Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Bianca Mabute-Louie, Sociology PhD candidate, Rice University
This article is adapted from UNASSIMILABLE: An Asian Diasporic Manifesto for the 21st Century by Bianca Mabute-Louie (HarperCollins, January 2025).
I grew up in San Gabriel Valley — also referred to as SGV or the 626. SGV is an ethnoburb — an ethnic enclave — that grew out of the 1970s, with its own economy and ecosystem that includes banks, grocery stores, hair salons and restaurants.
Since many early Asian immigrants to this country were barred from accessing white institutions, working together to build and protect this ethnic ecosystem was a matter of survival and necessity.
Wei Li, a Chinese American geographer, first proposed the term “ethnoburb” to describe the hybridity of ethnic enclaves and middle-class suburbs: suburban ethnic clusters of people and businesses.
The ethnoburb demonstrates that we can create our own power and belonging — without learning English, without participating in white institutions, and Americanizing. It is a communal endeavour, one that requires everybody’s imagination and care.
The ‘Chinese Beverly Hills’
Fuelled by foreign capital, ethnoburb immigrants redefined the entire landscape of the suburb and instigated an economic boom. The growth of Chinese American banking institutions, along with the political and economic factors that prompted the migration of wealthy ethnic Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong, played an important role in facilitating the Chinese economic growth in Monterey Park, a city in San Gabriel Valley.
With their resources, Chinese immigrants bought homes and started businesses with distinct Chinese and Vietnamese language signs to cater to fellow Asian transplants. Valley Boulevard, which runs through 10 cities in San Gabriel Valley, became home to Asian-owned malls, commercial plazas, office complexes, shops, hotels and industrial plants, often with trilingual signage in Chinese, Vietnamese and English.
Asian immigrants transformed neglected strip malls into prosperous Asian marketplaces and forged a sense of permanence and community. Monterey Park, and eventually the rest of San Gabriel valley, began to be referred to as “Little Taipei” or the “Chinese Beverly Hills” by journalists and Chinese diasporic media.
By the 1980s, Monterey Park was known as “the first suburban Chinatown,” converting San Gabriel Valley from predominantly white suburbs into an Asian-majority ecosystem with a conspicuous and diverse first-generation, unassimilated immigrant presence.
Bypassing urban Chinatowns for the suburbs
The ethnoburb troubles the American construction of the suburbs as static sites of whiteness and socioeconomic mobility.
The majority of new immigrants, especially those with resources, bypassed urban ethnic enclaves like Chinatown that previously served as immigrant gateway cities and settled immediately into suburbs instead.
Min Zhou, a professor of sociology and Asian American Studies at UCLA, argues that the deliberate preservation of ethnic values, ties and institutions is what actually acclimates non-white immigrants to the U.S.
Zhou also says the direct insertion of new Asian immigrants into traditionally white middle-class suburbs offends the conventional understanding of immigration and assimilation. Ethnoburb immigrants were non-white, didn’t always speak English, made considerably less effort to acculturate into whiteness, and many of them were already educated and affluent. They broke the bounds of the American imagination of an immigrant.
In addition to higher levels of education and incomes, many ethnoburb immigrants also possessed expansive and transnational social networks that shaped their reluctance to acculturate. They did not need to learn English or go through the ethnic enclave to reach a middle-class dream of financial stability.
The ethnoburb was not a “staging ground” for somewhere better or whiter. The ethnoburb was the final desired destination.
In actuality, contrary to popular conceptions, the ethnoburb was not apolitical or insular at all. It was and remains a site of resistance against the confining, white imagination of suburbia. With the emergence of Monterey Park as an Asian ethnoburb, questions over group identity, spatial boundaries, and the character of Monterey Park became politicized.
White hostility in an ‘all-American’ city
Nativist white residents were at the forefront of erecting boundaries of belonging that stigmatized first-generation immigrants. In addition to Asian businesses changing the esthetic and cultural identity of Monterey Park, Asian immigrants took on local politics. This direct insertion of unassimilated Asian immigrants into traditionally white suburbs and its institutions troubled conventional American understandings of who an immigrant is, the norms they should follow, and how they should behave.
On Nov. 8, 1983, Lily Lee Chen, a first-generation immigrant from Taiwan, was inaugurated in Monterey Park as the first Chinese American mayor in the nation. Chen was relatable, charismatic, and not assimilated. The Los Angeles Times described Chen’s speech as “accented with pauses and grammatical errors, characteristic of someone speaking in their second language.”
In another Times article from 1985, Chen told the reporter that she enjoyed dressing in bright reds and jade greens, despite being told by her consultant to look more subdued because her bright colours made her appear “aggressive.” During her campaign, she was met with fierce resistance from white residents, who commonly took down her neighbourhood campaign signs.
As a response, Chen worked tirelessly on voter engagement among Asian Americans and Latinos, publishing multilingual voter handbooks, registering voters, and building relationships with ethnic communities, including working with Cesar Chavez to support the Latinos in Southern California.
The same year as Chen’s election, Monterey Park’s five-member city council became multiethnic, with two Mexican Americans, one Filipino American, one Chinese American, and one white council member.
As Monterey Park became touted as a “successful suburban melting pot” by journalists and even won an “All-American City” award in 1985 for its civic engagement and racial diversity, white flight accelerated and resentment festered among the minority of white residents.
The large influx and increasing influence of Chinese immigrants over a short period of time caused racial tension to build, with mounting struggles over cultural differences, language barriers, and explicit mistrust of immigrants. Chinese businesses, political candidates, religious institutions, and entrepreneurs became racialized targets of nativist animus.
A particularly contentious conflict emerged over the proliferation of business signs in languages other than English. In 1986, white hostility among the remaining white residents swept the council members of colour out of office, and replaced them with three long-established white residents, who promptly launched an anti-immigrant, “English-only” campaign attacking the proliferation of business signage in Chinese.
Angry Asian Man/Annette Lee
The “English-only” movement in Monterey Park reflects the struggle to control the identity and narrative of a built environment. It represents the tension between America’s idea of how immigrants should assimilate, and how ethnoburb immigrants instead created their own unassimilable institutions and communities.
Frank Arcuri, one of the Monterey Park residents and community activists who started the “English-only” petition campaign, insisted, “Immigrants are welcome here, but they must realize that English is the language we use in America… They must realize they are making a negative impact on our city. They must adapt to our ways. They must use our language and respect our culture.”
The nativist, inflammatory rhetoric Arcuri employed to speak about immigrants is as American as apple pie, comparable to replacement theory touted by white nationalist conspiracists today.
The English-only conflict illustrates the deeper, ideological tensions behind an increasingly diverse and polyglot constituency, composed of politically active immigrants, and nostalgic white residents desperately (and at times violently) clinging on to institutional power and a homogeneous past.
Asian immigrants defied assimilation theories
Traditionally, sociologists of immigration and assimilation theorists believed that all immigrant groups would eventually assimilate and integrate into white Protestant American institutions, culture, and society. They argued that doing so would be in the best interests of immigrants. They were also all white scholars. For the most part, what they theorized was true for European immigrants.
However, Asian immigrants in the ethnoburb remained proudly unassimilable and trans-national. While the ethnoburb was their final destination, they maintained diasporic ties. Many with socioeconomic privilege shuttled back and forth to their home countries.
It is our diasporic connections to our motherlands and our ethnic communities, not necessarily our assimilation into whiteness, that help us thrive in the U.S.
Bianca Mabute-Louie is affiliated with Asian Texans for Justice.
– ref. How Asian immigrants to the U.S. resisted pressures to assimilate, creating a vibrant American suburbia – https://theconversation.com/how-asian-immigrants-to-the-u-s-resisted-pressures-to-assimilate-creating-a-vibrant-american-suburbia-247184
