SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2023

Representations within ethnic and heritage tourism expose how a particular ethnicity and its history is catered to a tourist’s understanding of “authentic” culture. However, few studies have captured ethnic and heritage tourist spaces which feature widely varying representations. This paper examines several tours of China Camp, a heritage tourism site within a California State Park. Utilizing theory on “authenticity” in both ethnic tourism and heritage tourism to approach and compare the unique narratives within China Camp, this paper analyzes the presentation of authentic cultural history as a case study into the varied essentialized narratives of Chinese transnationality within America. In their variation yet individual “authenticity”, these narratives signal the complications of establishing “diaspora” as a group identity label which is based in the Othering of transnational movement from an established “homeland”. This paper thus seeks to reveal how the “Chinese American diaspora” is diversely constructed, identified, and othered within an American locality, ultimately problematizing the use of diaspora as a group identity label.