A Sense of Place: The Politics of Immigration and the Symbolic Construction of Identity in Southern California and the New York Metropolitan Area.

American immigration has long been characterized by spatial concentration within major urban areas. Los Angeles and New York City are two of the most important immigrant meccas today. Recent studies of immigrant adaptation within these cities have emphasized material factors at the expense of cultural considerations. This paper adopts a comparative perspective to demonstrate extreme differences in the symbolic construction of identity vis-a-vis immigrants in these two urban areas. Using The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times as indicators of elite cultural orientations, a content analysis is performed. The results demonstrate the social construction of an exclusive “threat” narrative in Southern California, and an inclusive “immigrant as victim” narrative in the New York metropolitan area. I argue that this extreme variation in cultural orientations must be understood as the result of divergent material and symbolic contexts. In order to demonstrate the importance of cultural factors, this paper focuses on symbolic differences between these areas and the influence these differences have on the political process of inclusion/exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]