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  • Bronx Faces and Voices: Sixteen Stories of Courage and Community eds. by Emita Brady Hill and Janet Butler Munch
  • Laura Kaplan Mercado
Bronx Faces and Voices: Sixteen Stories of Courage and Community. By Emita Brady Hill and Janet Butler Munch (eds). Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014. 384 pages. Hardcover, $29.95.

The South Bronx has become synonymous, nationally and even internationally, with urban deterioration and failure. It was not until the late 1960s and the 1970s, however, when the southern parts of this New York City borough became associated with drugs, arson, crime, vandalism, and governmental neglect, that the moniker South Bronx came to distinguish this specific geographical area from the larger borough. At first, South Bronx referred to a very limited expanse within the Bronx, but as problems grew, the name itself became synonymous with urban decay. This stretch of New York City started turning around in the early 1980s, precisely at the time that the editors of this book began their oral history project.

The core materials for Bronx Faces and Voices come from the Bronx Regional and Community History project based at Lehman College. The sixteen people featured in this book include community organizers who formed neighborhood associations and institutions, program developers, property managers, religious leaders, small business owners, and politicians. The book's editors, Emita Hill and Janet Munch, expand on the themes of Jill Jonnes's excellent examinations of the South Bronx—We're Still Here: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of the South Bronx (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) and its sequel, South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002)—by featuring individual stories of men and women who stayed through the 1960s and 1970s and contributed to the strengthening and rebuilding of their communities. Others, such as Marshall Berman (All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1982]) and Marshall Berman and Brian Berger (eds), (New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg [London: Reaktion Books, 2007]), have written about how the destruction of neighborhoods and community led to the decimation of the South Bronx, but little has been written on how the Bronx rose again or about those who stayed through the destruction and fought it. Bronx Faces and Voices contributes to a more complete understanding of the Bronx's process of renewal through the use of oral history narratives.

By highlighting the stories of these sixteen interviewees, the editors place an emphasis on the role that individuals played in bringing about societal change. And by any measure, these narrators are extraordinary—hopeful, determined, resilient, and committed to bettering the lives of their fellow community members; it is clear that their stories merit telling. In using these oral histories, the editors not only provide inspiration to those in the South Bronx and others in communities similarly struggling with urban decay, but they also serve to counteract the dominant narrative in American society that personal enrichment [End Page 173] and acquisitions define social and cultural success. The collection of interviews in the Bronx Regional and Community History project create this counternarrative because we see the ways in which the interviewees found meaning in their lives by working for their community and trying to improve the lives of others. Their commitment to the betterment of others is so profound that it almost takes on religious dimensions, leading at least this reader to ask herself ethical and moral questions, such as, what is the purpose of life? What is a good life? Is it just about looking out for oneself, or is it in helping others? (These sixteen individuals provide a moving case that it is the latter.)

As Alessandro Portelli (The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991]) notes and as Emita Brady Hill acknowledges in her introduction, we cannot rely on oral histories for their historical accuracy, and, consequently, these stories cannot be construed as the history of the South Bronx at this time, but a history of it: the oral histories add texture, depth, and richness to an...

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