Lunar New Year is celebrated across Oregon in February, but if you haven't attended the festival in Jacksonville lately, it's time. The free event takes place at the Britt Pavilion garden, near the region's oldest Chinese Quarters, on Saturday.
Volunteer members of the Southern Oregon Chinese Cultural Association have hosted the Jacksonville event since 2006, and draw experts from the state and beyond to explore Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean New Year traditions. Family-friendly activities, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., include Taiko drumming, and lion and dragon dances performed by St. Mary's School students.
Southern Oregon, and specifically, Jacksonville, have a strong historical relationship with Asian immigrants. Archeologists' excavations of Jacksonville's early commercial district date the Chinese Quarters from 1852 to 1910. This makes Jacksonville home to the oldest urban Chinese community in the Pacific Northwest, according to the The Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project led by researchers with the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology.
Gold was discovered in 1851 in Jackson Creek, and Jacksonville, at the intersection of the Applegate Trail and the Oregon-California Trail, and historians say it quickly became the hub for miners and merchants supplying them. Despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other racist restrictions, Asian immigrants played an important role as merchants, miners, railroad workers and farmers in the economic and cultural development of this region.
For more information about the free Lunar New Year celebration in Jacksonville, visit "socca.us."
