Immigration trends and immigrant communities in America have taken on different on different forms. The three main waves of immigration all involved different groups and people and reacted to national and world phenomena. As America’s immigration changed and different groups moved in, the process of place making has also taken different forms. For some communities place making consisted of staying steadfast in cultural practices and being weary of assimilatory practices. In these readings, “Staying Vietnamese” and “Illegality and Spaces of Sanctuary” we see the ways in which communities of the newer waves of immigration attempt to make sense of changing identities. Ruiz’s piece deals with place making through the lens of illegality. It deals with issues of citizenship and how to some cultures that practice goes beyond documentation and nationality. To the residents of South Central LA, place making takes on the form of community gardens, and deals with how the physical transformation and re-appropriation of space deemed undesirable can be symbolic of the people who are performing the place making. To put in simply, the space becomes a symbol of the struggle of those trying to derive meaning and culture from it.

In my question, I pondered of where resistance identities would play into this process. If we think of the process of place making as an extension of identity politics then violence and  discrimination against the physical space can extend to be an attack on identity. When the land was razed and subsequently bulldozed, the subtle implications were that its cultivators lacked the necessary legal claims to the land, and thus lacked legal claims to express their culture and “citizenship”. The implications and cultural benefit of creating a space reminiscent of their home country were attacked, with the attack of the physical space. In many ways, the issues that these residents faced, stemmed from the illegality. Because in many ways their community was a minority (not necessarily in numbers but more in access to capital and cultural markets), attacks and eradication of culture can be understood in a Darwinian sense. Cultural practices of minority communities that are not lucrative or economically profitable are unrecognizable and thus justifiably “othered”.

On the flip side, place making in the Vietnamese communities of orange county took on a different look. The Vietnamese community culture is highly visible and recognizable to everyone in and around the neighborhood because of recognizable commercial businesses. In that community, place making has been relatively simple compared to their counterparts on the east coast in Boston. While in many ways the Boston community has the elements and ability to form distinct Vietnamese space, the process has been hindered by the lack of actual physical space. However, two distinct road blocks that Boston communities have is the lack of gaining a monopoly on the capital of that area and the lack of having a monopoly on the physical space in Boston (both in competition with other Asian communities, namely Chinatown).

In conclusion, place making plays a huge role in identity politics because it is influenced and deemed recognizable by a number of other factors, namely economic ones. Profitability and marketability play bigger roles in determining how culture is received in a given area, rather than individual,independent acts of the residents themselves