菲菲 universe

Overview of the Southern California Chinese Diaspora

No two Chinatowns are the same. While California has the most Chinatowns within its state borders out of all of Turtle Island, many histories of Chinatowns concentrate on stories and data from northern Californian Chinatowns — namely, San Francisco. Southern California’s past and present Chinatowns and ethnoburbs are gaining more historical attention today than ever before. Southern California is the largest economic region of the state, serving as home for more than half of the total state workforce — built in-part with a significant amount of Chinese contract labor. Meanwhile, there are still a variety of historical locations of Chinese immigration in Southern California that are at risk of becoming historically endangered. This paper seeks to synthesize scholarship on Southern California’s Chinatown communities. And moreover, I also aim to echo other scholars’ sentiments to focus more on the role of a place throughout in shaping the outcomes of a Chinatown by capturing unique spatial aspects of Southern California that affect its historiographic obstacles. From unique stories of southern railroad magnates, Chinese migrants in the growing metropole of Los Angeles, a smuggling system that spans the southern borderlands, endangered memories in the Inland Empire, and more — Southern California Chinese migrants faced unique geographic circumstances that shaped their histories of survival.

With my research scope being limited to Southern California, I quickly discovered the regional level analysis of Chinatowns to be lacking compared to Northern California. Many niche studies of Chinatown populations were centered around places like San Francisco and the Greater Sacramento area, with even fewer results found for the Central Valley. Of course, these disparities are easily attributed to the fact that San Francisco hosts the oldest Chinatown in the United States. As the main point of entry for Chinese migrants on the Pacific Coast up until the 1940s, the historical roots and contemporary cultural presence of the Chinese diaspora community is undeniably strong. Still, there remains a significant gap in literature around how different factors in the development of Southern California as an economy and space have affected Chinese migrants, who have become a more influential political group in the late 20th and 21st century. Studying ethnic communities by place is not new, but for Chinatown literature, the lack of place-based data and analysis for a diversity of locations beyond San Francisco makes historical comparison difficult between Chinatowns. It would also be supportive of helping understand the different circumstances that influence how some places have been able to discover or preserve materials for Chinese historical knowledge production, whereas others have not been so lucky.

Exploited Chinese migrant labor in the south played a key role in the transformation of stolen native land into the cultural and economic landscape of Southern California as we know it today. It is worth further emphasizing the potential for more unique work that can be done across historical, geographic, sociological lines by focusing on incorporating the spatial circumstances of Southern California at the regional level. From unique stories of southern railroad magnates, Chinese migrants in the growing metropole of Los Angeles, smuggling system that spans the southern borderlands, endangered memories in the Inland Empire and its own landscape of ethnic institutions — Southern California Chinese migrants faced unique geographic circumstances that shaped their histories of survivalist adaptation and growth.

This paper seeks to emphasize the role of ‘place’ throughout Chinese diaspora movement history to answer for the contemporary landscape of Chinese settlement and cultural preservation in southern California. The primary contents will be summarizing across different literatures the formation of Southern California as a place, Southern California’s Chinese settlements, and the growth of cultural influence over the region as Chinese-American familyhood develops. The main methods of inquiry for this paper will be analyzing information from newspapers, historical societies, and discussions of Chinatowns within other disciplines such as sociology, film, human geography.

Asian newspapers wrote about the shifting importance of Asian immigrants in southern California, and the need for appropriate documentation. On November 22nd in 1985, San Francisco based paper, Asian Week, announced their upcoming edition on Asians in Southern California. Publisher John C. Fang comments on the general lack of Asian English scholarship in Southern California: “There are now one million Asians and Asian Americans in the Los Angeles area, the largest Asian-Pacific community in the country…But no one has ever published a single volume — in English — covering all the different Asian-Pacific ethnic groups in this growing and dynamic area,” (AsianWeek). The announcement makes claims of Asian populations becoming a more ‘important’ minority in the area, insinuating a previous lack of organized, well-funded interest in highlighting Asian historical heritages and cultural discourses for the southern region.

Moreover, the absence of proportionate historical attention is not just an issue for Southern California either. Scholars of rural Chinese communities have shared similar concerns. Suchen Chang from the University of California Santa Cruz writes about rural California in both the north, south, and Central Valley, describing how the majority of the California diaspora in the second half of the 19th century actually lived within rural counties — despite their scarce representation in California history literature. Chang writes about the effect this can have on Chinatown literature as so, “The reliance on San Francisco data by so many authors has created a false impression that all Chinese communities in America are merely smaller replicas of the one in San Francisco and that the Chinese American historical experience is quite homogenous,” (Chang 275). Looking at more diverse places outside of urban metropolitan areas can still produce meaningful historical vignettes of Chinese life elsewhere, and the Chinese farmers and remote migrant workers of Southern California and their interactions with white settlers, non-whites, and the changing environment reflect this. With the incredible amount of diversity within Chinese immigration across the United States, place becomes a key part in how Chinese people identify themselves and one another. Place is also a useful framework for historians to understand how some areas have more or less academic prestige to study or how areas differ in the preservation of key resources for historical knowledge production. Immigration geography scholar, Yu Zhou, writes about this in their comparative research between New York Chinatown and Los Angeles’ Chinatown: “Since the role of locality has rarely been theorized in immigration research, there is little ground to speculate whether a trend observed in one location can be expected to happen elsewhere. While many community studies have been intrinsically local, the conclusions they draw are often thought to be context free,” (Zhou 158). Capitalist development across the United States is hardly uniform, and immigrant strategies to survive mirror this fact.

This is especially significant for studies of ethnic enclaves throughout time as stratifications of race have shifted throughout different localities over time. In James W. Loewen’s work, which is referenced in Chang’s work on rural Chinese Californians, he also takes a more place-based analytical approach to understanding the impact that Mississippi’s frameworks of race had on the residing Chinese community over time. He illustrates how socioeconomic discrimination informs ethnic identity. Charting the transition from plantation slavery to Jim Crow, the shift in available survival strategies for freed Chinese sharecroppers was the main determinant in shaping the outcome of the Delta Chinese population: “The Delta Chinese found their niche because of racial discrimination; now that it is breaking down, they may not outlast it,” (Loewen 922). As advantageous positions for Chinese migrants as a ‘third race’ in the region arose at the margins of whiteness, Loewen highlights how strict Southern segregation led to the Chinese losing out on maintaining distinct cultural heritage within the region that may have otherwise developed if they were not to have gained certain opportunities for spatial assimilation.

Southern California’s violent colonial history is often forgotten due to the efforts from actors like land speculators, real estate developers, company magnates, investors, and city planners who sought to override the traditional social and economic fabric of the ranchero system to market a superficial sense of Spanish heritage. Once considered the “cow counties” where predominantly Mexicans and remaining indigenous communities lived, Southern California evolved over several waves of migration triggered by tourism marketing campaigns, real estate land promotion, and the development of new industries that would serve as both cultural attractions and employers for people within the area.

When frontiersmen first arrived in Los Angeles, rumors about Southern California would spread far and wide of this estranged part of the Union. The climate has always been one of Southern California’s strongest pull factors. The popularity of ideas like medical climatology created a fascination with the year-round warm, sunny skies in the region. Books like Charles Nordoff’s California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence (1873) were famously published with claims that the sunny, warm climate offered superior deterministic health outcomes (CSU Northridge). The abundance of literature on wealthy “health seekers” arriving in Southern California depict the strength of the climate’s perceived health and lifestyle benefits. Once train travel in 1965 connected to Los Angeles, more arrivals would come looking to experience an American, leisurely “Mediterranean” lifestyle (Gendzel). Popular conceptions of Southern California are also enforced by the overwhelming Spanish Colonial Revival designs that have dominated public development — highlighting a romantic heritage of missions and Spaniards over the less desirable Mexican or indigenous cultural remains (Fu). Places like Ventura County are notorious for relying on heritage tourism around Spanish colonial culture, with prominent historical institutions like the Santa Barbara Historical Society investing heavily in fiestas and other local commemorations of a Spanish seaside lifestyle removed from any sort of violent setting. The crafting of an exciting, burgeoning regional culture was at the expense of the sovereignty and livelihoods of regional tribes like the Luiseno, the Chumash, the Gabrielino, the Serrano, and the Juaneno — to name a few. This demarcation of Southern California as a place, like many others, is not without racial expulsion as a means of preserving white ownership over places. Southern California features many sundown towns, alongside its own legacy of anti-Chinese expulsions, with California having the most sundown towns out of all the West coast states according to Tougaloo College’s History and Social Justice Project (Tougaloo).

Southern California would undergo several economic revolutions in its transition from the ranchero system to the dynamic place we know it as today. While the area was never nearly as rich in gold deposits as the north was, jewelers like Tiffany and Co. put speciality regional gems on the map (History of San Diego). While some Chinese miners from the north moved down to explore Southern California during the Goldrush, another underlooked story of Frontier economic development is the role of the former Chinese miners in creating the earliest foundations of the California salt-water fishing industry. By 1880, fishing villages in Santa Barbara’s Channel Islands and San Diego contributed several hundred thousand dollars annually. Anti-chinese lobbies, federal fishing regulation agencies, and real estate developers pushed many of them out of the trade by banning their ships, implementing Chinese taxes, ordinances, and land speculation through their villages (Armentrout-Ma). In addition, the establishment of train lines connected more areas of the south, bringing more money, investors, and settlers than ever before. As a result, this would interrupt northern California’s stronghold over the state’s wealth (Library of Congress). Southern California was also seen as abundant in land as a resource, like many newly carved parts of the U.S. empire before it. Out in the more remote areas of what would become the Inland Empire, land was seen as “empty” and for the taking. The region would become a hub for agriculture, like citrus production San Bernardino County — in which Chinese workers would become a large percentage of the harvesting workforce. The Los Angeles County and San Bernardino Land Associations respectively led campaigns to advertise Southern California as the perfect place for growing all kinds of exotic, profitable crops (Finklestein). Beyond agriculture, large investors like Disney and Hollywood studios began popping up to take advantage of the area’s climate and prime real estate availability in order to pursue business. These larger investors, government agencies, and commercial developers would promote boosterism campaigns designed to revamp dangerous racial stigmas of the region to appear more family friendly in order to encourage investment and travel to Southern California (Finklestein). For instance, the theme park-shopping plaza model of tourist development was conceived in California with the development of theme parks like Knotts Berry Farm, Universal Studios, Sea World, and Six Flags. Residential areas of Orange County like Anaheim were further developed around these tourist projects (Davis). These developments of the later half of the 19th and early 20th century paved the way for the development of the region’s most prominent economic activities and their surroundings. For Chinese immigrants, jobs in emerging Pacific Rim export economies and the proximity to Asian ports made California an attractive choice for chain migration. The true first date that the Chinese can be traced back to the region differ by sources, with some claiming as early as the 1760s. Most sources tend to land around the 1820s-1840 for earliest arrivals and 1850 as the turning point for Chinese people arriving in more significant numbers. This can be explained by the allure of gold in 1848, coupled with the political instability and natural disasters that would take place throughout China in the 1940s. At this time, Chinese presence in California was largely men looking to work temporarily to send money back to their families in China. From the start, the most common occupations taken up were vegetable farming, low-paid service positions, industrial work, and laundromats. The abundance of available contract work in the south played a huge role in the migration of Chinese to the region. Despite the outlawing of the international “coolie” trade by the late 19th century, which often featured kidnapping and scamming of Chinese people into brutal contract work, laborer recruiters managed to create unique ways to lure Chinese men to emigrate for contracted cheap labor.

Southern California also hosts an infamous legacy of illegal Chinese smuggling, often through the Mexican-American border. After the passing of the Chinese-Exclusion Act in 1882, the movement of Chinese people entering and traveling within the country was extremely restrictive. While Angel Island was the main processing point for immigration on the west coast for a long period of the 19th century, ports like Ensenada often received smuggled in Chinese who would enter from the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez border crossing in order to arrive in San Diego, Los Angeles, or San Francisco (Taylor-Hansen). Chinese illegal immigration became an extremely lucrative business that would certainly leave behind its imprint on the southern borderlands. For instance, southwestern border towns featured Chinese safe houses and readily available English-Chinese resources provided by both Mexican and Chinese people who sought to support other crossers (Lee). This phenomenon was even frequently depicted in Western films, more specifically called “Southwesterns.” Films like Yellow Cargo (Crane, Wilbur 1936) and Border Devils (William Nigh, 1932) participated in Anti-Chinese fear mongering by depicting the Chinese as immoral criminals threatening the sanctity of Manifest Destiny (Gates). Whether it was bringing Chinese migrants from the north or from the southern border, for work, they were largely recruited through “China bosses.” These were middle-men, often wealthier Chinese themselves, who communicated contracts between the workers and the English-speaking companies who sought cheap alternatives to slave labor for railroad, mining, or agricultural work. For those who traveled through the south to reach northern cities like San Francisco, we can also understand Southern California’s importance as a transitory space for Chinese people from Mexico trying to make it to opportunities up north or to reunite with loved ones. Upon arrival, workers often clustered in neighborhoods, constructing or living in small buildings fitted with bunk beds to allow for cheap shared housing. Many historians within the literature describe this as the “bachelor era” of Chinese American migration for this reason, as male workers had more agency in leaving their home country than women in Confucian culture. Keeping to themselves, they had no incentive to integrate into a culture where they were not eligible for citizenship. Instead, they often lived, worked, and conducted business alongside other immigrant communities. In Los Angeles, Chinese people were settling into a predominantly Mexican community. By the late 1860s, they had carved out their own space in the East plaza villages of Sonoratown. In San Bernardino County, Chinese workers were recorded to arrive by 1867; they filled in as restaurant workers, agricultural hands, laundromats operators, hotel employees, and domestic servants. Here, ‘Chinatown’ would become the area of Third Street. In more farmland areas of the Inland Empire, many would work in the quickly expanding agricultural industry, often as citrus farmers. At San Diego, many Chinese men arrived from the northern mines to work in the fishing industries and outlying railroad construction projects by the late 1800s. Many of them, being from southern Chinese port cities themselves, were versed in fishing and the influence of this trade could be seen from the men carrying fish from door to door to be sold in the neighborhoods (Liu). Early Chinatowns across the state were working men’s towns, and their lack of assimilation gave their places a distinct, often considered mysterious appearance that deeply preoccupied the Western imagination. For Southern California specifically, this created unique inter-community dynamics among the large Mexican population. In the new racial geography of Los Angeles, struggles over space and scarce resources amidst the city’s long takeover by surrounding wealthier, white residents would erupt in violence during the Chinese Massacre of 1871. 18-22 Chinese people were lynched and more were wounded from the outbreak. This death toll was significant, measuring up to 10% of the Chinatown population (Seong-Leong Quintana).

As Southern California continued to grow, the construction of major and minor railroads became extremely commercially promising. As the third largest state in the country, naturally, California travelers who sought to make the long journey from the northern ‘Gold Mountain’ to Southern California’s more isolated growing communities in Ventura, Los Angeles and Orange County, the Inland Empire, and San Diego found it extremely difficult. It is more common knowledge that the Chinese were a main source of labor when constructing national railway lines. However, information available on railroad construction workers is more fragmented between different southern California construction localities. Literature that focuses on the lives of Chinese railroad workers often lacked more concrete details about the timeline of railroad construction in the entirety of the region, whereas railroad industrialization literature does not always guarantee mention of the Chinese at length, if at all. The first railroad line to southern California was not to be constructed until 1865, but the work did not end there. The three thousand Chinese workers digging the San Fernando tunnel to Los Angeles were employed by the Southern Pacific Company of California — the largest owner of oil reserves in California through private property (Cooke). Their ambitious projects sought to monopolize California transportation and connect southern California to other major and smaller lines. A majority of their workers were transferred from the Greater Sacramento area because the Chinese there were known for “efficiency” doing work that nobody wanted to do (Sunset Limit). While railroad work was known to be cruel for Chinese people across California and the United States, southern California’s dry, hot chaparral climates created its own kind of misery for workers. Despite this fact, the rise in anti-Chinese violence labor in the north, especially within mining, made the south’s conditions as a less developed place for Chinese people a strong pull factor. Southern Pacific would become a major employer of thousands of Chinese people — composing two thirds of their workforce alongside European and Portuguese workers. In San Diego, a majority of Chinese immigrants residing in San Diego — between 1,000 to 1,500 people — were employed by Southern Pacific working on the Temecula Canyon segment of the roads. The work was backbreaking in an area that is hot, dusty, and dangerous, as is evidenced by two entries in a burial register: “Ah Sing, age 21, was "Burn [sic] up by Powder at Temecula" on October 27, 1881, and Lim Yuk, age 20, was "Killed by Cars CSRR" on April,10, 1882” (Liu). Historian Jason Cooke writes about Southern Pacific as the first of its kind in the southwest, paving the way for Big Oil capitalist enterprise. He goes on to say, “Without question, the railroads were the ‘first modern business enterprises’ that facilitated the emergence of industrial capitalism in North America,” (Cooke 2). If railroad companies like Southern Pacific were the first to step into how we, today, conceptualize the modern ‘company,’ then Chinese railroad workers would be some of the earliest test subjects of modern capitalism in the United States.

Not long after the completion of the railroads, more Chinese women began arriving in the United States. Many of whom were successfully barred from earlier entry by the Page Act and the Exclusion Act, often being suspected as prostitutes because of anti-Chinese stereotypes. Despite the Exclusion Era, Chinese people did manage to create families in Southern California. For example, scholar and descendant Colleen Fong has written extensively of the Fong family’s coming to being, who resided in rural Santa Barbara county as lemon farmers during the Exclusion Era (Fong). Rural farming and family businesses like restaurants, laundromats, and groceries became common family enterprises in Southern California. By the late 19th century, many of the men who had previously been working as migrant labor whether on farms, rails, or in construction would eventually come to settle in more established Chinatowns like Los Angeles. Here, however, early Chinese families often had no choice but to live in Chinatown unless they were servants of a white family (Turner). Generally, scholars have found that early Chinese immigrant families often had many children to secure their future and alleviate loneliness (Ling). The persistence of the Chinese population was at the dismay of anti-Chinese proponents. While Southern California as a space delineated for wealthy, white families was meant to offer a luxurious, healthy lifestyle, growing Chinese spaces and families disturbed the white spatial imagination by provoking the exact opposite image: “The news media pictured the Chinese as having "built a filthy nest of iniquity;” they were certainly responsible for "disease and pestilence;"and "dead puppy dogs were publicly sold in the streets for food.” (Caldwell).

Throughout the late 19th and 20th century, Chinese institutions would begin to crop up to create the first Asian or Asian-serving organizations in Southern California. One kind of resource that was common in the north was Missions, who provided many services to support Chinese brothel workers and immigrants. For instance, in the north, there’s literature of San Francisco congregational churches and the famous Presbyterian mission house that housed girls and women who escaped from the Chinatown brothels. But for most of the 19th century, it would be difficult to make any journey up north to access the kinds of ethnic resources that existed in the Chinese enclaves up north. Even after the trains to the south were constructed, there was a gap to fill to provide resources to marginalized migrant workers in need. For instance, for Chinese sex workers purchased to the south, it would be far too dangerous to try and make it back north without getting caught. In San Diego, resident Lee Hong noticed the lack of similar institutions from the north in the region and asked the American Home Missionary Association to come south (SDCM). The San Diego Chinese Mission would be established in 1885, serving as a group home, school, and community events center. The first congregational church would not be built until 1888, as reported in the Los Angeles Herald. While California schools were segregated to prevent Chinese attendance up until the 1900s, many Chinese schools like those today in the San Gabriel Valley wouldn’t be established in the late 20th century.

Today, rather than being the sole hub for Chinese residents newly coming to California, Chinese migration has become extremely diverse in terms of class — leaving California Chinatowns as tourist destinations and home to the working class who maintain their businesses and homes in the area. Many Chinatowns became progressively less dense with Chinese residents as more would settle into nearby neighborhoods and ethnoburbs like Monterey Park and the San Gabriel Valley. While Los Angeles remains as the only urban Chinatown, there are still towns that have streets dominated by Chinese business and families in the greater San Gabriel Valley and San Bernardino County such as Irvine and Chino Hills. Even in Los Angeles, the first Chinatown would be removed in 1938 by eminent domain with the city using the original plaza to build a new civic center and tourist shops. Historian Isabella Seong-Leong Quintana writes about this moment in connection to the broader geopolitical tensions that affected Chinese and Mexican people: “Chinese and Mexican bodies and neighborhoods were replaced with buildings of imperial control and symbolic modernity that depended on the idea that the threat of brown bodies had been contained,” (Seong-Leong Quintana 265). Los Angeles Chinatown would relocate next to Little Italy, and would become one of the nation’s first malls and claim to be the first modern Chinatown according to their website. One factor in LA Chinatown’s survival into the 21st century can be seen in the awarded funding provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1980s. Disabled and elderly residents of Chinatown were partial beneficiaries for 20.5 million dollars in aid, along with another 780,000 and 1,860,000 dollars in aid for low-income housing in two different Chinatown neighborhoods in 1984 (LA Sentinel). Another likely pull factor that would draw in people from outlying, smaller Chinatowns would be Los Angeles’ larger sized Chinatown population as the biggest commercial hub of Southern California. The stronger linkages of chain migration there has created more political influence and ethnic resources like banking, community advocacy groups, Chinese schools, and city-wide celebrations. Development in more remote areas of the region would suffer from anti-Chinese discrimination and development strategies that neglected Chinese cultural historical preservation to become more profitable to tourism and families, leading to the demise of the Chinatowns in Ventura, the Inland Empire, and San Diego in the late 20th century. These factors would push out the Chinese throughout the 20th century. In the Ventura Museum’s history of Chinatown, they describe the use of city ordinances and city developers in squeezing the size of the local Chinatown down to only 100 residents. The lack of economic opportunities and the aging population that stagnated during the persistence of the Exclusion era throughout the first half to the 20th century led to its demise, only to become more historically relevant again through initiatives throughout the 21st century. Similarly, San Bernadino’s Third Street was eventually demolished and taken over by the city in 1944, as residents gradually left either due to the degrading buildings, aging out, deciding to leave back to China, or finding security in numbers in a bigger Chinatown like Los Angeles or San Francisco during rising anti-Chinese violence in the early 20th century (Costello). In Redlands, while an infamous 1893 anti-Chinese ethnic cleansing riot drove many out of town temporarily, only Oriental Street remains after the effects of disease, restrictive immigration laws, and replacement immigrant workers took its toll (Several). Areas like Riverside and Pomona were subject to mainstream anti-Chinese campaigns to undermine Chinatown businesses to push them out. The last original remnant of the Inland Empire’s Chinese history can be seen in Rancho Cucamonga’s China House, which was placed on the 2013 Historic Places List by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Lastly, in San Diego, stagnation at the turn of the 19th century caused white people to begin competing for lower positions typically left to Chinese people (Liu). Following trends of other Southern California tourism booms in the 1950s and 60s, San Diego city planning aimed to get rid of their reputation as a “sailor town” which contributed to the erasure and replacement of Chinese businesses and apartments with more sleek commercial attractions in the Gaslamp district (Davis).

After the Hart Cellar Act in 1965 opened the country to more Chinese immigration, the class disparities between working poor Chinese immigrants in traditional Chinatown communities and more specialized, white collar Chinese immigrants became more pronounced through space. For new arrivals, Southern California’s inherent auto-centered environment makes it less attractive for poor Chinese migrants as opposed to the Bay Area or New York. The lack of walkability, alongside shifts in the global labor market, may be part of the historical character development of today’s Chinese organizations. Professor Yu Zhou’s geographic comparison of Los Angeles and New York analyzes Los Angeles’ Chinese organizations, “In general, they tend to focus on the needs of the middle-class Chinese population, with very few targeting the needs of low-income families…highly decentralized, are professionally run, and adhere to the mainstream institutional structure,” (Zhou 543). In contrast to the abundance of grassroots, low-income serving Chinese organizations and more accessible community resources in New York, Los Angeles’ Chinatown did not foster this exact development within this space. Another late 20th century development for Chinese history and space can be seen in the “ethnoburb.” Products of postwar global economic restructuring, Professor Wei Li coined the term to encompass suburban residential neighborhoods that are often multiracial, but feature a predominant ethnic group that the area is more accessible and culturally resonant for chain migration. Founding literature of the ethnoburb is based on Los Angeles neighborhoods like Monterey Park and the greater San Gabriel Valley. In 1968, while hardly competent at addressing the full extent of housing segregation, the Fair Housing Act allowed more Asian Americans to cross the suburban color line. While Monterey Park and San Gabriel Valley hosts more middle and upper middle class Chinese immigrants, El Monte and Rosemead are examples of lower-income and more racially diverse ethnoburbs. For many suburban neighborhoods in Southern California, people commute to nearby commercial cities to work. Yet for the ethnoburb, Professor Li points out they break from this trend: “In contrast to southern California’s characteristic spatial mismatch between the geography of home and work, the ethnoburb provides both a place to live and to work,” (Li 484). The ethnoburb as a spatial bubble is a fascinating trend of ethnic settlement, shaped by shifts in the global economy and the heightened diversity of backgrounds for Chinese migrants to the U.S. after the Hart Cellar Act.

Multicultural communities across the United States are fighting to preserve their own history embedded within landmarks and public spaces. Often, these struggles look like grassroots and regional organizing efforts opposing gentrification, overdevelopment, and rapid displacement. Southern California is no different. For instance, the China House in Rancho Cucamonga was only managed to be preserved by the efforts of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, Riverside’s Save Our Chinatown Committee, and the AAPI Americans in Historic Preservation group (YSOS). The role of place can help us understand how the Chinatowns of San Diego, Ventura, and the Inland Empire fared the way they did, while areas like Los Angeles have been able to maintain their ethnic enclaves through having more transnational linkages, political power in numbers, and institutions that reflect their history into the 21st century.

As the first Asian group to arrive to Southern California, Chinese people have a diverse history of Chinatowns. While not all Chinese settlements have survived throughout the course of development practices and demographic movements, these histories deserve their own regional analysis as being more than solely just being considered reproductions of the phenomena in Northern California Chinatowns. This research was meant to bring together a wide variety of primary sources and secondary sources from many disciplines around the evolution of Southern California Chinatowns, with a focus on English sources. It would be beneficial for any historical study on place, migration, and ethnicity to be able to include perspectives written in the first language of the people they are studying. I would highly push for future bilingual scholars looking into the power of place in shaping the southern California Chinese diaspora to investigate Mandarin and Cantonese sources, which I unfortunately was not able to do within the timespan and scope of this project. Even scholars who are not fluent in either language could benefit from translating and searching for terms that include common vocabulary related to Chinatowns, real estate development news, community events, shifts in migrant powered industries, and geography.

I would like to reiterate the sentiment shared by Yu Zhou in how locality-based data and human geographical analysis is important to understand the forces around the histories of any particular Chinatown community. I believe more scholars and organizations could further research from this angle in order to prevent future issues that Yu Zhou and Suchen Chang have pointed out. Growing up in various suburbs of the Inland Empire after the 2008 housing bubble popped, I have always looked to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York as the most interesting hubs of Chinese culture and political action. I understand and have grown to appreciate the smaller histories of Chinese survival throughout Turtle Island, because as we can see from the disproportionate lack of surfaced sources from outlying areas from Los Angeles, historical knowledge production is not a guarantee to take for granted. Each of them have their own stories of how Chinese people fit into different spatial configurations of race, resources, and the environment. While there are still many similarities and tendencies across all California Chinatowns, place can give us a frame of reference for understanding where Chinese people fit into broader stories of the emergence of American modern industrialization, changing needs of migrant communities brushed against one another, and the southwestern spatial imagination.

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