On 19 May 2024, I arrive in the southern California sunshine for my first ever visit to Los Angeles’s Chinatown. As an east coaster, I half expect to find the familiar grittiness of New York’s Chinatown. I am surprised by the bright airiness of LA Chinatown’s central pedestrian plaza. The colorful buildings look Chinese—from the outside, at least—given their tiled roofs with curling, elongated corners. Red paper lanterns are strung throughout the plaza, which is flanked by two imposing Chinatown gates. The buildings around the square house commercial spaces like souvenir shops, a bakery, and a print shop.
I have come to see Rasgos Asiaticos, a site-specific performance installation. Created by playwright Virginia Grise in collaboration with set designer Tanya Orellana, Rasgos narrates the legacy of Chinese Mexicans and engages themes of gender, race, migration, and colonial displacement in the United States-Mexico borderlands. The performance takes place across North Hill Street in the West Plaza, home of the Automata Theater. At the check-in table, I am offered a moon cake and map of the installations throughout plaza. While the audience mills around the door to Automata, the performance starts quietly at the end of the plaza near the Earth installation. Earth is a large crate full of soil and a speaker that plays Grise’s voice on loop, saying “a piece of history, a memory from this town built new by the people displaced, far away from what once was…here, in this town, the people are being displaced, again. What do they hold onto? What do we bury?” Performer Lydia Jialu Li reverently lights a stick of incense and places it in the soil. She speaks to herself in English, Chinese, and Spanish, reciting what seems to be a grocery list and fragments of memory. She slowly walks, drawing the audience toward her around the fountain and into the front door of Automata.
The performance’s opening signals its rootedness in the particulars of place. Rasgos Asiaticos is a multimedia performance piece that Grise has been developing for more than fifteen years. This iteration of Rasgos was supported by California Institute of the Arts and designed specifically for this site. Its installations are intentionally placed in relation to the buildings and architecture of the plaza. Moreover, elements of the performance incorporate both local and transnational histories as well as community participation. In her opening monologue, Li remarks that she is on “an ancestral walk from the Old Chinatown to the New Chinatown.” This, alongside the Earth recording’s reference to “people displaced,” calls attention to local histories of displacement, urban renewal, and gentrification.
As Rasgos alludes to these legacies of gentrification and displacement, it re-instantiates an act of space-claiming.
Automata is located in LA’s New Chinatown; the original Chinatown was destroyed in the 1930s when the Union Station was built on its site. Chinese migrants first began arriving to the United States in substantive numbers in the mid-nineteenth century, when the abolition of slavery coincided with the need for low-wage racialized labor in industries like agriculture, mining, and railroad construction. Over time, nativist backlash led to the passage of a series of restrictive laws culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all Chinese immigration until its repeal in 1943. Around this time, LA’s Chinatown begun to establish itself as Chinese immigrants increasingly settled adjacent to Sonoratown, a Mexican enclave around the Old Plaza. In The Power of Chinatown, Laureen D. Hom notes that Old Chinatown’s location at the edge of an industrial area reflects the city’s history of racial marginalization and housing segregation. As Old Chinatown grew, the city treated it as a slum, withholding social services and refraining from structural improvements. During its 1920s program of urban renewal, the city built City Hall and other civic institutions near the Old Plaza and widened the streets, demolishing Old Chinatown. In the 1930s, a group of Chinese business owners organized the development of a modernized New Chinatown. This was decorated in a neo-Chinese style and housed restaurants, souvenir shops, and other businesses designed to attract tourists; eventually, it would grow into a community-serving space for Chinese Americans. Hom argues that through this project, Chinese community leaders asserted belonging, community control, and self-representation, even as they faced the exclusions of immigration laws and other forms of racism. As Rasgos alludes to these legacies of gentrification and displacement, it re-instantiates an act of space-claiming. I understand this from the beginning of the performance, which begins without an overt signal that it’s starting. In other words, the frame of Rasgos is coextensive with the quotidian goings-on of West Plaza.
Automata’s interior is awash with soft light and bright color; the lower half of the walls are painted bright red, and they fade to white near the ceiling. Floor-to-ceiling banners feature text from the performance, and the space is furnished like the inside of a home. Crates of whole oranges are set throughout the room, as are platters of sliced oranges. The powerful scent of sweet orange diffuses throughout the space. Framed black-and-white family photographs sit atop a stack of three suitcases placed on the floor. The audience packs in, standing or sitting on the furniture and red Turkish rugs on the floor. We are coming together in an intimate space, cocooned away from the bustling city. The two performer-guides—Li and Marlene Beltran—approach the center of the room. Li and Beltran mirror one another as they slowly set up a record player in the center of the room, push play, and murmur to themselves in Spanish and Chinese as if translating the words spoken on the record. I hear, “I am searching for my dead ancestors at the markets in Monterrey…the Chinese restaurants in Tampico…in the newspapers from Sonora…at the henequen plantations in the Yucatan…in forgotten photos from Arizona.”