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

Conclusion: How Localized Knowledges Travel

· 197 ·· CONCLUSION · How Localized Knowledges Travel In the decades after World War II, channeled by systemic patterns of housing discrimination that steered them away from more exclusively white areas but valorized them relative to would-be African American homeowners, Asian Americans and Latinas/os became neighbors in the West San Gabriel Valley (SGV). In these communities, they forged friendships, especially as youths, and practiced a moral geography of differentiated space. Compared to whites, who fled the area en masse, an expectation and acceptance of difference rather than sameness kept Asian Americans and Latinas’/os’ numbers relatively stable during a rapid influx of ethnic Chinese immigrants to the region that began in the late 1970s and has continued into the present day. Throughout, both Asian Americans and Mexican Americans took advantage of the availability of diverse housing options in the West SGV’s lower-middle-income to middle-income residential landscape, in the process complicating the symbolic dimensions of American homeownership and giving rise to new paradigms of race and privilege. Through everyday practices of friendship, romance, love, and family, West SGV residents formed intimate cross-racial relationships that gave rise to strong multiracial affiliations and identifications and were often highly influential to their own identity formation. For many, the “multiple proximities” (e.g., of location and culture) experienced by Asian Americans and Latinas/os imbued the West SGV itself with a multiracial place identity. At the same time, in the mid- to late 2000s, in school and other civic institutions, Asian Americans and Latinas/os formed an overwhelming majority but at key moments struggled to make sense of their daily worlds vis-à-vis powerful national discourses and ideologies about race including the model minority myth and color blindness. Individuals’ ways of making sense of the social order were tied intimately to the particular regional context in which they lived. The nuances of their reactions and interpretations of the social order around them revealed dissonances and 198 CONCLUSION contradictions between regionally specific knowledges and dominant racial hierarchies. Civic institutions inculcated particular societal orders and mores, yet these were imperfectly internalized—never quite settling as commonsense, taken-for-granted truths. On several main public thoroughfares, racialized struggles regarding civic landscapes took place, revealing sedimented historical geographies of race as well as continuing uneven power relations. Throughout this book I have shown how everyday landscapes and people’s experiences within them can be simultaneously saturated with dominant racial ideologies and their attendant material outcomes and rich with alternative narratives of pasts, presents, and futures. These conflicts and emergent identities, shaped both within and against hegemonic ideologies and constituted by a host of often mundane interactions at neighborhood, municipal, and regional levels, make up the “accumulated history of a place.”1 Their contradictions and possibilities illustrate the importance of considering neighborhoods and regions as units of analysis in order to understand processes of racial formation. Cumulatively, they add up to a not fully articulated, yet definitely formed, regional racial consciousness , similar to Raymond Williams’s idea of a “structure of feeling.” Although I have described at length several strong and persistent themes that I believe define the history and recent past of the West SGV, even in the five years that have elapsed since I began my research, the rapid pace of change in this area has continued. Although the 1980s through 2000s saw, for the most part, a relative parity between Asian Americans and Latinas/os in terms of relative numbers and socioeconomic status, the Asian—and especially ethnic Chinese—population has continued to grow, and the Latina/o population has begun to decrease. Although the SGV’s Asian population remains ethnically heterogeneous and its ethnic Chinese population is actually highly heterogeneous as well (in terms of generational status, country of origin, and class), its racial heterogeneity may have begun to decline, with Asians becoming a clear majority presence in an increasing number of spaces. However, as we have seen throughout the book, this process is uneven and complex and often does not reflect deeply entrenched power hierarchies. Nor does it represent an inevitable trend, with easily predictable outcomes. Also, importantly, the relative socioeconomic parity of Asian Americans and Latinas/os in the area has remained consistent—especially when compared to whites’ much higher economic status—creating a similarity in class strata that has CONCLUSION 199 been integral to Asian Americans and Latinas’/os’ abilities to share neighborhoods and build cross...