The Last Chinatown

Part of the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions in Media Arts, the MAH is pleased to announce a new project in collaboration with local artists Huy Truong, Susana Ruiz, and Karen Tei Yamashita related to the history of Santa Cruz Chinatowns.

The MAH will commission artists Truong and Ruiz to create The Last Chinatown (working title), an interactive public memorial and augmented reality film that speaks to the rich narrative landscape of Santa Cruz through the lens of historical erasure with a focus on its last Chinatown. The project is a performative interpretation of an original story by Yamashita supported with insights from community members and historical documents. The final work will incorporate theatre and gameplay and will be experienced on mobile devices, including augmented reality glasses, at historically important sites in downtown Santa Cruz to render visible the lives, legacies, and labors of those who lived there.

As part of the project, Truong and Ruiz will also work closely with a number of history-makers and leaders in the Santa Cruz AAPI community, including George Ow Jr., an elder and one of the last residents with memories of living in the last Chinatown. As Ow explains, Chinatown may have been a ghetto, but it was also a haven not only for the Chinese but for Black people, Mexican people, Filipino people, and other groups for whom it wasn’t safe or legal to live elsewhere in Santa Cruz. Thus, Chinatown in Santa Cruz and Chinatowns across the country were not a space solely devoted to marginalization, but a place where Chinese culture and traditions could be preserved and passed down from generation to generation, as well as revised and transformed in diasporic and multicultural contexts.

The Last Chinatown is slated for a public premiere in Santa Cruz in the spring of 2024, with a preview of the work scheduled to be shown at the MAH’s “Frequency” digital arts festival from September 21-24, 2023. Additional support for this project is provided by the Arts Research Institute (ARI) at UC Santa Cruz.

Header image: An image of Georgina Wong and George Ow Jr (1942) overlaid on a digital model of Chinatown, rending courtesy the artists and photo courtesy the estate of George Lee.