The contested nexus of Los Angeles Koreatown: Capital restructuring, gentrification, and displacement

Amerasia Journal

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 127-150

  Park, Kyeyoung ^a   Kim, Jessica ^b,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^c Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63149153341     PISSN: 00447471     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17953/amer.34.3.d03g386u007n286w     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Marc Blanchard, "Lost in America," Cultural Anthropology 7:4 (1992): 496-507.
2. Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (London and New York: Verso, 2000). Davis was able to answer this criticism partly by writing, directly, on Latinos' contribution to the city of Los Angeles.
3. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990).
4. Ivan Light, "Immigrant Place Entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, 1970-1999," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26:2 (2002): 215-228.
5. Helen G. Lewis, The Korean Community in Los Angeles County (San Franscisco: R and E Research Associates, 1974).
6. Eui-young Yu, Peter Choe, Sang Li Han, and Kimberly Yu, "Emerging Diversity: Los Angeles' Koreatown, 1900-2000," Amerasia Journal 30:1 (2004), 25-52.
7. Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
8. See also Ivan Light, "Immigrant Place Entrepreneurs," 221.
9. Kyunghwan Park, Transnational Urbanism in Diaspora Space: Multi-Scaled Urban Redevelopment of Los Angeles Koreatown, Ph.D. Dissertation (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2005). Park notes that the rapid expansion of Koreatown along Olympic Blvd. has something to do with the construction of the Interstate-10 Freeway (the Santa Monica Freeway) connecting downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica and thereby the decline of the Olympic Blvd.
10. Whereas Abelmann & Lie (1995) hinted at the unplanned, spiraling Korean settlement and the resultant Koreatown, Light (2002) offers a different explanation: Koreatown development, engineered by a typical growth machine. It might have been the mixture.
11. Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): 200.
12. I updated the list of sponsoring agencies from Kyonghwan Park and Youngmin Lee, "Rethinking Los Angeles Koreatown: Multi-scaled Geographic Transition Since the Mid-1990s," Journal of the Korean Geographical Society 42:2 (2007): 196-217
13. Korean Americans established a growing commercial center adjacent to the Vietnamese community near Westminister along Garden Grove Street that runs from Beach Blvd. to Brookhurst (roughly eight avenue-length blocks). For detailed discussion on Koreatown, Orange County, see Linda Vo and Mary Y. Danico, "The Formation of Post-Suburban Communities: Koreatown and Little Saigon, Orange County," International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (IJSSP) 24:7/8 (2004): 15-45.
14. Park, Transnational Urbanism in Diaspora Space, 107.
15. Kemp Powers, "Neighborhood Project: Koreatown," available online at 〈http://laist.com/2007/07/19/neighborhood-pr-5.php〉, accessed on March 27, 2008. Powers suggests that some tourists tend to mistake the business district along Wilshire Boulevard between Western and Vermont as downtown Los Angeles, considering Koreatown's financial district often has more daytime foot traffic than parts of downtown's banking district. Los Angeles downtown is hardly considered as the downtown in this spread-out, post-modern city.
16. Jan Lin, Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
17. Jeffrey Louis Decker, "Postmodernity, or, The Worlding of America" (Review of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis), American Quarterly 44:1 (March 1991): 146-154.
18. Henri, Lefebre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
19. Also see Park and Lee, "Rethinking Los Angeles Koreatown: Multi-scaled Geographic Transition Since the Mid-1990s."
20. Anna Joo Kim, L.A.'s Koreatown: Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship, and Entertainment (forthcoming).
21. Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2004.
22. Bong-Yun Choy, Koreans in America (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979).
23. David S. Lee, Locating Global and Local Factors in the Changing Landscape of Los Angeles (forthcoming).
24. See Park and Lee, 203-206, especially Section 3: Los Angeles Koreatown as 'a' Korea-town. They discuss the problems with recognizing and defining the area itself. Although, it is important to examine how Korea-town has expanded its boundary, I posit that it is more meaningful to understand how its boundary has been constructed culturally and its implications beyond geographical boundary.
25. Korea Times, March 29, 2005.
26. Park, Transnational Urbanism in Diaspora Space, 237. For instance, the CRA adopted the Wilshire Center / Koreatown Recovery Redevopment Project on December 13, 1995. Their plan includes nine principal subprojects: Construction of Korean American Museum and Koreatown Gateway, commercial façade and signage improvement program, Wilshire Center streetscape improvement, and Sheraton town House Apartments renovation.
27. Korea Times, October 3, 2002.
28. Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2001.
29. New York Times, October 20, 2005.
30. Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1999.
31. See: Dong Yeun Lee, "Consuming Spaces in the Global Era: Distinctions Between Consumer Spaces in Seoul," Korea Journal (2004): 108-137.
32. With a population of 10 million, Seoul has developed as a representative thirdworld growth city, with skyscrapers equipped with advanced facilities, residential-commercial compounds that have been dubbed "dream palaces," and large shopping malls. In this city, according to a cultural studies scholar, Dong Yeun Lee, domestic companies compete fiercely with multinational corporations, super-speed information networks exchange information in real time, and famous foreign brands have become a part of everyday life. Also see, New York Times, August 17, 2004.
33. Los Angeles Times Magazine, December 8, 2002.
34. Los Angeles Times, March 3, 2005.
35. Korea Times, September 9, 2004.
36. Proponents of the ethnic enclave economies thesis conceptualize immigrant occupational niches as "urban subeconomies that grant labor market rewards and upward socioeconomic mobility over time." See Lin, Reconstruction Chinatown, 10.
37. Several scholars such as Sanders & Nee, Don Mar, and Peter Kwong made various criticism of the ethnic enclave economy thesis, regarding positive versus negative functions of the enclave economy, specifically over the question of different rewards conferred on employers versus employers and men versus women. Still it can't explain the contrasting, capital-scarce, deterioriated urban terrain of the "barrio" or "ghetto," which speaks to race- and class-based differences. I de-classified the Korean American economy as non-ethnic enclave economy in my earlier work, contesting the conventional portrayal of Korean American economy as a typical ethnic enclave economy. See Kyeyoung Park, The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997): 45-46.
38. Sharon Zukin, "(Review of) The Capitalist City: Global Restructuring and Community Politics," Contemporary Sociology 17:6 (November 1988), 790-793.
39. Also see Sharon Zukin's "Socio-Spatial Prototypes of a New Organization of Consumption: The Role of Real Cultural Capital." Sociology 24:1 (Feb. 1989): 37-57.
40. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984).
41. Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).