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Ethnic suburban settlement has shaped suburban landscapes in contrasting ways. On one end are ethnoburbs, where ethnic groups used spatial politics to assert their rights of ethnic expression in the landscape. On the other-less noticed-end are places where ethnic settlers arrived en masse, and their presence was scarcely visible. This article focuses on the latter, towns where ethnic suburbanites consented to existing design mores-what we term design assimilation. Using case studies from Asian American suburbs of the west and east San Gabriel Valley, we explore the history of places where Anglo design aesthetics persisted in the midst of profound demographic change. Multiple factors created and protected these landscapes, including stringent regulatory cultures of these suburbs, white political action, accommodations by builders, and Asian American consent. Asian suburbanites supported these landscapes for aesthetic, nostalgic, political, and economic reasons, including the belief that American landscape aesthetics conveyed a social distinction that positioned them above those around them-including other Asians in the ethnoburbs. Our work shows how suburban advantage has been reinforced by new waves of immigrant suburbanites, in ways that reflect the inequities and spatial expression of globalization itself. This work offers a new perspective on immigrant suburbanization and its interface with suburban "landscapes of privilege."What happens when places with long-standing design traditions confront radical social transformation? This is a phenomenon unfolding over broad swaths of our metropolitan areas, and it is especially striking in suburbs receiving large numbers of immigrants. The San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles offers a vivid example. As a prime destination of Asian immigration, the suburban 1 Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West,

Asians and Asian Americans are the most suburbanized people of color in the United States. While Asians and Asian Americans have been moving to the metropolitan fringe since the 1940s, their settlement accelerated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This was partly the result of relaxed US immigration policies following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Globalization and burgeoning transnational economies across the so-called Pacific Rim also encouraged outmigration. Whether it is Korean or Indian immigrants in northern New Jersey or Vietnamese refugees in suburban Houston, Asians and Asian Americans have shifted Americans’ understandings of “typical” suburbia. In the late 1980s, academic researchers and policymakers started paying closer attention to this phenomenon, especially in Southern California, where Asians and Asian Americans often clustered together in select suburbs. Sociologists, in particular, observed how greater Los Angeles’s economic, political, and built landscapes changed as immigrants and refugees—predominantly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, India, and Vietnam—established roots throughout the region, including Orange County. Since then, other studies of heavily populated Asian and Asian American ethnic suburbs—or “ethnoburbs”—have emerged, including research on New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. Nonetheless, scholarship remains focused on Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other hubs of the metropolitan West Coast. Research and scholarship on Asians and Asian Americans living in the suburbs has grown over the last decade. This is partly a response to demographic shifts occurring beyond the coasts. Moreover, geographers, historians, and urban planners have joined the discussion, producing critical studies on race, class, architecture, and political economy. Despite the breadth and depth of recent research, literature on Asian and Asian American suburbanization remains limited. There is thus much room for additional research on this subject, given a majority of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States live outside city limits.

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James Zarsadiaz reviewing Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb, by Noriko Matsumoto