A Chinatown Migration Story: Why Houston’s Asian Population Center Has Moved Over the Years

Many of us are familiar with the famed Chinatown sections of cities like New York and San Francisco. They serve as some of the largest enclaves of Asians in the world – outside of Asia. And those famous Chinatowns have basically always been in the same place within those cities – but that’s not the case in Houston.

Houston’s Chinatown – and later the city’s more pan-Asian center of population – has moved several times over the last 130 years. The area of East Downtown was one of those hubs, and Anton Sinkewich, the executive director of the East Downtown Management District, researched why Houston’s Asian population migrated several times and wrote about it in the current issue of the journal Sugar & Rice.

He talks with Houston Matters’ Michael Hagerty who asked him when the first Asians arrived in Greater Houston.

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