Hanna Schoettelkotte

The official designation of Los Angeles’s Thai Town in 1999 came with applause from all around as the first and only official Thai Town in the United States was created. The country of Thailand and its people celebrated the recognition of its culture and people in the U.S., and those in L.A. were happy to see a form of representation for the growing Thai population. In retrospect, the path to this official designation was rocky to say the least as Chanchanit Martorell spearheaded the efforts and faced a number of challenges. Let’s take a look at the history of the Thai community in Los Angeles and how it got to this point with Thai Town.

Not too long ago, the Thai community was quite small in Los Angeles and the United States in general. From her experience, Martorell paints the Thai community as “few and far between” during her upbringing in a working class Thai family in the 70s and 80s.

“When Thais were few and far between, businesses were few and far between, and we kind of just stuck together in clusters in mostly like central part of LA,” Martorell said. “That was the experience and it was mostly working class, working poor Thais, and then some entrepreneurs and business owners at the time, but pretty dispersed, pretty scattered.”

Martorell describes the immigration history of Thai people to be split up in three stages. The first stage took place in the fifties and through the mid-sixties affluent and well-educated Thai people came to the United States for more schooling and then applied that to development mainly back in Thailand. In 1965, the United States passed the Immigrant and Nationality Act, which spurred further Thai immigration due to an increased quota for Asian countries, Latin American countries, and more. This legislation led to more Thai people coming to America as students and subsequently starting new businesses in cities like Los Angeles. Finally, the third and current wave started in the eighties with immigration of impoverished Thai people from rural parts of Thailand. These immigrants fell into exploitative working conditions as they came to the U.S. with little education and lower-level skills, which people, oftentimes Thai themselves, took advantage of.

These exploitative practices came to light more in the nineties, which was the beginning of Martorell’s activism. Her work exposed the poor working conditions and advocated for human rights of Thai people in Los Angeles. Around this same time, the 1992 civil unrest occurred devastating large swaths of East Los Angeles. The Thai community was not exempt in this destruction as they lived in the East Hollywood area as well as Koreatown and Melrose.

“It had adverse impacts on the Thai community, displacing them from their homes, their jobs, and their businesses,” Martorell explained. “And so when the dollars were coming down the pipeline from corporations and the federal government and other local county governments to rebuild LA in the aftermath of the civil unrest, the Thai community was excluded.”

This exclusion of the Thai community for aid motivated Martorell to advocate for the Thai people in Los Angeles and help them get the funding and resources they desperately needed during this time. Martorell would form the Thai Community Development Center, or Thai CDC, in 1994 with the support of others in the community and East L.A. area. These major events also triggered her campaign for the official designation of Thai Town as a neighborhood in Los Angeles.

“For most people, we're still invisible, and we're still marginalized. And we still need our voice heard. And so we have no political clout, you know, or voice to speak up… I felt that the civil unrest was really a manifestation of the growing social and economic disparities that we have been experiencing in Los Angeles and the polarization between the haves and have nots,” Martorell said.

Martorell’s wording of the “haves and have nots” is in reference to of course the wealth disparities between mainly white people and POC/immigrant communities and how the civil unrest was the culmination of this inequity. However, she’s also referencing internal strife within the Thai community and the economic disparities there. Martorell revealed that there was animosity towards the Thai CDC when it was created as wealthy Thai people disapproved of the Thai CDC’s mission to assist working class Thai people in upward economic mobility. Much of this disapproval was due to their belief that the Thai CDC was interfering in the deeply rooted social hierarchy embedded in Thai culture, as well as the belief that karma had led to their current economic position in society. Some of these affluent Thai people were human traffickers and exploiting Thai labor, and the Thai government did not like that the Thai CDC was exposing these cases because it would make the government look bad for not having stricter regulations. Thus, wealthy Thais and the Thai government turned against the Thai CDC and even actively attacked their work.

“I never let it get to me personally, because, you know, I understood sort of the bigger picture in terms of like these are folks who really have been socialized in thinking a certain way and having a certain mindset,” Martorell said. “We're so mission driven, that we have no time to lose or waste with those criticisms and pushback… We just have to really stay focused because there are people that need us.”

Their tune would soon change when the campaign for Thai Town grew more visible and popular in the late nineties. The designation of Thai Town in East Hollywood became a source of national pride for all Thai people and even the Thai government as they saw what that kind of representation could do for the Thai community. Thais across the community testified in City Hall for the designation and willingly worked with the Thai CDC to learn how they could further the campaign.

“We became then a legitimate force to be reckoned with. And now no one’s like there to criticize us because now we give everyone what they want. It's like, they got Thai Town, and they love it and they celebrate it,” said Martorell.

Now, much of the affluent Thai people and the Thai government supports the Thai CDC not only for their efforts surrounding Thai Town’s designation but also their development of the neighborhood. The Thai CDC is primarily a poverty alleviation organization but they also recognize the importance of building up the community through different events and spaces. They help fund small businesses trying to get on their feet. They still expose exploitation of the working class in the Thai community. They do it all.