Suburbia Gains an Accent

When novelist James M. Cain needed a setting for “Mildred Pierce,” his 1941 classic about middle-class ambition gone awry, he chose Glendale because he believed it represented the epitome of suburban blandness. For the next three decades, the real Glendale remained the quintessentially insular, racially intolerant bedroom community that resisted the big-city temptations on the other side of the L.A. River.

Then an unprecedented influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Latin America and Asia changed everything. The new reality was described by the Census Bureau earlier this month: Glendale is the third most heavily immigrant large city in the U.S., behind Hialeah and Miami, Fla. It is one of only six U.S cities with a population of more than 100,000 that is majority foreign-born (54%).

I grew up in Glendale in the midst of its transition. My teachers were Midwesterners who pronounced Washington “Warshington.” But more and more of my classmates were from Iran, Panama, Vietnam and Lebanon. A boy from Australia beat me in the second-grade spelling bee. My best friend in fifth grade was from Korea.

This astonishing demographic transformation has made Glendale a symbol of the complexity of contemporary immigration. More telling, the city has become a testament to the durability of the suburban dream.

In contrast to turn-of-the-century European migrants who flocked to urban enclaves, large numbers of today’s newcomers settle in the suburbs. According to the 2000 census, 48% of immigrants who arrived in metropolitan areas in the 1990s chose to live outside the central city. Asian immigrants, especially, move to the suburbs. In 2000, 61% of East Indian households in metropolitan areas were in the suburbs, a figure just 10 percentage points lower than whites.

Successive waves of immigrants from Lebanon, Iran and Armenia have turned Glendale into the second-largest Armenian community in the world, after Yerevan. The city is also home to significant numbers of Mexicans, Cubans, Colombians, Filipinos, Chinese and Koreans. According to the Census Bureau, Latinos make up 20% of Glendale’s population, Asians 16% and Armenians around 30%. Glendale’s City Council reflects this demographic mix: One is Anglo, two are Latino and two are Armenian.

Today’s immigrants, as did their predecessors, prefer to cluster with family and co-ethnics who arrived earlier. Ethnic enclaves, as in the past, offer familiarity, information and social networks needed to adapt to the new homeland. But contemporary migrants are more mobile. As a result, today’s ethnic neighborhoods are not as starkly segregated as their early 20th century counterparts.

“Contemporary immigrants have a broader perception of where they can be and where they can go,” says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “They see what upward mobility is like, and they think it is more within their grasp than did previous immigrants.”

In part, this is because American culture is less foreign to today’s immigrants, thanks to globalization. For example, they are more likely to speak English. In 1900, an estimated 25% of the immigrant population could not speak English. In 1990, only 8% of all immigrants older than 5 could speak no English.

“The power of American pop culture has pre-assimilated people,” says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. “Many have already absorbed a mainstream American ethos, including the idea of owning a home and living the good life in the suburbs.”

The socioeconomic diversity of Glendale’s foreign-born population reflects broader trends in immigration. The city’s immigrants have both urban and rural backgrounds. They tend to arrive either very well off or very poor. Though roughly one-quarter of the nation’s new immigrants have less than nine years of schooling, a comparable percentage have college degrees. Many are scientists, engineers or high-tech entrepreneurs.

Suburbs have changed as much as immigrants. Forty years ago, the phrase “ethnically diverse suburb” would have been oxymoronic. Today’s suburbia is more mixed, economically viable and vital. A recent study found that racial and ethnic diversity in U.S. suburbs rose substantially in the 1990s, and that nonwhites accounted for the bulk of suburban population gains.

For earlier waves of immigrants, the suburbs were where second- and third-generation family members moved to get larger houses, safer streets and better schools. For millions of white ethnic Americans, suburbanization was an integral part of assimilation. It was in the ethnically neutral suburbs that these families first were exposed to different ethnicities and to the broader culture.

A century ago, the average immigrant living in an inner-city ethnic enclave couldn’t have imagined traveling the cultural distance between his neighborhood and the lily-white suburbs. But the emergence of the more open suburbs such as Glendale has erased the dichotomy between ethnicity and middle-class residential amenities. Moving to the suburbs doesn’t necessarily mean leaving behind the ethnic enclave. In their new neighborhoods, immigrants can continue to nurture their cultural distinctiveness even as they absorb middle-class American values.

Yes, some suburbs are so heavily urbanized that they can scarcely be considered suburban. But however much it has changed over the years, Glendale, with its own identity and sense of place, has retained its suburban character. The city is more densely populated, edgy and burdened by the ethnic and cultural conflicts that accompany rapid demographic change -- more than 60 languages are spoken in its schools. But Glendale still ranks ninth on the FBI’s list of the nation’s most crime-free cities with populations of more than 100,000.

Even as immigrants have introduced a broad array of new cuisines -- from Cuban pastries to Armenian baklava and Peruvian chicken -- they have not drastically altered Glendale’s suburban aesthetic. There are more people in the parks. Some homes have gaudier facades. But a drive down Glendale’s main thoroughfares offers scant evidence of the city’s majority foreign-born status. For the most part, Glendale’s suburban immigrants don’t apparently feel the need to re-create the physical experience of their homelands.

“The suburban grid is an easy template for immigrants to adapt to,” says D.J. Waldie, social historian and author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.” “Its simplicity and ordinariness accommodate the new immigrants in the same way that it did for the Anglo migrants in the 1950s.”

Today’s immigrants seek the same amenities and social significance in the suburbs as did the Midwesterners in the post-World War II era. As much as places like my old hometown have changed, they are still more leafy and low-key than the urban core. Their new inhabitants are not Ozzie and Harriet, but they share the same suburban dreams.