The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California

by Wendy Cheng

U.S. suburbs are typically imagined to be predominantly white communities, but this is increasingly untrue in many parts of the country. Examining a multiracial suburb that is decidedly nonwhite, Wendy Cheng unpacks questions of how identity—especially racial identity—is shaped by place. She offers an in-depth portrait, enriched by nearly seventy interviews, of the San Gabriel Valley, not far from downtown Los Angeles, where approximately 60 percent of residents are Asian American and more than 30 percent are Latino. At first glance, the cities of the San Gabriel Valley look like stereotypical suburbs, but almost no one who lives there is white. The Changs Next Door to the Díazes reveals how a distinct culture is being fashioned in, and simultaneously reshaping, an environment of strip malls, multifamily housing, and faux Mediterranean tract homes. Informed by her interviews as well as extensive analysis of three episodic case studies, Cheng argues that people’s daily experiences—in neighborhoods, schools, civic organizations, and public space—deeply influence their racial consciousness. In the San Gabriel Valley, racial ideologies are being reformulated by these encounters. Cheng views everyday landscapes as crucial terrains through which racial hierarchies are learned, instantiated, and transformed. She terms the process “regional racial formation,” through which locally accepted racial orders and hierarchies complicate and often challenge prevailing notions of race. There is a place-specific state of mind here, Cheng finds. Understanding the processes of racial formation in the San Gabriel Valley in the contemporary moment is important in itself but also has larger value as a model for considering the spatial dimensions of racial formation and the significant demographic shifts taking place across the national landscape.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Asian American

304 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2013

Reviews

[Ada · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely fantastic ethnographic book on the regional racial formation of Asians and Latinos in West San Gabriel Valley, also for anthro class. It was particularly engaging for me as someone who grew up in an Asian-dominant suburb in Calfornia and feels especially relevant given the recent shooting at Monterey Park, one of the main areas discussed. However, reading about the racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans also made me really sad.

This quote from the book aptly illustrates some of what it explores:

"With regard to Asian Americans and Latinas/os, one must also pay attention to differential racialization vis-a-vis Asian American model minority discourse and the ambiguously white status of Mexican Americans...These differentiated statuses of relative valorization coexist with a "forever foreign" racialization of Asian Americans--stemming from a long history of exclusion from citizenship, civic participation, and even the nation itself--and a combined "foreign" and devalorized class stigma for Mexican Americans, whose position in the racial hierarchy shifted over the course of the last century..."

This book definitely challenged my own perceptions of what it means to be Asian American, and I found its discussion of the racialized privilege Asian Americans enjoy very illuminating. I definitely had to confront my own biases and preconceptions about what "Asian American culture" is, particularly as it relates to a classroom setting.

A quote I related heavily to:

"For many Asian Americans, college represents a key setting in which pan-Asian or Asian American identities are developed for the first time. For West SGV Asian Americans, however, going to college often had a much different meaning: Instead of constituting their first opportunity to encounter concentrations of Asian American youth, it was often the first time they had encountered large numbers of white people."

Like hello?? story of my life

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never realized how fortunate I was to grow up in the San Gabriel Valley until I left to go to college on the East Coast. The incredible diversity of the place, the suburban sprawl, the large amount of immigrants and first and second-generation Americans makes it such a unique place to study how identities are formed. This book was right up my alley, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to friends of mine from the area. This book really prompted me to think twice about some of my experiences growing up, and the experiences of my family and friends living in the larger SGV region. It's a bit of a specialized book, and academic in tone, so I would caution that its audience is probably limited to people who are from the area, have family in there, visit often, or are really interested in enthoburbs, multiracial identities, or other issues relating to interracial relationships (social and familial).

Update: As a library student worker at my college, I was able to leave a nameplate in one book - this is the one I chose.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

400 years of settler colonial racism taints spaces, producing socioeconomic mists that frustrate lived experiences of all parties. There is a treasure trope of scholarship breaking down these processes, explaining history and social explosions far before they happen, but the strings of hate are so pervasive that it still only feels like we are barely scratching the surface. Like chasing a runaway train, agonizingly close to the proverbial peaceful caboose.

All this is to say the quilt work of context that is America is bubbling with unexamined clashes of racial tensions, prejudices, and harmony. What makes this book so prescient is not that the (West) San Gabriel Valley (SGV) is wholly unique (though Cheng make a phenomenal argument justifying her case choice) but that it is increasingly normal. All the conventional wisdom about “demographics is destiny” there is significant cultural lag on focus for regions already dominated by “non-traditional” (Cheng does a good job debunking this notion) demographic groups.

The book is only 200 pages, but it is rich with detail and interview evidence transporting you to the late 20th and early 21st century SGV, specifically the 4 cities of Alhambra, Monterey Park, Rosemead, and San Gabriel. A lot of my frustration with oral interview social science works is overemphasizing the individuals and downplaying larger contexts, but you don’t get that here. In fact, the book’s greatest is that theoretical bridge. Cheng makes a rather compelling theory fusing regional formation with experienced racial dynamics. Being a good geographer, she brings space and place to much of the theoretical bedrock of other disciplines.

Normally I get lost in the woods of these critical racial theories (though be warned, the book is most comprehensible to a college educated audience), but Cheng’s developments are quite clear and prudently connected with the book’s contents. With chapters on schools, property, urban landscape, intimacy, and even the Boy Scouts, Cheng really mixes your mental space with the average SGVite. Space and place are never irrelevant to any of these considerations and there are (crucially) efforts to capture experience both in-the-moment and reflecting outside of it. What makes the argument so convincing is just how spatially contingent the experiences are and feel.

I found it so fascinating that in the classroom, Hispanic students felt a clear bias lodged against them by teachers drinking the “model minority” koolaid, but in town halls it was the parents of those Hispanic students who allied with rich white to deny Asian business owners their deserved recognition. These groups co-form regional narratives that can be quite accepting of one another (though not necessarily theoretical outsiders or oppressing whites), but that narrative does not holdup in all the SGV’s institutions.

As said before, Cheng is rightfully critical of many of her interviewees, and she ensures that it is an ideologically diverse bunch. This makes the patterns in their mindsets all the more impressive. Constant negotiations exist between narratives of different scales (national hierarchies, family norms, and regional notions). Throughout this all though is a tendency towards the positive, attempting to build a better tomorrow.

This book thankfully does not fall into that trap. There is no argument that ethnoburbs are an ideal to aspire to for urban form (and the end of the day, they have almost all the same problems as classical American suburbs), but there is a recognition that we could build a better race relations from SGV’s example. Cheng mixes this realization with the caveat of the limited nature of the book’s selected context. While more areas are looking like the SGV, they ultimately aren’t the SGV.

Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and I hope more scholars pick up on this regional lens. The only other example I can think of with the lens is Juan De Lara’s “Inland Shift” (fitting, given the two authors are close friends), and that book was pure fire. Surely this is a lens worth replicating.

5/5, highly recommend!

[Ryan]

DNF

[RYAN PHAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently Chinese people are moving out of Monterey Park and into the San Gabriel Valley and Alhambra

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this on a professor's recommendation and this hit close to home (literally). the neighborhoods studied were all within the west san gabriel valley, just a stone's throw away from the IE, and pretty much describe the environment I grew up in. cheng did a great job diving into the race relations and placemaking done in these uniquely asian american and hispanic/latinx american dominant suburban communities in a way that was both open and understanding as well as critical. she brought in a variety of perspectives and stories, with interviewees both capitulating to expected racial narratives while simultaneously redefining them. I appreciate how cheng highlighted multiple contradictory narratives within these minority dominant communities that show the fluidity of racial perceptions. as america becomes increasingly diverse amidst the current weaponization of identity politics, i hope books like this with a regional focus show us that dominant white/black narratives are not the only way to frame race relations in our communities.

[Sara Salem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book on race in California but lacks broader links to both the national and the international. Race is never constructed in a vacuum.