just for the fun, let's juxtapose two stories this week about Asians coming to California and dealing with land ownership.
The backdrop is the California Alien Land Law of 1913, a law repealed in 1952, which prohibited people ineligible for American citizenship, primarily Asians, from owning land. This was part of a raft of racist laws aimed at controlling Asian immigration, including barring Asian laborers from entry, and restriction of commercial fishing licenses to citizens.
One of the long-term consequences of this series of laws, which began with the Naturalization Act of 1790, was that Asians, although a substantial presence in the US since the mid-19th century, remained permanent foreigners -- literally alienated from the land -- in the American imagination. So, jumping ahead a century or two, how's this gonna play with 1) a conflict between government and squatter farmers, and 2) Chinese real estate carpetbaggers?
The Hmong community of Fresno is the second largest Hmong settlement in the States. Earlier this fall a Hmong community garden created without permission 13 years ago on public land was threatened when the city decided to take back the land to build a police station.
There are 20 gardeners feeding around 300 people from this 4 acre plot. Over time the gardeners got grants and acknowledgment from organizations, with the approval of parks and recreation, but no formal permission. But then parks and recreation transferred the $750,000 parcel of land to the police, and the gardeners were supposed to be out by Nov 1.
The community looked to a new parks director to help them and at first he was enthusiastic.
He envisioned a cultural center, a park, carving the garden into smaller plots involving more people from all over the city, walkways, statues. It would be called the National Hmong Friendship Garden. The plans cost $2,500.
"He had plans drawn up. They were beautiful, expansive," says Edie Jessup, director of a hunger nutrition project with Metro Ministry. "We were all impressed. But then he said, 'By the way, it's up to you to raise the millions of dollars.' "
Of course, the garden was partly about growing food for a community that was "still struggl(ing) with poverty and food bills." City officials said the police department served the community as a whole, and that was that.
After protest and advocacy -- and the great article in the Fresno Bee I linked to above -- the city tried to arrange to move the police station to another site, but the plan was kiboshed when the city council tied on the vote. Now the garden has to move, although it hasn't yet.
Given the same state, and the same time frame, we have a much different second story: Curbed SF tipped me off to a new trend in China: organizing real estate trips to downturn-hobbled San Francisco, LA, and Vegas to buy up foreclosed homes.
As we have learned, the combination of rising housing prices in China and the appreciation of the Renminbi coupled with declining real estate prices in the US and the depreciation of the US dollar, has already become an impetus for Chinese investors to buy properties in the US. Besides, due to the continuous appreciation of the Renminbi, it is more cost effective to shop in the US. At the same time, the US sub-prime crisis has forced the prices of some of the mortgaged houses to drop, increasing the interest of some investors to go house hunting.
Apparently, half these folks
plan to buy houses when the US housing market is at its low level so that they can keep their children company when they study in the US. "My daughter started school in the US in August this year. I might as well buy a house if it is really cheap and I can visit her by the way," said ... one of the registered members.
Because of the decline of foreign students from the Islamic world due to post-9/11 immigration difficulties, 57% of foreign students currently in the United States are from Asia.
Okay. On the one hand, we've got a classic immigrant grit story superimposed on a group of refugees from a botched American war. They are traditionally agrarian, they're poor and dispossessed, they've squatted government land, and their welfare is not considered to coincide with broader community welfare. On the other hand, we have our greatest fear: an Asian superpower rising to meet us at a moment when our economy is faltering and our military superiority isn't doing us any good; citizens of that superpower are replacing us in our very own, white-picket-fenced dream homes, and not even living there but using them as edu-dachas!
The first is an age-old enclosure of the commons issue updated to post-Cold-War racialization, where the enclosing force is actually public ownership of a more institutional sort. The second is a new (or is it age-old?) situation: the US as exploited, exploitable land. This will be the first time since ... I don't know ... ever? ... that the US. has had foreign carpetbaggers coming in to take advantage of the mess we got ourselves into. And our family homes are now being colonized by the very people the US colonized in the mid-19th century. Does this make them Asian Americans, or are they going to be something else, something new?
Are these just the same old themes playing out yet again? Are we seeing new trends in immigration, land, ownership, conflict? Are there similarities in these two cases?
Discuss.
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