“Now the World Is Our Home”: Chinese and Mexican Girlhood and Mobility in Segregated Los Angeles during the Early Twentieth Century

Isabela Seong-Leong Quintana “Now the world is our home”: Chinese and Mexican Girlhood and Mobility in Segregated Los Angeles during the Early Twentieth Century By the 1910s-20s, Chinese and Mexican youth experienced the social world of Los Angeles' racially segregated central communities differently from their parents. At a time when Anglo officials and city boosters characterized Chinese and Mexican residential and business areas as discreet and problematic regions in the city's cultural and social geography, young women and girls increasingly found work outside their neighborhoods, allowing them to interact with Los Angeles—the city and its diverse populations—in new ways. As they got older, young women/girls worked in service and textile industries further from their homes, allowing them to traverse social, political and cultural boundaries more frequently than their mothers. Through these experiences, these young women began to redefine their experiences of girlhood, intimacy and identity. This paper examines how young Chinese and Mexican young women/girls experienced mobility and the day-to-day relations of intimacy within and across racial boundaries imposed by the state through segregation and border control. It analyzes their relationships with U.S. borders, as state practices of border formation changed shape during the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on oral histories, newspapers, census data, sociological studies and social workers' records, I focus on girlhood comparing how young girls' and women's increasing mobility impacted the segregation of their larger communities.