Sorting Respectability: How Work and Space Produce Intra-Ethnic Hierarchy Among Chinese Immigrants in Los Angeles

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 09. Ethnic boundary making

Abstract

This paper examines how intra-ethnic division among Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles is produced through everyday evaluations of work and space. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews conducted between June 2024 and August 2025 and complementary ethnographic observations across Chinatown and multiple suburban Chinese settlement areas in the San Gabriel Valley and beyond, I show that participants routinely interpret jobs, workplaces, cities, and neighborhoods through moralized rubrics such as “security,” “quality,” professionalism, and discipline. These rubrics function as cue-based classificatory tools: publicly legible signs—language environments, employer type and perceived regulation, cleanliness, greenery, policing, school reputations, and residential crowding—become shorthand for inferring education, character, legitimacy, and social worth. Participants then extend these place- and work-based inferences to co-nationals, differentiating between “respectable” and stigmatized Chinese people and spaces and reorganizing co-ethnic belonging into a ranked internal map (e.g., “old” versus “new” immigrants; legitimate versus illegitimate occupants).

Conceptually, the analysis treats intra-division as a moralized sorting mechanism with positional stakes. Rather than reducing internal hierarchies to individual prejudice, I argue that immigrants’ boundary work operates as an aspirational effort to secure legitimacy within Los Angeles’s racialized urban order by contracting “who counts” as a representative co-ethnic and distancing from stigmatized labor niches and racialized spaces. By linking scholarship on symbolic boundaries, ethnic enclaves, and racialized geographies to a cue-based account of classification and status marking, the paper clarifies how internal stratification is reproduced through ordinary talk, avoidance, and “common sense” readings of work and place.

Author

• Anni Gu, University of Notre Dame