It’s 1906: the Chinese Exclusion Act is in full effect, and the city of San Francisco wants to erase Chinatown from the map. When the earthquake destroys the community, their removal seems imminent.
It is a historical crossroads from which point a million futures could emerge.
Those days after the disaster—when the streets were filled with rubble, when the people of San Francisco wandered like zombies through their tragedy—are hard to parse with the quaint pagodas and dragon embellishments that define the neighborhood’s landscape today.
A clip from SF Chinatown: Look Up (Courtesy of California Migration Museum youtu.be)
With the California Migration Museum’s new immersive, phone-based walking tour, SF Chinatown: Look Up, you no longer have to. The narrated guide uses augmented reality and 360-degree video experiences that superimpose historical imagery over the modern neighborhood, offering an entirely new perspective that fuses past and present.
The free, 45-minute, self-guided Chinatown tour isn’t the only neighborhood into whose history the virtual “museum without walls” submerges viewers. SF Japantown: Returning to the Harlem of the West dives into the 1942 order that sent thousands of the city’s Japanese Americans to internment camps throughout the West—and what came next.
The vacuum created by the absence of Japanese American residents opened space for Black families moving out of the South in the Great Migration, transforming the neighborhood into the “Harlem of the West” within just a few years. The 40-minute tour explores those life-changing events, and what happens when internees returned home to find their home was no longer theirs alone.
A clip from SF Japantown: Returning to the Harlem of the West (Courtesy of California Migration Museum youtu.be)
The self-guided tour makes eight stops over about three-quarters of a mile in today’s Japantown and Fillmore District, peering through virtual windows into the long lines of frightened Japanese Americans awaiting their deportation, the jazz-era diner opened by a returning internee in 1945, and other scenes that had long disappeared from the streets of SF—until now.
“California’s story has always been about immigration. It still is,” says museum founder and director Katy Long. “We see this as a tangible way to build empathy and invite people to consider how important documenting our history is—not only as a means to understand our past but as a map to our shared future.”
Two additional 30-minute, 360-degree video tours take viewers inside the Castro—the sleepy Irish Catholic enclave where gay migrants formed a sort of queer homeland beginning in the 1950s—and the Mission, telling the little-known story of how 100 years of coffee trade with El Salvador helped bring tens of thousands of refugees to the neighborhood in the 1980s, sparking the Sanctuary City Movement across the U.S.
A still from the immersive Mission walking tour(Courtesy of California Migration Museum)
A fifth tour, based in Los Angeles, the 60-minute Downtown L.A.: Ni de Aquí, ni de Allá, unearths a period in which millions of Mexican Americans were coerced into leaving the city in the 1930s.
While the Cal Migration Museum’s tours provide an innovative way for visitors to go deeper into the history of SF, they’re just as fascinating for residents and Bay Area locals. The immersive experiences don’t treat history like a distant, untouchable artifact—they reveal its dynamic relationship with the present by literally blending together historical photos and video with the buildings, businesses, and political landscapes that exist today demonstrating that the past is never past.
The California Migration Museum’s free immersive tours (as well as their Melting Spots 38-stop interactive map and podcast of SF’s immigrant food stories) are available for streaming or to download to your phone.
A still from the immersive Castro walking tour(Courtesy of California Migration Museum)
