![]() Ironically, Denver’s Japanese American population actually grew after World War II when the Amache inmates decided to stay in the state after release. Muranaga, who was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism while fighting in Italy. Among the prisoners who left Amache to serve in the US Army was Kiyoshi K. One of them was the Amache concentration camp in southeast Colorado near the Kansas border. Many of the Nisei left for the American military straight out of one of the 10 concentration camps where the government had imprisoned them and their families for no other reason than their race. The Nisei, like other young Asian Americans who served in the US military, fought the country’s Axis enemies while having to cope with the country’s racist policies toward them at the same time. Fortunately, they were able to establish families in the United States and produce a second generation-the Nisei. Eventually, they too were excluded from the country beginning with the secret Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907 that resulted in the Japanese government denying them passports to travel to the United States, and the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1924 that kept them out of America. Like the immigrants from China, they came to work to support their families and suffered from prejudice and discrimination. Japanese immigrants arrived during the Gilded Age and settled adjacent to Denver’s Chinese community. Now Chinese Americans are the largest Asian American group in Denver and in the country, and Asian Americans in general are the country’s fastest growing immigrant group. With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Chinese population in America declined dramatically and would have disappeared altogether, which was the law’s intent, if not for its repeal in 1943 and the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 that allowed immigrants from China to come to the United States in numbers equal to other immigrant groups. “Not a Chinaman’s Chance” is an expression from the period that succinctly describes their position as one of America’s vulnerable minorities. As you would expect from race-based pogroms, their homes were destroyed and they were expelled from the West. During the latter half of the 19th century, Chinese immigrants were an integral part of communities in the region and contributed to the development of its economy until they were driven out. Not a lot of people are aware that Denver’s Chinatown ever existed or that there were in fact many Chinatowns-ghettos really-throughout the American West. ![]() Eventually their population dwindled because of further anti-Chinese violence and racist laws that prevented them from replenishing their numbers through immigration and reproduction. Still, the Chinese remained to rebuild their community. ![]() It was the city’s first race riot and one of the worst anti-Chinese incidents in the American West. While sympathetic to the persecuted Chinese, the marker is less about them and their community and more about how some of them were saved by some courageous Denverites, especially those belonging to the city’s demimonde, during a violent rampage on October 31, 1880, that nearly destroyed Chinatown. I told him about a historic marker with the somewhat misleading title “Hop Alley/Chinese Riot of 1880” located on the side of a building on 20th Street, between Blake and Market Streets in Lower Downtown Denver. Historical marker commemorating the 1880 anti-Chinese riot in Denver.
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