The Global Ethnopolis

Abstract

The city of San Francisco, with its culturally distinct neighborhoods, presents us with a telling and multifaceted laboratory where we can study the logic of how the ethnic space of difference is inserted into the vast and expanding network of the globalizing world.¹⁵ Until recently, social scientists have studied the American city as a flat, multicultural, and stratified entity, conceiving of it for the most part as a bound locale while informally recognizing its linkage to national sites and overseas territories, especially in the case of diasporas, which maintain ongoing relations with their homelands. As a result of this narrow way of deconstructing the city, the focus of most researchers has been primarily on social interaction at the local level, whether in terms of municipal regimes, social classes, economic transactions, or ethnic niches.