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200 Chapter 8 | Ma(r)king the Neighborhood: New immigrants, old Boundaries, New Maps It’s not an easy row to hoe to try to get people with you. I keep telling people too, they are here. We better learn to get along with them. —Carl, white resident of Radnor for almost five decades Carl was clearly a neighborhood leader and active resident when we spoke in 2006. Nearly a lifelong Radnor resident, he had observed many changes in his neighborhood, all of which he seemed to take in stride. School integration in the 1970s had changed Carl’s neighborhood and led to the closing of Central High School, which he attended and to which he still felt a strong attachment. Nashville’s interstate system and circle road had hemmed in his neighborhood, hurting its businesses and, along with busing, hastening its residential turnover. Finally, in the late 1990s, as Carl and other Flatrock residents entered retirement, a new change came to southeast Nashville: immigrant settlement. Still committed to maintaining life in Radnor as he knew it, Carl regularly frequented the few remaining commercial bastions of Flatrock in its heyday and kept up with old friends scattered throughout the area. He was also committed to his neighborhood, however, as it now was—caught somewhere between nostalgic Flatrock and immigrant Nashville. Getting his neighbors to work with him was admittedly “a hard row to hoe.” For Carl, though, there was no other alternative, since Latino immigrants in southeast Nashville were there to stay (Smith and Winders 2008). “We better learn to get along with them,” Carl stressed, as he and other long-term residents of southeast Nashville struggled to make sense of an immigrant presence in and an immigrant present for their neighborhoods in the new millennium. How did people who had lived in southeast Nashville for some time make sense of the changes in their neighborhoods brought about by—or Ma(r)king the Neighborhood 201 happening concurrently with—immigrant settlement? How did they narrate the multicultural present developing around them, and how did they link what their neighborhoods were in the 2000s to what they had been in the past? As detailed in chapter 7, Latino and long-term residents lived side by side in southeast Nashville but did not necessarily share social worlds; instead, they interacted through a silence that meant different things to each group. This chapter adds to that argument by showing how long-term residents and Latino immigrants understood and enacted neighborhood itself in different ways. If many long-term residents in southeast Nashville could describe in detail not only their current neighborhood but also its features from as early as the 1930s, many Latino immigrants, as an area nonprofit director explained, had to pull out their wallets to check their driver’s license (for those who still had them) to tell you their home address. The details that Latino immigrants did not see—their neighborhood’s name, boundaries, landmarks, and especially local history—were the very features that defined it for long-term residents. In fact, the historically deep neighborhood knowledge that many long-term residents possessed provided the material and symbolic means by which they came to grips with their neighborhood’s conditions in the 2000s, especially its increasing association with immigrant settlement. The difference between how immigrants and long-term residents understood not only how to behave in the neighborhood but also what neighborhood itself meant was, thus, central to southeast Nashville’s politics of demographic and social change and shaped immigrant incorporation in Nashville in the new millennium. To get a sense of these different ways of understanding neighborhood and its changes, I asked a simple question across southeast Nashville: “What neighborhood do you live in?” Neighborhoods, like segregated water fountains, carry powerful material and symbolic weight as the places where people are understood to belong in a city—a ground-truth spatial identity for urban residents and social dynamics. People may be employed at multiple work sites and may travel across the city to visit friends, pick up children, or complete other tasks. The neighborhood itself may even have lost its saliency in some urban residents’ lives. Nonetheless , urban residents are still marked and measured by where they live in the city for the census, by state agencies, and in everyday understandings of urban populations. Neighborhood, simply put, remains a central part of how people experience and understand their places in cities, even as it remains hard to define.1...

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