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

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

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: RacesuburbsplaceidentitybrandingLos 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 Ochoa, Gilda L. 2004. Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican American Community: Power, Conflict, and Solidarity, Austin: University of Texas Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Saito 1998 Saito, Leland. 1998. Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. [Google Scholar]; Pardo 1998 Pardo, Mary S. 1998. Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Google Scholar]; and Fong 1994 Fong, Timothy. 1994. The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Google Scholar]. 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 Saito, Leland. 1998. Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. [Google Scholar]; Fong 1994 Fong, Timothy. 1994. The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Google Scholar]). 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 Ochoa, Gilda L. 2004. Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican American Community: Power, Conflict, and Solidarity, Austin: University of Texas Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 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 Zhou, Min, Yen-Fen, Tseng and Rebecca, Kim. 2008. Rethinking residential assimilation: The case of a Chinese Ethnoburb in the San Gabriel Valley, California. Amerasia Journal, 34(4): 55–83. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). 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 Liu, Caitlin. 1998. Downtown Alhambra Revival Stirs Up Business and Controversy. Los Angeles Times., 9 November [Google Scholar]). 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 Liu, Caitlin. 1998. Downtown Alhambra Revival Stirs Up Business and Controversy. Los Angeles Times., 9 November [Google Scholar]). 7. 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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. Pulido, Laura, Laura, Barraclough and Wendy, Cheng. n.d. A People's Guide to Los Angeles, Manuscript in preparation. [Google Scholar]). 9. Mike Davis and Alessandra Moctezuma (1999) Davis, Mike and Alessandra, Moctezuma. 1999. Policing the Third Border. 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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 Deverell, William. 2004. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Widener 2003 Widener, Daniel. 2003. 'Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked?' Asia, Asian America, and the Construction of Black California. positions: east asia cultures critique, 11(1): 135–181. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 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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 Kropp, Phoebe S. 2006. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place, Berkeley: UC Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 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 Camarillo, Albert. 1979. Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]) and dispersal (e.g., through practices of urban renewal and freeway building) of Los Angeles's Mexican American population (Villa 2000 Villa, Raul Homero. 2000. 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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 Li, Wei, Gary, Dymski, Yu, Zhou, Maria, Chee and Carolyn, Aldana. 2002. Chinese-American Banking and Community Development in Los Angeles County. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92(4) [December]: 777–796. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Y. Zhou 1998 Zhou, Yu. 1998. How do places matter? A comparative study of Chinese ethnic economies in Los Angeles and New York City. Urban Geography, 19(6): 531–553. 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