"...[A]rtists have long been recognized as pioneers and catalysts of gentrification," Arlene Dávila asserts (86). Indeed, the history of postwar art in New York attests to this fact: the Lower East Side was once an artistic haven; when artists were priced out there they moved to SoHo; when artists were priced out there they moved to Chelsea and the Meatpacking District; now that artists are being priced out there they're moving to Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Gowanus. Having studied the influential East Village art scene in the late-mid/mid-late 20th century, I realize that I too am implicated in this trend, not just of artists but also of students and young professionals; haven't I too used gentrification to convince my mother to let me move into Brooklyn instead of staying in the dorms, used promises/half-truths/white lies of "everyone's moving out there, it's all students and yuppies, so it's safe"? Haven't I too dreamt of living la vie bohème, the life of an artist in a rundown Brooklyn studio, unaware that la vie bohème would only lead to la vie bourgeoise?
Yet artists have the ability to combat gentrification, to document and preserve the present, the past; Martin Wong, for example, is famous for his paintings of the Lower East Side and Chinatown, and also for collecting large amounts of graffiti art; his one-time boyfriend and collaborator Miguel Piñero co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Café in Loisaida. However, Dávila writes, "Initially established as an alternative movement, [the Nuyorican Poets Café] continues to embrace Nuyorican and Latino/a culture, however some argue that only as a 'content'—that is, as a bohemian version of multiculturalism where 'Latinidad' is oftentimes more a metaphor of inclusion..." (88-9)
The disparity between artists as bearers of culture and "art culture" as one that implicitly encourages inauthentic imitation—dressing the part, acting the part; how many of the artists that thrived in the 1970s East Village actually came from (upper) middle class suburbia, gave up their privileged lives to seek out la vie bohème?—becomes an apt analogy for the marketing of race in El Barrio, the battle between cultural preservation and "Latinidad" as a "content," the sanitized version of Latino and Puerto Rican history, or even the erasure thereof. As artists flourish, and/or as low rents allow younger crowds to move in, and a neighborhood becomes trendy, the development of businesses by outsiders trying to capitalize on the area's success is sure to follow.
Dávila discusses the importance of the tourism industry in the relationship between gentrification and ethnic cultural heritage; specifically, she compares the public awareness and recognition of places in Harlem, like the Apollo Theater, Sylvia's Restaurant, and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, with the lack of "cultural recognition of El Barrio, and of its Latino heritage" (102-3), which she attributes to the popularity of these landmarks among tourists, as opposed to the relative lack of interest in El Barrio's history. Dávila recognizes, however, that tours of Harlem are "always complemented with a visit to the Old Navy, Starbucks, and Disney Stores" (114-5)—even the Studio Museum is located within steps of a giant H&M and two Starbucks within a block of each other—the implication being that, though (or perhaps because) the existence of famous historical sites of in Harlem act as a sort of validation of Harlem as a cultural center, the effect of gentrification in the area both attracts greater interest and marketable traffic and sanitizes its history and the conflicts still present, simplifying the complexities of racialized spaces into a standardized set of buildings that represent certain abstract ideas of race that are palatable to white tourists and outsiders.
If gentrification and tourism in Harlem glosses over its complex history, it still at the very least allows for recognition of the significance of Harlem in the city and in the nation. In El Barrio, where much fewer famous establishments exist, the fight against gentrification then becomes the fight for self-representation, for the ability to create heritage sites, and the ability of El Barrio itself to become known as a cultural center. Tellingly, Dávila quotes a tourist brochure for Harlem whose sole mention of East Harlem says, "See 'Little Italy' in East Harlem" (114), completely erasing El Barrio from its map and, thus, denying not only its marketability, but its importance as a neighborhood and, to some extent, its very existence.
I'm interested in comparing the issues of gentrification in Harlem and El Barrio with the development of Chinatown, where, other than a Starbucks, a McDonald's, and a Duane Reade or two, there seems to be a complete lack of gentrification: the majority of businesses in the areas are Chinese-owned and cater to Chinese residents (although some restaurants obviously get a considerable amount of non-Chinese business; Joe's Shanghai is the first to come to mind). Despite that, Chinatown (or, at least, Canal Street) attracts throngs of tourists all the same; what about Chinatown has allowed it to still attract outside consumers while seemingly resisting gentrification? Is it the exotification of Chinese culture and fetishization of Chinese cuisine (indeed, I would argue that the majority of non-Chinese traffic to Chinatown centers around food), and the proximity to SoHo? If anything, most non-Chinese tourists seem to stay near the periphery of Chinatown, along Canal or maybe Bayard, but rarely past Pell; is it merely a rest stop for cheap, tasty food after a day of shopping? Also, how has New York's Chinatown developed this way, when, for example, D.C.'s Chinatown has faced so much gentrification that it can barely be recognized as such were it not for the Chinese-language signs (most of them translations of the English-named business) and the arch?
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
"in turn" meant
"Never marry a Japanese or a black," my mother told me once.
I think I've always been aware of the divide between my own Chinese heritage and all non-Chinese; "it's all in the way you're brought up," as the blonde girl in Hisaye Yamamoto's memoir would say (151). The way you're brought up, with an unconscious understanding of race (though I only realized it consciously much later in life), with a distrust of Japanese and blacks—or, no, but knowing you're supposed to distrust them, because of what the Japanese "did to us during the war" (also only later would I understand the complexities of that statement, the duality of the Japanese-Chinese war and the Japanese-American war, the conflation of Chinese patriotism with American patriotism in the form of hating the Japanese) or because blacks are just "untrustworthy."
How easy—too easy—to concede that "I was brought up this way, so that's the way I feel" (151), to inherit racism. Nature or nurture?
As easy as writing a "calm, impartial story, using 'alleged' and 'claimed' and other cautious journalese" when reporting the case of a black man being threatened by his white neighbors (154)? As Grace Kyungwon Hong writes, in response to Yamamoto's "Fire in Fontana," "Journalistic objectivity thus supports the processes through which the state maintains its pretense of offering equality to all citizens while hypocritically denying property rights to all but the most privileged few" (305).
But Yamamoto recognizes her failure, her resort to "easy": "I should have been an evangelist at Seventh and Broadway, shouting out the name of the Short family and their predicament in Fontana. But I had been as handicapped as the boy in the wheelchair, as helpless" (155).
easy to give in to hatred; easy to accept racism like an infant accepts breastmilk, from the heart of its mother; easy like my initials, like i am supposed to accept easy, accept the easy answer, the easy explanation, the easy way out, accept my mother's hatred like i accept her love; when easy is who i am what else am i supposed to do
but fight against easy
I think I've always been aware of the divide between my own Chinese heritage and all non-Chinese; "it's all in the way you're brought up," as the blonde girl in Hisaye Yamamoto's memoir would say (151). The way you're brought up, with an unconscious understanding of race (though I only realized it consciously much later in life), with a distrust of Japanese and blacks—or, no, but knowing you're supposed to distrust them, because of what the Japanese "did to us during the war" (also only later would I understand the complexities of that statement, the duality of the Japanese-Chinese war and the Japanese-American war, the conflation of Chinese patriotism with American patriotism in the form of hating the Japanese) or because blacks are just "untrustworthy."
How easy—too easy—to concede that "I was brought up this way, so that's the way I feel" (151), to inherit racism. Nature or nurture?
As easy as writing a "calm, impartial story, using 'alleged' and 'claimed' and other cautious journalese" when reporting the case of a black man being threatened by his white neighbors (154)? As Grace Kyungwon Hong writes, in response to Yamamoto's "Fire in Fontana," "Journalistic objectivity thus supports the processes through which the state maintains its pretense of offering equality to all citizens while hypocritically denying property rights to all but the most privileged few" (305).
But Yamamoto recognizes her failure, her resort to "easy": "I should have been an evangelist at Seventh and Broadway, shouting out the name of the Short family and their predicament in Fontana. But I had been as handicapped as the boy in the wheelchair, as helpless" (155).
easy to give in to hatred; easy to accept racism like an infant accepts breastmilk, from the heart of its mother; easy like my initials, like i am supposed to accept easy, accept the easy answer, the easy explanation, the easy way out, accept my mother's hatred like i accept her love; when easy is who i am what else am i supposed to do
but fight against easy
Sunday, October 11, 2009
nouvel chinatown
One summer I worked as a camp counselor in a predominantly white, upper middle class neighborhood, teaching children between the ages of 6 and 12 how to fold paper to create animals, or make balloons into piñatas. One day one of the children asked me, "Do you live in Chinatown?" Because she was so young, I obviously couldn't lecture her on the history of racism in America, or even the fact that the closest Chinatown to where I live is a 35-minute Metro ride away, and that Chinese don't even live there and own very few businesses there, that it's mostly an attraction for white tourists, that the only remnants of any "Chineseness" in the neighborhood are the arch, the few signs that translate "Starbucks" or "McDonald's" into Chinese, and the annual New Years parades. Driven out by race riots and gentrification, most Chinese residents have long since relocated to the suburbs, and newer immigrants rarely even consider moving there because of the high rents. Go there now and it looks like any other upscale neighborhood in D.C., like Adam's Morgan or Dupont Circle—if you ignore the arch.
But now I realize I live in a new Chinatown: the Chinese suburb. According to the 2000 Census, my neighborhood has the highest percentage of residents of Chinese descent outside of Hawaii and California (source); of the 23,000 residents, 27.59% are Asian, and 14.49% are Chinese (Census data sources: general, Chinese alone). Just off the top of my head, I can identify at least 15 Chinese or Taiwanese families within walking distance, of which half live on my street.
The Census data is useful in comparing the status of Chinese families in my neighborhood with non-Chinese (mostly White) families: 95.5% of Chinese households and 91.6% of non-Chinese are owner-occupied; the median income for both Chinese and non-Chinese households is roughly 109,000; 75.9% of Chinese residents are foreign born, compared to 29.1% of non-Chinese; 93.6% of Chinese residents speak a language other than English at home, compared to 34.4% of non-Chinese. Expanding on the last statistic, 41.9% of residents who speak an "Asian and Pacific Island language" also speak English "less than 'very well'", comprising both the highest number of non-native English speakers and the highest concentration of poor English speakers within one language group.
Cindy I-Fen Cheng traces the suburbanization of Chinese in America during the early Cold War era, a process which seemingly contradicts understandings of Asians as "foreign" (a concept Nayan Shah and Kay J. Anderson discuss in great depth through the establishment of Chinatowns in San Francisco and Vancouver). I've discussed Claire Jean Kim's idea of racial triangulation several times already, but it is extremely significant to our understanding of Chinese surbanization because Kim's idea of Asian Americans as "foreigner" is at odds with the ways in which Cheng charts the out-migration of Chinese into the suburbs. If we look, specifically, at the Sing Sheng case, we see the ways in which Asian Americans in the mid-20th century have been re-racialized as patriotic Americans, as "insiders", to borrow Kim's term:
However, Cheng reveals the duplicity of this reinvention of Chinese Americans: "While the contrived analogy between blacks and immigrants reinforced the sense that blacks were social problems, it also cast immigrants and in particular, the Chinese, to model the solution of assimilation." (1073) Thus it is clear that the shift from Chinese as alien to assimilative works to further racialize Chinese Americans as "model minority", specifically to strengthen the divide between black and white(/Chinese). Note also that Cheng consistently refers to conceptions of suburban Chinese as becoming both more American and more white, conflating the popular definition of "Americanness" and "whiteness". Tellingly, Chinese can only become more "American" when they become "whiter"; they cannot become "American" if they remain "Chinese".
Lastly, I want to note Cheng's interest in the intersections between race and gender, and specifically the role of Chinese women in creating Chinese suburbia. This could lay the groundwork for a whole essay so I won't discuss it in too much depth, but it's interesting to me because when I moved out of an urban area into the suburbs, my father left the family, and so my connection to suburbia is inherently and inextricably tied to the role of my mother in the family and, contrarily to the ideal of the "nuclear family" that Cheng discusses in detail, the lack of a father. In my lived experience, then, suburbia became possible when my mother was forced to perform both her normative female gender role (as caregiver) and my father's normative male gender role (as worker). Obviously Cheng is writing about a generic view in a specific historical period, but the differences between the "ideal" she discusses and my own personal history, as well as the similarities, struck me as equally important in understanding my own role in these structures of race and space: to borrow what I wrote in week one, how can I reconcile the "nuclear family" ideal with my own female-headed, Chinese, suburban household?
But now I realize I live in a new Chinatown: the Chinese suburb. According to the 2000 Census, my neighborhood has the highest percentage of residents of Chinese descent outside of Hawaii and California (source); of the 23,000 residents, 27.59% are Asian, and 14.49% are Chinese (Census data sources: general, Chinese alone). Just off the top of my head, I can identify at least 15 Chinese or Taiwanese families within walking distance, of which half live on my street.
The Census data is useful in comparing the status of Chinese families in my neighborhood with non-Chinese (mostly White) families: 95.5% of Chinese households and 91.6% of non-Chinese are owner-occupied; the median income for both Chinese and non-Chinese households is roughly 109,000; 75.9% of Chinese residents are foreign born, compared to 29.1% of non-Chinese; 93.6% of Chinese residents speak a language other than English at home, compared to 34.4% of non-Chinese. Expanding on the last statistic, 41.9% of residents who speak an "Asian and Pacific Island language" also speak English "less than 'very well'", comprising both the highest number of non-native English speakers and the highest concentration of poor English speakers within one language group.
Cindy I-Fen Cheng traces the suburbanization of Chinese in America during the early Cold War era, a process which seemingly contradicts understandings of Asians as "foreign" (a concept Nayan Shah and Kay J. Anderson discuss in great depth through the establishment of Chinatowns in San Francisco and Vancouver). I've discussed Claire Jean Kim's idea of racial triangulation several times already, but it is extremely significant to our understanding of Chinese surbanization because Kim's idea of Asian Americans as "foreigner" is at odds with the ways in which Cheng charts the out-migration of Chinese into the suburbs. If we look, specifically, at the Sing Sheng case, we see the ways in which Asian Americans in the mid-20th century have been re-racialized as patriotic Americans, as "insiders", to borrow Kim's term:
A widely circulated image of Sheng that showed him sitting with his wife on their living-room couch staring lovingly at [their son] Richard captured the defining characteristics that cast Sheng as similar to white Americans. His role as father and husband, more than his identity as a middle-class, college-educated veteran, had narrowed the gap separating him from white Americans. ... Depictions of Sheng properly performing his assigned gender role also helped establish his Americanness. (Cheng 1085-6)Thus, while Asians have long been cast as "alien," "perpetually foreign," and "unassimilable," the new phenomenon of Chinese suburbanization in the mid-1900s shifted these stereotypes and reconceptualized Asian Americans (specifically Chinese) as willing and able to integrate into white society.
However, Cheng reveals the duplicity of this reinvention of Chinese Americans: "While the contrived analogy between blacks and immigrants reinforced the sense that blacks were social problems, it also cast immigrants and in particular, the Chinese, to model the solution of assimilation." (1073) Thus it is clear that the shift from Chinese as alien to assimilative works to further racialize Chinese Americans as "model minority", specifically to strengthen the divide between black and white(/Chinese). Note also that Cheng consistently refers to conceptions of suburban Chinese as becoming both more American and more white, conflating the popular definition of "Americanness" and "whiteness". Tellingly, Chinese can only become more "American" when they become "whiter"; they cannot become "American" if they remain "Chinese".
Lastly, I want to note Cheng's interest in the intersections between race and gender, and specifically the role of Chinese women in creating Chinese suburbia. This could lay the groundwork for a whole essay so I won't discuss it in too much depth, but it's interesting to me because when I moved out of an urban area into the suburbs, my father left the family, and so my connection to suburbia is inherently and inextricably tied to the role of my mother in the family and, contrarily to the ideal of the "nuclear family" that Cheng discusses in detail, the lack of a father. In my lived experience, then, suburbia became possible when my mother was forced to perform both her normative female gender role (as caregiver) and my father's normative male gender role (as worker). Obviously Cheng is writing about a generic view in a specific historical period, but the differences between the "ideal" she discusses and my own personal history, as well as the similarities, struck me as equally important in understanding my own role in these structures of race and space: to borrow what I wrote in week one, how can I reconcile the "nuclear family" ideal with my own female-headed, Chinese, suburban household?
Sunday, October 4, 2009
mere accessories
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton preface the book American Apartheid with a quote by Kenneth B. Clark: "Racial segregation, like all other forms of cruelty and tyranny, debases all human beings—those who are its victims, those who victimize, and in quite subtle ways those who are mere accessories."
But, if we accept Massey and Denton's argument that segregation has never been so severe as along the black-white binary, who are the mere accessories? I am reminded of Claire Jean Kim's concept of triangulation: if, along a scale of "foreigner" and "insider", we can place Asians (certainly), Latinos (tentatively), and Eastern and Southern Europeans (tentatively, and mostly historically) close to the "foreign" end, and white Americans at the "insider" end, then what about African Americans also makes them "insiders," according to Kim? Of course, the way she conceptualizes "foreignness" and "insiderness" refers to their acceptance in the nation as a whole; but, if we follow Massey and Denton, and reinterpret this scale to mean acceptance in the neighborhood, we complicate the position of African Americans as "insiders." "...African Americans in large northern cities were effectively removed—socially and spatially—from the rest of American society," Massey and Denton write (43).
It might be inappropriate to look at this with the same "foreigner" vs. "insider" terminology that Kim uses, however, so I want to propose a new dimension, because even though Kim's idea of triangulation is based only on two axes, it opens the possibility for many more. Using Massey and Denton's terms, we can look at African Americans (as well as Latinos, Asians, etc.) on a parallel scale of "integrated" vs. "segregated". I call this a parallel scale because it, in a sense, restructures Kim's original foreigner-insider axis, taking the very basic idea of belonging, and changing the specifics of space and acceptance.
If we look at this new version of racial geometry, the discrepancies between "foreignness" and "segregated" become truly apparent: although African Americans can be viewed as "insiders", they are predominantly segregated, as opposed to Asians, whom Kim places as "foreigners" but can be placed in a moderate position in terms of segregation/integration. I acknowledge however that my reinterpretation of racial geometry is flawed in that Kim's axes refer to the popular (and strongly white) imagination of different racial groups, while Massey & Denton discuss real-world consequences of these imaginations, but I think that fact reveals the disparity between imagination and consequence. It's telling, in fact, that "the percentage of whites who agree that 'black people have a right to live wherever they can afford' rose from 76% in 1970 to 88% in 1980" (91), but at the same time "have little tolerance for racial mixtures beyond 20% black" (93); in other words, they belong as "insiders" but do not belong as "integrated."
I return to this idea of "mere accessories": who are they, or what? Are they the Korean storeowners caught in the midst of the LA race riots, or the low-income Puerto Ricans being bought out of Spanish Harlem? Because, though I understand the ways in which realtors discriminate against African Americans, though I've seen firsthand the segregation of black communities in New York and in D.C., I don't know whether I am a "mere accessory" or not.
But, if we accept Massey and Denton's argument that segregation has never been so severe as along the black-white binary, who are the mere accessories? I am reminded of Claire Jean Kim's concept of triangulation: if, along a scale of "foreigner" and "insider", we can place Asians (certainly), Latinos (tentatively), and Eastern and Southern Europeans (tentatively, and mostly historically) close to the "foreign" end, and white Americans at the "insider" end, then what about African Americans also makes them "insiders," according to Kim? Of course, the way she conceptualizes "foreignness" and "insiderness" refers to their acceptance in the nation as a whole; but, if we follow Massey and Denton, and reinterpret this scale to mean acceptance in the neighborhood, we complicate the position of African Americans as "insiders." "...African Americans in large northern cities were effectively removed—socially and spatially—from the rest of American society," Massey and Denton write (43).
It might be inappropriate to look at this with the same "foreigner" vs. "insider" terminology that Kim uses, however, so I want to propose a new dimension, because even though Kim's idea of triangulation is based only on two axes, it opens the possibility for many more. Using Massey and Denton's terms, we can look at African Americans (as well as Latinos, Asians, etc.) on a parallel scale of "integrated" vs. "segregated". I call this a parallel scale because it, in a sense, restructures Kim's original foreigner-insider axis, taking the very basic idea of belonging, and changing the specifics of space and acceptance.
If we look at this new version of racial geometry, the discrepancies between "foreignness" and "segregated" become truly apparent: although African Americans can be viewed as "insiders", they are predominantly segregated, as opposed to Asians, whom Kim places as "foreigners" but can be placed in a moderate position in terms of segregation/integration. I acknowledge however that my reinterpretation of racial geometry is flawed in that Kim's axes refer to the popular (and strongly white) imagination of different racial groups, while Massey & Denton discuss real-world consequences of these imaginations, but I think that fact reveals the disparity between imagination and consequence. It's telling, in fact, that "the percentage of whites who agree that 'black people have a right to live wherever they can afford' rose from 76% in 1970 to 88% in 1980" (91), but at the same time "have little tolerance for racial mixtures beyond 20% black" (93); in other words, they belong as "insiders" but do not belong as "integrated."
I return to this idea of "mere accessories": who are they, or what? Are they the Korean storeowners caught in the midst of the LA race riots, or the low-income Puerto Ricans being bought out of Spanish Harlem? Because, though I understand the ways in which realtors discriminate against African Americans, though I've seen firsthand the segregation of black communities in New York and in D.C., I don't know whether I am a "mere accessory" or not.
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