This article is adapted from UNASSIMILABLE: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century by Bianca Mabute-Louie ( HarperCollins, January 2025 ).
San Gabriel Valley, also known as SGV or the 626, is where I grew away. SGV is an ethnoburb — an ethnic area — that grew out of the 1970s, with its own business and ecosystem that includes businesses, grocery stores, locks shops and restaurants.
Working together to create and defend this tribal ecosystem was a matter of success and necessity because some early Asian immigrants to this country were prohibited from accessing bright institutions.
Wei Li, a Taiwanese American explorer, first proposed the name “ethnoburb” to identify the hybridity of racial enclaves and middle-class suburbs: residential cultural clusters of people and businesses.
The ethnoburb demonstrates that we can make our own energy and belonging — without learning English, without participating in white corporations, and Americanizing. It is a social enterprise, one that requires everybody’s mind and attention.
The” Chinese Beverly Hills”
The ethnoburb immigrants redefined the whole suburbian environment and sparked an economic boom driven by foreign capital. Important factors contributed to the economic development of the Chinese in Monterey Park, a town in the San Gabriel Valley, along with the political and economic factors that led to the movement of powerful ethnic Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Chinese immigrants used their resources to buy homes and launch businesses in the Chinese and Asian languages to welcome newcomers from Asia. Valley Boulevard, which runs through 10 locations in San Gabriel Valley, became household to Asian-owned malls, business plazas, business complexes, shops, hotels and commercial plants, generally with spanish banners in Chinese, Vietnamese and English.
Asian immigrants created rich Asian markets and neglected strip malls, forming a sense of permanence and community. Monterey Park, and eventually the rest of San Gabriel valley, began to be referred to as” Little Taipei” or the” Chinese Beverly Hills” by journalists and Chinese diasporic media.
By the 1980s, Monterey Park was known as” the first suburban Chinatown”, converting San Gabriel Valley from predominantly white suburbs into an Asian-majority ecosystem with a conspicuous and diverse first-generation, unassimilated immigrant presence.
By avoiding the cities ‘ Chinese, moving to the cities.
The ethnoburb is contrary to the notion that the suburbs are dynamic locations of social mobility and whiteness in America.
The majority of new refugees, particularly those with resources, chose to live in suburbs instead of urban racial enclaves like Chinatown, which were once used as immigration gateway cities.
According to Min Zhou, a professor of sociology and Asian British research at UCLA, the deliberate protection of cultural values, relationships, and institutions is what makes non-white immigrants to the US acclimate.
Zhou also contends that the traditional knowledge of immigration and assimilation is offended by the strong influx of new Asian immigrants into traditionally white suburbs. Ethnoburb newcomers were non-white, didn’t often talk English, made substantially less effort to acculturate into white, and many of them were previously educated and educated. They went beyond the scope of an immigrant’s mind in America.
Some ethnoburb immigrants even had broad and transnational social networks, which helped shape their resistance to acculturate, in addition to higher education and income levels. To realize the middle-class dream of financial stability, they didn’t want to study English or travel through the cultural enclave.
The ethnoburb was not a” conducting surface” for there better or white. The ethnoburb was the last desired target.
In reality, contrary to popular notions, the ethnoburb was no nonpartisan or isolated at all. It was and remains a page of resistance against the permitting, bright thoughts of sprawl. With the introduction of Monterey Park as an Eastern ethnoburb, concerns over group identity, geographic restrictions, and the figure of Monterey Park became politicized.
White hostility in an’ all-American’ city
First-generation immigrants were at the forefront of erecting boundaries of belonging, which were a priority for nativist white residents. Asian immigrants reshaped Monterey Park’s aesthetic and cultural identity in addition to changing the political landscape there. Traditional American perceptions of who immigrants are, the rules they must follow, and how they should act were hampered by this direct insertion of unassimilated Asian immigrants into traditionally white suburbs and its institutions.
On Nov. 8, 1983, Lily Lee Chen, a first-generation immigrant from Taiwan, was inaugurated in Monterey Park as the first Chinese American mayor in the nation. Chen was relatable, charismatic, and not assimilated. Chen’s speech was “accented with pauses and grammatical errors, characteristic of someone speaking in their second language,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
In a different 1985 Times article, Chen claimed to enjoy dressing in bright reds and jade greens despite being told by her consultant that her attractiveness would make her appear “aggressive.” During her campaign, she was met with fierce resistance from white residents, who commonly took down her neighbourhood campaign signs.
In response, Chen worked tirelessly to increase voter engagement among Latinos and Asian Americans, including working with Cesar Chavez to support the Latinos in Southern California. He also published multilingual voter handbooks, registered voters, and developed relationships with ethnic groups.
The same year as Chen’s election, Monterey Park’s five-member city council became multiethnic, with two Mexican Americans, one Filipino American, one Chinese American, and one white council member.
White flight accelerated and resentment grew among the minority of white residents as Monterey Park gained media attention as it was called a” successful suburban melting pot” and even won an” All-American City” award in 1985 for its civic engagement and racial diversity.
Racial tension increased as a result of the large influx and growing influence of Chinese immigrants over a short period of time, as well as growing disputes over cultural differences, language barriers, and explicit mistrust of immigrants. Chinese businesses, political candidates, religious institutions, and entrepreneurs became racialized targets of nativist animus.
The proliferation of business signs in languages other than English sparked a particularly contentious conflict. The remaining white residents ‘ white council members of color were replaced by three well-established white residents in 1986 when white hostility among them led to the launch of an anti-immigrant” English-only” campaign against the proliferation of Chinese business signage.
The” English-only” movement in Monterey Park reflects the struggle to control the identity and narrative of a built environment. It demonstrates the conflict between ethnoburb immigrants ‘ ideas of assimilation and those who have instead built their own unassimilable institutions and communities.
Frank Arcuri, one of the Monterey Park residents and community activists who started the” English-only” petition campaign, insisted,” Immigrants are welcome here, but they must realize that English is the language we use in America…. They must be aware that they are having a negative effect on our city. They must change their behavior. They must respect our culture and speak our language.
The nativist, incendiary language Arcuri employs is as American as apple pie, making it comparable to the replacement theory being promoted by white nationalist conspiracists today.
The English-only conflict illustrates the deeper, ideological tensions behind an increasingly diverse and polyglot constituency, composed of politically active immigrants, and nostalgic white residents desperately ( and at times violently ) clinging on to institutional power and a homogeneous past.
Asian immigrants defied assimilation theories.
Traditionally, sociologists of immigration and assimilation theorists believed that all immigrant groups would eventually assimilate and integrate into white Protestant American institutions, culture, and society. They argued that doing so would serve the best interests of immigrants. They were also all white scholars. For the most part, what they theorized was true for European immigrants.
However, Asian immigrants in the ethnoburb remained proudly unassimilable and trans-national. While the ethnoburb was their final destination, they maintained diasporic ties. Many of the people who enjoyed socioeconomic status traveled to their home countries.
Not necessarily our assimilation into whiteness, but rather our diasporic connections to our motherlands and our ethnic communities are what contribute to our success in the United States.
Bianca Mabute-Louie is a sociology PhD candidate at Rice University.
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.