Chinatown: The Ethnopole as an Informal Capital City

The development of Japantown and Manilatown in San Francisco was in one form or another influenced by the existence of Chinatown, the first Asian-American ethnopole in the city. Anglo-Californians developed their prejudices against Asian Americans based on the early model of their interaction with nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants. 32 Various debilitating forms of racism — the manipulation of the legal system to create and maintain a space of difference, racial discrimination, housing segregation, covenant clauses to prevent integration, and spatial ghettoization — that the constructed mainstream system used to marginalize the Chinese newcomers were time and again applied to subalternize both Filipino Americans and Japanese Americans. The fates of these three minoritized groups seemed tied to one another as each followed a different path of development and each exhibited variations in the ways in which it dealt with the mainstream. Since its birth as an ethnopole, however, Chinatown has emerged as the preeminent informal capital city for the larger Chinese population in Northern California in particular and a symbolic capital city for Chinese Americans in general. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.