As Asian families built thriving communities in Diamond Bar, Walnut, Rowland Heights and Hacienda Heights, they had to balance maintaining their heritage with adapting to mainstream American and suburban norms. Many Asian residents thus performed the rituals expected of model suburbanites: They tended to family life, prayed and shopped.
On the whole, immigrants in these communities largely attempted to fit in. When they tried to establish even conservative or basic institutions reflecting their culture, the pushback — from white residents, but also from pro-assimilation Asian people — demonstrated the stubbornness of Southern California’s suburban ideals.
Walnut especially illustrates how cultural pressures to assimilate originated both outside and within the Asian American community. Between 1980 and 1990, as Walnut’s white population fell from 75% to 48% of its total, its Asian population rose from 10% to 35%. The latter group sought modest changes. Take, for instance, St. Lorenzo Ruiz Catholic Church.
In 1992, church leaders and an architect approached Walnut’s planning commission and city council with blueprints to build a freestanding parish with a growing Filipino congregation. Walnut officials claimed St. Lorenzo’s design clashed with the suburb’s rural aesthetic, calling it “too ultramodern.” Others chided the height of the proposed cross claiming it suggested Catholicism reigned over Protestantism. Witnesses of these debates, including St. Lorenzo’s Filipino congregation, realized the criticism was less about the building plan and more about opponents’ fears that the church would mark Walnut as an Asian community.
The anti-Asian sentiment here was mostly covert, though some white critics specifically argued that the church stymied Filipinos’ abilities to assimilate because it was named after the first Filipino saint. But the message was clear: St. Lorenzo’s sizable Filipino congregation made an otherwise typical suburban space — a Christian church — transgressive and inappropriate for country living. It took years of disputes (and fatigue between parties) before the parish opened in 1995.
But white residents’ criticisms and fears of how Asian people occupied suburbia were echoed by affluent Asian residents too. In the mid-1990s, the Taiwanese grocery chain 99 Ranch Market — which launched in Southern California — wanted to open a Walnut location. City leaders assumed Chinese homeowners would welcome the plan. The opposite occurred. Joining white naysayers, Chinese suburbanites protested the grocery chain, citing concerns over traffic and safety. In other words, critics stereotypically equated Asian retail hubs with density and disorder. They also considered Chinese stores déclassé — a threat to property values and to the image of suburbia.