The trajectory of the colour line in a US immigrant gateway: hyperdiverse spatialization in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Focusing on LA, we show that 1) socioeconomic inequality in LA has increasingly emerged since the 1970s along two axes, Black-Latino and White-Asian, and that 2) the structure of residential segregation in LA intersects immigration dynamics to create unique patterns of isolation within groups and exposure between groups, setting distinctive conditions for interaction and identity formation. Two case studies — South LA and the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) — shed light on the mechanics of spatialization amid hyperdiversity. In South LA, Latino immigrants live alongside Black residents. Shared experiences of racism and socioeconomic deprivation widen Black-Brown linked fate to create novel platforms for place-based identity formation and political resistance. In SGV, Chinese immigrants of diverse class and ethnic backgrounds carve out a different path to residential assimilation by building an American ethnoburb without much contact with Whites. Despite clear inequalities across the Black-Latino and White-Asian axes, neither case converges uniformly towards Whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• Hyperdiversity
• spatialization
• ethnoracial segregation
• Black-Brown relations
• ethnoburb
• residential assimilation

Acknowledgments

We have benefited from facilities and resources, provided by the California Center for Population Research at UCLA, and computational and storage services associated with the Hoffman2 Shared Cluster, provided by the UCLA Institute for Digital Research and Education. We thank Manuel Pastor, Alex Piquero, Alejandro Portes, Margarita Rodriguez, members of the UCLA Urban Sociology Working Group, faculty at UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Unless otherwise noted, “LA” refers to the 158 municipalities and unincorporated places in LA County, California (see Data Desk 2021). LA County’s population in 2020 was 10.0 million, of which 3.9 million lived in LA City (Manson et al. 2021). “LA Metro,” or metropolitan LA, refers to the LA–Long Beach–Anaheim Metropolitan Statistical Area, home in 2020 to 13.1 million residents of LA and Orange Counties. For visual clarity, maps in this paper show only the LA–Long Beach–Anaheim Urbanized Area, which excludes peripheral population centers such as Thousand Oaks, Santa Clarita, and the Antelope Valley. Replication materials for this article are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EHSWZH.

2 Tasan-Kok et al. (2013) conceptualize hyperdiversity differently than Price and Benton-Short (2007), who define hyperdiverse immigrant gateways as places with at least one million inhabitants of whom at least 9.5% are immigrants and where no national origin accounts for more than 25% of the foreign-born.

3 A contemporary phenomenon impacted by international migration, ethnoburbs are defined as middle-class suburbs dominated by multiethnic non-White populations (Li 1998).

4 Authors’ calculations from 1970 decennial census data.

5 Authors’ calculations from 2015–19 American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates.

6 We calculated local Moran’s I spatial autocorrelation (LISA) statistics to identify population centers (Anselin 1995).

7 We measured exposure using Reardon and O’Sullivan’s (2004) spatial exposure index.

8 Clustering and concentration are correlated but distinct. We follow Massey and Denton’s (1988) definition of clustering as contiguity and proximity; we measured it using permutation tests of the Moran’s I spatial autocorrelation statistic, defining relationships among units by adjacency. Departing from Massey and Denton, we define concentration as “the extent to which there are residential areas in which the group predominates” (Poulsen, Johnson, and Forrest 2002, 231). This conceptualization tracks more closely with social-scientific notions of enclaves than Massey and Denton’s definition of concentration, which is based on how much physical territory a group occupies. We calculated concentration profiles to measure concentration (Hong and Sadahiro 2014).

9 Authors’ calculations from 2015–19 American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates. Owners of minority-owned businesses in MP were mostly Chinese, Taiwanese, or Sino-Vietnamese, while minority-owned businesses in South LA were run by middleman minority entrepreneurs of diverse national origins.

10 Taiwanese and mainland Chinese are both hyper-selected, but sino-Vietnamese are not. Sino-Vietnamese cluster in Rosemead and Alhambra. Despite their lower SES backgrounds, they are benefited from ethnic resources in the Chinese ethnoburb.