Reimagining Las Vegas Via Ethnic Studies
By Mark Padoongpatt
Las Vegas is a real place with real people. A laughable claim to most, I know. But writers, scholars, and locals can attest. Despite Vegas’ status and identity as one of the world’s top tourist destinations—an unbridled playground of gambling, shows, consumerism, and debauchery—its residents engage and experience the city in profoundly different ways. And the question of when, how, and why 2.6 million people came to build lives and communities here—real and imagined, fleeting and enduring—is all incredibly fascinating to me.
As an Asian American Studies scholar rooted in ethnic studies and history, I’ve long been interested in the struggles of marginalized peoples to create a more inclusive, sustainable, and just United States, especially when it presents a new vision of U.S. society altogether. I’m currently working on a book examining histories of structural racism, dispossession, and placemaking, and the creative ways Asian Americans in particular resist and survive legacies of racial segregation and lay claim to places not meant for them, and to what ends.
I’m teaching my “Asian Americans in Sin City” course again this fall at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and I’m as excited as ever to explore with students the ways Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) infused Vegas with dynamic cultures, perspectives, languages, lifeways, and ideals. I can’t wait for us to consider how they’ve altered the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the city. But I’m also ready for us to think bigger: to engage in conversations about who gets to shape a city, who gets to decide the use of space, and who gets to define a place.
Having lived in Vegas for nearly 10 years, I’m convinced that this place can teach us quite a bit about race and placemaking in the city and beyond. Since the 1980s, this “neon metropolis” has become incredibly racially and ethnically diverse. The number of non-Hispanic Whites has dipped to 41.7% of the population, while the number of Latinos has grown to 31.6%, as has African Americans (13.1%) and AAPIs (11.1%). Recent immigration has played a role, too, as “foreign born” persons make up almost 25% of the population.
As the “future face of America,” Vegas both reflects and catalyzes larger transformations in the nation (and perhaps globally) beyond just demographics.¹ For instance, its tourism and hospitality-based economy fueled by Asian and Latinx immigrant and Black labor registers the United States’ shift to a more “global” service-sector economy, with all its precarity. Its rapid suburbanization, which includes scores of master-planned communities and gated neighborhoods, represents a range of national and international trends—from metropolitan planning, housing, and the diversification of suburbia to the privatization of public services (roads, security, parks) and everyday life.
If we can understand Vegas through the lived experiences of people who have come to call it home, I believe we can learn important and timely lessons about where American society is and where it is headed socially, economically, culturally, and politically.
Mark Padoongpatt participated in the May 19, 2021, Nevada Humanities Why It Matters: What It Means to Build Community event. You can watch a replay of this conversation HERE.
Photo/Mark Padoongpatt.
Mark Padoongpatt is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He researches and writes on Asian American history in the 20th-century United States, with a focus on empire, migration, race, and urban and suburban cultures.
¹ Susan Milligan, “Nevada’s Population is the Future Face of American,” U.S. News & World Report, August 16, 2017; Jed Kolko, “40 Years From Now, The U.S. Could Look Like Las Vegas,” FiveThirtyEight, June 22, 2017.
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