Table Of ContentTHE CHANGS NEXT DOOR TO THE DÍAZES
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The Changs Next Door
to the Díazes
. . . .
Remapping Race in
Suburban California
Wendy Cheng
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Portions of this book have been published previously in Wendy Cheng, “Th e Changs
Next Door to the Díazes: Suburban Racial Formation in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley,”
Journal of Urban History 39, no. 1 (2013): 15– 35 (Sage Publications Ltd.); and in Wendy
Cheng, “‘Diversity’ on Main Street? Branding Race and Place in the New ‘Majority-
Minority’ Suburbs,” Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture 17, no. 5 (2010): 458– 96;
reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd.,
htt p://www.tandf.co.uk/journals).
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitt ed, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writt en permission of the
publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Th ird Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
htt p://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Cheng, Wendy, 1977–
Th e Changs Next Door to the Díazes : Remapping Race in Suburban California /
Wendy Cheng.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 8166- 7981- 2 (hc)
ISBN 978- 0- 8166- 7982- 9 (pb)
1. Los Angeles Suburban Area (Calif.)— Race relations. 2. Asian Americans—
California— Los Angeles Suburban Area. 3. Hispanic Americans— California—
Los Angeles Suburban Area. I. Title.
F869.L89A25174 2013
305.8009794'94— dc23 2013028358
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
Th e University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Th eorizing Regional Racial Formation 1
1. Not “For Caucasians Only”:
Race, Property, and Homeownership 23
2. “Th e Asian and Latino Th ing in Schools”:
Academic Achievement and Racialized Privilege 63
3. “Just Like Any Other Boy”? Race and the
San Gabriel Valley Boy Scouts of America 91
4. Diversity on Main Street: Civic Landscapes
and Historical Geographies of Race 129
5. SGV Dreamgirl: Interracial Intimacies
and the Production of Place 171
Conclusion: How Localized Knowledges Travel 197
Appendix: Cognitive Maps of Race, Place, and Region 213
Notes 221
Bibliography 257
Index 275
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Preface and Acknowledgments
W
hen I was a child growing up in North County San Diego,
about once every couple of months my parents would pack up an
empty ice chest, along with me, my grandparents, and my brother, and
we would drive the hundred miles to Monterey Park, in Los Angeles’s
San Gabriel Valley, to stock up on ingredients to make the food that made
my parents remember their native Taiwan: twenty- pound sacks of rice,
glossy plastic bags full of dried shitake mushrooms and tiny dried shrimp,
densely leaved heads of napa cabbage, pork spare ribs expertly hacked into
one- inch pieces, boxes of brown Asian pears cradled in padded nett ing,
and for us kids, Japanese chocolate- covered Pocky sticks and the green
and pink packs of Botan rice candy sold at the register. Besides going to
the market, we would meet my uncle and his family for a meal at one of
the Hong Kong banquet- style restaurants, where effi cient servers would
deliver a seemingly endless series of courses— platt ers of sliced barbecued
pork, chewy strands of jellyfi sh, and chicken cooked in white wine; freshly
sautéed baby pea sprouts; and steaming chunks of crab or lobster in gin-
ger and scallion sauce. Aft erward, the adults would sit contentedly, eating
orange slices and cleaning their teeth, one hand cupped discreetly over the
other wielding the toothpick.
For me as a child, then, the San Gabriel Valley represented things that
were both strange and deeply familiar. Compared to the predominantly
white suburb in which we lived, places like these in which everyone I saw
seemed to be Taiwanese, or some kind of Chinese, were in some sense
unfathomable. Yet it was where my uncle and his family lived, as well as
many of my parents’ Taiwanese friends, and many of the children with
whom my brother and I grew up. So even as we made our daily lives a
hundred miles away, our family was oriented toward the San Gabriel
Valley— and for many years, until the Nationalist government lift ed mar-
tial law in 1987, it was the closest we could get to Taiwan.
· vii ·
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I didn’t discuss these excursions with my friends, most of whom were
white. Perhaps I understood at some level these trips were part of a circuit
to which my friends had neither access nor understanding, which over-
lapped but did not intersect at all with North County’s predominantly
white, suburban beach culture. Driving between San Diego and Mon-
terey Park, stopping sometimes in Irvine, Rowland Heights, or Hacienda
Heights, was how my parents traced what it meant to be Taiwanese in
Southern California. For my brother and me, it instilled a sense of what
it meant to be a young “Asian” in America— or at least Southern Califor-
nia’s version of it. Th is included lowered Honda Civics with dark- tinted
windows and exaggeratedly high spoilers, speaking English with an accent
though one had been born and raised in the United States, and neighbor-
hood aft er neighborhood of faux- Mediterranean tract homes full of other
Asian families. Th ough of course these were vast oversimplifi cations, it
was already apparent to me that Taiwanese and other Asian groups in the
San Gabriel Valley were making worlds of their own, in Southern Califor-
nian suburbs, strip malls, and car culture.
It did not become clear to me until more than fi ft een years later, when
I had moved to the area myself, that there were many other people living
alongside and within what I had conceived of as exclusively “Asian” worlds
who were not Asian. In fact, in many of the San Gabriel Valley communi-
ties that are popularly conceived as “Asian,” Latinas/os make up between
a third to one- half of the population. I observed the old Asian American
ladies and men with their portable radios who started each day at Almansor
Park in Alhambra with a litt le tai chi and disco amid what seemed to be
a nearly 100 percent Asian American and Latina/o world. I watched as
Asian American and Latina/o skater kids plodded along to school, virtu-
ally indistinguishable from one another in their black skinny jeans, black
T-s hirts, and strategically disheveled hair. I sat among Asian immigrant
and Mexican American families eating late at night at Noodle World or
in the Taiwanese cafeteria-s tyle restaurants. What stood out was not an
unusual level of interethnic or interracial interaction— most oft en Lati-
nas/os and Asian Americans appeared to move in separate though tightly
overlapping orbits— but the everyday banality of it all, the sense of ease
with which people moved through this majority- nonwhite, predominant-
ly middle- income and suburban, world. What did this sense of ease— even
complacency— mean in a nation that has historically excluded nonwhites
from access to such spaces and confi ned them, literally and fi guratively,
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
to poor central city areas in which they are pitt ed against one another for
scarce resources and represented as deadly enemies? Th e streets, shops,
schools, and restaurants of the San Gabriel Valley did not seem inclined
toward confl ict or coalition— the other pole to which the representational
pendulum swings— but rather more modulated and nuanced daily codes
of coexistence. I began to wonder, how did this particular, majority– Asian
American and Latina/o racial confi guration come to be? What did place
have to do with it? What multiethnic and multiracial histories and present
realities have been obscured by the area’s contemporary designation as a
“suburban Chinatown”— and what possible futures?
As these questions coalesced into my dissertation research, I was for-
tunate to have the support and mentorship of a remarkable community in
the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of
Southern California. For my place there, and for so much else, I thank my
mentor and dissertation chair, Ruth Wilson 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. Laura Pulido provided generous and challenging mentor-
ship, from supporting me in exploring concepts important to her work in
my own terms, to giving me the opportunity to collaborate with her and
Laura Barraclough on A People’s Guide to Los Angeles— a dream project.
During the home stretch of writing this manuscript, she even shared pre-
cious offi ce space in Los Angeles with me. Viet Th anh Nguyen pushed
me to approach Asian American studies with an independent mind and
off ered an inspiring example of how critical and creative work can be com-
plementary to one another. David Lloyd was supportive from early on,
and Fred Moten urged me to think seriously about the virtue and meaning
of people simply coexisting and “leaving each other alone.” Leland Saito
off ered insight and support for my research from its beginning stages, and
Karen Tongson was an energizing interlocutor in shaking up convention-
al thinking (including my own) on the suburbs. Lanita Jacobs, Dorinne
Kondo, Josh Kun, Jane Iwamura, and David Román taught me skills and
inspired me with their research and knowledge. Kitt y Lai, Sandra Hop-
wood, Jujuana Preston, and Sonia Rodriguez made the department run
for students and faculty alike. Jujuana in particular continued to provide
much- appreciated assistance long aft er I graduated. My coconspirators
and dear friends during graduate school and beyond, especially Michelle
Commander, Laura Fugikawa, Emily Hobson, Viet Le, Jesús Hernández,
