Global Downtowns

12. Beside Downtown: Global Chinatowns

1 2 Beside Downtown: Global Chinatowns Gary W. McDonogh and Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong For m uch o f t he n ineteenth a nd t wentieth c entury, i n B arcelona’s barrio chino/barri xino, decaying tenements and crowded streets housed thousands of immigrant workers slaving in aging factories or seeking day-to-day opportunities at the nearby port. Only the broad, tree-lined Rambles, a promenade beloved of flâneurs, s eparated t he m iddling c lasses a nd el ites of t he historic city center from this “Chinatown” (this boulevard, in fact, had replaced a n e arlier u rban w all). A fter dark, however, exotic nocturnal amusements including prostitution, drugs, and gambling lured adventurous bourgeois men, bohemian artists, journalists, and even transnational revolutionaries into the barrio chino. In the twenty-first century, nonetheless , as Barcelona’s post-Olympic urban revitalization has spread from the port and historical core outward, this “Chinatown,” rechristened as the historic Raval, has been demolished in favor of neoliberal development of sanitized public spaces, new hotel and tourist services, gentrified residences, and cultural facilities including museums, foundations, and t he Universitat de Barcelona. The Raval has displaced the chino, its older inhabitants, its bars, social centers and memories (McDonogh 1987, 2002; McNeill 1999; Magrinyà and Maza, this volume). While this may seem to be a stereotypical Chinatown in location, function , and imagery, it differs from others where we have worked in a fundamental demographic element—the absence of Chinese. Barcelona had f ew Chinese u ntil t he 1990s. I nstead, ma ny i nhabitants of t his den se c entral zone had a rrived from poorer Spanish regions of Andalusia and Aragon. 274 Gary W. McDonogh and Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong Journalist Paco Madrid borrowed the sobriquet “Chinatown” in 1927 from his reading of San Francisco, using barrio chino as an urban metaphor to evoke a n a mbience o f c osmopolitan m ystery a nd B arcelona’s s tatus a s a world city (McDonogh 1987). When the first waves of Chinese arrived in Spain in the late 1990s, in fact, they settled elsewhere, including an important cluster next to t he downtown area of a sub urban Barcelona satellite city, Santa Coloma. Nonetheless, Barcelonans’ metaphorization of the early twentieth-century location and imagery of Chinatowns, like the demands and pressures of center city development that continue to change the area, are familiar and even suggestive phenomena for global downtowns. For more than a de cade we have lived, worked, and studied in Chinatowns worldwide, including Chinese enclaves in and around Chicago, New York, Sydney, Lima, Los Angeles, Bangkok, Havana, Paris, San José, Panama City, and São Paulo, in addition to our anchorage in Wong’s native Hong Kong and our home in Greater Philadelphia. These Chinatowns sometimes have been backgrounds for other projects in urban studies, mass media, architecture , a nd v isual culture (for example, Wong 1991, 1999); t hey a lso have become interwoven with lives of our family and friends. Our experiences and investigations underpin the complexities of multisite downtown ethnography t hrough w hich w e ha ve e xamined sha red cha racteristics o f place, function, ideology, and evolution (McDonogh and Wong 2005). Th ese social, sp ecial, a nd c ultural f eatures emb ody b oth C hinese a gency a nd evolving Chinese globalization, although we do not develop such a phenomenological exploration here. Instead, we argue that Chinatowns are deeply enmeshed with the structure and nature of central districts that such Chinatowns often border, a r elationship mapped decades ago by Burgess and the Chicago School (Burgess 1925: 56). Chinatowns provide a m ultivalent vantage from which to illuminate critical features of global downtowns, including the evolution of central spaces and functions, the competitive markets for people a nd capital t hey embody, a nd t he play of locality, region, nation-state, and transnational articulation shaping downtowns as well as Chinatowns. To analyze the dialectic of Chinatowns and global downtowns, we consider five specific themes: (1) the emergence and movement of Chinatowns in relation to urban cores; (2) the imagery of Chinatowns as cultural spaces that illuminates race, immigration, gender, and morality in downtowns; (3) competing contemporary demands for land, development, and movement, both Chinese and non-Chinese; (4) the meaning of Chinatowns in relation Beside Downtown...