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The Seoul of Los Angeles: contested identities and transnationalism in immigrant space

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The Seoul of Los Angeles: contested identities and transnationalism in immigrant space

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The Seoul of Los Angeles: Contested Identities and Transnationalism in Immigrant Space

by
Kristy H.A. Kang

Dissertation submitted on June 30, 2013

Media Arts and Practice Ph.D. Program
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction to The Seoul of Los Angeles ...........................................................................1

Early Pioneers ............................................................................................................................ 10
Re-mapping Immigrant Spaces: Koreatown after 1965............................................................. 14
Sa-I-Gu: The 1992 Los Angeles Riots....................................................................................... 17
Transnational Identities.............................................................................................................. 21
A Platform for Community Storytelling .................................................................................... 25
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 30

Instructions for Viewing The Seoul of Los Angeles ......................................................................32

References....................................................................................................................................................33

Bibliography................................................................................................................................................36

Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................................39

Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
1

This essay serves as an introductory frame for the online cultural history of Los
Angeles’s Koreatown that is the primary format in which my dissertation research is
presented. Using a combination of original interviews, film clips, archival photographs,
mapping techniques and written material, this research project is presented as a scholarly
website and digital archive conceived as a platform for community storytelling. It
utilizes a combination of open-source web tools to present a unique interface design that
reflects the multiple and uneven nature of urban development and transnational identity.
Ultimately, it uses the archive and database as a way to address the complex relationships
that comprise Koreatown’s socio-cultural history. I will describe the details and
influences of my research design method later in this article and frame it within related
theories on the archive and database narrative. I will also outline the four topics under
which I have organized the web-based study. These topics are: “Early Pioneers,” which
describes the establishment of Korean settlement in Los Angeles in the early 1900s and
before 1965; “Re-mapping Immigrant Spaces: Koreatown after 1965,” which describes
the development of contemporary Koreatown in the period following the 1965
immigration act–a period that saw the arrival of a significantly increased number of
newer Asian immigrants, among them Korean, to Los Angeles; “Sa-I-Gu: The 1992 Los
Angeles Riots,” which looks at the struggle for ethnic coalition building surrounding the
riots and how the tensions among the various ethnic communities comprising
Koreatown’s population magnified the heterogeneity within the community; and
“Transnational Identities,” which looks at how Koreatown reconfigures our
understanding of ethnic enclaves and transnationalism in local communities. But before I
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
2

discuss these four topics, I will first summarize my project and discuss how place and
transnationalism are utilized in this context.
“When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I thought it was Korea. There was no way
to tell it was the United States because on the streets there were signs in Korean. There
were a lot of Koreans too.”
1
This was an observation made in 1999 by a young Korean
man who had been raised in Brazil and had moved to Los Angeles with his family. His
parents were among a group of Koreans who moved to Brazil starting in 1962 as a result
of the South Korean government passing of an Overseas Emigration Law encouraging
emigration as a means of alleviating unemployment and controlling population during the
period following the Korean War. In December of that year, the Ministry of Public
Health and Social Affairs set up an emigration section that encouraged seventeen families
or 92 individuals to move to Brazil.
2
Many of these Korean emigrants developed
businesses in the garment industry and some later moved to Los Angeles, attracted by the
possibility of improved economic opportunities in its garment industry as well as by the
growing community of Koreans residing in the city.
The impression on the young Korean-Brazilian man that Los Angeles was
understood as Korea is striking on two registers. First, it reflects the degree to which Los
Angeles and its Korean community have become representative of Korean culture itself,
even in the consciousness of second generation Koreans who had not visited Korea and
are part of the multifaceted history of Korean emigration around the world. Secondly, it
suggests the spatial practice of Korean cultural identity within urban development is
mobile and transnational, not necessarily confined within defined national borders but
rather, transcending them. Emphasizing this point, as recently as 2012, Koreatown in
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
3

Los Angeles was described as “functionally a distant district of Seoul–in capital as well
as in culture, in both commerce and cuisine.”
3
With its explosion of spas, restaurants and
nightclubs, most visitors understand Koreatown as an extension of Seoul culture, but in
fact the majority of inhabitants who comprise its residential and working class population
are not Korean, but Latino. Though the majority of businesses are owned by struggling
first generation Korean immigrants or, in some cases, financed by Korean transnational
capital, the everyday space of this community is largely inhabited by a mix of immigrants
coming from Mexico, Central and South America, and other parts of Asia including
Bangladesh. This complex network of national affiliations, each with its own distinct
cultural history, converges in the urban space of Koreatown. This convergence results in
a contestation of dominant conceptions of ethnic enclaves in urban theory being
understood as ethnically homogenous.
Using Koreatown in Los Angeles as a case study, this project examines how
immigrant communities shape a sense of place and cultural identity and how these local
ethnic communities in large urban cities reconfigure our understanding of transnational
identity. Though transnationalism is usually framed more broadly in terms of the
mobility of cultural and economic commodities between nations globally, I argue that
transnationalism can be framed more locally by examining the sociocultural flows within
ethnic enclaves in large urban cities like Los Angeles. Framing transnationalism locally
allows for a place-based examination that magnifies and centralizes the narratives of
underrepresented ethnic groups that inhabit local communities. In other words,
transnationalism and its effects need to be experienced though a local and not solely
global lens in ethnic enclaves like Koreatown. A focus on place-based identity formation
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
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provides what human geographer Tim Cresswell calls “the ontological grounding for
subaltern strategies of ‘localization’.”
4
The Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance
(KIWA), which I will discuss in more detail later, is one such example of a grassroots
community organization resisting the forces of transnational capital to represent the rights
of multi-ethnic workers and residents of Koreatown. By revealing the inter-relationships
of such local transnationalisms, this project shows how immigrant ethnic enclaves can no
longer be understood as homogenous and fixed but rather, are unstable and constructed
out of a network of complex, multiple affiliations to race, histories and nations. These
ethnic communities serve to destabilize notions of place and space as being fixed,
showing instead, that they are never finished and in a constant state of negotiation and
process.
This sense of place that is unfinished and in a constant state of becoming is what
Michel de Certeau describes as the space of practice. De Certeau characterizes place not
in terms of geographic locality but in terms of social activity. Place is made and re-made
through the daily iterative social practices of people who inhabit their everyday spaces.
Reimagining place as a space of practice allows for “the creative production of identity
rather than an a-priori label of identity.”
5
Though De Certeau offers a useful alternative
to the essentialist notion of place as being rooted, his concept of place remains relatively
abstract and does not address the politics of social activity nor the influence of race,
ethnicity or class in shaping a sense of place. Doreen Massey, on the other hand, argues
for the importance of a global sense of place even within the local. Like de Certeau, her
conception of place is unbounded but she adds the importance of thinking of the politics
of mobility, linking the social activity of place-making to the mobility of global exchange
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
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and forces of capital. Koreatown combines the social activity that constitutes place-
making and its global influences. This project brings into the foreground the tension
between retaining a sense of national rootedness and homogenous identity in the
consciousness of Korean immigrants and the inevitable push towards a more
heterogeneous identity formation in the midst of multi-ethnic communities. My project
adds to these discourses on place by including narrative and storytelling as a form of
social practice that constitutes place while simultaneously making explicitly tangible the
dimensions that race, ethnicity and class play in the politics of place in Koreatown.
In framing the relationship between place and transnationalism, the work of Arjun
Appadurai and Aihwa Ong are useful in that they intervene in discussions on
globalization by addressing the human subject within its system and propose
transnationalism and cultural mobility as a way to think of place as unbounded and
identity as deterritorialized. According to Ong, the term “transnational” became
popularized in the 1970s because global companies were rethinking their strategies,
shifting from the “vertical integration model of the multinational firm to the horizontal
dispersal of the transnational corporation.”
6
Ong uses mobility as a means to gauge
immigrant relationships to nation and as a way to de-stabilize a fixed construct of
national identity. She presents the flexible geographical and social movements of Hong
Kong business people as an example of “the flexible subject” who embody the split
between a state-imposed identity and personal identity. This identity, however, is not a
simple binary, of being either a national or a nomad. Rather, it’s a negotiation among
different geographical and social positions that include family structures, the state, and
capital. This negotiation is embodied in the movement of the nomadic or flexible subject
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
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whose formation of identity is characterized more by instability and flux. Ong celebrates
the value of flexibility and instability in the construction of identity stating, “…while
mobility and flexibility have long been part of the repertoire of human behavior, under
transnationality the new links between flexibility and the logics of displacement, on the
one hand, and capital accumulation, on the other, have given new valence to such
strategies of maneuvering and positioning. Flexibility, migration, and relocations, instead
of being coerced or resisted, have become practices to strive for rather than stability.”
7

Similarly, Korean transnational capital has created increasingly mobile middle class
Korean immigrants who cultivate flexible affiliations to nation, traversing in-between
nations. Significantly, the period in the 1970s when the term transnationalism was
popularized coincides with the period when the large South Korean conglomerates,
known as “chaebol,” began to form and whose current investment of transnational capital
is transforming the urban development of Los Angeles’s Koreatown.
Though the concept of flexible citizenship as an aspect of transnational identity is
useful in formulating a deterritorialized sense of place and identity, it is limited in that its
focus remains an extroverted conception of transnationalism that focuses attention on
more privileged communities. What Ong does not address are the introverted, local
effects of transnational capital on the development of urban spaces like Koreatown and
the subsequent effects on a different class of people who maintain little or uneven access
to the benefits transnational capital may provide. Both Appadurai and Ong, in
privileging unbounded, outward mobility in their conception of transnational identity
formation, neglect to adequately examine the very real social consequences of
transnational capital accumulation on disenfranchised ethnic and working class
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
7

communities in places like Koreatown. The majority of its community is made up of
populations who may not always benefit from an idealized concept of increased mobility
and flexibility. This group comprises a significant component of the residential working
class community of Koreatown who struggle with the very real possibility of forced
mobility, of displacement due to transnational real-estate investment and the subsequent
change in housing affordability in their neighborhood. Those whose sense of place is a
constant negotiation between stability and instability within very specific economic and
social boundaries understand mobility and flexibility on a different register. Koreatown
reconfigures our understanding of transnationalism to include not only extroverted global
networks, but also the internal networks expressed through complex interactions within
local ethnic communities.
Having introduced the broader concepts of transnationalism and place for the
purposes of this project, it is necessary to also include a brief discussion of the specific
locality of Los Angeles and Koreatown’s configuration within it. If one of the outcomes
of transnationalism is a deterritorialized sense of national identity, then Los Angeles is its
urban manifestation–celebrated by geographers as the ultimate, postmodern,
polynucleated configuration of multiple national identities. As Edward Soja describes it,
“Everywhere seems also to be in Los Angeles. …And from every quarter’s teeming
shores have poured a pool of cultures so diverse that contemporary Los Angeles
represents the world in connected urban microcosms, reproducing in situ the customary
colors and confrontations of a hundred different homelands.”
8
Recognized for its
fragmented spatiality with an endlessly shifting constellation of unique ethnic
communities and cultures, Los Angeles today is predominantly understood as “a
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
8

conglomeration of distinct ethnic communities, some large and others small, some
relatively stable and others kinetic in transformation–at once one of the most diverse
cities in history but also one of the most segregated.”
9
The developmental history of Los
Angeles by historians and geographers, and their characterization of the city as a
constellation of segregated and homogenous ethnic communities, is succinctly
summarized by David E. James in his discussion of Los Angeles culture and community
formation. James outlines the origins of ethnic enclave formation starting from the
observation made in 1894 by Charles A. Stoddard that “Southern California is made up
of groups who often live in isolated communities, continuing their own customs,
language, and religious habits and associations.”
10
Stoddard was quoted by Carey
McWilliams to support his characterization made in 1946 of Los Angeles’s composition
of “social and ethnic islands, economically interrelated but culturally disparate.”
11

Following this rubric, urban theorists, the most influential among them being Soja, have
assumed that these distinct though isolated communities are culturally and ethnically
homogenous. This conception of Los Angeles’s ethnic communities as being segregated
from each other is further emphasized, as James points out, if you consider the more
recent formation of “little” Asian cities such as Tokyo or Saigon, which have “fashioned
themselves between the cultural patterns of their originals and those of their new
environment, forging a new local life for often globally distant identities.”
12
Although I
would include Koreatown in this pattern of replicating its cultural signifiers especially
through the restaurants, spas and other products of Korean cultural consumption that
dominate its urban landscape, I would argue that Koreatown as an ethnic enclave makes a
radical departure from the assumed homogeneity and segregation of ethnic community
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
9

formation in Los Angeles posited by urban theorists up to this point. Despite being one
of the most ethnically identified neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Koreatown is incredibly
heterogeneous in its ethnic makeup. According to a recent study by the USC Program for
Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE), “Koreans are the single largest national
origin group within Koreatown, at 22 percent of the population. However, while
Koreatown has by far the largest concentration of Koreans in the region, they are a
racial/ethnic minority; Latinos, with origins in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, other
Latin American nations constitute 58 percent of the population. The remaining 20
percent is made up of non-Hispanic whites, African Americans, non-Korean and Asian
and Pacific Islanders, and others.”
13
Furthermore, Koreatown is not only multiracial, but
also a multiclass community that includes immigrant families, upwardly mobile
professionals, as well as elderly Korean “empty-nesters” who are returning to the
community they had left years earlier to find better schools and safer streets. Considering
these factors, Koreatown radically breaks from previous assumptions that ethnic
communities have a stable homogeneity within them.
It is at this point that I will introduce the four topics under which the web-based
study is organized. Each explores an aspect of the complexity of Koreatown in Los
Angeles and how local communities reconfigure our understanding of ethnic enclaves
and transnational identity.

Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
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Early Pioneers
The history of Korean immigration to the U.S. has undergone various iterations
attracting groups from different classes, educational backgrounds and economic
conditions, each with varying motivations for immigrating to the U.S. Leaving Korea
due to famines at the turn of the century, the first wave of Koreans came to Hawaii
between 1903 and 1905 to work on sugar plantations. This group of migrant workers
immigrated due to the demand for cheap labor in Hawaii and due to the intermediary role
of Dr. Horace Allen, an American Presbyterian missionary in Korea who was influential
in making this first migration possible. Beginning in 1884, when diplomatic relations
between the U.S. and Korea were first established, American missionaries were actively
involved in converting Koreans to Christianity. It was through this influence that many
early Korean pioneers chose to come to the U.S.
14
Some of those early immigrants came
to Los Angeles and formed communities around their shared Christian faith. By 1904, a
regular gathering of Koreans met on Magnolia Avenue near the University of Southern
California to worship and take English lessons together. This gathering later became the
Korean United Methodist Church, one of the many ethnic church communities in Los
Angeles. In 1906, another group of Koreans started a Presbyterian gathering in
downtown L.A., later becoming the Korean United Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles.
This church stands to this day and is located on 1374 West Jefferson Boulevard near the
University of Southern California. One of the important foundations for spatial practice
among Korean immigrants centered around the practice of faith as a form of community
building.
15

Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
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Korean church communities in America also became an influential political
platform for the Korean independence movement during the Japanese colonization of
Korea between 1910 and 1945. By 1924 additional Koreans had immigrated to Hawaii
and California. Though the majority of these were “picture brides”–women sent from
Korea to become wives of the earlier wave of bachelor migrant workers–some were
political refugees and student activists involved in the anti-Japanese independence
movement. Many of these activists established the Korean independence movement in
the U.S. not only providing voices of dissent against Japanese colonization but by
funding the Korean Provisional Government in exile, which was engaged in diplomatic
and military action both domestically and internationally in order to gain Korean
independence.
16
The story of Dosan Ahn Chang Ho–a pioneering civil rights activist and
a prominent leader of the Korean Independence Movement in this early period–are
among the stories recounted by his daughter, Susan Ahn Cuddy, on the website that
accompanies this essay. The origins of this political movement were started in San
Francisco around 1903 with the establishment of organizations like the Korean National
Association, but by the 1930s the leadership of the Korean American community had
shifted to Los Angeles where more employment opportunities attracted Koreans to
relocate to Southern California. Moving the offices of the Korean National Association
from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1937 marked the emergence of Los Angeles as the
new center for the Korean American community.
17
The activities of the Korean
independence movement in the U.S. exemplify another form of spatial practice, one that
extends the boundaries of local space to global space. In her essay “A Global Sense of
Place” Doreen Massey states,
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
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Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be
imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and
understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and
understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to
define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or
even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted,
which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates
in a positive way the global and the local.
18

The movement for Korean independence created a network of activists whose
commitment to nationalism extended their concept of the Korean community beyond
their immediate immigrant space to a global space, encompassing a network of satellite
communities in the U.S., Mexico, China and Russia.
19
During the Japanese occupation
the concept of Korea as an independent nation was kept alive in the imagination of
Koreans living outside of Korea. Their network of interactions expanded and
destabilized the concept of nation as fixed within the borders of Korea. This developing
concept of nation has influenced a newer generation of Korean activists whose concept of
nation today rejects the division of Korea in 1945, striving instead for the reunification of
the North and South.
Reflecting a fluctuating sense of place, the spatial boundaries of Koreatown have
been multiple. In the early 1900s a small group of four Korean families lived near
Bunker Hill on the outer edge of the more upscale neighborhood along Temple Street
between Los Angeles Street and Broadway. Until the early 1930s Koreans owned a
grocery store, a laundry and a shoe repair shop in the area. By the end of the 1930s there
were approximately 650 Koreans living in Los Angeles County. By the 1940s the
majority of Koreans had established their homes, community organizations, churches,
restaurants and grocery stores in the southwestern edge of the downtown L.A. business
district. This early iteration of Koreatown was located near the University of Southern
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
13

California and bounded by Adams Boulevard to the north, Slauson Boulevard to the
south, Western Avenue to the west and Vermont Avenue to the east with Jefferson
Boulevard providing the primary artery for Korean residents and businesses. Housing
laws based on racial discrimination during the 1930s and 40s forced the Korean
community to establish themselves in this racially mixed residential zone where
restrictions were not as strictly enforced as in other areas of the city. Later as these
housing restrictions toward non-white residents began to ease, second-generation
Koreans moved out of this earlier iteration of Koreatown.
20
On the website for The Seoul
of Los Angeles that accompanies this essay, sociologist Eui-Young Yu, who has been
studying the Korean American community in Los Angeles since his arrival in 1968,
describes where Asian communities developed in Los Angeles and the origins of
Koreatown during this early period. The accompanying map that is part of the website
delineates the various spatial boundaries of Korean settlement over time and provides
links to archival images and video narratives of specific areas.
Beginning in the late 1960s as the African-American population increased in the
southern part of the city, the Jewish, Anglo and Asian communities began moving to
adjacent neighborhoods. The Korean settlement began to move north of Adams toward
Olympic Boulevard between Crenshaw and Hoover. During this time the next wave of
Koreans came to the U.S. following the enactment of the 1965 immigration act
abolishing national origins as a basis for immigration legislation. Though the act was
designed to reunite families separated during World War II and it was predicted that the
primary immigrants would be coming from Europe, few expected the large influx of
people arriving from Asia. Just in the two years between 1968 and 1970 the Korean
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
14

population in the United States had doubled from 25,000 to 50,000 with 8,811 living in
Los Angeles County. By 1980 the Korean population in the U.S. had grown to 354,000
doubling to 800,000 in 1990 and by 2000 there were about 1.1 million. It is currently
estimated that the annual number of Korean immigrants since 2000 has been 20,000 per
year.
21
Today Los Angeles has the largest number of Koreans in the United States living
outside of Korea.

Re-mapping Immigrant Spaces: Koreatown after 1965
Nicknamed the “L.A. district of Seoul City,” Koreatown in Los Angeles evokes
both a local and global concept of place. Though its geographic boundaries have been in
flux since the first Korean immigrants arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1900s,
Koreatown’s official boundaries were designated by the City Council in August of 2010
and have remained stable ever since: Third Street to the north, Vermont Avenue to the
east, Olympic Boulevard to the south and Western Avenue to the west, including a
narrow strip of Western Avenue up to Rosewood Avenue.
22
Prior to 2010, the
boundaries of Koreatown were unofficial and more expansive, roughly delineated from
the south to north between Pico Boulevard and Melrose Avenue and from east to west
between Wilton Place and Fairfax Avenue.
23
Though Korean immigrants have inhabited
the area since the 1960s, Koreatown was only officially recognized as a section of Los
Angeles in 1980 but without any designated street boundaries. In 1982, “Koreatown”
signs were posted on the highway and on the streets surrounding its neighborhood,
located around three miles west of downtown Los Angeles.
24
The current official
boundaries of Koreatown were created as a result of a proposal made in 2009 to designate
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
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an existing ethnic community within the boundaries of Koreatown, Little Bangladesh.
According to a mapping project undertaken by the cultural and advocacy group the South
Asian Network in 2005, the current population of Bangladeshis living in the area is
approximately 20,000.
25
Community members representing both the Korean and
Bangladeshi immigrant population worked with the City Council to negotiate the new
official boundaries of Koreatown and its sub-community of Little Bangladesh. This
recent development magnifies and makes obvious how assumptions of homogeneity
within Koreatown’s ethnic enclave are no longer applicable. Though it is perceived as a
predominantly Korean immigrant place in Los Angeles due to the number of Korean
businesses and the proliferation of signage in the Korean language, as indicated earlier,
its residents are primarily Latino, with Koreans comprising the largest Asian residential
population within the community. Today, the spatial practice of Koreatown includes the
daily social and economic interactions among its mix of residents and visitors who are
diverse in both racial and ethnic makeup.
Today’s Koreatown was created largely through the development efforts of its
immigrant community and without the help of the government or state. Following the
wave of Korean immigration after 1965, the new Koreatown had been established
between Crenshaw and Hoover with Olympic Boulevard providing the central artery of
Korean businesses in the area. Immigrant entrepreneurship established the basis of what
we now know as contemporary Koreatown. Hi-Duk Lee was among the first
entrepreneurs to open up businesses along Olympic Boulevard starting in 1971 with
Olympic Market, and then in 1975 with the VIP Palace–a restaurant and nightclub on
Olympic Boulevard designed to reflect traditional Korean architecture with roof tiles
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
16

imported from the motherland. Together, these businesses marked the symbolic
beginning of the contemporary neighborhood that is known as Koreatown today. In 1973
a group of Korean merchants, including Hi-Duk Lee, created the Koreatown
Development Association and initiated a campaign to install Korean language signs on
Korean-owned stores. One year later this same organization started the first Korean
Street Festival, which runs annually along Olympic Boulevard.
26
Gene Kim (another
member of the Koreatown Development Association and a small business owner who
first started the festival) was among the individuals responsible for initiating plans to
develop a Korean version of Japanese Village Plaza, designed by the L.A. based Korean
American architect David Hyun. The development of Japanese Village Plaza in the late
1970s helped dramatically revitalize the Little Tokyo area. As a result of its success,
Hyun created a similar design for the Korean American community in Los Angeles called
“Korea City.” This ambitious project would have been for the Korean community what
Japanese Village became for Little Tokyo. For Hyun, Korea City would have been a
showcase for the Korean American community in Los Angeles. Though plans for the
project had been initiated, the project was never realized. Hyun’s story of Japanese
Village and his unrealized designs for “Korea City” are part of the narrative of immigrant
entrepreneurship in Koreatown.
The immigrant entrepreneurs who established Koreatown did so with the idea of
replicating a sense of Korean culture in Los Angeles, particularly in the food industry.
This earlier conception of creating a local version of Seoul culinary culture for the Los
Angeles Korean community has since taken on another dimension. Whereas before,
businesses catered to the immediate local residential community, today, immigrant
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
17

entrepreneurs are developing more transnational and trans-local businesses, expanding
their clientele to include not only non-Korean customers but also consumers back in
Korea. In other words, though Seoul food culture is often replicated in Koreatown, in
some instances, Koreatown’s food culture is being replicated in Seoul. The story of BCD
Tofu House and its owner Hee-Sook Lee is atypical in that unlike most Korean
restaurants whose influence comes directly from Korea, BCD started in Los Angeles and
was later popularized in Seoul, subsequently expanding to other local and international
locations. This example is a reversal of more typical transnational businesses where a
product of national culture is replicated locally in its satellite ethnic community. The
case of BCD Tofu House shows how the spatial practices of Koreatown can also be
replicated in Seoul, thereby extending the spatial boundaries of Koreatown in Los
Angeles to Seoul itself. Seoul is not only in Los Angeles but Los Angeles can be found
in Seoul as well.

Sa-I-Gu: The 1992 Los Angeles Riots
Characterizing the “in-betweenness” of immigrant experience means negotiating
not only national borders but racial boundaries as well. Since the early 1900s when
Koreans first came to America, Los Angeles has attracted a steady influx of immigrants
inspired to leave their countries in order to pursue more promising economic and
educational opportunities abroad. Immigration from Asia increased after 1965 when U.S.
racial exclusion laws previously limiting immigration were changed. The peak period of
Korean emigration was from 1985 to 1987 when many moved to the U.S. to escape what
would be the last period of military dictatorship under Chun Doo Hwan’s political
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
18

regime.
27
A 2004 article surveying the history of Koreatown states, “Los Angeles
County has been the main gateway for Korean immigrants to the United States.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the 186,350 Koreans residing in Los Angeles County
and the 55,573 in Orange County collectively represent about 22 percent of the 1,076,872
Koreans who live in the United States.”
28
But unlike Korea’s ethnically homogenous
society where class is more likely to define social status, Los Angeles is distinguished
primarily by its ethnic diversity. For Koreans living in America, race became a new and
additional measure of social status and an increasingly important gauge in defining
identity in the United States.
Sparked by the verdict to release the four LAPD officers famously caught on
videotape violently beating the unarmed African-American motorist Rodney King, the
uprising broke out on April 29, 1992. A pivotal moment for Los Angeles and especially
the ethnic communities affected by it, the riots were the result of a combination of
systematic economic disenfranchisement especially in the poorer neighborhoods of
central Los Angeles, entrenched racism, and a deeply dysfunctional and ineffective
system of civil rights that left large communities feeling unrepresented and deeply
resentful of their city and its leaders. Over six days of violence on the streets, 53 people
died, 2,000 were injured, 1,000 buildings were destroyed and many businesses were
looted.
29
As a result, residents, workers and business owners lost their homes and
livelihood overnight. South Los Angeles and Koreatown were among the communities
left most devastated by the riots.
Known in the Korean community as “Sa-I-Gu,” meaning “4-29” in Korean, the
riots were a scathing example of the relative lack of understanding within the Korean
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
19

immigrant community of inter-ethnic and racial dynamics in America. Sometimes
referred to as a violent moment of birth for the Korean American community, the riots
were a hard lesson on race relations and a concrete reminder of the challenges facing
Korean immigrants, the majority of whom, having come from an ethnically homogenous
society, were completely unprepared and unequipped to navigate the intricacies of race
relations in America. This was acutely evidenced during the 1992 riots that erupted into
ethnic conflicts between Koreans, African Americans, Whites and Latinos in Los
Angeles. Among Korean American merchants who were part of the victims of the riots,
there were polarized attitudes towards the other ethnic minorities. Some expressed
opinions reflecting the racism that was played out in the media, especially between
African and Korean Americans, while others refused the inter-ethnic conflict rubric and
sympathized with fellow Afro-Americans and Latinos who were left unemployed as a
result of the destruction of many businesses during the conflict. These conflicting
attitudes suggest there are rifts even within the Korean American community that would
make it incredibly challenging to build any consensus around racial or ethnic
homogeneity.
Yet, the riots also created the opportunity for developing inter-ethnic coalitions
that would attempt to address the racially motivated conflicts and lack of understanding
within the communities. The Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA) is one
exemplary organization that formed as a response to the riots and has since developed
into an organization serving the multi-ethnic working class population of Koreatown.
Rather than rallying around ethnicity or race as a unifying rubric for the organization,
KIWA focused instead on class as the rubric under which solidarity could be created
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
20

among its multi-ethnic members. Founded by Danny Park and a group of progressive
Korean activists, KIWA is a grassroots, non-profit organization that serves the working-
class residential community of Koreatown. As such, most of its members and
constituents are Latino and Korean. Formerly called the Korean Immigrant Workers
Advocates, KIWA changed its name to Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance to more
accurately reflect the demographics of the community it serves. KIWA is one of the few
organizations that has effectively struggled to create inter-ethnic solidarity around larger
issues affecting all residents of Koreatown. These issues fall under three main categories:
workplace justice and workers’ rights; affordable housing and tenants’ rights; and parks
and open space.
30
On the website, Jang Woo Karl Nam-a former organizer at KIWA-
describes the origins of KIWA and the various initiatives and motivations surrounding
the organization’s efforts.
April 29, 2012 marked the 20
th
anniversary since the riots erupted. It was
interesting to note that despite the variety of commemorative events, lectures and
academic conferences organized around the city, there was no clear consensus in creating
a common name for this devastating moment in history. Alternately labeled “the 1992
riots,” “uprising,” the “Los Angeles civil unrest” or “Sa-I-Gu,” it is telling that even after
twenty years, there is no apparent agreement among the various communities affected, as
to what to call the events of 1992. This suggests that there remains much room for debate
and discussion among the various groups who were witness to the events, each of whom
have differing perspectives on the lessons and challenges of the riots. What is clear is
that this traumatic moment in Los Angeles’s urban history brought into national focus the
heterogeneity of the Koreatown community. The riots also forced all ethnic communities
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
21

and the individuals within them to painfully face their own racism and lack of
understanding of each other’s histories and culture. Some faced these great challenges
and were able to transcend them through their struggle for ethnic coalition building, but
these groups also recognize there is still much work to be done.

Transnational Identities:
Though dominated by Latino immigrants who make up the largest residential
population, Koreatown is an extraordinarily diverse community whose residents come
from around the globe, including Korea, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru.
31
Before 1965, most
of the Asians in the United States were from Japan, mainland China, and the Philippines,
but since then immigration from Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, India
and other parts of Asia have significantly increased. These newer Asian immigrants,
combined with the Latin American immigrants who make up the fastest growing minority
group in Los Angeles, comprise the residents of Koreatown. Of these, more than 70
percent are foreign born with 62 percent from Latin America and 22 percent from
Korea.
32
This indicates that despite its name, Koreatown is ethnically heterogeneous with
Koreans comprising a minority population. With such a shifting diversity in the cultures
that form its ethnic makeup, it is impossible to view Koreatown through a single lens of
national identity.
Even so, Koreatown in Los Angeles is commonly imagined and described as an
extension of Seoul. In their book exploring Korean American identity after the 1992 riots
in Los Angeles, Nancy Abelmann and John Lie observe that Koreatown is “a major
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
22

symbolic destination of Korean immigration to the United States. The portable
homelands that immigrants carry in their minds have been materially re-created near
downtown Los Angeles. Newcomers find that Koreatown in Los Angeles is in part a
simulacrum of Seoul in Southern California…”
33
Contributing to this symbolic
representation of Seoul in Los Angeles is the cultural and economic exchange between
the two cities that has resulted in the recent redevelopment of Koreatown as a space for
transnational consumer and business practice, and the fostering of collaboration between
media industries in the two cities. For the wealthier class of mobile Koreans, Koreatown
is an extension of contemporary Seoul and a foothold in the American economy. But to
its poor and working class inhabitants, this space is experienced very differently and
imagined on a more local, not global register.
Koreatown is symbolic, not only for Koreans in Korea, but also for Koreans who
have immigrated from other Korean diasporic communities including Brazil and China.
Combining these subjectivities along with others that characterize the diversity of Los
Angeles creates distinctively complex dimensions to the understanding of Koreatown and
the Korean transnational community. On the website, Miriam Kim’s film “Layers of US”
provides a clear example of the symbolic meaning of Koreatown in the minds of second
generation Brazilian Koreans. But the film also reveals conflicting attitudes towards
developing a sense of place and transnational identity for those whose cultural affiliations
are more complex. Sociologist Eui-Young Yu also offers a another perspective,
discussing the rapid generational shift from the first to second generation in the Korean
American community and how this shift influences identity formation and cultural
affiliation among immigrants.
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
23

Besides its ethnic complexity, what characterizes Koreatown today is its
transformation from a location built by local immigrant entrepreneurs in the early 1970s
to a real-estate investment opportunity financed by capital from Korea since the 1980s.
This coincides with changes in capital restructuring in the United States and Asia that
created interdependent global economies and consequent mobility of transnational
finance. As Kyeyoung Park and Jessica Kim state in their study on Koreatown
redevelopment, “the strength of South Korea’s foreign exchange holdings coupled with
IMF-mandated neoliberal, structural adjustment programs following the Asian Financial
Crisis in 1997, led the South Korean government to liberalize laws governing the transfer
of funds overseas. Increasing number of nouveau-riche South Koreans, concerned about
economic instability…invested in California businesses and real estate. In addition,
linguistic and cultural affinity, together with spectacular property appreciation in
Southern California, has positioned Koreatown as a prime destination for South Korean
investors.”
34
Because of its strategic location on the Pacific Rim, its status as a global
city, its importance as a media center for popular culture and communications, and its
large Korean immigrant population, Los Angeles is a hub for Korean investment and
satellite institutions promoting Korean media and industry. On the website, sociologist
Eui-Young Yu provides a perspective on the influences of transnational capital on the
transformation of Koreatown and how this capital is not necessarily sensitive to the
economic needs of the multi-ethnic, multi-class community it is transforming. He goes
on to state that the Korean American community needs to create a sense of its own
autonomy from the satellite media institutions in Los Angeles that are primarily
controlled by the South Korean government. He suggests that doing so would allow the
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
24

Korean American community to develop a more independent economy and sense of place
that doesn’t only serve the interests of South Korea but is mutually beneficial to both
communities in Los Angeles and in Seoul.
Despite the growth of transnational investment in Los Angeles and the resulting
redevelopment of Koreatown, not all Korean immigrants have benefitted. Koreatown is a
site where the desire for urban renovation is, on the surface, symbolically positive for the
Korean American community but potentially negative in that it can disenfranchise other
members of the community, discriminating against those who belong to a less affluent
class of first generation small-business owners excluded from involvement in the
redevelopment process. Therefore, we should not presume that transnational capital from
Korea results in necessarily democratic and positive changes within the Korean
community itself. For middle class and wealthy Koreans, Koreatown is a consumer
space, replicating the kinds of spas, coffee houses, clubs and restaurants that one would
find in Seoul. These spaces and the people they attract are largely segregated from the
daily practices of other Koreatown residents who are part of the working-class poor. Los
Angeles’s Koreatown is an example of a place that is both local and global. It can be
viewed from multiple perspectives and embodies multiple identities that are
simultaneously a source of richness and conflict.

What is unique about Los Angeles’s Koreatown is the way in which the mix of
differing histories, cultures, class identifications, and ethnicity contribute to the
impossibility of essentializing this ethnic enclave. My project asserts that though the
exchange between Seoul and Los Angeles is often based on promoting national identity
by extending the consumption, culture, and industry of Korea within the United States,
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
25

this exchange has not resulted in creating a more cohesive and homogenous Korean
American identity or community in Los Angeles but rather, has magnified the economic
polarization and differences in class and ethnicity that reveal a more complex portrait of
Koreatown and its transnational community. It is within these local transnational
communities that the construction of cultural identity is in a constant state of flux. As
Andrew Higson points out in his essay on the limited imagination of conceiving cultural
products (in this case cinema) from a purely national perspective, “the degree of cultural
cross-breeding and interpenetration, not only across borders but also within them,
suggests that modern cultural formations are invariably hybrid and impure. They
constantly mix together different ‘indigeneities’ and are thus always re-fashioning
themselves, as opposed to exhibiting an already fully formed identity.”
35
Los Angeles’s
Koreatown is an example of a transnational place in which the formation of transnational
identity occurs on multiple levels and across many borders within a local community.

A Platform for Community Storytelling:
Having introduced the organizing rubrics in which The Seoul of Los Angeles
online cultural history is presented, I will now outline the project’s developmental history
and discuss the reasons why this research is presented as a digital platform for
community storytelling.
The initial conceptual beginnings of this project first began while I was a member
of The Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on interactive narrative and digital
scholarship at the University of Southern California. With its founding director Marsha
Kinder, and with fellow media artists Rosemary Comella and Scott Mahoy, we developed
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
26

a series of pioneering collaborative projects that were designed as interactive cultural
histories exploring Los Angeles. Among these projects was Tracing the Decay of
Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill. A collaboration between the Labyrinth
Project and Los Angeles-based experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill with whom
Rosemary Comella and I served as co-directors, this project combines historical and
fictional narratives to explore the cultural history of the now demolished Ambassador
Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, located in what is now Koreatown. One of the sections of
the project that I designed features an archival aerial photo taken in the 1960s of the
Ambassador Hotel and its surrounding neighborhood. Choosing specific highlighted
locations on this aerial “map” would allow the viewer to see either archival images of the
Ambassador or video documentation of the urban activity on specific streets and corners
in the neighborhood around the Ambassador in 2002. While viewing this material, the
viewer could also activate voice-over narration from cultural historians, geographers and
even a former resident of the hotel.
36
It was while developing this project that I was first
introduced to the larger historical, geographic and cultural dimensions of the
neighborhood that was already familiar to me as Koreatown. However, it was not until a
few years later that the possibility of a Labyrinth Project on Koreatown presented itself.
While in the process of completing another Labyrinth project on the cultural history of
Pasadena with the Auto Club, my colleague Rosemary Comella first suggested we
collaborate on a similar project exploring the urban history of Koreatown. Together, we
developed some preliminary research and a Power Point presentation designed to outline
the scope of the project to potential collaborators and funders. The scope of the project at
that time was much more expansive than the current focus of my dissertation. As a
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
27

potential Labyrinth Project, we were not able to continue it further because by that time,
our resources and fund-raising efforts were reoriented toward developing a new online
cultural history on Jewish life in Southern California entitled Jewish Homegrown
History: Immigration, Identity and Intermarriage. Designed as an online archive and
database narrative, this project was a very early influence on the conceptual development
of my dissertation project on Koreatown in terms of its use of the online archive and
database narrative as structuring devices for the materials created for the site. The
current design of The Seoul of Los Angeles website developed later and independently
from an iterative process in which the themes of uneven development, community
storytelling, and mapping cultural history were realized visually through a dynamic
interface design created in collaboration with programmer Juan Camilo Gonzalez.
In order to explain how the archive and database narrative are useful as
structuring devices for exploring the complex relationships comprising Koreatown’s
socio-cultural history, I must first provide some definitions. I will start first with the
archive. Archives are traditionally thought of as collections of historical material housed
in cultural institutions and often representative of official, state-sanctioned accounts of
historical memory. As such, they are presumed to be fixed both spatially within the
places they are housed, and epistemologically within dominant historical narratives. In
her book on reconsidering the archive and the role of performance in transferring
knowledge and cultural memory, Diana Taylor identifies the archive as a cultural
construct, a means developed to preserve cultural memory in the form of “supposedly
enduring materials.” She distinguishes the archive from the “ephemeral repertoires of
embodied practice/knowledge” such as the spoken word and proposes that archives are
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
28

primarily understood as a way to preserve knowledge in a similar way that written texts
serve to transfer and document knowledge. This privileging of the supposed unmediated,
material purity and incorruptibility of the archival object as a means of sharing and
transferring knowledge is a myth. Furthermore, this assumption that archival objects are
representative artifacts of cultural memory denies the value of what Taylor identifies as
the embodied or “performed acts [that also] generate, record, and transmit knowledge.”
She writes, “By shifting the focus from written to embodied culture, from the discursive
to the performatic, we need to shift our methodologies. Instead of focusing on patterns of
cultural expression in terms of texts and narratives, we might think of them as scenarios
that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description. This shift
necessarily alters what academic disciplines regard as appropriate canons, and might
extend the traditional disciplinary boundaries to include practices previously outside their
purview.”
37
Taylor makes a convincing argument for re-evaluating the methodologies of
transferring knowledge to include performative and ephemeral modes of knowledge
production and dissemination. I would add digital practices and the creation of digital
artifacts among these methodologies and propose that digital methodologies are
themselves changing the conception of the archive as a fixed and purely institutional
construct.
With the introduction of digital media and the resulting transformation of archival
information, documents that were once rarified and not easily viewed are now available,
through digital reproduction, to a much wider public using technologies like the Internet.
Furthermore, the creation of archives is no longer limited to institutional practice. Open-
source, social networking tools have allowed the general public to become active
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
29

participants and creators of shared knowledge production. Such developments have
introduced new considerations in terms of online archives that include the relationship
between database structures in which archives are organized, and their relationship to
narrative as a means of constructing meaning. These developments have resulted in a
reconsideration of the archive and of knowledge production as mutable, open-ended
constructs that are no longer representative of any singular view but are inclusive of
multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives.
In her discussion on the relationship between database and narrative, Marsha
Kinder defines database narrative as “narratives whose structure exposes the dual
processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and are crucial to
language: certain characters, images, sounds, events and settings are selected from series
of categories and combined to generate specific tales.”
38
Kinder points out another
characteristic of digital archives that is tied to its mutability–the aspect of open-endedness
and incompleteness that creates new possibilities through the recombination of modular
items in a database into a variety of aesthetic forms including narrative. The open-ended
structure of database narrative resists any totalizing construction of meaning. Rather,
they “diffuse the force of master narratives, which can no longer be seen as merely
natural or, even more simply, the truth, because users are reminded that alternative
versions of the story and new combinations of the components are always possible.
Instead of master narratives, what emerges is a more open narrative field full of
possibilities, which is in turn fueled by an underlying database that continues to grow.”
39
The digital archive as database narrative makes us reconsider historical artifacts, not as
fixed constructs representative only of official accounts of history, but as open systems
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
30

that generate meaning through storytelling. Furthermore, as open systems, they invite the
possibility of public intervention and interaction in the construction of cultural history.
Combining the structuring frameworks of the archive and database narrative, The
Seoul of Los Angeles: Contested Identities and Transnationalism in Immigrant Space is
designed as a platform for community storytelling that reconfigures the digital archive as
a place for collective knowledge creation and transfer–a space that is inclusive of the
conflicting and contested narratives that together form the complex and uneven
development of transnational identities in ethnic enclaves. The project is designed
ultimately to be a resource for exploring urban history through the embodied narratives of
community members, scholars, artists and activists who, together, challenge the
conception of ethnic enclaves as being fixed, homogenous constructs.

Conclusion:
In the body of urban theory following Cary McWilliams’s 1946 observation that
Los Angeles is a racial and cultural archipelago consisting of “White, Negro, Mexican,
and Oriental,”
40
Los Angeles has been emphasized as a conglomeration of distinct
communities each with a stable ethnic homogeneity within them. Though Los Angeles is
characterized as the ultimate postmodern, polycentric city with satellites of ethnic
enclaves ranging from Little Tokyo and Little Armenia to Thai Town, and now Little
Bangladesh, it is often assumed that these enclaves are largely isolated from each other
and ethnically, even culturally integrated within. This tradition by social theorists from
Charles A. Stoddard in 1894 to Edward Soja in 1989, of over-emphasizing ethnic and
cultural homogeneity within these segregated urban enclaves, is no longer tenable. In
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
31

one of the most ethnically identified neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Koreatown, a
community with clear spatial boundaries, with a long history whose immigrants
originated from a country as powerfully nationalistic and ethnically homogenous as
Korea, even in Koreatown it is impossible to define the community along any singular
ethnic or cultural lens. Rather, what distinguishes Koreatown is the heterogeneity within
its ethnic enclave, its contested identities or the tensions not only ethnically but along the
lines of class, nationalities, and generations that make it impossible to characterize as
simply homogenous. Moreover, Koreatown is largely understood as transnational in that
its cultural and economic flows move between the U.S. and South Korea. However,
Koreatown’s network of nationalisms is incredibly diverse, consisting not only of
Korean, but others including Mexican, El Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Filipino and
Bangladeshi. These sub-communities within Koreatown interact daily with each other,
constituting the spatial practices that create the economic and cultural backbone of the
community. Together, these characteristics combine to make Koreatown an ethnic
enclave in which the assumption of internal homogeneity is radically destabilized–a place
in which the configuration of transnationalism is extended to include relationships in-
between differing local community nationalisms, and thereby, reconfiguring transnational
to be understood on a local rather than entirely global register.
Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
32

INSTRUCTIONS FOR VIEWING
The Seoul of Los Angeles: Contested Identities and Transnationalism in Immigrant Space

Please note: This website is best viewed on a Mac OSX operating system 10.6.8 or later
using the Google Chrome web browser. It will NOT work on Firefox at this time.

To install Google Chrome browser on your computer, please do the following:

1. Go to: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/
2. Download Chrome and follow the instructions.
3. Chrome will be added to your Applications folder on your computer and you may
find it there should you need to open it again later.

Go to the following URL to view The Seoul of Los Angeles online cultural history:
http://seoulofla.com/

Navigation and Interface Features:
Resizes text within a post

Some archival image posts have the option to view simultaneously in
Google Street View (available also in MAP section)

Makes video full screen for video posts

In MAP, zoom in or out to view posts according to location

Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
33

REFERENCES

1
Miriam Kim, Layers of US., VHS, directed by Miriam Kim, (1999; Los Angeles:
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.), Film.

2
Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles
1965-1982 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1988), 103.

3
Jonathan Gold, “Jonathan Gold's 60 Korean Dishes Every Angeleno Should Know,” LA
Weekly, March 1, 2012, accessed May 20, 2013
http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/2012/03/jonathan_gold_korean_food_los.php.

4
Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell, Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The Politics
of Representation in a Globalized World (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi B.V., 2002),
19.

5
Verstraete and Cresswell, Mobilizing Place, 25.

6
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 21.

7
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 19.

8
Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social
Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 223.

9
David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor
Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2005), 6.

10

David E. James, introduction to The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and
Community in L.A., ed. David E. James (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 4.

11

Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Layton, Utah: Gibbs
Smith Publishing, [1946] 1973), 314.

12

David E. James, The Sons and Daughters of Los, 5.

13

Jared Sanchez, Mirabai Auer, Veronica Terriquez, and Mi Young Kim
prepared in collaboration with the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA),
Koreatown: A Contested Community at a Crossroads (Los Angeles: USC Program for
Environmental and Regional Equity, April, 2012), 3.

Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
34

14

Pyong Gap Min, Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues (Thousand Oaks,
California: Pine Forge Press, 2006), 230-231.

15

Eui-Young Yu, Peter Choe, Sang Il Han, and Kimberly Yu, “Emerging Diversity: Los
Angeles’ Koreatown, 1990–2000,” Amerasia Journal 30:1 (2004): 25-52, 26.

16

Myung Kun Kim, Samuel Sunjoo Lee and Tom H.J. Byun, Korean Centennial Pictoral
Book of the North America: Rainbow over the Pacific (The Christian Herald U.S.A.,
2006), 111.

17

Korean National Association, http://koreannationalassn.com/.

18

Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today (June, 1991): 24-39, 28.

19

Korean National Association, http://koreannationalassn.com/.

20

Yu, Han and Yu, “Emerging Diversity,” 27.

21

Min, Asian Americans, 234.

22
Katherine Yungmee Kim, Images of America: Los Angeles’s Koreatown (Charleston,
South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2011), 125.

23
Yu, Han and Yu, “Emerging Diversity,” 25-52.

24
In 1982 “Koreatown” signs were posted at the intersections of Vermont and Olympic
and Western and Olympic in Los Angeles. Kim,Lee and Byun, Korean Centennial, 230.

25
Raja Abdulrahim, “Little Bangladesh Must Grow into its Name,” Los Angeles Times,
November 28, 2010, accessed May 24, 2013
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/28/local/la-me-little-bangladesh-20101128

26

Yu, Han and Yu, “Emerging Diversity,” 28.

27

Bruce Cummings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, [1997] 2005), 456.

28

Yu, Han and Yu, “Emerging Diversity,” 26. The population of Koreans in Los Angeles
is expected to increase dramatically in the coming years due to an agreement within the
current Korean Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and Korea to waive the visa
requirement for Koreans who travel between the two countries. This will potentially
have a dramatic impact on the local Koreatown economy, its related spatial practices and
on the interactions among newer and more established Koreans in the region.

Kang The Seoul of Los Angeles
35

29

Sanchez, Auer, Terriquez, Kim and KIWA, Koreatown, 1.

30

Sanchez, Auer, Terriquez, Kim and KIWA, Koreatown, 15.

31
Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, Koreatown on the Edge: Immigrant Dreams
and Realities in One of Los Angeles’ Poorest Communities (Los Angeles, CA: Korean
Immigrant Workers Advocates, 2005).

32

Kyeyoung Park and Jessica Kim, “The Contested Nexus of Los Angeles Koreatown:
Capital Restructuring, Gentrification, and Displacement,” Amerasia Journal 34:3 (2008):
127-150.

33

Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles
Riots (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press: 1995),
85.

34
Park and Kim, “The Contested Nexus of Los Angeles Koreatown,” 134.

35

Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Cinema and
Nation, eds. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London and New York: Routledge, 2000),
64.

36

Among the narrators featured in Tracing the Decay of Fiction were Los Angeles
cultural historian and film scholar David E. James, California State historian Kevin Starr,
cultural geographer Michael Dear, architectural historian Robert Winter, cultural theorist
Norman Klein and former hotel resident Carlyn Benjamin.

37
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 16-17.

38

Marsha Kinder, “Designing a Database Cinema,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic
Imaginary after Film, eds. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press and
ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2003), 349.

39
Marsha Kinder, “Jewish Homegrown History: In the Golden State and Beyond,” in A
Cultural History of Jews in California: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual
Review, eds. William Deverell, Bruce Zuckerman and Lisa Ansell (West Lafayette,
Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2009), 95-124.

40

McWilliams, Southern California, 315.

36

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Byun, Tom H.J., Myung Kun Kim, and Samuel Sunjoo Lee. Korean Centennial Pictoral
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Comella, Rosemary. “The Right to the Global City: Class and Ethnicity in Los Angeles’
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James, David E. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor
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37

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Kinder, Marsha. "Jewish Homegrown History: In the Golden State and Beyond." In A
Cultural History of Jews in California: The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual
Review, by William Deverell, Bruce Zuckerman and Lisa eds. Ansell, 95-124. West
Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2009.

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Realities in One of Los Angeles' Poorest Communities. Los Angeles: Korean Immigrant
Workers Advocates, 2005.

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Light, Ivan, and Edna Bonacich. Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles
1965-1982. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1988.

Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” Marxism Today, June 1991: 24-29.

McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island on the Land. Layton, Utah: Gibbs
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Min, Pyong Gap. Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues. Thousand Oaks,
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N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.

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Capital Restructuring, Gentrification, and Displacement." Amerasia Journal 34, no. 3
(2008): 127-150.

Sanchez, Jared, Mirabai Auer, Veronica Terriquez, Mi Young Kim, and Koreatown
Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA). Koreatown: A Contested Community at a
Crossroads. Los Angeles: USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, April,
2012.

38

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39

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project is dedicated to my parents, Sung Hee Kang and Won J. Kang.

In addition I would like to thank the following people whose immeasurable guidance and
support made this project possible:

My brilliant committee: David E. James, Marsha Kinder and Akira Mizuta Lippit.

My colleagues at the Labyrinth Project who planted the seed for the project: Rosemary
Comella with whom this journey started and Scott Mahoy who first discovered the 2004
cover article in the LA Weekly on Koreatown.

Esteemed faculty at USC who lent their time and support: Steve Anderson, Kathy Smith,
Holly Willis, Tara Mc Pherson, Priya Jaikumar, Anne Balsamo, Scott Fisher, Mark
Harris, Andreas Kratky, Anikó Imre, and François Bar.

The invaluable support of the East Asian Library and Korean Heritage Library especially
Dr. Kenneth Klein, Joy Hyon Kim, and Sun-Yoon Kim Lee.

The Korean Studies Institute's Elaine Kim and Dr. David Kang.

The interviewees and contributors who so generously offered their time to participate in
this project:

Martha Arévalo, Executive Director, CARECEN
Larry Aubry
Marcia Choo
Philip (Flip) Cuddy and Susan Ahn Cuddy
Yonah Hong
David K. Hyun
Than Hyun
Hyepin Im

40

Dr. David Kang
Bong Hwan Kim
Do Kim
Gene Kim
Joy Hyon Kim
Richard Khim
Dr. Kenneth Klein
Hi-Duk Lee
Hee-sook Lee
Emile Mack
Yong Soon Min
Jang Woo Karl Nam (KIWA)
Angela Oh
James Ryu
Kyungmi Shin and Todd Gray
Majib Siddiquee, Excutive Director, Little Bangladesh Improvements, Inc.
Cooke Sunoo
Dr. Eui-Young Yu

Very special thanks to my programmer Juan Camilo Gonzalez who is an amazing
collaborator and artist.

Special thanks to Katherine Yungmee Kim, Pyong Yong Min, Grant Chang (General
Manager, the Korea Times) and Lily Yunshin Kim (former staff writer at the Korea
Times), Mar Elepaño, and Elizabeth Ramsey.

Thanks to Eugene Yi, Helie Lee, Chase Kim at the Korea Times, Dai-Sil Kim Gibson,
Craig Dietrich, Erik Loyer, and Willy Paredes.

And thanks to all my brilliant iMAP cohorts especially Veronica Paredes.

Lastly, this project is a tribute in special memory of Anne Friedberg whose vision
inspired the collaborative efforts that created the Media Arts and Practice program at
USC's School of Cinematic Arts.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract “The Seoul of Los Angeles: Contested Identities and Transnationalism in Immigrant Space” is an online cultural history on the multi-ethnic identity and development of Los Angeles’ Koreatown. Currently, Los Angeles has the largest population of Koreans in the United States living outside of Korea. In an article in 2012, the Pulitzer Prize winning food critic for the LA Weekly, Jonathan Gold, described Koreatown in Los Angeles as “functionally a distant district of Seoul -- in capital as well as in culture, in both commerce and cuisine.” With its explosion of spas, restaurants and nightclubs, most visitors understand Koreatown as an extension of Seoul culture, but in fact the majority of inhabitants who comprise its residential and working class population are not Korean, but Latino. Though the majority of businesses are owned by struggling first generation Korean immigrants or, in some cases, financed by Korean transnational capital, the everyday space of this community is largely inhabited by a mix of immigrants coming from Mexico, Central and South America, and even Bangladesh. This complex network of national affiliations, each with its own distinct cultural history, converge in the urban space of Koreatown. This convergence results in a contestation of dominant conceptions of ethnic enclaves being understood as ethnically homogenous. Using Koreatown in Los Angeles as a case study, this project examines how immigrant communities shape a sense of place and cultural identity and how these local ethnic communities in large urban cities reconfigure our understanding of transnational identity. Moreover, this project shows how ethnic enclaves can no longer be understood as homogenous and fixed but rather, are unstable and constructed out of a network of complex, multiple affiliations to race, histories and nations. Using a combination of original interviews, archival photographs and written material, this research project is presented as a scholarly website and digital archive. It utilizes open-source tools to present a unique interface design that reflects the multiple and uneven nature of urban development and transnational identity. Ultimately, it uses the archive and database as a way to address the complex relationships that comprise Koreatown’s socio-cultural history.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kang, Kristy H. A. (author)

Core Title The Seoul of Los Angeles: contested identities and transnationalism in immigrant space

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Publication Date 07/19/2013

Defense Date 06/06/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag archive,Community,cultural history,database,digital,documentary,enclave,Ethnicity,global,Globalization,humanities,identity,immigration,interactive,Korea,Korean American,local,Los Angeles,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest,place,Race,South Korea,transnationalism,Urban

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor James, David E. (committee chair), Kinder, Marsha (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

Creator Email khkang@usc.edu,kristyhakang@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-292817

Unique identifier UC11288116

Identifier etd-KangKristy-1798.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-292817 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KangKristy-1798-0.pdf

Dmrecord 292817

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kang, Kristy H. A.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA