Who Else But Americans

Related Tactics
8380” x 16.5” (full extension)
accordion folded inkjet print of 3 photographs taken every 2 miles of the Transcontinental Railroad
2022

Who Else But Americans is a project by Related Tactics (Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nate Watson) that confronts the histories of violence against communities of color often erased in the advancement of nation building and power. The title of the piece is drawn from an infamous speech given by Leland Stanford at the Golden Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869 celebrating American exceptionalism in the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Despite the lack of acknowledgement by Stanford, the process of building the railway took a brutal toll on the thousands of migrant Chinese laborers who made up a majority of the workforce. It is estimated that three Chinese laborers died for every two miles of track laid along the route. Our project is a memorial to those lives lost, and situates this story within the long history of communities of color conscripted into processes of settler colonialism and environmental extraction.

The piece traces the span of the transcontinental railroad between the West Coast terminus in Sacramento, CA to its Eastern terminus in Council Bluffs, IA using images pulled from online mapping sources. We took three screenshots every two miles along the route (referencing the estimated 3 lives lost for every 2 miles of track laid). Across this collection of largely mundane images of the U.S. western landscape and the infrastructure that stitches it together, there is little evidence of the deaths underlying the construction effort, emphasizing the banality of how we have come to perceive and image this terrain. The digital maps that guide us through that space allows us to take for granted and overlook our country’s violent legacy.

Exhibition history:
P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists, ICA San Jose (2024)

Production of Who Else But Americans was supported by a Humanities Facilitating Fund grant from George Washington University (Michele Carlson principal faculty investigator) and artist-in-residences from The Luminary and Montalvo Arts Center.

images 1-3: studio documentation photos by Mia Nakano
images 4-8: installation photos by Glen Cheriton, courtesy of ICA San Jose, 2024
images 9-12: installation images at ICA San Jose, courtesy of Related Tactics