Reia LiFollow

Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Anthropology

Reader 1

Joanne Nucho

Reader 2

Wendy Cheng

Abstract

By the mid-1900s, although there were only around 700 Chinese people in Tucson, Arizona, there were over 100 Chinese-owned markets. These small grocery stores were located in Mexican American barrios and served mainly Mexican, Indigenous, and Black people. Starting from these stores and moving to other spaces important to the Chinese community, this work explores race as a spatial process and space as a racialized project. Drawing on anthropology, geography, and Asian/American studies, this thesis (t)races the transformations of Chinese homes, grocery stores, and suburban spaces throughout the 20th century, examining the racial meanings that these places both emerged from and created. This research attends to the relationship between broader structural forces and everyday people’s lives, arguing that Chinese people created forms of multiracial connection and reciprocity despite the racial hierarchies perpetuated by settler colonization and suburbanization. By interrogating the complexities of racial formation in the American Southwest, a region undertheorized in Asian/American studies and which can only be understood through a multiracial lens, this research contributes to the emerging field of Asian/American geography. Ultimately, this thesis challenges dominant narratives of “assimilation” by calling attention to the lingering presence of Chinese communities in Tucson.

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