From the Mainland to the Islands: Mapping the Political Geographies of Koreatown and Chinese Monterey Park, LA

This article analyzes how local political contexts at the municipal and intra-ethnic community levels shape the participation of immigrant place entrepreneurs in local growth politics and their pathways of entry into it. Based on in-depth interviews in Koreatown and Monterey Park in Los Angeles, the paper illustrates how immigrant involvement in local development evolves in response to differences in governance arrangements, electoral influence, and spatial scale. The findings show that the composition and organization of immigrant leadership, along with its position within the regional configuration of ethnoburbs, not only shape the strength of immigrant influence in land use outcomes but also how that influence is recognized, brokered, and constrained by public officials and neighboring growth regimes. Furthermore, political empowerment for immigrant and racial minority communities is often connected to place-based interests, as ethnic identity can shape how neighborhoods and commercial districts are valued, defended, and governed. The comparison highlights contrasting models of immigrant-led development politics: Koreatown operates as an auxiliary to Los Angeles’s dominant growth regime, concentrating leverage among a narrow set of well-positioned actors in a vertical and institutionally centralized political system, while Monterey Park exhibits a more autonomous, horizontally oriented model shaped by majority-representation governance and regional competition and cooperation. Across both cases, immigrant growth politics reflects coalitions in which place-based identity and capital-driven strategies interact in shaping development outcomes.