ABSTRACT
Ethnic heritage places are increasingly visible in U.S. cities through the founding of ethnic history museums, the restoration of historic buildings, the preservation and creation of other sites and monuments of cultural distinctness. They can be found in a variety of urban ethnic neighborhoods, including Chinatown, Little Havana, and African American districts. Some sites like Manhattan’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum explore a succession of ethnic groups through a historic portal of immigration. Some people may criticize these ethnic places as subculturally clannish, socially fragmenting, and a challenge to our larger collective sense of national heritage. My book seeks to convince critics that the growth of ethnic heritage sites represents a multicultural retooling as opposed to a culture war against the nation state that offers opportunities for boosting education, the arts, local economic development, and community life. The sense of economic and cultural retooling is associated with the tendency for ethnic heritage preservation to be linked with tourism and the livelihood of ethnic enclaves and small business sectors in our immigration gateway cities. The growth of ethnic enclaves has helped to counterbalance much of the urban decline in the postfordist city that resulted from the outmovement of jobs and people to the suburbs, and deindustrialization caused by corporate global sourcing of manufacturing to offshore
production sites. Ethnic enclaves and cultural heritage places can be harnessed as tools for neighborhood preservation. They offer a roadmap for local economic development.
