Llana Barber. Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945–2000.

Abstract

Llana Barber’s engaging, thoughtful book Latino City explores the transformation of Lawrence, Massachusetts, into the first Latino-majority city in New England. She argues that Latino migration from the 1960s onward revitalized a declining city suffering from deindustrialization and white flight to the suburbs. Yet Lawrence’s “white” residents, unwilling or unable to recognize the role played by structural problems that largely predated Latinos’ arrival, viewed the immigrants as the cause of the decline. This misplaced blame stemmed partly from racialized assumptions and nativism, and led to prejudice, discrimination, and even violence. In 1984 both white and Latino residents rioted. Barber explores the consequences of these riots, which helped catalyze the Latino community’s significantly increased political power and inclusion. At the same time, subsequent media and state and federal government portrayals obscured whites’ role in the riots and their anger at the economic marginalization that they too faced in a deindustrializing city, portraying the violence as exclusively caused by Latinos’ anger at discrimination. Such narratives helped fuel and justify the city’s shift toward Latino political inclusion. But they also obfuscated the structural conditions that fueled white participation, resulting in a failure to remedy the deep structural conditions that left the recently politically empowered Latino community nonetheless economically marginalized in a struggling city.