Ethnicity in urban places

[Rick Holden]

I wanted to open up a discussion about the role of ethnicity in urban
studies, and specifically how ethnicity is understood and leveraged as a
tool for access to resources and political representation.  Here in
Dallas, it seems like everything someone does politically is
automatically rendered through the filter of ethic tension, and it's
done so in a purposeful way.
In anthropology there's a lot of work done on tribal or ethnic ties in
more rural places, but I haven't seen a lot of recent stuff in the larger cities of the US.  Has anyone else looked at this issue?

[Tracey Pahor]

Putnam's 2007 article is from outside anthropology and does not look at tensions as much as 'hunkering' in the context of diversity. I think it is also less helpful because he deals with group level data rather than following through the experiences of people. However, I think it is interesting the role that a shared identity can play in our feeling obliged to share, or to have the right to access, resources.

Putnam, R. D. 2007. E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and community in the twenty-first century the 2006 Johan Skytte prize lecture. Scandinavian Political Studies 30:137.

[Iv Kre]

Tambs-Lyche, Harald (1980) London Patidars: A case study in urban ethnicity. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

[Martha Radice]

There's actually quite a lot of work on this in anthropology, particularly in regards to immigration and ethnicity rather than ethnicity as such (obviously, not all members of ethnic minorities are immgrants and vice versa). Caroline Brettell has been doing a lot of research on the subject in your region. Nina Glick Schiller has been arguing that we need to get "beyond the ethnic lens" to see the other routes to integration and civic participation that migrants take. The classic work in Canada on these issues is by sociologist Raymond Breton, but there are many anthropologists, geographers, sociologists and urban scholars working on it in the contemporary contexts of the big three metropolises - MTV - Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Breton, R. (2005). Ethnic Relations in Canada: Institutional Dynamics. Montréal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press. (The collected works of Raymond Breton, with intro by Jeffrey G Reitz).

Brettell, C. B. (2006). "Political Belonging and Cultural Belonging: Immigration Status, Citizenship, and Identity Among Four Immigrant Populations in a Southwestern City." American Behavioral Scientist 50(1): 70-99.
This article compares identity and citizenship among four immigrant populations in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area to explore the distinctions that immigrants themselves draw between political and cultural belonging. The article addresses the differences between the rights/responsibilities dimensions of citizenship on one hand, and the identity dimensions of citizenship on the other hand. It demonstrates the significance of immigration status in shaping attitudes toward naturalization, citizenship, and the construction of identity, arguing that immigrants have a bifocal outlook on belonging.

Glick Schiller, N. and A. Çaglar (2009). "Towards a Comparative Theory of Locality in Migration Studies: Migrant Incorporation and City Scale." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35(2): 177-202.
Building on the scholarship that theorises the restructuring of cities within neoliberal globalisation, this article calls for a comparative scalar approach to migrant settlement and transnational connection. Deploying a concept of city scale, the article posits a relationship between the differing outcomes of the restructuring of post-industrial cities and varying pathways of migrant incorporation. Committed to the use of nation-states and ethnic groups as primary units of analysis, migration scholars have lacked a comparative theory of locality; scholars of urban restructuring have not engaged in migration studies. Yet migrant pathways are both shaped by and contribute to the differential repositioning of cities. Migrants are viewed as urban scale-makers with roles that vary in relationship to the different positioning of cities within global fields of power.

Glick Schiller, N., A. Çağlar, et al. (2006). "Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality, and born-again incorporation." American Ethnologist.
Migration studies have focused attention on ethnic institutions in global and gateway cities. This ethnic lens distorts migration scholarship, reinforces methodological nationalism, and disregards the role of city scale in shaping migrant pathways of settlement and transnational connection. The scale of cities reflects their positioning within neoliberal processes of local, national, regional, and global rescaling. To encourage further explorations of nonethnic pathways that may be salient in small-scale cities, we examine born-again Christianity as a means of migrant incorporation locally and transnationally in two small-scale cities, one in the United States and the other in Germany.

[Rick Holden]

Thanx for the input. I'm looking forward to reading that Brettel article. I like Brettel already.

I was wondering if anyone has had experience in their work concerning this issue though. It doesn't have to be in the US. Personally, I've been looking at how the influx of Hispanic residents has affected the social networks of both black and multi-generational Hispanic residents in lower income neighborhoods. It hasn't been without friction, especially as traditionally black schools transition to becoming Hispanic schools.

[Fiona Hukula]

I am doing my fieldwork in an urban settlement in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. In my experience ethnicity plays an important role in the campaigns of aspiring politicians as they use their ethnic orgins to muster support and votes. In urban settlements people may vote for a candidate who is of the same ethnic background as them with the hope that they will assist with the provision of much needed services such as water supply.

Rick Holden said:

Thanx for the input. I'm looking forward to reading that Brettel article. I like Brettel already.

I was wondering if anyone has had experience in their work concerning this issue though. It doesn't have to be in the US. Personally, I've been looking at how the influx of Hispanic residents has affected the social networks of both black and multi-generational Hispanic residents in lower income neighborhoods. It hasn't been without friction, especially as traditionally black schools transition to becoming Hispanic schools.

[Rick Holden]

Yeah, I've noticed the exact same thing in Dallas. The interesting thing is also the way a politician of one ethnic background is expected act as a patron to "his people," and is also assumed by others to not doing anything for them. My last field site was on the border between two council districts and I found it interesting the way the people living on or close to this border were very aware of it. One black man I got to know who lived within yards of this border stated:

“He’s gonna deal with who he’s comfortable with [Hispanic councilman]. He ain’t comfortable with nobody out here, ‘I’m comfortable with Mr. Rodriquez and Mr. Gonzalez, because they always supported me’, cause he don’t get any votes over here, cause we don’t deal with him. He has never come here, I ain’t never seen him. But, them people over there, he’s a godsend to them, but to us, he’s just what we’ve been getting all the time. Nothin’. So, when the money comes down the pipe, they gonna use the councilman. They gonna send that stimulus money down to be handled by local people, and local people are Mr. Gonzalez (generic Hispanic name). And, if we say, ‘well, we a minority, but then they gonna say, we a minority too’. So, whose the minority? We just lost in the shuffle.”

Another man said:
"If you go anywhere in Dallas right now, the City of Dallas, if they digging a hole somewhere, it’s Mexicans digging that hole, no matter where it is. So, where’s all the black guys that used to work for the city?” “But, if you go down to City Hall and you look whose doing the hiring, then that’s a Mexican doing the hiring, so what does he do? Everybody looks out for their own, but black people. The few black people working there, they have to worry about, ‘if I hire a bunch of black guys, then that’ s gonna look prejudice’, but when they hire, they hire who just look like them and nobody says a dern thing.”

What's interesting is that the Hispanic people in the area express similar things. Ethnicity is very fuzzy though and expressed more by where one lives, who one knows, and where one gets services and recreation than by more traditional markers. That's not to say that the blacks of Hispanics I speak to in the area aren't defined and self-defined primarily by traditional ethnic markers, but that within groups there are many sub-groups. So you have multi-generational Hispanics that express similar levels of frustration or competition with 1st generation immigrants. You have older black folks who complain a lot about the younger generation that "don't wannna work," and, has no respect for anyone. I call this situation based roles.

One life long Hispanic resident told me:

"To me, what I’ve seen, the community was a lot closer. Families knew each other, neighbors knew each other, neighbors would talk to neighbors, and that’s not the case anymore from what I’ve seen. Sure, if you have a family that’s been living across from you for 15, 20 years, you know them, that’s about the only neighbors. But, for a while we had a whole lot of people just come in, move, other people come in, and that’s made a big difference… …A lot of families come from Mexico, they live her for a while, they just seem to live here in one area for a little while, then they turn around and move somewhere else. I don’t know if it’s just the rent on the housing or what, but we do have people that are constantly on the move, sometimes only in one house for 4 or 5 months."

I've found that the origins of these things are ultimately material, economic and political in origin, but cognitively people utilize various narratives and modes of discourse to explain what they see, which is often not in materialist terms. One narrative divides people up by ethnicity, rather than many other traditional factors, and pits people against each other based on that. I found that this discourse was imported into the area during the 1960's, by various leftist social movement groups.
One of the main effects that these groups had on the local culture of West Dallas was a new understanding themselves not in terms of kinship, citizenship, or neighborhood, but in terms of ethnic alienation. What is meant by ethnic alienation is a narrative introduced and incorporated among West Dallas residents, which stated that they were either African American or Chicano/Mexican American (solid ethnic groups with shared interests) before they were anything else (working class, American, etc..). Along with this change was the idea that they were united in competition with the wider, and Whiter, political economy. Each ethnic group was placed in competition with others over a small piece of the pie not needed by Dallas elites. As one lifelong resident and local historian told me:

It’s an issue that’s been a part of the community for a long time, the ethnic strife… …it’s like, perception or reality that you have two ethnic groups being played by what used to be the majority group to try to both get the same piece of the small little sliver of pie left… …Whether that’s reality or perception, I think the two ethnic groups, the Mexican Americans and African Americans have bought into it… …I think that started with the 60’s, I really do.

[Keith Hart]

Rick,

Apart from your call for comparative ethnography, I think you are also posing a broad historical question about the rise of identity politics and the place of ethnicity within that trend. Three general books that you may already know are: Joana Breidenbach and Pal Nyiri Seeing Culture Everywhere, Jean and John Comaroff Ethnicity Inc and Thomas Hyland Eriksen Globalization: the key concepts. As it happens, I have reviewed all three (two of them in press) and would be glad to pass on the reviews, if you or anyone else is interested.

[Rick Holden]

I am very interested. The only one I know is Ethnicity Inc., which I have not fully read. Thank you, and yes, I am also talking about the broad historical processes that have lead to the production of ethnicity. In the US this history is largely, I think, veiled within a certain narrative. I think many people would be very surprised, for example, that in the early 20th century the US census counted the Irish and Italians as "non-white," while those coming from Latin America were counted as "white." I find that in popular discourse ethnicity is something that is decontextualized from the economic and political forces that shape it.

[Joel M. Wright]

The historical permutations are still working themselves out, of course.

Federal (United States) reporting on race and ethnicity have just changed for higher education, as of the 2010-2011 year. For example, they added a category for "Two or More Races," (which I think is good). Also, they have rearranged the race appellations somewhat and have moved Hispanic/Latino into a separate survey item altogether, labeled Ethnic Origin, or some such.

The distinction between race and ethnicity threw my boss for a loop, and he asked me, as an anthropologist, what the difference was. Among the standard definitions for race and ethnicity (which I was uncomfortable to perpetuate), I did tell him that they amounted to socially constructed realities, but I'm not sure that part got through.

On a side note, I believe Arabs are considered to be racially White. It's funny, though, because I had a friend from Oman once complain about how people in Arkansas kept mistaking him for Mexican.

Rick Holden said:

I am very interested. The only one I know is Ethnicity Inc., which I have not fully read. Thank you, and yes, I am also talking about the broad historical processes that have lead to the production of ethnicity. In the US this history is largely, I think, veiled within a certain narrative. I think many people would be very surprised, for example, that in the early 20th century the US census counted the Irish and Italians as "non-white," while those coming from Latin America were counted as "white." I find that in popular discourse ethnicity is something that is decontextualized from the economic and political forces that shape it.

[Rick Holden]

"I had a friend from Oman once complain about how people in Arkansas kept mistaking him for Mexican"

I know a guy in Dallas that's from Venezuela, and he had moved here from Florida where his family first moved to in the US. I asked him how he liked going from Venezuelan to Cuban to Mexican in just a decade. He laughed pretty hard at that.

Bernard did a study in New York about ethnic switching that people do throughout the day in New York in order to maximize the benefits they get from each depending on the situation. I think the AAA needs to lobby the US census to throw out the term race and use only ethnicity, because by use the term race they sanction it through gov't proxy. I've found that when I ask someone in non-white neighborhoods here what their ethnicity is for a survey many have no idea what the word even means. They've never heard someone use the term ethnicity, and everything is in racial terms. They know the word "ethnic," but usually that's used to describe immigrants.

I think the reason I'm so interested in this is my own background. I grew up on the Texas border in a town that was 98% Mexican American, and I grew up in a bilingual home with family in both Mexico and Texas. I have white skin though, so my ethnicity has always been forced upon me in a way that was basically abusive. In elementary school for example, if I said something in Spanish people noticed it immediately and teased me to the point that I stopped speaking it and even if something said something in Spanish, I'd answer back in English. I noticed when I went out with my grandfather, who was a British Mexican that moved to Texas in his late 20's, he would speak Spanish if someone spoke Spanish, and they would immediately switch to English, which he would do, then they'd switch back to Spanish; like they were avoiding a linguistic similarity with him. My dad's first language was Spanish, but he barely speaks it for the same reason. Later, I started talking to my family about this, and I noticed that there was a deep insecurity that runs through our psychology, of not belonging anywhere. Everyone in the family have these strange psychological hang-ups that are rooted in this. My mom said it was really hard for her because it was her father who was Mexican, so she had a Spanish name and white skin and grew up on in a very poor neighborhood.
President Obama has talked about this in his books.

[Keith Hart]

All great stuff, Rick. I like to say that I am not English, I am from Manchester. The missing term in your discussion of race and ethnicity is nationality (-ism). I also like to say that nationalism is racism without the pretension to being systematic. By this I mean that racial categories form an ordinal set that presumes to divide all humanity between them: race is inclusive and hierarchical. Nationality is a nominal category that does not depend on being part of a set with others; it is us against the world. Ethnicity, in my view, follows from the division of the world into nation-states (sometimes grouped into regions), even though in practice it has proliferated to the point of including many tribes without states. Of course there are other principles of association such as federations and cities. A guy from Osaka wrote a book claiming that the future of the world is great cities and their hinterlands (so much for Tokyo!). I like Chicago (and some other great commercial cities like my home town) because it pushed the industrial capitalist project further and with less political interference from the centre than Manchester could. But then I have never agreed to be ethnically marginal and will always move to somewhere that supports my claim to being independent and central to the world.

I grew up in the streets of Manchester and won a scholarship to Cambridge. There I found that most provincial lower-class boys quickly changed their way of speaking to conform with the local class-based accent. I didn't. Edmund Leach once asked me if I thought I was different. I replied yes. He said, You're not. You don't think the aristocracy and the high bourgeoisie have the brains between them to keep a place like Cambridge going, do you? They scour the country for brght working class boys and then train them to sound like upper class twits. All you have done is kept your original accent. I am really different, he said, I had wealth and power to start with (one side of his family was Caribbean sugar and Argentine meat, the other a textile factory near Manchester). After my PhD I went to live in the US for a decade. There my students were puzzled that an Englishman didn't speak like the BBC, so I changed my accent, since the political point was now meaningless. When I returned to Manchester, a shopgirl asked me where I was from. I asked her to guess. She said, Ee I don't know, but you've got a Yankee twang! Later I returned to my Cambridge college and as I entered the bar my former classics tutor shouted across the room in an exaggerated Northern accent, Ee bah goom, it's 'Art! He couldn't forgive my refusal to do what he had done, exchange his working class Cockney accent for a Cambridge insider's posh way of speaking.

Of course all this subjective discussion of race, ethnicity and class (we are after all talking about classification) gets mangled up when bureaucracies make sets out of nominal categories and these then get interpreted through cultural hierarchies. No wonder it is often hard to keep track of shifts in identity.

I have uploaded the three reviews of which the globalization one is the least relevant to the way this conversation has gone.

[John McCreery]

Another take on urban ethnicity.