This post is part of the series 13 Ways of Looking at the Northwest. You can find the initial post here.
By Heather Lowcock, Project Archivist, NHPRC Grant – News Tribune Collection
During the 1960s, The News Tribune had a recurring feature called “Down the Road a Piece.” Set in old lumber, mining, or agricultural communities, the stories were of people making their home in these rural landscapes, and more often than not, they were stories of early immigrants. There’s Mossyrock, where businessman Ghosn Ghosn moved from Palestine in the early 1900s; Brooklyn, where Andy Ivnic, who left Austria in 1907, worked as bartender selling schooners of beer to lumberjacks, and Mud Bay, where Mrs. Judith Vestre, who came from Sweden in 1908, lived on a boat called 'Whoopee.' Their stories and faces are a reminder that whether you came to America and settled last month or 400 years ago, you are an immigrant.
Southeast Asian Communities
In April 1975, North Vietnam took control of Saigon, marking the end of the war, and the necessary evacuation of many South Vietnamese. During this same period, the Khmer Rouge government under Pol Pot came into power in Cambodia. In May of that year, President Gerald Ford signed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act allowing refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to enter the United States and allocating funds for their relocation. Washington Governor Dan Evans sent an invitation to refugees staying at Camp Pendleton, welcoming them to resettle in Washington State. The first refugees arrived at Camp Murray in May 1975, and by the end of the year over 4,000 made their home in Washington.
A 1984 News Tribune article tells the story of the Kao family. As an army medical corpsman in Cambodia in 1975, Jim Kao escaped to Thailand with his wife Sokha and stepson Chaydy the day after the capital of Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. This decision potentially saved their lives as the following years in Cambodia resulted in the genocide of up to three million people. The Kao family spent 6 months in a refugee camp before arriving in America and relocating to Tacoma. In the article, Kao describes the challenges of those early days acclimating to different foods and starting his first job as a dishwasher. Chaydy relays the difficulties of going to school while still learning to speak English: “No communication with anybody. You just sat there.” By 1984, both Jim and Sokha were American citizens and worked for the Tacoma School District. Sokha also worked part-time at Nalley’s packing plant, while Jim volunteered to assist newly arrived refugees, and Chaydy, a Lincoln High School senior, supervised berry and cucumber pickers in the Puyallup Valley during the summer.
Additional stories of Southeast Asian communities who arrived in Washington during this period are recounted in the book New Land, available to view in The Northwest Room.
Romani Community
With origins in India, the Roma are an ethnic community who migrated westward to Europe starting in the twelfth century. European rulers who mistrusted their close-knit family groups, nomadic way of life, and traditional occupations and practices oppressed and enslaved the Roma for centuries. As many Roma immigrated to America in the 1800s, they experienced further discrimination as they sought to maintain their culture. The Romani traditions of working in family settings within service trades like metalwork, horse (and later car) sales, carnival ride repair, and fortune telling, were often criminalized or romanticized.
The News Tribune photograph collection includes images of Tacoma’s Romani community. A 1968 article celebrating the opening of the “Little Red Schoolhouse,” the first headstart program for Roma children in the country and advocated by Miller Stevens, a Roma leader in Tacoma, highlighted an integrated Romani feast. In a 1970 article, as additional basic education courses were offered to adults, Stevens stated, “The desire is there…with education we can help share the burden of society.” However, Miller Stevens also voiced concern about what may be lost from the culture that helped them survive over centuries--their language, traditional occupations, close family units--suggesting that the Roma, like other immigrant communities, felt the tension of integrating to current American norms while maintaining their identity.
A growing number of Chinese immigrants arrived in the U.S. during the 1850s to assist with the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Many of the Chinese in Tacoma arrived as these railroad laborers and stayed, continuing to clean, cook, wash and serve at homes, restaurants, and hotels in the area. Some also worked in the lumber mills or opened their own businesses. Most lived along the waterfront on property leased from the railroad. Anti-Chinese hatred grew with the railroad’s completion and rising unemployment. Newspapers, including the News Tribune, when it was the Tacoma Daily Ledger, fueled these racist sentiments with editorials and headlines calling for the removal of the Chinese from Tacoma. In 1885, the Tacoma Anti-Chinese League set a November 1 deadline for all Chinese to be out of the city. Some left voluntarily, but by November 2, around 200 Chinese still remained.
On November 3, several hundred men converged on Tacoma’s Chinese districts. In groups of five or six, they removed the Chinese from their homes and businesses and marched them to a railroad station. Those with money were forced to buy a ticket; the rest were herded into empty boxcars for travel out of the city. The next day many of their homes and businesses were set on fire. In a later affidavit, How Lung, who came to Tacoma in 1875, recalled, “They took hold of the Chinese…and pulled them out of doors. Some persons pointed pistols.” Lung recognized Tacoma Mayor Jacob Robert Weisbach, a German immigrant who arrived in Tacoma in 1881, as a member of the mob who told him to leave. While The Oregonian described the act as a “crime against civilization and mankind,” the U.S. district court in Vancouver dropped the charges against the “Committee of 27” who organized the expulsion, and they returned to Tacoma with a parade in their honor. In 1993, the Tacoma City Council approved, unanimously, Resolution No. 32415, calling the expulsion a "most reprehensible occurrence" and allocating initial funds toward the creation of a commemorative park. The Chinese Reconciliation Park opened in 2010.
Deportation Trains
Localized removal of immigrant communities in the 1800s grew to federal mass deportation by the 1900s. Prior governmental efforts to police immigration laws and policy focused on ports of entry with states and local governments responsible for enforcement. As federal enforcement took shape, immigration officials, now under the Department of Labor as the Immigration Bureau, began raiding prisons, mental hospitals, workhouses, and charitable institutions to find people to deport--including nearby at Western State Hospital in Steilacoom. The government partnered with private railroad companies for deportation, and in 1914 the first modified Pullman prison cars began westbound routes starting in Seattle and Eastbound routes from Hoboken establishing a “deportation apparatus…to extend the settler-colonial dream of seizing the land and controlling who got to be a settler–and who didn’t.” You can learn more about this history and its relationship to current immigration policy and practice in Ethan Blue’s book The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal available to view in The Northwest Room.
The digitization and processing of the News Tribune Photograph Collection was supported by a grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission at the National Archives.
Sources:
Blue, E. (2021). The deportation express: a history of America through forced removal. University Of California Press.
Fjermedal, Grant. (1970, August 16). Tacoma Gypsies hopeful, saddened. The News Tribune.
Hughes, J. C., & Echtle, E. (2025). New Land. Legacy Washington, Office of the Secretary of State.
Jeffords, Edd. (1968, May 4). Tacoma Gypsies fete own headstart setup. The News Tribune.
Morgan, M. (2018). Puget’s sound. University of Washington Press.
Silverman, Carol. (2017). Oregon Roma (Gypsies): A Hidden History. Oregon Historical Quarterly, 118 (4), 519-553.
Workman, Dave. (1984, October 1). From the ashes of Cambodia, a family rises. The News Tribune.
