“A Chinatown Culture”: Smaller Chinatowns as Diverse Cultural Communities in the US West, 1945 to Present

Abstract

Chinatowns have grown as a thriving scholarly topic across numerous academic disciplines. However, most of these works focus on the history and modern functions of large Chinatowns on the coastal areas of the United States. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the history of five “smaller” Chinatowns in the US West since the 1950s. Through surveying five Chinatowns, this dissertation explains how these neighborhoods functioned in general and how they survived well into the twenty-first century despite most “smaller” Chinatowns disappearing by the mid-twentieth century. I argue that the small, multigenerational, and diverse cultural communities of these smaller Chinatowns were the key to their survival. These communities maintained members’ connections to smaller Chinatowns even after they moved away, which transformed smaller Chinatowns into economic, social, and cultural centers. The various businesses, organizations, and institutions of smaller Chinatowns were geographically flexible, relatively inclusive, and readily served other nonwhite ethnic groups, which allowed them to adapt to changes and threats to the Chinatown community. Smaller Chinatowns preserved their relevance throughout the decades by functioning as a place for US-born Asian Americans and Asian immigrants to express and construct their Asian American identity. This dissertation is lastly a community-based history that primarily relies on oral histories. Like the Chinatowns that are the main topic of this work, this dissertation’s analysis is grassroots and examines history from the bottom up.