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Reviewed by:
  • Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945–2000 by Llana Barber
  • David-James Gonzales
Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945–2000
Llana Barber
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017
xi + 325 pp., $85.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper)

As the emergence of majority-minority cities has garnered an immense amount of public attention in recent years, scholars have increasingly shifted their analysis to examine the intersection of race/ethnicity and immigration within the development of metropolitan regions throughout the United States. Particularly focused on post-WWII America, urban historians have detailed the socioeconomic and political disparities between urban and suburban communities, while immigration scholars have examined the changing demographics and culture of US cities brought about by sharp increases in Latino and Asian migration. Enter Llana Barber’s Latino City, an ambitious work that represents a recent turn in the study of US cities during the postwar era. Merging the fields of urban/suburban and immigration history, Barber looks to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to investigate the intersection of two of the most important developments affecting American cities during the late twentieth century: the decline of cities and the proliferation of Latin American migration.

Labor historians are likely familiar with Lawrence. Its early history is akin to several industrial cities and factory towns across the Midwest and Northeast. Known as the “Immigrant City” during the early twentieth century, Lawrence is perhaps most widely recognized as the site of the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike (2). Latino City seeks to understand the processes that transformed Lawrence from an early-to-mid-twentieth-century industrial city populated primarily by European immigrants to a postindustrial late twentieth-century example of urban decline and poverty predominated by Latino migrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

The first of those processes, urban disinvestment and suburban competition, entailed the very same developments that transformed other former industrial power-houses like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. Indeed, prior to the arrival of substantial numbers of Latin American migrants, postwar Lawrence competed against its surrounding suburbs (Andover, North Andover, Methuen, and Salem) to attract new residents and industries, as well as the capital that flowed from them. This was a losing battle, as the federal government subsidized the relocation of people and jobs to the suburbs through housing, transportation, and economic policies that disadvantaged cities. Lest this seem like another version of the “urban crisis” narrative, Barber points out that the “flight” of people and capital from Lawrence was missing the typical racial component of antiblack racism found in cities like Detroit, Oakland, and Los Angeles. In fact, “lacking a sizeable urban community of color,” white flight in Greater Lawrence was driven by “the myriad privileges and opportunities that enticed [a higher class of] urban white residents out into the suburbs” (27). [End Page 111]

As Lawrence struggled against deindustrialization, disinvestment, and population decline during the 1950s and 1960s, local manufacturers attempted to remain competitive by recruiting what Barber refers to as “imperial migrants” from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (61). Detailing the long history of US imperialism and intervention in the Caribbean, Barber skillfully interweaves this story within the urban crisis narrative to explain postwar Latin American migration to Greater Lawrence. Unlike New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, Lawrence lacked the economic and cultural attractions that made these other urban centers the home of established Latino communities. Rather than being drawn to Lawrence for its opportunities, Latinos settled in the region as a result of limited alternatives to live and work elsewhere. Indeed, during the 1960s and 1970s, many of the Latino migrants to Lawrence were secondary migrants from New York City. Seeking to “escape from New York,” Puerto Rican and Dominican migrants settled in Lawrence in search of a “better life, not just a better livelihood” (73). Caught between the confluence of urban disinvestment and suburbanization, Latino migration to the region, Barber argues, was the result of “displacement” from semicolonies in the Caribbean to urban ghettos in the urban North, as well as exclusionary zoning practices in the suburbs.

Although population decline and disinvestment initially created opportunities for Latino settlement, by the 1980s, Lawrence became...

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