Davila writes about the "cultural politics' of El Barrio (aka East Harlem), juxtaposing processes of gentrification and neoliberalism with the neighborhood's continuing "Latinization." She specifically focuses on Latinos in an effort to examine race and ethnicity from outside of a black-white paradigm.
I've been hearing about Barrio Dreams ever since I declared my Met Studies major my sophomore year. Now that I've actually had the chance to read it, I feel like it provides an interesting angle on neoliberal policies that come up again and again in classes that I have taken.
I particularly liked Davila's take on what she terms a "marketable ethnicity" - produced by policies and ideologies that support economic empowerment. The idea that privatization and "development" (read: gentrification) is virtually embraced and encouraged by "upwardly mobile aspirations" is both incredibly interesting and, like some others have already noted, somehow too all-encompassing in terms of capturing the consequences of community sentiment.
However, Davila provides an in-depth study of the historical and cultural development of El Barrio, and examines the ways that different Latino groups interact with one another as well as with Blacks and non-Latinos in East Harlem. This is a thorough perspective that I certainly appreciate after having read about many different theories of racial formation and racialization.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
A Fire in Fontana
"Here I was on a bus going back to the camp in Arizona where my father still lived, and I knew there was a connection between my seatmate's joy and our having been put in that hot and windblown place of barracks."
Hong's analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto's work touches on pretty much all of the major themes we've covered thus far - racialization, citizenship, property rights, white privilege, the nuclear family, segregation and suburbanization. Clear and interesting, but no need to really rehash all of that here. I'm going to talk more about Yamamoto's piece.
I thought "A Fire in Fontana" was really poignant and expressive in showing how Yamamoto, as a young Japanese-American woman whose family was placed in an internment camp, came to align herself with a community and a movement that was not typically tied to Asian-Americans at all. She never formally identifies this, and it's almost as if she can't quite put her finger on why she was so personally affected by the experiences of African-Americans around her, only that she was. It was "some kind of transformation" - her "inward self being burnt black in a certain fire." I really like the way she describes this process of change within herself. It's not that things were happening without her control, it's that they were happening before she even had the idea to consider what they meant. Totally true to life. We can recognize that change is happening, but we need to look at it retrospectively to really understand it.
Her reaction to the blond girl who expressed delight at a young black man being forced to drink from an outside tap, shows that she felt the power of this girl's racism without ever defining it as that - racism. She "knew" that this individual's joy in inequality had something to do with the inequality she experienced as a girl - and recognized a kinship in this, between the African-American experience and her very own.
Hong's analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto's work touches on pretty much all of the major themes we've covered thus far - racialization, citizenship, property rights, white privilege, the nuclear family, segregation and suburbanization. Clear and interesting, but no need to really rehash all of that here. I'm going to talk more about Yamamoto's piece.
I thought "A Fire in Fontana" was really poignant and expressive in showing how Yamamoto, as a young Japanese-American woman whose family was placed in an internment camp, came to align herself with a community and a movement that was not typically tied to Asian-Americans at all. She never formally identifies this, and it's almost as if she can't quite put her finger on why she was so personally affected by the experiences of African-Americans around her, only that she was. It was "some kind of transformation" - her "inward self being burnt black in a certain fire." I really like the way she describes this process of change within herself. It's not that things were happening without her control, it's that they were happening before she even had the idea to consider what they meant. Totally true to life. We can recognize that change is happening, but we need to look at it retrospectively to really understand it.
Her reaction to the blond girl who expressed delight at a young black man being forced to drink from an outside tap, shows that she felt the power of this girl's racism without ever defining it as that - racism. She "knew" that this individual's joy in inequality had something to do with the inequality she experienced as a girl - and recognized a kinship in this, between the African-American experience and her very own.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
From Enclave to Ethnoburb
This week's readings made a lot of sense together. They focused on the evolution of the Chinese-American enclave and the Chinese-American economy. Together, they chart a clear trajectory of the development of residential and economic patterns, including the roles that these entities play in each other's development, and how all of this interacts with cultural and racial ideas of the Chinese-American population.
Anderson's "The Idea of Chinatown" focused on Chinatown as a Western construction, both a place and an idea, structured by prevailing racial and racist ideologies. By studying the development of Vancouver's Chinatown in the late 19th century, she claims that Chinatown existed first as a way of creating and justifying white understandings and categories of the Chinese. Chinatown was a means of perpetuating negative stereotypes - it was a "cesspool" for disease (thus, the Chinese are filthy and unsanitary), a center of prostitution and opium-smoking (thus, the Chinese are immoral and hedonistic). Similarly, Shah explores these perceptions of Chinatown as perpetuated by public health norms in San Francisco. The point is the same - this was a way of marking the Chinese as an Other - intrinsically different from whites, and distinctly unfavorable.
Cheng's "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs" builds on these historical notions of Chinatown by exploring postwar patterns of suburbanization among the Chinese community in the United States. As various Chinatowns declined, more and more Chinese moved outward - to the suburbs. But this was no accident - Cheng's whole point is that suburbanization equaled "Americanization." It was seen as a solution to racial division and a strengthening of democracy. Because minorities who moved to the suburbs eventually lost their strong ethnic ties to their community, they could then more easily assimilate, a process that was essential in promoting whiteness as the norm, as the true marker of being American.
Li's article on Chinese-American banking and its relationship to community development in the LA area made a really interesting distinction between the ethnoburb and the ethnic enclave. "Unlike ghettos and enclaves, ethnoburbs emerge from the deliberate activities of ethnic minorities possessing both substantial financial resources and the capacity to generate stable income flows" (779). I had never thought about this difference before, but it's really significant! Aside from this, the article did a good job of showing how Chinese-American banks both enabled and benefited from the development and transformation of the Chinese ethnoburb of the San Gabriel Valley.
As a final note, I was really happy to see that Cheng grounded her article in a context of gender and sexuality. You can't really separate a study of race from a study of gender and sexuality. As she discusses, the influx of Chinese women immigrating to the US in the postwar era enabled the creation of the Chinese nuclear family (mirroring that of the white, American nuclear family), and played a key role in changing cultural perceptions of the Chinese-American community. And this idea of the traditional family has been a driving force in furthering white cultural and heterosexual norms in the U.S.
Anderson's "The Idea of Chinatown" focused on Chinatown as a Western construction, both a place and an idea, structured by prevailing racial and racist ideologies. By studying the development of Vancouver's Chinatown in the late 19th century, she claims that Chinatown existed first as a way of creating and justifying white understandings and categories of the Chinese. Chinatown was a means of perpetuating negative stereotypes - it was a "cesspool" for disease (thus, the Chinese are filthy and unsanitary), a center of prostitution and opium-smoking (thus, the Chinese are immoral and hedonistic). Similarly, Shah explores these perceptions of Chinatown as perpetuated by public health norms in San Francisco. The point is the same - this was a way of marking the Chinese as an Other - intrinsically different from whites, and distinctly unfavorable.
Cheng's "Out of Chinatown and into the Suburbs" builds on these historical notions of Chinatown by exploring postwar patterns of suburbanization among the Chinese community in the United States. As various Chinatowns declined, more and more Chinese moved outward - to the suburbs. But this was no accident - Cheng's whole point is that suburbanization equaled "Americanization." It was seen as a solution to racial division and a strengthening of democracy. Because minorities who moved to the suburbs eventually lost their strong ethnic ties to their community, they could then more easily assimilate, a process that was essential in promoting whiteness as the norm, as the true marker of being American.
Li's article on Chinese-American banking and its relationship to community development in the LA area made a really interesting distinction between the ethnoburb and the ethnic enclave. "Unlike ghettos and enclaves, ethnoburbs emerge from the deliberate activities of ethnic minorities possessing both substantial financial resources and the capacity to generate stable income flows" (779). I had never thought about this difference before, but it's really significant! Aside from this, the article did a good job of showing how Chinese-American banks both enabled and benefited from the development and transformation of the Chinese ethnoburb of the San Gabriel Valley.
As a final note, I was really happy to see that Cheng grounded her article in a context of gender and sexuality. You can't really separate a study of race from a study of gender and sexuality. As she discusses, the influx of Chinese women immigrating to the US in the postwar era enabled the creation of the Chinese nuclear family (mirroring that of the white, American nuclear family), and played a key role in changing cultural perceptions of the Chinese-American community. And this idea of the traditional family has been a driving force in furthering white cultural and heterosexual norms in the U.S.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
American Apartheid
Denton and Massey discuss overlapping issues of poverty, racism, and segregation in the context of U.S. history as well as its presence in current times. They link longstanding cycles of poverty among the "urban underclass" to the continuing consequences of residential segregation, itself a result of well-established processes and institutions that have lead to widespread structural discrimination.
They argue that residential segregation is not, as many might assume, caused by neutral market forces. Rather, it is a construction that has developed out of a tradition of white prejudice in the United States, however masked this prejudice may seem. Denton and Massey say, "Despite whites' endorsement of the ideal that people should be able to live wherever they can afford to regardless of race, a majority still feel uncomfortable in any neighborhood that contains more than a few black residents" (11).
This point really reminded me of Harris's discussion of white privilege. Though in theory, whites feel as though everyone should have the freedom to choose where they want to live, in practice, different feelings may come to light. The instinctual assumption that whites somehow have ownership of certain areas (that other minority groups then move "into") is exactly what we've been discussing in terms of the legacy of white privilege. Discomfort at the idea of racially integrated neighborhoods is a reaction to historical ideals of white, pure space.
Shapiro, in his articles, emphasizes the ways that structural discrimination stemming from this prejudice and privilege has very real and devastating economic effects on Black Americans and other people of color. His focus on the sub-prime mortgage crisis is certainly really relevant in the present moment. "The line from redlining to sub-prime is direct, as is the culpability" (A11). Shapiro and Oliver place blame on lenders who target communities of color with discriminatory practices, ultimately contributing to the creation of a national and definite "Black catastrophe."
They argue that residential segregation is not, as many might assume, caused by neutral market forces. Rather, it is a construction that has developed out of a tradition of white prejudice in the United States, however masked this prejudice may seem. Denton and Massey say, "Despite whites' endorsement of the ideal that people should be able to live wherever they can afford to regardless of race, a majority still feel uncomfortable in any neighborhood that contains more than a few black residents" (11).
This point really reminded me of Harris's discussion of white privilege. Though in theory, whites feel as though everyone should have the freedom to choose where they want to live, in practice, different feelings may come to light. The instinctual assumption that whites somehow have ownership of certain areas (that other minority groups then move "into") is exactly what we've been discussing in terms of the legacy of white privilege. Discomfort at the idea of racially integrated neighborhoods is a reaction to historical ideals of white, pure space.
Shapiro, in his articles, emphasizes the ways that structural discrimination stemming from this prejudice and privilege has very real and devastating economic effects on Black Americans and other people of color. His focus on the sub-prime mortgage crisis is certainly really relevant in the present moment. "The line from redlining to sub-prime is direct, as is the culpability" (A11). Shapiro and Oliver place blame on lenders who target communities of color with discriminatory practices, ultimately contributing to the creation of a national and definite "Black catastrophe."
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