Chinatowns Lost: The Birth and Death of Urban Neighborhoods in an American City

• In Event: 1555 - Urban Sociology

Abstract

This article historicizes they ways in which ethnically segregated neighborhoods are born, change over time, and die in American cities. Based on a historical ethnography of five Chinatowns in Los Angeles between 1850 and 1945, the author highlights Chinese residents’ agency in the manufacturing of their own neighborhoods and their agency in the death and destruction of their neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are embedded in social structures and social agency that effect how they are created and how they die, but there is an intellectual malaise in both the birth and death of neighborhoods that has failed to move beyond simplistic and formulaic answers for how neighborhoods come to be and come to be destroyed. This article aims to bring the lived experience of ethnically segregated neighborhoods back to the forefront of urban sociology. This framework calls for the bringing forth of the subjective experience and response of ethnic segregation into the theorizing of neighborhoods and cities. Furthermore, this article hopes to highlight the effectiveness of historical ethnography, a newer method in sociology, that is useful for studying that which no longer exists.

Author

• Daniel Zipp, University of California-Los Angeles