In LA Rising: Korean Relations with Blacks and Latinos after Civil Unrest, Kyeyoung Park revisits the Los Angeles unrest of 1992 and the interethnic and racial tensions that emerged. The 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles produced complex tragedies for racial minorities. Rather than being about Black-White issues or "Black Rage," the uprising pitted people of color against one another with Korean merchants bearing more than half of the total property damage. Twenty-five years later the disturbance requires re-analysis, correcting some misinformation previously presented. More importantly, differential access to the state and capital tends to affect racial relations--the relation of Latinos to Koreans as well as Blacks to Whites in South LA, thus feeding racial tension. Ethnic divisions manifest a racial matrix. To understand these divisions, it is useful to display them graphically--as a map. This is what Park calls "racial cartography." At its heart this is a case study of racial and class relations amplified by cultural relations.

Professor Kyeyoung Park is a faculty member in the departments of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her publications include The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City (Cornell University Press, 1997) which won the award for Outstanding Book from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Sponsored by the UCLA Department of Anthropology, UCLA. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies.