Guests in someone else's house? Korean immigrants in Los Angeles negotiate American race, nationhood, and identity.

Abstract

In a conceptual move beyond US- and white/black-centered analyses, this dissertation examines the role of global and multi-racial dynamics on the racialization and identity formation processes of neither-white-nor-black Korean immigrants. Korean immigrants are an excellent case study for such a research problem given this group's heavy exposure to US culture in South Korea (e.g., via a colonized history; US military occupation and media presence) and their frequent interaction with multiple racialized groups in US cities like Los Angeles (e.g., via economic relationships). By way of a multi-sited methodology of in-depth interviewing supplemented by ethnographic data in both Seoul and Los Angeles, this study seeks to capture the following key question: how do Koreans' pre-migration views of who is American interact with Koreans' direct experiences of racialization in the US to shape their sense of whether or not they can be American? This study's findings suggest that this negotiation process is largely based on the congruence of pre- and post-migration views of US and Korean race/nationhood. Specifically, Koreans' homeland conceptions of Americans as whites, blacks as approximate yet undesirable Americans, and of themselves (and other Asians, Latinos) as outside this US racial fabric are reinforced by Koreans' direct racialization as non-American foreigners within it. Thus racialized nationality is the most influential factor as Koreans, despite their economic mobility as model minorities, believe that their phenotype both precludes their claim to Americanness and signifies their essentialized status as blood Koreans. In this process, the dynamics of multi-cultural Los Angeles foster both a reified Koreanness (especially with regard to Koreatown) and a sense of shared commonality with Asians and Latinos as foreigners. In essence, this dissertation fills the gaps of current research by examining the impact of cultural globalization on US immigrants' identity construction, but more importantly, by examining the key interactions between the homeland and the hostland US contexts in this process. Broadly speaking, then, this study captures what the identifications of neither-white-nor-black immigrants reveal more broadly about macro-processes of assimilation, transnationalism, and of racial formations locally, globally, and at the crossroads.