A former executive chef in New York City, Feng-Feng Yeh, at the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, she lost her job and her career plans as soon as the coronavirus pandemic began. In search of inspiration, Yeh immersed herself in the local history of Chinese immigrants, from which she had only heard fragments of for her entire life. On the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center website, she discovered that Chinese-owned family grocery stores were a thriving industry in Tucson as of 1900, according to the Associated Press.

“More than businesses, they were lifelines for Mexican American communities. The stores even started preparing Mexican chorizo — the spicy, ground-pork breakfast staple. It earned the nickname “Chinese chorizo”.

The chef says she was very moved by the history of the alliance between Mexicans and Sino-Americans at a time when all crucial immigration policies were quite racist.

“Chinese immigrants settling in Arizona were doing so in the shadow of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the U.S. government’s first race-based immigration policy. Both Chinese and Mexican immigrants faced racism despite being instrumental to the workforce”, according to the publication.

Yeh proposed erecting an 11-foot (3.4 meters) tall sculpture of two chorizo sausage links, and recently won a grant through the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation. To promote the endeavor, she organized the inaugural Tucson Chinese Chorizo Festival. For the month of October, several local restaurants and food trucks have been serving weekend specials with meat and vegan chorizo.

“The 15,000-square-foot Tucson Chinese Cultural Center is a bustling hub that’s part community center and part museum and serves at least 5,000 people. Established in 2005, it has a multipurpose room, commercial kitchen, classrooms, and a lounge with tables for mahjong. On the walls, there are display boards with mini profiles of long-gone Chinese grocery stores. The center also has a YouTube channel that includes a 2014 video onChinese chorizo”.

“A lot of people don’t know we exist after 17 years. So, we’ve been trying to get the word out”, said Susan Chan, the center’s executive director.

Starting in 1900, Chinese-owned grocery stores prospered and became an economic force in Tucson. By the 1940s, there were 130 families running a little over 100 grocery stores in the city. The number of stores dwindled in the ’70s and ’80s due to an influx of supermarket chains, convenience stores, and a younger generation of Chinese Americans uninterested in the family business.

To learn more about these family histories, the Associated Press publication reveals interesting data from those events.