Week 4 - A Response on Koreatown and the Division of Labor

This week I wanted to respond to a post by one of my classmates, Joo, and her trip to Koreatown and how that region of Los Angeles relates to Durkheim’s views on the division of labor.

http://joosocial.blogspot.com/2012/10/blogging-social-difference-in-la-week-2.html

            Koreatown is one of my favorite places to visit in all of metropolitan Los Angeles. It is an area with great food, entertainment, and an interesting history especially over the last twenty years since the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Whenever I am in the area with friends, we usually go over to the BCD Tofu House on Wilshire for some tofu soup. There are a few other places we have gone to in the past, but BCD is just so good and consistent (and open 24 hours!).       

            Your post on the division of labor got me thinking about a few of the experiences that I have had in the past while visiting Koreatown. I have to admit that reflecting on most of my trips there, I didn’t see the variety of businesses or occupations that you described. The main thing on my mind every time I went out there though was grabbing some awesome Korean food. One experience down there however stuck out when I was thinking about your blog post and I wanted to share it with you and everyone else reading here.

            If I were to make a guess when this experience occurred, it was probably back in January of 2009. My friends and I were on our winter break from college and the nights were starting to get kind of cold (by southern California standards at least). One morning after an all-nighter of video games and movies, one of us came up with the great idea of grabbing some tofu soup for breakfast. We all rode out to BCD and by the time we got there it was probably around 5:30 AM.

            Just across the street from the BCD on Wilshire is a large Catholic church. I guess I hadn’t noticed it before, but I thought this was kind of peculiar, as the vast majority of Koreans that I knew (in the Cerritos area) belonged to Evangelical and Presbyterian denominations. (The three Koreans that were part of our group were all Presbyterian for example.) Eventually our food arrived, we ate, and went on our way but as we were leaving not only I, but my friends as well noticed that there was a large number of Korean parishioners going into the church across the street.

            A discussion on the topic or Korean religious life quickly broke out in the car and we started driving around Koreatown, looking for other churches. We found several Korean churches all throughout the area representing a number of different Christian denominations. In addition to these churches, we also drove past a couple Buddhist temples. This experience showed all of us diversity within the religious life of the Los Angeles Korean community that we had never noticed or recognized before.

            I think that sometimes when visiting different ethnic communities, a lot of us who grew up in southern California and the United States in general tend to look at them as being culturally homogenous. So often we fail to see the different ways groups of people within those cultures go about their lives. You are absolutely correct that Koreatown is full of differentiation and specialization, and it is not unique in that regard. I have had similar experiences visiting Little India and Little Saigon as well. These ethnic communities throughout Los Angeles are full of differentiation and definitely carry the markings of a distinct division of labor. I appreciate your post exploring these issues.

Week 3: Downtown Long Beach and Burgess

In the first half of the twentieth century, a school of thought emerged from the University of Chicago that expanded upon the organic analogy used by Emile Durkheim. Theorists from this school of thought included Ernest Burgess, who developed an early model for the development of cities. This model is represented as a series of rings in which the center ring represents the city’s central business district. Just outside the center ring is a “transition zone” which is characterized by businesses and light manufacturing, along with a few residences. The next three rings are primarily residential, each one representing a step up in class as you move outward into the suburbs. (Burgess 340) I decided to visit downtown Long Beach to take a look at how well this model holds up.

            This first picture was taken from a corner on Ocean Boulevard in Downtown Long Beach. This image shows the Wells Fargo building and City Hall on the left. The building on the right is the Renaissance Hotel, a lodging option for those attending events at the Long Beach Convention Center, which is just behind me in the image.

            This building has businesses on the bottom and first floors, and apartments on the floors above. There might be a restaurant or lounge on the top floor, which is common in a lot of these skyscrapers.

            This image shows some of the recent development that has occurred in Downtown Long Beach over the last few years. Several apartment buildings have been built either from the ground up or remodeled out of old businesses, bringing a new life and feel to the area. This area is roughly four hundred feet west of Pine Avenue on 1^st Street.

            As you move away from Pine Avenue and the beachfront, the neighborhoods begin to show a little more wear. Houses and apartment complexes begin looking older and older.

            Several problems arise when attempting to apply Burgess’ model to Long Beach. The largest and perhaps most significant of these is the nature of industrial production around the Downtown area. Assuming you can establish that this is the center of the city, this area lacks the factory and transition zones that the concentric ring model predicts (Burgess 340). It goes from center of power and major business district directly to residential dwelling without much evidence of a manufacturing industry of any kind.

            It is possible that over the years, such industries may have disappeared from the Downtown area, but this argument ignores the fact that the major manufacturing center within the city was (and arguably still is) the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing production plant a few miles away. The surrounding neighborhoods around this plant do offer a sense of transition between two of the ring zones Burgess observed, but it is between the “Zone of Workingmen’s Homes” and the upper class “Residential Zone.” (Burgess 340) Ultimately, the model proposed by the Chicago School fails to account for the expansion and growth of cities like Long Beach.

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Burgess, Ernest. "The Growth of the City." Trans. Array The Blackwell City Reader. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 339-344. Print.

Week 2: Centralia Street and Durkheim

As promised last week, this weeks post focuses upon an area that is fairly close to where I grew up. To this day I still spend quite a bit of time in this area and it has been interesting to watch the character of a couple of the intersections here change over the years.

            Located at the intersection of Pioneer Blvd and Centralia Street in Lakewood, the businesses on two of the four corners here haven’t changed very much over the last twenty years. The car wash on the southwest corner, owned and operated by an immigrant Armenian family, looks exactly the same as it has since it opened in the early 1990’s.

            Across the street on the northwest corner a few things have changed since I was a child, but the feel of this shopping center remains the same. The donut shop, Laundromat, carniceria, and liquor store have all been there since before I was born. The only real change here is that a pet shop used to stand where the beauty salon and gift shop now are.

            Now on the other side of the street is where things start to get interesting. This image here is the northeast corner of the intersection. This part of Los Angeles County was mostly farming until the late 50’s into the early 60’s. As a result of this legacy, there are several drive through dairies in this area that still operate to this day. What makes this one unique however is that it has been operated by a Korean family since the late 80’s.

            The southeast corner, pictured above, is where the most dramatic change has occurred. This shopping center was notable for its pizza parlor, Ciro’s Pizza, up until it closed in 2003. Beginning in the mid nineties, several Korean businesses began to move into this shopping center. Currently, there are three Korean restaurants at this shopping center, one of which is an all you can eat Korean barbecue occupying the former site of Ciro’s Pizza. One particularly peculiar business here is a Korean recording studio. It occupies the site where a very popular Korean PC bang (internet café) used to be before it was shut down by the city for being a public nuisance.

            This intersection is complemented by another intersection about a mile and a half east, which has gone through a similar transition over the last 5 years.

            This is the southeast corner of Norwalk Boulevard and Centralia Street. This Korean restaurant, Pine Tree, was formerly a very popular Mexican restaurant named La Casa Margarita. Nearby is another Korean barbecue, which used to be a run of the mill burger joint.

            Across the street on the northeast corner is a Tae Kwon Do gym. Interestingly, this shopping center has several businesses catering to the local Muslim community, including two halal restaurants and a halal butcher.

            This church is located between these two intersections. Several different ethnic communities use this building for their worship services. This sign hasn’t been updated in years, but it is my understanding that in addition to the advertised English, Spanish and Korean services, Tagalog worship services have recently begun here.  

            Over the last week and a half I have been thinking a lot about the work of Emile Durkheim and what he had to say about the division of labor, and mechanical versus organic solidarity. Though often thought of in purely economic terms, Durkheim argued that the division of labor transcended materialism and was a response “to enable us to live in the new conditions of existence created for us.” (Durkheim 1893) Also, Durkheim was very concerned with how societies and communities remain cohesive. He developed a differentiation between communities that were largely homogenous, and societies that showed more pluralistic tendencies. Homogenous societies were described as having mechanical solidarity, whereas the more pluralistic ones were descriptive of organic solidarity.

            Walking through this neighborhood I very much got the sense that this is an area where there is a very high level of organic solidarity between the people. I think the signs at the church are perhaps the best visual representations of this that I could find. The idea that four different cultural groups are able to share the same sacred space is pretty remarkable, especially when one considers how different they are from each other. One could also argue that the division of labor in the “Durkheimian” sense is also in play here at this institution as each group has their own set of ecclesiastic leaders.  These different congregations do not really compete with each other for parishioners, and their existence and utilization of this one spot is largely due to logistics. As such, the compromise appears to be borne out of a need for each group to be able to come together separately, not out of some larger materialistic motive.

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Emile Durkheim: “The Causes [of the Division of Labor]” from The Division of Labor in Society (1893) 

Week 1

           Hello everyone. My name is John Hayes and this blog is a chronicle of my exploration activities in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. Having lived in this area all but three years of my life, I am eager to go places I haven’t been before and share those experiences with a broad audience. As many people know, Los Angeles is one of the most diverse regions of the world in terms of ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status. These are just a few of the themes that I hope to explore when considering the role that the city plays in social differences.

            My interest in this topic comes largely from the experiences that I had growing up here in Los Angeles County. From the second I was born I was exposed to cultures, traditions, and practices that were far different from those of my own family. As I have gone through school and worked the various jobs that I have, I constantly find myself asking questions as to what role these differences actually play and what ways geography influences these differences.

            I hope you all find the posts that follow to be thought provoking and intellectually stimulating. In my first real post I intend to explore the neighborhoods that fed into the high school that I graduated from. Social difference was abundant everywhere at my high school, from socioeconomic status and religion, to ethnicity and family makeup. I hope to see you all next week!