Beyond the Traditional Enclave: Operationalizing Different Ethnic Neighborhoods

Purpose: Ethnic minority groups live in various types of neighborhoods across U.S. metropolitan areas. Where they live is largely dependent upon the length of time in which they established communities within the larger area. Guided by the spatial assimilation model, this study assumes that immigrants and their children spatially integrate into more diverse neighborhoods as they achieve upward socioeconomic mobility. While immigrant groups initially resided in ethnic enclaves (the original context of immigrant reception), subsequent generations will relocate to neighborhoods that are more recently conceptualized as the ethnoburb.  The ethnoburb is higher income and more racially/ethnically diverse compared to an enclave. As such, I sought to answer the following question: To what extent are enclaves and ethnoburbs present for five Asian ethnic groups (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Southeast Asian) across Los Angeles County zip codes?

Method: In order to create typologies for ethnic neighborhoods (i.e., enclave, ethnoburb), I utilized a classification tree to establish cutoffs based on distributions of several criteria across 319 zip codes across Los Angeles County.  The American Community Survey (2011) provided the estimates for percent ethnicity, population density, and median household income.  A zip code was classified as an ethnic neighborhood when the percent ethnicity is greater than one standard deviation from the average percentage across Los Angeles.  I established terciles based on the ranges for population density (range = 0 to 50,788) and median household income (range = $0 to $216,500).  Zip codes with low/medium population density and medium/high income were classified as ethnoburbs, and zip codes with high population density and low income were classified as enclaves.  Second, due to the exploratory nature of operationalizing the ethnoburb, I conducted a series of interviews with informants for the ethnic neighborhoods. Qualitative analyses were conducted using an inductive coding approach.  Patterns and themes were extracted from the interviews to provide a deeper understanding of ethnic neighborhoods, as well as to compare characteristics for ethnic enclaves and ethnoburbs across different ethnic groups.

Results: To assess accuracy of ethnic neighborhoods that the classification tree identified, I confirmed the presence of Chinese ethnoburbs based on its alignment with previous literature.  This methodology also yielded several known enclaves (e.g., Koreatown and Cambodia Town) and ethnoburbs (e.g., Filipino in Carson, Japanese in Torrance).  There are currently no true Japanese and Chinese enclaves given that these ethnic populations have been settled in Los Angeles for several generations. Upon giving their perspectives on defining the two types of neighborhoods, the common thread among key informants was that low income, walkability, and ethnic community cohesion distinguished ethnic enclaves from ethnoburbs. 

Conclusions: The current research carries implications for conceptualizing and operationalizing the ethnic neighborhood beyond the traditional enclave, which is also theorized to be protective for youth (mainly studied among Latinos).  It is important to consider the nuances that exist within immigrant neighborhoods for varying racial categories, e.g., Asian and Latino, that might give way to various social forces and mechanisms that explain risk and well-being among ethnically and racially diverse populations.