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1. Not “For Caucasians Only”: Race, Property, and Homeownership
- University of Minnesota Press
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· 23 ·· CHAPTER 1 · Not “For Caucasians Only” Race, Property, and Homeownership One summer afternoon not long ago, Milo Alvarez, a thirtyseven -year-old, fourth-generation Mexican American who grew up in Alhambra, went for a drive in the Monterey Park hills with a friend, also Mexican American. His friend, who was not familiar with the area, wanted to look at a house that was for sale. As Milo tells it, when they arrived at the house, there were these Japanese guys over there. I knew they were Japanese ’cause most of the old guys of that generation, they dress a certain way. . . . And [one of them] grabs a flyer and tells my friend, oh you’re thinking about moving here. [My friend’s] like, yeah. He goes, “That’s cool.” He goes, “I’m tired of all these damn chinos moving in, and just knocking down these nice houses and building their damn Hong Kong mansions. They think they’re in fucking Hong Kong” . . . he says it like that. And then he tells him, “My mom owned this house”—it wasn’t the house for sale, it was the house next to it—“she’s been here for years,” since like the forties or the thirties, I don’t know how long it was he said . . . “but now you have all these damn chinos moving in.” And he’s a Japanese dude, right? . . . I’m used to it because I knew folks like that [growing up] . . . [but] my friend was just shocked and stunned, and he almost wanted to laugh . . . in the sense that, if he’s talking about these “damn chinos,” but in the eyes of somebody from outside . . . all Asian folk are chinos, right? So he just kind of blew him away. . . . We got back in the car and [my friend’s] like . . . “I’m stunned. What is his perception of identity? Who does he think he is?”1 24 NOT “FOR CAUCASIANS ONLY” Milo, on the other hand, while amused by his friend’s reaction, was unimpressed. Having grown up in the area, he was accustomed to its particular racial and cultural alignments. While he acknowledged that it might “sound kind of strange . . . it’s very common if you grew up here.” Several facets of this story are significant. Its setting in the West San Gabriel Valley (SGV), adjacent to Los Angeles’s Eastside, and the basic outlines of the interaction—an older Japanese American man expressing cultural familiarity (using the Spanish term chino, meaning “Chinese,” but often used to refer to all Asians, regardless of ethnicity) as well as attempting to bond with two Mexican Americans—point to common group histories in the region. These began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with shared labor niches in the citrus groves and ranches of the SGV and extended through patterns of residential discrimination that formed multiracial neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights in the 1940s and 1950s.2 However, post–World War II processes of suburbanization, urban renewal, and resegregation have left few remnants of the older history, which is hardly known outside of individual and family histories and certain neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, Crenshaw, and parts of the West SGV such as Monterey Park—as evinced by the dumbfounded reaction of Milo’s friend. Further , the multiple ways in which the Japanese American man sought to make common cause—through disparaging more recent ethnic Chinese immigrants via their architectural choices, letting Milo’s friend know that he would welcome him as a neighbor, and affirming his own family ’s long status as homeowners in the neighborhood—are both highly specific to the contemporary history of the West SGV and speak more broadly to the ways in which relationships to property, and especially homeownership, are central to regional processes of racial formation and productive of particular social relations. What were the historical patterns and processes that informed Asian American and Latina/o residents’ movement into, and subsequent lives in, these suburban spaces? How were these movements shaped by, and subsequently productive of, differentially racialized relationships to property? What kind of “worlds of their own” have present-day residents of the West SGV made collectively, in what have become largely nonwhite, suburban, middle-income neighborhoods, and what do these worlds mean to them? Finally, what possibilities do such spaces allow (or foreclose) that are distinct from those articulated [34.201.37.128] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:15 GMT) NOT “FOR CAUCASIANS ONLY” 25 in majority...