Immigrant Neighborhoods Research Articles

“New food cultures” and the absent food citizen: immigrants in urban food policy discourse

AbstractMulticultural cities in the Global North are rapidly developing and releasing urban food policies that outline municipal visions of sustainable food systems. In turn, these policies shape conceptions of food citizenship in the city. While these policies largely absorb activities previously associated with “alternative” food systems, little is known about how they respond to critical food and race scholars who have noted that these food practices and spaces have historically marginalized immigrants. A critical discourse analysis of 22 urban food policies from Global North cities reveals that most policies do not meaningfully consider immigrant foodscapes, foodways, and food-related labour. Many promote hegemonic and/or ethno-nationalistic understandings of “healthy” and “sustainable” food without recognizing immigrants’ food-related knowledge and skills. Policies largely fail to connect the topic of immigrant labour with goals like shortening supply chains, subject immigrant neighbourhoods to stigmatizing health discourses, and lack acknowledgement of the barriers immigrants may face to participating in sustainable food systems. Relatedly, policy discourses articulate forms of food citizenship that emphasize individual obligations over rights related to food. This jeopardizes the potential for immigrants to be seen as belonging to dominant political urban food communities and benefitting from the symbolic and material rewards associated with them.

Neighborhood Diversity Is Good for Your Health: An Example of Racial/Ethnic Integration and Preterm Birth in Texas.

Racial concentration of neighborhoods is often associated with the risk of preterm birth (PTB) for women. This study examined differences between racially diverse and racially concentrated neighborhoods when examining preterm birth. Individual-level data were obtained from Texas natality files for 2009-2011, and neighborhood-level (i.e., census tract) data were obtained from the decennial census in 2010 and the American Community Survey 2005-2009. We used multilevel modeling to assess the association between neighborhood racial diversity and odds of PTB, after controlling for individual characteristics, neighborhood poverty, and population density. We found that neighborhood racial diversity and concentration matter for PTB. Results suggest that systemic racism is still key to understanding PTB. Furthermore, findings support policies that prevent displacement from gentrification of diverse neighborhoods and promote equal access to health-related resources for women in predominantly Black, Hispanic, and/or immigrant neighborhoods.

Space-focused stereotypes of immigrant neighbourhoods.

Recent research suggests that stereotypes are not only applied to social groups but also to the physical spaces that social groups inhabit. We present three experiments investigating space-focused stereotype content and valence regarding immigrant and non-immigrant neighbourhoods. In Study 1a (N = 198), a pre-registered online experiment, we observed that participants associate more negative characteristics with immigrant neighbourhoods than with middle-class neighbourhoods. Whereas they imagined immigrant neighbourhoods as crime-ridden, dirty and dangerous, they imagined middle-class neighbourhoods to be quiet, clean and safe. Furthermore, whereas stereotype valence regarding immigrant neighbourhoods was negative, stereotype valence regarding middle-class neighbourhoods was positive, suggesting large effects. These results were replicated in Study 1b (N = 274), examining stereotypes of immigrant versus majority-German neighbourhoods. In Study 2 (N = 209), a pre-registered online experiment, we observed that space-focused stereotypes were more negative when cultural stereotypes rather than personal beliefs were assessed. Exploratory analyses revealed that, compared with majority-German neighbourhoods, participants imagined immigrant neighbourhoods to be lower in socioeconomic status and also reported feeling less psychologically connected to these neighbourhoods, regardless of whether space-focused stereotypes were personally endorsed or not. Lastly, a mega-analysis across studies suggested that effects of stereotypes of immigrant in comparison to non-immigrant places were very large (ds = 1.70). Together, the present findings indicate that mere differences in descriptions of places with reference to their demographic composition are sufficient to elicit large differences in associated stereotype content and valence.

The embodiment of exclusionary displacement pressure: Intersections of housing insecurity and mental health in a Hispanic/Latinx immigrant neighborhood

Gentrification, growing income inequality, urban development, and the affordable housing crisis necessitate understanding the impact of the concern of displacement on health — prior to or even in the absence of a displacement event. In this paper, I use the term “exclusionary displacement pressure” to unify the literature on exclusionary displacement and displacement pressure, highlighting the disproportionate and inequitable impacts of displacement pressure among communities of color. Through following 35 residents over 2.5-years (2019–2022) in one predominantly low-income Hispanic/Latinx immigrant neighborhood in Denver, Colorado, I examine how exclusionary displacement pressure shapes their health and wellbeing over time. Through paying attention to how participants' lived experience is shaped by structural vulnerability (e.g. lack of documentation status, inadequate work, limited access to safety net systems), I identify how exclusionary displacement pressure is constantly internalized and responded to as a unique embodied health experience, wearing on individuals over time and reproducing population health inequities. The framework of embodied health experiences captures the wide range of health-related impacts, from diagnosable health conditions to idioms of distress, using participant's own language of suffering to express how they were feeling, battling, and enduring the pressure. Theorizing on structural vulnerability within specific subpopulations with intersecting identities, such as low-income immigrant Hispanic/Latinx communities, provides a bottom-up refinement to existing theories of embodied health. Understanding the place-health experiences of individuals in changing neighborhoods over time is also critically important to define time points at which context-specific supports and interventions are appropriate.

Examining the Relationship Between Immigrant Residential Segregation and Access to Healthcare

ABSTRACT As a result of recent immigration, the United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Since immigrants have added some new dimensions to the segregation picture within their ethnic/immigrant communities, it is important to understand their travel behaviour. Despite the recent research studies examining access to job opportunities in foreign-born neighborhoods versus U.S.-born neighborhoods, little has been done regarding spatial disparities in access to healthcare facilities. Accordingly, the present study investigates the disparities in the accessibility of Minnesota immigrant neighborhoods to healthcare facilities. Different neighborhoods are therefore distinguished according to their immigrant composition and median household income. The results reveal that compared to White neighborhoods, ethnic/immigrant neighborhoods are more physically accessible. Even so, low-income immigrant neighborhoods tend to have maximum access to healthcare facilities.

Субкультура молодежного протеста: парижские пригороды осенью 2005 г.

The protests of the youth of the immigrant neighborhoods in the fall of 2005 are an outstanding event in the history of the Parisian suburbs and in the political history of the Fifth Republic. Having begun as a local revolt, which flared up sporadically in the urban agglomerations of France populated mainly by immigrants from the countries of North and Tropical Africa, the events acquired the scale of a national uprising. They expanded to 300 communes, all departments of the Paris region, and responses happened in the east and west of France. There were thousands of detained and arrested participants, two hundred wounded police officers, thousands of burned cars. For three weeks the police and gendarmerie could not suppress the rebels. Some analysts, emphasizing the vandalism of the protests, call them “riots (émeutes).” Others, pointing to the scale of the protests, their duration, and the fierceness of the confrontation with the forces of law and order, propose the term “uprising (révolte)”. Both explain the vandalism of the protesters by the lack of other ways for young people to express their protest. Historians have noted the similarities between youth protests and social protest in traditional societies. In both cases, the participants sought a demonstration effect to convey to those in power the depth of their indignation. The protests sometimes took the form of festivities, accompanied by emotional release, the acquisition of self-esteem and collective identity. The rebels drew legitimacy for their actions by appealing to moral values. The article traces how deeply the actions of the 2005 rebels could match the cultural and historical typology of archaic forms of social protest.

Residence in Hispanic/Latino Immigrant Neighborhoods, Away-From-Home Food Consumption, and Diet Quality: The Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos.

Hispanics/Latinos are disproportionately burdened by nutrition-related diseases but immigrants appear healthier than their US-born counterparts. Neighborhoods characterized by high Hispanic/Latino immigrant segregation may provide environments to support healthier diets. To examine whether or not Hispanic/Latino immigrant segregation is associated with frequency of away-from-home food consumption and diet quality in a large, diverse sample of Hispanic/Latino adults. Cross-sectional baseline data from the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos were analyzed (2008-2011). Residential addresses were geocoded and linked to census tract-level 2008-2012 American Community Survey data. Hispanic/Latino immigrant segregation was characterized using the local Getis-Ord Gi∗ statistic, a spatial clustering measure that quantifies the extent to which demographically similar neighborhoods group together. Participants were 15,661 adults in the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos, a population-based study of Hispanic/Latinos aged 18 to 74 years from 4 US regions (Bronx, NY; Chicago, IL; Miami, FL; and San Diego, CA). Away-from-home food consumption was assessed using a modified dietary behavior questionnaire. Diet quality was assessed using the Alternate Healthy Eating Index 2010 (range= 0 to 110) from two 24-hour recalls. Multilevel linear and logistic regression with multilevel weights were used to estimate associations between Hispanic/Latino immigrant segregation (low, medium, or high) with Alternate Healthy Eating Index 2010 score, and away-from-home food consumption (≥3 vs <3 times/week) in separate models, respectively. The mediating role of neighborhood poverty and whether or not associations differed by nativity were also assessed. Higher levels of segregation were associated with higher adjusted mean Alternate Healthy Eating Index 2010 scores; estimates were further magnified after accounting for neighborhood poverty (low segregation: reference category; medium segregation: β= 2.43, 95% CI 1.10 to 3.77; and high segregation: β= 1.63, 95% CI .43 to 2.82). Associations were strongest among the foreign-born compared with the US-born. There was no association between segregation and away-from-home food consumption. These results highlight the potential role of Hispanic/Latino immigrant neighborhoods in supporting healthy diets among residents, especially immigrants.

‘BEST FOR FOODIES’: Food, Digital Media and Planetary Gentrification

AbstractLeisure activities, including place‐based food experiences, have become central to defining urban identities and branding places. Mobile and affluent urbanites’ search for authentic and cosmopolitan experiences is increasingly guided by corporate digital media such as apps and websites that direct them to previously ignored working‐class, ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods, which are being discursively and materially reconfigured to meet their needs, in turn causing the displacement of long‐time residents. We examine the relationship between food and gentrification through the lens of digital media, suggesting that they play an important role in shaping urban experiences and cities. Specifically, we investigate narratives produced by popular digital food media, not least websites and apps providing restaurant ratings and reviews, and their relationship to ongoing patterns of gentrification in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and Paris. Using mixed methods that combine census data with ‘hybrid fieldwork’ in online and offline foodscapes, we identify some spatial patterns and key characteristics of food‐driven gentrification, highlighting the aestheticization of everyday life and its significance in encouraging and legitimizing planetary gentrification.

Diverging pathways: the effects of initial legal status on immigrant socioeconomic and residential outcomes in France

Abstract Drawing on a unique, large-sample survey from France, Trajectories and Origins (TeO), this article provides an empirical assessment of the effects of migrants’ initial legal status on socioeconomic attainment focusing on three outcomes: household income, neighbourhood disadvantage, and concentration in immigrant neighbourhoods. Legal status effects are identified using a twofold strategy. First, our data comprise an exceptionally rich set of information on premigratory characteristics, which allows us to disentangle the effect of initial legal status from migratory selection processes. Furthermore, we implement an instrumental variable design to correct for the endogeneity of initial legal status. Findings show that some of the initial legal status effect is due to selection, whether measured by observable premigratory characteristics or other unobservable variables. Nonetheless, we also find robust evidence that refugees durably face socioeconomic disadvantage in terms of income and are more likely to live in immigrant-dense neighbourhoods. We discuss how these findings contribute both empirically and theoretically to the literature on the civic stratification of migrants’ pathways: first, by highlighting that we should disentangle the long-term civic stratification mechanisms from sorting into legal status categories, and second, by stressing that the theory should be more specific about which legal status categories are decisive in creating hierarchies between migrants.

The Specter of Gentrification in a Pan-Asian Immigrant Neighborhood: Community Development and Resistance to Displacement in Portland’s Jade District

The Specter of Gentrification in a Pan-Asian Immigrant Neighborhood: Community Development and Resistance to Displacement in Portland’s Jade District

Infrastructures in the context of arrival – multidimensional patterns of resource access in an established and a new immigrant neighborhood in Germany

Abstract. Recent debates on arrival cities, neighborhoods, or other scales of local contexts tend to focus on aspects of local areas which support new migrants in accessing resources such as social networks, organizations, and other kinds of local infrastructure that give access to (multilingual) information, housing options, first jobs, or a sense of belonging and conviviality. These features are often concentrated in long-standing immigrant neighborhoods. In this contribution, we compare different kinds of local infrastructure in two German local contexts – in an established immigrant neighborhood and a rather new immigrant neighborhood – and how they have shaped the arrival of refugees who have come to Germany since 2014/15. We emphasize the need to understand infrastructures and the way they shape arrival, first, in a multidimensional way that, second, comprises inclusive as well as exclusive aspects of local infrastructures. This, third, includes the need to specify for which category of people infrastructures work in an inclusive or exclusive way as they work differently along a range of social boundaries.

Global arts world and the worlding of Wynwood, Miami, Florida

ABSTRACT Wynwood, Miami, is a world-renowned global art canvas of street art and cultural production site. The rise of Miami as a global arts city and its hosting of Arts Basel enhanced the place marketing of Wynwood. Wynwood’s recent trajectory is driven by the confluence of art, real estate, and urban planning. Its redevelopment over time has been dramatic, transitioning from a low‐income immigrant neighborhood and warehouse district into innovative artistic milieu. In the 2020s the neighborhood is being highly commodified, resulting in the loss of artistic capital replaced by trendy retail, condo, and hotel projects. Our analysis is primarily based on interviews with gallery owners in 2016 and 2022, as well as planning documents and business census data. Wynwood as an art venue has peaked, and artists and galleries are exiting. Nonetheless, Wynwood continues to be marketed as an arts neighborhood by property developers and retail and entertainment businesses

The radicals watched from the sidelines or the ambivalent citizens’ relations to radicalism in a poor Montreal neighbourhood

ABSTRACT This analysis seeks to understand the appropriation or rejection of radicalism by two groups in a poor and immigrant neighbourhood of Montreal. Yet although both defend the same causes and share the same progressive dimension, one presents itself as a group of non-radical citizens while the other presents itself as a group of radical activists. So for each group, what do these different definitions of identity enfold: citizens versus militants, non-radicals versus radicals? More than the acceptance and the use of violence, the investigation’s results reveal that the divergences observed illustrate a different construction of the intersection between social class, cultural or ethnic identity, and global and local boundaries. These different ways of conceiving the intersection shape specific democratic practices and relations to politics. This analysis outlines the relevance of not restricting the reflection on radicalism to a focus on the repertoire of collective action but rather exploring its meanings for citizens in their daily lives and its implications for their relations to politics. Finally, it also offers a concrete picture of left-wing ideological tensions and debates and how some grass roots organizations try (or do not try) to resolve them.

The Missed Fork in the “Forked-Road Situation”

The Missed Fork in the “Forked-Road Situation”

New Frontiers of Integration: Convergent Pathways of Neighborhood Diversification in Metropolitan New York

This article examines the most recent trends on neighborhood racial integration in New York—the country’s largest metropolitan area in 2019 with a total population of 19.2 million. We ask how the suburbanization of both immigration and poverty have transformed suburbs over the last two decades. We highlight four findings. First, ethnoracial diversification has led to a significant decline in nonintegrated neighborhoods and a sharp rise in integrated neighborhoods, but such a decline is more dramatic in suburbs than in cities. Second, White-integrated neighborhoods remain the most prevalent form of neighborhood integration in both cities and suburbs. Third, immigrant neighborhoods are more likely to be integrated in both suburbs and cities, but immigration’s impact on neighborhood integration in suburbs was stronger in 2000 than in 2019. Finally, the impacts of concentrated immigration, affluence, and disadvantage on neighborhood integration are consistent across suburbs and cities, pointing to convergent processes over time.

Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.

Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.

Working-Class Germans in the Salt City: Syracuse, New York, 1860–1916

Working-Class Germans in the Salt CitySyracuse, New York, 1860–1916 Daniel Koch (bio) The central city of the Empire State was once the home of thousands of Germans, the largest contingent in a multicultural, multilingual urban melting pot. Syracuse was one of the key industrial cities of the United States during the Civil War era and into the twentieth century. Like other American cities, its industrial might was built on immigrant labor, much of which was German. Yet, there has not been a historical study of German Syracuse since the editors of the German-language Syracuse Union newspaper produced a book called Geschichte der Deutschen in Syracuse und Onondaga County (The history of the Germans in Syracuse and Onondaga County) in 1897. Like the tomes of county history produced around the same time, the Geschichte focuses on the great and the good. Its subtitle gives its intention away—Nebst Kurzen Biographien von Beamten and Hervorragenden Buergern (With short biographies of officials and prominent citizens). The book is handsomely illustrated with portraits of eminent German Americans who achieved great success in their careers, and who also gave back to their communities by supporting churches, schools, and charities. These leaders were a source of pride at a time when "great man" status was the aim to which young men were taught to aspire. But the men (and they are all men) whose portraits adorn the Geschichte were exceptions. Most German immigrants worked in industrial jobs, living in what urban accommodation they could afford. They clustered in immigrant neighborhoods with other Germans but also often in mixed communities with other groups of immigrants—Irish, particularly in the early decades, and Italian and Polish in the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article seeks to expose a little-studied German community, going beyond the limited great-man focused nineteenth-century sources that exist. Both the Geschichte and Dwight H. Bruce's Memorial History of Syracuse (1891), the two most detailed views of the city in the late nineteenth century, portray a highly positive view of a flourishing German [End Page 361] American community that exemplified civic virtue.1 Historians have maintained that Germans were widely accepted, even celebrated, in American society between the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I.2 The purpose here is not to try to undermine this view; indeed, the records from Syracuse in this period clearly bear it out. Nor is it to write a labor history of Germans in Syracuse. It is rather to bring back to life some of what was left out or swept under the carpet in building this narrative of German success in America. This article seeks to answer why these omissions occurred and argues that it was at least partially related to pervasive racialist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, studying Syracuse's German community enables us to reconstruct the urban geography of a nineteenth-century industrial center and take a new look at a lost German neighborhood in a key American city. Syracuse was a relatively late city to emerge in New York State. The land upon which it is built was part of the Onondaga Reservation, a 64,000-acre tract that was exempt from white settlement by the terms of the 1788 treaty between the State of New York and the Onondaga Nation.3 Syracuse is still known as the salt city due to the briny waters that flow into Onondaga Lake, from which salt can be made using a boiling process. Water from Syracuse's salt springs, an 1834 map boasted, produced nearly seven times as much salt as the same quantity of sea water. "Solar salt" was also produced by allowing the water to evaporate in the sun and raking in the remaining salt. Subsequent exploitative treaties with the state chipped away at the Onondaga Reservation (other Haudenosaunee people in New York experienced the same in the so-called treaty period between the 1790s and 1820s). The land upon which Syracuse was built was transferred first to the state and then sold off to private buyers. Settlers poured in, mainly from New England, in the early decades...

Immigrant neighborhoods and eviction: Hidden housing crisis?

Poor renting families are experiencing the worst affordable housing crisis in decades. Although there is evidence of high eviction rates, in part due to this affordability crisis, the housing literature only recently began to examine this phenomenon. As a relatively new area of inquiry, the eviction literature has some glaring gaps. First, most studies are qualitative and focus on one locality at a time. Second, to our knowledge, no U.S.- based studies investigate eviction rates in immigrant neighborhoods. We aim to fill these gaps by using the Eviction Lab database and American Community Survey Data to determine whether there is an association between neighborhood-level eviction filing and eviction rates and the presence of immigrants in the neighborhood, after controlling for other neighborhood factors. At the national level, we find that neighborhoods with an increase in the U.S. and foreign-born non-white populations have significantly higher eviction filing and eviction rates than neighborhoods with U.S.- born non-Hispanic white residents. Within race/ethnic groups, variation by nativity seems to reflect larger segregation and settlement patterns of U.S. and foreign-born minority populations. In low immigrant cities, Black immigrants are more vulnerable to eviction than any other group.

Housing Reform and the Ghetto Law in the Time of Covid

This short personal essay considers the principles behind housing reform in New York at the turn of the last century in light of the controversies around the ghetto law in contemporary Denmark. I take the example of documentary journalist and reformer Jacob Riis, who photographed housing conditions in immigrant neighbor-hoods on the Lower East Side in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, as a case study for considering the ways that race informed—and continues to inform—ideals around urban planning. Conversely, I also consider contemporary controversies around the ghetto law, and activism by community members as a way of re-thinking a research approach to historical urban reforms.

Ways that Diasporic Italy Matters and for Whom

Ways that <i>Diasporic Italy</i> Matters and for Whom