Ethnic enclaves

DEFINITION: Usually urban areas, within which culturally distinct minority communities maintain ways of life largely separate from those of the generally larger communities that surround them

SIGNIFICANCE: Ethnic enclaves have long played, and continue to play, significant and normally peaceful roles in bridging the periods between the arrivals of new and culturally different immigrant groups and their assimilation into United States (US) society. At the same time, they have also, to some degree, prolonged assimilation periods, and their presence has sometimes been perceived as an inflammatory refusal on the immigrants’ part to join the American nation.

One of the most enduring self-images of US society is that of the melting pot—that is, the notion that the US is a country into which immigrants from multiple points of origin have come, intermingled, intermarried, and produced new citizens endowed with a rich, intermixed cultural heritage. Although the melting pot theory has been widely challenged in the twenty-first century, it is an image that served the country well, providing the philosophical foundations for the widespread acceptance of the culturally pluralistic, or multicultural, nation that emerged in the US during the second half of the twentieth century.

The melting pot image also rests on a firm empirical base, albeit mostly on the frontier, where immigrant groups often spread out, where marriageable partners from within the same “Old World” communities were often hard to find, and where the harshness and dangers of life necessitated collaboration across ethnic and cultural lines. In the coastal cities where immigrants arrived and in the urban areas across the country where ethnic groups settled in large numbers, however, a different pattern prevailed. In big cities, neighborhoods with revealing names such as Germantown, Chinatown, and Little Italy often sprang up. These communities led day-to-day internal lives quite apart from those of the broader, usually English-speaking communities around them and the other ethnic enclaves that sometimes abutted them. Comforting in origin and resilient over time, many of these early ethnic enclaves have survived in some form into the twenty-first century across the US. They have been joined by new ethnic enclaves created, especially in the suburbs, by more recently arrived immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

Culture Shock and Ethnic Enclaves

The factors that produced and continue to lead to the emergence of these ethnic neighborhoods are varied and, in some instances, idiosyncratic. One pervasive element, however, has doubtless been the normal human desire to remain within one’s comfort zone and the associated reluctance to move precipitously outside one’s cultural community in one’s new homeland. It is one of the standard reactions to minority status across time and space. Where enough members of a person’s point of origin to sustain the development of an ethnic neighborhood are living, ethnic enclaves have arisen among immigrant countries worldwide.

Other factors also work to foster and sustain such enclaves. None is more common or significant than the two-sided nature of the culture shock that groups from differing ethnic backgrounds experience when they first encounter one another. For newcomers, immersion in a foreign culture, adjusting to a different economic setting—such as urban rather than rural—and perhaps encountering a different dominant language and a different religion can all combine to produce a strong desire to re-create a more familiar environment. The re-creation of the remembered homeland by incoming immigrants, often from a single village or province, provides a secure environment to return to after a daily bath in the outside culture. Such a setting can even serve as a cocoon within which a day-to-day life not too distant from that of the land of origin can be preserved, in which a familiar religion can be practiced, in which an immigrant entrepreneur class can develop, and in which the process of assimilating to the new world can be eased.

Meanwhile, encounters with the newly arrived can also result in a culture shock to the host culture, whose members may resent the immigrants’ “otherness” and ways of life and even fear that the new immigrants’ willingness to accept wages below prevailing market rates may threaten their own economic status. In extreme cases, new organizations may emerge to oppose the immigrants’ presence and even commit violence against them to “keep them in their place.” American history holds no shortage of such organizations. Outstanding examples included the post–Civil War Know-Nothing Party and the Ku Klux Klan, whose bigotry extended far beyond harassing formerly enslaved people to target Jews and Roman Catholics as well. However, even nonviolent forms of rejection, such as restrictive housing covenants designed to keep unwanted ethnic and racial groups out of existing neighborhoods, also played a role in the creation and endurance of ethnic enclaves in twentieth-century America. In such environments, ethnic neighborhoods became more than cultural and economic oases. They also became both sanctuaries from violence and secure homelands within a hostile world.

Life within Enclaves

As immigrants moved inland from their coastal points of arrival, ethnic enclaves became common in cities throughout the country. Their presence remained strong during the early twenty-first century, though often in less heavily populated centers. They have sometimes taken the forms of small restaurant or tourist districts rather than the microcosms of cultural distinctiveness they constituted a century earlier. At least a score of US cities, and another half-dozen in Canada and Mexico, contain Chinatowns. Little Indias exist in at least a dozen US cities, Germantowns and Little Italies are almost ubiquitous parts of urban America, and even Greektowns can be found in North American cities as diverse and spread out as Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, Omaha, and Vancouver.

Although culturally distinct, these older ethnic enclaves have nonetheless exhibited significant structural similarities. For example, religion has played a strong role in the founding of most of these enclaves and a leading role in the origins of some. For Roman Catholics, Jews, and immigrants from Asia and the Middle East who have found themselves in predominantly Protestant environments upon arrival, neighborhood churches, synagogues, and temples often became the social as well as religious centers of enclaves.

At least equally important, ethnic enclaves were sustained by economic cores. Their businesses were generally owned and operated by community members, with many catering to their communities’ particular tastes and needs while providing jobs for their members. Indeed, inside the enclaves, discrimination often favored community members over outsiders because social norms sheltered the enclaves' housing, investment, and labor markets from outside competition. Consequently, ethnic enclaves often provided their members with economically secure footings to venture into the broader society. At the same time, to the extent that they became restaurant zones or otherwise attracted outsiders, ethnic enclaves fostered interaction between their members and others within secure environments. In so doing, they encouraged their own members to learn English sooner rather than later, thus facilitating the process of interethnic interaction within the linguistic polyglots that were late nineteenth-century US cities and, ultimately, the assimilation of the ethnic groups into the wider society.

Twenty-First-Century Enclaves

The history of the US as an immigrant nation continues to unfold—sometimes over the opposition of such conservative groups as those fearing the “Re-Mexicanization” of the American Southwest—as asylum seekers, refugees, and both documented and undocumented immigrants continue to enter the country. Meanwhile, the process of forming new ethnic enclaves in receiving cities within the US and Canada has continued.

The arrival of new immigrants is rapidly transforming the ethnic character of the American nation. Latinos have already replaced Black Americans as the country’s largest ethnic or racial minority, and the arrival of large numbers of Koreans, Vietnamese, and others from Southeast Asia in the last third of the twentieth century recast the Asian American profile, which previously had been dominated by Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Like their predecessors, members of these new groups have established ethnic neighborhoods, albeit increasingly in suburban areas, rather than the inner-city enclaves created by the immigrants arriving from Europe and Asia during the nineteenth century. In Washington, DC’s commuter landscape in Virginia, for example, places such as Manassas Park grew quickly in areas where ethnic minorities constituted local majorities. Moreover, as was true in the past, stores within these enclaves emerged to offer goods not readily available in the broader, outside community. In many of these communities, particularly those of Hispanic residents, foreign-language radio and television stations continue to provide stories in greater detail on life and politics in the country of origin than in the broader community’s media outlets. 

Though the demographics of immigration to the US have evolved in the twenty-first century, ethnic enclaves remain important to immigrant residents of the US and the generations of US-born descendants that have come after them. Ethnic enclaves continue to provide social and economic support while allowing those of foreign descent to maintain integral ties to their cultures. Although classic urban ethnic enclaves may no longer be the dominant trend, the number of foreign-born US residents choosing to live in ethnic-focused neighborhoods increased by 24 percent from the late 1970s through the 2010s. As anti-immigrant sentiment proliferated in the 2020s, ethnic enclaves continue to play a significant role in the US immigrant experience. 

Bibliography

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