Review: THE POLITICS OF DIVERSITY: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey Park, California, by John Horton

Immigrant Enclaves and Ethnic Communities in New York and Los Angeles

“…Zhou (1992) interprets the satellite Chinatowns that have emerged in Flushing and other outlying parts of the New York region in this way. Horton (1995) describes a similar pattern for suburban Monterey Park, located not far from downtown Los Angeles, that was aggressively marketed by Chinese American developers to well-heeled immigrants and investors from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Marcuse (1997) also calls attention to such areas, "in which members of a particular population group, self-defined by ethnicity or religion or otherwise, congregate as a means of enhancing their economic, social, political and!…”

The trajectory of the colour line in a US immigrant gateway: hyperdiverse spatialization in Los Angeles

“…Newcomers to urban America, like their counterparts in the early 20th century, display patterns of ethnic clustering and spatial segregation. The color line, however, now expands more clearly beyond Black and White to include Latinos and Asians, making segregated urban and suburban spaces more multiracial and multiethnic (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Pastor 2021;Horton 1995;Li 1998;Ong and González 2019).…”

“…Unlike South LA, SGV's sociospatial transformation is preceded by foreign-capital fueled economic development and hyper-selected immigration (Zhou et al 2013). In the 1970s when South LA suffered from devastating impacts of economic restructuring, MP became a hotbed for development driven by the immigrant growth machine (Horton 1995;Lin and Chiong 2016). Investors and transnational entrepreneurs from Taiwan began to invest in real estate and business developments because of its desirable location and cultural ambiance-proximity to downtown LA, easy access to the international airport and two major ports, plenty of vacant lots, unused land, and affordable bungalow homes, and a visible Asian presence (Fong 1994;Zhou et al 2013).…”

“…Unlike South LA where shared lived experiences of exclusion and oppression among Blacks and Latinos form the basis for linked fate and place-based identities, identity formation in the Chinese ethnoburb in SGV appears to be fragmented and lacks attachment to the place due to diverse interests. The SGV case suggests that rather than gradually assimilating into established White middle-class suburbs, Chinese immigrants bring with them resources to carve out their own space in the suburbia already experienced White flight and develop a thriving Chinese enclave economy to serve as its base, leading to a divergent assimilation pattern characterized by the politics of diversity rather than the politics of resistance(Horton 1995).Discussion and conclusionGlobalized, polycentric, hyperdiverse, and distinctively segregated, LA partially represents and partially stands apart from other immigrant gateways in the US. As the capital of the US-Mexico borderlands and the eastern capital of the Pacific Rim, LA has sustained long-standing diasporic networks that facilitate the flows of capital and labor.…”

Immigrant Groups in the Suburbs: A Reexamination of Suburbanization and Spatial Assimilation

“…A great deal of evidence indicates that, in the past, suburbanization was generally linked with assimilation, both as precursor and as consequence (Alba, Logan, and Crowder 1997;Massey 1985;Massey and Denton 1988). That this link operates in the same way today as it did for the immigrant groups of past eras is open to question in light of the emergence of substantial suburban ethnic enclaves, such as Monterey Park in the Los Angeles metropolitan area (Horton 1995).…”