More than 2,200 Chinese Exclusion Act case files held by the National Archives at Riverside are now available online in the National Archives Catalog, thanks to a collaboration with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California.

The project began in 2018 after a fortuitous meeting at a local American Archives Month event. Shortly thereafter, professors and students from California State University, San Bernardino, and the University of California at Riverside joined the team.  

National Archives at Riverside staff trained the student interns, who digitized 56,507 documents using donated scanners. 

These records document the movement of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans in and out of the United States during the exclusion era, when a series of acts passed by Congress between 1882 and 1943 severely curtailed Chinese immigration to the United States.

Around 10 percent of Riverside’s Chinese Exclusion Act case files have been digitized.

While the pandemic may have temporarily disrupted the digitization efforts, it did not stop the momentum to increase access to these records, which are invaluable to family and historical research. 

You can read more in an article written by Angela Tudico and published in the archives.org web site at: https://www.archives.gov/news/articles/riverside-digitizes-chinese-heritage-records.