Moving Encounters With Spatial Racism: Walking in San Jose Japantown

In this article, I address how walking as a curatorial practice of storying a neighborhood facilitates an irreducible politics of place occurring as affective intensities at various registers, where everyday movements entangle with spatial enactments of racism. Working with theories of assemblage and immanent movement, I examine walking narratives in San Jose Japantown, California (U.S.), a historic, ethnic neighborhood historically subjected to U.S. government and banking practices of “redlining” and Japanese American incarceration and dislocation to prison camps. As an analytical method, assemblage requires attention to movement: material elements of arrangement, the relations they require, new arranging and arrangements they might enable, and how these arrangements are legitimated. I examine spatial racism as an assemblage, analyzing its affective qualities wherein attentiveness to immanent movement might breach the assemblage and, in doing so, reach toward radical reformation through memorialization, community activism and development.

Gerrard India Bazaar : an atypical ethnic economy in a residential neighbourhood

The purpose of this study is to examine the validity of the thesis that ethnic economies development from a co-ethnic residential context. This paper presents the Gerrard India Bazaar located at Gerrard Street East and Coxwell Ave. in Toronto, Ontario, as a South Asian ethnic economy that has developed into an ethnic commercial district without a corresponding coethnic neighbourhood. This paper explores the process and challenges that have accompanied the development of the Gerrard India Bazaar with the use of newspaper documentation on the area and business information from 1971, 1982, 1991, 1996 and 2009 MIGHTS Business Directory and 1976, 1986, 1996 and 2006 Census Data on the area. Findings from the research demonstrate that ethnic economics can be sustained without a co-ethnic neighborhood as long as there is co-occurring emergence of formal aspects of institutional completeness, accommodation to the residential environment and marketability to the mainstream market.

Gerrard India Bazaar : an atypical ethnic economy in a residential neighbourhood

The purpose of this study is to examine the validity of the thesis that ethnic economies development from a co-ethnic residential context. This paper presents the Gerrard India Bazaar located at Gerrard Street East and Coxwell Ave. in Toronto, Ontario, as a South Asian ethnic economy that has developed into an ethnic commercial district without a corresponding coethnic neighbourhood. This paper explores the process and challenges that have accompanied the development of the Gerrard India Bazaar with the use of newspaper documentation on the area and business information from 1971, 1982, 1991, 1996 and 2009 MIGHTS Business Directory and 1976, 1986, 1996 and 2006 Census Data on the area. Findings from the research demonstrate that ethnic economics can be sustained without a co-ethnic neighborhood as long as there is co-occurring emergence of formal aspects of institutional completeness, accommodation to the residential environment and marketability to the mainstream market.

Perceptions of E-cigarettes and Flavor Restrictions among Tobacco Retailers in Los Angeles

Objectives: In this study, we examined tobacco retailers' perceptions of e-cigarettes and associations with in-store availability of e-cigarettes. Methods: Retailers (N = 700) in multiple, racial/ethnic neighborhoods (black/African-American, N = 200); Hispanic/Latino, N = 200; white American, N = 200; Korean American, N = 100) in Los Angeles County participated in on-site interviews and store observations. Results: Controlling for individual and racial/ethnic neighborhood factors, retailers in majority-white neighborhoods had significantly higher odds of selling e-cigarettes and flavored e-cigarettes than retailers located in Hispanic/Latino (p < .001, OR = 0.14, 95% CI = 0.08-0.25; p < .001, OR = 0.19, 95% CI = 0.11-0.33) and Korean American (p < .05, OR = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.12-0.37; p < .05, OR = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.12-0.39) neighborhoods. Perceptions of e-cigarettes as being completely safe/safer than cigarettes were significantly associated with availability of flavored e-cigarettes (p < .05, OR = 2.03, 95% CI = 1.04-3.97); and opposition to flavored e-cigarette restrictions was marginally significantly associated with availability of flavored e-cigarettes (p < .10, OR = 1.56, 95% CI = 0.96-2.51). Adjusting for store type, perceptions of e-cigarettes as being completely safe/safer than cigarettes were marginally significantly associated with availability of flavored e-cigarettes (p < .10, OR = 1.78, 95% CI = 0.85-3.73). Conclusions: Targeted efforts are warranted for educating retailers and employees in these neighborhoods on the appeal and nicotine dependence potential of e-cigarette use for youth.

The Space of the New Ethnic Neighborhood: Polka Festival as Imagined Community

Following the spatial turn in cultural studies, ethnic space is understood as a cultural category, constructed by discourse and determined by capital, within which people create their own narratives. This essay explores the construction of ethnic space and identity in the phenomenon of the Polish American polka music festival. Framed by the attention to the process of “production of space” (Lefebvre 1991), the essay presumes that new conceptualizations of spatiality assume space is no longer treated as something given, a pre-existing territory, or locale. The case study of the ethnic music festival is an ideal place for examining the invention of place, because it is not located in a fixed space, but in a movable community traveling from festival to festival. The polka festival circuit is attended by a core community of polka boosters, many of whom travel from event to event in vacation motor homes, with attendees setting up "neighborhoods" of motor homes that include front lawns, outdoor kitchens, and "streets." Most bring lawn signs, street signs, flags and other public signs of Polish American identity, recreating—this essay argues—the urban ethnic neighborhood of previous immigrant generations. Polish American ethnic identity for this group of participants is located and recreated in an imagined community that it creates, dismantles, moves and recreates in a mobile spatiality of ethnic belonging.

The Politics of Purity, Disgust, and Contamination: Communal Identity of Trotter (Pig) Sellers in Madina Zongo (Accra)

The interplay of food, people, and market in the multi-religious and multi-ethnic neighborhood of Madina Zongo, Accra, results to some extent in food exchange. In a plural setting like Madina Zongo, an important aspect of their co-existence is the sharing of food; in so doing people claim their identities and mark boundaries; consequently, food in this sense becomes a potential for conflict. My primary aim in this paper is to focus on pig feet (trotter) sellers by drawing attention to their conflicting experiences and encounters in selling trotter. Pig feet (trotter) is a commodity that comes through a global network and is considered haram and unclean by Muslims. Actions by religious practitioners, thereby, play a pivotal role in provoking these experiences and, for this reason, it is prone to triggering tensions. In this paper, I explore the embodied encounters between these traders in the market (inhabited by people of different religious traditions) and, to some extent, the buyers and how this triggers religious sensibilities and at the same time evokes strong responses among those frequenting the space (e.g., market women and customers) and those (trotter sellers) who live in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods. In my analysis on tensions and pollution, I take into consideration groundworks by authors such as Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, Sara Ahmed’s and Deborah Durham’s notion of disgust and the anthropology of imagination, and inspired works on materiality such as the Latourian Actor-Network Theory (ANT) which draws attention to the agency of the non-human. This paper studies how religiously contested and so-called “contaminated” foodstuffs such as pig feet (trotter) result in boundary-making practices among members of the market and Zongo community. I argue that ideas of purity are influenced largely by cultural and religious convictions which seems not to be compromised by religious practitioners. The paper also investigates strategies people/sellers develop to negotiate these social relations.

Ethnic Enclaves, Education, and Crime among Immigrant Youth

While the spatial concentration of immigrant minorities raises concern about the intergenerational consequences of place-based ethnic inequalities, influential theories of assimilation emphasize that mobilization of social capital within local ethnic networks is central in shaping the future life chances of immigrant youth. This study asks how properties of the ethnic neighborhood environment in adolescence predict future criminal behavior and educational careers among immigrant youth using rich administrative data from Norway. I find that immigrant youth’s adolescent exposure to better-educated coethnic immigrant neighbors from the same origin country is related to lower risks of criminal engagement, higher likelihoods of completing upper-secondary education, and better academic achievements while growing up in areas with less-educated coethnics is associated with adverse outcomes. These associations are robust to adjustment for a broad set of background characteristics and fixed effects at the level of neighborhoods and national-origin groups. By contrast, the educational characteristics of other immigrant and native majority neighbors during adolescence seems to matter less. Overall, these findings support the view that the socioeconomic profile of coethnic neighbors in adolescence are consequential for key dimensions of immigrant youth’s assimilation.

Immigrant Life in an Artistic District. Polish and Ukrainian Immigrant Community and the New York Bohemia of East Village

The paper is a case study and addresses the issue of intersection of the immigrant and artistic worlds, exemplified by functioning of Polish and Ukrainian communities in East Village in New York. The Author tries to show how ethnic can intersect with the world of alternative artistic and intellectual culture and what the consequences of such a phenomenon for the transformation of the ethnic neighborhood and its status among the diaspora can be. The analysis is embedded in the historical and humanist perspective, accentuating the “longue durée” process, emphasizing the importance of the area and the social relations going on there for their users. Such an approach allows to form a final question on the possibility of conceptualizing this particular ethnic neighborhood in terms of cultural heritage of the immigrant group.

Cultural Manifestation and Ethnic Tourism: Hospitality in the Urban Public Space

Considered an ethnic neighborhood, boosted by the occupation of Italian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Bela Vista (also known as Bexiga) is the scene of cultural manifestations that expresses the vitality in the use of public space, becoming a tradition of the city of São Paulo. The neighborhood as a place of hospitality, gathers a set of ten cultural events that were catalogued over the years 2015 and 2016. This article focuses on one of those cultural events, the Italian festivity of Nossa Senhora Achiropita (Our Lady Achiropita). A celebration that by 2018 had been taking place for 92 years. Its aspects and dynamics were analyzed in order to identify the practices of sociability and commensality - treated in this study as dimensions of hospitality - as well as the potential of the neighborhood for ethnic tourism. Characterized as an exploratory research, the methodology of oral history was conducted via interviews with active participants or residents of the neighborhood, and through on site observation and bibliographical and documentary surveys. Among the results, the festive vocation of the neighborhood stands out as it shelters ethnic groups as well as cultural, popular and spontaneous manifestations, which are the locus of hospitality and touristic practices.