UC Irvine

This dissertation critiques the assimilation paradigm by highlighting the continued impact of race for third and fourth generation Japanese Americans in suburban Southern California. Despite their mass internment during WWII, assimilation scholarship since the 1960s heralds Japanese Americans as the model minority and a shining example of the colorblind promise of the "American Dream." Japanese Americans, as a group that has high socioeconomic attainment and residential integration, provides an opportunity to explore the future of ethnic communities after assimilation "success." However, through the political concept of substantive citizenship, defined as a sense of local and national belonging, I show that race continues to limit the ability of immigrant-origin communities to achieve full membership in US society. For this project, I conducted 91 in-depth interviews, as well as collected archival and visual image sources, to examine how Japanese Americans negotiate their substantive citizenship through localized practices of ethnic and racial community formation. I demonstrate that third and fourth generation Japanese Americans do not negotiate their lack of belonging by shedding their ethnic identity as dictated by assimilation theory. Rather, they rely on ethnic community to shape their sense of citizenship and belonging at both the local and national levels. Furthermore, I introduce the concept of racial replenishment of ethnicity to illustrate how the influx of similarly racialized immigration and refugees from Asia following policy reforms beginning in 1965 created a context under which later generation Japanese Americans simultaneously acknowledge their racialization as "Asian" and "forever foreigners" as well as augment their ethnic identification as "Japanese American" as unique within the panethnic label. In a final segment of my dissertation, I provide a concrete example of suburban ethnic community formation and substantive citizenship through an exploration of the relationships, community, and networks formed among the former employees of Japanese Village and Deer Park, a Japanese-themed amusement park in Orange County that employed many local sansei youth from 1967-1974. Overall, the Japanese American case opens a theoretical door for exploring the contemporary racial predicament of Latinos and other Asian Americans, the fast growing immigrant populations in the US.