With gentrification, the end of racial segregation moves into LA's Highland Park neighborhood

2015-03-23T14:16:00-04:00

For years, our family journeys have taken us from our hillside home, in the multiethnic Mount Washington district of northeast Los Angeles, into the flatlands of the Latino barrios that surround it. My wife, Virginia Espino, who is Mexican-American, knows these neighborhoods well, especially the community called Highland Park. [...] “I saw them all move out,” my wife said one day, referring to the neighborhood’s white residents. “And now I’m watching them move back in.”

Archinect's Lexicon: "Ethnoburb"

2015-02-27T14:01:00-05:00

ethnoburbs (noun): "suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large American metropolitan areas. They are multi-ethnic communities, in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration, but does not necessarily comprise a majority."

Dr. Wei Li, currently a professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at ASU, coined the term while a PhD student at USC in the 1990s. The above definition is quoted from the abstract of "Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles", Li's 1998 paper where the term was first published, when Li was an assistant professor of geography and Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut.

(Google's ngram charting published instances of "ethnoburb".)

The word grew out of Li's research on Los Angeles, where high concentrations of non-white ethnicities were settling in suburban areas, such as the San Gabriel Valley, during the 1980s and 1990s. The term has since been applied to demograph...

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With gentrification, the end of racial segregation moves into LA's Highland Park neighborhood

Archinect's Lexicon: "Ethnoburb"