By Robert Stark

I spent the 4th of July Weekend in the San Francisco Bay Area with Matt Pegas (check out his Substack). The trip was short, but I was able to take in enough observations of the region to compare it to past trips. My observations solidify many of my conclusion about California’s demographic, economic, social, and political trends.

Revisiting California’s future of pan-enclavism, my overall observation is nuanced in that we are seeing greater fragmentation but with pockets of diversity, which like with the more homogenous enclaves have their own unique traits rather than being  part of one monolithic melting pot. These trends vary throughout the region with the region’s geography of many different cities divided by the physical barriers of the Bay and several mountain ranges forming a sense of a patchwork of pan-enclavism.

Source: Best Neighborhood

The Bay Area is made up of more traditional enclaves such as Chinatown and North Beach/Little Italy in San Francisco but my impression is that Chinatown in San Francisco has declined in favor of more suburban ethnoburbs. These ethnoburbs include Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indian communities throughout the Silicon Valley as well as smaller one’s such as Little Kabul in Fremont, northeast of the Silicon Valley, which will likely grow due to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, symbolic of the grave yard of empires too.

My friend Pilleater has advocated for an identity politics that is a fusion of both Europeans and Asians. This sounds like silly meme culture, but relates to the trend of ethnogenesis where two or more groups merge together creating a new identity. There is a growing Eurasian population in the Bay Area and this ideal serves as a positive alternative to deracinated, rootless cosmopolitanism.

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