Chinatowns

A Chinatown is an ethnic enclave outside Chinese homelands where people of Chinese descent are concentrated. A Chinatown can be found in many major cities with a high clustering of Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, South and North America, Europe, and Oceania.

San Francisco’s Chinatown was the first in the United States. It began to take shape in 1850 as large numbers of Chinese immigrants were lured there by the California gold rush. Initially called Little Canton, it was christened Chinatown by the press in 1853. In the next several decades, more than two dozen Chinatowns were established in mining areas, railroad towns, farming communities, and cities of California, as well as Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. As the Chinese diaspora accelerated, especially after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinatowns gradually emerged in New York; Boston; Chicago; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Baltimore; and other cities.

The formation of Chinatowns in the United States was an outcome of both voluntary and involuntary forces. In a foreign land and with language barriers, Chinese immigrants needed their own communities for information sharing, lifestyle preservation, business transactions, cultural maintenance, kinship networking, and psychological support. Externally, hostility and violence against Chinese immigrants, housing and employment discrimination, and institutional exclusion forced them to establish their own enclaves for self-protection and survival.

Over time, some Chinatowns have survived and continued to grow, whereas other Chinatowns, such as Pittsburgh’s, have faded. Many important demographic, economic, social, and geographical factors have contributed to the growth or decline of a Chinatown, including the size of the city in which the Chinatown is located; the number of residents of Chinese descent in the city; the sex and age distribution of the Chinese and Chinese American population in the Chinatown; the demand for Chinese and Chinese American labor in the area; the demand of Chinatown residents for goods and services; the continuation of new Chinese immigration and settlement into the Chinatown; land-use patterns and land values in the Chinatown and its surrounding areas; changes in the socioeconomic status of Chinese and Chinese American residents; relationships between people of Chinese descent and other groups; and adaptation strategies of the Chinatown.

Historically, Chinatowns were located in urban centers, and residents tended to have a lower socioeconomic status. However, in the late 1970s, the first suburban Chinatown emerged in Monterey Park, located east of Los Angeles. Also dubbed the Chinese Beverly Hills or Little Taipei, it is home to mainly middle-class people. Chinese Americans are the dominant economic, social, and cultural force in the city. In November 1984, Monterey Park elected the first Chinese American woman mayor, Lily Lee Chen. There were signs that suburban Chinatowns were multiplying in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles and in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco. The Chinese community also spread to other cities in the San Gabriel Valley, including Alhambra, Arcadia, Rosemead, and San Marino, creating a cluster of ethnoburbs that had large Chinese populations.

In the twenty-first century, there were roughly fifty Chinatowns in the United States, of which New York’s Chinatown was the largest. Contemporary Chinatowns have been transformed into tourist centers and shopping bazaars. They also serve as living communities, cultural meccas, commercial cores, suppliers of employment and entrepreneurial opportunities, historical education hubs, and symbolic power bases for political office holders and seekers. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that injustice and the exploitation of new Chinese immigrants also take place in some Chinatowns. Despite the existence of the three types of traditional social organizations in Chinatowns (huiguan or district associations, zu or clans, and tongs or secret societies), they have much less influence on the lives of Chinese and Chinese American residents than they did in the past.

Bibliography

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Künnemann, Vanessa, and Ruth Mayer, editors. Chinatowns in a Transnational World: Myths and Realities of an Urban Phenomenon. Routledge, 2011.

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