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6 Quiet Crisis: A Community History of Latinos in Cambridge, Massachusetts Deborah Pacini Hernandez W hile the foundational work characterizing the earliest stages of the field of Latino studies focused on particular ethnic groups— primarily Mexican Americans/Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, the newer subfield of comparative Latino studies has focused instead on places—mostly cities with large Latino populations such as New York, Los Angeles, and Miami but more recently in newer receiving areas such as New England—where multiple ethnic groups, Latinos and non-Latinos alike, share space and influence each other’s development.1 This approach has encouraged viewing Latino communities in relation to other ethnic groups inhabiting these spaces—other Latino ethnic groups and nonLatinos alike. This work has gone a long way toward bringing into relief the profound heterogeneity of the urban Latino experience in the various parts of the United States. Many of the authors of such place-focused studies have been sociologists , economists, and political scientists who have typically relied heavily on quantitative data such as census figures because these are clearly the best ways of identifying broad patterns and historical trends—for example, labor force participation, education levels, and residential patterns— characterizing specific communities and how these have changed over time. Seeking to add to this rich body of knowledge, cultural anthropologists and public historians, acknowledging Sidney Mintz’s observation that ‘‘people are at once products and makers of the social and cultural systems in which they are lodged,’’2 have employed ethnographic research —oral history and in-depth interviews—in order to reveal the individual stories and perspectives of those whose daily lives and struggles have collectively constituted these systems. Equally valuable, from a different theoretical perspective, is that such studies can serve to assess whether models developed from research in other regions and from other data sources can be generalized. It is common knowledge, for example, that today’s U.S. Latino population is the consequence of decades of successive migratory waves from diverse Latin American sending regions. Typically, the earlier arrivals—Puerto Ricans on the East Coast and Mexican Americans in the Southwest—provided a base that facilitated the later arrival of relatives and friends (as well as pioneers from other ethnic groups such as Dominicans), who themselves subsequently become links in the rapidly extending cadenas (migration chains). The earliest immigrants to urban East Coast cities were drawn by the region’s manufacturing sector, while later arrivals have generally been incorporated into less remunerative and secure service-sector jobs. Unlike their European predecessors, however, who were eventually accepted by the majority society, Latinos have been unable to overcome the barriers of racism, segregation, and exclusion. Indeed, with the exception of the first wave of Cubans in the 1960s and 1970s, Latino immigration patterns have subverted the optimistic theories positing that all immigrants would eventually assimilate into the great ‘‘American melting pot’’ by shedding their ethnicity. As Andres Torres has pointed out, ‘‘Instead of dissolving into a single entity, they compete intensely, and ethnic identity and language continue to figure in their political, social and economic activities’’3 —a pattern which stimulated ‘‘mosaic’’ models of incorporation. In other cases, especially among Spanish Caribbeans, some assimilation did occur, but laterally into African American rather than white Eurocentric society .4 As Latinos continue to increase steadily in numbers, their political and economic visibility within the host society has also been increasing, generating newer theoretical models suggesting that ethnic political and economic succession become inevitable when an immigrant minority community grows large enough relative to the host society. Hardy-Fanta and Gerson’s work, for example, demonstrated such progressions in two Massachusetts cities, Lawrence and Chelsea, as the percentage of the Latino population in these cities increased dramatically.5 Latinos in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are another story. The city’s economy is heavily dependent on high-skilled, private, servicesector employment; these include jobs in education—Harvard and MIT are Cambridge’s two largest employers—and health-related services—six of the city’s eleven top employers are companies such as Genzyme and Biogen.6 Such an elite economic environment dramatically raises the bar for immigrants and minorities, making their incorporation even more difficult. Moreover, Cambridge is extremely expensive: it has a greater concentration of million-dollar homes than any other major U.S. city. In spite of these inauspicious characteristics, Cambridge’s Latino population has increased steadily, from 4,536 in 1980 to 7,455 in 2000.7...

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