Chinese social practice and San Franciscan authenticity

This chapter explores the possibility that Chinese social and linguistic practices are available resources for place authentication in contemporary San Francisco. The analysis draws on ethnographic observation and a content analysis of retrospective narratives about youth styles in neighborhood schools in the 1990s. The emergence of new indexes of place authenticity is seen as a result of the transnationalization of San Francisco and the emergence of neighborhoods known
as New Chinatowns (Laguerre 2005). In contrast to earlier periods of American history, these neighborhoods have become sites of new hybridities and the local authentication of what were previously the most exotic and foreign of social practices.