UCLA

From the Garden to the Streets: Working-Class Immigrant Foodways as Resistance in a Gentrifying Los Angeles Chinatown explores how foodways traditional to working-class senior immigrants in Los Angeles Chinatown provide grassroots organizing tools and epistemological frameworks to challenge gentrification, exercise the right to the city, and reimagine community health. Through both a research thesis and a community-oriented storybook presenting creative text, photographs, and visual illustrations, From the Garden to the Streets centers these seniors and their life experiences in relation to their sense of well-being, self-determination, and collectivity. Foodways provides a critical lens to explore the intersection of race, class, and space in the neighborhood, while their stories paint a complex and multidimensional narrative of Chinatown.

An unsustainable and inequitable form of neoliberal economic development facilitated by capitalist structures of power, gentrification is an intentional process of racial, spatial, and economic segregation. It aims to physically and figuratively erase the livelihoods and narratives of working-class senior immigrants who are deviant to the state. The sites of gardens and informal food economies produce knowledge and social networks that foster the community’s cultural wealth and collective power for resistance. Ultimately, these sites produce anti-capitalist politics that have the potential to actualize a vision of an equitable Chinatown that continues to support the poor, the elderly, and immigrants. Highlighting their narratives, thus utilizing their knowledge production as tools to address gentrification, renders possible working-class senior immigrants’ seemingly impossible continued existence in the midst of a gentrifying Chinatown.