Talk:Chinatown patterns in North America
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[edit] Underground communities??
- In response, these immigrants built elaborate underground communities in many cites through the American West. Many of these underground communities have been preserved, and are now the subject of historical tours, in cities such as Pendleton, Oregon, Havre, Montana, and Deadwood, South Dakota.
Those are pretty small towns to have underground Chinatowns; either under the ground or secret, whichever meaning is meant. And here's a cite from the Pendleton, Oregon page:
- By 1900, Pendleton had a population of 4,406 and was the fourth-largest city in Oregon. Like many cities in eastern Oregon, it had a flourishing Chinatown from the 1880s into the 1920s.
Doesn't sound very "underground" to me, unless you're meaning something like the warren of underground storehouses and opium parlours etc as existed in Vancouver and San Francisco.....Skookum1 06:19, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Merge proposal with Chinatowns in North America
And, actually, after the merge, the combined article needs to be broken into a Canada article and a US article; the other article is already very long, partly because it replicates a lot of information from Chinatown and related articles (e.g. the cuisine articles); US "patterns" have a very different history from those in Canada, and the currnet page is heavily US-skewed in terms of content/experience. See also comments on Talk:List of Canadian cities with large Chinese populations about the multiple overlap/redundancy of so many articles on the same ethnic group; I imagine it may even be worse for US-related articles than it is for Canadian ones.Skookum1 08:58, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
- The problem is, that each of these articles are already huge, which is why they were split in the first place.--Pharos 21:44, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
The the split should have been between Canada and the US and Mexico (which has Chinatowns and is in North America), not between Chinatowns and "Chinatown patterns". The only useful sense of the latter term would be layout/feng shui considerations, zoning, housing/building styles, economic figures and so on - "patterns". "Patterns" needs defining; and once it's defined it needs to be followed. Yes, these two articles were huge before; they're huge now; but they muddle US and Canadian experiences/histories/ "Patterns" and also seem to omit the Mexican ones (I haven't looked lately, granted).Skookum1 03:20, 10 March 2007 (UTC) Here's the proper split:
- Chinatowns in Canada
- Chinatowns in the United States (of America)
- Chinatowns in Mexico
And throughout both the fudging of the historic sense of a Chinatown and the new application to ethnic-flavoured/dominated suburban shopping malls and condo developments needs to be clarified and kept separate; there's also the List of Chinatowns pages of course...Skookum1 03:22, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
- I think the national/regional scope thing is a separate issue. There's no reason we couldn't just split the existing articles further, with separate lists for the US and Canada, and perhaps separate "pattterns" articles as well. My real concern is just that we not exacerbate the article length problem. By the way, I'm not necessarily wedded to the "patterns" name; we could just as easily call these social trends articles "Chinatowns in X", to be complemented by "List of Chinatowns in X".--Pharos 04:01, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
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- Hi; back only for a bit. I'm nearing the end of my wiki-rope and will be largely offline, other than webmail, for the summer anyway for various reasons. So I wouldn't have time to do what's needed here; and by "merge" I wasn't meaning all material from the one article combined with all the text from the other; there's a lot of duplication/parallel phrasing that could simply be combined; as you note "patterns" is superfluous; there's already separate listings for Canada and the US on the "List of" page; this isn't meant to be that; but there's a big difference in the nature and history of Chinatowns in Canada (well, mostly BC) and the United States and also Mexico; there's no "North American" pattern except the historical commonalities, not limited to but including Chinese urban/town ethnic history, between California/OR/WA and British Columbia. Patterns of Chinese settlement in North America might work better, in fact, because some of the towns I know of that were near-entirely Chinese for many years (e.g. Richfield) were never referred to as as Chinatown; but the title implies something like original research, i.e. digging up data on farming and merchant settlement outside of Chinatowns in small towns, rural areas etc; another example of why "settlement" and "Chinatown" don't always coincide is in Barkerville's Chinatown did not mean business and residence there was Chinese, and Chinese lived outside it as much as inside; as before there's also that all-important distinction between the historic Chinatowns and the "new chinatowns" or ethnoburbs or whatever, which aren't what "we" mean when "we" say "Chinatown"; I guess the meaning has changed or is changing but it's still important to distinguish between century-old urban colonies and the new-wave immigrant-suburb phenomena; and also to remember that Chinese settled on farms and ranches and in small towns, and there's a whole history there that's overlooked because of the focus on Chinatowns in the urban sense, either historic or "new". I'd hoped to spend some time writing on later 19th C. history of the Interior of British Columbia which would include a lot of this stuff, and also meant to work more on History of Chinese immigration to Canada (which similarly needs renaming to History of the Chinese in Canada as it's not entirely about immigration anymore...and doesn't have formal immigration figures as it should for that title). But I can't spend my whole life writing Wikipedia, so have been popping by here and there offering last suggestions; in this case the idea's pretty simple and I think we're close to agreement - the Chinatowns in North America and Chinatown patterns in North America should be integrated, for now or temporarily, with the former title the main title as it's simpler and to the point; and once integrated then (quickly) split into the national articles and their own various subsections (certain states, like BC, are going to need their own sections of course). I just think right now the two articles are too similar, and cover the same ground; one is not needed, though some of its text can be put with the other's; and "North America" is really in need of a split, such that Chinatowns in North America can be a short summary, with section-links for Canada, the US, Mexico etc.Skookum1 23:28, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Ethnoburbia
Most of the trends described in this article (such as the emergence of new suburban Chinese settlements) are described by the geographer Wei Li in her work on ethnoburbia. A good starting point is her article "Building Ethnoburbia: The Emergence and Manifestation of the Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley" in the Journal of Asian American Studies 2(1): 1-28 (1999). --Kilgore MTL 06:20, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] OR + Sources
This article seems like OR to me. It desperately needs sources. Could one of the experts here see about doing so? It's unlikely to happen without your help. Thanks. --Lendorien 16:03, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
- I tend to agree, unless there are substantial writings in urban/popluation geograpy addressing "Chinatown patterns"; this is why the merge/split discussion farther up the page. This does seem an inventd term, and even as such what "patterns" are we talking about? Building design? Whether or not a won ton shop is next door to an import-export, whether or not Chinatowns were located into, or attracted, centres of other economies (including vice) etc. But without actual documentation of studies about this topic, it does seem to be a made-up topic. But then so is a lot of the hsitory on various other Chinese-American/Canadian pages....Skookum1 (talk) 20:26, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
