Latino City

Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945–2000

Llana Barber

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469631349, 9781469631332
• eBook ISBN: 9781469631356
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Latino City explores the transformation of Lawrence, Massachusetts, into New England’s first Latino-majority city. Like many industrial cities, Lawrence entered a downward economic spiral in the decades after World War II due to deindustrialization and suburbanization. The arrival of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the late twentieth century brought new life to the struggling city, but settling in Lawrence was fraught with challenges. Facing hostility from their neighbors, exclusion from local governance, inadequate city services, and limited job prospects, Latinos fought and organized for the right to make a home in the city.

In this book, Llana Barber interweaves the histories of urban crisis in U.S. cities and imperial migration from Latin America. Pushed to migrate by political and economic circumstances shaped by the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, poor and working-class Latinos then had to reckon with the segregation, joblessness, disinvestment, and profound stigma that plagued U.S. cities during the crisis era, particularly in the Rust Belt. For many Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, there was no “American Dream” awaiting them in Lawrence; instead, Latinos struggled to build lives for themselves in the ruins of industrial America.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes.

AHS

Andover Historical Society, Andover, Mass.

BG

Boston Globe

BH

Boston Herald

DOJ-CRS

United States Department of Justice-Community Relations Service

ET

Eagle-Tribune

ICCHC

Immigrant City Community Housing Corporation, Lawrence, Mass.

LDIC

Lawrence Development and Industrial Commission

LHC

Lawrence History Center, Lawrence, Mass.

LPL

Lawrence Public Library, Lawrence, Mass.

MSA

Massachusetts State Archives, Boston

NARA-NE

National Archives and Records Administration Northeast Division, Waltham, Mass.

NYT

New York Times

SLM

State Library of Massachusetts, Boston

VTNA

Vanderbilt Television News Archives, Nashville, Tenn.

Introduction

1. For accounts of Lawrence’s earlier history, see Cole, Immigrant City; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort; Watson, Bread and Roses; Vecoli, “Anthony Capraro and the Lawrence Strike of 1919”; and Robbins, “Bread, Roses, and Other Possibilities.” For classic accounts of earlier immigration more generally, see Handlin, The Uprooted, and Bodnar, The Transplanted. For broad and critical overviews of immigration history, see Reimers, Other Immigrants; Spickard, Almost All Aliens; and Waters, Ueda, and Marrow, New Americans.

2. Gonzales, Reform without Justice; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge, Beyond Walls and Cages; Nguyen, We Are All Suspects Now.

3. For an overview of the debate over whether “Hispanic/Latino” should be considered a race, see Klor de Alva, Shorris, and West, “Our Next Race Question.” See also the profoundly influential work of Flores, Diaspora Strikes Back and From Bomba to Hip-Hop. For a classic study of how another group of immigrants (West Indians) negotiated their place in the U.S. racial hierarchy, see Waters, Black Identities.

4. For postwar urban and suburban histories, as well as accounts of racialized struggles over metropolitan space and resources, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Self, American Babylon; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight and Folklore of the Freeway; Cohen, Consumers’ Republic; Seligman, Block by Block; Kruse, White Flight; Kruse and Sugrue, New Suburban History; Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Freund, Colored Property; Lamb, Housing Segregation in Suburban America since 1960; Wiese, Places of Their Own; Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development; Gillette, Camden after the Fall; Williams, Politics of Public Housing; Biondi, To Stand and Fight; Thompson, Whose Detroit?; Singh, Black Is a Country; Theoharis and Woodard, Freedom North; Joseph, Waiting until the Midnight Hour; Young, Soul Power; Murch, Living for the City; Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage; Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!; Lassiter, Silent Majority; Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings; and Satter, Family Properties.

5. For postwar Latino urban histories, see Acuña, Community under Siege; Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight; Fernández, “Young Lords and the Postwar City”; Hoffnung-Garskof, Tale of Two Cities; Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia; Whalen and Vázquez-Hernández, Puerto Rican Diaspora; Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen; Fernández, Brown in the Windy City; Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement; Snyder, Crossing Broadway; Muzio, “Struggle against ‘Urban Renewal’ in Manhattan’s Upper West Side”; Otero, La Calle; Perales, Smeltertown; and García, Havana USA. For prewar and World War II–era Latino urban histories, see Sánchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community; Escobedo, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits; Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?; Innis-Jiménez, Steel Barrio; Alvarez, Power of the Zoot; Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon; Romo, East Los Angeles; and Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American. For significant scholarship on urban Latinos in the contemporary era, see Pérez, Near Northwest Side Story; Dávila, Barrio Dreams; Stepick, Grenier, Castro, and Dunn, This Land Is Our Land; Levitt, Transnational Villagers; Itzigsohn, Encountering American Faultlines; Davis, Magical Urbanism; DeGenova and Ramos-Zayas, Latino Crossings; Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop; Haslip-Viera and Baver, Latinos in New York; Laó-Montes and Dávila, Mambo Montage; Smith, Mexican New York; Valle and Torres, Latino Metropolis; and Diaz and Torres, Latino Urbanism. For significant scholarship on other postwar and late twentieth-century urban immigrant communities, see Tang, Unsettled; Buff, Immigration and the Political Economy of Home; Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams; Bao and Daniels, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky; and Johnson, New Bostonians. Finally, for important studies of Latino communities outside traditionally urban spaces, see Fink, Maya of Morganton; Mahler, American Dreaming; Pitti, Devil in Silicon Valley; and Gordon, Village of Immigrants.

6. Guzmán, “Hispanic Population.” For a clear articulation of the importance of Latino immigration to urban studies scholarship, see Sandoval-Strausz, “Latino Landscapes”; Diaz and Torres, Latino Urbanism; and Davis, Magical Urbanism.

7. In 1960, 69 percent of mainland Puerto Ricans lived in New York City alone, and 79 percent of Mexican Americans lived in cities; see Whalen and Vázquez-Hernández, Puerto Rican Diaspora, 3, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps, Table, and Chart
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Latino Migration and the Ruins of Industrial America
• One: The Urban/Suburban Divide
• Two: Why Lawrence?
• Three: Struggling for the City
• Four: The Riots of 1984
• Five: Forcing Change
• Six: The Armpit of the Northeast?
• Seven: Creating the Latino City
• Conclusion: Latino Urbanism and the Geography of Opportunity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index