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232 Chapter 9 | at the intersection of history and Diversity Living with diversity is a matter of constant negotiation, trial and error , and sustained effort, with possibilities crucially shaped by the many strands that feed into the political culture of the public realm. (Amin 2002, 976) Nashville entered the last decade of the twentieth century a black-andwhite city whose place on the map of country music was established but whose place on the map of international migration was questionable at best. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that image had changed. During the 2000s, Nashville’s immigrant communities grew through international migration from Latin America, secondary migration from other U.S. cities, and refugee resettlement from around the world. Immigrant Nashville became more diverse and more settled, reaching 10 percent of the city’s population by 2010 and transforming conversations about race, diversity, and social belonging in the city. At the same time, those conversations became more heated through the articulation of national , if not international, responses to 9/11 and local reactions to a growing immigrant presence. In this way, local, national, and international politics of immigration came together in Nashville schools and neighborhoods , where the social and cultural manifestations of new levels of racial and ethnic diversity combined with local histories to shape immigrant incorporation in the Music City in the new millennium. Because the impact of immigrant settlement was felt in some but not all Nashville neighborhoods, immigration politics took on a particular urban geography. In southeast Nashville, the overlapping social worlds of Latino immigrants and long-term residents changed local neighborhoods in ways that both groups struggled to understand in the 2000s, making them both more diverse and more segregated, both livelier and quieter. Southeast at the intersection of history and Diversity 233 Nashville schools also changed as a second generation of immigrants joined the first generation in the classroom and complicated the link between present and past, between race and place. As teachers struggled to find ways to situate immigrant students in locally available categories of race and ethnicity and to keep Nashville’s immigration politics out of their classrooms, immigrant students struggled to find their place in “American” cultural practices and identities, which were often seen and read through the actions of their teachers. Immigrant students also worked to find their place in the local and regional histories of racism and racial struggle that had created the very categories into which their teachers could not place them. As this book has suggested, Nashville, its residents, and its institutions negotiated the path from a politics of speed to a politics of settlement as the organizing grammar of immigration with few locally relevant examples of how they could or should proceed. Admittedly, there were ample instances of other cities, like Los Angeles and New York City, dealing with waves of immigrant settlement, but the linkages between these gateway cities and a city like Nashville were not clear in the 2000s. Instead, the comparative frames of reference deployed to understand Nashville were more modest. There was, for instance, a strong desire not to be “another Atlanta,” as city officials repeatedly stressed in explaining their desire to avoid re-creating Atlanta’s sprawling urban and suburban expanse in the decisions they made about Nashville’s urban future. The actors charged with making decisions for Nashville also had some awareness of other Southern cities like Charlotte as possible benchmarks for those decisions. More than anything, however, at the scale of daily life in the school and neighborhood, few long-term residents, teachers, or immigrants looked beyond their immediate surroundings to search for ways to contextualize and explain their view and experience of immigrant settlement. In the 2000s, teachers taught whoever came through their classroom doors and used that threshold to keep politics out of teaching and to sort and organize students whose racial and ethnic identities spilled out of a black-white racial binary. In the neighborhood, long-term residents saw immigrant settlement as a local phenomenon that lacked a clear explanation and did not fit in their understandings of local histories.At the same time, new immigrants closely watched these same long-term residents to determine how to behave and live in Nashville neighborhoods and responded to rumors of dangerous parts of the city by not going there. In the late 2000s, there were readily available ways in Nashville to describe Latino immigrants—as legal or illegal , Hispanic, Mexican, or Spanish...

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