The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California

5. SGV Dreamgirl: Interracial Intimacies and the Production of Place

· 171 ·· CHAPTER 5 · SGV Dreamgirl Interracial Intimacies and the Production of Place In the late 2000s, the local street-wear brand called “SGV” produced a T-shirt, which they called “SGV dreamgirl,” featuring a black-andwhite image of an attractive, dark-haired and dark-eyed woman, overlaid with the repeating three-letter brand logo (Figure 19). The website catalog description of the shirt read, “meet your dreamgirl; she’s half Asian, half Latina.” The T-shirt, along with several others designed by Paul Chan and produced and distributed by Chan and a “motley crew” of skateboarding buddies turned business partners who had grown up in the area, evoked an explicitly multiracial, Asian American and Latina/o place identity.1 Other T-shirts produced around the same time included one featuring the well-known red Sriracha hot sauce bottle (a staple in casual Asian restaurants and home pantries everywhere) with the letters “SGV” instead of the Sriracha logo, another that sported the logo of a popular hair cream favored by cholos, and yet another that riffed on the painted ivy walls created by local government agencies as an attempt to deter graffiti. In the melding of their cultural, racial, and geographic imaginations, the SGV brand’s ethos and creations clearly evoked a shared racial-spatial imaginary highly specific to the area. More specifically, the image of an SGV dreamgirl who is half Asian and half Latina prompts the following questions: What is the relationship between place and interethnic or interracial intimacy? In the West San Gabriel Valley (SGV), how is a collective, place-based multiracial or multiethnic identity experienced and expressed? What are the key components of such an identity, how is it produced and sustained, and toward what ends? In chapter 2, we saw that Asian Americans and Latinas/os who grew up in the SGV, especially those who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, were likely to develop close interethnic and interracial friendships in their neighborhoods 172 SGV DREAMGIRL and schools, which often developed into a lasting sense of multiracial consciousness and collective nonwhite identity. The three subsequent chapters illustrated that while this multiracial consciousness and collective identity formed a pronounced regional structure of feeling in the SGV, with the potential to form a basis for antiracist politics, ideology supporting the reproduction of dominant national racial hierarchies Figure 19. In 2008, the SGV brand released a T-shirt design called “SGV dreamgirl,” featuring the image of a woman who was half Asian and half Latina. Courtesy of Paul Chan. SGV DREAMGIRL 173 nonetheless remained powerful among individuals and local institutions. In this chapter, we will look further at the question of multiracial identity and racial-spatial consciousness not only through the experiences of multiethnic and multiracial individuals but also through the lens of interethnic and interracial intimacy. The coexistence of more fluid affective and interpersonal identifications with the more hardened racial and social hierarchies expressed in civic institutions and spaces—and sometimes within or experienced by the same individuals—show the importance of affective, interpersonal, and cultural realms to the formation and expression of regional structures of feeling. These are the realms where we can consistently find a distinctive place-based racial consciousness , which, though not fully realized in institutions and more broadly based power structures, is nevertheless consistently present. Considering the meanings and effects of interethnic and interracial intimacy in relationship to place is important for two primary reasons. First, interracial intimacy and ethnic identity are closely related. In the case of marriage—the institutional binding together of family lines and fortunes—scholars have argued that they are in some ways mutually constitutive. Following Max Weber’s definition of ethnicity as “real or fictive kinship, a sense of common provenance and history,” Paul Spickard argues: “People making marriage choices, and other people reacting to those marriage choices, do so largely around the notion of who is within their group. Perceptions of class and culture, and knowledge of social connections, all play parts in these decisions. But ultimately, after an individual ’s feelings for another individual, marriage choices seem mainly to embody judgments as to whether a particular person is one of us or not.”2 Place is similarly important to ethnoracial identity because, as we have seen, place-based understandings about racial and ethnic identity also have the potential to blur the boundaries and meanings of ostensibly discrete racial and ethnic categories. Seen in...