California Story Fund
Angel Island Oral History Project
The Regents of the University of California
Office of Research
San Diego
Project Director: Georges Van Den Abbeele
Pacific Regional Humanities Center, UC Davis
The stories of Angel Island detainees
This project recorded and archived the stories of immigrants detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay between 1910 and 1940.
Recent projects have brought attention to Angel Island’s history, but much of the daily routine of the station remains unrecorded. This project filled that gap by collecting oral histories of former detainees. Katherine Toy, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, said in “Stanford Magazine,” “It is time to insert the immigrant stories of Angel Island into the nation’s historical timeline.”
The oral histories are now part of the interpretive displays on Angel Island. A public archive of the oral histories is located at UC Davis and online.
For more information about the project, see the Pacific Regional Humanities Center website.