Pub Date : 2022-10-10DOI: 10.1177/15356841221123820
Nikki Jones, Kenly Brown, Eduardo Bautista Duran, Kaily Heitz, Jasmine Kelekay, Gil Rothschild Elyassi, Geoffrey Raymond
In this article, we show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. Our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western United States identifies person- and place-specific heuristic classifications that police officers rely on to manage routine encounters. We find that officers use membership categorization devices to sort people and places in the city into distinct categories (e.g., nice places, normal people, the projects, and people in the projects), which, in turn, prefigure different orientations to action at the start of and throughout their encounters with the public. Our findings provide an empirical basis for thinking of professional police knowledge as encoding systemic racism in routine policing, rather than being a break from it.
{"title":"“Other than the Projects, You Stay Professional”: “Colorblind” Cops and the Enactment of Spatial Racism in Routine Policing","authors":"Nikki Jones, Kenly Brown, Eduardo Bautista Duran, Kaily Heitz, Jasmine Kelekay, Gil Rothschild Elyassi, Geoffrey Raymond","doi":"10.1177/15356841221123820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221123820","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. Our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western United States identifies person- and place-specific heuristic classifications that police officers rely on to manage routine encounters. We find that officers use membership categorization devices to sort people and places in the city into distinct categories (e.g., nice places, normal people, the projects, and people in the projects), which, in turn, prefigure different orientations to action at the start of and throughout their encounters with the public. Our findings provide an empirical basis for thinking of professional police knowledge as encoding systemic racism in routine policing, rather than being a break from it.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49561338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-08DOI: 10.1177/15356841221126670
Tyler S. Bellick, Michael S. Barton, S. Friedman, M. Douglas
The immigrant-crime relationship remains among the most intensely debated and contentious public policy concerns. In contrast to hypotheses under social disorganization theory and consistent with hypotheses under the immigrant revitalization perspective, most studies find the relationship of percent foreign-born with crime to be nonsignificant at the neighborhood level. Previous research focuses mostly on the importance of overall immigration or Latino immigration specifically in large immigrant destinations. The current study extends research on the immigrant-crime relationship to a non-Latino group in a smaller city by examining the relationship of Guyanese immigration with crime in neighborhoods within Schenectady, NY. We also investigate the association of homeownership with crime, which has received little explicit attention in the immigration-crime literature. Consistent with previous research, we find no significant association between percent Guyanese and crime. We find a negative and significant relationship between homeownership and crime. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.
{"title":"Guyanese Immigration, Homeownership, and Crime in Schenectady, NY: 2000–2017","authors":"Tyler S. Bellick, Michael S. Barton, S. Friedman, M. Douglas","doi":"10.1177/15356841221126670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221126670","url":null,"abstract":"The immigrant-crime relationship remains among the most intensely debated and contentious public policy concerns. In contrast to hypotheses under social disorganization theory and consistent with hypotheses under the immigrant revitalization perspective, most studies find the relationship of percent foreign-born with crime to be nonsignificant at the neighborhood level. Previous research focuses mostly on the importance of overall immigration or Latino immigration specifically in large immigrant destinations. The current study extends research on the immigrant-crime relationship to a non-Latino group in a smaller city by examining the relationship of Guyanese immigration with crime in neighborhoods within Schenectady, NY. We also investigate the association of homeownership with crime, which has received little explicit attention in the immigration-crime literature. Consistent with previous research, we find no significant association between percent Guyanese and crime. We find a negative and significant relationship between homeownership and crime. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45843140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-07DOI: 10.1177/15356841221123762
Kasey Zapatka, Juliana de Castro Galvao
The growing housing affordability crisis is at the center of conversations about U.S. inequality. This paper reconsiders the role of rent stabilization as one important affordability tool. We investigate who is most likely to benefit from rent stabilization, how much non-stabilized renters would save if their units were stabilized, and the extent to which stabilization would reduce rent burden among households. Using New York City Housing Vacancy Survey data and employing logistic and hedonic regression techniques, we show that Hispanic and foreign-born householders are more likely to live in rent-stabilized units and find evidence of both rent savings and rent burden reduction when comparing stabilized tenants with their non-stabilized counterparts. We argue that expanded rent stabilization could be paired with policies that stimulate new construction to simultaneously curb rent inflation, protect current populations from displacement, and increase housing supply.
{"title":"Affordable Regulation: New York City Rent Stabilization as Housing Affordability Policy","authors":"Kasey Zapatka, Juliana de Castro Galvao","doi":"10.1177/15356841221123762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221123762","url":null,"abstract":"The growing housing affordability crisis is at the center of conversations about U.S. inequality. This paper reconsiders the role of rent stabilization as one important affordability tool. We investigate who is most likely to benefit from rent stabilization, how much non-stabilized renters would save if their units were stabilized, and the extent to which stabilization would reduce rent burden among households. Using New York City Housing Vacancy Survey data and employing logistic and hedonic regression techniques, we show that Hispanic and foreign-born householders are more likely to live in rent-stabilized units and find evidence of both rent savings and rent burden reduction when comparing stabilized tenants with their non-stabilized counterparts. We argue that expanded rent stabilization could be paired with policies that stimulate new construction to simultaneously curb rent inflation, protect current populations from displacement, and increase housing supply.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42502197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-07DOI: 10.1177/15356841221129629
K. Attoh
{"title":"Book Review: Maryam S. Griffin, Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transportation in the Palestinian West Bank","authors":"K. Attoh","doi":"10.1177/15356841221129629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221129629","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43183098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-07DOI: 10.1177/15356841221129621
João Queirós
Known locally as musseques, the slums located in the outskirts of Luanda, the capital of Angola, were important foci of Portuguese colonial policy, especially during the war period that preceded the fall of Salazar and Caetano’s regime (1961–1974). Nonetheless, much remains unknown in relation to their genesis and how everyday life was organized in these urban areas marked by poverty, insalubrity, the threat of eradication, and police terror. How did the organization and execution of Portuguese colonial policy, namely in the dimensions referring to the surveillance, control, and repression of poor native populations, contribute to shaping the development of this large African city and its slums? On what logics were they founded? And what implications did urban policies and urban initiatives, and the strategies for disciplining and controlling local culture and leisure, have on the formation of the cultural, associative, and political dispositions and practices of their populations in the final stage of the Portuguese colonial empire? Through research carried out on these subjects by six social scientists from Portugal and Brazil, these are the main questions this book wishes to answer. The analyses contained in this book are based on the evidence of the “dualism” characteristic of Luanda, which opposed the “poor,” “Black,” and peripheral musseques to the city’s “Downtown,” the center of White colonial power in Angola. This was unquestionably a physical dualism, but also a dualism that became deeply rooted in the minds and public representations that were then made of social life in the Angolan capital. Fueled by the racism that divided Luanda’s society from top to bottom, this dualism translated into a “punitive geography” of which the musseques were the main expression: inevitably presented by the colonial power and by dominant, everyday portrayals as contexts of “vagrancy” and “criminality,” as well as loci of dissent and revolt, if not “nests of terrorists.” Since this was the time of the rise and consolidation of liberation movements in the country, the musseques were the frequent targets of racial violence, police terror, and indiscriminate punishment. All chapters in this book attest to the ubiquity of this dualism and seek to specify both the factors of its (re)production and its social and political implications. In doing so, they denounce the lusotropicalist representations of colonial cities as flourishing and diverse urban contexts, supposedly characterized by ethno-racial imbrication and by the cultural fluidity typical of a “soft colonialism.” At the same time, the book contributes to complicating the—sometimes miserabilist, sometimes populist—visions of life in the slums, and the relationships (actually quite complex) that their residents established with other social agents, with the colonial power or with liberation movements. Also, these chapters 1129621 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841221129621City & CommunityBook Reviews book-review2022
{"title":"Book Review: Bernardo Pinto da Cruz (ed.), (Des)Controlo em Luanda: Urbanismo, Polícia e Lazer nos Musseques do Império [(Dis)control in Luanda: Urbanism, Police and Leisure in the Musseques of the Empire]","authors":"João Queirós","doi":"10.1177/15356841221129621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221129621","url":null,"abstract":"Known locally as musseques, the slums located in the outskirts of Luanda, the capital of Angola, were important foci of Portuguese colonial policy, especially during the war period that preceded the fall of Salazar and Caetano’s regime (1961–1974). Nonetheless, much remains unknown in relation to their genesis and how everyday life was organized in these urban areas marked by poverty, insalubrity, the threat of eradication, and police terror. How did the organization and execution of Portuguese colonial policy, namely in the dimensions referring to the surveillance, control, and repression of poor native populations, contribute to shaping the development of this large African city and its slums? On what logics were they founded? And what implications did urban policies and urban initiatives, and the strategies for disciplining and controlling local culture and leisure, have on the formation of the cultural, associative, and political dispositions and practices of their populations in the final stage of the Portuguese colonial empire? Through research carried out on these subjects by six social scientists from Portugal and Brazil, these are the main questions this book wishes to answer. The analyses contained in this book are based on the evidence of the “dualism” characteristic of Luanda, which opposed the “poor,” “Black,” and peripheral musseques to the city’s “Downtown,” the center of White colonial power in Angola. This was unquestionably a physical dualism, but also a dualism that became deeply rooted in the minds and public representations that were then made of social life in the Angolan capital. Fueled by the racism that divided Luanda’s society from top to bottom, this dualism translated into a “punitive geography” of which the musseques were the main expression: inevitably presented by the colonial power and by dominant, everyday portrayals as contexts of “vagrancy” and “criminality,” as well as loci of dissent and revolt, if not “nests of terrorists.” Since this was the time of the rise and consolidation of liberation movements in the country, the musseques were the frequent targets of racial violence, police terror, and indiscriminate punishment. All chapters in this book attest to the ubiquity of this dualism and seek to specify both the factors of its (re)production and its social and political implications. In doing so, they denounce the lusotropicalist representations of colonial cities as flourishing and diverse urban contexts, supposedly characterized by ethno-racial imbrication and by the cultural fluidity typical of a “soft colonialism.” At the same time, the book contributes to complicating the—sometimes miserabilist, sometimes populist—visions of life in the slums, and the relationships (actually quite complex) that their residents established with other social agents, with the colonial power or with liberation movements. Also, these chapters 1129621 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841221129621City & CommunityBook Reviews book-review2022","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43974597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1177/15356841221101432
R. Vargas
If the study of racial capitalism is to have maximum impact on urban sociology, it is well positioned to do so especially for the study of urban racial inequality. At first glance, the study of racial capitalism and urban racial inequality may appear to have an enormous gulf between them. Many strands of research on urban racial inequality contain heavy elements of both pragmatist and positivist epistemologies. “Policymakers” are often the target audience in this field where urban sociologists aspire for objective and scientifically rigorous analysis to produce knowledge for local and Federal government technocracies. In contrast, urban scholars of racial capitalism often approach their work with an emancipatory epistemology that aspires to dismantle capitalism or achieve liberation for oppressed groups. The state is not the primary audience for many scholars of racial capitalism. This makes for a wide epistemological gap to bridge. The excellent articles in this special issue, however, raise four essential tensions that urban sociologists (pragmatic, emancipatory, or otherwise) cannot ignore if the field wants to innovate or pursue integration with other existing sociological paradigms. It should not be controversial to argue that amid a global pandemic, worsening climate change, the Black Lives Matter movement, and Russian destruction of Ukrainian cities, that the various strands of urban sociological research on race could stand to benefit from engaging in some reflexivity on how to innovate. To that end, readers who are new to the racial capitalism framework may find it helpful to think about it in relation to Du Bois’s ([1935] 1998) work on Reconstruction. Rather than aspiring for reductions in racial inequality through technocratic policy nudges or reformist policies, the articles in this special issue illuminate racial capitalism’s usefulness for thinking about how to reconstruct cities and their positions within racialized political economies. Each article invites the reader to place their pragmatism on the shelf for a moment and think differently about taken-for-granted urban social processes that blind scholars from understanding the mutually constitutive roles of race and capitalism in producing city problems. This goes beyond the co-opted trope of a search for “root causes,” as positivist notions of cause and effect are less useful if scholars accept the premise that U.S. cities’ formed with racism and economic exploitation baked into their foundations. Racism and economic exploitation, therefore, are not to be examined like removable cancer cells, but as building blocks of U.S. cities that must be dismantled in order for cities to be reconstructed. Advancing such a perspective to the study of cities requires critical reflection on ways the field can move forward. In this essay, I identify and elaborate on four ways that 1101432 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841221101432City & CommunityVargas research-article2022
{"title":"Postscript: Four Ways Race and Capitalism Can Advance Urban Sociology","authors":"R. Vargas","doi":"10.1177/15356841221101432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221101432","url":null,"abstract":"If the study of racial capitalism is to have maximum impact on urban sociology, it is well positioned to do so especially for the study of urban racial inequality. At first glance, the study of racial capitalism and urban racial inequality may appear to have an enormous gulf between them. Many strands of research on urban racial inequality contain heavy elements of both pragmatist and positivist epistemologies. “Policymakers” are often the target audience in this field where urban sociologists aspire for objective and scientifically rigorous analysis to produce knowledge for local and Federal government technocracies. In contrast, urban scholars of racial capitalism often approach their work with an emancipatory epistemology that aspires to dismantle capitalism or achieve liberation for oppressed groups. The state is not the primary audience for many scholars of racial capitalism. This makes for a wide epistemological gap to bridge. The excellent articles in this special issue, however, raise four essential tensions that urban sociologists (pragmatic, emancipatory, or otherwise) cannot ignore if the field wants to innovate or pursue integration with other existing sociological paradigms. It should not be controversial to argue that amid a global pandemic, worsening climate change, the Black Lives Matter movement, and Russian destruction of Ukrainian cities, that the various strands of urban sociological research on race could stand to benefit from engaging in some reflexivity on how to innovate. To that end, readers who are new to the racial capitalism framework may find it helpful to think about it in relation to Du Bois’s ([1935] 1998) work on Reconstruction. Rather than aspiring for reductions in racial inequality through technocratic policy nudges or reformist policies, the articles in this special issue illuminate racial capitalism’s usefulness for thinking about how to reconstruct cities and their positions within racialized political economies. Each article invites the reader to place their pragmatism on the shelf for a moment and think differently about taken-for-granted urban social processes that blind scholars from understanding the mutually constitutive roles of race and capitalism in producing city problems. This goes beyond the co-opted trope of a search for “root causes,” as positivist notions of cause and effect are less useful if scholars accept the premise that U.S. cities’ formed with racism and economic exploitation baked into their foundations. Racism and economic exploitation, therefore, are not to be examined like removable cancer cells, but as building blocks of U.S. cities that must be dismantled in order for cities to be reconstructed. Advancing such a perspective to the study of cities requires critical reflection on ways the field can move forward. In this essay, I identify and elaborate on four ways that 1101432 CTYXXX10.1177/15356841221101432City & CommunityVargas research-article2022","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45375613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-23DOI: 10.1177/15356841221101568
Camille Petersen
Drawing on Black and Indigenous intellectual traditions, this article applies racial capitalism and settler colonialism as twin frameworks essential for understanding gentrification in a city whose growth is predicated on historical storytelling. Challenging the hegemony of neoliberal and colorblind urbanisms, it is argued that the longue durée world system of racism is always already structuring capitalism and the urban process. The case study of St. Augustine, Florida, shows the role of White nationalist place-making in consolidating the material and ideological structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, past and present. Using ethnographic and textual data, I show how what I call the “heritage industrial complex” produces and is produced by racist ideology, promoting diversity and inclusion in historical storytelling about “the oldest city” at the same time as urban processes of gentrification, redevelopment, and disenfranchisement characterize contemporary race relations in the city and the state. Although we have a firm understanding of spatialized inequalities, bringing together the sociology of race and ethnicity’s attention to ideology with urban sociology’s emphasis on the city and landscape can help us understand how race is constitutive of the capitalist project.
{"title":"Capitalizing on Heritage: St. Augustine, Florida, and the Landscape of American Racial Ideology","authors":"Camille Petersen","doi":"10.1177/15356841221101568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221101568","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on Black and Indigenous intellectual traditions, this article applies racial capitalism and settler colonialism as twin frameworks essential for understanding gentrification in a city whose growth is predicated on historical storytelling. Challenging the hegemony of neoliberal and colorblind urbanisms, it is argued that the longue durée world system of racism is always already structuring capitalism and the urban process. The case study of St. Augustine, Florida, shows the role of White nationalist place-making in consolidating the material and ideological structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, past and present. Using ethnographic and textual data, I show how what I call the “heritage industrial complex” produces and is produced by racist ideology, promoting diversity and inclusion in historical storytelling about “the oldest city” at the same time as urban processes of gentrification, redevelopment, and disenfranchisement characterize contemporary race relations in the city and the state. Although we have a firm understanding of spatialized inequalities, bringing together the sociology of race and ethnicity’s attention to ideology with urban sociology’s emphasis on the city and landscape can help us understand how race is constitutive of the capitalist project.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48907355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-22DOI: 10.1177/15356841221103978
Prentiss A. Dantzler, Elizabeth Korver‐Glenn, Junia Howell
Social scientists have long debated whether racial inequality is an unfortunate consequence of political and economic exploitation or a core feature of capitalism. In 1983, Cedric Robinson synthesized these two opposing perspectives, calling the latter racial capitalism and demonstrating its theoretical viability. In recent years, scholars have increasingly employed Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism to explain a wide array of phenomena. Yet, urban sociology has not fully explored how racial capitalism changes and reshapes our core theoretical approaches. To begin to fill this gap, this special issue presents original papers that employ racial capitalism to extend, challenge, or refine theories of and methods for understanding cities and communities. In this introduction, we outline urban scholars’ historical explanations of racial inequality and provide an overview of the development and definition(s) of racial capitalism. We then summarize the papers included in this special issue and discuss a pathway forward for urban sociology.
{"title":"Introduction: What Does Racial Capitalism Have to Do With Cities and Communities?","authors":"Prentiss A. Dantzler, Elizabeth Korver‐Glenn, Junia Howell","doi":"10.1177/15356841221103978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221103978","url":null,"abstract":"Social scientists have long debated whether racial inequality is an unfortunate consequence of political and economic exploitation or a core feature of capitalism. In 1983, Cedric Robinson synthesized these two opposing perspectives, calling the latter racial capitalism and demonstrating its theoretical viability. In recent years, scholars have increasingly employed Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism to explain a wide array of phenomena. Yet, urban sociology has not fully explored how racial capitalism changes and reshapes our core theoretical approaches. To begin to fill this gap, this special issue presents original papers that employ racial capitalism to extend, challenge, or refine theories of and methods for understanding cities and communities. In this introduction, we outline urban scholars’ historical explanations of racial inequality and provide an overview of the development and definition(s) of racial capitalism. We then summarize the papers included in this special issue and discuss a pathway forward for urban sociology.","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45055846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-19DOI: 10.1177/15356841221093697
Emir Estrada
From the first page of the book, you enter the social world of street fruit vendors (fruteros) in Los Angeles with a dynamic and engaging writing style. Through thick fieldnote descriptions, the reader can envision the fruteros’ mannerisms and personalities, the fruit carts, and the vibrant street sounds of Los Angeles, which at the time of the study prohibited street vending. Rocio Rosales masterfully weaves six years of ethnographic fieldwork, twenty-five interviews with fruteros in Los Angeles, and fifteen interviews with the fruteros’ family members in Dos Mundos, a small town in Mexico. Rosales’s book is both timely and timeless. Since she started the project some fifteen years ago, much has happened in the world of street vendors in Los Angeles. For years, street vending in California was illegal, mostly attracting undocumented immigrants. After Trump won the presidential election in 2016, California decriminalized street vending to protect undocumented immigrants who risked deportation if apprehended and charged for criminal activity. What does decriminalizing street vending mean to fruteros? According to Rosales, the fruteros in her book did not attend any events organized by the mobilization campaign. The type of immediate legal help the fruteros needed to fight back when citations were issued, when arrests were made, or when confiscations were carried out, was not the type of assistance offered in those meetings. Instead, the paisano network, a social network based on immigrants from the same hometown, provided fruteros the immediate and tangible assistance they needed in their everyday business life. Through their networks, fruteros could afford expensive carts and avoid unwanted attention from health inspectors. According to Rosales, “Fruit vendors criticized the street vendors in the mobilization campaign in part because they feared losing their dominance if legalization occurred” (149). Operating in a “semiformal” sector gave fruteros with a strong paisano network an edge over their competitors. The new legislation came with restrictions and responsibilities for vendors that fruteros, asserts Rosales, have missed due to a lack of engagement in the information summits. Yet, it is too early to tell if and how the new laws will impact vendors’ personal, social, and work relations. Rosales’s findings may help organizers engage street vendors in future organizing efforts since there seems to be a disconnect between fruteros’ everyday urgent needs and the campaign’s larger wins for the street vendors. Rosales’s book helps bridge this knowledge gap between street vendors and campaign organizers. While Rosales makes great contributions to the informal economy literature, her book is not just about street vending. It expands what we know about social networks in immigrant communities. We learn how paisano networks pose both advantages and disadvantages. While this type of network offers financial incentives, protection, and support, it can a
{"title":"Book Review: Rocio Rosales, Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles","authors":"Emir Estrada","doi":"10.1177/15356841221093697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15356841221093697","url":null,"abstract":"From the first page of the book, you enter the social world of street fruit vendors (fruteros) in Los Angeles with a dynamic and engaging writing style. Through thick fieldnote descriptions, the reader can envision the fruteros’ mannerisms and personalities, the fruit carts, and the vibrant street sounds of Los Angeles, which at the time of the study prohibited street vending. Rocio Rosales masterfully weaves six years of ethnographic fieldwork, twenty-five interviews with fruteros in Los Angeles, and fifteen interviews with the fruteros’ family members in Dos Mundos, a small town in Mexico. Rosales’s book is both timely and timeless. Since she started the project some fifteen years ago, much has happened in the world of street vendors in Los Angeles. For years, street vending in California was illegal, mostly attracting undocumented immigrants. After Trump won the presidential election in 2016, California decriminalized street vending to protect undocumented immigrants who risked deportation if apprehended and charged for criminal activity. What does decriminalizing street vending mean to fruteros? According to Rosales, the fruteros in her book did not attend any events organized by the mobilization campaign. The type of immediate legal help the fruteros needed to fight back when citations were issued, when arrests were made, or when confiscations were carried out, was not the type of assistance offered in those meetings. Instead, the paisano network, a social network based on immigrants from the same hometown, provided fruteros the immediate and tangible assistance they needed in their everyday business life. Through their networks, fruteros could afford expensive carts and avoid unwanted attention from health inspectors. According to Rosales, “Fruit vendors criticized the street vendors in the mobilization campaign in part because they feared losing their dominance if legalization occurred” (149). Operating in a “semiformal” sector gave fruteros with a strong paisano network an edge over their competitors. The new legislation came with restrictions and responsibilities for vendors that fruteros, asserts Rosales, have missed due to a lack of engagement in the information summits. Yet, it is too early to tell if and how the new laws will impact vendors’ personal, social, and work relations. Rosales’s findings may help organizers engage street vendors in future organizing efforts since there seems to be a disconnect between fruteros’ everyday urgent needs and the campaign’s larger wins for the street vendors. Rosales’s book helps bridge this knowledge gap between street vendors and campaign organizers. While Rosales makes great contributions to the informal economy literature, her book is not just about street vending. It expands what we know about social networks in immigrant communities. We learn how paisano networks pose both advantages and disadvantages. While this type of network offers financial incentives, protection, and support, it can a","PeriodicalId":47486,"journal":{"name":"City & Community","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43873663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-19DOI: 10.1177/15356841221091811
Sarah Mayorga, M. Underhill, Lauren Crosser
Using interview data from three mixed-income neighborhoods—one predominantly white and two multiracial neighborhoods—we find that an overwhelming majority of white, middle-class respondents did not shop in their local grocery store (n = 68). To explain this phenomenon, we propose a concept of everyday disinvestment to capture the interplay between individual-level decision-making and structural-level disinvestment under racial capitalism. We identify three practices of everyday disinvestment—avoidance, distancing, and selective engagement—as well as the rationalizations residents present for their behaviors. We argue racial capitalist ideologies of antiblackness and consumption as freedom are foundational to residents’ justifications of disinvestment from grocery stores in mixed-income communities. Everyday disinvestment not only expands our understanding of disinvestment as a mechanism of racial capitalism, but it deepens our understanding of food apartheid as a relational process.
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