Charlotte Brooks. Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xv + 329 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-07597-6.
Reviewed by Jennifer Fang (University of Delaware)
Published on H-California (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Eileen V. Wallis (Cal Poly Pomona)
Asian American Struggles for Housing and Equality in Urban California
Charlotte Brooks’s Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends is a well-researched examination of Asian Americans’ housing struggles in California from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s. Brooks focuses on housing discrimination experienced by Japanese Americans in the Los Angeles area and Chinese Americans in the San Francisco area to explain the “startlingly rapid racial transformation of mid-century California” (p. 7). She asserts that “how and where Asian Americans found homes, or were denied them, is one of the best ways to understand California’s racial dynamics and why they changed over the course of just a few decades” (p. 2). California’s racial diversity, in particular its significant Asian American population, allows Brooks to paint a picture of housing discrimination that goes beyond black versus white struggles. Brooks uses housing as a lens to understand changing white Americans’ conceptualizations of their own racial identities and where they drew racial boundaries. It also serves as a way to measure Asian Americans’ interactions with the developing American welfare state throughout the twentieth century.
Brooks’s work is centered on how white Californians’ changing conceptualizations of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners informed the degree to which these individuals had access to the housing market. Brooks argues that white Californians’ perceptions of Asian Americans as “alien neighbors” in the late nineteenth century to the World War II years lay at the root of Chinese and Japanese Americans’ ineligibility for citizenship, lack of political rights, and unequal access to housing rights and privileges. By the 1950s, Asian Americans’ housing opportunities and political rights expanded as they increasingly came to be viewed by white Californians as “foreign friends,” a more favorable characterization, but one that still maintained Chinese Americans’ foreignness. Wrapped up in Cold War motives to improve America’s reputation abroad as a truly egalitarian and democratic society, Brooks argues that white Americans viewed Asian American housing integration as a necessary sacrifice in America’s struggle against Communism.
Alternating between Chinese Americans in San Francisco and Japanese Americans in Los Angeles, the first five chapters trace Asian Americans’ housing struggles from the 1870s to the eve of World War II. Brooks begins with an examination of the establishment of San Francisco’s Chinatown--“America’s first segregated neighborhood”--during the late nineteenth century when mounting anti-Chinese sentiments led to the increased segregation of Chinese Americans in San Francisco (p. 11). In 1920s Los Angeles, the focus of the second chapter, white Angelenos, bound together by a shared conceptualization of “white Nordic Protestant” superiority, demanded residential segregation (p. 39). Though driven by differing motives, white Angelenos worked together with anti-Asian activists to prevent Japanese, Mexicans, and blacks from moving into white neighborhoods. These patterns of settlement shaped Los Angeles’s residential development for the next two decades.
White Californians’ perceptions of Asian Americans as fundamentally foreign affected Chinese and Japanese Americans in San Francisco and Los Angeles in different ways during the Great Depression and World War II. Brooks argues that in Los Angeles, the New Deal social welfare state operated on a three-track system in which white male wage earners received generous benefits with no shame attached, blacks and Mexicans received substandard assistance, and Asian Americans were denied any access to such programs. The denial of social welfare to Asian Americans intensified racial segregation, placed Asian Americans outside of the emerging welfare state, and undermined the meaning of Asian American citizenship in Los Angeles. Brooks explains that by 1940, mounting tensions between the United States and Japan led white Angelenos to increasingly question Japanese Americans’ loyalty to the United States. These attitudes informed the motives of citizens who were determined to stop Nisei ambitions to construct housing developments for poorly housed Nisei and Issei in South Los Angeles.
Ironically, Brooks argues that San Franciscans’ perceptions of Chinese Americans as perpetual foreigners enabled Chinatown to fare better than the Japanese Americans of Los Angeles. Americans’ increasing sympathy to China during the Sino-Japanese War led many tourists to treat Chinatown as an extension of China. Because of Chinatown’s importance to San Francisco’s tourist economy, the city worked together with the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Society to open a shelter to house unemployed Chinese “bachelors.” Unemployed Chinese Americans would also later receive assistance from the State Emergency Relief Administration.
Brooks frames World War II as the turning point in white Californians’ perceptions of Asian Americans. However, this shift did not occur evenly or without consequence. While the federal government’s view of Japanese Americans as a racial threat led to their subsequent internment, the wartime alliance with China fueled the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Brooks argues that in San Francisco, although Chinese Americans remained as racially and culturally alien as ever, white Californians began to view them in a slightly more positive manner as racist attitudes shifted toward Japanese Americans and toward the growing population of blacks who had migrated to the Bay Area in search of wartime jobs.
Asian Americans came to be viewed as “foreign friends” during the postwar years as white Californians “felt obligated to welcome [Asian Americans], if only for the good of a nation” (p. 7). Brooks argues that in San Francisco and Los Angeles, “perceived national security imperatives eventually overrode older local racial traditions” (p. 197). As many white Californians began to view Asian American integration as a matter of American foreign policy and national security, Chinese and Japanese community organizations, including the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and Japanese American Citizens League, mobilized and worked together across racial and ethnic boundaries to assert Asian Americans’ housing rights.
Drawing on a diverse array of sources including court cases and residential disputes, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends makes significant contributions to suburban and urban history in California, and Asian American studies. For scholars outside of Asian American studies, Brooks’s work is useful in illuminating how Asian Americans experienced the Great Depression, Cold War, and civil rights years. In particular, Brooks’s analysis of the Oyama v. California (1948) case and Sing Sheng versus Southwood 1952 residential dispute provides rich details and thoughtful insights into how anti-Asian attitudes and Asian American cultural citizenship were debated in the legal system and among private citizens.
Divided into two sections, Brooks’s study is an examination of California’s shifting attitudes toward racial minorities before and after World War II. However, Brooks’s treatment of prewar and postwar California is rather uneven--five chapters trace developments from the late nineteenth century to the eve of the war, while only three explore the important developments that occurred during World War II and the Cold War. Brooks’s focus on Chinese and Japanese Americans in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas also raises questions worth addressing about the extent to which these cities served or did not serve as a barometer for how Asians Americans (including non-Chinese and Japanese Americans) fared in other parts of California and the rest of the United States.
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Citation:
Jennifer Fang. Review of Brooks, Charlotte, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California.
H-California, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32731
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