The Changs Next Door to the Diazes

Abstract

Asian Americans and Mexican Americans began to purchase homes in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley in large numbers beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. They approached the task with a full awareness of the realities of structural racial discrimination and the limitations it imposed on where they could and could not live. As largely middle-income homebuyers, however, they had a degree of choice distinct from their poorer, nonwhite counterparts that was also informed by differentiated positions in American racial hierarchies vis-à-vis property—in particular, the “model minority” status of Asian Americans, and the ambiguously white standing of Mexican Americans. However, even while housing market discrimination shaped their initial movements to a large degree, Asian American and Latina/Latino residents of the area ultimately participated in producing what George Lipsitz has called a moral geography of differentiated space, in which their motivations and long-term actions differed significantly from those of white residents, who fled the area en masse during the same time period. This “moral geography” is both continuous with earlier histories of multiracial communities in the greater Los Angeles region, and distinctively new. It signifies an emergent multiracial, “nonwhite” identity that challenges conventional notions of race and class in American suburbs.