UC Santa Barbara

My dissertation explores the contemporary contradictions of the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of Chicanidad/Latinidad within global capitalism. Specifically, I investigate the 21st-century connections and exchanges between China and Chicanx/Latinx populations in Los Angeles, a top location of transnational investments from China and home to the largest Latinx and Chinese descent populations in the United States. These objective connections have created exchanges that are contradictory and messy as they are alternately exploitative and collaborative, local and internationalist. I argue global capitalism has internationalized Chicanx politics within the global city of Los Angeles. Through transnational cultural commodification, labor relations, real estate, and the logistics industry Chicanx politics become dialectically connected with China’s growth in the global economy. It is ironic that as China grew in global political and economic power which has impacted 21st century Los Angeles that there has been little or no scholarship on the Chinese exchange in Chicanx/Latinx Studies. Thus, I anchor this project in Chicanx Studies and intersect with Critical Globalization Studies, Labor Studies, China Studies, and Critical Environmental Justice Studies to identify the dialectical nature of local and structural forces which reveals how power, resistance, and collaboration undergird unique China-Chicanx exchanges that involve various conflicts and syntheses within the context of global capitalism. My dissertation makes a unique intellectual intervention that builds upon historian Roberto Chao Romero’s call to develop, “Chino-Chicano Studies,” by bringing a substantive focus on the relations between Chinese capital, Chinese descent populations in Southern California, and Chicanx/Latinx populations.To capture the complexities and ideological vicissitudes of this relationship, I use a conjunctural case study approach that employs mixed methods: content analysis, participant observation, structured interviews, descriptive statistics, and oral history. I interrogate “authentic” food in the Los Angeles San Gabriel Valley, Latinx immigrant restaurant labor, commercial real estate development, and environmental internationalism. I draw from sociologist William Robinson, Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldua, and environmental anthropologist Devon Peña to develop Chicanx Material Conditions. The concept of Chicanx Material Conditions connects the particular geographic characteristics with the broad cultural political economic realities that undergird identity, resistance to exploitation/subordination, and complex power dynamics central to Chicanx/Latinx populations. Robinson’s analysis of global capitalism illuminates the transnational organization of investments which challenges the legitimacy of the nation-state and ultimately has dramatic local effects. Anzaldua’s new tribalism pushes static identitarian politics to embrace the relational aspect of identity to reflect changes under globalization, particularly various layers of transculturation and urbanization. I follow Peña’s call for community-based action research to anchor scholarship in ongoing social movements. Thus, I investigate Chicanx Material Conditions through case studies on the San Gabriel Valley restaurant industry’s importance to the local economy, racialized labor hierarchies in these restaurants, a Chicano politician Jose Huizar as an agent of dispossession, and environmental solidarity between Los Angeles and Beijing. The evidence empirically adds to the field of contemporary China-Chicanx Studies and the theoretical contributions of Chicanx Material Conditions grounds Chicanx Studies in contemporary material realities that 1) transnationalize the geographical scope of Chicanx Studies to center China and 2) embrace the changing, and at times contradictory, nature of identity within global capitalism.