Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California

by Charlotte Brooks

Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Charlotte Brooks examines this transformation through the lens of California’s urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities.

Against the backdrop of cold war efforts to win Asian hearts and minds, whites who saw little difference between Asians and Asian Americans increasingly advocated the latter group’s access to middle-class life and the residential areas that went with it. But as they transformed Asian Americans into a “model minority,” whites purposefully ignored the long backstory of Chinese and Japanese Americans’ early and largely failed attempts to participate in public and private housing programs. As Brooks tells this multifaceted story, she draws on a broad range of sources in multiple languages, giving voice to an array of community leaders, journalists, activists, and homeowners—and insightfully conveying the complexity of racialized housing in a multiracial society.

Genres: History

329 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Charlotte Brooks is a historian and author who has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American and Chinese diaspora history. Originally from California, she graduated from Yale and worked in mainland China and Hong Kong before earning a PhD from Northwestern University. She is a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a proud New Yorker.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to give this book more stars. The thesis that the Asian-American housing experience in California in the twentieth century differed greatly from other minorities is a fascinating contention. The author’s execution, however, leaves a lot to be desired. The author essentially presents fact after fact in rabid succession with little to no analysis. This, in my opinion, makes the book difficult to stay engaged-with. So, in conclusion, not a bad book, but could have been better.

[Robert D. Yee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where Can I Live?

How did Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans change from America’s most despised and feared minorities at the end of the 19th Century to “model minorities“ in the 1960’s? In her book, Alien, Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California, she uses rock-solid information about housing to document how this change came about. She compares and contrasts how white Americans reacted to Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans and other minorities in San Francisco and Los Angeles. This is a scholarly book, but easily understandable to non-historians. Her writing style is direct and avoids jargon.

Fear of losing social, economic and political status and abhorrence of interracial marriage underlay white racism during this period. However, dissimilar demographics and history explain why minorities were treated differently. For example, San Francisco’s Chinatown was the nation’s largest ghetto at the beginning of the 20th Century. Almost all of the city’s Chinese Americans were segregated in ten square blocks of slums. San Francisco’s history as the major California port during the Gold Rush brought many Chinese immigrants to the city. In contrast, many fewer Chinese Americans lived in Los Angeles. This difference might explain why white nativist groups, that pictured Asians as ignorant, filthy and sexually depraved, were much stronger in northern California.

National and international events affected how Asian Americans were viewed and treated by the white majority. Prof. Brooks explains how the exclusion acts, the Japanese invasion of China, World War I, World War II, the Chinese Communist’s defeat of the Nationalists, the Korean War, the Red Scare, and the Cold War influenced where Asian Americans were allowed to live. Her book is a must-read for Baby Boom generation, Asian Americans. We grew up when housing restrictions were loosening and our parents were able to move outside of segregated communities into white-only neighborhoods that were once protected by restricted covenants. Her book can help us better understand some of our own experiences as minority members.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California is a book by Charlotte Brooks about racial history of through the lens of Asian American housing in urban California. Brooks uses this lens to show how the once non-citizen Asian Americans, seen as foreign aliens, transitioned to become relatively accepted by white neighbors as other minority groups continued to be segregated against. To position her argument, Brooks focuses on two different populations in two different cities in California for her analysis - Chinese Americans in San Francisco and Japanese Americans in Los Angeles. She starts her analysis in the early 1900’s and ends during the Cold War and American Civil Rights Movement. She broke her book into two parts that showcase the transition of racial relations that she demonstrates through her argument; the first part is titled Alien Neighbors, the second is titled Foreign Friends.

She does a good job of comparing and contrasting with other races, such as African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Eastern European immigrants. This strengthens her argument as she situates the difficulties Asian Americans faced in with other minorities and groups that faced discrimination. This situation also strengthens her argument that race is complicated and ever-changing based on current affairs as she is able to discuss how the idea of “whiteness” changed in certain contexts for certain groups. For example, she talks about how Mexican Americans could pass as “white” if they identified as Spanish instead of Latin American.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more on the subject of racial relations in America, Asian American history, 20th century history, or housing or urban history.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting intervention, the idea that changed in housing help trace Asian American experiences of race/racism in the 20th c. Helpful on postwar Japanese Americans in CA.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, precise writing.