How the refugees stopped the Bronx from burning

Abstract

While the conflagrations that took hold of the South Bronx in New York City from the 1960s to the 1980s and the widespread devastation that resulted focused attention on not only the US ‘urban crisis’ but also on the area’s potential for cultural resurrection and targeted economic development, the struggles of its immediate neighbours to the Northwest have received much less attention. What were the factors that stayed the arson ‘epidemic’ from consuming Northwest Bronx so that it retained some viability? While neighbourhood community organisation has been largely credited with this, and undoubtedly had a major impact, much less attention has been paid to the consequences of cheaply and cynically housing refugees from war-torn Southeast Asia, under a so-called resettlement programme, in the Northwest’s semi-derelict, unheated buildings. Here, perforce, they had no option but to survive and carry on their lives; survival can itself be a form of political resistance, one that does not easily submit to a premature resolution of the conflict.