From Enclave to Ethnoburb

This week's readings made a lot of sense together. They focused on the evolution of the Chinese-American enclave and the Chinese-American economy. Together, they chart a clear trajectory of the development of residential and economic patterns, including the roles that these entities play in each other's development, and how all of this interacts with cultural and racial ideas of the Chinese-American population.

Anderson's "The Idea of Chinatown" focused on Chinatown as a Western construction, both a place and an idea, structured by prevailing racial and racist ideologies. By studying the development of Vancouver's Chinatown in the late 19th century, she claims that Chinatown existed first as a way of creating and justifying white understandings and categories of the Chinese. Chinatown was a means of perpetuating negative stereotypes - it was a "cesspool" for disease (thus, the Chinese are filthy and unsanitary), a center of prostitution and opium-smoking (thus, the Chinese are immoral and hedonistic). Similarly, Shah explores these perceptions of Chinatown as perpetuated by public health norms in San Francisco. The point is the same - this was a way of marking the Chinese as an Other - intrinsically different from whites, and distinctly unfavorable.

Cheng's "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs" builds on these historical notions of Chinatown by exploring postwar patterns of suburbanization among the Chinese community in the United States. As various Chinatowns declined, more and more Chinese moved outward - to the suburbs. But this was no accident - Cheng's whole point is that suburbanization equaled "Americanization." It was seen as a solution to racial division and a strengthening of democracy. Because minorities who moved to the suburbs eventually lost their strong ethnic ties to their community, they could then more easily assimilate, a process that was essential in promoting whiteness as the norm, as the true marker of being American.

Li's article on Chinese-American banking and its relationship to community development in the LA area made a really interesting distinction between the ethnoburb and the ethnic enclave. "Unlike ghettos and enclaves, ethnoburbs emerge from the deliberate activities of ethnic minorities possessing both substantial financial resources and the capacity to generate stable income flows" (779). I had never thought about this difference before, but it's really significant! Aside from this, the article did a good job of showing how Chinese-American banks both enabled and benefited from the development and transformation of the Chinese ethnoburb of the San Gabriel Valley.

As a final note, I was really happy to see that Cheng grounded her article in a context of gender and sexuality. You can't really separate a study of race from a study of gender and sexuality. As she discusses, the influx of Chinese women immigrating to the US in the postwar era enabled the creation of the Chinese nuclear family (mirroring that of the white, American nuclear family), and played a key role in changing cultural perceptions of the Chinese-American community. And this idea of the traditional family has been a driving force in furthering white cultural and heterosexual norms in the U.S.