How L.A.'s Chinatown helped reinvent Southern California

For almost 150 years, Los Angeles has been an idea as much as a place. Even before the growth of Hollywood, newspaper publishers and land developers sold a carefully constructed image of the region to the world. These boosters promoted Los Angeles as a suburban paradise to an audience of middle-class white families in the Midwest. Perhaps surprisingly, as both a concept and an immigrant enclave, Chinatown was crucial to developing this image and forming L.A.’s identity.

Known as New Chinatown and China City, they pushed back against leering representations of Chinatown by using non-threatening commercialism, surface aesthetics and racial performance to shape popular perceptions of Chinese Americans. Both districts’ commodification of racial differences shaped L.A.’s image as a complex multiethnic metropolis. Under the leadership of Peter SooHoo, Chinese American merchants created New Chinatown — the Chinatown we still have today near downtown.

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