Koreans and Bangladeshis Vie in Los Angeles District
By MIRA JANG
nytimes.com
LOS ANGELES — In the last 30 years or so, a six-square-mile area west of downtown Los Angeles has become an enclave of some 50,000 Korean-Americans, the largest concentration of Koreans in the country. The district is now commonly known as Koreatown.
But on the city’s official maps, Koreatown is nowhere to be found, because until 2006 Los Angeles had no formal process for designating neighborhoods, whether well recognized or little known. Korean civic groups say they always simply assumed that the area was officially Koreatown.
They were surprised, then, when an application was filed with the city clerk’s office in October to name dozens of square blocks in what they consider the heart of the neighborhood. The name sought was Little Bangladesh.
The application, submitted by a committee of the growing number of Bangladeshis in Los Angeles, has brought a struggle between two mainly immigrant groups that reflects the complexities of negotiating space and official recognition in an increasingly crowded urban center.
The last official count of the Bangladeshi population, in the 2000 census, showed only 1,700 in all of Los Angeles County. But the Bangladeshi consul general here, Abu Zafar, estimates that there are now 10,000 to 15,000 in Los Angeles and some 25,000 in Southern California, making the region the nation’s second-largest home to Bangladeshis, after New York City.
In what the Koreans thought was Koreatown, a handful of Bangladeshi stores have cropped up, Mr. Zafar said, and the community is growing as a result of migration from out of state.
Moshurul Huda, a member of the Little Bangladesh Project, the committee that filed for official designation, said of the effort, “We just want to show our pride for future generations.”
But that goal is shared by the other side.
“We don’t want to seem like bullies, but this is Koreatown,” said Chang Lee, chairman of the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles. “We will fight for it.”
So the federation, along with several other community groups, filed its own application last month, asking that six square miles between downtown and Hancock Park, an area including the proposed Little Bangladesh, be officially Koreatown.
“This cross-ethnic tension is somewhat new,” said Jan Lin, a sociology professor at Occidental College here whose specialty is ethnic enclaves. “Historically, it’s been whites against nonwhites as new immigrants move into established white neighborhoods.”
But the tension is not surprising, Mr. Lin said, given the tendency of immigrant groups to live in close proximity to one another. In Hollywood, Thai Town is inside Little Armenia. Little Tokyo and Chinatown occupy distinct but neighboring spaces downtown. And a Salvadoran business corridor lies adjacent to Koreatown.
Korean immigrants, who withstood the 1992 riots here, began transforming the city’s core in the 1970s from a depressed neighborhood into what is today a business and social hub so large and dotted with so many Korean-language signs that it has been compared to Seoul. Formal recognition would bolster tourism there and help preserve ethnic heritage, Mr. Lin said.
Bangladeshi leaders acknowledge the de facto existence of Koreatown; many of them live or work in Korean-owned buildings.
“But we have the same aspirations as the Koreans,” said Shamim Ahmed, a Bangladeshi vice consul. “Having a sign doesn’t mean we own it. It’s just symbolic.”
Symbolism also resonates strongly with many Koreans, but their objections to the Little Bangladesh designation, they say, go further. The Wilshire Center-Koreatown Neighborhood Council wrote a letter to the city opposing it on the ground that it would cause “irreparable harm” to Koreatown’s commercial ambitions and cultural influence.
Either designation requires a majority vote of the City Council, and prospects for an official Koreatown appear brighter than those for Little Bangladesh, which is opposed by Councilman Tom LaBonge, who represents much of the area.
“Koreatown has been around for so long that it predates any regulation,” Mr. LaBonge said in an interview. “It’s just as formal, and justified. It is Koreatown.”
Mr. LaBonge has recommended that the Little Bangladesh Project instead erect a monument at a local park as a starting point for a possible future name designation, perhaps of a nearby area.
“I want to see that they are invested in the area,” he said, “and that they’re here to stay.”
Korean leaders say that there is room for a Little Bangladesh, but that there are boundaries.
“It’s nice to embrace other communities,” said Brad Lee, a member of the Koreatown neighborhood council’s board, “as long as it’s not in our backyard. Or in our front yard.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company |
