The Making of San Gabriel Valley as a Nonwhite Multiethnic Enclave
Leila Benedyk
SOC 215
12/20/14
Prompt: How have demographic shifts in the San Gabriel Valley over the past four decades produced a unique "regional racial formation" in this Southern California suburb? What insights does Cheng's case study provide into how individual and group identities form, change, and sustain themselves in our changing socio-cultural landscape?
Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, Asian-Americans and Mexican-Americans moved to the San Gabriel Valley in large numbers, fully aware of the limitations structural racial discrimination imposed on where they could purchase homes. Although they faced discrimination, their class status as middle-income and their unique
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Differential racialization in the San Gabriel Valley housing market meant that Asian Americans and Mexican Americans benefited from their relatively better access to homeownership compared to African Americans. However, along with their increased status relative to African Americans, Asian Americans and Mexican Americans had to negotiate entry into formerly homogenously white neighborhoods. Conditional acceptance was based on Asian American’s statuses as “model minorities” and Mexican American’s statuses as “ambiguous whites.” Many found that these statuses were inexorably tied with their initial entry into their neighborhoods and the acceptance of their white neighbors. The racial hierarchy of the United States originally considered Asians to be “forever foreign,” excluded them from fundamental entry points to the privileges of whiteness such as citizenship and property ownership. Starting in the late twentieth century and continuing to the present, however, Asian Americans have been fabricated to be “model minorities”. Compared to other racial minorities, they supposedly succeed because of their cultural norms such as hard work and educational attainment, qualities that are seen as intertwined with white, middle-class identities. Therefore, they are often thought of as “honorary whites.” Latinxs, by contrast, have an ambiguous relationship to whiteness stemming from the U.S. government’s proffering of citizenship, a symbol of legal whiteness, to former Mexican citizens after the Mexican American War. White racial status by law often enabled Mexican Americans to gain access to homeownership in ways that were denied to other racial groups, but often did not translate into social acceptance as white. Because it was based on whiteness as a category of privilege, the ambiguously white status of both Asian Americans and Mexican Americans served largely to reinforce the