Sally Chen - “Take Root”: Community Formation at the San Francisco Chinatown Branch Public Library 1970s-1990s
The Chinatown Branch serves as a case study for the Chinese American community in San Francisco as they formed and contested new narratives of what it meant to be Chinese American from the 1970s-1990s. Through examining the Chinatown Branch as the culmination of the unrecognized labor of the Chinatown Branch librarians, this thesis shows the forms of work that undergirded processes of community formation in the context of changing U.S. immigration policy, growing and diversifying populations, and San Francisco, California, and national politics of the time.
