ABSTRACT
From the mid-nineteenth century for over a century, Chinese migrations across the Pacific might be best understood as a singular historical process – the “Cantonese Pacific.” This is not to say that trans-Pacific Chinese migrants during that period all expressed some form of self-identity as “Cantonese.” However, regardless of the various dialects they spoke, and the fractured local and regional networks they created out of their individual and family patterns of migration, these hundreds of thousands of trans-Pacific migrants created a single migration system with nodes centered upon Hong Kong, San Francisco, Victoria/Vancouver, and Sydney, Australia, as well as other ports such as Honolulu, Seattle, Yokohama, and Manzanillo, Mexico. Over multiple generations a unique, recurring, and persistent geographic imaginary developed around a mythic “Gold Mountain” that was extraordinarily powerful in directing these migrant aspirations for spatial and social mobility.
