Ethnic Origins: The Adaptation of Cambodian and Hmong Refugees in Four American Cities

6. Ethnic Succession in the Urban Pecking Order

Chapter 6 Ethnic Succession in the Urban Pecking Order I n small midwestern cities Southeast Asian refugees brought a new kind of diversity, but in Chicago and Milwaukee they were just the latest installment in a century of ethnic succession. Southern blacks began arriving in Chicago and Milwaukee during World War I, followed by Mexicanos, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans during the 1940s and 1950s, and then more African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. The proportion of racial and ethnic minorities in both cities expanded as white residents left for the suburbs during the 1970s. Their departure coincided with the new immigration from Asia and Latin America as well as economic distress brought on by deindustrialization. How established residents in Chicago and Milwaukee reacted to newcomers from Southeast Asia reveals a pattern of American race and ethnic relations that can be termed “theurbanpeckingorder.”TheCambodianAssociationofIllinois(2000,2), originally located in Chicago’s Uptown, poignantly describes what the refugees experienced there: “Negotiating their way amidst gangs, drugs, urban violence, inadequate housing, and poor schools, many felt they had been transported from one war zone to another.” Ethnic Succession in Chicago Between 1975 and 1978 about 1,200 Southeast Asian refugees resettled in Chicago, and they quickly congregated in Uptown, an area in northern Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan (see figure 6.1). The 1980 census found that blacks accounted for 15 percent of the area’s population, Hispanics 28 percent, American Indians 3 percent, and Asians 23 percent (Brune and Comacho 1983). By 1981 more than 4,000 Southeast Asian refugees lived in Uptown.1 Direct resettlement from refugee camps in Southeast Asia peaked during 1982 and 1983, when about 900 Lao and Hmong, 1,000 Cambodians, and 2,500 Vietnamese came to Chicago (Asian American Services of Chicago 1986). The migration continued at a slower pace during the mid- and late 1980s. Community 101 leaders estimated that by the early 1990s approximately 8,000 Vietnamese, 4,000 Cambodians, and 1,000 Lao lived in Uptown. Almost all of the Hmong, however, had left for Wisconsin and other states (Hansen and Hong 1991). The coordinator of the Illinois Refugee Resettlement Program provides a succinct assessment of the neighborhood’s role in the city: “Uptown is the Ellis Island of Chicago” (Immigration and Refugee Services of America 1986b, 9). Southeast Asian refugees joined a long list of ethnic groups that called the Uptown area home. Germans, Swedes, and Irish first settled the area during the early 1900s, moving north as more recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe moved into their neighborhoods in the southern part of the city (Cutler 1982). Development in Uptown subsided during the 1920s, and for the next two decades the area became synonymous with affluent leisure and recreation in cafes, nightclubs, and auditoriums (Lyden and Jakus 1980). After World War II a new series of displaced people began moving into Uptown, attracted by low-cost housing and an increasing number of single-room occupancy hotels that catered to transient populations. Japanese Americans were the first of the new groups to settle in Uptown in 1944 and 1945, when the U.S. government released them from the 102 Ethnic Origins 294 94 90 Irving Park Rd. Harlem Ave. Western Ave. Cicero Ave. M ilw aukee A ve. JFK Expy. DePaul Univ. Loyola University Northwestern University Dempster Argyle St. Uptown Uptown Chicago Riv e r M i l w a u k e e A v e . Forest Preserve O’Hare International Airport Lincoln Park Zoo Lake Michigan Evanston Alban ny Park k Skokie Albany Park Chicago Chicago n Sh er id an R d . Figure 6.1 Northern Chicago Source: Graphics Division, Learning and Technology Services, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. internment camps. About 30,000 of the more than 110,000 Japanese Americans leaving the camps in remote regions of western states came to Chicago and about one-half of these settled in Uptown (Yoshino 1996). Many Japanese Americans subsequently left the city to return to their native state of California. Nonetheless, in 1990 Uptown had a Japanese American population numbering approximately five hundred. The Japanese American Service Center was still in operation when Southeast Asian refugees began arriving, as was a Japanese Buddhist temple. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s a second wave of newcomers arrived in Uptown: poor whites from the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia.2...