Creating the Latino City

Chapter Seven traces Lawrence's transition to a Latino-majority city with the 2000 census, including the tremendous increase in immigration during the 1980s that led Lawrence to become home to the largest concentration of Dominicans in the United States outside of New York City. The city's Latino population came to define Lawrence's public culture in this period, and the long push for Latino political power in the city was ultimately successful in many ways. This chapter discusses the transnational activities that brought new vitality to Lawrence's economy and its public spaces, yet larger structural forces continued to create obstacles to Latinos finding in Lawrence the better life they pursued.

Latino Migration and the Ruins of Industrial America

To feel like you belong to a city and to feel intimately linked to its roots, it is not enough to just reside in a city. To accept a city as your own, you have to have lived, worked, suffered, and forged the history of that city....

Latino Urbanism and the Geography of Opportunity

As any ten-year-old in East L.A., or Philly’s El Norte knows, borders tend to follow working-class Latinos wherever they live and regardless of how long they have been in the United States. Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism As the twentieth century drew to a close, Lawrence barely resembled the city it had been at the end of World War II. While its landscape was still dominated by brick mills and triple-decker homes, its economy and population had been profoundly transformed by suburbanization, deindustrialization, and Latino immigration. As scholars develop a distinct historiography of postwar Latino urbanism, Lawrence may not prove to be typical—as no city could possibly be—but its history nonetheless provides a set of essential questions to address: What was the role of U.S. imperialism in the Latinization (and globalization) of U.S. cities in the late twentieth century? How did race and class segregation in the era of suburbanization and urban crisis impact Latino settlement patterns and experiences? How did Latinos fight against disinvestment and discrimination and strive to claim their right to the city? Where did Latinos fit in the larger stigmatization of the “inner city” and the broad turn to conservatism that this discourse helped enable? From the periphery of U.S. empire to the ghettos at its center, Latino migration in the crisis era was a protracted struggle against containment and marginalization. Imperial migrants fought to have in the United States what U.S. intervention had denied them at home, pushing back against barriers of race and class in a segregated metropolitan landscape....

The Urban/Suburban Divide

Chapter One locates the roots of Lawrence's economic decline in suburban development from World War II until 1980. It focuses on white flight from the city and the divergent housing markets that developed between Lawrence and its suburbs. In addition, it traces the decline of Lawrence's economy and tax base in the postwar decades, arguing that suburban competition for industry and retail played a major role in eviscerating Lawrence's economy.

The Armpit of the Northeast?

Chapter Six recounts the decimation of Lawrence's public services in the 1980s and 1990s, with an emphasis on public safety and education. Major metropolitan centers experienced a "tale of two cities" phenomenon in this era (substantial reinvestment in some neighborhoods along with deepening crisis in others); in smaller postindustrial cities, however, economic decline often continued to define the city as a whole. Lawrence's crisis is situated in the larger battles over public spending in the late twentieth century, especially state-level education and welfare reform legislation. These reform efforts illustrate a distinctly suburban political agenda that came to reject the liberal welfare state when many voters saw it as privileging poor, urban communities of color.

The Riots of 1984

Chapter Four offers a narrative account of race riots in Lawrence in 1984, and an analysis of how white and Latino Lawrencians viewed the rioting in the context of the city's larger transformations. The riots were the most spectacular and devastating example of the racialized clash in the city, as whites and Latinos attempted to stake their claims with knives, rocks, guns, and Molotov cocktails.

Forcing Change

Chapter Five addresses the impact of the riots, including the major media spotlight trained on the city. Latinos successfully used the riots as leverage to press for changes in the city, finding allies in state and federal anti-discrimination agencies. This chapter also includes a discussion of the successful voting rights lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice against the city in the late 1990s that greatly increased Latino political power in Lawrence.

Struggling for the City

Many white residents correlated the economic decline of the city with the contemporaneous Latino immigration and so scapegoated the city's newcomers for Lawrence's decline. Resisting Latino settlement in the city became a way to hold on to an idealized past or to hopes for a future renaissance. Chapter Three examines white attempts to discourage Latino immigration into the city. Faced with this white hostility, Latino efforts to settle and build community in Lawrence were a form of quotidian activism, aimed at claiming an equal right to the city's homes, jobs, and public spaces. Latino activism and community formation is viewed through the life and work of Puerto Rican organizer, Isabel Melendez.

Why Lawrence?

Chapter Two analyzes Latino settlement in Lawrence during the 1960s and 1970s, as the city's declining manufacturing sector recruited Latino workers. I emphasize the push factors driving migrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, as well as from New York City, in which the crisis provoked by racialized disinvestment and deindustrialization was already well advanced. The postwar metropolitan political economy ensured that suburban housing, particularly in Massachusetts, was largely off limits to working-class Latinos, so this dispersal from New York was marked by a re-concentration within small cities like Lawrence. A second wave of deindustrialization in the late 1970s was especially destabilizing for Latinos concentrated in the city's manufacturing sector.