Just this. I think it was more common in the past, but I do not know.
In the past some East European cities seemed to have areas favoured by [sanctioned for?] embassy staff and foreign nationals. These were invariably singled out in tourist guides as being ‘safe’ and having restaurants with less risk of confronting weird local foods and mores.
I don’t know of any Little Wisconsin similar to the various Chinatowns or Wee Britain, certainly not in Australia, although there are areas with more touristy accommodation where short-staying Americans are likely to be.
Several countries have large American or other foreign enclaves. Portugal, Costa Rica, Panama and Mexico all come to mind. I have a friend living in a large expat community in Portugal (largely British and American). As mentioned, embassies tend to have areas where diplomatic personnel are housed, although that’s not universal. In Lisbon, that area is in Cascais in the suburbs (and near the school), but we lived in an apartment in the city. In Egypt there was one good-sized community outside the city, and an apartment complex closer in. In Frankfurt, all Consulate personnel (other than the ConGen) lived in a condo complex. In both of my African posts, housing was scattered.
In Sao Paulo, Braszil, there is a neighborhood where many Americans live. The natives call it Brooklyn.
You also have places like “Little Quebec” in Hollywood, Florida, where the dominant language is French. Welcome to Little Quebec in Florida – Richards Motel Family of Lodgings
Seoul’s Yongsan District (total population 232,000) has more than 20,000 foreign residents, of whom Americans are currently the largest single national group, with nearly 5,000. The main reason Americans gravitated there was that the US Army headquarters in South Korea used to be based here.
I spent 6 weeks in a neighborhood of Sydney that seemed to be heavily Lebanese. I don’t know how to describe it except it was about a mile from the university.
It sounds like it is largely commercial, with Portuguese building names common but not universal:
Maybe someone will identify a true Americatown somewhere in Mexico. But I think the answer to the thread question is: Not common.
There are many places in Israel that have Anglo (English speaking) enclaves that include Americans, but I don’t think there are any neighborhoods that are exclusively American.
I think that there is a universal trend for people in countries where they do not speak the local language to live near each other.
There are, for example, English enclaves in Spain. retirees who moved there for the sun and cheap wine, but have little contact with the natives. I wonder if Canadian snowbirds in Florida flock together? AFAIK there are no American enclaves in London, although Earls Court did seem a bit like a suburb of Sydney sometimes.
I grew up in Sierra Leone. For a couple of years, we lived in a house where all the neighbours were white British. Then we moved to a much nicer house where One neighbour was an African politician and the other a tribal chief, and there was a native market down the road. My sister and I both spoke passable Creole (the local lingua franca), but Mother told us off if she heard.
But unless shown otherwise, I don’t think even one such town or neighborhood exists, in Spain, where the population is majority American.
The OP question is a good one, and I still think the answer is – not common.
Given that the United States is the third most populous country in the world, a related factual question may be – why not?
Starting just a first guess here – the United States is too diverse. Black and white may not want to live in the same neighborhood at home, and same with Democrats and Republicans, so if they move, they wouldn’t feel a need to be with others just because they are from the U.S.A.
But if the above was true, then you might think there would be a predominently American neighborhood in Ghana, and don’t think there is.
Maybe, instead of asking why there are no Americatowns, I should be asking why there ARE Koreatowns in the United States and British neighborhoods in Spain.
It may be a language thing. It is easy to get by speaking only English in many countries around the world. Not so speaking Korean.
I’d also submit the US is less welcoming of foreigners than other countries are of Americans. So, those foreigners will want to group together in the US whereas Americans need not group-up in foreign countries.
Personally, were I to move to Spain or France or wherever I would not want to be in an American enclave. That’s just me though.
My guess is that the answers to some extent are going to be the reverse of each other. “_______” towns in the US are mostly inhabited by immigrants who don’t speak English , who share a language and the ethnic character of the neighborhood frequently disappears as people assimilate - they either move away or lose the language and the culture by the third generation. This is why Little Italy in Manhattan now consists of about three blocks - Chinatown expanded into what was once Little Italy, but that could only happen once the Italian immigrants or their Italian-American children moved out. And the reason Chinatown expanded is because people are still immigrating.
It would not surprise me at all if most Americans living in foreign countries are not immigrants but rather are living there due to a particular job and will move back to the US and that most of the Americans who are immigrants are retirees. Then of course you have the issue of English - I don’t need to live in an American neighborhood in Rome to speak English. Not just because a lot of Italians speak English , but because there are multiple countries with a lot of native English speakers. I could get by fine in a neighborhood of English speakers even if most are not from the US - that doesn’t apply to many other languages. And when it does, you may find that language is more important than nationality, even in the US. I grew up in a very German neighborhood - German delis, German butchers, German restaurants , German bakeries and even a German school *. Obviously a lot of German immigrants had lived there. But there were also a lot of immigrants from a German-speaking town that is currently in Slovenia - those people’s ancestors left Germany hundreds of years ago, but when they came to the US, they went to a neighborhood full of German speakers.
* Not nearly so German now - the school closed years ago , there’s one restaurant left and the only German bakery left is owned by Italians. And the German delis are all gone.
Not just you, I think.
If I was to move to the only highly westernized country likely to accept me as an immigrant, Israel, I wouldn’t look for a neighborhood with the most Americans – such could be predominently ultra-Orthodox, and some of the Americans would only speak languages I don’t know (Yiddish and Hebrew). I would be more at home in a mixed neighborhood with as many, or as few, fellow-Americans as it has Israeli Arabs, and where most of the people do speak at least a little English.
Another factor is that, although I can’t find good statistics, I think the United States is still more a country for immigration than emmigration. And when Americans do permanently emmigrate, I think they are mostly going back to the country they were born in and whose culture they prefer. The second largest group of emmigating Americans is probably retirees, and, given their zero fertility and short life expectancy, it takes a very large number of them to fill up a neighborhood, and keep it filled. I just don’t think there are enough. This article, on a city in Ecuador known for having lots of Americans (but probably no more than 2 percent of population) may give a feel for that:
I wonder how many of these “long-term privileged tourists” are dying in Ecuador. Do the long-term privlieged tourists stay there a decade and then return to the U.S. when the diseases of old age start getting serious?
There’s a few choices, depending which university it was, or it could as easily have been the predominantly Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Portuguese / Brazilian suburbs which are also in the shadow of Sydney University.
what they all have in common, probably with most EthnicTowns globally is that at their core they were areas of cheap housing which were once quite middle class suburbs but which had declined over time, close to transport and surrounded by the sorts of industry that uses lots of unskilled / migrant / non-English speaking labour. Chain migration reinforced a multi-generational ethnic population. As their kids and grandkids got wealthy they left and the next lot took over.
I suspect that most Americans aren’t in the low-skilled job market to the point where they’d travel around the world on the say-so of their uncle.
I think the comments about US citizens abroad is common to most affluent nation’s citizens abroad.
They are there because it is their cultural/ancestry, and they feel at home, or they are there because of work, and will likely rotate back in a few years. A few emigrate. But tend to pick places that are pretty culturally close.
In Cairo the suburb of Maadi is favoured by many ex- pat residents. You will find the embassies, major international companies and their employees there. Along with affluent Egyptians. All the international oil company guys I knew lived there. (It was a paradise compared to living in downtown Houston. They really hated it when their time ran out and they rotated back.)
Saudi Arabia has gated enclaves. Again mostly international companies with employees on rotating postings or contractors working for companies like Saudi Aramco. The enclaves allow the women some freedoms frowned upon outside. You may get not so much an American enclave as a company enclave.
One sees ex-pats split into two paths. One cleaves together with fellow ex-pats and limits social connections to that circle. The others go native. There is not a lot of in between. Ex-pats in more affluent countries are more likely to go native. Singapore for instance. Right now it would be very interesting to see how things are evolving in China.
Everyone I know who has gone to Japan has gone as native as the culture allows and married locals. But also returned later in life with spouse. Probably because the economics of retirement in Japan and the standard of living expectations make no sense in comparison to returning.
My anecdotal experience from friends and family who’ve moved abroad for corporate jobs and ended up in places like Sao Paolo and Shanghai is that it isn’t so much fellow nationals that clump together - more like Westerners and english speakers. So, people who feel comfortable culturally with each other. The Americans live in the Western, english-speaking compounds along with the Europeans and the Antipodeans.
The Brits in Spain thing is a facet of numbers - no doubt, if there were many American and Australians moving to the Costa del Sol, they’d move to where the Brits live.
I had a holiday home in southern Italy, in a place that wasn’t used to foreign tourists, but where the numbers were slowly growing. The locals dubbed my street ‘Contrada Inglese’ because four houses were lived in by people who all spoke English. They therefore assumed we were all English, but we were, in fact, one English couple, one American couple, a Dutch couple and an Irish family.
Interesting question! What produces entire ethnic neighborhoods is a high immigration rate. Americans don’t permanently leave what is perhaps the richest and most free nation in the world in very large numbers. Anything resembling an American neighborhood is probably made up of military families or families with work visas.
US taxes add an extra disincentive
The reason that there are British neighborhoods in Spain is that nowadays the British usually go to certain coastal areas in southern Spain for a beach vacation rather than to the beach towns in the U.K. that they used to go to. It used to be considerably cheaper for them to travel overland to those beach towns in the U.K. rather than to fly to Spain. Now it’s not that much more expensive for them to travel to Spain than to other parts of the U.K. The beach towns in the U.K. now look a little old-fashioned because of this, like nothing there has changed for several decades. Many of the British people who traveled to Spain for vacations then decided to retire there.
I think that ethnic neighborhoods tend not to last more than a few decades in the U.S. There will be a large amount of emigrants from another country who move to the U.S. and settle in a small number of neighborhoods. They then gradually move out of those neighborhoods by intermarrying with people of other ethnic origins, going to college elsewhere, becoming well-off enough that they can afford better housing, and being offered jobs elsewhere. Eventually the only indication of there once being an ethnic neighborhood there is the few remaining restaurants serving food of that ethnic origin.