In the second installment of a new collaboration between the University of California Press and Carnegie California, senior fellow Milan Vaishnav speaks with James Zarsadiaz about his book, Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Milan Vaishnav: In some ways, I think this book was a homecoming for you. You grew up in the East San Gabriel Valley, east of the city of Los Angeles. Tell us a little bit about the character of the East Valley.
James Zarsadiaz: The East San Gabriel Valley is in Los Angeles County, and all but one of the municipalities that I focus on in the book is in Los Angeles County. The region itself—in post–World War II history at least—was largely agricultural communities that had ties to the citrus belt that was shipping citrus around the world. Cattle were roaming around the area. This was very much a rural or semirural community.
By the 1950s and 1960s or so, you start to see pockets of suburbanization throughout the East San Gabriel Valley. But by the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, you had large swaths of suburban tracks emerging, largely because there was a lot of land available. A lot of that earlier settlement was mostly White, Euro-American families. By the 1980s and 1990s certain middle-class or affluent suburban tracts were attracting Asian immigrants—chiefly Chinese diasporic families from Hong Kong and Taiwan, Filipinos, Koreans, and smaller groups of South Asian immigrants, including Indians and some Southeast Asian refugees such as Vietnamese families. By the turn of the century, you have multiple Asian-majority suburbs in the East Valley and in surrounding regions.
Milan Vaishnav: One of the main concepts that you unpack in the book is called “country living.” It’s this nostalgic ideal that many Americans have had about the pastoral West, dotted by quaint hamlets and open spaces. But, as you point out in the book, the idea of country living isn’t just this gauzy vision of a suburban utopia—it’s a loaded term in many ways. Could you help us understand its multiple connotations?
James Zarsadiaz: The term “country living” did not just describe how residents saw the communities in which they live. It’s also used as a way to frame how Americans, immigrants, and refugees envision the ideal suburb, which in some ways has rural qualities that connote innocence, wholesomeness, and timelessness. Country living is a way to describe low-density communities, ones that are not associated with traffic congestion, tall buildings, and lots of people. In many ways, a lot of this is based on the imaginations or desires of a community to look and feel as if they’re living in the countryside.
This is not a new concept. The idea of living in the countryside, the romanticizing of the pastoral and the bucolic, goes back to the nineteenth century. And it’s not just immigrants who embrace this idea that the city is bad for your health, dangerous, and vice-ridden and that the countryside is the place to go when you need a feeling of being centered and whole. [The countryside was supposedly] removed from modernity. It was not engaged with the perils of globalization and a liberalizing society—even though that was not necessarily the case. These suburbs had immense global ties and transnational linkages, especially with business, trade, and actual migration.
Milan Vaishnav: Could you say a little bit about what those transnational connections were and how strongly they were felt?
James Zarsadiaz: When I talked to some of these Asian immigrants, many of whom moved to the San Gabriel Valley in the 1980s and 1990s, [they talked about embracing] American popular culture. They watched American movies and television shows, listened to American music, and read American books. They already had an image of American life before they even thought about moving to the United States.
That idea of the American dream was also rooted in suburbia. It was not a condo. It was not a high-rise. It was not a tenement in the middle of the city. Their idea of a proper American life is a single-family home in the suburbs, and that’s what they should reach for as immigrants.
In the more material sense, the transnational linkages are especially with business and family ties. It is not uncommon for a Taiwanese import-export business owner to have offices in Taipei, but then they’re working out of the den or the office of their tri-level home 30 miles from L.A. [You see these] transnational connections in the day-to-day life of the suburbs, particularly as communications became more advanced with fax machines, affordable desktops and printers, then the internet. When I was growing up there, one of the things that I noticed is that a lot of businesses and restaurants are open until the wee hours of the morning, which is unusual for a suburb. But a lot of them are working on Asia time, so their bodies and clocks are adjusting, and they’re doing business during hours when [others in the region] are sleeping. And this was well before a more sophisticated internet landscape, where people can just hop on a Zoom.
Milan Vaishnav: What I find so interesting about the period of Asian American migration to the East Valley is that as you start to see the numbers swell, many of these migrants are consciously, or maybe subconsciously, adopting the “model minority standard” that has often been foisted on them as they sought to assimilate into these communities.
James Zarsadiaz: I think that’s one of the central challenges that a lot of Asian immigrants even today face. You have, on the one hand, a society that says, “You must assimilate. You must blend in to the American mainstream,” however you define that. But there’s also another set of thoughts: “This is America. It’s diverse. You can be whoever you are, speak your native tongue, eat the food that you want, and watch the television shows that you want to watch.” You have those freedoms, and that’s part of our rich cultural heritage, or at least the idea that America is open to that.
Asian Americans found themselves trying to straddle these ideas and worlds. I say they kind of take a third way. They weren’t just fully assimilating in the way that pre-1965 immigrants were forced to do. But at the same time, they wanted to engage with assimilation—this is around the civil rights movement, immigration reforms, and people are telling them, “Multiculturalism is great. Diversity is great.”
Particularly middle-class, upper-middle-class, and affluent immigrants who are generally made more aware of these different ideas around American racial politics, they kind of did both. They would teach their children that you must speak English and embrace hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, and all of those things. But at the same time, behind closed doors, they are eating tofu and they’re speaking Tagalog, or Vietnamese, or Mandarin. They have cable subscriptions to a Hong Kong channel that they like or a Filipino channel provider.
That is also demonstrated in the physical landscape of suburbia. Their homes are these very conventional suburban homes that are of Southern California style—stucco, pseudo-Mediterranean. But inside, they might be [arranged] in accordance with feng shui. They’re shopping at a grocery store in the middle of a strip mall that looks like it’s supposed to be a plaza in Mexico, as is the Southern California style, but they’re buying live seafood at a Chinese supermarket or kimchi at one of the several Korean grocery stores.
The interesting thing—and this is partly why I wrote this book—is that this is also occurring in Northern California, in the suburbs of Houston and Atlanta, then Washington, DC; Chicago; and beyond. So, in many ways, California was the place where Asian American representation started to take off, and then in other parts of the country, as populations grew in terms of Asian immigrants, you started to see what you saw in [Southern California] in the 1980s occur in other parts of the United States in the 1990s, 2000s, and beyond.
The model minority myth comes into play here, because many of them felt that they had to embrace this idea of being the “good immigrant” and not a menace to society. Many of them downplayed their ethnic heritage to fit into that mold. But many of them embraced it, because it granted them access in ways that, for example, other communities of color did not have—particularly Black Americans and Latinx Americans.
Milan Vaishnav: I am glad that you brought up the nationalization of the story because I think part of what’s so brilliant about this book is that it is very deeply grounded in a particular geography in Southern California. You get the payoff from getting a 360-degree view of what it’s like to be on the ground. But at the same time, when you zoom out, you start to see all these linkages with these other suburban areas, where you see very similar patterns playing out.
You talk about Asian American residents as living “in between.” So, on the one hand, they were viewed as the model minority. On the other hand, non-Asian residents felt threatened that Asians would upend the norms of suburbia. Why did so many residents find this Asian influx to be so threatening?
James Zarsadiaz: Space and place matter. The concern from critics—many of whom were more conservative, older, White residents—[was a fear that] Asian immigrants and their families were going to upend the suburban idyll. They were afraid that the influx of Asians meant changing the cultural traditions of suburbia. For example, Asian immigrants and their families were not as active in historic American organizations like the Lions Club, Kiwanis, and things like that, which usually attracted generally Euro-American families, especially Euro-American men.
A second thing is the built environment itself. Among the concerns chiefly was the display of non-English-word signage in retail spaces, religious spaces, and what have you. We saw this in the early and mid-1980s in the West San Gabriel Valley, where there was an earlier settlement of Chinese immigrants, especially from Hong Kong and Taiwan, where racial politics got really nasty. It was covered widely in the news, because you had nativists coming out saying, “This is not how suburbia is supposed to look and feel.”
What you saw on the east side several years later was people saying, “You should not see Korean lettering on a strip mall. There shouldn’t be a Chinese megachurch for evangelicals with Chinese lettering.” In one case, some White resident said, “Oh, a Chinese parent-teacher association is self-segregating. How does that benefit anybody?” And they considered this a form of “reverse racism.”
I think some of them were so invested in the idea of the American dream and how that’s rooted in a particular place and lifestyle, that when confronted with diversity and change, they reacted negatively. They were not accustomed to seeing people of color in suburbia, which opened up another set of questions about, well, “What is suburbia, and who gets to control it?” And “Who gets to control the idea of what it means to live in the suburbs?” That’s why this story is so complicated. Racism, white supremacy, and nativism are definitely present in the book, but I think that it’s much more multilayered. I think, because immigrants themselves also bought into the idea of the American dream and what a suburb is supposed to look like, many of them also bought into the idea that it shouldn’t have Chinese lettering on strip malls or Buddhist temples that feature overtly Asian aesthetics.
Milan Vaishnav: To make it even more complicated, there’s a lot of coded language used by Asians and non-Asians alike about needing to protect their communities, their families, and their children from “city people.”
James Zarsadiaz: That’s right.
Milan Vaishnav: In the book you go into debates over school districting and zoning and show how quickly Asians and non-Asians became allies—allies over keeping other minorities out. Did that surprise you?
James Zarsadiaz: Yes and no. I think that this is, again, the importance of place and geography. . . .
The Asian Americans in the six communities I focus on are generally middle-class, upper-middle-class, or affluent. And for them, this was about protecting their economic privileges, their financial privileges, all the things that they felt were going to be threatened if you allow “city people,” which was the coded language for working-class people, working-class immigrants, Black families, Latinx families, and other groups. For them, this is also tied to the idea that they are wholesome Asian immigrants, and they are more conservative politically and culturally. That’s why you saw these alliances, even though some of these alliances were with people who at one point were saying, “You’re the reason why suburbia is falling apart.”
Milan Vaishnav: There’s a feeling of cognitive dissonance because it’s sometimes hard to square this behavior that you’re describing with the fact that Asians themselves were victims and targets of discriminatory behavior.
James Zarsadiaz: Exactly. And that’s why in the introduction of the book, I say, “There are a lot of inconsistencies here—incongruities, paradoxes, contradictions. But that’s also part of the story.”
One of the underlying themes in this book is how many Asian Americans are conservative. And I think we don’t talk about that as much as a society. Maybe not necessarily voting Republican in the sense of electoral, partisan politics, but at least culturally and politically, they have more right-leaning tendencies, particularly among certain generations or certain ethnic groups within Asian America. You see that especially in these suburban communities, where the defense of property, property values, all these ideas of an old-fashioned lifestyle, so to speak, are where the right-wing politics starts to come into the conversation.
Milan Vaishnav: One of the terms that you introduced me to in this book was the “slow growth movement.” Tell us a little bit about what that is and what role Asians played in it?
James Zarsadiaz: The slow growth movement, briefly, is something that emerged more or less in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s across the United States (although you had earlier versions of slow growth movements occurring even before that).
But that term is the idea that in the suburbs and exurbs, growth and development are controlled. There wouldn’t be mid-rises or high rises. Transportation would be developed regionally. The infrastructure would essentially deter or minimize traffic on the road and public transit. If there was going to be new housing development, there would be tight restrictions in terms of how many people would live in a building or how many homes are allowed to be constructed in a community.
In Southern California, slow growth politics was hot in the 1980s. It was especially hot in the San Gabriel Valley because this is where a lot of the newest homes were being built. You had White families and Asian American families who were in strong support of slow growth. And what’s interesting here is that they would say, “All these people are moving here, and they’re ruining the bucolic feel. They’re bringing traffic, and they’re bringing vice.” But at the same time, many of them would not acknowledge that they too are part of the “problem” that they are speaking out against. In other words, this is NIMBYism.
What was fascinating to see was that slow growth politics—historically associated with White activists—captured the interest of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans equally engaged in the politics of development. They were at city hall meetings and city council meetings. They were out protesting developments and fighting realtors and developers as much as their White counterparts.
I felt that was important to make note of, because there’s also a general understanding that Asian Americans are not as politically engaged, if not maybe apathetic and disconnected. But here’s this example of Asian Americans who were activated and engaged and where classist politics came into conversation again. For a lot of Asian American families who were more well-to-do or had more comfortable financial status, what often activated them in politics were matters that affected their pocketbooks and things that they felt they worked hard for—homeownership, especially.
Milan Vaishnav: When you get to the very end of the book, many residents came to recognize that country living was something that may have existed in name only, and maybe that was always the case. Was the idea of country living sort of this mirage, this kind of unattainable mountaintop that people were seeking to reach?
James Zarsadiaz: I think so. The idea of country living was constructed, built, and made by, one could argue, advertisers, developers, and people who were trying to make these communities fashionable. And this is something that developers, realtors, and politicians still do today, whether it’s a city or a suburb. They’re trying to generate interest and create intrigue for a place.
We talk about this in the urban context of renaming neighborhoods. For example, in San Francisco, you have the Financial District. Then suddenly there’s a swath of it called the East Cut, and people are losing their minds. They’re like, “Who decided this is the East Cut?”
In the 1960s and 1970s, people were not thinking about the San Gabriel Valley. People were thinking of the San Fernando Valley—the original “the Valley.” How do you get people to move to what people thought was the middle of nowhere—the so-called boonies? Oh, let’s call it “country living.” That idea caught on, and it wasn’t just developers—the residents themselves embraced it.
And so the myth was much more powerful than the reality of these communities. I think once you got to the 2000s and you saw traffic congestion and rows upon rows of houses, people realized, “Maybe this was never really true to begin with.”
And when that reality sets in for some of these residents, they move to find it somewhere else. They move deeper into greater metro L.A., into Riverside County. Many of them leave the state of California altogether. Many of them moved to Idaho, Oregon, Arizona, Wyoming, because they felt that that was what California [used to be]. If they can’t have that anymore in California, they have to move to other parts of the West that are not as racially diverse, not as populated, and not as built out in the way that much of California is today.
Milan Vaishnav: [This is] a bit of an unfair question for a historian, but as a political scientist, I can’t resist.
You mention time and time again the deeply held, conservative values that Asian immigrants had and exhibited throughout this period and that helped to shape their behavior and their patterns of assimilation. Yet we know, at least on a national level, that Asian Americans tend to vote for the Democratic Party. They tend not to vote for the Republican Party. Obviously, it’s a huge community, and you have to look at different ethnic origin groups rather than Asian Americans at large. You would find very different patterns, say, if you look at Vietnamese communities versus Indian communities and so forth. But tell us a little bit about this geography. Do you see this sort of paradox of conservative social values but politically expressed oppositely?
James Zarsadiaz: You have places like where I’m based in San Francisco, or [other] urban centers, where you have Asian Americans who, on paper, are registered Democrats but they’re out protesting a progressive district attorney or a school curriculum that is perceived to be embracing critical race theory. You have Asian Americans who might vote Democratic but are upset about affirmative action and what they perceive to be policies that discriminate against Asian Americans.
So that’s an unanswered question that I think even people are trying to figure out today. It’s an urban and suburban challenge. You have Asian immigrants who would say, “I’m voting for Joe Biden,” but then they say they don’t like critical race theory or adjacent ideas being taught to their children. Again, the cognitive dissonance, right? It’s interesting to see that.
And for some Asian Americans, they may not have been as engaged with national politics . . . but when it came to local politics, they were paying attention more. It just so happens that it was often more on conservative issues, or at least issues that were seen as aligned with conservative politics: resistance to development, urbanization, school district boundary policies, and so forth.
Milan Vaishnav: Congratulations on the book, which was fun to read. It is grounded in this very particular geography that you know very well, but I think has resonance way beyond it.
James Zarsadiaz: I know one of the reasons why I wrote this book is because I felt like so many people I knew who identify as Asian American would say that a lot of elements of their lives are tied to suburbia. I think this is a story that U.S. historians and people who are interested in history should engage with more. The Asian American experience is not centered in Chinatown or Koreatown. I would argue that for a lot of us, especially in the past thirty years, it’s grounded in Sugarland, San Gabriel Valley, Edison, Daly City, all these places that are outside of city limits.
Read the first installment in this series, on islands and climate change, here.