SOURCES
Bonacich, Edna. "Small Business Among Koreans in Los Angeles." 1976. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED129969.pdf.
This paper describes the characteristics of small businesses among Koreans in Los Angeles, and examines the means by which these small businesses survive among a strong capitalist environment. The authors use census data to show the proportions of Koreans working in small businesses as well as the directory listings of different businesses within Koreatown, and cites commonly noted characteristics of these businesses. This work is important because it describes some traits of Korean businesses (they are often service-based, require little initial capital to start, and are commonly “middleman” businesses where a client could perform the work themselves but choose to outsource, etc.), and we can validate these characteristics by looking at the prevalence of specific types of businesses within Koreatown and see how well they match up with the authors’ descriptions. This will help us form our hypothesis for our thesis as to what sort of businesses we would expect to see in Koreatown, and why certain types of businesses are more prevalent than others.
Cheung, K.-K. "(Mis)interpretations and (In)justice: The 1992 Los Angeles "Riots" and "Black-Korean Conflict"." MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 30, no. 3 (2005): 3-40.
https://escholarship.org/content/qt807839r5/qt807839r5.pdf
King-Kok Cheung investigates the interracial conflicts focusing on misinterpretations in the legal and cultural realms specifically using the 1992 Los Angeles ‘Riots’ to explore the nuances in the Black-Korean conflict. Cheung uses a variety of academic resources to supplement her argument. This resource is important because it allows people to understand the context of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot, a crucial point for the communities of Los Angeles and explores the complexities of the riots with a holistic approach. What this resource does specifically is provide context for a key event that shaped the history of Koreatown and the economic devastation on Korean businesses. This resource can help further our understanding and perhaps answer questions in our data leading up to and after 1992.
Choy, Bong-youn. Koreans in America. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. 1979.
This book is a broad, encyclopedic-style account of Koreans in America, with a few sections that go into more detail about Korean cultural, social, and economic activity in Los Angeles. More specifically, in a chapter about the economic life of Koreans in the United States, the author presents a case study of Korean business in Los Angeles. The case study is a profile of the number, size, monetary assets, and loans taken out by each of the approximately 250 Korean businesses in Los Angeles. Analyses about Korean business composition follows, as well as a discussion of challenges faced by Koreans and immigrants in Los Angeles attempting climb higher up the ladder of the city’s political economy into more prominent economic sectors. Much of the evidence comes in the form of data provided by the Small Business Administration (S.B.A.). This source serves as an important snapshot of Korean businesses and the imprint they had left in Los Angeles at the time of writing (1979). It will be useful to compare information in this book to some of our more recently published sources to see if the composition and strength of Korean businesses has changed or stayed relatively the same over the past 40 years. This source helps support our thesis by painting a picture of Korean economic life in Los Angeles in 1979, more than 10 years before an era of civil unrest in the city.
Kim, Anna. 2015. From the enclave to the city: the economic benefits of immigrant flexibility. Local environment 20 (6): 706-727.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2015.1053439
This journal article argues that ethnic enclaves, such as Koreatown, are essential for many immigrant workers in that they work around their citizenship status and allow for collaboration among different ethnic groups in order to build broader social and economic networks that transcend the boundaries of the ethnic enclave. This argument is supported through interviews with 30 Korean and Latino Koreatown workers in the restaurant, retail, and other low-wage service-sector industries. This is resource is
critical to the understanding of how Koreatown has grown from what was once considered an urban ghetto into an “ethnic growth machine” and the influence of the workers on this change. This will help us get a better understanding of the historical context as well as the work dynamics of Koreatown and shed light on why and how Koreatown is comprised of so many small businesses.
Kim, Anna Joo. Immigrant Crossings and Interactive Labor Markets: The story of work in Koreatown, Los Angeles. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011.
https://search.proquest.com/docview/863639111/previewPDF/99C005C6A6E94444PQ/1?accountid=14512 (We have access to the entirety of the book due to ProQuest access to UCLA students)
Anna Joo Kim goes into detail in the economics surrounding Koreatown in Los Angeles in the previous decade. She looks at the different sectors of labor being the “formal” and “informal” sector and talks about the different issues and how the markets around Koreatown have developed since. She also goes into detail in the way that racialization of immigrant employers have escalated into real problem and how that has affected the markets surrounded the city. Kim uses data analysis of the Census PUMS from 2006 - 2008 as well as data collected through interviews. These data collections gather demographic information of Koreatown in census PUMA 05414, as well as the overlay of the Residential Employment Density and the Current Occupation in the formal and informal market sector. This resource is important in our thesis statement because it showcases the how Korean Market has changed in the past decade. This data can also provide information in any major racial changes in the past decade that have contributed to the increment of certain business in the city. Additionally this books presents us evidence of the different labor markets (multi-ethnic workplaces) inside of Koreatown, providing a new perspective and new associations regarding Koreatown and the business recently developed.
Lee, Dong. 1995. Koreatown and Korean Small Firms in Los Angeles: Locating in the Ethnic Neighborhoods*. Professional Geographer 47 (2): 184-195. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1995.184_m.x
This journal article argues that small Korean firms are strategically located in Los Angeles in accordance to residential patterns of Korean immigrants to allow for a positive business environment specific to ethnic small firms. This argument is supported using various historical sources from 1975 to 1986, such as mail surveys, telephone directories, and interviews with Korean entrepreneurs in Los Angeles. This resource provides a solid foundation to document the changes in location patterns of Korean firms in relation to the density of ethnic populations. We can use this information to better understand why certain businesses chose to be located in Koreatown as opposed to other areas of Los Angeles as well as the geographic distribution of businesses within Koreatown.
Lee, Dong Ok. "Responses to Spatial Rigidity in Urban Transformation: Korean Business Experience in Los Angeles." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 19, no. 1 (1995): 40-54. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1995.tb00489.x
This journal article argues that responses to urban transformation diverge between industrial sectors, the ethnic migrant communities, and localities. The evidence used include the Korean directory of Southern California for 1975 and 1986, the Survey of minority-owned business enterprises for 1977 and 1987, and the author’s own survey of Korean entrepreneurs in Los Angeles in 1988. This resource is important in revealing how Korean migrants went from mainly being self-employed in the small-firms sector to increasing their shares in both the manufacturing and construction sectors from 1975 to 1986. We can use this resource to help us track the changes in Korean businesses in response to the industrial change in Los Angeles since the author lays out a detailed timeline of events.
Min, Pyong Gap. “Korean Immigrants in Los Angeles.” California Immigrants in World
Perspective: The Conference Papers. Volume 5. (1990). https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt2w76n5vs/qt2w76n5vs.pdf
Min’s paper is a broad survey of the Koreatown population from 1990, using over 500 interviews with different immigrants as the data for the paper. Min also sources public documents and directories to inform his paper. Min found Koreatown to be similar to Little Havanna in Miami as the only large ethnic ghettos to form following the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished racial quotas. Min also found that Koreans were unique in that the vast majority of families in the middle-class were self-employed entrepreneurs, and were more attached to their ethnic identity than other immigrant groups due to the concentration of their neighborhoods and small businesses.
Min, Pyong Gap. "Problems of Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs." International Migration Review 24, no. 3 (1990): 436-55.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2546368.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Ab7412592b03a81664f5783a2a7ee4a3f
Pyong Gap Min analyzes the major problems of Korean immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States that they face, citing reasons such as their business concentration in low income communities, their vulnerability to exploitation, status inconsistency, and segregation in ethnic sub-economy while enhancing ethnic and social assimilation. This source is based on interviews with 557 Korean immigrants in Los Angeles, ethnic newspaper articles, and personal observation of the Korean community. This resource is important because deepens the understanding of the obstacles that Korean immigrant entrepreneurs faced in the United States and the effects it has on their businesses and overall economy. What this resource does for our thesis specifically is that it provides context to the entrepreneurship and the ensuing issues which can be translated to businesses in Koreatown. This resource can perhaps provide explanations for certain questions about our data and the types of and frequency of industries as a result of the problems Korean entrepreneurs faced.
Min, Pyong Gap, and Mehdi Bozorgmehr. "Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Business Patterns: A Comparison of Koreans and Iranians in Los Angeles." International Migration Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 707-38.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/019791830003400303
This paper describes the differences between Korean and Iranian immigrants to Los Angeles in a number of relevant factors for entrepreneurship, such as the use of personal savings for capital, language familiarity, income level, and work type. The piece uses primarily census data to elucidate points, and cites works from other authors on the developmental path of Koreans and Iranians in the Los Angeles area. This work is important because it helps us identify relevant characteristics of Korean immigrants in Los Angeles. We can use these characteristics in our thesis to hypothesize what sort of businesses we would find present in Koreatown, and compare that hypothesis with the actual business distribution we pull from our data set.
Oh, Sookhee and Chung, Angie. “A Study on the Sociospatial Context of Ethnic Politics and
Entrepreneurial Growth in Koreatown and Monterey Park.” Geojournal, Volume 79, No. 1 (2014). pp 59-71 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24432614.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A29e6d1d989d4c52a11f03f051d75ffc9
Oh and Chung utilized GIS analysis and spatial mapping to understand the sociospatial, entrepreneurial and residential layout of Koreatown and Monterey Park. Their findings suggested that Koreans faced different opportunities and challenges due to Korea’s entrepreneurial influence but weak electoral impact, while the Chinese population held a stronger political presence. They concluded that Koreatown could be classified as an auxiliary immigrant growth machine, i.e a group that exercises entrepreneurial and financial power and cooperation with existing policy to achieve their aims, while Monterey Park was an autonomous immigrant growth entity, i.e an independent political group that only needed to coordinate development within itself without much negotiation with other ethnic political groups.
Park, Kyeyoung, and Jessica Kim. "The Contested Nexus of Los Angeles Koreatown: Capital Restructuring, Gentrification, and Displacement." Amerasia Journal 34, no. 3 (2008): 126-50.
http://uclajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17953/amer.34.3.d03g386u007n286w
Kyeyoung Park and Jessica Kim argue that ethnic Americans and new immigrants are influenced by and affect urban development and that specifically Korean Americans use the inner city Koreatown as an “nexus” site between urban and suburban, blurring the segregation along class and modifying the groupings by lifestyle and cultural sensibilities. This resource uses a variety of other scholarly resources and other academia listed in its bibliography. This resource is important because it defines Koreatown in the city of Los Angeles and depicts the history of Koreatown and the business that were created from its emergence and how it eventually established itself as a central city business center, focusing on the capital development in the post 1992 era defined as the Wilshire Era. What this resource does specifically for our thesis is help form our underlying foundation of the businesses in Koreatown and the economic effects on the area and the people.
Yu, Eui-Young, Peter Choe, Sang Il Han, and Kimberly Yu. "Emerging Diversity: Los Angeles Koreatown, 1990–2000." Amerasia Journal 30, no. 1 (2004): 25-52.
http://uclajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.17953/amer.30.1.m470332320241t24
This paper examines the origins of Koreatown and how its development was affected by a mix of different political and social agendas, which have evolved over time. These authors use varied forms of evidence to support their claims, including maps of Koreatown divided into areas with common racial demographics and different income levels, tables describing correlations between different income levels and races, and charts showing the proportion of immigrants from different Asian countries. The information contained in this journal is important because it sheds light on the different political forces that affected business development in Los Angeles, which inform the variety of options that business owners had in choosing their business goals. This relates to our thesis by providing a framework for how and which businesses emerged in the 90’s.
Zhou, Min. “How Neighborhoods Matter for Immigrant Children: The Formation of Educational
Resources in Chinatown, Koreatown and Pico Union, Los Angeles.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Volume 35. Issue 7 (2009). pp 1153-1179.
Zhou explored the ways in which local institutions (city councils, etc) in inner-city neighborhoods had an affect on the formation of educational opportunities and resources for immigrant children. Zhou found that the various immigrant neighborhoods of Los Angeles varied in their levels of institutional involvement. The various ethnoburbs (Pico Union, Chinatown, Koreatown) all had different structures that were relevant specifically to their children’s education. Institutional emphasis on education was found to be very important, but access to neighborhood-based resources was unequal and ethnically exclusive, as Asian children generally had more access to resources than their Hispanic counterparts.