The United States is an immigrant nation—nowhere is the truth of this statement more evident than in its major cities. Immigrants and their children comprise nearly three-fifths of New York City’s population and even more of Miami and Los Angeles. But the United States is also a nation with entrenched racial divisions that are being complicated by the arrival of newcomers. While immigrant parents may often fear that their children will “disappear” into American mainstream society, leaving behind their ethnic ties, many experts fear that they won’t—evolving instead into a permanent unassimilated and underemployed underclass. Inheriting the City confronts these fears with evidence, reporting the results of a major study examining the social, cultural, political, and economic lives of today’s second generation in metropolitan New York, and showing how they fare relative to their first-generation parents and native-stock counterparts. Focused on New York but providing lessons for metropolitan areas across the country, Inheriting the City is a comprehensive analysis of how mass immigration is transforming life in America’s largest metropolitan area. The authors studied the young adult offspring of West Indian, Chinese, Dominican, South American, and Russian Jewish immigrants and compared them to blacks, whites, and Puerto Ricans with native-born parents. They find that today’s second generation is generally faring better than their parents, with Chinese and Russian Jewish young adults achieving the greatest education and economic advancement, beyond their first-generation parents and even beyond their native-white peers. Every second-generation group is doing at least marginally—and, in many cases, significantly—better than natives of the same racial group across several domains of life. Economically, each second-generation group earns as much or more than its native-born comparison group, especially African Americans and Puerto Ricans, who experience the most persistent disadvantage. Inheriting the City shows the children of immigrants can often take advantage of policies and programs that were designed for native-born minorities in the wake of the civil rights era. Indeed, the ability to choose elements from both immigrant and native-born cultures has produced, the authors argue, a second-generation advantage that catalyzes both upward mobility and an evolution of mainstream American culture. Inheriting the City leads the chorus of recent research indicating that we need not fear an immigrant underclass. Although racial discrimination and economic exclusion persist to varying degrees across all the groups studied, this absorbing book shows that the new generation is also beginning to ease the intransigence of U.S. racial categories. Adapting elements from their parents’ cultures as well as from their native-born peers, the children of immigrants are not only transforming the American city but also what it means to be American.

Urban teens of color are often portrayed as welfare mothers, drop outs, drug addicts, and both victims and perpetrators of the many kinds of violence which can characterize life in urban areas. Although urban youth often live in contexts which include poverty, unemployment, and discrimination, they also live with the everydayness of school, friends, sex, television, music, and other elements of teenage lives. Inner City Kids explores how a group of African American, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Haitian adolescents make meaning of and respond to living in an inner-city community.

The book focuses on areas of particular concern to the youth, such as violence, educational opportunities, and a decaying and demoralizing urban environment characterized by trash, pollution, and abandoned houses. McIntyre's work with these teens draws upon participatory action research, which seeks to codevelop programs with study participants rather than for them.

A provocative look at the true forces that shape housing markets, challenging mainstream theories of supply and demand and calling for a new way to provide shelter to our cities’ most overlooked inhabitants—the elderly, the disabled, and the poor.

Businesses come to life as owners are allowed to speak in their own words in this first in-depth examination of self-employment told from the perspectives of low-income microentrepreneurs. The book systematically analyzes a range of issues, including who chooses to open a micro business, and why; what resources do they bring to their business venture; how well will their venture fare; and what contributes to the growth or decline of their business. The authors conclude that most microentrepreneurs believe self-employment offers a range of monetary and nonmonetary benefits and argue it would be more advantageous to view microenterprise as a social and economic development strategy rather than simply as an anti-poverty strategy. Based on this observation, a range of strategies to better promote microenterprise programs among the poor is advanced, with the goal of targeting the most promising approaches.

Reason is not the monopoly of any particular group or culture. It is a universal human quality. Nevertheless, it should be recognised that reason manifests itself differently from one culture to another. Do we therefore admit that these forms are distinctly plural or should we, on the contrary, recognise the possibility of a meeting and, if need be, of an ordered confrontation that would guarantee, beyond this obvious diversity, a unity of human reason? This book with contributions in both English and French is the result of a debate on this question, during a conference co-organised by UNESCO and the 'Centre Africain des Hautes Etudes de Porto-Novo' on the theme 'The Meeting of Rationalities' held in Porto-Novo in Benin in September 2002, during the 26th General Assembly of the International Board of Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPH). Several well-known researchers participated in that debate, amongst whom Richard Rorty (United States), Meinrad Hebga (Cameroon), Harris Memel-Fot? (C?te d'Ivoire), and more than seventy philosophers, historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and psychoanalysts from various countries. Paulin J. Hountondji is a Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Benin Republic, joint-laureate of Mohamed El Fasi 2004 prize. He is the Director of the African Centre of Higher Education in Porto-Novo. The American version of his book ? philosophie africaine ? : critique de l'ethnophilosophie (Paris, Maspero 1976) (African philosophy, Myth and Reality, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1983) was awarded the Herskovits Prize in 1984. The book is part of the 100 best African books of the 20th century selected in Accra in the year 2000. Hountondji has recently published The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2002) and edited several publications, including Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails, (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997). Paulin J. Hountondji has served as the Vice-President of the International Board of Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPH) and also of CODESRIA.

In the 1990s, thousands of non-Jewish Latinos arrived in Israel as undocumented immigrants. Based on his fieldwork in South America and Israel, Barak Kalir follows these workers from their decision to migrate to their experiences finding work, establishing social clubs and evangelical Christian churches, and putting down roots in Israeli society. While the State of Israel rejected the presence of non-Jewish migrants, many citizens accepted them. Latinos grew to favor cultural assimilation to Israeli society. In 2005, after a large-scale deportation campaign that drew criticism from many quarters, Israel made the historic decision to legalize the status of some undocumented migrant families on the basis of their cultural assimilation and identification with the State. By doing so, the author maintains, Israel recognized the importance of practical belonging for understanding citizenship and national identity.

City plazas worldwide are centers of cultural expression and artistic display. They are settings for everyday urban life where daily interactions, economic exchanges, and informal conversations occur, thereby creating a socially meaningful place at the core of a city. At the heart of historic Los Angeles, the Plaza represents a quintessential public space where real and imagined narratives overlap and provide as many questions as answers about the development of the city and what it means to be an Angeleno. The author, a social and cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Los Angeles, is well suited to explore the complex history and modern-day relevance of the Los Angeles Plaza. From its indigenous and colonial origins to the present day, Estrada explores the subject from an interdisciplinary and multiethnic perspective, delving into the pages of local newspapers, diaries and letters, and the personal memories of former and present Plaza residents, in order to examine the spatial and social dimensions of the Plaza over an extended period of time. The author contributes to the growing historiography of Los Angeles by providing a groundbreaking analysis of the original core of the city that covers a long span of time, space, and social relations. He examines the impact of change on the lives of ordinary people in a specific place, and how this change reflects the larger story of the city.

Using Memphis as a case study, Rushing explores the significance of place in a globalizing age. Challenging the view that globalization renders place generic or insignificant, Rushing argues that cultural and economic distinctiveness persists in part because of global processes, not in spite of them. Rushing weaves her analysis into stories about the history and global impact of blues music, the social and racial complexities of Cotton Carnival, and the global rise of FedEx, headquartered in Memphis. She portrays Memphis as a site of cultural creativity and global industry--a city whose traditions, complex past, and specific character have had an influence on culture worldwide.