This study explores food consumption in the Market Street Chinatown, a 19th-century Chinese migrant community in San Jose, California. I use data collected from archaeologically-recovered animal and plant remains to address two primary goals: understanding the intersections of food and identity within the Market Street Chinatown and exploring how the community’s food choices connected its members to other people and places. To address the first goal I compare food remains from trash pit features utilized by both merchants and laborers within the community, and I demonstrate that while food-based differences existed several shared food practices that cross cut social classes served to reinforce community cohesion in the face of rising anti-Chinese sentiment in the 19th-century United States. I draw upon the growing body of literature on migrant food studies as well as transnational approaches to Chinese migration put forward by Madeline Hsu and others to highlight the many ways that food consumption contributed to the formation of complex identities simultaneously rooted in both China and the United States. Key to these interpretations is my contextualization of the Market Street Chinatown food data within the broader flow of people, goods, and ideas occurring throughout the 19th-century Pacific world. To begin tracing these flows and achieve my second goal, I use the biological concept of indicator groups to link fish remains recovered from the Market Street Chinatown to numerous Chinese-operated fisheries throughout North America and China; though these data only scratch the surface of the exchange of goods between China and the United States, they reveal how deeply entangled Market Street’s residents were in these trade networks. Ultimately, I not only demonstrate the importance of food in emerging Chinese migrant identities and its ability to drive multiscalar connections, I challenge previous archaeological interpretations of Chinese migrant food practices which frame interpretation within binaries of continuity and change and do not fully acknowledge the generative potential of migration.