"A Landmark for Sun Valley": Wat Thai of Los Angeles and Thai American Suburban Culture in 1980s San Fernando Valley

Abstract

IN THE CRISP EARLY MORNING HOURS of Saturday, April 17, 1982, Thais from across Southern California arrived at Wat Thai of Los Angeles—the first and largest Thai Theravada Buddhist temple in the United States—in preparation for the start of a much-anticipated weekend festival to celebrate the Thai New Year. The temple filled with chatter and laughter as volunteers bustled to build a performance stage, set up an amplifier system, and fold out chairs on the main lawn. Food vendors, almost all Thai women, placed portable stovetops, griddles, deep fryers, steamers, and makeshift barbecues under tented booths along the inside perimeter of the rear parking lot. By afternoon, Wat Thai was packed with hundreds of visitors enjoying live music, shopping for lampshade hats and handcrafted trinkets, and eating grilled meat on sticks and bowls of noodles. The sights, sounds, and smells were reminiscent of weekend bazaars in Bangkok, only the temple was nestled on the corner of a residential neighborhood in the suburban San Fernando Valley, just one block west of the Hollywood Freeway. One local writer even observed that the scene looked “as if it had been plucked from Bangkok and set down by accident in North Hollywood.” This article explores Thai American suburban culture in Los Angeles’s east San Fernando Valley in the 1980s. It asks: What was the Thai American suburban ideal? What factors shaped its formation? And how and why did it dovetail with or disrupt dominant notions of suburbia? Tens of thousands of Thais across Los Angeles used Wat Thai as a public space to engage in cultural practices like weekend festivals. Thai American cultural practices at Wat Thai embodied a vibrant public suburban culture that valued an inclusive and collective use of space. This Thai American suburban ideal fostered the development of social capital, community-building, and a public sociability that crossed ethnic, citizenship, class, and religious lines. I argue that this was vital not just for Thai American suburban culture, but