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LA Ethnic Museums The Removal and Renewal of Los Angeles Chinatown From the Exclusion Era to the Global Era By Jan Lin Sociology Department Occidental College 1600 Campus Road Los Angeles, CA 90041-3341 Phone: 323-259-2994 Email: [email protected] And Eugene Moy Chinese Historical Society of Southern California [email protected] Phone: 626-926-5705 January 2005 A paper for submission to the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting 2006 1 We are experiencing a period of profound economic and social change in the Chinese districts of American central cities. These trends are associated with the liberalization of U.S. immigration and trade law since the 1960s, a process of globalization marked by increasing flows of labor, capital, and culture between borders. The growth and expansion of Chinatowns in many U.S. central cities occurs amid the broader emergence of suburban Chinese neighborhoods or “ethnoburbs” on the metropolitan periphery.1 These trends can be seen in other U.S. immigration gateway cities such as New York, Washington, DC, Houston, and Los Angeles. I focus on downtown Chinatown in Los Angeles, which has dramatically expanded with an influx of new immigrant labor and capital since the 1960s. The renewal of Chinatown there has been associated with the efforts of community-based artists, historians, and activists in undertakings such as ethnic heritage museums, public arts projects, cultural festivals, and preservation of landmarks and cultural sites. Ethnic arts and cultural districts are increasingly strategic sites in a global, postindustrial city in which ethnicity as well as other cultural features are increasingly transacted as a factor of production. Chinatown is a site where the “ethnic enclave” economy increasingly intersects with the growing “creative economy” in sectors such as tourism, entertainment, and the arts.2 For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, public officials, the police, and moral reform and temperance groups, generally viewed ethnic places such as Chinatown as sites of crime, residential overcrowding, and contagious diseases. They were seen as spatial and cultural obstacles to modernization and cultural assimilation. The newspapers further proliferated this representation. Until the mid-twentieth-century, immigrants and other minorities in American cities were subjected to a number of legal, residential and economic restrictions and exclusions that effectively segregated them in downtown neighborhoods marginal to the interests of prevailing urban elites. The Chinese were subjected to exclusion from continued immigration 2 and citizenship, while the Japanese suffered internment. California state-level Alien Land Laws excluded them from property ownership. Mexican immigrants were subjected to repatriation and African Americans to segregation. The “slum clearance” and “urban renewal” programs that comprised the Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949 codified the prevailing view of these “blighted” areas as targets of demolition, clearance, and redevelopment (Lin 1998). In Los Angeles, classic episodes include the displacement of Chinatown by Union Station in the late 1930s as well as the eviction of Mexican Americans from Chavez Ravine for Dodger Stadium in the late 1950s. The Chinese and Mexicans were subject to a kind of “racial” or “ethnic removal.” 3 In this paper, I consider the historical development of Los Angeles Chinatown from the exclusion period to the contemporary global era. During the exclusion era from 1882 to 1943, Chinatown was twice subjected to clearance by the City of Los Angeles. Despite these challenges, the ethnic entrepreneurs and leaders of Chinatown periodically reached out to local business leaders and booster organizations, such as during the 1890s, when they participated in public festivities, notably the Fiesta de Los Angeles. The touristic presentation of the Chinese lion dance was a gesture of cultural diplomacy during the booming years of Anglo ascendancy in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. By the end of the Depression under Mayor Bowron, the business elite assisted the Chinese business community in reinventing Chinatown itself as a tourist site. Thus they created Chinatown and China City in 1938, newly constructed urban villages that incorporated aspects of the Hollywood stage lot with the aesthetics of the preservation movement. They foreshadowed to some degree theme parks like Disneyland, launched in 1955. Chinatown thrived during the liberal Bowron administration of the New Deal years and during the wartime years of U.S.-China geopolitical rapprochement, during which Chinese exclusion was lifted. The community became more patriotic and markedly anti- communist after the Chinese revolution of 1949, which played favorably during the McCarthy “red-scare” climate of the 1950s under Mayor Poulson. The post-exclusion years coincide with the “neoliberal” opening up of U.S. immigration controls and growing “free trade” agreements since the 1960s. Los Angeles Chinatown has expanded both demographically and economically in the global era, with the original Cantonese colony now augmented by immigrants from other provinces of southern China as well as ethnic Chinese from Vietnam and other areas of Southeast Asia. New generations of activists inspired by the civil rights movement, the Asian American movement, and the community action movement have promoted a sense cultural solidarity and self-determination while acting as 4 power brokers with the City of Los Angeles and the downtown business elite. In the second part of this paper, I consider how these social actors and the new community institutions they have created negotiate the new landscape of race, space, and power in the metropolis of the global era. In the current period, Chinatown is entering an era of new possibilities, as ethnic places are increasingly a factor rather than a barrier to urban renewal. In postindustrial, global cities like Los Angeles, ethnic sites are linked to strategies attracting global investment capital and immigrant labor. After years of decline, downtown Los Angeles is experiencing a revival, and has been the focus of recurring attempts at renewal by public officials, downtown boosters, and the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). Beginning in the 1970s, there was a land rush of investment capital (much of from overseas European, Middle Eastern, or Japanese sources) in the construction of downtown skyscrapers that did much to signify the ascendance of Los Angeles as a nodal “global city” of the Pacific Rim, an advanced headquarters and management complex for the global-economy (Davis 1987, Sassen 1988). The CRA has been principal overseer to the emergence of an elite arts and civic center complex on Bunker Hill, especially along Grand Avenue, which includes the Music Center, California Plaza, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, just completed in 2003. As the arts and culture becomes part of the engine of growth in the postindustrial city, many cities have tried to replicate the “Bilbao effect” achieved by the highly successful Guggenheim Museum designed by internationally known architect Frank Gehry, that has done much to kindle the economic resurgence of the declining provincial city of Bilbao, Spain. Culture is now perceived as a component of production in urban economic development.3 CHINATOWN IN THE EXCLUSION ERA 5 Los Angeles was founded in 1781 as an agricultural settlement, or pueblo to play a supporting role to the system of missions and presidios established up the California coast by the Spanish crown in New Spain. Rule of the city passed to the newly established state of Mexico in 1822, then to the United States in 1847. Chinese immigrants disembarked initially through San Francisco as laborers with gold and silver mining and railroad companies, but began to arrive in Southern California by the 1850s through work with the wagon roads, the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the digging of the San Fernando Tunnel. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 signed between China and the U.S. encouraged the flow of immigration. Chinese immigrants faced increasing hostilities and competition with native labor after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, which enabled native workers from the East Coast a quicker and safer trip to the West Coast than the arduous journey over overland trail on foot or stagecoach. A notable incident was the Los Angeles “Chinese Massacre” of October 24, 1871, in which nineteen Chinese immigrants were publicly lynched or shot dead and their stores and residents looted. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited further immigration and excluded the Chinese from U.S. naturalization. For the rest of the exclusion era up until 1943, U.S. Chinatowns were “bachelor societies” of migratory men that lacked rights of citizenship and property ownership. The Chinatown in Los Angeles had a particularly “wild west” quality in the dusty streets area around the plaza with the coming of the railroad in the late nineteenth century. The Chinese experienced numerous legal and economic barriers to the forming of a larger immigrant community for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were restricted from purchasing property in Los Angeles through local and state laws including California’s 1913 Alien Land Law. Persisting despite these difficulties, the Chinese colony reached some 2000 persons in the late 1880s in an area east of the old City Plaza in an area dubbed locally “Calle de Los Negroes” 6 or “Negro Alley.”4 This was a dim dead-end alley occupied by declining, sub-divided adobes undesired by the businessmen of the Anglo power elite who were pushing downtown development to the south and west of the original city plaza. The Chinese leased space especially in the Coronel Adobe. After the decline of mining and railroad employment, Chinese immigrants were settling into vegetable farming on agricultural land southwest of the city center, marketing their produce door to door from horse-drawn carts by 1880 and in 1890 at the first public market at the old city plaza. Their operations were based in 50 small sheds, jutting out of old, wooden buildings on the east end of Apablasa Street.
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