A racist mob burned Santa Ana’s Chinatown to the ground. It still serves as a lesson

Behind a row of hipster lofts in downtown Santa Ana is a parking lot where there once stood a Chinatown.

It was a vibrant community that reached about 200 residents at its peak in the 1890s. They were an island in the middle of a city that didn’t want them. In a country that denied them citizenship. During a time when the United States blocked immigration from China altogether. Tenants and business owners withstood racist taunts and physical attacks and repeated attempts by city officials to drive them out of town, even as they washed the laundry of white people and sold them fresh vegetables.