“Diversity” on Main Street? Branding Race and Place in the New “Majority-Minority” Suburbs

Abstract

The emergence in the United States of an increasing number of spaces across the socioeconomic spectrum with majority nonwhite populations merits close attention because of these spaces' potential in reconfiguring historical and contemporary claims to place. In an era in which the neoliberalization of urban development has spurred local governments toward more active involvement in defining relationships between race, ethnicity, consumption, and space, “majority-minority” suburbs are particularly important sites of study. In the late 2000s, two branding campaigns in majority-Asian American and Latina/o municipalities in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley—a densely populated region popularly known as a “suburban Chinatown”—put forth specific discourses of race, ethnicity, and culture in attempts to actualize specific visions and claims to place, identity, and history. In doing so, these campaigns illuminated and reinforced larger racial, geographic, and ideological divides. “Diversity” on Main Street embraced pluralist multicultural discourses of the nation, while the “Golden Mile” proposal sought to showcase the transformation of a central thoroughfare by ethnic Chinese capital and immigration. A close examination and comparison of these two campaigns shows how struggles over race, geography, and history are intertwined in the contemporary identities of places and integral to the shaping of civic landscapes.

Keywords:

• Race
• suburbs
• place
• identity
• branding
• Los Angeles

I thank Arlene Dávila and Johana Londono for their guidance in developing this article. Juan David De Lara, Christopher Niedt, and two anonymous reviewers provided assistance in the process of revision. I presented a version of this paper at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan on December 28, 2009, and received valuable feedback from several audience members, including Yen-fen Tseng, Naiteh Wu, Mau-kuei Chang, and Jonathan Ying. This article began as a portion of a chapter in my dissertation, and I thank my chair, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and committee members, Laura Pulido, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and David Lloyd, for their intellectual provocations and continuing support.

Notes

1. In the specific context of the San Gabriel Valley, see Ochoa 2004; Saito 1998; Pardo 1998; and Fong 1994.

2. As of 2000, Asian Americans were 51.5 percent of the total populations of Alhambra, Monterey Park, Rosemead, and San Gabriel, and self-identified Chinese made up 66.8 percent of those Asian Americans (calculated from U.S. Census 2000, Summary File 1, DP-1.).

3. Cumulatively 34.3 percent (calculated from U.S. Census 2000 data, Summary File 1, DP-1.). The total population of these four cities in 2000 numbered 239,164—comparable to Scottsdale, Arizona (235,677) and Jersey City, New Jersey (242,389), and larger than, for example, Orlando, Florida (227,907), or Madison, Wisconsin (228,775) (calculated from U.S. Census 2000, Summary File 1, DP-1.). The population of the San Gabriel Valley as a whole numbered just over 1.5 million in 2000 and was estimated to have grown to nearly 1.8 million in 2006, a population comparable to the San Francisco metropolitan area (Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, “San Gabriel Valley, 2006 Economic Overview and Forecast,” http://www.visitsangabrielvalley.com/wis%5CReports/SGV-2005.pdf

4. Mexican Americans' history in the San Gabriel Valley dates from before the United States conquest of Alta, California, and continues through the formation of citrus labor communities in the East SGV from the early to mid-twentieth century. Since the 1950s, a significant population of middle-income Mexican Americans has moved east from East LA into the West SGV. Suburbanizing later-generation Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans began to arrive with their Mexican American counterparts beginning in the 1950s as well, unwittingly laying the groundwork for the massive ethnic Chinese immigration that would begin in the late 1970s (Saito 1998; Fong 1994). In the 1970s and 1980s, new Asian immigrants—Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians political refugees, many of them ethnic Chinese, and immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong seeking to escape political uncertainty—flowed into the area, as well as to eastern SGV cities like Rowland Heights and Hacienda Heights. Latina/o immigrants moved into cities slightly further east, such as El Monte and La Puente (Ochoa 2004). The 1980s saw an increase in Asian American, as well as Latina/o, political power in the area, with the election of several Latina/o and Asian American politicians (M. Zhou, Tseng, and Kim 2008).

5. In 1997, Alhambra was awarded HUD's Best Practices award for economic development, for, in the words of HUD spokesman Larry Bush, “acting as an entrepreneur” and being an example of “government shouldering the responsibility to meet the economic opportunity needs of its own community” (Liu 1998).

6. For example, to make way for the Edwards theater complex, several immigrant-owned small businesses, including a bakery, a wig shop, a dental office, and a Vietnamese restaurant, were told to move or face eminent domain proceedings; three national chain restaurants (Johnny Rockets, Panda Express, and Applebee's) eventually replaced the small businesses (Liu 1998).

7. Here I refer broadly to the rise of the entrepreneurial state, in which decentralization and increased mobility of capital forces municipal governments to compete for investment and wherein public spaces are reshaped as arenas of privatized consumption (cf. Dávila 2004; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Weber 2002; Gregory 1998; and Harvey 1989).

8. The most conspicuous example of north-of-Huntington wealth is, of course, railroad tycoon Henry Huntington's vast estate in exclusive San Marino. San Marino, which borders both eastern Alhambra and San Gabriel to the north, was incorporated in 1913 by Huntington and a group of wealthy ranchers when neighboring cities threatened to annex their extensive land holdings. Ever since, San Marino has prided itself on being what the local newspaper calls “the finest, exclusively residential community in the West.” Beginning in the 1980s, the historically old-money, white community changed substantially with a large influx of affluent, ethnic Chinese immigrants; currently, Asians are a slight plurality, making up nearly half of the residents. However, the community's deep investment in property values (with a median home sales price of $1.4 million in 2007) and exclusivity has changed very little: in 1990, San Marino residents opposed a bid to join the city from 900 households to the north and in 1993 resisted a state mandate to provide a minimal thirteen units of affordable housing (Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng n.d.).

9. Mike Davis and Alessandra Moctezuma (1999) have written of a suburban “third border” in the West SGV, in which wealthy, ostensibly white, suburbanites effectively racially police public space such as municipal parks by limiting access to their working-class (assumed to be) Latina/o neighbors through instituting stiff entry fees or blocking pathways in certain neighborhoods.

10. In addition, in the United States, the commonly accepted connotation of the term “Mediterranean” as exclusively European serves to create an ideological erasure of the geographical fact that the Mediterranean Sea is encircled by West Asia and North Africa as well.

11. The geographical area covered by DABA is bordered by 3rd St to the west, Chapel Avenue to the east, Alhambra Road to the north, and Beacon Street to the south. An assessment on businesses within these boundaries pays for licenses and promotion (phone conversation with Sharon Gibbs, Business Outreach Manager, Alhambra Chamber of Commerce, and formerly of DABA, 11 February 2009).

12. In the case of Los Angeles, an implied linear narrative, which depicts Los Angeles as the city of the multicultural future, proffers a false version of history that denies Southern California's Mexican, indigenous, and multiracial pasts (Deverell 2004; Widener 2003). Also see Kurashige on a political shift from integrationist goals to the use of multiculturalism as “world-city” boosterism in Tom Bradley's mayoral administration in 1980s Los Angeles (2008: 259–285).

13. In 2005, San Gabriel Square brought in $378,000 in sales tax revenue for the city, which receives 1 percent of all taxable sales (Ho 2006a).

14. Huang ran unopposed in 2007.

15. By ensconcing “Spanish” architectural references in the landscape and placing the Spanish Franciscan missions in a mythicized narrative of European racial succession, Anglo Americans relegated Native Americans and the Spanish to the past, asserting their place in national narratives of manifest destiny and frontier colonialism. In the process, “Mexicans” were rendered as both invisible laborers and hypervisible, threatening foreigners; indigenous Californians were reduced to vanishing, picturesque figures in a sentimentalized history (Kropp 2006). Dating back to 1848 and continuing through the twentieth century, discriminatory spatial and economic practices, buttressed by such ideologies, have contributed to both the “barrioization” (Camarillo 1979) and dispersal (e.g., through practices of urban renewal and freeway building) of Los Angeles's Mexican American population (Villa 2000). Partially in response to such practices, Chicana/o activists and scholars both in and following the 1960s Chicano Movement have placed issues of history and representation in civic landscapes at the forefront of contemporary struggles for social, political, and economic equality (Valle and Torres 2000; Villa 2000; Acuna 1996).

16. For example, in a struggle to save a local park, the organization Friends of La Laguna centrally placed the immigrant, Chicana/o history of San Gabriel (KCET 2007a, 2007b; Ho 2006b, 2006c; Lubisich 2006; see also Cheng 2009).

17. As scholars, such as Mary Pardo (1998) and José Calderón (1991, 1992), have noted, in predominantly middle-class-identified, suburban settings, such as the West SGV, the role of ethnic and political identifications for Mexican Americans is far from clear cut.

18. The homeownership rate was 64 percent, compared to only 39 percent in the south. Median value of single-family owner-occupied homes was 41 percent higher in the northern zip code than in the southern ($282,400 compared to $199,900) (U.S. Census 2000, Summary File 1, DP-1; Summary File 3, DP-2, DP-3, and DP-4).

19. Approximately one in three residents in the northern zip code were white, whereas south of Las Tunas Drive, in the southern zip code, only one in ten were (U.S. Census 2000, Summary File 1, DP-1; Summary File 3, DP-2, DP-3, and DP-4).

20. Cathay Bank, the first Chinese American bank, was founded in Los Angeles's Chinatown in the early 1960s specifically to counteract mainstream lending discrimination and to help new immigrants navigate United States financial institutions. Cathay Bank proceeded to open the first Chinese American bank branch in Monterey Park in 1979, planting the first seed of what would subsequently become the largest concentration of ethnic community-oriented banks in the United States (W. Li et al. 2002; Y. Zhou 1998)

21. See Rosenthal 2003, among others, on Orange County, China, a suburb of Beijing.

22. Although patterns of immigrant Chinese settlement in the United States have shifted over time, from the dispersed settlement of laborers and merchants in the nineteenth century to central urban Chinatowns to, currently, what Wei Li calls an “ethnoburb,” or a multiethnic suburb (W. Li 1999, 2005, 2006), the racial ideologies that inform discourses around “Chinese” race and place have remained remarkably the same. Indeed there is a long history of discourses about Asians “taking over” or trespassing the boundaries of their allotted space, in North America as well as other Pacific Rim British settler societies, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (see especially W. Li 2006). Such sentiments are inextricable from conceptions of areas of Chinese settlement as foreign spaces that operate autonomously, a notion whose currency in Eurocentric thinking dates back at least to the eighteenth century, when a class of diasporic Chinese merchants began to establish themselves globally in interstitial spaces created by European imperialism (cf. Ong and Nonini 1997). The eventual abstraction of these historically grounded conceptions into (racial) common sense gave them a normative quality, leading to the conjectural leap that “Chinese” or “Asian” spaces should operate autonomously, neither requiring nor being worthy of partaking in public resources. The spaces produced and reproduced by such ideas and discourses are made most obvious in the numerous urban Chinatowns in the United States and Canada. For example, geographer Kay Anderson (1987, 1995) documents how Vancouver's Chinatown became a “physical manifestation” of the abstraction “Chinese,” in no small part due to state practices. In Anderson's words, “Chinatown accrued a certain field of meaning that became the justification for recurring rounds of government practice in the ongoing construction of both the place and the racial category.” Chinatowns are, therefore, a “western landscape type,” shaped and produced by racial ideologies and state practices in Western societies, rather than any straightforward expression of “Chinese” culture or practices (Anderson 1987: 583–585).

23. In addition, the ideological tactics involved in such struggles are similar in Chinese “ethnoburbs” throughout California. For instance, discourse around “monster houses,” or the practice—usually attributed to wealthy Chinese immigrants—of purchasing a house, then tearing it down to build a larger house, often resulting in significant reduction of yard space, are one way in which ethnic Chinese immigrants are seen as unable to conform to American values and ideals and are therefore somehow unfit as neighbors and, by extension, as members of American civil society (W. Li and Park 2006; W. Li 2006). For discussions of similar discourses in Canada, see Mitchell 2004 and P. Li 1994.