The Changs next door to the Diazes: remapping race in suburban California

The Changs next door to the Diazes: remapping race in suburban California, by Wendy Cheng, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 2013, xi + 285 pp., US$25.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8166-7982-9 In one of this book's many striking passages, one of Wendy Cheng's interviewees relates a story about purchasing property in the Southern California suburb of Monterey Park, a few miles east of Downtown Los Angeles. The interviewee and his friend, both Mexican-Americans, visit one house for sale and find several Japanese-American men also inspecting the house. In conversation, one of those Japanese men turns to the interviewee and his friends and complains, "I'm tired of all these damn chinos moving in" (p. 23). The interviewee's friend is stunned to find the Spanish term chino (which, as Cheng explains, means "Chinese" but can also be used to refer to all Asians) being used by one who is, ostensibly, also a potential chino. Yet as Cheng carefully explains through the course of this book, interactions like this one make sense when contextualized within the place-specific histories of race, property, and immigration in the West San Gabriel Valley (SGV). Composed of four municipalities (Alhambra, Monterey Park, San Gabriel, and Rosemead) and striking for a majority non-white population, the West SGV presents a particularly interesting case to study the everyday ways that race and racial hierarchies are formed, contested, and reproduced. For Cheng, these fall under the category of regional racial formation, processes that are neither purely local nor simply national; rather, Cheng details the diverse connections between "the micropolitics of everyday life" and broader discourses and ideologies (p. 11) and provides a careful depiction of "people remaking their everyday lives and places within particular constraints but also emphatically on their own terms" (p. 13). Three themes in particular are central to Cheng's book: (1) The development of a "nonwhite" identity rooted in a stereotypically white middle-class and suburban context; (2) The complicated relationship between race and property, one that raises questions of privilege and the proper use of space and that ties this region into broader histories of space and place; and (3) The crucial role that civil society institutions like schools and community organizations play in establishing linkages between place-specific practices, beliefs, and cultures and broader national ideologies. She develops these themes in five substantial empirical chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on race, property, and homeownership and explores how differentially racialized access to property both helped to form the regional racial formation of the West SGV and gave rise to particular social relations. Chapter 2 examines Alhambra High School and its 2005 debate about the "achievement gap." That debate racialized the "gap" in specific ways and pointed to the signal importance of the school as one crucial landscape within which understandings of race were reworked and gained significance. Chapter 3 asks how the multiracial (and majority nonwhite) makeup of one West SGV Boy Scout troop nevertheless raised important questions about the continuing salience of race within an ostensibly "post-racial" America. Chapter 4 juxtaposes three different civic landscapes in the West SGV in order to show the possibilities and limitations raised by different (and contested) understandings of diversity. Finally, Chapter 5 shows how Latina/o and Asian Americans created, lived, and experienced a shared racial-spatial imaginary specific to the West SGV. Particularly for cultural geographers interested in questions of race, place, and urban landscapes, Cheng's book is essential reading. Despite the many successes of the book, the book raises three major questions. The first is methodological. While the book's many interviews are skillfully interwoven and carefully analyzed, they sometimes seem somewhat distanced from the events themselves. …