Migration to the “First Large Suburban Ghetto” in America

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Chanhaeng Lee

In this article, I argue that Korean immigrant merchants were active agents who opened small businesses in South Central Los Angeles in order to overcome a range of disadvantages faced in American society. From a structural point of view, Korean immigrant merchants constituted a middleman minority group that played the dual role of “oppressed and oppressor” in the suburban ghetto. Although these merchants made efforts to maintain civil relations with their African American customers, they were often treated with hostile attitudes largely because of the exploitative relationship that existed between the two groups. However, I maintain that Korean American journalists and scholars have not only misunderstood the identity of the middleman minority as an innocent buffer but have also erroneously estimated that race relations with African Americans in Los Angeles were better than those in other areas of the United States.

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 79-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Elizabeth Rosas

Using a combination of oral life history interviews, field observation, and conversations with undocumented Mexican immigrant parents raising children born in the United States in South Central Los Angeles, California, this in-depth consideration of the state of emergency they face as a result of the U.S. government's implementation of the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) and Secure Communities Program (SCP) reveals their uniquely local and transnational confrontation of an increasingly insecure family situation that stretches across the U.S.-Mexico border and throughout U.S. inner cities, like South Central Los Angeles. The visibly public alienation these children, most recently identified as citizen kids endure makes evident that tragically they are most vulnerable to the indignities born out of these programs. The convergence of minor offenses committed by their parents, the illegality of their immigration status, and these children's U.S. citizenship status have paved the way for an incalculable loss that is most palpable when pausing to observe their multifaceted alienation. The relationship between these children's citizenship status, family relationships, day to day interactions, and these program's implementation reveals an underestimated yet infinitely tragic state of emergency.


Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández

The sixth chapter spans the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s. In these years, as Los Angeles took center stage in the nation’s landscape of jails and prisons, the population of African Americans incarcerated in Los Angeles shot from politically irrelevant and slightly disproportionate to politically dominant and stunningly disproportionate. It has remained so ever since. Chapter 6 tracks the origins of the incarceration of blacks in Los Angeles. In particular, it details why and how black incarceration so disproportionately followed the expansion of L.A.’s African American community. Moreover, by exhuming the first recorded killing of a young black male by the LA PD, which occurred in South Central Los Angeles on the evening of April 24, 1927, this chapter details why and how police brutality so closely accompanied black incarceration in the city. It is a brutal history attended by persistent—and, in time, explosive—black protest, tracking how community members fought police brutality between 1927 and the outbreak of the Watts Rebellion in 1965. Indeed, race, policing, and protest became inextricable as Los Angeles advanced toward becoming the carceral capital of the United States.


Author(s):  
William Fulton

It is always difficult to measure urban resilience, but never more so when the trauma results from civil unrest, as opposed to a natural disaster or enemy attack.With natural disasters, it is frequently difficult to place blame, even if “acts of God” are sometimes all too intertwined with ill-advised decisions to site buildings in vulnerable areas. Wars and other attacks usually entail clear enemies, and eventually come to some negotiated halt, accompanied by greater territorial clarity. With riots and civil unrest, by contrast, destruction is community-based. Victims and perpetrators live in close proximity; violence is often inflicted within the very neighborhoods that feel most aggrieved; and recovery entails the need to redress not just physical damage but also deeply ingrained mistrust. Rebuilding, in this sense, requires not just investment in real estate, but also a variety of human capital—local infusions of community dynamism, neighborly cooperation, and no small measure of hope. In the United States, Los Angeles, California, stands out as the site of two generations of civil unrest: the Watts riots of 1965 and the civil unrest of 1992. The 1992 disturbance was the most damaging urban riot in American history, killing fifty-four people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. Touched off by the acquittal on April 29 of white police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King, the rampage lasted several days and spread to an area much larger than the earlier riots in Watts. The disturbance ranged across dozens of square miles, mostly along the lengthy commercial strips in the southern part of the city of Los Angeles, including many areas not traditionally viewed as part of South Central. It even spilled northward above the Santa Monica Freeway into Hollywood, the traditionally Jewish Fairfax district, and other neighborhoods far from the traditional centers of African-American residence. This chapter investigates a full decade of efforts to rebuild South Central Los Angeles, following the trial of King’s assailants. In so many ways, Los Angeles is a city like no other—a vast but low-rise city, dense and sprawling at the same time. Auto-oriented and generally without high-rises, Los Angeles might seem different from a more traditional metropolis such as New York.


Author(s):  
Shelley Sang-Hee Lee

Although the 1992 Los Angeles riots have been described as a “race riot” sparked by the acquittals of a group of mostly white police officers charged with excessively beating black motorist Rodney King, the widespread targeting and destruction of Asian-owned (mainly Korean) property in and around South Central Los Angeles stands out as one of the most striking aspects of the uprising. For all the commentary generated about the state of black-white relations, African American youths, and the decline of America’s inner cities, the riots also gave many Americans their first awareness of the presence of a Korean immigrant population in Southern California, a large number of Korean shop owners, and the existence of what was commonly framed as the “black-Korean conflict.” For Korean Americans, and Asian Americans more generally, the Los Angeles riots represented a shattered “American dream” and brought focus to their tenuous hold on economic mobility and social inclusion in a society fraught by racial and ethnic tension. The riots furthermore marked a turning point that placed Asian immigrants and Asian Americans at the center of new conversations about social relations in a multiracial America, the place of new immigrants, and the responsibilities of relatively privileged minorities toward the less privileged.


Author(s):  
Craig Allen

The first completely researched history of U.S. Spanish-language television traces the rise of two foremost, if widely unrecognized, modern American enterprises—the Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo. It is a standard scholarly history constructed from archives, original interviews, reportage, and other public materials. Occasioned by the public’s wakening to a “Latinization” of the U.S., the book demonstrates that the emergence of Spanish-language television as a force in mass communication is essential to understanding the increasing role of Latinos and Latino affairs in modern American society. It argues that a combination of foreign and domestic entrepreneurs and innovators who overcame large odds resolves a significant and timely question: In an English-speaking country, how could a Spanish-speaking institution have emerged? Through exploration of significant and colorful pioneers, continuing conflicts and setbacks, landmark strides, and ongoing controversies—and with revelations that include regulatory indecision, behind-the-scenes tug-of-war, and the internationalization of U.S. mass media—the rise of a Spanish-language institution in the English-speaking U.S. is explained. Nine chapters that begin with Spanish-language television’s inception in 1961 and end 2012 chronologically narrate the endeavor’s first 50 years. Events, passages, and themes are thoroughly referenced.


Author(s):  
Latifa HORR

In order to understand and describe the internationalization behavior of companies, the first research carried out before the 1970s focused on large multinationals whose internationalization strategies were made possible by heavy investments. Other research on the internationalization of SMEs, conducted in the United States and Europe in the early 1980s, has given rise to behavioral models in stages where size is a barrier to internationalization. However, we find that very small businesses (TPE), newly created, inexperienced and with limited resources, internationalize and thwart the classic models of internationalization by scrambling the stages. Age, size and resources are no longer barriers to internationalization. This makes Cavusgil (1980) say that the gradual internationalization of companies has become obsolete. Veilleux and Ferro (2010) confirm that today, between 1 and 2% of new businesses are international when they are created and 76% have export prospects in the first two years. And the majority of research carried out since the 1990s deals with the precocity and rapidity of this internationalization from a point of view external to the company such as the saturation of local and / or national markets, the liberalization of international markets or the aid provided by governments, competitive pressure; and from an internal factors point of view such as the role of the manager and his various experiences, the support of his social networks, the use of new communication and production technologies, the characteristics of the product. However, there are very few works that address the internationalization of these VSEs through pedagogical learning in international entrepreneurship; learning mediated by the University, quickly enabling these companies to position themselves on an international market. The object of this research is precisely the questioning of the relevance of this learning; and this, through our participation in the training "International Entrepreneurship and Development of the Global Enterprise" initiated by the "College of Business" of the University of Indiana (ISU). It is a training program, offered by the ISU "College of Business", bringing together Universities from four other continents: Europe, America, Asia, Africa & l 'Oceania. A mixed group of teacher-researchers and researchers from these different universities benefited from this training program.


Author(s):  
Christina H. Moon

Fast fashion is often a story about the most powerful global retail giants such as Zara and H&M. The rise and dominance of fast fashion within the United States, however, areintimately tied to the work of Korean immigrant communities within downtown Los Angeles. In the last decade alone, Koreans have refashioned the city of Los Angeles into the central hub of fast fashion in the Americas, designing and distributing clothing from Asia to the largest fast-fashion retailers throughout the Americas. This chapter explores the work of these fast-fashion families who blur the lines between design and copy, author and imitator, exploiter and exploited. How do their modes of work profoundly transform the material object of clothing? How do they complicate the assumed directions and global flows of design and production in the global fashion industry? And finally, what role does risk and failure play—in a landscape of creativity, aspiration, and imagining—to make fast fashion even a possibility?


Author(s):  
William B. Meyer

If the average citizen's surroundings defined the national climate, then the United States grew markedly warmer and drier in the postwar decades. Migration continued to carry the center of population west and began pulling it southward as well. The growth of what came to be called the Sunbelt at the "Snowbelt's" expense passed a landmark in the early 1960s when California replaced New York as the most populous state. Another landmark was established in the early 1990s when Texas moved ahead of New York. In popular discussion, it was taken for granted that finding a change of climate was one of the motives for relocating as well as one of the results. It was not until 1954, though, that an American social scientist first seriously considered the possibility. The twentieth-century flow of Americans to the West Coast, the geographer Edward L. Ullman observed in that year, had no precedent in world history. It could not be explained by the theories of settlement that had worked well in the past, for a substantial share of it represented something entirely new, "the first large-scale in-migration to be drawn by the lure of a pleasant climate." If it was the first of its kind, it was unlikely to be the last. For a set of changes in American society, Ullman suggested, had transformed the economic role of climate. The key changes included a growth in the numbers of pensioned retirees; an increase in trade and service employment, much more "footloose" than agriculture or manufacturing was; developments in technology making manufacturing itself more footloose; and a great increase in mobility brought about by the automobile and the highway. All in one way or another had weakened the bonds of place and made Americans far freer than before to choose where to live. Whatever qualities made life in any spot particularly pleasant thus attracted migration more than in the past. Ullman grouped such qualities together as "amenities." They ranged from mountains to beaches to cultural attractions, but climate appeared to be the most important, not least because it was key to the enjoyment of many of the rest. Ullman did not suppose that all Americans desired the same climate. For most people, in this as in other respects, "where one was born and lives is the best place in the world, no matter how forsaken a hole it may appear to an outsider."


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