Despite its many contributions to Los Angeles, the internally complex community of Armenian Angelenos remains enigmatically absent from academic print. As a result, its history remains untold. While Armenians live throughout Southern California, the greatest concentration exists in Glendale, where Armenians make up a demographic majority (approximately 40 percent of the population) and have done much to reconfigure this homogenous, sleepy, sundown town of the 1950s into an ethnically diverse and economically booming urban center. This article presents a brief history of Armenian immigration to Southern California and attempts to explain why Glendale has become the world's most demographically concentrated Armenian diasporic hub. It does so by situating the history of Glendale's Armenian community in a complex matrix of international, national, and local events.
Glendale may house the most visible Armenian diaspora in the world; however, it remains among the most invisible in print. The following begins to shed light on this community by providing a brief background and demographic profile of Armenians in Glendale. The article then attempts to expand discussions of Chinese “ethnoburbs” by situating Glendale Armenians in these discussions. Despite scholars’ expansion of the concept, the ethnoburb has had limited application—largely, to Chinese and a few other Asian immigrant communities. However, is the concept of the ethnoburb generalizable in contexts outside of Chinese immigrant settlements? In this article, I contend that the ethnoburb model is generalizable by situating Glendale's Armenian community within this framework.
Return migration from the diaspora to the ancestral homeland has emerged as an important sub-field within migration studies. The scholarship has introduced new ways of understanding migratory trajectories by exploring the roles of migrants' ethnicity and imagination and has identified novel ways of unpacking migratory patterns whose motivations are not centered on economic mobility. But the scholarship has begged the question by documenting the ethnic and sentimental motivations that make migration incomprehensible and the unexpected difficulties returnees encounter once they have settled in their perceived homelands. The current research project investigates the experiences of North American Armenians who have "returned" to Armenia. It seeks to extend the existing theoretical framework by demonstrating how ancestral returnees sustain a powerful feeling of connection to a country while simultaneously harboring a sense of disengagement from local practices.
Drawing upon ethnographic data collected in Glendale, California, this study applies constructivist theories of ethnic politics to political incorporation research. The analysis demonstrates how the evolving loci of political incorporation-from marginalized racial minorities in urban centers to multi-ethnic migrants in prosperous suburbs-have given rise to new agents (ethnopolitical entrepreneurs) in new spaces (ethnoburbs). In these evolving spaces, community leaders emphasize, consciously and unconsciously, specific attributes, which determine, in part, whether co-ethnics support selected candidates. Specific emphases lead to both the nomination of prospective politicians as well as the political incorporation of newcomers. By applying constructivist theories of ethnic politics to the study of political incorporation, this article expands and refines discourses in both fields of study. Based upon a case study of the intra-ethnically diverse yet highly mobilized Armenian community in Glendale, California, the paper's findings synthesize the strengths of both analytical perspectives.
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