Los Angeles is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, a production of film frames, media bytes, and marketable mythologies. In the 1980s, there was the tourist-enticing image of L.A. as a model of economic growth and the live-and-let-live multiculturalism of a vibrant city internationalized by immigrants from Asia, Africa, Mexico, Central America, and the Middle East. Then, in the 1990s, there were the riots, economic depression, and the “discovery” that immigrants were poisoning the wells of paradise.¹ The boosters of sunny diversity grew silent before the doomsayers proclaiming L.A. to be America’s capital of ethnic conflict and nativist hostility toward...

By uncongested freeway, Monterey Park is about ten minutes east of downtown Los Angeles. Our drive takes us past the gleaming postmodern monuments to Pacific Rim capital and beyond the black, Korea, China, Latino, and J(Japan)-towns of the central city to the west end of the commercial and residential sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley, the eastern gateway to suburbia and the desert spillovers of the megalopolis.

With only 7.7 square miles and an estimated population of about 63,000 in 1994, Monterey Park is one of 84 cities incorporated within the administratively fragmented County of Los Angeles (4,090 square miles,...

Old-timers talk a lot about community as something they had and lost when the newcomers arrived, a geographically bounded and culturally defined network of familiar sights, sounds, and social activities.¹ Their sense of community is richly textured and entangled in their personal memories of local history—people like themselves on the block knowing each other, raising their children together, belonging to the same schools and clubs, volunteering, and getting involved in city council elections. From this perspective, the present is judged ambivalently and often negatively as a break from the good old days.

Confronted with an unexpected present, old-timers continually...

Our initiation into the rough and tumble of Monterey Park politics began in 1988 in the city council chamber. On that stage—and a dramaturgical metaphor is appropriatei—we began to identifY major political issues and actors. Their trails led us offstage to the individuals, social networks, organizations, and events that made up the political arena of the city and the changing sites of our ethnography. What we saw on and off stage were signs of a political break—the decline of the aging white power structure; the political rise of women, minorities, and grassroots leaders; and a “battleroyale”...

The quotations that begin this chapter express three different reactions to community change, three levels of discourse that framed the terms of conflict between newcomers and old-timers and between ethnic groups in Monterey Park in the mid-1980s.¹ The anonymous slogan, with its image of foreign invasion, conveys an unambiguous anti-immigrant nativism. Rubin speaks the populist language of growth control. For him, uncontrolled economic development rather than immigration as such is the problem in Monterey Park. Control over land use should be wrested from the developers and compliant city officials and put in the hands of the people who live in...

Monterey Park spawned nativists and slow-growth rebels, but also multiculturalists who took a stand against the xenophobic politics of the mid-1980s. Their diverse class backgrounds, changing organization, and tactics had contradictory effects on the course of group conflict. In 1986, the promoters of cultural diversity came together defensively in Citizens for Harmony in Monterey Park (CHAMP), a coalition of conservative businesspeople and radical professionals, to oppose the city council’s Official English resolution. Later the same year, CHAMP split along class lines. The business-dominated faction with broader support formed a new group, A Better Cityhood (ABC), to recall two council members...

Spring, 1988: The scene is the Monterey Park city council chamber. Seated behind microphones on a long dais are the five council members: two Anglo men and two Anglo women, all variously identified with the politics of slow growth and Official English and a lone Chinese American woman, an advocate of harmony and “managed” growth. Although Asian Americans and Latinos constitute more than 80 percent of Monterey Park's population, the city staff and elected officials are predominantly white.

Facing the council members in choice front-center seats, a “jury” of mostly white and elderly council watchers scrutinizes the proceedings. This is...

With the defeat of Barry Hatch and the installation of a majority/ minority council in the spring of 1990–two Chinese Americans, one Latino, and two Anglos—local activists were saying, “Now we have a good development plan for the city, and we have gone beyond ethnic conflict.” Indeed, there were many signs that Monterey Park had regained its title as the “All-America” city, a model of multiculturalism and controlled development.

The business-oriented members of the council had pledged allegiance to managed growth. Interethnic cooperation rather than confrontation seemed to be the council norm. The multiethnic Community Relations Commission was...

Many of the whites in the audience were not happy to hear someone raise “the racial thing” after a pleasant morning of “harmony.” The speaker was reacting to a white resident’s wish that Monterey Park would not become entirely Chinese but would remain diverse. As we left the meeting, the disturbance still on our minds, a Chinese American companion remarked ironically, “What’s wrong with Monterey Park being Chinese? Aren’t we all Americans?”

One way of keeping peace in Monterey Park is to avoid talking publicly about ethnic and racial tension, except perhaps to say that “the conflict is behind us...

The crisis of identity in Monterey Park may be extreme, but it is a problem faced generally by Angelinos and other Americans who live in territory internationalized by immigration. One aspect of this crisis is uncertainty about the meaning of ethnicity; another is resisting or asserting the ethnic component of American culture and power.

Nativists use public occasions to contain ethnic and cultural diversity by affirming Anglo or European symbols of America. Ethnic groups seize the moment to assert their positive identities. They want cultural as well as political inclusion, a collective recognition of their distinctive Americanness. Multiculturalists seek ways...

To commemorate Monterey Park’s 75th birthday in 1991, the Anniversary Committee agreed on a motto. “Pride in the Past, Faith in the Future” was suggested by Chairperson Louise Davis, a resident of the city for over 35 years, City Treasurer, and twice Mayor. Davis was not sure whether she had heard the phrase before or invented it.¹ Nobody was sure, but the motto, now emblazoned on the front wall of the council chambers, seemed appropriate for a city in transition.

New words signify new social relationships—in this case, greater accommodation between old-timers and newcomers as the bearers of the...