Murals have long been used in communities to express solidarity and voice political opinions. As neighborhoods become increasingly diverse, complex economic and political motivations emerge for making murals that reflect new claims and contests over space. Focusing on recently designated ethnic "-towns" in the Greater Los Angeles area, the study finds that murals reveal multiple narratives and motives, including negotiations over space, identity, place-branding, and border-making as well as interethnic competition and reconciliation. It is argued that understanding the evolving functions and multivalent potentials of murals is critical for the success of place making and community planning. In particular, we draw attention to the trend of businesses and local government agencies using murals to make statements on identity and intercultural relations.Murals are known for their use by communities and neighborhoods to express collective identities. Common themes include endorsement of shared ideals or values, celebration of events or people from history, and political criticism or protest. Available literature is relatively sparse, however, on murals in the context of new immigrant politics, especially with regard to the interplay between inclusion of new immigrants and interminority relations, concerns of second and third generations, and agendas of economic development. Murals inhabit multiple spaces-at once symbolic and material, image and narrative, and representation and reality. In this article, we attempt to read murals to learn more about the motivations behind their creation.Murals produced in three ethnic "-towns" of Los Angeles are analyzed in this paper. The neighborhoods that have a special significance for people of Thai, Cambodian, and Vietnamese origin. The three neighborhoods were chosen because these communities form a significant part of the post-1965 immigration flows to the United States. Furthermore, the three neighborhoods

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Doubts about the efficacy of multiculturalism to address the tensions experienced between different social and cultural milieus or ethnoscapes in globalizing nations have grown. At the nexus of these tensions are multi-ethnic cities. Discussions of interculturalism at the urban scale have emerged as national governments search for ways to live in and with diversity in peace. However, less is understood about how interculturalism is actually lived out through the tensions in everyday encounters and negotiations in these globalizing multi-ethnic neighborhoods by people who live, work and/or regularly use these settings, which I posit in this paper as public-parochial realms. This paper presents empirical findings from a comparative qualitative study of three globalizing multi-ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles of different income levels by examining the following aspects (a) the circumstances of intercultural interaction in these neighborhoods from the perspectives of different ethnicities and (b) if and how local belongings are formed in these multi-ethnic spaces, in order to understand the possibilities for the formation of intercultural space in these diverse neighborhoods. The discussion foregrounds the globalizing multi-ethnic neighborhood as a meaningful frontier space for encounters that are capable of leading to either experiences of conflict or conviviality.