University of Chicago Press
Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California
Key Metrics
- Charlotte Brooks
- University of Chicago Press
- Hardcover
- 9780226075976
- 9.2 X 6.3 X 1 inches
- 1.4 pounds
- Social Science > Ethnic Studies - American - Asian American Studies
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Between the early 1900s and the late 1950s, the attitudes of white Californians toward their Asian American neighbors evolved from outright hostility to relative acceptance. Charlotte Brooks examines this transformation through the lens of California's urban housing markets, arguing that the perceived foreignness of Asian Americans, which initially stranded them in segregated areas, eventually facilitated their integration into neighborhoods that rejected other minorities.
Against the backdrop of cold war efforts to win Asian hearts and minds, whites who saw little difference between Asians and Asian Americans increasingly advocated the latter group's access to middle-class life and the residential areas that went with it. But as they transformed Asian Americans into a model minority, whites purposefully ignored the long backstory of Chinese and Japanese Americans' early and largely failed attempts to participate in public and private housing programs. As Brooks tells this multifaceted story, she draws on a broad range of sources in multiple languages, giving voice to an array of community leaders, journalists, activists, and homeowners--and insightfully conveying the complexity of racialized housing in a multiracial society.
Author Bio
I am a historian of the twentieth-century United States and of the Chinese diaspora. My scholarship spans numerous fields, including immigration, race, Asian American history, politics, and urban history. I received my B.A. from Yale College and my M.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. The author of three books and numerous articles, I am a professor of history at Baruch College, CUNY.
I am currently working on two new book-length projects. An American Family: The Moys of New York and Shanghai, is my first piece of narrative non-fiction. It follows the lives of six Chinese American siblings and their spouses during the exclusion era and into the postwar years. The second, Selling America in China, is a scholarly study of the promoters, diplomats, and small businesspeople who sold American products and ideas in and to republican China.
My occasional blog, Asian American History in New York City looks at sites of significance to Asian American history in the five boroughs. Someday, I’ll have time to regularly update it again!
Source: Blogs.baruch.cuny.edu
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