A publication about one migration and the streets it built

kaanet.com covers Korean migration to the United States and the commercial districts it produced.

The subject has two very different halves. The first arrivals were labourers recruited to Hawaii's sugar plantations from 1903 — a few thousand people, after which the door effectively closed for sixty years. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed the national-origin quotas, and within two decades the census was counting one of the fastest-growing populations in the country.

What that growth produced is legible as urban form. Koreatown in Los Angeles, Annandale in Virginia, Flushing in Queens, Albany Park in Chicago and Duluth in Georgia each carry a different trade base, a different kind of signage and a different generational split. The commercial history behind them is specific and documented: the concentration of small business, the rotating credit associations that capitalised it, and the way the second generation moved out of it.

How the site is arranged

Four sections. 1965 covers the Act, what stood before it and what the tables show afterwards. Five Streets takes the districts one at a time. The Pot covers the kye and the financing. The Record covers the census series, the Korean-language press and 1992. Every piece on the site is listed on the archive.

Where the figures come from

Population counts are the U.S. Census, with the enumeration year and the counting basis stated wherever a number appears. Where the site describes the financing of storefronts it works from the published academic record on Korean immigrant entrepreneurship, including field surveys conducted in New York and Los Angeles through the 1980s.