I wasn’t fully aware of the history.
Chinese Laborers Built Sonoma’s Wineries. Racist Neighbors Drove Them Out
…“There was virtually no organized anti-Chinese agitation in the Sonoma Valley during the 1870s, much unlike what was common throughout much of the Bay Area, particularly in San Jose, Santa Rosa and Petaluma, even Napa,” writes Sullivan in a 2014 article in the Wayward Tendrils Quarterly. Haraszthy refused to stop employing Chinese at Buena Vista, despite the growing political opposition. He began carrying a gun to protect himself, and in 1868, he fled to Nicaragua to produce rum.
Meanwhile in wine country, nativist sentiments continued to take root. By 1877, lawmakers in Washington, D.C., debated a bill to stop Chinese immigration. Sonoma Valley grape grower John Hill testified in Congress to defend Chinese labor. "He explained that Sonoma Valley grape growers depended on the 500 Chinese laborers employed in his ‘neighborhood,’ " Phillips wrote in his 2015 thesis for his master’s degree from Sonoma State University.
But spurred on by Denis Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party, a labor-oriented political group that supported nativist policies, Congress eventually passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, barring nearly all immigration from China. And whites drove out Chinese from many rural areas throughout the West. “There was a movement to forcibly remove all the Chinese from Sonoma by starving them out — don’t hire, don’t patronize any shops that hire Chinese. During that period, a lot of Chinese left Sonoma. They were chewing on weeds down by the riverbanks, things got so bad,” explains Phillips. According to U.S. Census data, the Chinese population in Sonoma County dropped from 1,145 in 1890 to fewer than 200 in 1930.