Ethnography in Today's World

Color Full Before Color Blind

Roger Sanjek

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812245455, 9780812245455
• eBook ISBN: 9780812208764
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Ethnography in Today's World, Roger Sanjek examines the genre and practice of ethnography from a historical perspective, from its nineteenth-century beginnings and early twentieth-century consolidation, through political reorientations during the 1960s and the impact of feminism and postmodernism in later decades, to its current outlook in an increasingly urban world. Drawing on a career of ethnographic research across Brazil, Ghana, New York City, and with the Gray Panthers, Sanjek probes politics and rituals in multiethnic New York, the dynamics of activist meetings, human migration through the ages, and shifting conceptions of race in the United States. He interrogates well-known works from Boas, Whyte, Fabian, Geertz, Marcus, and Clifford, as well as less celebrated researchers, addressing methodological concerns from ethnographers' reliance on assistants in the formative days of the discipline to contemporary comparative issues and fieldwork and writing strategies. Ethnography in Today's World contributes to our understanding of culture and society in an age of globalization. These provocative examinations of the value of ethnographic research challenge conventional views as to how ethnographic fieldwork is and can be conceived, conducted, contextualized, and communicated to academic audiences and the twenty-first-century public.

PART I

Engaging Ethnography

Chapter 1

Color Full Before Color Blind: The Emergence of Multiracial Neighborhood Politics in Queens, New York City

The United States is in the midst of a great transition. Within a few decades, Americans of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry will outnumber those of European origin. According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau projection, by 2042, the proportion of whites will fall from its present 65 percent to 50 percent, and by 2050, the country’s population will be 46 percent white, 30 percent Latin American (or “Hispanic”), 15 percent black, and 9 percent Asian. The great transition among America’s children will arrive even sooner. By the year 2020, fewer than half of children under age 18 will be white.¹

The pace of multiracial change is faster on the nation’s coasts and in its cities than in its heartland and suburbs.² New York City crossed the “majority minority” threshold in the early 1980s,³ and by 1990, the city’s white population stood at 43 percent, down from 52 percent in 1980. Two decades later in 2010, New York City was 33 percent white, 29 percent Latin American, 23 percent black, 13 percent Asian, and 2 percent biracial or multiracial (a category first enumerated in 2000).

It is in New York’s diverse, changing neighborhoods, such as Elmhurst-Corona in northwest Queens, that clues about the future of us all may first be glimpsed. Elmhurst-Corona underwent its “majority minority” transition in the 1970s. Between 1960 and 1970, the neighborhood’s white population fell from 98 percent to 67 percent, then to 34 percent in 1980, and 18 percent in 1990. Over these same decades, immigrant and African American newcomers arrived in substantial numbers, and by 1990, Elmhurst-Corona was 45 percent Latin American, 26 percent Asian, and 10 percent black. Established residents of German, Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish, and other European ancestries now lived among Africans, African Americans, Chinese, Colombians, Cubans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Filipinos, Haitians, Indians, Koreans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other new neighbors. In 1992, New York’s Department of City Planning called Elmhurst-Corona “perhaps the most ethnically mixed community in the world.”⁴

My fieldwork in this neighborhood began in 1983, and I followed its changing political life over more than a dozen years. I worked with a team of researchers who mirrored the cultural and linguistic complexity of the Elmhurst-Corona population. Their work focused on Chinese, Korean, African American, Indian, and the diverse Latin American residents. My assignment was the white folks.⁵

Our team’s overall charge was to assess how far Elmhurst-Corona’s diverse population had come in forming what Lani Guinier terms “an integrated body politic in which all perspectives are represented, and in which all people work together to find common ground.”⁶ I took primary responsibility for this by focusing on what Jane Jacobs defines as the “district-level” political field. Anthropologists envision any political “field” they study as a set of linked “arenas” in which ongoing political events may be observed; the field also extends beyond these “enclaves of action” to include “encapsulating” structures of power at larger-scale levels.⁷

In her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs distinguished three levels of urban existence: “the city as a whole,” in which people find jobs, visit museums, support baseball teams, and vote for mayor; “the street neighborhood” of immediate daily interaction; and “the district,” which “mediates between the politically powerless street neighborhoods, and the inherently powerful city as a whole.” In contemporary New York City, she noted, districts range from eighty thousand to two hundred thousand residents in size.

Jacobs envisaged district-level political power emerging from “churches, PTAs, business associations, political clubs, civic groups, and block associations.” For a district “to be big and powerful enough to fight City Hall,” political “interweaving” of its groups and associations was required. In a “successful” district, “working relationships [exist] among people, usually leaders, who enlarge their local public life beyond the neighborhoods of streets and specific organizations or institutions, and [who] form relationships with people whose roots and backgrounds are in entirely different constituencies. It takes surprisingly few people to weld a district into a real Thing. A hundred or so do it in a population a thousand times their size.”⁸

The composition and scale of Elmhurst-Corona’s district-level political field matched Jacobs’s description. Within it, I could readily do what an ethnographer does: observe ongoing events and listen to speech in action.⁹ Its participants included black and immigrant newcomers, but the majority continued to be long-established white residents. Some local whites were antagonistic or indifferent to their new neighbors. Others sought accommodation and even formed new friendships. All were intensely aware of change going on around them. It was impossible to do otherwise.

A Neighborhood Remade

Already by 1970, salsa stars Tito Puente and Orquesta Broadway were appearing on Roosevelt Avenue, and Dominicans and Colombians referred to sections of Corona and Elmhurst as “Sabana Iglesias” and “Chapinerito,” named after locales in their homelands. Korean Christian churches sprouted up everywhere, joined by Spanish-language Protestant congregations, a Pakistani mosque, a Hindu temple, and a Chinese Zen Buddhist church. Enormous crowds came for Colombian, Ecuadorian, and Korean festivals in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, where Latin American leagues also played soccer every weekend. New Asian and Latin American stores appeared on the district’s commercial strips, and languages other than English could be heard on subway platforms, in Elmhurst Hospital, at local libraries, in coin laundries, and on every block and apartment building floor.

Latin American and Asian immigrants settled gradually throughout the area, in all of its thirty-five census tracts. The white population had already begun leaving in the 1950s, and their moves to suburbs and other parts of the United States continued, resulting in vacant apartments and homes. The number of white households shrank less than the overall white population, however, with one or two older persons remaining by the 1990s from what had been larger, growing households in earlier decades.

African Americans arrived under very different circumstances from those of the diverse immigrants. Following a federal housing discrimination suit at the forty-six-hundred–unit Lefrak City apartment complex in 1970, white flight occurred there, and by 1980, Lefrak City was 65 percent black. Most black newcomers settled here or nearby so that even in 1990, only 3 of the 35 census tracts contained 86 percent of Elmhurst-Corona’s black population. The historically white local real estate sector, now including large numbers of immigrant-owned firms, had opened up to Latin American, Asian, and even Haitian renters and home buyers, but not to African Americans.¹⁰

I traced the emerging relations among Elmhurst-Corona’s whites, blacks, and immigrants from 1983 to 1996 through participant observation and also back to a 1960 baseline with archival sources. My fieldwork centered on Community Board 4 (CB4). The most immediate layer of government in New York City, the fifty-nine local community boards of up to fifty appointed members each, were created in the late 1960s as part of “the nation’s most ambitious attempt at urban decentralization.”¹¹ Their purview includes land-use review, city budget recommendations, and the monitoring of municipal service delivery. Their maturation as arenas for local politics coincided with Elmhurst-Corona’s growing ethnic and racial diversity.

I attended a hundred and twenty-three meetings and public hearings of CB4 and its district services cabinet. From there I worked outward, to fifty meetings of civic associations, small business groups, redistricting bodies, and mayoral commissions and “town hall” events. I also observed eighty-three public rituals, which ranged from Christmas tree lightings, ethnic festivals, protest rallies, and block cleanups to award ceremonies, park openings, antidrug marches, and International Day programs in schools. I attended seventy-five services and social events at three historically white Protestant churches and visited several other white, African American, Asian, and Latin American houses of worship. Moreover, I spent numerous hours in walks throughout the area and in parks, an indoor shopping mall, Elmhurst Hospital, the local police precinct house, libraries, senior centers, and restaurants. I used formal interviewing strategically and sparingly, and in my 1,230 pages of fieldnotes, participant observation outnumbers interviews by 10 to 1.

African Americans Misperceived

In 1970, just 9 percent of Lefrak City’s tenant population was black, and this included many Africans working for the United Nations and other international organizations. Following landlord Samuel Lefrak’s agreement to end discriminatory rental practices, African American lower-middleclass city employees, teachers, and white-collar workers who could afford the prevailing rents found they were now treated on a first-come, firstserved basis and sought out Lefrak’s roomy apartments. By 1975, the complex was two-thirds black, and Elmhurst-Corona’s surrounding white residents had noted the change. When some whites saw black faces, however, they made uninformed assumptions.

In January 1975, a rumor that Lefrak City “is being loaded with welfare cases” was reported at Community Board 4, where no Lefrak City tenant, white or black, had yet been appointed.¹² One CB4 leader averred, “People have moved out [of Lefrak City] because of the bad conditions there, due to welfare tenants. As soon as landlords begin to rent to them, the buildings deteriorate and we will have another South Bronx.” Representatives from the still mainly white Lefrak City Tenants Association (LCTA) were invited to CB4, where they insisted the problem was not “welfare cases” (it turned out that the tiny percentage of these was smaller than the figure for Queens overall) but rather cuts in maintenance and security by Lefrak Management. The complex had been overbuilt in relation to the rental market, and Lefrak had hundreds of vacant apartments, a situation that had persisted ever since the complex opened in 1962.

Slowly, as Elmhurst-Corona whites began to meet black Lefrak leaders, they also began to understand that their own neighborhood’s fate was inextricably linked to that of Lefrak City. By 1979, white Corona civic groups were supporting the now black-led Lefrak City Tenant Association in a rent strike, and Community Board 4 and the LCTA joined forces against Queens politicians maneuvering to move twenty-six hundred Social Security Administration jobs from Lefrak City to another Queens neighborhood. In economic terms, Lefrak City’s black population in 1979 had a higher mean family income than its white Corona neighbors. This would continue. In 1990, Elmhurst-Corona’s average household incomes by race were closer to each other than anywhere else in Queens. Blacks stood at slightly over $35,000 and whites slightly under that figure; Asian incomes were $36,000 and Latin American ones $33,000.

An “Illegal Aliens” Panic

Much as white Elmhurst-Corona leaders had misperceived Lefrak City’s growing black population as “welfare cases,” they also misdefined Elmhurst-Corona’s immigrant newcomers as “illegal aliens.” Both designations masked real issues—Lefrak’s overbuilding and maintenance reductions in the first instance and rapid population growth and overcrowded schools and housing in the second. In both cases, progress in facing these issues was made only after perceptions were revised, hysteria over newcomers subsided, and leaders began to redefine problems as ones affecting the “quality of life” of all Elmhurst-Corona residents, white and black, American and immigrant, alike.

The phrase “illegal aliens” first appeared in Community Board 4’s minutes in 1971 in connection with the emerging problem of school crowding. Young immigrant families with children were replacing aging whites in Elmhurst-Corona, and School Board 24, which was controlled by members elected from still overwhelmingly white neighborhoods in southwest Queens, was responding with makeshift measures, mainly prefabricated “mini-schools” that filled former school playgrounds.

In addition, white and immigrant realtors, landlords, and home owners were satisfying the growing demand for housing in Elmhurst-Corona by adding illegal room rentals and basement and garage units to the local housing supply. And worse, overzoning under the city’s 1961 ordinance permitted developers to buy and demolish existing one- and two-family homes and replace them with brick-box “infills” that housed six or more units. Nonetheless, one white Elmhurst civic leader insisted, “this is a job for the INS.” As far as he was concerned, if “illegal aliens” were dealt with properly by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, “the housing and neighborhood deterioration problem would solve itself.”

In 1974, Community Board 4 held its first public hearing on the “illegal aliens” issue, and panic then set in. An August 25 New York Daily News story headlined “Illegal Aliens, a Flood Tide in Elmhurst” quoted Community Board 4’s white chairman referring to immigrant newcomers as “people pollution.” “My parents were immigrants,” he continued, “and this country was built by immigrants. But our community is being overrun. Our schools, housing, and many jobs are being taken by people who have no legal right to be here.” More public forums were held in 1974 and 1975, and INS and elected officials inflamed the situation with inflated estimates of New York’s undocumented population.¹³

Cooler heads eventually prevailed. The white male Community Board 4 district manager pressed for city housing code enforcement, and a black female Democratic district leader who represented Corona reminded the district cabinet of “the legal residents of Hispanic origin who are good hardworking people.” A careful numerical analysis after the 1980 census would have shown that the vast majority of Elmhurst-Corona’s immigrant population consisted of visa and green-card holders, naturalized citizens, and their children. But by the end of the 1970s, the “illegal aliens” question had in effect been redefined locally as a housing and school crowding issue.

Fiscal Crisis and Quality of Life

The prospect for solutions to housing and school problems, however, worsened after the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis, which eclipsed the Elmhurst-Corona flare-ups over new black and immigrant neighbors. In 1975, Manhattan’s major banks cut off credit to the city, and ultimate budgetary and policy control passed from public to private hands. Massive cuts in municipal services quickly followed.

Overall, the city budget shrank 22 percent between 1975 and 1983, and service cuts affected every aspect of life in neighborhood New York. The transit fare was raised; 129 years of free college education ended with the imposition of tuition; public school layoffs resulted in fewer teachers and paraprofessionals and a 25 percent increase in class size. Library hours were curtailed. Summer youth jobs and senior citizen, recreation, and cultural programs were scaled back. Five city hospitals closed. Fire Department response time increased. Building inspectors fell from 625 in 1975 to 382 by 1980 (and to only 7 for all of Queens by 1994). Sanitation department staff declined 48 percent by 1984. Park and playground workers were cut 25 percent during 1975, 29 percent more by 1984, and shifted from fixed assignments to mobile teams servicing several locations.

In Elmhurst-Corona, the Newtown Crier, a local civic association publication, reported in March 1976: “Home burglaries and muggings have been on the rise. Our police are trying to do their job, but do not have enough manpower. The sanitation pickups have dwindled to one a week in some sections and overall our streets are filthy. We are informed some of the classes in our schools are so large that teachers are having problems maintaining control.”

The aftereffects of the 1975 fiscal crisis defined the content of neighborhood politics for the next two decades. These assaults on what Elmhurst-Corona residents call “quality of life” have troubled whites, blacks, and immigrants alike.

The phrase “quality of life” resounded in the community board, civic association, and mayoral town hall meetings I attended during the 1980s and 1990s. The most succinct definition I heard was offered at a 1993 CB4 meeting, where a member explained: “Q...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Engaging Ethnography
• Part II. Ethnography, Past and Present
• Part III. Comparison and Contextualization
• Part IV. Ethnography and Society
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Acknowledgments