Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland: Race and Redevelopment in the Rust Belt

In her second monograph, Rebecca Jo Kinney intervenes in both Asian American studies and Rust Belt scholarship by foregrounding the overlooked experiences of Cleveland's Asian American communities. Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland examines how regional context shapes Asian American life, culture, and racial formation in ways that resonate beyond the Midwest. In so doing, Kinney challenges the coastal focus of Asian American studies and locates Asian Americans in narratives of urban decline and Black-white race relations.Utilizing both community ethnography and archival research, the book focuses on how Asian Americans have been placemakers across different parts of Cleveland, Ohio, from the 1940s to the late 2010s. For Kinney, Asian American placemakers include business owners, developers, and community leaders who not only built individual lives in Cleveland but also forged spaces of belonging.The first half of Kinney's book presents two historical case studies of Asian American groups who migrated to Cleveland: Japanese Americans who resettled during World War II and Chinese American families who have operated food enterprises since the Chinese exclusion era. Kinney then homes in on a Japanese American who relocated to the Midwest after leaving an incarceration camp in exchange for wartime employment, and a Chinese American grocery store owner whose storefront also functioned as a social gathering place. Kinney's strongest case for the argument that region fundamentally shapes Asian American racialization appears in her chapter on Japanese Americans. She demonstrates that Japanese Americans’ migration from incarceration camps produced experiences in Cleveland that were “divorced from their prior exclusion on the West Coast” and “rendered in relationship to Cleveland's rapidly growing population of Black Southern migrants,” ultimately recasting them as “model citizens” (p. 46).Kinney also documents Cleveland's three Chinatowns, each displaced and rebuilt due to successive urban renewal projects. She reveals how Chinese American families mobilized to establish Asia Plaza, a mall that became the foundation and core of the more formalized present-day AsiaTown and subject of her ethnography, despite enduring long-term financial challenges caused by suburbanization and urban decline in the latter half of the twentieth century.The second half of the book follows Kinney's fieldwork in present-day AsiaTown, focusing on the relationship of AsiaTown Advisory Committee (ATAC) and the Cleveland Asian Festival (CAF) to neoliberal multi-culturalism and ethnic thematic urban planning. She connects the origins of ATAC to the 1966 Hough Rebellion, highlighting how in the rebellion's aftermath, Community Development Corporations (CDCs) were created to challenge systemic, anti-Black racism in Cleveland. Because AsiaTown was in between three CDC districts, Asian Americans lacked representation in city planning. As a result, one CDC headed AsiaTown's development and branding. It coined the name “AsiaTown” and made long-lasting decisions without sustained community input, drawing criticism from Asian American leaders. In 2017, the ATAC was established as an advisory board to a different CDC, signaling progress toward greater representation and economic investment for Asian Americans. AsiaTown subsequently received greater commercial and real estate interest, shaped by racialized stereotypes portraying it as stable and attractive to middle-class visitors, in contrast to nearby Black neighborhoods.In 2010, the Cleveland Asian Festival was established to celebrate cultural pride and promote economic development. However, as Kinney contends, it also requires performances of Asians as “good immigrants” or the “exotic other,” through the promotion of food consumption, distribution of educational material, and guided tours, often aimed toward a non-Asian audience. Kinney underscores the challenge of striking a “balance between community-led development, which creates economic- and ethnic-based place that appeals to an in-group, while simultaneously relying on an appeal to neoliberal multiculturalism to gain broader public support” (p. 17).Taken as a whole, Kinney offers a broadly applicable lens for understanding the stakes of space and visibility in ethnic neighborhoods across the United States. While many works in the field of Asian American urban history focus on long-standing residents and their perceptions of newcomers and neighborhood change, Kinney centers Asian American placemakers and brings in their voices using interviews and oral histories. Kinney also emphasizes that Asian Americans in Cleveland have historically lived within predominantly Black neighborhoods and are shaped by the region's bifurcated Black-white residential segregation, unlike other Asian American patterns of white suburban assimilation or ethnic enclave formation. More than a regional portrait, Mapping AsiaTown Cleveland will interest scholars of Asian American studies, urban history, and the Midwest, particularly those who employ interdisciplinary approaches.