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1 Chapter 1 | Nashville in the New Millennium They want immigrant labor, and then they want everybody to pack up and go home at night. —Yvonne, a school psychologist In the midst of one of the last interviews I conducted with schoolteachers for this study, Yvonne, a school psychologist, shared a sentiment that I had heard across Nashville since the early 2000s, and that I had largely accepted: Nashville wanted immigrant labor but not immigrant residents. Nashville, like many new destinations (Murphy et al. 2001; Rich and Miranda 2005), initially seemed to welcome the arrival of Latino workers, who filled an important labor niche in the city’s residential and commercial expansion in the late 1990s and became the workers of choice in parts of the local labor market, especially its lower end. When Latino workers became Latino residents who had families, whose children enrolled in local schools, and whose daily lives became visible, however, the attitude toward immigrants in Nashville seemed to shift. Yvonne made sense of that attitudinal change by explaining that Nashville wanted immigrant laborers, but only if they went home at night. As this book suggests, Nashville ’s desires were more complicated than that, especially in southeast Nashville, where most of the city’s immigrant population had settled. When immigrant workers went home at night, Nashville’s need for immigrant labor in the city and long-term residents’ concerns over cultural change in their neighborhoods came face to face in the intimate spaces of everyday life. To give a sense of what that encounter looked like in the late 2000s and how long-term residents dealt with it, let me share a vignette. In late August 2007, my research assistant and I headed to an informational meeting on an upcoming Diversity in Dialogue (DID) series on neighborhood living in Woodbine, a Nashville neighborhood that had once been synonymous with the city’s white working-class population 2 Nashville in the New Millennium and was now increasingly known as “Little Mexico.” The DID series, which began in Nashville in the late 1990s as a way to bring people together to discuss pressing issues, had become a national model for addressing race relations. In these sessions, small groups of people gathered to talk about issues in their communities and to discover, according to the DID official description, “their own and others’ views on racism, diversity and immigration, and faith traditions and practices to create long-term change.”1 In the early 2000s, the first dialogue sessions with Latino residents were held in Nashville. By the late 2000s, immigration was being addressed in its own DID series. The organizational meeting for Woodbine’s DID in late August 2007 drew the usual group of active neighborhood residents—local men and women who participated in neighborhood associations, attended neighborhood festivals and cleanups, and generally took an interest in the affairs of the place where they lived. As the meeting began and the DID facilitator passed out flyers advertising the sessions, a participant looked around at the group of almost exclusively white attendees and commented on the irony of the lack of diversity at a planning meeting for a series on diversity. The facilitator quickly explained that the dialogues were meant to include participants from different racial and ethnic backgrounds , genders, and ages, but that participation was voluntary. Participants had to want to be part of the sessions in the first place. Another attendee shared that he had tried unsuccessfully to recruit Latino residents in his neighborhood, an effort I had observed at a neighborhood festival a few weeks earlier. Others suggested that distributing an announcement about the dialogue series over neighborhood listservs might help diversify attendance, although most agreed that immigrants were not on these listservs, which ran in English and often themselves featured heated debates about immigration. Participants also had to acknowledge that conducting the DID sessions in English, not providing child care, and holding the meetings at the same time every week put up structural barriers to the participation of younger, working immigrant families. Eventually, it was decided that participants could bring their own interpreters if they did not speak English. However, there was no funding for interpreters in the budget; and anyone who came forward to interpret would have to volunteer his or her time. As the conversation about how to diversify Woodbine’s Diversity in Dialogue series progressed, another attendee suggested that groups such as the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) and local Hispanic churches...

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