Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging

6. Seeing Immigrant Nashville: Institutional Visibility, Urban Governance, and Immigrant Incorporation

138 Chapter 6 | seeing immigrant Nashville: institutional visibility, urban governance, and immigrant incorporation On an early evening in July 2007, my research assistant, Sandra, and I wandered into a draft concept plan meeting organized by Metro Nashville ’s Planning Department.1 Held in the old Turner School in the heart of southeast Nashville, this meeting was part of a visioning exercise designed to create a new land-use plan that would form the basis for zoning requests and other land-use decisions for the next decade. At this gathering and at others like it, Metro urban planners asked residents to brainstorm about what they wanted their neighborhoods to look like, compiling a collective sense of residents’ aspirations for their neighborhoods and translating those aspirations into neighborhood design plans. Finding a seat along the edge of the room close to the tables set up for participants, I made the first entry in my field notes: “all white attendees.” This observation would be made again at the meeting’s conclusion by attendees themselves , as it would be at similar meetings across southeast Nashville. It would also become a leitmotif of Nashville’s institutional interactions with immigrants as neighborhood residents. To begin the session, the lead planner reminded attendees that “the neighborhood spoke” at these sessions about what it wanted vis-à-vis greater connectivity along corridors and among residents, mapping the idea of “neighborhood” onto the people at the meeting and linking their involvement to the neighborhood’s ability to be represented. At this session , as at others, conversations bounced between urban planners’ calls for the “diversity” necessary to transform Nolensville Road into a functioning urban community and long-term residents’ hopes for the “small- seeing immigrant Nashville 139 town” feel that would re-create the neighborhood they nostalgically recalled (Fainstein 2005). Planners stressed that a combination of diversity and quaintness in southeast Nashville was attainable, with the right planning approach. Mixed-used development, they explained, would create defined centers and address a perennial concern of long-term residents by making Nolensville Road more than a thoroughfare out of the city or a string of car lots.2 To redefine Nolensville Road, however, residents had to “declare your neighborhood” and mark its limits, the facilitator reiterated . Whether that “declared” neighborhood constituted an actual neighborhood was hotly debated by participants. This area along Nolensville Road “was a beautiful community,” one attendee stressed, but had become excessively commercial, particularly around the section known as “Little Mexico.” Other participants described this stretch of Nolensville Road as a “potential neighborhood” that would have to overcome the same commercial intrusion to be a real neighborhood. As participants pondered whether the area was a former community or a future neighborhood, planners stressed that it was “up to the neighborhood” to drive changes, again mapping responsibility for the physical space of the area onto the residents physically present in the room. “You all are the watchdogs,” planners declared to attendees, saying that they were the ones who could pressure council representatives and neighborhood associations. “You, as a community, are watching over” the neighborhood. Through such declarations , Metro planners connected attendees at the meeting, the physical state of their neighborhoods, and the sociopolitical formation of community , placing the task of determining the future of all three in the hands of meeting participants. Throughout the evening, participants periodically remarked on the whiteness of the audience as a problem in that constellation of neighborhood , community, and residents. As one participant quipped, “I’m just gonna say it. There are no Hispanics here.” It was true that no Latinos were present at the session (aside from my research assistant, who was from Puerto Rico). In spite of their physical absence, however, a Latino presence was central to the meeting in many ways. When facilitators turned the discussion to a proposed corridor to link Coleman Park at the intersection of Nolensville Road and Thompson Lane to the Woodbine Community Organization (WCO) in the heart of Woodbine, a particularly vocal attendee described the WCO as no longer a neighborhood center and “not what it once was,” obliquely referencing tensions surrounding the WCO’s immigrant outreach and directly noting its failure to merit identification as a neighborhood node. An absent Latino presence was also central to how the meeting itself was organized. As organizers ex- 140 Nashville in the New Millennium plained that budget limitations had not allowed them to send out multiple announcements or...