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All that Glitters: Trans-ing California's Gold Rush Migrations

In early 1848, on the eve of the California gold rush, San Francisco was a small, coastal settlement with approximately eight hundred residents, including Californios, Native Americans, and Euro-American settlers. Within two years, the town’s population had boomed to thirty-five thousand; within ten years, it had surpassed fifty-five thousand, as the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills brought thousands of migrants to the port of San Francisco.1 Over 95 percent of these migrants were young men, and over half traveled from outside the United States, arriving first from Mexico, Chile, and Peru, and later from Hawaii, France, Australia, China, Britain, Ireland, and Germany. The vast preponderance of men among these migrants transformed gender relations in the region, as thousands of young men struggled to organize their social, sexual, and domestic lives in the virtual absence of women. In this context, a wide range of cross-gender practices emerged, most often visibly manifesting in cross-dressing. These cross-dressing practices, however, were joined by another crossgender phenomenon that became a central fixture of the nineteenth-century political landscape — the political and popular discourses that represented Chinese men as feminine and Chinese gender as illegible or indistinct. Emerging in gold rush California, these discourses legitimized discriminatory laws and violence, and mobilized support for federal immigration policies that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In this article, I analyze these racializing and feminizing discourses alongside cross-dressing practices to explore the multilayered relationship between cross-gender phenomena and migration politics in gold rush California. This article is grounded in my analysis of the writings of Euro-American migrant men, as recorded in gold rush diaries, newspaper columns, and political monographs. In focusing on these writings, I do not intend to reproduce white male