Reimagining the Ethnic Enclave: Gentrification, Rooted Cosmopolitanism, and Ernesto Quiñonez’s <i>Chango’s Fire</i>

Abstract

Who belongs in a place and what criteria define terms of belonging? Ownership of property? longevity of your residence? Your economic contribution? ... Your influence on local politics? --Mitchell Thomashow, Bringing Biosphere Home (175) In October of 1977 while New York Yankees were playing Los Angeles Dodgers in baseball's World Series, announcer Howard Cosell famously observed, as cameras panned over several raging fires in environs of Yankee Stadium, Ladies and Gentlemen, Bronx is burning. Thirty years later, I opened up Metro Section of New York Times to find a two-page ad that broadcast in huge letters, Ladies and Gentlemen, Bronx is Booming. Apparently, in three decades a sea change has occurred. ad encourages us to believe that Bronx has been transformed from a powder keg to a paradise. But as anyone familiar with urban ecology knows, transformation does not simply entail renovating and rebuilding; issues at play are much more complicated than simple progression from destruction to construction. New and refurbished buildings in urban areas do not arise in a vacuum. They are built on parcels of land where older buildings once stood, or they are remodeled for new and richer tenants. Most of time, people who lived, worked, played, and worshipped in those buildings are displaced. Many developers, eager for profit and armed with very real promise of upgrading neighborhood, tend to ignore fact that those displaced people and those old buildings once constituted a community that, though poor and in decline, had cultural and spiritual value. issue is not whether a community should change--change is inevitable. It is instead how new life may be infused into a community without destroying lives and culture of those who have long resided there. phenomenon of neighborhood gentrification that results in displacement of lower-class ethnic populations fits squarely into ecocritical field of place studies. In words of Lawrence Buell, place studies looks at self-consciously dialectical relation between being and habitat, with particular attention to the erosive effect of rapid change on the stability of locale and assumption of belonging to it (62). An exploration of problems and anxieties gentrification creates in a specific ethnic neighborhood therefore seems appropriate for this special issue of MELUS, which is concerned with intersection of ethnic studies and ecocriticism. In this article I look at Latino author Ernesto Quinonez's novel Chango's Fire (2004), a story of gentrification set not in Bronx but in neighboring Manhattan community of Spanish Harlem. As novel's protagonist, Julio Santana, observes: The history of all countries is battle over land. In New York City it's always been a battle over slums. Real estate is to this city what oil is to Texas. It's precious, because you can't produce more land than already exists (117). poorer neighborhoods--those like Julio's--are always most vulnerable because their people lack financial and structural resources that would help them resist or negotiate proposed changes. Quinonez's first novel, Bodega Dreams (2000), showed his incipient appreciation of what Buell refers to as contemporary eco-localism and its concern with countering threats to bounded holistic community from outside (77). gangster hero of Bodega Dreams, Willie Bodega, gains influence and loyalty in Spanish Harlem by renovating buildings for poor who live there. His actions strengthen not only his own position but also that of his community with respect to incursions from outsiders. In Chango's Fire Quinonez takes up same issue, but he ranges wider and delves deeper, factoring economics, religion, class, and ethnicity into his exploration of importance of built environment to life of this community. …