IDS assignment

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IDS 494: Interdisciplinary Inquiry Summer 2020 Dr. Padoongpatt

Asian Americans and a “Right to the Suburb”

Large numbers of Asian Americans moved into suburbs across the United States after

World War II, bringing distinctive everyday lifeways, identities, and worldviews that

remade American suburbia. By 2010, Asian Americans were the “most suburban” of all

ethnic and racial groups, as 62% of Asians called the suburbs home, followed by Latinos

(59%) and African Americans (51%).1 In the process, they made claims on suburban space

and tried to assert themselves as full-fledged participants in suburban culture and life

historically defined by racial exclusivity and white middle-class norms. However, their

presence, ethnic expressions, and ways of life often sparked tensions with other

suburbanites that led to heated battles over what suburban neighborhoods should look

and feel like. How and where did Asian Americans try to establish a place for themselves

in America’s suburbs? And what kinds of conflicts emerged from these attempts?

Urban studies scholar Willow Lung-Amam offers one of the more recent studies of

these complex "battles for suburbia" in her book Trespassers? (2017). Lung-Amam

analyzes the way Asian American suburbanites in Silicon Valley, California established a

sense of belonging and created places centered on their needs, desires, and values. She

focuses especially on how Asian shopping malls and plazas provided ethnic-specific and

mainstream goods and served as a community hub for Asian Americans. She argues

however, that they also generated a great deal of controversy. In different

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neighborhoods, local officials and residents deemed the plazas as nonnormative,

undesirable, and foreign, rendering them out of place in the retail landscape of middle-

class suburbia.2 As such, many longtime residents sought to maintain white suburban

norms in the face of demographic changes via race-neutral mechanisms of exclusion.

Religious centers also allowed Asian Americans to practice, redefine, and put on full

display their respective religious traditions in a suburban setting. In Creating a Buddhist

Community (2015), anthropologist Jiemin Bao documents the way a Thai Buddhist

temple in Fremont, California served as a place of worship for Thais and White Americans

as well as a vibrant community center that hosted festivals and events. Her ethnographic

fieldwork at Wat Thai Buddhanusorn revealed that while many supported the temple, it

also frustrated local residents and led to fierce, lengthy battles. Bao asserts that it

stemmed from racism and xenophobia. Local residents harassed monks and the laity and

tried to petition the city to stop temple construction, citing traffic, illegal parking, and

violation of single-family use. But Bao found that Thais were not welcomed because they

were “misrecognized as poor immigrants or ‘boat people,’ although they were

predominantly urban, affluent, well-educated professionals.”3 Moreover, Bao found that

temple officials were also convinced that racial prejudices were “being hidden behind

some legitimate claims” as the same residents also expressed fears that “Thai cooking

smells would be offensive,” “a Buddhist ‘cult’ would be their midst,” and that Thais would

“ruin the neighborhood.” 4

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Asian American suburbanites also tried to assert a right to the suburb through the

architectural design of their homes. Historians Becky Nicolaides and James Zarsadiaz

argue that a majority of Asian American homeowners participate in “design assimilation”:

conceding to hegemonic white American landscape aesthetics and muting Asian design

elements, both willingly and through coercion.5 Design assimilation was especially at play

in middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods where, despite rapid demographic changes,

Anglo architectural customs persisted. For example, they show that after 1980, Chinese

residents in San Marino, California, in spite of their growing numbers, embraced

established Euro-American tastes and design principles—Tudor, Spanish Colonial Revival,

Mediterranean/Italian Renaissance—because they upheld property values as well as

provided an elevated class position and status over other Chinese immigrants in nearby

ethnic enclaves. However, Nicolaides and Zarsadiaz argue that these decisions are not

always made by choice. Local officials and residents passed measures regulating design,

landscaping, and structure to crack down on potential Asian “foreign” aesthetic

encroachment into “their” neighborhoods. White San Marino residents, with support

from Chinese community leaders, spearheaded a “discreet, preemptive campaign” to

shut down any possibility of having Asian immigrants transform the neighborhood’s

physical appearance. 6

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While they focus on different kinds of sites (shopping plazas, temples, single-family

home), Lung-Amam, Bao, and Nicolaides and Zarsadiaz agree that Asian Americans had

to fight to create their own spaces and places in the suburbs. In other words, they were

born out of disputes. Yet, the scholars seem to disagree when it comes to the nature of

the disputes. Lung-Amam and Nicolaides and Zarsadiaz suggest that suburban residents

and policymakers used race-neutral and color-blind language to prevent Asian ethnic

expression. Bao, on the other hand, asserts that anti-Asian racism and xenophobia drove

opposition to the presence of Asian Americans.

My research on Thai food festivals at the Wat Thai temple in suburban Los Angeles

aligns more with the insights of Lung-Amam and Nicolaides and Zarsadiaz. I build on

these studies by turning attention to a relatively understudied site of suburban

placemaking for Asian Americans: ethnic food festivals. More importantly, I will use ethnic

food festivals to show how these kinds of tensions and battles over suburban spaces

were fueled by more than just anti-Asian racism. In the case of Wat Thai, I want to argue

that nearby residents opposed the temple's food festivals not because of personal

bigotry toward Thais but because they wanted to reclaim a 1950s suburban ideal rooted

in white middle-class values and the sanctity of private property—or a "white spatial

imaginary.”

1 Nicolaides, Becky M. “Introduction: Asian American Suburban History.” Journal of American Ethnic History 34, no. 2 (2015); 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

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America, May 4, 2011: 7, 9, https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/0504_census_ethnicity_frey.pdf 2 Willow S. Lung-Amam, Trespassers?: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia (Oakland: University of California, 2017), 115–122. 3 Jiemin Bao, Creating a Buddhist Community: A Thai Temple in Silicon Valley (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 61 4 Bao, “From Wandering to Wat: Creating a Thai Temple and Inventing New Space in the United States,” Amerasia Journal 34, no. 3 (2006): 6 5 Becky Nicolaides and James Zarsadiaz, “Design Assimilation in Suburbia: Asian Americans, Built Landscapes, and Suburban Advantage in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley since 1970,” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 2 (2017): 332-71 6 Nicolaides and Zarsadiaz, “Design Assimilation in Suburbia,” 344-345