Out of the Urban Shadows: Uneven Development and Spatial Politics in Immigrant Suburbs

Abstract

It is now well established that the concentric zone model, developed by Ernest Burgess and elaborated by others in the Chicago School of Sociology to explain the distribution of social groups in metropolitan areas, was wrong. In the past several decades, immigrants have not only moved out of the centers of U.S. metropolitan areas, many have bypassed central cities altogether and settled directly in suburbs. Increasingly, they have done so in nontraditional gateway cities, such as those in the American South and Rustbelt, and in smaller metropolitan or nonmetropolitan areas (Singer et al. 2008). Suburban settlement has also not clearly been associated with immigrants’ “move up” or integration into the so-called Americanmainstream, as Chicago school authors argued. In many rapidly growing metropolitan areas, rising housing prices have pushed many immigrants out of their historic urban neighborhoods. While post-World War II visions of the American Dream may still pull immigrants to suburbia, the communities into which many have settled hardly reflect that dream.While Asian immigrants have high rates of settlement in middle-class, affluent, and white suburban neighborhoods, other immigrants more commonly settle into suburbs with relatively high rates of foreclosure, poverty, segregation, and other measures of disadvantage (Farrell 2016; Logan 2014). These are not the touted “opportunity neighborhoods” that provide pathways to economic mobility. In fact, compared to central city ethnic enclaves, many provide less of the social, cultural and institutional supports that have traditionally promoted the economic advancement of immigrants and their children. Chicago School scholars also failed to account for the politics within suburbs that challenge not only immigrants’ ability to settle within particular communities, but also to achieve their own purposes and pursuits within them. My research on immigrants in suburbia has sought to fill some of these gaps. It has investigated the struggles of educated, professional Asian immigrants to establish a place for themselves within largely white, middle-class suburbs in Silicon Valley. In the Washington, DC suburbs, I have examined how lower-income, primarily Latino and African immigrants have fought to maintain a presence within redeveloping neighborhoods with rising gentrification and displacement pressures.