As many as 20,000 Chinese workers were recruited to build North America’s railways. Their descendants are still fighting for recognition
Chris Merritt showed me the ruins of Kelton, the last of the railroad ghost towns he wanted me to see that day, a storm whipped up on the horizon. I stood there watching the landscape, these clouds, the winds blowing up the dust, and I thought about what life was like more than 150 years ago for the Chinese workers who lived here then, laying rail and inhabiting this thrown-together desert settlement thousands of miles from home.
I grew up in Toronto, and when I first found out that Chinese workers had helped build the Canadian railways, I wanted to know more. The monumental story I learned is the heart of this photographic project: Before Canada’s construction ever got under way, immigrant laborers from China—10,000 to 20,000, according to the haphazard records—had built the hardest, most dangerous segments of the transcontinental railroad in the western United States.
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