Content area
Full Text
The Six Companies, or Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, of San Francisco played an important role in the immigration of Chinese to the United States and Mexico.1 This was largely owing to the peculiar nature of this movement. Unlike the more common forms of foreign immigration based on the immigration of individual persons as well as entire families, Chinese immigrants to the United States, in the great majority of cases, were laborers hired by companies requiring their services.
U.S. businessmen who hired Chinese laborers contemplated using their services only on a temporary basis for undertaking certain projects. Neither they nor the rest of their countrymen wished the Chinese to stay in the United States as permanent settlers. Owing to the great cultural divisions between the United States and China, it proved necessary to obtain the services of these laborers through Chinese commercial houses based in San Francisco. The directors and managers of these houses, in turn, belonged to the Six Companies, a collective or umbrella association embracing the entire Chinese community in the United States.
The principal purpose of this paper consists in analyzing the role of the Six Companies in the smuggling of Chinese across the U.S.-Mexico border, from the publication of the first of the so-called exclusion laws in 1882 until the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, when the Chinese contraband traffic ceased for all intents and purposes. I argue that, in order to better delineate the process of illegal Chinese immigration to the United States for the period under study, it is essential to understand the relationship between the existing forms of social organization among the Chinese immigrants and the role which the organizations played in the various jobs which the immigrants performed, especially as workers hired for specific tasks, such as in mining, agriculture, railway construction, etc. Far from being merely a collective association dedicated to the welfare of its members or to the efficient management of the commercial operations of the companies and businesses of the Chinese overseas communities, the Six Companies, in their role of an "umbrella" organization, constituted, in reality, the keystone in the process of Chinese immigration to the host/receiver countries.
DEVELOPMENT AND ROLE OF THE SIX COMPANIES
The history of the Six Companies dates...