Where Angels Fear to Tread: Latinx Work and the Making of Postindustrial New York [electronic resource].

9781088308646

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (188 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

Where Angels Fear to Tread: Latinx Work and the Making of Postindustrial New York argues that labor and economy in the United States after World War II cannot be understood without attending to how Latinx workers and businesses influenced major shifts in urban development. In New York City, Latinx manufacturing production workers, small business owners, bankers, and drug workers were far from passive actors as the city sank into the urban crisis that began in the late 1960s. I argue that their dynamic engagement with New York's evolving economy complicates standard histories of the racialized disinvestment and deindustrialization in cities suffering from fiscal woes. New York's rapidly growing Latinx population utilized the city's factories, storefronts, warehouses, and buildings to establish community, and in many cases to build wealth.The dissertation's four chapters grapple with postwar Latinx work in a particular realm: manufacturing, business ownership, banking, and the illicit drug trade. The research relies on a wide array of primary sources, including Spanish-language newspapers, oral histories, census data, organizational records, mayoral papers, business magazines, tenant surveys, photographs, and federal documents, such as those of the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People (CCOSSP) and the Office of Minority Enterprise (OMBE). These sources lay bare the resilience of small business owners during the 1940s and 1950s era of urban renewal "slum clearance", and they show how small business was embraced as an antidote to urban poverty in the 1960s and after. They also enable this dissertation to track the agendas of New York's Hispanic banks in financing Latinx businesses and rehabilitating the deteriorating buildings of Latinx neighborhoods, and they reveal the efforts of illicit drug workers who utilized residential buildings as places of business during the 1980s and 1990s. In the case of the latter, local and federal policy emboldened a long drug war that served as a regulatory tool against the booming drug economy.Building on recent work in U.S. urban history, Where Angels Fear to Tread fills in significant gaps in the scholarship on postwar economic, political, and social history by illustrating how Latinx labor and business patterns shaped local and federal urban development from below. That the New York metropolitan area became more Latinx - including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Mexicans, and others - throughout the twentieth century has been under-historicized, its implications lost within a broader narrative of urban change centered on top-down global industrial transformations and metropolitan housing development. In each of the economic sectors that I explore, Latinx New Yorkers made use of New York's aging infrastructure in the neighborhoods where they settled, including Williamsburg, Brownsville, Washington Heights, East Harlem, Jackson Heights, and the South Bronx, to advance their own economic agendas. Their actions had a lasting impact on Latinx national politics, urban economic policy, and community formation in the poorer neighborhoods of New York City.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. American Studies.