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Episodes in the life of a place: regional racial formation in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley

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EPISODES IN THE LIFE OF A PLACE:
REGIONAL RACIAL FORMATION IN LOS ANGELES’S
SAN GABRIEL VALLEY

by
Wendy Hsin Cheng

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Wendy Hsin Cheng

ii
Acknowledgments

I am tremendously lucky to have been a part of USC’s Department of American
Studies & Ethnicity (ASE) for the past five years. I could not imagine a warmer, more
collegial, and more intellectually stimulating environment in which to complete the
strange work of graduate school. For my place there, and for much else, I thank my
dissertation chair, Ruthie Gilmore, whose formidable intellect, ready laughter, and
unwavering commitment to the people in her life no less than her political convictions
have deeply informed my thinking and aspirations.
Dissertation committee member Laura Pulido has provided generous and
challenging mentorship, from supporting me in exploring concepts important to her work
in my own terms, to giving me the opportunity to collaborate with her and coauthor Laura
Barraclough on A People’s Guide to Los Angeles – a dream project. Viet Thanh Nguyen
pushed me to approach Asian American studies with an independent mind, and has
offered a truly inspiring example of how critical and creative work can be complementary
to one another. David Lloyd was supportive from early on, and I have benefited from his
sharp thinking and willingness to broach difficult questions.
The support and generosity I have encountered from other ASE faculty, both in
and out of the seminar room, is hard to overstate. I was fortunate to take seminars with
Dorinne Kondo and Lanita Jacobs-Huey, who taught me how to approach my topic with
an ethnographic eye, honed by critical theory. Fred Moten, resident philosopher at ASE
for several years, shared observations which changed my whole way of thinking at a few
key junctures. Jane Iwamura was an encouraging and motivational force in seeing my
iii
dissertation proposal to completion. From David Roman’s example, I learned about
building structures of community and mentorship. I know our department would not exist
in the way that it does without George Sánchez, and for all of his work over the years I
am grateful. Josh Kun has been an enthusiastic supporter of my dissertation project, and
renewed hope in the possibilities of my own writing. Leland Saito offered insight and
support for my research in its beginning stages, and Karen Tongson has been an
energizing interlocutor in shaking up conventional thinking (including my own) on the
suburbs.
ASE staff Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, and Jujuana Preston – and for most of my
years there, Sandra Hopwood – make the department run for students and faculty alike,
and I appreciate their patience, good humor, and hard work at every step of the way.
My supportive and accomplished fellow graduate students and friends in ASE are
too many to name individually, but I would like to especially thank my writing group,
Michelle Denise Commander and Emily Hobson, for their close readings, insightful
comments, and friendship. Laura Fugikawa has been a stabilizing and uplifting
accomplice in work and fun over the years, and read chapter drafts for me at more than
one eleventh hour, as did Jesús Hernández. Dan HoSang and Laura Barraclough, now
both assistant professors themselves, consistently helped me see the way ahead, and I am
inspired by their work and examples.
At numerous ethnic studies, American studies, and geography conferences over
the years, I have benefited enormously from collaboration with and commentary from
Karen Tongson, Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Glen Mimura, Christine Bacareza Balance,
Alexandro Gradilla, Daniel Widener, Laura Liu, Trevor Paglen, Jenna Loyd, and Shiloh
iv
Krupar. Lan Duong gave thoughtful and stimulating comments on my dissertation
proposal at the 2007 Mauricio Mazon seminar. My project has also been enriched by Lisa
Lowe’s suggestions on an early article draft based on my master’s thesis, which shifted
my thinking about race, homeownership, and property in important ways.
At UC Berkeley, where I began my graduate studies, Michael Omi gamely
agreed to direct an independent course in Asian American studies for a geography student
with a burgeoning interest in race and ethnicity, and contributed his astute suggestions as
part of my master’s thesis committee. Richard Walker, also a member of my thesis
committee, helped me to think about the political economy and cultural landscapes of
California both critically and with love. Paul Groth assured an aspiring artist that there
was a place for her in geography, and deepened my understanding and appreciation of
cultural landscape studies.
With regard to my dissertation research, I owe the most to the sixty-four people
who so generously gave their time to share with me their life experiences and thoughts
regarding growing up in the West San Gabriel Valley, many of them deeply personal.
During the course of my interviews, I have frequently been inspired, moved, challenged,
and awed. Translating specific events and feelings from their lives into a dissertation has
been a daunting and, in many ways, impossible task, but I hope those who may
eventually read it will at least find some of my arguments to be interesting. I especially
thank Bill Gin, Deshawn Holmes, Albert Huang, Russell Lee-Sung, Helena McCrimmon,
Stephen Sham, and Eloy Zarate for trusting me with stories that became quite central to
the dissertation. I am also grateful to Susie Ling for her historical insights about the area,
and Sharon Gibbs’s assistance at the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce. The Alhambra
v
Latino Association permitted me to attend several of their meetings and events, and I
thank Dora Padilla in particular for her encouragement and interest in my research.
Los Angeles Times reporter Jia-Rui Chong first brought to my attention the
excellent article she had written on the controversy over Robin Zhou’s column at
Alhambra High. Her article served as a foundational starting point for my own research,
and she assisted me in making several key contacts as well. I have also benefited from the
astute reporting of Patricia Ho and Cindy Chang at the Pasadena Star-News, whose
stories proved to be an invaluable resource during the course of my research. Julienne
Gard’s mapmaking skills and patience in converting my mental images into several
readable maps are very much appreciated.
Over the course of my time at USC, I have been generously supported by a
Haynes First-Year Fellowship, a USC Urban and Global Studies Fellowship, a Haynes
Dissertation Fellowship, and a USC Oakley Fellowship, as well as a Summer Strategic
Themes Grant and a Diversity Placement Assistance Award.
My family, although we are spread across the states of California and Arizona
and span the ocean to Taiwan, is always in my heart. My parents, Edward Teh-Chang
Cheng and Shu-Ching Cheng, have given me everything. I will never stop learning from
my father’s wisdom, good humor, and unique philosophies of life, and my mother’s
fierce devotion to family and doing things right. In many ways, my brother Eric is the
closest person in the world to me, and I am inspired by his courage to live the life that he
wants.
Finally, Jake Peters suffered over every dissertation chapter and nearly every job
cover letter and research proposal I wrote this year nearly as much as I did. His
vi
willingness to share with me his capacity for joy, and faith in life and love, has been a
great gift.
vii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii
List of Figures viii
Abstract x
Introduction: Developing a Theory of Regional Racial Formation 1
Chapter 1: The Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Homeownership, 34
Property and Suburban Racial Formation

Chapter 2: ‘The Asian and Latino Thing in Schools’: Regional 85
Racial Formation and Institutions of Civil Society

Chapter 3: Race and the Monterey Boy Scouts of America 131

Chapter 4: ‘Diversity’ on Main Street: Civic Narratives of Race 181
and Place

Conclusion: Localized Knowledges and Questions of Travel 239

Bibliography 260

Appendix A: Cognitive Mappings of Race, Place, and Region 278

Appendix B: ‘Latinos Lag Behind in Academics’ 286
viii
List of Figures

Figure 1: Map of the West San Gabriel Valley in the context of 3
metropolitan Los Angeles region

Figure 2: 2000 West San Gabriel Valley median household income 6
by race

Figure 3: 2000 West San Gabriel Valley per capita income 7
by race

Figure 4: 2000 West San Gabriel Valley occupational distributions 8
by race

Figure 5: Personal cognitive map by Oscar Ixco 24

Figure 6: Personal cognitive map by Karen Toguchi 25

Figure 7: West San Gabriel Valley population growth by city, 40
1940-1990

Figure 8: Map of West San Gabriel Valley cities 43

Figure 9: Ethnic/ Racial composition of Monterey Park, 1970-1990 60

Figure 10: Population of Alhambra by race, 1970-2000 60

Figure 11: West San Gabriel Valley median family income by race, 64
1980-2000

Figure 12: West San Gabriel Valley per capita income by race, 64
1980-2000

Figure 13: West San Gabriel Valley population by race, 68
1980-2000

Figure 14: Alhambra housing tenure by race/ ethnicity, 2000 81

Figure 15: Monterey Park housing tenure by race/ ethnicity, 2000 81

Figure 16: Monterey Park Boy Scout Troop 252, circa 2007 133

ix
Figure 17: “Diversity” banner near Main Street, Alhambra, 182
August 2006

Figure 18: Location map of Downtown Alhambra business district 196

Figure 19: “Mosaic on Main” and “diversity” banners, Alhambra 198

Figure 20: Map of main east-west thoroughfares in Alhambra and 200
San Gabriel

Figure 21: City of Alhambra Mosaic on Main banner images 210

Figure 22: City of Alhambra Downtown Shopping Guide, 2009 210

Figure 23: Map of San Gabriel denoting the Proposed Golden 213
Mile, Vincent Lugo Park, and Mission San Gabriel

Figure 24: Mike Murashige, cognitive map of San Gabriel 215

Figure 25: Opening day, La Laguna de San Gabriel, May 16, 1965 227
x
Abstract

Episodes in the Life of a Place develops a theory of regional racial formation
through examining the everyday experiences of residents of four cities in the West San
Gabriel Valley (SGV), an area which became known in the 1980s and 1990s as a
“suburban Chinatown,” but which is in fact a multiethnic, majority-Asian American and
Latina/o space. Drawing from episodic case studies, cognitive maps, and in-depth
interviews with diverse Asian American and Latina/o residents, I examine how
hierarchies of race, ethnicity, and class are shaped by racialized relationships to property,
neighborhood-based social formations, and key institutions of civil society such as high
school and the Boy Scouts of America. How have Asian American and Latinas/os’
movements into the West SGV been shaped by, and subsequently productive of,
differentially racialized relationships to property? What kind of “world(s) of their own”
(to paraphrase Matt Garcia) have they made collectively, in what have become largely
non-White, suburban, middle-income neighborhoods? What affective and political
possibilities do such spaces allow or foreclose, which are distinct from those articulated
in majority-White settings? Finally, how are ideological linkages between notions of race
and space formative of local civic landscapes? In my analysis, three important themes
emerge: the intertwined relationship of race, property, homeownership, and privilege; the
essential role of institutions of civil society in reconciling regional epistemes and
practices with national ideologies; and the development of an emergent ‘non-White’
identity rooted in middle-class and suburban contexts. I find that people’s experiences
and everyday landscapes in the West SGV are simultaneously saturated with dominant
xi
racial ideologies and their attendant material outcomes, and rich with alternative
narratives of pasts, presents, and futures. These contradictions and possibilities illustrate
the importance of considering neighborhoods and regions as units of analysis in order to
understand processes of racial formation.
1

Introduction: Developing a Theory of Regional Racial Formation

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed
to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve,
remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the
body. ‘I feel good here’: the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in
like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.
- Michel de Certeau (1984, 108)

The West San Gabriel Valley (SGV) is a densely populated suburban region just
minutes by car east of downtown Los Angeles, with a landscape characterized by
sprawling strip malls, clusters of industry, and housing ranging from nondescript
apartment complexes to faux-Mediterranean townhomes to stately mansions. The area
gained fame in the 1990s as what has been described as a suburban, “spectacular eight-
mile-long linear Chinatown” (Davis and Moctezuma 1999; also see Fong 1994). Indeed,
Asians and Asian Americans make up just over half of the population here, and self-
identified ethnic Chinese—of whom nearly 4 in 5 are foreign-born—make up about two-
thirds of this group.
1
Despite such overwhelming emphases on the immigrant “Chinese”
character of the region, in fact, most West SGV communities are highly diverse in terms
of ethnicity, national origins, and immigrant-generational status. Most strikingly,
Latinas/os make up more than a third of the populations of the core West SGV cities of
Monterey Park, Alhambra, Rosemead, and San Gabriel,
2
whose total population

1
As of 2000, Asian Americans were 51.5 percent of the total populations of Alhambra, Monterey Park,
Rosemead, and San Gabriel, and self-identified Chinese made up 66.8 percent of the Asian Americans.
Calculated from U.S. Census 2000, Summary File 1, DP-1.

2
Cumulatively 34.3 percent. Calculated from U.S. Census 2000 data, Summary File 1, DP-1.
2
numbered nearly a quarter million residents in 2000.
3
Mexican Americans in particular—
who constitute over three-quarters of the Latina/o population of 82,132 in the area
4
—
have had a long history in the Valley dating from before the U.S. conquest of Alta
California and continuing through the formation of citrus labor communities in the East
SGV from the early to mid-twentieth century. Since the 1950s, a significant population of
middle-income Mexican Americans has moved east from East LA into the West SGV,
and cities such as Montebello and Monterey Park were referred to (albeit sometimes
tongue-in-cheek) as the ‘Mexican Beverly Hills.’ (Fong 1994).
In the early twentieth century, Japanese Americans and Filipinos labored in the
citrus groves alongside Mexican Americans (Garcia 2001), and Japanese Americans
farmed fruits and vegetables (Ling 2003). A small early Chinese American population
sold produce off trucks, or worked as ranchhands or domestic labor (Ling 2005).
5

Suburbanizing later-generation Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans began to
arrive with their Mexican American counterparts beginning in the 1950s as well,
unwittingly laying the groundwork for the massive ethnic Chinese immigration which

3
239,164 – comparable to Scottsdale, Arizona (235,677) and Jersey City, New Jersey (242,389), and
larger than, for example, Orlando, Florida (227,907) or Madison, Wisconsin 228,775). Calculated from
U.S. Census 2000, Summary File 1, DP-1. The population of the San Gabriel Valley as a whole
numbered just over 1.5 million in 2000, and was estimated to have grown to nearly 1.8 million in 2006,
a population comparable to the San Francisco metropolitan area. Los Angeles County Economic
Development Corporation, “San Gabriel Valley, 2006 Economic Overview and Forecast,”
http://www.visitsangabrielvalley.com/wis%5CReports/SGV-2005.pdf. Accessed February 19, 2009.

4
Cumulatively 78.4% in Alhambra, Monterey Park, Rosemead, and San Gabriel, ranging from 75.1%
(Alhambra) to 81.4% in Monterey Park. Calculated from U.S. Census 2000 data, Summary File 1, DP-
1.

5
For instance, Alhambra resident David Tong’s father, an Chinese American immigrant from Hawaii,
sold fruit from a cart in South Pasadena and Alhambra in the 1930s, and had previously worked as a
ranchhand in Diamond Bar (at the eastern edge of the San Gabriel Valley, approximately 20 miles east
of Alhambra).

3
would begin in the late 1970s (Saito 1998, Fong 1994). In the 1970s and 1980s, new
Asian immigrants—Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians political refugees, many of
them ethnic Chinese; and immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong seeking to escape
political uncertainty—flowed into the area, as well as eastern SGV cities like Rowland
Heights and Hacienda Heights. Latina/o immigrants moved into cities slightly further east
such as El Monte and La Puente (Ochoa 2004). The 1980s saw an increase in Asian
American as well as Latina/o political power on the area, with the election of several
Latina/o and Asian American politicians. The SGV thus constitutes not only an important
site of Asian and Latina/o suburbanization in the contemporary period, but also a place
rich in multiracial political, economic, and social history.

Figure 1: Map of the West San Gabriel Valley in the context of the metropolitan Los
Angeles region
4
Racial and economic development
The contemporary racial and economic development of the SGV has very much
been part of metropolitan and global processes of global economic restructuring,
especially processes of deindustrialization and reindustrialization since the 1970s.
Beginning in the 1960s, in response to successful labor organization and a decline in the
rise of profit rates (Gilmore 2006, 30-86), firms in the United States began to look
elsewhere for cheap labor as well as develop new production platforms in the global
South and East, leading to the loss of manufacturing jobs and economic polarization in
the United States and the depression of wages on a global scale. Deindustrialization left
warehouse and manufacturing spaces empty and available in the SGV, which also had
well-developed infrastructure in large part due to the construction of freeways in the
1950s and 1960s. Changes in immigration law in 1965 opened the door to an influx of
Asian immigrants both at the top (e.g. professionals) and the bottom (e.g. low-waged
labor) of the economic spectrum. The West SGV, especially Monterey Park, with its
proximity to Chinatown, relatively cheap land, and growing ethnic Chinese business
networks (e.g. banks and real estate agents) became a top point of entry for ethnic
Chinese (Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng 1994; Saito 1998). In particular, the growth of
Chinese American banking institutions, concurrent with global economic cycles and
political and economic factors prompting the migration of an ethnic Chinese
“bourgeoisie” from Taiwan and Hong Kong (Tseng 1994), played an important role in
5
facilitating ethnic Chinese business growth and home ownership (Li et al. 2002; Li 2006;
Zhou 1998; Tseng 1994).
6

Asian and Latina/o immigrants are directly implicated in this latest round of
global capitalist restructuring, which seeks a “two-prong” solution via 1) technological
innovation and 2) cheap labor: Asian immigrants participate in both solutions, furnishing
highly educated professionals in technical fields as well as joining their Latina/o
immigrant counterparts in low-waged jobs (Ong, Bonacich, and Cheng 1994; 3-35). This
is true in the San Gabriel Valley, in which Latina/o immigrants work alongside Chinese
and other Asian immigrants in the kitchens of ethnic-Chinese-owned restaurants, garment
factories, and manufacturing firms. However, recent Latina/o immigrants are less likely
to live in the West SGV than recent Asian immigrants, favoring instead communities
with larger immigrant Latina/o populations and lower rents further to the east such as El
Monte and La Puente. Only a third of Latinas/os living in the Monterey Park, Alhambra,
San Gabriel, and Rosemead are foreign born (compared to three-fourths of the Asian
population), and just 1 in 10 immigrated since 1990 (compared to nearly 1 in 3 Asians).
7

Most of the West SGV’s Latina/o population, then, are later-generation Mexican
Americans with lower-middle to middle-class incomes. For instance, in Alhambra,
Monterey Park, and San Gabriel in 1999, Latinas/os reported higher median household
incomes than Asians (and second only to that of Whites) (see Figure 2)— and

6
Zhou has estimated that ethnic Chinese in Los Angeles have more bank branches per capita than any
other group (although of course this does not guarantee use or access) (Zhou 1996; also see Zhou
1998).

7
35.4 percent of Latinas/os living in Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Alhambra, and Rosemead are
foreign-born, and 9.8 percent immigrated between 1990 and 2000, compared to 75 percent and 29.1
percent of Asians, respectively. Calculated from US Census 2000, Summary File 4.

6
significantly higher median household incomes in all four cities than Latinas/os in Los
Angeles County as a whole.
8
Latina/o incomes were highest in Alhambra and Monterey
Park, where 18 to 20 percent of Latina/o workers were employed by the state (compared
to 12 to 13 percent of Asian workers). However, it must be noted that per capita income
among Asians remained slightly higher (with Whites’ per capita income standing out as
nearly twice that of either group) (see Figure 3), and Asians’ rates of homeownership
were significantly higher than those of West SGV Latinas/os.
9

Median Household Income
Compiled from US Census 2000, Summary File 4, DP-3
$-
$10,000
$20,000
$30,000
$40,000
$50,000
$60,000
Alhambra Monterey
Park
Rosemead San Gabriel Average Total
Hispanic
Asian
Non-Hispanic
White

Figure 2: 2000 West San Gabriel Valley median household income by race

8
For example, in Alhambra, median household income among Latinas/os was $40,028, compared to
$36,960 among Asians (Whites made the most, with $42,485). The median household income for
Latinas/os in Los Angeles County was $33,820, compared with a median household income of $38,942
for West SGV Latinas/os. Calculated from US Census 2000 Summary File 4, DP-3.

9
US Census 2000 Summary File 4, DP-3.

7
Per Capita Income
Compiled from US Census 2000, Summary File 4, DP-3
$-
$5,000
$10,000
$15,000
$20,000
$25,000
$30,000
$35,000
Alhambra Monterey
Park
Rosemead San Gabriel Average Total
Hispanic
Asian
Non-Hispanic
White

Figure 3: 2000 West San Gabriel Valley per capita income by race

Compared to Latinas/os Asians were also better represented in management and
professional occupations, while proportionately more Latinas/os held service jobs (see
Figure 4).
10
Finally, approximately 2 in 3 businesses in Monterey Park and San Gabriel
(and nearly half in Rosemead) were owned by Asians, while only 1 in 10 were owned by
Latinas/os
11
—a clear indication of the degree to which (mostly) ethnic Chinese have been
able to transform the landscape of the West SGV. Large numbers of Asian-owned
businesses, many of which serve a predominantly Asian clientele, characterize significant

10
About 30 percent of both groups held sales and office-related occupations. Again, it must be noted
that Whites held management and professional jobs at much higher rates than either Asians or
Latinas/os (46.7 percent). US Census 2000 Summary File 4, DP-3.

11
Number of Latina/o-owned businesses in Rosemead not available; numbers for both groups were not
available for Alhambra. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2002 Survey of Business Owners.

8
swaths of the West SGV’s commercial landscape, compared to a relatively small number
of Latina/o-owned or Latina/o-serving businesses.
12

West SGV Occupational Distributions by Race
Compiled from US Census 2000, Summary File 4, DP-3
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Management,
professional,
and related
Service
Sales and
office
Construction,
extraction, and
maintenance
Production,
transportation,
and material
moving
percent
Hispanic
Asian
Non-Hispanic
White

Figure 4: 2000 West San Gabriel Valley occupational distributions by race

‘The first suburban Chinatown’
Of the four cities which form the core of the West SGV as well as my study,
Monterey Park—adjacent to East Los Angeles, is probably the most well-known. In
1990, Monterey Park became the first majority-Asian American city in the continental
United States. Journalists promptly dubbed it “the first suburban Chinatown,” and a
cluster of scholars researched social, political, and economic changes and conflicts in
Monterey Park between newly arrived Asian immigrants and established Asian

12
US Bureau of the Census, 2002 Survey of Business Owners (comparable figures not available for
Alhambra and Rosemead). It should also be noted that while approximately two-thirds of the businesses
in Monterey Park and San Gabriel are Asian-owned, they account for only about one-fifth of the total
receipts, indicating that the balance of economic power in these two cities still lies elsewhere.

9
Americans, Latinas/os, and Whites (Fong 1994, Saito 1998, Pardo 1998, Horton 1995,
Calderón 1991, Tseng 1994). Perhaps most relevant here, Leland Saito’s Race and
Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb (1998) employs
a vigorously place-based and interethnic approach to his study of the intersections of
race, identity, politics, and demographic change in Monterey Park. In doing so Saito
points to an important gap in the literature on so-called suburban Chinatowns (Fong
1994)—that in most cases they are not mono- but multi-ethnic places, not “ethnic
enclaves” in the traditional sense but “multiethnic enclaves” and dynamic sites of
contestation. Saito details how Asians and Latinas/os navigated racial discourses to make
political alliances, and how race plays into struggles over public space. Subsequently,
geographer Wei Li developed the concept of “ethnoburb,” or a transitional, complex,
multiethnic and multiracial space characterized by class diversity and both formal and
informal ethnic business networks (Li 1999, 2005, 2006), to describe the West SGV.

Theorizing Regional Racial Formation
While my research is certainly indebted to these earlier studies, it also departs
from them in several important ways. Instead of focusing primarily on political struggles
or ethnic community-based cultural and economic processes, my dissertation focuses to a
large degree on people who will likely never attend a city council meeting, run for office,
or make pan-Pacific business deals—people who are beneath the public radar, so to
speak—and how they make sense of race and place in their everyday lives. Through a
cross section of such people’s everyday experiences, I develop a theory of racial
formation that looks at the West SGV through sharply focused lenses of race and place.
10
Building upon Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential definition of racial
formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhibited,
transformed, and destroyed” (1994, 55), I define regional racial formation broadly as
place-specific processes of racial formation, in which locally accepted racial orders and
hierarchies complicate hegemonic ideologies and facile notions of race.
In American cities which are increasingly majority non-White, excavating the
roots and interrogating the nature of multiracial, multiethnic non-White identities and
worldviews which cut across class and scale is no small thing. A growing body of
scholarship and activism, not to mention cultural productions and especially literature (cf.
Yamashita 1997), has located such identities and worldviews as integrally tied to places,
localities, regions. As such we must take seriously Pulido’s observation that looking at
the regional scale allows a “fine-grained analysis” of the everyday processes that shape
racial hierarchies (Pulido 2006, 26-7). Thus, a theorization of regional racial formation
allows 1) a level of analysis that includes deviation from and subversions of hegemonic
scripts and a focus on the level of everyday actions and movements, which are formed
temporarily and shift more quickly and subtly than those formed at a larger scale; and 2)
an analysis of the dynamic and dialectic between ideologies felt and enforced on a larger
scale, and micropolitics of local, everyday life—or put another way, Gramscian common
sense in formation, in dialogue with yet also apart from state/civil society- ascribed
ideologies (the “dialectic between assertion and assignation that shapes the content of
racial categories,” as Susan Koshy (2001) has worded it).
Attention to processes at this scale allows a close analysis of the formation of
“regional common sense” as provisional, daily, constantly, shifting, even as certain
11
givens and structural (ideological) formations or limitations remain constant. Similarly to
how Jose Munoz (1999) defines disidentification
13
(as shifting practices which subvert
dominant narratives, often through direct acknowledgment and engagement with racial
discourses, which do not have fixed tendencies or outcomes), regional racial formation
also includes the ways in which people work and talk through racialized stereotypes and
narratives, employ them centrally, yet come out somewhere unexpected at the other end.
In theorizing regional racial formation, I seek to articulate a set of practices that has to do
with the production of local, daily knowledges that exceed what national frameworks and
top-down ideologies can dictate. A theorization of regional racial formation reflects an
openness of meanings and outcomes that has to do with place-based, everyday
knowledges and interactions, with social and political consequences of proximity. How
do people’s daily paths, and whom they encounter upon then—shaped by family
histories, regional and global economies, and localized knowledge—inform their racial
consciousness, and even a political consciousness? How do people experience these
shifting formations on a daily basis, especially in an area in which the local hierarchy
does not match up easily to national racial ideologies (although these are nonetheless
influential)? Finally, in majority non-White contexts, what kinds of localized racial
orders, or “worlds of their own,” are being asserted and made, despite dominant state
structures that favor White supremacy?
The question of how regional racial formation travels is also an important aspect
of a scalar articulation of racial formation. Here, geographer Neil Smith’s theorization of
“jumping scales,” or the idea that norms and practices associated with one scale change

13
Muñoz locates practices of disidentification in his analysis of queer-of-color cultural production.

12
meaning when you widen the geographical field, is instructive (Smith 1992). In Smith’s
discussion of art projects and housing and homeless activists in New York City, he
argues that “jumping scales” allows marginalized populations “to dissolve spatial
boundaries that are largely imposed from above and that contain rather than facilitate
their production and reproduction of everyday life” (60). An artist-designed “homeless
vehicle” enabled a mobility which transformed the usual parameters and constraints of a
homeless person’s life, and political slogans chanted to protect homeless and evicted
people’s access to a park evolved from a proprietary sentiment regarding a small
geographical area (“Whose park is it? It's our fucking park!”) to one that connected the
struggle over space with unequal processes of spatial distribution across the city and
beyond (“Tompkins Square Everywhere”) (60). Through these examples, Smith argues
more broadly that the construction of geographical scale is the primary means through
which spatial differentiation ‘takes place,’ and that correspondingly, the production of
scale is the site of “potentially intense political struggle” (62).
The high incidence of West SGV residents feeling ‘alien’ or having to make a big
adjustment even if they only traveled a short distance (sometimes as little as 25 miles, to
Los Angeles’s West Side) illuminates individuals’ sophisticated mappings of race and
place and how these shift and are transformed at a variety of scales: neighborhood,
regional, intra-regional, national. Struggles over civic landscapes—for example, over
types of businesses on Main Street, Alhambra, or representations of a stretch of Valley
Boulevard composed predominantly of ethnic Chinese-owned businesses—are also
struggles over scale. When a majority-Asian and Latino Boy Scout troop represents
Monterey Park at the Boy Scouts of America’s National Jamboree, or when Alhambra-
13
raised, Korean American Grace Ahn moved 120 miles north to attend UC Santa Barbara,
a large state university, and felt “like an alien,” we see instances of racial formation
informed by a politics of scale. How a regional racial order shifts—is disrupted,
reinforced, or transformed—when it moves or jumps scale accentuates its social and
political possibilities as well as its limitations.

Conceptualizing regions and racial formation
In Omi and Winant’s social constructivist notion of racial formation, the state—
composed of “institutions, the policies they carry out, the conditions and rules which
support and justify them, and the social relations in which they are embedded” (83)—
plays a crucial role. The concept of “racial projects” is also important. Racial formation
depends upon historically situated “racial projects” which represent and organize human
bodies and social structures through assertions of racial difference. These projects
represent shifting configurations of hegemonic blocs (cf. Gramsci [1971] 2005), or ruling
orders. Racial projects do the ideological work of making the links between social
structure and cultural representations, or connecting what race “means” and the ways in
which social structures and everyday experiences are organized based on that meaning. A
racial project then, “is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of
racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular
racial lines” (56). Racial projects are therefore essential to creating and reproducing
“structures of domination based on essentialist constructions of race” (71).
A theorization of regional racial formation rests on the same basic components as
Omi and Winant’s concept of racial formation. Where it pushes their ideas forward is
14
through a close attention to place and scale. While Omi and Winant consider racial
formation and racial projects in terms of large-scale, national social processes and
movements, I am concerned instead with the ways in which they are situated in smaller-
scale contexts—neighborhoods, localities, regions—and what racial formation has to do
with the production of these scales themselves.
14
How and where do racial projects and
moments of racial formation
15
‘take place,’ and what do these have to do with regionally
inflected identities?
In focusing on the regional scale, I am less interested in using the lenses of
specific political or historical events than in what Laura Pulido has called the
“sedimentation” of generations of social relations in the landscape (Pulido 2000), or the
coexistence of complex and multiple histories and identities in a given moment, and how
these congeal (if only temporarily) into particular ways of making sense of the world.
Pulido’s geologic metaphor is also useful if one considers that in any given landscape,
only the uppermost layer may be visible, but nonetheless the cumulative processes that
formed all the layers below still shape the uppermost layer, and may cause shifts and

14
On the production of geographical scale and the social production of space more generally, see
Lefebvre [1974] 1991); Smith 1992; Marston 2000; Brenner 2000, 2001; Marston and Smith 2001;
Swyngedouw 2004. On “place” and “region” within conceptualizations of scale see Paasi 2004. For a
critique which advocates the abandonment of the conceptual use of scale altogether see Marston et al.
2005. For an overview of debates regarding scale within the field of geography see Sheppard and
McMaster 2004.

15
Richard Schein, in his discussion of racialized landscapes, uses the phrase “moments of racial
formation” in his own analysis of Omi and Winant: “The concept of race becomes a matter of ‘both
social structure and cultural representation,’ and the ideological linkages between those moments of
racial formation take place through racial projects” (emphasis added). Schein goes on to connect these
concepts to “racialized landscapes”: “Clearly, a racialized landscape is a racial project, one that is not
only sociohistorical, but also sociospatial. As such, a racialized landscape serves to naturalize, make
normal, or provide the means to challenge racial formations and racist practices” (Schein 2003, 203-
204; see also Cheng 2003).

15
ruptures at any time.
16
Therefore in conceptualizing the “region” in regional racial
formation, I draw from Doreen Massey’s insight that “localities are not simply spatial
areas you can easily draw a line around,” but “will be defined in terms of the sets of
social relations or processes in question” (Massey 1994, 139). Echoing Marx, Massey
argues that a place or region is not a thing but a set of social relations; as such, the
identities of places are inevitably unfixed, since social relations are by nature dynamic
and changing (Massey 1994, 169). Places are therefore “constructed out of a particular
constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus”:
“Instead… of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined
as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (154).
Further, places or regions are not defined through internalized histories independent of
“outside” processes, but by simultaneous linkages between relations, experiences, and
understanding at multiple scales. In this sense, a region or place’s specificity derives from
the “focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations,” “which may
produce effect that would not have happened otherwise” (155-56).

Black geographers and the political geography of race
In shaping the contours of this theory I have learned especially from a group of
geographers engaged in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described as “the political
geography of race,” or “a research agenda that centers on race as a condition of existence
and as a category of analysis,” with the assumption that “the territoriality of power is a

16
Similarly, Doreen Massey conceptualizes place as “the multiplicity of histories that is the spatial”
(Massey 2000, 231) and discusses the “accumulated history of a place,” imagined as “the product of
layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world” (Massey 1994, 156; see
also Massey 1995).

16
key to understanding racism” (Gilmore 2002b, 22). Pulido puts forth a concept of
“regional racial hierarchies,” arguing that while we must always be cognizant of national
racial narratives, it is “primarily at the regional or local scale that more nuanced
discussions of the relationship between race and class emerge.” Focusing on a local or
regional scale enables analysis of how racial hierarchies
17
“are shaped by local
demographics, regional economies, local history,” as well as larger-scale racial ideologies
(Pulido 2006, 26-27, 29). Thus Pulido’s comparative study of Black, Latina/o and Asian
American Third World Left activist groups in Los Angeles in the 1970s is anchored by an
understanding of the regional economy of Southern California at the time, each racialized
group’s structural position within it, and how their corresponding socioeconomic
positions in turn shaped their political priorities (for example, for the Black Panthers,
whose communities were suffering from massive unemployment, ghettoization, and
police harassment, survival and self-defense were primary concerns, while the more
middle-class-based Japanese American East Wind activists foregrounded issues of
leadership and community service, and the Chicana/o organization CASA (El Centro de
Accion Social y Autonomo) focused on issues of immigrant rights and labor
organizing
18
). Pulido also found that residential demographic patterns played a large role
in activists’ development of political consciousness. As one Japanese American described
such sociospatial relations, ‘If you lived in Boyle-Heights, you hung out with Chicanos
and acted Chicano. If you grew up in South Central, you hung out with Blacks and acted
Black…” (Pulido 2006, 56). These patterns were informed, of course, by residential

17
Defined as “a specific configuration of power relations in a given place and time based on racial
ideology” (Pulido 2006:25).

18
See especially Chapters 4 and 5.

17
discrimination as well as affirmative decisions by residents within overall structural
constraints.
Clyde Woods’s study of political-economic development and African American
oppositional culture in the Lower Mississippi Delta region of the South (1998) is also
significant to a conceptualization of regional racial formation. In particular, my interest in
regional common sense, or a shared worldview regarding norms and expectations rooted
in local racial, political, and economic contexts, draws from Woods’s evocation of an
“ethno-racial epistemology.” Woods describes an African American “blues
epistemology” or worldview that grew out of the Mississippi Delta region in opposition
to a dominant plantation regime, and subsequently spread around the world. This
constituted what Woods (with Katherine McKittrick) has conceptualized elsewhere as a
“black geography,” or a dialectic of knowledge and spatial production in which “black
histories, bodies, and experiences disrupt and underwrite human geographies”
(McKittrick and Woods 2007, 4). The ways in which the lives of marginalized Black
subjects prop up a mythical norm, through interlinked processes of essentialization,
exclusion, and erasure, demonstrate how “common-sense” workings of modernity and
citizenship are worked out and normalized through “the ‘literal mappings of power
relations and rejections” (4). McKittrick and Woods maintain that the situated knowledge
of subordinated communities and their contributions to real and imagined human
geographies, although often hidden, are significant political acts and expressions. These
have the potential to disrupt dominant modes of geographic thought rooted in
territoriality (“the normative practice of staking a claim to place” (5)) and allow us to
consider alternate ways of imagining the world.
18
This way of thinking has been comprehensively elaborated on a global scale by
Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism ([1983] 2000) and other scholars in the Black Radical
Tradition, dating back at least to W.E.B. Du Bois, in particular Du Bois’s magnum opus,
Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 1998). Gilmore (2008) has also theorized a
regional consciousness arising from shared processes of abandonment and exploitation in
the “in-between spaces” of California’s prison-industrial complex, made up of spatially
discontinuous but processually linked places: the inner city, where the vast majority of
prisoners come from; and the rural towns where prisons are sited (see also Gilmore
2002a, 2002b, 2006). While the suburban municipalities of the West SGV may not seem
to have anything to do with the racial, economic, and political extremes of plantation
regimes, inner cities, and prisons, they are nonetheless implicated in what George Lipsitz
(2007), drawing from the work of geographers such as Woods and Gilmore, has
concisely described as “the racialization of space, and the spatialization of race.” The
suburb is the inner city’s processually linked inverse, just as the prison is its shadow
counterpart. However, these typological spaces are not isolated poles but intermingled
shades in a complex spectrum. This ambiguity of place in the West SGV, or “in-
betweenness,” as Gilmore puts it, has very much to do with the political and economic
processes that have shaped it, its local histories, and regional ways of thinking, especially
with regard to race.

19
Regional racial hierarchies in ethnic studies
In ethnic studies, a number of scholars have organized studies of differential
racialization by looking at regional racial hierarchies.
19
In one of the earliest examples of
such an approach, James Loewen (1971), paying careful attention to the binary Black and
White regional racial hierarchy of the South, charts how the Chinese in Mississippi, who
initially came as contract laborers, were initially considered “Black,” and mixed
relatively freely with Black communities. Later on, as their socioeconomic status
improved, Chinese community leaders (usually self-appointed) were warned by local
Whites to distance themselves from Black people if they wanted to enjoy more social
opportunities. They effectively did so, notably by ostracizing mixed Black-Asian couples
and families, and eventually became considered, effectively, “White.”
20
In Racial Fault
Lines (1994), Tomás Almaguer explicates the differential racialization of Native
Americans, Mexicans, African Americans, and Chinese and Japanese in California’s
early days of statehood. Neil Foley’s The White Scourge (1997) explores how Mexicans,
African Americans, and poor Whites “negotiated and manipulated the racial space” of
Central Texas (reconceived as a “borderlands province between the South, the West, and

19
Though among these Pulido (2006) is the only one who explicitly theorizes the term “regional racial
hierarchies.” According to Pulido, differential racialization refers to how different groups are racialized
in distinct ways, and how the “particular set[s] of racial meanings” attached to them “not only affect
their class position and racial standing but also are a function of it.” Because of this “dialectic between
the discursive and the material,” “differential racialization affects how each group is treated legally,
socially, and economically” and can even determine life and death (24-5). Subordinated groups are
racialized not only in relation to the dominant group but also in relation to one another, and how this
works out hierarchically varies according to scale and context. An emphasis on differential racialization
foregrounds the complexity, relationality, and mutability that characterize the formation and
maintenance of racial categories and is essential to detaching them from “common sense” justifications
for the continuance of systemic inequalities.

20
See also Koshy 2001 and Warren and Twine 1997, 209-11, for discussions of The Mississippi
Chinese.

20
Mexico”) (xiv); and Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s Unequal Freedom (2002) looks at
differential racialization in relation to citizenship and labor between Black and White
people in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Japanese and Haoles in
Hawaii.
Many of these works focus on Southern California and especially Los Angeles,
showing the immense fruitfulness of the region for scholars interested in the social,
political, and cultural possibilities of regional processes of racial formation. For instance,
Natalia Molina (2006) traces the development of a “regional racial lexicon” in public
health discourse in Los Angeles in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century which
“categorized and ranked county residents as white, Mexican, Japanese, or other” (13).
Initially, the Los Angeles city health department had used only two racial categories:
“Chinese” and “the rest of the population.” Subsequently, how health officials’ viewed
and treated Mexicans was directly tied to assumptions about and experiences with Asian
residents. Thus, Molina argues, in Los Angeles, “Mexican” was “a category constructed
from what it was not: not white, not Chinese, not Japanese.... what it meant to be
‘Mexican’ in Los Angeles was determined in part by what it meant to be ‘Japanese’” (9).
Anthropologist Karen Leonard’s Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican
Americans (1992) explores the early twentieth-century world of Punjabi men working in
agriculture in the Imperial Valley who married Mexican women, and made “biethnic”
families and communities. The regionally specific histories of these shared multiethnic
spaces are important not only because they challenge liberal democratic narratives of
ever-increasing integration (into a normatively White polity), but also because of the
radical possibilities often embedded within the residents’ daily paths: in addition to
21
Pulido, an increasing number of scholars have catalogued vibrant multiethnic
neighborhoods in Los Angeles in different historical moments, and how the political
possibilities arising from them were shaped by “street meetings” (Wild 2005) and
neighborhood-based social formations (Sánchez 2004, Varzally 2008, Kurashige 2008,
Widener 2003). At crucial moments, non-White groups living in multiethnic, majority-
non-White spaces in Los Angeles were able to make “worlds of their own”
21
(Garcia
2001). These constituted and gave rise to alternate worldviews in which White people are
peripheral, although of course structures of White dominance are never absent. In these
worlds, Whites are neither neutral bystanders nor ever-present oppressors; they are
simply, for once, irrelevant to the main act—which is the making of life-worlds with the
terms that have been given, and sometimes, remaking those terms entirely.

Methodological approach
Based on the theoretical underpinnings I have just outlined, my analysis proceeds
from two main assumptions. First, I consider that sites of everyday life—homes,
neighborhoods, schools, civic organizations, and civic landscapes—are crucial terrains
through which racial orders are produced, contested, and reproduced. Bearing in mind the
concept of regions as sets of constantly shifting social relations and processes, I engage
an episodic approach, focusing on pivotal episodes occurring in and through these sites as
“articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (Massey 1994,

21
In Matt Garcia’s A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,
1900-1970 (2001), Garcia shows how Mexican agricultural workers in the East Valley formed
communities outside of the purview of their White employers. This “world of its own” produced,
among many other things, a community theater which pursued intercultural understanding through
entertainment, and a vibrant multiethnic music scene that drew youth of all races from all over
metropolitan Los Angeles.

22
154). At these moments of (regional) racial formation, an emergent structure of feeling,
or “meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt,” which are as yet
ideologically unthinkable but perched “at the very edge of semantic availability”
(Williams 1977, 132-4), collides with dominant institutional practices and discourses. In
such moments, which arise from a disruption or challenge to an existing order, outcomes
are not fixed and prevailing patterns of social relations, usually taken for granted, are
illuminated by their disruption. In ensuing struggles to “make sense” of existing social
relations as well as the challenges to them, each has the potential to transform the other.
Second, I believe that people’s accounts of their daily lives in the West SGV—
the decisions they make, people they regularly interact with—these seemingly mundane
interactions cumulatively add up to a not necessarily fully articulated, yet definitely
formed, regional racial consciousness. This can be conceived of as the gestalt—the
‘feeling’ people have living in this area—what feeds into their general satisfaction and
long-term investment in the area despite existing tensions or conflicts, a sense of self and
place which is rooted in the past but not fixed. As Stuart Hall puts it, while “the past
continues to speak to us” with “real, material, and symbolic effects,” identities are never
fixed but are rather “the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and
position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.” They are “not an essence but a
positioning.” Thus it is quite important to pay attention to “the points of identification…
or suture, which are made, within the discourse of history and culture” (Hall 1990, 226).
In the West SGV, I translate this into a concern with how people position
themselves vis-à-vis their individual and family histories in the area. With this in mind, I
chose as primary methods in-depth interviews and cognitive mapping. The interviews,
23
which took place over a period of two years (from Fall 2006 through Fall 2008), included
64 Asian American and Latina/o residents of Monterey Park, Alhambra, San Gabriel,
Rosemead, and South San Gabriel across a range of ages, income levels, and ethnic
backgrounds.
22
In a “semi-structured” fashion (with a list of questions I wanted to be
certain to cover, but allowing conversations to develop organically), I inquired about
people’s family histories in the West SGV area, everyday social worlds and geographies,
and conceptions of race, ethnicity, and place. For Chapters 2 and 3, discussing incidents
at a local high school and in a Boy Scout troop, I interviewed students, teachers, and
parents; and troop affiliates as well as regional Boy Scouts of America officials,
respectively. For Chapter 4, discussing civic landscapes, I conducted interviews with
local officials and examined relevant public documents and newspaper articles.
At the conclusion of about two-thirds of the interviews, I also asked people to
draw personal cognitive maps of their regular pathways in the region, in order to
understand the variety of spatial experiences among residents of the same area, and the
coherence of the West SGV as a region in everyday experiences (see Appendix A). In
Dolores Hayden’s discussion of cognitive mapping (1995, 27-29), Hayden describes how
urban planner Kevin Lynch studied mental images of the city “by asking people to draw
maps or give directions” (Lynch 1960). Lynch’s first study of this kind showed—
unsurprisingly, at least in retrospect—that not everyone saw the city in the same way. In

22
Interviews typically lasted between 45 minutes to two hours. I located people to interview first
through my immediate circle of acquaintances and eventually through people I had already interviewed,
through what anthropologists call “snowball” sampling. At times—in particular in my discussion of
race and property in Chapter 1—I include information from several interviews with residents of South
San Gabriel, an unincorporated community between Rosemead and Monterey Park with a relatively
small population (7,595 in 2000, compared to Alhambra, 85,804; Monterey Park, 65,051; Rosemead,
53,505; and San Gabriel 39,804. U.S. Census 2000, Summary File 1, DP-1), but whose history is tied to
that of the larger region in several important ways.

24
subsequent studies, Lynch and others explored the roles of class, gender, age, and
ethnicity in shaping people’s “mental maps” (Gould and White 1986). Hayden
reproduces several maps from a 1971 study of Los Angeles residents which “showed
graphically the differences between the residents of an affluent white suburb, an inner-
city African American neighborhood, and a mixed neighborhood close to downtown that
had long been home to new immigrants working in downtown factories and using a few
downtown bus lines.” As “the space of the city, as understood by these different groups,
varied greatly in size as well as in its memorable features,” Hayden concluded that “the
maps are striking images of inequality of access to the city” (27).

Figure 5: personal cognitive map, O. Ixco

25

Figure 6: personal cognitive map, K. Toguchi

While this is certainly true, in my approach, I focused more explicitly on the
relationship of such maps to ideas about race, place, and region, and what Hayden, citing
Frederic Jameson, describes as the potential of such exercises (constituting, in Jameson’s
words, “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping”) to engender “a heightened sense of place,”
and even raise political consciousness (Hayden 1995, 27-29). In asking people to draw
maps of the places they went to on a regular basis in their daily/weekly paths, I was able
to see both commonalities and variety among spatial experiences of people of different
races and ethnicities living in the same areas. Sometimes, people also used the map
exercise as a way to elaborate upon themes we had already talked about during the course
of the interview. Cognitive maps are therefore an expedient way to learn about
individuals’ often sophisticated understandings of relationships between race and place,
built up over lifetimes of daily observations and experiences. Cognitive maps are also
26
shaped by everyday experiences and in dialectic with racial ideologies, constituting racial
geographies (Sugrue 1996).
23

Key Themes
With regard to the specific racial, ethnic, class, and historical contexts of the
West SGV, three important themes emerge: the development of an emergent ‘non-White’
identity rooted in middle-class and suburban contexts; the intertwined relationship of
race, property, homeownership, and privilege; and the essential role of institutions of
civil society in reconciling regional epistemes and practices with national ideologies.

Development of a non-White identity
The development of a distinct non-White identity in the West SGV grounded in
lower-middle to middle-class, suburban neighborhood spaces stands in contrast to
“people of color” identifications traditionally rooted in working-class affiliations and
central urban areas. In Mary Pardo’s book Mexican American Women Activists (1999),
Pardo refers to “the disordering of meanings and ethnic and racial categories” in the wake
of rapid demographic change in Monterey Park from majority White to majority Asian
and Latina/o—evidenced, for example, in the fact that in 1987, an Alhambra School

23
Sugrue describes how in mid-twentieth century Detroit, the near total exclusion of African Americans
from the building trades, which operated primarily on friendship and kin networks—a virtually
insurmountable barrier to blacks because of Black-White residential and social segregation—led them
to work as casual or subcontracted labor. They gathered at informal outdoor labor markets at
intersections (one in particular was known as the “slave market”), making a ready supply of cheap
labor. To the masses of suburban white commuters who drove past them every day, the labor markets
crystallized an image of black male shiftlessness that reinforced ideologies of race and became a
cognitive racial geography of the city.

27
District survey categorized Whites as “other” and “minorities” (39-40).
24
Indeed, in the
course of my interviews, many people referred to Whites as “minorities” or “token
Whites,” sometimes matter-of-factly, and sometimes in a pleased tone which connoted a
subversive delight that supposedly normative categories had been inverted. When
describing the West SGV, both Asian Americans and Latinas/os evoked peaceful Asian
and Latina/o settings which they felt might be “ruined” by White people (as 22-year-old
Vietnamese American Nancy Do put it
25
). Others expressed a sense of comfort tied to
growing up as part of a non-White, Asian and Latina/o majority, which would influence
their decisions as adults regarding where to live, or in which schools to enroll their
children. While people-of-color identities have been mobilized for the most part on the
left and in pursuit of specific political aims (cf. Pulido 1996, Lipsitz 2001), an emergent
non-White identity in the West SGV is instead characterized by frequently shifting
alliances, with uncertain political outcomes depending on the individuals involved and
the situation. It is nonetheless significant to name, however, since most studies of racial
minorities in suburban or middle-income settings to date (with some notable exceptions,
e.g. Wiese 2004, Kurashige 2004, Garcia 2001) assume either a trajectory toward
assimilation to White American norms (albeit with varying degrees of “success” or
“failure”), or at least are premised on the aspiration to such (e.g. Tuan 1998, Clark 1998,
Portes and Rumbaut 2001).

24
Pardo partakes in the same sense of wonder as many people I interviewed by following this comment
with an exclamation mark: “In a racial/ethnic survey used by the local school district, the ‘other’
category refers to anyone was is not American Indian, Asian, black, or Hispanic. The ‘total minority’
category is the sum of the whites...! Now, the one-time minorities are the majority and the ‘others’ are
white.” (Pardo 1999, 39-40)

25
Interview with Nancy Do, March 21, 2007.

28
A shared non-White identity does not, however, preclude the continued
production of privilege and inequality. For one, a generalized “non-White” category can
easily reify Whiteness and White dominance. As Natalia Molina points out, in
California’s multiracial history, the development of a “non-White” category helped to
stabilize a new racial order, with “Whites” at the top, and “non-Whiteness” dictating
degrees of access to privilege and fluidly changing its composition “in response to both
national factors (e.g. labor needs, immigration laws, and economic cycles) and more
regional pressures (e.g., the presence or absence of other marginalized populations)”
(Molina 2006, 6; see also Almaguer 1994 and Saxton [1971] 1955). Certainly, in the
West SGV, positionality within a generalized non-White identity varies by race,
ethnicity, immigrant-generational status, and class. With regard to Asian Americans and
Latina/os, one must also pay attention to differential racialization vis-à-vis model
minority discourse and the ambiguously White status of Mexican Americans (referring to
both day-to-day experiences of “passing,” and historical and legal factors). A shared non-
White identity also does not preclude the continued production of privilege and
inequality—for instance, what I call “racialized privilege” with regard to Asian
Americans, in which one’s privilege relative to other non-White groups is predicated on
racial otherness rather than on assimilation to a White American norm. In the regional
racial common sense of the West SGV, this manifests in the usage of the terms “Asian”
and “non-Asian.” Therefore I use the term “non-White” with caution, to indicate the
ways in which an emergent non-White identity in the West SGV brushes histories and
narratives of suburban and middle-class racial formation against the grain (cf. Benjamin
29
1968), yet must still contend with the pervasiveness of Whiteness and structures of White
domination.

Conceptions of race, property, homeownership, and privilege
A second important current throughout my analysis is the intertwined
relationship of race and property, particularly as expressed through homeownership and
conceptions of privilege. Family histories in the West SGV are deeply informed by
racialized relationships and differential access to property. While this is arguably true
everywhere in the United States, and perhaps especially in urban areas, this has played
out in the West SGV as well as the region as a whole in ways which have particular
historical and theoretical significance. The significance of suburban, middle-income,
majority people-of-color neighborhoods cannot be separated from the historical
intertwinement of race, property, and citizenship in the United States—in particular, the
centrality of linked notions of Whiteness and property to the production and perpetuation
of material racial inequality from the inception of the United States (Harris 1993).
Homeownership is a central element of the perpetuation of racial inequality vis-à-vis
literal property. For much of the twentieth century, housing discrimination was written
into law (Massey and Denton 1993, Sugrue 1996, Kurashige 2008, Nicolaides 2002,
Wiese 2004), and indelible links between housing discrimination, inheritance, and life
chances continue into the present (Shapiro 2004; Lipsitz 1998, 2007; Massey and Denton
1993; Oliver and Shapiro 1995).
More specifically, I consider how particular components of Asian and Latina/o
racialization in the United States and their differential relationships to Whiteness and
30
property have been mutually constitutive—in particular, the “honorary White” status of
Asian Americans as model minorities (Tuan 1998, Palumbo-Liu 1999, Lee 1996), and the
ambiguously White status of Mexican Americans (Orenstein 2005, Gómez 2007,
Robinson and Robinson 2006, Basler 2007). How have Asian American and Latinas/os’
movements into the West SGV been shaped by, and subsequently productive of,
differentially racialized relationships to property, and what possibilities do such majority-
Asian American and Latina/o, suburban, middle-income neighborhoods allow (or
foreclose) that are distinct from those articulated in majority-White settings? I also
consider how ideological linkages between race and property—broadened into questions
of access and ownership of public space—are formative of civic landscapes, and how
actions and attitudes in this realm are frequently shaped by and expressed through
racialized categories and tropes. In the West SGV, recurring motifs which buttress and
reproduce White domination through the containment or erasure of specific racial groups
in space or time include tropes of Chinatown and a “Spanish fantasy past” (McWilliams
[1946] 1973; cf. Deverell 2004, Kropp 2006), and flexible notions of Americanness.

Role of institutions of civil society
The third theme concerns the essential role of institutions of civil society in
reconciling regional epistemes and practices with national ideologies. Many a theorist of
modernity has argued that institutions of civil society (e.g. schools, churches, community
organizations) are key to the inculcation and production of hegemonic ideologies (cf.
Arnold [1869] 1994, Althusser 2001, Gramsci 2005). Institutions of civil society,
especially school but also civic organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America, serve to
31
inculcate a sense of a national culture and ideologies that mold their participants
(compulsorily, in the case of school) to enter the working world as productive and loyal
citizens—or, in an expression from Marx, render them “free” to bring their hides to the
market for tanning: to enter the job market and participate in reproducing capitalist
relations of production. In their capacities as everyday, “racialized landscapes” (to use a
term from geographer Richard Schein (2003)), institutions of civil society are essential to
making concrete and normalizing particular social, racial, economic, and political orders
into “common sense” (cf. Hall 1996). In other words, under cover of ideological
neutrality and egalitarianism, civic institutions normalize stratification and inequality.
Because of this uniquely powerful function, they are also what Althusser characterizes as
both the “stake” and “site” of ideological struggle—so at moments of crisis, outcomes are
not fixed, and reconfigurations of power can occur (Althusser 2001, Gramsci 2005).
Paying attention to the dynamics of social relations within institutions of civil
society is particularly important in suburban, middle-class settings which specialize in the
ideological valorization of home, family, school, and nation. The West SGV, as a
majority-Asian and Latina/o lower-middle to middle-income, semi-suburban space, is
distinct from mainstream conceptions of non-White spaces (as poor, central urban
ghettoes, barrios, or enclaves) as well as mainstream conceptions of suburbs (as
normatively White and economically homogeneous). As such, institutions of civil society
constitute key sites in which the West SGV’s particular “disordering of meanings and
ethnic racial categories” is taking place.

32
Conclusion
Past scholarly work as well as popular representations of interracial relations
between non-White groups have overwhelmingly focused on conflict in central-urban
communities and the failure of integration in the post-Civil Rights era.
26
However, as
Scott Kurashige (2004) has pointed out, “[T]he rapid and dramatic transformation of the
United States from a majority-white society toward one in which people of color are in
the majority must be taken as a challenge to do more than simply add new story lines to a
preexisting narrative.” That is, the mid- to late-twentieth century paradigm of racial
progress, in which racial integration was conceived of as incorporation into a White
majority, must be “revitalize[d]” as “a movement to construct a new polyethnic
majority,” in which integration depends less on the “spatial distribution of whites and
blacks” and more on the relationships among multiple ethnic and racial communities (56-
7). In keeping with this goal, a rapidly growing body of work across several disciplines—
much of which I have already mentioned—has sought to unearth “the neglected history
of multiracial coalitions and solidarities” (Kurashige 2004, 57). These emphasize
coalition-building in labor and political activism (e.g. Pulido 1996, Kurashige 2004) and
the day-to-day formation of interracial friendships and alliances which have previously
been ignored or overlooked by urban historians, as well as ethnic studies scholars more

26
For instance, see American Apartheid (1993), in which Massey and Denton argue that decades after
the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that separate is inherently unequal, “race remains the
dominant organizing principle of U.S. housing markets.” In the 1990s, scholars focused on conflicts
between Korean shopowners and Black residents of poor urban neighborhoods in Los Angeles and New
York (e.g. Abelmann and Lie 1995, Min 1996, Kim 2000), while in the 2000s, Mindiola et al. (2002)
argue that excessive media focus has exacerbated tension between working-class African Americans
and Latina/o immigrants.

33
concerned with single-group histories (cf. Widener 2003, Sánchez 2004, Kurashige
2008).
Another important facet of this scholarship is its positing of majority non-White
spaces as “worlds of their own,” in which White people are peripheral to the main act:
people remaking their everyday lives and places within particular constraints, but also
emphatically on their own terms. It is not a coincidence that many of these works focus
on Southern California, and especially Los Angeles. The rich multiracial history and
present of California have long posed a challenge to binary Black and White sociological
models of race relations (cf. Almaguer 1994, Omi and Winant 1993), showing the
immense fruitfulness of the region for scholars interested in the social, political, and
cultural possibilities of interethnic relations. In recent years, several scholars have also
focused specifically on interethnic and interracial relations in the San Gabriel Valley (e.g.
Garcia 2001, Ochoa 2005, Pardo 1998, Horton 1995, Saito 1998).
A theory of regional racial formation adds to this important and growing body of
literature on the social and political possibilities of multiracial, majority non-White
spaces, by conceptualizing the roles of place and place-making within processes of racial
formation. In articulating “the multiplicity of histories that is the spatial” (Massey 2000,
231) as a key aspect of racial formation, we can better understand how place-specific
knowledges may illuminate histories and ways of thinking which offer alternative
worldviews to prevailing hegemonic ideologies.
34

Chapter 1: The Changs Next Door to the Diazes:
Homeownership, Property and Suburban Racial Formation

One summer afternoon not long ago, Milo Alvarez, a 37-year-old, fourth-
generation Mexican American who grew up in Alhambra and now lives in Rosemead,
went for a drive in the Monterey Park hills with a friend, also Mexican American. His
friend, who was from Riverside
1
and not familiar with the area, wanted to look at a house
that was for sale. As Milo tells it, when they arrived at the house,
there were these Japanese guys over there. I knew they were Japanese—don’t tell me
how, I just knew they were. ‘Cause most of the old guys of that generation… they
dress a certain way. They’re Japanese dudes…. And [one of them] grabs a flyer and
he tells my friend, oh you’re thinking about moving here. [My friend’s] like, yeah. He
goes, ‘That’s cool.’ He goes, ‘I’m tired of all these damn chinos moving in, and just
knocking down these nice houses and building their damn Hong Kong mansions.
They think they’re in fucking Hong Kong’… he says it like that. And then… he tells
him, ‘My mom owned this house’—it wasn’t the house for sale, it was the house next
to it—‘she’s been here for years,’ since like the ‘40s or the ‘30s, I don’t know how
long it was he said… ‘but now you have all these damn chinos moving in.’ And he’s a
Japanese dude, right?... I’m used to it because I knew folks like that [growing up]…
[but] my friend was just shocked and stunned, and he almost wanted to laugh… in the
sense that, if he’s talking about these ‘damn chinos,’ but in the eyes of somebody from
outside… all Asian folk are chinos, right? So he just kind of blew him away…. We
got back in the car and [my friend’s] like… ‘I’m stunned. What is his perception of
identity? Who does he think he is…?
2

Milo, on the other hand, while amused by his friend’s reaction, was nonplussed—‘I’d
heard things like that from those kind of older folks before’; having grown up in the area,
he was accustomed to its particular racial and cultural alignments. While he

1
Approximately 50 miles east of Monterey Park.

2
Interview with Milo Alvarez, February 27, 2008.

35
acknowledged that it might “sound kind of strange… it’s very common if you grew up
here.”
Several facets of this story are significant to the discussion which follows in this
chapter. Its setting in the West SGV, adjacent to Los Angeles’s Eastside, and the basic
outlines of the interaction—an older Japanese American man expressing cultural
familiarity (using the Spanish term “chino,” meaning “Chinese,” but often used to refer to
all Asians, regardless of ethnicity) as well as attempting to make common cause with two
Mexican Americans—point to common group histories in the region, beginning in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century with shared labor niches in the citrus groves
and ranches of the San Gabriel Valley, and extending through patterns of residential
discrimination which formed multiracial neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights in the
1940s and ‘50s (cf. Garcia 2001, Sánchez 2004, Varzally 2008). However, post-World
War II processes of suburbanization, urban renewal, and resegregation have left few
remnants of the older history, hardly known outside of individual and family histories,
and certain neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, Crenshaw, and parts of the West SGV
such as Monterey Park—as evinced by the dumbfounded reaction of Milo’s friend from
Riverside. Further, the multiple ways in which the Japanese American man sought to
make common cause—through disparaging more recent ethnic Chinese immigrants via
their architectural choices, letting Milo’s friend know that he would welcome him as a
neighbor, and affirming his own family’s long status as homeowners in the
neighborhood—are both highly specific to the contemporary history of the West SGV,
and speak more broadly to the ways in which relationships to property, and especially
36
homeownership, are central to regional racial formation and productive of particular
social relations.
What did it mean for arriving Asian and Latina/o residents of the West SGV to
live in a suburban setting under relatively stable economic conditions, fully cognizant of
structural racial restrictions, at a time in which the trend in inner cities has been toward
displacement, economic polarization, and increased segregation? How were these
movements shaped by, and subsequently productive of, differentially racialized
relationships to property? What kind of “worlds of their own” have present-day residents
of the West SGV made collectively, in what have become largely non-White, suburban,
middle-income neighborhoods, and what do these worlds mean to them? What
possibilities do such spaces allow (or foreclose) that are distinct from those articulated in
majority-White settings?
In this chapter, I explore these questions through an analysis of differential
racialization vis-à-vis property. Differentially racialized access to property is a key aspect
to regional racial formation in the West SGV as a formative condition, and is also
productive of particular social relations. For many West SGV residents, I argue that what
is produced is a form of what George Lipsitz (2007) has called a “moral geography of
differentiated space,” or an ethos which departs from the exclusionary mandates of
normatively White suburban space in American history. Lipsitz makes a distinction
between a “moral geography of differentiated space” developed by “aggrieved
communities of color” and a “moral geography of pure space,” originating from
American frontier ideologies. A moral geography of pure space is the basis of a “white
spatial imaginary,” which privileges the generation of exchange value via property over
37
all else, while a moral geography of differentiated space, the basis of a “black spatial
imaginary,” promotes use value and the communal social good. In this formulation,
Black and White refer not literally to Black and White people, but are signifiers of
ideological stances with deep historical and material implications. In the Black Radical
tradition of thought, Blackness denotes an ethos which subverts and eludes structures of
domination in which capitalism and racialism are intertwined
3
—what Cedric Robinson
has described as an “ontological totality,” or a way of thinking and being not informed
solely by White domination but which recuperates a whole history.
4
Whiteness, in
contrast, refers to advantages accrued from structural discrimination both historically and
in the present (Harris 1993, Pulido 2000, Lipsitz 1998).
In what follows, I argue that even while their initial movements were to a large
degree shaped by differential racialization in the housing market, Asian and Latina/o
residents who came to the West SGV beginning in the 1950s and 1960s participated in
producing a moral geography of differentiated suburban space. In doing so, they
developed a particular sense of non-White identity, in which their motivations and long-
term actions differed significantly from those of White residents, who fled en masse as
well as ceasing to move to the area between 1960 and 1990 (cf. Saito 1998; Fong 1994).
This “moral geography” is both continuous with earlier histories of multiracial
communities in the greater Los Angeles region, and distinctively new, in the ways in

3
Characterized, as W. E. B. Du Bois described it, by an absence of the “wish… to exploit.” The
original passage in Du Bois reads: “Above all, we must remember the black worker was the ultimate
exploited; that he formed that mass of labor which had neither wish nor power to escape from the labor
status, in order to directly exploit other laborers, or indirectly, by alliance, with capital, to share in their
exploitation” (Du Bois [1935] 1998, 15).

4
Also see Clyde Woods’s theorization of a “blues epistemology,” a distinctly African American way of
knowing and being which grew out of regional racial and economic hierarchies in the Mississippi Delta
(Woods 1998).

38
which it has been transformed by transnational ethnic Chinese settlement and economic
globalization. I focus first on West SGV family histories which began between the 1950s-
1970s, a formative period which laid the groundwork for the “spectacular suburban
Chinatown” (Davis and Moctezuma 1999) which took root in the area beginning in the
1980s, but whose history has been subsumed by the latter narrative. This earlier period
was shaped not only by distinctive post-World War II patterns of residential development
but by longer histories of shared multiracial residential spaces in the Los Angeles region
as well. I then consider how second generation experiences growing up in the West SGV
from the 1970s-1990s, as well as experiences of new arrivals during that time period,
further trouble commonly accepted notions of race, homeownership, and property.
In my investigation of how people make sense of local histories in the present
moment—including their individual life histories as well as the actions of people around
them—I am interested in how people position themselves vis-à-vis their individual and
family histories in the area (cf. Hall 1990), particularly with regard to formulations of the
relationship between race and property, and how these speak to a ground-up, subtly
oppositional, suburban racial formation among non-Whites. Therefore when a Mexican
American resident of Monterey Park in his sixties explains that on his primarily Asian
American and Latina/o block, people had owned homes for a long time because ‘nobody
sells their home’ (quoted in Saito 1998, 31), I am less interested in whether or not this is
statistically “true,” but how this statement reflects a particular way of making sense of
local history and the actions of people in one’s community.
After a brief overview of the residential development of the West SGV since the
1950s, I focus on three key themes: 1) the implications of differentially racialized
39
relationships to homeownership via the “model minority”/”honorary White” racial
positioning of Asian Americans, and that of Mexican Americans as ambiguously
White/less foreign; 2) the development of a moral geography of differentiated space
through actions and neighborhood social relations; and 3) reconfigurations of
relationships between race and property (encompassing differentiated material
opportunities as well as expectations, understood or expressed through racialized
categories and tropes). Throughout I trace articulations of a distinctive majoritarian, non-
White identity among Asian Americans and Latina/os which, while selectively complicit
with dominant racial hierarchies, is nonetheless deeply informed by anti-racist principles.

Not ‘For Caucasians Only’: Residential Development in the West SGV since 1950
Although a few developers made forays into the West SGV in the 1920s—
particularly in Monterey Park (Fong 1994), it was really after World War II, in the 1950s
and 1960s, that the West SGV began its rapid transformation from a semi-rural farming
region into a suburb of Los Angeles. Newly built freeways offered proximity and easy
access to downtown as well as East Los Angeles, Chinatown, and Little Tokyo.
Advertisements in the 1950s boasted that new developments in Monterey Park were a
mere 7-minutes drive from downtown.
5
Proliferating subdivisions attracted World War II
veterans looking to buy homes (facilitated by the GI Bill’s home loan guaranty program)
and drew Mexican Americans from East Los Angeles, Japanese Americans from the
West Side and East Side, and Chinese Americans from Chinatown (Fong 1994, Saito
1998). Non-White homebuyers, especially Japanese Americans recently released from

5
Interview with Winston Gin, August 14, 2007.

40
World War II internment camps, approached homebuying cautiously, gathering
information from intra-ethnic networks and gauging the attitudes of real-estate agents.
Although racially restrictive covenants had been rendered legally unenforceable in
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Fair Housing Act, which explicitly prohibited racial
discrimination in the sale of a house or in more institutionalized forms such as redlining
and racial steering, was not instituted into law until 1968. Thus Asian Americans and
Mexican Americans attempting to buy homes in the West SGV in the 1950s and 1960s
approached the task with a full awareness of the realities of structural racial
discrimination and the concomitant limitations it imposed on where they could and could
not live. As largely well-waged working-class and middle-income homebuyers, however,
they had a degree of choice distinct from their poorer non-White counterparts, thereby
enacting a dialectic of assertion and assignation (Koshy 2001) that was informed by
differential racialization vis-à-vis property.
West SGV Population Growth, 1940-1990
Compiled from US Census 1970 6-20, Table 7; US Census 1980; US Census 1990
-
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
70,000
80,000
90,000
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
number of inhabitants
Alhambra
Monterey Park
Rosemead
San Gabriel

Figure 7: West San Gabriel Valley population growth by city, 1940-1990
41
The generation which can now be considered “old-timers” in the West SGV, for
the most part, moved to the area between the 1950s and the 1970s. While some families
had already lived in the region for some time, most Mexican Americans who moved into
the West San Gabriel Valley during this period were second-generation immigrants from
East Los Angeles, looking to buy their first homes. When 4-year-old Alice Ballesteros
moved to Monterey Park with her family in 1952, she recalled that Monterey Park was
definitely seen as a “sign of upward mobility”; indeed, in the mid-1950s, Monterey Park
was known to many in East Los Angeles as the “Mexican Beverly Hills” (Fong 1994, 21-
2). Throughout the Japanese American community, word circulated that Monterey Park
was a White and Japanese American “bedroom community.” Karen and Ed Toguchi,
Japanese Americans from Hawaii, were then a young married couple living in an
apartment in Los Angeles. Karen, now 63, describes how they found their first house in
Monterey Park in the 1970s:
We lived in an apartment in an alley in… what’s called K-town now. And then, one
day, I have no idea how it came up, we decided on getting a place of our own—and
we really didn’t think that would happen. But we contacted some gentleman… and I
believe he was from a place called Kashu Realty, down here in Monterey Park. And of
course, we had no clue what Monterey Park was… it’s a Japanese name, but we don’t
know who owned it… I don’t know how we got in touch with this gentleman or how
he got in touch with us. And he came over [to our] little apartment in K-town and he
says, ‘you guys would like to find a little place? I’ll help you… I know a place called
Monterey Park.’ And I says, ‘oh, I don’t think I want to live there… it’s a bedroom
community, White and Japanese Americans, I don’t think I want to live in a place like
that.’ I want to live in a place that’s mixed. And he says, ‘well, just come on down and
take a look.’ And so we went down and took a look. And we found a house there….
6

Even though the Toguchis, according to Karen, did not initially want to live in a “White
and Japanese American bedroom community,” ethnic networks, in a way they barely
noticed (“Kashu Realty… it’s a Japanese name, but we don’t know who owned it… I

6
Interview with Karen Toguchi, July 21, 2007.

42
don’t know how we got in touch with this gentleman or how he got in touch with us”)
nonetheless led them to purchase a home in Monterey Park, where they have lived for the
past thirty-plus years, and have no intention of leaving (as Karen puts it, “We’re gonna
die here”).
This reputation subsequently attracted second-and-later generation Chinese
Americans like 78-year-old Winston Gin, who heard that “it was one of the few areas
where it was said that uh, orientals might be welcome… The fact that there were… some
Japanese families here already, we thought that we would belong.”
7
Chinese American
Howard Jong, who, like Gin, worked as an aeronautics engineer, purchased a home and
moved to Monterey Park in 1964. Although he had heard that Monterey Park was “for
Caucasians only,” “Bill and Ernie”—two Chinese American friends—“had already
purchased homes here at the time. I followed them” (quoted in Fong 1994, 24-5).
Others, following in the footsteps of earlier generations of racial minorities as
well as working-class Whites, bought land or homes in unincorporated areas outside the
purview of municipal regulations (Wiese 2004; Nicolaides 2002; Garcia 2001; Sánchez
1993, 188-206; Sides 2003, 95-130). Lisa Beppu’s Japanese American family in 1961,
and Anita Martinez’s Mexican American parents, moving from Boyle Heights in the
1970s, took advantage of the relative lack of racial restrictions to buy homes in
unincorporated portions of Los Angeles County in South San Gabriel and what is now
Rosemead. Mike Murashige, whose Japanese American family has been in San Gabriel
for three generations, dating back at least to the 1920s, recalled a “weird pocket of
Japanese Americans” in unincorporated land in South San Gabriel, who bought houses in

7
Interview with Winston Gin, August 14, 2007.

43
new developments built in the 1960s and became the center of a vibrant Japanese
American community in the West SGV.
8

Figure 8: Map of West San Gabriel Valley cities
However, even though prospective Asian American and Latina/o homeowners
like the Gins, Toguchis, and Martinezes had in some ways unprecedented opportunities to
settle in the West SGV during this time, nearly all of them had experienced instances of
discrimination in their lives which pointed to the ways in which racially differentiated
access to space—public and private—delimited the boundaries of their social worlds. For
instance, eighty-one-year-old David Tong, a third-generation Chinese American who has
resided in Alhambra since 1973, recalled growing up the son of a grocer in Watts, “way

8
Interview with Mike Murashige, March 30, 2007.

44
on the southwest side” of Los Angeles, in the 1930s and ’40s, which was then a
predominantly White area. Although he maintained that “we didn’t feel any prejudice
after they… got to know us,” as a high school student during World War II, he also
recalled passing through “the neighborhood” on his way home from school and being
mistaken for Japanese by strangers, who “would holler out, ‘You Jap… Why don’t you
go back to where you’re from?’”
9
He recalled another incident as a teenager, in which
he—the only non-White in his group of friends—was refused admission to a public
swimming pool on a club excursion to the San Fernando Valley. After the war—in which
he served in the army in Saipan—Tong studied engineering in college and eventually
embarked upon a stable career as a civil engineer, but was always aware not only of the
“glass ceiling,” but of racial boundaries inscribed in the landscape as well. He recalled
that it was generally known that in certain areas, non-White professionals could work, but
not live: “It used to be a joke. Glendale
10
invites you if you’re an Asian businessman and
all that—you can open your business here in Glendale, but please leave at night, go back
to where you’re from.” While Tong and his friends could laugh about it, in actuality
nobody was kidding: he recounted the “shocked” reaction of a Chinese American
engineer who moved from the Bay Area to work in Glendale when he could not find an
apartment, “although there were plenty of them”—the man ended up staying in a
Glendale YMCA. Thus even for middle-income, professional people of color, public and

9
Interview with David Tong, September 28, 2007. For a fictionalized account of the complexities of
various forms of anti-Asian racism from the perspective of a young Japanese American woman in Los
Angeles in the immediate years after World War II, see Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story, “Wilshire
Bus” (Yamamoto 1998).

10
A suburb in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, bordered by Burbank to the west and Pasadena to
the east, approximately 10 miles north of downtown (and 10 miles northwest of Alhambra).

45
private space were clogged with racial boundaries. Racial restrictions on where
professionals like Tong could live often constituted a lingering reminder of their
subordinated status in society, even as they found stable employment and made progress
at work.
The ability of large numbers of Asian Americans and Latina/os to buy homes in
the West SGV beginning in the 1950s, then, its reputation as a place where Chinese
Americans like Winston Gin “thought we could belong,” is no small thing. However, the
West SGV suburbs’ relative openness was not uniform across racial minority groups.
Indeed, the increasing ability of Asian Americans and Latina/os to buy houses was
characterized by grudging acceptance posed in contradistinction to, and often facilitated
by, anti-Black racism. For instance, when Japanese American Kazuo Inouye, founder of
Kashu Realty—the same company which led the Toguchis to purchase a house in
Monterey Park, and which many have credited with singlehandedly integrating many a
formerly White neighborhood in metropolitan Los Angeles, especially in the Crenshaw
district in the 1950s and ’60s—opened a branch office in Monterey Park, he recalled that
the local real estate board “wouldn’t let us in because they were afraid that we were going
to sell to blacks. So they said we had to wait two years. Nobody had to wait two years.
They’re always begging for members. Way in the back page, it says you had to wait two
years. So we waited two years.” When the two years was up, Inouye and his partner met
with the board:
So they had a meeting with about eight or nine guys. They’re all kind of looking at
you with their arms folded and kind of glaring at you. They say, ‘Mr. Inouye, what
type of people are you going to sell homes to here in Monterey Park?’ I thought about
it, and I said, ‘I would only sell to people who would be an asset to the city of
Monterey Park.’ I didn’t say I’m not going to sell to blacks or purples or whatever it
is. I just told them (chuckles) that. They couldn’t answer.
46
My partner was Chinese, and he went in there. He was taking a Berlitz course on
memory. There were these eight or nine guys, and when he [partner] left, he got up
and called them by their first and last name. It shook each and everyone up. (chuckles)
So we kind of shook them up a little over there. (Inouye 1997)
Inouye and his partner’s knowing evasion of the board members’ questions and delight in
“shaking them up” show how while they were willing to take advantage of opportunities
afforded by their privileged racial status relative to Black people, this did not indicate a
uniform willingness to comply with the existing racist hierarchy.
11

A reluctance to conform to exclusionary scripts even while deriving relative
benefits from racist practices—especially opportunities for homeownership—was also
evident in many residents of the West SGV, as the experience of Bob and Helen Liley in
Monterey Park in the early 1960s illustrates. Although significant numbers of Japanese
Americans had already purchased homes in new tract developments in the area by that
time, no “outright racial confrontation” occurred until February 1962, when the Congress
of Racial Equality (CORE) charged that developer Montgomery Fisher refused to sell a
house to Bob and Helen Liley, a Black physicist and his wife. Although the Monterey
Highlands Homeowners Association (at that time still largely White) refused get
involved, stating that such matters were a matter of “individual conscience,” the
Monterey Park City Council took a more active stance to support the Lileys: Al Song, a
Korean American who had recently been elected to the council, and Howard Fry, a White
man who had previously lived on a South Dakota Indian reservation, issued a joint
resolution endorsing state laws prohibiting discrimination and segregation. Unlike in
other cases of housing activism, in which the primary antagonists were would-be Black

11
Indeed, Inouye’s record of purposeful “blockbusting” in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles, in which
he sold large numbers of homes to African Americans as well as Japanese Americans, indicate his
multiracial ethos (Kurashige 2008, 250-51).

47
residents’ own neighbors (almost invariably Whites), the Lileys had the support of their
neighbors in Monterey Park; when they were finally able to purchase the house, Bob
Liley said, “We’re happier over the response of the community than anything else.”
According to Eli Isenberg, the Jewish American editor of the Monterey Park Progress,
“No city in the Southland, no large group of people have dealt with a problem as
potentially explosive as the Liley case as well as Monterey Park has” (Fong 1994, 23-24).
During the Liley incident, Monterey Park residents’ refusal to uphold the
suburban color line which many of them had so recently crossed may indicate that Asian
Americans and Mexican Americans living in the West SGV, while complicit with the
anti-Black racism which had allowed them, but not African Americans, to buy homes in
the first place, had distinct notions about race, homeownership, and property which
depart from the usual narratives of movement into the suburbs as an inevitably whitening,
assimilationist practice. In the next section, I examine in more detail how differential
racialization via property—defined as a set of mutually reinforcing material opportunities
and expectations (Harris 1993)—shapes people’s movements and experiences, as well as
how their own agency and actions form a dialectic with larger structural forces.

Property and Differential Racialization

The significance of suburban, middle-income, majority people-of-color
neighborhoods is intimately tied to the imbrication of race, property, and homeownership
in the United States. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris (1993) has discussed the centrality of
interlinked notions of Whiteness and property to the production and perpetuation of
material racial inequality in the United States. Thomas Shapiro, in The Hidden Cost of
48
Being African American (2004), highlights the links between housing discrimination,
inheritance, and life chances. According to Shapiro, “inheritance is more important in
determining life chances than college degrees, number of children in the family, marital
status, full time employment, or household composition”—and currently, almost all
inherited wealth in the United States is rooted in White property ownership via gains
from overtly discriminatory housing markets prior to 1968 (Lipsitz 2007, 19; cf. Massey
and Denton 1993, Oliver and Shapiro 1995). Discrimination was not an unfortunate
incidental aspect of federal policies beginning in the 1930s but written into the laws
themselves (cf. Massey and Denton 1993, Sugrue 1996, Kurashige 2008, Nicolaides
2002, Wiese 2004). However, David Freund (2007) argues that post-World War II
patterns of suburban residential development, to which federal policies and practices
were central, marked a shift in White racial attitudes about race and property. White
homeowners,
12
veiling the continuance of racist practices with professions of colorblind
self-interest (HoSang 2008), grew to embrace a “market imperative” explanation and
justification for racial segregation in which race and economics were conflated—an
explanation which, ironically, was only possible due to the overtly discriminatory
housing and loan policies that had segregated their neighborhoods in the first place.
Within this logic, White homeowners were not personally racist; they were simply
“concerned citizens” defending their right to property and following the dictates of the
market in upholding the neighborhood color line. In the postwar period, the terms
“White,” “homeowner,” and “citizen” became increasingly conflated.

12
See David Roediger 2005 for a detailed exposition of how homeownership and the whitening of
formerly racially “inbetween” European immigrants became intertwined after World War II. For other
historical studies of the whitening of European immigrants, see Jacobson 1998, Allen 1994, and
Roediger 1991, among others.

49
It follows, then, that the specific components of Asian and Latina/o racialization
in the United States and their differential relationships to Whiteness, homeownership, and
property have been mutually constitutive—in particular, the “honorary White” status of
Asian Americans as model minorities (Tuan 1998, Palumbo-Liu 1999, Lee 1996), and the
ambiguously White status of Mexican Americans (Orenstein 2005, Gómez 2007,
Robinson and Robinson 2006, Basler 2007). Just as notions of Whiteness and property
have been bound to one another since the founding of the United States (Harris 1993),
racialized minority groups’ relationship to, or terms of exclusion from, Whiteness have
been defined by differential access to property—and more recently, to homeownership.
Put another way, if conceptions of Whiteness and property have been inextricably linked,
so too have varying constructions of non-Whiteness, and denial of rights to property.
13
In
the United States private property, symbolized by the “properly-ordered and prosperous
domestic dwelling” has come to serve as the “the nation’s key symbol of freedom,
harmony, and virtue... the privileged moral geography of American society” (Lipsitz
2007, 15). Therefore discourses concerning race and property are also significant in that

13
While the linkages between property and the continuance of White privilege have been relatively
well-documented (albeit still contested), aside from many excellent studies of the historical, structural,
and ideological underpinnings of ghettoization (e.g. Massey and Denton 1993, Sugrue 1996), scholars
have paid less attention to theorizing differentially racialized relationships of non-White groups to
property and privilege, especially with regard to non-White homeowners. A growing body of work
which seeks to recover the history of majority non-White spaces both within and on the fringes of
metropolitan centers seeks to correct this lacuna (Wiese 2004, Garcia 2001, Kurashige 2008, Sides
2003). Kurashige evokes a history of shared spaces among African Americans and Japanese Americans
in Los Angeles and illuminates access to homeownership as a site of active struggle among both
groups. Wiese catalogs a long history of Black residential settlement and property ownership on the
fringes of U.S. cities. Garcia describes how Mexican American citrus laborers made “worlds of their
own” outside of the purview of White employers in the early twentieth century colonias of the eastern
San Gabriel Valley. However, recent scholarship on “suburban Chinatowns” has been somewhat
disconnected from these histories, focusing more prominently on intraethnic dynamics (e.g. Lin 1998,
Chen 1992), economic flows (e.g. Zhou 1998, Li et al. 2002), and transnational connections (e.g. Ong
1999). While geographer Wei Li, in her conceptualization of “ethnoburbs,” points out that most so-
called “suburban Chinatowns” are in fact multiethnic, multiracial communities, she does not account
for the long, multiracial “prehistories” of many such spaces (Li 1999, 2006).

50
they delineate “good” and “bad” citizens. Grace Kyungwon Hong (1999), in her analysis
of African American and Asian Americans’ shared histories of racialized denial of
property rights (through, for example, segregation and Japanese American internment),
has argued that in liberal democracy’s privileging of private property, “If the purpose of
the state is to maintain property relations, criminality becomes defined as the threat to
private property.” Therefore, in Hong’s reading of Hisaye Yamamoto’s memoir “A Fire
in Fontana,” African Americans shown “looting” on television during the Watts Riots
justify White supremacist notions that Black people do not deserve private property
because they don’t respect it. In what follows, we shall see how Asian Americans and
Mexican Americans in the West SGV, as “model minorities” and “ambiguous Whites,”
negotiated provisional acceptances in formerly majority-White neighborhoods in the
West SGV partially by performing specific relationships to private property.

‘Who’s moving in?’ Model minorities and ambiguous Whites
In 1973, David and Soume Tong, who are Chinese American, purchased a house
in a then-largely White neighborhood in North Alhambra. As Soume, now 79, describes
it, “Our neighbors next door… asked the neighbor, ‘Who’s moving in?’ They didn’t want
to say it’s an oriental couple…. they [just] said, ‘an engineer and a teacher,’ so they were
really surprised [when we moved in].”
14
In the 1970s, the Tongs’ entry into a North
Alhambra neighborhood constituted an exception to prevalent patterns of racial steering,
in which Asian Americans were usually taken to “lesser value homes in a different area…
down closer to the freeway.” When the Tongs had initially looked for a house in San

14
Interview with David and Soume Tong, September 28, 2007.

51
Marino (a bastion of old, White money adjacent to North Alhambra), they noted that real
estate agents “weren’t all that friendly.” Ultimately, their entrée into a predominantly
White neighborhood in North Alhambra in the 1970s was facilitated by a realtor
acquaintance of Soume’s who had recommended they look in the area.
Second-generation Mexican Americans Dora and Al Padilla purchased the home
in Alhambra in which they still live in the early 1960s, when Dora Padilla was just 24.
According to Padilla, who is now 73, “Alhambra had an unpublished agreement through
the realtors. They wouldn’t fall out of their chairs to show homes to Latinos…. It was
prejudiced. There isn’t another word for it, it was prejudice.”
15
Although at the time,
Padilla and her husband didn’t “realize that there was that existing, uh, gentleman’s
agreement among realtors,” they found that they were only shown houses that were
extremely highly priced, which exceeded their budget. Looking back now, Dora Padilla
believes that “the idea was to discourage us.” Ultimately they found their house not
through a realtor but after seeing a posted “for sale” sign while driving through the
neighborhood on their own and dealing directly with the owner:
The reason we got this house was that uh, the woman here had two children, and she
was a widow, and she had to get into a bigger home. And she wanted to sell quick.
And I think she just saw the opportunity to sell to us, and didn’t do it through a real
estate [agency]. She just put up a ‘for sale’ sign.

Padilla recounted how their White next-door neighbors, although perhaps
initially hostile, seemed to accept them after finding out that her husband coached
football at nearby Roosevelt High, where he counted their neighbors’ nephew as a
colleague: “So all of a sudden, we were okay.” Padilla, whose Mexican father was of
German and Spanish ancestry, had always been able to pass as White. However, “My

15
Interview with Dora Padilla, October 24, 2007.

52
husband is obviously very Latino—he looks like a Mexican [chuckles], if you want a
stereotype. But he’s dark-skinned. He doesn’t look Italian, he looks Mexican.” The
Padillas’ somewhat ambivalent relationship to their initially White neighborhood—as
well as Dora Padilla’s ability to selectively “pass” as White, continued to characterize
their relationship to living in Alhambra over the next decades. For instance, when she
decided to run for school board in the late 1970s, a friend who had experience working
on local city council campaigns advised her to run with her maiden name “Swarto”—
derived from her father’s German heritage—as her middle name. Padilla complied, and
won the election. Subsequently, “people would run into me, they’d ask, ‘so are you a real
Mexican?’” Padilla describes her response as follows: “after awhile, I thought, well,
okay, if they’re gonna be stupid, asking me questions like that, I can be offhand with
them too. And I said, uh, ‘Well, I’m not the Pillsbury Dough Boy. I’m real.’ [laughs].”
While at least in retrospect, Padilla could joke about the “problem” her racial ambiguity
presented for White fellow school board members, at home in the neighborhood with her
“obviously very Latino” husband, they worked hard to validate their suburban pedigree
by “keeping with the neighborhood” in appearances, particularly through tending their
front yard—a principle they passed on to their children.
People have their attitudes, and if you just go up against them, trying to knock
heads… you’re not going to be successful. You have… educate them. And that’s what
we did over a period of time…. [My husband] goes over there and does yard work at
my daughter’s house [across the street]. He’s very proud, because he feels that that’s
something you have to be aware of. He taught our boys…. He had a big power
mower, he would cut the grass… he does everything—the roses, the ivy, all the plants.
And he taught them that, it’s important to have your home looking good…. My
daughter’s husband isn’t that great at yardwork [laughs], but the same thing is carried
over. He’s very conscious that even though it’s a rental, it look very nice… right away
he started pruning all kinds of things, just keeping with the neighborhood.

53
Both the Tongs and the Padillas felt that their ability to find a house in a desirable
area was limited by racial discrimination. Their acceptance into their respective
neighborhoods, however, was predicated by slightly different terms: for the Tongs, their
next-door neighbors didn’t want to tell others “an oriental couple” was moving in,
preferring to emphasize their middle-class, professional status as “an engineer and a
teacher.” This aligns with the Asian American model minority stereotype, in which Asian
Americans, albeit “forever foreign,” are provisionally accepted as “honorary whites” (cf.
Tuan 1998) as long as they conform to American immigrant narratives of striving for
middle-class attainment through hard work and ingenuity. In the case of the Padillas,
Dora Padilla’s ambiguous Whiteness won her both trust and suspicion through the years,
while her husband may have sought to counteract his “obvious” Mexicanness (albeit
tempered, in the eyes of their White neighbors, by his coaching position at a local high
school) with his careful cultivation of the house and front yard’s appearance to
neighborhood standards.
In some cases—and especially as the Asian immigrant and Asian American
population increased—Asian Americans and Mexican Americans were pitted against one
another by Whites in terms of relative desirability (coded as proximity to implicitly
White “Americanness”). In Rosemead in 1993, Milo Alvarez described how his parents
were able to buy a house by benefiting from a contingent acceptance as White, in
comparison to Asians. When the previous owner, a White woman, complained how
Asians were taking over and could buy whatever they liked with cash, the Alvarezes kept
silent:
[T]he lady was a White lady that ended up moving to Tennessee, she refused to sell
to Asians—which is the only reason really why my parents were able to afford to
54
move in that neighborhood. She said… ‘They think they can come here and buy
everything with their money’—‘they’ meaning Asian Americans, right? So my
parents were just, like, quiet. [laughs] And so she took their offer, even though it was
a FHA offer, loan thing—they didn’t have as much of a downpayment—versus a cash
offer that was more money, from an Asian American family, because she liked my
mom. And it was kind of weird because back when we were growing up, they
wouldn’t have sold to Mexicans…. I mean, that sentiment would have been reserved
for Mexicans. But she for some reason felt like… it was Asian people she didn’t want
moving into her place.
16

The White woman’s implicit inclusion of the Alvarezes in her construction of “we”
(versus “’they’ meaning Asian Americans”) illustrates how at certain moments, the
“ambiguously White” status of Mexican Americans stands in contrast to the “honorary
White”/ “forever foreign” status of Asian Americans (Tuan 1998). One could also
conceptualize this differential racialization within Claire Jean Kim’s “field of racial
positions” (1999), in which one axis delineates valorization relative to other groups, and
the other, “insider” versus “foreigner” or “outsider” status. In the context of the West
SGV, Mexican Americans could be conceived of as relative insiders, more “American”
than the “foreign” ethnic Chinese, whose ability to make a cash offer for a house disturbs
“American dream” narratives of poor immigrants working their way up from nothing.
17

While in the 1960s and 1970s, the Tongs and Padillas, as racialized non-White
bodies, had to either “pass” as White (as Dora Padilla did), or perform a “proper”
relationship to property as conceived as coextensive with a middle-class, White nuclear-
family based vision of Americanness (to have professional occupations like the Tongs, or

16
Interview with Milo Alvarez, February 27, 2008.

17
Along these lines, Aihwa Ong (1999) has argued that the skillfulness with which a contemporary
transnational ethnic Chinese capitalist class manages its mobility, when exhibited within the national
confines of the United States, serves to unsettle dominant conceptions of Whiteness and citizenship,
implying “alternative notions of citizenship within the dominant frame of ‘American’ neoliberalism and
suggest[ing] that citizenship benefits, even for the entrenched white middle class, have become more
precarious in a world of circulating multinational subjects (109).

55
to “keep up with the neighborhood” in appearances, like Al Padilla), in the 1990s, in
order to purchase their home, the Alvarezes still had to concede to White dictates of who
could be American, and who could not. In other words, as model minorities and
ambiguous Whites, they all had to make concessions to a White spatial imaginary, in
which a moral geography of pure space—predicated on sameness—and the generation of
exchange value via property over all else, are the dominant principles of operation
(Lipsitz 2007).

Mexican Americans, Whiteness, and property
Mexican Americans’ relationship to Whiteness—and by extension, to property
and homeownership—is, however, rather more complicated than I have presented it so
far. Mexican Americans’ ambiguous racial status dates from the United States’ forcible
acquisition of Mexican land in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which all
former citizens of Mexico in those territories were given U.S. citizenship, rendering them
effectively White by law (Gómez 2007, Almaguer 1994, Foley 1997, Haney López
2006). While most scholarship emphasizes systemic disenfranchisement and
discrimination against Mexican Americans in housing, references to at least two mid-
century cases point to instances in which ambiguous racial status under the law allowed
Mexican Americans access to homeownership in ways that were denied at the time to
other racial groups: In the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles, a “Mrs. Lopez”
recounted to Japanese American realtor Kazuhiro Inouye how she had bought her house
previous to World War II, “and the neighbors all took her to court saying that she wasn’t
white.” Ultimately, the courts ruled in Mrs. Lopez’s favor, “that the Mexicans were
56
white” and Mrs. Lopez kept the house and stayed, but “it cost her a lot of money”
(Inouye 1997, 194).
18
In A. T. Collison and R. L. Wood v. Nellie García et al.(1945), the
Los Angeles Superior Court dismissed a suit brought by property owners in El Monte to
prevent Nellie Garcia, a Mexican American woman, from occupying a property covered
by a covenant which barred those of the “African,” “Asian,” and “Mexican” races.
García’s attorney, David Marcus, successfully requested dismissal on the grounds that
“there was no Mexican race” (Robinson and Robinson 2006, 100-101, 116fn27).
Marcus’s argument was extended to two significant court cases during the mid-
to-late 1940s dealing with school segregation and interracial marriage, respectively:
Mendez v. Westminster (1946), in which Marcus served as the plaintiff’s attorney, and
Perez v. Sharp (1948). In Mendez v. Westminster a California U.S. District Court ruled
that the segregation of Mexican American children into separate schools was
unconstitutional. Although Mendez v. Westminster served as an important precedent to
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—indeed, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall filed a
brief in the case which presaged many of the arguments he would use in Brown seven
years later—the case did not argue directly against racial discrimination. Instead, Marcus
won the case by asserting that Mexican American children were White, and therefore
could not be segregated on grounds of race (Powers 2007). Echoing the language he had
used only a year earlier in Nellie Garcia’s case, Marcus stated, “[W]e do not contend that
there is such a thing as the Mexican race. That will eliminate the question of race.” The
defendant school district’s lawyer concurred that “Mexicans are white” (Powers 2007, 9-
10). In U.S. District Court Judge Paul McCormick’s decision, he stated, “It is conceded

18
For a discussion of this anecdote in the context of Inouye’s “blockbusting” tactics as a realtor in
Crenshaw, see Kurashige 2008, 250.

57
by all parties that there is no question of race discrimination in this action” (7). Similarly,
the ambiguity of Mexican Americans’ racial status under the law made for a gray area in
their ability to intermarry across racial lines (Orenstein 2005): In Perez v. Sharp, the
judge ruled a law forbidding non-Whites to marry Whites “void for vagueness”—the
bride, Mexican American Andrea Perez, could not be definitively categorized as White or
not White.
As this selection of legal cases indicates, Mexican Americans’ historic
relationship to a host of racially legislated domains, including education, homeownership,
and marriage, has been deeply informed by their (legally) indeterminate racial status.
With regard to homeownership, although there is plenty of evidence of pervasive
structural discrimination against Mexican Americans, their ability to be considered White
by law nonetheless stands in contrast with laws which explicitly forbade Asian
Americans to own land or become citizens in the early twentieth century, effectively
blocking fundamental entry points to the privileges of Whiteness. Robinson and
Robinson argue that because of this ambiguous racial status under the law, Mexican
Americans tended not to join other groups in battling Whites-only restrictive housing
covenants (100-101). However, although some Mexican Americans certainly benefited
materially from their ambiguous Whiteness, relative to other racial groups, it is clear that
legal status as White often did not translate into acceptance by one’s White neighbors as
such. The battles Mexican American homeowners in predominantly White
neighborhoods fought on the ground, where there were no judges or lawyers to adjudicate
that “there was no Mexican race,” were also significant to the formation of racial and
political identities. For instance, when Mrs. Lopez, the Mexican American woman
58
homeowner in Crenshaw whose neighbors had contested her Whiteness in court, later
decided to sell her house, she approached Inouye, a Japanese American, and insisted that
he sell her house to a person of color: “Mrs. Lopez… called up one day, she says… ‘I
want to sell my house, but I do not want to sell to the whites.’ I said, ‘That's all right with
me. I got all kinds of customers that are not white’” (Inouye 1997, 194). When Inouye
asked why, Mrs. Lopez cited her White neighbors’ efforts to prove that she was not
eligible to live in her own house. Although the legal battle had been costly, Mrs. Lopez
had persevered. In the process, her house became not just a commodity to be sold to the
highest bidder, but a symbol of a moral imperative: to pass on her right of
homeownership, gained via access to Whiteness, to a person of color. Inouye obliged and
sold the house to a Japanese American family, standing up to White intimidation and
threats of violence to do so (Kurashige 2008, 250).
The actions of Mrs. Lopez and Inouye reiterate that, as mentioned earlier, Asian
American and Latina/os’ relatively better access to homeownership (than African
Americans) did not necessarily translate into complicity with a “white spatial imaginary”
of exclusion, suggesting that theirs was often a strategic use of Whiteness
19
(whether
“honorary” or “ambiguous”) which did not lose sight of legacies of historical and
structural racism. In Mrs. Lopez’s case, the outcome was not only that was able to keep
her house because of being categorized as legally White, but also that she stayed in it at
considerable personal expense, and in the process developed a “moral geography of
differentiated space.”

19
See Gayatri Spivak (1988) on strategic essentialism, or the “strategic use of positivist essentialism in
a scrupulously visible political interest” (13).

59
In the next section, I will discuss how, like Mrs. Lopez and Kazuhiro Inouye,
Asian American and Latina/os in the contemporary West SGV acted in ways that asserted
a “moral geography of differentiated space,” illuminating relationships to property based
on distinctly anti-racist, non-White identifications.

What is produced? Toward a moral geography of differentiated space
In the emergent majority Asian American and Latina/o neighborhoods of the
West SGV, residents developed and passed onto their children goals and expectations
regarding property distinct from White residents, who fled the area en masse during the
same time period. Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Mexican Americans
whose families arrived in the West SGV between the 1950s and the 1970s (or earlier),
stayed in the area long-term at much higher rates than White residents, and often spurred
family members to settle in the area as well. For instance, while the White population in
Monterey Park dropped precipitously between 1960 to 1990, the Latina/o population
increased in the 1970s, and declined by only 5 percent in the 1980s. The Japanese
American count increased by nearly two-thirds in the 1970s, and dropped by about a fifth
in the 1980s—a significant decrease, but still much lower than the rates of White flight
(see Figure 9). Similarly, in Alhambra, by 1990 the White population had dropped to one
quarter of its size in 1970, while the number of Latinas/os more than doubled (see
Figure10). These numbers, suggest that although some established Chinese and Japanese
Americans, along with Latina/o residents, were disgruntled by the influx of ethnic
Chinese immigrants which began in the late 1970s and has continued through the present
(cf. Saito 1998, Fong 1994, Calderon 1991), unlike White residents, they tended to stay,
60
suggesting differing responses, expectations, and stakes in the area. The following stories
show some of the dimensions of established Latina/o and Asian American residents’
experience of demographic transition in the area during this period and suggest affective
as well as practical reasons as to why they chose to stay.
Ethnic/Racial Composition of Monterey Park, 1970-1990
Data from Saito 1998, Tables 3 and 4
-
5,000
10,000
15,000
20,000
25,000
30,000
1970 1980 1990
number of inhabitants
White (non-Hispanic)
Latino
Chinese
Japanese

Figure 9: Ethnic/racial composition of Monterey Park, 1970-1990
Population of Alhambra, 1970-2000
Compiled from US Census Data, 1970-2000
-
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
1970 1980 1990 2000
number of inhabitants
Asian
Latino
White (not Hispanic)

Figure 10: Ethnic/racial composition of Alhambra, 1970-2000
61
‘Nobody sells their home’: the significance of staying
The sentiment of not selling one’s home or moving, tied to expressions of
acceptance (albeit sometimes grudging) of difference, is a pervasive theme among
Mexican Americans and Asian Americans in the West SGV. “Nobody sells their home,”
a Mexican American longtime resident of Monterey Park explained, regarding the
residents of his block (quoted in Saito 1998, 31). The man went on to describe how when
he first moved there, “Only Anglos could buy houses, but we fought it and could move
into these two blocks. There is a Japanese American family at the other end of the block,
and they had been here a long time, too.”
20
The man’s simple statement, “nobody sells
their home,” is not only a product of shared interethnic histories and spaces, but a
particular way of making sense of local history and the actions of people in one’s
community.
According to Bill Gin, a third-generation Chinese American who has lived in
Monterey Park since he was ten years old in 1959, “Asians don’t move out of the area
unless something drastic happens.” He noted that while he and his family had been in
their current house for 32 years,
My neighbors were here all that time… I notice that. Because even my parents, the
only reason they moved… was ‘cause they wanted a bigger house on top of the hill.
So they moved. But that was less than a half a mile move. And then I looked at my
aunts and my uncles and everybody else… You notice that they don’t move.… This
neighborhood… it’s a little bit on the old side, but there’s enough… younger couples
moving in, their kids and stuff like that…. I think they enjoy the area, and moving is

20
The man also recalled how the land behind his house used to be farmland worked by a Japanese
American family—he and his wife would help farm sometimes in exchange for free fruit—and how
upset his wife was when her Japanese American best friend had to leave for World War II internment
camps. “My wife’s best friend had to go and my wife drove her to the train, and they cried. We still
have some pictures of her.” Saito notes that in this account, the man foregrounds how “Latinos and
Japanese Americans shared the experience of battling segregation, and because they were neighbors
and friends they were also linked intimately and emotionally to the major events in each other’s lives.”
(31)

62
basically too much of a hassle. And they have great neighbors—everything’s here for
them.
21

In contrast, Gin remembered “a big shift” in the White population: “over there it was
basically all Whites, until the kids grew up and didn’t want to live there, and they got
older and they just suddenly sold out to the Asian population, and they moved too… So
there was a big shift.”
In contrast to the multigenerational investments of Asian American families in
the area (three generations of the Gin family—his parents, himself and his siblings, and
now his daughter have all purchased homes in Monterey Park), White residents were
more likely to move, and for those who stayed, their children usually did not settle in the
area as adults. When I asked Gin if he had any idea why the children of White residents
did not tend to stay in the area, he replied,
I think maybe they would feel an oddity right now, they’d be a minority and stuff like
that… I mean, they would get along with everybody, it wouldn’t be a problem… but
it’s just a matter of everybody having a choice of where they want to live and where
they want to live… and the [life]styles they want to live. You know, there’s a lot of
acceptability of mixed marriages here. Even my mother, she said, every one of you
have to marry Chinese. Twenty years later she modified it. She says, okay, as long as
you get married I’m okay, for the girls, but the boys, you gotta marry an Asian
[laughing].

Gin’s mention of the relative acceptance of mixed marriages, as a reply to why Whites
might have a different relationship to the area, points to not only sheer numbers—being
the numerical majority versus a minority—as an explanation for people’s choices to stay
or leave, but to an attitude of tolerance and flexibility. Although she now lived in an area
with a plurality of Asians, Gin’s mother, who had been staunchly against interethnic
(much less interracial) marriages, became more rather than less accepting over time.

21
Interview with Bill Gin, April 30, 2007.

63
Glancing at data regarding occupational status and income in the West SGV back
to 1980, it is clear that White residents may have had more financial capabilities to move
than Latinas/os or Asian Americans: for instance, in 1980, a White family’s median
income was 15 percent higher than a Latina/o family’s income, and a White person was
1.6 times more likely to be employed in a managerial or professional occupation (see
Figures 11 and 12). Although Asians’ median family incomes exceeded those of Whites
and a higher proportion of Asians worked in managerial and professional occupations,
Whites still had the highest per capita income of all three groups—surpassing that of
Latinas/os by 40 percent. However, the reasons some departing White residents gave for
leaving clearly evinced nativist, anti-Asian sentiments. For example, former Monterey
Park resident Frank Rizzo, interviewed by the Los Angeles Times in 1987, expressed
disapproval of his new Chinese immigrant neighbors’ perceived unwillingness to “give
up their traditions and settle into an American way of life.” Rizzo commented that when
he left, “What I might do is hang a little American flag on my truck and drive through
town on my way out and wave goodbye to all my old friends…. I’m moving far away
from here” (quoted in Fong 1994, 64-65). For departing White SGV residents like Rizzo,
then, moving was a statement of protest against a foreign invasion. In national studies,
sociologists and demographers have noted that Whites have long shown the highest
correlation among different racial groups between negative racial stereotypes and
negative attitudes toward neighborhood integration (Charles 2003).
22

22
There have been long-standing, active debates among sociologists, demographers, and political
scientists regarding the causes of neighborhood segregation and uneven patterns of homeownership.
Until recently, most of these have been limited to analyses of Black-White residential patterns and
assumptions of binary racial scenarios. More recent studies have sought to include Asian Americans,
Latinas/os, and Native Americans and analyze the dynamics of multiethnic neighborhood settings
(Charles 2003; Oliver and Wong 2003) as well as immigrant status (Myers and Lee 1998; Painter,
64
West SGV Median Family Income, 1980-2000
Compiled from US Census Data 1980-2000
$-
$5,000
$10,000
$15,000
$20,000
$25,000
$30,000
$35,000
$40,000
$45,000
1980 1990 2000
Asian
Latino
White (non-Hispanic)

Figure 11: West San Gabriel median family income by race, 1980-2000

West SGV Per Capita Income, 1980-2000
Compiled from US Census Data 1980-2000
$-
$5,000
$10,000
$15,000
$20,000
$25,000
1980 1990 2000
Asian American
Latino
White (non-Hispanic)

Figure 12: West San Gabriel Valley per capita income by race, 1980-2000

Gabriel, and Myers 2001). Most relevantly for my arguments here, Oliver and Wong find that in
contrast to metropolitan-level findings, analysis at the neighborhood level shows that living in
integrated, multiethnic neighborhoods corresponds with lower levels of prejudice and competition.
Charles, refuting Clark’s arguments about “multicultural ethnocentrism” (in which Clark implies an
equivalence between White racism and non-White “ethnocentrism,” arguing that high levels of “deep-
seated own-race preference structures” are simply “built into our everyday thinking” (245)), finds that
unlike Whites, Asians, Hispanics, and Black people generally preferred diverse, integrated
neighborhoods, and that “own-race preference” was not necessarily a sign of ethnocentrism, but a
reaction to White racism (or apprehension of White hostility).

65
In contrast, many Asian Americans and Mexican Americans who felt
uncomfortable about the demographic changes in the area still saw no reason to leave,
even as they noted dramatic White flight. As Japanese American Karen Toguchi put it:
We were very, very comfortable, until about 20 years ago, maybe? We had been here
for [pause] at least 15 years, and then things started to change. Chinese people started
to come in, and it was like a locust descending on the land. And next thing we knew…
it was White flight. I’d never seen White flight. I read about it in the books and the
newspaper, but to truly be involved in it, it was almost shocking to the system.
Literally seeing people run out of this place.
23

Although Toguchi described the arrival of Chinese immigrants with a dehumanizing
metaphor of invasion—“it was like a locust descending on the land”—its effect on her
was relatively mild. What was “almost shocking to the system,” she believed, was not
that, but the ensuing White flight, “literally seeing people run out of this place.”
The rapid departure was noticeable even to a child. Japanese American Romy
Uyehara, who was in elementary school in the early ‘80s, noticed that her older brother’s
White friends “kind of just moved away”: “I really noticed it—I noticed that my brother
started hanging out with more Asians—you know, Chinese and Japanese friends, and his
White friends moved away.” Romy herself had “a couple White friends” in elementary
school, but they moved away as well, and “pretty much by the end of eighth grade, most
of my friends were Asian. And that just kind of continued on to Alhambra High School.”
Romy remembers learning about White flight from her parents during a conversation
over dinner one night as a child:
They were talking about this family moving away, and discussing, ‘well, I guess it’s
that White flight thing.’ And I remember asking them, what’s that supposed to
mean?... ‘cause at that time, I was so young, I thought of flight of being like, birds. So
I didn’t understand, ‘what do you mean, White flight?’ And they explained to me.

23
Interview with Karen Toguchi, July 21, 2007.

66
‘You know, sometimes people move out of an area, and in this case it’s all the
Caucasian White people.’ So yeah. I remember that. [chuckles]
So they described it to you kind of as racially motivated?
Yeah, they did… I mean, my parents didn’t delve too deeply into it, they just kind of
said, you know, ‘sometimes people move away because they don’t feel comfortable,
or they don’t want to live somewhere anymore.’ But they didn’t go into the whole—
because other people are moving in, they just can’t understand, and they can’t get
along. But yeah, I kind of got the sense, ‘oh, okay, these people moved away because
they didn’t feel comfortable living here.’

Romy’s sense of comfort and belonging in the area as a child made it impossible for her
to understand people’s hostility.
[E]ven at that age… I guess I kind of knew I belonged here…. So to me, it was like,
well, I don’t understand why people would um, feel uncomfortable that other people
are moving in, because this is where you belong. I always felt like I belong here. I was
born here, I’ve lived in this house all my life, and it was kind of like, wow, I can’t
believe people feel so uncomfortable in this place just because other people are
moving in. I don’t know. I didn’t understand that whole idea that people just can’t um,
tolerate… change, or they just feel uncomfortable with it…. I just felt like… I wasn’t
really a part of it.
24

Tony Gonzalez, a 72-year-old Mexican American, purchased a house in the
Monterey Park Hills in 1960. Gonzalez, who fought in the Korean War (and met his
Korean wife while there), considers himself an unhyphenated “American” and
maintained that location, specifically proximity to his parents in East Los Angeles—and
not race or ethnic composition—was the primary criterion when he and his wife were
looking for a house. When they moved in, their street of around a dozen homes was about
half White and half Japanese American. When I asked if he ever observed any tension or
discomfort in relation to the mixed neighborhood, he began talking about how Whites
could be hostile toward Asians—complaining about bad driving and accusing them of
“taking over” or saying, “there goes the neighborhood.” Gonzalez’s take on it, however,
was that when he moved in initially, “it was more like I was moving into a Japanese

24
Interview with Romy Uyehara, September 28, 2007.

67
neighborhood, like I was the interruption.” Because of his perception from the outset that
he was living in a predominantly Asian neighborhood, Gonzalez was not particularly
surprised or disturbed when increasing numbers of ethnic Chinese began to move in. In
response to a question about whether or not his neighborhood had changed much over the
years, he replied simply, “Yes and no. It’s gone from Japanese and Chinese [to more
Chinese]. It’s still a nice, quiet place to live.”
25
Although White neighbors over the years
felt comfortable confiding to Gonzalez, who can easily pass for White with his light skin,
blue eyes, and “terribly conservative” political views, Gonzalez did not share their sense
of ownership and assumptions that the arrival of more Asians represented a disruption in
a proper neighborhood balance.
Downhill from where the Toguchis, Uyeharas, and Gonzalezes lived, Juan
Ramirez,
26
40, recalled the overall diversity of his predominantly Mexican American
neighborhood in the 1970s and early 1980s—his childhood neighbors included
Vietnamese, Filipinos, African Americans, Central Americans, and Chinese—and also
how Whites had been quick to leave: “when I was a real little kid, there were still some
White people. But they were leaving. I mean… they were gone right away.”
27
Just east of
Monterey Park in South San Gabriel, Anita Martinez, 37, a fifth-generation Mexican
American and 4
th
-generation Angeleno, recalled that their house, purchased in the late
1970s, was flanked by a Japanese American family behind, Koreans across the street,
Mexican Americans on one side, and a White family on the other. In keeping with larger

25
Interview with Tony Gonzalez, November 29, 2007.

26
A pseudonym.

27
Interview with Juan Ramirez, October 4, 2007.

68
patterns throughout the area, the Whites eventually moved away, and were replaced by
Asians.
28

West SGV Population, 1980-2000
Compiled from US Census Data, 1980-2000
0
20,000
40,000
60,000
80,000
100,000
120,000
140,000
1980 1990 2000
number of inhabitants
Asian
Latino
White (non-Hispanic)

Figure 13: West San Gabriel Valley population by race, 1980-2000

‘This is as far away as we got’: Family ties
Many West SGV Asian Americans and Latinas/os reported strong relationships
with their parents and other family members which continued well into adulthood, and
often dictated their choice of where to settle as adults, sometimes economically as well as
affectively. For instance, after Bill Gin married, “My parents [said] okay you’re married,
we’re gonna give you the down payment for the house.” Bill and his wife Rainie found a
house they liked within their budget in Palos Verdes, approximately 35 miles away, but
his parents rejected it as being “too far.” Next the young couple proposed a house in

28
Interview with Anita Martinez, June 20, 2008.

69
Hacienda Heights, less than 15 miles away, but this too was rejected as too far. The house
that was finally approved, and in which the Gins still live, is only a five-minute drive
from where Bill’s parents’ live: “So this is as far away as we got.” When it came time for
the Gins’ daughter to buy a home, initially she “didn’t want to live in an Asian
neighborhood, she wanted to be in a more mixed neighborhood.” Bill and Rainie were
actively involved in the process, accompanying her downtown to look at lofts that were
“pretty expensive,” according to Bill. Ultimately, in part because their son-in-law, a first-
generation Chinese immigrant, liked the area, their daughter ended up purchasing a home
in nearby San Gabriel, close to one of Bill’s brothers.
29

When the time came for Lisa Beppu and her husband to purchase a house, they
initially looked further afield, near Sierra Madre (approximately 10 miles north), but
Beppu’s sister, who lived with their mother and her three children in San Gabriel, in the
house they’d grown up in, “wanted me to move close to home.” Through her sister’s best
friend who was a realtor, Beppu was alerted whenever a house opened up in the
neighborhood. Eventually they chose a house that was only “a couple big blocks” away
from where her sister and mother lived.
30
In the Monterey Park hills, Romy Uyehara and
her twin sister, 33, ended up purchasing the house next door to the one they grew up in,
where their mother still lived.
31
And just before 20-year-old Daniel Moberg’s parents

29
Interview with Bill Gin, April 30, 2007.

30
Interview with Lisa Beppu, June 28, 2007.

31
Interview with Romy Uyehara, September 28, 2007.

70
were married in the 1980s, they bought a house about “a mile from driveway to
driveway” from his Mexican American mother’s parents’ house in Monterey Park.
32

While compared to Whites, many Asian and Latina/o families may not have had
the same means to leave due to unequal levels of accumulated family wealth, my
interviews suggest that many Asian and Latina/o residents of the West SGV had from the
outset a different set of meanings and expectations in relation to property, and over time
passed these on to their children, who, growing up in the particular regional racial mix,
also solidified and produced a new set of social relations.

Growing up in a geography of differentiated space
For those who were born into, or moved at an early age, into multiracial
neighborhoods in the West San Gabriel Valley, neighborly interethnic coexistence—
sometimes expressed as an expectation or acceptance of difference, rather than an
expectation of sameness—was all they had known. Anita Martinez, whose parents found
their way to South San Gabriel via Echo Park and Boyle Heights, grew up in a house
flanked by Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Mexican Americans, and Whites
(who later moved away and were replaced by Asians). Martinez, who now lives in
Lincoln Heights—another predominantly Asian and Latina/o neighborhood—recalls for
the most part an atmosphere of friendship and acceptance, at times actively guided by her
parents.
I can’t really remember people being too derogatory or mean… I really don’t
remember there being that much prejudice from like, other Latino kids. The only thing
in my neighborhood that people would complain about is the smell of food around 5
‘o’clock… I don’t know if they were Vietnamese families or whatever, but you could

32
Interview with Daniel Moberg, November 12, 2007.

71
smell like, fish and garlic in the air, and it was really really strong. And I know the
other kids would be like, ‘oh, there’s that smell again!’ And then my mom would go,
‘How do you think they feel when they smell our chorizo?’… She would always try to
put it in perspective.
33

Martinez’s mother, a teacher who had been active in the Chicano Movement, nudged the
neighborhood kids not to negatively exoticize their neighbors’ food (and by extension,
the neighbors themselves) by reminding them that “our chorizo” (a fatty pork sausage
common in Mexican cuisine) might elicit the same reaction in others. By likening the
smell of “fish and garlic” to the smell of chorizo, Martinez’s mother asserted a “moral
geography” of differentiated space—a lesson her daughter still remembered years later.
Eloy Zarate and Mike Murashige, growing up a few miles north in San Gabriel in
the 1970s, both remembered a carefree neighborhood space in which children of diverse
ethnicities moved freely in and out of one another’s houses. Zarate, now 40, enjoyed a
“very mixed” friendship group, including children of Polish and Italian immigrants,
Japanese Americans, and Zarate himself, whose parents are Mexican American and
Argentinean. Sharing the same community in which nearly everyone was “lower middle
class, upper working class” formed a bond of commonality: “we were all different, but
we were all very similar in how we were in our community.”
I mean, we understood ethnically that we were different… there was a label that we
understood, that your parents are Japanese or your parents are Polish. But it didn’t
mean anything past that… we didn’t see the differences of what that meant, in terms
of what you went home to. Because we were also in each others’ homes. So what you
were experiencing, we were experiencing… And it’s not like that much anymore. You
know, because kids who are our age, elementary school, are not free to go around in
the neighborhoods the way we used to. You know, we could go, ‘hey I’m going over
to Steve’s house,’ when we were ten years old…. We’d just show up… Now you need
to ask permission. It wouldn’t even of gotten into my head that I would need to ask

33
Interview with Anita Martinez, June 20, 2008.

72
permission of the parents to go see the kid…. We just played. My parents weren’t
there.
34

Juan Ramirez, growing up in Monterey Park around the same time, had a similarly
nostalgic view of growing up in his neighborhood: “[W]e had a really good time in the
neighborhood. Uh, a really good time. I mean, I had a lot of friends… growing up in the
neighborhood… there was kids everywhere, so there was always something to do, you
know?” His best friend was a Central American boy, and he played with a Chinese boy,
David. A Filipino family with nine daughters lived nearby—”we [boys] were always
there [laughing]”—and the girls’ father “was always out there playing with us. ‘Cause I
guess he wanted a son, you know? And so he was out there, you know, on his
skateboard—a grown man, he was out there with us.”
35

Many of these stories demonstrate understandings about nuances of
socioeconomic hierarchies and the specificity of particular social relations to scale and
context, for instance, relationships that were possible at the neighborhood level but did
not translate in other contexts. Mike Murashige recalled being aware that the Chavezes,
36

the Mexican American family who moved in two doors away, were different from the
middle-income Mexican American families who already lived on the street, or the
Mexican American mayor of San Gabriel at the time, who was a judge. Mr. Chavez “sold
little Mexican hats at Olvera Street” (a historic tourist destination in downtown Los
Angeles), participating in an informal economy that Mike characterized as “not even
working class, it’s you know… kind of that low-rent retail stuff, right.” Mike and his

34
Interview with Eloy Zarate, April 18, 2007.

35
Interview with Juan Ramirez, October 4, 2007.

36
A pseudonym.

73
younger brother befriended two of the Chavez boys, and the four “hung out a lot,” but
only in the neighborhood, since the Chavezes attended Catholic school. When they did
attend the same high school, Mike and Kiko Chavez would walk to school together, or
catch a ride with Kiko’s father, “sittin’ in the back with all the fuckin’ sombreros that he
sold.” But at school, while Mike was increasingly in honors classes, Kiko was “in there
with the barrio kids,” and had joined Sangra, a local gang.
And so he was like, ‘Dude, at school, so, we don’t really talk.’ And I understand
that… he said it, but I thought the same thing. I’d say hi to him [at school] and just be
like, ‘hey dude,’ and walk on. But then we’d walk home together, and that sort of
thing…. And then when [Kiko] was hanging out with them, they’d look at him funny
when he talked to me. But you know, he was a regular part of my group of [friends]—
you know, even in high school, we’d hang out together. And we’d have these
ridiculously hilarious discussions. They didn’t seem that at the time, but they are now
that I think about them. They’d be like, ‘What the fuck are you doing going out of the
house with your boxers hanging out?’ He’s like, ‘fuckin’, that’s stylish’… We’d have
these little cultural exchanges. That was the [cholo] style at the time. They’d get their
sweatpants, like black or gray sweatpants, and they’d cut them off, and then they’d
have their boxers hanging low below them…
37

The neighborhood context, as two kids who grew up practically next door one
another, allowed Mike and Kiko to maintain their friendship, and perhaps fostered in the
two teenagers an awareness of racial and cultural identities as contextualized
performances, as evidenced in their frank discussion of cholo style as “stylish” to one,
and preposterous to the other—a discussion which, like their friendship, was unlikely
outside the permissive social space of the neighborhood.
For Anita Martinez and her friends, performing racial and cultural identity
became a game. As a teenager, Anita became best friends with a Vietnamese American,
Tina, and spent much of her time at Tina’s house and with her family: “I was there all the
time… I would go to like, the weddings with them and stuff.” Anita and Tina became so

37
Interview with Mike Murashige, March 30. 2007.

74
close that they sometimes played at blurred the boundaries of their identities, bending
ethnic lines to “pass” as each other’s family:
[B]ecause she was Vietnamese, she also could get pretty dark during the summer like
me, so there would be times when we would like, pretend to be cousins. Or like, later
on, when we got older and I would hang out with her, I would go with her to the
Vietnamese clubs in Santa Ana. And she’d be like, okay, don’t tell anybody you’re
Mexican, we’re gonna see if you can pass!... I’d go to the club, I just wouldn’t really
talk or anything. [laughing] And then she would tell everybody that… my dad was a
Mexican, US soldier… and my mom was Vietnamese… And so we would do that just
for fun…. And then the same thing with her… if she started hanging out with me a
lot… people would think she was Mexican… she doesn’t really look that Mexican,
but she could pass if she wanted to. So one time, we did this thing where I used to get
my nails done at the shop and I’m like, ‘I think they’re talking shit about me, I can’t
tell.’ She was all, ‘I’ll go with you… teach me some words in Spanish.’ So we’re
pretending to speak Spanish and we’re sitting there, and she’s all, ‘They are talking
shit about you.’ [laughs] And then so when we left, she just told them something like,
‘bye,’ in Vietnamese. And all the ladies are like, ‘oh my god.’ [laughing]
38

Anita recalled also playing games of cross-racial passing with another friend, who was
Japanese and White.
She would say, ‘oh, this is my cousin, she’s you know, half Japanese too or
something.’ So when I was younger… I could pass for part, maybe half Asian or
something... or people would think I was Filipino…. But if you put that idea in
people’s mind they’ll be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I could see that.’

Anita and her friends’ games spoke to the porousness of ethnic and racial identities in the
area in which they grew up, as well as an early awareness, perhaps, of the socially
constructed and somewhat arbitrary nature of such categories.
The potential porousness of racial and ethnic boundaries was not seen as positive
by everyone, however: Once, Anita recalls, Tina’s mother told her daughter to “Stop
acting Mexican.” Although Anita believes that Tina’s mother was simply upset by how
“wild” the two girls acted together (“we would just goof around like crazy… just be
rolling on the floor laughing, just doing stupid things”) and was not offended by the

38
Interview with Anita Martinez, June 20, 2008.

75
comment when Tina relayed it to her, Anita’s father, a former activist in the Chicano
Movement, was upset by it. Such exchanges show that although for the most part, young
Asian and Latina/o residents of the West SGV developed and practiced a moral
geography of differentiated space, normative racial assumptions nonetheless intruded
upon and shaped the contours of a particular regional hierarchy.

Troubling Relationships to Property
‘What having a house represented’
Differential access to homeownership in the West SGV has also given rise to
new paradigms of race and privilege, as well as shifting meanings of property itself. This
is particularly true at the intersections of Monterey Park and East Los Angeles, where in
the 1970s, Monterey Park incorporated sections of East Los Angeles, demolishing swaths
of working-class residential areas in the process. Juan Ramirez, a teenager in the mid
1980s, remembered feeling like “they wanted to get rid of us”—in his mind, “we” meant
working-class Mexican Americans, and “they” included “rich Chinese people” as well as
White developers: “[M]y neighborhood was going to get demolished. It was a political
move by developers. It was categorized as a blighted area… we knew how we were
perceived. We knew that our homes were perceived as bringing down property values in
Monterey Park.”
39
Juan’s connection between “how we were perceived” and how “our
homes” being “perceived as bringing down property values” show how racialized bodies
were conflated with measures of economic value, and that he saw “rich Chinese people”
as complicit with the White developers in that moment.

39
Interview with Juan Ramirez, October 4, 2007.

76
Oscar Ixco, 35, grew up in the low-income Maravilla housing projects, right on
the boundary of Monterey Park and East LA, a line, he recalled, which was literally
visible on the street. At some point as a child, living in the projects “became something of
an embarrassment to me, something I wouldn’t share with people.” When people asked
where he lived, “a lot of times I would say that I lived in Monterey Park, because
Monterey Park carried you know, prestige.” Ixco, now an assistant project manager in
urban redevelopment, is half Mexican and half Salvadorean and has light skin, black hair,
and dark eyes. In elementary school, he tested into the gifted program, and was
sometimes mistaken for Asian up through high school, a slippage he admitted enjoying:
“sometimes it felt like a good thing, because I felt like, wow, you know, I’m not like,
looked at in this negative way, you know… I guess thinking about, you know, that we
were poor and where we lived, it kind of felt good to be looked at on that level. And
that’s kind of why I kind of rode with it for awhile.” Many of the friends he made in his
classes were Asian and White, and were “better off economically”:
[T]hat fact that they lived in a house? It was just different. Something that I didn’t
have, didn’t understand, but liked…. I wanted to be a part of that, on some level…. I
remember going through a lot of difficulties when I would hang out with them,
because I didn’t have the things that they had. Like I remember… after school, it was
so easy for them to go to the store or go to the hamburger stand and buy something,
and I never had the money to buy anything, just to sit there and watch. But I guess I
was just left to be satisfied to be hanging out with them. That was my thinking back
then, I won’t deny it. I realize now that I didn’t have to think any less of myself
because of where I was, but I did at the time.
40

At the margins of Monterey Park, for Ixco, to be mistaken for Asian was to be
temporarily respected, to be taken for a middle-class kid who did well in school and most
likely lived in a house which his parents owned, not a poor kid from the projects being

40
Interview with Oscar Ixco, July 18, 2007.

77
raised by a single mother, who knew that the onus of improving their family’s long-term
prospects (“it was up to me to get it to the next level”) was all on him.
This symbolic intertwinement of Asianness and homeownership as a badge of
middle-class status was powerful among Asians as well. For instance, Grace Ahn, a 31-
year-old, Korean American social worker who grew up living in rented apartments in
which money was tight, while her immigrant parents worked a string of “random,”
largely blue-collar jobs, recalled feeling different from her predominantly Chinese
American friends, most of whom had parents who were professionals and lived in homes
their families owned: “I think the big factor was, they had their own house, and we
didn’t… that was the biggest difference I noticed between me and my friends.” Grace
was “a bit embarrassed” that her family could not afford a house, because of “what
having a house represented”: “with Koreans,” she explained, “part of showing your
wealth was having a house… growing up, that’s what I was taught by my folks.” For
Grace, the symbolism of what having a house meant—that one had “made it” as an
immigrant—extended to other Asian American groups as well. She felt, in contrast to her
friends, that although her parents were also immigrants, “their immigrant story wasn’t
similar to my other Asian friends. ‘Cause I feel like… they’ve kind of made it? Whereas
my parents, they didn’t really make it… [my friends’ parents] had like, professions, and it
all goes back to you know, being middle-class, and we weren’t really like that.” Even
though Grace did her best to “keep up” with her friends, she “knew we were kind of
different.”
41

41
Interview with Grace Ahn, January 16, 2008.

78
Perhaps because she was so conscious of the Asian model minority stereotype’s
lack of truth in her own life, Grace became extremely sensitive to how she and other
Asian Americans—who tended to dominant honors classes and school activities in high
school—were perceived by others.
I was more cautious of how I said things so that, like, the Latino kids didn’t think we
were being prejudiced against them, or things like that… just even like, using the right
way to identify them... you know, is it okay to say ‘chicana’ or—you know, things
like that, the terminology? I just remember being kind of cautious… so that we
didn’t… so that I didn’t offend other minorities, because we were such a majority.… I
guess I didn’t want them to think of us stereotypically, you know, how Asians are
supposed to be… kind of let ‘em be aware that you know, we weren’t all Chinese…
‘cause you know, they usually categorized us into one thing, into one group…. I guess
to just kind of show that we weren’t all the same…. I just feel like… me personally, I
just had to be careful with how I am, so that I’m not considered as you know, a typical
Asian person.

She sought simultaneously to defuse middle-class Asian Americans’ relatively privileged
status compared to Latinas/os at school (to be discussed further in Chapter 2), and
interrupt the racial assumptions many Latina/o students held about Asians. Her awareness
of the inadequacy of stereotypes and their power to exclude or obscure difference,
symbolized by “what having a house represented,” inflected her social relationships; her
cautiousness about neither treating other people as homogenous nor letting her own group
be treated as homogenous—”to show that we weren’t all the same”—served as an
attempt to make more room for assertions of difference.

Renting and Owning
At the same time, some West SGV residents, particularly immigrant families,
produced new meanings regarding what owning a house did or did not mean. In 2000, the
ratio of owner-occupied to rented units in the West SGV averaged 44 percent owner-
79
occupied (slightly lower than the 48 percent owner-occupied average of LA County as a
whole) to 53 percent renter-occupied (for Alhambra and Monterey Park figures by race
and ethnicity, see Figures 14 and 15). The availability of a mix of units from apartments
to townhomes to single-family homes translated to flexible uses of space. Paul Pham,
42
an
18-year-old whose ethno-Chinese Vietnamese family escaped Khmer Rouge rule in
Cambodia via Vietnam and then Los Angeles, has lived in a triplex in Alhambra with a
combined total of fourteen extended family members nearly all his life, which the family
rented for years before saving up enough to purchase it.
43
Traditional narratives of
upward mobility feature a young couple or nuclear family which moves “out into the
suburbs” in order to buy a home. The experience of the Phams and of the stories which
follow show that other factors beyond the possibility of homeownership, such as family
and community amenities, draw diverse Asian and Latina/o families to the West SGV,
and that the mix of types of housing makes it possible for residents of a variety of income
levels to maintain proximity to family members and preferred amenities.
Milo and Gina Alvarez’s parents chose to rent an apartment in Alhambra for a
period of years rather than buy a house in East LA in order to afford their children better
educational opportunities and a quieter environment in which to grow up.
44
On Dora
Padilla’s street of single-family homes in Alhambra, the mix of rentals and owner-
occupied units have made it possible for Padilla’s daughter and son-in-law to rent a house

42
A pseudonym.

43
Interview with Paul Pham, August 14, 2007.

44
Interview with Milo Alvarez, February 27, 2008.

80
across the street. Padilla also described how her Chinese neighbors have paved what was
previously the backyard to make more parking spaces for their extended family:
[T]his house, it’s multiple, from what we can see… they took the backyard, had it all
torn out. Here the former owners had put in a sprinkling system to make it good for
selling and everything. And they took it out, all the trees and everything. Everything
cemented. They even [put] stripes in, ‘cause they’ll be as many as eight cars back
there.
I see. So you think there’s more than one family living there, or—
It’s the mother and the father, with I think a couple of sons. I understand from friends
telling me… in the Chinese tradition, the oldest son has the honor of having the
mother and father. And that’s the way they pool their resources. One fellow that was a
bilingual teacher in the district told me, he says, ‘That’s how they do it. Let the oldest
son be successful, everyone pools their money. It’s crowded sometimes, but we do it.’
And I think that’s a marvelous tradition, if they can stand each other [laughs]. I think
that’s marvelous.
45

Although Padilla seemed mildly disapproving that the family had “torn out” the
backyard, she made an effort to understand it in light of “Chinese tradition” and even to
say that she thought it was a “marvelous tradition.”
Grace Ahn (whose feelings about home ownership have been discussed above)
first moved to Alhambra when her aunt, who was single and worked as a nurse,
purchased a home there. Grace and her parents lived with her aunt for a period of years,
before moving into an apartment when other relatives from Korea arrived and took up
their place in the house. Thus in the extended Ahn family, home ownership was not
synonymous with furthering the wealth and prospects of a heteronormative nuclear
family, but with offering an entry point to the area for a larger extended family upon
immigrating to the United States. Finally, Nancy Do, a 22-year-old child of Vietnamese
refugees, described how, growing up in Monterey Park, her family, in their rented
apartments, was always surrounded by her “whole family”: “You’d walk down the street

45
Interview with Dora Padilla, October 24, 2007.

81
and—across the street was my grandmother, and up the street were my two cousins, you
know, so. And my aunts lived with my grandmother, and my uncles, you know. So my
whole family was there….”
Alhambra Housing Tenure by Race/Ethnicity, 2000
Compiled from US Census 2000, Summary File 4
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
Vietnamese
Japanese
Chinese
Mexican
Non-Hisp. White
Total
percent
renter-occupied units
owner-occupied units

Figure 14: Alhambra housing tenure by race/ ethnicity, 2000
Monterey Park Housing Tenure by Race/Ethnicity, 2000
Compiled from US Census 2000, Summary File 4
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Vietnamese
Japanese
Chinese
Mexican
Non-Hisp. White
Total
percent
renter-occupied units
owner-occupied units

Figure 15: Monterey Park housing tenure by race/ ethnicity, 2000
82
A New Non-White Majority
I never felt, when I was growing up, oh, I wish I was this, or I wish I was that.
Because I think we were always the majority… where we lived.
- Gina Alvarez
46

I like being around… old men on their bicycles and Chinese people and Mexican
people, and I like the fact that there’s not a lot of White people out here because they
would ruin a lot of things. Gentrification and everything, you know? They would ruin
a lot of the things that have already [been] established.
- Nancy Do
47

Gina Alvarez and Nancy Do’s comments point to a sense of being part of a non-
White majority common to particular communities in the West San Gabriel Valley. When
as an adult, Gina Alvarez moved slightly outside of the area and enrolled her two young
children in pre-schools with larger numbers of Whites, she quickly realized that, “you
know, the schools over there are good, but… when I would look at the ethnicity of it, it’s
mostly Caucasian, and I didn’t want my kids to—because I never grew up like that, being
the minority, and I didn’t want that for them, you know?” When her older child was
ready to go to kindergarten, Alvarez made a choice to “put her in an environment where
she’s confident in who she is… So I moved her to another school where, you know, she
is—I wouldn’t say the majority, but there’s more people that look like her than not.”
Nancy Do connected her sense of the undesirability of “White people” to “gentrification
and everything,” linking the particular nexus of racial/ethnic social relations in the West
SGV with class status and relationships to property.
Both Alvarez and Do articulated the West SGV’s particular version of what Scott
Kurashige has called “a new polyethnic majority,” at a moment in which the United

46
Interview with Gina Alvarez, April 4, 2008.

47
Interview with Nancy Do, March 21, 2007.

83
States is transforming rapidly from a majority-White society towards one in which people
of color constitute the majority (Kurashige 2004). In the context of the West SGV,
despite the heterogeneity of individual experiences, what binds residents together in the
first instance is historical context, how their families were part of broader racialized
movements and patterns, although what they end up making of it is distinct—making
collectively, what I have argued (following Lipsitz) is a moral geography of
differentiated space. Geographers’ metaphor of sedimentation is also useful, because
what also binds people’s heterogeneous experiences together is place. The sedimentation
of history and collective experience adds up to a whole that is more than the parts.
Whatever their professed individual motivations, by choosing to move there and then by
staying long-term and establishing broad family roots in the area, Asian Americans and
Mexican Americans laid the groundwork for later immigrants who settled in the region,
particularly large numbers of ethnic Chinese who came beginning in the late 1970s.
They produced a particular racial mix in which lines of identification across
racial and ethnic lines shift with circumstances and are often unpredictable—for instance,
in which, later-generation Asian Americans and Mexican Americans sometimes identify
and sometimes disidentify with more recent immigrants depending on the situation. For
instance, for the Japanese American man described at the opening of this chapter and
others, perceptions of the more recent immigrants range from alternately “locusts” and
“damn chinos” to fellow Asians, fellow immigrants, fellow people of color. In this
chapter I have argued that people make places; whether or not under circumstances of
their own choosing, they make choices, and the choices as well the constraints became
clear especially through the lens of race and relationships to property. Differential
84
racialization via discourse around who is or is not deserving of property continues
through the present and continues tacitly to link notions of Whiteness and property. Most
recently this has manifested in expressions of opposition to “McMansions,” a term which
in the West SGV is more often than not code for the aesthetic tastes of rich Asian
immigrants who presumably buy their homes with cash and therefore do not conform to
the approved immigrant trajectory of starting downtrodden and having to pull oneself up
by the bootstraps before daring to purchase a piece of the American dream—a new kind
of Yellow Peril expressed through buying up all the “bigger homes” and “nicer cars” (as
one disgruntled White resident of San Marino put it).
48
For all his complaints about
“chinos” and their McMansions, however, the Japanese American man had still stayed in
the area and near the home which his mother had occupied for so many decades. His
presence—and the near total absence of Whites—nonetheless points to a solidification of
differentiated, majority non-White suburban space through the years. As Japanese
American Lisa Beppu put it, although the community had “changed an awful lot,” “I feel
comfortable here.”
49

48
Interview with David and Soume Tong, September 28, 2007.

49
Interview with Lisa Beppu, June 28, 2007.

85

Chapter 2: ‘The Asian and Latino Thing in Schools’:
Regional Racial Formation and Institutions of Civil Society

... in this concert [of reproduction of capitalist relations], one ideological State
apparatus certainly has the dominant role, although hardly anyone lends an ear to its
music: it is so silent! This is the School. (Althusser 2001, 104)

I guess in Alhambra you only have a choice—a ‘choice,’ and that’s in quotations—
between Latinos or Asians.
- Nancy Tran,
1
former student, Alhambra High School

In the spring of 2005, Alhambra High
2
received the Title I Academic
Achievement Award, which recognizes schools with low-income student populations that
have made progress in closing the achievement gap. Principal Russell Lee-Sung arranged
a meeting with student government leaders to announce the good news. One of the
students present at the meeting was Robin Zhou, an inquisitive, first-generation Chinese
American senior, who began to wonder why this gap—a persistent discrepancy in test
scores and grade point averages between Alhambra’s Asian American and Latina/o
students—existed in the first place. The results of his speculations ran in Robin’s monthly
school newspaper column, “Nerd Rants,” on March 22, 2005 (see Appendix B).
3

1
Interview with Nancy Tran, March 9, 2007. All names excepting those of Robin Zhou, school and
district administrators, and persons quoted in publicly available media have been changed to protect the
privacy of my respondents.

2
Alhambra’s residents currently number approximately 90,000. Its city motto is the “gateway to the
San Gabriel Valley,” and its residents are primarily lower-middle to middle-income Latinas/os and
Asian Americans (52 percent Asian and 32 percent Hispanic or Latina/o, according to the 2006
American Community Survey (http://factfinder.census.gov/); accessed June 30, 2008).

3
See Appendix B for the full text of the column.
86
Following the headline, “Latinos Lag Behind in Academics,” he wrote that “Hispanic
students” were not “pulling their weight,” and attributed the cause to cultural factors,
suggesting that Asian parents “push their children to move toward academic success”
while Latino parents “are well-meaning but less active.” Zhou also attributed the
disparity to what he called a “deliberate segregation” of students into two groups,
AP/honors and regular, beginning in middle school, and closed with a stern remonstrance
for lower-scoring students to take the gap seriously: “Those who casually dismiss their
own inabilities that place them on the bottom end must be forced to understand that those
are not empty numbers, but are indicators of the brightness of their futures.” Even though
he stated that he was not “suggesting that brown people cannot think on the level of white
and yellow people,” but that he felt the difference in test scores had to be addressed, the
column, along with a subsequent news article which ran in a local newspaper a week
later, set off what Lee-Sung described as a “firestorm” of controversy among students,
teachers, administrators, and parents.
4

Much of the frustration that emerged in the weeks after the column’s publication
revolved around the difficulty of articulating exactly what the problem was. Whether or
not people believed there was any “truth” to what Robin Zhou had written, they seemed
to agree that how he had written it was a problem: Either he had told the truth but it was
“phrased too harshly”
5
or “politically incorrect,” or Robin’s “elaborate,” “sophisticated”

4
Interview with Russell Lee-Sung, April 18, 2007.

5
Senior Leslie Granillo, interviewed by The Moor in a special edition published two weeks after
Robin’s column, believed that although “[s]ome thought that certain parts of the article were phrased
too harshly, but I don’t think it would have had the same effect if it were sugar-coated.” (Alhambra
High School Moor, April 12, 2005)

87
language disguised statements that were simply racist. For instance, student Jenny
Rodriguez felt that “Robin Zhou should [not] have written the column… in the way that
he did,” but “[i]n the end, I believe that it was a good statement… because it is a wakeup
call to every Hispanic.” Math teacher Abel Bourbois protested that it was “elitist,
unsubstantiated speculation” that used “elevated vocabulary to make a hurtful idea more
legitimate.”
6

In the heated dialogue that followed, it became clear that much more was at stake
than raising test scores and grade point averages. In fact, Robin’s column exposed to
public scrutiny a socioacademic order dramatically bifurcated by race. Students, teachers,
and administrators’ attempts to resolve the crisis revealed how deeply national American
ideologies intertwining race, individualism, and merit shaped participants’ ways of
making sense of racial and ethnic hierarchies. Simultaneously, “common-sense” ways of
making sense of the existing socioacademic order were elucidated, ruptured, and
reproduced. Various participants’ struggles to articulate something different suggested
forms of regional thinking that eluded hegemonic purview—what Raymond Williams
(1977) has described as structures of feeling, or “meanings and values as they are actually
lived and felt,” which are as yet ideologically unthinkable but perched “at the very edge
of semantic availability” (132-4).
In this chapter, I explore the dialectic between the constraints of national
ideologies and regional affective/ experiential possibilities in the context of the key civil
society institution of school, articulating processes of regional racial formation through
the lens of high school experience. In the context of school, a focus on regional racial

6
Alhambra High School Moor, April 12, 2005.

88
formation highlights the open-endedness of meanings created from everyday interactions
and unanticipated consequences of proximity, particularly in spaces and places created by
non-White groups that constitute “worlds of their own” (Garcia 2001; cf. Wiese 2004),
despite dominant state institutions that have historically nurtured majority-White spaces
to the detriment of other groups’ mobility and life chances (cf. Harris 1993, Pulido 2000,
Lipsitz 1998, Massey and Denton 1993, and Sugrue 1996, among others).
Throughout, I argue that in the particular regional context of the West SGV, the
production of binary discourses of “achievement” at Alhambra High—racialization of
Asian American academic excellence, along with a concomitant racialization of Latina/o
academic deficiency—shaped students’ experiences to such a degree that it was not
merely an explanation for particular outcomes, but productive of a social order that
valorized Asian American students at the expense of “non-Asians.” As a result, Asian
American students within this social order often experienced and enacted a form of what
I theorize as racialized privilege—in which the particulars are predicated by one’s
racialization, or ascribed group identity, by dominant society. A concept of (non-White)
racialized privilege marks a critical shift from thinking about privilege as synonymous
with Whiteness, and argues for increased recognition and accountability for the effects of
racial hierarchies from all positions. Finally, in the episode that frames this chapter, one
student’s attempt to address the “problem” of the achievement gap in the school
newspaper ignited struggles over language and meaning which served to both reproduce
and subvert previously accepted norms, showing how close attention to regional racial
formations may reveal possibilities other than reification of dominant paradigms.

89
‘Our school does not have very many White or Black people’
Since the 1980s, students at Alhambra High have been accustomed to an
racial/ethnic mix that is overwhelmingly Asian and Latina/o (currently 48 percent Asian
and 44 percent Latina/o). For Gabriela Fernandez, a 19-year-old Mexican American
whose family has lived in Alhambra for three generations, since elementary school, the
racial/ethnic mix had “pretty much been like, you know, the Hispanic and the Asian and
that’s pretty much all I’ve ever seen. And sometimes, [a] Caucasian comes in… and
you’re just kind of like, well, okay, you can come and be my friend too.” Gabriela’s
parents work as a professional nurse and a meatcutter, making “good money,” as she put
it.
7

Annie Liu, 18, whose parents are first-generation immigrants of Chinese and
Chinese-Korean descent, characterized her perception of the racial/ethnic makeup of the
area as a whole:
It’s very rare you see Caucasian people…. Whereas like, if you drive down the street,
you’ll see a huge group of Latino kids, or a huge group of Asian kids hanging out. So
I always felt that this area was more for people who just moved to California from
another country…. I don’t really know what the appeal of this area is to new
immigrants, but if you’re looking for a community where you won’t feel too, you
know, outcasted, I guess this is where it’d be, because you look at the makeup, and
it’s like, wow, it’s mostly Asian and Latino.
8

Both of Annie’s parents attended college prior to emigrating to the U.S. Now her father
works as a buyer for a department store in Pasadena, while her mother is employed by a
Korean airline at LAX.

7
Interview with Gabriela Fernandez, March 28, 2007.

8
Interview with Annie Liu, July 27, 2007.

90
Twenty-two-year-old Nancy Tran, whose ethno-Chinese parents fled Vietnam
after the fall of Saigon, put it this way: “I guess in Alhambra you only have a choice—a
‘choice,’ and that’s in quotations—between Latinos or Asians.”
9
Nancy’s mother is a
clerk for Los Angeles County, while her father works 2am-to-noon nightshifts as a
machine operator for a manufacturing company.
In eighteen-year old Paul Pham’s view, at Alhambra High, students who were
neither Asian nor Latina/o were so uncommon, that “We would probably assume that
they were either Asian or Hispanic even if they weren’t. I think that would be the way we
approached them, until they actually told us.” For example, he remembered a few Middle
Eastern friends, “who were assumed to be Hispanic.” He continued, “I know that our
school does not have very many White or Black people. And when we do see them, we
kind of stare for a second, actually. We would actually go, ‘hey, we do have them here’
[laughing].”
10
Paul’s family is also ethno-Chinese Vietnamese, and escaped Khmer
Rouge rule in Cambodia via Vietnam and then Los Angeles. Paul’s father works in an
auto body shop and his mother as a seamstress.
In this metropolitan suburb, the Asian and Latina/o mix—as well as the diverse
transnational, generational, and class character of students’ lives—stands in distinct
contrast to mainstream conceptions of majority non-White spaces as poor “ghettoes”
populated by African Americans and Latinas/os. Seen in this light, Annie’s comment that
Alhambra is a place in which new immigrants can be comfortable, where they won’t feel
“outcasted”—and furthermore, where they constitute the “norm,” suggests a novel

9
Interview with Nancy Tran, March 9, 2007.

10
Interview with Paul Pham, August 14, 2007.

91
regional racial order in which immigrants and people of color are not marginal or
exceptional, but at the center. However, the former students’ observations, especially
Paul’s, also suggest a perceived normative, binary aspect to the racial mix of the area.
The establishment of norms, especially binaries, which eventually pass as “common
sense” has been central to the operation of race as a political system of categories that, for
most of modern world history, has defined “who should get what.”
11
For instance, at a
global scale, the legacies of an imperial-colonial order justified and dictated by
categorizing people non-European peoples as “others” (cf. Said 1978, Williams 1994,
Fanon 2004, Blaut 1993, and Chakrabarty 2000, among others) still continue to shape the
life-and-death chances of much of the world today. Considering U.S. history, one can
argue that national ideologies of race—which is to say, its dominant notions of
citizenship and humanity—have predominantly been defined by a Black-White binary
developed in tandem with the enslavement of forcibly displaced Africans (Fields 1990),
the erasure and displacement of Native Americans, and the production of Whiteness
(Jacobson 1998; Allen 1994). These continue to define structural privilege, deprivation,
and neglect in racial terms today (cf. Gilmore 2002a, 2002b, and 2006; Mills 1997).
12

Within this context, the dynamics and meanings of a regional racial order
inscribed primarily by Asians and Latinas/os appear, at least at first glance, to be far less
overdetermined—at least, they have not been continually inscribed and reinscribed in the

11
Analyzing Black-White-Asian racial dynamics in the United States, Claire Jean Kim (1999) has
theorized “a field of racial positions” that works as “a normative blueprint for who should get what.”

12
Also see Fredrickson (1981) for an illuminating comparative study of White supremacy as a political
system in South Africa and the United States. White supremacy is an overarching political ideology and
system (Mills 1997) which supports the production and perpetuation of (White) “privilege”, which is
the participation in, and exercise of, particular benefits and advantages accrued historically by Whites,
such as disproportionate ownership of property and other sources of capital (see Harris 1993, Pulido
2000, and Lipsitz 1998).

92
same ways in terms of discourse, effects, and outcomes. Statements such as Nancy
Tran’s—“I guess in Alhambra you only have… a ‘choice’, and that’s in quotations,
between Latinos or Asians”—in particular, her invocation of the quotation marks
surrounding the word “choice,” suggest that the experiences self-described “Asians” and
“Latinas/os” are having in Alhambra on the ground exceed the ability of dominant racial
discourses to contain them. Nonetheless, any regional racial order in the United States
cannot help but be molded by national ideologies. How and where was this happening in
Alhambra?

The importance of school as a key institution of civil society
According to Althusser (2001), of all of institutions of civil society, school
occupies the dominant position in contemporary capitalist societies, as the only institution
which has “the obligatory… audience of the totality of the children in the capitalist social
formation, eight hours a day for five or six days out of seven” (105). Indeed, in the West
SGV, outside of school, interethnic/interracial interactions happen only unevenly on a
daily basis. While Latina/o residents (largely lower-middle to middle-income Mexican
Americans
13
) are likely to work in state institutions such as hospitals, local governments,
and schools, Latinas/os employed in the area’s high concentration of ethnic-Chinese-
owned and oriented businesses may commute from poorer areas to the east and south,
and fill primarily blue-collar positions such as busboy and janitor. Clientele at these
businesses may never notice such workers, who perform their labor in the background or

13
As of 2000, Latinas/os of Mexican origin constituted 75.1% of the Hispanic or Latina/o population in
Alhambra. Of these, less than 30 percent were foreign born, compared with nearly 80 percent of Asians
living in Alhambra. (US Census 2000)

93
out of sight. A tendency toward ethnic/racial clumping in some neighborhoods and the
predominance of car culture exacerbates the unevenness of inter-group interactions. In
the public schools, however, which more accurately reflect the demographic composition
of the area, sustained interethnic and interracial interactions happen every day between
students, staff, and administrators.
Within this compulsory context, school serves to inculcate a sense of a national
culture and ideologies that mold students to enter the working world as productive and
loyal citizens. In its capacity as an everyday, “racialized landscape” (Schein 2003),
school concretizes and normalizes “some prescribed social, racial, class, economic, or
political order that not only stands for the past and present, but also inescapably embodies
power relations that make claims on the future,” although its norms are “unconsciously
promoted and unrecognized as anything other than ‘common sense’” (217). Like
everyday landscapes, common sense itself appears self-evident; as Stuart Hall (1996)
reminds us, it “represents itself as the ‘traditional wisdom or truth of the ages,’ but in
fact, it is deeply a product of history, ‘part of the historical process’” (Hall cites Gramsci;
15). From its central position in civil society, then, school is uniquely able to normalize
stratified groupings under cover of neutrality and egalitarianism.
14
While the effects of
such institutions in practice are never uniform or homogenous (cf. Willis 1977), looking
closely at social dynamics in school nonetheless allows us to see in sharp relief the ways
in which school is fundamental to structuring society along racial and class lines (cf. Hall
1980; Carby 1982). Marxist theorists have also emphasized the potential for subversion

14
Foucault, in his essay “Of Other Spaces” (1986) put forth a concept of heterotopias, a category of
marginalized sites/spaces integral to shaping the center or norm, a “constitutive outside.” School, I
would argue, constitutes a constitutive inside.

94
and challenge of hegemonic ideologies in school and other institutions of civil society
(Althusser 2001, Gramsci 2005). As Althusser puts it, school is both the “stake” and the
“site” of ideological racialized, class struggle—that is, through struggle, reconfigurations
of power can occur and outcomes are not fixed.

Producing the ‘gap’: Alhambra High’s social-academic order
What, then, was the specific regional nature of the social-academic order at
Alhambra High, within the theoretical and institutional contexts I have laid out so far?
Initially, in elementary school and junior high, most of my respondents who grew up in
Alhambra and Monterey Park enjoyed racially and ethnically mixed groups of friends
regardless of the range of their interactions outside of school. But by the time they
entered high school, many experienced a shift in their social interactions; their social
groups tended to become more segregated, and they became more conscious of racial and
ethnic dynamics. At Alhambra High, this increased separation was influenced by a
tracking system, and after formal tracking was discontinued, by a conspicuous divide
between who took Honors and AP classes (overwhelmingly Asian American students)
and who took ‘regular’ classes (the vast majority of Latina/o students). Because the
composition of AP and honors classes was over 90 percent Asian, and many
extracurricular activities such as social clubs and student government were also
predominantly Asian, for many students, especially those often categorized as “high-
achieving” students, racially segregated social groups were easily perpetuated and
naturalized.
95
In educational circles as well as popular discourse, distinctly racialized socio-
academic orders in school are commonly referred to in the language of the “achievement
gap,” a term which denotes a consistent disparity in grades and/or test scores between one
category of students and another. While divisions are sometimes laid out along lines of
gender or other identity categories, over time the term has acquired distinct racial
connotations and is usually used in the context of one racially marked group consistently
and conspicuously achieving higher grades and test scores than another (cf. Ladson-
Billings 2006). Beginning in the 1960s, a considerable amount of popular media and
academic research focused on the ‘achievement gap’ between Black and White students.
In California, as demographics have shifted and White enrollment in public schools has
dropped precipitously, attention to the ‘achievement gap’ has focused increasingly on
grade and standardized test-score disparities between White and Asian American students
on the one hand, and Latina/o and Black students on the other (Becerra 2008). As at
Alhambra High, in a significant number of public high schools in metropolitan Southern
California, Asian Americans and Latina/o students make up a large majority of the
students, and Asian American students as a group tend to make better grades, score
higher on standardized tests, have a greater level of participation in school activities, and
be more likely to enter a four-year college. At Alhambra, the disparity has been treated as
a problem by the school and the Alhambra Unified School District (AUSD) as a whole
for a number of years. According to Scott Mangrum, AUSD’s Director of Research and
Evaluation, part of the district’s motivation for discontinuing “ability tracking” (in which
students are placed into the same levels of different courses across the curriculum) in the
late ‘90s had to do with “overtones” of discrimination, since the lowest “track,”
96
consisting of courses which did not meet standards for state college and university
admission, tended to be constituted by “all minorities” (meaning non-Asian students, i.e.
Latinas/os).
15

Even though strongly racialized patterns among students who took AP/Honors
versus “regular” courses and differences in college preparedness have persisted,
Alhambra now compares somewhat favorably to demographically comparable schools at
both the district and state level in several respects. In 2007-08, more Latina/o students at
Alhambra met state college and university entrance requirements than the district
average, and they performed better on the state high school exit exam (CAHSEE) than
Latina/o students as a whole in the district, as well as in the state, by around 10 percent.
16

Perhaps most notably, in 2005 the school received the Title I Academic Achievement
Award. Nonetheless, after Robin Zhou wrote his opinion piece on the subject, public
response was such that the “gap” was revealed to be an open wound for which no easy
solutions or interpretations could be agreed upon. In order to understand the nature of this
wound, we must consider the specific components of the racialization of academic
achievement at Alhambra High.

15
To make sure more students were eligible for college by eliminating courses that didn’t meet
standards for Cal State and UC admission, detracking meant that the lowest track, or “B-level,” courses
were essentially eliminated, and A-level courses became the current “college prep” (or “regular”)
courses. Phone conversation with Scott Mangrum, June 18, 2008. At the time I spoke with Mangrum,
his position had been eliminated due to funding problems, and he was being transferred to a different
job at a high school at the end of the month.

16
According to 2006 data. In 2006-07, while the number of Cal State and UC-eligible Latina/o students
had increased from previous years, 60 percent of Asian students as compared to only 24 percent of
Latinas/os completed Cal State/UC entrance requirements (California Department of Education,
Educational Demographics Unit. In 2004-05 (the most recent data available), just over half of
Alhambra’s senior class took the SAT (51.1 percent). 62.8 percent of the testtakers were Asian, while
only 27 percent were Hispanic or Latina/o. In 2006-07, 24 percent of Latina/o students at Alhambra
High as compared to 18.3 percent in the AUSD district as a whole met state college and university
entrance requirements. All data from California Department of Education, Educational Demographics
Unit, http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/ Accessed June 16, 2008.

97

The Racialization of Academic Achievement
Since the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racially
segregated schooling illegal, a voluminous amount of scholarly literature as well as
popular media has been produced on the subject of group discrepancies in academic
attainment. In 2002, the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, with its explicit focus
on “closing the achievement gap between high and low performing children, especially
minority and non-minority students” (as cited by Paik and Walhlberg 2007, 4), testified
to the continued centrality and urgency of the issue on a national level. I will not attempt
to summarize this literature, which spans multiple disciplines and a half century, but I
wish to point out two persistent discursive threads over the years: the pitching of
problems and proposal of solutions 1) in terms of generalizations about inherent cultural
attributes, and 2) vis-à-vis studies of individual motivation and families.
17

Overt arguments about “cultural deficiency” which participated in the
pathologization of the Black urban “underclass” via denigrating Black families were most
prevalent in scholarly discourse in the 1960s. More recent academic research in education
now takes up a multi-pronged approach—encompassing arguments about the
psychological effects of racial stereotypes, “cultural mismatch,” curriculum and school
structure, and teachers’ pedagogical practices (Ladson-Billings 2006, 4). Nonetheless,
culturalist and individualist reasoning remains common in education literature, and
certainly continues to dominate popular discourse. In our contemporary era in which

17
The language used in education scholars Paik and Wahlberg’s edited anthology on the subject (2007)
is representative: in the introduction, Paik and Wahlberg describe “the strengths and challenges of
minority children,” and ask, “How can we diminish the achievement gaps…? Educators and allied
professionals are interested in improving the efforts of these growing minority populations” (1-2).

98
explicit reference to race is taboo and “culture” stands in as its euphemism, references to
“culture” (as an underlying cause for differential outcomes) often have the effect of
continuing to reify racial categories and difference as inherent, rather than socially,
historically, and relationally constructed. A focus on individual motivation and family
dynamics, without attention to larger social and institutional factors, can serve similarly
to divert attention from structural and relational factors. Further, it easily partakes in
coded racist discourse veiling the same-old “underclass” rationale (whose opposite is the
model minority (Kim 2000)), in which individual failure may be traced to a “cycle of
pathology” in families and communities (Carby 1982). Indeed, education scholar Gloria
Ladson-Billings (2006) suggests that it will take more than diversification in research to
shift fundamental thinking on the subject, pointing out that most existing work offers
only short-term solutions which treat the symptoms rather than the cause. Ladson-
Billings argues instead for reconceptualizing the achievement gap as an “education debt”
accrued through the effects of structural inequalities over time (rather than a naturally
occurring phenomenon in the present), which can only be paid back through large-scale
change.
My analysis which follows of the racialization of achievement at Alhambra High
concerns precisely the problem which Ladson-Billings highlights—how words, such as
“achievement gap,” present not merely a neutral description of facts, but manifest and
reproduce ways of making sense of the world, or ideologies. That is, discourse is not
merely representative or explanatory, but productive of material conditions and essential
to the operation of power (cf. Foucault 1980, 1982, 1995, 2003; Hall 1971, 1980, 1996;
Althusser 2001; Said 1978). Attaching “common sense” rationales to particular social
99
orders and hierarchies has real effects, ultimately serving to facilitate and justify “who
gets what.” Indeed, even at the modest scale of Alhambra High, the “gap” was not merely
a problem of some combination of “cultural differences,” individual motivation, and
family environment, but produced by a racialized socio-academic order. “Common-
sense” arguments involving cultural differences and recourse to the American
individualist myth of success (that anyone, regardless of race or class—can succeed in
this country, if they only work hard) served to veil and naturalize fundamentally racial
constructions of Asian Americans as high achievers and Latinas/os as academically
deficient. These shaped students’ experiences to such a degree that they became not
merely an explanation for particular outcomes, but (re)productive of a social order that
valorized Asian American students at the expense of Latinas/os. For Asian American
students, this effectively constituted a racialized form of privilege—in which the
particulars are predicated by one’s racialization, or dialectically asserted and ascribed
group identity, by dominant society.

‘Because I was Asian, I pretty much had this path set for me’
Popular reasoning behind the commonly held stereotype that Asian Americans
excel in education is, of course, bound up with the Asian American model minority myth.
Most often it features two seemingly contradictory lines of reasoning: first, that valuing
education is inherent to an essentialized “Asian” culture; and second, that Asians succeed
in school because they work hard, therefore embodying the ideal immigrant/ minority
group by increasing their capacity to contribute productively to American society—if
they can do it, the argument goes, why can’t Black people, or Latinas/os, or any other
100
marginalized group? However, this second line of reasoning is actually as essentialist in
its underpinnings as the first, since it usually rests on an assumption that the “Asian”
work ethic is attributable, again, to an essentialized “Asian” culture. At Alhambra High,
students, teachers, and administrators frequently expressed such generalized cultural
explanations, as the following accounts suggest. When Nancy Tran’s family moved from
a diverse, generally poor neighborhood in Echo Park to Alhambra when she was in third
grade, Nancy observed a difference right away, which she attributed to something “within
the Asian community.”
The kids… studied a lot more. I think the kids in Alhambra, they just generally work
really hard. But it’s not true of everyone. Truthfully, I think it’s within the Asian
community. I think they work a lot harder, maybe because of parental pressure?
18

Annie Liu used the terms “Asianized” or “Westernized” to describe degrees of
commitment to academic achievement. Students in the year following hers, she said,
were “even more competitive”: some had gotten perfect SAT scores, and all had straight
A’s and were involved in multiple extracurricular activites. “To some extent,” she said,
they were “even further along than we are—you know, like further ‘Asianized’ or
whatever you want to call it… working their butts off to get into a good college.” When I
asked if she felt that this “Asianized” culture of achievement was generally
acknowledged in the area, she said yes, adding,
I mean, whenever I encounter parents who were like, ‘oh, as long as they’re doing
their best,’ I think to myself, that’s such a Westernized kind of thought, you know?
19

Gary Wong, a Chinese American history teacher at Alhambra High, agreed. It
was not wrong, he believed, to say that Asian parents pushed their kids. “They’re not

18
Interview with Nancy Tran, March 9, 2007.

19
Interview with Annie Liu, July 27, 2007.

101
satisfied [if] their kids get B’s and C’s. They’re satisfied when their kids go to
Harvard.”
20
Even though Wong, a history teacher, had a detailed understanding of the
diverse cultural, economic, and political conditions under which various Asian ethnic
groups have immigrated to the United States in the past few decades, nonetheless, like the
students I interviewed, he took for granted a shared “Asian” culture undergirding Asian
American student success. Any Asian American whose family did not value and push for
educational success constituted a deviation from this “cultural script” (Louie 2004).
21
In a
similar vein, Paul Pham, when I asked whether or not he was always “expected or
encouraged to achieve” at the level he was achieving (his senior year he was co-editor in
chief of the student newspaper, got top grades in his slate of AP and Honors classes, was
involved in a biomedical research elective as well as service clubs, and was admitted to
Yale and Harvard, among other elite universities), answered, “No. Surprisingly not. Um,
and my friends tell me this also—I’m kind of an anomaly, because I achieve, but I’m not
pushed to achieve.” If he hadn’t “achieved” at the level he had, he believed his parents
would not have viewed him much differently: “their expectations of me were not as high
as those of other parents—Asian parents.”
22

For Nancy, Annie, and Paul, as well as their teacher Gary Wong, easy recourse to
racialized cultural explanations—referencing a shared “Asian” culture which implicitly
valued education more than other cultures—blocked access to all other explanations. This

20
Interview with Gary Wong, February 19, 2008.

21
For instance, Wong asserted that his lack of set college expectations for his own children was
“atypical, because my parents were atypical”; because he did not push his sons to go to elite
universities, he conceived of himself as deviating from the mandates of “Asian” immigrant culture, and
furthermore, that he was this way only because his parents had not performed the usual Asian parental
indoctrinations regarding education either.

22
Interview with Paul Pham, August 14, 2007.

102
generalized “Asian” culture was contrasted (implicitly or explicitly) against a generalized
“Western” culture, rather than placed in the specific ethnic, racial, and national contexts
in which they actually lived. Particular regional factors, such as a greater amount of
social capital, or resources derived from “socially patterned associations” (Bourdieu
2001; Stanton-Salazar 2001, 265-70), on the part of the Asian American students, such as
parents’ educational attainment and social networks which shared information and
facilitated sending students to private tutoring schools (Prado 2006),
23
went
unacknowledged as contributing factors in the “gap”. Vivian Louie (2004) has made
similar observations in her study of 1.5- and 2
nd
-generation Chinese American college
students in New York City; while many of the Chinese immigrant parents she
interviewed attributed their approach to education to Confucian values and educational
norms in their sending countries, their children rarely understood these values with any
ethnonational or historical specificity, and instead cited generalized “Asian” values.
The effect of such erasures at Alhambra High was an atmosphere in which the
brainy, studious Asian student was seen and accepted simply as the truth, showing the
prodigious ability of racial discourse to obscure recognition of substantial social factors
and stand in as common sense, In Gabriela Fernandez’s opinion,
It was… known that the Asian students did a lot better than everybody else. I mean,
Asians are smart. Some Hispanics are smart too. But you always see Asians studying,
you always see ‘em in the library; they’re always reading, they always get A’s on their
tests. So yeah, it was pretty much known around the school that Asians did better in
classes than everybody else.
24

23
Prado, in his study of social networks and academic achievement at a similar, unidentified West San
Gabriel Valley high school, concluded that while available statistical evidence showed “no large or
significant class differences” between Asians and Latinas/os at the school, a greater amount of social
capital on the part of the Asian American students (in terms of the factors named above) played a
significant role in their ability to do well academically.

24
Interview with Gabriela Fernandez, March 28, 2007.
103

“You always see Asians studying, you always see ‘um in the library”—therefore
“Asians are smart.” This was simply taken for granted; it was, she said, “one of those
things that nobody really talked about.” In localized common sense, these dynamics
seemed so normal that they generally went unremarked. Indeed, the naturalization of a
disparity between Asian and Latina/o students even extended beyond the classroom to
social relationships. For example, Paul Pham believed that between Asian and Latina/o
students “there is sort of a natural barrier. We seem to segregate ourselves naturally,
based on race rather than actually acknowledging it” [my emphasis]. When I pressed Paul
to elaborate on what he meant, he chose an abstracted second-person phrasing,
explaining,
You will tend to ignore the people that do not seem like they have similar
backgrounds to you. And not that you would do it on purpose. You wouldn’t go, ‘oh,
he doesn’t look like me, I don’t want to talk to him.’ Not like that. It just happens.
You don’t do it consciously. It’s a subconscious kind of action.
25

Although moments before in the same interview, Paul had described how his exclusively
Asian American peer group solidified in conjunction with his entry into an honors/AP
schedule of courses in high school, the Harvard-bound senior was unable to offer
anything but a common-sense explanation for what he saw around him on an everyday
basis. Any linkages between structural causes and normalized social orders were
obscured by his seemingly irrefutable conviction that, “It just happens.” The degree to
which the discrepancy in achievement, and a resultant “segregated” social order, were
seen as “natural” by both Asian and Latina/o students indicated its acceptance as
common sense.

25
Interview with Paul Pham, August 14, 2007.

104

Asian American racialized privilege
Despite critical shifts in the field of Asian American Studies over the past
decade, much of its scholarship continues to be constrained by a post-Civil-Rights-era
inheritance of seeing Asian Americans as an oppressed group which must therefore be
inherently resistant and oppositional to hegemonic claims (Nguyen 2002). Theories of
differential racialization such as Claire Jean Kim’s work on the “triangulation” of Asian
Americans (1999) and Laura Pulido’s observations on the relationship between racial
hierarchy and class position (2006, 45), as well as Kandice Chuh’s theorization of Asian
Americans as an “emerging dominant”
26
(2003), suggest a more ambivalent view of how
Asian Americans fit into US racial schema. Anthropological and sociological studies of
Asian Americans have tended to replicate traditional “nation-based ontologies” (Lowe
1998), focusing on questions of assimilation into a White-ethnic model (Tuan 1998) and
immigrant and diasporic identity formation (Kibria 2002, Maira 2002). Alejandro Portes
and Ruben Rumbaut have identified the importance of studying second-generation
immigrants to understand the formation of ethnic identities (Portes and Rumbaut 2001),
but these studies are oriented toward concerns with what the future of the nation will look
like, not of how differential racialization is a legacy of the past and is lived and reformed
in the everyday.
However, Mia Tuan (1998), in her study of third- and fourth-generation Chinese
and Japanese Americans, has posited an Asian American experience of “racial privilege,”
or “the freedom of not having to think about one’s racial background... the privilege to be

26
Chuh uses a phrase originally from Gayatri Spivak (1992).

105
considered ‘normal,’ to have one’s race be irrelevant.”
27
Tuan concluded that her
respondents who grew up in predominantly Asian-American communities enjoyed this
privilege “within the context of their neighborhood” (96), consequently suffered fewer
injuries (psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical) and were able to develop
greater self-confidence than those who grew up in predominantly white communities.
28

Regarding 1.5- and second-generation Asian American professionals, Pensri Ho (2000)
has described what she calls “class privileged racialized identity” (198), in which an
Asian American identity “rooted in class privilege and Pacific Rim experiences” (rather
than racial oppression and disenfranchisement) is developed during young adulthood
(182). Deviating from Tuan, Ho locates the beginnings of this particular identity
formation in the predominantly White or “racially mixed” suburban communities in
which her respondents were raised, arguing that these settings enabled them to
“accentuate their meritocratic abilities” over racialized differences (184). Perhaps most
significantly, Ho makes the observation that “regardless of the source of privilege—
whether achieved as an adult, acquired through parental efforts or affectation,” class
privilege fueled her respondents’ “confidence and faith in their abilities to shape their
own identities” (219; my emphasis).
Building on but modifying Tuan and Ho’s observations, I argue that the social
dynamics I have described at Alhambra High (as well as what Ho describes above as

27
Tuan adapts Robert Blauner’s discussion of White racial privilege (Blauner 1972).

28
However, Tuan’s theorization of racial privilege as experienced by Asian Americans ends here, and
is thus limited by her focus on neighborhood comfort and the discrete experiences of individuals, as
well as her use of largely middle-class, later-generation Chinese and Japanese Americans to stand in for
Asian Americans as a whole, rather than on the dialectic between these and larger structural and
historical forces.

106
class privilege) can be characterized more accurately as racialized privilege, in which
issues of class are intertwined, but in which the particulars are dictated by one’s
racialization, or ascribed group identity, by dominant society. Rather than the absence (or
“irrelevance,” in Tuan’s words) of racism that the concept of racial privilege implies,
racialized privilege foregrounds the centrality of racialized meanings and outcomes—that
the circulation of model minority discourse is not merely incidental or external, but itself
participates in the production and reproduction of privilege. Accordingly, Asian
American racialized privilege, in concert with being marked as a model minority,
constitutes not a privilege to be considered “normal,” but a privilege to be considered
exceptional (compared to other non-White minoritized groups). The prioritization of
exceptional, racialized identity collapses racial and class identities into one another and
allows for a subsumption of class differences under presumed racial or cultural
commonalities. To reiterate, then: if (White) racial privilege is “the freedom of not
having to think about one’s racial background...the privilege to be considered ‘normal,’ to
have one’s race be irrelevant,” (Asian American) racialized privilege is an internalization
of privilege accorded to one’s ascribed racial identity, which can lead to a conditional
freedom of not having to think too deeply about one’s racial background, and a limited
privilege to be considered exceptional. One’s race is not irrelevant but integral.
29

29
Further, a conception of racialized privilege, like theorizations of White racial privilege, must also
take into consideration deep historical contexts, structural forces, and durable material benefits, all of
which taken together can ultimately mean the difference between life and death. The flip side of racial
privilege is, of course, racism, as defined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002) as “the state-sanctioned
and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death”
(261). While a conception of Asian American privilege can never be the same as White privilege,
which is based on historical and material legacies of White supremacy that are still enacted and
perpetuated on an everyday basis, clearly distinct benefits do accrue from Asian Americans’ relatively
valorized position in American racial hierarchies, at expense to others.

107
Under the common umbrella of “Asianness,” ethnic, class, and other differences
are obscured. For instance, Paul Pham, the ethno-Chinese Vietnamese son of working-
class political refugees with few academic expectations for their son, inhabited the same
expectations regarding “achievement” as Annie Liu, the Chinese-Korean American
daughter of college-educated professionals, whose father mapped out her AP/Honors
class schedule on an Excel spreadsheet and was deeply disappointed when Annie was not
admitted to an Ivy League university. For both Annie and Paul, the subsumption of class
and other considerations under racial/cultural expectations meant that “achievement”
could become a thing in and of itself, as though to “achieve” itself, albeit with the
ultimate achievement of gaining admittance to an elite university, was the goal.
Personally, Paul said, he was not “achieving” with the future in mind.
I mean, you might ask someone, why do you want to go to college? ‘Oh I want to
have a good job, I want to make a lot of money’—that would not be my answer. I
don’t think I was achieving to get to something, because I don’t know what exactly
that would be anyway….
30

Annie applied to prestigious colleges “out of loyalty to my parents”; she felt that
she had to “try, for them.” But when I asked her why she thought this was so important to
them, she replied,
I don’t know… I don’t know if it’s an American thing, or it’s an Asian thing? Because
like, when I talk to my friends in Canada, they’re just like, ‘oh, there are only a couple
universities in Canada’—if you just get into one, you’re happy about it. They don’t
understand the obsession that Americans, or at least Asian Americans, have with Ivy
League schools.... So I really don’t understand what the obsession is about that.
31

Because of the racialized character of “achievement” at Alhambra High—the
taken-for-granted that academic excellence was natural to Asian American students—

30
Interview with Paul Pham, August 14, 2007.

31
Interview with Annie Liu, July 27, 2007.

108
neither Annie nor Paul felt pressed to explain their drive to achieve in terms beyond
generalized racial or cultural explanations; that is, the form of privilege they experienced,
their presumed educational lifepaths as Asian Americans, had buffered them so far from
having to think deeply about their place and motivations in American society.

Louie
argues that the “ethnic-cultural narrative” of Asian immigrant academic excellence
offered her second-generation Chinese American respondents “a symbolic safe space
from the injuries of race.” In light of real racial barriers awaiting them in the workplace,
if not in school, “the supposed distinctiveness of the Asian immigrant ethos which
privileges hard work and, above all, a respect and keen desire for education should be of
some utility in offsetting these obstacles” (187-89). However, at Alhambra High, and in
the West San Gabriel Valley in general, where Asian Americans are a plurality and often
perceived as the majority, anti-Asian discrimination was not so apparent to my
respondents; in turn, the rationale behind embracing the ethnic-cultural narrative for high-
achieving Asian American students was harder to discern.
32
When pressed, both Anne
and Paul admitted that they did not have a developed understanding of their motivations
and goals as “high-achieving” students. For Paul, his academic success seemed quite
detached from his family’s immigrant/ refugee, working class background. As a result of
conversation with her Canadian friends, Annie was able to sense that the “obsession…
with Ivy League schools” might have something to do with the particular history and
position of Asians in America, but this was not yet something about which she had

32
In contrast, see S. Lee 1996, in which Lee details how Asian American students in a high school in
which White students dominated were used as a buffer between White and Black/ African American
students. Lee further delineates how distinct groups of Asian American students either complied with or
resisted the model minority stereotype, and how the stereotype operated in the production of particular
race relations at the school among students, teachers, and administrators.

109
thought deeply. Lia Chen, who attended Alhambra High in the early 1990s and was an
honors student as well as senior class president before going on to attend college at Penn
State, summed up the general rationale at work: “Because I was a good student, and
because I was Asian, I pretty much had this path set for me.”
33

‘I always felt that outsiderness’
How was this peculiar form of privilege experienced by those presumably
excluded from it—that is, by “non-Asians”
34
? In fact, an integral counterpart to the
racialization of Asian American achievement was a racialization of low achievement
among “non-Asian” students—in this case, specifically Mexican American students. A
rapidly growing body of research in education and sociology has begun to address factors
and causes of Latina/o disaffection with schooling (cf. Stanton-Salazar 2001 and
Valenzuela 1999, among others) in a variety of settings. Valenzuela’s study of immigrant
Mexican and Mexican American high school students in Houston (1999) suggests that as
with Asian American students, “culture” is at the center of common characterizations of
Mexican American students’ academic performance; however, in contrast to the relative
valorization of “Asian” culture as studious and hardworking, Mexican American students
suffer from a “systematic undervaluing of people and things Mexican” (20). While both
Asian Americans and Mexican Americans have been stigmatized through a history of
restrictive United States immigration laws as “permanently foreign and unassimilable to

33
Interview with Lia Chen, October 24, 2007.

34
Asian American student involvement in certain subgroups was so pervasive that many of my
respondents used the categorical term, “non-Asians.” For instance, Annie Liu reported that students
who were in sports, “have a lot more interaction with non-Asians,” while the more “bookish, nerdy
activities” such as newspaper, included “a very limited amount of non-Asians.”

110
the nation,” the increased centrality of border control and abstract categories of status
embodied in the figure of the “illegal alien,” as well as greater opportunities for Asian
immigration since 1965, have shifted a greater burden of this racialized “alien” status
onto Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans (Ngai 2004).
35

This formula does not entirely hold in Alhambra, since the majority of the
Latina/o population here is comprised of Mexican Americans, some of whose families
have been in the United States for multiple generations, while 80 percent of Asians living
in Alhambra are foreign-born.
36
Further, as I have discussed elsewhere, in the West San
Gabriel Valley as a whole, in an intensive period during the 1980s and into the 1990s
when ethnic Chinese immigrants began to move en masse into the area, the labels of
“foreign” and “immigrant” were firmly attached to these new immigrants by shifting
coalitions of White, Latina/o and later-generation Asian American residents (Saito 1998).
Nonetheless, “cultural” explanations which stigmatized what was construed as
“Mexican” or “Latino” culture (often used interchangeably) emerged in the course of the
debate over the achievement gap, especially, as we shall see, in the column controversy.
Here, however, I will first focus on the relational nature of racialized discourses
of achievement in the regional institutional context of Alhambra High—on how
racialization in school, like processes of racial formation in any context, depends on
relationality (whether implicitly or explicitly), even as essentialist racial/cultural claims

35
Ngai argues that Asian Americans and Mexican Americans share the “legally racialized” status of
“‘alien citizens’—Asian Americans and Mexican Americans born in the United States with formal U.S.
citizenship but who remained alien in the eyes of the nation” (8)—due to the production of their ethnic
and racial identities in the United States by restrictive immigration laws.

36
American Community Survey 2006. In comparison, only 30 percent of Latinas/os living in Alhambra
were foreign-born.

111
are made. In the regional context of Alhambra High, the “rule” for Latina/o students—to
not excel and progress academically—formed a warped, reverse mirror-image of
prevalent characterizations of Asian American achievement. Just as deviation from high
academic achievement was considered anomalous for “Asian” students, interlinked
discourses dictated that among “Latina/o” students, to deviate from the rule of low
achievement was to be an exception. While for Asian American students, high
expectations generally buttressed their self-images and minimized barriers to academic
continuation, for Latina/o students, breaking from the racialized image of low
achievement often proved to be a constantly demoralizing, uphill battle, making them
“racially vulnerable” (Steele 1992) from a young age.
Steele’s concept of disidentification is useful to understanding how such a
dynamic operates. In the early 1990s, in an effort to understand higher college drop-out
rates for Black students across the board regardless of socioeconomic status and level of
achievement, Steele argued that what was at work was a mainstream culture that fostered
“disidentification” with academics among Black students. From an early age, Black
children suffered academic stigma and were expected to fail or need remedial attention.
Subsequent studies showed that by junior high and certainly by high school, studies
showed that Black male students detached their measures of self-worth from academic
achievement, while White students, for example, did not; that is, they ceased to identify
with academics (Osborne 1995). Steele also noted that Black college students performed
better academically in the 1950s, when legal segregation was still in effect, than they did
in more recent decades, when a host of support programs and organizations supposedly
tailored to their needs were available to them. In contrast, several programs at levels from
112
elementary school to college that focused on challenging Black students, taking for
granted their intelligence and potential (rather than assuming that they needed extra
support and remedial attention), were unqualified successes. (Steele 1992)
My respondents’ experiences at Alhambra High point to a similar culture in
which Latina/o “underachievement” was taken for granted as the rule, and often either
actively or inadvertently enforced. Unlike the Asian American students with whom I
spoke, none of whom mentioned any problems with staff or administration, all of the
Latina/o students and almost all of the teachers and administrators had stories of Latina/o
students who were openly discouraged from reaching higher goals. A few examples:
Gabriela Fernandez described her counselor, a Latina/o woman, who was widely known
to favor Asian students because “they don’t talk back to her” and “they get really high
grades,” whom Gabriela felt disliked her and Latina/o students in general: “other
Hispanic students that I talked to that had her were kind of like, why is she like that?” As
a result, Gabriela “avoided going to the counselor at all costs. Which is probably… the
reason why I didn’t get to go exactly to a university like I wanted to because I just didn’t
want to talk to her.”
37
When I asked English teacher and newspaper advisor Matt Ramos
about experiences like Gabriela’s, Ramos, who feels that many of his Mexican American
students regard him as a mentor, acknowledged, “We have discouraging counselors—you
know, they have them everywhere… I’ve heard students say that, ‘This counselor’s
ruined my life. They have ruined my life.’”
38
Principal Lee-Sung recounted an incident in
which a hesitant Latina student was persuaded by her counselor to take a higher-level

37
Interview with Gabriela Fernandez, March 28, 2007.

38
Interview with Matt Ramos, June 29, 2007.

113
math class, but when the student went to the class, “first thing the teacher says is, ‘What
are you doing here? You don’t belong in this class’…. Just shot her down, just like that.”
This had everything to do with expectations, he said, adding, “I would bet that [in] that
same scenario, [if] an Asian kid walked in with that slip to be in that class, he [the
teacher] wouldn’t have said that.”
39
Student Perla Trejo found that in her AP classes,
teachers seemed to expect less from Latina/o students than from Asian American
students. “When we answer a question wrong, they say, ‘It’s OK. You’re trying really
hard.’ It’s like, OK, but what’s the answer?” (Chong 2005).
Paul Pham related a similar pattern of racial expectations among students: if “a
person with a completely different background” joined a class or activity that was
“mostly Asian,” “that person would actually receive a lot of attention—positive
attention,” simply for showing up at something conceived to be out of the ordinary for a
Latina/o. If you were “different,” he believed, it was “very welcome.”
40
If we apply
Steele’s arguments, the upshot of the situation Paul described would be the following: if
someone who was “different,” i.e. “non-Asian” (a term many of my respondents
sometimes used interchangeably with Latina/o), joined an AP class or a challenging
extracurricular activity, she or he would be greeted with surprise and praise for exceeding
expectations of low achievement. Devalued with the stigma of low expectations from the
outset, the student would grow increasingly likely to disidentify with academics, unless
this pattern was interrupted by mentors or other factors that recognized and nurtured her
abilities and potential.

39
Interview with Russell Lee-Sung, April 18, 2007.

40
Interview with Paul Pham, August 14, 2007.

114
Albert Navarro’s account of his academic experiences growing up in Alhambra is
instructive in showing the difficulty in breaking from polarized expectations of Latina/o
versus Asian students. Albert was told in kindergarten that he “was going to be mentally
slow”; from then on, he felt that he constantly had to prove himself to teachers who did
not believe in his ability to do well in school. He recalled an instance in sixth grade when
his math teacher, a Japanese American woman, would not put him in an advanced class
until he consistently turned his homework in early (and correctly)—“and she would be
like, really angry, checking it.” Although of course we can’t really know the motivations
of Albert’s teacher, the mere fact of her anger—the oddity of it, under the ostensibly
heartening circumstances of a student making extra efforts to be placed in a more
challenging class—suggests that she perceived his efforts as a transgression of accepted
boundaries, perhaps rupturing her sense of (racial) order. By the time he got to high
school, Albert was usually the only Mexican American in AP and honors classes
populated predominantly by Asian American students, and felt that teachers stereotyped
both himself and Asian American students, in a binary of high and low achievement: “I
definitely felt like in the classroom, [the teachers] favored the Asian American students.
It was like they stereotyped them, in a way. Like, oh, these are gonna be the smart kids.
And then… they’d look at me like, what are you doing here? I always felt like, that
outsiderness.”
41

Albert also recalled two incidents that occurred with close friends, who were
Asian American. First, in his senior year of high school, when he was admitted to
Berkeley and UCLA, “some of my friends were like, oh, I wish I was Mexican, ‘cause I

41
Interview with Albert Navarro, February 27, 2008.

115
could have gotten into Berkeley or UCLA.” He remembered with annoyance one friend
in particular who had made such comments: “Howard,” a relatively wealthy Asian
American boy from the Monterey Park hills with only mediocre grades, who on several
occasions had paid Albert to write his papers for him because he was “too lazy” to do
them himself. Howard’s professed belief that he too could have gotten into Berkeley or
UCLA if he was “Mexican” not only asserted a certain racial privilege in its
presumption,
42
but also perpetuated stereotypes of Mexican Americans as inherently
academically deficient (that Albert could only have gained admittance because of
“remedial” help, or in the form of affirmative action). The second incident involved
Albert’s best friend, who was “Chinese”:
When we graduated from eighth grade, he wrote in my yearbook that I was… the only
smart Mexican he knew, or the smartest Mexican he knew? And I kind of felt like,
that sucks, you know, why would he say that. And then I thought about it, and I was
like, well, I was one of the few in the class.

His friend’s comment, as well as Albert’s reaction, highlight the difficulty of separating
what appears to be everyday material reality from ideological racial “truths,” and the
degree to which the regional Asian-Latina/o scholastic-racial order had already been
ingrained in the two boys by the close of junior high. This aspect of Albert’s experience,
as well as other students’ accounts mentioned earlier, suggest that by high school, both
Asian and Latina/o students have been conditioned to expect bifurcated groupings

42
This discourse tends to align Asians politically with Whites, raising the often-implied notion that
particular minority groups can only make it with lowered standards, and that certain forms of
affirmative action amount to “reverse discrimination.” This argument was epitomized by Regents of the
University of California v. Bakke, 1978, in which Allen Bakke, a White man who had twice been
rejected from University of California, Davis, medical school, claimed discrimination and won in the
Supreme Court by a narrow margin. In 2006, Jian Li, a Chinese American applicant who was rejected
from Princeton, made such comparisons explicit when he filed a federal complaint alleging racial bias.
Takagi (1992) has written about how the controversy over Asian admissions at elite universities such as
UC Berkeley eventually resulted in anti-affirmative action discourses and practices, despite attempts by
Asian American activists to distinguish themselves ideologically from such outcomes.

116
separating academically excelling Asians from low or average-performing Latinas/os. In
high school, Latina/o students who attempted to cross the line were often met with
surprise, outright hostility, or more subtle forms of disapproval, most crucially from
teachers and counselors.
43

Like many schools in the area, until recently Alhambra High has had a large
concentration of “veteran,” predominantly White teachers who no doubt have had a great
influence on the school culture.
44
However, as we have seen from the examples above,
racist cultural assumptions and behaviors were not merely the provenance of White
teachers. They had more to do with a larger, institutionalized culture, shaped by
prevailing national ideologies of race, in which Asian American and Latina/o students
experienced differentially racialized patterns of relationships with and to schooling—
illustrating, as Valenzuela (1999) puts it, the ways in which “[a]cademic success and
failure are… products of schooling rather than… something that young people do” (30).

43
Of course there are always counter-examples. For instance, Albert recalled fondly a Mexican-
American vice principal who “took me under his wing, and saw that I was doing well,” who invited
Albert to college banquets and encouraged him to apply to many colleges. Albert also noted that among
the teachers and administrators, this man “was the only one I felt like was proud to be Mexican.” He
contrasted him with the principal at the time, who was also Mexican American:

I remember bringing up one time something that had to do with being the only Mexican in class,
and he [the principal] was just like… ‘don’t dwell on things like that’—kind of like, ‘you’re just
exaggerating,’ or ‘this is not really important, just worry about going to school.’ And I just
remember feeling really pissed off at him—like, ‘you’re not really acknowledging what I’m telling
you. It sucks!’... But Mr. ___ [the vice principal]… he seemed more proud of who he was. He was
Mexican American. He wasn’t anything else, he wasn’t ‘Hispanic’—they used to use ‘Hispanic’ a
lot back then… He would say he was Mexican American. Whereas [the principal] was just like a
White person, you know?

The importance of being recognized (“he saw that I was doing well”) and feeling affirmed in his ethnic
identity (“Mr. ___ was Mexican American. He wasn’t anything else.”) was invaluable for Albert, who
is now earning his Ph.D. at UCLA and writing a dissertation on Chicano history.

44
According to Principal Lee-Sung. Over the four years of Lee-Sung’s tenure as principal, a large
proportion of these retired, and Lee-Sung strove to replace them with “culturally sensitive” teachers
(whom, he was careful to specify, could be of any ethnicity).

117
Thus, English teacher and newspaper advisor Matt Ramos, who is Mexican American,
offered the opinion that “high-achieving Asian American students” are “a different breed
altogether,” going on to describe their intensely ambitious approach to learning and
extremely high expectations of themselves and others. Although it is probably arguable
that the characteristics of Ramos’s students are simply those of many a “high-achieving”
college-bound student in the United States today, Ramos, living and teaching in the
particular contexts of his area, asserted that these dynamics and characteristics were
regional—and racial—in nature: you could talk to any newspaper advisor who worked in
the West San Gabriel Valley, he said, “from Keppel to Arcadia to San Marino to Schurr
[area high schools with similar populations of students] to… you name it, and they will
all tell you the same thing about how these students are.”
45

School, as a key engine of inculcating dominant national ideologies, constituted
the regional setting in which a socioacademic order tied intimately to comparative racial
constructions of Asian Americans and Latinas/os in the United States took shape
strongly, and was internalized not only by its young subjects, but by their mentors and
peers.

The Column Controversy
Until the spring of 2005, however, most of these dynamics went unspoken and
generally unacknowledged in any public or community discourse. In the furor that
followed the publication of Robin’s column, however, the “common-sense” notions
supporting the existing socioacademic order were simultaneously elucidated, ruptured,

45
Interview with Matt Ramos, June 29, 2007.

118
and reproduced. The heated dialogue concerning language, race, and the irreduceability
of lived experience to racialized generalizations suggested that many participants sensed
that Robin’s column was not only symptomatic of the racialized socioacademic order, but
a struggle over, and opportunity to, shift discourse (Takagi 1992)
46
—the larger stakes of
which are, as we have discussed, prevailing common sense and resultant reconfigurations
of power.

‘Don’t turn this into a racial war’
Perhaps no one understood this better than Principal Lee-Sung. In his opinion,
the language in which the conflict was depicted was absolutely crucial to the way in
which it unfolded. He believed that what might otherwise have been “a very positive
thing, a healthy discussion,” was derailed by the way in which local newspaper reporter
Cindy Chang portrayed the situation in an article published in the Pasadena Star-News a
little more than a week after Robin’s column. “Latinos object to being called laggards,”
the front-page sub-headline proclaimed. Chang opened with a description of how the
column had led to an “uproar” on campus. In the second and third paragraphs, she
highlighted how Robin had been “threatened with bodily harm by other students,” how a
teacher had denounced the article as racist, and that “opinions have generally converged
along racial lines, with Asian students agreeing with the gist of the piece and Latinos

46
In her study of controversies in the late 1980s over Asian American admissions to UC Berkeley and
other elite institutions, Takagi draws attention to the importance of rhetoric and language in what she
calls “shifting discourse,” in which the central focus of debate changes as participants redefine and
rearticulate others’ definitions of the problem (9). In the case of Asian American admissions, through
dialectical exchanges between Asian Americans, university officials, liberals, and neoconservatives, the
terms of debate morphed over time from discrimination to diversity to affirmative action, finally
effecting a “subtle but decisive” shift in public and intellectual discourse about, and some universities’
practices of, affirmative action.

119
questioning whether it should have been printed at all” (Chang 2005). Lee-Sung believed
that Chang’s focus and choice of words “inflamed the situation.”
There were a couple quotes on there that really focused on the racial part, the racial
tensions. I’m here at the school, and I’m talking to the kids and staff, and you know
what, I don’t see that. Yes, people are angry about it, but don’t turn this into a racial
war. Because sure, that’s what’s gonna get the headlines and get picked up on the AP
Wire…. I was so upset that that’s the way the article was written. So it made matters
worse.
47

Lee-Sung, in the thick of the situation, “talking to the kids and staff,” refused to
recognize the conflict in the racialized terms in which it was cast by the Star-News
reporter. His acknowledgment that yes, people were angry, “but don’t turn this into a
racial war,” while certainly partially a function of his role as administrator to defuse
conflict, likely also reflected his ability to separate how he understood the complexity of
the world in which he lived and worked, from its reduction to a formula of racial conflict
by mainstream press. Indeed, Lee-Sung knew from his own life the nuances of the
region’s particular class, racial, and ethnic mix as they pertained to attitudes about
education. Raised in neighboring Monterey Park, where he still lived as an adult, he was
the child of a Mexican-Chinese father had grown up poor in Texas, and a Chinese mother
from a wealthy family in China. While his father “was very encouraging about what
[grades] I got. If I tried my best, that would be fine,” his mother was more demanding: “If
I came home with all A’s and a B, she’d question me. ‘What’s the problem?’” However,
Lee-Sung asserted that while his parents “communicated in different ways,” “they both
valued education” (Chong 2005).
As a result of his personal history in the area and his lifelong personal navigation
of Asian and Latina/o identities, Lee-Sung felt that “pretty much my beliefs my entire

47
Interview with Russell Lee-Sung, April 18, 2007.

120
life” fed into how he handled the situation; he was, he felt, “the ideal person to be in the
middle of this whole controversy.” As principal and both Asian and Latino, he was
always keenly aware of how his appearance and ethnic identities influenced his
interactions with parents as well as students. For instance, various parents’ comfort and
ability to identify with him were often inflected by what they either assumed or knew
about his ethnic/racial background.
Because I appear to be more Asian than Hispanic… I’ve had Asian people come up to
me and say things to me [laughing]—‘all those Mexicans and blah blah blah’ [in
disparaging tone]…. Sometimes I will say ‘I’m Mexican also, you know… what
you’re saying is not true’—kind of balance out their opinions. But yeah, they’ll
confide in me sometimes and say some things that uh, they think it’s safe to say,
because they think I’m just Asian…. What’s nice is that once people do realize that
I’m Mexican also, a lot of the Mexican parents feel very comfortable talking to me
too….

Still, despite feeling that such patterns of identification were “just part of human nature”
(that “people will tend to be more comfortable with people that look like then, that [have]
the same ethnic background”), he consistently refused to generalize the response to
Robin’s article as split among racial lines, or even primarily racial in nature, maintaining
instead that, “There is no simple response to this,” and that it really was “not along racial
lines.”
When this article happened, it was amazing. I had people who supported the article
and said, ‘You know what? He’s right on. And good for him! He’s the only one
courageous enough to say it like it is.’ And I had Caucasian people, Asian people,
even Hispanic people saying ‘Right on!’ you know? [laughing] And on the other side,
who were saying, ‘He’s racist, he should be disciplined… he should get his butt
kicked’… it was mostly Hispanic, but there were Asians, there were Caucasian people
who sided on that end. So it really was amazing that it was not clearly down racial
lines.

Lee-Sung, whose own life reflected so well the complexities and particularities of the
West San Gabriel Valley’s class, racial and ethnic mix, knew himself that there was no
121
“simple response” to the achievement gap, that the problem was not reducible to
racialized generalizations. What seemed “amazing” to him, perhaps, was that at
moments, the community response reflected this complexity as well. Similarly, even
though he affirmed that there were “underlying feelings that had not come up” previous
to the publication of Robin’s article, he was careful to distinguish these from the usual
tropes of interracial conflict inevitably resulting in violence.
Did we see any kind of racial problems? No, we didn’t. It wasn’t like there was
tension, people beating each other up just because of their ethnicity…. It wasn’t a
situation that I was concerned that there was gonna be this riot, okay. I never, ever felt
that way. There were students that actually wanted to beat up Robin. They were angry
at him. But it wasn’t like the Hispanics were getting together and saying, ‘Now we’re
gonna go kick—you know, beat up Asian people in general.’

Lee-Sung’s distinction between the kind of tension that might lead to generalized racial
violence, and the kind of tension that might lead to personal animosities and heated
debate might travel a fine line, but it is essential to understanding how at a regional level,
members of racialized groups can produce subtle forms of coexistence that cannot be
assimilated by dominant racial discourses. The principal, at the center of the controversy,
seemed to hint at seeds of possibility held in these kinds of complex responses, even as
he deftly navigated what amounted to a full-blown crisis for the school.

‘Why didn’t we just work harder?’: Narratives of individual merit and immigrant success

As in racialized discourses of achievement in general, perhaps the most difficult
ideological strands to extricate from the controversy over the column were interlinked
narratives of individual merit and immigrant success. Immigrant success narratives, such
as the model minority myth (as discussed above), are complex because they often rest on
essentialist precepts about race and culture—yet, they are anchored by core “American”
122
principles of individualism and the Protestant work ethic: that “anyone” can succeed in
democratic, capitalist America, if they only work hard enough. These all-too-easily
available narratives often made it difficult for students to uphold any but an individualist
account which discounted any significant structural or institutional causes. Junior Crystal
Tchan’s comments in many ways encapsulated the pitfalls of individualist thinking vis-à-
vis issues of structural racism: “It’s clearly an anti-racist article; in a sense, I think it
should be motivating for Hispanics.”
48
Tchan’s belief that the article was “anti-racist”
was linked to her sentiment that “it should be motivating for Hispanics.” That is, racism
could be solved if only individuals could be “motivated” to prove it wrong (cf. Harris
1993).
In another instance, Principal Lee-Sung described a Latino senior who had
transferred from another high school, where he was failing all of his classes, to
Alhambra.
And he says, you know what, Alhambra is a so much better school… so all of a
sudden I got my act together. He said, I got my act together. I didn’t need my parents
or anybody else to tell me. And he says, now I’m gonna graduate, I’m gonna go to
college… but it was all me…. One day I just decided you know what, I’m gonna start
doing my homework, I’m gonna start showing up to class—and he turned his whole
life around, okay.
49

Regarding the turmoil over Robin’s column, the senior said, “Don’t blame our parents,
don’t blame our culture. Blame us.” The student’s comments point to the difficulty of
making sense of the multiple cultural, historical-structural, and individual factors at play.
In Lee-Sung’s account, even while acknowledging that Alhambra was “a so much better
school,” the student still attributed his improved motivation solely to individual factors:

48
Alhambra High School Moor, April 12, 2005.

49
Interview with Russell Lee-Sung, April 18, 2007.

123
“all of a sudden,” “I got my act together.” In a comment sheet generated from a meeting
between Lee-Sung and a number of students, the same student elaborated in his own
words:
Academic progress has nothing to do with culture… I believe that a positive attitude
can lead to confidence and personal achievement. And it’s also wrong to blame
parents who work hard to give their children a better life. It’s the student’s fault for
doing poorly. Hispanics have the ability and potential to succeed just as well as other
races. Confidence, support, attitude, and environment all have an impact on achieving
success.’
50

Even though this student’s abrupt academic turnaround happened “all of a sudden” after
transferring to a “much better” school, he still believed that it was the “student’s fault for
doing poorly.” His own experience could have supported a slight modification to his
statement: that indeed, “Hispanics have the ability and potential to succeed just as well as
other races,” yet “confidence, support, attitude, and environment all have an impact on
achieving success.” However, the easily available narratives made it difficult to uphold
any but an individualist account which discounted any significant structural or
institutional causes.
Similarly, even those who were offended by the column had trouble breaking
free of such narratives. For instance, although Gabriela Fernandez was one of the most
vocal students in protesting the charges in Robin’s column, she nonetheless believed that
everyone had the ability to succeed, that “It’s all about you… and your mindset…. These
kids [who] just wanna slack off and have fun in high school—what excuse do they have?
There really isn’t an excuse to not get an education, to not better yourself.” Further,
reflecting on student protests against Robin’s column in which “Hispanics… joined

50
Comment sheet from a meeting between Russell Lee-Sung and students, read by Lee-Sung during our
interview, April 18, 2007.

124
together and wore brown shirts,” she felt that it would have been more effective to “work
harder” to prove that Robin’s charges were wrong, rather than uniting on grounds of
racism:
I mean, I guess it was a way to unite, and—but now thinking back on it, it’s kind of
like, well, why didn’t we just work harder to prove that that was wrong, instead of just
wearing shirts for a day and thinking that that’s gonna solve everything?
51

Gabriela and others’ attempts to articulate the problem at hand underline the difficulty of
disentangling historical legacies of structural racism from dominant ideologies. In the
absence of any reference to locating problems of inequality in the structure of institutions
themselves, they also illustrate how the idea of school as a neutral environment, “purged
of ideology” is absolutely crucial to its effectiveness in purveying and inculcating
ideology (Althusser 2001, 105). The ways in which students at various levels are
encouraged or discouraged to “succeed,” serving the social order of capitalism, are veiled
and cast as individualized failure. To put a twist on Allen Feldman’s characterization of
arrest,
52
one could say that the ideology of “success” revolves around a political art of
individualizing failure—and then deviously, via implicating an individual’s family
background, attributing the causes of failure to racial and “cultural” factors.

‘I’m Mexican, and I’m lazy’: Practices of disidentification
One of the most pernicious attributes of U.S. racial discourse is its inability to
include or account for experiences that fall outside of a dynamic of conflict versus
assimilation, its obsessive focus on singular, essential identities rather than identifying as

51
Interview with Gabriela Fernandez, March 28, 2007.

52
“Arrest is the political art of individualizing disorder” (Feldman 1991, 109).

125
a process of multiple alliances that shift with context—or disidentifying as an act of
refusal of dominant narratives (Muñoz 1999). Rey Chow (1993), building on Michel de
Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics as well as Gramsci’s concept of a war
of maneuver, describes a way of identifying that operates based on “tactics of
intervention”—“a marginal practice that doesn’t accumulate ‘property’ but continuously
seeks to subvert and erode the center,” which has less to do than seeking to secure
hegemonic power, than with “a continued, constantly renewed skepticism and critique of
all firmly established fields” (15-17). “These are the tactics of those who do not have
claims to territorial propriety or cultural centrality.” (cf. Scott 1985) Part of Chow’s goal
in her argumentation is to “unlearn… submission to one’s ethnicity… as the ultimate
signified”—that is, politics and conviction should spring from ethically rather than
ethnically-based convictions (25).
Indeed, throughout my interviews I noticed a quiet but consistent refusal on the
part of many of my respondents (such as Lee-Sung, in the discussion above) to agree with
the thrust of questions I phrased, somewhat disingenuously, in the language of racialized
conflict—moves which could arguably be construed as tactics of intervention, or a form
of what Jose Muñoz calls “disidentification.” In contrast to Steele’s concept of academic
disidentification discussed earlier, Muñoz’s practice of disidentification does not have
fixed tendencies or outcomes, indicating instead shifting practices of subversion of
dominant narratives, often through direct acknowledgment and engagement with racial
discourses. In his analysis of queer-of-color cultural production, Muñoz employs
Althusser’s “ideology cop fable” (in which identification occurs through an act of
interpellation, or being hailed), putting forth a “working definition” of queer as the
126
following: “people who have failed to turn around to the ‘Hey, you there!’ interpellating
call of heteronormativity” (33). Muñoz argues that the artists and performers of which he
writes perform disidentifications in their work, moving through racialized stereotypes
and narratives in order to subvert them in the end. In the context of regional racial
formation, as in Muñoz, disidentifications encompass the ways in which people employ
racialized stereotypes and narratives, yet come out somewhere unexpected at the other
end; a set of practices that has to do with navigating and reproducing the specific, local,
daily knowledges that exceed what a national framework or top-down-imposed
ideologies can impose or control.
For example, reacting to Robin’s column, Gabriela Fernandez noted the irony of
a member of one racialized group using racialized generalizations to chastise another:
I mean, I can’t just go into a predominantly Asian area and say, you know, insurance
rates are high because Asians are bad drivers. I can’t do that. So he can’t come into
Hispanic territory and say, your parents don’t care about your education, that’s why
your test scores are low. It’s the same thing. You have to live that life in order to say
that you know what’s going on with it.
53

By recognizing that “you have to live that life in order to say that you know what’s going
on with it,” she gestured to the inadequacy of such discourses in describing the
particularity and complexity of everyday life in Alhambra as she knew it. She also
grappled with the references to racial stereotypes in the column, eventually subverting
their meaning in a way that suited her worldview:
Who is this guy, just making assumptions?... trying to assume that you know, all
Hispanic families have ten kids and are working three jobs and don’t care about their
children’s education? And like, maybe that was true in Mexico for his nanny, but not
here. I mean, you could still have that ten-people family with the mom working three
jobs, but at the same time, if she is working three jobs, you can see that she’s trying to

53
Interview with Gabriela Fernandez, March 28, 2007.

127
make a life for her family, is that necessarily a bad thing? So that article kind of really
rallied a lot of Hispanics together to say no, that’s not the way it is.

Gabriela recognized and was offended by the implied racial-economic stereotypes, but
then backtracked to suggest, in effect, so what? Even if they were superficially “true,”
they did not mean what racialized discourses supposed them to mean.
In a similar vein, sophomore Robert Himenez told the Moor, “Most of [the
article] is true. I’m Mexican, and I’m lazy. But [the author] shouldn’t have blamed it on
our parents and ancestors.”
54

Himenez, after making the surprise move of admitting the personal “truth” of the
racial stereotype, then blocks discursive access to pathologizing the family unit, which, as
Althusser has observed, forms the key pairing with school in disseminating hegemonic
ideologies in institutions of civil society. Without the ability to generalize via the
supposedly neutral institutions of school and family, racial discourse loses its power.

Conclusion
During discussions with my interviewees of their family and life histories in the
West SGV area, high school emerged as a key period during which social relations were
solidified and made sense of, and achievement in academics and extracurricular activities
often became a marker of one’s perceived ability to succeed and prosper. Students’ ways
of making sense of the social order were tied intimately with the particular regional
context in which they were growing up, in a majority-Asian American and Latina/o,
immigrant, metropolitan suburb in which the alignments of race and privilege were
neither fixed nor clear-cut. The nuances of the students’ reactions and interpretations of

54
Alhambra High School Moor, April 12, 2005.

128
the social order around them speak to the ideologically formative moment in which high
school takes place, where societal orders and mores are being taught but have not yet
been internalized as common sense, taken-for-granted truths. However, at the same time,
as young adults, students have begun to develop regional forms of common sense, based
on what they see and experience in their own lives, on local and familial contexts.
Because of the visibility of the disconnects and crises that arise in such a dynamic,
masked and twisted as they are in multiple, interwoven, and often contradictory layers of
competing explanatory discourses, high school constitutes a critical site in which to study
regional racial formation.
In the three years that have passed since the controversy over Robin’s column,
probably the most significant change at Alhambra High has been the implementation of
open enrollment for honors and AP classes.
55
In the previous system, students had to
apply for honors and AP classes, with qualifying grades, test scores, teacher
recommendations, and in some cases a specialized exam. In the debate over open
enrollment, as in the debate over the achievement gap, the rhetoric of individualism and
equal opportunity figures strongly. It is used both in support of and against it, with a
circular reasoning that recalls conservative and liberal debates over “color-blind”
admissions policies in the 1990s. To “high-achieving” former students Paul Pham and
Annie Liu, opposition to open enrollment seemed universal among their friends,
classmates, and teachers. Paul explained that he personally was against it, because it

55
Open enrollment was instituted progressively beginning in the fall of 2006. In the response to the
fallout over Robin’s column, students also formed a local high school chapter of MEChA, and Latina/o
parents founded an organization to support students (Chong 2005). In addition, after Lee-Sung chose to
leave for an opportunity at another high school, the district hired Maria Elena Sanchez, a Latina, as
principal.

129
would “water down the quality of the students… you would not have students who
actually met some prerequisites, or have shown some sort of merit that would allow them
to be into the class.”
56
In Annie’s opinion,
[J]ust ‘cause you open the enrollment, doesn’t mean that there’s gonna be a flood of
non-Asians who want to enter AP. I think if you really wanted to take the class, you
would have filled out the application. It’s not such a difficult process… to start
with…. If they [Latinos] really wanted to do it, they would just go out and fill out the
application and ask the teacher for details…. I don’t think that was what was holding
them back. It was just, if they don’t want to take it, they’re not gonna take it. That’s
what I felt.
57

Although Annie agreed in theory that “it’s good to give people a chance,” like Paul, her
belief that the previous system could not be held at fault because it was based on
individual achievement prevailed. While Paul and Annie upheld the view that open
enrollment would undercut the institution’s ability to uphold an equitable system of
rewards based on individual merit, teacher Matt Ramos believed that it was the only way
to be truly equitable: “If they wanna take it, I don’t think any student should be denied
access to it. Let them prove themselves. If they’re failing the class, well, they’re failing
the class… if they can do it, let them prove it.”
However, the one thing they all seemed to agree on is that open enrollment was
unlikely to effect the desired changes. In Ramos’s words,
this open access thing looks better on paper, I think, than it will prove to be any sort of
positive result…. It’s just like saying, ‘okay, we’re gonna go ahead and leave this
plate of cheese out for all the mice who are full,’ and ‘let’s see what happens.’ I mean,
it may be open, but how many of them are going to go in there and do anything?
58

56
Interview with Paul Pham, August 14, 2007.

57
Interview with Annie Liu, July 27, 2007.

58
Interview with Matt Ramos, June 29, 2007.

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They all seemed to sense, even if they could not acknowledge it as such, that
without any substantive acknowledgment of historical and structural effects on
educational equity, the illusion of school as a neutral institution is so powerful that real
change is unlikely. In the context of Alhambra High, even though the particular regional
demographics admitted unusual opportunities for reconfiguring conventionally accepted
racial dynamics, “color-blind” liberal ideologies of individualism and merit, in concert
with immigrant success narratives such as the model minority myth, proved impossible to
disentangle. Instead, racialized “cultural” discourses of academic achievement and
deficiency justified and perpetuated an experience of racialized privilege for Asian
American students, continually reproducing a bifurcated school experience for Asian
American students in comparison to their Latina/o peers. Yet, the controversy over Robin
Zhou’s column, in forcing students, staff, and administration to confront socially
constructed hierarchies which had previously been accepted as simple common sense, left
a lingering sense of unease, the full outcomes of which are yet to be determined.

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Chapter 3: ‘Just like any other boy’?
Race and the Monterey Park Boy Scouts of America

[E]very culture that’s in that Troop right now, every different kind of culture that we
have in Troop [252], is learning the same values.
- Joe Castillo, Assistant Scoutmaster, Troop 252
1

He was always the lone milk dud…
- Marie Johnson, mother of Shawn Smith
2

Monterey Park’s Boy Scout Troop 252 was chartered in 1922, when Monterey
Park was a newly incorporated, semi-rural town on the outskirts of Los Angeles—still
decades away from becoming the even sprawl of strip malls, faux-Mediterranean
townhomes, and aging 1950s subdivisions it is today. A 1928 photograph of the troop
depicts fourteen White-looking adolescent boys and two men clustered around a Rose
Bowl float decorated with an American flag made of flowers. The boys are solemn-faced,
their hands raised crisply to their foreheads in the scout salute.
3
Fastforward eighty years
to a Troop 252 meeting in July, 2008: Dozens of adolescent boys in dark green T-shirts
adorned with the Boy Scout of America’s (BSA) fleur-de-lis logo and khakis move
energetically in the parking lot and up the stairs of a large, Methodist church in Monterey

1
Interview with Joe Castillo, October 19, 2007. Although I have preserved the location of the troop due
to its importance to my argument, I have changed its number and all names in this chapter, with the
exception of Boy Scouts of America officials not directly affiliated with the troop, in order to protect
the privacy of my respondents.

2
Interview with Marie Johnson, October 5, 2007.

3
Troop 252 documents, housed in the basement of the church in Monterey Park in which they are
chartered. Viewed July 31, 2008.

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Park. Parents—mostly mothers—cluster in small groups, chatting amiably. A handful of
men—assistant scoutmasters, most of them fathers of boys in the troop, also wearing the
green BSA shirts—seem to be leading the enterprise, pointing moving currents of boys in
various directions, or standing back with their arms crossed surveying the scene. A little
later, the meeting is underway: boys sit on one side, leaving irregular gaps between
themselves for slouching in the pews, and mothers on the other, gathered in
conversational groups of two or three. It might be any BSA meeting anywhere in the
United States—except that nearly all of the boys and parents present are Asian American
or Latina/o, and conversations can be heard in Spanish, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and
Mandarin, as well as English. Scoutmaster Jim Lee estimates that similar to the current
racial-ethnic makeup of Monterey Park itself,
4
the troop is about two-thirds Asian, and
the remaining one third mostly Latino, with some White and White-Latino Scouts as
well. “We like to refer to three of them as token Whites,” Lee joked.
5

In the spring of 2007, Shawn Smith became the first African American Eagle
Scout in the 85-year history of Troop 252. His achievement of the highest rank a scout
can earn was the subject of extensive articles in the local Pasadena Star-News, the
African American paper The Sentinel, and others. His mother, Marie Johnson, sent out
press releases and custom-printed invitations to Shawn’s Eagle Court ceremony with the
return address labeled, “First African American Eagle Scout.” The ceremony, which took
place at Shepherd of the Hills Methodist Church, the Asian American church which

4
62 percent Asian and 29 percent Latino, according to the 2000 US Census.

5
Interview with Jim Lee, April 30, 2007. Referring to the few White people present as “token Whites”
was a joke I heard often in the course of interviewing SGV residents, most often from Asian
Americans. The pleasure they took in revising this phrase, which is typically applied to the minimal
inclusion of non-Whites in various contexts, was obvious.

133
sponsors the troop, lasted over three hours. Shawn was feted by a long list of officials,
including the head of the regional Boy Scouts of America (BSA) council, a deacon from
a church in nearby Pasadena, a representative of the National Guard, and local
congresswoman Hilda Solis. During the ceremony, a significant portion of the audience
responded to the speeches with emphatic vocal affirmations, following the norms of
Black church services. Afterward, guests were treated to a soul food banquet and a live
jazz band. Johnson had hired assistants to decorate the banquet room: “We had cloth
tablecloths… it was just old-school elegant.”
6

Figure 16: Monterey Park Boy Scout Troop 252, circa 2007 (courtesy of Jim Lee)

6
Interview with Marie Johnson, October 5, 2007.

134
However, fewer than half of the troop’s assistant scoutmasters attended.
According to Shawn, for an Eagle Court, usually nearly all of them would attend. While
two of the assistant scoutmasters I interviewed recalled that there may have been a time
conflict which prevented some of the others from attending, Scoutmaster Jim Lee
attributed the low attendance to something else: some “didn’t feel it was going to be
appropriate, the way it was gonna come out.” According to Lee, they felt that the
ceremony, which he described as “a different type of Eagle Court that no one has ever
seen,” overemphasized Shawn’s status as the first African American Eagle Scout in the
troop, when it should have simply focused on “the boy and his accomplishments. If you
read the newspaper beforehand and everything else… sometimes you felt that hey, this is
not going to be for me… they felt it wasn’t a scouting-type deal… it just wasn’t the Boy
Scout way, or anything that we were used to, basically.”
7

Lee’s statements raise significant questions: in the minds of scouts, leadership,
and parents of Troop 252, what did constitute “a scouting-type deal,” or the “Boy Scout
way”? Why did one scout’s Eagle Court ceremony cause so much consternation and
discomfort within the troop, and what was the nature of that discomfort? In fact, the
Eagle Court of Honor ceremony was the culmination not only of Shawn’s many years in
the troop, but also of a long path informed by the regional racial/ethnic dynamics of
Troop 252, in which Shawn was the only African American among more than 50
primarily Asian and Latino counterparts. Shawn’s elaborate, much-publicized Eagle
Court of Honor was preceded by several newspaper articles framing his achievement in
clearly racial terms, yet omitting any mention that the troop as a whole was

7
Interview with Jim Lee, April 30, 2007.

135
predominantly non-White. The treatment of the majority Asian American and Latino
troop as racially invisible or “neutral,” a role historically reserved for Whites, while
African American is marked as hyper-visible or exceptional, speaks to the particular
racial formation at play in Monterey Park and the West SGV. The emphasis on race in
Shawn’s advancement to Eagle both constituted a rupture in the principles of the BSA as
understood and expressed by its local proponents, and exposed regionally specific racial
dynamics operating within the troop that had previously been taken for granted.
In my analysis which follows, I seek to complicate the literature on the political
possibilities of majority non-White spaces by showing how racial ideologies are
produced, perpetuated, and subverted not just in explicitly political contexts but through
the civic institutions which guide people’s everyday lives, and not only in central urban
areas, but in a growing number of “majority-minority” suburbs, such as Monterey Park.
Historically, American civic institutions have played an important role in fostering
immigrant involvement in public life, mostly toward the end of assimilating White
ethnics for the purposes of political participation. More recently, scholars have begun to
analyze the role of less mainstream civic institutions such as community organizations,
ethnic voluntary associations, and ethnic churches in mobilizing non-White immigrants
to participate in civic life (Wong 2006). In the context of the West SGV’s predominantly
Asian and Latina/o racial mix, how were regional norms of race, gender, class, and
citizenship articulated within the institutional context of the Boy Scouts of America, an
influential national organization which openly espouses patriotism, good citizenship, and
heteronormative masculinity (Macleod 1983, Peterson 1984, MacDonald 1993, Mechling
2001, Townley 2007)—attributes historically interwoven with the production of gendered
136
racial hierarchies in the United States? A look at the history of ethnic/racial minorities
and scouting, in combination with an analysis of its meaning in the lives of members of
Troop 252, calls into question how supposedly hegemonic civic institutions such as the
BSA actually operate in people’s lives, and highlights the importance of middle-income,
“majority-minority” suburbs, as potentially important sites of multiethnic racial
formation.
Throughout my analysis of interviews with scouts, troop leadership, parents, and
BSA administrators, I examine closely the affective dimensions of Shawn Smith and
others’ experiences in Troop 252, with the premise I carry throughout my dissertation
that the nuances of individual experiences have value in showing not only the difficulty
of escaping overdetermined meanings of race in the United States, but also latent
alternative possibilities of meaning-making operating at a regional level in people’s daily
lives. The ways in which diverse members and leadership of Troop 252 reacted to and
made sense of Shawn’s progress in the troop had much to do with their beliefs about the
United States, such as the roles of egalitarianism, individualism, and hard work in
ensuring equal access to the “American Dream,” and about their own place in the nation
as racialized ethnic minorities. In the suburban, majority-Asian American and Latina/o,
multiracial setting of Troop 252, what practices, racial orders, and norms were being
produced, and how did diverse members of the troop fit into these orders?

Differential racialization and the West SGV’s ‘field of racial positions’
In an approach to conceptualizing differential racialization that focuses on the
“triangulation” of Asian Americans, Claire Jean Kim (1999) puts forth the notion of “a
137
field of racial positions” (106). This is “a normative blueprint for who should get what”
defined by “at least two axes—superior/inferior and insider/foreigner,” emphasizing both
“that groups become racialized in comparison with one another and that they are
differently racialized” (107). Asian Americans are triangulated relative to White people
and Black people in this field, simultaneously “valorized” by whites relative to blacks,
and ostracized as perpetual outsiders. Kim argues that these processes work together both
discursively and functionally, and both are required to maintain Asian Americans in their
“equilibrated position” (107). Change in either axis would alter the group position.
Although Kim is concerned specifically with how Asian Americans have been
constructed in the nation as a whole (hence her attempt to locate them within a Black-
White paradigm), her evocation of positions on a field points to how group positions in a
racial field (or hierarchy) are vulnerable to changes in multiple axes of relations.
8

In the context of the present-day West SGV, a charting of Kim’s field of racial
positions entails not only understanding the dynamics of a shared, predominantly Asian
American and Latina/o space, but also the presence of a growing Asian majority with
increasingly pronounced influence within the area’s civic institutions as well as its
commercial boulevards. Within the Asian population, the largest group is ethnic Chinese
immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, but the mix also includes ethno-
Chinese from Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and
Koreans, to name just a few groups. As discussed earlier, later-generation Chinese and
Japanese Americans have had a strong presence in the region beginning in the 1960s and
‘70s. Latinas/os—specifically lower-middle and middle-income Mexican Americans,

8
See also Loewen 1971, Koshy 2001, and Warren and Twine 1997.

138
have also made up around a third of the area’s population since that time. Thus, in the
West SGV’s complex field of racial positions, Asians and Latinas/os are insiders, with
Asians occupying a relatively valorized position in some contexts (such as school), but
due to their largely immigrant composition, also often conceived of as “foreign” in
comparison to the area’s more established Mexican Americans. Both African Americans
and Whites are positioned as outsiders, but while a few longtime-resident White families
have stayed in the area, and proximity to Whites is sometimes idealized as a measure of
‘real’ success, many Asians and Latinas/os are also wary of Whites. Very few African
Americans have settled in the West San Gabriel Valley over the years, although a few
people observed a small increase in recent years in middle- to upper-middle-income
African Americans purchasing homes in the area. While some Asians and Latinas/os do
express racial bias against Black people, many also feel affinity with them as fellow
people of color.
Because of relatively infrequent interactions with Black and White people in
most of my respondents’ daily lives, most of the time in-depth examination of such
dynamics could be avoided. When Shawn’s status as the first African American Eagle
Scout in Troop 252 garnered public notice, however, members and leaders of the troop
were forced to articulate and confront the particulars of their perspectives on race in the
context of the regional racial order. Within the institution of the Boy Scouts, a national
organization which tends to attract members who are deeply invested in its espousal of
American ideals of egalitarianism and individualism, the foregrounding of race in
Shawn’s attainment of the Eagle rank constituted a challenge not only to their personal
beliefs, but to their investments in the institution of scouting.
139
Racial/ethnic minorities and the BSA
The official contemporary image of the Boy Scout as an abstract figure of
boyhood and nationhood that in some sense transcends divisions of race, ethnicity, and
class (although never gender or sexuality), presumes one unified national culture which,
in the BSA, was from the outset defined by “frontier” ideals of expansion, conquest, and
the appropriation of conquered native peoples’ cultures by Whites (Deloria 1998,
Huhndorf 2001, MacDonald 1993). This notion of Americanness is predicated on
ideologies of racial succession and White “manifest destiny.”
9
In particular, Deloria
argues that just as Blackness has been an “essential precondition” for American
Whiteness, constructions of American nationhood such as those employed in the BSA
have depended upon contradictory relationships to Indianness epitomized by the notion
of “noble savagery,” in which Indianness is both the “impetus and precondition for the
creative assembling of an ultimately unassemblable American identity” (5). Similarly,
British Army general Lord Baden-Powell’s original vision of scouting in England
incorporated colonial African and Indian themes, and aimed to make boys into men able
and willing to defend the British empire (MacDonald 1993).
As discussed in Chapter 2, institutions of civil society play a key role in the
inculcation of hegemonic national ideologies (cf. Gramsci 2005; Althusser 2001). In the
United States, these are inevitably intertwined with ideas of liberal individualism.
However, national political and cultural institutions, in direct contradiction to the creed of
individual liberty for all, have in fact been integral to structuring inequality by
intertwining definitions of citizenship with race from the outset. Mills (1997) argues that

9
On the myth of the frontier and its utility in justifying racial violence, exploitation, and conquest in the
history of the American West, see Limerick 1987 and Slotkin 1973, 1985, 1992.

140
race, “the marker of personhood and subpersonhood,” like citizenship, has stood for
inclusion within or exclusion from the… polity” (Mills, 111). Lowe (1996) highlights
what she argues is a fundamental contradiction, that liberal citizenship has been
predicated on racial formation, so that even as citizens, racialized groups such as Asian
Americans have a “differential relationship” to national institutions (12). As such, when
Asians or members of racialized minority groups become “abstract citizens” of the
state—for example, symbolically, by donning a Boy Scout uniform—the act does more
than just erase individual particularities (as argued in liberal political theory and
Marxism). According to Lowe, it performs a “negation of history” by acceding to a
narrative of “political emancipation” via immigrant “naturalization,” perpetuating a
fiction of “American liberal democracy as a terrain to which all citizens have equal
access and in which all are equally represented… a narrative that denies the
establishment of citizenship out of unequal relationships between dominant white citizens
and subordinated racialized noncitizens and women” (26-7).

‘A lot of us were ashamed of our parents and our culture’
A moment broadcast on national television in 2003 illustrates what the historical
negation Lowe describes might mean in the context of racialized minorities and the Boy
Scouts. Gary Locke, then governor of Washington, had been chosen by the Democratic
party to deliver its response to the president’s annual State of the Union address. After
Locke’s speech was aired, news anchor Tom Brokaw, in his recap, listed Locke’s
political offices, then added two more details: “Gary Locke… Yale-educated, Eagle
Scout.” According to Alvin Townley (2007), this statement “told America volumes about
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Gary Locke”; upon hearing the two words “Eagle Scout,” “viewers in every household
would immediately recognize something rare and admirable about Washington’s
governor” (5). The listing of Locke’s Boy Scout credentials suggested to television
viewers that despite Locke’s Asian background, he could be considered an “abstract
citizen”; having donned the Boy Scout uniform as an adolescent served to symbolically
foreground his status as a citizen, his Americanness, over his Asianness.
10

In fact, Locke’s status as a racialized minority was not peripheral or irrelevant,
but central to his experience as a scout. Locke remembered his troop, an all-Chinese
troop affiliated with Seattle’s First Chinese Baptist Church, as a source of solace in
contrast to school, where teachers disparaged immigrant Asian children’s backgrounds
and constantly impressed upon them the ways in which they must assimilate into (White)
American culture. Since many of the adults and children in the troop were recent
immigrants, meetings were conducted half in English and half in Chinese, and the scouts
wore neckerchiefs embroidered with Chinese characters. As Locke remembers it,
A lot of us were somewhat embarrassed or ashamed of our parents and our culture….
That’s why Scouting was even more important. Here, I had a surrogate family and
kids I could relate to. We also had adults who tried to instill in us some pride in our
culture while at the same time helping us to understand American society. (Townley
2007, 38-9)

However, in the national symbolic registers of what being a Boy Scout is commonly
understood to mean, however (i.e., assimilation into a presumably White, middle-class
polity), the fact that one of the main functions of scouting, for Locke, had been to affirm
his ethnic/racial identity within a racist mainstream society, were effectively erased.

10
Parallels can be made here with the U. S. Army’s recruitment of immigrants, non-Whites, and semi-
colonial subjects.

142
This delicate balancing act of cultivating pride and patriotism while feeling
“embarrassed or ashamed” in larger “American society,” as Locke put it, has been shared
by a large number of non-White scouts in ethnically-based troops which began
organizing almost immediately after the founding of the BSA in 1910. As an
organization, due to its “vaguely progressive” origins (Macleod 1983), the BSA has long
promoted scouting across lines of race and class, beginning with the establishment of its
“Inter-Racial Service” in 1926 to promote scouting among non-Whites. In 1961 the Inter-
Racial Service was replaced by the Urban Relationships Service and the Inner-City Rural
Program in 1965, targeting both inner-city and poor rural areas (Peterson 1984). The first
Black Boy Scout troop was founded in North Carolina in 1911, only a year after scouting
began in the United States as a whole. By 1926, there were 248 all-Black troops.
Although Black scouts pre-Civil Rights had to contend with segregation, poor funding,
discrimination, and sometimes vigilante opposition, the troops, many of which were
based in Black churches, often served to build a sense of individual and community pride.
As a writer for the African American Registry put it, for individual scouts, becoming an
Eagle Scout meant that they could be “no longer just ‘Boy’”—treated by Whites as less
than a man and constantly subjected to a subordinate position—but an Eagle Scout.
Although many Troops slowly integrated after the Civil Rights Act, some Troops
remained segregated by choice, since “[i]f they had made it this far under such extreme
oppression, why should they happily submit themselves to white churches and social
clubs?” (African American Registry).
Beginning in the 1930s, Japanese American Boy Scout troops flourished in
Southern California and other parts of the West, and Boy Scout troops were active in all
143
ten World War II Japanese American detention camps.
11
One of the oldest and most well
known, Koyasan Troop 379, based in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, was founded in 1931
by Buddhist Reverend Taido Kitagawa to serve “as a way to help Japanese American
children armor themselves against the anti-Japanese rhetoric of the early Depression”
(Little Tokyo Historical Society). Troop 379 still operates out of Little Tokyo today.
As these examples illustrate, scouting in racial/ethnic minority communities has
often not functioned not as one might think—to encourage assimilation into mainstream
White society—but as a means to “armor” themselves against racist sentiments, to assert
“worlds of their own” in which becoming White, or closer to White, was likely not really
the goal. For these communities, participating in scouting served not only as an avenue
through which non-White boys sought to assert themselves as legitimate American
citizens, but as a means to build individual and community pride. Ethnic churches and
temples often served as foundations for troops which stood at a slight distance from
American civil society at large, simultaneously asserting their place in it, but also
maintaining a separate sphere of activities through which the pride and legitimacy
systematically denied to them as racialized subjects could be developed and nurtured.
Nonetheless, despite this history of organizational flexibility and openness, as
one might guess, the experiences of ethnic-minority scouts were not all flags and roses.
Two stories regarding Japanese American scouts during World War II, one real and one

11
One incident in particular encapsulates the fraught position in which a Japanese American scout
could find himself at that time: in the Manzanar detention camp, at the close of 1942, conflict erupted
between dissidents, accused War Relocation Authority (WRA) collaborators, and the WRA
administration (Weglyn 1996). When protesters headed for the flagpole to tear down the American flag,
Japanese American scouts surrounded the base of the pole, arming themselves with “stones the size of
baseballs”
11
in order to defend it. Ultimately, after military police released tear gas and opened fire on
the crowd, the protest ended with 2 fatalities and at least 9 wounded—but due in large part to the efforts
of the scouts, the flag stayed, camp director Ralph Merritt told the Associated Press (Peterson 1999).

144
fictionalized, suggest some of the grimmer dimensions in which this was so. In these
examples, at a crucial historical moment, the fallacy of the BSA’s egalitarian and
individualist creed was exposed in an exercise of power by the racial state (Omi and
Winant 1994). The first instance involves American politician Norman Mineta, who has
most recently served as U. S. Secretary of Transportation in the George W. Bush
administration. When soldiers came to the Mineta family home in San Jose in 1942 to
“evacuate” them to the camps, 11-year-old Mineta was wearing his Cub Scout uniform
and carrying a baseball, bat, and glove. But the uniform was no protection against the
grim chain of events; a U.S. Army MP only confiscated Mineta’s bat “as a potential
lethal weapon” before allowing the boy to board the train (Ringle 2000). Eve Bunting’s
children’s book, So Far from the Sea (1998), offers a fictional echo of Mineta’s
experience. In the book, set in present day, a young Japanese American girl named Laura
Iwasaki visits Manzanar with her family. The main purpose of the visit is to pay respects
to her grandfather, who died there while incarcerated during the World War II internment
of Japanese Americans. Laura has brought her father’s yellow Cub Scout scarf to leave as
a kind of offering, and her younger brother wants to know why. Standing at the barren
memorial, Laura’s father answers, his “voice coming from some remembering place”:
“When they came for us, my father said to me, ‘Koharu! Put on your Cub Scout uniform.
That way they will know you are a true American and they will not take you.’ I put it on.
But they took me anyway. They took all of us” (28). At these two crucial moments in
Mineta’s and the fictional Iwasakis’ lives, the ability of Japanese Americans, as racial
subjects, to become abstract citizens (in Lowe’s terms) was shown to be selectively
dictated by a racial state.
145
Although many of my Troop 252 respondents were not aware of such histories or
stories, both of these dynamics—the flexibility of the meanings and functions of the
institution in their individual lives, as well as its racially inscribed limits—applied in
ways which will become clear.

‘Vale la pena’? Marketing the BSA
The enthusiasm of specific African American and Japanese American troops
notwithstanding, however, it is clear that in general, the BSA has always had to make
extra efforts to attract non-White participants. While the BSA has always been perceived
as a public, civic institution, it is nonetheless a private organization which adheres to
fundamentally conservative social values (recently, most conspicuously spelled out in a
Supreme Court ruling of 2000 that upheld the BSA’s right to discriminate against gays).
Further, the BSA is perceived by many Asian Americans, Latinas/os, and African
Americans as overwhelmingly, unwelcomingly, White (Boy Scouts of America 2006).
However, as a private organization in a country whose youth is becoming increasingly
non-White, the BSA must maintain its capitalist imperative to appeal to the greatest
number of boys and parents as possible, whatever its BSA’s underpinning ideologies may
be. Since 1998, the Scoutreach division (the present-day incarnation of the BSA’s earlier
minority recruitment programs) has focused on developing relationships and promoting
scouting in African American, Latina/o, Asian American, and rural communities
(including Native American communities) (BSA website
12
). The BSA has focused much
of these efforts on recruiting Latinas/os: currently, Latinas/os constitute 15 percent of the
US population, but account for only around 3 percent of the BSA’s membership. As the

12
http://www.scoutreachbsa.org/; Accessed September 24, 2008.
146
BSA’s immediate past president Rick Cronk put it in early 2009, “We’re either going to
figure out how we can be the most exciting and dynamic organization of Hispanic youth,
or we’re going out of business” (Campo-Flores and Kliff 2009, 66). The BSA established
a “Hispanic emphasis” since 1990, launched a Spanish-language marketing campaign in
2002 (with the central slogan, “Vale la pena” (“It’s worth it”)), and in 2004, established
the Soccer and Scouting Program specifically to appeal to Latina/o youth and families.
In 2006, the BSA conducted nation-wide focus groups with African American,
Latina/o and Asian American parents and youth in order to better understand perceptions
of scouting among ethnic-minority parents and children. While the resulting report
maintains that those surveyed generally had a positive impression of scouting, the BSA
also found that “many see a Scout as a white or Anglo person who is not comfortable
with people from diverse backgrounds,” and that in general parents “lack an emotional
connection with Scouting” (Boy Scouts of America, 6). For parents and youth in racial-
minority groups, the traditional symbolic connotations of the Boy Scout uniform were not
ones they wanted to embody, or felt their kids would want to embody: parents believed
their kids would not want to wear them, and all groups of youth agreed it was outdated—
African American youth in particular suggested that the uniform should be optional.
Further, all groups of parents surveyed agreed that they “do not see a Scout as someone
their child would hang out with.” Their children concurred, mentioning to researchers
that they “do not see others like themselves in Scouting,” “do not have friends who are
Scouts,” and that “Scouts are not someone they can see themselves hanging out with.”
Further, African American and Latina/o youth also “[did] not think Scouts are
comfortable with their racial/ethnic group.” Asian American and Latina/o parents also
147
expressed concern about language barriers, and that their children would “[lose] their
cultural heritage.” (Boy Scouts of America, 9). In addition, specifically regarding
“Hispanic/Latino” families, the two main obstacles cited by BSA executives were the
perception that “Scouting is for wealthy families,” and that scouting was not “a
household experience shared by most Hispanic Americans/ Latinos.”
13

The report’s recommendations to address these concerns fall roughly among
racial(ized) lines:
When addressing African American parents emphasize the values reinforced through
Scouting and faith-based partnerships. When addressing Hispanic/Latino parents
emphasize the values reinforced through Scouting and building family bonds. When
addressing Asian American parents emphasize the educational benefits of Scouting,
the merit badges, and the activities that can help their children in future careers. (my
emphases; BSA Strategic Plan 2006-2010: 9)

Even though both the findings and the recommendations are presented as arising in a
straightforward manner from the focus groups, the lack of correspondence between the
expressed concerns (at least those expressed as having to do with race), and the
“solutions” (displaced as culturally-specific target-marketing) is striking. The failure of
2002’s “Vale la pena” campaign showed that basing marketing tactics on racialized
cultural stereotypes was not effective. In fact, the slogan was “neither culturally resonant
nor especially rousing,” nor did it explain to Spanish-speaking parents “what was worth
it.” While some Spanish-language fliers highlighted “ideals, like reverence and
obedience, embedded in the Scout Oath,” these completely omitted the organization’s
main goals of producing “good citizens and leaders”: “While those are nice values that

13
BSA Fact Sheet, “Hispanic/Latino American Demographics in a Changing America”
http://www.scouting.org/Media/FactSheets/02-972.aspx; Accessed September 24, 2008.
148
are consistent with the Latino community, if a parent reads that, they still don’t know
what the Boy Scouts of America is,” said one market-strategist (Campo-Flores and Kliff
2009, 66-67).
More recently, in August 2008, an “emerging markets” department was
established for “diversity purposes,”
14
suggesting that the organization, in keeping with a
larger “retreat from race” in American society (Takagi 1992), is moving away from
explicitly racial/ethnic language. The delicate navigation between fundamentally
conservative values and the need for constant expansion has been aided by a considerable
amount of flexibility built into the organizational structure which allows for the
continuance of ethnic-based units. Indeed, the large degree of autonomy exercised by
individual troops (albeit within carefully delimited parameters), allows for a quite a bit of
variation in terms of troop composition and interests, as the following discussion of the
BSA’s San Gabriel Valley council illustrates.

‘What you build on that bedrock is up to you’
In the San Gabriel Valley Council, Senior District Executive Jack Pan maintained
that scouting participation simply mirrored regional demographics, that “if you look at
the census, you can pretty much predict what Scouting’s gonna look like.”
15
Participation
in the BSA’s three programs, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, and Venture Crew, grew by about

14
Email correspondence from Paul Reyes, Senior District Executive, Verdugo Hills Council,
September 19, 2008.

15
Interview with Jack Pan, July 21, 2008.

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a third in the San Gabriel Valley Council between 2002 and 2006.
16
Troop 301 is one of
more than 350 units
17
that make up the San Gabriel Valley Council. Altogether 35,000
youth participate in the BSA in the Council. The Mission Amigos District encompasses
96 units within the four cities of San Gabriel, Rosemead, Monterey Park, and Alhambra,
and involves 2200 youth and around 700 adult volunteers. The Troops in the Mission
Amigos District of the San Gabriel Council, which covers Monterey Park, Alhambra, San
Gabriel, and Rosemead, are correspondingly majority-Asian and Latino.
In these multiethnic, multiracial Troops, the role of race and ethnicity was
perhaps less clearly defined than in single-race, single-ethnicity Troops. As Pan put it,
“Our bedrock, our foundation, is character education and outdoor learning. How, what
you build on that bedrock, is up to you.” Similarly, longtime San Gabriel Valley
scoutmaster Bob Matsumoto, who is Japanese American and leads a historically Japanese
American troop, told me that “each scout troop has its own identity and personality. So…
if a boy and their family come into a unit and they’re not happy… or if they just don’t
feel comfortable—there’s a spot for them in the scouting organization if they want to be
there.” When I asked Pan if he believed Boy Scouts, as it had for African American and
Japanese American troops in the past, still offered members of ethnic-minority groups a
way to develop their racial pride and identity, he said, “sure”—but was careful to
generalize ethnicity as just one way of “social identification”:
We’re very social animals, like it or not, and oftentimes we flock together towards
those of similar backgrounds, and sometimes that background is an ethnic
background, sometimes it’s educational background, sometimes it’s an economic

16
When I asked whether or not Boy Scouts enrollment in the area had increased after 9/11, Pan
answered yes, but in the absence of significant qualitative data, it is difficult to make a case for a causal
relationship.
17
includes Boy Scout troops, Cub Scout packs, and co-ed Venture Crew teams.

150
background. So there are different ways of flocking together. One of those, yeah, sure,
is certainly an ethnic one.

We do have a number of units that are predominantly Asian or predominantly
Hispanic, or predominantly African American. And I think the identity there, it is
helpful. It does instill a certain sense of self to these kids, and particularly for early or
new immigrants to this country. That’s another avenue that we’ve really approached,
in that you know, just because you’re a recent immigrant, doesn’t mean scouting’s not
for you. Because a lot of people felt like you have to be in the United States for
several generations before you join scouting, which is not true. And units like that
provide an avenue for new immigrants who may not have a full grasp of the English
language to join and be able to participate, because somebody else there speaks their
language, whether it be Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, whatever it is.

Will we ever preach segregation? Of course not. Of course not. Will we ever
recommend that you set up a unit exclusively for one group or another? Of course not.
But like you mentioned, sometimes the importance of fitting in is very, very important
for adolescents…. And one of the tabs, or bookmarks, of fitting in, fortunately or
unfortunately, is race and ethnicity. So that is an important factor, oftentimes.

As a sidenote, I should note that Pan is a self-professed “professional Boy
Scout”; although he was never actually a scout himself, he has a degree from Harvard’s
Kennedy School and worked as a political consultant (Pan: “That’s a nice way of saying
spin doctor”) previous to working for the BSA .
18
And indeed, his answer above, as an
official representative of the BSA, is a skillful piece of spin, in keeping with the BSA’s
organizational history and philosophy. Even as Pan appeared to validate my query, he
redirected the lines of the conversation so we were talking not about race and historical,
structural racism, but about “new immigrants,” language, participation, and “like you
mentioned… the importance of fitting in” (which was not actually what I said or
meant)—emphasizing that again, just one way of “fitting in, fortunately or unfortunately,
is race and ethnicity.” Shifting the terms of the conversation to immigration and
assimilation and adolescent desires to “fit in”—and away from race, as a socially

18
Macleod (1983) argues that much of the success of the BSA as an organization can be attributed to its
early development of a central infrastructure made up of paid, professional bureaucrats.

151
produced category of difference with material effects—falls in with “American Dream”
ideology, in which each individual has the same capacity to succeed if only she works
hard. At the same time, while he is careful to say that the BSA would never “preach
segregation,” Pan affirmed the continuing large degree of autonomy exercised by
individual troops in terms of recruitment and focus.

Dynamics of race and ethnicity in Troop 252
How does this institutional history and philosophy work on the ground in a
multiethnic, majority non-White troop like Troop 252? Over the past 85 years, Troop
252’s enrollment seems to have roughly paralleled the demographics of the area: at its
founding, 12 boys with Anglo/European surnames were enrolled, and Anglo/European-
surnamed scoutmasters led the troop every year at least until the early 1970s, when the
BSA stopped listing the name of the scoutmaster on the charters. A March 8, 1972 letter
from the BSA’s San Gabriel Valley Council to Rev. Dr. James J. Sasaki, expressing
appreciation for sponsoring the troop, signals the arrival of an institutionalized Japanese
American presence in the area. In 1996, when Lee, a third-generation Chinese American,
became scoutmaster, there were 12 boys in the troop; over the twelve-year span of his
leadership so far, the troop has more than quadrupled in size, usually hovering around 55,
but peaking at nearly 80 boys one recent year. The troop also has an unusually high
number of assistant scoutmasters compared to other troops of its size—a ratio of
approximately one assistant scoutmaster for every four boys, indicating not only Lee’s
collaborative leadership style but also a high degree of parental involvement. Although
Troop 252, like many other troops across the San Gabriel Valley, has become majority-
152
Asian American in recent years, these are generally a mix of later-generation Chinese
Americans and Japanese Americans, more recent ethnic Chinese immigrants, and kids
with mixed backgrounds (both interethnic and interracial). The “Latinos” in the troop are
mostly Mexican American, but at least one is of Cuban descent, and several come from
mixed Mexican and White (Anglo) families. As Assistant Scoutmaster Joe Castillo saw
it, primarily “we have four cultures in there… Anglo, Chinese, Japanese, and Latino.”
19

‘My group is pretty well mixed’
“My group is pretty well mixed,” said Scoutmaster Jim Lee, “and they all work
towards one goal…. And it’s pretty good to see. A lot of other troops—they’re maybe all
Asian, or they’re all Hispanics.”
20
Assistant Scoutmaster Gary Wong agreed: “You would
say we are uniquely… one of the few multiethnic troops in the area… Most troops are
predominantly Asian or Hispanic, or whatever.”
21
Since troop traditions are not, and
never have been, defined along ethnic lines, the role of race and ethnicity in parents,
scouts, and leadership’s experience of the troop is not easy to pinpoint. In addition, since
nearly all of my respondents grew up in the Los Angeles area, many of them had lived all
of their lives in contexts where majority-minority, multiethnic groupings were the norm,
and thus they had nothing else to compare it to. For instance, Assistant Scoutmaster Joe
Castillo, a third-generation Mexican American, participated as an adolescent in the 1960s
in a multiethnic troop which simply mirrored his East Los Angeles neighborhood: “Every

19
Interview with Joe Castillo, October 19, 2007.

20
Interview with Jim Lee, April 30, 2007.

21
Interview with Gary Wong, February 19, 2008.

153
kid on the block… belonged to Boy Scouts…. We had everybody in it, every race that
you could think of. We had Jewish, Black, Chinese, Latinos, Italians…. Every kind of
race and language was spoken at [those] meeting[s].” Correspondingly, in Castillo’s
view, “I can’t think of any troop in Southern California that’s all one culture. I think it
would be totally impossible.”
22
The normalcy of such scenarios for many Southern
Californians made it difficult for some to ‘see’ race and ethnicity at all. For instance,
Assistant Scoutmaster Gary Wong felt that because Troop 252’s mix was so multiethnic,
he never gave much thought to the significance of its racial/ethnic composition.
I don’t really think about it because we’ve had such a multiethnic troop…. Because
unless you consciously think about race, I don’t see—you know…. I see kids as, ‘Is
he rowdy? Is he a good citizen?’ That’s what I look at…. I don’t see them as, ‘he’s a
White kid, he’s a Black kid’—they’re just kids.
23

Even for Wong’s son, David, whose grandfather and great-uncle on his Japanese
American mother’s side had become Eagle Scouts in Little Tokyo’s Koyasan troop
decades earlier, his decision to become a scout was not motivated by a desire to continue
family or ethnic-community tradition:
[T]he person who actually got me into Boy Scouts was not one of my grandparents,
but this friend of mine from [school], an African American boy… one of my good
friends. And he kept telling me, ‘You’ve gotta come to Boy Scouts.’ [I said] ‘Oh, no
no no. I’m too busy. I’m taking swimming and I’m taking piano.’ And I was in
basketball at the time. So when I quit basketball, he said, ‘Well, you gotta’—so I
went, and that was it….
24

22
Interview with Joe Castillo, October 19, 2007.

23
Interview with Gary Wong, February 19, 2008.

24
Interview with David Wong, August 7, 2008.

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‘A doorway to the White experience’?
Like David, no one else I interviewed mentioned the racial-ethnic composition of
Troop 252 as either a draw or deterrent; no one had initially searched, for example, for a
Mexican- or Japanese- or Chinese-American based troop. However, this is not to say that
culturally or racially inflected considerations were unimportant to Troop 252 members’
motivations to participate in scouting. Conceptions of scouting activities as
stereotypically White—or at least, not “Mexican” or “Asian”—were quite prevalent.
Asian American parents and troop leaders tended to characterize scouting as
providing activities that were not typically available to “Asians.” When I asked
Scoutmaster Lee if he felt there were any aspects of scouting which Asian Americans
responded to in particular, he responded,
I think they [Asian Americans] want more out of life than what they’ve got, what they
had when they were a child. It’s probably because the parents were saying, you gotta
go to school, you gotta do this, and you’ll get a good job. Marry a… Asian, nothing
else—that’s what they do [laughs]—so that’s the way they look at it. And so now they
want more for their child besides sitting at home.

In Lee’s opinion, Asian Americans “get overboard on education” and were “not well-
rounded.”
That’s where the Boy Scouts are good, because they give you another alternative, to
do other things. Instead of sitting there doing your video games. Because that’s what
most of the parents say—‘they’re playing too much video games.’ Okay, send ‘em
over and we’ll get them out…. So they learn a little bit about everything.
25

In the scoutmaster’s analysis, Asian Americans joined scouting in order to find out how
to be less stereotypically Asian, “to do other things” besides “going overboard on
education,” and raise their children in ways they themselves wish they had been raised.

25
Interview with Jim Lee, Jaunary 28, 2008.

155
Mexican Americans were more direct about characterizing scouting as a
stereotypically White activity. Mexican American parent Mary Hernandez, who worked
as a literacy coach in local schools, recalled her coworkers’ distaste when she mentioned
her family’s involvement in scouting: “When you say ‘Boy Scout,’ you picture a White
kid. You don’t usually picture an Asian kid or a Latino kid, or an African American kid.
Because you know, that’s not the stereotypical picture of a Boy Scout.” As a
counterargument, Hernandez evoked the little-known flexibility and diversity of the
organization. “[A]t the same time, they have to see that… we have evolved as a country,
where you know, kids can do anything…. I think that they need to realize that… every
troop is different, even within Boy Scouts.”
26
Assistant Scoutmaster Walter Ruiz, a first-
generation Mexican American, was the most outspoken in his blunt description of the
BSA as fundamentally a “White, paramilitary organization.” However, Ruiz saw this not
as a problem, but a desirable characteristic, admitting that he “kind of like[d] that
paramilitary thing,” and that he saw scouting as a “doorway to the White experience” for
his kids, in that it offered them new experiences and hence a greater capacity to “do
something really special for themselves.”
One of the things my wife and I say is that our kids get an Anglo experience…
because they’re in scouting. When you look at your typical Hispanic, like from… my
upbringing in a predominantly Hispanic area, you don’t go camping. You don’t go
fishing… you don’t do community projects… you don’t do this, you don’t do that.
Those are what [rich] White boys [do]… and for us, being in the lower class, ‘rich’ is
middle class. That’s the perspective I grew up with. So. I’ll be honest with you.
Scouting to me? is one way I can give my children the Anglo experience.

Because [brief pause] what governs scouting? The scout book. Okay. Who started
scouting? Sir Baden Powell—Anglo, British guy. And if you look at the leadership in
Virginia, they’re all Anglo. If you look at the values in the scout book, they’re really
Anglo values. They’re not the Hispanic experience. They’re not the Asian experience,

26
Interview with Mary Hernandez, August 25, 2008.

156
or the African American experience. It’s the White experience. You know, pioneering,
frontiering, orienteering… using buck knives, and making bridges out of rope. And
the Indian lore—those are all White experiences. So for me, scouting is a doorway to
the White experience for my children… that’s what it is.

I can give my kids the Mexican experience, that’s no problem. We’ll go to the park
and I’ll drink beers with my buddies and make ‘em run around with a soccer ball, and
we’ll eat carne asada—the Mexican experience, I can do that with my eyes closed. It’s
the White experience that I want… for my children.
27

That the presumption of one unified national culture in the BSA was from the outset
defined by conquest and appropriation of subjugated cultures by Whites (“pioneering,
frontiering… Indian lore”) was not lost on Ruiz. But for him, this assessment did not lead
to a oppositional political outlook, but functioned rather as a pragmatic position. When I
pressed him on what he meant by the “White” or “Anglo” experience, he explained that
what he meant was having the time and the money to do the kinds of activities scouts did
(although clearly, this also included a devaluation of stereotypically “Mexican” culture as
unable to furnish success in “American” terms). For him, scouting being “a doorway into
the White experience” meant that his kids would have “a platform… to succeed” and
have a wider range of choices in the world than he had had growing up poor in Echo
Park. The more “Anglo” experiences his children had, the more increased their chances
for social and economic mobility: “you start to put pieces together, and you start to
decide where you want to be. And that’s what I want my kids to do. I want them to
decide where they wanna be.” For Ruiz, then, “race” functioned as a set of practices and
performances that lead to particular opportunities and entitlements. Once one was
“successful,” having achieved the trappings of stereotypically White social and economic
status, “you can be whoever you want to be at that point.”

27
Interview with Walter Ruiz, August 8, 2008.

157
‘I don’t want no Chinese food’: Reactions to the Asian American majority
An additional dynamic in Troop 252 requires comment: a sense in the troop
(reflected, as we have seen, in the region as a whole), of an “Asian” majority. Twenty-
year-old Jesse Boden, an Eagle Scout from Troop 252 who is half White and half Latino,
recalled that as more Asian Americans joined the troop, he felt that there was “a shift in
consciousness, maybe, toward that group,” and that his friendship group, which included
Shawn Smith and a couple other Latino boys, “were kind of pushed aside a little bit.” He
noticed especially that Shawn and “a couple other [Latino] kids,” when working to
advance within the troop, “they wouldn’t get any attention” or would experience what he
felt were “unnecessary hindrances.” As a result, “It would take them forever to advance.
It was just little things like that… that kind of made one sit back and think… what’s
going on here really?” He couldn’t help but wonder,
how the fact that the troop has become predominantly Asian might’ve played into any
instance of prejudice or discrimination that my friends might have experienced… I’m
being completely honest here…. I mean, you can almost follow it… down from a
chain of events, [and] you almost have to conclude that that that’s probably what
happened. [pause] Where it happened and how it happened, I don’t know, but I can’t
help but wonder about it….

When I pressed him to say more about this—Why did he think an increase in the
number of Asian Americans in the troop would foster discrimination? Was it something
in particular about Asians?—he replied that,
[A]ll it is, is a simple change in demographics. There’s just… more Asian people
coming from wherever to live in this areas. And it just so happens that as a result of
that, there’s this kind of indirect experience of, you know, prejudice…. In any
situation, in any group where there’s a visible majority, and there is just that shift of
power… there’s just that shift of focus and people are affected by that. It doesn’t just
have to be with an increase in Asian American population…. It’s just any increase of
one group, I think, results in that sort of struggle, you know?
28

28
Interview with Jesse Boden, November 12, 2007.

158

Jesse vacillated between “human nature” explanations—that any group that becoming a
“visible” majority would “naturally” shift the balance of power toward some and away
from others—and an awareness of a long history of racial discrimination in the United
States (“Considering the history of prejudice and discrimination towards minorities in
this country anyway, how can one not almost assume that that would be the cause?”).
Although Jesse’s mother is Mexican American and he identifies as Latino, within the
troop he was read as White, since his White father was an assistant scoutmaster, and he
does not have a Hispanic last name. Perhaps because of Jesse’s particular racial status
within the troop, he was able to observe these dynamics somewhat from a distance,
without animosity or, it seems, direct effect to him. He was a secret Latino—read and
treated as White, but observing things with the acuity of someone who identifies as a
person of color. In the end he preferred not to draw conclusions (or at least not to share
them with me), only repeating that he “couldn’t help but wonder” about it.
Some of the Latino assistant scoutmasters felt tested by the majority Asian
American leadership as well, at moments. Although Joe Castillo did not think that “they”
(the Asian American leadership) were “harder on me because I’m a Latino,” he added, “I
think I’ve already proved myself,” suggesting that the sense of acceptance he felt had not
been a given. Walter Ruiz recounted an incident where he almost resigned as assistant
scoutmaster, fairly convinced that he had been excluded from invitation a community
event by the other scoutmasters because of his ethnicity.
To their credit, they didn’t just let it stand like that. [Gary Wong] sought me out, and
we talked about my misperceptions of what I thought was a slight because I was
Hispanic and they’re Chinese, or Asian. And after I got over myself, and then I started
realizing that I’m really the one that’s putting a lot of emphasis on certain things, and
I’m looking for ghosts where there aren’t any ghosts—once I got over that, and kind
159
of relaxed and just saw my assistant scoutmaster comrades as just that, just people
who are here with their kids ‘cause they want something good for their kids, and not
saying like ‘oh, they’re Chinese, they’re Japanese, I’m the only Mexican around’—
once I got over that, then I haven’t had a problem anymore.
29

While Castillo and Ruiz both made their peace with the troop’s mix, there were still
moments in which the accepted order of things was revealed, if only by a desire to
rupture it: According to Castillo, when his older son was preparing for his Eagle Court
ceremony, he told his father, ‘Dad, I don’t want no Chinese food. I want Mexican food,
and I want mariachis.”

Patriotism: ‘the heart and soul of the organization’
Asian Americans and Latinas/os members of Troop 252 all agreed, however, on
the importance of patriotism to the troop and to their participation in Boy Scouts in
general. For them, Boy Scouts was not merely a recreational organization, but a way of
life which represents certain ideals. For instance, Walter Ruiz’s ability to reconcile White
privilege with a staunch belief in the “American dream”—that everyone has the chance to
“do something really special for themselves,” regardless of racial/ethnic background, was
intimately tied to his fervent sense of patriotism.
I’m the guy that goes to the Dodger Stadium and when the Star Spangled Banner is
played, I get goosebumps and I get a tear in my eye…. I don’t agree with everything
this country does—well, [everything] its leaders do, but I love this country. I love the
flag. The flag to me is the embodiment of opportunity, of ability. You know… one of
the greatest words and ugliest words in the English language is ‘potential’. And this
country gives you the opportunity to realize potential…. I think the flag is a symbol of
that, and I feel very strongly about the flag…. And [pauses] I know I’m a Mexican
[chuckles]. I know I’m just a permanent resident of this country, but in my heart… I
believe the red, white, and blue. I mean, that flag means something to me.
30

29
Interview with Joe Castillo, October 19, 2007.

30
Interview with Walter Ruiz, August 8, 2008.

160

Even as a non-citizen, Ruiz believed fervently in what he felt being American
represented, embodied in the flag as a symbol “opportunity,” “ability,” “potential.”
To Jesse Boden, the “heart and soul of the organization” was “the patriotism and
the respect and appreciation for the fact that you live in this country, and… everything
that’s wonderful about it.” Echoing the principles of the Scout Oath
31
as well as what
many others told me, he said, “It’s about your god… what you believe in, in terms of… a
higher power; it’s about your family, and it’s about your country… It’s about having
those sensibilities and being aware of all of that.”
32
Troop participants’ attitudes toward
patriotism are significant not only because it is a central tenet of the scouts with which
the symbolism of the organization is intimately intertwined, but also because of
patriotism’s relationship to people’s conceptions of race and citizenship. How one sees
oneself and people like oneself in relation to the nation defines how one see others—what
being a good citizen means, and by extension, who is and who is not deserving of
citizenship (cf. Ngai 2004).
Still, everyone acknowledged that there was a wide spectrum of engagement with
these principles within the troop. For instance, Scoutmaster Lee told me that he believed

31
The Scout Oath:

“On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.”

(BSA National Council website: http://www.scouting.org/Media/FactSheets/02-503a.aspx; Accessed
July 24, 2008)

32
Interview with Jesse Boden, November 12, 2007.

161
that some of the “new immigrants or some of the parents” did not “really fully understand
duty to God and country,” and that he sometimes got the feeling that the boys did not
know what it meant either. But while Lee accepted the much more open definition of
what “duty to God” might mean that the BSA has adopted in recent years, he still held
that duty to country was important, “cause you’re here.”
33
For all the internal diversity
within troops, as Castillo put it, nonetheless, “every different kind of culture that we have
in Troop 252, is learning the same values.”
34
Most of these BSA “values,” as espoused by
the troop leadership, are contiguous with heteronormative, prototypically “American”
ideals. People talked often of how scouting built “character” and taught boys valuable
leadership skills which made them mature into men. Implicit in the foregrounding of such
values were the “American myth of success” (Weiss 1988) —that anyone can succeed
with a bit of ingenuity and a lot of hard work, and that those who don’t have only
themselves to blame for it—and a frontier ethos of charting unknown territories and
knowing how to survive within them. Built into the acceptance of such values, as we
shall see, particularly the myth of success, is the purported color-blindness of the so-
called American Dream: that if the myth of success is true, than race doesn’t matter, or
that if it did once, that unfortunate period of time is past and everyone stands on equal
ground now.

33
Interview with Jim Lee, Jaunary 28, 2008.

34
Interview with Joe Castillo, October 19, 2007.

162
‘First African American Eagle Scout’
In 1989, Marie Johnson, a 28-year-old African American woman, moved to
Alhambra with her one-year-old baby Shawn, first living with her mother, then finding an
apartment around the corner when Shawn was around 5 years old. Johnson’s mother had
raised her and two sisters as a single mother in a poor, predominantly African American
neighborhood of South Los Angeles, and Johnson recalled summers “stuck right there in
LA, just right on the street.” In comparison, she and her mother enjoyed the “fresh,”
“brand new” apartments they found in Alhambra, the “well lit,” “wide” streets, and the
sense of safety they had as women coming in and out their apartments at night. It was
convenient to where she worked as a probation officer in Eastlake. From the beginning,
Johnson saw being in Alhambra as a move “outside of the box” that few people made:
“To grow up and then come out, and just to see this part of town… It’s like [Shawn] and
his scouting… he’s the first African American in 80 years [to become an Eagle Scout in
Troop 252], and you’re… this close to LA?... People don’t venture outside of the box.”
Their apartment complex, off of Main on the west side of Alhambra, was racially diverse,
with a mix of Latinas/os, Whites, and Asians, but only one other African American man.
For the most part, it was comfortable, although Johnson initially felt racially stereotyped
by their next door neighbors: “Until they got to know us… they just seemed a little
snobbish…. It’s like the stigma follows you. You enter into another area, and… they
have to kind of like, as they say, ‘peep us out’—you know, try to observe us and see if
we’re going to bring trouble to the area.”
35

35
Interview with Marie Johnson, October 5, 2007.

163
Shawn’s friends as he grew up were Asian and Hispanic, reflecting the mix
around him at home and in school. Growing up, he felt “there weren’t any racial cliques
ever,” and that in high school, “everybody was friends with everybody.” Nonetheless,
being the only African American kid in mostly Asian and Latina/o settings nearly all the
time took a toll.
I had a lot of insecurity when I was little. Because of course, when you’re different
from other people, you start looking at yourself like, what’s wrong with me, why am I
like this? You kind of want to fit in and be the same, but [brief pause] as I was
growing up, I just started realizing there’s nothing I can do to change it. I’m stuck—
there’s nothing I can do. I’m not going to complain about it, I’m going to make the
best of it.

When I asked Shawn what he meant by being “stuck,” he elaborated,
I felt like I was stuck in a way…. I didn’t want to change my skin color... I wanted
people to look past that and see me for me. But of course they didn’t do it. So I was
just kind of like, ‘ok, whatever… who cares? If you don’t like it, just get off my back
and leave me alone, and stop talking smack, you know?’
36

Despite the bitterness of such feelings, Shawn still maintained that he was not
discriminated against by his peers, that it was just “typical” school bullies, and when I
asked if he wished he had grown up in a different place or a different community, he
answered that although he wished sometimes that he could have gone to a different
school just to have a new experience, “I didn’t want to move…. I wouldn’t want to
change [where I grew up]… to me it was fun. I liked it a lot.” Both Shawn and his
mother’s experiences show a very different relationship to living in Alhambra and the
West SGV than Asian Americans and Latinas/os, most of whom adapted readily to the
predominantly Asian and Latina/o mix even if they had not grown up in the area, and

36
Interview with Shawn Smith, October 4, 2007.

164
were able to derive a sense of comfort from it. As much as Shawn liked where he grew
up and was used to it, they were unavoidably, as his mother put it, “outside of the box.”
Johnson was determined for Shawn to make use of the opportunities he had in
Alhambra, many of which she believed he would not have had if they had stayed in South
Los Angeles. When Shawn was in elementary school, he brought home a flyer
announcing the formation of a Cub Scout Pack at his school. At the time, “my mom was
having me try all these new things—sports… arts and crafts, YMCA, all this other
stuff—she had me do everything, I’m telling you, believe me… She was like, ‘Did you
want to become a Cub Scout?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’” Johnson herself had been a
Girl Scout for a period of time as a child, but had to stop eventually because of limited
finances; nonetheless, she appreciated that her mother, who raised her and her two sisters
alone, had given them “a taste of it.” At a certain point, Shawn considered quitting
scouting, and raised the subject with his mother. As Johnson recalls it, she said, “‘Okay
fine,’ [but] we’re not quitters in this family. You’re going to quit, you’re going to talk to
the… cubmaster or scoutmaster, and you’re going to tell them yourself [laughing].”
Shawn decided to keep with it, and finally, just before his eighteenth birthday in the
spring of 2007, he became an Eagle Scout.

‘Youth soars above the odds’
As with the controversy over the achievement gap at Alhambra High, the trouble
appeared to begin with a newspaper article. Several local newspapers ran stories on
Shawn’s achievement of the Eagle rank. Shawn’s story made page one of The Sentinel,
an African American paper based in Los Angeles. The Culver City Front Page ran a long
165
profile focusing on Marie Johnson’s challenges and successes as a single mother.
However, for the leadership of Troop 252, one article in particular, written by Patricia
Jiayi Ho
37
for the Pasadena Star-News a month before Shawn’s Eagle Court, stood out
(Ho 2007a). The Star-News was the local San Gabriel Valley paper, the one they and
people they knew were most likely to read. But further, while all of the articles lauded
Shawn for being the first African American Eagle Scout in Troop 252 and presented the
troop’s racial/ethnic makeup as a whole only as a neutral, unspecified backdrop, this was
the only article which suggested that Shawn may have faced specific difficulties in the
troop on account of his race. The central focus was on how Shawn had “soar[ed] above
odds” to achieve his rank. While the other articles kept to a more personal angle, limiting
their interviews to Shawn, his mother and grandmother, and Troop 252 affiliates, Ho
quoted the president of the Pasadena NAACP, who stated that “[t]he reason we are most
proud of his accomplishment” was because he came from an area where there were not
many African Americans. “He has demonstrated to the greater San Gabriel Valley that
you can be first in any environment, if you have what it takes to endure.” Finally, Shawn
told Ho that he had wondered at times “if he was singled out for disciplinary action
because of his race,” and that “A lot of adults there didn’t know how to handle my type
of culture.” With these statements, he directly contradicted the professed egalitarianism

37
Both Scoutmaster Lee and his wife Karen Lee, who has also been actively involved in Troop 252 for
years, mentioned to me on separate occasions that the writer of the story was an Asian woman. Jim Lee:
“Of all things, too, I think it was written up by an Asian girl.” Karen Lee: “The person was an Asian
person, Wendy. So I think she had her stereotypes of things, you know what I’m saying?” (Interview
with Jim Lee, April 30, 2007; Interview with Karen Lee, Janaury 28, 2007) Their statements implied a
complex and somewhat contradictory set of charges, perhaps that 1) this added to the offense, since Ho
should either have not have written about Asian Americans in a bad light, or have written about race in
a less incendiary way; and 2) that being Asian meant that Ho carried unfair stereotypes of race
relations.

166
and “color-blind” approach of the troop leadership—that, in Scoutmaster Lee’s words,
“we treat every kid the same no matter what.”
Of the four other assistant scoutmasters I spoke with in addition to Scoutmaster
Lee—two of whom were Japanese American, and two Mexican American, all but one
agreed that Shawn had nothing to complain about, that he had been treated no differently
from any other boy. Everyone acknowledged that Shawn’s path to achieving his Eagle
rank had been difficult, but most felt that that had been Shawn’s doing, and that in fact,
much of the leadership should be thanked for continuing to hold him to a higher standard
and helping along the way. It became clear, however, through some respondents’
linkages of professed color-blindness to charges of “playing the race card” and “Black
entitlement,” that in fact, racial discourses were not at all irrelevant, but an integral part
of the conflict over Shawn’s Eagle Court.

‘All the boys are the same’: Discourses of colorblindness
According to Kim (2000), the dominant racial discourse of the post-civil rights
era is “colorblind talk,” which functions as “a veil that hides the American racial order
from view, protecting it from challenge” (17). Colorblind talk perpetuates racial power
not in spite of, but through taboos on overt references to racial differences, by “obscuring
the operation of racial power, protecting it from challenge, and permitting ongoing
racialization via racially coded methods… The most egregious efforts at racial
classification are permissible within this discourse as long as they are racially coded, or
expressed in cultural rather than explicitly racial terms” (19). Its particular definitions of
race as an essential physical property, and racism as limited to individual acts of
167
prejudice, participate in producing a teleological reading of American history as “moving
inexorably toward the promised land of race-blindness” (18). Once a progressive
ideology espoused by civil rights leaders, colorblind talk has since 1965 become “a
powerful tool for racial retrenchment,”
38
its language often employed by conservatives in
backlashes against affirmative action and other progressive reforms. Its “liberal-
individual” definitions of race and racism deny, by definition, “the very possibility of
systemic group dominance” (18).
In my discussions of Shawn’s experiences with troop leadership, Kim’s
description of colorblind talk proved apt. Frequently, an espousal of colorblindness was
interwoven with oblique references to “culture” (read: race) and sometimes even frankly
racial statements. At the same time, in keeping with the norms of colorblind discourse,
much of the leadership operated under the assumption that to even mention race was
“racist.” In a typical explanation, Scoutmaster Lee argued that even if “we don’t
understand the culture of the boy… we treat every kid the same no matter what.”
39

Assistant scoutmaster Gary Wong was perhaps the most overt proponent of color-blind
discourse in the troop. Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, who was raised
in an “all-Black neighborhood” in San Francisco in which his parents ran a laundry, and
was deeply influenced by the idealism of the civil rights movement when he attended UC
Berkeley in the early ‘70s. “We treat every kid like a kid, we don’t treat ‘em as a White
kid, Black kid, Yellow kid…. I felt it was… a misstatement, that there could not be a
Black Eagle Scout out of our Troop. You understand? That we were so not colorblind, to

38
Kim cites Gotanda 1991.

39
Interview with Jim Lee, April 30, 2007.

168
keep a kid from achieving.” Wong was considerably more emphatic when I brought up
the question of whether or not Shawn Smith had been treated any differently than any
other boy, as the newspaper articles suggested.
Well, it was like, the inference was it was such a hard road, made so much harder for
him because he was Black. No. You know what? He was a knucklehead, that’s why it
was harder. He was a turkey. And we disciplined him in the same way that we would
have disciplined any other knucklehead. In fact, we didn’t—we don’t say hey,
[Shawn’s] Black, we say, [Shawn’s] a knucklehead.
40

Both Wong and Lee seemed to feel the implication that “we were so not
colorblind,” as a personal affront. Lee explained that the reason “we were not too happy
with… the way he talked to the press about it” was because Shawn had made them look
“not human at all, that we didn’t understand him culturally.” The way Lee refers to
humanity in this context is telling: that to be accused (at least by implication) of being
racist is to be dehumanized. This turns on its head the historical “invention of race” (cf.
Allen 1994, Gould 1996) as a discourse which divides into hierarchical categories groups
accorded full humanity, and groups who are not. In Lee’s formulation, to be human is the
capacity to see and treat everyone as human. The charge of “making us look… not
human” can be read then as referring to racial injury—that for Lee, what was at stake was
not merely being perceived to be not a racist, but something affectively sharper and
unresolved.
Indeed, while questions of how racial attitudes and personal histories interweave
are always complex, the fact that almost all of the leadership of Troop 252 were ethnic
minorities who had had to contend with the salience of race in their own lives, made their
responses to Shawn’s foregrounding of race even more fraught. For instance, Karen Lee,

40
Interview with Gary Wong, February 19, 2008.

169
Jim Lee’s wife, who has been actively involved in the troop’s parent committee for years,
related Shawn’s experience as the only African American boy in the troop to her own
experiences growing up in a Los Angeles neighborhood in the 1950s and ‘60s:
It is difficult, because if you’re the only—that type of ethnic group within a larger
ethnic group? ‘Cause… we were the only Chinese family at that time in the area, that
had gone to that school. So it was just kind of like, they didn’t treat me like a very—
how would you say—human-type person. You know, like, they would play with my
hair, and stuff like that…. I was a curiosity. So I could kind of understand where he
[Shawn] was coming from, because it’s awkward when you’re the isolated one.
41

However, she drew the conclusion that in such an experience, “you think everybody is
against you, but they’re not”—in her opinion, “we supported [Shawn] totally.” Karen felt
this way so strongly that in a conversation she, Jim Lee, and I had regarding an incident
which occurred during one of Troop 252’s camping outings, Karen literally could not
even see the possibility of overt or even implied prejudice toward Shawn.
WC: Did any of the parents ever have problems with having a Black kid in the troop
or anything like that?
JL: Yes, yes.
KL: They did? [surprised]
JL: Yeah. We had one parent… the parent was Hispanic and it was just a boy about a
year into our troop, and the mother found out that [Shawn] was his bunkmate… And
so she came up right away and plucked him out of there, and never came back to our
troop.
WC: Wow.
KL: Oh, that one at C___? That was strange.
JL: …You know, it’s not like any of the boys was going to do anything. But I guess
the perception of what a Black kid is… you got too much stuff in the papers… you
know, the bad ones are not doing things right, and they’re always in the paper. So
that’s what she thought of him. And I said, what’s wrong with him? There’s nothing
wrong. [But] she pulled [her son] out….
KL: [skeptically] No, she was just insecure, period, with letting her son go camping.
JL: Well, that too, but the kicker really was that there was a big Black kid. You know
how big [Shawn] is...
Did she express that openly?
JL: Yeah, she did. She really did. [brief pause] So I said, ‘Okay. But you know, he’s
not that type of kid. He’s actually a steady, nice guy, real teddy bear.’

41
Interview with Karen Lee, January 28, 2008.

170
KL: He’s made some good friends in the troop.
JL: Yeah, he has…. But that’s the only incident I can think of.
KL: I didn’t even know any… I didn’t even know that was the incident.
42

In this exchange, both Karen’s skepticism and Jim’s insistence stand out. Karen
much preferred to believe that the mother in question’s “insecurity” about letting her son
go camping was the primary motivation—although initially, when Jim first brought up
the incident, she does recall that it was “strange.” If not for Jim Lee’s detailed memory
and insistence that the mother’s motivation was due primarily to racism, the story would
likely have been brushed aside. Karen Lee’s skepticism points to how difficult it was for
certain members of the troop leadership to even admit the possibility that race could have
been a factor in how people behaved in Troop 252. Jim Lee, as scoutmaster, was able to
astutely observe the racist dynamics in play in the incident, but nevertheless held to the
line that the troop leadership never treated Shawn any differently than any other boy.
Indeed, the scoutmaster’s adamant downplaying of any racial significance to
Shawn’s experiences in the troop, much less his achievement of the Eagle rank, was clear
to others as well. Parent Mary Hernandez recalled an exchange between her son and
Scoutmaster Lee sometime not long after Shawn’s Eagle Court:
[M]y son came home from the meeting that day… and he said, ‘Did you know that
[Shawn] was the first African American to get his Eagle [in Troop 252]… And I said,
‘Really?... I didn’t know that. I can’t believe that that’s true’… I was shocked… I
thought they must have got it wrong or something… I said, ‘are you sure you guys
heard right?’ … He said, ‘Yeah, because I asked Mr. [Lee]’… And Mr. [Lee] said to
him, ‘Now that doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s your brother just like
everybody else here.’ So he kind of got the impression that he was deemphasizing the
color issue.”
43

42
Interview with Jim and Karen Lee, January 28, 2008.

43
Interview with Mary Hernandez, August 25, 2008.

171
To Hernandez and her son, the fact that there had never before been and African
American in the troop was surprising, and worthy of notice: I thought, hm, that’s
interesting… If I was him, I would have been really proud…. I think if I was the leader I
would have been making a big deal of it. ‘Cause I think it merits it.” However, she was
quickly able to rationalize the scoutmaster and others’ attitudes by employing the troop’s
prevailing colorblind logic that “all the boys are the same”: “If they weren’t that happy,
the only thing I could imagine [is] because they do really stress that all the boys are the
same. That you know, ‘Why should we make a big deal out of this boy making it, and
this boy over here is doing it too, and this boy over here is doing it too?’”

‘Playing the race card’: Notions of ‘Black entitlement’
Discourses of colorblindness, however, easily shifted into accusations that Shawn
had “played the race card.” Gary Wong, for one, believed that if Shawn had never
“played the race card,” the discussion would never even have come up.
I don’t think there was ever a reference to ethnicity, or a racial slur, or any of that
stuff, with him…. I mean, until that issue came up with him being the first Black
Eagle Scout… we just [thought of him as] ‘[Shawn]’. That’s it. I mean, not, ‘hey, that
Black kid over there, that’s [Shawn]. He’s our Black kid. He’s our lone Black’—you
know what I’m saying? We didn’t point him out….
And do you remember any incidents where parents or anybody else—
No.
--brought up race?
Not at all, not at all. Until… the race card was played. Up to that point, I don’t think
we ever even thought about that.
44

In Wong’s account, he seemed to offer as proof of lack of racism the fact that in his
experience, there was never “a reference to ethnicity, or a racial slur, or any of that stuff.”
The implied relationship between these two acts (of referring to race or ethnicity and

44
Interview with Gary Wong, February 19, 2008.

172
committing a racial slur) feeds into the logic of colorblind discourse—that if racism is
relegated to unfortunate events of the past that no longer have any substantial bearing on
the present, to even acknowledge race is to be in some sense racist.
Tracing the phrase “playing the race card” back to the 1995 O. J. Simpson
murder trial, in which prosecutor Christopher Darden charged that police detective Mark
Fuhrman’s evident racism was irrelevant to the case, Linda Williams (2001) argues that
“behind this statement stands a moral assertion that within American jurisprudence—and
indeed in many other areas of contemporary American popular culture—race should be
unmentionable… the very accusation of playing the race card has now become a way of
disqualifying the attempt to discuss past and present racial injury” (3-4). The Simpson
trial reference, as well as a host of other contemporary examples,
45
suggest that although
the race card charge has certainly been applied to other groups of racialized minorities, it
is associated especially with discussions of race and racism by or about Black people.
After the gains of the Civil Rights movement, structural explanations (such as
discrimination in housing and employment and loss of jobs due to deindustrialization) for
the persistence of pervasive inequalities between African Americans and Whites were
superseded by an “underclass” discourse in which the blame is placed on the supposed
failings of individual Black people and their families. Colorblind discourse, as Kim has
argued, enables model minority and underclass discourses, operating in tandem, to

45
An example from the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign illustrates this point as well. In late July 2008,
after African American Democratic candidate Barack Obama said in a speech that the Republican
campaign would try to elicit fear based on the fact that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents
on the dollar bills,” Republican John McCain’s campaign accused Obama of “playing the race card…
from the bottom of the deck” (Cooper and Powell 2008). Also see public discourse concerning the
firing of radio talk host Don Imus in April 2007, and the 2006-2007 prosecution of three White Duke
University students charged with raping a Black woman. See Joe Hicks (2007) for a representative
opinion piece, published in The Washington Post, which alleges “racial opportunism” in these two
instances and suggests that people should “drop the race card.”

173
perpetuate racial claims under cover of “culture,” with the implication that model
minorities (e.g. Asian Americans) are good “Protestant ethnics” (Chow 2002) who make
good on the American Dream, while the underclass (i.e. Black people) fall down on the
job. The idea that those who play the race card are trying to circumvent legitimate
channels to get something they didn’t actually earn—an offense to a central tenet of the
American Protestant work ethic—feeds into an idea of “Black entitlement,” as in
arguments which pose African Americans as the primary (and undeserving) beneficiaries
of affirmative action (cf. Crenshaw 2007). Assistant scoutmaster Walter Ruiz’s
perspective on Shawn is typical of this rationale:
My opinion is that [pause] he felt entitled to being an Eagle Scout, and he felt that we
should do more to funnel him through. And I think that the fact that the troop
maintained their standards, and… treated him equally, as they would any other Eagle
applicant, spoke volumes of the integrity of the troop. And the fact that he managed to
finally get his act together, and do the things he had to do, showed that he had the
ability to do them, all along…. So, do I think it’s unfortunate he made those
comments? It shows that he didn’t really learn everything he should have learned out
of the experience. In my opinion, there’s a part of him that didn’t understand the
reason why he was being held to the high standard that we hold every Eagle applicant
to. He obviously felt singled out and excluded, and maybe used the race card as kind
of a shield, instead of being a little more introspective and looking at his part in the
deal.
46

Scoutmaster Lee had a response along similar lines. Lee described an “us” (the
troop leadership, i.e., non-Black people) in opposition to a “them” (Black people), in an
interpretation of the events which ultimately led to a familiar place: sticking Shawn and
his family with the charge of “Black entitlement.”
It was not a good thing, ‘cause… you know, we’re a little bit more conservative, and
they have another view of things. How would you say it—Black entitlement, or
something like that? [A] ‘woe is me’ attitude... His family or him was lock-step into
what the Black culture of the paper and everything else has said…. It’s strange
because… generally you don’t get any politicians coming out to a Eagle Court, but

46
Interview with Walter Ruiz, August 8, 2008.

174
because he’s the first Black American to get his Eagle from our [troop], you got um,
[Congresswoman] Hilda Solis coming out. And then you have another politician too
that came out too. You don’t get those people coming out unless they want to pander
to that particular type of group.
47

Individual actions and perspectives are inevitably complex and contradictory. At
the same time that Lee complained of “Black entitlement,” at other moments concerning
Shawn, he showed a deep understanding of the effects of racially coded sentiments
expressed by others and acted to counter them as best as he could. The purpose of my
analysis of troop leaders’ statements is not to point fingers at individuals, but to show
how despite their protestations that Shawn was “just like any other boy,” they could not
help but speak about Shawn in racialized ways. For example, while Jim and Karen Lee
characterized some of the Chinese American boys in the troop as having “absent fathers,”
Jim Lee maintained that Shawn came from a “broken home.” Even when Shawn did not
fulfill stereotypically “Black” tropes, he was nonetheless measured against them: Walter
Ruiz, for one, held that Shawn could not have been discriminated against was because he
was not a “real Black kid.” Growing up in Echo Park, Ruiz said, he had grown up with
“real Black kids.”
[Shawn] was not a real Black kid. [Shawn] was a middle-class Black kid, in a middle-
class, bedroom community… He was not a ghetto Black kid… he was not a
gangbanger. He was not a dumb kid…. He was just a kid that was going to Alhambra
High, that dressed like every other kid that went to Alhambra High… He didn’t come
off as an urban Black—you know, a gangster, a ghetto Black kid. He was just a
normal kid that happened to be Black, just like any other scout in the troop. So… I
don’t think that anyone looked at him like that. I know I didn’t…. Because it’s not
about our perception of him, it’s the way he carries himself? And he doesn’t carry
himself like that. He was…okay, first of all, not into sports. So you couldn’t look at
him as a ‘Black athlete’… he was great at our skits, and our things of that nature. He
was very kind of art-centered… and had a great speaking voice. He had a good, sharp
wit. So you know, he wasn’t a Black kid when you think of ‘Black kid.’ You think of

47
Interview with Jim Lee, April 30, 2007.

175
what you see on the videos and things like that. He wasn’t like that. So I don’t think
anyone treated him like that.
48

The associations Ruiz had about “real Black kids”: “urban,” “gangbanger,” “ghetto,”
“Black athlete,” “what you see on the videos”—and also about the qualities Shawn had
which, by implication, “real Black kids” did not (“middle-class,” “not dumb,” “not into
sports,” “artistic,” “great speaking voice,” “a good, sharp wit”), in their near perfect
recitation of Black “underclass” tropes, show the impossibility of opting out of racialized
expectations.

‘Don’t they know it’s not just Asians, that scouting touches everybody?’
Within the atmosphere of general disapproval among troop leadership regarding
Shawn’s handling of his advancement to Eagle, one assistant scoutmaster, and some of
the Latino boys in the troop, disagreed strongly. Joe Castillo’s account of Shawn’s
experiences in the troop was strikingly different from the others’. He believed that in fact
Shawn “was held to a different standard, and they were somewhat harder on him. And
whether [it was because] he was Black, I don’t know. You know, I’m going to lean
towards that and say probably?” Of all of the leadership, with the possible exception of
Jim Lee, Castillo knew Shawn the best. Shawn had been a Cub Scout in the pack of
which Castillo was Cubmaster, and had essentially grown up with one of Castillo’s sons.
In addition, Marie Johnson and Castillo’s late wife had been very close. To Castillo, they
were “like family. Coming from a Latino, that’s a big thing. There isn’t a thing I
wouldn’t do for [Marie] and [Shawn].”
49

48
Interview with Walter Ruiz, August 8, 2008.

49
Interview with Joe Castillo, October 19, 2007.
176
In contrast to the other assistant scoutmasters, none of whom recalled any
instances of discrimination toward Shawn, Castillo recalled an incident in which a few
parents did not want their children to share a tent with Shawn. “I heard it from parents, ‘I
don’t want my son sleeping with [Shawn]—he’s Black—in a tent…. They were Asian
parents… And they were new parents in the troop, who I guess [had] never seen a Black
person before, or never seen a Black person in the troop, which is more where I’m gonna
tend to lean…” According to Castillo, the issue was discussed not only among parents
but also among the leadership:
And some of the Asian parents that heard that got very upset with those parents who
said that. In fact, I know for a fact two parents went up to that family or families and
said, ‘you know… [Shawn] has been in scouting for, you know, five years here and
then four years with Mr. [Castillo]. So this gentleman has nine years of scouting. My
son has slept in a tent with this man… And so has [the son of] that mother over there
[and] that mother over there…’ These two parents were kind of very upset at those
three parents who made that comment. So when I heard that, I was like, wow, man,
where have these parents been?
And they expressed that in a public setting?
Yes. And so the leadership was like, ‘Where have these parents been? Have they been
hiding in the garage or what? Don’t they know that it’s just not Asians, you know, that
scouting touches everybody?’

Although Castillo was careful to point out that other Asian parents had stepped up to
counter the parents who expressed racist sentiments, his comment that perhaps the new
parents had “never seen a Black person before,” and his phrasing of the question, “‘Don’t
they know it’s just not Asians... that scouting touches everybody?’” suggest a tension in
the troop, as mentioned above, regarding the troop’s recent shift to an Asian American
majority. With Joe Castillo, one of Castillo’s sons, and Shawn’s good friend Jesse Boden
aligned with Shawn (at least to some degree), Latinos in the troop were, at moments,
triangulated between the Asian American majority and Shawn’s position as the lone

177
African American. As mentioned earlier, Jesse Boden had felt that when more Asian
Americans joined the troop, he felt that there was “a shift in consciousness, maybe,
toward that group,” and that his friendship group, which included Shawn and a couple
other Latino boys, “were kind of pushed aside a little bit.”
50

At moments when Shawn felt that he was being treated unfairly, Jesse said, he
and Shawn would have long conversations. After making attempts to make Shawn see it
differently, Jesse would reluctantly conclude that probably there was a racial aspect to
what Shawn had experienced, and the two of them would wonder, “Are we really part of
an organization that would do this?” Jesse put the problem succinctly:
Boy Scouts is supposed to stand for… a unity… a sense of community, a sense of
loyalty to your family and to your friends… It was never a question of race or
ethnicity or any of that. It was always just one big group…. We were—Boy Scouts
was supposed to represent this diverse, multicultural, society that we live in. You were
supposed to promote that message [that] everyone has the same opportunity, everyone
can do this, everyone can be this, everyone can get to the rank of Eagle Scout…
everyone has that opportunity.

But it just sort of like [brief pause] flew in the face of all of that. It was like, well,
really?… Is that really the truth? Does everyone have the same opportunity, you
know? Is everyone treated equally and fairly? It just raised those kinds of questions…
It just contradicted what we thought we were standing—what we stood for.

For the leadership of Troop 252, Shawn’s playing of the race card (as they saw it)
constituted an affront, a rupture which contradicted deeply cherished beliefs of
egalitarianism and individualism that had been nurtured in the institution of scouting. For
scouts like Jesse Boden, it raised questions and contradictions in the nature of the
organization itself.

50
Interview with Jesse Boden, November 12, 2007.

178
Conclusion
“[Boy Scouts] taught me so much,” Shawn told me, with apparent sincerity. It
was the fall after his Eagle Court. He had graduated from high school and Troop 252, and
was taking courses at Pasadena City College to get an associate’s degree, as well as
working as a cashier at Toys ‘R’ Us. He still lived in Alhambra with his mother. He had
learned, he said,
how to deal with different people, different situations, how to be a leader. It taught me
all of that stuff and… you know, that’s why I’m not really upset about the situations I
was put in. Because that’s what’s gonna happen in life—why not learn it at an early
age? That’s how I looked at it. I was like, fine, this is what I’m gonna be dealing with
in life? I’m ready, you know?.... Nothing surprises me, you know, from what they
were doing. So it was just basically—it was like a little mini world.
51

In marked contrast to the troop leadership, and even to his close friend Jesse Boden,
Shawn expressed no surprise about the ways he felt he had been treated differently from
the other boys, showing quite different expectations of the institution, indeed a different
worldview. He was aware of the troop leadership’s consternation over what he had told
reporters: “[O]f course they all get mad at me about it,” Shawn said. “[T]hey always tell
me, you know, ‘why would you say something like that?’” But Gary Wong had spoken
with him directly about it, and even though they disagreed, Shawn allowed that “he’s a
good guy.” He still spoke affectionately of Scoutmaster Lee:
Mr. [Lee]—he means well. I can say I know Mr. [Lee]. I can talk to him about
anything. I talked to him about some things, some issues I was having before… he
means well, and—and you know, he’s just not like everybody else to me. That’s why
he’s in the position that he’s in. That’s why he’s the scoutmaster.

The following January, Shawn regrouped with Troop 252 to march in the Pasadena Rose
Bowl parade. “When I saw him interact with the boys, the ones that graduated out with

51
Interview with Shawn Smith, October 4, 2007.

179
him… they were just wonderful,” said Karen Lee. “I wish that news reporter could see
them now, you know, write an article about them doing the Rose Parade together.” Time
had tempered Jim Lee’s reaction to the events as well: “We’ve moved on, we
understand… okay fine, we just move on and that’s it.”
52

For its key players, the moment had passed. Nonetheless, Shawn’s public naming
of race as a factor in his Boy Scout experience challenged the troop leadership—and
institution’s—prevailing assertions of “colorblindness” and individualism, that every boy
was, or could be, treated exactly the same, opening up a space of uncertainty. The
episode showed that although Troop 252, like Monterey Park and the West San Gabriel
Valley as a whole, constituted a majority-Asian American and Latina/o space, as a
national institution, it was still integrally shaped by prevailing national racial binaries of
Black and White. Even in a context in which Asian and Latinas/os were considered the
norm, scouting still functioned as a “doorway to the White experience,” in which
Blackness was marked as hyper-visible or exceptional. The rhetoric of color-blindness
masked the alternative histories and possibilities of scouting for racialized minorities, yet
consistently marked Shawn, a Black person, as a representative of Blackness—as the
noncooperative “other” in a teleological narrative of national racial progress.
Certainly although during the course of my interviews, distinguishing a “real
from a fancied injury” (Baldwin 1962, 68) became increasingly difficult, the ways in
which diverse members and leadership of Troop 252 reacted to and made sense of
Shawn’s progress in the troop had much to do with their beliefs about America and about
their own place in it as racialized ethnic minorities. For Troop 252 participants—

52
Interview with Jim and Karen Lee, January 28, 2008.

180
themselves national, if not regional, racial minorities—who believed in a certain vision of
America and its national institutions, in which race could be irrelevant, Shawn Smith’s
refusal to “pass” as an “abstract citizen” ultimately showed the lingering impossibility of
doing so as a non-White national subject. The fuss over Shawn’s achievement of Eagle
rank suggested, hearkening back to the experiences of fictionalized and real scouts
Koharu Iwasaki and Norman Mineta at an earlier historical moment—“I put on my
uniform. But they took me away anyway. They took all of us”—that to put on a uniform
was still not enough, in a circle of abstract citizenship perhaps expanded, but still shaped
and delimited by race. In the context of a Monterey Park Boy Scout troop, while Asian
Americans and Latinas/os may have had the power to shape specific regional hierarchies
and norms, they nonetheless participated in reproducing national racial ideologies that
ultimately continue to benefit Whites. Adherence to “colorblind,” American Dream
discourse (perhaps an oxymoron) only provisionally positions Asians and Latinas/os as
“neutral” or normative. In continuing to mark Blackness as hyper-visible or exceptional,
the history of a nation that has in fact been fundamentally shaped by defining who is
White and who is not, is erased, in the end continuing to veil and reproducing White
social, political, and economic dominance.

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Chapter 4: ‘Diversity’ on Main Street:
Civic Narratives of Race and Place

What you see here is kind of an area that’s always been in transition… you have
incorporated cities that have an idea of an identity. And they never realized that they
didn’t have one until all these Asians started coming in.
- Eloy Zarate
1

The most frequently asked question in San Gabriel these days is not ‘Where’s the
mission?’ but ‘Where’s a good Chinese restaurant?’
- Los Angeles Times (Chavez 2004)

If it is now recognized that people have multiple identities then the same point can be
made in relation to places. Moreover, such multiple identities can either be a source of
richness or a source of conflict, or both. (Massey 1994, 153)

Driving north toward Alhambra’s Main Street on Garfield Boulevard in the
summer of 2006, soon enough you would see banners featuring a sedate blond White
woman with blue eyes and black-rimmed glasses. She was a prominent face of Alhambra
city council’s “diversity” campaign, a face which, unlike the vast majority of Alhambra’s
population, looked neither Latina/o nor Asian. How do we read such a scene, in which a
young White woman is touted as an official representative of “diversity”? In the image
below, the blond woman’s face looms over a cluster of Asian senior citizens on the left,
and a passing Latina/o family on the right. In its neat triangulation, the photograph
encapsulates a particular set of struggles over race and ethnicity in civic landscapes of
Alhambra and the West SGV as a whole, in which the specter of Whiteness looms over
Asian and Latina/o pasts and presents, in one of several current bids for the future.

1
Interview with Eloy Zarate, April 18, 2007.

182

Figure 17: “Diversity” banner near Main Street, Alhambra, August 2006
(photos by the author)

In this chapter, I consider how civic landscapes on Valley Boulevard and Main
are also sites of struggles over larger geographic divides in West SGV municipalities and
represent particular discourses of race and ethnicity. I analyze the role of race and
ethnicity in imagining civic identities in the West SGV through analysis of three episodes
in everyday landscapes: the redevelopment of Alhambra’s Main Street and its “diversity”
branding campaign, San Gabriel’s “Golden Mile” on Valley Boulevard proposal, and the
struggle to save a local park. At a moment of demographic and political transition, the
West San Gabriel Valley of the early twenty-first century finds itself caught between
varying bids for civic identities with particular material and ideological ramifications:
183
“diversity” on Main Street in Alhambra, an embrace of pluralist multicultural discourses
of the nation, contrasts with San Gabriel’s “Golden Mile,” a proposal to showcase the
transformation of Valley Boulevard by ethnic Chinese capital and immigration. Finally,
Friends of La Laguna, a grassroots organization dedicated to saving a local park from
redevelopment, offers a third possibility, of an appeal to shared immigrant pasts in the
forging of a suburban utopia. Such moments of rapid demographic, political, and
economic transition are instances of both crisis and opportunity (Gramsci 2005). As such,
contests over civic landscapes are also struggles over power in which questions of race,
history, and identity are implicated, and the stakes include particular and unequal material
outcomes.
These episodes are in part rooted in a recent regional past characterized by
striking disparities between who lives in the West SGV, and who makes decisions
regarding civic landscapes. Leadership associated with these episodes—including a
Chinese American city councilmember espousing assimilationist principles, a Taiwanese
American city councilmember and scion of a wealthy Taiwanese real estate family, and a
multiethnic group of Latina/o and White residents of north San Gabriel—speak to the
complexities of translating personal into public identities as well as racial, class, and
geographical divides within the cities. Further, each episode speaks to confluence of
particular spatial configurations within the West SGV as well as larger-scale ideologies.
Chinatown typologies of race and space are still salient, through discourses of Chinese
“takeover” or “invasion.” Such struggles over “Chinese” (usually used interchangeably
with “Asian”) space must also be put in the context of, and in conversation with,
ambiguous constructions of Mexican Americans as both more and less “American” than
184
Asians, in a historical context of the simultaneous erasure of Mexican and indigenous
pasts (and contemporary Mexican immigration) from the Southern California landscape,
and fetishization of what Carey McWilliams called the “Spanish fantasy heritage”
([1946] 1973). In the present moment in the West SGV, I argue, celebrations of
decontextualized multiculturalism (Widener 2003) serve a similar purpose to the
deployment of the Spanish past by Anglo elites in the early nineteenth century (Deverell
2004, Kropp 2006): that is, to naturalize or obscure systemic inequalities built into
landscapes, institutions, and economies (Lowe 1996). Following Lowe, I will also attend
to the ways in which civic deployments of multicultural discourses may be productive
venues for exposing the process by which systemic inequalities are obscured, to the
degree that they emphasize rather than absorb “productive irresolution” and conflict
within various narratives of place.

Chinatown and the Spanish fantasy past
Although patterns of immigrant Chinese settlement in the United States have
shifted over time, from the dispersed settlement of laborers and merchants in the 19
th

century to central urban Chinatowns to, currently, what Wei Li calls an “ethnoburb,” or a
multiethnic suburb (W. Li 1999, 2005, 2006), the racial ideologies that inform discourses
around “Chinese” race and place have remained remarkably the same. Just as nineteenth-
century Chinese settlements were officially considered unsanitary, morally aberrant, and
sources of contagion (both in public health and territorial senses, i.e. would spread and
“contaminate” larger and larger amounts of space if allowed to developed unchecked)
(Anderson 1987, 1991; Molina 2006; Shah 2001; Lin 1998), in early twenty-first century
185
multiethnic suburbs with significant immigrant Chinese presence such as the SGV,
struggles over the landscape are racially coded in terms of values and territory. As several
scholars have noted, discourse around “monster houses,” or the practice—usually
attributed to wealthy Chinese immigrants—of purchasing a house, then tearing it down to
build a larger house, often resulting in significant reduction of yard space, are one way in
which ethnic Chinese immigrants are seen as unable to conform to American values and
ideals and are therefore somehow unfit as neighbors and by extension, as members of
American civil society (W. Li 2005, Li and Park 2006; for discussions of similar
discourses in Canada, see P. S. Li 1994, Mitchell 2004).
2
In short, places coded as
“Chinese” or “Asian” (e.g. Valley Boulevard) are still seen as either threats encroaching
upon implicitly White “American” suburban space, or as autonomous foreign spaces
which may be tolerated but are not to exceed their prescribed bounds, or to be
incorporated within official civic identities. The prescription and negotiation of these
bounds, which are both symbolic and material, is precisely what is at stake in such
spaces.
Indeed there is a long history of discourses about Asians “taking over,” or
trespassing the boundaries of their allotted space, in North America as well as other
Pacific Rim British settler societies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (see
especially W. Li 2006). Such sentiments are inextricable from conceptions of areas of
Chinese settlement as foreign spaces that operate autonomously, a notion whose currency
in Eurocentric thinking dates back at least to the eighteenth century, when a class of

2
At the same time, the extended family members who might occupy these houses, and the children
growing up in them who might perform well at a local school, are lauded as evidence for the model
minority argument, that “Asians” have good family values and that “anyone” can succeed in American
society (see Chapter 2).

186
diasporic Chinese merchants began to establish themselves globally in interstitial spaces
created by European imperialism (cf. Ong and Nonini 1997). The eventual abstraction of
these historically grounded conceptions into (racial) common sense gave them a
normative quality, leading to the conjectural leap that “Chinese” or “Asian” spaces
should operate autonomously, neither requiring nor being worthy of partaking in public
resources. The spaces produced and reproduced by such ideas and discourses are most
obvious in the numerous urban Chinatowns in the United States and Canada. For
example, geographer Kay Anderson (1987, 1991) documents how Vancouver’s
Chinatown became a “physical manifestation” of the abstraction “Chinese,” in no small
part due to state practices. In Anderson’s words, “Chinatown accrued a certain field of
meaning that became the justification for recurring rounds of government practice in the
ongoing construction of both the place and the racial category.” Anderson argues more
broadly that the state has played pivotal role in making of symbolic and material order
around the “idiom of race” in Western societies, and that through “sanctioning the
arbitrary boundaries of insider and outsider,” in which “insider” is implicitly coded as
“white,” state institutions have enforced and perpetuated White, European hegemony.
Chinatowns are therefore a “western landscape type,” shaped and produced by racial
ideologies and state practices in Western societies, rather than any straightforward
expression of “Chinese” culture or practices (Anderson 1987, 583-5).
In California and the American Southwest as a whole, struggles over “Chinese”
or “Asian” space must be discussed alongside the erasure of Mexican and indigenous
pasts and presents from the landscape. More specifically, in Southern California, the
fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy past” was key to the establishment of a newly arrived
187
Anglo American power elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Deverell
2004). By ensconcing “Spanish” architectural references in the landscape and placing the
Spanish Franciscan missions in a mythicized narrative of European racial succession,
Anglo Americans relegated Native Americans and the Spanish to the past, asserting their
place in national narratives of manifest destiny and frontier colonialism. In the process,
“Mexicans” were rendered as both invisible laborers and hypervisible, threatening
foreigners; indigenous Californians were reduced to vanishing, picturesque figures in a
sentimentalized history. (Kropp 2006) Dating back to 1848 and continuing through the
twentieth century, discriminatory spatial and economic practices buttressed by such
ideologies have contributed to both the “barrioization” (Camarillo 1979) and dispersal—
for instance, through practices of urban renewal and freeway building—of Los Angeles’s
Mexican American population (Villa 2000). Partially in response to such practices,
Chicana/o activists and scholars in the 1960s Chicano Movement and since have placed
issues of history and representation in civic landscapes at the forefront of contemporary
struggles for social, political, and economic equality (Acuna 1996, Valle and Torres
2000, Villa 2000). However, in predominantly middle class-identified, suburban settings
such as the West SGV, the role of ethnic and political identifications for Mexican
Americans is less clear cut, as the following overview of Latinas/os and Asian Americans
in West SGV politics suggests.

Political contexts: Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and the persistence of the
White elite

Asian American and Latina/o representation across distinct West SGV
municipalities in recent decades has been uneven. In the 1980s and 1990s, the West
188
SGV’s adjacency to East Los Angeles gave rise to multiethnic, multiracial Asian
American and Latina/o political formations which launched the careers of notable Asian
American and Latina/o politicians such as Judy Chu, Mike Eng, and Hilda Solis, and
mounted successful campaigns for redistricting (Saito 1998, 2006). Asian American and
Latina/o politicians began to serve in Monterey Park’s city council as early as the 1960s
and 1970s (during which three Asian Americans and one Latino were elected (Saito
1998, 33)). However, although Asians constituted a plurality in San Gabriel, Alhambra,
and Rosemead by 2000, no Asian Americans were elected to these municipalities’ city
councils until 2003, 2004, and 2005, respectively (Chang 2005c).
3
In contrast, perhaps
due to a larger, more established, native-born population, Latinas/os were able to secure a
steady presence in local city councils in San Gabriel, Rosemead, and Alhambra dating
back to the 1970s and early 1980s.
In the early 1990s, Jose Calderón found that Latinas/os who held city council and
city administrative positions in Monterey Park typically placed more emphasis on
(middle-)class identifications rather than race or ethnicity: “They saw themselves as part
of a middle-class community and a middle-class culture, holding political positions that
were fluid, ambivalent, and middle-of-the-road.” The loss of Spanish language—
institutionally and culturally enforced beginning with the parents of most Mexican
Americans of this generation (cf. Sánchez 1993)—and social mobility into an integrated,
suburban, middle-class community “motivated them to see themselves as ‘Americans like

3
Chi Mui, a first-generation immigrant from Hong Kong, was elected to the San Gabriel city council in
2003, and became the city’s first Asian American mayor in 2007. In 2004, third-generation Japanese
American Gary Yamauchi was elected to Alhambra’s city council and became the city’s first Asian
American mayor in 2007. Rosemead elected first-generation Vietnamese American John Tran to city
council in March 2005; in 2007, Tran became the first Asian American mayor of Rosemead as well as
the first Vietnamese American mayor of any city in the United States.

189
everybody else.’” In addition, most identified as “Hispanic” (rather than, say, “Latina/o”),
believing that this term was “politically safer” and “more acceptable to the mainstream”
(Calderón 1992, 41). The ability of these middle class-identified, suburbanized Mexican
Americans to assimilate relatively easily into formerly predominantly White suburban
communities in the West SGV signals the racial ambiguity of Mexican Americans in the
area as well as deeper historical erasures. While many Mexican Americans suburbanizing
into the West SGV beginning in the 1960s prided themselves on “not making waves”
(Pardo 1998, 44)
4
—ostensibly in contrast to later-arriving Asian immigrants—there were
also those whose families had long lived in the SGV both before and after the region
became part of the United States, and the erasure of whose Mexican and Mexican
American histories are part of a larger problem in official Southern California histories
and identities. Therefore, the sentiment that “we didn’t make waves” has multiple
valences. Perhaps many Mexican Americans were more assimilative—and assimilable, in
the “dialectic of assignation and assertion” that shapes racial categories (Koshy 2001).
However, their ability to “not make waves” was certainly conditioned upon an erasure of
their histories and presence in the region that rendered them less visible within it,
effecting a kind of historically and racially specific disappearance.
Nonetheless, the ability of middle-income Mexican Americans to assimilate into
the West SGV suburbs—and into an implicitly White American norm—remains
imperfect. In San Gabriel and Rosemead, Spanish-surnamed officials have rarely
occupied more than one city council seat at a time, which suggests that they have not

4
Both Pardo and Saito (1998) note that in Monterey Park, this sentiment was shared among later-
generation Japanese American residents as well.

190
been able to expand their constituency beyond a fixed voter base
5
; it appears that
whatever officials might claim, ethnoracial identification—whether for or against them—
is happening nonetheless among West SGV voters. Within the last decade in Alhambra,
an explosion of racially-tinged conflict between the newly elected Latino council
members and an “old guard” White faction has ruptured the West SGV Latina/o SGV
paradigm of de-emphasizing race and “not making waves.” When Michael Blanco served
as Alhambra’s first “Hispanic” (self-identified) city councilmember from 1982-1994, he
believed that “race was never an issue” ((Blanco 2004).
6
However, this changed after
1998, when Daniel R. Arguello, a Mexican American raised in Boyle Heights, who had
previously served as an assistant to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and chief of staff
for Los Angeles assemblyman Richard Alatorre (Chang 2005a), was elected. Arguello
was joined on the council by Efren J. Moreno in 2000. In the several years that followed,
the council became bitterly divided between Arguello and Moreno, on one side, and
White councilmember Paul Talbot, usually supported by Mark Paulson (also White), on
the other. Arguello and Moreno characterized Talbot and Paulson as a corrupt, pro-
business, pro-development “old guard.” In turn, the Talbot faction accused Arguello and
his supporters of cronyism, practicing “East-LA style politics” (Chang 2005a), and

5
A search of data provided by city clerks of city council members with Spanish surnames yielded the
following information: In Rosemead, Roberta Trujillo was a member of city council from 1974-1978,
Joe Vasquez served from 1992 to 2005, William Alarcon from 2003-2005, John Nunez from 2005-
2009, and Sandra Armenta was elected in March 2009. In San Gabriel, Richard Montes was elected to
city council in 1972 and served until 1976, Edward T. Lara from 1976 to 1986, James Castaneda from
1988 to 2000, and David R. Gutierrez from 2001 to the present.

6
With regard to the bitter 2004 city council campaign, in which the Arguello faction endorsed an all-
Latina/o slate of candidates and sent out a mailer accusing those endorsed by Talbot and Paulson
(including Gary Yamauchi) of greed and corruption, Blanco believed that they had run “a clearly racist
Mexican-only campaign, damaging the racial harmony that we worked so hard for and creating an
atmosphere of hate and distrust among the three races of Alhambra, which may take years to erase”
(Blanco 2004).

191
“playing the race card” (Chang 2003b, 2004e)—accusations Arguello called racist.
Arguello and Moreno maintained that they had an obligation to bring up race. “Everyone
thinks that Dan or myself are the bogeymen coming from the East Side,” commented
Moreno (Chang 2004b). According to the manager of Arguello’s unsuccessful campaign
for state assembly, “Latinos and other ethnicities network, and it’s called corruption. The
old guard networks, and it’s called networking” (quoted in Chang, 2005a). On the other
side, Mark Paulson, who often took a more conciliatory stance than Paul Talbot, and had
on occasion tried to broker truces between Talbot and Arguello, was upset by Arguello’s
charges of racism: “Alhambra has been a racially diverse community for 40 years, and
we’ve never had this kind of tension with regard to race. If Paul and I were anti-Latino,
we would have moved out of town years ago. It seems like the race card is being played,
and that upsets me” (quoted in Chang 2003b).
In a heated race in 2004, the Talbot and Paulson faction regained control over the
council with the elections of Japanese American Gary Yamauchi—the first Asian
American elected to Alhambra city council—and Steven Placido (Placido beat Moreno;
both Yamauchi and Placido were endorsed by Paulson and Talbot). In 2006, Arguello ran
for a third term and was defeated by Paulson and Talbot-supported candidate Barbara
Messina (who is White). Although Paulson and Talbot reached the end of their 12-year
term limits in 2006, they had endorsed 4 of the 5 successfully elected city council
members (Yamauchi and Placido in 2004, and Messina and Chinese American Stephen
Sham in 2006) (see Chang 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2004f; Ho 2006c, 2006f). The “old
guard’s” influence had been preserved.
192
The roles of Asian American council members Gary Yamauchi and Steven
Sham’s roles in helping to preserve Alhambra’s “old guard” against Arguello and
Moreno’s challenges merits some discussion. It seems clear that Yamauchi and Sham—
both business owners and registered Republicans—will, for the most part, support
Paulson and Talbot’s longterm goals. As one San Gabriel Valley Tribune editorial put it,
“When all the votes were counted, Alhambra’s political present looks to be in good
hands…. Gary Yamauchi, the heavily Asian city’s first Asian councilman, can be
counted on to stay the course of investment in the downtown and creation of an attractive
business climate” (San Gabriel Valley Tribune 2004). When asked about his connection
to the “old guard,” however, Yamauchi was careful to clarify what that meant to him: “If
I’m… the old guard tied with people who have contributed to Alhambra, fine, I’ll accept
being a member of the ‘old guard’” (Chang 2004e). He made clear from the outset that as
the first Asian American on city council, trying to be “a good representative” to the
“Asian community” was also a priority for him (Chang 2004f).
Indeed for aspiring Asian American politicians in Monterey Park and Alhambra,
it seems that attaining the acceptance and approval of “old-boy,” mainstream, White
organizations has not been optional. According to the head of a locally based Asian
American political action committee, previous to Yamauchi, “In Alhambra you haven’t
been able to elect an Asian because of the old boys—a small group of old-timers that
controls the city. Not one of them is Asian. To overcome that, there are no shortcuts. You
have to develop relationships with these people, become one of them” (quoted in Chang
2005c).
7
In his analysis of political change in Monterey Park, Leland Saito concurs that at

7
Chang quotes David Lang, head of the Indochinese American Political Action Committee, who has
served as campaign consultant to Judy Chu and former Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo.
193
least initially, Asian Americans and Latinas/os who ran successfully for office tended to
build their campaigns as outgrowths of a White power structure which included the Lions
and Kiwanis Clubs, and the Monterey Park Democratic Club (Saito 1998, 63).
8
Indeed,
Yamauchi, aside from building relationships with Talbot and Paulson, had previously
served as Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce presidents. Stephen Sham followed
Yamauchi’s lead, also serving as presidents of these two organizations.
The challenges Asian American politicians in the West SGV face in tapping into
an ethnoracial voter base offer a partial explanation for why they must clear the hurdle of
the “old-boy” network. Many in the predominantly ethnic Chinese immigrant population
do not have the legal status to vote; those that do, are often more preoccupied with the
more immediate concerns many immigrants face in establishing themselves in a new
country, or may face language barriers and discrimination (Chang 2005c). For instance,
during the acrimonious 2004 council race in Alhambra described above, one political
consultant noted, “I think the majority of Asian voters don’t even realize there are
factions… It really boils down to whoever can appeal more to them, commit more
resources to outreach to the Asian community, speak their language and talk about the
issues” (Chang 2004c).
9
Sham, who is a first-generation Chinese immigrant himself, uses

8
In part, this was due to the absence of any Asian American political organizations (with the exception
of local chapters of organizations such as the Japanese American Citizens League, which were not
particularly active in local politics). According to Korean American councilman Alfred Song, who was
the first Asian American elected to city council in Monterey Park in 1960,

In all of the years that I have campaigned for elective office, I have never had the help, financial or
otherwise, of any organized Oriental group; whatever their origin may be—Korean, Japanese,
Chinese, Filipino or any others…. in twenty years, I think I could count the individual Asians who
have come to my assistance on one hand and still have a couple of fingers left over. (quoted in Saito
1998, 64)

9
Chang quotes David Lang.
194
the metaphor of an onion to describe his struggle to garner votes from Alhambra’s large
immigrant, ethnic Chinese community:
I tell people, don’t forget, Chinese community here is just like an onion… so many
layers. The first layer is illegal immigrants. You peel them off, that’s gone. The
second layer is… visa people—F1 visa, H1 visa, whatever, not even residents. They
have no voting rights. Then you go down to legal residents, who have green cards.
They have no voting rights—peel that one off. Then leftover is the citizens. Right?
Unfortunately, they don’t register. So peel that one away. Then you’ve got citizens,
registered. And they don’t go out there to vote! Peel that one off! So you’re left [with]
a very, very small amount of people… if you really look at this onion, the core is very
small.
10

As Yamauchi and Sham struggled to solidify their positions in Alhambra as
newly elected Asian American councilmembers, in San Gabriel, Taiwanese American
city councilman Albert Huang was contending with rather different, but no less racially
charged, alignments (to be discussed in detail later). Suffice to say that in early twenty-
first century Alhambra and San Gabriel, the question of Latina/o and Asian American
representation in city politics and landscapes is still very much contested. While in
Monterey Park, the elections of three Asian American politicians in the 1980s, with
substantial support and funding from Asian Americans, signaled a turning point in
Monterey Park politics (as Saito characterizes it, “the demise of the white old boy
network and the emergence of Latino and Asian American political networks” (Saito
1998, 64)), in Alhambra and San Gabriel’s municipal politics, race has remained “a
largely unspoken but constant theme” (Chang 2004e), with far from certain outcomes.
We turn now to the physical landscapes of the West SGV, in order to see how racialized
municipal politics have been key to the development of particular local geographies, and

10
Interview with Stephen Sham, June 14, 2007.

195
how struggles over space and place are intertwined not only with narratives of race,
identity, and history, but with the material outcomes of such narratives.

‘Diversity’ on Main Street
Alhambra’s Main Street runs for approximately three miles from Alhambra’s
western boundary, with El Sereno, where it turns into Huntington Blvd., to its eastern
boundary with San Gabriel, where it turns into Las Tunas Blvd. From the west, it travels
through industrial buildings, box stores, and car dealerships until it reaches the city’s
downtown, a stretch of six blocks centered between Atlantic and Garfield Boulevards,
dotted with restaurants, stores, a few clubs, a large, mixed-use condominium complex,
and two movie theaters – most of which have turned over or been newly built in
Alhambra’s push for “redevelopment” since the late 1990s. East of Garfield, Main Street
travels through remnants of a fading, mid-to-late twentieth-century version of downtown:
a greeting card store, a coin collectors’ store, and a mortuary, next to a Ralphs grocery
store and more scattered retail. Finally, Main Street crosses the boundary of San Gabriel
and becomes Las Tunas Boulevard. As of April 2009, a rapidly increasing number of
these businesses east of Garfield—although not the greeting card store or the mortuary—
stood vacant, awaiting new tenants or demolition.
196

Figure 18: Location map of Downtown Alhambra business district
In 2003, in the wake of Alhambra’s intensive multi-year redevelopment
initiative—involving over $30 million in city and federal redevelopment funds, the
ejection of dozens of existing businesses, and the opening of over 40 new businesses,
including a 16-theater movieplex—the merchants of the Downtown Alhambra Business
Association (DABA) were ready to solidify the identity of Alhambra’s reconstituted
Main Street. The work was initially contracted to a high-profile design firm in Santa
Monica, Gregory Thomas Associates. DABA asked Gregory Thomas, the head of the
firm, “to give the area one alluring brand image.” Thomas interviewed about 20 business
owners and civic officials, and noted that “the same word—diversity—came up over and
over again in his interviews.” Thomas also drew inspiration for a “Mosaic on Main”
197
theme from mosaic tiles decorating the new Edwards movie theater plaza. “With the
colors all working together, a mosaic reflects the quality of the restaurants and the
shopping, and the diversity of the people, which is what makes Alhambra unique,”
Thomas told the Pasadena Star-News. The merchants’ association spent $28,000 on the
branding effort in 2003, and had budgeted an additional $30,000 for 2004. (Chang 2003a)
The three faces ultimately chosen to represent Alhambra’s “diversity” on banners hung
on and around Main Street in subsequent years were what appeared to be a young White
woman, a middle-aged Asian American man, and a young, olive-skinned woman with
light freckles and dark hair—none of which are obvious representations of ethnic-
Chinese immigrants or Mexican Americans, Alhambra’s two largest population groups.
Municipal celebrations of diversity or multiculturalism are often, as various
scholars have pointed out, a flawed panacea, in their “reification of decontextualized
ethnicity” (Widener 2003, 136). In such pluralist expressions of multiculturalism—of, in
Thomas’s words, a “mosaic” “with all the colors working together”—distinct racial,
ethnic, and immigrant groups are leveled and presented as “equally ‘other’…
metaphorized as equally different and whole without contradiction,” in the words of Lisa
Lowe. Official multiculturalist narratives which suppress tension and opposition suggest
that the American dream has already been, or will immanently be, achieved; that “we
have already achieved multiculturalism, that we know what it is, and that is defined
simply by the coexistence and juxtaposition of greater numbers of diverse groups” (Lowe
1996, 96). With their celebratory tone, multiculturalist narratives allow us to gloss over
structured inequalities, conflicts, and heterogeneity among different racial, ethnic, and
immigrant groups (Lowe 1996, 84-96). In the case of Los Angeles, an implied linear
198
narrative which depicts Los Angeles as the city of the multicultural future proffers a false
version of history which denies Southern California’s (and the Southwest’s) Mexican,
indigenous, and multiracial pasts (Deverell 2004, Widener 2003).
11

Figure 19: “Mosaic on Main” and diversity banners. Photos courtesy of the author and
Gregory Thomas Associates

Indeed, in their presentation, Alhambra’s diversity banners imply equivalence
without specificity and present White as just another “ethnicity,” just one of a rainbow of
ethnic options (cf. Waters 1990). Race is reduced to individuals of various ethnic
provenances and different kinds of consumption (suggested by the “diversions” banner
with the picture of peppers). That is, in the “festive deployment of race and ethnicity”

11
Also see Kurashige 2008 on a political shift from integrationist goals to the use of multiculturalism as
“world-city” boosterism in Tom Bradley’s mayoral administration in 1980s Los Angeles (259-85).

199
(Kropp quotes Catherine Cocks), cultural differences are celebrated largely as
commodities available for possession to an implicitly Anglo public (Kropp 2006, 10; also
see Kropp, 207-60; Deverell 2004, 49-90; Valle and Torres 2000, 67-99). The “diversity”
and “mosaic” themes, with their connotations of egalitarian multicultural harmony, belie
two important aspects of Alhambra’s Main Street: first, that Main Street was and remains
contested terrain, a key dividing line in the racial geography of Alhambra; and second,
that the “mainstream” multicultural version of Main Street was not something that had
arisen organically from equal participation by the municipality’s diverse population, but a
concerted effort by city officials to excise particular types of small businesses—many of
which were ethnic-Chinese, immigrant-owned—to make room for national chains and
“mainstream” (implicitly White American) appeal.

North-South/ East-West divides
In Alhambra, Main Street had long served as a kind of racial divide between
established White residents and the growing Asian immigrant population in Alhambra.
As local historian Susie Ling, a 48-year old ethnic-Chinese immigrant who grew up in
the Philippines and has lived in the area since the 1980s, describes it, “Valley was all
Asian. And then Main Street was all White… [T]here was at one point a JC Penneys on
Main… all the service people were White. The Ralphs, the supermarket, was White….
today Ralphs has you know, some Asian foods, right. No [not then]!... if we wanted
Asian stuff, we would go to the other side of town.” In the mid-‘80s, “Latinos were in the
west side, Asians were in the south, and Whites were in the north… there was no
200
question.”
12
In fact, the Main Street divide in Alhambra is part of a broader north-south
racial-ethnic divide in the West SGV, which in many ways is also metaphorically an
East-West divide. Whites live to the north, Asian Americans to the south; Mexican
Americans live in the west, and in a dispersed way, in the north and south.

Figure 20: Map of main east-west thoroughfares in Alhambra and San Gabriel
Ling has traced the north-south divide in the SGV back to the late-nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, with landed wealth and more racially restrictive strictures north
of Huntington,
13
and railroad depot towns and smaller-scale orchards, farms, and

12
Interview with Susie Ling, April 16, 2007.

13
The most conspicuous example of north-of-Huntington wealth is, of course, railroad tycoon Henry
Huntington’s vast estate in exclusive San Marino. San Marino, which borders both eastern Alhambra
and San Gabriel to the north, was incorporated in 1913 by Huntington and a group of wealthy ranchers
when neighboring cities threatened to annex their extensive land holdings. Ever since San Marino has
prided itself on being what the local newspaper calls “the finest, exclusively residential community in
the West,” with a host of supporting city ordinances from the seemingly trivial, such as a ban on
201
vineyards to the south. Most non-Whites north of Huntington during this period were
servants and laborers, while south of Huntington, non-White groups were more able to
carve out modest niches, such as Japanese truck-gardening families, of which the San
Gabriel census counted more than 80 in 1920 (Ling 2005), and Mexican and Mexican
American farmworkers living in “semiautonomous” camps or colonias in and around El
Monte (Garcia 2001). As Mexican Americans and Asian Americans began to settle in the
bedroom communities which sprouted along newly constructed freeways in the 1950s
and 1960s, they more or less followed an eastward line from East Los Angeles,
Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and other central-city ethnic enclaves. Further, the north-south
divide was actively enforced by real estate agents (see Chapter 1). The north-south
divide, while increasingly porous, is still generally true today, especially in Alhambra and
neighboring San Gabriel (which sit north-northwest of Monterey Park and Rosemead,
respectively), whether residents name the dividing north-south line as Huntington Drive
(still a major road running east from downtown into and through the San Gabriel Valley,
approximately 1 mile north of Main), Main Street, or the railroad tracks along Mission
(just south of Main in Alhambra and Las Tunas in San Gabriel). The area around Valley
Boulevard was itself a site of struggle in earlier decades (and, as we will see, it still is).

placing trash cans in view of the street, to the more significant—a ban on apartment buildings, and a
limit of one family per home. Beginning in the 1980s, the historically old-money, white community
changed substantially with a large influx of affluent, ethnic Chinese immigrants; currently, Asians are a
slight plurality, making up nearly half of the residents. However, the community’s collective antipathy
to change and deep investment in property values (with a median home sales price of $1.4 million in
2007) and exclusivity has changed very little: in 1990, San Marino residents opposed a bid to join the
city from 900 households to the north, and in 1993 resisted a state mandate to provide a minimal 13
units of affordable housing.

202
For Ling, who now lives at the eastern edge of San Gabriel, “it’s very clear to me [that]
I’m south of Huntington…. You live north or south of Huntington.”
14

These boundaries were policed and enforced, first with official codes and White
vigilante violence, and now, in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with
more subtle struggles in the civic landscape as well as in local politics. Mike Davis and
Alessandra Moctezuma (1999) have written of a suburban “third border”
15
in the West
SGV, in which wealthy, ostensibly White suburbanites effectively racially police public
space such as municipal parks by limiting access to their working-class, (assumed to be)
Latina/o neighbors through instituting stiff entry fees or blocking pathways in certain
neighborhoods.
16
In the 1980s and 1990s, Horton (1995), Fong (1994), and Saito (1998)
detailed racially coded struggles in Monterey Park over growth, commercial
development, and signage. For instance, in a protracted struggle over the architectural
design of the Atlantic Square shopping center, a group of predominantly established
White and Latina/o residents banded together to affirm non-Asian culture (Saito 1998,
39-54). In one public hearing, a young White man active in a citizens’ group advocating
for “a strong local definition” to the shopping center asked, “What’s the theme? Things
have changed so fast that our roots are blurred. We have to go back to the history of the

14
Interview with Susie Ling, April 16, 2007.

15
In Davis and Moctezuma’s scheme, the first border is the geopolitical boundary between Mexico and
the United States. The second border is the checkpoint 75 miles north from the literal border which
creates a broader border region for policing.

16
Davis and Moctezuma pretty much write off the ethnic Chinese presence in the same area as
constituting an “eight-mile-long linear Chinatown,” albeit a “spectacular” one (Davis and Moctezuma
1999). While the article is useful in its geographical and demographic overview of the West SGV, it is
limited by its seeming inability to compute Chinese or Asian American with suburban, or Chicana/o
with anything but “blue-collar,” or the interaction of these two non-White groups with one another
rather than solely with Whites. These limitations point to the undertheorized nature of the relationship
of race and suburban space in general.

203
town”—meaning “European,” not Asian, roots (Field notes taken by Leland Saito in
1989, quoted in Horton 1995, 92). Planners first evoked Southern California’s Mexican
past, suggesting a Mexican architectural theme that was eventually “whitened,” becoming
Spanish and finally, vaguely “Mediterranean.” Saito notes that the wide acceptance of
“Mediterranean” style as somehow more “American” than “Mexican” or “Asian” styles
also played a role in the struggles in Monterey Park over business signs written in
Chinese and other visual markers of Chinese culture.
17

Similarly, during the push for redevelopment on Alhambra’s Main Street, Ling
remembered that at “that corner where the Applebee’s is now, they had this huge sign
that said, ‘Wanted: American restaurant’… I drove by every day. And I was like, well,
screw you.”
18
Ling’s understanding of the word “American” on the sign as unequivocally
anti-Asian taps into local memory of a large sign placed at a gas station and printed onto
car bumper stickers in Monterey Park in the mid-1980s that read, “Will the last American
to leave Monterey Park please bring the flag?” (Horton 1995, 79; Fong 1994, 4). The
slogan was widely understood to be as an expression of nativist hostility against
incoming Asian immigrants and Asian-owned businesses, and is still vividly engraved in
the minds of long-term Asian American and Latina/o residents today. The “Wanted:
American restaurant” sign on Main Street, read in the context of local history as an
expression of nativism and barely veiled racism via consumer desires—or, put another
way, that restaurants serving Chinese food, and by extension, ethnic Chinese people

17
Further, in the United States, the commonly accepted connotation of the term “Mediterranean” as
exclusively European serves to create an ideological erasure of the geographical fact that the
Mediterranean Sea is encircled by West Asia and North Africa as well.

18
Interview with Susie Ling, April 16, 2007.

204
themselves, could not be “American”—suggest that the struggles in Monterey Park of the
1980s and 1990s are not over. The third border (to use David and Moctezuma’s term) has
simply shifted location.
These residential divides were and are also effectively political divides, in the
eyes of both voters and political candidates. In a recent state assembly election, Ling
voted against a candidate who lived north of Huntington: “I knew that I wanted the guy to
be south of Huntington. I’m not alone in this.… That line of Huntington is very clear.”
Stephen Sham, Alhambra city councilmember and former mayor, described his
experience walking door-to-door in neighborhoods north of Main Street during his
campaign for election in 2006:
I went up north, one sentiment that I got from the residents there is—some of them
expressed strongly, some of them not, but you can see from their facial expression—
one person in particular says, you know, ‘you guys [are] Chinese invaders.’ You
know, ‘they took Monterey Park, they took Valley Boulevard, they now come to
Main Street—when [are] you guys gonna stop?’
19

In this exchange, the White, North Alhambra resident depicts Main Street as the last
stronghold of territory that has not yet been “taken” by “Chinese invaders” in their
northward sweep. Sham described what he felt was the general attitude of such north-of-
Main residents: “when I send my, you know, propagandas, my brochures, out to the
voters—especially up north—they see the Chinese family, ‘to hell with you. I don’t know
you, I’m not going to vote for you’” (although he was careful to qualify that residents, on
an individual level, might be won over by his assimilationist stances, “once they
understand who you are,” and count him as an exception to the rule). “Hispanics,” in the
vision of the resident Sham encountered, are also evacuated from the “pure” space of

19
Interview with Stephen Sham, June 14, 2007.

205
Americanness north of Main. Sham recounted that during the course of the conversation,
when he mentioned that “we have a lot of Hispanics” in Alhambra, the resident
immediately responded in a negative tone, “Yeah, those Hispanics!” When Sham replied,
“you know what, I’m a first-generation immigrant too,” the resident was quick to say,
“Oh, no no no no, you’re American. You’re okay.” Although the person had just vented
to Sham about “you… Chinese invaders,” he or she was quick to award Sham honorary
American status relative to “Hispanics” and “immigrants,” simultaneously constructing
Sham as an exception, and asserting White domination and privilege in the ease with
which he or she assigned racial (or national) identities to others.
In sum, Main Street was not neutral territory, a blank slate upon which a
harmonious multicultural future could be drawn.

Redevelopment: ‘No Guts, No Glory’
Alhambra first secured US Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD) redevelopment funds in 1972 when a stretch of Main Street was declared
officially “blighted.” During the ‘70s and ‘80s vacancy rates increased to the point that
by the early 1990s, “you could have shot a missile down Main Street and not hit anyone,”
in the words of city manager Julio Fuentes (Shirey 2005). In 1994, Fuentes, who had
previously worked as a city administrator in both Pomona and Azusa, was hired to take a
more aggressive approach to redevelopment (Chavez 2002). With the motto, “No guts, no
glory,” scrawled across the whiteboard in his office, Fuentes and other city officials set
about remaking Main Street. “Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves and telling the
council that we failed, we thought, ‘Why don’t we try to become developers ourselves?”
206
Fuentes told the Los Angeles Times (Liu 1998). By 1998, 28 new stores had opened due
to redevelopment agency efforts, and an additional half dozen had moved in
independently. Between 1994 and 2006, the city spent more than $30 million on public
improvements to attract commercial development (including land acquisition, tenant
relocation, façade improvements, and the building of three new parking structures), with
funds coming from HUD grants, city reserves, and the Alhambra Redevelopment Agency
(Vincent 2006, Peschiutta 2002).
Although plans focused on attempts to attract retail and multiunit residential
development on several main thoroughfares (Vincent 2006), much of the efforts were
concentrated on a stretch of Main Street which measures not quite one mile long,
between Almansor and 5
th
Streets. Between 1994 and 2002, 40 new businesses and a
plaza anchored by a 14-screen movie theater complex opened. During this process, city
staff “acted much like real estate brokers, scouting out vacant, run-down or under-used
sites for new businesses that fit their vision for Main Street.” When some national chains
were initially hesitant to move into Alhambra (due, some city officials thought, to their
belief that they would not be popular with “Asian” residents), the city provided extra
incentives. For instance, after the national restaurant chain Tony Roma’s refused several
overtures, the city bought an 8,000-square-foot building for $1.1 million and spent
$350,000 on upgrades; the restaurant opened at the corner of 1
st
and Main in 2002
(Peschiutta 2002). Alhambra was also the first city in the state to give Starbucks a “tenant
improvement grant” using $136,000 of HUD money. The redevelopment agency also
gave Edwards $1.2 million from a HUD loan and a 43,000-square-foot parcel for the
Renaissance Plaza movie theater, and paid “hundreds of thousands of dollars” siphoned
207
from HUD funding and increased property taxes (resulting from rising land values in the
redevelopment zone) to existing businesses to renovate aging building facades (Liu
1998).
In a process in which the city uses redevelopment funds to pay for the relocation
of existing businesses which do not conform to the new plan, the city used eminent
domain only twice between 1994 and 2002; however, some existing business owners and
tenants complained about favoritism toward new businesses and “high-pressure tactics.”
In 1998 several immigrant-owned small businesses including a bakery, a wig shop, dental
office, liquor store, and Vietnamese restaurant, were told to move or face eminent domain
proceedings in order to make way for the Edwards movie theater complex, which now
features national chain restaurants Johnny Rockets, Panda Express, and Applebee’s (Liu
1998). Arthur Wong, who owned one of the buildings the city wanted to raze,
complained that the city’s “vision” was nothing more than to turn Main Street into “an
Old Town Pasadena, a yuppie thing.” Rudy Aguirre, the owner of a law office building,
complained that the city was displacing businesses that had “stuck it out with Alhambra
during the bad times” (both quoted in Liu 1998). One man who owned a restaurant
supply business sued the city during condemnation proceedings, eventually settling on a
lump sum. According to the man’s son, Bryan Kan, the lump sum still represented a loss
of what the family had hoped would be their monthly retirement income. The Kan family
business was replaced by a “Juice It Up” store (a smoothie franchise) and two small
shops, and counted by city officials as a redevelopment success story. (Chavez 2002)
Perhaps in part because Alhambra did not have any Asian American
representation on city council until 2004—long after the Main Street redevelopment
208
juggernaut had been set in motion—many Chinese Americans felt that redevelopment
had a racial cast. According to a Taiwanese American city council member (and
developer by profession) in neighboring San Gabriel, “most [of the] Asian American
community, specifically the Chinese American community, felt that it [redevelopment]
was a backlash against Chinese that were on Main Street.” Many business owners felt
that eminent domain was exercised disproportionately “to drive away a lot of the
Chinese-owned businesses, or properties that were held by Chinese Americans, and they
were handed over to developers… with a huge advantage.” Although he now believes
that redevelopment, somewhat paradoxically, is currently having the effect of attracting
Asian American youth to stay in or move to Alhambra—he still feels that “for that gain,
there were many losses,” sustained disproportionately by Chinese American businesses
and property owners.

Mosaic on Main
In 2007, the “diversity” banners on and around Main began to be replaced by
“mosaic” banners. The new banners do not feature any faces, but just the words “live,”
“dine,” “shop,” and “work,” counterposed against a tiled mosaic pattern. According to
Sharon Gibbs, Business Outreach Director of the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce, at
some point DABA realized its initial branding scheme was too ambitious, and contracted
with the chamber to take over the promotion, which was considerably reduced in scale.
Gibbs inherited the promotional materials that had been developed by Gregory Thomas
Associates. Based on Thomas’s designs, the chamber produced the new “mosaic”
209
banners to replace the fraying “diversity” banners.
20
In early 2009, the Chamber of
Commerce also produced a downtown shopping guide and map, which feature five faces
(real Alhambra residents this time, photographed on Main Street, according to Gibbs): in
order of the sizes of the image, an older man and a middle-aged man, who could be
White or light-complexioned Latina/os, a young Asian American woman, and two young
Latina-looking women. Although these faces are certainly more reflective of Alhambra’s
residents than the earlier “diversity” banners, the single, isolated faces, interspersed with
the words “live, work, dine, shop, play,” nevertheless affirm a White, male-dominated
hierarchy on Main Street in their selection and relative size, in which darker-skinned
Latinas/os and Asians make an appearance only as friendly young women who are
attractive in heteronormatively feminine ways. Thus, despite being more “authentic” in
presenting actual residents of Alhambra, the Alhambra Downtown Shopping Guide still
presents a vision of pluralist multiculturalism via consumption (shop, dine, play) in which
White male dominance remains unchallenged.
In describing the mosaic theme, the Downtown Alhambra Business Association
evokes the Alhambra in Granada, Spain:
Alhambra’s roots harken back to a beautiful palace in Spain where arts and culture
flourished, a crossroads of culture and commerce, and a destination for shopping,
dining and entertainment.

Mirroring the mix of cultures and art of that palace in Granada, The Alhambra Mosaic
On Main – a mosaic of tastes, sights and sound for a myriad of customers uniting to
form a beautiful scene. It is the perfect metaphor for the Main Street Alhambra’s
unique offering and cultural diversity.

20
Phone conversation with Sharon Gibbs, February 11, 2009.

210
When considering a day or evening of entertainment, dining, cinema, music, dancing
or shopping, consider the unparalleled eclectic mix of The Alhambra Mosaic on
Main.
21

Figure 21: City of Alhambra “Mosaic on Main” banner images (courtesy of Alhambra
Chamber of Commerce)

Figure 22: City of Alhambra Downtown Shopping Guide, 2009 (courtesy of Sharon
Gibbs, Alhambra Chamber of Commerce)

21
Downtown Alhambra Business Association website, http://downtownalhambra.org (Accessed July 9,
2007).

211
In fact, the reference to the city of Alhambra’s namesake, the Alhambra palace
and fortress in Granada, Spain, is more fitting than city officials might have intended.
22

The Kingdom of Granada was one of the last strongholds of Muslim Iberian rule by the
time of its defeat by Christian Spain in the late fifteenth century; Granada’s Muslim and
Jewish occupants were subsequently expelled, forced to convert to Christianity, or killed.
The Spanish cooptation of its ruling edifice and the Alhambra’s contemporary
representation as a cultural crossroads for tourist consumption obliquely parallels the
exclusion of Mexican, indigenous, Mexican American, and Chinese immigrant histories
from Southern California civic landscapes —histories of conquest and exploitation as
well as of resistance and the making of “worlds of their own.” Nonetheless, small hints—
for instance, the minor grammatical imperfections in the “Mosaic on Main” text (“It is
the perfect metaphor for the Main Street Alhambra’s unique offering…”), article and
singular-versus-plural errors common to many English speakers whose first language is
Chinese—nonetheless point to a strong immigrant presence that cannot be excised from
municipal narratives. Such disjuncts suggest that official multiculturalist discourses such
as Alhambra’s diversity and Mosaic on Main campaigns might, as Lisa Lowe has argued,

22
Alhambra High School’s mascot is the Moors. Writer Hisaye Yamamoto makes a brief comment on
Alhambra’s connection to its Iberian namesake in her memoir, “A Fire in Fontana” (Yamamoto 1998,
156). Hong (1999) quotes this brief passage and discusses it at length:

Once, when hospitalized for an unspecified illness, [Yamamoto] lies next to a woman whose
brother confides to her that ‘he kn[ows] it’s wrong, but he didn’t want Blacks moving into his
neighborhood in Alhambra—no Moors in Alhambra?—because of the drop in property values that
would ensue.’ The ironic question ‘no Moors in Alhambra?’ bursts through [Yamamoto’s]
summary of the man’s statement, underscoring the hypocrisy of naming an all-white town after the
famed palace in Granada, Spain, built by Arab conquerors whose name was for a long time
synonymous with blackness. This seemingly flippant and sarcastic question also disinters the buried
legacies of Spanish colonialism, as well as the acquisition of wealth and property, including what is
now Los Angeles, through the American expansionism of the U.S.-Mexico War. Like the ‘Spanish-
style’ architecture and Spanish street names so common in California, the name of the incorporated
municipality of Alhambra is a facile, sanitized signifier that recalls in a palatable way the history of
Los Angeles--a history filled with violent conflicts over property. (306)

212
“ultimately emphasize, rather than domesticate,” contradictions and irresolution within
various narratives (Lowe 1996, 96). The uncovering of such dissonances may serve as a
first step toward calling attention to the processes by which systemic inequalities are
literally built into, and subsequently reproduced by, civic landscapes, economies, and
geographies.

Valley Boulevard: San Gabriel’s Golden Mile
‘The city with a mission’
23

The question of civic identity in San Gabriel is complicated by the fact that it is
home to the Mission San Gabriel, the first of the Spanish missions in California and a key
signifier of California’s Spanish fantasy past. The Mission Playhouse adjacent to the
mission (now the San Gabriel Civic Auditorium) originally housed the Mission Play, a
cultural phenomenon that engraved visions of a mythicized mission past onto the hearts
and minds of thousands of predominantly Anglo American California residents and
tourists in the early twentieth century (Deverell 2004). The “historic Mission district,”
where city hall and other municipal buildings are located, anchors the “north,” while San
Gabriel’s portion of Valley Boulevard looms large in the “south.” Valley Boulevard starts
in unincorporated East Los Angeles, just east of downtown, and runs the entire length of
the San Gabriel Valley (28 miles to the eastern edge of the Valley at the border of Walnut
and Pomona). The several-miles-long section which passes through Alhambra, San
Gabriel, and Rosemead constitutes a large segment of what has been called a “spectacular
eight-mile-long linear Chinatown” (Davis and Moctezuma 1999), due to its concentration

23
San Gabriel city motto.

213
of ethnic Chinese-owned businesses, and a “Chinese Wall Street” (Li et al. 2002), due to
its concentration of Chinese American banks.

Figure 23: Map of San Gabriel denoting the Proposed Golden Mile, Vincent Lugo Park,
and Mission San Gabriel

Like Alhambra, San Gabriel is divided internally north to south, with the north
holding larger numbers of wealthier, long-term White residents and the south home to a
more heterogeneous mix of working-class to middle-income Asian Americans and
Mexican Americans. Mike Murashige, whose Japanese American family has lived in San
Gabriel since the 1920s, described the train tracks just below Las Tunas Boulevard,
around Mission, as “a hard barrier” between a working-class, Mexican American barrio
ringed by industrial corridors, and “everything else.” He also described how “in addition
214
to that, a lot of people will talk about the difference between the fact that there’s two zip
codes in San Gabriel. There’s 91775, and 91776. 91775 is the northern half, and so it’s
the nicer part of San Gabriel.”
24
Indeed, in 2000, an average resident of the northern zip
code reported a median household incomes almost 50 percent higher than her southern
zip code counterpart ($56,657 compared to $38,085), and a per capita income almost 75
percent higher ($24,786 compared to $14,229). She was much more likely to own a
home, and if she did own a home, its value was much higher, on average, than that of
homes in the southern zip code.
25
Finally, she was three times more likely to be White.
26

As in Alhambra, racial and political sentiments were described in spatial terms.
San Gabriel residents like Eloy Zarate, a Mexican and Argentinean American childhood
friend of Murashige’s who is now a history professor and local activist, had heard people
say that the “Asian” population was “taking over,” “spilling over” northward, from
Monterey Park. Some felt that “Monterey Park wants to take over San Gabriel” and it
was “the same developers, the same money.”
27
San Gabriel city councilmember Albert
Huang, a 1.5-generation Taiwanese American and the sole Asian American on the
council, did not realize until he became a city official the degree of “the polarization of
the city, the north versus the south.” He characterized the political power in the north as
dominated by mostly White, wealthy residents, and some Latinas/os, who had lived in

24
Interview with Mike Murashige, March 30, 2007.

25
The homeownership rate was 64 percent, compared to only 39 percent in the south. Median value of
single-family owner-occupied homes was 41 percent higher in the northern zipcode than in the southern
($282-400 compared to $199,900).

26
Approximately 1 in 3 residents in the northern zip code were White, while south of Las Tunas Drive,
in the southern zip code, only 1 in 10 were. US Census 2000, Summary File 1, DP-1; Summary File 3,
DP-2, DP-3, and DP-4.

27
Interview with Eloy Zarate, April 18, 2007.

215
San Gabriel for a long time. “It’s kind of weird, because people say, well, you’re very
diverse. To the north, you’re mostly Caucasian, to the middle part, you’re mostly Latino,
south, you’re Latino and Asian. That’s not diverse.”
28

Figure 24: M. Murashige, cognitive map of San Gabriel

The proposal
The Golden Mile will serve as one of Southern California’s most vibrant shopping,
dining and entertainment destination districts with emphasis on its rich heritage and
well influenced Asian and fusion cultures…. The essence of the Golden Mile is
defined by the pursuit of the American Dream and the symbol of the Golden
Opportunity. The corridor is an economic phenomenon without any financial
assistance from the government. (Huang, “Golden Mile Summary” (draft), 2009)

28
Interview with Albert Huang, May 4, 2007.

216
In May 2006, 30-year old Albert Huang was selected by the San Gabriel city
council to replace Chi Mui, an immigrant from Hong Kong and a well-loved public
official known for bridging language and cultural gaps in San Gabriel, as well as having
been an activist in Los Angeles’s Chinatown for over twenty years (Pierson 2006b). Mui,
who had been elected to city council in 2003, was the sole Asian American on the council
and had become San Gabriel’s first Asian American mayor only two months earlier,
before passing away from liver cancer in April at the age of 53. Huang was chosen from a
slate of three candidates, all Asian American men. Huang, a developer and San Gabriel
planning commissioner, prevailed in a unanimous 4-0 vote over attorney Frank Chen and
John Hou, former planning commissioner and president of San Gabriel-based Asian
Pacific National Bank. Huang considered Mui a mentor and came into office determined
to honor Mui’s legacy, particularly the older man’s habit of referring to San Gabriel’s
vibrant, commercial stretch of Valley Boulevard as the “Golden Mile.” According to
Huang, Mui emphasized the retail and business opportunities that offered a “golden
opportunity” to immigrants, and that the “essence of the Golden Mile” was “the pursuit
of the American Dream.”
29
“It is bitter that it had to happen under these circumstances,
but sweet in that I’ll be able to complete some things that Mui was not able to complete,”
Huang stated in the days after his appointment (as quoted in Ho 2006a).
In March 2007, Huang transitioned into a new four-year term as councilman,
without opposition. That spring, he began in earnest to push forward Mui’s “Golden
Mile” concept. Huang’s “Golden Mile” plan would be a banner-based advertising
program, complementary to the Valley Boulevard Sustainability Plan, to market an

29
Huang, “Golden Mile Summary” (draft), 2009.

217
approximately 1-mile stretch of Valley Boulevard which runs through San Gabriel to
both visitors and locals. Emblematic of San Gabriel’s section of Valley Boulevard is San
Gabriel Square, a huge complex of pan-Asian restaurants and stores “larger than the Rose
Bowl” (Pierson 2006a). Called by the Los Angeles Times “The Great Mall of China” and
the “Chinese Disneyland” (Carpenter 2005), San Gabriel Square is anchored by a
department store which caters to Chinese-speaking clientele and 99 Ranch, the largest
Asian American supermarket chain in the US and Canada (founded by a Taiwanese
expatriate), and features restaurants like the 1,000-seat Sam Woo Seafood Restaurant.
Initially funded by a Taiwanese commercial bank and private investors, San Gabriel
Square is indicative of how transnational and coethnic sources of capital have shaped the
contemporary development of the West San Gabriel Valley. Indeed, according to city
planner Mark Gallatin, “Valley Boulevard has been the economic engine for the city of
San Gabriel for the past decades” (Ho 2006b. Currently, San Gabriel Square alone
provides as much sales-tax revenue to the city of San Gabriel as some of the other
commercial streets “along their entire length,” according to Deputy City Manager Steve
Preston (for example, more than all the non-car dealership businesses on Las Tunas Drive
combined) (Ho 2006b,2007c).
30

Huang envisions the Golden Mile as a “destination district” “with emphasis on its
rich heritage and… Asian and fusion cultures” (Huang 2009). He likens the “Golden
Mile” concept to “Old Pasadena, Third Street Promenade—these places have a name that
draws people there”: “when you have something that works… you have to still go back
and promote it” (as quoted in Ho 2007). However, the plan ran into opposition from other

30
In 2005, San Gabriel Square brought in $378,000 in sales-tax revenue for the city, which receives 1%
of all taxable sales (Ho 2006b).

218
city council members almost immediately. Councilwoman Juli Costanzo, a White,
longtime resident of north San Gabriel and affiliate of a Mission District revitalization
organization, wondered publicly whether “limited staff time and resources would be
better spent on other commercial areas.” “Valley is such a phenomenon to begin with.
We’re very well known for Chinese restaurants, but I would like more variety throughout
the city and not just focused on one area.” (Ho 2007c) According to Huang, Mexican
American councilman David Gutierrez has also been reluctant to support the initiative,
although unlike Costanzo, he does not oppose it outright.
31
In 2004, in a Los Angeles
Times article on San Gabriel which focused on the Asian businesses on Valley
Boulevard, Gutierrez acknowledged that “we need an identity that will not only preserve
the history of the city, but one that remains open to the new members of the community.”
However, regarding Valley Boulevard, he stated that “non-Asian residents and others” (in
the words of the Times reporter), whom Gutierrez characterized as the “forgotten 50% of
the population,” complained about the lack of “Western world” restaurants like national
chains Tony Roma’s or the Claim Jumper. He elaborated that for many such residents,
shopping in an Asian supermarket was outside of their comfort zone, adding that he
himself felt “more at home” buying groceries at a nearby Vons or a Mexican market: “I
like my beans, my tortillas, my carne asada.” (Chavez 2004)
It is notable that at least on the public record, Costanzo and Gutierrez focused
their comments on food (restaurants and supermarkets), giving the impression that any
opposition to municipal support of initiatives on Valley Boulevard such as the Golden
Mile were based on a desire for more “variety” and balance in “ethnic” options; it was a

31
Interview with Albert Huang, May 4, 2007.

219
matter of culture and diversity, not race or xenophobia. Further, Gutierrez’s
categorization of both “Western world” restaurants and “my beans, my tortillas, my carne
asada” as part of the “non-Asian,” “forgotten 50% of the population” aligns Mexican
culture with “mainstream,” implicitly White Americanness, in a way that is denied to the
“Asian” supermarkets.
In Huang’s view, when he presented the initiative to the chamber of commerce
and other city council members, he encountered opposition that was clearly expressed in
racial terms. In May 2007, he described the proposal’s reception:
Some major concerns that came out of the initial proposal was that people were
uncomfortable with… the street being renamed. And I said, it’s not about renaming
the street… We’re adding that name to this area. That’s one. Number two… another
concern that came out was oh well, when you say diversity, what diversity are you
celebrating?... And I think the concerns mainly came out from the non-Asian groups.
They said… does Golden Mile have to do with Hong Kong’s Golden Mile?.. So there
was, again, some concerns about that, that I’m serving—primarily serving the Chinese
American community by renaming this area.
32

Nearly two years later, in March 2009, I met again with a visibly beleaguered
Huang. Huang seemed more dedicated to bringing the Golden Mile proposal to fruition
than ever, but even though two years had passed, he was still fighting to get the proposal
off the ground. After failing to get any definitive support from his fellow councilmembers
and the chamber of commerce in 2007, Huang began to approach Valley Boulevard-
based businesses and ethnic organizations, trying to “get all the organizational support…
the property owners’ support, and the business support.” He worked with Chi Mui’s
widow, Betty Mui, to raise money “to help buy the banners,” “completely outside of city
money.”
33
In working primarily through private channels, Huang followed an already

32
Interview with Albert Huang, May 4, 2007.

33
Interview with Albert Huang, March 10, 2009.
220
existing pattern of development on Valley Boulevard, at least among ethnic Chinese
immigrants. The massive growth of restaurants, stores, services, on San Gabriel’s and
adjacent sections of Valley since the 1980s has been largely funded by private capital
stemming from businesses and banks helmed by ethnic Chinese (cf. Li 1999, 2006; Li et
al. 2002, Zhou 1998, Tseng 1994). It is important to note, however, that the very
existence of Chinese American banking institutions in the West SGV stemmed from
structural racism against Asians and other non-Whites: Cathay Bank, the first Chinese
American bank, was founded in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in the early 1960s specifically
to counteract mainstream lending discrimination and to help new immigrants navigate
U.S. financial institutions. Cathay Bank proceeded to open the first Chinese American
bank branch in Monterey Park in 1979, planting the first seed of what would
subsequently become the largest concentration of ethnic community-oriented banks in the
United States (Li et al. 2002, Zhou 1998).
Therefore, after the lukewarm reception of the Golden Mile proposal by city
officials, Huang’s choice to pursue funding through private, ethnic community-based
sources (for instance, at a banquet dinner with the Chinese American Real Estate
Professionals Association (CAREPA) in July 2007
34
) confirmed the continuing need of
ethnic Chinese immigrants to draw financial support from sources other than
governmental (i.e. municipal) institutions. Indeed, few business owners on Valley
Boulevard are members of the San Gabriel chamber of commerce—a situation Huang
blames on the chamber not making sufficient efforts to recruit on Valley—and as yet

34
Flier accessed on CAREPA website. http://carepa.org/admin/upload/files/2008-
05/114b3546021efeea2159a0f514dca7ce.pdf. Accessed February 5, 2009.

221
there is no unified Valley Boulevard merchants’ organization (such as the Downtown
Alhambra Business Association), so Huang has had to go door-to-door to drum up
support for the proposal.
In 2009, Huang was now also considerably more blunt about other city officials’
and residents’ reluctance to support the Golden Mile proposal, stating flatly that it was
“bigotry.” There was, in his opinion, definitely “persecution, discrimination” against
Asian immigrants, especially from wealthy White residents in the north, signified by
attitudes toward businesses and issues on Valley, such as the perception that there must
be illegal activities going on and that “Asians are dirty.” Further, since the “propensity to
vote” was up north, Huang believed that many city councilmembers believed that they
should serve the people who voted them in: the north, and not the south. Huang, still the
sole Asian American on the council, felt that race and ethnicity was an element in city
issues “all the time.” In the city council campaign that had just ended (in which Huang
was not up for reelection himself),
we’ve heard people say, ‘Valley Boulevard doesn’t serve the residents of San
Gabriel.’ And that’s crazy. Because 60 percent of the population is Asian American.
And you’re saying Valley Boulevard doesn’t serve the residents? I mean, it obviously
serves somebody. It serves predominantly Asians, because there’s so many Asian
businesses here. But… you know, it’s just very unfortunate that people speak of things
like that.
35

The concerns posed by “non-Asian groups” to Huang speak to how Asian
American politicians with immigrant backgrounds such as Huang (and Stephen Sham in
Alhambra, as discussed above), have both had to contend with what Ruth Wilson
Gilmore has called the “performance effect,” in which an audience member or
interlocutor attributes motivations and interests based on an identity (e.g. racial) ascribed

35
Interview with Albert Huang, March 10, 2009.

222
to the speaker by the audience member or interlocutor himself (Gilmore 2004). Huang
felt that, as the only Asian American member of San Gabriel’s city council, “it was easy
for them [‘non-Asian’ chamber of commerce members] to think that I’m doing this kind
of with a… selfish intention, for my ethnic community, you know, my Chinese heritage
prompted me to do this.” Therefore, when asked pointedly, “When you say diversity,
what diversity are you celebrating?” and “Does Golden Mile have to do with Hong
Kong’s Golden Mile?” the questioners could not separate Huang’s appearance and
position as the sole Asian American body on the council from his (presumed)
motivations. As Huang puts it succinctly, “[S]ome people thought when I say ‘Golden
Mile,’ that it was meant to serve the Chinese.” When he was told this, Huang says, “I
[was] shocked because to me, it’s essentially [the] opposite… It’s not to serve the
Chinese, it’s to serve the whole community… I want Golden Mile, when it comes to
fruition, to serve the entire community, to celebrate… not only the current vitality,
prosperity, but also the diversity that we want it to achieve.”
36
On the other hand, Huang
believed that when “non-Asians,” including two economic consultants who were not
from the local area (who were therefore “not biased” or seeing things through a “tainted
lens” of “bigotry and persecution”), and White city councilman Kevin Sawkins, argued
for the Golden Mile, city officials were much more willing to listen. It “absolutely” made
a difference, “because he’s not Asian [in a mildly bitter tone]. People have a tendency to
think this is an Asian concept. So when he comes in and he speaks on our behalf, I mean,
the Asian community’s behalf, it’s superb.”
37

36
Interview with Albert Huang, May 4, 2007.

37
Interview with Albert Huang, March 10, 2009.

223
In fact, “Golden Mile” is a popular name for numerous locales around the world,
from the stretch of banks and financial institutions called “Milla de Oro” in San Juan,
Puerto Rico, to beachfront promenades in South Africa and England, to swaths of
expensive real estate in Moscow, and even a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard in Los
Angeles (King 2003), as well as Hong Kong’s Golden Mile (used to describe Nathan
Road in Kowloon, a main thoroughfare after World War II and now a shopping area and
tourist destination). However, former mayor Chi Mui’s upbringing in Hong Kong, Albert
Huang’s Taiwanese background, and of course, the plethora of restaurants and shops on
Valley Boulevard primarily targeting ethnic Chinese immigrants, made only the Hong
Kong reference to the chamber of commerce salient.

Mission District revitalization
In contrast to the absence of any official city support for the Golden Mile
proposal, the city was conspicuously involved in promoting and “revitalizing” the
Mission District. While Huang acknowledged that the city is a “major stakeholder” in the
Mission District, since the city hall, the civic auditorium (the former Mission Playhouse)
are all located there, he also believed that “there’s definitely a slanted interest there” that
was not unrelated to the “persecution, discrimination… from a very small body that we
talked about, up in the north, that have a tendency to think, hey, Valley Boulevard, just
let it be.”
38
The city formed the Mission District Partnership in 1996, an organization of
“businesses, residents, government, schools, organizations and various entities with an
ongoing interest in the success of the San Gabriel Mission District” (San Gabriel Mission

38
Interview with Albert Huang, March 10, 2009.

224
District Partnership 2005). The Partnership’s stated mission goal is “to cooperatively
develop, promote and market the District as a destination for tourism, culture,
entertainment, dining and shopping.” Current mayor
39
Juli Costanzo—the White,
longtime resident of North San Gabriel who is staunchly opposed to the Golden Mile
proposal, as mentioned above—is an affiliate, and the city provides significant staffing
and organizational support. As Huang puts it, “the [Mission District Partnership]
meetings are completely organized by the city. Versus the Valley Boulevard stakeholders
meeting, this is something that, it’s kind of like, thrown at us—‘hey, you go and organize
it.’ It’s a completely different idea.”
In the early 1990s, the city spent about $2.6 million in state and local funds in the
push to “revitalize” the Mission District—a move in keeping with more widespread
tendencies among White Southern Californians to romanticize the “Spanish” past
(discussed above). The “anticipated clusters of sidewalk cafes and boutiques” have yet to
materialize (Chavez 2004), but attempts to “revitalize and preserve the District” have
continued into the present: a current Mission District Specific Plan encompasses several
new mixed-use developments and remodels. The first project to be built under this plan,
Mission Villa, for which construction is likely to commence in the summer of 2009, is a
mixed-use development “designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival architectural style to
complement the historic character of the district.” Mission Village, another mixed-use
project, proposed by the owners of upscale Chinese restaurant Mission 261 (brothers
Harvey, Lewis, and York Ng) in a site adjacent to the restaurant, would include a

39
As of March 2009.

225
“Spanish Colonial style boutique hotel.”
40
The willingness of ethnic-Chinese immigrant
business owners to participate in promoting a Mission theme—or more precisely, a
“Spanish” theme broadened into “Mediterranean” architectural styles—particularly in
order to gain “mainstream” acceptance, was also exemplified by Sunny Chen, a
Taiwanese businessman who built two large retail centers on Valley Boulevard and
opened a $60 million-dollar Hilton Hotel across from San Gabriel Square in late 2004.
Chen chose a “contemporary Tuscan décor” in order “to make non-Asian visitors feel
more at home.” A buffet featured both “Western” and “Asian” food, and the hotel’s
meeting rooms were named after California missions (Chavez 2004). Indeed, in many
Pacific Rim countries, a Spanish-fantasy or faux-Mediterranean architectural style has
now become emblematic of the ‘good life’ that can be achieved by Asian immigrants in
Southern California
41
—as apt an indication as any of the potent ideological caché of this
fabricated regional history.
In San Gabriel, however, the struggle to pin down a clearly articulable identity
and history for the city continues. For instance, the planned Mission Village project, in
addition to the “Spanish Colonial style boutique hotel” mentioned above, will include
14,000 square feet of restaurant space, 3,500 square feet of retail space, and 30
condominiums on Mission Drive. Residents and business owners are voicing concerns
that the project’s size would “overshadow the nearby Mission Playhouse and overwhelm
the historic nature of the Mission District.” To one resident, who filed an appeal against
the project, the scale and size of the project was “‘not indicative of the character and

40
San Gabriel Grapevine, Winter 2009 (Vol. 13, Iss. I).

41
See Rosenthal 2003, among others, on Orange County, China, a suburb of Beijing.

226
history of the district.’” (R. S. Hong 2009) In scholar Leland Saito’s opinion, however,
the mission district has failed so far not because of aesthetic choices which
misrepresented some kind of authentic character or history, but “because it was not only
not relevant to the Chinese immigrant… it wasn’t relevant to residents, period” (Saito,
quoted in Chavez 2004).
Nonetheless, the validating function of vaguely “Spanish” and “Mediterranean”
references in the Mission District as well as on Valley Boulevard stands in stark contrast
to city council members’ negatively coded speculations about Golden Mile’s possible
linkage to Hong Kong. The contrasting civic investments and attitudes toward these two
areas illustrate how an elite, White-dominated north continues to keep a tight grip on who
can make claims to San Gabriel’s identity and history, and what the nature of those
claims might be. The nurturing of the Spanish fantasy past via Mission District
revitalization was prioritized, while city officials maintained a “let it be” attitude toward
Valley Boulevard through coding it as perpetually foreign, autonomous “Asian” space.
Just a few blocks north of Valley Boulevard, however, another fight over space
was brewing, in which grassroots activists would seize the struggle over identity and
history as an opportunity to put forth a rather different narrative of San Gabriel’s identity
and history.

Friends of La Laguna: Development of pan-ethnic immigrant identity
These are not individual sculptures but a historical and cultural landscape.
- Eloy Zarate, Friends of La Laguna (Ho 2006e)

In the mid-1960s, the city of San Gabriel commissioned 70-year-old cement
sculptor Benjamin Dominguez, a Mexican immigrant, to create more than a dozen
227
whimsical sculptures and play structures of sea creatures for a section of Vincent Lugo
Park
42
that was named “La Laguna de San Gabriel.” The park became known colloquially
as Monster Park or Dinosaur Park. Dominguez’s most well known work in his native
Mexico had been lion and tiger enclosures for the Mexico City Zoo. Since emigrating to
the United States in 1956 at the age of 62, Dominguez lived in Texas and Nevada and
created zoo and playground structures in the El Paso and Las Vegas areas before moving
to La Puente, a predominantly Mexican American suburb in the East SGV. In Southern
California, he designed imaginative and beloved parks including Garden Grove’s
Atlantis, in Orange County, and play structures at Legg Lake in Whittier Narrows, in
nearby Rosemead. La Laguna de San Gabriel was his final work, and is the largest
remaining example of Dominguez’s work.

Figure 25: Opening day, La Laguna de San Gabriel, May 16, 1965 (courtesy of Friends
of La Laguna)

42
Named, incidentally, after San Gabriel resident Vincent Lugo, a descendant of a prominent Californio
family which, courtesy of a Mexican land grant in 1842, once owned a vast swath of land encompassing
San Gabriel as well as much what is now San Bernardino county.

228
In the forty-four years since the park’s opening, more than two generations of
San Gabriel residents have grown up playing among the brightly colored cement sea
lions, starfish, whale, dolphins, octopus, and sea serpent lighthouse slide. Many San
Gabriel residents had lifelong and multi-generational ties to the park. For instance, one
woman recounted how her father took her to play in the park as a young child. She took
her babysitting charges there as a teenager, and was proposed to by her future husband in
the park. As a mother, her own three children grew up playing at the park (Lubisich
2006). However, in November 2006, the San Gabriel city council approved a renovation
plan for Vincent Lugo Park which called for the removal of Dominguez’s sculptures,
since they did not comply with present-day safety standards. In their place a soccer field
and baseball field extension were proposed (Ho 2006d). The decision met rapidly with
opposition, led by longtime San Gabriel resident Eloy Zarate and his wife Senya
Lubisich, both history professors at local colleges. The Zarate and Dominguez families
had met four years earlier by chance on Father’s Day, when Zarate and Lubisich brought
their children to the park and Fernando Dominguez and his wife, who had just come from
paying their respects at the cemetery where Benjamin Dominguez was buried, were there
photographing the structures (KCET 2007a). Zarate and Lubisich, with the support of the
Dominguezes, began to rally residents, sending volunteers to make pitches door to door
in the neighborhoods abutting the park. Speaking at an emotional rally at the park in late
December 2006, Marta Dominguez, the youngest of 13 Dominguez siblings, said that she
believed that her brother’s encounter with Zarate and Lubisich “was not a mere
coincidence, I think, because God’s hand is in this.” Standing with Marta Dominguez and
several of her family members, Zarate spoke: “This is no longer about my memories, this
229
is about Benjamin Dominguez… I am not going to let Benjamin Dominguez be forgotten.
We’re not going to let that happen” (National Public Radio 2006). Their appeals proved
effective: At the end of the rally, nearly 40 volunteers signed up to canvass the
surrounding neighborhoods.
Zarate, who played in the park as a child and brings his own children there now,
argued that the sculptures were “historical, cultural works,” “artistically relevant,” and
that, as the works of a Mexican immigrant, they spoke to San Gabriel’s immigrant past
and present. “It is made by a Chicano artist in the ‘60s, mixing and combining his culture
and the new American suburban way of looking at things. It’s become a much larger
issue for us than, ‘Oh my kids play there’” (Ho 2006d). Zarate and Dominguez’s children
foregrounded Dominguez’s immigrant experience, arguing that Dominguez’s personal
story of “immigration and adopting a new homeland” reflected San Gabriel’s diverse
population (Ho 2006e). Dominguez “wanted to express gratitude to his new homeland
through the playgrounds,” the sculptor’s son, Fernando Dominguez, who helped build
some of the structures, told the Pasadena Star-News (Ho 2006d). In arguing that saving
the park wasn’t just about nostalgia but about a key aspect of the city’s identity, Zarate
and other Monster Park supporters articulated a specific vision of San Gabriel’s past,
present, and future which linked a pan-ethnic, pan-racial immigrant experience to
suburban identities and priorities.
Zarate says that knocking on doors himself made him understand the “schism” in
San Gabriel between north and south. The park is located south of San Gabriel’s
proverbial (and literal) train tracks, about a mile south of the Mission district, and less
than two blocks north of Valley Boulevard. Zarate realized that many northern San
230
Gabrielites’ visions of south San Gabriel—specifically, its Asian residents—were wrong.
In north San Gabriel, he said, there was a common belief that the city’s problems
stemmed from the city council “selling out to Asian businesses.” Talking to Asian
immigrant residents of the neighborhoods around Vincent Lugo park, Zarate found that,
“These people aren’t benefiting from all those businesses… They’re working like
anybody else to try to make it, to pay their rent. They’re living in apartments… they’re
poor.” These residents felt that “City council is selling out to rich people. They don’t care
about us.” Zarate told the story of a Vietnamese man who took Zarate into his backyard,
whose view was now completely dominated by the newly constructed Hilton Hotel: “he
said, ‘Look what they did. Look what they did to my backyard.’ I‘m like, ‘yeah, that
sucks. You got people looking into your backyard!’ He says, ‘Look what the city did…
all they care about is money.’”
43
The unhappiness Zarate heard from Asian immigrant
residents about development on Valley as well as sentiments regarding the park—that, as
one Chinese man put it, “Not all change is good”—add complexity and nuance to
common local discourses which polarize a Whiter, wealthier north San Gabriel of single-
family homes from a densely populated south characterized by rampant “Asian”
development without regard for normatively White, suburban, quality-of-life concerns.
Finally, Zarate based his feeling that such residents would support his cause on
his observations that when he went to the park in the morning, “it’s all Chinese people.
Chinese people doing their tai chi, doing their martial arts.” From such scenes, Zarate
derived a sense of collective well-being that included himself, the son of a Mexican
American father and an Argentinean immigrant mother, as well as them: “then I go there,

43
Interview with Eloy Zarate, April 18, 2007.

231
and I love it… It’s like, they’re right…. They enjoy the park and they enjoy the
dinosaurs, and all these things that are there, and I knew that they did. And I knew that if
I went and communicated to them what I was doing, what we were doing, that they
would agree… that this meant something.”
Friends of La Laguna (FoLL), led by Zarate and Lubisich, built an inclusive
campaign based on uniting people by class, shared immigrant histories, and/or longevity
in area, by positing coalition based on voluntary affiliations rather than on terms
predicated on identitarian concerns—or the denial of such, in the supposedly egalitarian
leveling of multiculturalism. In their emphasis on Benjamin Dominguez’s Mexican
immigrant background (which Zarate also characterized as “Chicano” more than once),
FoLL’s campaign to save Monster Park also has the potential to push back against the
erasure of the histories and presence of Mexican immigrants and Mexican American
history in the region, and in Southern California more generally. With its grassroots
campaign based on multiple, non-identitarian affiliations, Zarate says that FoLL brought
to the surface voices “in their broken English communicating [that] the park should stay,
we love the park, we love the dinosaurs, that’s a beautiful place.”
In January 2007, FoLL entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the
city of San Gabriel to preserve and protect the structures (FoLL website). According to
Rebecca Perez, director of parks and recreation for San Gabriel, “We really didn’t have
much historical information about the playground, and because of that, we didn’t realize
how important this playground was” (Rees 2007). In order to raise the funds necessary to
bring the structures up to current safety codes, Friends of La Laguna became a nonprofit
organization. Lubisich became president, Zarate became CFO, and their friends and
232
fellow north San Gabriel residents John Harrington and Eric Kirchhoff filled the
remaining positions of vice president and secretary. Zarate described this core group as
being indicative of the multiethnic families which made up a politically progressive
segment of north San Gabriel: in addition to Zarate and Lubisich (who is White),
Harrington is a “White guy raised in Seattle married to a Salvadorean,” and Kirchhoff the
son of German immigrants, raised in San Gabriel, and married to a Chinese woman.
Senya and I noticed, I go, do you notice the families? We have mixed kids. We have
one White person married to a person of color… That’s north San Gabriel. And that’s
the United States. And we’re all pretty liberal… we have liberal politics. But this has
nothing to do with politics. Right? So we all have kind of these larger worldviews, and
we understand even though we have different views and ideas, the park brought us
together… this is important for our community in San Gabriel.

In the summer of 2007, FoLL received their first major grants of $50,000 and
$70,000 from California Cultural and Historical Endowments and the Annenberg
Foundation, respectively, to begin assessments for a historic structures report and
preservation plan (Pasadena Star-News 2007). However, their first step to protect the
park was to submit a nomination to the State Register of Historic Places to name the
Laguna a historical landmark, making it eligible for official protection as a “historic and
cultural resource. This was important, the organization believed, because it would
“formally articulate the value that the park holds for our community.” FoLL is still in the
process of raising the anticipated $300,000 to $500,000 needed to completely restore the
Laguna and make the structures more accessible to visitors (FoLL website).
In the broadening of FoLL’s outreach in order to raise money and educate
community members and organizations (such as local Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs as well
as preservation organizations) about the park’s history, it became clear that the narrative
of the reasons for saving La Laguna was not fixed in the minds of potential supporters —
233
especially, perhaps, when presented by a predominantly White, north San Gabriel-based
board. Some voiced to Zarate the opinion that “‘You’re saving San Gabriel… They
would have taken it all.’” The “they” in the statement Zarate interpreted to mean
unequivocally, “those Asians”: “So on one hand you’re hearing this awful, racist stuff,
but now you have to be diplomatic. You know, you have to be, ‘Weelll, you know…’”—
to respond tactfully, without alienating the potential donor. However, the anxiety and
hostility of such residents has also clearly represented an opportunity for FoLL. The park
activists tapped into a desire for history and identity in longtime residents.
Overwhelmingly, people have been very receptive to the idea that the park means
something to the city. ‘Cause there are so few things that are San Gabriel. I mean, it’s
no longer the city that it was. Things are going. And that’s why they kind of react to
the Asian community: ‘Look what they’ve done over there.’ Well what have they
done?

Zarate and his collaborators sensed that at this moment of rapid demographic
transition, the city’s history and identity was up for grabs, much as it was in the late
nineteenth century, when newly arrived Anglo Americans enshrined the Spanish fantasy
past as part of their narrative of national racial succession. The FoLL activists were
always careful to affirm that the park was worth saving because it represented history. To
people against saving the park who argued that it was not worth saving because to them it
was “not history” because it was “just art,” or because it had been built within their own
lifetimes, Zarate replied, ‘Alright, well maybe it’s not your history. But it’s mine. I grew
up there. I take my kids there.’
In fact, FoLL, who often represented their leadership to the press as “three
families,” made narratives of local family histories, children, and futurity central to its
234
campaign.
44
As mentioned previously, Benjamin Dominguez’s children and
grandchildren actively rallied around his legacy, and spoke frequently of Dominguez’s
love for children. As one of his sons put it, “He just wanted to do something for this
country that he loved and leave something for the enjoyment of the community, the kids”
(KCET 2007a). “He was very passionate about kids and found children to be very special
people,” his youngest daughter told the Pasadena Star-News (Ho 2006e). One of
Dominguez’s daughter-in-laws recounted how at the park’s opening festivities, “I had
three children then and I was carrying the smallest one in my arms” (KCET 2007a).
Typical responses by supporters to the news of its possible demise included the
following:
It would be a cultural tragedy to destroy this delightful park. It has been treasured by
me, my children and, now, my grandchildren.

Dinosaur Park is a great park that my family and I have enjoyed since I was born
some 31 years ago. Now, I take my godson and my cousin’s children there to play….
The park is great and different, and should be saved for future children to enjoy.

I grew up in San Gabriel…. We spent much of our time in the then-brand-new park. I
watched the park grow into a beautiful place. I took my children there to play…. I
want to take my grandchildren there, as well.

My Aunt took me to Vincent Lugo Park when I was a little girl…. Now, as a mother
of two, it has become a family treasure of sorts…. Monster Park doesn’t just belong to
the City of San Gabriel, it belongs to generations of children.
45

Within the context of multiple available narratives and both the benefits and drawbacks
of the FoLL actions being seen as a North San Gabriel-driven issue, Zarate centered
Benjamin Dominguez’s immigrant, Chicano history as the story that “has driven

44
See Gilmore 2007, 181-240, on how Mothers Reclaiming Our Children wielded the “ideological
power of motherhood” to challenge the legitimacy of the state of California’s investment in prison
expansion.
45
Margaret Chirivella, Arlene Chavez, Linda Takeuchi, and Kim Totten (KCET 2007b).

235
everything,” in FoLL’s claim that the park, this story, was San Gabriel’s history. By
affirming that personal family histories are San Gabriel’s history, FoLL and their
supporters seized the opportunity to redirect the narrative on a modest piece of the
landscape in a way which could have lasting significance: they claimed a place for the
immigrant, Chicana/o history of San Gabriel. Put another way, they affirmed that
immigrants and Chicanas/os have a place in the history of San Gabriel and the region as a
whole. In FoLL’s successful grassroots campaign to save La Laguna de San Gabriel from
demolition, they were able to direct narratives of San Gabriel’s history from the ground
up, and to employ the contested nature of the city’s identity and history in a moment of
transition as an opportunity rather than a constraint. As Zarate put it,
Something is happening. And if you can tweak what happens, you can change the
relationships… Maybe the park is one of those tweaks, right? I mean, the park is
something that everyone can come together… that’s important. So you got to find
something like that that draws people together.

Conclusion
In three distinct struggles over civic landscapes, West SGV civic officials and
residents fought to put forth particular representations of history and identity. In
Alhambra, the deployment of pluralist multiculturalism in the “diversity” and Mosaic on
Main campaign papered over a divisive process of redevelopment, in which implicitly
White, “mainstream” businesses won space at the expense of a large number of
predominantly Asian immigrant-owned small businesses. On Valley Boulevard in San
Gabriel, a predominantly White elite clung to promoting a Spanish fantasy heritage in the
city’s historic Mission District, while refusing a Taiwanese American council member’s
bid to celebrate the economic transformation of Valley Boulevard by transpacific capital
236
and claim Valley Boulevard as a “diverse” space. Finally, at Monster Park in San
Gabriel, multiethnic White and Latina/o grassroots activists led an inclusive campaign to
save the park, affirming a space for immigrant and Chicana/o histories in the West SGV.
In these episodes, which constitute instances of regional racial formation, it is
clear that state practices, in the form of local government, have the power to create new
racial meanings through the conflation of racial and spatial discourses (cf. P.S. Li 1994;
Anderson 1987, 1995). In the West SGV, despite rapidly transforming demographic and
economic contexts, an “old guard” White elite still holds sway in its municipal
governments, with significant contexts for the region’s civic landscapes. So far, if they
are to be successful, aspiring Asian American and Latina/o politicians must contend with
the old guard one way or another, whether through incorporating themselves into the
existing power structure or simply “not making waves.” In lobbying for the Golden Mile,
a proposal which would acknowledge the city’s flourishing Valley Boulevard, with its
predominance of Asian and Asian-American owned businesses, as integral to the “city
with a mission,” Albert Huang has troubled the waters, revealing how civic landscapes
are intimately tied to varying conceptions of regional identities and histories—in this
case, the illusion of an authentic, “Spanish” European past, upon which Southern
Californian Whites’ claims to power rest. Eloy Zarate, one of the activists instrumental in
“saving” San Gabriel’s Monster Park, argues that in San Gabriel and the West SGV more
broadly, White elites’ shaky “idea of an [municipal] identity” was not put to the test
“until all these Asians started coming in”: “We have north San Gabriel, we have barrio
San Gabriel, we have village San Gabriel… and now people are going, ‘San Gabriel!’
Who is that? I mean, I think this whole region is like that.” Zarate also pointed out the
237
fallacy of forming a collective identity against an essentially fictive “Asian” group: “With
even the Asians that come in, are they Asian? You know… can they fit any of these ideas
that we have of these groups?”
46

Instead, Zarate and Friends of La Laguna managed to articulate inclusive grounds
for community affiliation, in which one’s personal history was, at least in relation to
Monster Park, San Gabriel’s history. They found a way to, as Lisa Lowe puts it, “think
through the ways in which culture can be rearticulated not in terms of identity,
equivalence, or pluralism… as a site for alternative histories and memories that provide
the grounds to imagine subject, community, and practice in new ways” (1996, 96). Taken
together, Alhambra’s “diversity” initiative, San Gabriel’s Golden Mile proposal, and the
campaign to save Monster Park illuminate how conceptions of history and diversity based
on discrete identities and linear narratives only perpetuate inequalities based on notions
of race. Rather we need to examine the contradictions of such conceptions in order to
understand how state-structured processes produce material inequalities which are
sedimented and codified in space. If we can understand the power of ideological
underpinnings of state practices to shape familiar, everyday landscapes, we may be better
prepared to mobilize for change at key moments when, in Zarate’s words, “something is
happening”: “if you can tweak what happens, you can change the relationships.”

Coda
In the spring of 2009, most of the diversity banners that had decorated
Alhambra’s Main Street were gone, replaced by the people-less “mosaic” designs.

46
Interview with Eloy Zarate, April 18, 2007.

238
However, two remained posted at the intersection of Main and 3
rd
. The banners—
featuring the faces of the blond White woman and the Japanese American-looking man—
were badly faded from the sun and spattered with bird leavings. Their tattered and
disrespected state stood in contrast with the vitality of the predominantly Latina/o and
Asian customers of the Mexican Super-A Foods market, who passed by indifferently on
their way to and from buying groceries, pausing as they waited for the light to change and
then moving on.

239

Conclusion: Localized Knowledges and Questions of Travel

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
- Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”

My inquiry into episodes of regional racial formation in the West San Gabriel
Valley so far has allowed a close analysis of the possibilities and limitations of regional
understandings with regard to race and ethnicity—or, in the words of the locally based
“SGV” streetwear brand, how the (West) SGV is “not just an area… but a state of
mind.”
1
Within the contexts of neighborhoods, school, a prominent mainstream civic
organization, and civic landscapes, I have sought to articulate processes that have to do
with the production and negotiation of local knowledges grounded in everyday practices.
These are both constrained by institutional practices, and elude the reach of national
frameworks and ideologies. I have taken up the question of how racial formation operates
in place to form particular, albeit oftentimes fragile, local hierarchies, and how people’s
daily paths—and whom they encounter upon them—inform their racial consciousness,
and even a political consciousness, whether overtly expressed or not. The combined
approaches of episodic analysis, in-depth interviews, and cognitive mapping enabled me
to analyze key moments of racial formation within the contexts of people’s place-based
life histories, and in terms of their own conceptions of relationships between race and
place.

1
SGV brand website, http://whatissgv.com, accessed July 20, 2007.

240
At the neighborhood level, channeled by systemic, post World-War II patterns of
housing discrimination which steered them away from White areas but valorized them
relative to would-be African American homeowners, Asian Americans and Latinas/os
became neighbors in the West SGV. In these communities, they forged friendships,
especially among the children, and practiced a moral geography of differentiated space;
compared to Whites, who fled the area en masse, an expectation of difference rather than
sameness kept Asian Americans and Latinas/os’ numbers relatively stable during a rapid
influx of ethnic Chinese immigrants to the region which began in the late 1970s and has
continued into the present day. Throughout, both Asian immigrants and Mexican
Americans took advantage of the availability of diverse housing options in the West
SGV’s lower-middle to middle-income residential landscape, in the process complicating
the symbolic dimensions of American homeownership and giving rise to new paradigms
of race and privilege.
In school, in the mid-2000s, Asian American and Latina/o high school students
found themselves the subjects of a racial discourse called the “achievement gap.” Within
this discourse, “culture” operated as a code word for race: Asian Americans were praised
as model minorities whose (presumably singular) culture valued education, while “non-
Asian,” Mexican American students were stereotyped as culturally deficient “non-
achievers” whose parents did not understand the value of education. Students’ ways of
making sense of the social order were tied intimately to the particular regional context in
which they lived—in a majority-Asian American and Latina/o, metropolitan suburb. The
nuances of the students’ reactions and interpretations of the social order around them
spoke to the ideologically formative moment in which high school takes place, where
241
societal orders and mores are being inculcated but have not yet been internalized as
common sense, taken-for-granted truths. Yet, the ways in which Asian American model
minority discourse—buttressed by “American” narratives of individual merit and
trajectories of immigrant success—circulated and was internalized by students as well as
teachers and administrators ultimately produced a form of racialized privilege, in which
Asian American students’ success was facilitated at the expense of Latina/o students.
In 2007, an African American boy became the first African American Eagle
Scout in the history of a West SGV Boy Scout troop. His and his family’s celebration of
his achievement in those terms, as well as the boy’s publicly aired opinion that at times,
he felt he had been “held to a different standard” than other boys, were met with anger
and consternation by most of the troop’s Asian American and Mexican American
leadership. In trying to make sense of what had happened, troop leadership held to a
“colorblind” rationale that “we treat every kid the same,” while simultaneously being
unable not to speak about the boy in racial terms. A range of reactions and interpretations
of the events illuminated troop members’ struggle to reconcile charges of anti-Black
racism with their own experiences as racialized minorities in the United States, as well as
their contradictory beliefs that the institution of the Boy Scouts represented both an
expression of “American” values of egalitarianism and individual merit and, as one
assistant scoutmaster put it, ‘a doorway to the White experience.”
Finally, on the main thoroughfares of San Gabriel and Alhambra, several
interlinked struggles regarding civic landscapes were taking place. In two civic branding
initiatives, the term “diversity” was deployed as a concept which, to various degrees,
implicitly and explicitly excluded Asian immigrants. Newly elected Asian American
242
civic officials in both cities found themselves stymied by the performance effect
(Gilmore 2004), in which no matter what their statements or actions, they were assumed
by Whites (who retained disproportionate power in the municipal governments) to
represent only “Asian” interests. White and Latina/o officials treated Valley Boulevard,
an “economic engine” whose growth has been funded in large part by Asian and Asian
American capital, as a foreign, unassimilable space, which could not be incorporated into
either city’s official identity. By extension, Asian immigrants and Asian Americans were
also discounted, as not a valid part of an implicitly White (or at least “American”) public.
In contrast, a grassroots group led by multiethnic Latina/o and White residents of San
Gabriel pitched a successful battle to “save” a local park based on shared immigrant
identities and an assertion of Chicana/o history, suggesting that bases for commonality
could be found through affiliative, rather than essentialist, identities.
The particular terms by which Asian Americans and Latina/os have been
racialized in the United States, in California, and in Southern California, as well as
locally in the West SGV, formed a constant thread throughout. In some moments,
“Asians” struggled against constant characterizations of foreignness and inassimibility,
while in others, they benefited from “model minority” characterizations which earned
them a modicum of “racialized privilege,” at the expense of “non-Asians” (usually
Mexican Americans). While some “Mexicans” made strategic use of their ambiguous
Whiteness, others were subject to erasure in a White-dominated racial order. Institutions
of civil society such as school and the Boy Scouts, as well as state power in the form of
municipal governments, played key roles in asserting White American dominance as an
explicit and implicit norm, often by reproducing Asian American and Mexican American
243
difference in the terms I have described above. At the same time, in the neighborhoods,
streets, parks, and consciousnesses of the West SGV, a persistent, affirmative “non-
White” identity emerged, in which Asian Americans and Latinas/os found points of
affiliation centered upon a majority non-White, multiethnic, multiracial worldview.
As we have seen, then, everyday landscapes in the West SGV and people’s
experiences within them are simultaneously saturated with dominant racial ideologies and
their attendant material outcomes, and rich with alternative narratives of pasts, presents,
and futures. These conflicts and emergent identities, shaped both within and against
hegemonic ideologies, and constituted by a host of often mundane interactions at
neighborhood, municipal, and regional levels, make up the “accumulated history of a
place” (Massey 1994, 156). Their contradictions and possibilities illustrate the
importance of considering neighborhoods and regions as units of analysis in order to
understand processes of racial formation. Cumulatively, they add up to a not fully
articulated, yet definitely formed, regional racial consciousness, similar to Raymond
Williams’s idea of a “structure of feeling.”
What is the significance of knowledges and feelings derived from place-specific
processes of racial formation, beyond their local context? To what degree do such
localized knowledges and feelings constitute a worldview, or a form of knowledge which
travels? In this concluding section I would like to make some final observations about
how regional racial formation is something one feels in one’s body, in place, and how
such embodied and emplaced knowledges are transformed, or stay the same, when people
move—and why we should care.

244
Questions of travel
In the preceding chapters as well as in people’s cognitive maps of race and place
(see Appendix A), we have seen how West SGV residents articulated sophisticated local
understandings of the connections between race and place. Keeping these tracings of
racially differentiated local and regional worlds in mind, I want to ask now, how do West
SGV residents make sense of moves within, between, and beyond these scales? On a
basic level, the ways people experience shifts and transformations in their understanding
of racial orders as they move between different locations or “jump scales” (Smith 1992)
speaks to the importance of grounded, everyday experiences in the formation of ideas and
attitudes about race. They also illuminate a range of possibilities and limitations in
formulating a critical theory of regional racial formation. A few examples will help to
clarify what I mean. In the discussion which follows, I address the dynamics of some
Mexican Americans’ experiences of living in “el barrio chino” and the potential for
jumping scales; the limits of Asian American racialized privilege; and finally, the
development of multiethnic, multiracial knowledges and affiliations that are both West
SGV-specific and mobile.

Jumping scales in ‘el barrio chino’
Within the West SGV, racial and ethnic boundaries were produced and felt in
ways which both enclosed the region from without and traversed it within. These divides
could operate down to a neighborhood level. For instance, Juan Ramirez remembered
how one of his young son’s friends, upon visiting the Ramirezes’ newly purchased house
in Alhambra (to which they had moved from Monterey Park), proclaimed that they had
245
moved to “el barrio chino.”
2
“El barrio chino,” in a Spanish-speaking, United States
context, means Chinatown or Chinese district: as such, in some Mexican Americans’
characterizations of the West SGV as a “barrio chino,” the concept, as utilized locally,
shows how state ideologies intermingle with regional racial hierarchies.
In fact, Ramirez’s young son and the boy’s friend were just beginning a process
that Ramirez had gone through himself, having had Chinese neighbors “all of my life”
and trying to make sense of what seemed to be their increasing dominance compared to
Mexican Americans in the Monterey Park neighborhood he lived in as an adolescent.
From very early on, Ramirez also started to make transnational associations, connecting
“la tiendita del chinito” (a small grocery or store owned by a “chinito”—literally a
diminutive form of “chino,” or male Chinese; “chino” is also often used to refer to a
person of any Asian ethnicity) where he grew up in Monterey Park and “la tiendita del
chinito” close to where he spent summers with relatives in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
I had grown up spending my summers in Mexico. And I had grown up knowing
that… Mexicans and Chinese people had interacted for a long time historically. I
knew that just as part of the family history. For instance, my grandmother
remembered the attacks on Chinese people in Mexico… when they were kicked out of
California, a lot of them went to Mexico. There were lynchings and mob riots. My
grandmother told us, when I was a little kid, that Chinese people would hide in her
house, [because] of mobs of people attacking Chinese families. So I knew about that
kind of stuff…. I knew about this tension, I knew about this animosity.… There’s a lot
of memory about this.
3

The Ramirezes’ family memories, tied to larger collective community memories
and cumulative experiences up to the present, show how day-to-day experiences which
expose the intricate, small-scale boundaries of one’s local worlds can also lay the

2
Interview with Juan Ramirez, February 18, 2008.

3
Interview with Juan Ramirez, October 4, 2007.

246
groundwork for cognitively “jumping scales”: drawing connections and making meaning
between geographic scales and across larger areas. The understanding embedded in Juan
Ramirez’s family history that “Mexicans and Chinese people had interacted for a long
time historically” made him constantly aware of transnational and historical forces
connecting the fates of Mexicans and Chinese, complicating his perceptions of and
reactions to local developments. For instance, when sections of his childhood
neighborhood were categorized as blighted in the late 1980s and began to be demolished,
a move many in the predominantly Latina/o neighborhood blamed on “rich Chinese
people,” Ramirez’s own strong emotions were tempered by the awareness that other
forces, such as White elites who had long wielded power in the region, were also
involved.
Forty-year-old Jorge (pronounced “George”) Banuelos’s account of an
experience in a Chinese restaurant on Valley Boulevard soon after moving from Echo
Park to Alhambra in the early 1990s offers another example of intra- and multi-scalar
movements in making sense of classed and racialized dynamics. Banuelos and his wife
had gone out to eat, and decided to try a new restaurant “off of Valley and Garfield.”
When the couple walked in, they noticed that only one table was occupied with diners,
who appeared to be an Asian family and a “Caucasian boyfriend or husband.”
So we walked up to the counter, and the guy behind the counter, he looked at us and
he walked away and walked to the back. So we figured he had to do something…. at
least five minutes later, a busboy walked out. And I said, ‘hey, do we just sit
anywhere? Can we get a menu?’ And he kind of gave us the signal like, ‘I don’t know
what you’re saying, maybe I don’t speak the lingo’—I don’t know what he was
saying. He walked over to the table with that family, and he talked to them, and then
he left. So at that point I realized what was happening. We were basically being
ignored. They were waiting for us to leave….
4

4
Interview with Jorge Banuelos, August 8, 2008.

247

Although his wife implored him to just walk away, Banuelos was so enraged, “I picked
up a chair and I threw it across the restaurant, and I walked out—you know, that was my
statement.” The incident “left an indelible mark on my psyche.” He felt it was “the first
time I’d really been discriminated against”:
I remember walking away from that experience and feeling [long pause] I don’t know
how to [pause] feeling different. Like, debased, you know? Like I wasn’t treated like a
human being. I was less than a human being to them, because they were willing to let
me just stand there with my wife—and oh, she was pregnant at the time too—and
[pause] I wasn’t even worth—I was so contemptible to them that I wasn’t even worth
sitting down and you know, [being] offered a glass of water or a menu or something
like that.

His incredulity that it was in this circumstance that he would experience the “first time
I’d really been discriminated against”—the sting of feeling like he was considered “less
than a human being”—led to a number of reflections about place-based experiences of
interracial and interethnic interactions. The experience also disrupted stereotypes he had
previously held of Asians as “really good businesspeople… people who would do
anything to make a buck,” marking class- and race-inflected boundaries within Alhambra
in a way that Banuelos had not previously felt, and forcing him to make connections
regarding class divisions within Asian as well as Latina/o communities.
I don’t look at the Chinese in Chinatown the same as I look at the Chinese in
Monterey Park. I think of Monterey Park, they’re much more exclusive… they have
more walls around them. And I think they’re more arrogant… self-centered—I mean,
I can go on and on and on. But you get the same thing from Hispanics in Montebello.
I have friends who are from Montebello, when they look at people from let’s say, East
LA, they have the same mentality: ‘we’ve pulled ourselves out of the muck, and we
don’t want to be like that anymore, so we’re gonna build walls, and we’re different
from you.’

He also speculated on how one racial minority could treat another in this fashion.
Being treated by Asians as lower in the racial hierarchy overturned his expectations of
248
how the racial hierarchy worked. He “genuinely believe[d] that any Asian person walking
into a Mexican—a taco restaurant in Echo Park or anywhere like that, I don’t think they’d
ever be turned away. So that’s why it was so traumatic to me, to go into an Asian
restaurant and be turned away. And not even turned away, just completely ignored.”
Thinking that the Asian restaurant workers must themselves have experienced overt
racial discrimination in the past “from other cultures, maybe Anglos, or maybe even
Hispanics,” and that it was a “learned trait” or “defense” helped Banuelos to make sense
of it, but also led him to make the comparison that for him, “let’s be honest, it was like
being a Black person in the South”: “To me, that’s how it felt…. I’m not saying I have
400 years of oppression behind me, but it was difficult to swallow. It still is. It’s still a
very vivid memory that I don’t think I’ll ever get over.” Banuelos’s comparison to being
treated “like a Black person in the South” indicates how in popular discourse, racism in
the United States is often reduced to, and naturalized as, a Black and White problem.
Nonetheless, Banuelos’s struggle to make sense of the experience had led him to
make inter-regional as well as national connections. Instead of attributing the actions of
the Chinese restaurant’s Asian workers to individual racism, he thought about the
complexity of class differences within ethnic and immigrant groups, and made intra-
regional and national distinctions and connections. Although none of it ultimately helped
Banuelos to “get over it,” his thought process in trying to sort through the experience,
which remained vivid in his mind, showed the potential for “jumping scales” in analysis
of interracial and interethnic interactions, and how its meanings were not fixed, even
years later. Finally, the experience marked indelible boundaries within the local area: “It
changed my outlook on the area… where I could go.”
249
Forty-seven-year-old Chicana artist Laura Aguilar, who grew up in South San
Gabriel and currently lives in Rosemead, also felt alienated by experiences in businesses
oriented toward Asian clientele, in which she could not rely on the presence of English
speakers and. in one instance, felt as though all the Asian customers were served first. For
Aguilar, who can trace her family back five generations in the SGV (since before the U.S.
conquest of Alta California), her feelings of disorientation were strong enough to make
her consider moving away.
It’s so Asian. I feel like an outsider. But I always felt like an outsider when it was
always White. [laughs] But more in the sense that… there are so many stores that are
all in a language that I can’t even read. And I just know that I’m not going to go in
there because it services a certain community that speaks that language. Mexican
restaurants before, or a store that was Mexican, I could go in knowing that someone
was going to speak English…. It’s also like in East LA, there are people who have
lived here their whole lives and were born here but don’t speak English, ‘cause
everyone only spoke Spanish to them. But… I’m used to going into Mexican culture
and not being able to communicate, but… in Monterey Park and stuff, I can’t tell
who’s who. ‘Cause I know there’s a big Korean culture and I know there’s a big
Chinese culture, and then I think there’s a medium-sized Cambodian culture, but I
never know who I’m dealing [with]—and everything’s in another language.
5

As a result, because of her discomfort at the prospect of struggling to communicate,
Aguilar, who has a learning disability which affects her speech, avoids Asian-oriented
businesses, feeling that she has to go “further away” to “just a basic store like Vons.”
Like Banuelos, Aguilar drew correlations between Mexican and Asian communities, but
also could not help but be influenced by her racial perceptions of Asians (“I can’t tell
who’s who”) and assumptions that they would not be able to English. Regardless of the
individual specificities of Banuelos and Aguilar’s experiences, it is important to note that
both reacted to a perceived lack of validation or acknowledgment of their presence,
which resulted in demarcations which placed racialized limitations on their access to

5
Interview with Laura Aguilar, March 2, 2007.

250
local spaces. Aguilar’s comment that she “always felt like an outsider” whether the
predominant population was Asian or White, in the context of an unusually long family
history in the West SGV, also speaks more broadly to a longstanding erasure of Mexican
and Chicana/o histories from the regional landscape.

The limits of racialized privilege
While Mexican Americans, as sometime minorities in the West SGV, had plenty
of opportunities to ruminate on racial hierarchies at multiple scales, for Asian Americans,
the transformation of localized knowledges into racial consciousness happened more
often upon leaving the West SGV. As discussed in Chapter 2, in some contexts—
particularly institutional ones—Asian Americans enjoyed a racialized form of privilege
within the predominantly Asian American and Latina/o regional context of the West
SGV. However, when Asian Americans left the West SGV—especially middle-income
Asian Americans who left for the first time to attend college—they were often
disoriented by the presence of much larger numbers of White people. Their previous
sense of relative privilege evaporated. While Mexican Americans wrestled with a
perceived Asian-Latina/o divide within the West SGV, Asian Americans more often
focused on White-Asian divides, and discussed the effects of jumping scales—to, say,
statewide contexts of the University of California, or private colleges—via traveling
outside of the West SGV. For example, eighteen-year-old Jennifer Lin, who grew up in
Alhambra under close supervision of her Taiwanese father and Korean mother, had this
to say about her experience at a UCLA orientation 25 miles west, on the West Side of
Los Angeles:
251
When I went to UCLA, I felt that I was really a minority… ‘Cause when you’re in
Alhambra, you don’t feel like a minority. It’s sort of like when you see a Caucasian,
the Chinese term [is]… ‘foreigner,’ right? [laowai]… but when you go to a college
campus, you’re the minority again, so it’s like, you’re the foreigner. So it was kind of
a wake-up call… a surprise for me to see, like, wow, there are so few Asians
compared to where I come from.
6

Lin’s experience expresses the degree to which the particular mix of the West SGV was
normalized for residents, especially those who had grown up there. For Grace Ahn
(Korean American, Alhambra), Russell Lee-Sung (Chinese Mexican American,
Monterey Park), and Lisa Beppu (Japanese American, South San Gabriel/Rosemead),
going to college was also a significant moment in which they realized that the place they
had grown up in was not like other places. Yen Le Espiritu (1992) and Nazli Kibria
(2002) have noted that for many Asian Americans, college has been a key setting in
which pan-Asian or Asian American identities are developed for the first time. For West
SGV Asian Americans, however, going to college could be a much different experience.
Instead of constituting their first opportunity to encounter concentrations of Asian
American youth, it was often the first time they had encountered many White people.
Russell Lee-Sung, for one, left Monterey Park in the mid-1980s to attend Pepperdine, a
private, “almost entirely White,” Christian university in Malibu, “because I wanted to get
away from the community that I was very comfortable in, which was Asian and Hispanic,
and go and experience different people, and different culture, and that kind of thing. And
it did exactly that [laughing].” Lee-Sung recalls his first days there:
I did not know a single person at Pepperdine. Did not know anybody, okay. I did not
have a single friend there. So that right there was pretty scary. And then the other part
is you walk onto campus, and everybody’s White, you know. So that was strange. I
mean, I could just feel it. ‘Cause when you’re in Monterey Park, everyone is dark-
haired, dark-eyed, you know. You go to Pepperdine, everyone has, you know, light

6
Interview with Jennifer Lin, July 27, 2007.

252
hair and light eyes. And so, walking through there, I really—I felt, like, everyone
looking at me because I looked very different.
7

Lisa Beppu’s experience at Chapman College in Orange (a small private college
approximately 35 miles south, in inland Orange County) in the early 1980s, sounds
similar to Lee-Sung’s:
[I]t was a verrry uh, awakening experience for me, because until that time there are
things that I had never experienced. Like, the thing that always sticks with me, is that I
had never felt short before. You know? Like, for a Japanese girl, I’m pretty tall, you
know? I’m like, about 5’4” and a half, and all of a sudden, I felt short! ‘Cause there
was all these 6-foot guys, and uh, a sea of blue eyes and blond hair.
8

And Grace Ahn, traveling 100 miles north from Alhambra to attend coastal UC Santa
Barbara in the mid-1990s, “felt like an alien there.”
Did it feel really White to you?
Yes. [emphatically] I felt really small on campus.
Physically?
[pause] Maybe. Physically. Emotionally, I think…. I felt like an alien there.
9

The vivid, visceral nature of Lee-Sung, Beppu, and Ahn’s memories of these initial
displacements from the West SGV shows how race is always an embodied experience in
place: “You walk onto campus and everybody’s White… I could just feel it.” “The thing
that always sticks with me, is that I had never felt short before.” “A sea of blue eyes and
blond hair.” “I felt really small… I felt like an alien there” [my emphases]. Similarly,
twenty-one-year-old Derek Yee, who is Chinese and Japanese American and grew up in
Alhambra before attending UC Berkeley for college, described the difference for him
between walking “into a room full of Asians versus walking into a room of all White

7
Interview with Russell Lee-Sung, May 18, 2007.

8
Interview with Lisa Beppu, June 28, 2007.

9
Interview with Grace Ahn, January 16, 2008.

253
people”: “I would feel much more comfortable—I mean, just to be honest—with the
Asian. And I don’t know why, but I just—maybe it’s a stature thing, or something like
that… You know, like height difference. I don’t know what it is, but I feel almost
intimidated.” Yee traces this feeling back to an experience in high school, when he
attended Boys State, a selective, week-long camp in Sacramento for teenaged boys with
demonstrated leadership skills. Yee felt “intimidated” by the White boys, who constituted
the majority of the participants, “like I was not even their equal.” He felt that they were
“older,” “taller,” and “more sophisticated” than him. Working as a news editor for the
camp newspaper, the other boys treated him badly, “but I just took it, because for some
reason, I felt like they were all my superiors rather than peers” (although he is careful to
qualify that he did not think this was a “racial thing”). Yee felt his own unease had very
much to do with growing up in a predominantly Asian American, majority-non-White
environment. If, for example, he had grown up in a predominantly White area like some
cousins in North Carolina, he probably could have “gone there and just been one of the
bunch.” As it was, “I still feel—I think about it, and I feel [pause] different.”
10

For Lee-Sung and especially Beppu, their sense of unease or not belonging was
sometimes substantiated by the way they were treated. Lee-Sung remembered an incident
in which a university staff member assumed he was a foreign student:
I remember… coming up to a table, standing in line… and the person asked me for
my green card!... [brief pause] I was like, I can’t believe you just assumed I’m a
foreign student, you know? [laughing] And it’s like, ‘No, I was born here in the
United States’—in a very firm voice, looking [at him] right in the eyes. ‘Cause that’s
not right—you can’t just assume that I’m a foreigner like that. I was kind of upset.
And that had never happened to me before. But that was kind of how they looked at
anybody who wasn’t White.

10
Interview with Derek Yee, August 7, 2008.

254
Lisa Beppu related several incidents while attending college in Orange, or when she
traveled to other areas, when she would get “that look,” which said, “What are you
doing? You don’t belong here.” She recalled going to apply for jobs in the summer and
getting the feeling that “they’re not even going to consider me,” and one incident in
which “some kid” rode past her on a bike yelling, ‘you Jap!’ Beppu’s brother told her that
he didn’t like to visit her there, following an experience at a restaurant in which he “sat at
the counter, and… never got waited on.”
Clearly, there are limits to a West SGV-developed sense of what I have called
Asian American racialized privilege. Moving as little as 25 miles away (in Jennifer Lin’s
case), people could feel physically and emotionally alienated. From Lee-Sung and
Beppu’s accounts, it is apparent that in some moments, they struggled simply to be
treated like human beings (echoing Banuelos, reflecting on his experience in the Chinese
restaurant on Valley)—nothing more, or less. Racist assumptions and attitudes (that Lee-
Sung could not be American, or that Beppu could not even be considered as a prospective
employee) made, or could make, a material difference in their opportunities at a basic
level. The trappings of Asian American racialized privilege, predicated on racial
expectations which reinforce White dominance such as the model minority myth,
inevitably failed when transported to contexts in which Whites are clearly dominant.
Confronted with unpleasant contradictions upon leaving, many Asian Americans now
saw their experiences growing up in the West SGV in a much different light. Within the
apparently simplistic framework of the production of comfort or a sense of privilege that
came with being “the majority,” outcomes other than reproducing racialized privilege
became possible.
255
‘As a community, people have a personality’
While the limits of racialized privilege are just as real as the sense of
subordination many Mexican Americans felt about living in a “barrio chino,” I observed
a third pattern of regional racial thinking in the West SGV, which did travel. This is the
idea that, as Lisa Beppu put it, “as a community… people have a personality”—a sense
of affiliation tied to place that had to do with a majoritarian non-White identity and the
development of particular kinds of knowledges. This way of thinking was often (although
not always) generational, and definitely had something to do with having grown up in the
West SGV; most commonly, it developed when people moved or traveled, and evaluated
how they felt and what they found in comparison to what they had known growing up.
For example, Beppu described how her perception of subtle daily interactions in and
outside of the West SGV changed after she moved to Orange County for college.
At college… and then just even out and about that town, like—there’s always one
thing that stands out in my head. As a woman, right, if you go in and out of the door,
they would just close the door right in front of your face, okay, with not a backwards
glance. Whereas here [in the West SGV], in this community, a woman comes towards
the door, a man will hold it open for you, even wait for you, if they see that you have
bags in your hand. And you don’t always experience that in Orange.

Later in our interview, when I asked Beppu how she would describe what she called the
“personality” of the West SGV, she elaborated:
You know, like, what I was telling you about before about how men will hold the door
open for you? So I think because most of us in this community have an immigrant
background, people tend to still have a little bit of the old-school manners, you know,
just common courtesy about certain things…. And I like that there’s a mix of cultures,
you know? Because my kids, they’re all mixed up. That’s the world…. You need to
be able to know how to live with, work with, be friends with different cultures,
backgrounds, communities. That’s the future, you know? And it does still feel to me
like family.

256
Like Eloy Zarate and the Friends of La Laguna in their struggle to save Monster
Park (Chapter 4), Beppu, who is a third-generation Japanese American, located shared
“immigrant” mores as a source of commonality for West SGV residents, although she
then widened the description to “you know, just common courtesy about certain things.”
Ultimately, like many other West SGV residents, she tied the sense of the community
feeling like “family” to knowing “how to live with, work with, be friends with different
cultures, backgrounds, communities.”
Derek Yee and Anita Martinez both pointed to a sense of camaraderie that
exceeds singular racial or ethnic identities. Yee described an experience when visiting
relatives in North Carolina, when he was stranded on a Greyhound bus:
We got completely stuck. And they took a lot of people off and transferred them to
another bus, so there were only maybe about a dozen of us left on the bus. And there
were a Hispanic… mother and son. And then there was a White guy who was about
my age, and then there were three German girls… and then there was a Black couple.
Pretty diverse group. But just thinking about it, in retrospect, I was talking to the
Mexican couple, in Spanish even, and I’m terrible at Spanish. But I felt more at ease
than… when I was talking to the White guy… That’s just the way I am, and maybe
you know, I have a problem. [laughs] But yeah, I guess if you think about it, I felt
very comfortable with them. I laughed, I joked, it was very enjoyable.

Anita Martinez described a similar sense of comfort when she moved to Lincoln Heights,
a hilly, working-class Asian and Latina/o neighborhood just north of Chinatown.
It was almost kind of like being in the San Gabriel Valley…. Where I live now, we
live in a four-plex…. the bottom floor, it’s… me and my boyfriend, the other family
[is] Mexican, and upstairs, Chinese. And it feels natural to me… it’s not weird or
anything. Although they [the Chinese neighbors] can’t really communicate that well,
we still get by with gestures and hand signals. And if I really need to tell ‘em
something, I’ll go to, what is that, Babblefish [a translation website], I’ll type it out
and print it in Chinese [laughing] so I could give it to them. And it works!
11

11
Interview with Anita Martinez, June 20, 2008.

257
Martinez and Yee’s expressed comfort with the labor of communicating across linguistic
and cultural divides (Yee describing his Spanish as “terrible” and Martinez saying that
she and her neighbors “get by with gestures and hand signals”), contrasts with Jorge
Banuelos’s tense experience at the Chinese restaurant on Valley, and Laura Aguilar’s
sense of being treated as an outsider and expectations of stressful communication. Indeed,
unlike Martinez, 37, and Derek Yee, 21, who grew up in the area, Aguilar is in her late
forties, and Banuelos moved to the West SGV as an adult.
Like Martinez and Yee, Mexican American Gina Alvarez, growing up in
Alhambra, articulated a sense of being part of a multiethnic, multiracial, non-White
majority (as discussed in Chapter 1: “I never felt, when I was growing up, oh, I wish I
was this, or I wish I was that. Because I think we were always the majority… where we
lived”). Alvarez, one might recall, moved slightly out of the area to Temple City as an
adult, and decided when choosing schools for her two daughters that she wanted them to
grow up with a similar sense of comfort in being part of the “majority.” For Alvarez, this
meant choosing schools with fewer Whites and more children of color.
12

For these children of the West San Gabriel Valley, then, this sense of “feeling
like the majority” was not tied to one racial or ethnic group having the largest numbers,
instead often translating into a traveling sense of comfort in multiracial, multiethnic, non-
White settings, and sometimes even purposefully seeking them out. They also learned
particular skills and developed a comfort with communicating across racial, cultural, and
linguistic divides, leading to a sense of connection that could be exhilarating but was also
comfortable. As Milo Alvarez (Gina’s older brother) put it,

12
Interview with Gina Alvarez, April 10, 2008.

258
Having been to some places—I’ve been to the Midwest… the East Coast… New
Mexico… I’ve never seen anything like this community here…. I feel very connected
to it as a place that was home. Now what does that home represent? It represents these
sort of changes that took place in my lifetime, that I witnessed with my own eyes…. I
have this good feeling about that…. It was like, these groups that sort of worked
together in this weird, sort of crazy way, trying to figure each other out, you know?
13

Conclusion
Milo Alvarez’s insight that “these groups that sort of worked together in this
weird, sort of crazy, way” was tied to “trying to figure each other out” is an important
one. It points to how studying regional processes of racial formation can unearth
knowledges and practices which constitute alternatives to dominant notions of interrracial
relations among non-Whites in the United States. Instead of supporting a pendulum-like
model, in which “race relations” swing perpetually between the two poles of conflict and
cooperation, a multiracial regional analysis illuminates a spectrum of experiences which
are constantly shifting and often contradictory. A regional field of analysis allows a “fine-
grained” analysis of the production of both hegemonic ideologies and counterhegemonic
ways of thinking in everyday landscapes and institutions of civil society. By defining a
“region” of racial formation as a set of social relations and processes common to a place
or set of places, and building from people’s everyday experiences, a regional approach
also provides a comparable lens through which to consider suburban as well as central
urban and rural racial hierarchies, as well as those processes which link and define
different “types” of space (cf. Gilmore 2008). Indeed, in conducting further research, a
comparison of dynamics (such as those entailed by the concept of Asian American
racialized privilege) across multiple regions would certainly enrich my arguments here.

13
Interview with Milo Alvarez, February 27, 2008.

259
A large part of my challenge in this work—and, I believe, a challenge for many
of us who seek to understand how to disrupt systemic inequalities based on the
production and reproduction of difference—has been to make sense, meaning, and
purpose out of relationships that are complicated, but not to compromise on their
complexity. With regard to the West SGV, I hope a regional analysis, in episodic form,
has made sufficient room for the coexistence of the Mexican American kid moving into
“el barrio chino,” the descendants of Californios who live in north San Gabriel and
consider themselves White, the Vietnamese and Mexican American girls performing each
other’s “race,” the children of Japanese Americans who first moved into the area as truck
farmers, the African American boy who has just signed up to be a Cub Scout, the
Taiwanese immigrant, the city councilman who grew up in a highrise in Hong Kong with
bars on the windows, the Chinese Mexican American, the Asian Latina/o— the ladies
and men with their portable radio who start each day at Almansor Park in Alhambra with
a little tai chi and disco, those who labor in the kitchens of restaurants and warehouses, in
real estate offices, hospitals, engineering firms, and factories: enough room for their
histories, experiences, and knowledges, enough room to learn from them.
260
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Appendix A: Cognitive mappings of race, place, and region

A few of the basic questions which motivated me from the beginning included:
What defines the West SGV as a place? How do regional racial hierarchies shape its
contours, its internal and external boundaries? How does this vary for individuals whose
bodies are differentially racialized, gendered, and classed? To begin to get an idea of the
answers to these questions, cognitive mapping—in which I asked 40 of the people I
interviewed to draw maps of their regular pathways within the West SGV, and how they
imagined it cohered as a region—proved to be illuminating. A sampling of the resulting
maps and their implications for my research follows.

cognitive map, O. Ixco

35-year-old Salvadorean and Mexican American Oscar Ixco mapped his world growing
up in the Maravilla public housing projects, literally at the border of East Los Angeles
and Monterey Park. Three freeways defined the structuring lines: the 710, 60, and 10.
279
East LA and Monterey Park adjoined at the center at East LA College, and Alhambra and
Montebello flanked the north and the south, respectively. Ixco also marked Asian and
Hispanic spheres: the Asian in Monterey Park and Alhambra, and Hispanic in Montebello
and East LA. Ixco went to elementary school and junior high in Monterey Park but lived
just across its borderline: indeed, in a land grab by Monterey Park in the 1951, the city
had taken land right up to, but not including, the Maravilla projects (Acuna 1984, 35; also
cited in Pardo 1998, 40). Ixco lived this municipal bifurcation, happy to be occasionally
mistaken for Asian at school—since in his mind, those were the middle-class kids who
lived in single-family homes in Monterey Park—and ashamed at the end of the day to go
back to the projects (which, although predominantly Mexican American, housed people
of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds.
People’s maps also showed a regional cohesiveness to adjoining municipalities
and challenged traditional conceptions of urban versus suburban functions.

cognitive map, K. Toguchi
280

cognitive map, S. Sham

cognitive map, A. Flores
281
The maps above, drawn by Karen Toguchi, a 63-year-old, third-generation
Japanese American woman living in Monterey Park; Stephen Sham, a 42-year-old first-
generation Chinese American from Hong Kong living in Alhambra; and Adrian Flores,
1
a
29-year-old first-generation Mexican American, show how people’s regular paths in the
West SGV are likely to consist of five or six adjoining municipalities, and often do not
take them west of Monterey Park, Alhambra, and Pasadena (with the exceptions, for
some Mexican Americans, of El Sereno and occasional trips to East LA, which are
directly west of Alhambra and Monterey Park). The maps below, drawn by Ana
Shimizu,
2
a 29-year old Japanese and Mexican American woman who grew up in
Monterey Park and Montebello, and Romy Uyehara, a 33-year-old Japanese American
woman raised in the Monterey Park hills, show a similar sensibility—and again, that
freeways and major roads are important dividing lines.

cognitive map, A. Shimizu

1
A pseudonym.

2
A pseudonym.

282

cognitive map, R. Uyehara

Some maps also showed an even broader regional fetch, dictated by family ties,
and work and school obligations (but still not conforming to traditional conceptions of
city-suburb interconnections). Thirty-one-year-old Korean American Grace Ahn, who
grew up in Alhambra, now lives and works further east in the SGV but still retains ties to
Monterey Park and Alhambra, in a southwest-to-northeast arc of municipalities which,
with the exception of Monrovia, all have majority-Asian American populations (and
conspicuously excludes the Whiter and wealthier northwestern SGV cities of Pasadena,
South Pasadena, and San Marino). Similarly, 26-year-old Mexican immigrant Gloria
Enriquez’s
3
map of her regular pathways (directionally flipped) moves east from where
she lived in Rosemead to El Monte, a predominantly Mexican immigrant and Mexican
American municipality where she worked at a locksmith business owned by an aunt and

3
A pseudonym.

283
uncle, and significantly further (about 20 miles) to Pomona, where she attended
community college.

cognitive map, G. Ahn

cognitive map, G. Enriquez

In contrast, maps drawn by people who had only just completed high school or
left the area shortly after high school are considerably smaller-scaled than either of the
types mentioned above. Ethno-Chinese Vietnamese American Paul Pham’s
4
map features
a subsection of Alhambra and Monterey Park not more than four miles square, bounded

4
A pseudonym.
284
at the north and south by Main Street and Garvey Boulevard. Similarly, Korean
American Riva Kim’s map is bounded primarily by Main Street in the north and the 60
Freeway at the south (an additional 2 miles south of Garvey Blvd)—although Pham and
Kim both indicate trips outside of the immediate area for restaurants, groceries, and
shopping.

cognitive map, P. Pham

cognitive map, R. Kim
285

While not surprising, considering the constraints and dependencies of adolescents’
worlds, these are nonetheless indicative of the relatively small geographic scales at which
people develop first—and formative—understandings of the relationships between race
and place. They also suggest the grounded material effects of racial divisions at multiple
scales: at the metropolitan level, discriminatory housing policies that pushed non-Whites
into the Eastside of Los Angeles (as discussed in Chapter 1); and at the neighborhood and
municipal, and inter-municipal levels, major thoroughfares which serve as dividing lines
(albeit contested ones) between different populations (as discussed in Chapter 4).
286
Appendix B: ‘Latinos Lag Behind in Academics’

Alhambra High School Moor, March 22, 2005

NERD RANTS
Latinos Lag Behind in Academics

by Robin Zhou

It's do or die as our school struggles to meet yearly state-mandated increases in our
Academic Performance Index based on student performance on the April-May
Standardized Testing Assessment Report tests.

Using past scores as a measure, are Hispanic students not pulling their weight? The
answer is clearly no. To deny that the Hispanic student population as a whole lags behind
its Asian counterpart would be ignoring the cold statistical truth. Is this suggesting that
brown people cannot think on the level of white and yellow people? Absolutely not. But
the difference is real, and it needs to be acknowledged and explained before it can be
erased.

So why are our Advanced Placement classes 90 percent Asian? Two factors contribute
significantly that influence students' academic progress from the first year of school. The
first is cultural: many Asian parents, especially recent immigrants, push their children to
move toward academic success, while Hispanic parents are well-meaning but less active.
Since kids are concerned mainly with the present, little parental involvement often means
they fail to realize that school is not an end in itself but a bridge to better things.

Given that Asian students are often pushed harder and more consistently by their parents,
it's not surprising that a performance gap already exists by middle school. For example,
the Gifted and Talented Education program offers high school math courses to students
willing to undetake the effort; it is composed of a mostly Asian group. The second factor
maintaining the performance gap appears around then, the deliberate segregation of
previously uniform student bodies into white- and blue-collar castes.

With few exceptions, the students in AP classes accompany each other all through high
school, excluding the rest of the student body. Here the cultural difference does its sad
work: entrance into advanced classes is largely dependent on standardized test scores and
grades, personalized evaluations being impossible due to time constraints. Those who
miss the first boat rarely get a second chance. The gap is widened as the chosen surge
ahead while others languish in classes watered down to yield acceptable pass rates. The
stark difference between AP and regular curricula largely accounts for the
homogenization of regular students into a more or less uniform level of minimal
proficiency by senior year. Students are essentially partitioned into two levels based on
287
middle school performance, so far apart content-wise that lower rarely adds members to
upper.

While few Hispanic students enter the honors track, culturally influenced lack of
preparation, not prejudice, is to blame. Even so, the school is responsible for ensuring
that all students have their abilities challenged, to not mistake lack of preparation for lack
of merit. Our current, Dickensian system of the haves and have-nots needs to include a
place for those in between the heterogeneous and honors tracks. Bringing back a form of
tracking, for instance, would recreate A-level classes that push the capable enough to
give them a decent start on life.

I suppose suggesting ways to increase parental awareness is a futile, superfluous exercise.
Even with our school's attempts to reduce the language barrier and host parent
conferences and workshops, a certain proportion of parents will never be able or willing
to devote time to planning and shepherding the growth of their children. Additionally,
teenagers tend to shrug off disembodied statistics that come from two boring weeks of
testing. Those figures do show a definite racial gap, however, and those who casually
dismiss their own inabilities that place them on the bottom end must be forced to
understand that those are not empty numbers, but are indicators of the brightness of their
futures.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract "Episodes in the Life of a Place" develops a theory of regional racial formation through examining the everyday experiences of residents of four cities in the West San Gabriel Valley (SGV), an area which became known in the 1980s and 1990s as a “suburban Chinatown,” but which is in fact a multiethnic, majority-Asian American and Latina/o space. Drawing from episodic case studies, cognitive maps, and in-depth interviews with diverse Asian American and Latina/o residents, I examine how hierarchies of race, ethnicity, and class are shaped by racialized relationships to property, neighborhood-based social formations, and key institutions of civil society such as high school and the Boy Scouts of America. How have Asian American and Latinas/os’ movements into the West SGV been shaped by, and subsequently productive of, differentially racialized relationships to property? What kind of “world(s) of their own” (to paraphrase Matt Garcia) have they made collectively, in what have become largely non-White, suburban, middle-income neighborhoods? What affective and political possibilities do such spaces allow or foreclose, which are distinct from those articulated in majority-White settings? Finally, how are ideological linkages between notions of race and space formative of local civic landscapes? In my analysis, three important themes emerge: the intertwined relationship of race, property, homeownership, and privilege

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Cheng, Wendy Hsin (author)

Core Title Episodes in the life of a place: regional racial formation in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2009-08

Publication Date 06/25/2009

Defense Date 05/19/2009

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

Tag Asian American,interethnic relations,Latina/o,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,racial formation,San Gabriel Valley,southern California,suburban

Place Name Alhambra (city or populated place), California (states), Monterey Park (city or populated place), San Gabriel Valley (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee chair), Lloyd, David (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), Pulido, Laura (committee member)

Creator Email wendy@wendycheng.com,wendyhch@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2319

Unique identifier UC1450490

Identifier etd-Cheng-2999 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-577754 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2319 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Cheng-2999.pdf

Dmrecord 577754

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Cheng, Wendy Hsin

Type texts

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

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu