Angel Island's History

The Angel Island Immigration Station has a short but important history. In operation for only thirty years, the station was built on an island in the San Francisco Bay. The name, Angel Island came from Spanish explorer Juan Miguel de Ayala. He encountered the island, which had been inhabited by the Coast Miwok tribe for thousands of years, on the Roman Catholic holiday of Our Lady of the Angels and correspondingly named the island. Many immigrants who came to the United States through the West Coast during this time period, from 1910-1940, were stopped at Angel Island for inspection before their passage into the country. Inspectors at the station would perform interviews, interrogations, and exams on the incoming passengers, which could range from a "visual examination" to a multi-month stay (some even stayed years!) with daily extensive interrogations and intrusive medical exams. The kind of treatment each passenger received was almost always linked to their nation of origin upon arrival and the color of their skin.

COURTESY OF CALISPHERE

Letter from the Editor

Thank you for your interest in the Angel Island Immigration Station! Dominican University of California’s Public History program is proud to showcase the talents of 16 students from our FA2022 HIST 3901 course. Public history itself is a growing field, represented in both academia and a variety of professional careers. Despite the diversity in potential career paths, trained public historians share a common purpose, to communicate historical content to the public. Trained public historians can be found working in museums, heritage sites, public parks, the Hollywood film industry, the media, and at every level of government. Beyond this, Public Historians are also found working as or alongside archaeologists, oral history specialists, genealogical researchers, online content creators, and in a variety of other career trajectories.

The History Department at Dominican is committed to graduating students with a diverse set of skills and knowledge that prepares them to live in the globalized 21st century. Our department, with the creation of History 3901, now requires students to expand their skillset to include the creation of high quality media content designed for public consumption. These projects, like the one you are about to enjoy, are based on in-depth individual research projects that I individually advised upon. Students were required to network with local historical resources as part of their research, resulting in an overarching effort to showcase the power of collecting and organizing community knowledge. All of the students represented here developed highly marketable skills; including, leadership, teambuilding, web design, audio/video content creation, editing, writing, and design. The Public History skillset is paired with an equally rigorous classical historical education at Dominican University, designed in total to best equip our students with a variety of transferable skills, civil leadership, and historical knowledge for their future success.

Special thanks to California State Parks, especially our primary liaison, Interpreter II Casey Dexter-Lee, for partnering with Dominican University in this endeavor. This project would not be possible without the extensive support of the National Archives and Records Administration: San Francisco, especially Director Stephanie Bayless and Archivist Sean Heyliger. The Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation (AIISF) provided essential guidance, experience, and knowledge for this project, particularly Program Manager, Daniele Wetmore, who actively participated in our course. Other people and organizations, without whom this project would not exist, includes the Division of Public Affairs, the History Department, and countless other supportive faculty and staff members here at Dominican University of California. The support of the Public History Program’s Teaching Assistant, Cece Trifoso, was also vital for the success of this project.

The content found in this project is designed to serve as an introduction to the rich history found at the Angel Island Immigration Station. We aim to make our shared history come alive; or, perhaps better phrased by Winston Churchill when he commented before parliament shortly after the fall of France in World War II, “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, revive its echoes, and kinds with pale gleams the passion of former days.”

In Appreciation,

Jordan Lieser, PhD
Dominican University of California History Department

Who We Are

and what is public history?

Public history is crucial to the study of history. It is what connects a broad public to their communities, their identities, and the broader human experience. We are students at Dominican University of California currently studying the practice, importance, and application of public history. We have particularly focused our efforts on something close to home, the Angel Island Immigration Station, and have partnered with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and California State Parks on this project. Community history is very valuable and providing our local community with access to high-quality history education involving Angel Island enriches both our visitors and ourselves.