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

Appendix: Cognitive Maps of Race, Place, and Region

· 213 ·· APPENDIX · Cognitive Maps of Race, Place, and Region What defines the West SGV as a place? How do regional racial hierarchies shape its contours, its internal and external boundaries ? How does this vary for individuals whose bodies are differentially racialized, gendered, and classed? To begin to get an idea of the answers to these questions, cognitive mapping proved to be illuminating. I asked forty of the people I interviewed to draw maps of their regular pathways within the West SGV and how they imagined it cohered as a region. A sampling of the resulting maps and some brief discussion of their implications follows. Thirty-five-year-old Salvadorean and Mexican American Oscar Ixco mapped his world growing up in the Maravilla public housing projects, literally at the border of East Los Angeles and Monterey Park. Three Figure 20. Cognitive map by Oscar Ixco. 214 APPENDIX freeways defined the structuring lines. East L.A. and Monterey Park adjoined at the center at East Los Angeles College, and the cities of Alhambra and Montebello flanked the north and the south, respectively. Ixco also marked Asian and Hispanic spheres: the Asian in Monterey Park and Alhambra, and Hispanic in Montebello and East L.A. Ixco went to elementary school and junior high in Monterey Park but lived just across its borderline: indeed, in a land grab by Monterey Park in the 1951, the city had taken land right up to, but not including, the Maravilla projects.1 Ixco lived this municipal bifurcation, happy to be occasionally mistaken for Asian at school—since in his mind, those were the middle-class kids who lived in single-family homes in Monterey Park— and ashamed at the end of the day to go back to the projects (which, although predominantly Mexican American, housed people of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds). People’s maps also showed a regional cohesiveness to adjoining municipalities and challenged traditional conceptions of urban versus suburban functions. Figure 21. Cognitive map by Karen Toguchi. Figure 22. Cognitive map by Stephen Sham. Figure 23. Cognitive map by Ben Avila. 216 APPENDIX These maps above—drawn by Karen Toguchi, a sixty-three-year-old, third-generation Japanese American woman living in Monterey Park; Stephen Sham, a forty-two-year-old, first-generation Chinese American from Hong Kong living in Alhambra; and Ben Avila,2 a twenty-nine-year-old, first-generation Mexican American—show how people’s regular paths in the West SGV are likely to consist of five or six adjoining municipalities and often do not take them west of Monterey Park, Alhambra, and Pasadena (with the exceptions, for some Mexican Americans, of El Sereno and occasionally East L.A., which are directly west of Alhambra and Monterey Park). The following maps, drawn by Elena Tanizaki-Chen,3 a twentynine -year old Japanese and Mexican American woman who grew up in Monterey Park and Montebello, and Romy Uyehara, a thirty-three-yearold Japanese American woman raised in the Monterey Park hills, show a similar sensibility—and again, that freeways and major roads are important dividing lines. Some maps also showed an even broader regional fetch, dictated by family ties and work and school obligations (but still not conforming Figure 24. Cognitive map by Elena Tanizaki-Chen. APPENDIX 217 to traditional conceptions of city-suburb interconnections). Thirty-oneyear -old Korean American Grace Ahn, who grew up in Alhambra, now lives and works further east in the SGV but still retains ties to Monterey Park and Alhambra, in a southwest-to-northeast arc of municipalities that, with the exception of Monrovia, all have majority-Asian American populations (and conspicuously exclude the whiter and wealthier northwestern SGV cities of Pasadena, South Pasadena, and San Marino; Figure 26). Similarly, twenty-six-year-old Mexican immigrant Gloria Enriquez’s4 map of her regular pathways (directionally flipped) moves east from where she lived in Rosemead to El Monte, a predominantly Mexican immigrant and Mexican American municipality where she worked at a locksmith business owned by an aunt and uncle, and significantly further (about twenty miles) to Pomona, where she attended community college. In contrast, maps drawn by people who had only just completed high school or left the area shortly after high school are considerably smaller-scaled than either of the types already mentioned. Ethno– Chinese Vietnamese American Paul Pham’s5 map features...