Ethnic Geography Research Articles

Future Research Directions of North American Ethnic Geography

Future Research Directions of North American Ethnic Geography

Changing politics of race and region: Latino migration to the US South

Questions and practices of race in the US South have historically been unthinkable outside the register of a black-white binary. In recent years, this connection between the South as a region and race as a dualism has been challenged by Latino migration to southern cities and towns. This article reviews the emerging literature on this southern arm of Latino migration, arguing for more attention to its interactions with racial formations and practices in southern communities and the geographic and place contingency of its features across the region. To achieve more critical understandings of these processes, it suggests, future studies must contextualize this migration in relation to studies of both immigrant gateway cities across the USA and the historical geographies of race and ethnicity in southern cities.

Becoming “Syrian” in America: A Global Geography of Ethnicity and Nation

Colonial and nationalist discourses have constructed landlocked histories of the Middle East. With differing valorizations, most such narratives nevertheless used the same trope of essentialized and timeless peoples and societies living in a clearly delineated and bounded geography. Postcolonial scholarship has endeavored to historicize these narratives by showing the contingency and complexity of categories such as nation, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion. Yet the success of this latter body of literature has been incomplete because it remains predominantly chronocentric, swallowing place within the folds of time. In most such narratives, place is rarely contemplated; even when it is considered, our historical gaze remains transfixed on a never-changing spot on a cartographically regimented map where the narrative supposedly unfolds (Ludden). Historical actors come and go across the boundaries, but the story remains resolutely contained within the city, region, empire, or nation. Such a staid notion of place amid a fluctuating narrative is even more striking when, in fact, individuals and communities, ideas and commodities, have crisscrossed every imaginable geo-historical location. War, pilgrimage, missionary zeal, travels and sojourns, the search for work, trade, shipwrecks, slavery, diplomatic missions, boredom and curiosity, population transfer, persecution, environmental changes, and migrations have taken people in and out of the physical Middle East with remarkable regularity.

Becoming “Syrian” in America: A Global Geography of Ethnicity and Nation

Khater contends that the historiography of the Middle East remains constrained by insufficiently examined geographical categories. The Middle East remains tethered and landlocked into a state of “Otherness” because of essentialized, static narratives that neglect the movement of people across its boundaries. Immigration, diaspora, and transnational experiences are, with rare exceptions, footnotes in histories of the Middle East; Khater’s essay presents the experience of early Arab immigration from the Eastern Mediterranean as a counterpoint to those tendencies. He explores how the idea and identification of being “Syrian” was articulated by several hundred thousand peasants immigrating from Mount Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine to the Americas and explores how their religious identities were mapped unto the racial identities prevalent in the United States (as well as in Australia and South Africa) to construct an ethnicity out of “Syrianness.” Khater uses the concept and practices of diasporic transnationalism as a first step toward providing a globalized history and geography of the Middle East; at the same time, this case study from the turn of the twentieth century provides a longer genealogy of transnationalism, endowing it with a historical dimension that is too often lacking in similar accounts.

The World Settles in: Washington, DC, as an Immigrant Gateway

This study examines the ethnic geography of a new immigrant gateway, Washington, DC. According to Census 2000, more than 832,000 foreign-born individuals reside in the Washington metropolitan region. This research uses Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) data in an effort to map the residential decisions of immigrant newcomers by zip code from 1990 to 1998. Spatially, a very diverse, dispersed, and suburbanized pattern of newcomer settlement emerges, a pattern that contradicts many of the assumptions of the spatial assimilation model. Whereas the overall pattern is one of dispersion, an analysis of country-of-origin groups results in a settlement continuum ranging from concentrated (Vietnamese) to highly dispersed (Indians). Current research in Washington suggests that a pattern of heterolocalism (community without propinquity) may be a better model for understanding the role of immigrant settlement patterns and networks.

Ethnic Geography Dynamics: Clues from Los Angeles

The five-county metropolitan region of Los Angeles has such large ethnic populations that it can show ethnic geography trends and patterns not easily identified in smaller places. I use Los Angeles to illustrate three dynamics that seem neglected in the urban literature. First, significant out-movement from poor, more central areas of Los Angeles into suburbs means that Blacks, Latinos, and Asians are no longer trapped in such neighborhoods, as was the case a half century ago. Second, many suburbs, particularly those built after about 1970, contain racially and ethnically diverse populations, some with very low levels of residential segregation between groups. Last, rates of ethnic group intermarriage with other groups are higher outside each group's area of residential concentration, and Blacks and Whites in Los Angeles are more likely to be married outside their respective groups than in the U.S. as a whole. All this evidence suggests the value of studying Los Angeles and suburbs as indicators of the nation's future ethnic geography.

The changing geography of ethnic minority settlement in Glasgow, 1951–2001

Thirty years ago the Scottish Geographical Magazine published a seminal paper by Kearsley & Srivastava on the spatial evolution of Glasgow's Asian community. The study, although limited by lack of access to contemporary Census data on ethnicity, provided a benchmark for subsequent research into the ethnic geographies of the city. The present research builds on these foundations and employs data from successive national Censuses of Population to present a descriptive analysis of the changing geographies of ethnic minority settlement in Glasgow, over the half century from 1951 to 2001.

The Tyranny of Small Differences: The Relationship between Ethnic Diversity and Democracy in the Former Socialist Bloc

When Communism fell, each newly liberated state embarked on a path of creating a new regime from existing institutions. The successor states shared a common history of conquest and Russification (in the case of the former Soviet Union) and several generations as Soviet satellites (in the case of Eastern Europe). They also carried pre-existing legacies shaped by geography and demography which, unlike the similar experience of Communist ideology and administration, varied dramatically from country to country. Did these legacies constrain actors in crafting new institutions, condemning some to authoritarianism and backwardness while providing others with the raw materials for success? Or was this inheritance merely a minor stumbling block easily overcome by actors who were then able to shape institutions as they pleased? (1) Ethnic diversity, although obviously not the only product of historical legacy, is nonetheless thought to be a major factor in determining a variety of outcomes in political science, including economic growth, good governance, public goods distribution, and stability, in addition to democracy. (2) The twenty-eight states of the former socialist bloc, whose regimes range from robust and consolidated democracy to unbridled authoritarianism, provide a strong test of the relationship between ethnic demography and democracy because they were all subject to the same political regime and all underwent regime change at the same time. To test this proposition, I first lay out several theories pertaining to the problems of consolidating democracy in plural societies, identifying three distinct mechanisms in the literature--violence, majority domination, and trust--through which ethnicity is thought to directly influence democratization. Next, I test each mechanism using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to examine the relationships between ethnic pluralism, level of democracy, and the intervening determinants of democracy. Overall, the results offer little evidence that ethnic pluralism influences democracy. Finally, several case studies illustrate the relative unimportance of demography in determining the level of democratic consolidation and identify alternative explanations for the range of outcomes. Although a test of the relationship between ethnic pluralism and democracy can be conducted for many regions of the world, there are several reasons to limit this study to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU). First, whereas using a data set composed of different regions of the world would pose a challenge in controlling for the many factors that differ between regions, the shared legacy of Soviet rule in the socialist bloc automatically controls for historical factors and allows for the isolation of structural factors inherent in a polity, such as ethnic fractionalization, wealth, and geography. Although the states of Eastern Europe and the FSU had experienced varying levels of democracy and statehood over their histories, for the most pan, the Soviet Union prevented internal conflict and the development of independent institutions and civil society throughout its empire. Between 1989 and 1992, each of the twenty-eight countries in the region began implementing independent policies from the Soviet Union for the first time in generations (with the partial exception of Yugoslavia and Albania, which had started earlier), permitting focused comparison of the natural constraints inherited by political actors and their effect on the choices made in the postindependence period. Second, using countries that as of eleven years ago all exhibited a common value oil the dependent variable (regime type) reduces the chances for endogeneity, which is important in interpreting the results of a statistical analysis. Since I am testing the effect of ethnic diversity on democratic consolidation, I can better establish causality if the former is exogenous to the hitter in the data set. The data set used in this analysis is advantageous in this regard because it consists of polities that all possessed a single regime type and have only been democratizing for a short time, providing less of a risk for reverse causality. …

Urban Ethnocracy: Ethnicization and the Production of Space in an Israeli ‘Mixed City’

In this paper we offer a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli ‘mixed city’. Similar to other sites shaped by the logics of settling ethnonationalism and capitalism, the ‘mixed city’ is characterized by stark patterns of segregation between a dominant majority and a subordinate minority, as well as by ethnoclass fragmentation within each group. ‘Mixed’ spaces are both exceptional and involuntary, often resulting from the process of ethnicization prevalent in contested urban spaces. We theorize this setting as an ‘ urban ethnocracy’, where a dominant group appropriates the city apparatus to buttress its domination and expansion. In such settings, conspicuous tensions accompany the interaction between the city's economic and ethnoterritorial logics, producing sites of conflict and instability, and essentializing group identities and ethnic geographies. Empirically, the paper focuses on the city of Lod or Lydda, Israel, where the production of contested urban space has been linked to the construction of an exclusionary Israeli-Jewish national identity and to the establishment of hierarchical ethnic citizenship. Like other previously Arab cities, Lod has been the target of a concerted strategy of Judaization, which has formed the city's central planning goal since the late 1940s. We analyze in detail various aspects and sites of the Judaization process, and of the ensuing urban conflicts. We point to the chronic instability of urban ethnocracies, and to the need of planning to rise above narrow ethnocentric considerations in order for the ‘mixed city’ to prosper as the home for all communities.

The ethnic geography of New Zealand: A decade of growth and change, 1991–2001

Abstract: New Zealand's population growth of 10 per cent over the decade 1991–2001 resulted substantially from an increasing number of those claiming Pacific Island and Asian ethnicity, and to a lesser extent of the New Zealand Maori. Using census data for a comparable set of small areas with average populations of just over 100, this paper examines the changing geography of the four main ethnic categories – New Zealand European, New Zealand Maori, Pacific Island Peoples, and Asians – across the country as a whole and in its major settlements, especially Auckland. There is little extreme segregation of the three minority groups, but most of the Europeans live in areas where there is little exposure to those of other ethnicities. Most of the changes in segregation reflect the growth of Auckland's Pacific Island and, especially, Asian populations.

Galveston: Ellis Island of Texas

The isolated windswept port of Galveston, located on the Texas Gulf Coast, served as the entry point for tens of thousands of immigrants from many parts of the world between 1850 and 1920. This paper maps, analyzes, and compares the ethnic/racial geography of this "Ellis Island of Texas" using a triangulation of ethnographic methods to understand more about (1) the settlement of particular groups on the island between 1850 and 1920; (2) the relationships between diverse foreign–born and native–born residents of the island and their impacts on local landscapes; and (3) the nuances of economic, political, and social power on the island and the ways complex ethnic and racial dimensions of the city's population influenced this power structure and the shifting identities of both foreign-born and native–born residents through time. Key to the analysis is the application of recent theoretical thinking in ethnic and population geography to understand and explain historical patterns and processes. Here in Galveston, the humidity was like a clammy hand held over your face. Yet the city had a ghostly charm. The scent of the tangled gardens hung heavy on the muggy air. The houses ... seemed built of ashes. Here was a remnant of haunted beauty–gray, shrouded, crumbling. –Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic.

Migration, embedded networks and social capital: towards theorising North American ethnic geography

AbstractThis paper critically evaluates the impacts of networks of ethnicity and social capital on the migration paths and settlement decision‐making of refugees now living on the Pacific Coast of the US. Of particular significance are the social networks of two complex groups who relocated in large numbers to communities in central California and the Pacific Northwest over the past decade. Postmodern sensitivities to race, space and place in recent years have revalidated humanistic approaches suggested by human geographers more than two decades ago. Today, however, this earlier humanistic approach is being reshaped to centre on unravelling and analysing social and place‐based relationships. Rather than viewing migration in a narrow perspective (as a process happening in a particular place at a particular fixed moment in time), human geographers have begun to use ethnographic methods to record migration processes. I build on the ideas and approaches of both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in this article, paying particular attention to the social relationships and networks that emerge at intersections of fluidity, fusion, motion and negotiation, to appraise their role in constantly shaping and reshaping migration processes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Catholic Greenwich Village: Ethnic Geography and Religious Identity in New York City, 1880 -1930

Introduction Greenwich Village is a neighborhood of diagonal streets and narrow alleys on lower West Side of Manhattan. Tourists find it an unexpected contrast to Manhattan's rigid grid of north-south avenues and cross-town streets. The area is so different from rest of city that even seasoned New Yorkers will admit that a walk through Greenwich Village can be a disorienting experience. Until morning of September 11, 2001, confused visitors would often look up at twin towers of World Trade Center to regain a sense of direction. The population of Village has long been as distinctive as its topography. Until late in nineteenth century Greenwich Village remained stoutly nativist in a city teeming with immigrants. In early twentieth century it became world-famous as Bohemia of America. More recently it has been home of a thriving gay community.1 For a period of about fifty years, from 1880 to 1930, Greenwich Village was also a vibrant Catholic neighborhood. There were a dozen churches and chapels with their attendant institutions located either in Village proper or immediately adjacent to it caring for at least seven different ethnic groups. In many respects Catholic Greenwich Village was a microcosm of big-city American Catholicism of that era. For that reason it is a researcher's delight today. The compact area and well-defined character of Greenwich Village in those years make it possible for historian to trace complicated interplay among different Catholic ethnic groups that lived there, and between each of them and local Irish-American ecclesiastical power structure. Such an analysis yields some fascinating insights into grassroots strengths and weaknesses of largest Catholic archdiocese in United States at a time when ethnic, urban-centered Catholicism was reaching apogee of its influence in America. Greenwich Village was once a real village, a northern suburb of New York City to which residents of city fled during periodic outbreaks of cholera. As early as 1822, however, an English visitor noted that, though once a separate town, [it] now forms part of city. Nonetheless, for many years thereafter Greenwich Village still preserved its distinctive identity. Amid tenement districts of lower Manhattan it remained a middle-class enclave with a predominantly native-born white Protestant population. As late as 1893 a rather dyspeptic observer commented favorably on humanity of a better sort who inhabited Greenwich Village in contrast to inhabitants of lower East Side of Manhattan, where even bad smells have foreign names.2 By that date, however, Greenwich Village was already in process of a major social transformation as influx of Irish and Italian immigrants from adjacent neighborhoods accelerated flight of middleclass Protestant residents. In 1902 a prominent social worker stated without hesitation that most of people were now Catholic. The anonymous writer of WPA's New York City Guide commented condescendingly that by 1910 the American Ward had become Ward 9, a foreign ward . . . its people faithful followers of Roman Catholic Church and of Tammany. By 1920's Greenwich Village was over-whelmingly Catholic and remained such until deterioration of neighborhood, and then its subsequent gentrification initiated still another social transformation that sent many middle-class Catholic families scurrying to outer boroughs of city.3 The Irish Village Fully half of twelve Catholic churches in and around Greenwich Village had predominantly Irish congregations. Far and away most important of them was St. Joseph's Church, located at corner of 6th Avenue and Washington Place in heart of Greenwich Village. Founded in 1829, St. Joseph's was Mother Church of Catholics in Greenwich Village and fifth oldest parish in whole archdiocese. …

The ethnic geography of EthniCities

Does London conform to the classic American model — based on the work of the `Chicago School' — with regard to the residential segregation of ethnic groups? To address this question, methods of analysing census small area data on ethnic group residential segregation in London are introduced, which provide more detailed information on the degree and extent of segregation than the usually employed methods of mapping and calculating single indices. These indicate very little spatial segregation of ethnic minority groups in London compared with New York, which is used here to exemplify the `American model'. In both cities, however, the White majority is very substantially separated from other ethnic groups.

Transnationalism and the Geography of (Sub)Ethnicity in Hong Kong1

The concept of diaspora as an active agent in the making of transnationalism has been a subject of various interpretations and heated debates. This study examines the heterogeneous subethnic identities of the Chinese diasporas and their spatial manifestation, using Hong Kong as a case. With its colonial connections and strategic location, Hong Kong has functioned as a center of origin and destination in the transnational movement of the Chinese diaspora. The great spatial mobility demonstrated by the Hong Kong sojourners or their "refugee mentality," as it is known, is found to be deeply rooted in their subethnic identity in the nation. A systematic analysis of spatial data collected in 1961 and 1996 reveals an uneven geography of subethnicity polarized by the elite English and Shanghainese on the one end and the local Kejia people on the other end. Despite the processes of deterritorization and displacement, the great spatial mobility of the Hong Kong sojourners and the diasporic landscape they have created have remained effectively shaped by their place-based ethno-linguistic identities. The seemingly "ungrounded empire" of Chinese diaspora capitalism, in which Hong Kong has played a crucial part, has been based on preexisting place-specific conditions.

Sydney's Ethnic Geography: New approaches to analysing patterns of residential concentration

Most studies of ethnic residential segregation in Australian cities have used single-measure indices of dissimilarity and segregation, which access the degree of unevenness between two maps. Segregation is a multi-dimensional concept, however, and in this paper we introduce an alternative way of measuring residential concentration which incorporates several of the key dimensions. The procedure is illustrated using birthplace and language-used-at-home data for collection districts in metropolitan Sydney in 1996. Results show no evidence of extreme spatial concentration of ethnic groups.

Sydney's Ethnic Geography: new approaches to analysing patterns of residential concentration

Sydney's Ethnic Geography: new approaches to analysing patterns of residential concentration

The Geography of the New Ethnicity: Ethnic Residential Segregation in Metropolitan Sydney 1996

The increased volume of international migration is producing a substantial number of multicultural cities with residents drawn from a large number of different birthplaces. Models developed a few decades ago of the intra‐urban social geography of where these migrants live suggested that they were initially concentrated in particular parts of the metropolitan area, reflecting their limited ability to compete in their host societies’ labour and housing markets; later economic integration led to spatial spread and assimilation. This paper evaluates whether that is the case in the context of the ‘new ethnicity’ stimulated by the increased volume of international migration, using Sydney as its case study; almost one‐third of its population of over 3 million was born outside Australia. Analyses of the 94 largest birthplace groups identified by the 1996 Census show that recency of arrival, facility with the English language, educational qualifications and low incomes were all associated with a group’s residential segregation within Sydney – with the major residuals reflecting cultural differences between the groups.

Garden of the Empire: Catherine's Appropriation of the Crimea

This paper investigates the ramifications of the garden trope, as Catherine the Great and Grigorii Potemkin applied it to the Crimea after Russia's annexation in 1783. Schönle argues that Catherine conceived of the province as a kind of garden and that she did so in order to bolster the identification of the Crimea with the garden of Eden and thus appeal to the paradise myth that became an intrinsic part of Russia's ideology of imperial power. The Crimean garden was meant to exemplify the benefits of her loving and protective rule, one that enables multicultural coexistence, eschews the risks of assimilationist imperial policies, and yet brings about a moral transformation of the subjugated population. In both its physical and ethnic geography, the Crimean garden claims universality in that it foregrounds an eclectic diversity of species and peoples. Catherine ascribed religious overtones to the garden trope, and she did so in opposition to a western Enlightenment definition of empire and civility.

A colonial perspective on population migration in Soviet Estonia

Industrialisation facilitates social and economic change and its role in modifying population patterns via the process of urbanisation is well documented. The socially selective nature of population redistribution is widely recognised, but in multi-ethnic states this redistribution of population is also culturally selective and has important ramifications for ethnic relations. This paper suggests that the theory of Internal Colonialism remains a useful theoretical framework for explaining the changes seen in Soviet Estonia. Specifically, it examines the influence of industrialisation on patterns of immigration into Estonia, and their consequent impact on Estonia's ethnic geography. We conclude that industrialisation is an important factor influencing patterns of population movement and distribution and that internal colonialism provides a valuable framework for the analysis of societal change in Soviet Estonia, and in other socialist contexts.