Doing Fieldwork with Community Residents: Mapping Spaces of Everyday Resistance in Milwaukee’s Northside Neighborhoods

Similar to many inner-city neighborhoods in industrial towns of the American Midwest, Milwaukee’s Northside neighborhoods experienced rapid deterioration after the Second World War. Racial segregation and unjust policies negatively impacted poor African American neighborhoods. Interested in documenting history from the point of view of marginalized residents, we engaged community members in data collection and analysis adapting method from collaborative ethnography. Our empirical field research brought researchers in close contact with residents, exposing the former to contradictions produced by expert and lay perceptions of value and significance. Community residents taught us that mere analysis of the buildings from period one—that is the period it was built—offers an incomplete picture. When we adopted ethnographic methods to examine the physical world from the perspective of African American residents, we discovered that a long history of grassroots resistance against inequitable urban policies produced two overlooked sets of heritage sites—the first, retrofitted vernacular buildings and the second, repurposed spaces in-between buildings. Our fieldwork not only offered us a different understanding of heritage in the built environment, but this experience transformed us into advocates of marginalized histories of neglected places.