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3 In and Out of Chinatown Residential Segregation and Mobility among Chinese Immigrants in New York City N ew York City has the second-largest concentration of Chinese Americans in urban America. Its Chinatown has always been a distinctly contiguous geographic locality in which Chinese immigrants cluster. While other ethnic communities, such as Little Italy across the street, have dwindled, Chinatown has survived for more than a century and a half and has grown into a full-fledged immigrant community based on a solid organizational structure and a thriving enclave economy.Yet even though contemporary Chinese immigrants retain a strong desire to maintain their own language and culture, they are much less likely to live in ethnic enclaves than their predecessors. At the time of the 2000 census, about 451,000 Chinese Americans lived in New York City, making up more than 80 percent of New York State’s Chinese American population. One fifth of the city’s Chinese (91,500) lived in Manhattan, 27 percent in Brooklyn (125,000), and 33 percent in Queens (147,000). It was estimated that a majority of Manhattan’s Chinese lived on the Lower East Side, where Chinatown is located—“Old Chinatown,” as we will call it here. Although the absolute number of Chinese there or elsewhere in the city is much underestimated by official counts, current demographic trends suggest that New York City’s Chinese are rooted in the city but more dispersed than before in relation to Old Chinatown. This chapter examines the residential patterns of Chinese residents in and around New York City, based on 1980 census data and analysis conducted in the late 1980s. 56 / Chapter 3 Changes in Old Chinatown and Beyond When Chinese laborers were shipped in large numbers across the Pacific to the west coast in the late 1850s and early 1860s, few Chinese resided in New York. The 1860 U.S. Census shows 120 Chinese in New York, one-fifth of one percent of the total Chinese population in the United States (63,199). New York’s Old Chinatown emerged in a four-block neighborhood across Canal Street from Little Italy in Lower East Manhattan in the 1870s.1 The first significant group of Chinese immigrants settled on Mott, Park, and Doyer Streets.2 During the first decade of official Chinese exclusion, New York City gained a few thousand Chinese . The ethnic population increased by 147 percent in 1890, while in the rest of the country it dropped 16 percent. At the turn of the century, the proportion of Chinese living in California fell to 39 percent, while the proportion in New York increased to 6 percent. New York’s Chinese population was relatively small but experienced steady growth (from 7,170 to 13,731) between 1900 and 1940, while California’s Chinese population sank from 45,753 to 39,556. In the first half of the twentieth century, New York’s Chinese community was fairly stable and experienced modest growth. Prior to the drastic changes of the 1960s, most Chinese immigrants in New York City clustered in Old Chinatown. Although residential dispersal began in the late 1950s, substantial outmigration was not common until much later. Close to 60,000 Chinese were believed to live in Old Chinatown in 1980, compared with fewer than 25,000 two decades earlier. But in fact Chinatown has always sustained many more residents than the official counts reveal. The discrepancy is mainly due to the reluctance of Chinese immigrants to cooperate with census workers and also possibly to the presence of a considerable number of undocumented immigrants.3 Over the span of one and a half centuries, Old Chinatown has not experienced the neighborhood decline predicted by assimilation theories, unlike neighboring Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side. Instead of diminishing in significance , both the ethnic Chinese population and the territory of Chinatown are growing at accelerated speeds. As the tremendous influx of new immigrants and foreign capital brings life to the decaying area surrounding Chinatown, this enclave has necessarily spilled beyond its traditional boundaries, spreading over southeastern Manhattan into neighborhoods once solidly Jewish and Puerto Rican. Canal Street used to divide Chinatown from Little Italy. There was a time when Chinatown residents did not dare to venture into neighborhoods across the street, even for a stroll. This borderline no longer exists. The Chinese have not only crossed the street, all but smothering Little Italy, which is now a twoblock relic amid buildings and businesses full of Chinese...

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