Clash of Cultures & the Discovery of Gold      123456

Building Community in Suburban Monterey Park

Most Taiwanese immigrants avoided settling in the typical Chinatowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles in favor of suburban areas. Chief among these was Monterey Park, in Los Angeles County.

The immigrants from Taiwan came to Monterey Park at a critical moment in that city’s history. What had been an almost entirely white suburban town was by the 1950s becoming multiethnic, with Latinos and Japanese Americans present in modest numbers. By 1970, however, 15 percent of the population was Asian, but only 30 percent of that group was Chinese (most were U.S.-born Japanese Americans). The Taiwanese began arriving in large numbers in the late 1960s and continued to come through the 1970s. By 1980, 35 percent of the residents were Asian, 41 percent of whom were Chinese or Taiwanese.

Little Taipei

In the 1970s the city gained a new name, Little Taipei, in recognition of the fact that most Chinese living there were Mandarin speakers from Taiwan, not Cantonese speakers from mainland China. By the late 1980s, however, Cantonese speakers and Vietnamese immigrants came to dominate the immigrant population. By 1990, Asians had become the majority census group category in the city.