and Rock Springs Chinatowns in rural Southwestern Wyoming in collaboration with Dr. Dudley Gardner and Chinese American descendants. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University.
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