"Home is Little Tokyo": race, community, and memory in twentieth-century Los Angeles

UnrestrictedThis dissertation examines the spatial and memorial practices through which the state and racialized communities have together, though with unequal access to power and resources, produced ethnoracially-inscribed spaces in the twentieth-century American city with significant material and symbolic consequences for domestic racial formations, global flows of capital, the use and organization of urban space, and the reproduction of ethnic identity and community. To analyze these processes, I have focused on Little Tokyo, a Japanese American enclave in existence in Los Angeles, California for more than one hundred years. Although geographically small, Little Tokyo -- as a diverse downtown neighborhood undergoing multiple cycles of disinvestment and reinvestment, while remaining linked to a transnational community occupying radically dissimilar positions in the U.S. racial hierarchy at different historical moments -- represents a key element in the spatial development of U.S. cities in the twentieth century: the creating, claiming, and sustaining of ghettos, barrios, and ethnic enclaves. The story of Little Tokyo's formation and development offers necessary lessons on the opportunities and challenges of shaping a just and nurturing home in our collective urban future.; I begin by exploring the immigrant and racialized communities sharing the spaces of Little Tokyo at the start of the twentieth century, the racial state's efforts to contain and domesticate them, and the spatial practices through which enclave communities resisted these efforts. I then analyze the more extensive and brutal spatial policies of the racial state during World War II, and the experiences of African American war workers and returning Japanese American evacuees sharing the enclave. In the following decades, urban redevelopment divided the Japanese American community until a consensus was achieved in support of the spatial and memorial practice of historic preservation in Little Tokyo. Finally, I describe the contemporary focus on constituting community through the enclave even as ethnic identity is appropriated and commodified by the (multi)racial state and private capital. My sources range from archival collections housed at Stanford University, the Huntington Library, and the University of California at Los Angeles to ethnographic observation and interviews with significant Little Tokyo figures past and present