“Where’s Barry?”

2020 ◽  
pp. 231-278
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
Latin Music ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter analyzes the understudied, multidimensional relationship of New York Jews with Latin music. Jewish engagement with Latin music took place throughout New York beyond the Palladium Ballroom, and the chapter presents the dance announcements in New York newspapers from 1947 to 1961 in order to show the extent of activities. It also details the historical depth of Jewish New Yorkers' involvement in Spanish Caribbean music by examining performance venues and events beyond the Catskills as well as the specific contributions of Eydie Gormé, Abbe Lane, Barry Rogers, and the dancer Ira Goldwasser. Ultimately, the chapter explores Jewish self-representations in Latin music and portrayals of Jews by non-Jews in Latin music. While there have been Jewish performers of Latin music throughout the Americas, Jewish New Yorkers' ongoing and nuanced relationship to Latin music has been unique and distinct.

“Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too”: Homelessness and visuality in New York City

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 831-848 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Goldfischer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
York City ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
The People ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Yorkers

This paper examines an anti-homeless visual campaign which appeared in New York City in the summer of 2015, in the midst of a resurgence of public concern over the visibility of homeless New Yorkers. The campaign, produced by a police union and titled “Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too” encouraged police officers and allies concerned with a perceived decline in “quality of life” to photograph homeless people on the street, tagging their locations and uploading the photographs to a website. Using the photographs, concurrent discourses, and evidence from surveys conducted by a homeless-led organization, I argue that this campaign represents more than simply an instance of revenge upon and against the homeless. Rather, I suggest that it represents a moment of what philosopher Kristie Dotson calls “epistemic backgrounding” a case in which the people visually displayed at the center of the pictures are “backgrounded” in the knowledge produced off of their images. Connecting this singular campaign with a broader conception of anti-homeless actions, I suggest that we might understand the relationship of visuality and homelessness as one which relies on revanchism for its political logic but produces the simultaneous absence and presence of homeless people through epistemic backgrounding.

Racial Migrations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse E. Hoffnung-Garskof
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Political Network ◽  
Revolutionary Nationalism ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
New Yorkers

In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. At an immigrant educational society in Greenwich Village, these early Afro-Latino New Yorkers taught themselves to be poets, journalists, and revolutionaries. At the same time, these individuals built a political network and articulated an ideal of revolutionary nationalism centered on the projects of racial and social justice. These efforts were critical to the poet and diplomat José Martí's writings about race and his bid for leadership among Cuban exiles, and to the later struggle to create space for black political participation in the Cuban Republic. This book presents a vivid portrait of these largely forgotten migrant revolutionaries, weaving together their experiences of migrating while black, their relationships with African American civil rights leaders, and their evolving participation in nationalist political movements. By placing Afro-Latino New Yorkers at the center of the story, the book offers a new interpretation of the revolutionary politics of the Spanish Caribbean, including the idea that Cuba could become a nation without racial divisions. A model of transnational and comparative research, the book reveals the complexities of race-making within migrant communities and the power of small groups of immigrants to transform their home societies.

New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Music Teachers ◽  
Musical Sound ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Latin Music ◽  
The Impact

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. This book seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, the book examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. The book studies this sound in detail and in its context. It offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, the book treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, it recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.

Nearly Got Shot Dead, and He Didn’t Get His Little Check Yet: Workers, Crime, and Law and Order in New York City, 1962-1970

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422199964
Author(s):  
Glenn Dyer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
York City ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Management Conflicts ◽  
High Crime ◽  
New Yorkers

Historians have conducted important research on the rise of law-and-order politics in New York City, where anxieties over women’s freedoms, political battles over police oversight, and crime impacts in poor communities contributed to its rise. The numerous walkouts, negotiations, and worker-management conflicts around high-crime areas in New York City suggest that the question of law and order was a salient workplace issue as well for the members of Communication Workers of America Local 1101. In their case, such concerns predate the rhetorical rise of law and order and help us better understand why such politics found fertile ground among working-class New Yorkers, white and black. Repeated incidences, largely in the city’s black ghettoes, prompted workers with a strong class consciousness and commitment to solidarity to transform the problems and experiences of individual workers into a shared question to be addressed via collective action.

WHO WE ARE: America Becoming and Becoming American

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lee
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Russell Sage Foundation ◽  
Illegal Aliens ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
New Yorkers

Samuel P. Huntington,Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004, 448 pages, ISBN: 0-684-86668-4, Cloth, $27.00.Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, and Mary C. Waters, eds., Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004, 448 pages, ISBN: 0-87154-436-9, Cloth, $39.95.Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 400 pages, ISBN: 0-691-12429-9, Paper, $19.95, and 0-691-07471-2, Cloth, $49.95.

A Rank Order of Eateries: A Chicago Stochastic Model

1974 ◽  
Vol 7 (02) ◽  
pp. 165-174
Author(s):  
Donald H. Haider
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Stochastic Model ◽  
Rank Order ◽  
The Many ◽  
New Yorkers

.... The hands of men took hold and tugged And the breaths of men went into the junk And the junk stood up into skyscrapers and asked Who am I? Am I a city?Carl Sandburg-“The Windy City”Robert Merriam, picking up where his father left off, once indicated that it would take 50 years for an aroused citizenry to root out corruption in Chicago. It has taken at least that long to upgrade Chicago's restaurants. Several decades ago, top gourmet societies labelled Chicago a “gastronomic wasteland.” Among the many old clichés and modern prejudices that the Windy City is constantly seeking to outlive is the quality of its restaurants. New Yorkers, of course, will not let old myths die. Gail Green,New York Magazinegalloping gourmet, recently went away from Chicago dubbing its restaurants the “Big Potato” — homely and solid, mealy and bland. Chicago epicureans responded by a whirlwind tour of the Gotham Town's “Best and Most Delectable,” writing devastating critiques of New York's much overrated eating places. If one can transcend these diatribes and gastronomic polemics, you will find Chicago to be as good a dining town as there is in the U.S.A. — variety, service, and prices.

Cry of Murder on Broadway

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Law ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Desperate Attempt

This book shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the Astor House Hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him. Ballard survived the attack, and the trial that followed created a sensation. Newspapers in New York and beyond followed the case eagerly, and crowds filled the courtroom every day. The prominent author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child championed Norman and later included her story in her fiction and her writing on women's rights. Norman also attracted the support of politicians, journalists, and legal and moral reformers who saw her story as a vehicle to change the law as it related to “seduction” and to advocate for the rights of workers. This book describes how New Yorkers followed the trial for entertainment. Throughout all this, Norman gained sympathys, in particular the jury, which acquitted her in less than ten minutes. The book weaves together Norman's story to show how, in one violent moment, she expressed all the anger that the women of the emerging movement for women's rights would soon express in words.

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