UC Irvine

This dissertation examines the introduction of governmental technologies that have shaped the formation of three ethnic museums in downtown Los Angeles, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), La Plaza de Cultura y Artes (LAPCA), and the Chinese American Museum (CAM), to provide a critical genealogy that reconstructs the histories, political rationalities, and traces the implementation of new models of financialization that converged to form these institutions. Earlier studies of ethnic museums have stressed the ways the city’s ethnic museums have either constructed or contested the representation of ethnic Otherness. Instead, this dissertation examines how the formation of downtown’s ethnic museums were formed by networks of governmentalities that were mobilized in the last decades of the twentieth-century that accelerated the redevelopment of the ethnic neighborhoods that surrounded these ethnic specific institutions.This project uncovers how the disciplinary technologies of land use, zoning laws, immigration policy, and urban redevelopment, were utilized in the creation of the museums examined in this study. As I explore in this project, the creation of this trio of museums provides a crucial key to understanding the means through which these institutions have arrived at their present configurations in the city’s cultural economy. My project’s focus on the formation and impact of downtown’s Los Angeles’ ethnic museums uncovers the various roles these institutions have played in the creative destruction of downtown Los Angeles’ historic ethnic enclaves in the latter half of the twentieth century. My approach assumes that understanding the ‘how’ of museum-making is a crucial prerequisite to future discussions of policy alternatives and approaches to the institutional formation these museums and others like them may wish to explore to ensure their sustained economic survival and continued relevance to their audiences.