Writing Architectural Histories in Dark and Cruel Times
For the introduction to PLATFORM's new series on Migration, click here.
In the years leading up to the current elections in the United States, I have felt a deep sense of turmoil about my role in this world. As an immigrant now naturalized as a U.S. citizen, I am confounded by contemporary public discourse about the migration of people of color. As an architectural historian, I am uncertain about how my work can address the cruelty swirling around me.
Whether legal or illegal, the racialized discourse of who belongs is nothing new. Since 1790, U.S. immigration laws and policies have centered on questions of color, race, and geography of origin, reinforcing the persistent settler-colonial imagination that envisions a country that is white and Christian, ignoring the presence and histories of indigenous and peoples of color.[1] Just as in the era of the Asian Exclusion Act, the current rhetoric of “Making America Great Again” brings with it an official sanction of cruelty—a communal agreement to inflict pain on the most vulnerable among us—and a sense of entitlement and power that enables one person to demand the forcible removal of another.[2]
This article is my attempt to address this political moment by exploring how the way we write architectural history can help us rethink concepts of place, belonging, and citizenship, and offer more inclusive ways to engage with our past and national identity.
Architecture as a Mode of Belonging
Leaving an indelible mark on the landscape has long been a way to stake a claim on this land as a citizen. This act of belonging is deeply intertwined with the concept of American frontierism, forged by the westward movement of European settlers—formative qualities of a self-reliant, individualistic, and inventive nation.[3] Vernacular architecture historians trace the marks left on the landscape to write the history of American architecture. They describe the westward diffusion of house forms, the adaptation of shotgun houses, the construction of German barns, and the craftsmanship of Black artisans to uncover a more diverse America. Despite their efforts, people who leave no material trace on the landscape simply don’t exist in their canon.[4]
The people who tread lightly on the land are often people of color: Native Americans forcibly displaced from their land, descendants of enslaved Africans migrating across the continent, seasonal agricultural laborers from Mexico and Central America, and working-class Asian immigrants. Those of us writing Asian American histories find few buildings inhabited by Asian immigrants—places of worship, internment camps, SROs, and retail stores. Archival property records of ownership are often absent. This is because, until 1952, Asians were legally barred from owning property.[5] Many of these buildings in which immigrants live and work were not built by them. As a result, it becomes all too easy to dismiss the world of those who are marginalized—pushed, evicted, and moved. And yet immigrants demonstrate agency and creativity in remaking their worlds in alien and inhospitable settings.
I argue that to write the history of immigrants and their stories of struggle and survival, we must focus not on buildings but on the human body. Migrants carry histories in their bodies: collective memories, survival strategies accrued over generations, practices of labor, and tricks to circumvent cruelty. They don’t leave permanent records on the landscape but rather carry personal geographies with them as they travel. Their memories of lived moments are often tied to specific places, and even as migrants move—often under precarious conditions—this sense of place helps them survive, rebuild, and maintain connections.
Migrant Landscape
When I began my career in the early 1990s, writing about the architectural legacy of immigrant Sikhs who entered the United States in the first half of the twentieth century seemed nearly impossible. These laborers left few marks on the landscape as they moved down the Pacific Coast, working in the lumber industry or on the railroads. It wasn’t until they reached the agricultural fields of California that they began to settle in one place sufficiently long to invest in gurdwaras, buy land through proxies, or build community spaces. I found a few oral histories, novels written by descendants, and accounts of the so-called “Hindu infestation” in newspapers.[6] Much of my methodology could be characterized as what Saidiya Hartman would call “critical fabulation”—a creative recreation of an ephemeral world made of sensory ambience, fleeting moments, and lived memories. But in those early years, I removed this account from my dissertation because it seemed to lack the material analysis and records that architecture historians revered.
Sikh laborers “recreated” home wherever they lived—in worker cabins or crowded hovels. They conjured up this world when the fleeting smell of fried onions reminded them of their mother’s kitchen, or when they lingered for hours in the yard as if they were back in their wehra in Punjab. Those who had access to a backyard kept dogs and chickens, grew vegetables, and stored buttermilk under the shade of large trees. This confounded their white neighbors and even led to violence.
On September 4, 1907, a mob of five hundred white men, mostly members of the nativist organization The Asiatic Exclusion League, attacked the homes of Sikh laborers in Bellingham, Washington.[7] These laborers had traveled south from Vancouver, Canada, in search of jobs in the lumber industry. The morning after the riot, Bellingham newspapers reported that the mob’s anger was justified, claiming that the immigrants—mostly bachelor men—lived in squalid hovels and their disorganized camps were evidence of their corrupt morals. One newspaper described the aftermath: “A visit to the headquarters of the Hindus… reveals a condition of squalor and filth. In one of the lodging houses on C Street, where the windows had been smashed, watermelon rinds were scattered promiscuously over the floors and old coats and rags were hanging on hooks.” [8] The immigrants’ use of their yards as living, sleeping, socializing, and bathing spaces rattled these writers’ expectations of what constituted appropriate domestic space.
“Migrants carry histories in their bodies: collective memories, survival strategies accrued over generations, practices of labor, and tricks to circumvent cruelty.”
A local paper claimed, “Those Hindu colonies have presented conditions worse than the Andersonville prison… The places have been fouler than the worst-conducted slaughterhouse. The stench of decaying meat, entrails, and vegetables has contaminated the whole block.”[9] Media reports fueled the fear of the uncontrollable: cultural, racial, and moral “effluences” that could undermine the social order of American communities.[10] Even though many yards were fenced in and often located at the rear of the property, the smells of vegetables and spices seeped out, disturbing the sensorial order of the neighborhood. These temporary “hovels” became a symbol of the social and mental degeneracy of the “invading” alien.
Nevertheless, as Sikh laborers moved down the Pacific Coast, working in railroad labor camps or factory towns in Oregon, they persisted in growing vegetables, raising chickens, and creating outdoor living spaces. The outdoor yard remained a constant in recreating home, marking social and physical boundaries, and continually reimagining lost worlds in creative ways. [11]
In 1945, nearly four decades after the Bellingham incident, Allan Miller studied the Van Tiger Camp in Sutter County, California, which was owned by Roy J. Van Tiger, who held eighty acres of productive land and leased the Oak Grove farm with 160 acres, located midway between Yuba City and Live Oak[12] (Figure 1). The Indian laborers, some of whom had experienced the violence in Bellingham, lived in crowded bachelor quarters, and sometimes in bunkhouses as in the Richard R Wilbur Ranch in Marysville. The kitchen at the camp had two distinct spaces: a cooking area and a dining room. The kitchen itself was small but functional, with a sink, a large stove, and galvanized iron cans used to store flour for flatbreads. The dining room, with its large table covered in oilcloth, served as a social space with newspapers and magazines. But most activities took place in the outdoor veranda overlooking the yard, outhouse, chicken roost, and woodshed. Eating often occurred in the outdoor covered space, especially during the summer months.
Figure 1. Van Tiger Camp, Sutter County, CA, 2022. Photograph by Arijit Sen. The remnant of the Van Tiger Camp building that housed Punjabi laborers studied by Allan Miller.
According to Miller, the interior yards were “fenced in to keep out the chickens, carefully weeded, and constantly cared for by the cook.” At the Van Tiger camp, most of the outbuildings in the yards were in disrepair, and the chickens roamed freely in the back garden because the chicken house had become filthy.
Miller was puzzled. Even when the immigrants adapted and modified their religious practices, dress, and language, they seemed to resolutely maintain their food habits and preserve their gardens. At the Van Tiger camp, residents grew tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, hot peppers, okra, Italian banana peppers, scalloped squashes, Chinese elongated string beans, bitter melons, and gourds. The garden was also used to sun-dry pickles and vegetables and to store milk in shaded, cool spaces (Figure 2). Miller’s description shows that the unkempt backyard was a functional space where immigrants grew food.[13] These were stage sets where informal behaviors—eating together, resting, and gossiping—produced moments of conviviality and community. The activities in the yard temporarily recreated a sense of home and safety that was not available to these migrants in the public realm or the fields.
Figure 2. Yard at the Van Tiger Camp, Oak Grove, Sutter County, CA, 2022. Photograph by Arijit Sen. Miller describes the activities that took place in the verandah and this yard.
In 1995, Kartar Singh Dhillon remembered her home in Astoria.[14] She described, “I had written that we lived on a dirt road atop a riverbank of the Columbia River near the intersection of a large masonry pipe that came down from the mountainside. Below our house was a meadow, the far end of which was lined with ‘company’ houses. The company was the Hammond Lumber Company, where my father worked.” Dhillon’s mother used their home terrace to dry pickles, just as she had remembered from her ancestral village in Punjab.
Later, when Dhillon traveled back to India, she recognized a familiar scene. Observing a domestic courtyard in Punjab, she found it similar to the terraces and yards in the camps:
My hostess, visible through the open kitchen door, is serving and preparing breakfast for ten or twelve of us: children, relatives, and guests. She sits cross-legged on an inch-high stool in front of a “choola” the charcoal-burning stove which resembles a milk bucket….
I arise with the rest of the household and bathe with cold water freshly pumped from the earth. It is pitch-black night. I bathe in the open in the courtyard, wearing a cotton gown for privacy….
These are the rooms, the house, the courtyard where my husband was born and lived as a child. This is where he would be living now if he were still alive, and where I would be living.[15]
Curiously, for Indian working-class immigrants living in crowded, shared labor camps, recreating outdoor courtyards—rather than indoor spaces—became the primary mode of remembering and reproducing home in the inhospitable and alienating environment of North America (Figures 3 and 4). The yard provided an opportunity to remember and recreate a familiar way of living through the practice of body-memory and habitual acts—what anthropologist Paul Connerton calls “incorporating practices.”[16]
Figure 3. Lakha Singh Chima (1892—1961) and Swaran Singh Chima home, Yuba City, CA, 2022. Photograph by Arijit Sen. The Chima brothers lived in this building while they worked in the farm.
Figure 4. Chima home courtyard, Yuba City, CA, 2022. Photograph by Arijit Sen. This courtyard space became a space of social gathering for local farmers as well as activists and students associated with the Ghadar Party, an early twentieth century international political movement that attracted expatriate Indians who wanted to overthrow British colonial rule in India.
Studying the enactments of the past in new contexts offers a unique method for understanding how place is reproduced under conditions of migration. Here, architectural history becomes less about the study of permanent places and more an analysis of fleeting time and embodied practices. How can we write histories that recover stories of ephemeral lived moments as familiar apparitions that persistently appear in the world of immigrants?
“The yard provided an opportunity to remember and recreate a familiar way of living through the practice of body-memory and habitual acts…”
Methods
Writing about the history of the ephemeral, the small, and the banal, Swati Chattopadhyay urges us “to unlearn habits of thinking about architecture and history—what matters and what counts as evidence.”[17] What might such unlearning look like? Currently, a single narrative of precarity, injustice, victimhood, and exploitation dominate the portrayal of socially marginalized immigrants of color. Many of our most vulnerable populations move around a lot—sometimes because they are evicted, at other times because they are running from law enforcement or transitioning from one exploitative and low-paying job to another. Their architecture temporary, their lives mobile, and their geographies uncertain. Light rarely enters the stiflingly dark accounts of rental exploitation, overcrowded shared units, immigration camps, transit lounges, and jails.
Just as the cruel violence in Bellingham created a rupture that rendered visible the otherwise invisible domestic spaces of Sikh laborers, we face a similar historic moment today. The sights and sounds of ICE agents, vigilantes, and news anchors, intent on driving out the vulnerable, low-paid workers in 2025, echo the collective anger against immigrants in Bellingham then. Like then, contemporary media accounts create an aesthetic distinction that separates the “civilized” ways of living from the “primitive,” unclean, and barbaric spaces of immigrants. Yet, just when this cruelty manifests, we are also confronted with the sheer determination to exist—the insistence of this otherwise invisible minority to survive and nurture their collective humanity. This moment offers us, architectural historians, an opportunity to experiment with new ways to write immigrant histories; to rethink our ways of seeing and interpreting the world around us—what Chattopadhyay describes as strategic delinking: a method that aims to insert “small spaces into the narrative of empire.”
First, we begin by questioning the often assumed categorial differentiation between Architecture and commonplace buildings. It means that we move beyond valorizing architects and their archives and cast our sight toward the ordinary and commonplace. We consider a complex network of places and people that constitute a cultural landscape of immigration and belonging. We let go of the habit of only focusing on material and physical environments. We retrieve stories of imaginary geographies, memories, and embodied practices of ordinary people—a method I call spatial ethnography. Finally, we change how histories are written—an exhilarating possibility of co-creation of architectural histories with people whose voices and worlds are missing in our archives. Co-writing goes beyond collecting oral histories, conducting interviews and acknowledging the lived experience and expertise of everyday people. It requires participation of community members or their descendants in the entire process of collecting, documenting, indexing, analyzing, archiving, writing, disseminating, and owning research data.[18]
Currently, I am working with Dr. Nicole Ranganath and descendants of Sikh immigrants to document the sites of cultural relevance in Yuba City. Our research affirms that there is hope and beauty in the lesser-written story of stoic survival. Christina Sharpe argues that this form of beauty “is a practice, that beauty is a method, and that a vessel is also ‘a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused’.” In her case, she discovered how her “mother tried to make a small path through the wake. She brought beauty into that house in every way that she could; she worked at joy, and she made livable moments, spaces, and places in the midst of all that was unlivable…” The first step toward dreaming of a world that respects the humanity of socially marginalized immigrants of color is to write them down—to acknowledge the presence of this other history of beauty, struggle, and survival amid the cruelty and darkness that envelops us.
Citation
Arijit Sen, “Writing Architectural Histories in Dark and Cruel Times,” PLATFORM, April 14, 2025.
Notes
[1] Some examples of legislations that affected immigration into the US include the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790, the Asian Exclusion Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1924, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
[2] There is a growing literature examining how legal and official procedures continue to sanction cruelty on marginalized and frontline communities. See for instances Catherine Goetze, “When the State Shatters Families. The US Family Separation Policy of 2018, Cruelty and Patrimonial Sovereignty,” Global Studies Quarterly 2, Issue 2 (April 2022): 1-10.
[3] While Turner’s frontier thesis is often cited as a primary example of such thinking, architectural historians use concepts of diffusion and hybridity to normalize an account of westward expansion of European immigrants. I first encountered a powerful study of migration in the work of Fred B. Kniffen’s work on the diffusion of folk housing traditions in the New England, Pennsylvania, and Chesapeake Tidewater and the Carolina Low County area. His argument, that building traditions were carried by immigrants, often from the old country into the new world, and spread across the landscape as these populations moved westwards from their point of disembarkation created a school of research built on cultural preadaptation theories. Histories written as diffusion of traditions from east to west, assume that America was settled in this direction. This misapprehension not only ignores the presence of native communities but also fails to recognize the arrival and impact of people on the Pacific Coast. John B. Jackson, “The Westward-Moving House,” Places Journal, July 2011; Fred B. Kniffen, “Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion,” Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John M Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 3-26. See also, John Michael Vlach, “Fred B. Kniffen’s Milestones in American Folklife Study,” The Journal of American Folklore 108, no. 429 (1995): 328–33.
[4] Another reason why architectural historians fail to describe the transient worlds of marginalized people is because the latter may not own property or build structures. Historical accounts of buildings and landscapes include sites that we can see, measure, and document.
[5] For more on the Alien Acts see California Supreme Court case "Fujii v. California" in 1952. Greg Robinson, “Fujii v. California,” Densho Encyclopedia, 5 Oct 2020.
[6] See for instance, Werter D. Dodd, “The Hindu in the Northwest,” World Today 13 (1907). “Gifts of Famine: Invasion of Sikhs from the Punjab,” The International Wood-Worker 17, no. 10 (1907): 4-5; “Hindus Driven Out,” New York Times, 27 January, 1908; Tuly Singh Johl, interview by Joan Jensen, Yuba City, 1975, Joan Jensen Asian Indian Immigrant Research Materials, 1975–88, Library Special Collections, University of California, San Diego.
[7] David Cahn, “The 1907 Bellingham Riots in Historical Context,” Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, 2008; John R. Wunder. “South Asians, Civil Rights, and the Pacific Northwest: The 1907 Bellingham Anti-Indian Riot and Subsequent Citizenship and Deportation Struggles,” Western Legal History 4, no. 1 (1991): 59-68.
[8] “Dwellings of Hindus are Dens of Dirt,” Bellingham Herald, September 6, 1907; Bellingham Herald, September 2, 1907, 1:7, and Bellingham Herald, September 5, 1907, 1:5; Mary Jane Gallagher, “1907 Bellingham mob forced East Indian mill workers out of town,” October 16, 2019, Bellingham Herald.
[9] “Whither are we Drifting,” Nya Världen, Bellingham, Washington, Friday, September 13, 1907, East Indian Documents - Nya Världen, Woodring College of Education, Western Washington University, March 19, 2009.
[10] See, “Have We A Dusky Peril?,” Puget Sound American, September 16, 1906: 16. Linking insalubrious conditions to social and moral degeneracy is not new. This was the same argument used to justify demolitions and removal of people in nineteenth-century industrial Manchester and London.
[11] Again, in 1923, Rajani Kanta Das’s book Hindustani Workers on the Pacific Coast repeated that many of the homes of the immigrant laborers had outdoor backyard gardens and the residents often slept outside under the trees.
[12] Allan Miller, “An Ethnographic Report on the Sikh (East) Indians of the Sacramento Valley,” Graduate Thesis, Berkeley, 1950, D-621, Box 3 Folder 24, Ted (Tejinder Singh) Sibia Collection on Sikhs in California, D-621, Archives and Special Collections, UC Davis General Library, University of California, Davis.
[13] Kingston Heath and Jim Fonseca write about Portuguese American gardens as memory spaces that allow the immigrants to reconnect and reproduce a familiar landscape. In this case the term “yard” refers to a different form of open space. The yard of the Sikh immigrant men differed from a carefully tended domestic gardens meant for public display or a kitchen garden to grow produce. Jim Fonseca, “Signs, Symbols and Stones: The Portuguese American Urban Ethnic Landscape #10,” Medium (Jul 22, 2021); Kingston Wm. Heath, The Patina of Place: The Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial Landscape, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001).
[14] Kartar Dhillon, “Astoria Revisited and Autobiographical Notes,” CUMTUX (Clatsop County Historical Society Quarterly) 15 (Winter, 1995), 2-9; Kartar Dhillon, “The Parrot's Beak,” Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 214-222.
[15] Kartar Dhillon, “Journey to India,” Sikh Pioneers: Indian American Pioneers to North America, Manjit Kaur Sibia (Owner), PJ Singh Sikh American Community Historian.
[16] Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 88.
[17] Swati Chattopadhyay, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), 24.
[18] Co-writing histories borrow from collaborative ethnography and co-theorizing where the scholar works back and forth with community collaborators to write the final document. Luke Eric Lassiter describes collaborative ethnography as “an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it—from project conceptualization to fieldwork, and, especially, through the writing process.” Luke E. Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 15; See also Joanne Rappaport, “Beyond Participant Observation: Collaborative Ethnography as Theoretical Innovation,” Collaborative Anthropologies 1 (2008): 5.
