In 1874, a group of women opened a “safe house” on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Because their work disrupted the thriving trade in women between China and America, they faced endless legal challenges and even sticks of dynamite placed on their doorstep. By offering a place for survivors of sex slavery and other forms of servitude to escape to and drawing public scrutiny to the crime, they threatened their century’s existing business model of human trafficking.
Debunking the “White Rescue Myth”
The best-known image of the pioneering anti-trafficking crusader Donaldina Cameron at work was taken in the early 20th century in a garbage-strewn alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Donaldina Cameron (left, standing) with interpreter and police officers staging a rescue of a Chinese girl. Courtesy of Cameron House.
Cameron, wearing a full black skirt that fell just above her ankles and a dowdy, small- brimmed hat, gazes toward the camera. A man in a suit stands partway up a ladder propped against a brick building. On a balcony above him, a man who appears to be a plainclothes police officer holds a girl in his arms. She has a long black braid hanging down her back and is the “slave girl” supposedly being rescued.
The Fight to End Modern Slavery
January was Human Trafficking Prevention Month, a designation of heartbreaking relevance to my home state of California. Not only does it remain one of the nation’s leading hubs for sex and labor trafficking; the state is also home to a host of non-profit organizations who fight the crimes of sex and labor slavery year-round.
Map showing locations of human trafficking cases in 2017, as tracked by anti-trafficking organization Polaris.
The Cameron Family’s Gift to the Bancroft Library
One morning, in June of 2016, an e-mail popped into my inbox from the grandniece of Donaldina Cameron, one of the main characters in The White Devil’s Daughters, my nonfiction account of the women who fought slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
I’d already been researching and writing my book for more than three years by that time. Ann told me that while cleaning out her brother’s home for a move, she’d discovered a box filled with photos, letters, and other genealogical material about her great aunt Dolly, as Donaldina was known.
Cameron family materials dating to the 1840s Family
Finding Your Literary Community
At this year’s annual gathering of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, I was honored to give the opening talk. Here are my remarks.
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I’m so happy to be here… to help celebrate the rollicking and generous spirit that has infused our Community all these years.
Julia Flynn Siler
How many first-timers are here today? Raise your hands…
Well, for you newbies, you’ll see what I mean about community spirit here during the Follies later in the week. Or you may discover it while connecting with other writers over dinner or while hiking on Thursday with your fellow work-shoppers.
Remembering 1882
On Saturday, May 6th, several hundred protestors gathered in San Francisco’s historic Portsmouth Square in Chinatown carrying such signs as “Remember 1882” and “2017 Has Become 1882.”
They were there to mark the 135th anniversary of the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law implemented to exclude a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the U.S. It was one of the most shamefully racist pieces of legislation ever enacted in America and was repealed in 1943.
Guidebooks to Sin
At opening night of the 2017 Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans, I met a librarian who also happens to be a champion ham kicker.
Pamela D. Arceneaux at the Williams Research Center in New Orleans
She shimmied her way onto the stage of Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre in New Orleans in a sparkly black top and full-length skirt. Channeling the spirit of one of her heroes, Mae West, she delivered a lively and ribald talk on a subject that has fascinated her for some 35 years: the “blue books” of Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans that flourished from 1897-1917. The “blue books” were guidebooks to the prostitutes and brothels in the district
The end of the library (as we know it?)
Ralph Lewin at the Mechanics’ Institute, photo courtesy of the Sacramento Bee.
A few months ago, San Francisco’s venerable Mechanics’ Institute hosted a discussion titled “The End of the Library (As We Know It)?”
As the oldest library in the city of San Francisco, the Mechanics’ Institute founded in 1854 and opened a year later with a grand total of four books, a chess room, and a mission to offer vocational education to out-of-work gold miners. (The San Francisco Public Library was founded more than two decades later, in 1879.) As one of the oldest libraries in the state, the Mechanics’ was a fitting place for this discussion.
Devotees of the Bancroft Library: “We’re archive rats!”
This past Saturday, I went to the annual meeting of the Friends of the Bancroft Library. I love this University of California campus and especially U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, which houses some of the most precious and rare manuscripts of the American West. That day, I met other people — historians, authors, and avid readers – who are also devoted to preserving and supporting the library’s treasures. It was a gathering of fellow “archive rats.”
Dispatches From Squaw’s Annual High-Altititude Literary Gathering
Almost a decade ago, I joined the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley for an intensive, week-long non-fiction workshop. It was a summer camp-like experience in the high Sierras. Each morning, about a dozen of us in the non-fiction workshop gathered around a table to critique each other’s manuscripts — usually discussing two submissions each morning. In the afternoons, we’d either stay for the craft talks or hike through the mountains. After dinner, we’d stay up late, swapping stories with fiction and non-fiction writers alike.