History Talk - Winston Ho Describes New Orleans' Long Gone Chinatown

Historian Winston Ho will discuss New Orleans’ long-gone Chinatown at 7 p.m., Thursday, April 30, at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W. Napoleon, Metairie. This event is free of charge and open to the public.

Ho says that the first significant migration of Chinese into Louisiana took place during Reconstruction after the American Civil War, between 1867 and 1871, when local planters imported hundreds of Cantonese contract laborers from Cuba, California, and directly from China as a low-cost replacement for slave labor. By the mid-1870s, nearly all of these laborers had abandoned the plantations and migrated to Southern cities, especially New Orleans, in search of higher pay and better working conditions. The laborers became workers in factories, laborers in levee and railroad construction projects, fisherman, grocers, and especially laundrymen. 

By the 1880s, these merchants had developed a small Chinatown on the 1100 block of Tulane Avenue, between Elk Place and South Rampart Street. The historic Chinese Presbyterian Mission of New Orleans was located a few blocks to the north on South Liberty Street. Though much smaller than the Chinatowns of the West Coast or the industrial cities of the north, New Orleans Chinatown was the site of several dry goods groceries, import/export companies, apothecaries, restaurants, laundries, and the meeting halls of several Chinese associations.

Winston Ho is an independent historian and published writer, specializing in modern China and Chinese American history in New Orleans. He was a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of New Orleans and he holds an undergraduate degree in history and Chinese language from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, under the Department of History and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. He has previously studied at the Mandarin Training Center at National Taiwan Normal University, Beijing Language and Culture University, the University of Mississippi, and Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans. 

Winston Ho is employed as a public historian at The Historic New Orleans Collection. He has taught Chinese at the Academy of Chinese Studies in New Orleans and at St. Mary's Dominican High School in New Orleans. He is the son of Taiwanese parents and is a native of New Orleans.

For more information regarding this exhibition, contact Chris Smith, Manager of Programming for the library, at 504-889-8143 or wcsmith@jefferson.lib.la.us.