Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 2

The adventures have started! This past week a friend and I drove east on the I-1o freeway and ventured out to the city of Rosemead, which is located 25 miles away from Westwood and about a 40 minute drive without traffic.

The first thing I noticed was the physical appearance of the place, and how it greatly differed from Westwood. The layout of the city consisted of boulevards with blocks of “mini-plazas” where stores were located and most of them were usually franchised stores. The suburban aspect of Rosemead was most noticeable when driving through the residential areas where many of the houses were each identical to the next. The lack of architectural variation was a detail that stood out to me, compared to Lima, Peru where I am from and even Westwood, the houses and stores did not vary in styles, colors, sizes, etc.  This distance between places was much more extensive as well, without a car going from one place to another was an inconvenience. As a result, there were not as many pedestrians, especially when compared to Westwood where many people walk to the stores and restaurants. In that respect, there was more of a car activity in this place and for the most part they were usually the average sedan or SUV.

Another striking aspect of Rosemead and its surrounding cities is the immediate acknowledgement of a large Asian and Hispanic community when driving through the boulevard, as many of the store signs are written either in Chinese, Vietnamese or Spanish. This observation was also reinforced when we went to the Montebello mall in the neighboring city, where many of the languages spoken were Spanish, Vietnamese or some variation of Chinese. By using Simply Map afterward, it confirmed my observation of the highly concentrated Asian and/or Hispanic community in Rosemead and it surrounding cities such as San Gabriel, Montebello, Alhambra, Arcadia, El Monte, and others.

Since my friend’s family is Chinese I had a greater exposure to the Asian culture of Rosemead. It was interesting to see that there was such a community outside of Los Angeles Chinatown, where I would think would be the center for the Asian community. However, it seems that if people wanted to have authentic Chinese food and a wide variety, these are the cities to go to. Even the supermarkets in these areas are tailored to the community, with products that were imported from Asia that would not be found at Ralphs or Vons in West LA. These cities in Los Angeles have been able to create a large community with people that share the same culture. And these places sort of become the replica of the community’s hometown in the United States. When speaking to my friends’ mother, she stated that although she left China a few years back, coming to the U.S. and living in this community did not feel too different at all. If she did not venture out of the 10 mile radius, it would not even feel that she was in a different country. Despite not speaking English, she has been able to easily adapt to life in the United States because there did not seem to have a need to learn English, when everyone in her surrounding spoke Chinese.  

This testimonial is not specific to Rosemead or Los Angeles; similar communities were generated throughout cities in the United States. In one of this week’s class reading, Ernest Burgess’s article “The Growth of the City,” he uses Chicago as an example and in that map it can be observed as well how the different communities are labeled. Burgess also mentions the idea of “centralized decentralization,” in which the focus of the Chicagoan life was no longer centered on downtown, but slowly moving towards the suburbia. He states that with all city expansions, it is the natural tendency for local communities to become a larger economic unit and these local communities will coalesce into sub-business areas. From my point of view, Los Angeles is already further along that process where there are already larger economic units formed and business zones, and Rosemead in this case, is one of these sub-business areas. The difference is that Los Angeles did not originally begin like Chicago with a concentric city lay-out. It began with different communities spread out in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. This also underscores Kling’s, Olin’s and Poster’s concept of multicentered metropolitan region from the article, “The Emergence of Post Suburbia,” where they state that through time instead of long commutes these areas will start to have centers of their own. As observed on my trip, this is the occurrence in the city of Rosemead and their neighboring cities where their business activity was no longer as dependent on the dominant business center in downtown Los Angeles, but they focused on their own city’s center. The focus could be in Rosemead itself, Monterey Park, Alhambra, Arcadia, San Gabriel, and the other neighboring places. This creates the multicentered metropolitan phenomenon in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.