Review
Reviewed Work(s): Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn's Sunset Park by
Tarry Hum
Review by: Van C. Tran
Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Fall 2016), pp. 120-122
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History
Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.1.0120
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Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2016
certainly powered those efforts, but Chen suggests that the efforts also demonstrate
the “resistance and perseverance of Chinese Americans in the face of enormous
hostilities” (p. 4).
In essence, Chop Suey, USA regards what may be taken for granted as mundane—the Chinese take-­out box—and unpacks an epic set of stories behind its
rise. Chen’s series of narratives are thorough in their details yet accessible in the
prose. That said, at times, he detours into brief but non-­intuitive tangents. It is not
clear why, for example, he includes a subsection on Karl Marx’s failure to anticipate
the popular “desire to avoid home cooking” (p. 40). Likewise, it is confusing why
Chen includes a recipe for making gumbo even while admitting “I have not found
evidence that [Chinese domestic cooks prepared] gumbo” (p. 64).
These small shortcomings aside, Chop Suey, USA offers a compelling and provocative contribution to the burgeoning field of American food studies. At the very
least, Chen’s discussion of the preconditions behind the success of Chinese food
should provide other scholars and interested food aficionados with a bountiful set
of ideas to debate and—forgive the pun—chew on.
Oliver Wang
California State University, Long Beach
Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. By Tarry
Hum. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 2014. viii + 286 pp. $89.50
(cloth); $32.95 (paper).
How does immigration transform urban neighborhoods in New York City? How
does immigration connect global flows of financial capital with local communities?
How do residents and businesses negotiate their cultural and social differences in
multi-­ethnic settings? This important book addresses these three related questions,
while yielding original insights into the historical, cultural, and social transformations of Sunset Park over the last decades.
Sunset Park is the quintessential immigrant neighborhood. A century ago, it was
home to burgeoning Finnish and Scandinavian enclaves, whose legacies remain in
the many churches in the neighborhood today. In the 1970s, it became predominantly
Puerto Rican. Since the 1990s, the influx of Mexican and Chinese immigrants has
given the neighborhood its current multicultural, multi-­ethnic, and multilingiual
character. In 2010, Sunset Park was a “Chino-­Latino” neighborhood, with its total
population being 44 percent Latino and 38 percent Asian (p. 4).
Theoretically, the book argues that Sunset Park is a “global immigrant neighborhood” where local neighborhood conditions are shaped by broader global forces.
One important mechanism linking the “global” to the “local” is the infusion of
global capital into this immigrant neighborhood, which fueled the pro-­growth urban
agenda under the Bloomberg administration. At the same time, the book challenges
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Reviews121
the “ethnic enclave” perspective, which homogenizes both race-­and class-­based
differences within ethnic neighborhoods. This case study reveals Asian neighborhoods as “multiracial and contested spaces” (p. 9). From its proposed pagoda-­style
“Friendship Arch” on 8th Avenue as a tribute to its Little Fuzhou community to its
annual Puerto Rican Day Parade, this increasingly multi-­ethnic neighborhood is
anything but monolithic.
Methodologically, this book draws on diverse sources, including census and
administrative data; observations of community board meetings and public hearings; as well as interviews with public officials, non-­profits, and local residents.
As a rich neighborhood case study, its strength lies in its ethnographic focus and
in-­depth accounts of the social transformations that have taken place. The focus on
neighborhood institutions such as labor unions, ethnic banks, and small businesses
as key actors in the revitalization process is an important contribution. The author
also draws extensively on her own experience as a local resident both before and
during her fieldwork, which provides a unique vantage point into the question of
neighborhood change.
The book’s five substantive chapters cover several important and connected
themes: ethnic succession, de-­industrialization, gentrification and urban renewal,
and revival of the waterfront. The book also draws attention to the role of “immigrant growth coalitions”—a group of bankers, real estate developers, community
leaders, local politicians, and ethnic power brokers who worked together to promote
the most recent phase of revitalization and redevelopment. Specifically, chapters
2 and 3 trace the neighborhood’s history of ethnoracial transition and its present
revitalization along with its ethnic occupational niches. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on
ethnic banks and their roles in neighborhood gentrification in the recent decade.
For example, the total deposit in Sunset Park banks was approximately 1.2 billion
in 2012, with 29 percent—or $351 million—held in Chinese banks (p. 114). This
infusion of global capital is vital to local ethnic businesses. Chapter 6 highlights
the connections between environmental justice and sustainability as the neighborhood struggles to transform its heavy concentration of power plants and sewage
treatment facilities into a more “green” and sustainable post-­industrial economy.
More generally, the book reveals the opportunities for multi-­ethnic coalitions
and alliances, as well as the barriers for ethnic solidarity and community cohesion in a diverse setting. The transformation of this formerly working-­class white
neighborhood into its multi-­ethnic present highlights the fluid and contested nature
of neighborhood spaces. From debates about public use of space to discussions
on ethnic street vendors, local residents must constantly negotiate multiple social
differences in their daily lives.
In sum, the author’s urban planning background, along with her keen ethnographic
insights, provides a unique blend of theoretical arguments and substantive findings.
Although the book is informative throughout, three critical observations are in order.
First, the book highlights the “global” nature of Sunset Park while downplaying
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its “transnational” nature. Because these global influences are facilitated by immigrants who often lead transnational lives, a transnational perspective would have
provided a window into how these global, local, and transnational processes are all
interconnected. Second, the book could have adopted a more comparative approach
by addressing why these global flows of financial capital are disproportionately
concentrated within the Chinese community, and not in the Latino community that
shares the same neighborhood. Finally, I wish that the author had chosen to present
the quotations from the qualitative interviews directly in the book, which would
have allowed these diverse and rich voices to be heard. Despite these limitations,
the book should be of interest to historians and immigration scholars who work at
the intersection of intergroup relations, race, and urban space, as well as gentrification and urban inequality.
Van C. Tran
Columbia University
The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream. By Desirée J. Garcia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2015. 208 pp. Illustrations, notes, index, and bibliography. $85 (cloth); $27.95
(paper).
When the academic study of musicals took off in the 1980s, it was dominated
by a presumption of homogeneity. When people wrote on musicals, it was assumed
they were writing about “Hollywood musicals,” which, in his powerful critique, Australian critic Adrian Martin further refined to mean the big-­budget, high-­spectacle
films exemplified by MGM of the 1940s—and not, say, musicals from Germany,
India, Spain; Russian factory musicals; or independently made musicals (Adrian
Martin, “Musical Mutations: Before, beyond and against Hollywood,” in Cinesonic:
Experiencing the Soundtrack, ed. Philip Brophy, Moore Park, NSW: Australian
Film, Television, and Radio School, 2001, 67–104). That U.S.-­centrism has recently
been upended, thanks in part to Desirée J. Garcia’s first book, The Migration of
Musical Film. Garcia forcefully demonstrates how the musical, even within U.S.
contexts, was never monolithic, with singular meanings, histories, audiences, or
effects, but in fact has always been a transnational, trans-­ethnic phenomenon.
Garcia makes her case by focusing on the subgenre of “folk musicals,” musicals
that extol the virtue of a usually rural community or of small towns of the past,
typically exemplified by films such as Oklahoma! or The Music Man. Contrary to
those examples, and to much of that early musical scholarship, Garcia argues that
the folk musical did not originate all of a sudden in Hollywood—­or on Broadway,
when Oklahoma! premiered in 1943—­but was rooted in earlier independent African American, Jewish and Yiddish, and Mexican and Mexican American musical
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