Intercultural climate and belonging in the globalizing multi-ethnic neighborhoods of Los Angeles

Abstract

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.