The racialized and gendered regulations of national borders through the industrialization of neighborhood geographies had a tremendous impact on daily work, home architecture, and social relationships in the Chinatown and Sonoratown neighborhoods of Los Angeles during the early twentieth century. Using space and gender as analytic lenses, this article examines the built environments of house courts in Sonoratown and Chinatown as windows into the everyday lives of Mexican and Chinese Angelenos. Women's ordering of domestic space and intimate labor in and around the home spaces-in particular, their use of common spaces like courtyards and alleyways-blurred the categories that city and state agents designated for family, home, and nation, as they shaped conceptions of community that exceeded the logic of the nation-state.In 1924, eleven-year-old Betty Wong and her younger brother Bruce returned home from grammar school one day to find that their father had passed away, leaving behind their mother and their twelve older siblings along with the family business, a herbal medicine shop that was attached to their house in Chinatown, Los Angeles. 1 Observing the customary Chinese mourning period, Mrs. Wong and the children did not leave the house for three months. During that time, the women and children of their neighborhood came to cook together and socialize. Betty fondly remembered that her mother had taught the children to play mahjong and let them stay up all night. "With no father around, she just living the life of variety I guess, just having a good time, showing her children how to play dominos, you know. 'Cause she have all the say then, see?" Betty's testimony focused not on her father's death but on the importance of the home her mother created in his absence, and the extended neighborhood community she forged with other Chinese women and children. For Betty's mother, home-making and community-making went hand in hand, and she used the space of her house, the medicine shop, and its location in the neighborhood to those ends. Chinese women like Mrs. Wong worked not only to maintain their familial
Though relatively little is known about them when compared with their adult counterparts, the experiences of Chinese American youth and Mexican American youth in Los Angeles were significantly shaped by living in the developing urban city. More independently as they became older, these ethnic youth navigated social structures that informed the racial, gendered, and class orderings of the city. As both Asian American and Mexican American adult populations in the Los Angeles area boomed before World War II, so did their youth populations, reflecting wars, changes in immigration law and policy, and the steady growth of the region’s railroad, manufacturing, and agriculture industries. With lives intimately tied to adults’ lives, both Asian American youth and Mexican American youth were a mix of recent arrivals from outside the United States and individuals who were born within its national borders. Their presences overlapped with those of their parents and other adults, in both private and public spaces where paid and unpaid labor took place. In ways that reflect the cultures of their respective communities of the era, young people utilized city spaces in different ways as they attended school, worked, socialized, and participated in community events and activities. Excluded from white-only institutions and social organizations, Asian American and Mexican American youth formed their own respective organizations and clubs. They brought dynamic life to Angeleno spaces as they navigated social and community expectations along with rapidly changing cultural and consumer trends.
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