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circularcubes's review
4.0
This is a book that I wish I knew existed when I was a kid growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, curious about history and the past and yet completely bereft of any way to understand why my particular community looked so different from the rest of America. I distinctly remember my middle school yearbook instructor giving us an assignment to learn about the history of our city as a way to fill the time between finishing the yearbook and the end of the school year - I wish that I had something like this book then. In the course of my research, I learned that our city was officially incorporated in 1960, and I learned about the namesake of the city, but I didn't have the know-how (or the access to age-appropriate resources) to learn more about my city - the one I recognized, with multilingual signage galore and spacious Asian grocery stores, the city that my immigrant parent (and all of my friends' immigrant parents) moved to and shaped. Although I knew that my hometown wasn't always 60% Asian American, I couldn't find any information on when the first Chinese immigrants began moving to the area, and what that process looked like. As a result, my understanding of my hometown's history was incomplete, just a fuzzy, vague understanding that most of America did not look like this, and that the community I grew up with was a new one that hadn't existed even a generation or two before me.
It wasn't until college, when I left the San Gabriel Valley, that I came to understand the gaps in my understanding of my own community. Why did it take until my late teens to learn about the Chinese massacre of 1871 in downtown Los Angeles? Why was readingthis book the first time I learned about the expulsion of all Chinese from Pasadena in 1885, when I practically grew up in Pasadena? Frankly, I'm angry! I had no access to my history, and there are still things about my very own community that I'm learning about in the twenties that shock and amaze me.
This book may seem simple (and indeed, it does tend to repeat itself, and perhaps could have been summarized in a long journal article rather than a stand alone book) - but it's important. I learned so much about the formation of my community by reading this, and just having access to that in the form of a book like this was important for me as a product of this specific ethnoburb.
I do have a few quibbles: this book is on the drier, academic side (lots of statistics -interesting, but not the most stimulating thing to read). I also really wish that the final portion of the book took a more in-depth look into other ethnoburbs in the United States - the subtitle of the book makes it seem like an exploration of the phenomenon of ethnoburbs, but in reality, it's a look at one specific ethnoburb: the San Gabriel Valley. It only briefly named a few other ethnoburbs in North America, and most of them were also majority Chinese. What about ethnoburbs full of African immigrants, or Latinx communities, or Indian-Americans? Do they exist? In what ways are those communities similar to the Chinese ethnoburb of the San Gabriel Valley, and it what ways are they unique? Clearly, I have more research to do on this topic...
Originally marked as to-read on April 7, 2013.
It wasn't until college, when I left the San Gabriel Valley, that I came to understand the gaps in my understanding of my own community. Why did it take until my late teens to learn about the Chinese massacre of 1871 in downtown Los Angeles? Why was reading
This book may seem simple (and indeed, it does tend to repeat itself, and perhaps could have been summarized in a long journal article rather than a stand alone book) - but it's important. I learned so much about the formation of my community by reading this, and just having access to that in the form of a book like this was important for me as a product of this specific ethnoburb.
I do have a few quibbles: this book is on the drier, academic side (lots of statistics -interesting, but not the most stimulating thing to read). I also really wish that the final portion of the book took a more in-depth look into other ethnoburbs in the United States - the subtitle of the book makes it seem like an exploration of the phenomenon of ethnoburbs, but in reality, it's a look at one specific ethnoburb: the San Gabriel Valley. It only briefly named a few other ethnoburbs in North America, and most of them were also majority Chinese. What about ethnoburbs full of African immigrants, or Latinx communities, or Indian-Americans? Do they exist? In what ways are those communities similar to the Chinese ethnoburb of the San Gabriel Valley, and it what ways are they unique? Clearly, I have more research to do on this topic...
Originally marked as to-read on April 7, 2013.
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