Immigrants to American cities were often confined to ghettos outside fashionable residential and commercial neighborhoods, through which they established cohesive albeit defensive communities. Since the nineteenth century, names of variable dignity from “Chinatown” or “Little Italy” to “Niggertown” have embodied the dual faces of American assimilation—being in America but not quite belonging. In other areas, more neutral names demarcate complex and dynamic areas—Italian, Jewish and Latino immigrants to New York City, NY’s Lower East Side or the multiple populations of Harlem. Moreover, while these enclaves could be seen as havens and creative elements in the melting-pot, history cannot ignore the poor housing, exploitative labor, neglected services and outside rejection, including physical attacks, that kept immigrants in ghettos.

Suburban opportunities after the Second World War offered escapes for assimilated generations of white enclave residents, while the civil-rights movement and urban renewal in the 1960s sought to eradicate the worst abuses of segregation and the poverty associated with it. Yet, racism continued to block opportunities for some, while after 1965, new immigrants poured into cheap, available housing. The elderly left behind by families and progress, have also posed special problems of security and services.

Some urban enclaves have found new life in the 1990s metropolises as service centers for dispersed populations and foci for ethnic-chic restaurants and shopping. New names, food and faces also reflect the presence of new immigrant populations making it in America—Miami’s Little Havana/ Calle Ocho, multi-ethnic Central American and African restaurants and residents of Washington’s Adams-Morgan, or “Little Saigon” in nearby northern Virginia. Class is a critical element in ethnic and racial development and attitudes “Chinatowns” have become tourist sites in ways that inner-city black or Hispanic neighborhoods have not.

In Sunbelt cities, new enclaves have emerged along suburban highways rather than in older center cities, claiming an alternative locus of cheaper space for stores and residences. Near Los Angeles, CA, meanwhile, suburban cities like Monterey Park and Alhambra have become the first Chinese-majority cities in the nation. Even Chinatown in Manhattan, New York faces competition from new immigrants in outer boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn.

Ethnic enclaves have offered transitional spaces for newly arrived families, and maintain traditions, associations and monuments of the past for future generations. Legal and medical services, media (newspapers and videos), foodstuffs and restaurants, and religious centers all provide continuing linkages in community (within definitions of ethnicity acceptable to American diversity). Festivals, movies (whether Godfather II (1974) or Joy Luck Club (1993)), museums, web-sites and touristoriented services also convert former ghettos into images of American success, despite the popula tions that may still be packed into cramped apartments or sweatshops on upper floors.