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

3. Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies: Placing Southeast Nashville

41 Chapter 3 | two Neighborhoods, two histories, two geographies: Placing southeast Nashville What happens in cities like Nashville when neighborhoods and schools change through immigrant settlement? Within schools, how does the presence of students who themselves or whose families came from Latin America and beyond affect what teachers teach, how they see and understand their students, and where they place their work in the classroom vis-à-vis broader ideas about cultural change, immigration, and other publicly debated topics? Within neighborhoods, how does the presence of residents who speak different languages and come from different places impact understandings of what it means to be a neighbor and how a neighborhood works and is governed? These questions concerning the politics of demographic change, immigrant incorporation, and social belonging in schools and neighborhoods faced Nashville and other new immigrant destinations in the 2000s. To answer them, we must take a close look at how cities like Nashville negotiated the confluence of immigrant settlement, local histories, and new ethnic and racial diversity. This chapter introduces the areas of Nashville where these negotiations took place and where immigrants transformed neighborhoods and schools. Given the multifaceted nature of immigrant incorporation and community change, this study took an equally multifaceted approach to studying both topics in Nashville. As discussed in chapter 2, my research assistant and I spent 2007 in southeast Nashville schools and neighborhoods , conducting interviews and participant-observation with teachers and school administrators, black and white residents, neighborhood association leaders and members, business owners, and others with longterm views of southeast Nashville and its transformations through immi- 42 Nashville in the New Millennium grant settlement. We also spent time with new Latino immigrants and advocates in the same areas, working through community centers, immigrant -owned restaurants, cultural festivals, and other venues. Often on the same street, we talked with white, working-class residents who had grown up in southeast Nashville in the 1930s and with young mexicanos who had moved there a few months earlier. We spoke with Guatemalan couples who had sought refuge in Nashville and with black families who wanted to live in an integrated subdivision. We worked in neighborhoods so new that developers had yet to relinquish control to emerging neighborhood associations and in communities so old that they had clubs dating to the early 1900s. We talked with people so familiar with their neighborhoods that they could draw intricate street maps on restaurant napkins and others who were not even sure what their street was named. We attended community meetings, went to local festivals and gatherings, and participated in “Nights Out Against Crime.” We ate lunches at old diners, new Turkish restaurants, and Mexican bakeries. We spent time in community centers and downtown offices and pored over city maps both new and old, some archived in libraries and some drawn by residents. I also spent time in schools—some too new to have established a solid identity for teachers or students and some that had been neighborhood institutions for generations. I hung out in teachers’ lounges and participated in school career fairs. I talked with teachers before, during, and after school, in and out of their classrooms, and on and off the record. Interviews covered both changes in teachers’ work over the course of their career and transformations in their schools’ neighborhood. What did this work in southeast Nashville neighborhoods and schools show about immigrant integration and community change in a new destination in the 2000s? This chapter begins to show how immigrant integration changed Nashville in the 2000s by laying out the histories of the two parts of southeast Nashville where most Latino immigrants settled during that period and by sketching the broad features of Latino immigrant experiences in Nashville . Drawing on field notes, newspaper clippings, interviews, community reports, and archival sources, it provides a historical context for the responses of teachers, long-term residents, and immigrants to southeast Nashville’s changing demographics and social dynamics discussed in later chapters. Like subsequent chapters, it alternates between long-term residents’ personal and collective memories of these areas (Brundage 2009) and Latino immigrants’ accounts of their experiences there, thus laying out the two different frames of reference—one for long-term residents and one for new immigrants—operating in southeast Nashville in the 2000s and powerfully shaping the city’s wider politics of immigrant inclusion. two Neighborhoods, two histories, two geographies 43 As later chapters show, long-term residents saw...