Inscribed in Exclusion: A Chinese Ledger and the Global West

New archival discoveries continue to unsettle our understanding of the Chinese diaspora, revealing how migrants adapted language, material, and geography to sustain community across vast distances. This proposal examines a handwritten ledger from Montana (circa 1880s-1890s) filled with hundreds of Chinese phonetic renderings of English place names, tools that helped non-English speakers navigate the social and economic terrain of the American West. Linking mining camps in the Rockies, locations across North American, and Asian cities, the ledger traces a transnational geography of exchange, mobility, and kinship. This palimpsest (composed on discarded law-office stationary) “writes back” against the systems that sought legislative erasure of the Chinese presence. Cataloging local places intertwined in global trends, this source suggests an evolving record of travel, trust, and adaptation as Chinese migrants remade their worlds. Read both artifact and archive, this proposal argues that such fragile records reveal how endurance was materially inscribed within exclusion.