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Epilogue Tony Rosalia, one of the many Hamptons residents I interviewed for this project, spoke to me on the phone after he had read the penultimate draft of the book. “I think it’s good,” he said. “You make some important points about the area’s history and recent changes. But, it’s too negative. The Hamptons that you write about doesn’t feel like the Hamptons I know and see so much of the time.” As an example, he related a story from his experience as a court translator and liaison for the Latino community. It seems that two wealthy older women had recently appeared in court on behalf of their Latino chauffeur, who had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. According to Rosalia, “these women felt very responsible for their driver and genuinely concerned for his welfare.” He concluded, “This is the Hamptons that I know.” I think Tony is right about the importance of recognizing the speci fic ways in which we experience the realities of everyday life. The Hamptons are a place where people with myriad backgrounds relate to one another, often in very intimate ways. Much of my book shows how people have navigated the major social transformations of the Hamptons , from the European conquest, to the rise of an American aristocracy , to the recent changes brought by urban and suburban economic development. But, what I believe Tony found “too negative” in the book is the unfortunate reality that, despite the noblesse oblige attitude of the wealthy, the best intentions of white politicians, and the sincere efforts of people interested in protecting wildlife and waterways, the structures of economic wealth, social stratification, and political power remain the dominant factors in determining the everyday experience of people in the Hamptons. People may treat each other with great respect and decency, but the frameworks that enable them even to decide what is dignified are powerfully defined by forces that are often out of their control. While recognizing the intersection of structural inequality with 224 individual experiences doesn’t always yield a positive picture, let me simply say that no place is “positive” or “negative” in this way. We may applaud the commitment and caring of two women toward their employee , but even their small acts of heroism do little to alter the segregated labor markets, the racially and ethnically insensitive law enforcement , or the larger economic and social conditions that shape daily events. Karl Marx once wrote that, while “Man makes his own history . . . he does not make it out of whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brain of the living.”1 For most of this book, I have tried to trace just how such a historical dialectic shaped both the past and the present in the Hamptons . Since the first encounters between Native Americans and Europeans , people in the region have struggled to control the land and its resources , their own cultural identities and integrity, and the richness of their everyday lives. While Europeans cemented their political, economic , and cultural conquest over the territory, the Shinnecock and the Montaukett Indians navigated these changes, sometimes resisting, sometimes accommodating, but always negotiating conditions in an attempt to survive and thrive. Their efforts, in turn, also shaped the course and content of European settlement itself. Similar dynamics of power and resistance occurred as new demographic groups migrated to the Hamptons and older “local” people were forced to resist or accept, challenge or adapt to the forces of change. From the late nineteenth century, when the nation’s first aristocracy began its summer conquest of the area, through the early-twentieth -century arrival of a new wave of European immigrants, to the post–World War II era of professional-managerial-class leisure seekers, the forces of major social transformations have impacted the Hamptons . But each period of rapid change has also witnessed the power of historical traditions and cultural resistance and the struggles of native entrepreneurs and community leaders to meet those large-scale forces with their own stock of local resources through collective action. Most of the book has been about how these historical struggles set the stage for the recent history of culture and politics in the Hamptons. By examining recent demographic changes, real estate trends, and artistic representations of the region; by documenting the...

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