Abstract of World Donut: Cambodians, Donut Shops, Los Angeles, 1975-Present, by Erin Michelle Curtis, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2016 At the turn of the twenty-first century, the five-county Los Angeles area boasted more donut shops per capita than any other place in the United States and a populace “mad for” the fried confections. Cambodian refugees owned and operated between eighty and ninety percent of these businesses. This dissertation tells the history of the formation and operation of this urban ethnic economy. Individual chapters take up questions of how Cambodian donut entrepreneurs recombined and reinterpreted the technologies and discourses developed for the U.S. donut industry during the early twentieth century, eventually creating an alternative formation to that industry; why policy imperatives together with refugee resistance shaped Cambodian American ethnic enclaves and how the ethnic donut economy in Southern California is implicated in this process; how Cambodian refugees became involved in the donut business and what this story reveals about the role of donut shops in their negotiation of ethnic and national identities; and how individual actors marshall a variety of resources and manage risks and insecurities in order to run their shops in a manner that reflects the urban built environment of Los Angeles. Overall, this dissertation contends that the technologies and ideologies of early twentieth-century mass food production, the exigencies of U.S. refugee and economic policies, and the physical and cultural landscapes of Southern California together with the ideas and actions of Cambodian refugees created a unique ethnic business niche in Los Angeles.
Curtis, Erin Michelle,
"World Donut: Cambodians, Donut Shops, Los Angeles, 1975-Present"
(2016).
American Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0MC8XFG
