Chinatown Then and Neoliberal Now: Gentrification Consciousness and the Ethnic-Specific Museum

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of cultural tourism, gentrification, and urban development in the neoliberal period by examining the complex and ambivalent relationship between an “ethnic-specific” cultural institution and a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Through a case study of the Museum of Chinese in America's (MoCA) profile, history, and community involvement in Manhattan's Chinatown, this article suggests that small to midsize ethnic-specific museums relate to the social and spatial transformations inherent in gentrification through a mechanism called gentrification consciousness. This mechanism helps to explain how an institution whose history, mission, and politics might indicate a resistance to gentrification is confounded and constrained by the larger neoliberal landscape. Offering little in the way of substantive alternative funding and space, neoliberal urban development touts tourism and culture as key routes to economic development with gentrification as a “natural” and beneficial by-product of such development for both the surrounding neighborhood and for individual cultural institutions. An analysis of the unique relationship of smaller ethnic-specific organizations to gentrification processes complicates discussions about museums and gentrification as well as potentially identifying methods and measures of institutional success that do not rely so heavily on neoliberal logics and policy prescriptions.

Keywords:

• Gentrification, neoliberalism, cultural policy
• ethnic museums
• Chinatowns
• arts and urban development

I thank the editors and anonymous peer reviewers of Identities for their thoughtful and incisive comments. I also thank in particular Arlene Dávila and Johana Londono for reviewing earlier drafts of this article and convening the 2009 American Studies Association panel.

Notes

1. The communities of Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, have long been considered “satellite” Chinatowns in New York City, achieving a high percentage of Chinese immigrant residential and retail settlement in the city since at least the 1980s. Mainstream media has started to recognize the demographic and cultural importance of these other Chinatowns, although the emphasis still tends to be on Manhattan's Chinatown (see, for example, Semple 2009).

2. I suggest here that the case of MoCA in Chinatown offers evidence for Markusen and Gadwa's assertion: “responsibility for cultural planning is fragmented among major agencies such as cultural affairs, city planning, and economic development” and, in order to analyze cultural planning fully, we need to examine these multiple state policies and spaces (2010: 16).

3. Total assets of approximately $555,000 in the 11/01/2004 to 10/31/2005 period went to about $2.5 million in the 11/01/2005 to 10/31/2006 period (Foundation Center, “990 Directory”). http://www.foundationcenter.org/findfunders/foundfinder/

4. Ibid. According to its 2007 990 form, MoCA's total assets were valued at approximately $3.7 million, $3 million (or about 80 percent) of which was restricted.

5. Ibid. In 2008, the assets of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) totaled $1.5 billion, those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art $3.5 billion, and those of the American Museum of Natural History $1.2 billion.

6. See National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) File 2-CA-39261.

7. See Chinese Staff and Workers Association v. City of New York, 68 N.Y.2d 359. The CSWA case argued that environmental impact studies should consider the displacement of poor and working-class residents within the broad environmental and social impacts of gentrification (Lin 1998b; Sze 2009).