The Changs Next Door to the Díazes

Abstract

The book examines how the everyday experiences of residents of a multiracial, “majority-minority,” suburban area in Southern California shape distinctive notions of race, privilege, and belonging. At a moment in which Asian Americans and Latinas/os are becoming a significant presence in American suburbs, such dynamics illustrate the increasingly relevant role of middle-income, majority-nonwhite spaces to understanding racial formation in the twenty-first century. In particular, the development and assertion of an emergent multiracial, nonwhite identity points to the social, cultural, and political possibilities we might find in the rapidly increasing number of “majority-minority” suburbs in the United States to challenge the reproduction of white privilege and racially exclusive notions of belonging. In its conceptualization of regional racial formation, this is the first work to explicitly link the importance of place and place-making to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential concept of racial formation. The main audience for this book will be scholars and students in ethnic studies, American studies, urban and suburban studies, geography, sociology, California and Los Angeles studies.

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