Introduction: Asian American

Suburban History
BECKY NICOLAIDES
FROM THE SUBURBAN SAHIBS OF Middlesex County, New Jersey,
to the Taiwanese of L.A.s 626, stories of immigrant suburbia are finally
moving from the peculiar to the everyday.1 It is no longer so unusual when
we find suburbs populated by diverse types of people and familiesAfrican
Americans, gays, newly arrived immigrants, single-parent households, the
elderly. Yet even as this trend becomes more widespread, there lingers a
kind of deeply reflexive surprise that continues to register in many people.
It stems from suburbias deep association with white, middle-class conformity, built on a base of racial and ethnic exclusion. It is a history that is
hard to shake off, but one facing a formidable challenge by new, emerging
scholarship.
The three articles in this special issue add to a strong, vigorous body
of work that is bringing the story of diversity to the front and center of
the suburban historical narrative. Suburban diversity, of course, is nothing
newit has been around for some time, brought to light in recent years by
practitioners of the new suburban history.2 What is new, however, is the
scale and character of that diversity. Since 1970, the suburbs have emerged
as truly multi-dimensional, complex places. The historical narrative that has
been so well established up to this pointemphasizing the primacy of white
suburban homeowner politics and culture, with their values of individualism, privatism, color-blind meritocracy, and entitlementremains vitally
important in our understanding of metropolitan inequality and national
politics.3 However, that narrative is being supplanted by parallel suburban
narratives with different players, politics, and everyday practicessome that
build off of long-standing suburban cultures, and others that are revamping
them altogether.
Asian American suburbanization has emerged as a vibrant, fascinating
thread of this unfolding story. Perhaps because Asian Americans gained an
early foothold in the suburbs in the post-World War II era and emerged as the
most suburban of all ethnic groups, scholars have devoted more attention
to themas opposed to other ethno-racial groups breaking the suburban

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color lineto explore how suburbias historically white spaces have been
shaken by the transformative process of ethnic diversification.4 The scholarship on Asian American suburbanization has matured in recent years,
moving beyond early works that simply documented the presence of Asians
in the suburbsan emphasis still prevalent among geographerstoward
works that delve into the history of social, political, and community life in
these suburban places. The results have been rich. This small but growing
subfield represents the cutting edge of scholarship on the history of ethnic
suburbs, producing important findings on the nature and implications of
settlement patterns, spatial practices, transnational connections, political
and cultural practices, and the internal dynamics of ethnic suburban communities. Scholars from multiple disciplineshistory, geography, sociology,
political science, urban studieshave made critical contributions, and this
interdisciplinarity has infused this subfield with especially strong theoretical frameworks that hold rich implications for the study of all ethno-racial
groups in the suburbs. The articles in this issue, which probe the history
of Asian suburbanites from multiple angles, illustrate this disciplinary and
thematic diversity.
Suburban ethnic and racial diversification took off in earnest after 1970,
coinciding with the broader trends of suburbanization and immigration in
the United States. From 1970 to 2010, the proportion of Americans living
in the suburbs rose from thirty-seven percent to fifty-one percent, signaling
the emergence of suburban dominance in the United States. Demographic
diversification profoundly shaped this suburban upsurge. While Asians,
African Americans, and Latinos comprised just ten percent of the suburban
population in 1970, that proportion rose to thirty-five percent in 2010. From
another angle, by 2010, a majority of all three groups lived in suburban
areas, with Asians at the top: sixty-two percent of Asians, fifty-nine percent
of Latinos, and fifty-one percent of African Americans called the suburbs
home.5 So, at the same time America was becoming more suburban, suburbia
was looking more and more like multi-ethnic, multi-racial America itself.
Immigration was a key driver of this late twentieth-century suburban boom.
In 2000, fully fifty-two percent of the foreign-born population lived in the
suburbs, many of them settling directly in suburbia upon arrivalbypassing traditional urban ethnic enclavesas they sought homes near jobs that
had likewise moved to the periphery. American suburbs have thus become
twenty-first-century gateways, as Audrey Singer dubbed them. Whatever
uniformity existed among them, noted one key study, was shattered in the
centurys last decades.6

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A hallmark of Asian America historically has been its diversity, and this
has been reproduced across suburban space itself. Among both U.S.-born
and foreign-born Asians, there have been tremendous variations by class,
education level, national origin, gender ratio, and the like, closely tied to
evolving immigration policy in the post-World War II period. The first small
wave of Asian immigrants in the postwar era came from two sources: those
from mainland China fleeing the Communist regime in the late 1940s, who
were part of a highly educated elitepolitical refugees, diplomats, merchants, and professionalsand thousands of Chinese wives and fiances
who came right after World War II, and who forever changed the bachelor
communities of the prewar era. Some of the immigrant families, along with
second-generation Chinese and Japanese Americans, were the Asian suburban pioneers of the postwar years. On the heels of the Shelley v. Kraemer
(1948) Supreme Court decision that outlawed race-restrictive covenants,
they sought suburban residence with some success, thanks to their economic
wherewithal, their leveling gender ratios that conformed to suburban family
norms, and the Cold War geopolitical climate, which found the United States
competing for the loyalty of Asian nations. Together, these factors created
a mood of greater acceptance of Asian neighbors in white suburbia. These
first-generation postwar Asian suburbanites, then, were pioneer settlers in
comfortable middle-class white suburbs such as Palo Alto and Menlo Park
in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Crenshaw district and Monterey
Park in Los Angeles.7
The late 1960s marked a critical turning point, when the pace and variety of Asian suburbanization began to accelerate. The confluence of two
federal policiesthe 1965 Hart-Celler Act and the Fair Housing Act of
1968created a ripe context for this change. At the same time fair housing
laws opened up many more suburban communities to non-whites,8 the HartCeller Act changed the face of immigration itself, stimulating inflows from
Asia and Latin America and opening the way for socio-economic diversity
in the process. By replacing the old national origins quota system with one
based on family reunification and skilled labor needs, the Hart-Celler Act
had the effect of diversifying Asian immigration in terms of national origin
and socio-economic profile, a process that continued with subsequent immigration laws, such as those that allowed in refugees.9 Immigrants came
especially from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia,
Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and India, and there were high levels of
socio-economic stratification across these groups, a reflection of global economic restructuring and shifting geopolitics. At one end were well-educated,

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highly skilled workers, professionals, and transnational capitalists; at the

other end were lower-skilled service and manufacturing workers; and in
between were immigrant entrepreneurs.10
These ethnic and class differences powerfully shaped settlement patterns, and worked to help inscribe these inequalities within suburban space
itself. As noted earlier, the suburban periphery has always been a variegated
landscape. However, since 1970, the extent of that variety has accelerated
to unprecedented levels, particularly in terms of class difference. We have
seen the rise of suburban poverty, fiscally strained exurbs pre-dating even
the recent foreclosure crisis, and generational succession into older rich,
middle-class, and poor suburbs.11 Ethnic Asians settled across the gamut
of these suburban types.12 Wealthy Asians settled in high-end suburban
enclaves, like San Marino, Palos Verdes, and Palo Alto in California, where
they enjoyed the advantages of suburban fiscal and spatial isolation. Middleclass Asians found homes near high-tech jobs in Fremont, California; north
Austin, Texas; and Phoenixs East Valley, and in sprawling mass-produced
tracts in Diamond Bar and Walnut in the east San Gabriel Valley, California. Vietnamese alighted in the suburbs of northern Virginia, and San
Jose, Westminster, and Garden Grove in California, while a diverse mix of
middle-class Asian groupsChinese, Koreans, Indians, and Pakistanis
came together in Flushing, New York.13 In lower middle- and working-class
suburbs like El Monte and Rosemead in Los Angeles County, ethnic Asians
have struggled to make ends meet alongside their multi-ethnic neighbors,
especially Latinos. S. Mitra Kalitas remarkable portrait of Asian Indians
in the suburbs of central New Jersey captures this class diversity in vivid
human terms, from the H-1B tech workers living in suburban comfort,
to the working-class families crammed into shabby apartment complexes
formerly occupied by Vietnamese and Korean immigrants.14 Regional patterns are also worth noting: the vast majority of ethnic Asians settled in the
West and South, nearly seventy percent by 2000, with the largest number
in California. At the metropolitan scale, Asians have concentrated in traditional gateways like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago,
and Honolulu, although in recent decades, their numbers have increased in
a wider range of cities and regionsincluding Washington, DC; Atlanta;
Tampa; Raleigh/Durham; Denver; Phoenix; and Austin.15
Over the past thirty years, demographers and geographers have been
tracking patterns of immigrant settlement in suburbiaa highly volatile
moving targetand coming up with ways of naming and characterizing
them. In simplest terms, they identified two major patternsdispersal and

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clustering. Zelinsky and Lee, for example, argue that in the late twentieth
century, residential dispersal was the norm for immigrants, who could still
maintain ethnic community ties via new technologies (like the computer).
Among Asians, this pattern has been most prevalent for Indians, Filipinos,
Japanese, and Vietnamese, although they note variations by time and place.16
Wei Li, by contrast, describes the phenomenon of the ethnoburb, suburban towns with heavy immigrant clustering, often multi-ethnic, with ethnic
businesses and institutions reinforcing a strong sense of ethnic identity in
the place itself. Ethnoburbs formed in the context of recent globalization,
and thrived on the transnational flows of people, capital, and commodities,
which allowed new types of ethnic economies to emerge. The vibrancy of
ethnicity in ethnoburbia is bolstered by two additional, interrelated patterns:
the persistence of ethnic clustering (as opposed to gradual spatial dispersal)
and the continued influx of new immigrants into these suburban enclaves.
Ethnoburbs formed in metropolitan areas with high proportions of immigrants, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco/Silicon Valley, New York City,
Houston, northern Virginia, Toronto, and Vancouver.17 While the ethnoburb
concept could theoretically apply to multiple ethnic groups, in practice,
scholars have mostly applied it to Asian suburbanites, best exemplified in
Lis own study of Asians in L.A.s San Gabriel Valley. If heterolocalism and
ethnoburbia stand at opposite ends, there are shadings of difference within
this spectrum. For example, one group of researchers identified what they
call the cosmoburbfast-growing, large suburban municipalities with
populations exceeding 100,000 in 2000, with notable percentages of immigrants (eleven to thirty-seven percent) who were well educated, homeowners,
and in high-tech and white-collar professions.18 Finally, the emergence of
majority-Asian suburban municipalities is another notable trend, especially
pronounced in Californias San Gabriel Valley and Silicon Valley.19 These
divergent models of Asian suburban settlement had profound implications
for community dynamics, ethnic identity, and everyday life itselfand
suggest a multiplicity of suburban histories and experiences that defy broad
generalizations.20
If we approach these patterns from the perspective of the built landscape
itself, we find a spectrum of ethnic expression in the landscapewith dispersed settlement on one end, where visible ethnicity was muted, to the
ethnoburb on the other, where ethnic expression was often quite free and
full-blown. Dispersed Asian settlers were virtually absorbed into suburban
landscapes, vastly outnumbered by residents of other ethnic backgrounds.
Their ethnicity was rendered invisible in spatial terms, as suggested by the

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evocative descriptor invisiburb coined by Emily Skop.21 By contrast, in

ethnoburbia, ethnicity was more visible and expressive. It was there to see
in Chinese-language signage, Asian malls, and in architectural flourishes
on private suburban homes. This ethnic assertiveness was never a given, but
was invariably the product of hard-fought battles with white suburbanites resistant to changea story well documented in foundational works on Asian
suburbs, especially Monterey Park, which stands as a well-studied archetype
in this literature.22 Dubbed everything from the first suburban Chinatown
to the Chinese Beverly Hills, Monterey Park in L.A.s west San Gabriel
Valley was an early site of intense ethnic conflict between Chinese settlers
and old guard whites over the right to inhabit, participate in, and shape the
suburb. Chinese residents ultimately triumphed, winning political power
and asserting the rights of ethnic expression in the landscapesuch as allowing Chinese characters in signageyet suffered the continual backlash
of English-only movements that led to the passage of Californias Proposition 227. Between heterolocal and ethnoburban landscapes, a third model
emerged in metropolitan areas with high Asian populations, such as Los
Angeles. In several majority-Asian suburbs, a process of design assimilation occurred, where ethnic Asian residents muffled expressions of Asian
design elements and conceded to the dominance of European American
landscapes within their communitiessometimes willingly, sometimes
through coercion. By this measure alonethe visibility of Asian identity
in the suburban built environmentthe multiplicity of experiences among
ethnic Asian suburbanites suggests a great degree of variation.23
The relationship of these patterns to assimilation has been a particularly
rich thread of the scholarship on Asian suburbanization, spearheaded by
sociologists and geographers. Several scholars, notably Wei Li, Zhou Min,
and Emily Skop, have challenged traditional interpretations of American
suburbanization that posit that moving to the suburbs means ethnic assimilation. When ethnic (especially European) groups settled in the suburbs, the
old argument goes, they shed the ethnic identity that had been so strongly
reinforced in urban ethnic enclaves and assimilated to blander middle-class
American lifeways. In the process, these ethnics gained the advantages of
whiteness, so powerfully embodied in the racialized production of suburban
space itself.24 Li, Zhou, and others have contested this linear model, arguing
that Asian (especially Chinese) suburban settlement defies this simplistic
process, especially in the ethnoburbs, where ethnic culture, lifeways, and
spatial expressions in the landscape were robust and continually refreshed as
new waves of immigrants arrived. Ethnicity was vividly experiencedand

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sometimes re-adaptedwithin the American suburb, exploding a plethora of

suburban stereotypes of conformity, whiteness, blandness, and quintessential
white middle-class American values. Moreover, the class diversity of these
suburbs complicates the older spatial assimilation model, which posits that
movement into suburbia (conceived as a fairly uniform concept) meant
automatic upward mobility and assimilation. The fact that suburban living
has come to mean a variety of class experiences challenges the idea that a
suburban address automatically confers white middle-class advantage.25
The nuances in the relationship between assimilation and suburbanization
among Asians ties as well to their racialization. Scholars have yet to achieve
consensus around this issue, likely stemming from the different temporal
and spatial contexts of their studies. Racialization was a dynamic process,
contingent upon demographic, social, and (geo)political conditions. In the
1950s and 1960s, for example, racializations of Asians as a model minority helped them gain entre into white suburbia, which at that point was
a highly charged racialized (white) space. Cindy I-Fen Cheng captured the
paradoxical character of suburbia and its impact on Chinese racialization in
this period. Cold War democracy, she argues, moved away from promoting a suburbanization that completely eradicated racial difference through
assimilation to whiteness and relied instead on the Chinese as a marker of
racial difference in a manner that signified suburbias racial inclusivity when
Chinese were ultimately let in. Chinese suburbanites ultimately occupied a
liminal position simultaneously integrated and marginalized, in line with Lisa
Lowes characterization of Asians in America.26 Yet as more ethnic Asians
settled in more suburban communities, divergent processes of racialization
emerged. Some scholars challenge the idea that when ethnic Asians settled
in suburbia, they experienced a process of whitening as a function of spatial assimilation. In their study of Asian Indian and Chinese suburbanites in
Austin and Phoenixwho settled in dispersed patternsSkop and Li argue
that suburbanization is not an indication of assimilation, but rather a site
of ethnic adaptation and retention. In suburbia, both groups successfully reinforced their racial and ethnic identities, cultural cohesion, and solidarity.27
Even more powerfully, Wendy Cheng found that in majority-minority suburbs
like Alhambra and San Gabriel in Los Angeles, Asian suburbanitesalong
with their Latino neighborsre-defined the racialized meanings and values
of suburbia itself, and their own racialized identity as suburbanites in the
process. Together, they created a moral geography of differentiated space
that manifested as diverse meanings and uses of suburban space ... [which]
produced a worldview that challenged and opposed whiteness as property.

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In the suburbs, they asserted a multi-ethnic, multi-racial non-white identity

that embraced inclusionary, multi-racial values.28 In other suburban contexts,
particularly where ethnic Asians were neighbors with whites, some scholars found they occupied a liminal racial position. In the east San Gabriel
Valleys sprawling tracts of Diamond Bar and Walnut, for example, James
Zarsadiaz describes how the logic of color blindness and multi-culturalism
placed Asians in a marginal racial position somewhere between inclusion
and exclusion. Asian suburbanites in these towns, in turn, behaved, on one
hand, as residents seeking full rights and inclusion, but, on the other hand,
as class-conscious property owners seeking to exclude undesirable people
and land uses.29
One of the most fascinating threads in this scholarship traces the transnational flows of designs, policies, practices, and ideals about suburban
living between Asia and the West. If the earliest formulations of elite suburban living originated in the United Kingdom, those ideas followed the
pathways of the British Empire to places like Madras and Calcutta, India,
in the 1700s, where British merchants built suburban garden homes in the
open spaces surrounding colonial outposts. In these suburban spaces, as
John Archer shows, they pursued the bourgeois ideals of individual aesthetic expression, privacy, and social insulation.30 Those same suburban
ideals hit the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, then one hundred years later began a robust exchange across the Pacific once again,
this time in tandem with the Pacific tilt of postwar globalization. In recent
years, scholars have explored these exchanges from several angles. Cold
War geopoliticsespecially U.S. efforts to demonstrate the superiority of
American democracy through material forms, such as the suburban home,
which signified superior living standardsdrove several early suburban
initiatives. Nancy Kwak, for example, explores how American advisers
and experts disseminated an ideal of democratic homeownership globally
as a tool of Cold War diplomacy, targeting South and Southeast Asia in the
1950s and 1960s. Housing policy initiatives and direct aid in China, Taiwan,
Burma, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines may have yielded
uneven results, but still went a long way toward spreading a core element
of the suburban idealhomeownership for all.31 At a smaller scale, Lauren
Hirschberg explores the formation of American suburban-style settlements
on U.S. military bases in the Marshall Islands in the 1950s, demonstrating the global reach of the American suburban form.32 Since the 1980s,
globalization began propelling Asian cities toward new spatial forms that
resembled the sprawling multi-nodal metropolis described in Joel Garreaus

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Edge City. In postcolonial Asia, these regional conurbations contained central cities, suburbs, exurbs, and agricultural areas scattered among them. In
the insecure context of post-independence Southeast Asia, gated suburban
compounds and shopping malls caught on by the 1980s.33 Two recent studies
explore the social dynamics of these transnational spaces, among the highly
skilled, highly educated tech workers living suburban lives concurrently in
Silicon Valley and Taiwanwhat Shenglin Chang calls the trans-Pacific
commuters. Their lives simultaneously exist in two homes at once. For
these trans-Pacific high-tech suburban families, transnationalism defines
everyday experiencethey have constructed a system of landscapes and
social networks that intertwine[s] both home places.34
The three articles in this special issue exemplify the vibrancy and diversity
of the growing subfield of Asian American suburbanizationspanning geographical regions, settlement patterns, and ethnic groups. We get glimpses
of Asian suburbanites settled in clustered and dispersed patterns in Silicon
Valley and Washington, DC, and Thai suburbanites in L.A.s iconic San
Fernando Valley. While these works probe different aspects of community
life and suburban social dynamics, they share an interest in the symbiotic
process between ethnic Asians and suburban space itself. Willow LungAmams article explores a key hub of the Asian suburban communitythe
Asian mall. In this rich history of the evolution of Asian malls in Silicon
Valley, an epicenter of Asian ethnoburbia, Lung-Amam vividly illustrates
the continued social relevance of suburban forms that many have written
off as dead. With new ethnic inflections by their Asian developers and
patrons, Asian malls came to represent critical centers of community life,
reincarnating the earlier function and spirit of postwar suburban malls in Anglo communities.35 Lung-Amams work suggests that Silicon Valleylong
overshadowed by the presence of high techwas in fact a site of dynamic
ethnic history, with profound variations among Asian settlers across time
and space. The malls powerfully reflected these differences. In Silicon Valley, Asian developers and suburbanites re-defined these familiar suburban
spaces in ways that fulfilled multiple community and individual needs.
The internal tensions and dynamics within the spatially dispersed Chinese
community of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area are the focus of Jennifer Fangs article, which explores the history of suburban Chinese schools.
In this context of heterolocal settlement, where Chinese suburbanites lacked
the demographic power to materialize ethnicity in the landscape, Chinese
schools took on heightened importance as sites of ethnic community. Within
these schools, the politics of ethnic identity played out among successive

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waves of Chinese settlers, who channeled homeland identities and values

through decisions about school curricula. Fang documents a fascinating
schism between first and subsequent generations of Asian suburban settlers.
In these conflicts, the global became local, as shifting geopolitics shaped
intensely localized struggles over how to best teach ethnic Chinese children.
These tensions played out within suburbia, challenging a simplistic spatial
assimilation model. Fangs story suggests a much more nuanced, complex
portrait of what suburban settlement does to ethnic identity.
Moving away from internal Asian community dynamics in suburbia, Mark
Padoongpatts article on Thai American suburban culture in the San Fernando
Valley explores a central theme in Asian suburban historiographyconflicts
between white and Asian suburbanites over community and spatial practices. He traces the controversies that erupted around the Wat Thai Buddhist
temple in the east San Fernando Valleyonce an iconic site of lily-white
suburbiabetween the Thai community and white residents. Padoongpatt
casts this as a conflict between two competing suburban visionsthe Thai
ideal of a communal, public suburban life, and the European-American ideal
that vaunted privatism and the protection of property. Thais, in effect, were
seeking to re-define suburban spatial practices in ways that would allow them
to claim a place as full-fledged participants in suburban life.
These articles show how suburban change is a kind of layered process.
Normative ideas about suburban living and spacesthat potent white
middle-class suburban idealcontinue to exert power and often represent
that first foundational layer of place. New suburbanites bounce off of it.
They sometimes measure their communitys success by it. Or they may
challenge it brusquely, or perhaps gradually. In other cases, that foundational layer may have a different provenanceone of working-class suburbia, for example. This represents, as Ruth McManus and Phil Ethington
put it, the embeddedness of history.36 These articles extend the story
to the next stage, when ethnic Asians brought their own set of outlooks,
identities, community norms, and everyday lifeways into the American
suburban milieu, changing themselves and suburbia itself in the process.
NOTES

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1.
The author would like to thank Charlotte Brooks and Willow Lung-Amam for
their helpful comments, and John Bukowczyk for an excellent collaboration.
S. Mitra Kalita, Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and Their Passage from
India to America (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005); Rosanna Xia, Cool Fusion in The 626;

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Nicolaides 15
Asian American Youth Culture Comes of Age in the San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles Times,
August 27, 2012: A1. The 626the area code of the San Gabriel Valleyis shorthand
for the ethnically diverse suburbs of that region. The new suburban youth culture of the area
is captured brilliantly in the Fung Brothers music video 626, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=3n3HQ9uge0g.
2.Overviews of the new suburban history include Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J.
Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago, 2006); Matthew D. Lassiter and Christopher Niedt, Suburban Diversity in Postwar America, Journal of Urban History 39, no.
1 (January 2013): 314; Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, eds., The Suburb Reader
(New York, 2006), esp. chaps. 7 and 14.
3.Key works in this large literature include Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The
Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985); Robert Self, American Babylon:
Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ, 2003); Matthew Lassiter, The
Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ, 2006); Kevin Kruse,
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ, 2007); David
M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
(Chicago, 2007); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
(Princeton, NJ, 2001); Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the
Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 19201965 (Chicago, 2002).
4.Most suburban quote is from Susan Hardwick, Toward a Suburban Immigrant Nation, in Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America, ed.
Audrey Singer, Susan W. Hardwick, and Caroline B. Brettell (Washington, DC, 2008), 45.
5.William H. Frey, Melting Pot Cities and Suburbs: Racial and Ethnic Change in
Metro America in the 2000s, Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, State of Metropolitan America, May 4, 2011: 7, 9, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/
papers/2011/5/04%20census%20ethnicity%20frey/0504_census_ethnicity_frey.pdf.
6.Audrey Singer, Twenty-First-Century Gateways: An Introduction, in Twenty-First
Century Gateways, ed. Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell, 330; Michael B. Katz, Matthew
J. Creighton, Daniel Amsterdam, and Merlin Chowkwanyun, Immigration and the New
Metropolitan Geography, Journal of Urban Affairs 32, no. 5 (2010): 525.
7.Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs: Chinese Americans and
the Politics of Cultural Citizenship in Early Cold War America, American Quarterly 58, no.
4 (December 2006): 106790; Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian
Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago, 2009), chaps.
7 and 8; Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community,
19401965 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002). Scholars like Charlotte Brooks and others note
that Asians and Latinos met with greater acceptance in white suburbia than did African
Americans, who faced the most resistance.
8.Although it had its own limitations, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 worked to close many
of the loopholes left in the wake of the Shelley decision.
9.The complex effects of these laws on Asian immigrations are outlined in Sucheng
Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New York, 1991), chap. 8.
10.Lucie Cheng and Philip Q. Yang, Asians: The Model Minority Deconstructed, in
Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (New York, 1996), 30544.
11.Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Washington, DC,
2002); Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, Suburban Disequilibrium, New York Times,

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April 6, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/suburban-disequilibrium/

?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0.
12.I use the term ethnic Asian to refer to both foreign-born and American-born Asians.
13.Wei Li, ed., From Urban Enclave to Ethnic Suburb: New Asian Communities in Pacific
Rim Countries (Honolulu, 2006). On the Vietnamese of northern Virginia, see Andrew Friedman, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs
of Northern Virginia (Berkeley, CA, 2013).
14.Kalita, Suburban Sahibs.
15.On regional patterns, see Emily Skop and Wei Li, Asians in Americas Suburbs:
Patterns and Consequences of Settlement, Geographical Review 95, no. 2 (April 2005):
169.
16.Wilbur Zelinsky and Barrett A. Lee, Heterolocalism: An Alternative Model of the
Sociospatial Behaviour of Immigrant Ethnic Communities, International Journal of Population Geography 4 (1998): 28198.
17.Wei Li, Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America (Honolulu, 2009);
Merlin Chowkwanyun and Jordan Segall, The Rise of the Majority-Asian Suburb, The
Atlantic City Lab, August 24, 2012, http://www.citylab.com/politics/2012/08/rise-majority
-asian-suburb/3044/#disqus_thread.
18.Robert E. Lang and Jennifer B. LeFurgy, Boomburbs: The Rise of Americas Accidental
Cities (Washington, DC, 2007), 6669.
19.Chowkwanyun and Segall, Rise of the Majority-Asian Suburb.
20.For a discussion of these implications in the contemporary context, see Skop and Li,
Asians in Americas Suburbs, 16788.
21.Emily Skop and Wei Li, From the Ghetto to the Invisiburb: Shifting Patterns of Immigrant Settlement in Contemporary America, in Multicultural Geographies: Persistence
and Change in U.S. Racial/Ethnic Patterns, ed. John W. Frazier and Florence Margai (Binghamton, NY, 2003), 11324; Emily Skop, Saffron Suburbs: Indian Immigrant Community
Formation in Metropolitan Phoenix (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2002).
22.Timothy Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park,
California (Philadelphia, PA, 1994); Leland T. Saito, Race and Politics: Asian Americans,
Latinos, and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb (Urbana, IL, 1998); John Horton, The Politics of
Diversity: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia,
PA, 1995).
23.Becky Nicolaides and James Zarsadiaz, The Design Assimilation of Asian Suburbanites in L.A.s San Gabriel Valley (forthcoming); Willow Lung-Amam, That Monster
House Is My Home: The Social and Cultural Politics of Design Reviews and Regulations,
Journal of Urban Design 18, no. 2 (2013): 22041.
24.See, especially, George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White
People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, PA, 1998); Karen Brodkin, How the Jews
Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998);
David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How Americas Immigrants Became White: The
Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, 2005).
25.Li, Ethnoburb; Min Zhou, Yen-Fen Tseng, and Rebecca Y. Kim, Rethinking Residential Assimilation: The Case of a Chinese Ethnoburb in the San Gabriel Valley, California,
Amerasia Journal 34, no. 3 (2008): 5583; Skop and Li, Asians in Americas Suburbs,
17374. In a similar way, some scholars have likewise questioned the linearity of suburban

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assimilation for white ethnic groups. For example, see Lila Corwin Berman, Metropolitan
Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (Chicago, forthcoming).
26.Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Out of Chinatown, 1068, 1088; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts
(Durham, NC, 1996). Also see Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy
and Race during the Cold War (New York, 2013).
27.Skop and Li, Asians in Americas Suburbs, 184.
28.Wendy Cheng, The Changs Next Door to the Dazes: Remapping Race in Suburban
California (Minneapolis, MN, 2013), 6061.
29.James Zarsadiaz, Where the Wild Things Are: Country Living, Asian American Suburbanization and the Politics of Space in Los Angeless East San Gabriel Valley, 19452005
(PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2014).
30.John Archer, Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 17001850, and the Spaces of Modernity, in Visions of Suburbia, ed. Roger Silverstone (New York, 1997), 2654. Also see
Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago, 2012), which
explores the transnational flow of ideas around racial segregation.
31.Nancy Kwak, Homeownership for All: American Power and the Politics of Housing
Aid Post-1945 (Chicago, forthcoming).
32.Lauren Hirschberg, Nuclear Families: (Re)producting 1950s Suburban America in
the Marshall Islands, OAH Magazine of History 26, no. 4 (2012): 3943.
33.Peter J. Rimmer and Howard Dick, The City in Southeast Asia: Patterns, Processes
and Policy (Honolulu, 2009), 2842. A study that explores the effects of privatization of
homeownership on urban space, class, and community governing in China is Li Zhang, In
Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Ithaca, NY, 2010).
34.Quoted in Shenglin Chang, The Global Silicon Valley Home: Lives and Landscapes
within Taiwanese American Trans-Pacific Culture (Stanford, CA, 2006), 9, 15; also see
Shenglin Elijah Chang and Willow Lung-Amam, Born Glocal: Youth Identity and Suburban
Spaces in the U.S. and Taiwan, Amerasia Journal 36, no. 3 (2010): 2951; Hillary Jenks,
Seasoned Long Enough in Concentration: Suburbanization and Transnational Citizenship
in Southern Californias South Bay, Journal of Urban History 40, no. 1 (2014): 630.
35.This is described in the seminal work by Liz Cohen, A Consumers Republic: The
Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003). On dead malls, a good
starting place is deadmalls.com.
36.Ruth McManus and Philip J. Ethington, Suburbs in Transition: New Approaches to
Suburban History, Urban History 34, no. 2 (2007): 31737.

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