A timely reminder of who built one of California’s greatest assets.
Locke statue honors the many Chinese hands that built Delta
By Todd Milbourn - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, October 14, 2007
The peat soil was too soft. Horses would sink right through it. The clamshell dredger hadn't been invented yet. And no white workers would do the job. So when it came time to build the levees that allowed the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to become the farming paradise it is today, the job fell to the Chinese.
They had come seeking gold years earlier. They ended up panning the sludgy soil, building the muddy barriers with little more than their hands.
These days, headlines bemoan the Delta's eroding levees and dwindling fish stocks. But little consideration is given to the men and women who, more than 120 years ago, waded waist-deep in the mud, toiling for a dollar a day, so flooded land could be put under plow.
The townspeople of Locke want to change that.
On Saturday, they unveiled a statue commemorating the Chinese contribution to the construction of the vast levee system that protects some of California's richest farmland and supplies two out of three Californians with water.
The granite and bronze statue is 9 feet tall. It's meant to hold up, even if this long-neglected town falls down.
"Locke is a wooden town," said Elyse Marr, the 19-year-old artist who designed the tribute, which stands proudly along Locke's main drag, between a building that seems likely to tip over and one poised to crumble. "If it ever goes, we'll still have this monument."
Marr, a Stanford University sophomore whose father was born in Locke, said she drew inspiration from photographs and oral histories of Chinese laborers. She said she wanted to do justice to a legacy that involves far more than a "physical infrastructure."
"It's not just the levees and railroads that shaped the landscape of California I wanted to capture," she said. "It's the richness of stories."
