I need everyone reporting on the devastating #lunarnewyear shooting to know a few things about #montereypark (thread)
#MontereyPark is home for my diasporic family. It is where you find the best damn Chinese food in the U.S. It is the 1st Asian ethnoburb: an ethnic enclave in the 'burbs that thrives b/c it refuses to assimilate, instead unapologetically catering to its own immigrant community.
Formerly an exclusive white middle class suburb, MP became “the first suburban Chinatown” by the 80s, when "highly skilled" Asians, SEAsian refugees, and working class undocumented immigrants started settling in MP and its surrounding areas now known as San Gabriel Valley (SGV).
They transformed San Gabriel Valley into an Asian-majority ecosystem with a conspicuous and diverse first-generation, unassimilated immigrant presence. My grandparents never learned english yet thrived because of the ethnoburb.
#MontereyPark as an ethnoburb troubles the American imagination of an immigrant, assimilation, and integration. Ethnoburbs are not a “staging ground” (Zhou 2008) for somewhere better or whiter. The ethnoburb is the final desired destination where our communities thrive.
I'm still reflecting and there is more nuance to all this than I can include here, but I hope this context on the gorgeous unassimilability of #montereypark sheds insight into the layers and extent of devastation behind this #lunarnewyear attack.
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