Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging 0871549336, 9780871549334

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Nashville in the New Millennium

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Nashville in the New Millennium Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging

Jamie Winders

Russell Sage Foundation New York

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The Russell Sage Foundation The Russell Sage Foundation, one of the oldest of America’s general purpose foundations, was established in 1907 by Mrs. Margaret Olivia Sage for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States.” The Foundation seeks to fulfill this mandate by fostering the development and dissemination of knowledge about the country’s political, social, and economic problems. While the Foundation endeavors to assure the accuracy and objectivity of each book it publishes, the conclusions and interpretations in Russell Sage Foundation publications are those of the authors and not of the Foundation, its Trustees, or its staff. Publication by Russell Sage, therefore, does not imply Foundation endorsement. BOARD OF TRUSTEES Robert E. Denham, Esq., Chair Kenneth D. Brody Karen S. Cook W. Bowman Cutter III John A. Ferejohn

Lawrence F. Katz Nicholas Lemann Sara S. McLanahan Nancy L. Rosenblum

Claude M. Steele Shelley E. Taylor Richard H. Thaler Eric Wanner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Winders, Jamie.   Nashville in the new millennium : immigrant settlement, urban transformation, and social belonging / Jamie Winders.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-87154-933-4 (pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61044-802-4 (ebook : alk. paper)  1.  Hispanic Americans—Tennessee—Nashville—Social conditions. 2.  Hispanic Americans—Cultural assimilation—Tennessee—Nashville. 3. Immigrants—Tennessee—Nashville.  4. Population geography—Tennessee— Nashville. 5.  Assimilation (Sociology)—Tennessee—Nashville. 6. Nashville (Tenn.)—Emigration and immigration—Government policy.  7.  Nashville (Tenn.)—Population.  I. Title.   F444.N29S758 2013  305.868’073076855—dc23     2012046092 Copyright © 2013 by the Russell Sage Foundation. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Reproduction by the United States Government in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. Text design by Suzanne Nichols. RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION 112 East 64th Street, New York, New York 10065 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In memory of Lindsey Powell Rensch, the strongest person I’ve ever known.

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Contents



List of Tables and Figures

ix



About the Author

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Preface

xvii

Chapter 1

Nashville in the New Millennium

Chapter 2

 utting New Places on the Map: How to P Study New Immigrant Destinations

13

 wo Neighborhoods, Two Histories, T Two Geographies: Placing Southeast Nashville

41

 iversity at the Door: Understanding D Demographic Change in the Classroom

76

Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

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 esponding to Diversity: Multiculturalism, R Immigration Politics, and Southern History in the Classroom

1

107

Chapter 6

 eeing Immigrant Nashville: Institutional S Visibility, Urban Governance, and Immigrant Incorporation 138

Chapter 7

 ilent Streets: Assimilation, Race, and Place in S the Neighborhood

168

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viii      Contents viii       Chapter 8

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 a(r)king the Neighborhood: New M Immigrants, Old Boundaries, New Maps

200

Chapter 9

At the Intersection of History and Diversity

232



Notes 261



References 283



Index 309

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Tables and Figures

Figure 2.1

Nashville and the Study Area

14

Figure 3.1

Southeast Nashville

46

Figure 3.2

Percentage White by Census Tract, 2000 Census

55

Figure 3.3

Percentage White by Census Tract, 2010 Census

56

Figure 3.4

Percentage Hispanic by Census Tract, 2000 Census

58

Figure 3.5

Percentage Hispanic by Census Tract, 2010 Census

59

Figure 7.1

Southeast Nashville Neighborhoods

170

Figure 9.1

Percentage Black by Census Tract, 2000 Census

254

Figure 9.2

Percentage Black by Census Tract, 2010 Census

255

ix

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About the Author

Jamie Winders is Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University.

xi

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Acknowledgments

This book may be authored by me, but it was only possible with the help of many people and institutions along the way. First, this book would literally not have happened without the support of the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF). In 2005, Russell Sage was willing to take a chance on a young scholar, funding the research that formed the basis of this book and later bringing me to New York to begin the manuscript and to complete it as a visiting scholar in 2010–2011. I am grateful to the foundation for believing in this project and my ability to do it. Russell Sage, however, did more than provide material support for my work. Through their commitment to creating a lively institutional space for work in the social sciences, they exposed me to a range of amazing scholars driven to understand the inner workings of social issues like immigration. My own work, both that seen in this book and that I have published elsewhere, has been shaped for the better by the opportunities for engagement I have experienced at the foundation. Being pushed to make our research speak across disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical boundaries creates stronger scholarship; and Russell Sage has helped me immensely to become more interdisciplinary. A special thanks to Aixa Cintrón for supporting this project from the beginning and to Suzanne Nichols for showing great skill in shepherding it from project to book. Without Suzanne, this book would have remained a series of articles. Thanks to her for encouraging me to think beyond journals and for being such a supportive editor. This book also would not have been possible without the support and encouragement I received in Nashville. Thanks to the long-term residents, immigrants, and city officials who were willing to open their doors and their lives to me for this project. Without them, there would, quite simply, be no book. I cannot name them here for reasons of confidentiality; but I am exceptionally grateful to all the individuals who, over the years, spoke with me about their experiences in Nashville, allowed me into their classrooms, living rooms, conference rooms, and other intimate spaces of daily

xiii

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xiv      Acknowledgments life, and introduced me to their version of Nashville and its changes. I especially thank the immigrant men and women who shared with me. This study was conducted amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment in Nashville and across much of the country. Immigrants, especially those who were undocumented, took a real risk in speaking candidly about their lives in Nashville and in making themselves visible to me. Many did so, they stressed, because they were convinced that bringing their stories to light was the only way to begin to create a more humane process of immigrant integration and community adjustment in places like Nashville. For their courage, I am forever grateful. The same is true for long-term residents, many of whose efforts to create and re-kindle a sense of community amid change made me more hopeful for the future in places like Nashville. A special thanks as well to the teachers and administrators who, often against their better judgment, allowed me into their schools, working lives, and incredibly busy days. I came away from these schools with a deep respect for teachers and their desire to do best by their students. I hope I have done justice to the effort they put into teaching through Nashville’s demographic and social changes. I would be lying if I claimed total ownership of this book, since much of the best fieldwork was conducted by my research assistant, Sandra Sanchez. Sandra’s skills as an interviewer and ethnographer were unsurpassed. Many of this study’s strongest findings were dependent on her savvy at translating vague questions about daily life, social dynamics, and place into concrete questions that fired the imaginations of those we interviewed. Within Nashville, I also had key support from Laura Davis, who regularly, and repeatedly, opened her home to me, let me set up camp in her living room and made countless trips to and from the airport. Born and raised in Nashville and herself a teacher, Laura provided great insight at key moments in this study, helping me see historical connections I might otherwise have missed and giving excellent advice about research in public schools. Laura was there when this study was on the verge of collapse and when it was on the verge of spiraling out of control. She helped me manage both moments, and I am thankful to have her as a friend. There are many colleagues whose feedback helped shape this project. Barbara Ellen Smith came to the rescue when I struggled to frame the book’s overarching argument, reading it repeatedly when she did not have time to do so. Barbara has been so formative in my thinking on questions of immigration, race, community, and social change that I often struggle to parse out my own ideas from those she and I have worked on together. All the clever bits in this book show her mark. Helen Marrow, too, was immensely helpful. Publishing her own book on immigration to a new destination a

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Acknowledgments      xv few years before this one, Helen helped convince me that this book could be done and gave me an excellent example of how to do so. Her thoughts on the topic of new destinations appear throughout it. Members of Russell Sage’s working group on immigration and cultural contact helped me find an interdisciplinary language to describe the social dynamics centered in this book and pushed me to think qualitative arguments through different lenses. I must also thank my students at Syracuse University. Students in my seminars on migration in 2008 and 2011 read drafts of chapters in this book and helped me see where I was, and was not, making new arguments. Approaching the material with fresh eyes, they helped me find connections across chapters and among ideas. Although my students may have thought I was teaching them about Nashville, in reality, I was learning how to structure this book, as I watched them grapple with its ideas. The Association of American Geographers and Syracuse University provided funding at the beginning of this project, helping get it off the ground. Galo Falchettore at RSF and Joe Stoll and Thor Ritz at Syracuse University helped immensely in preparing the maps for this book and deserve hearty thanks. Over the years, I presented material from this book at Georgia Tech, Syracuse University, the University of Toronto, the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, the University of Kentucky, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Queen’s University, Vanderbilt University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Alabama, the University of California, Los Angeles, Virginia Tech, and the University of Tennessee. I thank colleagues in all of these venues for feedback on my work. I also thank colleagues I encountered in presentations at conferences in geography, southern history, sociology, and other fields, especially the St. George Tucker Society, where I received one of the closest engagements with my ideas of any conference I have attended. Colleagues in the geography department at Syracuse University have been supportive of me and my work from the beginning, as has the Maxwell School, which repeatedly gave me leave to work on it. Small portions of this book were first developed in other writings. Thanks to Rob Sampson, John MacDonald, Jonathan Leib, Deborah Martin, and Mark Davidson for inviting me to do so. Finally, big thanks to my parents for supporting me before, during, and after this study. They have helped me move between Syracuse and Nashville more times than they care to recall and have finally accepted that the boxes of papers, printers, and other debris of my work are permanent fixtures in their house. Over the years, they let me move and in out of their guest room, lent me cars, and patiently answered friends’ and families’ questions about when this book would be finished and what it was about.

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xvi      Acknowledgments My biggest thanks, however, goes to Stephen. Willing to pick up and move with me when I needed time away to finish this book and willing to listen to me talk and/or complain about it endlessly, he is my biggest supporter in more ways than he knows. I envisioned this project before I met Stephen but now cannot imagine life without him.

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Preface

In 2002 I arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, to commence a study of Latino immigrant workers and their experiences in the city. This project began my career as a scholar of immigration, race, and American cities and eventually led to the research on immigrant incorporation in Nashville schools, neighborhoods, and wider urban politics on which this book is based. I did not stumble onto that initial 2002 study accidentally. Throughout the late 1990s, I had worked summers at a horse barn near Nashville and had watched the city change ethnically and racially in ways that surprised many local residents. I had heard rumors of immigrant workers, mainly Mexican, in parts of the Nashville labor market and had listened to coworkers describe their parents’ desire to leave neighborhoods that had begun to change and were becoming unfamiliar. As I returned to Nashville each summer, the transformations I saw in the city reminded me of what I was also observing in rural western Kentucky, where I grew up. Immigrants, primarily from Mexico, had arrived in these small Kentucky towns in the mid to late 1990s to pick tobacco and work in the chickenprocessing plants opening across the area. At local hardware stores and feed shops, farmers often discussed their new employees, whose work ethic was easy to describe but whose identity seemed more difficult to frame in the available social categories. When asked about their new workforce, farmers often struggled to find the right words. “They’re . . . they’re just . . . they’re Mexicans, I guess,” they often responded when asked about their new workforce, revealing their uncertainty about how to fit the category “Mexican” into local racial parlance and how to describe being Mexican in rural Kentucky. Seen as neither white nor black, immigrant workers in small-town Kentucky were indescribable in the racial grammar of these rural places, and the minimal description “just Mexican” had yet to be incorporated into local understandings of race, identity, and place.

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xviii      Preface Questions concerning this struggle to place newly arrived Latino immigrants in locally available categories of race followed me to Nashville, where I began a study of workplaces transitioning toward an immigrant workforce (Winders 2008b). In Nashville, I soon found find my questions about how Latino immigrant workers were or were not drawn into the city’s racial politics, formations, and relations being answered with a broader question: Why did I want to study immigration to Nashville in the first place? Although my research made sense to both Nashville employers and service providers, who increasingly recognized the new needs and issues brought on by Nashville’s internationalization, for many scholars in migration and urban studies, not to mention my friends and family, the question of “Why Nashville?” nearly always came up. Reviewers of my work questioned the census data I cited to show growth in Nashville’s immigrant population, and at the end of a long presentation in 2004, I was told that immigrants would return to California and that I should find something else to study. Nashville, these scholars stressed, was a minor player in comparison to the large American cities on which most urban scholarship focused and, like other southern cities, was entirely absent in the study of immigration. What could a city so marginal in research on immigration, race, and American cities teach us? Why would anyone study immigration to Nashville? More than a decade later, I am asked this question less frequently. There is now a large and established literature on new immigrant destinations like Nashville, and new destinations themselves are increasingly part of mainstream academic and policy discussions of immigrant settlement in the United States. It now seems empirically obvious that new destinations merit scholarly attention. Immigrant communities, especially Latino ones, are well established in these places, the second generation is coming of age, and immigration has become a central aspect of the local social fabric and public discourse. Owing in part to these transformations, new destinations in the South especially are home to some of the nation’s most vitriolic anti-immigrant politics, as well as the site of new alliances between immigrant and civil rights advocates. This mix creates compelling political reasons to study new destinations and their responses to immigrant settlement. New destinations have settled immigrant populations, many of them quite large, and their impact on political and policy debates around immigration frequently makes front-page national news. Thus, there are now clear reasons to study immigration to cities like Nashville. The question “Why Nashville?” seems to have been answered. Nevertheless, however clear the reasons for studying new immigrant destinations have become, we have much to learn about the results of such scholarly attention and, more importantly, the practical implications of

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Preface      xix living in a new immigrant destination for both immigrants and long-term residents. We still know few of the details, and have little sense of the texture, of immigrant incorporation, reception, and settlement experiences in new destinations, especially urban and suburban ones. What is more, many questions remain about the role of new destinations in processes of immigrant incorporation and the politics of immigrant settlement more broadly. This book speaks to these lingering questions about this new geography of immigrant settlement, offering perhaps the first extended study of the cultural, racial, and institutional politics of immigrant incorporation in a new urban destination. In the new millennium, Nashville, like other new destinations, faced the reality that in the span of just a few years, its immigrant population had not only grown but also put down roots in the city. This rapid transition raised key questions about demographic change, social dynamics, and the links between place and identity for new Latino immigrants in Nashville, for the long-term black and white residents they joined there, and for the institutions and social spaces affected by immigrant settlement. This book examines how Nashville negotiated this transition to become an established immigrant destination. It does so most directly in the context of Nashville’s schools, neighborhoods, and wider urban politics, as well as from the perspectives of both long-term residents and new immigrants. I argue that we cannot understand immigrant reception and incorporation in a place like Nashville without conducting a fine-grained analysis of the institutions and spaces most affected by immigrant settlement and the perspectives of the multiple social actors involved in this demographic trend. Moving from schools to neighborhoods to Nashville’s wider institutional infrastructure and tacking between the experiences of immigrants and those of long-term black and white residents in these different contexts, the book details how Nashville, its long-standing populations, and its new immigrants experienced daily life in a new urban immigrant destination in the new millennium. The result is a relational portrait of demographic change in the city and the complicated terrain of immigrant reception. Of course, this argument for a textured look at how cities like Nashville adjusted to a settled immigrant population is not entirely new, building as it does on a strong body of interdisciplinary work marked by close attention to the institutional and geographic specificity of the politics of immigrant incorporation.1 What is new about the argument I make here is this: In Nashville, the politics of immigration, immigrant settlement, and immigrant incorporation in the 2000s could not be understood without understanding their articulation with dominant versions of Nashville’s local history and collective memories, especially those associated with the

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xx      Preface neighborhood. Long-term Nashville residents came to understand the city’s new immigrant presence through the lens of the local past, especially its manifestation in the urban landscape and social fabric. At the same time, new Latino immigrants adjusted to life in Nashville based on what they observed in the local spaces of their neighborhoods. For both groups, the immediate context of the neighborhood, both past and present, shaped the process of immigrant incorporation and community change. In a city where no one, immigrants included, knew what to expect as Nashville became more ethnically and racially diverse, the key role that the local context of immigrant reception and settlement played in the processes and politics of immigrant incorporation raises new conceptual and methodological questions for the study of intergroup dynamics and cultural contact more broadly. This book explains how that local context—and the salience of place, past and present—came to matter so much and with what consequences for immigrant inclusion, intergroup dynamics, and even understandings of identity in the Music City. Although Latino immigrant settlement had never been a part of local history, long-term Nashville residents and the institutions with which they worked tried to make sense of Nashville’s new immigrant presence, especially in the neighborhood, through the lens of local history. Across the city, the public image of and response to Latino immigrant workers was fairly straightforward and largely positive throughout the 2000s. However, when Latino workers went home at night to the neighborhood, the politics of immigrant incorporation and the process of demographic change in Nashville became a lot messier.2 This book explores what that messy process looked like and how and why it happened.

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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

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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 could be asked to help with recruitment. This suggestion met with a strong response from participants, who stressed that the DID meeting was about “interactions across the street with your

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Nashville in the New Millennium      3  neighbor,” not broader community relations involving immigrants and the organizations representing them. Hispanic churches and TIRRC, it was argued, not only worked across the city, rather than in the neighborhood, but also addressed broader issues, not the specifics of residential life. For the same reasons, participants opposed inviting community leaders, who would bring “politics” to the dialogues. As one participant remarked, “There are other sessions on immigration. This is about neighborhood living.” In the midst of this discussion about the differences between dialogues on immigration and dialogues on neighborhood living, a neighborhood association president asked whether the DID sessions should include participants who were “resistant” to the changes that southeast Nashville was experiencing through immigrant settlement. He shared the observation that his own association was losing members because some people felt that they were not able to talk about the main issue they saw in their neighborhood—“how to get rid of the Hispanics.” Working with folks who were “ready to line up all the Hispanics and deport or shoot them,” he described a man who walked through his neighborhood wearing a border patrol hat and keeping his camera out, ready to take pictures of immigrant codes violations to send to the city’s Metro Department of Codes and Building Safety. Did the DID group want to invite these residents to participate as well? Another neighborhood association president answered with a resounding no, arguing that such residents were “potentially violent” and “just looking for a fight,” not a constructive dialogue about life in Woodbine. The facilitator, however, again stressed that DID sessions were open to all who wanted to participate, no matter what their views were. Although there were “mechanisms” for “inviting” disruptive people to leave, she would not exclude anyone up front, based on his or her personal opinions. At this point, another attendee raised the issue of inviting “more than Hispanics.” Listing the other ethnic groups living on her street—Kurds, Arabs, and Somalis—she wondered whether they too should be included. This question precipitated a discussion of what specific ethnic and racial combination in the DID sessions should represent Woodbine’s multicultural mix. How could a dialogue on diversity accurately represent the diversity of diversity—not to mention the diversity of opinions on diversity—in southeast Nashville? Since I knew that this attendee lived in Glencliff, a historically middleclass, predominantly white neighborhood close to but not part of the neighborhood of Woodbine, I asked how the group defined the neighborhood at the center of these dialogues. Some of the places identified as sites where a more diverse group of participants could be recruited, such as a local community center with a strong immigrant outreach program, drew

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4      Nashville in the New Millennium immigrants from across Nashville, and some of the participants in the room did not themselves live in Woodbine. After a lengthy discussion, the facilitator agreed to settle the matter by bringing a map to the next meeting, and the conversation returned to the need for diversity at a dialogue on diversity. Everyone was on board with diversifying the dialogue on diversity. No one, however, had a clear sense of how to do so. What is more, no one had clear ideas about whose neighborhood and which kinds of diversity the sessions should discuss. The challenges faced by these residents in their efforts to create a space to discuss diversity and neighborhood living in southeast Nashville sit at the center of this book. Wanting to address Woodbine’s racial and ethnic diversification, southeast Nashville residents struggled with how to handle the structural factors that limited the participation of the immigrants who constituted the growing “diversity” these sessions were meant to address. At the same time, although the absence of immigrants pointed to a lack of diversity in these sessions, participants were reluctant to make the meetings about immigration itself. With the politics of “neighborhood living” and the politics of immigration increasingly intertwined—not only in public discourse about neighborhoods like Woodbine but also in the minds and actions of long-term residents—how were DID participants to parse the two areas of concern? When the neighborhood in question was both nostalgic Woodbine and Nashville’s “Little Mexico,” talking about neighborhood living without talking about immigration was nearly impossible. Finally, in trying to focus on neighborhood living, these residents bumped up against the reality that “neighborhood” was a slippery geographic and social concept. With multiple boundaries and meanings, the neighborhood whose dynamics sat at the center of these dialogues was not identified in the same way by all attendees. Although it was clear to participants that immigration was not the main topic to be discussed but that immigrants should be present in the discussions, the question of whose neighborhood and what kind of diversity—racial and ethnic, age and gender, public opinion—remained topics to be debated at later sessions. This book addresses how long-term residents and the local institutions with which they worked dealt with this complex situation in Nashville in the 2000s. At the same time, it examines how immigrants themselves came to grips with their new lives in Nashville as they responded to the reception they received from long-term residents. If long-term residents, like the ones at the DID meeting, understood the neighborhood to be a key locus and site of cultural contact and social dynamics in Nashville, many Latino immigrants struggled to see where they lived as an identifiable neighborhood with clear boundaries and a shared social meaning.

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Nashville in the New Millennium      5  Aware of the dominant social norms for how one should behave in “American neighborhoods,” Latino immigrants often tried fit into their new neighborhood by conforming to these standards. Nonetheless, the ideas, practices, and institutions that long-term residents used to define the neighborhood were frequently as invisible to immigrants as immigrants were at the DID session. Living side by side, many long-term residents and new immigrants lived in social worlds defined in different ways. Thus, even in the midst of immigrant settlement and the emergence of multicultural neighborhoods across the city, Nashville in the new millennium was home to two groups. Black and white at the top of its popu­ lation pyramid yet deeply multicultural in its youngest cohorts, the city had long-standing black and white populations whose histories dated to Nashville’s founding as well as a new immigrant population whose history in the city began in the late 1990s. These two groups took different paths into Nashville, spoke different languages, and held generally different meanings of life in the Music City. Nonetheless, they met in key social spaces and institutions across the city, especially in schools and neighborhoods, even as they led separate social lives within and across these spheres (Chaney 2010). During the 2000s, long-term black and white residents and new Latino immigrants not only began to sort out together what it meant for a Southern city with a drawl to become a multicultural city with a new cosmopolitanism but also tried to sort out the details of living and working in places whose social and cultural meanings were suddenly up for grabs. As this book suggests, those negotiations took on particular saliency in schools and neighborhoods—two social institutions that looked toward Nashville’s future and grounded memories of its past, respectively. In addition, these two institutions were profoundly reshaped by immigrant settlement in the 2000s. Moving between institutional and individual perspectives in both schools and neighborhoods, this book elucidates these shifts associated with immigrant settlement by following several threads: neighborhood and demographic change; local history and multicultural present; and immigrant adjustment to and reception in Nashville schools and neighborhoods. In the 2000s, Nashville, like many new destinations, was unsure how to proceed at the crossroad of immigrant arrival and immigrant settlement where it found itself. In that first decade of the new millennium, Nashville registered not only initial surprise at an immigrant arrival as has been documented across other new destinations but also a more complicated response as it adjusted to an established foreign-born presence that constituted just over 10 percent of the city’s population by 2010.2 With a strong

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6      Nashville in the New Millennium economic base in the service, construction, and light manufacturing sectors and with strong cultural links to its rural hinterland (Doyle 1985; Kyriakoudes 2003), Nashville was both a Sun Belt success story in which immigrant labor had played a key role and a quintessentially Southern city whose immigrant population had forced a reconsideration of the local social and cultural fabric. With patterns of racial segregation that dated to the antebellum period (Lovett 2005), the already divided city saw immigrant enclaves begin to change some neighborhoods from white to multicultural (Chaney 2010) and the rise of new forms of racial, if not social, integration in what was now “Little Mexico” and the historic heart of white, working-class Nashville. As the Music City became a popular destination for Latino immigrants in the 2000s and was the composition and politics of its neighborhoods and schools were transformed, Nashville sat at a crossroad where immigrant settlement, urban transformation, and social belonging were inextricably linked. Nashville had little to go on in determining how to negotiate that crossroad. In traditional immigrant gateway cities such as Los Angeles and New York, and even in some new destinations where immigrants had settled in the recallable past, the arrival of immigrants could be placed within a local history of immigrant settlement.3 White and black residents, second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants, city officials, and other actors in such locales could access that local history of an immigrant presence to make sense of and respond to new immigrants, either framing them as similar to previous immigrant groups or marking them as different from those groups. Either way, recallable histories of immigrant settlement give destination cities cultural, political, and racial frameworks that local actors can mobilize as they interact with the newest cohort of immigrants. Equally important, a city’s recallable history of immigrant settlement gives new immigrants themselves something to draw on in their ­efforts to find a place there. Where native-born populations at least acknowledge a local immigrant past and where local institutions, from schools to hospitals to courts, have become accustomed to working with foreign-born populations, arriving immigrants encounter a social, cultural, and institutional context in which a recallable history of immigrant settlement, in some ways, has anticipated their presence. How long-term residents and new immigrants across different receiving communities operationalize a recallable local history of immigrant settlement is an empirical question that, to date, has received little attention. That they can do so, however, marks a key difference from the situation in a city like Nashville, where the absence of a history of immigrant settlement shaped not only the institutional, cultural, social, and political incorporation of Latino immigrants who arrived in the 2000s but also un-

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Nashville in the New Millennium      7  derstandings of those immigrants. Although Nashville had German and Irish immigrant populations as early as the 1840s and 1850s (Lovett 2005) and although Mexican workers lived near a World War I munitions factory in the early twentieth century (Kyriakoudes 2003), memories of these newcomers were too distant to be mobilized by long-term residents or local institutions to make sense of the recent Latino immigrant settlement. In addition, although the arrival of refugees in Nashville from the 1970s onward had sensitized institutions like schools and local government to a foreign-born presence, the speed and scale of Latino immigrant settlement and the legal situation faced by undocumented immigrants were so different from the experiences of refugees that Latino settlement in the Music City was looked upon as unprecedented. With no obvious way to contextualize immigrant settlement historically and no clear identity as part of a “nation of immigrants,” Nashville, like other new destinations, offered a context of reception that was arguably unique in its sharp differences from what gateway locales offered. To date, we know very little about these differences around context of reception, details of which this book examines. Two questions, then, lie at the heart of this book: How did Nashville as a city, a local government, and a society interpret and respond to Latino immigrant settlement in the 2000s? And how did Latino immigrants come to understand their place in Nashville? As its chapters suggest, in cities like Nashville that lack a cultural framework and local history of immigration, long-term residents and the social institutions they create and embody (schools and neighborhoods, in this case) draw on key aspects of local histories and landscapes to respond to immigrant settlement. However, even as long-term residents use specific elements of local histories and collective memories to fashion a way to address demographic and social changes that otherwise seem not only out of place but also outside local history and collective identity, the absence of a recallable history of immigrant settlement shapes their adjustment to the new immigrants in their midst.4 In new destinations, long-term residents lack not only a language to describe Latino immigrants—as Helen Marrow (2011) noted in the early years of Hispanic migration to rural North Carolina—but also a set of experiences to suggest how to approach the immigrants newly settled in their neighborhoods, schools, and other social spaces and institutions. This book examines how that lack of a readily available way to understand and respond to immigrant settlement shaped immigrant incorporation in Nashville. At the same time, immigrants in new destinations like Nashville also lack a readily available interpretive framework to help them adjust to their new surroundings. As documented in other studies (for example,

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8      Nashville in the New Millennium Stuesse 2009; Marrow 2011) and as confirmed by my own research in Nashville, Latino immigrants settling in Southern destinations often know little about these locales, especially their local and regional histories (Winders 2011). Coming to these destinations, as one Latina woman put it, “with your eyes closed,” Latino immigrants are often as unfamiliar with how immigrant settlement will proceed in new destinations as the longterm residents are. In places like Nashville, many immigrants are not only unaware of local histories but also unfamiliar with the present conditions of these places. With no intergenerational immigrant presence to relay stories of immigrant success and failure, with local immigrant memories beginning only in the mid-1990s, and with no cultural representations of Southern cities in the telenovelas, corridos, and other media through which Latin Americans learn about the United States, Latino immigrants in new destinations become familiar with their new homes primarily through their own encounters with very local landscapes and populations. As Marrow (2011) notes, it is difficult to parse out what Latino immigrants knew of race before they came to Southern locales and what they learned on-site. In other matters, however, Latino immigrants in other cities like Nashville learn about American cultural practices, social norms, and expectations through their local observations and experiences. When it came to immigrant incorporation in new destinations in the 2000s, immigrants, like long-term residents, were in uncharted territory, where local landscapes and interactions provided some of the only markers that shaped immigrant incorporation. This book charts the features of that unknown territory of immigrant settlement and incorporation in Nashville, with the goal of showing where new destinations might fit in wider understandings of the adjustment processes associated with immigration. Moving from the school to the neighborhood, shifting from the perspectives of individuals to those of government and nongovernment institutions, and tacking between past and present, the book offers a multifaceted look at the multifaceted phenomenon of immigrant incorporation. Its path admittedly is not smooth, jumping as it does from the intimate spaces of elementary school classrooms to the bird’s-eye views of Nashville urban planners and city officials and then back to the neighborhood. Such scalar shifts are necessary, however, as is the book’s oscillation between perceptions of the neighborhood now and memories of it in the past, if we are to understand how immigrant settlement is proceeding in places like Nashville and what the different groups involved understand to be at stake in the resultant cultural and demographic transformations. To grasp the complicated nature of immigrant incorporation as it plays out on the ground, a complicated approach to the subject is required.

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Nashville in the New Millennium      9 

The Structure of the Book To begin that process of examining immigrant incorporation in Nashville in the new millennium, chapter 2 lays out the wider context of immigrant settlement in new destinations and this book’s place in the expanding literature on this topic. In part a review of key works in the field and in part an introduction to the basic idea of new immigrant destinations, the chapter discusses the new questions raised about immigrant incorporation by recent shifts in where immigrants are settling across the United States. Identifying key differences between gateway locales and new destinations, it also highlights the contribution of this study of Nashville to the growing body of work on new destinations. The chapter concludes by describing the research on which this book is based and explaining its focus on schools and neighborhoods. Chapter 3 introduces southeast Nashville, the part of the city where most immigrants settled in the 2000s and whose local history helped shape longterm residents’ perceptions of and responses to the area’s changing demographics. This historical contextualization of southeast Nashville is key to understanding how its long-term residents contextualized immigrant settlement, but since this book provides a relational portrait of understandings and responses to demographic change, chapter 3 also discusses the contemporary context of reception that Latino immigrants faced in Nashville in the new millennium. These wider sets of immigrant experiences and encounters across Nashville shaped how Latino men and women came to understand neighborhood life in southeast Nashville. In moving between the longer history of southeast Nashville necessary to make sense of long-term residents’ responses to immigrant settlement and the more recent features of immigrant reception necessary to understand immigrants’ reactions to life in southeast Nashville, the chapter admittedly combines two themes that seem unrelated. One goal in doing so, however, is to show how these two different ways of contextualizing southeast Nashville shaped longterm residents’ and immigrants’ responses to one another in the 2000s. The different frames of reference used by immigrants and long-term residents to understand neighborhood life produced different narratives of neighborhood change and different individual and institutional responses to these changes. Chapter 3, thus, lays the foundation for more textured examination of the politics of immigrant incorporation and community change in Nashville, by showing the different foundations on which immigrants and long-term residents based their understandings of neighborhood life in Nashville. Chapter 4 moves the discussion of immigrant settlement and community change into the public schools. Beginning with the history of Metro

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10      Nashville in the New Millennium Nashville Public Schools, especially the district’s struggles to desegregate schools from the 1950s on, the chapter contextualizes one of the book’s main arguments concerning the role of local histories in understanding and addressing immigrant settlement in Nashville. Although seasoned teachers in southeast Nashville used their past experiences with students, especially their experiences during the era of busing, to make sense of their present multicultural student body, they did so outside a language of race or ethnicity, despite the fact that both busing and immigrant settlement were deeply racialized events in Nashville and beyond. Examining the comparisons that teachers drew between bused children brought to southeast Nashville schools from the 1970s through the late 1990s and ELL (English-language learner) students coming to southeast Nashville schools from surrounding neighborhoods in the 2000s, the chapter examines why teachers avoided a language of race to describe racialized transitions in their classrooms and how they struggled with their decisions to do so. Chapter 5 builds on these arguments, analyzing how teachers handled diversity in their classrooms by claiming not to see it. Through a discussion of teachers’ ways of addressing ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse classrooms in the 2000s, it examines what happened when teachers’ efforts not to talk about race encountered wider discourses of multiculturalism, broader debates about immigration, and the politics of Southern history. Teachers in southeast Nashville worked hard not to see, or acknowledge seeing, differences among students and to keep Nashville’s immigration politics out of the classroom. Such strategies enabled them to work through the demographic and political shifts associated with immigrant settlement in Nashville in the 2000s, especially the city’s growing anti-immigrant rhetoric in 2007. When it came time for history lessons, however, teachers struggled to find ways to help immigrant students place themselves in Nashville’s local past, especially in the eras of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. Immigrant children, faced with no recallable history of immigrants in Nashville and sitting in classrooms where difference was downplayed, struggled to link their own identities to those of past Southern residents, black or white. The same strategies that teachers used to cope with social and political changes related to immigrant settlement made it difficult for them to provide both a contemporary and a historical context for their students’ connections to Nashville’s own history. Chapter 6 shifts the focus and scale of analysis from the intimate spaces of the classroom in southeast Nashville to the wider institutional context of government and nonprofit organizations across the city. Examining how Nashville saw, understood, and addressed Latino immigrants as urban res-

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Nashville in the New Millennium      11  idents, it argues that immigrant institutional invisibility is an unacknowledged precursor to immigrant incorporation. The chapter lays out the ways in which Latino immigrants in Nashville were often institutionally invisible as neighborhood residents, as recipients of social services, and as part of the city’s urban future and suggests that this invisibility resulted from institutional practices of local government that empowered Nashville neighborhoods but made immigrants hard to see and to serve. When restructurings of local government further reduced the city’s ability to identify immigrant residents and their needs, the link between the structure of local governance and the increasingly multicultural public it served and represented across Nashville became complicated. Chapter 7 shifts the focus and scale of analysis again, this time from the citywide view of immigrant Nashville to the intimate spaces of daily life in the neighborhood. Through an examination of how Latino immigrants understood and adjusted to life in southeast Nashville neighborhoods, it discusses why these neighborhoods had silent streets and why Latino immigrants chose not to speak in them. Latino immigrants made the decision to be quiet in their new neighborhoods in response to what they observed of their white neighbors, what they knew of negative stereotypes of Hispanics across Nashville, and what they had heard or imagined about African American neighborhoods elsewhere in the city. Their decision, however, backfired: rather than being accepted in the neighborhood by being quiet, immigrants were viewed by long-term residents as failing to adopt local norms of neighborliness. Immigrants’ strategy of silence in the neighborhood demonstrates two key factors in immigrant incorporation in a new destination. First, it shows the role of geography in immigrant integration and exclusion in Nashville: immigrants came to understand how they should live in southeast Nashville neighborhoods by comparing those neighborhoods to other parts of the city. Second, it makes clear how racial distancing, especially between Latino and black residents, was accomplished through the city’s social geography of race, especially its long-standing patterns of racial segregation. In the end, Latino immigrants’ attempts to acculturate in the neighborhood were interpreted by their long-term neighbors as a refusal to adopt locally recognized standards in the neighborhood, and both groups were left with conflicting definitions of what it took to be a neighbor in southeast Nashville. Chapter 8 augments chapter 7’s discussion of Latino immigrants’ understanding of neighborhood life in southeast Nashville by examining the corresponding viewpoints of long-term residents. As it shows, not only did long-term residents and Latino immigrants understand neighborhood in different ways, but long-term residents institutionally defined neighborhood in a manner that inadvertently excluded immigrants from

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12      Nashville in the New Millennium its social meanings. Detailing how long-term residents struggled to narrate immigrant settlement in the context of a wider local history of neighborhood, the chapter lays out how immigrants unintentionally redefined local neighborhood spaces that, for long-term residents, were intimately bound up with their own identities. Long-term residents responded by turning to historical events, especially busing, to tell the story of those changes and explain an immigrant presence in the present. The chapter ends with a discussion of the institutional histories of two southeast Nashville neighborhoods that dealt with neighborhood change by mobilizing a local past that redefined the present state of their neighborhoods but inadvertently excluded Latino immigrants by predating them. Chapter 9 brings together the discussions of the politics of immigrant settlement in Nashville schools and neighborhoods, again rescaling these dynamics to the wider context of Nashville’s overall racial and class politics. Revisiting some of the book’s main arguments, it examines how population growth and ethnic and racial diversification in southeast Nashville combined with long-standing racial inequalities in historically black north Nashville to bring Nashville’s multicultural present and biracial past together in the late 2000s. This joining of past and present also forced the city to think about diversity beyond the concentrated residential geography of southeast Nashville. Using this discussion as a springboard, the chapter lays out three interventions in the wider field of migration studies called for by a fine-grained analysis of a new destination like Nashville and outlines areas for future research on new destinations to which this study points. The chapter closes with a reflection on one neighborhood’s effort to think about local history and ethnic diversity at the same time and to work along the two axes of history and diversity that shaped immigrant incorporation and the politics of immigrant settlement in Nashville in the new millennium.

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Chapter 2  | Putting New Places on the Map: How to Study New Immigrant Destinations

As chapter 1 suggested, and as much research on new destinations attests, a defining feature of the new geography of immigrant settlement that emerged in the late 1990s has been the speed with which it developed. Through the mid-1990s, Nashville, like many American cities outside established immigrant gateways such as Los Angeles and New York City, had an exceptionally small foreign-born population. A refugee relocation site from the 1970s on, the Music City in the 1990s was home to small numbers of Hmong refugees from the Vietnam War and larger numbers of Kurdish refugees from the first Gulf War (Winders 2006a). Because both groups clustered in southeast Nashville, however, and because southeast Nashville itself was all but invisible to the rest of the city, neither Kurdish and Hmong refugees nor the smaller groups of refugees who followed had a notable impact on Nashville’s urban landscape and social fabric. Instead, the city reached the late twentieth century with a population geography that looked much as it had in the early twentieth century, if not before: black neighborhoods in north and east Nashville, wealthy white neighborhoods in west Nashville, and working-class white neighborhoods in southeast Nashville (figure 2.1). At a glance, no part of the Music City appeared to be anything but black or white. That population geography began to change in the late 1990s. As the twentieth century drew to a close, more and more Latino immigrants, particularly young Mexican men, began to be seen at large downtown construction sites in Nashville, at residential construction sites throughout middle Tennessee, and at workplaces in the city’s growing service economy (Winders 2006b). These Latino workers, drawn by Nashville’s relatively high wages and low cost of living, initially came from other U.S.

13

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14      Nashville in the New Millennium

Figure 2.1 Nashville and the Study Area

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cities. In a short time, however, Latino men, and then Latina women, came directly from nearly all states in Mexico and from many Central and South American countries, giving Nashville’s Latino population more class and nationality heterogeneity than has been documented in studies of the rural South or in broader studies of transnationalism.1 Although increased border policing after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had an impact on immigrant lives in Nashville as it did in other locales, post-9/11 border anxieties and politics stopped neither the flow nor the settlement of Latino immigrants in this city in the heart of the Volunteer State.2 In-

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Putting New Places on the Map      15  stead, as has been noted in other nontraditional destinations, Latino workers began putting down roots in the Music City in the 2000s (Smith and Winders 2008), starting families and becoming an established presence in parts of the city.3 In the process, they marked out new patterns of translocal lives that linked Nashville to cities and towns across Latin America yet did not feature the frequent back-and-forth migrations that were so prominent among Latin Americans in the 1990s (Winders and Smith 2012). Latino immigrants in Nashville also transformed local institutions from schools to neighborhoods to work sites, charting new paths of immigrant incorporation, racial and social belonging, and daily life in the Music City. Over the course of the 2000s, the politics of speed that had defined the arrival of Latino immigrants in Nashville became a politics of settlement, and the dual process of immigrant incorporation and exclusion began to take shape in the city’s neighborhoods, workplaces, streets, parks, and other social spaces. Nashville, of course, was not alone in its emergence as a new immigrant destination in the late 1990s or in the shifts it observed from a rapidly arriving immigrant population to an increasingly settled one. Many midsized cities and small towns across the South, Midwest, and even New England began to see a growing number of immigrant workers in the last decades of the twentieth century and, by the early twenty-first century, growing immigrant communities. For some of these new destinations, the arrival of Latino immigrants in the 1990s sparked memories of previous waves of immigrants that held clues as to how this new migration and settlement might proceed. In other destinations, especially in the South, the arrival of Latino men and women was historically unprecedented. These geographic shifts in immigrant destinations in the United States put new places on the map of immigration in the closing years of the twentieth century and raised a host of new questions about understandings of immigration as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. This chapter examines that new geography of immigrant settlement in the United States, with a special focus on the South. A significant number of studies of new destinations have focused on Southern locales, and many Southern states, especially Alabama and Georgia, have become increasingly central to national debates over immigration policy (Winders, forthcoming[a]). Although there is no reason to think that immigrant experiences in new Southern destinations would be entirely different from those in nontraditional destinations elsewhere, key aspects of Southern locales, especially their racial histories and lack of recallable immigrant histories, do create differences in the context of reception. Understanding those differences, as well as the major findings from the growing litera-

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16      Nashville in the New Millennium ture on new destinations, will contextualize the book’s wider arguments and its place within the broader social science literature. Beginning with a review of studies of new Southern destinations, this chapter identifies gaps in this literature and places this study within it. As suggested here, the emergence of new destinations on the map of immigrant settlement in the United States in the late 1990s reconfigured the links between where immigrant incorporation is studied and how we understand it. The chapter concludes by describing how this study of immigrant incorporation in Nashville’s schools, neighborhoods, and wider urban politics was carried out and what its findings bring to studies of the new map of immigrant settlement in the new millennium.

Immigrant Settlement in the South The academic literature on new immigrant destinations took shape in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a largely descriptive body of scholarship that provided important initial assessments of this new demographic trend but did not engage arguments or theories in the wider fields of migration studies.4 By the late 2000s, however, research on new destinations had expanded far beyond those early roots in descriptive or applied research to encompass rigorous analyses and new theoretical arguments built from the perspective of new destinations themselves.5 This literature now includes a number of edited interdisciplinary collections, special journal issues, and book-length studies, as well as a range of articles on immigration to new destinations.6 Increasingly, the topic of immigrant settlement in new destinations is addressed as part of mainstream discussions of immigration rather than as a sidebar to the story of immigrant settlement in the United States (see, for example, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 641, no. 1). Given the existing reviews of this literature that are available elsewhere (Winders 2005a; Marrow 2011), a full discussion of them here is not necessary. Nonetheless, a brief mention of key findings from studies of immigration to new destinations, as well as of the key features of immigration to new destinations, will contextualize the arguments that follow. In the United States, as is now well documented, the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first saw dramatic growth and change in the overall foreign-born population. From 1990 to 2000, the country’s foreign-born population grew by 57.9 percent (Guzman and McConnell 2002), and some of the most pronounced increase occurred among the nation’s foreign-born Hispanic population. As the twentieth century drew to a close, the geography of that Hispanic population growth began to shift, and Latinos started settling in new places, es-

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Putting New Places on the Map      17  pecially towns and cities in the South and Midwest, for the first time in recallable history.7 Across the South, states such as North Carolina and Arkansas saw Latino population increases above 300 percent in the 1990s, and all or part of many small Southern towns and larger Southern cities became “Latinized.” Southern communities that had understood immigration to be something that happened elsewhere came face to face with its effects on their own local landscapes and social fabrics. This new geography of immigrant settlement raised many questions, especially concerning how it compared to trends documented in immigrant gateways, where so much migration research has focused. Answers to this question are still being formulated, but already it is clear that the speed, not size, of immigrant population growth in new destinations sets it apart from previous patterns. In 2001, 59 percent of the country’s “New Ellis Islands”—those areas where the immigrant population between 1991 and 1998 was at least 50 percent of the 1990 foreign-born population— were in the South, where several states, including Tennessee, contained more than ten such areas (Camarota and Keeley 2001). In these new gateways, the foreign-born component of the Hispanic population was large, reflecting the youthful nature and newness of this migration stream and marking a key difference from gateway locales with large, intergenerational Hispanic populations. In North Carolina and Georgia, for example, more than 60 percent of the Latino population was foreign-born in the 1990s (Grieco 2003a). Between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina saw a 1,050 percent increase in its foreign-born Hispanic population, followed closely by states such as Tennessee (899 percent) and Arkansas (869 percent) (Grieco 2003a). Counting only the foreign-born Mexican population—by far the largest component of Hispanic populations in the South—eight of the ten states nationwide with the highest percentage change between 1990 and 2000 were Southern, with Tennessee’s 2,166 percent change at the top of the chart (Grieco 2003b). Although the numbers involved in Latino migration to the South could not rival the size of Latino populations in California or New York, the speed of migration to the South constituted a new demographic phenomenon in the 1990s. The spectacular Hispanic population growth rates seen across the South in the 1990s generally slowed in the 2000s, but nationally, Hispanics accounted for more than half of all U.S. population growth in the new millennium’s first decade, reaching 50 million by 2010.8 During this time period, racial and ethnic minorities also accounted for approximately 90 percent of total population growth as the U.S. population became increasingly diverse, especially in its youngest age cohort. In the 2000s, the largest growth rates among the nation’s Hispanic population were again concentrated in the South, where the speed of Hispanic population growth

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18      Nashville in the New Millennium continued to exceed national rates. What changed in the 2000s, however, was the demographic structure of the South’s Latino population. As Latino workers became settled Latino families, births to Hispanic mothers increased, and the size of the U.S.-born Hispanic population began to grow across Southern communities, both large and small. By 2010, Hispanic populations were growing in Southern cities and towns through not only international migration but also births to foreign-born Hispanic parents. As the growth of a U.S.-born Hispanic cohort in new destinations began to link Latino populations to local Southern communities in new ways, public sentiment toward Latino populations, who had been seen as temporary labor rather than as part of the local social fabric, began to change as well (Winders 2012a). What did research on this new demographic phenomenon show? Studies suggest that Latino migration to the South began as a domestic migration of Latino workers from the Southwest but quickly became international, as immigrants from across Latin America headed to the U.S. South, particularly its cities.9 Domestic Latino migration to Southern locales was driven by several factors: rapid economic growth in the South and stagnation in the Southwest in the 1990s; the unintended consequences of the amnesty associated with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2005); cheaper living expenses in Southern communities; recruitment efforts by Southern employers;10 and hopes for a calmer life away from Los Angeles and other big cities (Cuadros 2006; Marrow 2011). Factors contributing to international migration ranged from Mexico’s post-NAFTA economic difficulties to Central America’s natural disasters, from Colombia’s political unrest to overall economic displacement in much of Latin America. In the 1990s, as Atlanta geared up for Olympics construction (Hansen 2005), as poultry-processing plants moved into rural Southern communities reeling from factory closings (Kandel and Parrado 2004, 2005), and as cities like Nashville became nationally recognized livable cities (Wall 1999), Latino immigrants streamed into the region in numbers only partially captured in the 2000 census and only partially understood in local communities. These factors combined to create a new geography of immigrant settlement whose features became evident in a post-9/11 political, social, and economic context and whose effects came into view throughout the first decade of the 2000s. Because Latino population growth and settlement were not distributed evenly across the South or within its states, these demographic shifts were even more pronounced in local Southern communities. From 1990 to 2000, for example, Nashville saw its Hispanic population increase by 454 percent, which was markedly greater than Hispanic population growth for

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Putting New Places on the Map      19  the state of Tennessee as a whole (278 percent).11 By 2001, Nashville’s metropolitan area had somewhere between 40,000 and 110,000 Latino residents (in a total metro population of 1.2 million). That number grew through the 2000s to constitute 10 percent of the city’s population in 2010.12 In a short time, parts of Nashville were being called “Little Mexico” and “Hispanioch,” a pejorative creolization of “Hispanic” and “Antioch,” an area of southeast Nashville where many immigrants had settled. Soon, many political, business, and social organizations were competing for the right to speak for “the Hispanic community” in the Music City (Winders 2008a). By the early 2000s, “even Nashville” had secured a place on the map of immigration in the United States and was becoming part of the complex national conversation about the country’s changing racial and cultural landscape (Davis 2000). In the 2000s, as many scholars have noted, immigration transformed the “political, cultural, spatial, and economic characteristics and relations” of American cities (Rocco 2002, 273).13 Nationwide those changes were perhaps most profound in Southern cities like Nashville, where the growth of immigrant populations changed urban landscapes and social fabrics in ways that had been hard to imagine only a few years before. In Nashville, for example, immigrant settlement from the mid-1990s onward reconfigured the city’s racial geographies. By 2010, a number of census tracts in southeast Nashville were more than 35 percent Hispanic, and many census tracts, especially those closest to the city’s major interstates, were more than 25 percent Hispanic (see figures 3.4 and 3.5). Across the city, fewer than half of Nashville’s African American residents lived in majority-black neighborhoods by 2010 (see figures 9.1 and 9.2), and in southeast Nashville this change was partially a result of immigrant settlement.14 These demographic changes were even more dramatic in Nashville schools. From 1994 to 2004, Nashville public schools saw an 1,100 percent increase in the Hispanic student population. In the 2000s, then, immigrant settlement in the Music City demanded new ways to talk about race and urban inequality, about service provision and political representation, and, in parts of the city, about neighborhood and school life. These changes in Nashville and other new destinations in the 2000s reconfigure how we think about the connection between the places where immigrants settle and the politics of immigrant incorporation and settlement. Until the mid-1990s, the geography of Latino settlement in the United States was easy to describe and to study: it was urban and concentrated in California, Texas, New York, and Florida (Morales 1998). This easily drawn map had consequences not only for how we understood immigration but also for how we understood American cities. Because the U.S. cities most studied in migration studies were also the cities most scrutinized in urban

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20      Nashville in the New Millennium studies, much of what was known about both immigration and U.S. cities rested on a few sites, especially New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. With the advent of immigrant settlement in new destinations in the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, that map changed, and new places on it emerged. It is now clear that our investigations of immigrant settlement must follow suit. Settling in urban, rural, and suburban locations in the South, Latino immigrants have transformed the regional and local contexts of immigrant experiences and reception in ways that have yet to be examined in migration and urban scholarship. What, for instance, can studies of immigration patterns in Los Angeles tell us about immigrant incorporation in Nashville, and vice versa? What happens when immigration, that quintessentially American phenomenon, takes hold in the South, a part of the country typically framed as an “other” to national trends?15 What happens when the frameworks for understanding immigration, race, and social belonging must be stretched to include new destinations like Nashville? How do understandings of the dynamics of immigration change when we examine them from the perspective of new destination cities? Despite fifteen years of scholarly work on this topic, these questions about how immigrant gateways and new destinations compare, and how the experiences of immigrants in each kind of location differ, remain largely unanswered (see, however, Massey, Rugh, and Pren 2010; Lichter and Johnson 2009). Nonetheless, even at this point in the development of the literature, four key differences between new destinations and gateways can be identified and merit discussion. First, at least through the mid-2000s, the economic context of immigrant settlement in the South was different from what had been seen in traditional gateways (Myers et al. 2004). In the South as a whole, immigrant population growth, even though geographically uneven (MDC 2002), took place amid substantial economic and population growth for both black and white residents (Kocchar, Suro, and Tafoya 2005), making immigration only part (admittedly a large part) of the story of the region’s changing demographics. Broadly speaking, there were more economic opportunities in many Southern locales in the late 1990s and early 2000s than in places like the Southwest; and this fact drew immigrants and native-born residents alike. As Helen Marrow (2011) and Steve Striffler (2007) suggest, Latino immigrants moving to small Southern towns in the 2000s were often able to do something that was nearly impossible in places like California: approximate a working-class, if not middle-class, rural lifestyle. In larger Southern cities like Nashville and Atlanta, Latino immigrants found decent-paying jobs with relative ease, even if issues like wage theft and worker mistreatment were ongoing problems (Bauer 2009). Although some new destinations in the South experienced immigrant popu-

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Putting New Places on the Map      21  lation growth but not economic or native population growth (for a discussion of one such community, see Marrow 2011), the general economic context of immigrant reception was relatively good in new destinations in the South, at least until the financial crisis of 2008–2009. For these reasons, the possibility that immigrants would displace nativeborn workers was not a prominent local issue across many Southern cities in the 2000s, since their labor markets were exceptionally tight and since immigrants generally took jobs seen as undesirable by many long-term residents. Middle Tennessee, for example, had an unemployment rate that hovered between 3 and 4 percent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, outpacing the national average and creating a context in which “everyone who want[ed] to work [could] find some kind of job.”16 “A treadmill of prosperity that no one wants to stop,”17 according to economic assessments from the late 1990s, middle Tennessee added approximately 1,200 housing units each month in 1996, a growth associated with the construction industry in which immigrant labor played a key role.18 In 1997, Nashville ranked first in the nation, along with Atlanta, on overall job growth.19 By 1999, middle Tennessee was in its tenth year of record economic growth.20 Although unemployment rose slightly in Nashville in 2002,21 as it did elsewhere, the region’s service economy continued to experience strong growth in the 2000s, especially in Nashville.22 In interviews conducted from 2002 to 2007, Latino immigrants shared stories of arriving in Nashville and finding employment within a few days. At least until 2008, then, the economic context of immigrant settlement and reception in Southern cities was relatively welcoming because jobs were available and local economies, especially in cities, were expanding. When immigrant workers became immigrant families, the politics of immigrant reception got more complicated. So long as work was available, however, the economic context of immigrant reception in Southern cities was different from that in many gateway locales. Second, across new destinations, the rate of change associated with immigrant settlement has been notably faster than what has been seen in many gateway locales, although this claim admittedly merits further comparative analysis. In the South, speed became a defining feature of immigration to the region because immigrant communities seemed to develop “overnight,” according to many journalistic and academic accounts. Equally important, because Latino migration into new destinations was often begun by immigrants who had accrued social capital and business acumen in places like Los Angeles, they lost little time in establishing immigrant businesses, immigrant community infrastructure, and immigrant social organizations (Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2005). As a result, it was not just the number of immigrants that grew very quickly but also their physical presence in neighborhood business districts and even in the

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22      Nashville in the New Millennium nonprofit realm. A third rapid shift associated with immigrant communities in the South has been the transition from a secondary migration of Latino men from other U.S. destinations to a direct international migration of Latino men and women from across Latin America.23 Because opportunities were greater in the South for approximating a middle-class lifestyle based on homeownership and job stability, especially in the rural South, many Latino immigrants were motivated to reunite their families on this side of the border, sometimes for the first time. Immigrants’ incentive to stay in the South and bring their families was also driven, of course, by the increased border policings associated with the U.S. response to 9/11 and the skyrocketing costs of illicitly crossing that militarized border (Wampler et al. 2009). When returning frequently to home communities in Mexico and elsewhere became less possible after 9/11, hopes among immigrants in Southern cities and towns for permanent, if precarious, family reunification on one side of the border rose much higher and immigrant workers became immigrant families wherever possible. At least in partial response to these rapid changes, immigrant reception also shifted quickly in new destinations; what had been cautious hospitality in the early 2000s turned into outright hostility only a few years later.24 Tennessee, for example, went from passing legislation in 2001 that allowed residents without Social Security numbers to apply for driver’s licenses to requiring a driving certificate for all temporary residents, legal or otherwise in 2004, to eliminating this program entirely in 2006 (for a similar transition in North Carolina, see Marrow 2011). Along the same lines, Georgia shifted from a focus on bilingual education initiatives in the 1990s to passing the nation’s strictest state immigration legislation in 2006—the same length of time it took some Southern communities to recognize that their composition had changed at all. More than in any other region, the South’s local law enforcement became federal law enforcement in the 2000s (Coleman 2007, 2009; Nguyen and Gill 2010), and border patrols—officially through the 287(g) program and unofficially through the Minutemen, a private activist group—came to towns and cities across the region (Winders 2007; Armenta 2012). In the 2000s, as Southern locales became aware of their new immigrant populations, the South and its political leaders moved to the center of national debates about immigration, forcing a reconfiguration of the region’s place in both the geographies of immigrant settlement and the national politics of immigration. Third, and perhaps most obviously, Latino migration to Southern communities took place in a racialized context markedly different from that found in traditional gateway destinations. If California’s engagement with a racial divide resembles “a complex escarpment, not . . . a Grand Canyon of black-white incomprehension and mistrust” (Walker 1996, 178), the South

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Putting New Places on the Map      23  arguably constitutes that Grand Canyon of racial mistrust for much of the nation. If New York’s experience with diversity offers a national benchmark for how cities can address their multicultural populations (Foner 2007), the South sits at the bottom of the same ranking (Winders 2005b). It is important not to overstate or reify the South’s history of race relations as unique in a U.S. context or to draw a dividing line between Southern racism and American nativism. Similarly, it is important not to position the South as the only place, new destination or otherwise, to experience racism or racialized tensions vis-à-vis immigrant settlement. Nonetheless, given the South’s historic link to issues of race and racism, nearly all studies of new destinations note the potential impacts of Latino migration on the region’s racial hierarchy, politics, and practices, and vice versa. In textile communities like Dalton, Georgia, for example, ethnographic research has highlighted the ways in which Mexican migrants learn to negotiate a local landscape and social fabric sliced by class divisions among white residents (Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2000, 2005). Elsewhere, such as in rural Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina, Latino residents encounter social systems and spaces structured by a historically deep racial binary, and learn its features as they determine which side of this binary provides better options and opportunities (Marrow 2011). In some parts of the South, Latino immigrants have moved into historically black neighborhoods or work sites, creating new opportunities for interracial coalitions and new forms of interracial tensions.25 In other locales, like Nashville and Atlanta, Latino immigrants have moved into historically white, often suburban neighborhoods (Odem 2004, 2009) where the differences between themselves and long-term residents are not only cultural but also generational. Across these varied settings, Latino men and women encounter in the South a complex geography and syntax of race, class, and culture that lacked a clear place for them in the 2000s. Race, however, was not the only factor creating a different receiving context for immigrants in new destinations compared to gateways. The fourth and final difference, although harder to articulate, is that the cultural context of immigrant reception in new destinations that can sometimes lack a history of immigrant settlement within which to situate this contemporary trend. To give a sense of what this difference of cultural context looks like in practice, let me share an anecdote. While completing this book, I purchased a subscription to ancestry.com for my father, who was born in the coalfields of western Kentucky in the late 1940s. His family is not unusual in having been in Kentucky for many generations and claiming no immigrant heritage. They are, simply, a Kentucky family, with some claims to a Cherokee ancestor but no sense of their past as bound up with an immigrant identity. There is, in fact, an empirical reality

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24      Nashville in the New Millennium to this failure to claim an immigrant past in my father’s family. After a few weeks of playing with ancestry.com, my father had mapped out more than eleven generations of his family, tracing his lineage to the early 1600s. In the tenth generation on his mother’s side, he found the first evidence of a relative not born in the United States—an ancestor born in Scotland in 1622 who arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1640. On the other side of his family, my father did find a more recent “immigrant” arrival—a distant relative who came from Ireland to North Carolina in 1750. In all cases, however, his early relatives were in the United States while it was still a colonial holding. Settlers more than immigrants, his family was already in western Kentucky, where he would grow up, by the 1780s, before Kentucky became a state. By the time Ellis Island was established in the 1890s and the mythology of the United States as a nation of immigrants took hold, his family, like many white (and black) families in the South, had been in Kentucky for more than one hundred years. From its beginning, this national myth seemed to, and did, apply elsewhere in the country. This anecdote illustrates an important feature of the cultural context of immigrant settlement in Southern cities and towns; the absence of a recallable history of immigrant settlement affects not only immigrants’ experiences in these locales but also long-term residents’ ability to make sense of immigrant settlement in the context of a local past. For many black and white residents of the South, an immigrant history or heritage that can be accessed, much less embraced, to interpret immigrant settlement is simply too distant to be recalled or altogether nonexistent, especially for African Americans for whom the links between contemporary immigration from Latin America and a history of forced migration are complicated.26 Southern cities rarely, if ever, have ethnic parades and festivals to remind long-term residents of their individual or collective connections to histories of immigrant settlement, and very few are home to identifiable ethnic enclaves, aside from racially segregated neighborhoods that trace to a Southern history of racism, not an American history of immigration. There are few street names, monuments, or other public markers in Southern cities to commemorate a shared immigrant past or heritage such as those evident in New York or Los Angeles.27 Simply put, the idea of a West Indian Day parade or a large celebration of Chinese New Year in a city like Nashville, while not impossible, would make little sense to long-term residents, for whom a national immigrant past happened elsewhere and a local immigrant past is so very past that it is all but inaccessible. Despite these facts, immigrants did settle in places like Nashville throughout the 2000s, working to craft social, cultural, and economic lives in cities that were not ready for them. As Latino immigrants tried to make their way into the local labor market in Nashville in the 2000s, settle into

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Putting New Places on the Map      25  particular Nashville neighborhoods, and pass through the doors of institutions like public schools, long-term residents also had to find ways to deal with this new group, both institutionally as schools, local government, and other sites were transformed and individually as neighborhoods, grocery stores, and local parks became shared multicultural spaces. Nashville may have had no clear way to interpret immigrant settlement in the new millennium, and new immigrants may have struggled to sort out what it meant to live in the Country Music Capital of the World. Both groups, however, persevered and eventually marked out new paths of immigrant incorporation, immigrant reception, and community change that point our wider understandings of these concepts in new directions.

Contributions to the Study of New Destinations Research on new destinations has provided substantial insights into the social, cultural, and political dynamics of immigrant settlement, developing not only empirical but also theoretical contributions to understandings of immigrant assimilation, immigrant incorporation, transnationalism, racial distancing, and other topics central to migration studies.28 This book builds on these findings in three main ways. First, it provides one of the first studies of the experiences of immigrants and long-term residents in tandem in new destinations. Although such an approach is not new in migration studies, it has been surprisingly rare in the study of new destinations, especially cities. Within studies of new destinations, much research has documented, and sometimes analyzed, the experiences of Latino immigrants at work, at home, in leisure spaces and activities, and in other aspects of daily life.29 Collectively, this research on immigrant experiences has shown how Latino immigrants in new destinations face various social and political exclusions, how they negotiate different kinds of workplaces, and how they cope with life in communities that are unprepared for them socially, culturally, and institutionally. Often paying close attention to the daily experiences of Latino immigrants, this portion of the literature sheds much light on immigrants’ adjustment to life in the “Nuevo” South. Along similar lines, many scholars of new destinations have examined the politics of immigrant reception from the perspectives of long-term black and white residents at work sites, in institutional settings, in local neighborhoods, and in public opinion.30 These works trace the transition in long-term residents’ attitudes toward immigrants from uncertainty over immigration’s impacts in the early years to more blatant hostility toward immigrant newcomers since the mid-2000s and, in some cases, to

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26      Nashville in the New Millennium resigned acceptance. Research has shown how immigrants in new destinations are viewed as temporary workers who are not community members, as sources of crime, not community. It has also laid out the r­ esponse of local communities to immigrant settlement, both directly through local ordinances that support or exclude immigrants and indirectly through reluctance or willingness to provide social services. Some works have shown how long-term residents respond to immigrant settlement within and beyond the legislative arena. Taken together, these studies illustrate the range of individual and institutional responses to immigrant settlement in local communities across the South. These two bodies of work on immigrant experiences and reception have shed much light on how immigrant settlement has proceeded in new destinations. Few of these studies, however, have examined the experiences of both immigrants and long-term residents in new destinations, especially from the perspective of specific institutions like schools or neighborhoods. Some work has analyzed intergroup dynamics and cultural contact in the rural South, and a few studies have engaged both immigrants’ and long-term residents’ perspectives on immigrant incorporation in the workplace.31 Little work however, has examined new urban destinations in this way. This book contributes to this literature, then, by focusing on both immigrant and long-term residents’ experiences with and understandings of the politics of immigrant settlement and community change in specific institutional contexts. Examining the interactions not only between immigrants and long-term residents in the neighborhood and the school but also between their different understandings of community change in these institutions provides textured insight into the politics of immigrant incorporation. Second, this book pays close attention to how the local histories of new destinations are drawn into the politics of immigrant incorporation. Although nearly all works on immigration to the South acknowledge the impact of the history of the South and of Southern communities on immigrant experiences, few consider how the specific details of a Southern new destination’s past are mobilized to shape immigrant incorporation there (but see Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2005). As this book argues, examining how different social actors—teachers, community leaders, long-term residents, and government officials—mobilize versions of a local past to interpret an immigrant presence sheds new light on not only the ways that the specific cultural context of new destinations impacts intergroup dynamics but also that cultural conflict itself can emerge in new destinations over contestations between past and present definitions of social identity and place. In historicizing both immigrant settlement in Nashville and individual and institutional responses to it, this book tries to explicate more fully what dif-

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Putting New Places on the Map      27  ferent social actors understand to be at stake in the competing claims to place, neighborhood, and other socio-spatial formations raised by immigrant settlement. As we will see, conflicts over immigrant settlement take place not only as immigrants redefine contemporary social spaces and institutions, as several studies have already shown, but also as immigrants inadvertently reshape social spaces that are meaningful to a shared local past, even if that local past is no longer visible.32 Thus, even as long-term residents turn to local histories to make sense of immigrant settlement, new immigrants sometimes unintentionally challenge that local history and its spatial manifestations in the urban landscape by simply living their lives. As this book shows, long-term residents’ mobilization of local versions of the past to interpret and address immigrant settlement positions immigrants as out of place not only in the current neighborhood and school but also in the histories and shared meanings of these spaces. This exclusion of immigrants from a shared local past works powerfully to limit the ability of long-term residents to see immigrants as rightful community members. Third, and finally, this book delves into the complicated tensions over how identity is defined when immigrants settle in a new destination. On the one hand, and as nearly every study of a new immigrant destination in the South notes, Latino immigrants settling in Nashville were marked as a racialized, othered group through definitions of Latino, immigrant, Hispanic, or Mexican that drew on social categories of race-ethnicity, legality, and citizenship. In Nashville, long-term residents viewed Hispanics as a racial and legal other, even if they were not always sure where the new immigrant group fit in a black-white binary (Marrow 2011; Winders 2008a). Before they saw Latino men and women (and their children) as neighbors, coworkers, or students, long-term residents saw them as different in a racialized manner. Thus, individual and institutional responses to Latino immigrants in Nashville cannot be understood without thinking about how race was mobilized in these contexts. On the other hand, and especially as the 2000s progressed and immigrant settlement became more established, long-term residents also worked with categories grounded in place—their neighborhood, their school—to describe the effects of immigrant settlement and sometimes to describe Latino immigrants themselves. Although Latino immigrants were clearly treated as a racially marked community, their increasing visibility in local neighborhoods and schools called into question what these places meant. Because those preexisting place identities of schools and neighborhoods, however called into question by the presence of immigrants, remained central to long-term residents’ own identities, long-term Nashville residents stuggled over how to identify and place Latino immigrants. Should they be described through social categories of race and ethnicity not necessarily

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28      Nashville in the New Millennium linked to particular places in Nashville or through place-based categories, such as “Woodbine resident” or “Glencliff school child,” that until the arrival of immigrants, had always coded white. With the spatial overlap of immigrants and long-term residents in specific Nashville neighborhoods and schools, questions about immigrant identity in Nashville became questions about long-term residents’ own social place in the city, as the two increasingly entangled in public discourse across the city. As Nashville’s immigrant population became established in southeast Nashville, the lines blurred between understanding immigrant identity through social categories of race and ethnicity and seeing it through spatial categories that located immigrants within Nashville’s social fabric and urban landscape. This tension around definitions of identity in Nashville’s transitions in the 2000s was central to the local politics of immigrant settlement and community change in the neighborhoods and schools and drove some of the institutional and individual responses of long-term residents. As teachers struggled to articulate the identities of their increasingly diverse immigrant student body through a place-based language (neighborhood children, apartment kids, bused students, and so on) and as debates ensued over neighborhood as a place-based identity and community as ethnically defined the relationship between place, race, and identity in Nashville became complicated. In this context of confusion over basic categories, how did my study proceed? As laid out in the remainder of this chapter, I drew on a number of disciplines but grounded this work in a geographic perspective, mapping out a multi-sited ethnographic approach to the multiple spaces and practices impacted by immigrant settlement, as Nashville received, incorporated, and sometimes excluded Latino immigrants in the 2000s.

Studying Nashville My approach to understanding the intersection and interactions of immigrant settlement, urban transformation, and racial and cultural politics in Nashville is multidisciplinary. Trained as a geographer, I have approached Nashville in the new millennium from the perspective that space and place matter in our examinations of the social, cultural, and political dynamics of immigrant settlement and cultural contact.33 Making sense of the politics of immigrant settlement and community change requires close attention to how spatial relationships, mental maps, and immigrants’ and long-term residents’ differing visions of the urban landscape help drive the politics of immigrant incorporation more broadly. We cannot, for example, understand the racial distancing documented among Latino immigrants (Marrow 2009b; McClain et al. 2006; Stuesse 2009) without ac-

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Putting New Places on the Map      29  counting for Latino immigrants’ knowledge of and interactions with Nashville’s segregated landscape or their observations of white neighbors. Similarly, we can only begin to make sense of the barriers to immigrant incorporation in new destinations when we understand the role of the institutional invisibility of immigrant residents—that is, how governmental and nongovernmental institutions both see and do not see immigrant residents as part of the overall urban landscape and population. In these and other ways, I argue for a geographic perspective on the complicated cultural and social adjustments faced by long-term residents and new immigrants in new destinations. At the same time, I have drawn on a number of other disciplines to craft the arguments in this book, as studies of new destinations, like migration studies itself, stretch across disciplinary boundaries. The bulk of the growing literature on new destinations has been written by sociologists, who have examined immigrant needs and reception, as well as the histories and key features of immigration to new destinations.34 Work in sociology has documented the emerging intergroup dynamics between immigrants and black and white residents, the politics of immigrant incorporation in different institutional contexts, and employment and settlement patterns for Latino men and women in new destinations.35 More than any other discipline, sociological work has taken the lead in the slow process of building theoretical claims from the perspective of new destinations (Waters and Jiménez 2005; Marrow 2009a; McConnell 2008), thus bringing new destinations into conversation with mainstream sociological theories on assimilation, contact, and other themes. Other disciplines have also contributed to the emerging literature on new destinations. Anthropologists, for example, have examined longterm residents’ perceptions of immigrants, developing arguments about structural violence against immigrant workers (Benson 2008), the national and class politics of long-term residents’ responses to immigrant settlement (Brettell and Nibbs 2011), and changing transnational practices among immigrants in new destinations (Striffler 2007; Lacy 2009). More recent anthropological work has described how Latino immigrants construct their identities in relation to long-term residents while marking differences of class and race between themselves and, for example, low-income white residents (Hallett 2012). Anthropologists played a key role, especially early on, in documenting the key features of this migration and provided much-needed textured insight into how immigrants adjust to life in Southern locales and make claims to place and home.36 Through applied anthropology, scholars have also helped bridge gaps between academics and service providers and advocates, particularly in the early years of this migration.

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30      Nashville in the New Millennium The fields of political science and economics have yet to turn sustained attention to new immigrant destinations, but their work on labor dynamics (Ciscel et al. 2003), racial distancing (McClain et al. 2006), immigrant political participation (Bullock and Hood 2006), and immigrant incorporation (Jones-Correa 2006, 2008) raises key questions for further research, particularly on the impact of the growth of immigrant populations in the South on future political patterns and coalitions among people of color in the region and beyond. Finally, ancillary fields like history, education, and planning have added important contextualizing arguments to the emerging consensus on immigrant settlement in new destinations. Through a mixed-­ methods approach, scholars like Mai Nguyen and Hannah Gill (2010) have offered detailed insight into the impact of the highly charged political climate around immigration on immigrant daily life in the South. Documenting representations of immigrants in new destinations (Wortham et al. 2009), immigrant uses of social services (Erwin 2003), and perceptions of immigrant workers in fields from tree planting (McDaniel and Casanova 2003) to day labor (Easton 2007), this body of work has examined the interface between immigrant settlement and higher education (DeGuzmán 2011), immigration and public art (Valdivia, Palis, and Reilly 2011), and immigrant residents and local economic and service infrastructures. Building on these works from across disciplines, this study began with basic questions. In the 2000s, how did immigrant settlement impact practices of daily life, understandings of race, notions of social belonging, and overall social relations in Nashville public schools and neighborhoods? How did the dynamics, relations, and politics associated with immigrant settlement in each institution compare and connect? The trajectory this study took to address these questions, however, was more complicated and, in many ways, encapsulated the changing dynamics around immigrant settlement in Nashville that the book set out to examine. First, and on a basic level, the study followed the shifting spatial and institutional dynamics of immigrant settlement and incorporation in the Music City in the mid to late 2000s. After talking with immigrant advocates in Nashville about the new flashpoints emerging in their work in 2004 and 2005, after following Nashville’s public debates around immigration since the late 1990s, and after working in a bilingual literacy program for Latina girls in Nashville elementary and middle schools in 2002 and 2003, I began to see the centrality of the neighborhood and public schools in debates over immigration in Nashville. What began as a citywide conversation about immigrant settlement had become, by the mid-2000s, a more heated discussion of immigrant families and households, especially their impacts on Nashville neighborhoods and schools.

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Putting New Places on the Map      31  At the same time that this dialogue about immigrant settlement was heating up, however, I also began to see the uneven incorporation of immigration and immigrants into the institutional fabric of Nashville’s governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Immigration was becoming a very visible local issue, but Nashville’s institutional infrastructure for addressing “the public” had yet to fully incorporate immigrant residents, creating an uneven institutional landscape whose peaks and valleys this study examined. Although institutions like churches, health care facilities, and social service agencies and even public or pseudo-public spaces like parks and grocery stores were intermittently drawn into Nashville’s politics of immigrant settlement, it was in the neighborhood and the public school that the politics of immigration literally took shape and took on material form. As my research progressed, it captured not only the demographic transformations wrought by immigration but also the changing politics of immigration in Nashville and the South as a whole. Conceived in 2004, when the political and social landscape of immigrant reception in Southern communities was relatively tame, this study began in earnest in 2006, when that landscape began to display sharp points of anti-immigrant sentiment. I conducted much of the fieldwork in 2007 and 2008, when Southern states were passing legislation to make undocumented immigrants unwelcome, local newspapers teemed with stories of immigrant crime and illegality, and Southern cities’ streets were filling with activists on all sides of the immigration debate. The school portion of this study was caught in the backlash of those 2006 immigrant marches across U.S. cities, as well as in the local politics of school performance in Nashville. My application to conduct research in Nashville public schools was submitted weeks before the 2006 marches, reviewed and then denied just after them, and eventually approved as things calmed down and I found ways to make the study more palatable for schools. As this study progressed, then, it captured in sequence not only Nashville’s demographic transformations across the 2000s but also the political shifts this new composition precipitated in local neighborhoods and schools. In its main, the study worked in two phases. The first, conducted in 2006, comprised forty interviews with key actors at community organizations, government offices, development offices, local schools, and other institutions and agencies associated with Nashville neighborhoods and schools or youth. These initial interviews were often fact-finding and open-ended in nature, designed to map out Nashville’s institutional handling of immigrant settlement as a residential and educational issue and to grasp the big picture of where immigration fit in the context of schools

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32      Nashville in the New Millennium and neighborhoods. I augmented this early round of interviews with an analysis of ten years of media coverage of immigration, neighborhood dynamics, and schools in Nashville and my notes from three months of ­participant-observation in Nashville neighborhoods, at citywide meetings, and at events associated with neighborhoods or schools. The media analysis helped fill in the gaps in interviews with key actors who saw only part of the overall picture of immigrant settlement in Nashville and raised questions to explore in further interviews. Through my brief stint of ­participant-observation in 2006, I became familiar with the neighborhoods I would later study in detail and began to see the connections—and lack of connections—between the institutional picture of immigration across Nashville and its everyday manifestations in specific neighborhoods. In 2007 I returned to Nashville for a year of ethnographic fieldwork. I spent a semester in multiple schools and conducted fifty-five formal interviews with teachers, administrators, and other school employees and officials. I divided my weeks between two schools in particular, Morgan ­Elementary and Fellow Middle Schools, observing classrooms, talking formally and informally with teachers, and sometimes working with students.37 I selected these schools because of both their student composition and their willingness to participate in the study. Teachers at each school were informed of my study through either a letter or a presentation from me and invited to be interviewed. Many teachers at each school chose to participate. Parents of children at each school also received a letter describing the study and were given the option of not having their children participate in the study. With the help of my research assistant, Sandra Sanchez, I spent the remainder of 2007 conducting individual and group interviews and engaging in participant-observation in Nashville neighborhoods, especially those associated with the two schools. This portion of the study included approximately thirty-five interviews with long-term black and white residents and forty interviews with Latino immigrants, as well as extensive participant-observation and informal individual and group conversations with both groups. Among the group of long-term residents who participated in this study were those who had lived their entire lives in southeast Nashville and those who had only recently arrived. A few more men than women were interviewed, although the high number of female teachers who lived in the neighborhoods under study more than corrected any gender imbalance. The group also skewed toward older residents, in part because many southeast Nashville neighborhoods skew this way and in part because older residents are typically more involved in the kind of neighborhood and community organizations on which I focused.

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Putting New Places on the Map      33  An equal number of male and female Latino immigrants participated in this study. Most were fairly young, as would be expected in a new destination like Nashville. All save one were foreign-born, and many admitted that they were undocumented, although I did not ask about legal status. Approximately 50 percent were from Mexico; as has been documented in other new destinations, no particular Mexican state or states predominated (Massey et al. 2010). A fairly large proportion of the remainder came primarily from Central America, especially El Salvador and Guatemala. Just over one-third of immigrants in this study had come directly from Latin America to Nashville. All others had spent some time in other American cities, although for many that time had been brief. Nearly threequarters had arrived since 2000, and just under half of those had arrived since 2005. Most of the remaining one-quarter had arrived in the mid1990s. It is important to note that fieldwork in the neighborhoods progressed somewhat differently than it did in the schools. In large part because Davidson County entered the 287(g) program in April 2007, one month before my neighborhood research began in earnest, many Latino immigrants were initially reluctant to speak with us. For this reason, we first worked through local community organizations and then used a snowball method to find additional participants from these sites. This approach was admittedly a compromise: it created a sample of Latino immigrants that included more Central Americans than in the overall population and overrepresented, at least initially, immigrant residents who were actively seeking opportunities for English-language training and other services. Throughout the fieldwork, however, we moved beyond this group of immigrants involved with community organizations and sought participants from other venues, such as church and support groups, to find different entry points into Nashville’s overall immigrant population. As research on vulnerable populations has shown time and again (Cornelius 1982; Chavez 1992), different sampling techniques must be used when working with an undocumented population to find a balance between obtaining a representative sample and obtaining in-depth interviews, which require substantial trust-building. Finding long-term residents willing to participate in this study was generally easier, even if tracking them down was not. We worked through neighborhood associations to identify longterm residents in southeast Nashville, especially ones who had been there for some time, but quickly moved on to snowball sampling; we also attended neighborhood events throughout 2007. Beyond this ethnographic work, my archival work on school politics, neighborhood boundaries and politics, and overall urban transformation in Nashville since the 1950s helped make sense of how the city came to see

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34      Nashville in the New Millennium and understand its immigrant population in the context of schools and neighborhoods and in the midst of wider urban transformations and political change. It also illuminated the details of the individual histories of some long-term residents in particular neighborhoods, some of which began in the 1920s. Working through schools, community centers, churches, restaurants, festivals, support groups, and homes, I examined the strategies used by different social actors in Nashville neighborhoods and schools to come to grips with community change, immigrant settlement, and urban transformation, as well as the relationship among these processes. As already mentioned, there are many social spaces and institutions in which I could have studied the impacts and experiences of immigrant settlement. Much work, for example, has considered the effects of immigrant workers on daily life in low-wage work sites in new destinations.38 Other studies have examined social service agencies, religious organizations, and even policies and public opinion as key sites in the politics of immigrant settlement and incorporation.39 As these works suggest, the profound impact of immigrant settlement on a range of social spaces and institutions makes the process of immigrant incorporation, simply put, multi-sited. This study, however, in addition to its attention to Nashville’s wider urban politics, focused most intently on schools and neighborhoods—two social spaces that have been central to debates about immigration to Southern cities but have, ironically, received little direct attention in studies of this phenomenon. Across southern communities, the arrival of immigrant children or children of immigrants in Southern schools has often been a watershed moment in community politics and immigrant reception (Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2005; O’Neil and Tienda 2010). In Southern locales, public schools to which immigrant parents send their children have become key sites where ideas about citizenship, community, and belonging have taken on new saliency. Schools also have been central to political discussions about the costs of immigration, especially undocumented immigration (for example, Bryant 2006), to public opinions on immigration (O’Neil and Tienda 2010), and to policy recommendations for the future of new destinations. Educating the next generation of residents, workers, and community members, schools have a powerful impact on the politics of immigrant settlement in Southern locales, as the geography of immigrant social reproduction shifts to the South and becomes a local issue. Along similar lines, neighborhoods where immigrants have settled in the South have been central to emerging racial hierarchies (McClain et al.

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Putting New Places on the Map      35  2006), ideas about national identity and citizenship (Brettell and Nibbs 2011), and changing claims to public spaces (Odem 2004, 2009). Across such neighborhoods, the speed of change has generated a flurry of responses, from the formation of neighborhood associations to white flight to the welcome of new immigrant neighbors. In every new destination, however, immigrant residential settlement has forced a reconsideration of what it means to be a neighbor and how intimate neighborhood dynamics are scaled up to the broader politics of immigrant reception. Surprisingly, the details of these residential dynamics have been largely overlooked in the literature on new destinations. Thus, a brief discussion here of findings from wider studies of these two institutions, especially vis-à-vis immigrant settlement and incorporation, will contextualize this book’s arguments about the institutional and interpersonal politics of immigrant settlement in Nashville schools and neighborhoods.

Schools As has been widely noted, schools are key social spaces and institutions for processes of social and cultural reproduction (Jay 2003), the development of a sense of self (Veninga 2009), the (re)production of nation and national identities (Mitchell 2003; Secor 2004; Bullen and Whitehead 2005), and the maintenance of social and economic inequalities (Crosnoe, RiegleCrumb, and Muller 2007). Across the social sciences, schools have been examined for their role in producing gender, class, and racial norms, for their impact on the life chances of immigrant students, for how they transmit social capital across class boundaries, and for the lessons they impart about race.40 Schools teach students who they are and are not and where they do and do not fit in national and local narratives of place, thus transcending and reinforcing social boundaries in complex ways (Lamphere 1992). Schools are particularly important sites of interaction between immigrants and the state, as well as of socialization and cultural adjustment for children of immigrants (Zhou 1997). School experiences, especially the experience of being schooled, linger into adulthood, and school is often one of the first and strongest sites of contact with mainstream society for first- and second-generation immigrants (Bourgois 2003; Capps et al. 2004; Cuadros 2006). In all these ways, schools constitute key “mediating institutions” between immigrants and receiving societies (Rocco 1996, 373), for teachers and students alike. Because schools are also key sites in debates over public spending, they are especially central to understanding the politics of immigrant incorporation in new destinations.41 From the short-term fiscal costs of public education to the cultural “threat” of bilin-

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36      Nashville in the New Millennium gual education, public schools are key to debates around immigration in the South, as elsewhere. Some scholars suggest that in new destinations immigration may have its greatest impact in the public schools (Wainer 2004; Singer et al. 2008a). In such locales, schools are often the first institutions to experience the transition from Latino workers to Latino families and to address immigrant integration at its earliest (and youngest) point. Equally important, schools in nontraditional destinations are frequently the institutions through which immigrant students and their parents first feel connected to the local community.42 Published work on Latino immigration and schools in Southern locales has focused primarily on identifying learning barriers (see, for example, Wainer 2004) and best practices in schools (Cornfield and Arzubiaga 2004) or assessing education policy (Wortham et al. 2002). Aside from this early policy-oriented work, few published studies have focused on schools in new destinations, and almost no work has examined daily life in schools, the workings of schools as institutions that shape student identities, or immigrant incorporation through the lens of the school.43 Studies of new destinations also have yet to pay sustained attention to the experiences of teachers. Although this literature has examined how key actors from political leaders and employers to long-term residents and community advocates understand Latino newcomers, educators—who arguably spend as much time, if not more, with immigrants, especially young ones—have been all but overlooked.44 Working intimately with first- and second-generation immigrant children and their parents, personally observing the internationalization of Southern locales, and doing so with little understanding of how these newcomers came to their classrooms, teachers literally work through the transformations that have redefined Southern cities and towns. What is more, as much research on schools shows (Dickar 2008; Vaught and Castagno 2008), teachers play key roles in how students come to understand the world beyond the classroom, especially their notions of race and structures of racism. Add in concerns over “de facto educational segregation” (Wainer 2004, 1) in Southern schools, and it is clear that studying the changing public schools in new destinations is all the more important for understanding immigrant incorporation and community change more broadly. In this study, I was interested in how Nashville teachers made sense of ethnic and racial transformations in their classrooms rather than in questions of student performance, pedagogy, or characterizations of different cohorts of students. My questions to teachers, thus, focused not on asking them to describe or reflect on this racial group or that ethnic group but on

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Putting New Places on the Map      37  how, if at all, they mobilized a language of race or ethnicity to describe school transitions that were marked as racial or ethnic in wider discourses and in federal practices. Asking direct questions about different racial or ethnic groups is a more standard approach in research on schools (Pollock 2004) and would have yielded more explicit reflections on race (see, for example, Radcliffe 1999). Such questions, however, would also have captured the process of describing racial and ethnic categories rather than the process of reflecting on how, when, and where those categories were produced, challenged, and transformed (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). As Mica Pollock (2004, 5), in her ethnography of “race talk dilemmas” in a California public high school, notes, “Racial orders are built daily through movements of the body, through statistics and numbers, through glances across rooms to friends.” Focusing on “how, when, and why people ­interpret social experience in racial, ethnic, or national terms” (Brubaker, ­Loveman, and Stamatov 2004, 53), rather than on what different categories meant, this study attempted to capture the processes through which teachers made sense of and narrated Nashville’s changing racial and ethnic orders in the 2000s (Anderson and Jack 1991) as the student composition and wider political context of immigration both rapidly changed.

Neighborhoods This study took a similar approach to neighborhoods, which, as research since the Chicago School has shown, are crucial sites for enactments of race, nation, and community, especially vis-à-vis immigrant integration.45 “Neighborhood” is a key spatial and social construct for examinations of urban populations, spaces, and politics across disciplines—a lens through which much social science research has evaluated economic status and change across a city or over time, studied sociopolitical practices and activism, and examined racial and cultural identities.46 From voting patterns to median income, from understandings of place to perceptions of crime, both individual and group parameters of urban life are frequently examined through the lens and the space of the neighborhood. In much socialscience research, we come to know cities through their neighborhoods. In these ways, neighborhood constitutes not only the scale through which urban space is organized and governed by cities but also the interpretive framework through which scholars see many urban processes. Dynamic through processes like residential turnover yet seemingly fixed through the “permanence” of its physical landscape (Wyly 1999), neighborhood provides a concrete way to make sense of urban phenomena and their spatial arrangements, even amid well-documented trends toward

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38      Nashville in the New Millennium deterritorialized social networks in the contemporary era.47 Neighborhood also remains an important way for urban residents to understand and respond to life around them. Through its dual role as analytic tool for scholars and interpretive and political frame for residents, then, the neighborhood matters in urban geographies and practices, especially with respect to the politics of immigration. The dramatic speed with which immigrant settlement has changed neighborhoods throughout the South has made neighborhoods central to the region’s wider politics of immigration, as can be gleaned from a glance at Southern newspapers or legislative dockets. For instance, D. A. King, a leader of Georgia’s anti-immigrant movement, has pointed to changes in his immediate neighborhood as a catalyst for his involvement in calls for a crackdown on undocumented immigration to the state. Many state and local ordinances in the South focus on residential dynamics that are related to immigrant settlement, from the number of occupants allowed in a rental unit to whether day laborers can gather on local street corners. It is not hyperbole to say that changing neighborhoods have driven the South’s political and social tensions over immigration as much as changing workplaces. In my own study, people in Nashville talked about downtown immigration rallies, national immigration reform, and other large-scale events circulating in public discourse. They responded, however, to changes they observed across the street, in the park, and in other spaces of everyday life. As in all new destinations, it was within the neighborhood that long-term residents and immigrants came to know one another and to make sense of Nashville’s changes through immigrant settlement in the 2000s. Despite the centrality of neighborhood to the sociopolitical dynamics associated with immigrant settlement, research on immigration and neighborhoods in Southern cities has been slow in coming. Most work on immigrant settlement in the South has documented increasing or decreasing residential segregation between Hispanics, blacks, and whites (see, for example, Yarbrough 2003; Barcus 2007), wider patterns of Latino settlement (Lichter and Johnson 2009; Flippen and Parrado 2012), or Latino struggles to find affordable and safe housing (Atiles and Bohon 2002, 2003; Benson 2008). Studies that discuss neighborhood dynamics often rely on journalistic reports to speculate about tensions between black and Latino residents (Mohl 2003, 2005), although Marrow’s work in North Carolina (2009a, 2009b, 2011) is a clear exception here. Scholars who examine feelings of social belonging or exclusion among Latino immigrants in Southern communities rarely address the space of the neighborhood. Instead, these works focus on more contained institutions, such as churches, or more general

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Putting New Places on the Map      39  sentiments of immigrants that are not associated with particular spaces.48 In this way, many questions remain about the impact of immigrant settlement on neighborhood dynamics and the politics of cultural contact in new destinations. Also complicating our understanding of the neighborhood dynamics of immigrant settlement in Southern cities is the lack of scholarly attention to Southern cities themselves. There are few large cities within the traditional South, and the imaginative—and until recently, material—geographies of the region have been distinctly rural. Thus, while there is a strong base of scholarly knowledge about cities like Chicago or New York City, there is not for cities like Nashville, Atlanta, or Charlotte, which lack generations of scholarship or large longitudinal studies. As many scholars also note, the settlement of Latino immigrants in the first ring of suburbs in Southern cities marks a new pattern of suburban immigrant settlement and a sharp socio-spatial shift from previous patterns of immigrant settlement closer to the urban core in many gateway destinations. This new pattern of suburban settlement raises questions about the applicability of studies of intergroup dynamics in gateways to places like Nashville.49 Equally important, the academic literature on suburbs has largely overlooked Southern suburbs. As a result, immigrant settlement in the South, already an understudied demographic phenomenon, is taking place in a spatial context (Southern suburbs) that has not received substantial academic scrutiny. This lack of attention to Southern suburbs is surprising, since, as Matthew Lassiter and Kevin Kruse (2009) suggest, Southern suburbs have often led key regional trends. From the growth of the South’s military-industrial complex to the deepening of a Republican base in the 1950s and 1960s, from resistance to school integration to support for the Religious Right in the 1980s and 1990s, Southern suburbs have been a leading edge for politically important regional patterns. Our lack of knowledge about them, and about the new trend of immigrant settlement within them, makes future work on this topic all the more pressing. In Nashville in the 2000s, Latino residents settled in historically white, working-class neighborhoods just outside the urban core and in more diverse and newer areas in the southeastern quadrant of the city (figure 2.1). Thus, Nashville’s shift from a music city to a multicultural city was spatially uneven. This concentrated, localized residential geography of immigrant settlement in southeast Nashville waned in comparison to the ubiquitous presence of immigrant workers across Nashville’s urban landscape each day. To many Nashville residents, Latino immigrant workers in construction, hotels, fast-food restaurants, and other workplaces across the city seemed like “ghosts” who disappeared at the end of the workday,

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40      Nashville in the New Millennium a perception that prevails in other new destinations as well (Ciscel et al. 2003). From the perspective of southeast Nashville and its long-term residents, however, immigrants going home at the end of the workday were anything but invisible; and that residential visibility helped drive the politics of immigrant incorporation on which the remainder of this book focuses.

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Chapter 3  | Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies: Placing Southeast Nashville

What happens in cities like Nashville when neighborhoods and schools change through immigrant settlement? Within schools, how does the presence of students who themselves or whose families came from Latin America and beyond affect what teachers teach, how they see and understand their students, and where they place their work in the classroom vis-à-vis broader ideas about cultural change, immigration, and other publicly debated topics? Within neighborhoods, how does the presence of residents who speak different languages and come from different places impact understandings of what it means to be a neighbor and how a neighborhood works and is governed? These questions concerning the politics of demographic change, immigrant incorporation, and social belonging in schools and neighborhoods faced Nashville and other new immigrant destinations in the 2000s. To answer them, we must take a close look at how cities like Nashville negotiated the confluence of immigrant settlement, local histories, and new ethnic and racial diversity. This chapter introduces the areas of Nashville where these negotiations took place and where immigrants transformed neighborhoods and schools. Given the multifaceted nature of immigrant incorporation and community change, this study took an equally multifaceted approach to studying both topics in Nashville. As discussed in chapter 2, my research assistant and I spent 2007 in southeast Nashville schools and neighborhoods, conducting interviews and participant-observation with teachers and school administrators, black and white residents, neighborhood association leaders and members, business owners, and others with longterm views of southeast Nashville and its transformations through immi-

41

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42      Nashville in the New Millennium grant settlement. We also spent time with new Latino immigrants and advocates in the same areas, working through community centers, immigrant-owned restaurants, cultural festivals, and other venues. Often on the same street, we talked with white, working-class residents who had grown up in southeast Nashville in the 1930s and with young mexicanos who had moved there a few months earlier. We spoke with Guatemalan couples who had sought refuge in Nashville and with black families who wanted to live in an integrated subdivision. We worked in neighborhoods so new that developers had yet to relinquish control to emerging neighborhood associations and in communities so old that they had clubs dating to the early 1900s. We talked with people so familiar with their neighborhoods that they could draw intricate street maps on restaurant napkins and others who were not even sure what their street was named. We attended community meetings, went to local festivals and gatherings, and participated in “Nights Out Against Crime.” We ate lunches at old diners, new Turkish restaurants, and Mexican bakeries. We spent time in community centers and downtown offices and pored over city maps both new and old, some archived in libraries and some drawn by residents. I also spent time in schools—some too new to have established a solid identity for teachers or students and some that had been neighborhood institutions for generations. I hung out in teachers’ lounges and participated in school career fairs. I talked with teachers before, during, and after school, in and out of their classrooms, and on and off the record. Interviews covered both changes in teachers’ work over the course of their career and transformations in their schools’ neighborhood. What did this work in southeast Nashville neighborhoods and schools show about immigrant integration and community change in a new destination in the 2000s? This chapter begins to show how immigrant integration changed Nashville in the 2000s by laying out the histories of the two parts of southeast Nashville where most Latino immigrants settled during that period and by sketching the broad features of Latino immigrant experiences in Nashville. Drawing on field notes, newspaper clippings, interviews, community reports, and archival sources, it provides a historical context for the responses of teachers, long-term residents, and immigrants to southeast Nashville’s changing demographics and social dynamics discussed in later chapters. Like subsequent chapters, it alternates between long-term residents’ personal and collective memories of these areas (Brundage 2009) and Latino immigrants’ accounts of their experiences there, thus laying out the two different frames of reference—one for long-term residents and one for new immigrants—operating in southeast Nashville in the 2000s and powerfully shaping the city’s wider politics of immigrant inclusion.

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      43  As later chapters show, long-term residents saw “neighborhood” through a historical lens that stretched as far back as the early twentieth century but rarely included places beyond southeast Nashville. Because they understood neighborhood in the present in relation to neighborhood in the past, these residents assessed the impact of contemporary immigrant settlement through a historical frame of reference. For Latino immigrants, by contrast, the historical frame used by long-term residents to evaluate neighborhood change in southeast Nashville was all but invisible, since most of them had arrived in the 2000s and few knew anything about southeast Nashville before that time. Instead, Latino immigrants made sense of southeast Nashville neighborhoods through a geographic lens drawn from other U.S. places, as well as from different parts of Latin America. These two different frames of reference used to make sense of life in southeast Nashville—one historical and one geographic—produced different, if sometimes overlapping, narratives of neighborhood change and immigration’s role in the changes. These different frames themselves produced contrasting interpersonal and institutional responses to change for each group and sometimes led to contradictory efforts to adjust to southeast Nashville’s multicultural reality. The juxtaposition here of these different histories and geographies, while central to understanding Nashville’s politics of immigrant incorporation and community change, may feel somewhat forced. In laying out together the histories of these neighborhoods and Latino immigrants’ reflections on their experiences across Nashville, however, the chapter encapsulates the complexities and challenges that new and old residents faced as southeast Nashville became home to Latino immigrants in the 2000s and as both groups adjusted to life with the other. Before the 2000s, southeast Nashville’s history included aging white parents who pushed their children out of working-class neighborhoods from the 1950s onward, struggles in the 1970s over busing that initiated a white exodus from the city, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, population growth that had to happen somewhere. By the 2000s, as west Nashville was ever more economically successful, east Nashville continued its struggles with gentrification, and downtown Nashville focused on spectacular construction projects, southeast Nashville remained what it had always been: hard-luck white neighborhoods populated by blue-collar workers and recent arrivals to the city. Living in large apartment complexes, small older homes, and new subdivisions, southeast Nashville’s population included elderly residents who remembered the neighborhood as it was, young families who sought starter homes, empty-nesters who had moved to small farms, and immigrants who wanted a place of their own. Its contours and politics were informed by issues ranging from HOPE-VI dis-

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44      Nashville in the New Millennium placements to affordable housing debates, from “smart-growth” struggles to systematic disinvestment. All of these transformations worked their way into the narratives discussed in this book about immigrant settlement in the 2000s and the social dynamics generated by this demographic change in southeast Nashville’s schools and neighborhoods. As I spoke with teachers while they taught, ate lunch, or took a breath between classes, as I sat in the halls and observed students, I asked questions about how teachers and school administrators understood and worked through the demographic changes southeast Nashville experienced from the late 1990s onward. How did teaching in their schools now compare to teaching there, or elsewhere, in the past? What, if anything, had changed about their approach to their classrooms or their response to students and parents? What social dynamics did they observe at their schools, and how did they handle new interactions between students? How did their school relate to its students’ neighborhoods, and had that relationship changed over time? I asked similar questions within the neighborhood as I took tours of neighborhoods where elderly white residents were being joined by young Mexican families, as I sat in longtime businesses that were the last bastions of the neighborhood from the past, and as I talked with elderly residents who had grown up in these neighborhoods. I asked long-term residents how they understood and participated in their neighborhood and what boundaries, landmarks, and memories they associated with it. Where did they once hang out in their neighborhoods, and where did they spend time today? What areas did they avoid? Where were neighborhood boundaries in the 1940s, and where were they now? When did these areas “peak,” and what changed them? What, if anything, did immigrant settlement have to do with these transformations, and how did they explain it? Of all the things that had changed in southeast Nashville, where did immigrant settlement fit? My questions for immigrants were tweaked to account for their shorter tenures in the city and their different frames of reference. How did living in Nashville compare to living in various parts of Latin America or gateway cities like Los Angeles? How did they describe Nashville neighborhoods to family members in Mexico, Guatemala, or elsewhere? What did they call their neighborhood? How did they learn neighborhood boundaries in Nashville? Where did they meet and make friends, and how did they interact with neighbors? What did they do in their spare time, and where did they go? What did they know about the rest of Nashville, and what parts of it did they visit or avoid? If the neighborhood felt “like forever” to many long-term white residents, what did it feel like to recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America? All three of these groups—teachers, long-term residents, and Latino

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      45  immigrants—often found these questions hard to answer for a variety of reasons. Different definitions and geographies of neighborhood emerged across interviews. Neighborhood boundaries moved or engulfed other neighborhoods, and some depended on school districts from bygone eras. Many Latino immigrants had never heard of the names used by long-term residents and stretched their own definitions of “neighborhood” across Nashville and sometimes far beyond. When we asked about neighborhood boundaries, both Latino immigrants and some long-term residents often said, “I don’t know, but I should find out.” In southeast Nashville, neighborhood was both a slippery concept whose meaning was hard to pin down and a salient concept whose malleability enabled new and old residents to convey where they and their new neighbors fit, or did not fit, in Nashville’s changing urban landscapes and social terrains. As this book argues, and as scholars like Eileen McConnell and Faranak Miraftab (2009) have shown (see also Nelson and Hiemstra 2008), Nashville’s historical geographies, particularly those associated with neighborhood and race, influenced both immigrant experiences within its urban landscape and long-term residents’ responses to immigrant settlement. Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage (2009, 756) has discussed “the salience of historical memory to contemporary civic life in the South.” In southeast Nashville, historical memory, especially a very local memory, formed the basis of many long-term residents’ interpersonal and institutional engagement with immigrant settlement, even as that shared memory remained hard for immigrants to see. If “two worlds” collided in southeast Nashville schools as teachers met immigrant students at the classroom door in the 2000s (see chapter 4), two histories and two geographies met in its neighborhoods. One history stretched into the early twentieth century, and the other began in the early twenty-first. One geography placed southeast Nashville in relation to itself in the past, and the other placed it alongside Latin American cities and towns. Southeast Nashville’s path toward immigrant integration in the 2000s was complicated by the distance and differences between these two frames of reference for understanding neighborhood and the place of immigrant settlement within it.

Southeast Nashville South Nashville’s like this huge area, when they talk about it in the news. And if something happens, you know, like four or five miles down Nolensville Road, they say, south Nashville or Antioch/south Nashville area. And it all gets lumped together. —Director of a community organization in Woodbine

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46      Nashville in the New Millennium

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Understandings of southeast Nashville in the 2000s rested on two widely accepted ideas. First, as this director of a nonprofit community organization implied, south or southeast Nashville, despite its size and heterogeneity, was frequently “lumped together” as “Antioch,” a name more accurately describing the southern part of southeast Nashville and carrying a distinctly negative image in the city (figure 3.1). Although there were obvious differences within southeast Nashville (such as small, older neighborhoods toward the north and large, newer subdivisions in the south), its representation in public discourse as a generalized Antioch in-

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      47  cluded within its borders anything problematic, especially vis-à-vis immigration or crime. As Mark, a white teacher who lived in a wealthier part of southeast Nashville, shared, “I hear people talk about, ‘Don’t drive in south Nashville because you’re going to get hit by somebody who doesn’t have insurance.’” More bluntly, a developer with several apartment complexes in southeast Nashville explained that the rest of Nashville “wouldn’t go there,” hated the area, and considered it “a ghetto, high-crime” place. Because of conflations of Antioch and southeast Nashville, references to southeast Nashville in interviews, media accounts, and other contexts were often hard to follow. Antioch/southeast Nashville’s boundaries changed depending on what, and who, was being described. The same was true for other place names. For Latino immigrants, “Murfreesboro” could mean either Murfreesboro Road, which ran through southeast Nashville and was home to many immigrants, or the town of Murfreesboro, which was south of Nashville and had its own Latino population. Some Latino immigrants were not sure which one they meant because they were not sure about which one they lived in. In short, geographic confusions over how to talk about southeast Nashville not only affected this study but enabled many of the negative stereotypes about specific parts of southeast Nashville to cover its entire territory. In the words of a councilman who represented Woodbine, a neighborhood in the northernmost part of southeast Nashville, “Where it stops being Woodbine and starts being Antioch, I’m not really sure.” Second, and somewhat ironically, southeast Nashville, despite its negative image, was largely unknown to the rest of Nashville. Hemmed in by interstate highways to the north and west and a system of manmade lakes on the east (see figure 3.1), southeast Nashville was a place that many Nashville residents drove by—or, at best, drove through—and saw at fast speeds from multi-lane highways, if they saw it at all. The same interstate system that facilitated southeast Nashville’s growth through suburban expansion from the 1960s onward made stopping in its neighborhoods largely unnecessary for many Nashvillians in the 2000s.1 Although Murfreesboro Road through the heart of southeast Nashville was once the main route to Nashville’s airport, in 1987 airport traffic was rerouted to I-40, and many businesses along Murfreesboro Road subsequently closed.2 For all these reasons, unless people were going to southeast Nashville for work or lunch at one of its international restaurants, many rarely traveled through the area. Thus, by the time Latino migration to Nashville began to pick up in the late 1990s, southeast Nashville had become, in the words of Diane, an African American woman who had lived across Antioch since 1990, “a whole

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48      Nashville in the New Millennium ’nother world,” not only because of immigrant settlement but also, if not mainly, because of the area’s isolation from the rest of Nashville. Although southeast Nashville neighborhoods like Woodbine, Radnor, and Glencliff were familiar to long-term residents living in the area, they were largely unknown elsewhere in the city. As Mary, a white woman who had lived in Woodbine since the early 1990s, quipped, if the rest of Nashville was “even aware at all” of Woodbine, they mainly thought of it as “crime city” or “Little Mexico.” Beth, a white woman who moved to Glencliff with her husband Eric in 2003, explained the difficulty of telling other people where she lived. “Nobody knows, outside of this area, what Glencliff is. . . . Even people from . . . Nashville have never heard of this.” Despite southeast Nashville’s negative public image and overall invisibility to the rest of the city, long-term residents were strongly attached to its neighborhoods. As those neighborhoods changed through immigrant settlement and other factors, long-term residents sometimes mobilized memories of their neighborhoods that excluded Latino immigrants from social and institutional definitions of neighborhood, struggling as they did, to link what they saw in their neighborhood in the present to what they knew of it in the past. Meanwhile, Latino immigrants in southeast Nashville tried to find their place in a city that remained unfamiliar in many ways and that was pulling up the welcome mat by the mid-2000s. These two dynamics—long-term residents’ efforts to place immigrant settlement in the history of their neighborhood and immigrants’ efforts to find a place in Nashville in the present—animated interpersonal and institutional responses to community change in southeast Nashville in the 2000s.

From Flatrock to Little Mexico: Demographic Change and Urban Transformation in Southeast Nashville Allegedly named for a flat rock used by Native Americans in the area (Hancock 1976), the neighborhood of Flatrock in the northern portion of southeast Nashville was first settled in the early 1800s.3 Formed out of farms deeded to Revolutionary War soldiers, it remained rural and sparsely populated until the late nineteenth century, when residential development pushing out from Nashville’s urban core began to expand along Nolensville Road in the heart of Flatrock. As Nashville and its transportation routes grew in the early twentieth century, Flatrock remained the city’s residential limits and paled in comparison to its northern neighbor, south Nashville, the most prominent city neighborhood at that time (Norman 1984). Soon, however, Flatrock began to grow (Norman 1984). In 1906 Rad-

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      49  nor College opened near Flatrock, and in 1912 Radnor Yards, a large railroad switching facility named for the college,4 opened as well (see figure 3.1 for the remaining railroad presence in the area).5 Within a few years, a growing number of people were moving to Flatrock from across Nashville, as well as from Nashville’s rural hinterlands, drawn by job opportunities at Radnor Yards (Norman 1984; Doyle 1985; ­Kyriakoudes 2003). By the early 1920s, Thompson Lane had emerged, as had a few blocks in what would become the smaller neighborhood of Radnor.6 Although Radnor College burned to the ground in 1922 (Hancock 1976), its namesake railroad yard continued to draw workers to Flatrock. By the 1930s, Flatrock had its own streetcar stop,7 and through the 1940s many men in Flatrock, particularly in Radnor, worked for the railroad. As ­Burton, a white man who grew up in Radnor in the 1930s and 1940s, described it, “If you were lucky, you had a job working for the railroad. That was really the best place to work back then.” Despite its growth, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Flatrock remained “almost a self-sufficient rural community” with “hardworking and independent citizens” more attached to Flatrock than to Nashville (Norman 1984, 44).8 By the late 1930s, however, Flatrock had an established business district along Nolensville Road (Perkins et al. 2005) and was ready for an upgrade. In 1939 local residents decided that Flatrock was not a sophisticated name and voted to rechristen the area Woodbine, after a honeysuckle found there.9 Although many residents continued to describe the area as Flatrock, the name Woodbine began to be used as well, especially in reference to Flatrock’s northernmost part. From 1939 to the present, then, two names and two sets of geographic boundaries described this area of southeast Nashville, creating a confusion that lasts to this day. In part because of this early name change and in part because of Woodbine’s smaller size, Flatrock’s limits, as well as its relationship to Woodbine, have been subjects of constant debate in southeast Nashville. Most longterm residents in the area identified Flatrock as the area from what is now the neighborhood of Woodbine south to what is now the neighborhood of Radnor, including several blocks on either side of Nolensville Road (see figure 3.1). Some familiar with the area, however, identified the smaller neighborhoods of Glencliff and Radnor, not as part of Flatrock, but, in the words of a housing expert and former Woodbine councilman, as “part of greater Woodbine,”10 which they defined as the area others called Flatrock (Hancock 1976). Although Elizabeth Campbell and her co-authors (2009) suggest that lack of consensus over neighborhood boundaries is often greatest in neighborhoods where residents feel little community attachment, in southeast Nashville the neighborhoods with the most community attach-

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50      Nashville in the New Millennium ment and the longest histories were subject to the fiercest debates over their boundaries. For clarity’s sake, the remainder of this chapter uses “Flatrock” to mean the overall northern part of southeast Nashville and “Woodbine” to describe the smaller neighborhood designated as such in 1939. Radnor Yards expanded through the 1940s, and Flatrock continued to grow, especially at its southern edge, where new neighborhoods and subdivisions were being developed as Nashville grew outward into the surrounding county. By 1946 Radnor Yards employed almost 900 workers,11 and houses for workers had been built “in all directions” (Hancock 1976, 10). In the process, Woodbine, with 16,000 residents, became Nashville’s largest suburb, surpassing south Nashville just north of it.12 As was the case in many postwar suburbs, Flatrock faced a severe housing crunch as World War II soldiers returned in search of housing and suburbanization stretched Nashville’s limits (Hawkins 1966; Coomer and Tyer 1974). The extent of this postwar boom was soon evident in Flatrock’s infrastructure. In the 1950s, Nolensville Road, which was first paved in the 1920s, was expanded to four lanes as traffic along it increased and subdivisions on either side of it blossomed.13 For most long-term residents, Flatrock eventually encompassed three smaller neighborhoods: Woodbine, Glencliff, and Radnor. Since their beginnings, these neighborhoods have had different public images, even if those differences were not always visible to immigrants or Nashvillians living elsewhere. Because of its proximity to Radnor Yards and to downtown Nashville, Woodbine began as home to both railroad and city workers. Over time, however, its working-class image became dominant, and its connections to downtown were largely forgotten. Further south, Radnor dates to Flatrock’s earliest years and is composed of small lots and houses that were home, in the words of an area neighborhood association president, to “the worker bees” at Radnor Yards. Radnor’s working-class image continued into the 2000s, although its visibility as a neighborhood faded, since it had no namesake school or community center, unlike Woodbine and Glencliff. Glencliff developed after World War II, somewhat later than Woodbine and Radnor, and included larger lots and houses that were home to “the doctors and the lawyers and the professional people,” in the words of a neighborhood association president. With more winding lanes and more territory than either Radnor or Woodbine, Glencliff’s different class identity lingered into the 2000s. In 2007, for example, Eric, a white man who moved there with his wife Beth in 2003, described Glencliff as having “basically a blue-collar neighborhood and some white-collar neighborhood, depending on which side of [Thompson Lane] you get.” Citing Thompson Lane as a boundary between “burneddown properties and deserted sections” to the north and Glencliff to the

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      51  south, Beth identified Woodbine as “like the buffer . . . between the immigrants coming in and us,” pointing to class differences between Glencliff and Woodbine that first emerged when the neighborhoods were created in the early twentieth century but lingered into the present through a language of ethnicity and nationality. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the switch to diesel engines hit Flatrock hard, and Radnor Yards downsized to 300 workers (Hancock 1976).14 By this time, growth in Flatrock had become uneven as residential and commercial expansion continued in parts of the area and tailed off in others. The neighborhoods of Woodbine and Radnor, for example, were largely filled by the 1960s; and new residential construction was concentrated in Flatrock’s southern edge, which remained rural as late as the 1950s, and in undeveloped parts of Glencliff. During this period, industries like aircraft production and insurance claims processing also came to southeast Nashville, bringing new jobs to Flatrock’s newest neighborhoods but skipping the neighborhoods of Radnor and Woodbine, which were already built up and home to older residents.15 In subsequent decades, additional subdivisions and strip malls were built farther south along Nolensville Road, and Flatrock was increasingly left behind in new commercial and residential development. Instead, new development moved toward Antioch, which was beginning to grow in the southernmost part of Davidson County. The building and population boom that started in Woodbine in the 1930s, thus, was largely silenced by the mid-1960s, when Radnor Yards downsized and baby boomers pushed east into the Glencliff neighborhoods abutting Murfreesboro Road and south into the rural county. In the process, Woodbine began what Robert, a white man who had lived in Flatrock since the early 1950s, described as “a slow deterioration.” The residential history of Helen, a white woman who grew up in Flatrock in the 1930s and 1940s and moved to Woodbine in 1964, reflects this decline. When she arrived in Woodbine in the mid-1960s, Helen had mostly elderly neighbors, many of whom were original residents and almost none of whom had young children. By the 1970s, many of these residents had died, houses along her street were becoming rentals, and “nobody stayed anywhere long.” Woodbine’s residential turnover continued through the 1980s and early 1990s, when, as Helen explained, “people just didn’t stay. They would move in for a few months. You never knew who they were really, maybe never knew their name because they came and went.” As Helen’s observations of her neighborhood demonstrate, Woodbine by the mid1960s had aging residents who were not being replaced by young families intending to stay. As a result, it became a stopping point for transient residents from the 1970s onward.

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52      Nashville in the New Millennium Further south, the neighborhood of Radnor displayed a starkly different dynamic, as can be seen in the residential history of Alice, a white woman who was also born in Flatrock in the 1930s but who bought a house in Radnor with her husband in 1960. When Alice and her husband had their first child in the early 1960s, there were no other children on her street, since in Radnor, as in Woodbine, most of Alice’s neighbors were elderly. By the time her youngest child was born in the early 1970s, however, there were many children on their street, as over that period new families had moved in and begun to put down roots. Part of what facilitated Radnor’s rebirth in the 1970s, and part of what distinguished it from Woodbine, was the practice by its first residents of purchasing multiple lots, which they later sold or gave to their children. As a result, Radnor’s housing stock included both small “railroad” houses from the 1920s and larger homes from the postwar boom. This mix of housing stock kept the neighborhood attractive to young families in the 1970s and beyond and kept space available for them as the neighborhood aged. This intergenerational presence “renewed” Radnor in the 1970s but also set it up for another round of turnover in the early 2000s, as the second set of families moved away or died off. This time, however, in Radnor, as in Woodbine, many of the new arrivals hailed, not from other parts of Nashville or Tennessee, but from across Latin America. Throughout these transformations and into the 1970s, Flatrock remained what Brian, a white man who moved there as a small child in 1965, described as a gritty, “tough” neighborhood that people were proud to be from but did not always remain in. It was almost exclusively white and working class and continued to be for some time, according to long-term residents. In reality, Flatrock’s demographics were more complicated. Woodbine, for example, had always included, in the words of one neighborhood association president, “a very strange mix” of black and white, affluent and poor residents, with pockets of black settlement throughout. Providence, for example, was a black neighborhood further south on Nolensville Road that began as a postbellum enclave.16 Both Providence and black portions of Woodbine, however, were often seen as separate from Flatrock by long-term white residents. Several interviewees, for example, remembered that there were clusters of African American settlement in Flatrock but could not recall where those clusters were. Others were like Helen, who had lived one street over from black residents in Woodbine but had little interaction with them in her fifty years there. “It was seldom ever you saw a black person come up [my] street. I mean, we just had our own places,” even though in her case those places were one street apart. Some white long-term residents like Frank, who grew up in Flatrock in the 1920s and 1930s, recalled

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      53  playing with black children from Providence but also recalled separation between the communities. “Most people in Providence were black people, and they didn’t want us in their community, and evidently, [white] people didn’t want them either.”17 For Burton, a white man who grew up in Radnor and lived there from the late 1920s to the late 1950s, Providence was an area that white Flatrock children knew, but mainly to “just pass through.” Thus, before the arrival of Latino immigrants, Woodbine was a diverse but segregated neighborhood, and Flatrock had African American residents who were not always seen as Flatrock neighbors. Over time Flatrock’s racial composition changed, but these microgeographies of racial segregation lingered, as did its public image as white, even when (and where) it was not.18 Into the 1970s, Flatrock retained its “small-town” feel, with local gossip, intergenerational families, and “dogs running loose.” It remained anchored by a business district along Nolensville Road and by memories of Central High School, the county’s first public high school, which closed in 1971 as a result of school consolidation and desegregation (Norman 1984; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1977). By the late 1970s, however, there was little doubt that Flatrock was peaking—or “already going downhill,” in the words of a former Woodbine representative—as its residents began to retire, move away, or die off (Hancock 1976). Although Flatrock remained home to white, working-class families with children in the mid1970s and even into the early 1980s by some accounts, an increasing portion of Flatrock housing was being sold as rental units, as Helen described and as was happening in first-ring suburbs elsewhere (Brettell and Nibbs 2011). Frank, for example, moved to Flatrock in the late 1920s as a child but moved his family out of Radnor in 1978 when “the neighborhood started going down.” By the time I left there [in 1978], it got to where you knew most of the people in your block, and maybe some scattered around, but any fellowship or communication you had neighborhood-wise was usually through the church or through the beer joint, one or the other.

Increasingly concerned about commercial intrusion onto his street, growing numbers of rental homes around him, and the “undesirables” and “really rough people” moving into Radnor, Frank moved to a newer subdivision farther south along Nolensville Road, where he and his family stayed until the early 1990s. By the early 1980s, then, fewer families with children were moving into Flatrock, especially Woodbine, as suburban expansion pushed farther south into Davidson County and young families followed suit. Because

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54      Nashville in the New Millennium many families who moved to Flatrock in the 1930s for railroad jobs encouraged their children to pursue other opportunities, the intergenerational connections that had defined Flatrock had largely stopped by the 1980s. Flatrock offered “fewer neighborhood things” to young people in this period, as Brian, who came of age in Woodbine in the early 1980s, explained, and over time the area “dwindled.” The completion of the 440 highway loop in the early 1980s sped up the decline; with a multi-lane highway now going through Woodbine, Flatrock was left more separated than ever from the rest of Nashville (see figure 3.1). South of Flatrock, commercial expansion in Antioch in the 1970s also reduced the number of shoppers coming from rural parts of the county to Flatrock’s business district. Although many small stores remained in Flatrock in part because many area families remained one-car households, over time their owners retired or they were squeezed out by large chains. Through such transformations, Flatrock languished in the 1980s and 1990s, while new suburbs further south in the county grew. Because Flatrock was largely skipped in Nashville’s transition to a booming Sun Belt metropolis, the area reached the 1990s with an aging population, relatively few children, available commercial space, and a low profile. For many long-term residents, change came suddenly in the 1990s, when as one older white man described it, “The businesses I go to weren’t there anymore,” echoing narratives of loss documented in other first-ring suburbs (Brettell and Nibbs 2011). During this time, Flatrock noticeably changed from an area of “older established neighborhoods” of white, working-class families to one with “conventional rentals” occupied by Hispanics and Asians, in the words of one Metro official who worked with neighborhoods.19 This transition, according to some longterm residents, precipitated white flight, and there was empirical evidence for this trend by 2000 (Yarbrough 2003) (figures 3.2 and 3.3). The area’s overall graying, however, also precipitated residential turnover as residents aged and died off. Whatever its cause, change came to Flatrock in the late 1990s. A neighborhood association president, for example, recalled Woodbine in the late 1990s as “a nice safe neighborhood, and truly a neighborhood.” When we first moved, it was starting to perk up. And then . . . everyone took off running, I guess, because they saw foreigners come in, and so they just vacated their properties and went flying out and turned them into rentals or abandoned them. And then we saw the neighborhoods start really falling apart.

By the 2000s, Woodbine’s image as “Little Mexico” had solidified through Latino immigrant settlement and business expansion, even as it

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      55  Figure 3.2 Percentage White by Census Tract, 2000 Census

£ ¤ 40

£ ¤

J Percy Priest Reservoir

o

440

£ ¤ 24

£ ¤ 65

Less than 25 Percent 25.1 to 50 Percent 50.1 to 65 Percent

^ Nashville TENNESSEE

65.1 to 80 Percent 0

N

5

80.1 to 97 Percent

Miles

Source: Author’s compilation based on Summary File 1, 2000 U.S. Census.

remained nostalgic Woodbine for many long-term residents. Marcela and Octavio, a Mexican couple who moved to Nashville in 2000 and bought a house in Woodbine in 2003, captured both images in their description of Woodbine. For Octavio, Woodbine was “a poorer area . . . where all the immigrants are—at least, where all the immigrants start.” Marcela added that many people said to her, “‘Oh dear, I used to live in Woodbine,’ or, ‘My parents . . . and it’s nice.’ But now . . . ,’” her voice trailing off to mimic people’s acknowledgment that Woodbine had become Little Mexico and thus hard to define and accept. Finally, Octavio quipped, “They know it for the food. . . . Mostly, they see it as about car dealers and a lot of Mexi-

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56      Nashville in the New Millennium

Figure 3.3 Percentage White by Census Tract, 2010 Census

£ ¤ 40

£ ¤

J Percy Priest Reservoir

o

440

£ ¤ 24

£ ¤ 65

Less than 25 Percent 25.1 to 50 Percent 50.1 to 65 Percent

^ Nashville TENNESSEE

65.1 to 80 Percent 0

N

5

80.1 to 97 Percent

Miles

Source: Author’s compilation based on Summary File 1, 2010 U.S. Census.

cans.” In this way, Woodbine in the new millennium was home to Latino immigrants, to memories of times past, and to a cultural diversity that could be consumed. Recalled nostalgically by long-term residents as the place where they started out in the city, it was now seen as problematic for serving the same role for Latino immigrants. The effects of this transition from white to brown and from elderly to young were obvious across Flatrock, especially in the emergence of Hispanic churches, a trend documented in Atlanta as well (Odem 2004, 2009).20 In the 2000s, many Flatrock churches faced dwindling numbers

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      57  and difficult financial situations as their congregations died off or moved away. Radnor Baptist Church, for example, was one of the best-known churches in Flatrock and a landmark along Nolensville Road. With a history dating to the late nineteenth century, its congregation by 2007 had shrunk from upwards of 3,000 on Sunday mornings to 200 active members.21 In response to declining attendance, as well as to declining enrollment in its private academy, Radnor Baptist sold its properties to a group of Catholic investors, who then sold the property to St. Edward Catholic Church.22 Long involved in immigrant outreach and services in Nashville, St. Edward used the Radnor Baptist property to start Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, the first stand-alone Hispanic church and community center in the diocese.23 This “space swapping” reflected the area’s demographic transition from approximately 80 percent white in 1990 to over 30 percent Latino by 2000, as well as the continued growth of a Hispanic population throughout the 2000s (figures 3.4 and 3.5).24 It also reflected, however, the cultural redefinition of Flatrock, as Radnor Baptist relocated to the edge of Davidson County, which remained predominantly white, and a landmark Flatrock institution from the twentieth century became a Hispanic community center in the twenty-first.25 Although the common trajectory of neighborhood change in Woodbine was aging white to young Latino, the area’s transition to Little Mexico included other stops along the way, as happened in Atlanta as well (Odem 2004). As early as 1996, for example, Woodbine was described in The Tennessean, Nashville’s primary newspaper, as a “working-class United Nations,” not because of its Latino residents, but because of its refugee communities.26 As an executive director of a local community organization in Woodbine explained, “From when I started [in the mid1980s], it became the color of the Laotian skin to the Latino skin to the Kurdish skin to the African skin.” In the late 1970s, Hmong refugees brought to Nashville after the Vietnam War settled in Woodbine (Lydon 1988; Winders 2006a). Living in small “pockets” in Woodbine, Laotian residents “kept to themselves” and “never integrated well,” in the words of a former Woodbine representative.27 Using Woodbine as a “steppingstone” to more affluent parts of the city, Laotians were largely gone by the 1990s. Taking their place were Kurdish families relocated to Nashville after the first Gulf War.28 In contrast to Laotian households, Kurdish families did not live in identifiable clusters in Woodbine and were not readily identifiable as racially or ethnically different to long-term residents. Over time, however, Kurdish residents also moved farther south into neighborhoods with larger homes. By the time Latino immigrants arrived in the late 1990s, these earlier waves of refugees had given Woodbine an

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58      Nashville in the New Millennium

Figure 3.4 Percentage Hispanic by Census Tract, 2000 Census

£ ¤ 40

£ ¤

J Percy Priest Reservoir

o

440

£ ¤ 24

£ ¤ 65

Less than 5 Percent 5.1 to 10 Percent 10.1 to 20 Percent

^ Nashville TENNESSEE

20.1 to 35 Percent 0

N

5

35.1 to 52.8 Percent

Miles

Source: Author’s compilation based on Summary File 1, 2000 U.S. Census.

international image, which later refugee groups from Somalia and elsewhere helped to maintain.29 As Woodbine became Nashville’s “Little Mexico” and Glencliff High School became the city’s “United Nations” in the 2000s, its streets remained caught between Flatrock new and old. Flatrock in the new millennium was home to elderly white widows living beside Guatemalan households, retired empty-nesters with RVs in the driveway across the street from extended Mexican families with cars around the house. Nolensville Road

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      59  Figure 3.5 Percentage Hispanic by Census Tract, 2010 Census

£ ¤ 40

£ ¤

J Percy Priest Reservoir

o

440

£ ¤ 24

£ ¤ 65

Less than 5 Percent 5.1 to 10 Percent 10.1 to 20 Percent

^ Nashville TENNESSEE

20.1 to 35 Percent 0

N

5

35.1 to 52.8 Percent

Miles

Source: Author’s compilation based on Summary File 1, 2010 U.S. Census.

c­ atered to a Latino, especially Mexican, clientele, leading some residents and political representatives to claim that Latino immigrants had saved the area’s business district.30 Some of its long-standing businesses, however, also anchored memories of Flatrock for many long-term residents. As the demographic distance between an elderly white population and a younger Latino population solidified into cultural differences in Flatrock, the two groups began to articulate what Caroline Brettell and Faith Nibbs (2011, 6), in a study of a similar suburb near Dallas, describe as “quite different pri-

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60      Nashville in the New Millennium orities and points of view about their community” (see also Ley 1995). In response, some long-term residents began to avoid the area altogether, and many immigrants tried to be quiet to blend in. Although Flatrock’s transformation at the end of the twentieth century was similar in some ways to what other parts of Nashville experienced, the form it took was distinct. The city had also neglected and disinvested in historically black north Nashville in the latter half of the twentieth century, if not before. Much of Nashville’s public housing was located in north Nashville, and the area was sliced in half in the late 1960s, when I-40 was constructed through its residential and commercial heart (Seley 1970; White 1971; Szymanski 1974).31 Because of its role in public assistance debates, however, as well as because of ongoing concerns about racial injustices, north Nashville stayed on the public radar in a way that Flatrock did not. Flatrock’s place in Nashville’s urban fabric was also different from that of east Nashville, a neighborhood with similar economic diversity but a very different public image. East Nashville residents, too, were concerned about neighborhood disinvestment and residential turnover, but through the lens of gentrification, not immigration. East Nashville was an older part of the city, where, in fact, many of Flatrock’s earliest residents had previously lived, and its “historic” homes were prime for upgrading and resale to anyone seeking a hip place and willing to pay for it. Flatrock, by contrast, with younger, less expensive housing, could not “overcome” its negative image through gentrification, according to some long-term residents. Flatrock’s place in Nashville’s racial fabric also helped explain how it became home to Latino immigrants and various groups of refugees. Although factors such as the city’s geography of affordable housing,32 the age and socioeconomic profile of Flatrock residents, and its proximity to major interstates helped turn Flatrock into Little Mexico, its place outside a spatialized racial binary in Nashville factored in as well. As a Metro ­official working with neighborhoods explained: If you look at that southeastern quadrant of town, that’s not restricted to the old racial barriers between the old Nashville of the city and north Nashville and east [Nashville], where African Americans were living. And so it was affordable, and it seems to be open to everybody. And I think that that has encouraged some people not to see maybe, I think, some kind of racial barriers to move into these areas.

Placing southeast Nashville outside Nashville’s “old” racial division between white and black, this official positioned the area as “open to everybody” because it was not part of the city’s initial racial geography and

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      61  because its class standing made it affordable to many residents. This openness, he explained, was institutionalized in the local housing market; for example, southeast Nashville landlords were familiar with other “cultures” and accustomed to frequent turnover through their experiences with refugee resettlements. Of course, the many apartment complexes at Flatrock’s southern edge also made the area attractive to immigrants. Metro police estimated there were 116 apartment complexes in southeast Nashville in 2005, with 25,000 apartments, many of which became immigrants’ first home in Nashville.33 Katy, for example, a young white teacher in southeast Nashville, moved into one of those complexes in 2002 when she arrived in Nashville. Every time a tenant moved out, the family moving in was foreign-born. By the time Katy left in 2005, there were only two American families in her complex. Although Murfreesboro Road to the east of Flatrock was called “Little Mexico” a few times in interviews, it generally had a separate public image from Flatrock’s. Still, it remained associated with immigrant settlement. As mentioned before, neighborhoods along Murfreesboro Road developed later than Flatrock neighborhoods and were some of the most expensive in the area when they were built, especially in Glencliff. As early as the late 1960s, however, the numerous apartment complexes along Murfreesboro Road, particularly around its intersections with Thompson Lane and I-24, helped differentiate Murfreesboro Road’s public image from that of Flatrock, which lacked high-density settlements. Initially, some apartment complexes along Murfreesboro Road were considered “high-end” and drew white residents attracted by the area’s new industrial jobs. In the 1970s, however, a growing number of black families moved to the Murfreesboro Road area, and by the early 1990s several complexes were home to equal numbers of white and black residents. Through the early 1990s, apartment construction continued along Murfreesboro Road, part of a city-wide building boom partially driven by the arrival of Texas developers seeking sites for investment before the 1986 Tax Reform Act and bringing their Latino workforces with them. By the late 1990s, as construction associated with projects like the Opryland Hotel continued, a growing number of Latino residents had moved into the apartment complexes along Murfreesboro Road, making some of them majority Latino in a short time. By 2003 the elementary school serving the area was 70 percent “non-English language background” and “a mini United Nations,” in the words of its administrators.34 By the 2000s, then, Murfreesboro Road, a happening place for young singles in the 1980s, had become associated with day labor, lonely Hispanic men, and dangerous apartment complexes.35 As Flatrock peaked in the 1970s, Antioch to its south was just hitting

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62      Nashville in the New Millennium its stride; and the fates of these two neighborhoods are linked through the wider saga of Nashville’s suburban expansion, racial politics, and urban change. In the 2000s, Antioch was the paradox that Woodbine had been in the late 1940s: the county’s fastest-growing area and its rural fringe.36 Antioch’s image as an “amorphous blob” filled with “big-haired women and hick accents” in the 1990s gave way in the 2000s to several others: it was “Hispanioch,” filled with Latino immigrants; it was “LA” (Lower Antioch), Nashville’s “hood” filled with “rising crime”; and it was shorthand for, in the words of one African American resident, “poor colored people.”37 Historically Nashville’s “throwaway area” for unwanted development, if not residents, Antioch was a “problem from the beginning” because of its “ethnic churning,” as an area developer put it. In the 1970s, when it eclipsed Flatrock, Antioch was seen as an area with out-ofcontrol growth and expansion. By the 2000s, it was simply seen as out of control.

From Antioch to Hispanioch: “an other . . . Definitely the periphery”38 Gone are the quiet, peaceful farmlands that for so long resisted change. In their place stand the shopping centers, apartment buildings, countless commercial establishments, and the new roads so vital to everyday life of the increased population. (Marshall and Marshall 2002, 1)

The early histories of Antioch and Flatrock are similar in many ways. Antioch, like Flatrock, began as a small settlement in the early 1800s and by 1820 was a recognizable, if rural, community. As in Flatrock, the railroad’s arrival in 1851 brought substantial change, linking Antioch to Nashville in a new way and creating a town center for the growing community.39 Antioch’s orientation around the railroad lingered into the 2000s as a key railroad crossing at Blue Hole Road—where, incidentally, many Latino residents lived—remained the “real Antioch” for many long-term residents. From its beginning, Antioch, like Flatrock, also had a small black population, despite being described, also like Flatrock, as a white community. In the early 1900s, for example, Antioch was home to Davidson County’s first black subdivision, and before the consolidation of black schools into Flatrock’s Providence School, Antioch Elementary School educated black students through the eighth grade (Marshall and Marshall 2002). In the early 1900s, improved county roads strengthened the links between Antioch and surrounding smaller communities, making movement between them easier and creating more customers for Antioch businesses.

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      63  Through the 1930s, Antioch had particularly strong connections to Flatrock. Antioch students attended Central High School near Woodbine, and Antioch residents often shopped in Flatrock. Some of those connections were broken in the 1930s, when Antioch High School opened for county students. Nevertheless, rivalry between Antioch and Central High Schools continued to link Flatrock and Antioch, as did family connections between the two communities (Marshall and Marshall 2002). A key difference between Flatrock and Antioch, of course, was the timing of their growth. Whereas Flatrock grew in the 1940s and 1950s, Antioch remained rural into the 1970s. Although Antioch farms began to be turned into subdivisions as early as the 1950s, this transformation was slow and incremental, remaining partial for nearly two decades.40 Through the 1970s, farms were still interspersed between subdivisions in Antioch, which remained the rural periphery of Flatrock and the rest of Nashville. In the late 1970s, Antioch began to change. New apartments and condos sprang up (U.S. Commission of Civil Rights 1977) as Nashville developers obtained approval for almost 15,000 new units and Antioch became the city’s “outlet for excess and unwanted development.”41 In 1978 Hickory Hollow Mall opened in Antioch near a major exchange with I-24 and “chang[ed] the face of the community forever” (Marshall and Marshall 2002, ix). Eventually, 14,000 apartment units were built around the mall— a construction boom partially responsible for increasing “the density of the Antioch population . . . sixteen fold” between the 1960s and 1980s (Marshall and Marshall 2002, 47).42 From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, developers won approval to build more than 10,000 apartments and homes in Antioch, as Nashville grew and white parents fled school integration and busing in other parts of the city.43 By 1985 Antioch was Nashville’s fastest-growing area, “the place” and “the singles capital of the world,” according to Megan, an African American woman who moved there in 1980 and taught in southeast Nashville. Situated within Metro’s General Service District but outside the Urban Services District, Antioch had a population boom in the 1970s and 1980s because it offered lower taxes, shopping attractions, and homeownership.44 Antioch’s growth, despite its seemingly chaotic design, was intentional in many ways. Nashville urban planners and developers, for example, explicitly lured residents to Antioch, which was one of the county’s few remaining spaces for suburban development by the 1980s. As an Antioch political representative explained, Antioch’s development “wasn’t by accident. They asked people to come.” These recruitment efforts were almost too successful. As early as the 1970s, the organization, Neighbors of Antioch, had been formed to fight what members saw as

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64      Nashville in the New Millennium excessive commercial development near their neighborhoods.45 By the mid-1980s, Antioch schools were overcrowded, and its subdivisions were fighting further development of new apartment complexes. The area’s growing pains are well captured in the saga of the new Antioch High School, which reached overcapacity on the day it opened in 1984: Antioch’s growth, it seemed, outpaced even its anticipated infrastructural needs.46 Antioch High School also encapsulated the area’s racial politics in the 1980s. During the era of federally mandated school desegregation in Nashville, white families flocked to Antioch, which, as Davidson County’s rural fringe, was not initially subject to busing. Its schools were, thus, soon not only overcrowded but also almost exclusively white. In 1982, federal courts ruled that these all-white schools at the edge of Davidson County had to be incorporated into Metro Nashville Public Schools’ (MNPS) desegregation plan and become part of the city’s busing plan. Until MNPS reached racial balance in its schools, including those in Antioch, no new school construction was allowed. Unless neighborhoods feeding Antioch High School reached 18 percent black by 1986 (Lovett 2005), the new school could not open. When white Antioch residents responded by working to “lure minorities” to Antioch, not only was the high school ultimately opened but Antioch also became “one of the most diverse communities in the Nashville area.”47 By the early 1990s, “Lower Antioch” had become Nashville’s “LA,” mirroring the City of Angels not in demographics but in its sprawling landscape.48 A way station for residents new to Nashville and a place where money went further than elsewhere in the city, Antioch by the late 1990s was in search of an identity and “something to fight for,” according to residents trying to organize its neighborhoods.49 Like American suburbs elsewhere (Wyly 1999), it was racially diverse and reflected Nashville’s geography of affordable housing, patterns of suburban expansion, and unintended consequences of white resistance to busing. With a substantial black population (26 percent in 2001) and growing immigrant population, Antioch in the 2000s was larger, younger, and harder to define than Flatrock. Whereas Flatrock centered on the business district along Nolensville Road, identifying Antioch’s core and even boundaries was more difficult. When asked about Antioch’s borders, for example, Diane, an African American woman who had lived in Antioch for several years, simply exclaimed, “Who knows?” Defining Antioch was further complicated by its range of housing options that made identifying distinct neighborhoods a challenge. In addition to congested commercial expansion at the major intersections with I-24, Antioch included everything from $85,000 townhouses to $3 million

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      65  homes, sometimes not far apart. With neighborhoods that encompassed apartment complexes, condominiums, duplexes, starter homes, subdivisions, and farms, Antioch was the place “everybody came to,” and construction was evident “just about anywhere land is available.”50 Under “constant pressure to accommodate more people, more services, and more cars” (Metropolitan Planning Commission 2003, 5), Antioch had planned communities and rural areas, crowded apartments along major highways and condos along winding paths. Tellingly, a community design goal in Antioch’s 2003 subarea plan was “to reintroduce the concept of true neighborhoods into the future development patterns of the community” (34). The lack of planning in Antioch, it seemed, left no room for real neighborhoods. With its racially integrated subdivisions, concentration of affordable housing, and presumed tolerance for diversity—Antioch did, after all, recruit black families—the area caught the attention of Metro housing authorities, who relocated public housing residents displaced through HOPE-VI projects from Nashville’s urban core to Antioch in the early 2000s (Williams 2003). Soon potential home buyers were talking about apartment complexes and subdivisions going “Section 8,” and some neighborhood associations began to suspect that Nashville planned to “crowd this area up” with unwanted residential and commercial development.51 By this time Antioch’s public image was increasingly negative, and more and more residents were organizing against it. Neighbors of Antioch, for example, disbanded in the mid-1980s but re-formed in 2001 to address the impacts of Antioch’s crime “problem” on property values.52 In 2006 local businesses formed the Hickory Hollow Area Business Alliance to challenge Hickory Hollow Mall’s image as a dangerous commercial space and address its loss of tenants and customers as newer, larger malls opened elsewhere.53 In 2009 a new organization, Antioch Together, brought residents into this effort to create a new image for Antioch, holding Nights Out Against Crime at Hickory Hollow Mall and drawing upwards of 600 residents to “reclaim the neighborhood” by redefining its landmark.54 Such efforts were often directed at changing the view of Antioch as the city’s “dumping” ground and, in the words of a Metro urban planner, the fringe area that “soak[ed] up” growth in Nashville. In 2009, for example, the Metro Health Department announced plans to open a clinic for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) in Hickory Hollow Mall, since more than 40 percent of Nashville’s WIC recipients lived in Antioch and the struggling mall had available space. Local residents and elected officials protested, however, fearing the stigma such a move would create for Antioch and the message

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66      Nashville in the New Millennium it would send about the mall as a failed commercial space.55 Along similar lines, when a homeless camp displaced during the 2010 Nashville floods was relocated to an Antioch farm, local residents held a community meeting to protest the “dumping” of the homeless in Antioch. In the words of one attendee, “Antioch is not a place to put everything you don’t know what to do with.”56 If in Flatrock a graying population set the stage for immigrant settlement, Antioch offered a different, more complicated story. As one urban planner described it, Antioch had “a combination not only of a lot of immigrants moving in but also the available land for new subdivisions and people buying homes.” As Antioch became home to new immigrants from across Latin America and new black and white residents from across the city, its public image, for both the city and its residents, became hard to pin down. Immigrants often moved to Antioch not only through residential turnover but also through residential expansion, as new apartment complexes were built. Within its older subdivisions close to Flatrock, Antioch experienced the kind of change Flatrock saw, but the breadth of its housing options otherwise complicated the picture of neighborhood transformation. That breadth also complicated neighborhood politics. The speed of expansion inhibited “the same cohesiveness” seen or idealized in other neighborhoods and led, as noted in the 2003 subarea plan, to the lack of “true” neighborhoods. Across Nashville, then, Antioch in the 2000s conveyed several images: a crime-ridden mall that failed as a community anchor; explosive growth that challenged Antioch’s integrity as a community; and an area that had too many immigrants and poor people to be home to valuable property. Despite these negative images, Latino immigrants continued to settle in Antioch, redefining the area’s public image, racial composition, and social dynamics in ways they did not always recognize. In older neighborhoods with ranch houses built in the 1950s and 1960s and in apartments and townhouses constructed along major routes in the 1980s and 1990s, Latino immigrants put down roots, both temporary and permanent, and changed the literal and figurative face of southeast Nashville. What, however, did life in these areas look like to the immigrants whose presence changed them so profoundly? Although suburbanization, as Matthew Ruben (2001, 442) suggests, may have “consolidated a three-way equation among location, whiteness, and American-ness” in many cities, immigrant settlement in Nashville in the 2000s undid that equation, especially in southeast Nashville. Just as southeast Nashville schools encountered a “new equation” they did not entirely understand in their classrooms as immigrant children arrived, southeast Nashville neighborhoods encountered an equally perplexing new equation when immigrant settlement transformed their social fabric.

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      67 

Immigrant Nashville Nosotros somos como una mancha que se va ensanchando y los americanos una malla que se va orillando. (We are like a stain that keeps growing, and Americans, a net that keeps retreating.) —Nicolás, a Mexican man in his late forties

Nicolás, who came to Nashville from Chicago and Los Angeles in 1999, arrived at his 2007 interview somewhat frazzled. He had previously participated in a group discussion about immigrant life in Nashville, where he had been quick to correct my sloppy distinction between “latinos” and “americanos” and to remind everyone that Latin America is America.57 Nicolás declined our first invitation to participate in this study, but he watched people he knew complete interviews and listened to repeated explanations of the project. When he did agree to an interview, he asked for the questions up front and wanted to sit down with my research assistant to discuss the study’s objectives. On the morning of his interview, Nicolás was clearly exhausted, having just completed a night shift at a new factory job that involved hard manual labor. Trained as an agronomist in Mexico, Nicolás had never expected to work such a job in Nashville, or to work so hard. At work, Nicolás rarely saw interactions between Latinos and “morenos” or Latinos and americanos, a divide he attributed to language. Daily life in Nashville, in his view, was monotonous, although he also felt that many immigrants experienced stress in the Music City. His remark that “we are like a stain that keeps growing, and Americans, a net that keeps retreating” followed from his observation that, in both Chicago and Nashville, americanos move out when Latinos move in. Other Latino residents in Nashville were blunter. As Alejandra, a Colombian woman who had lived in Antioch since 1997, put it, “Everywhere [in Nashville is] the same. People move when they hear Spanish.” Although determining how immigrants in Nashville experienced and made sense of their neighborhoods was key to this study, the general set of social and political experiences that Latino men and women anticipated and encountered in Nashville is equally important to consider. This wider picture of immigrant life in the Music City not only contextualizes subsequent, more detailed examinations of immigrant experiences in the neighborhood and the school but also helps drive home that “neighborhood” and its local meanings, though critical to how long-term residents understood and responded to immigrant settlement, were not always concerns for Latino residents. Whether because they spent little time in their neighborhoods, because they could not communicate with English-speaking neighbors, or because work rather than leisure was the main, if not only, point of

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68      Nashville in the New Millennium being in Nashville (Chavez 1992), Latino men and women in Nashville often knew little about their neighborhoods. Instead, general social experiences across the city shaped immigrant perceptions of Nashville, although even those encounters were sometimes overridden by the imperatives of a precarious immigrant lifestyle. For example, Rafael, who came to Nashville in 2006 to be with his sister after a year in Atlanta and two years in Virginia, explained early in his interview: “Look, for me, [living in Nashville versus living in Honduras] is ­almost the same because I . . . am an immigrant, right? An immigrant will always live in a small apartment with other family members or friends that charge him rent. He will always work hard. He will go from work to the apartment and have nothing more to do.” Rafael, like many other Latino residents we interviewed, had a clear sense of how Nashville understood Latino immigrants and what he could expect of life there. Living in crowded quarters and working hard, Rafael did not know the name of his neighborhood or even the names of nearby streets. Turnover among Latino, Somali, and a few African American residents within his apartment complex, which sat at the center of debates over day labor along Murfreesboro Road, was rapid and, combined with Rafael’s work demands, inhibited social interactions. He and his neighbors, he noted, “cannot communicate because . . . I have not been here a long time and . . . I do not know the name of the person living above me or around me, because I only arrive at night to sleep. I watch television for about a half-hour; then I lie down and go to sleep. In the morning, I only leave the apartment, go to the car, and we go off to work—there is no time.” As he explained at the end of his interview, “Here, most of the time, you see people, you only see them,” and this lack of interaction, even among Latino immigrants, limited social connections in the neighborhood. In similar fashion, Fabián, a young Salvadoran man, stressed that he came to Nashville in 2003 “because . . . you go wherever you have someone expecting you or saying, ‘Come here. You will get a job.’” For Fabián, thus, the place of Nashville was ancillary to its economic possibilities. Fabián had never weighed the pros and cons of going to other U.S. cities; he came to Nashville only “because I needed to.” Alicia, a middle-aged Mexican woman, was not even aware that she was coming to Nashville when she left for the city in 1996. Unaware of what Nashville was like or how different it would be from the California city where she had briefly lived, she explained, “You come with your eyes closed.” Immigrants’ lack of knowledge about their new surroundings in Nashville was compounded by their extreme mobility, particularly among those who had arrived most recently. Many Latino residents moved repeatedly across neighborhoods in southeast Nashville, across communi-

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      69  ties in middle Tennessee, and across cities in the United States. For example, Carlos, a Mexican man in his late fifties who came to the United States in 1984 and to Nashville from Chicago in 2002, moved frequently in a tightly circumscribed area bounded by Harding Place, I-65, and I-24 (see figure 3.1). The problems he encountered at the apartments where he lived in southeast Nashville—from flooding to bug infestations, from unexplained rent increases to overcrowding—led him at times to sleep in his car and kept him from bringing his wife from Mexico. As documented in other new destinations (Atiles and Bohon 2003), Carlos dealt with his difficult living situation by not being there: “Whether I work or not, I am almost never at home.” For many Latino residents in Nashville, especially apartment-dwellers, less-than-ideal living arrangements likely inhibited any strong attachments to place. For Leonardo, a young Salvadoran man who came to Nashville in 1999, life in his apartment along Murfreesboro Road was restricting: “You are not really free, living in an apartment.” Expressing similar sentiments, another young Salvadoran man, Manuel, who came to Nashville in 2006 and first lived in apartments along Harding Place, described living in an apartment as “like trying to see in the darkness.” Now that he rented a house in Glencliff, he felt much calmer, although he admitted that he still spent no time outside in his neighborhood. Apartment was also linked to problems of drinking and loud music for some Latino residents, as well as to a sense of loneliness. Salvador, a middleaged man from southern Mexico, came to Nashville in 2005 and ended up in a large apartment complex on Nolensville Road. Living with men he did not socialize with, Salvador struggled with loneliness and considered bringing his wife and children from Mexico. “Sometimes I wonder if this is all a mistake, but I say to myself, ‘I am already here.’” Although he felt out of place in Nashville and had intended to stay only a year, Salvador could not return to Mexico because he was still in debt from his trip to Nashville. Similarly, although Fabián, the young Salvadoran man, felt the most comfortable in his apartment in southeast Nashville of all the places he went in the city, he admitted that “as an immigrant, you live with fear” and that a sense of belonging in Nashville was elusive. Home for him remained somewhere between Nashville in the present and El Salvador in the future.58 As he explained, “I have tried to feel at home [in Nashville], but I can’t. . . . Whenever I first came here, I was overwhelmed by this sadness. I used to feel desperate. I felt this urge to leave. I would feel like nobody knew me and I didn’t know anybody.” Although he had not seriously considered returning to El Salvador, because he was undocumented, thinking about that possibility was also unsettling. “I start having night-

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70      Nashville in the New Millennium mares about going . . . back to my country, and . . . I don’t find the things the way I left them. I feel like everything has changed, and I didn’t even notice.” Returning to El Salvador, he feared, would be just like arriving in Nashville: “I feel nobody knows me . . . I feel this fear again but this time . . . in my own country.” These nightmares were followed by the equally paralyzing fear of not being able to return to Nashville. To explain his feelings, Fabián quoted Ricardo Arjona’s song “El Mojado”: “[The immigrant] isn’t from here because his name isn’t in the records, nor is he from there, because he left.”59 “Sometimes,” Fabián reflected, “I wonder if I am going crazy.” These challenges of finding or creating a sense of home or place in Nashville were amplified for many Latino residents by the reality of needing to live, if only briefly, in one of the many apartment complexes along Murfreesboro Road or Harding Place, two sites publicly linked to immigrants, overcrowding, and danger and showing some of the earliest signs of immigrant concentration (see figures 3.4 and 3.5). Flor, for example, a Mexican woman who came to Nashville with her brother in 2004 and first lived in an apartment along Murfreesboro Road, explained, “When we first got there, we didn’t know about it. A friend brought us there so we could get an apartment.” She “didn’t last long there,” however; the area was “ugly” and “full of Hispanics,” and she quickly moved to another part of southeast Nashville. Nicolás, whose words began this section, first lived in his sister’s house in an Antioch neighborhood filled with retired americanos and Latino immigrants buying houses. Then, to save money, he moved into a duplex along Harding Place, which turned out to be filled with Latino residents and “Arabs.” As Nicolás’s residential history shows, Latino immigrants in southeast Nashville often lived both amid americanos and other Latino immigrants and in more ethnically diverse immigrant enclaves that included a number of immigrant and refugee groups, as is the case in Atlanta (Odem 2004; Dameron and Murphy 1997). Although James Chaney (2010) considers southeast Nashville’s concentration of immigrants and immigrant businesses an immigrant enclave that offers Latino immigrants few opportunities for contact with long-term residents, southeast Nashville neighborhoods, at least at the census-tract level, continued to have large white—and in some areas, black—populations throughout the 2000s. As Chaney notes, by the 2000s some southeast Nashville apartment complexes were majority Latino, and many businesses along Murfreesboro and Nolensville Roads were “Hispanicized.” This transition, however, was both residentially and commercially incomplete, and the claim that “the Hispanic presence is the most salient” feature of these areas (Chaney 2010, 26) was hotly contested in the early twenty-first century, especially

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      71  by long-term residents. Instead, many Latino immigrants in southeast Nashville lived side by side with a range of neighbors: elderly white residents, younger white and black families, refugee households from around the world, and other Latino immigrants from across Mexico and much of Latin America. Although nearly all Latino residents with whom we spoke viewed Nashville as a peaceful and calm city, a common description in new destinations (Marrow 2011), the local and national immigration debate in the late 2000s created new, unexpected tensions for them. Some issues, like language barriers between English and Spanish speakers, had been anticipated challenges to living in a foreign country and were present in Nashville since immigrants arrived in the mid-1990s. Latino residents, however, consistently noted changes in immigrant reception in the mid-2000s that surprised them. Around 2005, Nashville became “a case study in the shifting sentiment that immigrant communities have experienced in Southern cities” (Bauer 2009, 45; Winders 2007), and Latino immigrants became a citywide scapegoat for a range of urban ills. Beatriz, for example, came to Nashville from Mexico in 1994 and watched Nashville become a new immigrant destination in the late 1990s. She recalled most vividly, however, the growth of its antiimmigrant sentiment in the mid-2000s. When asked how Nashville had changed since she arrived, she explained that “everything has taken a turn for the worse. Before, I didn’t see news about stuff like this, that focused on minorities. . . . Now we are the minority, and people are bothered by this.” For Latino immigrants in Nashville in the 2000s, this was by far the most salient change. In response to a less “welcoming” city (Americas Society/Council of the Americas 2009), many Latino immigrants reconfigured their daily geographies, habits, and broader understandings of where they belonged in Nashville, as they did elsewhere in the mid-2000s (Nguyen and Gill 2010).60 As Beatriz explained, “Lately, I have heard [Latino] people comment that before, they used to go to the parks and see all types of people— black and white. They used to say [to Latinos], ‘Look! What pretty children!’ However, this doesn’t happen anymore. They will look at them and walk right by.” From Latino residents who tried to be quiet in their neighborhoods to a tejano man who carried his birth certificate in his back pocket in case he was pulled over, from Latino workers who took back roads to avoid being pulled over without a driver’s license to young Latino men who avoided public spaces to avoid detection by police, the daily geographies of Latino immigrants, especially the undocumented, were under increasing surveillance and becoming increasingly restricted in the late 2000s in Nashville (Chaney 2010), as in other new destinations

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72      Nashville in the New Millennium (Deeb-Sossa and Mendez 2008). As one Latina service provider explained, “The fear I see in the families . . . [is] getting so bad that they don’t even want to go outside.” Sofia, one of the few documented immigrants interviewed for this study, contrasted her own confidence with that of her undocumented friends. “Whenever I drive, I don’t drive with fear, as my girlfriend or my other friends feel. It is more difficult for them to visit new places. I can go outside, and I can go to different places without any fear.” These observations from Latino immigrants in Nashville correlate with overall changes in the city’s political climate in the mid-2000s. By 2005 Nashville was home to “de-magnetize Tennessee” rallies by people opposed to unauthorized immigration. In 2006, after a lengthy fight, Tennessee suspended legal options for undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses. In April 2007, Davidson County launched its 287(g) program, which, following a trend across new destinations in the South (Coleman 2009), turned local police officers into immigration officials (Winders 2007; Armenta 2012). In its first year, when fieldwork for this study was conducted, nearly 3,000 undocumented residents were processed under the 287(g) program, with most deported or voluntarily returned to their home countries.61 This figure was the highest of any participating county east of Arizona.62 By the fall of 2010, 7,887 immigrants in Davidson County had been flagged, and 5,338 had been deported.63 A 2011 report by the Migration Policy Institute noted that Davidson County had one of the nation’s highest rates of deporting undocumented traffic offenders rather than violent criminals: almost 80 percent of undocumented residents detained from October 2009 to August 2010 were picked up for misdemeanors or traffic violations.64 In the late 2000s, Latino immigrants learned in no uncertain terms the limits of Southern hospitality in a city like Nashville and responded accordingly in how they saw Nashville and negotiated its urban spaces.65 From the young Nicaraguan man who noted the presence of more racist groups since he arrived in 2001 to the Mexican woman who felt that she lost her job because of the 2006 immigrant rights demonstrations, Latino residents in the late 2000s mapped a landscape of exclusion, restricted mobility, and constricted opportunities in the Music City. A pastor who worked closely with a Latino congregation noted in the summer of 2006 “more of an alertness” among immigrants about impending laws and ordinances. Pablo, a Mexican man whose work took him across Nashville, had been in the Music City since 2001. In 2007, he noted that people were “more at unease than they used to be around me.” Even immigrants who arrived more recently marked a change. Sofía, who came to Nashville in 2004, explained that her undocumented friends “don’t even go to the store because American people look at them funny. The police are harder with a Mexican than with an American.”66

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      73  Despite these changes in immigrant reception and despite the lack of welcome that some felt, many Latino immigrants continued to try to maintain a place and a home in Nashville in the 2000s, as they did across the country (Wampler et al. 2009). Octavia, for example, had come to Nashville from Mexico in 2001 to escape a bad family situation and brought her young son across the border a year later. For Octavia, Nashville felt like home, despite the fact that, lacking legal documents, she was constantly subject to detention and deportation. I feel this place is like home. Sometimes, when I walk on the street, I say, “This is such a beautiful place. I wish we could just always walk around this calmly.” You know, sometimes, you hear rumors about raids and all that. It makes you fearful to go outside. . . . [But] you are free to do more things here than in Mexico. . . . Everything is effortless here. Whenever we walk on the street, I would say to my husband, “If we were just able to feel this free always, I would spend my whole life here.” But no, we can’t.

Along similar lines, Arturo, a Mexican immigrant, came to Nashville in 2006 after ten years in Brooklyn to find a peaceful place for his family. Peace, however, was elusive: “Honestly, we are tired. . . . It is like you feel . . . chased . . . mostly because of our situation, but we have to keep going forward . . . and work hard, saying, ‘Keep going, keep going.’” Despite feeling “chased” and excluded in Nashville, Arturo intended to stay to provide a better future for his three daughters. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “we are not welcome in some places, but there is nothing we can do but keep going and keep fighting.”

Conclusion Arturo was not the only Latino immigrant who did not feel welcome in Nashville but still planned to stay, nor was he the only resident who felt out of place in southeast Nashville but intended to make a home there. In the 2000s, southeast Nashville neighborhoods were caught between becoming twenty-first-century immigrant enclaves and remaining midtwentieth-century suburban neighborhoods. This in-between position forced both Latino immigrants and long-term residents to seek a new place within and in relation to these neighborhoods, which oscillated between two histories, two demographic trends, and multiple meanings of home and place. Tovi Fenster (2005, 218) argues that the city, not the state, has become “the relevant scale for discussion of the different formations of belonging in everyday life” (see also Secor 2004). In Nashville, where immigrant settlement was a localized phenomenon but the politics of immigration were not, the neighborhood was the space, and the scale, in

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74      Nashville in the New Millennium which the two were linked and in which social belonging amid the city’s overall transformation was negotiated and sought by both long-term residents and new immigrants. Some of the complexities of these negotiations can be seen in the juxtaposition of two passages from an interview with a young Salvadoran couple. Débora came to Nashville in 2003 to pursue the American dream and see the place where her father had lived and worked since 1980. Jaime came a year later, mainly to work. Meeting in Nashville, they married and moved into an apartment in Antioch. Undocumented parents of a young child born in Nashville, they explained how their current neighborhood compared to the places they had lived in El Salvador. You feel like you belong there [in El Salvador]. You feel like you are a member of a big family. It is not the same here. Here, we have people from different races, different countries, and different cultures. That makes relationships very difficult. —Débora You feel as if you have more freedom in your own country. You can walk freely there . . . in your country, your area, your neighborhood. You feel free to go out. Here, you feel a little like, you always have this feeling of—I don’t know how to explain it. It is as if you don’t feel like you are free. —Jaime

The link between these statements captures the difficulties of immigrant belonging in Nashville. For Débora, the Music City’s multicultural mix made relationships difficult in comparison to El Salvador, where she felt a sense of belonging more easily. Contrasting family in El Salvador with diversity in Nashville, she found it “very difficult” to form relationships or develop a sense of place in the latter environment. For Jaime, the constricted social and spatial mobility that he and other undocumented immigrants faced in Nashville limited where he went and where he felt welcome. “Free” in El Salvador yet not free in Nashville, Jaime found Nashville a hard place in which to feel at ease. In combination, Jaime and Débora felt placeless because of Nashville’s diversity and place-bound because of their legal status, unmoored because they were surrounded by different races, nationalities, and cultures and deeply circumscribed because in the Music City they lived in fear of deportation. Lise Nelson and Nancy Hiemstra (2008, 322) ask, “How can scholars assess the changing nature of belonging and place within immigrantreceiving communities?” One way, this book suggests, is through exam-

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Two Neighborhoods, Two Histories, Two Geographies      75  ining how immigrants and long-term residents interpret, make sense of, and respond to changing neighborhoods and social dynamics. As this chapter has shown, however, assessing the nature of belonging and place in new destinations like Nashville requires close examination of “the ways in which historical memory informed day-to-day life” (Brundage 2009, 754), especially for long-term residents in their responses to immigrant settlement. At the same time, it requires close attention to the complicated ways in which immigrants themselves responded to their place in the urban social fabric through their experiences in its neighborhoods. Making sense of these related dynamics in Nashville starts with understanding two neighborhoods with different histories, two groups with different demographic trends, and two sets of geographies that led into and out of southeast Nashville. As the next two chapters suggest, teachers in southeast Nashville faced these dual frameworks of local history and new diversity perhaps most intensely as they met an increasingly diverse student body at their classroom doors and taught through Nashville’s ethnic and racial transformations in the new millennium.

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Chapter 4  | Diversity at the Door: Understanding Demographic Change in the Classroom

In an interview squeezed into the planning period of Leslie, a young African American teacher at Morgan Elementary in southeast Nashville, conversation turned to her increasingly diverse classroom. A seasoned teacher and resident of Antioch, Leslie had lived and worked through the social and demographic changes at the center of this book. In her reflections on her awareness of a growing immigrant population around her neighborhood but not in it, on the “horror” stories she heard about teaching new immigrant students, and on the challenges of explaining the civil rights movement in 1950s Memphis to Latino students who wondered, “Where were the Hispanics?” she discussed the impact of Nashville’s new levels of ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity in the 2000s on her classroom. “I see a fourth-grader trying to learn, and I see their parents wanting them to get their best education that they can get. . . . I don’t see them being Hispanic. I don’t see the negativity that comes across from television.” Seeing but not seeing difference, marking but removing a boundary between school and community, child and parent, and acknowledging but rejecting local and national immigration politics within her classroom, Leslie grappled with the questions facing teachers across Nashville and other new immigrant destinations in the 2000s. How should teachers make sense of and adjust to racial and ethnic changes in the composition of their student bodies? How should they understand the growing differences between their own racial and ethnic identities, life experiences, and cultural frameworks and those of their students?1 How should, and how did, teachers see and respond to these differences? In the new millennium, Nashville teachers became, as Leslie put it, “more aware” of cultural differences among their students, as well as between students and them-

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Diversity at the Door      77  selves. As they encountered the youngest cohort of Nashville’s immigrant population in their classrooms, teachers also encountered steep learning curves in determining how to relate to students from diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. Amid all these differences in the classrooms of the 2000s, however, “I still got to teach math,” Leslie stressed. “I still have to teach reading. I still have to get these little kids ready for fifth grade.” As she quipped, “You can’t leave it [diversity] at the door, [but] you can’t let it encompass” everything.2 How Nashville teachers understood and described a diversity that could not be ignored but also could not be allowed to take over the classroom is the focus of this chapter. Drawing on ethnographic work in two schools in southeast Nashville, it highlights what many teachers attempted to push aside, if not downplay altogether—the racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity embodied in their students and enmeshed in their students’ neighborhoods. The chapter argues, in conjunction with chapter 5, that in the context of immigrant settlement in Nashville in the 2000s, “diversity” became the social and pedagogical norm for many southeast Nashville schools yet at the same time was consistently overlooked by teachers trying to treat students marked as “different” the same. Constituting both what was most obvious to teachers and what they went to great lengths not to see, diversity in the classroom came to define these schools for teachers—as well as for a broader public—even as it went unremarked, but not unmarked, in the school’s day-to-day operations. This chapter develops part of that argument by examining how teachers made sense of and described diversity in their classrooms in the 2000s. I begin by briefly describing the history of Metro Nashville Public Schools, both to situate the schools in this study historically and to sketch the links between the schools and the neighborhoods, past and present, addressed in subsequent chapters. This historical background is central to understanding how Nashville teachers understood diversity in their schools, since they often did so through the lens of their previous teaching experiences. Building on this historical discussion, the chapter then examines teachers’ descriptions of demographic changes in their classrooms. Displaying in concentrated form the racial and ethnic changes associated with immigrant settlement in Nashville in the 2000s, the southeast Nashville classroom became a prime space for sorting out what those wider racial and ethnic changes associated with immigrant settlement meant for understandings of race and social belonging, both in the school and in the city. As the chapter suggests, teachers in southeast Nashville talked about the racial and ethnic transformations seen in their classrooms by not talking about race. Through labels grounded in language and in place, teach-

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78      Nashville in the New Millennium ers marked racial and ethnic differences among their students and racial and ethnic changes in their schools’ composition, without mentioning race itself. As the 2000s progressed, however, and more and more U.S.-born children of immigrants were enrolled in southeast Nashville schools, these de-raced labels became increasingly inaccurate. In the process, teachers themselves became unsure about their schools’ approach to diversity in the classroom and its impact on the wider goal of educating the next generation.

Teaching Change in Nashville One of the challenges of thinking through the impacts of immigrant settlement in new destinations like Nashville is determining how this new moment resonates with key historical events in these locales and is transformed by them (Winders and Smith 2010). Although a few works highlight preexisting class and racial cleavages that have influenced immigrant settlement in new destinations (for example, Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2005; McConnell and Miraftab 2009), historical contextualization of immigration to new destinations remains rare. Historical context matters in schools, however, not only because contemporary schools continue to be affected by past decisions about school districting, construction, and policies but also because many teachers have personal experience with different models of how schools are run, how students are distributed across them, and how schools and neighborhoods are connected. In Nashville, how teachers understood new levels of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in their classrooms in the 2000s was inextricably bound up with how they understood their classrooms in the past. As in many U.S. cities (Hartigan 1999), the story of Nashville public schools is a story of race and space, of how Nashville neighborhoods became racially segregated and how federal legislation and local maneuvers worked both with and against that segregated racial geography. After Nashville’s first public schools opened in 1855, they would be racially segregated for one hundred years (Alexander 2001; Lovett 2005).3 In 1954, however, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, made segregated public schools in the United States unconstitutional (Alexander 2001). Within hours of this decision, Nashville’s struggles to desegregate its public schools began, and in 1955 a lawsuit against the city’s schools was filed by a group of black leaders (Egerton 2009; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1977). In 1956 a federal court ordered the Nashville Board of Education to submit a desegregation plan (Woodward 1978), localizing the process but federalizing its supervision (Hood 1985). In response, Nashville initiated nominal efforts to desegre-

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Diversity at the Door      79  gate its public schools in September 1957 (Alexander 2001) through what became known as “the Nashville way” of integrating one grade each year (Doyle 1985, 223). Intended to slow white flight from public schools (Woodward 1978), this approach became a model for other Southern school systems interested in dragging their feet on desegregation (Egerton 2009).4 The Nashville way offered a “middle path” in the struggle to end Jim Crow and made the city “a testing ground for the civil rights movement” more broadly (Doyle 1985, 222). The first step in that struggle was the effort to desegregate public schools.5 When desegregation began in 1957, Nashville had four public school systems (Egerton 2009). In the city itself, approximately 10,000 black and 20,000 white students attended racially segregated public schools in two systems. Beyond the city limits, 30,000 students, 90 percent of whom were white, attended segregated county public schools that were also split into two systems. Public schools in the county faced their own lawsuit in 1960 and were ordered to desegregate in 1961 (Hood 1985; Egerton 2009). Anticipating a merger with city schools as part of the new city-county Metro government created in 1962, county schools desegregated the first four grades at once in 1961 to catch up with the desegregation that began in city schools in 1957 (Hood 1985; Lovett 2005). In 1962 Nashville public schools were merged with Davidson County public schools to create Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) (Alexander 2001). Schools in this consolidated system were in theory desegregated by the time classes began in 1966 (Woodward 1978); and on paper, the district was fully integrated by 1970 (Doyle 1985). Although school officials hoped a year-byyear desegregation plan would stem white flight (Woodward 1978), between 1955 and 1971 more than 20,000 white students left the district (Alexander 2001). In 1968, as Nashville’s incremental desegregation was nearing completion, the federal courts introduced the idea of a unitary school district as the goal of desegregation across the United States (Alexander 2001). A 1969 study revealed, however, that Nashville schools remained deeply segregated: more than 80 percent of white students in the county attended schools that were 90 to 100 percent white (Woodward 1978, 46). This continuing segregation led the courts to determine that Nashville school policies “did not facilitate a rapid conversion from a dual to a unitary school system” (Woodward 1978, 47); thus, the school system needed a federally designated desegregation plan “to redress violations of the constitutional rights of minority students” (Alexander 2001, 59). In 1971, U.S. District Judge L. Clure Morton ordered large-scale busing of students in Nashville to create racial balance in its public schools. With a map of Davidson County that covered a gymnasium floor, Metro school officials drew the

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80      Nashville in the New Millennium city’s racial geography house by house, block by block, creating new districts and busing routes to work against the city’s segregated landscape (Woodward 1978). As Nashville began busing elementary students across the city in 1971, the city sought a compromise between the need for racial balance in public schools and the financial and political costs of desegregation for the city and its leaders (Hood 1985). “One of the first school systems to have a busing plan” (Woodward 1978, 11), Nashville soon was busing more than 22,000 elementary students to 74 schools across the city and rezoning nearly two-thirds of its 141 schools (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1977). Structurally, Nashville’s busing plan descended from a 1971 Supreme Court decision in Charlotte, North Carolina, that paired black and white schools (Woodward 1978). Thus, black schools just outside inner-city Nashville were paired with white schools in the ring of postwar suburbs, replicating patterns in other U.S. cities (Lassiter and Kruse 2009; Veninga 2009) and leaving schools in the innermost parts of Nashville and the outermost parts of Davidson County exempt from busing (Hood 1985), at least initially. However, to prevent or at least stem white flight to areas that were not part of the original busing plan, no new school construction was allowed at the rural edge of Davidson County (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1977). To allay the concerns of white parents and “keep as many small white children as possible in the suburbs” (Woodward 1978, 69), most suburban schools affected by busing remained kindergarten through fourth grade, and most black schools in the busing plan became fifth- and sixth-grade schools. Under this model, first- to fourth-grade African American children were bused into Nashville’s postwar suburbs and spread across a cluster of previously all-white schools (Woodward 1978), creating schools that were 15 to 35 percent black (Lovett 2005, 95). Older white children from these suburban neighborhoods were then bused to downtown schools that functioned as racially mixed fifth- and sixth-grade centers. From elementary to high school, children attended multiple schools in a complicated map of school clusters and varying attendance patterns, with many experiencing long bus rides each day. In 1971, the first year of busing, school attendance in MNPS dropped by more than 7,000 as white parents transferred their children out of public schools and into newly established private academies across middle Tennessee, continuing a trend of white flight initially precipitated by desegregation itself (Woodward 1978; Alexander 2001).6 White flight, however, also followed the busing plan: white students were withdrawn from public schools after fourth grade, when they would be sent to historically black schools downtown and away from “neighborhood” schools (Woodward 1978). Most relevant for this study, many of the predominantly white neighborhoods affected by busing were the same neighborhoods where immi-

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Diversity at the Door      81  grants settled at the turn of the twenty-first century. Nashville’s immigrant population, thus, grew in neighborhoods where the memory of busing and the “loss” of neighborhood schools in the 1970s were entangled with the emerging consensus among long-term residents that these neighborhoods were becoming “Little Mexico.” Into the 1980s, schools on Nashville’s rural edge, especially in Antioch, remained exempt from busing (Alexander 2001), leading many white residents to flee “to the far ends of Davidson County” to avoid busing altogether (Lovett 2005, 96). White families also left the county entirely, a trend that by the 1980s had dropped MNPS enrollment to 1950s levels (Egerton 2009). In response, the courts ordered a new plan in 1982 “to integrate these predominantly all-White suburban schools” at the edge of Davidson County (Alexander 2001, 7) and to move MNPS closer to the required unitary district status. With empty seats in Nashville’s inner city, overcrowded portables in its distant suburbs (Lovett 2005), and new findings that black children were disproportionately affected by busing (Hood 1985; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1977), MNPS was forbidden to build or open new schools until racial balance was achieved. As discussed in chapter 3, this ruling hit Antioch in southeast Nashville especially hard. Until the neighborhoods that fed Antioch High School reached a minimum of 18 percent black (Lovett 2005), the school could not open. In response, white Antioch residents united through local organizations to recruit black families to the area, meeting the quota to allow school construction in 1984 (Lovett 2005) and beginning the racial diversification that soon defined Antioch. The federally mandated decision to bus students in Nashville produced a range of reactions. An early study of Nashville’s busing politics (Woodward 1978, 73) suggested that a primary source of anxiety of white parents was not racial mixing but the loss of “neighborhood solidarity” that busing precipitated. Suburban resistance, from this perspective, was “not so much anti-black as . . . pro-community” (86) and grounded in a defense of neighborhood as community and in children’s role in maintaining it. For white parents, it was argued, resistance to busing was driven by both “provincial loyalty . . . for their [white, suburban] community” (119) and a lack of knowledge about the majority-black areas to which their children were being bused, an argument also made in other cities that bused students (Veninga 2009). In David Woodward’s (1978, 167) estimate, “white parents did not mind contact with blacks as long as the relationship was in the familiar suburban environs controlled by local residents.”7 Integrated schooling, it seemed, was acceptable so long as it remained in the suburbs and on familiar socio-spatial turf for white parents. Other scholars, however, see white opposition to busing as a defense of

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82      Nashville in the New Millennium white privilege and ground it in the wider politics of postwar suburbanization in the United States. In a discussion of the cultural politics of the 1980s, for example, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994, 127) characterize resistance to busing as reaction to a perceived “assault on ‘the community’ and ‘the family,’” both of which were implicitly racialized as white and both of which were wrapped up in Nashville’s own response to busing. For Matthew Lassiter and Kevin Kruse (2009, 693), white Southern suburbs were “pivotal sites for the national battles over court-ordered busing” as well as the leading edges of the convergence of Southern with Northern or national trends vis-à-vis race, urban space, and civil rights. Framing white flight as “the most successful form of resistance to the civil rights revolution” (696), Lassiter and Kruse argue that suburbanization in the South, as much as long-standing racial conflict in the region, drove the racial backlash seen there, and eventually across the country, from the 1970s onward, including the busing backlash. They also suggest that the impact of busing was complicated by the fact that suburbanization had itself expanded the political distance between white suburbanites and black urban residents in the South and elsewhere. Writing alone, Kruse (2005) frames white responses to school desegregation in the South as part of a longer, white middle-class abandonment of urban spaces altogether, especially public spaces and institutions like schools, through the privatization of space in the suburbs. Kruse, thus, locates the origins of white resistance to busing not only in a reluctance to enter or become familiar with black neighborhoods and institutions, as did Woodward (1978), but also in the urban politics of the 1950s and the confluence of new federal policies, transportation changes, and racial struggles that laid the groundwork for American suburbanization, even in the South. Whatever its interpretation, busing became an exceptionally divisive issue in Nashville (Alexander 2001), speeding the expansion of private schools and Christian academies, intensifying suburbanization, and spurring white population growth in adjacent counties (Lovett 2005). By the late 1990s, however, Nashville, like other cities, was eager to end busing. Nashville’s civic leaders, with an eye on new professional sports teams and with office and commercial space occupied by an expanding international business community, began to suspect that busing, like segregation before it, was bad for business and especially for attracting corporate investment (Lovett 2005). Nashville, therefore, sought unitary status in 1994 in order to lift federal intervention and officially end busing (Alexander 2001). Around the same time, the federal courts reversed their own position on school desegregation and moved toward local, not federal, control (Alexander 2001). The stage was thus set in the late 1990s to rework the relationship between Nashville schools and neighborhoods as busing ended. In the process, the

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Diversity at the Door      83  youngest cohort of Nashville’s immigrant population suddenly became visible to the city in a new way. Even with a new federal proclivity for local control, the Metro Nashville Board of Education still needed the appearance of community consensus on the decision to end busing and, therefore, sought support from the black families who had brought the initial desegregation lawsuit in 1955 (Alexander 2001). Support from African American community leaders was begrudging, however; the long struggle with school desegregation in the Music City had not been successfully resolved almost forty years down the road. The perennial conflict over integrating schools had worn down black advocates, who were “just tired of fighting,” according to many accounts (Alexander 2001, 104). The initial plaintiffs in the desegregation lawsuit eventually agreed to support the city’s effort to end busing, and in 1998 MNPS was freed from the desegregation order that began busing. Capping a three-decade fight, the ruling enabled local officials to draw attendance lines and all but ended busing in Davidson County.8 Although the remnant of busing in north Nashville would be drawn into the politics of southeast Nashville’s growth in the late 2000s, bringing Nashville’s past efforts to create racial equality and its present effort to address diversity face to face, the late 1990s largely closed the chapter on busing in the Music City. The end to busing in 1998 had consequences for MNPS’s subsequent handling of immigrant students. When the school board mapped new zones for Nashville schools after busing, for example, it predicted that white students who had entered private schools to avoid busing would return to public schools when it ended (Alexander 2001). Nashville’s mayor, however, believing that few white students would return, did not support school additions or expansions to accommodate the school board’s estimated post-busing returns (Alexander 2001). The mayor, it turned out, was right. What both he and the school board failed to anticipate, however, was the influx of Latino families into southeast Nashville neighborhoods at nearly the same time that busing ended. In part because early Latino residents in the city were initially seen as workers, not residents (Winders 2012a), and in part because the neighborhoods where Latino immigrants settled had limited visibility elsewhere in the city, the possibility of a growing immigrant student population in Metro schools did not factor into school decisions. Ironically, the Latino workers so visibly employed in the urban development projects that were key justifications for ending busing were largely invisible to Nashville schools until their children arrived at the classroom door. As Nashville schools returned to being “neighborhood” schools at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new group of “neighborhood” students was going to school.

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84      Nashville in the New Millennium As the dust settled from the end of busing in Nashville, local schools experienced another substantial transformation—the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The politics and impacts of NCLB—particularly its mandate to disaggregate student performance by ethnicity, socioeconomic standing, gender, and other categories (Mitchell 2003)—have generated an immense amount of academic and policy discussion (for example, ­Valenzuela, Prieto, and Hamilton 2007; Fine et al. 2007). My own study did not consider curriculum development, student performance, or other standard elements of education research and, thus, did not directly address NCLB. Nonetheless, NCLB’s mission of holding schools accountable for the performance of children with limited English proficiency (Capps et al. 2005) periodically brought this study and “the most sweeping federal-based reform since the 1950s” (Mitchell 2003, 398) face to face. Metro Nashville Public Schools, for example, fell under NCLB in 2002, just as southeast Nashville’s demographics were changing and schools were adjusting to being neighborhood schools again. With Tennessee’s testing threshold set for NCLB standards at forty-five students per subgroup, some schools in southeast Nashville with large immigrant cohorts had to report the scores of Hispanic students as soon as NCLB went into effect.9 With No Child Left Behind also coming into effect a year before MNPS reworked its own structure for educating English-language learners (ELL), it was a politically and pedagogically tumultuous time for Nashville schools. Pedro Garcia, the district superintendent, resigned in January 2008, and within a few months state agents assumed control of MNPS for failing to meet state standards and annual yearly progress under NCLB for four years running.10 In all these ways, NCLB increased the pressure on teachers as they faced changing classrooms and changing mandates in the late 2000s. These structural and pedagogical changes in the 2000s took place amid equally rapid demographic change among Nashville’s youngest residents. From 1990 to 2000, Tennessee ranked tenth nationwide in increases in students with limited English proficiency, prekindergarten to fifth grade (Capps et al. 2005, 20), with most of this statewide growth concentrated in Nashville, especially southeast Nashville. Between the end of busing in Nashville in 1998 and the start of NCLB in 2002, the population of English as a second language (ESL) students in MNPS nearly doubled.11 By 2009 almost 7,000 students in the district were ELL,12 and by early 2011 students whose first language was not English constituted 22 percent of the overall student population.13 Across the 2000s, most ELL students were Latino, although the city’s refugee communities continued to contribute smaller numbers of students who themselves or whose parents came from an ever-changing list of global hot spots (Winders 2006a).

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Diversity at the Door      85  Across the district from 1996 to 2006, the number of Latino students jumped by 1,260 percent, reaching almost 7,000 and generating six majority-Hispanic schools across Nashville.14 By late 2010, nearly 17 percent of Metro students as a whole were Hispanic.15 Amid this racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversification of Nashville’s student population, however, overall district enrollment continued to drop. By 2005, MNPS had 23,000 fewer students than it did in 1969, just before busing began, and from the late 1960s to the late 2000s, MNPS sustained a net loss of over 50,000 white students (Egerton 2009). In southeast Nashville, these two demographic trends of a net loss of white students and rapid growth of first- and second-generation immigrant children profoundly changed local schools, and teachers struggled to understand the contours of their new classrooms and the changes that produced them. It is important to note that MNPS’s handling of immigrant students in the 2000s had roots in its response to Nashville’s refugee populations. In 1977, when Southeast Asian refugees in Nashville were starting families and sending children to local schools, MNPS began a short-lived bilingual education program in which all students in the selected schools were either taught in two languages or taught two languages (Lydon 1988).16 Moving quickly from a bilingual to an ESL model in which students with low English skills received special English classes throughout the day, MNPS initially moved ESL teachers from school to school across the district, since the number of ESL students was relatively low. In 1979, however, MNPS established ESL clusters in southeast Nashville schools, acknowledging the geographic concentration of Southeast Asian refugees in this part of the city and creating an institutional pattern that would linger throughout the 2000s. In schools designated as ESL clusters, students with low English proficiency were brought from adjacent schools and taught together, rather than dispersing small groups of ESL students across schools in the district. By the mid-1990s, demand for ESL classes in Nashville was increasing, as the city’s internationalization continued. Between 1997 and 1998, Metro schools saw a 40 percent increase in ESL classes and enrolled more than 2,500 ESL students across thirty-four schools.17 Very soon, demand for ESL teachers outpaced supply in Nashville, and with no aid from federal or state governments, schools were struggling to find appropriately trained teachers.18 By 2000, concerns had grown over shortages of funding and of ESL teachers as the number of expected ESL students continued to rise and ESL funding continued to be cut.19 In 2003, as NCLB got under way and ESL populations in Nashville schools continued to grow, MNPS shifted from describing students with low English proficiency as ESL students to labeling them ELL students. The shift to ELL was largely semantic, although it was accomp-

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86      Nashville in the New Millennium anied by a change to self-contained ELL classrooms in elementary schools. Through this self-contained model, ELL and “regular” students were now taught in separate classrooms and through separate curricula. Now designated as ELL clusters because of their many ELL students, some schools, especially those in southeast Nashville, received additional ELL-trained teachers. Nashville middle and high schools, however, took a different approach to ELL education, in part because there were fewer ELL students in the upper grades in the early 2000s: they continued to move ELL students throughout the school day between “language” (or “sheltered”) classrooms, where they received intense English-language training through curricula designed specifically for ELL students, and “regular” classrooms where they were “mainstreamed” with English-proficient students. These rapid changes across the 2000s in how MNPS educated ESL/ELL students provided the institutional context within which teachers came to understand the new and rapidly changing ethnic, racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity among their students. The process and politics of teachers’ adjustment to their newly diverse classrooms in the 2000s were surprisingly mild, particularly in comparison to the politics of immigrant settlement in Nashville neighborhoods. Despite the rapid and dramatic changes teachers had observed, conversations with them about ethnic and racial transitions in their schools did not generate jarring discussions of immigration’s effects on their daily lives. Instead, interviews with teachers focused as much on school politics and leadership changes as on the changing racial and ethnic composition of their students. When the interviews were over, conversation quickly turned to other themes—perceived and actual school violence, actual or desired institutional support, parents and students. In interviews, teachers pulled conversation toward their concerns about current or past principals, their general frustrations over growing demands on their time, and the tightening regulation of their teaching practices. Some interviewees, particularly school leaders, framed diversity as “more of a central office issue,” in the words of one assistant principal. From this perspective, the issue of diversity was about test scores, not the everyday lives of students. More broadly, for most teachers, growing racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in their classrooms was often “just one more thing that has to be dealt with” in an ever-changing environment where they felt pressured to improve student performance, fill in the gaps in what students knew, and do more with less. As teachers coped with the daily vagaries of school schedules, field trips, and parents with or without translators, a growing immigrant presence was just one of many factors they juggled in their work. In this context of competing demands, how important was the new

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Diversity at the Door      87  level of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in southeast Nashville schools in the 2000s? Assessing this question was not straightforward, not least because teachers are not a monolithic group. On the most basic level, teachers in southeast Nashville in the 2000s neither understood nor reacted to school changes and dynamics in uniform ways (Sloan 2007). Translating federal mandates and district policies into individual classroom practices, teachers displayed a range of responses to growing ethnic and racial diversity, not only because it manifested itself differently in their classrooms from year to year, but also because they themselves understood and acted upon school politics and students in different ways. More broadly, schools included a mix of teachers. New teachers in southeast Nashville had experienced only multicultural classrooms and, thus, did not see their current teaching experiences as anything different in the first place. Longer-term teachers had watched their school populations become more ethnically and racially diverse, but also more impoverished, amid new pedagogical approaches and new federal policies. Thus, figuring out which of these many changes, or which combination of them, had had the greatest impact on teachers’ work was complicated for them, as well as for me. Many teachers had taught across schools or across districts in Nashville and elsewhere; others had worked in multiple schools as social workers, psychologists, and translators. Some teachers had changed grades within and between schools, and others had moved in and out of active classroom work altogether. Seasoned teachers experienced in sequence bringing ESL specialists into classrooms, pulling ESL students out of classrooms, separating ESL and regular classrooms, and identifying ELL students as a group whose scores mattered to their schools’ well-being. In response to a growing ELL population, some teachers had returned to school to be certified as ELL teachers and, thus, had experienced both regular and ELL classes. As a result of all of this mobility, most teachers had only a partial sense of the demographic changes in their schools because they themselves had seen or experienced only some of them. For all these reasons, analyzing how teachers taught through demographic change was complicated. To examine how they did so, this study focused on two schools in southeast Nashville, with a handful of interviews at other schools in the area. Morgan Elementary School sat off a main thoroughfare associated with immigration and urban ills in an older part of southeast Nashville. Nestled in a postwar neighborhood that was the gem of the area in the late 1950s, Morgan Elementary was built in the 1960s and initially drew an almost entirely white student body from the prosperous neighborhoods around it. In 1971 the school became a “bused” school that was paired with a downtown majority-black school. From the

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88      Nashville in the New Millennium early 1970s to the late 1990s, Morgan Elementary was racially mixed, except for its all-white kindergarten class. By the 1980s, as white parents continued to pull their children out of MNPS and as this part of southeast Nashville continued its slow demographic and economic decline (see chapter 3), Morgan Elementary’s enrollment dropped low enough to raise concern that it could not support multiple kindergarten teachers. Morgan Elementary continued to languish through the late 1990s, when Nashville’s desegregation order was lifted and the school again became a “neighborhood” school. By that time, Morgan Elementary’s immediate neighborhood had changed. Large garden apartment complexes near the school were now home to a growing Latino and smaller refugee population, as were many of the houses clustered nearby. As the area’s long-term white population continued to die off or relocate, often to Nashville’s outermost suburbs, the local population transitioned from white toward brown, and Morgan Elementary followed suit. At the end of the twentieth century, then, Morgan Elementary had a large Latino student population, smaller groups of African, Arabic, and Vietnamese children, and a few remaining black and white children. Because its ELL population had continued to grow, the school was designated an ELL cluster in the early 2000s. As a result, Morgan Elementary was structurally split into regular and ELL classrooms, teachers, and students. Since elementary students did not change classes throughout the day, ELL and regular students had little contact, and this divide played a key role in how Morgan teachers came to understand their work and students. From the 1980s, when kindergarten teachers went door to door to recruit students, to the 2000s, when portable classrooms around the main school building were bulging with students, Morgan Elementary School encapsulated the changing relationship between race and place, school and neighborhood, in the Music City. Also encapsulating this change was Fellows Middle School, although its approach to an increasingly diverse student body was affected by its shorter history and different relationship with its students’ neighborhoods. Although teaching students from a part of Antioch, Fellows Middle was some distance from where its students lived. The school itself was not very old, and most of its teachers were relatively new. Fellows Middle began as a small school that drew students from across the district but was then redesigned, and its teachers now faced very different classrooms. In the mid-2000s, Fellows Middle, like Morgan Elementary, became an ELL cluster, with a student body of white, black, Latino, Arabic, and other groups of teenagers. As at other middle and high schools, ELL students at Fellows Middle split their day between sheltered and mainstream classes but remained largely separate from regular students, ex-

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Diversity at the Door      89  cept in elective classes like art. Because middle school students ate lunch by grades, even with this split structure there were opportunities for interactions between students in ELL and regular classes, as there was on the bus ride each day. The histories of both schools encompassed a great deal of change: the racial, ethnic, and class composition of their student bodies shifted; teachers moved in and out of each school, as well as within them; and non-English-speaking children became ESL and then ELL children, who were pulled out of mainstream classrooms, pushed into ESL classrooms, and then placed full- or part-time in ELL classrooms. Students in both schools became more impoverished over time, and teachers had to do more with fewer resources for their classrooms. At the same time, a new federal mandate to “leave no child behind” was establishing a new testing regime for all children. In the context of these changes, how did teachers make sense of and “manage cultural diversity in the classroom” (Wainer 2004, 27)?

Describing Diversity Sarah Jewett (2006, 144–45), in an ethnography of a northeastern U.S. high school, asks, “What do racialized constructions look like across school communities? In what contexts and for what purposes are they created, adapted, and employed?” Focused on how different actors in the school understood race, she examined “teachers’ struggles to define and differentiate these unwieldy terms” (154) and their “multiple and even contradictory constructions of race” (158). Addressing similar questions, Mica Pollock (2004) studied how, when, and why teachers and students in a California high school deployed and silenced a language of race to discuss school events, policies, and populations. Highlighting what she calls the “colormuteness,” or “active resistance to describing people as racial” (44), that contoured school discussions, Pollock interrogated “the basic American choice of when and how to describe one another racially” (1). Like many across the social sciences, Pollock, at root, examined “the fundamental American question of when, how, and whether to take race ‘into account’” (4) (see also Hartigan 1999, 2009). In the 2000s, teachers in southeast Nashville also faced this basic question about whether and how to account for race each time they entered their classrooms. Operating within an American discourse dominated by blunt racial categories, especially black and white, but faced with a new local context that seemed to require new categories, Nashville teachers in the new millennium encountered classrooms that reflected racial and eth-

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90      Nashville in the New Millennium nic change, but in ways that defied easy categorization. In these schools with U.S.- and foreign-born Latino, Vietnamese, Kurdish, and African students who sometimes claimed an American, even white, identity and sometimes were placed outside that category by teachers, the gap between “the clarity of racial abstractions and the often confusing contingencies of everyday life” (Hartigan 1999, 108) was wide. In that confusing space, teachers in southeast Nashville confronted the reality that the racial and ethnic categories with which they were familiar no longer fit their students. They also confronted the reality that no local framework was readily available through which they could make sense of what they observed. In response, teachers in southeast Nashville allowed categories of language and place to “proxy for race” (Ladson-Billings 2006, 106) and to fill in the difference between how they understood race as black and white and what they saw in their classrooms. Although these teachers were not alone in avoiding a language of race in the classroom (see Vaught and Castagno 2008), their reasons for doing so differed from what other scholars have suggested, and, as this chapter shows, their response points to the impact of a missing local cultural framework on immigrant incorporation in a new destination like Nashville. In southeast Nashville, talking about racial and ethnic changes in the classroom without talking about race was a way to address the wider challenge of interpreting immigrant settlement without a shared local cultural or historical framework of immigration and its meanings. In general terms, teachers in southeast Nashville operationalized a “de-raced” language (Pollock 2004), both to make sense of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences in their contemporary classrooms and to discuss differences between their current and previous teaching experiences. Relying on categories such as “ELL,” “bused,” “regular,” “projects,” and “neighborhood” to describe students, teachers used language, place, and the school’s institutional structure to organize both the ethnically and racially diverse student body of the present and their schools’ racialized transition to the present. Although teachers in our study were not always consistent in which of these terms were used most frequently to describe current and former students, they were consistent in using this bevy of terms rather than a language of racial or ethnic categories. Unless describing differences within those categories, teachers avoided a language of race to describe diversity in their classrooms (Vaught and Castagno 2008). In the California high school she studied, Pollock (2004, 40) found that “placing ‘racial’ boundaries on Columbus students was an inherently inaccurate exercise” because many students located themselves outside the boundaries of accepted racial and ethnic categories. Working

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Diversity at the Door      91  in schools where many students self-identified, or were identified by others, as multiracial, teachers struggled to assign a racial category to students who occupied multiple slots. In response, Pollock argues, teachers “just asserted bluntly that [student] relations were racially ordered” (53), even when those teachers were not certain what that order looked like. At Morgan Elementary and Fellows Middle, the relationship between students and the available racial and ethnic categories was somewhat different, and it is here that we see a key difference associated with teaching in a new destination. In southeast Nashville, teachers struggled to racially and ethnically describe their students, not because those students occupied multiple racial and ethnic categories, but because, as teachers, they were uncertain about the racial and ethnic categories into which students fit in the first place. Instead, teachers sorted and differentiated students using other markers that seemed more stable in a rapidly changing classroom. Katy, for example, a white thirdgrade ELL teacher at Morgan Elementary, described her classroom from year to year, not through the racial or ethnic categories it reflected, but “by how many languages I have,” using sound to sort out what sight failed to do. The same trend was evident at Fellows Middle. Ellen, an African American fifth-grade teacher, explained that in her classroom “you never know what their nationality is.” She responded by sorting her students in terms of language, placing black and white students who tended to cluster together in the classroom in an “English” group and, with the rest, allowing more obvious linguistic differences to override opaque nationality or racial distinctions. Especially at Morgan Elementary, teachers’ categories for organizing and describing students were reflected in and reproduced by the structure of the school itself. In a mutually reinforcing system, Morgan teachers mapped the school’s pedagogical and spatial design of separate ELL and regular classrooms onto its students. In the era of busing, for example, teachers described the African American children brought to Morgan Elementary as “bused” children and distinguished them from the (white) “neighborhood” children who walked to the school from nearby houses. Bused and neighborhood children not only reached the school in different ways but also often occupied different classrooms through tracking in place at that time. Since parent-teacher meetings were held in Morgan Elementary and in the downtown neighborhoods where the bused children lived, teachers interacted with bused and neighborhood parents in different spaces, reinforcing the sense of difference between the two groups of children and reinforcing their different spatial and social relationships to Morgan Elementary. In the words of one longtime white teacher, Morgan Elementary during the busing era was like “two worlds

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92      Nashville in the New Millennium colliding.”20 Teachers at the school described those two worlds, and the students within them, spatially, not racially, despite the fact that racial difference defined the practice of busing itself. In their language, bused and neighborhood children came to Morgan Elementary, not black and white children. In this distinction between neighborhood and bused children, a placebased identity proxied for a socially based identity grounded in a language of race. “Neighborhood” connoted white children, who were understood to be part of the same social fabric and place as the school, which itself was described as a “neighborhood” school until the advent of busing. “Bused” connoted African American children who were brought into and taken out of the school-neighborhood space each day. Tapping a widely circulating definition of schools as community anchors (Katz 2008), neighborhood children were viewed as belonging to the same social and physical space as the school, whereas bused children were marked as outsiders brought into the school’s (and neighborhood’s) social space. The presence of bused children at Morgan Elementary redefined the school as something other than a neighborhood school. Because the school was now linked to a distant “other” space and because neighborhood children were themselves bused somewhere else for fifth and sixth grades, the school could no longer be the neighborhood’s defining feature. It is, thus, no coincidence that when long-term white residents living near Morgan Elementary explained the changes that their neighborhood experienced through immigrant settlement in the 2000s, their narratives started with the “loss” of their neighborhood school at the advent of busing in the 1970s. Teachers employed the same strategy of describing students by using place to proxy for race to discuss Morgan Elementary’s transition to an ELL cluster in the 2000s. With separate ELL and regular classrooms, teachers, and students, as well as separate Spanish and English parent-teacher meetings, Morgan Elementary’s structure as an ELL cluster in the 2000s mirrored its structure as a bused school in the 1970s.21 As in the era of busing, teachers in the era of immigration used “ELL” and “regular”—terms built into the school’s structure of split classrooms—to describe students at Morgan Elementary. Although on the surface, the distinction between “ELL” and “regular” reflected how classrooms were organized at Morgan Elementary, these place-based categories became shorthand for describing the students in those classrooms, rather than the classrooms themselves. Like the comparison between bused and neighborhood children during the busing era, the comparison between ELL and regular students in the 2000s described social categories of race and ethnicity without re-

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Diversity at the Door      93  sorting to a language of race or ethnicity. In the 2000s, places within the school—ELL and regular classrooms—proxied for race or ethnicity. Equally important, some teachers at Morgan Elementary used the same language of “two worlds colliding” to describe the arrival of Latino students in the early 2000s. The content and geography of that collision, however, were different. Whereas during the era of busing, teachers framed interactions between bused and neighborhood children as a collision of two worlds that they themselves observed and mediated, during the era of immigration, teachers framed the collision of worlds involving ELL students as implicating their own sensibilities and sense of self. In their classrooms, for example, teachers sometimes used a language of collision to describe what was more accurately their own failure to connect their American cultural frames of reference and those of their “foreign” students. Many teachers reflected on the challenges they faced in trying to convey American social and cultural ideas to non-American students and to find common ground in classrooms where little could be taken for granted. Ellen, for example, an African American teacher who had worked with both inner-city black students and suburban white students, found the multicultural mix at Fellows Middle challenging, especially in terms of relating to students. Shared cultural ground between Ellen and her students was elusive, and she was often left wondering, “What do I do?” Struggling to find cultural examples that resonated with all of her students and unsure whether her sense of humor made sense to some of them, Ellen, like other teachers, found the multicultural mix that had become the norm for students a radical departure from her own cultural framework. In southeast Nashville, teachers encountered unexpected “collisions” not only between the worlds of ELL and regular students but also between teachers raised under a racial binary and students living a multicultural reality (for a discussion of a similar difference in New York, see Dickar 2008). To complicate matters even further, in the era of immigration, both ELL and regular students lived in the neighborhood; this fact had important implications for teachers’ understanding of the relationship between school and neighborhood. In the 2000s, the spatial separation between bused and neighborhood children that had enabled teachers to maintain a boundary between them, by linking bused children to a space beyond the neighborhood, failed. Instead, in comparing ELL and regular students in the 2000s, teachers had to come to grips with the fact that the two worlds colliding in their schools both lived in the neighborhood. As Frances, a white, ELL kindergarten teacher at Morgan, explained:

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94      Nashville in the New Millennium

These [ELL] children . . . live in this neighborhood and the bused-in children were not actually a part of this neighborhood. They [bused children] were not taking away anything from the neighborhood people, if you know what I mean, because they went back to their homes way over there. . . . It’s probably not any more accepted, really. . . . They’re [Latino families] here, and they cause crime in this very neighborhood. . . . They’re not sent home.22

As the 2000s progressed and as more and more immigrant families had children in Nashville, the composition of Morgan Elementary changed and the system of sorting its students as either ELL or regular became more complicated. When Morgan Elementary became an ELL cluster in the early 2000s, “ELL” easily, and accurately, had been code for “foreign-born.” Nearly all students in ELL classes at that time, especially in the school’s upper grades, were born outside the United States, and “regular” classrooms contained the remaining white and black American children who lived near the school. By 2007, however, ELL classes at Morgan increasingly included U.S.-born children of immigrants as the second generation grew in Nashville and faced a linguistic isolation that brought them to school with limited English skills (see, for example, Capps et al. 2004, 2005). At the same time, the racial and ethnic composition of Morgan Elementary’s regular classrooms was changing: when children of immigrants began to exit ELL classrooms or come to school with proficient English skills, as was happening across new destinations, Morgan Elementary’s regular classrooms increasingly resembled its ELL classrooms (Cuadros 2006). As the new millennium began, it became difficult to determine what the labels “ELL” and “regular” had come to mean, who belonged in each category, and what they captured about student diversity. Nevertheless, because these categories were built into school structures and because they provided a definite, if imprecise, way to describe students who otherwise challenged local understandings of race and ethnicity, teachers continued to use them. When Morgan Elementary teachers discussed the school’s transformation from an “integrated” school maintained through busing to a multicultural school produced through immigrant settlement, they compared bused and ELL kids but did not always discuss the white neighborhood children, who also changed from the 1970s to the 2000s. Although some teachers contrasted difficult American students with compliant ELL students, more frequently, they used a frame of reference that put current “ELL” students alongside former “projects” or “bused” children. This framing left white neighborhood children unremarked in both time periods. The term “ELL” in the present and “bused” in the past were under-

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Diversity at the Door      95  stood to mark racial, ethnic, and/or cultural differences from a white neighborhood norm, but teachers rarely discussed the white children who embodied that neighborhood norm in their narratives of how their schools or teaching experiences had changed over time. In describing the students in her classroom, for example, Dorothy, a longtime, white, second-grade teacher at Morgan Elementary, problematized the idea that “Latino” meant “Mexican” and stressed that she used her diverse classroom to teach students that “we all have a place in this world.” In her classroom, she had students from El Salvador, Puerto Rico, India, and Yemen, and then she had “just the regular folks,” whose features and behaviors did not merit disaggregation in her narrative. Between deconstructing a homogenous Latino population and drawing on student diversity to teach tolerance, she reinforced an American—presumably white—norm, even as it receded at Morgan. In the context of the dramatic ethnic and racial shifts Morgan Elementary had seen, its “regular” students, while constituting the norm against which Morgan’s new racial and ethnic composition was marked, did not constitute a difference noticeable enough to be described or remarked on. The comparison between ELL and bused students was consistent across teacher interviews, but the contents of this comparison were not. Some teachers expressed a preference for the “more respectful” and “less troublesome” ELL students over former bused students, echoing the sentiments of some service providers and employers in other new destinations who define the place and value of Latino clients and workers against the place and value of African Americans (Winders 2008a; Fink 2009). Others, like Rebecca, a seasoned white regular teacher at Morgan Elementary, described ELL students as “like inner-city kids, they don’t get out.” Still others saw the similarities between the “inner-city” and “ELL” populations as distrust toward educators, a lack of high test scores, and a strong family core. In all such comparisons, however, teachers understood their current classrooms through a recollection of their past classrooms that worked in two ways. First, by comparing past bused and present ELL students, teachers marked racial change by not talking about race. “Bused” and “ELL”—two categories grounded in place-based features of the city and the school, respectively—were clearly racialized terms in Nashville and beyond but were not clearly marked as racial by teachers. Second, teachers used the same comparison to reinforce the sense that both groups were racially and ethnically different from the white neighborhood norm—without talking about white students. By defining “ELL” and “bused” students as the “other” to “neighborhood” students in both eras, teachers marked the former groups as out of place in the school, which was linked to the neighborhood, but did so outside a language of race.

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96      Nashville in the New Millennium Because “neighborhood students,” the category that enabled teachers to compare ELL and bused students and that enabled these categories to make sense in the first place, went unremarked in these discussions, the unspoken racial connotations of all three labels—“bused,” “ELL,” and “neighborhood”—were powerfully communicated. In addition to the distinction between ELL and regular students, several Morgan Elementary teachers further differentiated students—again outside a language of race—by drawing a more finely detailed neighborhood geography and operationalizing even more specific place-based categories. Following a pattern seen in conversations with long-term residents, some teachers distinguished between “apartment” and “neighborhood” students or, as it was phrased at Fellows Middle, the “apartment complex population” and the “home population.” As in other Southern cities (Odem 2004), many Latino families in southeast Nashville lived in apartment complexes along its major highways. For many teachers, these apartment complexes lay outside their mental geographies of the neighborhood’s spatial and social boundaries. As Cynthia, a seasoned kindergarten teacher in a regular classroom at Morgan Elementary, described it, most of her students lived in apartments, but she did have “some in the neighborhood, too, in the houses.” Thus, Cynthia linked belonging to the neighborhood and living in a single-family home (Campbell et al. 2009). When Elaine, a second-grade ELL teacher at Morgan Elementary, explained that playing with “American” children who “live in houses” could expand the social worlds of her ELL students, she mapped “American” onto “houses” and “ELL,” by default, onto “apartments.” Like the comparison between ELL and regular students, however, the distinction between “neighborhood” and “apartment” children could not always, or accurately, account for what teachers observed at Morgan Elementary. Latino children attending Morgan Elementary also lived in the houses near the school, and nearly all students at the school qualified for free or reduced lunch programs. Although “poor people” may have lived in nearby rentals, as Gina, a thirdgrade teacher, put it, apartment versus neighborhood children, like ELL versus regular, left much to be explained about southeast Nashville classrooms, even as teachers continued to use this distinction to describe their students. If teachers at Morgan Elementary struggled to find a language to discuss demographic and racial transitions in their school’s forty-plus years, teachers at Fellows Middle struggled to make sense of similar changes in a much shorter time period. Teachers at the two schools not only taught students at different stages but also experienced the act of teaching in different ways. Whereas many teachers at Morgan Elementary were familiar with where their students lived because they themselves either lived nearby or spent

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Diversity at the Door      97  time there on their daily commute, teachers at Fellows Middle knew little about where their students lived in Antioch. Most of them lived elsewhere in Nashville, and their commutes did not send them through Antioch, which was geographically separate from the school and socially distant from most teachers’ lives. As a result, Fellows teachers knew little about their students’ home lives. Some described their students’ neighborhoods as “suburban” and “very affluent” and their students as “spoiled kids from middle-class families” and “well-to-do homes.” Other teachers felt that Fellows students came from apartment complexes or “projects” and were “low-income,” even if they lacked the typical attitude of “a pretty low socioeconomic population.” Most Fellows teachers admitted, however, that they did not know where their students were from, in either a geographic or a social sense. When I was at Fellows Middle, the school’s racial composition was just under 40 percent black and just over 25 percent white and Hispanic, but most teachers were unclear on those figures as well. Although nearly all teachers agreed that the school included, in the words of Libby, a white language arts teacher, a “big mix of ethnic backgrounds,” what that mix included was up for debate. Some described the school as an equal mix of white, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Asian, erasing entirely the school’s substantial black population. Others, like Gary, a white seventh- and eighth-grade teacher, described Fellows Middle as “about a third Hispanic, about a third black, and it’s about a third everybody else.” Still other teachers morphed the school’s first- and second-generation immigrant students from across Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East into one group by describing the school as equal parts white, black, and “international.”23 Some, like Barbara, a young, white ELL teacher, described Fellows students as Hispanic, Arabic, and African American, while others, like Adam, the school resource officer, identified a generalized multicultural mix, with “the all-American, typical, Caucasian white student” sprinkled in. As these teachers’ perceptions make clear, most were at best unsure of Fellows’s racial mix. With separation between grades and no obvious numerical majority, Fellows Middle provided teachers with few opportunities to observe schoolwide social and racial dynamics, and most teachers were unfamiliar with racialized patterns of interaction across the school. Since students changed classrooms throughout the day, teachers saw the school’s racial composition in sequence across periods and often observed no obvious patterns in their classrooms. Instead, they placed racial sorting and tensions elsewhere in the school as something they knew, or suspected, took place but had not personally observed. Teachers often referred to school dances, for example, when reflecting on what they

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98      Nashville in the New Millennium knew of student social dynamics. At dances teachers could observe a larger group of students without being expected to structure their activities and could see patterns that did not show up in the classroom. For example, Megan, a seasoned African American teacher, saw “three different dances going on entirely: Hispanics, African Americans, and one group of people who just didn’t want to be part of any.” Although Fellows teachers commonly reflected on the racialized patterns among students they assumed were there, most of them also consistently undermined such claims by confessing that they did not keep up with student social dynamics. Whether they saw no clear patterns of racial or ethnic divisions or saw a student body “very divided by race or culture” (as one white resource teacher put it), teachers at Fellows Middle came to no consensus on the place of race among students in their classrooms, just as there was little agreement among them over what the student body looked like racially. Although Fellows Middle teachers relied more directly on racialized labels to describe student composition than did teachers at Morgan Elementary, they also used de-raced labels to racially mark students and describe racial transitions and dynamics in their classrooms. A resource teacher at Fellows, for example, explained that her teaching experience had changed when “those students from Henry Middle” arrived, using “Henry Middle” as a proxy for the racial composition of its students. Other Fellows teachers, following the trend seen at Morgan Elementary, described students as “language” or “ELL” students, leaving students in “regular” classes, an admittedly diverse group at Fellows, un(re)marked. Still others distinguished between those students who racially mixed in social interactions and the “ELL students” who hung together and whose already mixed racial and ethnic composition was not remarked upon. At least part of the avoidance of racialized labels at Fellows Middle, as at Morgan Elementary, resulted from confusion about where students fit in the racial and ethnic categories familiar to teachers. For example, Gloria, Fellows’s guidance counselor, in trying to discuss the color preferences she observed among students, had difficulty placing or even describing a “Hispanic” student who turned out to be Afro-Cuban and U.S.-born. Confounding the conflation of Hispanic, Mexican, and foreign-born at Fellows (if not across Nashville) and problematizing the line between Hispanic and black, this student challenged the school’s racial and ethnic categories, as did another student who, though born in the Dominican Republic, identified as black, not Hispanic. Where did children of Egyptian Coptic Christians fit in the school’s racial categories or on state-issued forms? Should such students be counted, or did they themselves identify, as African? Pauline, an

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Diversity at the Door      99  African American math teacher, wondered if it was even acceptable to “say ‘African American’ about the kids [at Fellows] because most of them are not African American.” As Pollock (2004, 19) found in California, students at Fellows Middle “were both boxed into ‘racial’ categorization, and exploding out of such boxes all the time.” In response, Fellows teachers, like those at Morgan Elementary, largely avoided a language of race to describe their students because it simply left too many students unaccounted for. Southeast Nashville schools, of course, are not alone in avoiding a language of race to describe students, but their motivation for doing so differs from what has been documented in other studies. One factor at play is undoubtedly school policy. Both Morgan Elementary and Fellow Middle Schools followed a common-ground philosophy of not celebrating diversity but rather treating it as part of everyday life in the school. This policy of trying to create “equal footing for everybody,” in the words of one administrator, became, in practice, an avoidance of discussions of difference.24 Teachers largely followed this institutional mandate and did not linger on questions of diversity in their classrooms. While school policy and a school culture of downplaying difference were clearly influential in how teachers talked about their students, these factors alone cannot account for the pattern of de-racialized labels. School policies did not keep teachers from voicing other presumably unmentionable topics, like critiques of school leadership or the breaking of district rules. Moreover, especially at Morgan Elementary, teachers de-raced their descriptions of not only current but also former students from an era that predated any contemporary push not to dwell on racial differences and was a time when the relevant racial categories were much clearer. More substantively, NCLB, as an organizing system for schools, was based almost entirely on acknowledging racial and ethnic differences among students and using those differences to evaluate and rank performance. Thus, even though teachers did not use racial or ethnic labels to describe their students, the use of such labels was not necessarily avoided at these schools, which were undoubtedly influenced by the “national habit of matter-of-factly thinking racially about school achievement” (Pollock 2004, 147) as well as by the national imperative to track racial and ethnic student subgroups through NCLB. For all these reasons, federal or local school policies alone, which themselves sent contradictory messages about the place of race and ethnicity in seeing and managing the classroom, could not account for teachers’ avoidance of race labels to describe what they saw in their classrooms. Another factor is teacher training (Vaught and Castagno 2008). As Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006, 105) notes in a discussion of how U.S. teachers are educated, “culture is randomly and regularly used to explain everything. . . .

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100      Nashville in the New Millennium Whenever [teachers] seem not to be able to explain or identify with students, they point to students’ culture as the culprit.” In this way, she argues, “culture” becomes a code for not-white, not-English-speaking, foreignborn students, leaving “regular,” American students unmarked (Vaught and Castagno 2008). For teachers at both Morgan Elementary and Fellows Middle, culture did sometimes become a way to “explain” nonwhite students, but not, as Ladson-Billings and others suggest, a way to explain their behavior. Instead, in southeast Nashville schools, “culture,” read obliquely and imperfectly through place-based categories and the school structure itself, was grafted onto descriptives like “ELL” and “bused” to account for the changing array of students arriving in the classroom each year and to describe as cultural those differences among students, such as those between ELL and regular students, that were difficult to assess as racial. Moreover, teachers used a notion of “American” culture to reconcile the growing demographic similarity between ELL and regular students as the 2000s progressed and, in particular, to preserve a sense of American identity distinct from the U.S.-born children of immigrants at both schools. These uses of culture in place of a language of race, however, did not stem from teacher training, as Ladson-Billings implies. When I asked teachers, especially younger ones, what their training had prepared them for in the classroom, the primary response was, “Nothing like this,” and none expressed the sense that their training in multicultural educational practices was applicable to their multicultural classroom in southeast Nashville. Moreover, a de-raced language was used not only by teachers trained to see and speak about cultural diversity in the 1990s and 2000s but also by teachers trained as early as the 1960s. When they avoided a language of race by resorting to “culture,” teachers were not simply applying a lesson about multiculturalism they had been taught in their own schooling. It is also important to stress the wider reach of what some have called a “cultural” or “new racism” that uses a language of culture to occlude a discussion of racial inequalities (for example, Harrison 1995; Stoler 1997). In addition to Pollock’s (2004) extensive work on this subject, another scholar documenting the practice is Maryann Dickar (2008, 118), who, in a study of a New York high school, found that “most White teachers interviewed avoided referring to race, preferring to use euphemisms and coded language.” They did so, she argues, in part “because they doubt[ed] their knowledge of the unwritten rules for navigating complex racial terrain” (125) and in part because they hoped to avoid being misconstrued as racist or racially insensitive. What Dickar found in New York may have been at work across Morgan Elementary and Fellows Middle Schools, both of

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Diversity at the Door      101  which had predominantly white teaching staffs and nonwhite student bodies. Aware of the wider racial politics within which they worked and of Nashville’s long and contentious history of segregated school and racial divisions, these teachers may have de-raced their conversations with me to avoid both uncomfortable situations and, in Dickar’s (2008, 128) words, “being held accountable for their observations.” Particularly in the context of the South, a practice of talking about race without talking about race has its own long history that may have been magnified in Nashville schools, where “race” has been such a politically and socially loaded term. While such “race evasive” practices (Dickar 2008, 129) may have emerged from Nashville’s contentious racial school politics or a wider Southern practice of sidestepping direct conversations about race—what one school leader described as “bird-walking” around my questions—teachers talked about racial and ethnic transitions in their classrooms outside a language of race and ethnicity, I argue, primarily because the locally available ways of discussing race and ethnicity in the 2000s simply failed them. When race as a framework for describing students had to account for not only black and white students but also Latino, Vietnamese, Kurdish, Egyptian, Somali, Arabic, and other populations of students that changed from year to year, when “ELL” included both foreign- and U.S.-born children from all of these groups, and when “regular” classrooms included a mix of all of the above, a language of race as a black-white binary and ethnicity as American or foreign fell apart. Whereas the teachers Dickar studied in New York City or whom Pollock worked with in California may have de-raced their language because they were unsure of the unwritten “rules of racial classification” where they worked (Omi and Winant 1994, 60), teachers in southeast Nashville were unsure of that racial classification itself. With no recallable history of immigrant settlement against which their classrooms could be evaluated, teachers lacked a reliable language to describe what they observed through available social categories of race and ethnicity. Nashville teachers did not simply deploy “defensive strategies developed to cope with complex experiences that they cannot fully control or comprehend” politically (Dickar 2008, 129); they avoided a language of race to cope with a complex demographic reality that they could not fully comprehend analytically. Although, as Pollock (2004, 161) suggests, “it gets easier to publicly describe people in racial terms the further one gets from those being described,” for teachers in southeast Nashville, that distance was impossible to find in the 2000s. Sitting face to face with children who confounded how they thought about race and ethnicity, southeast Nashville teachers in the first decade of the new millennium avoided a language of race because it could not describe what they saw.

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102      Nashville in the New Millennium

Conclusion In 2007 a southeast Nashville elementary school celebrated its fifty-­second anniversary. Opening in 1955 as its postwar neighborhood boomed, the school had seen many changes over its life span, from the advent of desegregation to a new building in 1977 to the arrival of a multicultural student body in the 2000s. Southeast Nashville’s state representative, Janis Sontany, herself entered the school in 1955, as part of its first cohort of students. As she noted at the anniversary celebration, at one time some students had come from other neighborhoods, as this school, like Morgan, had been a “bused” school. Now, however, things were different. “It’s gone from a neighborhood school back to a neighborhood school. It’s come full circle,” Sontany explained.25 As this chapter has shown, it was along the path marked by that full circle that southeast Nashville teachers in the 2000s, otherwise lacking a framework for understanding what they saw in their classrooms, found a way to talk about racial and ethnic change without talking about race and ethnicity. Dympna Devine and Mary Kelly (2006, 138), in a discussion of how young children see and understand ethnic and racial differences, call for “increased awareness of cultural diversity without stereotyping and further labeling minority ethnic children as different and outside the norm.” Discovering how to understand diversity without fixed labels was not easy in southeast Nashville schools, where “diversity” was both so different from what teachers knew of race and ethnicity and so rapidly changing. With children of immigrants as the fastest-growing component of the child population across the country (Capps et al. 2004; Passel and Taylor 2010), Nashville schools in the 2000s embodied the generational gap between immense diversity among the youngest segment of the American population and less diversity among the adult population. Across the United States, this demographic difference called into question not only how school curricula were organized and whose experiences they were meant to reflect (Jay 2003) but also how teachers understood their classrooms. As this gap emerged in southeast Nashville in the new millennium, the demographic difference in the ethnic and racial diversity of Nashville’s adult and child population led teachers not to talk about it, especially not through a language of race. Teachers’ efforts to understand and work with a changing student body in southeast Nashville are part of a broader narrative of immigrant settlement, urban transformation, and social belonging across Nashville, and potentially a minor part at that. Morgan Elementary School was all but invisible in the city. Its neighborhood, aside from negative press concerning immigrants, was largely overlooked. Its students headed to un-

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Diversity at the Door      103  derfunded middle and high schools with security issues, low graduation rates, and, following national trends of concentrating language resources on elementary schools (Capps et al. 2005), few opportunities for Englishlanguage training. Fellows Middle School, originally a small, experimental school, was redesigned in a top-down decision that teachers resented. Both teachers and students at Fellows treated it as a nine-to-five job and looked forward to leaving, for the day or for good. In Nashville the model of ELL education changed from elementary to middle to high schools, so the strategies for labeling students changed at each stage.26 Even the approaches to educating ELL students in MNPS changed after 2007.27 Why, then, do schools like Morgan Elementary and Fellows Middle matter in the wider saga of immigrant settlement and community change in new destinations? There are at least two reasons why these schools are key to understanding the politics of immigrant incorporation in new destinations. First, the labels used to describe and organize students in schools have material consequences in both the actions they produce and the mechanisms they capture (Crosnoe et al. 2007). On a basic level, ELL and regular students experienced the process of being schooled in southeast Nashville schools differently because they were separated within them. For example, Yvonne, a school psychologist, stressed that she never tested “second-culture” or ELL children for giftedness, only for problems. In her words, “You never get called to look at a gifted child who’s coming from a second culture. . . . They get coded as slow . . . [on] a track that kind of relegates them to the bottom echelon of wherever they’re going.” Teachers at both schools were often ambivalent about separating children by language ability, even as they used that separation to make sense of student diversity. Concerned that they were “no longer really teaching second grade” and that ELL classes did not just cover things differently but also more slowly, teachers, especially at Fellows Middle, wondered about the educational and social impacts of separating students throughout the day.28 Echoing the arguments of education scholars that schools need “spaces for students to learn about each other” (Stoughton and Sivertson 2005, 290), a Fellows administrator asked, “When are they ever going to intermingle and meet people . . . because some of them are tracked all day long together?” Thus, as teachers used these categories and worked in schools structured by them, they wondered about their consequences and the possibility, as Katy, a white ELL teacher at Morgan, put it, that some children were “just always going to be in ELL.” In the 2000s, there was some evidence supporting this fear, even for U.S.-born ELL students (Capps et al. 2005). In 2006, 60 percent of Metro students reached graduation. Just 40 percent of Hispanic students did so within four years.29

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104      Nashville in the New Millennium Institutional arrangements that kept students apart in school, thus, reinforced differences between ELL and regular students (Stoughton and ­Sivertson 2005), merging linguistic, cultural, racial, and nationality differences among ELL students into one measure evaluated against an Englishspeaking “regular” norm (Brittain 2005). Reflecting a national trend of concentrating ELL students in particular schools and leaving English-proficient students in schools with few ELL students (Capps et al. 2005), schools like Morgan Elementary created in miniature the segregated urban landscape that made southeast Nashville “Little Mexico” and left the rest of Nashville largely unaffected by immigrant settlement. As Jessica, a white ELL kindergarten teacher at Morgan, remarked, when ELL students left her classroom, “merging back into the regular population is kind of a culture shock.  . . . There’s just such a difference between the cultures” of ELL and regular students, a difference perpetuated by the structure of the school and driven by teachers’ reliance on it. At the same time, labels like “ELL” and “regular” also marked off different sets of social experiences beyond the school; thus, not using them occluded the distinctions they captured, even if imperfectly (Pollock 2004). The limited social and spatial mobility across Nashville of many “ELL” or “apartment” children, for example, exacerbated their sense of isolation not only from other students but also from the rest of the city. School psychologist Yvonne, reflecting on her own experience of growing up in a segregated black community, pondered the situation of her Latino students, who “live in communities that are very heavily based in other people who are like them. I often wonder, ‘Do they see the city where they live like I saw the city where I lived when I was a child?’ . . . I kind of felt like I lived with my people and then I went out to the other world. So I was aware of it, but I didn’t have to cope with it every day.” More bluntly, Katy at Morgan Elementary expressed concerns about the constricted daily geographies that her ELL children experienced. Our kids don’t ever leave their neighborhood. . . . They don’t go downtown. They don’t go to the Parthenon. They don’t go to the park down there. . . . They’ve never walked down lower Broadway. They’ve never seen the river. They stay in their area, so I don’t think they have anywhere near the same concept that we have of Nashville as a whole city. . . . They shop in their neighborhood because their neighborhood speaks their language, and they’re comfortable there. . . . Their Nashville is really just a neighborhood.

For immigrant children, being ELL—wherever the label came from and whatever its imperfections in capturing racial, ethnic, and linguistic differences among students—turned their neighborhood into their city as

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Diversity at the Door      105  the linguistic isolation they experienced at school overlapped with their geographically limited experiences in the neighborhood (Capps et al. 2005). Given well-documented concerns about the impact of race and class segregation in U.S. cities on not only the life chances of immigrant children but also their social outlooks, downtown Nashville as “another world” for the Music City’s youngest immigrants raised difficult questions about the politics and processes of “growing up American” (Zhou 1997, 999) in Nashville and the wider practice of immigrant incorporation in new destinations. When “their world really is Antioch,” as Lorenzo, a Latino teacher at Fellows Middle, described his students’ spatial and social outlook, being ELL in Nashville mattered in ways that these schools had to address. Such questions plagued teachers in southeast Nashville. For example, Cynthia, a seasoned kindergarten teacher at Morgan, wondered, “How much more are we going to have to do and experience? There’s only so much we can do in the school system to give these children experiences.” In a classroom filled with many children who themselves, or whose parents, had traveled extensively to get to Nashville, Cynthia encountered the constricted local worldview that such “international” children possessed. Sandy, another longtime white teacher at Morgan Elementary, felt that students now were “needier,” not only because they were still learning English but also because “they don’t have all the experiences. You spend so much time trying to explain what things are, and they haven’t traveled.” When students, in the words of Amanda, a white teacher at Fellows Middle, “really only know where they live,” the irony of having a classroom full of children who represented multiple continents, languages, religions, and nationalities yet knew “nothing beyond their neighborhood” became clear. Thus, as teachers used de-raced labels that imperfectly captured the changes and the students at their schools, they also tried to describe the shared life experiences and social challenges that ELL students faced. For many southeast Nashville teachers, these efforts left them feeling uncomfortable with their complicity in producing immigrant students’ place in Nashville’s emerging social, and racialized, order and in overlooking the very material consequences of this social order in their students’ lives. Second, then, schools like Fellows Middle and Morgan Elementary matter in the politics of immigrant integration in new destinations because they occupy the frontline of contact between immigrants and receiving communities as both negotiate a new social and racial order. Through their role as educators, teachers worked with a range of students (and parents) new to Nashville schools, if not to the city and the country. They did so, however, with little if any background on why or how their

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106      Nashville in the New Millennium classrooms’ racial and ethnic composition had changed. They simply taught, in Nathan’s words, “whoever show[ed] up” at their door. Year to year, they had “to accommodate the differences” they encountered, as Elaine, a second-grade ELL teacher, described the experience of teaching through Morgan’s transition from bused school to ELL cluster. The “instability in local readings” of race (Hartigan 1999, 15), especially in new destinations, becomes more apparent when we examine how teachers made sense of racial and ethnic transitions in their classroom in the absence of a readily available local framework to help them interpret immigrant settlement and place it within wider urban and educational transformations. More to the point, such an examination illuminates the complex, and geographically contingent, nature of immigrant inclusion and incorporation in these locales. Marrow (2009a, 758) suggests that elementary schools exhibit “the most inclusionary responses” of bureaucratic institutions in new destinations. Thus, paying attention to the limits of these inclusionary responses, particularly for ideas of race and ethnicity, can shed light on the texture of, and gaps within, the broader picture of immigrant incorporation in new destinations and the emerging place of immigrants in a city’s racial and social order. Josh Inwood and Deborah Martin (2008, 377) suggest that schools “play a vital role in shaping public memory and historical identity.” As this chapter suggests, they play an equally important role in shaping public understandings of the present moment and, in Nashville, the emerging collective identity of immigrants and their children in the local social fabric. A primary way that schools in southeast Nashville incorporated a diverse student body into the local social fabric was by not seeing that student body as diverse. Unsure how to describe the students in their classrooms, southeast Nashville teachers went to great lengths not to see the complicated racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences among them. However impossible it may have been to leave diversity at the classroom door in southeast Nashville, teachers worked hard in the 2000s to do just that as they worked to teach through the changing demographics and increasingly heated political climate created by immigrant settlement in the Music City in the new millennium.

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Chapter 5  | Responding to Diversity: Multiculturalism, Immigration Politics, and Southern History in the Classroom

When Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) initially denied my request to conduct this study in their schools in May 2006, I contacted adjacent school systems in middle Tennessee in the hopes of salvaging the project and finding other districts interested in it. These preliminary interviews with educators across Nashville’s greater metropolitan area painted a chaotic picture of the impacts of immigrant settlement on public schools in middle Tennessee. From interview to interview, district to district, there was no uniform institutional response to the arrival of immigrant students, no standard reply to the question of when immigrant students had been first noted in local schools, and no shared sense of their impact on schools. The only consistent theme in these conversations with middle Tennessee educators was the recurring sentiment that teachers had, as one ELL director put it, a “new equation” to solve. No one specified what that new equation added up to or how local schools and teachers had attempted to solve it in the 2000s. After I secured permission to work in MNPS and found individual schools willing to participate in the study, I continued to encounter the same lack of clarity about the place of an increasingly diverse student population in Nashville schools. Even the relatively simple question “Where are your students from?” was rarely simple to answer. The following exchange from an interview with Mark, a white fifth-grade teacher in a “regular” classroom at Fellows Middle School, captures the challenges teachers faced in the 2000s.

107

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108      Nashville in the New Millennium Interviewer: Do you have a sense of where they [Fellows students] are from? Mark: How do you mean, “Where they’re from”?

Unsure if I was asking about where his students lived in Nashville or where they or their parents were born, Mark struggled to answer a question about what he knew of his students’ backgrounds. More broadly, he struggled to place them geographically and socially in Nashville and beyond. In a school where all students ostensibly came from the same Antioch neighborhood, determining where they were from in a local sense should have been easy. In a school with foreign- and native-born students, black, white, and “other” students, and a general multicultural mix, however, the question of how and where to place students became more complicated, caught, as it was, between their residential location in the city (a place-based identity) and their ethnic origin, an identity based in social categories of race and nation that, as chapter 4 showed, perplexed teachers in the 2000s. Many teachers in southeast Nashville, like Mark, were unsure how to respond to this question because they lacked both the necessary background information for understanding their classrooms and any clarity about the relationship between place and identity in the context of immigrant settlement. Chapter 4 examined the complexities of that “most basic act of racialization: using race labels to describe people” (Pollock 2004, 1) in southeast Nashville schools in the 2000s and the ways in which teachers made sense of an increasingly diverse student body by using a de-raced language dependent on both the social space and structure of the school and the changing relationship between school and neighborhood. This chapter builds on the previous one by examining teachers’ responses to diversity in their classroom and what questions it generated for their work. More specifically, it examines what happened when teachers’ de-raced approach to their students encountered the broader discourses of multiculturalism, the politics of immigration, and narratives of Southern history circulating throughout the schools and beyond. How did teachers respond when they were forced to address their students’ efforts to learn where they fit in Nashville’s social and political fabric, past and present? This chapter, thus, enumerates how teachers handled the “two worlds colliding” in their classrooms in the era of immigration and how they answered the questions raised by such collisions for the students caught in the midst of them. As it shows, amid the racial and ethnic transitions described in chapter 4, teachers repeatedly stressed that they did not see the racial and

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Responding to Diversity      109  ethnic diversity that increasingly defined not only their schools but also southeast Nashville. Managing diversity at the classroom door by trying not to see it, teachers worked to see “only children” in an effort to teach through demographic changes that otherwise destabilized their approaches to the classroom as a space of sameness. In the process, however, teachers could not ignore Nashville’s wider immigration debate in the late 2000s, even though they worked hard to keep it from entering their classrooms and to keep it separate from their take on immigrant students. The boundary that teachers created between the classroom and politics, like their efforts not to see differences among students, enabled them to keep teaching their students in spite of the contradictory place of teachers and students in Nashville’s immigration debates. As teachers turned from Nashville’s political present to its racial past, however, that boundary betweem teaching and the wider political world became problematic. When immigrant students asked where they fit in relation to Southern history, teachers struggled to make the biracial past of Nashville and the South visible in its multicultural present (Winders and Smith 2010). If, as chapter 4 discussed, teachers used their experiences with students during the era of busing to make sense of their encounters with students during the era of immigration, students did the reverse: they tried to make sense of the South’s biracial past by using their knowledge of contemporary Nashville, which, in their constricted view of the city, was deeply multicultural. In a classroom where difference was denied and politics excluded, teachers had difficulties placing immigrant children in that local past and were left with no way to address the role of Nashville’s political and social history in the present. As a result, immigrant students were left struggling to find their place(s) in Nashville more broadly through a local history they could not see in their everyday multicultural surroundings.

Kids are Kids: (Not) Seeing Difference One thing I noticed . . . regardless [of] whether the school room was filled with black students and few white students, or white students and few black students, what I noticed is that children are children. —Celeste, African American fifth-grade teacher at Fellows Middle

“This school doesn’t see color.” This comment, made by Ralph, a white teacher at Morgan Elementary, reverberated throughout interviews with teachers, as they assured me that they and their schools saw only children, not color. Besides using racially unmarked labels to describe a racially diverse student body, teachers in southeast Nashville came to grips

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110      Nashville in the New Millennium with their classrooms’ racial and ethnic complexity by claiming not to see it or by claiming that it was “just understood,” in the words of Isaac, an African American teacher at Fellows Middle. Through a discourse of universal childhood and of diversity as an un(re)marked norm, teachers stressed over and over that kids are kids—a pattern documented in other studies of schools, especially among white teachers (Dickar 2008). “Racial” issues and negativity lurked outside the school, but within it, children were children, who were not discussed in racial terms, except to reject that language, and not publicly acknowledged as different in any significant way. This color-blind approach, it is important to note, was not the same as the de-raced language teachers used to describe their past and present students. It was not motivated by the politics of uncertainty that led teachers away from a bimodal system of racial categorization that could not account for their current multicultural classrooms. Instead, teachers’ arguments that kids were kids and that diversity was irrelevant were cited as philosophical, if not professional, mantras; they used these arguments not to describe students but to guide their approaches to teaching and working with them. Driven by factors ranging from the wider politics of immigration in Nashville and elsewhere in the late 2000s to the broader discourses of multiculturalism permeating contemporary U.S. society (see, for example, Foner 2007; Kim 2004), to professional mandates to teach all children regardless of background or status (Marrow 2011), this color-blind approach made it possible for teachers to rationalize uncertainty over students’ racial and ethnic identities through an ideology of universal childhood.1 From this perspective, teachers’ lack of clarity over where immigrant children fit in available racial and ethnic categories did not matter because those differences were understood to be irrelevant to how teachers handled their classrooms. Children were simply children. Although Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994, 59) suggest that “to see racial projects operating at the level of everyday life, we have only to examine the many ways in which, often unconsciously, we ‘notice’ race,” in southeast Nashville those racial projects could also be seen in the ways in which teachers worked not to notice race. Southeast Nashville schools, of course, were not the only sites where a color-blind discourse was mobilized to manage an ethnically and racially diverse population. Whether attributed to a neoconservative or liberal response to the fragmentation of whiteness in the 1990s (Winant 1997) or critiqued as a backlash to civil rights struggles and subsequent multicultural policies (Omi and Winant 1994; Kim 2004), color-blindness in the United States has roots in the wider political shifts that began with the

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Responding to Diversity      111  civil rights movement and stretched into the turn toward neoliberalism in the 1990s (Bonilla-Silva 2004). These transformations, scholars suggest, de-raced a language of racial equality instituted through 1960s civil rights activism, replacing it with a neoliberal framework of individual rights outside the realm of racial or ethnic difference.2 In the process, race became something seen but not said, noted implicitly but not acknowledged publicly, especially in the South. Differences, if noticed, were to be downplayed. Various works have examined the political and social consequences of such color-blind approaches, as well as of wider efforts to manage racial and ethnic difference through a framework of diversity that elides racialized structures of dominance.3 It is important to note that an ideology of color-blindness in which racial and ethnic differences are not acknowledged is not the same as an uncritical ideology of multiculturalism in which cultural diversity replaces attention to racial and ethnic inequalities. The former suggests that all individuals are equivalent, and the latter that they are different but equal. Both, however, eliminate the political from understandings of social dynamics and refuse to acknowledge the uneven playing field for groups whose sameness is proclaimed or whose diversity is celebrated. As many scholars argue, neither approach grasps the workings of racism (Fishman and McCarthy 2005) or the place of whiteness as an unacknowledged center against which diversity is measured (Stoughton and Sivertson 2005)—two factors that limited the efficacy of a color-blind approach in southeast Nashville classrooms. Equally important, neither approach addresses the socioeconomic and sociopolitical differences within a multicultural population or the different histories that created unequal starting points among that population in the first place (Kim 2004). Despite these limitations, many U.S. schools continue to take a colorblind approach to students. In New York, for example, Dickar (2008, 116) found that white teachers “often insist[ed] that all students are the same” and were “reluctant to employ more complex notions of race and racism that might threaten their deep belief about themselves and society.” From the common-ground approach to diversity in schools to the reluctance to engage questions of race documented across studies of schools (Pollock 2004; Rodriguez 2010), schools, like many U.S. public institutions, struggle to find a balance between not seeing difference and obsessively focusing on it. In Nashville schools, trying to see all students as the same translated into trying not to see the growing levels of ethnic and racial diversity in southeast Nashville classrooms in the 2000s. This approach enabled teachers to manage the racial and ethnic transformations they observed but had no way to discuss. It did not, however, provide a way for teachers to address

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112      Nashville in the New Millennium the wider sociopolitical context that produced those differences and subsequently limited what they could teach their students about the world around them. The practice of noting difference in order not to notice it can be seen in how Edith, a longtime white, ELL, fourth-grade teacher, explained her students at Morgan Elementary. “The ELL [students] come from different places. They all come from different languages that they speak. They are children. I don’t care where they came from, or all languages, but children are children.” Conflating place of origin and mother tongue, language ability and language learners, Edith marked differences among students to show that those differences did not matter. As she went on to note, however, those same differences she had labeled as irrelevant entered into not only what she taught but how she taught. “They may have different cultures. They may have different customs. . . . Maybe we need to understand some of those differences, as children, as a classroom together. ‘How would somebody do such and such, and the rest of us don’t?’ ‘Okay. . . .’ And we bring a lot of that in all the time.” Dual claims like these—that there were linguistic and cultural differences among students, but that those differences were not relevant—surfaced throughout this study, as did the admission that such differences seeped into teaching practices. Both, in fact, were dominant tropes through which teachers responded to ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity in their classrooms. With the arguments that children were the same even though they were different and that difference did not matter but sometimes had an impact on how teachers taught, diversity, in the sense of a mix of ethnic, racial, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, became both what defined the classroom and what teachers refused to see in it, what enabled teachers to claim all children were the same and what required pedagogical attention because those children did not see or experience the world in uniform ways. When diversity was brought up in these classrooms, it was “discussed, and then we kind of move on,” in the words of Tracy, a white, first-grade teacher in a regular classroom at Morgan Elementary. Although teachers periodically “reminded” students that they were a diverse group, differences among students were generally downplayed. As Martha, Morgan’s guidance counselor, explained, I don’t even know if the kids are aware of how diverse they are. . . . You can’t really tell oftentimes [to what group a child belongs]. . . . Every little group you see looks pretty blended. So I don’t think they view themselves as diverse, unless we remind them. We do remind them occasionally, when we celebrate diversity, or something. We have to explain it.

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Responding to Diversity      113  With students who were difficult to place in available categories of race and ethnicity in Nashville and with groups that looked “pretty blended” across the school, teachers saw sameness in place of differences that defied easy categorization. In the process, they assumed that students did not acknowledge this indescribable diversity either—that it was something teachers had to “remind” students about rather than something students themselves noticed. Like the teachers Pollock (2004) studied in California, teachers in southeast Nashville not only de-raced the language they used to describe their current and former students but also did not always acknowledge noticing changes in student composition in the first place. Ralph at Morgan Elementary, for example, explained that he did not notice the arrival of greater numbers of African American students in the school until many white students had left. In similar fashion, Martha, who, as Morgan’s guidance counselor, worked with students across the school, remarked that, “when you look around for blond hair and blue eyes, you don’t see that much.” This white absence, rather than the presence of an ethnically and racially diverse group of students, merited mention in a system where white students constituted the school’s social, if not demographic, norm and, thus, were seemingly most visible within its population. Because Morgan Elementary’s neighborhood had historically been white, the school was seen as a white neighborhood school in the public equation of race and space in Nashville. As the number of white students shrank in the 2000s and the number of nonwhite, especially immigrant, students grew, teachers remarked on the disappearance of white students, not the growth in other ethnic or racial groups, to chart the changes they otherwise struggled to describe. In an admittedly ironic twist, white students merited little mention when teachers described their classrooms past and present; instead, they remained the unmarked norm against which differences between bused and ELL students were charted. The attenuating presence of those same white students, however, also enabled teachers to mark, and describe in relief, racial and ethnic changes that were otherwise hard to label. Part of the challenge faced by teachers in southeast Nashville in determining if, when, and whether they noticed their schools’ ethnic and racial diversity was the difficulty of evaluating that diversity in the first place (for a discussion of a similar dilemma in assessing school inequality, see Pollock 2004). As Martha explained, school visitors found Morgan Elementary’s student body confusing, because the nationality of individual students was often not “obvious.” What was obvious, however, was a diminishing whiteness by which the school’s growing racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity was measured (Vanderbeck 2006). As Martha stressed

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114      Nashville in the New Millennium repeatedly in her interview, school visitors “just don’t see the blond hair, blue eyes as much,” which was “pretty much what they recognize” in an area of Nashville historically seen as white. Teachers, in this way, struggled not only to find a language to describe a student body whose “diversity” as simultaneously racial, national, linguistic, religious, and cultural challenged a racial binary (Oboler 2002) but also to find a baseline against which to mark the transition toward this diverse student population. In many cases, that norm became white, “neighborhood” students who themselves did not merit attention in discussions of how classrooms had changed over time but whose retreating presence at Morgan Elementary continued to constitute the center against which that change was marked. Teachers’ discussions of diversity, it should be noted, partially resulted from the process of obtaining permission to conduct research in MNPS. My initial proposal to the school district focused on immigration and race relations in public schools. When that version was rejected, I resubmitted a proposal using the “euphemism” of diversity, following other scholars who struggled to be allowed into public schools for studies about race (Pollock 2004; Klaas 2006). A keyword in post–civil rights multiculturalist discourse, diversity, as Claire Kim (2004, 990) argues, signifies “both the descriptive fact of plural differences and the normative goal of creating equal access to public institutions” (see also Kymlicka 2010; Vertovec 2010). In Nashville schools, a language of diversity was less politically charged than a language of race, which brought up memories of Nashville’s ongoing debates over school segregation. A study of diversity, thus, was more palatable, since schools as institutions were based on universal education (Marrow 2009a, 2011) and since a study of diversity would be focused on something teachers claimed not to see in the first place. Because teachers thought I was studying diversity, I often asked what that term meant in their schools. This question frequently perplexed teachers for both the obviousness of their schools’ diversity as ELL clusters and their schools’ less obvious lack of diversity because they were “dominated” by large Hispanic or ELL populations. Katy, a white, thirdgrade, ELL teacher at Morgan, for example, after explaining that she taught in a very diverse school, went on to muse that the more I think about this, I should have qualified that diverse statement. We are more diverse than most. Well, we are more diverse than a lot of places. Although, if you really look at us, we’re a huge percentage Hispanic, so maybe we’re not as diverse as we think we are. We’re just not white. . . . You could throw just about any third-grade child in the world in here, and I don’t think anybody would blink an eye because you wouldn’t notice if he was [foreign-born].

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Responding to Diversity      115  Several teachers argued, as did Katy, that for Nashville schools, being diverse meant not being white, but that being majority Hispanic did not necessarily constitute a diverse school. For example, Elaine, a white, ­second-grade, ELL teacher at Morgan Elementary, concluded that, aside from issues of disability, the dominance of only one or two groups made Morgan “not very diverse . . . at all.” Diversity at Morgan Elementary—a school that was not majority white and could absorb “any third-grade child in the world”—was again defined by the absence of white students. Because the school was “just not white,” it seemed capable of accepting students from any ethnic or racial background, even as it remained “not as diverse as we think.” As Katy shared, Morgan could absorb any immigrant child, and “you wouldn’t notice if he was,” both because Morgan was so ethnically and racially diverse and because noticing that child as different undermined how teachers responded to their classrooms. Teachers at Fellows Middle shared similar approaches to diversity, although they framed it more as a hindrance to an equitable classroom than as a school norm. Dana, a white sixth-grade teacher, for example, explained that she was not sure “if I ever address it [diversity] specifically. . . . I try not to differentiate between a category of people or another.” As she stressed, “I try to make my classroom a more general community and not so much, you are from here and this race. So I don’t really address the differences. I try to treat them as students of Fellows.” Although Dana admitted that issues of diversity surfaced in teaching ELL students, overall, “we try not to make anybody feel isolated because of their background.” As Vivian, another white teacher at Fellows, explained, “You kind of discuss it [diversity] behind closed doors and then go on about business.” Framing public acknowledgment of diversity as a decision to treat students differently and favoring, like Dana, a “general community” over the entanglement of migration and race (“you are from here and this race”), teachers at Fellows Middle strove not to see diversity in the classroom to create not only sameness but also equality among students. In the words of Pauline, an African American math teacher, not seeing or acknowledging diversity helped “make them feel that all students can learn.” One reason why Fellows teachers were more circumspect about the meaning of diversity and its impact on their classrooms was that they were less certain than Morgan Elementary teachers about student social dynamics. Because students changed classes throughout the day and because Fellows teachers worked with a new group of students every period, teachers struggled to see the bigger picture of Fellows’s social dynamics, which the structure of their workday made a piecemeal experience. For example, Aileen, an African American resource teacher, felt that students at Fellows did not group ethnically, especially in the classroom, but

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116      Nashville in the New Millennium she herself worked with only a few Fellows students. Several other teachers made the same observation about the school’s lack of ethnic segregation through the lens of what they saw in their rooms from period to period. As Aileen explained, and other teachers confirmed, in the classroom, students were “so enmeshed with all of these different cultures” that “all they see is different folks”—a claim that positioned diversity as the same unacknowledged norm that Morgan teachers saw. At Fellows, Aileen stressed, racial and ethnic grouping “kind of stops at the door,” where teachers’ observations did the same. A different take on the role of diversity in school dynamics emerged in less structured school spaces, such as hallways, the cafeteria, and the bus, as well as among school employees who worked across the school. Outside the classroom, “a lot of social everything” took place at Fellows Middle, according to its principal, although Adam, the school resource officer, felt that only the small number of white students by necessity “mixed” outside the school.4 In research on schools, spaces like cafeterias are frequently cited as symbols of the racial and ethnic segregation that schools seem to reproduce in miniature from the wider society (Stoughton and Sivertson 2005; Pollock 2004). At Fellows Middle School, however, teachers had yet to sort out if and how students mixed, even in the cafeteria. Because they saw student dynamics in piecemeal fashion throughout their workday and because they lacked a workable framework to describe the differences they saw, teachers had a difficult time reconciling what they observed of students, what they heard from other teachers, and what they thought might take place elsewhere in the school—let alone how these dynamics compared to those across Nashville. As Barbara, a white ELL teacher, explained, “Diversity here maybe . . . is a challenge more than something that is celebrated.” Although most teachers could discern no definite patterns of diversity among students and did not address it on a daily basis, diversity, in Barbara’s estimation, came into play when it “erupted” and became an issue among students.

“We Have to Watch Out for Diversity” Asking questions about race, immigration, and diversity in southeast Nashville schools was not easy. Although teachers saw diversity every day in their work, they did not acknowledge seeing it. Teachers were expected to sort students by race, ethnicity, or other factors to evaluate federal performance targets and manage student interactions in their classrooms. At the same time, they were expected not to acknowledge noticing these differences for either task. Although teachers at both schools were not always sure what diversity meant and whether it mattered in their

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Responding to Diversity      117  work, they were certain that their schools dealt with it more than others in the district and that in the wider context of race and space in Nashville, their school was different from the rest of the city. With their need to be aware of a range of religious practices, to learn what gender norms went with what ethnic groups, and to ascertain the cultural characteristics of various nationalities by watching small children or teenagers on the verge of puberty, teachers had “to watch out for diversity,” as Celeste, an African American teacher at Fellows Middle, put it, even as they tried not to see it. The strategy of not seeing diversity in the classroom sometimes failed, however, whether because of the unpredictability of young children or the general challenges of diversity as an unspoken norm. Stories in ELL classrooms of the “weird” student who was, in every telling, not Latino in a predominantly Latino classroom or the Somali child who kept to himself or the Kurdish child no one got along with, implicitly recognized that in classes designed to teach English, not knowing Spanish was often a social disadvantage. Outside the ELL classroom, teachers struggled to respond to a diversity they also struggled not to see, especially as they watched students themselves negotiate these differences. Ingrid, a white, fourth-grade, regular-classroom teacher, admitted as much when she quipped, “It’s tough being a little girl that’s white or black” at Morgan Elementary. At Fellows Middle, these tensions were even more pointed. In listening to teachers discuss the challenges of their jobs, the conflict between teachers not seeing differences among students and students living the realities of those differences became clear. Frances, a school administrator, explained Fellows’s policy of not celebrating difference but admitted that students “hated it” (Stoughton and Sivertson 2005). As she observed, “They are so proud of where they have come from or where their family has come from. . . . Now, they’re in a new environment educationally that really doesn’t recognize it, and I think that that’s a problem for them.” Frances wavered over how to apply an approach of not seeing difference in a school that was admittedly diverse. After detailing her constant pleas that ELL students speak English in the halls, she shared that the same students wanted to learn to read in Spanish and that teachers assigned to teach them English should not stifle their desire to learn a language that was part of their “heritage.” To complicate matters even further, when Fellows teachers did recognize student heritage, they encountered the challenges of representing a diversity not captured by the dominant categories used to organize the student body for testing and other purposes (“Hispanic,” “Asian,” and so on). When a Latin dance was included in a school talent show, teachers were surprised when a group of Puerto Rican

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118      Nashville in the New Millennium students were upset that the dance was not Puerto Rican enough. How were they to proceed when their recognition of diversity among students was critiqued for not recognizing enough of diversity, or the right kind? Such experiences showed teachers that, while they may have only seen or wanted to see children desiring to learn, students “saw” race and heard differences (Devine and Kelly 2006). Teachers in southeast Nashville often implicitly acknowledged this fact when they organized their classrooms by mixing student groups based on the same differences they tried not to see. Jessica, a white, ELL kindergarten teacher at Morgan Elementary, for example, explained that she always included more than one Kurdish child in her classroom to keep them from feeling the “double isolation” that the lone Somali girl in her classroom felt. While explaining that first-graders were too young to have opinions about race, Tracy, a white regular-classroom teacher at Morgan, told the story of a student who, while playing house, said that another student “has to be the maid because she’s black.” After explaining to this child that her assumptions about race were “not acceptable in my classroom,” Tracy remarked, “She wasn’t even American.” By deploying what Tracy saw as a distinctly American practice of positioning a black child as an obvious choice for a maid, the student confounded both Tracy’s understanding of American racial formations and her assumption that very young children are innocent about race. Already struggling to find ways to handle students who straddled the American/foreign binary on which the division of their school into “regular” and “ELL” classes and students relied, teachers in southeast Nashville then had to respond when regular classrooms began to resemble ELL classrooms in the late 2000s, especially in elementary schools like Morgan. In his discussion of Latino youth in rural North Carolina, Paul Cuadros (2006, 155) describes three cohorts in schools in the 2000s: “the ‘newcomer’ kids in ESL,” “the ‘immigrant’ kids” who had been there for some time, and “the ‘Chicanos.’” In Nashville, only one teacher used the term “Chicano” to describe U.S.-born Mexican students. Nonetheless, southeast Nashville teachers were increasingly aware of different groups of immigrant students in their schools, even as they remained uncertain about how to address them. Tracy, for example, was now teaching U.S.-born children of immigrants as the cohort of foreign-born children aged into middle and high schools (Capps et al. 2005) and the cohort of children born to immigrant parents in the United States entered elementary schools, often with proficient English skills (Singer 2009; Passel and Cohn 2010). Such students forced Tracy and other teachers to rethink the boundaries and cultural collisions between “us” and “them” and how they responded to diver-

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Responding to Diversity      119  sity in the classroom. As Tracy explained, “They [Kurdish students] know they were born here. . . . I mean, they know they’re a different culture and that they have some different beliefs from what—than what we do. But they consider themselves American. . . . And it kind of bothers them that they don’t celebrate all the holidays that we do.” Dealing with an otherness that claimed sameness to her own American identity, Tracy was unsure where to place Kurdish students who saw themselves as American but whom she saw—as perhaps they themselves did—as culturally different. In her classroom, Tracy taught six-year-olds not only how to hold pencils but also where they fit in a c­ itizenship-culture matrix that, for her, split along religious lines—“they don’t celebrate all the holidays that we do”—her ostensibly Christian “we” marking a difference from her presumably Muslim Kurdish students. Knowing that they were from “a different culture” but considering themselves “American,” these Kurdish children were learning their place in Nashville’s social fabric as their teachers learned which differences to see and which to overlook. It is hard to tell what these Kurdish students learned through such impromptu lessons (Acosta-Alzuru and Kreshel 2002) or what place was found by other students, like U.S.-born Latino or Somali children, in these conversations about Americanness and culture. Nevertheless, such informal teaching constituted a central, if contradictory, part of immigrant incorporation in Nashville as teachers taught young students who, by being culturally different but nationally the same, undermined the system of race and foreignness on which Nashville’s schools, if not the broader social fabric of the city, was based (Anderson 1988; Barrett and Roediger 1997; Jewett 2006). The growing cohort of children born in Nashville to immigrant parents fell between teachers’ understanding of American citizenship as imparted through place of birth and American identity as “the capacity, as a racial subject, to be a representative body—figuratively and materially—for the nation” (Carbado 2005, 638). In other words, these second-generation immigrants created a new tension between identity as place-based and identity as socially, if not racially, defined. The distance between these two ways of defining American—as either where one was born or how well one fit the dominant images of being American—made U.S.-born Kurdish students who identified as American but were seen as culturally different “not quite not American, not quite not foreign” (Carbado 2005, 645; see also Baldoz 2004; Barrett and Roediger 1997). American by birthplace but not by sight, these students called into question how teachers understood and talked about culture, nationality, and citizenship in the 2000s. This tension over how to identify and define the category “American” also undermined how teachers understood the structure of the school and

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120      Nashville in the New Millennium the sorting of its students. The destabilizing effects of these tensions can be seen in Ralph’s recollection of 9/11 at Morgan Elementary. Post-9/11, the biggest problem was . . . calming down the teachers who had a legitimate question, “How do we know they [some immigrant students] are not terrorists?” And calming down or combating—not combating, but putting some logic into the big liberal teacher who just wanted to hug everybody and be one united country or something. . . . She was telling them [students] to act like Vietnamese, and they were American. He had on his Tommy Hilfiger shirts, this little kid, and she wanted him to wear his native clothes in school, and I said, “He is native. He was born in Texas.”

Here, Ralph describes how difficult it became for teachers at Morgan Elementary to address diversity in the context of both Nashville’s transformation through immigrant and refugee resettlement and post-9/11 hysteria. Wondering if some students (and presumably, their parents) were terrorists, and thus a material threat, yet wanting students to unite and celebrate their cultures and cultural differences from an unmarked American norm, teachers encountered contradictory impulses over how to perform an American patriotism in the context of diversity. Teachers in schools like Morgan Elementary also encountered a post-9/11 imperative to draw seemingly non-American immigrants into the national fold even as they marked differences between Americans and those same students. Wanting everyone to be “one united country or something” but also wanting second-generation immigrant students to dress “like Vietnamese” and acknowledge their difference from an American norm that did not include being seen as Asian, teachers struggled to place students who seemed to sit on both sides of an American-foreign binary at a time when that boundary was deeply politicized. Although, as Inderpal Grewal (2003, 548) suggests, “fear compelled many [after 9/11] to display the signs of ‘Americanness’ on their bodies to counter the colour of their skins,” immigrant students in southeast Nashville faced the contradiction of being placed both within “one united country” as Americans, which many were by place of birth, and beyond its social boundaries as Vietnamese, Kurdish, Latino, and so on, which they seemed by sight. In schools where teachers tried not to see differences, teachers were unsure how to proceed in moments when tensions surfaced between identity as place-based and identity as social and differences seemed unavoidable. Even in the second generation, immigrant incorporation into the category “American” proceeded in fits and starts in Nashville, and sometimes in both directions. The strategy of addressing diversity by not seeing it also led to chal-

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Responding to Diversity      121  lenging situations at Fellows Middle. For example, when asked about diversity, Jennifer, a white sixth-grade teacher, exclaimed with clear exasperation, “How could you not pay attention to it? That’s all the classrooms are, is complete diversity.” How to heed and act upon that diversity in classrooms, however, was not always clear. Although Fellows teachers working closely with ELL students or with students of color often felt that the only way to overcome tensions among students was to discuss diversity, most teachers did not discuss it, thus creating an environment in which diversity was the norm that no one acknowledged. Even so, the same Fellows teachers who stressed the need not to bring attention to diversity sometimes admitted being uncomfortable with the assimilatory nature of their approach. Amanda, a white teacher at Fellows, for example, explained that “you don’t want them to lose who they are because they need to be taught that . . . ‘You are Hispanic’ or ‘You are Arabic’ or ‘You are black’ or whatever, and that you should be proud of that and not try to be somebody who you’re not.” No one was sure how to teach such lessons at Fellows Middle in the 2000s, nor was it clear who should teach them. Faced with the choice of teaching students who they were (“You are Hispanic,” “You are Arabic,” and so on) or teaching them to be “somebody who you’re not,” most teachers simply skipped that lesson and stuck with seeing, if not teaching, sameness. Teachers in southeast Nashville were not alone in their uncertainty over diversity’s impact in their classrooms: the difficulties and pitfalls of diversity in the classroom are dominant themes in research on schools (see, for example, Fishman and McCarthy 2005). Compared to the experiences of teachers elsewhere, however, the experiences of teachers in southeast Nashville in the 2000s differed both because of the absence of a local context within which they could place and make sense of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences in their classrooms and because of the rapidly changing composition of those classrooms. If discussions of multiculturalism and student experiences must be placed “in broader historical, cultural, and/or philosophic contexts” for students (and teachers) to “forge connections between their views and larger themes” (Fishman and McCarthy 2005, 348; Gillborn 2006), in Nashville in the 2000s, that wider context and recallable history was neither visible nor accessible to teachers. In its absence, teachers responded to the challenges of diversity by not seeing what was in front of them. Unsure of the ethnic or racial backgrounds or identities of many of their students and still trying to describe how their classrooms had changed and what they currently looked like, teachers struggled to help students forge connections to the diverse historical or cultural contexts that could account for the differences they themselves were (not) seeing.

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122      Nashville in the New Millennium As the number of U.S.-born immigrant children in schools in southeast Nashville grew, as the social glue that had joined Americanness as a placebased identity and a socially defined category dissolved, and as it became hard to distinguish ELL from regular students, foreign from American, teachers coped more and more often by just seeing children. Seeing anything else in their classrooms raised more questions than it answered and required a perspective that they (and Nashville) had yet to develop in the 2000s. By the mid-2000s, however, teachers working hard to see only children encountered another set of dynamics at their classroom door—Nashville’s heated immigration debate. Their response was not so much to avoid seeing this political debate in their classroom, but to keep it out altogether.

“When the Doors Get Closed, Those Are Their Kids” “I’m against it, but . . . I certainly don’t hold it against the children,” explained Nancy, a seasoned, white, ELL kindergarten teacher at Morgan Elementary.5 Although in our interview, the ‘it’ Nancy was against remained some unspecified aspect of immigration, she went on to share that she also felt the need to bite her tongue during discussions of immigration with “heartless” people who made inflammatory statements about Latino immigrants. In the midst of what was by 2007 a tense debate around immigration in Nashville, Morgan Elementary provided its students with “their own little oasis,” in Nancy’s estimation. Opposed to something unspecified about immigration but also opposed to those who fanned the flames of public opinion about immigration, Nancy separated both positions from her work with “the children” and carved out a space for her school in the contradictions between her statements on immigration and her stance toward teaching immigrant students. Teachers in southeast Nashville, like teachers in other new destinations in the 2000s, had to work not only in the presence of rapid demographic changes in their schools but also amid sudden political changes in immigrant reception. They did so, however, with no wider framework to help make sense of ­either set of dynamics.6 Although little research has examined immigration in the context of schools in new destinations (but see Cuadros 2006), schools are particularly important spaces in the politics of immigrant incorporation (Marrow 2009a, 2011). O’Neil and Tienda (2010), for example, in an analysis of public opinion concerning immigration in North Carolina, found that parents with school-age children were more likely to have negative views of immigration than residents with no direct involvement in schools. Marrow’s work in North Carolina (2009a, 2011)

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Responding to Diversity      123  reveals that elementary schools are some of the most open bureaucratic institutions vis-à-vis immigrant incorporation because of their state mandate and professional mission of serving all. Cuadros (2006, 37) places transformations in public schools “at the top of the list” of “problems” that long-term residents of rural North Carolina associated with immigrant settlement. Although the assumption that children operate outside the political realm remains strong in and out of the school setting (Vanderbeck 2008; but see Kallio and Häkli 2010), the social institution of the school is central to the political dynamics of immigrant settlement. Thus, Nashville teachers in the 2000s sat both outside the wider politics of immigration through their role as educators committed to teaching all students (Marrow 2009a, 2011) and in the center of those same politics through their role in educating immigrant children. Working at a key interface between immigrants and the state, between federal mandates for universal education and local tensions over the costs of that education (Ellis 2006), teachers in cities like Nashville occupied the center of not only engagements with immigrant populations but also the politics of immigrant incorporation. In southeast Nashville, that politics was embodied in the young immigrant students whose presence in classrooms drove at least part of the immigrant backlash noted across the South in the late 2000s.7 In response, teachers worked to excise the school from wider political debates and to make it an oasis in the city. Through their efforts to manage changing classrooms in the 2000s, teachers sometimes experienced dissonance between the heated politics of immigration they observed throughout the city and the intimacy they experienced in teaching immigrant children. As Davidson County blurred federal and local border policing through the 287(g) program in 2007, Nashville considered English-only legislation, and as neighborhood politics in southeast Nashville grew tense throughout the 2000s, classrooms with small children whose immigrant families drove these struggles became contradictory sites for teachers, who had to reconcile their personal feelings about immigration and their professional—and equally personal—responses to children in their classrooms. After the 2006 immigration marches in downtown Nashville, for example, teachers in southeast Nashville watched politics seep into their classrooms. Although Patricia, a white teacher who had worked in an elementary school in southeast Nashville for more than twenty-five years, stressed that her school was “a safe haven” that was “not affected by what goes on in the community,” she admitted that her young Mexican students noticed anger across Nashville after the rallies and asked why it was directed toward them. Rebecca, a second-grade, white, regular-classroom teacher at Morgan Elementary, described “a discrepancy between what parents told

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124      Nashville in the New Millennium them [her students] and what we thought. ‘You don’t like us, want us to be here.’ No, just get legal.” Having to negotiate their own political views on immigration as they taught young children whose families helped create Nashville’s immigration debates, teachers straddled a thin line between politics and practice, between their work and the wider world. Trying to align their own sometimes inconsistent views on immigration and their commitment to teaching all children, teachers often strove to look past not only their students’ racial and ethnic identities, as already described, but also their students’ immigrant families. As Dorothy, a white, second-grade, ELL teacher, explained, she and other teachers did not “deal with the adult part” of immigration. A state-level coordinator of ESL training told The Tennessean, “Teaching is not a political thing. As a teacher, we teach the children who sit in front [of] us.”8 Thus did teachers in classrooms across southeast Nashville work through Nashville’s politics of immigration, and depoliticize the act of teaching, by symbolically excising immigrant children from the political dynamics generated by their families. Reconciling the practice of teaching and the politics of immigration by separating them, however, sometimes required leaps of faith, if not suspensions of logic. As students of oral history have noted, moments that mark “a contradiction within the logic of [the] narrative” (Anderson and Jack 1991, 22) are often key to understanding how social actors (teachers) come to understand their relationship to broader issues in the world (immigration). For example, at the end of her interview, ­Dorothy, who had taught in several Nashville schools and worked extensively with parents at Morgan Elementary and elsewhere, explained that she did not “deal with adults that are not following the law and are not citizens because, if I did, they wouldn’t be here.” She made this claim about not working with undocumented adults after sharing multiple stories about working with immigrant parents in a variety of capacities. The contradiction between her stance on undocumented immigration and her commitment to helping the (likely undocumented) immigrant parents of her students went without remark as the slippery foundation on which Dorothy justified her work in and out of the classroom to herself, and to me. In southeast Nashville, then, as in other new destinations, teachers like Dorothy may have viewed immigrant students as clients whom they had a professional obligation to teach (Marrow 2009a, 2011). That framing, however, sometimes worked alongside the simultaneous positioning of the parents of those same students as “undeserving,” and therefore beyond the boundaries of the school and the act of teaching. This contradiction required that teachers working with immigrant parents try not to see or acknowledge the “adult” part of immigration. Even as teachers consis-

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Responding to Diversity      125  tently undermined their own efforts to mentally separate children from their parents through their work with those parents, they were able to bridge the gap between the personal and the professional and reconcile the politics of immigration with the practice of teaching by claiming to avoid the “adult” part of immigration. In addition to separating immigrant students from the politics of immigration that implicated their parents, teachers also separated their work and workplace from a wider political realm altogether (for a similar picture of schools as separate from the politics of immigration, see Cuadros 2006). When I asked Elaine, an ELL teacher at Morgan Elementary, about the effects of wider immigration debates on her school and classroom, she explained that “school is separate. I think a teacher looks at a child. I don’t think they look at anything else.” The mobilization of borders like this one between the school and politics has been noted in other new destinations, but in a different fashion. Several scholars, for example, have examined how the 287(g) program and anti-immigrant ordinances bring the international border to interior locations across the South (Coleman 2007, 2009; Winders 2007). Borders in new destinations, however, can also be produced socially. Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Jennifer Bickham Mendez (2008) argue that new destinations themselves operate as borderlands, particularly visà-vis immigrant belonging. As they show, service providers can act as “gatekeepers” toward immigrants, denying them access to places like health clinics and excluding them from full social membership in local receiving communities. In southeast Nashville, the border that teachers drew around the school to separate it from a wider political realm worked in a contradictory manner: it facilitated social membership for children of immigrants at the same time that it worked to exclude their (undocumented) parents and the wider immigration debate. Like the social services administrators in Deeb-Sossa and Mendez’s study, some teachers in southeast Nashville framed immigrants as “undeserving.” Their children, however, through their presence in the schools defined as separate from the city’s wider political sphere, were deserving of full social membership as students. As Katy, a white, third-grade, ELL teacher at Morgan Elementary, described it, despite some teachers’ personal feelings that undocumented immigration was wrong, “when the doors get closed, those are their kids.” This motif of checking politics at the door surfaced across interviews. If borders work to demarcate “safe from unsafe, to distinguish us from them” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3), the border that teachers created between the school and Nashville’s immigration politics largely succeeded in separating the “safe” practice of teaching immigrant children from the

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126      Nashville in the New Millennium “unsafe” politics of immigration. In the 2000s, however, that same line could not successfully distinguish between “us” and “them” in the debate over immigration as young immigrant students in southeast Nashville schools began to blur the line between citizen and immigrant, American and foreign. In this context, the border drawn by teachers around their work began to fail as “immigrant” children claimed “American” identities and the heated politics of immigration popped up during story time. Teachers thus had to work to stabilize the line between the school and Nashville’s wider political realm. Speaking about the negative press concerning immigration, Sandy, a longtime white teacher at Morgan Elementary, actively separated what she heard “out there” from what she saw in her classroom. “Even though we’re right here in the middle of the community, when I think about all this,” she said, referring to Nashville’s political climate, “I think about down here where the kids live.” Echoing this sentiment, Terri, an ELL kindergarten teacher at a school in southeast Nashville, explained that immigration was “a problem on the airwaves . . . [in the school] I see real people.” However, even as they marked the line between the school and the city, between teaching and politics, teachers were aware of its contradictions. In the words of Katy, an ELL teacher at Morgan Elementary, “our neighborhood . . . we are the population that other people are complaining about . . . [but] we’re kind of out of that fight because we’re the ones that people are complaining about.” At the center of ‘that fight’ but outside it, the source of complaints but sheltered from them, southeast Nashville teachers depended on this paradoxical location to maintain the myths that differences did not matter and that the school was separate from politics. Although Lorenzo, a Latino teacher at Fellows, echoed the sentiments of several teachers in saying that, when he reached his classroom, “I’m just walking through that door. We’re all one color,” depoliticizing the classroom and treating it as a space of sameness required a particular way of seeing the school and teaching. As Martha, Morgan’s guidance counselor, explained, “I kind of like everybody just being happy being together and not really calling attention to those causes of friction, which is [sic] not in the children. It’s out there in the community.” (For a discussion of a similar strategy in a New York school, see Fine et al. 2007.) In separating the school from the community, Martha, like teachers at ­Morgan Elementary, reinforced the positioning of its students as separate from the neighborhood and chose not to acknowledge the “friction” that might leak across that boundary. By working hard to excise the school and their students from Nashville’s wider immigration debates, teachers succeeded in negotiating Nashville’s political climate in the late 2000s. In the process,

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Responding to Diversity      127  however, they were left with little to bring difference and politics back into the classroom when it came time for history lessons.

“Which Water Fountain Would I Be Able to Drink From?” In the midst of a lesson on the civil rights movement, a first-grader asks, “Which water fountain would I be able to drink from?” Such a question is not unusual for young students trying to learn history by determining how it relates to them (Rodriguez 2011). The historical geographies of race, racism, and resistance embedded in this iconic question resonate powerfully across the United States, as the segregated water fountain, like the segregated bus, has become a proxy for the inhumanity of American racial apartheid. Conjuring images of Jim Crow, separate but unequal color lines, and transgression, the question is grounded in a racial ontology in which the answer is always the “good” white water fountain or the alternative marked “colored.” During the Jim Crow era, knowing the answer to this question was a matter of self-preservation, as getting it wrong carried severe, if not life-threatening, consequences for African Americans and other nonwhite groups. Children learned the answer to this question at home, church, and other community sites, and it was reinforced in public spaces and institutions, as well as in the collective memories of black communities through stories of Jim Crow’s nature and exceptions. Everyone, even children, knew the answer to this question, and that knowing was the bedrock of a Southern, if not national, de facto and de jure system of race and place (Lovett 2005). How, then, could children, especially in a Southern city like Nashville, not know the answer to the question, “Am I white enough to drink from the ‘good’ fountain?” The racial and ethnic diversification brought about by immigrant settlement made this question difficult to answer in places like Nashville in the 2000s. Where did immigrant children fit in the racial logic of a Jim Crow system of segregation that did not include them in most places (see Weise 2008)? How did teachers respond to this question about water fountains when it came from Latino, Kurdish, Vietnamese, Somali, or Sudanese children whose place in a black-white binary was not clear in the 2000s, let alone in the past? Which water fountain would they have drunk from in the 1950s, and would they all have drunk from the same one? In cities without recallable local histories of immigrant settlement, how do immigrant students find their place in the past? What connections between old social boundaries and new racial logics does such learning depend on or create?

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128      Nashville in the New Millennium These questions link immigrant students in Southern locales like Nashville to the South’s racial history, creating connections that were neither necessary nor present in most of the region in the past but are now required to help immigrant students understand the South’s social system and historical roots. Before we can think through where immigrant students fit in Southern histories of race, however, we must also consider the linkages and breaks between current and historical geographies of race in cities like Nashville. The transition that Kim (2004, 988) describes as the “official reimagining of race and nation [in the United States]—moving from a biracial, black-white focus to a formal acknowledgment of multiracial realities,” is pronounced in new destinations. It is even more magnified, however, in their schools, where immigrant students struggle to understand old systems of racialization and teachers struggle to understand the new one taking shape in front of them. For immigrant children, a key part of that learning is determining how they can relate their own identity and place in a Southern city to its history. In some ways, it would have been easier for teachers just to avoid answering these questions, but many chose to address them head on, even as they acknowledged the challenges of doing so. An interview at Morgan Elementary with Tracy, a white, first-grade, regular-classroom teacher, revealed the difficulties of such lessons. In the midst of immigrant rights protests in 2006, she and other teachers tried to explain another social movement from another time. Tracy: When we were talking about Martin Luther King and how the blacks and the whites were treated so differently. They [Kurdish students] were like, “Well, which water fountain would I be able to drink out of? My skin’s white.” And it was kind of hard to answer, because they weren’t here then. I mean, they were just, “Well, why was that?” and “My skin’s the same color as yours. I’d be able to drink from the same water fountain—the good water fountain.” Interviewer: So what do you tell them? Tracy: I’m like, “Well, I don’t know,” and we have a talk about it. We’re like, “You know, it’s—you’re actually a different culture than I am. And you have different beliefs, and it’s okay, and so, I don’t know. You might’ve had to drink from that other one.”. . . And I always tell them, I said, “Of course, it was wrong back then, and we’re happy that things have changed.”

Just as U.S.-born Kurdish students struggled with being American by birthplace but culturally marked as different by not celebrating “American” holidays, they struggled with claims to white skin but uncertainty

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Responding to Diversity      129  over whether they were “white enough” to drink from the “good” fountain. These students used Tracy as a reference point to assess this question, learning their place in Southern history by calibrating their own racial identity against their teacher’s white body and connecting racial hierarchies across time and space. In her answer, Tracy hedged her bet, using cultural differences to clarify what skin color and citizenship left blurry about the place of these students in past systems of racialization. Other teachers were less circumspect. Anita, an African American teacher at Fellows Middle, explained to students that during Jim Crow, “colored was colored,” and no one, save the few white, U.S.-born students in her classroom, would have been allowed near the “good” fountain. Where Tracy left room for doubt about U.S.-born Kurdish students’ place in a Jim Crow South, Anita filled in what she described as immigrant students’ missing “background information” on U.S. social practices with harsh lessons in American racism. White, but not quite, in one classroom and definitely “colored” in another, immigrant students learned different history lessons from different teachers and encountered no clear place in the South’s historic racial struggles or order within which to locate themselves. As these examples show, incorporating immigrants into “the racial fabric of ‘new destinations’” (Marrow 2009b, 1037) proceeded unevenly, and sometimes in different directions, at the scale of the classroom and in the context of local and regional histories. These differences point to the need for spatial, scalar, and even institutional specificity in emerging arguments about the clarity of racial categories, distancing, and interactions across new destinations (McClain et al. 2006). From classroom to classroom, and teacher to teacher, immigrant students learned different things about race, place, and history, for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, they learned different lessons about where they fit vis-à-vis a Southern past because teachers, like Nashville itself, lacked a wider sociohistorical or sociopolitical context in which they could place their immigrant students and link an immigrant presence to a Jim Crow past. Without this “background information” about how to situate immigrant students in Southern history, without a recallable historic immigrant presence, teachers drew on their own knowledge of Southern history, and often their own experiences with that history, to answer questions with little empirical grounding but deep importance to the students asking them. In the process, teachers created different racial positionalities for their students vis-à-vis the past. As Dickar (2008, 116) notes in her study of schools in New York, “White and Black teachers bring very different experiences to their conversations about their students, their schools, and the significance of race.” Failure to

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130      Nashville in the New Millennium acknowledge these differences, Dickar stresses, can silence “more meaningful dialogue about how race does and should inform the work of urban teachers working with diverse students.” In Nashville, differences in teachers’ own racialization experiences led to students being differently racialized from classroom to classroom. As teachers charted new ground in comparing a contemporary multicultural South and its biracial past (Winders and Smith 2010), they moved immigrant students back and forth across the color line created by Jim Crow in cities like Nashville, evaluating that location with and against their own place along that line. More broadly, the challenges teachers faced in answering such questions from immigrant students point to the limits of their efforts not to see difference. Simply put, not all the students in Tracy’s classroom would have drunk from the same fountain, and some of her students would have been expected to drink from different fountains in different locations across the city. Not seeing differences among students and depoliticizing the classroom enabled teachers to work through the political atmosphere of Nashville in the 2000s. It hamstrung, however, conversations about the politics of Nashville’s racial past. Although not acknowledging difference helped teachers negotiate students’ complex place in Nashville’s modern-day immigration politics, it failed to situate students within the larger historical context necessary to help those same students find their place—and water fountain—in cities like Nashville in the 1950s (Fishman and McCarthy 2005). Just as teachers somehow had to educate immigrant students on where they fit within American culture, they also had to translate a historical system of biracial segregation for children for whom Nashville had always included Kurdish and Egyptian families, Sudanese refugees, Mexican children, Honduran and Salvadoran men, and a sprinkling of white and black residents. The challenge of making a Southern biracial past not only visible but also believable was perhaps clearest in an interview with Leslie, an African American teacher in a fourth-grade regular classroom at ­Morgan Elementary. When asked about the impact of Latino migration on her work, she shared this story. Like history, I do a lot with Black History Month. Slavery, I do a lot of that. So we read about Martin Luther King, and . . . my Hispanic students were like, “Where are the Spanish people?” And I’m like, “Well, they were there, but it was mostly blacks and whites that had the argument.” “But where were the Hispanic people?” And I was like, “But you have to think about, you know, they were the minorities then. After the Blacks were the Hispanics, so the white people didn’t like any of them but, you know, just geared it toward the blacks at that time.” And they say, “Oh, wow, that is not right!

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Responding to Diversity      131  They can’t go to the bathroom.” I was like, “From that we are here. You have a black teacher. Look at us. We have Hispanics, and Kurdish and Arabic, and you know, Egyptians and Vietnamese . . . and think how boring if everyone is the same.”

As this vignette suggests, teaching the civil rights movement to immigrant students in Nashville required teaching a collective memory of black struggle and white resistance presumed to be universal in the South (Jones 2009; Brundage 2009). Explaining that “the Spanish people” were present in 1960s Memphis but “after the Blacks” in the racial hierarchy, Leslie stretched the truth in Southern history to create a place for her current Latino students in a 1960s Memphis that did not include them. Although Omi and Winant (1994, 54) stress “how deeply Americans both as individuals and as a civilization are shaped, and indeed haunted, by race,” the centrality of that racial binary had to be taught in southeast Nashville schools, where students’ status as “American” was debated even as it was claimed and where the process of inculcating them into American racial projects required innovative lesson plans. Immigrant children in Nashville knew the South, so often defined by the burden of its past (Hobson 1983), through its present because immigrants, especially their children, knew so little about local or regional history and because their own history in this part of the country was less than two decades old. When seen not only from this perspective but also from the streets and businesses of “Little Mexico,” Jim Crow was all but incomprehensible to immigrant students. As teachers worked to translate Memphis’s garbage strikes for Latino children who looked for the “Spanish people” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and as U.S.-born Kurdish children tried to grasp a system of racial difference with no clear place for them, these students struggled to position themselves vis-à-vis past Southern practices that they found to be “not right” but potentially separate from their own sense of self within contemporary Southern cities. These translations of race, place, and history only complicated the struggles of teachers trying to teach Southern and civil rights history in ways that would be meaningful to their immigrant students. Given the role of collective memory in the production of identity and space, what are the implications of immigrant students who learned the South’s history through its present and lived the realities of that history without recognizing its source?9 In their daily lives, immigrant children in southeast Nashville may not have grasped the “idea” of the South about which so many scholars, artists, and others have written (Gray 1986), but they certainly lived its reality. The history of Nashville’s segregated neigh-

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132      Nashville in the New Millennium borhoods, for example, could be traced to antebellum practices of black settlement in less-valuable tracts in north Nashville that established a racialized geography of “old [white] Nashville” and north black Nashville, reinforced over time through racist zoning practices, restrictive deed covenants, and segregated urban spaces and institutions (Szymanski 1974; Lovett 1999). Thus, the people seen, or not seen, by immigrant children in their schools and neighborhoods reflected an urban history of race that had kept African American and white residents largely on opposite sides of the city. Because the civil rights movement tends to be memorialized in historically black neighborhoods (Dwyer and Alderman 2008), immigrant children also did not see references to black struggles in their own landscape and did not learn about this movement informally as they moved through southeast Nashville. More directly, the structures of Morgan Elementary as a “bused” school and Fellows Middle as an “overflow” school reflected past struggles over race in the context of education and neighborhoods in Nashville—struggles that continued to inform student composition and teacher practices at each school, as well as the different relationships the schools had with their students’ neighborhoods. In this way, even as immigrant students had a hard time understanding Southern history in the classroom and locating themselves within it, their place in Nashville’s social fabric, urban landscape, and racial order was produced through that same history of race and racism they had difficulty seeing. Fred Hobson’s (1983) “rage” to explain the South and its past may have historically contoured white Southerners’ engagement with their homeland (Gray 1996), and as Carol Stack (1996, 18) suggests, Southern blacks, even those who left, often internalized the impacts of a “southern upbringing.” In cities like Nashville in the 2000s, however, some of the South’s newest residents, especially the youngest ones, themselves sought explanations about the South as they sat in its classrooms and challenged how the region has been known and reproduced over time as a place and an idea. What are the implications of immigrant students’ difficulties in locating themselves within Jim Crow and civil rights history? As numerous scholars suggest (Owen Dwyer 2000; Dwyer and Alderman 2008), the act of recalling civil rights struggles is central to African American efforts to carve out a place in the South more broadly. Although few studies have engaged the relationship between civil rights activism and immigrant settlement in the South (Stuesse 2009; Winders and Smith 2010), Marrow (2009a, 773) suggests that current immigrant incorporation in new Southern destinations is dependent on “past efforts by racial/ethnic minority groups and their coalition partners to achieve substantive electoral responsiveness.” At the same time, she argues elsewhere (Marrow 2009b,

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Responding to Diversity      133  1038), Hispanic newcomers in the South are coming to “perceive the social distance separating themselves from whites as more permeable than that separating themselves from blacks, and are engaging in distancing strategies that may reinforce this distinction.” In public schools in southeast Nashville, that racial distancing was subtly, if unintentionally, reinforced when immigrant students struggled to see themselves within historic black struggles for racial equality across the region (see Stuesse 2009). In classrooms where racial and ethnic differences were downplayed and politics denied, finding connections between the civil rights past and a Latino present—not to mention between those moments and the lives and histories of non-Latino immigrant students—was difficult. Not doing so, however, ran the risk of teaching immigrant students that they had no place in Southern history lessons about—and by extension, present struggles for—civil rights and thus reinforcing the sense that black and brown lives, past and present, shared no common ground. Brundage (2009, 754), in a reflection on Southern history’s engagements with memory, suggests that “commemorative symbols and rituals acquire and retain significance only if individuals acknowledge them.” Although Brundage does not include immigrants in his discussion, his “complicated . . . politics of memory . . . in the modern pluralist South” (764) takes material form in the contemporary Southern classroom, where teachers must manage the instabilities of not only cultural, racial, and national identities but also collective memory (Hall 1997). In this classroom, the symbolic value of the segregated water fountain and the harsh nature of American racial apartheid had to be taught to immigrant children, whose own histories linked to places and events from genocide in East Africa to economic turbulence in Mexico (Winders and Smith 2010). If place is also “what takes place, what contributes to history in a specific context through the creation and utilization of a physical setting” (Pred 1984, 279), what is the impact of the growth and maturation of an immigrant population that cannot see the role of the civil rights movement in shaping cities like Nashville or the meaning of these places (Stuesse 2009; Winders 2011)? If place is a historically contingent process, what happens when that history is not visible in the same way to all residents and when the youngest residents bring their own unacknowledged (perhaps even to themselves) histories to places like Nashville? In recent years, scholars in Southern studies have called for comparative and transnational analyses that link the South and its past and present to places around the world (Kolchin 2009). What immigrant students are asked to do, however, to find their place in Nashville and its past is more complicated. The attempts by immigrant students in cities like Nashville to insert themselves into a past that helped create the place

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134      Nashville in the New Millennium they now inhabit but that remains largely foreign to them resonate with wider attempts by diasporic groups to find identities across locales. Much has been written, for example, about diasporic identities that “cut across dominant narratives” and emphasize “connections across national boundaries” (Claire Dwyer 2000, 476).10 Many scholars have examined what Sunaina Maira (2002, 2), in a study of second-generation Indian American youth culture in New York, describes as “the dynamic meaning of history in self-making” (see also Striffler 2007; Ali and Holden 2006). In nearly all of these cases, however, the dynamic history sought by children of immigrants is linked to how they locate themselves vis-à-vis the history of their parents’ community of origin or the present circumstances of the community in which they live. Almost no attention has been paid to how children of immigrants see themselves in terms of the history of receiving communities, especially those that lack recallable histories of immigrant settlement. In this latter case, immigrant students and their teachers have little to go by as they write themselves into a Southern history that necessitates engagement with differences among students and the politics of their lives in Southern cities.

Conclusion In teaching immigrant and native-born children where they fit in relation to one another and in Nashville itself, teachers in southeast Nashville also taught the city’s next generation about the world and their place in it. At Morgan Elementary, these lessons were poignantly captured in two posters that students and teachers walked by every day. One poster, entitled “Where Are These Beautiful Babies From?” featured a U.S. map with pins marking the birthplaces of each teacher. Surrounding the map were the teachers’ baby pictures, with their places of birth listed below. Further down the hall was another map—a world map made by students and listed as “not to scale.” For each twenty students from a particular continent, a stick figure was drawn, creating a census of students and their place(s) in the world. The differences between these two maps—one of embodied teachers from individual places in the United States and one of disembodied students from aggregated locations around the world—epitomize the different geographies at work in schools like Morgan Elementary and the different frameworks through which teachers in southeast Nashville taught in the 2000s. Predating Nashville’s multicultural turn even as they taught through it, teachers could be mapped in a format that was easy to understand and individualize. Mapping Morgan’s students, however, was more complicated. Marking them as aggregated stick figures by continents, not hometowns, was the only way to get them all on

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Responding to Diversity      135  one map. Acknowledging the different places that individual students came from, not to mention their different social positions in Nashville, would have required a map that covered Morgan’s hallways and presented the world itself from multiple perspectives. There were simply too many students from too many places to map them any other way. Sabina Vaught and Angelina Castagno (2008, 104), in a study of professional development programs designed to increase racial, ethnic, and cultural awareness among teachers and administrators, found that in such programs, “students of color are recognized only as members of collectives while teachers are afforded the propertied right of individualism.” This juxtaposition of “individual White teachers in opposition to large groups of reductively racialized students” (104) was also present in Morgan Elementary but was driven by a different dynamic, one that highlights a key aspect of immigrant incorporation in a new destination. In a context where kids were kids and the school was apolitical—constructs that teachers saw as necessary to work through Nashville’s demographic transitions and immigration politics in the late 2000s—students had to remain disembodied and decontextualized to be seen as all the same and to make teaching apolitical. If those stick figures on the world map were fleshed out and their places in the world as U.S. citizens, immigrants, and refugees, as documented and undocumented, were acknowledged, not only would the map become too complicated, but the differences between students that teachers worked so hard not to see would be unavoidable every time they walked down the hall. Karen Monkman and her co-authors (2005, 30) argue that a “teacher’s first task is to become aware of the deeper cultural and social dynamics in schools and how these relate to society’s inequalities.” This kind of awareness undoubtedly would have helped teachers in southeast Nashville make sense of the diversity they worked hard not to see. In these schools, though, awareness of those deeper dynamics, and especially their relationship to social inequalities, would also have required redrawing that student map and thus undoing the very strategies that enabled teachers to work through their schools’ transformations in the 2000s. With school days filled to the rim, with classrooms bulging in portables, and with student composition changing from year to year, if not week to week, there was no space for anything but stick figures. What students at Morgan Elementary learned as they walked by these maps was part of the school’s hidden curriculum, “those things that children learn through the everyday experience of attending school, rather than the conscious, deliberate, and evident educational objectives of the school” (Jay 2003, 6). Teachers’ answers to student questions about hypothetical histories, unplanned lessons about culture and Americanness,

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136      Nashville in the New Millennium and maps lining the school hallways were key elements in the lessons learned by students and teachers about difference and sameness in Nashville in the new millennium. Even as teachers worked to see only children, however, the complexities of their students’ lives and their questions about where they fit in Nashville’s changing present and lingering past crept into the classroom. In response, teachers worked with two maps, one of themselves and one of their students, even as the different politics and histories that created each map sometimes leaked across them. If two histories contoured southeast Nashville’s neighborhoods in the 2000s, two maps and two ways of knowing students and teachers contoured its schools. In the 2000s, southeast Nashville schools were caught in a moment when the wider racial framework used to understand the city’s social dynamics was in flux. A 2003 series of listening forums on racial justice in Nashville captured this uncertainty (Williams 2003). A forum on race and diversity in Metro schools focused on the plight of black students and citywide patterns of poverty. Immigration received almost no mention. In the forum on race and diversity in international/immigrant communities, Nashville’s long-standing racial binary did not come up, and the focus remained on relations between “the international and immigrant community” and “the Nashville community” (Williams 2003, 9). Thus did race, diversity, and immigration remain largely separate aspects of the city’s urban politics on an institutional level. At the more intimate scale of the classroom, however, diversity and immigration came together, leaving schools to oscillate between them. Still addressing long-standing racial inequalities experienced by black students, Nashville schools now had to address “the immigrant community” whose children increasingly filled their classrooms and whose presence challenged the capacity of a bimodal understanding of race to account for all differences and inequalities in the classroom. At the same time, ‘the Nashville community” was also present in the schools and included most teachers, black and white U.S.-born students, and, at least in theory, the U.S-born children of immigrants and refugees. Complicated triangulations among race, immigration, and the local thus structured teachers’ school days in the 2000s. In Nashville, what Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean (2003, 26) described a decade ago as the “profound loosening of the rigid racial and ethnic boundaries that have so long divided the country” also loosened the foundation upon which teachers saw and approached their students. Subsequently unsure about how to proceed, they often ended up trying not to see what they saw around them (Leonard 2010). Nashville’s wider, sometimes nasty (Sampson 2008) political debates over immigration in the late 2000s only complicated teachers’ uncertainty

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Responding to Diversity      137  about how to approach their classrooms. Working at the epicenter of immigrant Nashville, teachers in southeast Nashville came to grips with this location, as they did with their schools’ diversity, by working not to see it. On the frontline of contact between “the Nashville community” and “the immigrant community” and watching the line between the two dissolve and reform in their classrooms, teachers adopted imperfect strategies that limited their ability to place their multicultural students in a biracial past but enabled them as teachers to learn at least the broad features of Nashville’s multicultural spaces. These approaches left many questions unanswered, especially about what happened when students went home. As Patrick, a fourth-grade ELL teacher at a school in southeast Nashville, explained, “The only thing I can say is, I don’t know how they feel in their neighborhood.” As the remainder of this book lays out, the feelings of immigrant and long-term residents in the neighborhood also incorporated particular understandings of local histories that, as in the schools, pulled apart for both groups yet powerfully shaped immigrant inclusion. As the social worlds of immigrant and long-term residents increasingly overlapped in southeast Nashville neighborhoods, they worked to understand each other and to sort out what it meant to live in a changing neighborhood. Both groups did so, however, by mobilizing different understandings of race, place, and memory to come to grips with Nashville in the new millennium. Before examining the details of those mobilizations, the next chapter pulls back from the intimate spaces of the southeast Nashville classroom to the wider sphere of Nashville’s urban politics and the place of immigrants in urban government. It examines Nashville’s handling of the shift from immigrant arrival to immigrant settlement from the perspective of the city’s wider urban politics and institutional infrastructure. The ethnic and racial transformations that seemed so dramatic in the classroom were sometimes hard to see from this more detached standpoint, and the chapter raises new questions about not only the spatial texture but also the institutional specificity of immigrant incorporation in the Music City.

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Chapter 6  | Seeing Immigrant Nashville: Institutional Visibility, Urban Governance, and Immigrant Incorporation

On an early evening in July 2007, my research assistant, Sandra, and I wandered into a draft concept plan meeting organized by Metro Nashville’s Planning Department.1 Held in the old Turner School in the heart of southeast Nashville, this meeting was part of a visioning exercise designed to create a new land-use plan that would form the basis for zoning requests and other land-use decisions for the next decade. At this gathering and at others like it, Metro urban planners asked residents to brainstorm about what they wanted their neighborhoods to look like, compiling a collective sense of residents’ aspirations for their neighborhoods and translating those aspirations into neighborhood design plans. Finding a seat along the edge of the room close to the tables set up for participants, I made the first entry in my field notes: “all white attendees.” This observation would be made again at the meeting’s conclusion by attendees themselves, as it would be at similar meetings across southeast Nashville. It would also become a leitmotif of Nashville’s institutional interactions with immigrants as neighborhood residents. To begin the session, the lead planner reminded attendees that “the neighborhood spoke” at these sessions about what it wanted vis-à-vis greater connectivity along corridors and among residents, mapping the idea of “neighborhood” onto the people at the meeting and linking their involvement to the neighborhood’s ability to be represented. At this session, as at others, conversations bounced between urban planners’ calls for the “diversity” necessary to transform Nolensville Road into a functioning urban community and long-term residents’ hopes for the “small-

138

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      139  town” feel that would re-create the neighborhood they nostalgically recalled (Fainstein 2005). Planners stressed that a combination of diversity and quaintness in southeast Nashville was attainable, with the right planning approach. Mixed-used development, they explained, would create defined centers and address a perennial concern of long-term residents by making Nolensville Road more than a thoroughfare out of the city or a string of car lots.2 To redefine Nolensville Road, however, residents had to “declare your neighborhood” and mark its limits, the facilitator reiterated. Whether that “declared” neighborhood constituted an actual neighborhood was hotly debated by participants. This area along Nolensville Road “was a beautiful community,” one attendee stressed, but had become excessively commercial, particularly around the section known as “Little Mexico.” Other participants described this stretch of Nolensville Road as a “potential neighborhood” that would have to overcome the same commercial intrusion to be a real neighborhood. As participants pondered whether the area was a former community or a future neighborhood, planners stressed that it was “up to the neighborhood” to drive changes, again mapping responsibility for the physical space of the area onto the residents physically present in the room. “You all are the watchdogs,” planners declared to attendees, saying that they were the ones who could pressure council representatives and neighborhood associations. “You, as a community, are watching over” the neighborhood. Through such declarations, Metro planners connected attendees at the meeting, the physical state of their neighborhoods, and the sociopolitical formation of community, placing the task of determining the future of all three in the hands of meeting participants. Throughout the evening, participants periodically remarked on the whiteness of the audience as a problem in that constellation of neighborhood, community, and residents. As one participant quipped, “I’m just gonna say it. There are no Hispanics here.” It was true that no Latinos were present at the session (aside from my research assistant, who was from Puerto Rico). In spite of their physical absence, however, a Latino presence was central to the meeting in many ways. When facilitators turned the discussion to a proposed corridor to link Coleman Park at the intersection of Nolensville Road and Thompson Lane to the Woodbine Community Organization (WCO) in the heart of Woodbine, a particularly vocal attendee described the WCO as no longer a neighborhood center and “not what it once was,” obliquely referencing tensions surrounding the WCO’s immigrant outreach and directly noting its failure to merit identification as a neighborhood node. An absent Latino presence was also central to how the meeting itself was organized. As organizers ex-

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140      Nashville in the New Millennium plained that budget limitations had not allowed them to send out multiple announcements or announcements in multiple languages, one attendee lamented that even though the core group was “committed to the neighborhood . . . [it] doesn’t represent the demographics of the community.” Through an absent immigrant presence at a meeting about southeast Nashville’s future, the distance between the neighborhood represented by a core group of active residents, on the one hand, and the community constituted by an increasingly diverse residential population of long-term residents and immigrants, on the other, came to the fore in a meeting whose legitimacy was premised on the connection between the two constructs. What that immigrant residential presence, especially a Latino residential presence, looked like to different institutions across the city, and how Latino immigrants were and were not visible as neighborhood residents in these institutions, is the topic of this chapter. I address Nashville’s institutional planning for immigrants by looking at how local government saw or did not see Latino immigrants. Coming on the coattails of smaller refugee populations (Winders 2006a) and in the midst of overall population growth (Kocchar et al. 2005), Latino immigrants arriving in Nashville from the mid-1990s onward encountered a city unprepared for them (Winders 2006b). This situation, of course, is well documented across new destinations, almost none of which anticipated or were institutionally prepared for immigrant settlement.3 The discussion here sharpens understandings of these patterns by focusing not only on instances of immigrant exclusion or oversight by an ill-prepared city but also on Nashville’s broader ways of seeing Latino immigrants as part of overall urban dynamics, particularly neighborhood dynamics. This focus reveals an overlooked precursor to immigrant incorporation—how cities see, or do not see, immigrants within the structure of local government. The institutional invisibility of Latino immigrants to government or nongovernment organizations in Nashville, I argue, diminished their ability to make claims to or on the city as urban residents, especially where they lacked both descriptive representation through elected Latino officials and substantive representation through non-Latino elected officials who advocated for them. Whether we are looking at new destinations learning to see and understand an immigrant population or at traditional gateways reconfiguring their provisions of social services and other resources, our analyses of immigrant incorporation must include an understanding of how a city sees immigrant residents within the structures of its governance. How, then, did Nashville plan for Latino immigrants in its neighborhoods? Neighborhoods, where immigration’s impacts can be intense and

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      141  sustained, often become epicenters in the wider politics of immigration (Ley 1995). In Nashville, however, Latino immigrants as neighborhood residents occupied a paradoxical space where they were both politically central to official and grassroots efforts to manage Nashville’s residential spaces and institutionally marginalized within those efforts. This paradoxical place held by immigrants in visions and plans for Nashville neighborhoods had consequences for both how such spaces were subsequently addressed by Metro government and how residents themselves managed neighborhood politics. Because Latino immigrants were unevenly drawn into institutional and grassroots neighborhood politics, when Nashville did see immigrants in its neighborhoods, it did so in ways that minimized opportunities for immigrant integration and further marginalized immigrants within the city’s social fabric. This chapter also situates these institutional responses to neighborhoods in Nashville within neoliberal transformations in urban governance. Examining the histories of institutions that worked with immigrants in Nashville, it shows how wider changes in local government in the mid-2000s made it difficult for many Nashville institutions to see immigrants not only as residents but also as urban constituents, and thus as relevant clients. Immigrants’ institutional invisibility was exacerbated by Nashville’s view of its neighborhoods as territorially discrete and by a local government structure that parceled out immigrant issues across Metro departments. This invisibility combined with broader urban transformations in the new millennium to make it hard for Nashville institutions to plan for immigrant residents they could not see in the first place. In laying out this argument, the chapter contributes to the growing body of work on immigrant incorporation in new destinations, especially the claim that immigrant incorporation may proceed differently in these sites.4 As this scholarship suggests, local institutions from government agencies to churches function as “jumping-off” points (Cabell 2007) for immigrants in new destinations, particularly in the absence of immigrant political incorporation and formal participation (Odem 2004, 2009; Bullock and Hood 2006). In the most extensive discussion to date, Marrow (2009a, 2011) suggests that bureaucratic incorporation may outpace political incorporation for immigrants in new destinations not only because the formal political participation of Latino immigrants is limited but also because elected officials are reluctant to see Latino immigrants as legitimate political constituents. Marrow’s work, thus, points to a new form of immigrant integration in new destinations, one driven by incorporation into bureaucratic agencies and institutions, not by coethnic political representation. She shows that bureaucratic immigrant incorporation proceeds unevenly because institutions from schools to law enforcement to health care have different public

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142      Nashville in the New Millennium missions vis-à-vis immigrants and because federal mandates limit the distribution of services. As a result, some institutions in new destinations reach out to immigrants, and some ignore them. As this chapter shows, the politics of inclusion or exclusion embedded in the missions of different institutions is not the only reason for the unevenness of immigrant incorporation in new destinations. Also contributing is the visibility or invisibility of immigrants within and to those institutions themselves. Examining how local government sees, and does not see, immigrants in new destinations like Nashville, thus, can refine understandings of immigrant incorporation more broadly by demonstrating that such incorporation is predicated on immigrant’s institutional visibility as urban residents or constituents. In Nashville in the 2000s, immigrants were only partially visible to key institutions across the city, with consequences for how they could later make political claims. Even a local government’s efforts to be more responsive to local residents can inadvertently exclude immigrants if they are not institutionally visible. Thus, as immigration became politically visible and heated across Nashville in the 2000s, immigrant residents became institutionally hard to find.

Planning to See Immigrants In an interview conducted in 2002 on Latino migration to Nashville, a representative of a well-known business organization remarked that Nashville had discovered that it “need[ed] to have a plan for” Latino immigrants.5 Nashville, like other new destinations ten years ago, was unprepared for the arrival of Latino immigrants. As Spanish-language newspapers, radio stations, and signage began to pop up alongside ­Hispanic-owned restaurants and businesses in southeast Nashville, Nashville government, as well as other institutions in the city, scrambled to find translators and bilingual employees and to assess where this new population fit socially, politically, and culturally, both in the city and in relation to existing groups. In a short time, what had been understood as a Latino workforce that labored across the city became a Latino community that enrolled children in schools, used public parks and health clinics, and shopped at local stores. This shift from Latino workers to Latino residents caught Nashville off guard, and institutions from schools to police departments struggled to adjust. The development of Latino communities and the emergence of Latino social, political, and business organizations at the turn of the millennium transformed the Music City into a multiethnic city and reworked the structure and daily practice of its governance. The late 1990s, for example,

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      143  saw city council proposals to bring Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) offices to Nashville and an unsuccessful attempt to make contractors working on city construction projects verify that all workers were legal residents. Nonprofit organizations working with children began to form Latino outreach programs, as did elements of Nashville’s business community and its boosters. In short, in the late 1990s, institutions across Nashville began to notice the city’s changing demographics and to understand the change that immigration could bring to their missions and daily activities. Even as Nashville focused on immigration, however, the city paid little attention to immigrant settlement. Although the racial, ethnic, and age composition of southeast Nashville neighborhoods changed dramatically in the 2000s, the overall social and political marginality of these neighborhoods ensured that Latino immigrant settlement remained a localized phenomenon seen to impact only parts of the city and not as an overall urban issue. From the beginning in Nashville, a tension emerged between immigration as an urban phenomenon affecting the city as a whole and immigrant settlement as a residential issue impacting only parts of it—and politically and socially marginal ones at that. The space between these two geographies of immigration and immigrant settlement shaped how Nashville saw and planned for Latino immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. As discussed in chapters 4 and 5, one of the first institutions to feel the effects of immigrant settlement and respond to it was Metro Nashville Public Schools. In the late 1990s, when federally mandated busing stopped and most Nashville schools returned to being “neighborhood” schools, public schools in southeast Nashville were surprised to see large numbers of Latino students at their doors. As the public debate over English as a Second Language (ESL) training and provisions grew in the early 2000s, Nashville schools, according to both educators and public discourse, formed a frontline response to immigrant settlement, acting as bellwethers for other government and nongovernment organizations and making visible the more established nature of Latino communities in Nashville. The same was true for state agencies administering social services, especially those related to children’s health. TENNderCARE, for example, a health care program for children eligible for Tennessee’s Medicaid program (TennCare), first noticed an increase in Latino children in the early 2000s, a trend that combined with the increasing number of Latino children in Nashville schools to provide some of the earliest evidence that a Latino workforce was becoming a Latino community. As in other new destinations (Ansley 2005), the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department also saw early signs of immigrant settlement in the late 1990s and was one of the first institutions to respond. Perhaps the first,

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144      Nashville in the New Millennium and certainly most public, awareness of Latino residents for Nashville police came during the Ivy-Woods abuse scandal (Winders 2008a). In 1999 an alternative newspaper, The Nashville Scene, ran a cover story detailing accusations of abuse and racial profiling of Latino residents by off-duty police officers moonlighting as security guards at the Ivy-Woods apartments in southeast Nashville. The story, which delved into alleged collusion between the police department and the private security company employing the off-duty officers, was picked up by Nashville’s main newspaper, The Tennessean, and quickly became a flashpoint for the city’s Latino organizations. The scandal also became a point of contention between Latino and African American community leaders, who were divided over the culpability of the police chief, the first African American to hold the post in Nashville. As Latino leaders called for the chief’s resignation and demanded to be part of discussions of racial profiling in Nashville, African American leaders supported the police chief and distanced themselves from Latino leaders organizing around the scandal.6 As the complicated politics of a newly multiracial city divided Latino and black leaders, Latino residents were drawn into Nashville’s racial politics—and onto the radar of its police force. The public debate over the Ivy-Woods scandal, along with the release of the 2000 census figures, made Nashville’s Latino population newly visible, especially for Metro police, in the early 2000s. In 2004, in response to a series of listening forums held by the city on race and diversity (Williams 2003) and in recognition of the limited effectiveness of Metro’s six Spanish-speaking officers for a growing Latino population, Metro police created “El Protector,” a program that placed Spanish-speaking police officers as liaisons between the Latino community and the police department.7 The program was designed to address trust issues among Latino residents raised by the Ivy-Woods scandal, as well as ideas about police corruption that some had brought with them to Nashville, by promoting community policing and outreach and offering a different face, figuratively and literally, for Metro police in southeast Nashville and east Davidson County. Although identified nationally as a best practice by the Vera Institute, the program encountered problems, not only because Davidson County entered the federal 287(g) program in 2007 but also because of controversy surrounding an El Protector officer.8 In 2006 Juan Borges, southeast Nashville’s El Protector, ran unsuccessfully for state representative of District 60, which included parts of southeast Nashville, on a platform opposing “illegal immigration.”9 This position, along with Borges’s refusal to speak Spanish at a public meeting, created rifts between him and Latino advocates, and he resigned his position in 2008, citing other reasons for his departure.10

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      145  Like public schools, some Nashville institutions filtered their awareness of an immigrant population through understandings of the city’s refugee communities, portions of which dated to the arrival of Cubans in the 1960s and Southeast Asians in the 1970s. This early refugee presence offered a framework of cultural diversity outside a black-white racial binary through which to make sense of and respond to immigrant settlement in the early 2000s. By initially interpreting a Latino immigrant presence and needs through previous experiences with smaller, more diverse refugee populations, Nashville’s government and nonprofit agencies smoothed the ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences among Nashville’s foreign born into an “international community” that could be discussed and addressed collectively (see, for example, Ray and Morse 2004).11 Both governmental and nongovernmental institutions soon realized, however, especially after the shock of 9/11, that refugees and Latino immigrants were not institutionally interchangeable when it came to both cultural needs and legal relationship with the federal government. Thus, programs designed to work with refugees were often found to be incapable of addressing Nashville’s growing Latino population, especially undocumented immigrants.12 Even though an early refugee presence made Nashville institutions more sensitive to the idea of a foreign-born population in the city, Latino immigrants coming to Nashville in the new millennium still entered through gaps in the city’s institutional frameworks, especially in relation to its neighborhoods.

New Urbanism and New Immigrants Understanding where Latino immigrants fit within Nashville’s framework for addressing its neighborhoods first requires understanding where neighborhoods themselves fit in the city’s urban politics. In the Music City, neighborhood activism has roots in 1970s debates over interstate expansion (Seley 1970; White 1971; Daugherty 1980), midcentury struggles to desegregate the schools (Woodward 1978; Alexander 2001), and earlytwentieth-century urban political machines (Doyle 1985). Since the mid1990s, neighborhoods have assumed an even greater role in Metro government through both wider neoliberal devolution of responsibility to local communities (Martin 2003a, 2003b; Herbert 2005; Ellis 2006) and specific changes in Nashville governance. This interplay between wider neoliberal dynamics and local change can be seen in the actions of Nashville’s political leadership in the 2000s. In 1999 Bill Purcell was elected Nashville’s mayor on a platform of neighborhood empowerment that offered “a neighborhood-based approach to addressing the [city’s] problems and

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146      Nashville in the New Millennium opportunities” (Grant Jones 2000, 5). Shortly after taking office, Purcell made two decisions that not only transformed the governance of Nashville neighborhoods but, because Nashville’s immigrant population was just establishing itself in the city, had a direct impact on where immigrants fit into the management of Nashville’s neighborhoods. First, in 2000, Purcell hired a new lead urban planner who brought to Nashville a framework of new urbanism, a planning approach that has received critical attention and public praise since the early 1990s for its foundation in idealized notions of community and its marketing of a nostalgic past.13 With a focus on mixed land use and human-scale landscapes that contrast sharply with the sprawling urban landscapes of cities like Los Angeles or Dallas (Talen 2000), new urbanism taps a reservoir of collective longing for how things used to be to produce new community landscapes removed from and defined against both the urban and the suburban (Till 1993; Falconer Al-Hindi and Staddon 1997). Sitting somewhere between suburbanization and gentrification (Butler 2007), new urbanism works to “reform the sprawling pattern of suburban growth” seen across many U.S. cities by creating a “strong sense of community” (Mendez 2005, 34) that residents can, quite literally, purchase. Made especially prominent by highprofile experiments like Florida’s Seaside and Disney’s Celebration, the politics of new urbanism has been debated by scholars who critique its spatial determinism (if you build the ideal physical community, an ideal social community will develop), as well as its market-driven sense of community that hearkens back to an envisioned, if not actual, golden era of neighborhoods. These criticisms notwithstanding, new urbanism has moved from new developments into urban heartlands as cities have embraced it as a planning paradigm (Butler 2007). In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for example, urban planners intertwined new urbanism and neoliberalism to envision a new city through a celebration of the old one (Kenny and Zimmerman 2003). In southern California, scholars have pointed to overlap between new-urbanist ideologies of dense, healthy neighborhoods and existing patterns of Latino community development, framing Latino neighborhoods as “an untapped resource that could enable the development of more sustainable communities” (Mendez 2005, 33) through a Latinized new urbanism. In Nashville, new urbanism, in combination with Mayor Purcell’s focus on residents as participants in planning decisions (Knox 1991), reconfigured both the city’s urban landscapes and its planning practices in the early 2000s, sending planners into neighborhoods and making the neighborhood, rather than a more general urban area, the new planning unit. Committed to (re)creating pedestrian neighborhoods, Nashville planners envisioned the city as a series of human-scale neighborhoods with

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      147  streetscapes and limited traffic. Although a focus on downtown development remained, especially in urban design and public arts campaigns, the Metro Planning Department from 2000 onward increasingly worked with and solicited input from local residents and neighborhood associations, the latter of which became the official venue through which the city saw its residential spaces and the institutional link through which local government interacted with residents.14 In addition to putting a new focus on neighborhoods through new urbanism, Purcell also formed the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods (MON) to link his office, other Metro departments, and Nashville neighborhoods.15 Designed to “give our constituents a voice in government,” in the words of its executive director in 2006, MON provided information and technical assistance to “help organize neighborhoods around their issues” and, equally important, to organize those constituents into neighborhood associations. One of MON’s earliest acts was to create a Neighborhood Training Institute—“a series of workshops designed to build capacity and assist in the establishment and development of neighborhood associations” (Department of Codes and Building Safety 2006, 19). Sponsoring Mayor’s Nights Out, Neighborhood Nights Out Against Crime, the Neighborhood Response Team, and other activities, MON worked to keep neighborhoods and Metro government on the same page and to create a mental and institutional map of the city in which its residential spaces, and thus residents, were represented by neighborhood associations that covered the entire city. This effort to blanket the city with neighborhood associations was largely successful. When MON began in 1999, approximately 125 neighborhood groups were identifiable across Nashville. By 2006 that number had reached close to 600, and neighborhood empowerment through neighborhood associations had become a mantra across the city. MON not only expanded the number of neighborhood associations, however, but also elevated the importance of neighborhoods as the institutionally recognized representative of Nashville residents and the institutionally encouraged way for residents to think about where they lived (see, for example, Neighborhood Resource Center for the Neighborhoods of Nashville 2006). If Nashville residents wanted to speak to the city in the 2000s, they were strongly encouraged to do so through neighborhood associations. Of course, as in other cities, empowering neighborhoods did not always proceed smoothly in Nashville (Herbert 2005). Across the city in the 2000s, “expectations were way down because participation was way down,” as one neighborhood association president put it, and convincing residents to get involved in their neighborhoods was a challenge. Some neighborhood associations had initially formed around concerns that,

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148      Nashville in the New Millennium once resolved, left them little reason to continue as an active group. The Glencliff Neighborhood Association, for example, formed in 1996 to address robberies in the area, as well as confusion about which arm of the police department was working with residents to address the problem. Once these issues were settled, the association had no clear reason to continue and participation waned, as often happens in neighborhood activism (Martin 2003a). Under Purcell’s administration, however, neighborhood associations were newly motivated to come and stay together in order to take advantage of grants, services, and other opportunities for neighborhood improvement available only to formally recognized neighborhood associations. Through Purcell’s interest in neighborhood empowerment, neighborhood groups began, in the words of one Metro director working with them, “not just asking for something” but “demanding” it. This new level of expectation, however, was not without problems. Metro departments that dealt with residential issues were increasingly expected to respond to requests from the growing number of neighborhood associations, and neighborhood associations were increasingly expected to work together smoothly to manage their own physical spaces. As they negotiated Metro’s bureaucratic networks, neighborhood associations learned the limits of what they could accomplish, either on their own or through recourse to local government. As one association president in southeast Nashville put it, “We don’t have the means to help people, but we can at least keep the neighborhood in good shape.” That task of keeping the neighborhood in good shape required not only commitment from local residents to participate in their neighborhood and its governance but also a strong link between the local management of neighborhood spaces by residents and the local government of the city by Metro departments (Herbert 2005), a link cultivated and maintained through neighborhood associations. Although MON generated interest in neighborhood organizing on a scale not seen under previous administrations, it was not the first initiative to empower neighborhoods in the Music City or to “envision Nashville and Davidson County as a community of neighborhoods” (Neighborhood Resource Center for the Neighborhoods of Nashville 2006, 1). In 1997 the Neighborhood Resource Center for the Neighborhoods of Nashville (NRC) formed with the explicit mission of working with low- to moderate-income neighborhoods on community organizing, leadership training, information services, and codes and zoning concerns. Responding to concerns over gentrification in east Nashville and exposés about substandard public housing in north Nashville, NRC prioritized the contributions of residents and focused on finding solutions among them. As

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      149  its director explained, Nashville neighborhoods “need[ed] an excuse to come together and talk . . . about what’s important.” In 2006 NRC provided that opportunity in the Future of Neighborhoods Summit—“the single largest neighborhood led planning/visioning process in the history of Nashville” (Neighborhood Resource Center for the Neighborhoods of Nashville 2006). Like MON, both NRC and the Future of Neighborhoods Summit positioned the neighborhood association as the link between local government and local residents and the lens through which the city and its residents saw each other. In southeast Nashville, maintaining the link between local government and local residents through neighborhood associations was not easy, and the view that neighborhood associations gave the city of southeast Nashville neighborhoods was decidedly skewed. Even with increased incentive for neighborhoods to organize into associations, the cohesion necessary to create and maintain an association was often in conflict with the desires of individual members (Martin 2003a). According to one nonprofit director in southeast Nashville, groups “are really trying to work together, but when it trickles down to the average Joe coming from whatever country, then I think there is still a lot of segregation.” Nonetheless, in Nashville participation in a cohesive neighborhood association was cast as a duty and expectation for local residents who wanted visibility to or action from Metro government. In the early 2000s, Metro government followed wider trends in urban governance and “recast [local participation] as a moral duty of active citizenship” (Grundy and Boudreau 2008, 348). Under this model, as Luke Desforges, Rhys Jones, and Mike Woods (2005, 441) suggest, “active citizens are judged to have succeeded or failed . . . as a place-based community, with repercussions for the further treatment of that locality by the state” (see also Dickinson et al. 2008). As active citizenship through neighborhood associations became the way Nashville saw its neighborhoods and, by extension, its residents, it also became the only way for residents to make themselves, their neighborhoods, and their issues visible to Metro Nashville. In the process, immigrants within those same spaces became increasingly hard to find.

Finding Immigrant Nashville Part of Latino immigrants’ limited institutional visibility in Nashville is bound up in the geographies of immigrant settlement in the city. Immigration’s residential impacts in the 2000s were concentrated in southeast Nashville, which in 2000 had twice the percentage of foreign-born residents (14.2 percent) as Davidson County (7.4 percent) (Perkins et al. 2005). Since as early as the 1920s, these had been white, working-class neighbor-

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150      Nashville in the New Millennium hoods with strong local identities and tight-knit residents. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, southeast Nashville was experiencing turnover as families aged, children left, and houses became available for purchase or rent, often by immigrants new to the city.16 As a result, by the mid-2000s, southeast Nashville neighborhoods were home to a range of residents: “the native South Nashvillians, the young professional family types who are remodeling the affordable homes, and the international groups,” in the words of a director of a neighborhood center.17 In the 2000s, such neighborhoods began to change from owner-occupied to rented, from English to Spanish, from elderly white residents who lived all their lives in the neighborhood to young Latino families who had lived their lives across international borders. Because this transformation remained incomplete through the 2000s, both groups soon occupied the same residential, if not social, spaces and lived side by side. What impact did this demographic change have on the neighborhood empowerment that Purcell began in the early 2000s? Although, as this chapter’s opening vignette showed, Latino immigrants were discussed by southeast Nashville’s neighborhood associations, most neighborhood associations, like the wider organizations and departments with which they worked, did not have immigrants involved in them and, instead, were led by and composed of white residents. Some neighborhood associations tried to involve Latino immigrants, and some immigrant organizations had outreach programs in southeast Nashville neighborhoods. Latino immigrants, however, were an absent presence in most neighborhood associations in the 2000s: they influenced what associations addressed but had little say in how they did so. As the former MON executive director explained, southeast Nashville neighborhood organizations “don’t have the participation of the immigrant population. . . . People are making decisions for those groups. They [immigrants] are not participating, but they are being discussed.” Reasons for this immigrant absence included language barriers, cultural mistrust, immigrant vulnerabilities, and the general challenges of social activism in contemporary urban neighborhoods (Herbert 2005). It also arose, however, because of the gap between Nashville’s social geographies of immigrant settlement and institutional geographies of neighborhood governance. Within southeast Nashville, Latino residents were not concentrated in one or two neighborhoods (see figures 3.4 and 3.5) and so were not necessarily visible as an ethnic residential enclave (but see Chaney 2010). Instead, immigrant Nashville took the form of a heterolocalist community dispersed across southeast Nashville (Zelinsky and Lee 1998), with social connections, consumption spaces, and even workplaces found throughout the area. Equally important, because Nashville’s

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      151  immigrant organizations worked with immigrants living anywhere in the city, they were not visible to neighborhood-focused institutions like MON or NRC. As a result, MON and other neighborhood-oriented groups viewed immigrant organizations as institutionally separate from their own missions and assumed that immigrant communities, stretched as they were across neighborhoods, had their own organizations to address their concerns as immigrants, not as neighborhood residents. Latino immigrants in Nashville, thus, occupied a space between geographically defined neighborhoods that were central to local government and ethnically defined communities that were central to Nashville’s immigrant organizations. These two understandings of neighborhood and community, and their different formalizations in government and nongovernment organizations, institutionally displaced Latino immigrants as neighborhood residents in Nashville. As a MON official explained, “Most immigrant populations . . . have their own resources, so they don’t need us.” Suggesting that other agencies gave immigrants “the information and work[ed] with them through the system,” this official explained the absence of immigrants in MON, and in the neighborhood associations through which it saw and managed Nashville neighborhoods, by placing them in organizations beyond these associations. Because immigrant organizations did not address neighborhood issues and because neighborhood organizations assumed that immigrants had their own “system,” immigrants were not seen as residents who could contribute to Purcell’s neighborhood-based approach to addressing Nashville’s issues. As Nashville neighbors, Latino immigrants were institutionally invisible. How, then, did Metro governmental institutions eventually find immigrants within the city’s neighborhoods? A primary way immigrants emerged was through complaints to Metro departments tasked with regulating residential spaces, especially zoning changes and codes violations—two aspects of neighborhood politics intimately linked to an immigrant presence in many cities (McConnell and Miraftab 2009; Brettell and Nibbs 2011). Mike Davis (2000), for example, notes that in many new destinations, Latino residents have revitalized declining urban cores and first-ring suburbs (see also Rocco 1997; Odem 2009; Wortham et al. 2009). The same was true in southeast Nashville: as its immigrant population grew, its business districts, which had struggled since the late 1970s, especially in Flatrock, began to thrive again. To many long-term residents, the key change was the emergence, seemingly “overnight,” of car dealerships along these thoroughfares. In a city with few public transportation options and geographically dispersed low-wage work sites, owning a car was one of the only mobility options for Latino immigrants in Nashville, as in other Southern cities (Odem

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152      Nashville in the New Millennium 2009). This need quickly caught the attention of auto dealers, who, along with Mexican groceries, clothing stores, and Western Unions, transformed southeast Nashville’s roads into international corridors for the city. In the words of a neighborhood association president, “You can go to bed and wake up the next morning and have a car lot.” Often linked to immigrant, especially Latino, settlement, car lots came to proxy for the wider commercial “intrusion” in southeast Nashville (there were eighty car lots by 2006) against which neighborhood associations had to “hold our boundaries,” as one member explained at a 2006 meeting to address zoning change requests. In the early 2000s, under Nashville’s model of neighborhood empowerment, the power to “hold” neighborhood boundaries increasingly lay in the hands of neighborhood associations, through which zoning proposals were partially vetted. Although not all associations were consistently active, those that were could institutionally respond to, and intervene in, proposed changes in the commercial and residential areas they represented (Martin 2003a). In neighborhoods with active associations, for example, residents and business owners who wanted to change the status of their property or make changes to its structures made their case to the neighborhood association, which then made recommendations to the Metro Planning Department. In contrast to the common perception that local government directs zoning, neighborhood associations played key roles in determining how their spaces were defined and used in the 2000s by considering requests for everything from creating new car lots to transforming residential lots into commercial sites. In southeast Nashville, neighborhood associations often responded to zoning requests through a framework that recalled the neighborhood as remembered by long-term residents and, thus, sought to limit neighborhood changes seen to stem from the commercial and demographic transformations in the area. Local residents working through neighborhood associations, however, were empowered not only to make decisions about zoning requests to preserve a particular image of their neighborhoods but also to police their own residential spaces through codes enforcement, another topic bound up with the politics of immigrant settlement. When MON opened in 1999, for example, some of the earliest issues it encountered— and earliest signs of an immigrant presence it noticed—were codes violations. For long-term residents in southeast Nashville, codes enforcement became a tense topic in the 2000s as the questions of cultural diversity raised by their new immigrant neighbors became inseparable from questions concerning the changing material conditions of their neighborhoods (Ray, Halseth, and Johnson 1997). Where (and how many) vehicles were parked at a dwelling, how many residents lived in one house, and whose responsibility it was to maintain rental units became points of contention and sur-

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      153  veillance for neighborhood associations and their resident-members (Erwin 2003). As these associations addressed issues from the visibility of day laborers to language barriers between new and old residents, not only the composition but also the politics of neighborhoods and their governance became increasingly complex, and the democratization of decision-making through neighborhood empowerment in Nashville rubbed up against the ethnic and racial diversification of its neighborhoods through immigrant settlement (Purcell 2007). Through its work with neighborhood structures and spaces, the Metro Department of Codes and Building Safety (hereafter, the Codes Department) became an important interface in this encounter between neighborhood empowerment and neighborhood diversification. It also became a key way in which Latino immigrants as residents became institutionally visible to the city. As the Codes Department director explained, his department had more and more contact with Latino immigrants through the 2000s, often at the urging of long-term residents, over codes violations. Through its regulatory work with residential structures, the Codes Department institutionally mediated contact between long-term residents and immigrants by intervening in how Latino immigrants used and occupied neighborhood spaces. In response to my question about how Latino migration had affected neighborhood relations in southeast Nashville, for example, a Codes Department official exclaimed, “I don’t think they are interacting. I got a call yesterday. A neighbor has a problem with his neighbor. They call me . . . ! They use me as their conduit.” Responding to new, sometimes tense dynamics among southeast Nashville residents and new demands for intervention in the process of immigrant settlement, the Codes Department adopted the NOTICE (Neighborhoods Organized to Initiate Codes Enforcement) initiative in 2002, a new approach to neighborhood monitoring. This neighborhood-audit program trained local residents in neighborhood associations to detect, document, and report codes violations in their neighborhood (Department of Codes and Building Safety 2006). As the name suggests, NOTICE enabled the Codes Department to become more involved in neighborhood management without having to add personnel. From the perspective of neighborhood associations, it was, in the words of one president, a way to make Metro government “accountable” and “responsible” to the neighborhood, echoing MON’s goal of “making our government accountable to” residents and NRC’s “custom of accountability” necessary for successful neighborhoods (Department of Codes and Building Safety 2006, 1). NOTICE also, however, functioned as a codes version of community policing (Herbert 2005): it asked neighborhood associations and residents to assume responsibility for their own streets and to step in where the state had stepped back through wider reductions in government funding and

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154      Nashville in the New Millennium services. Thus, the program demanded more involvement from residents, making them equally accountable to Metro government and ensuring, as the same association president went on to note, that residents “[kept] up their end of the job” to monitor residential spaces at little cost to local government. The structure of Metro’s NOTICE program can be situated among broader neoliberal transformations, especially rollbacks, in urban governance across North American cities in the 2000s, if not earlier. Through such initiatives, city governing became “concerned less with coercion or force than with enabling individuals to cultivate the capacities to govern themselves” (Grundy and Boudreau 2008, 348). More to the point, urban governments sought ways to reduce costs and streamline programs, often by placing more responsibilities on residents. In the process, the division of labor between local government and local residents was reworked, even if this new division did not always operate smoothly (Herbert 2005). Although southeast Nashville neighborhood associations, for example, frequently turned to NOTICE to improve their neighborhoods and bring residents together, the program was not particularly efficient, even in the eyes of those working with it. Residential turnover was high in southeast Nashville neighborhoods, complicating the NOTICE training process and making resident education a never-ending process. As a director involved with the Codes Department noted, “the problem is, if we just have an influx and no more, then we can do it. They keep coming in, new people keep coming in all the time, and so you are constantly having to reeducate and reeducate.” More broadly, the constant need to educate new residents was coupled with a recognition that neighborhood empowerment could only go so far in managing neighborhood spaces. Although NOTICE provided residents and organizations with something to rally around, it also created, in its director’s words, “a disconnect in what we can do as a department and what they expect us to do.” This realization, he admitted, caused “a lot of frustration” as the strategy of neighborhood empowerment through local residents’ involvement in and surveillance of their own spaces hit the wall of neoliberal urbanism and the devolution of responsibility to the same “local” level that Nashville was trying to empower (but see Grundy and Boudreau 2008).

Neoliberalizing Immigrant Nashville This shift toward increased resident involvement in and responsibility for Nashville neighborhoods was just one of many neoliberal redistributions of responsibility from urban governments to nonstate actors in

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      155  U.S. cities.18 In Nashville, those transformations took off in the 2000s, when key Metro departments began to seek, in the words of one official, “a vantage point of 5,000 feet to help connect things and to give assistance and push when it was needed” (for discussion of a similar transition in Rhode Island, see Uriarte 2006). As one longtime Metro employee described the change in the early 2000s, “A lot of folks in the community and groups—nonprofits, government agencies—[were] doing things . . . but none of them were really coordinated.” In response, many governmental and nongovernmental institutions that had been providing direct services to different urban constituencies in an admittedly redundant system were redefined as clearinghouses that offered bird’s-eye views of Nashville’s network of service provision but provided few direct services themselves. Although this reconfiguration, like Nashville’s turn to neighborhood empowerment, was not explicitly related to immigrant settlement, it had a citywide impact on immigrant visibility, as Nashville service providers came to see and respond to Latino immigrants in a new way.19 Because Nashville became a new destination as its local government was experiencing neoliberal transitions, its path to established immigrant destination was decidedly neoliberal in a way not seen in gateway locales, whose immigrant communities were established in the 1970s or earlier. The nature of this transition is evident in the history of one of Nashville’s earliest Latino service organizations. In the 1990s, the Hispanic Family Resource Center (HFRC) was formed to provide basic health care to Nashville’s growing Latino population and address other needs in this population. Like many early efforts, HFRC was initially neighborhoodbased, operating out of the Woodbine Community Organization; in 2002, however, HFRC became Conexión Américas. Its mission of meeting basic Latino health needs was replaced with wider missions, including homeownership workshops, Spanish classes, and other courses, and its board of directors was reconfigured to make Conexión Américas Nashville’s first Latino-run community organization (Winders 2006b). With a new focus and visibility as a node in Nashville’s growing network of Latino organizations, Conexión Américas moved out of the neighborhood of Woodbine and began to operate less as a frontline of service provision for Latino residents of southeast Nashville, especially newly arrived ones, and more as an information clearinghouse for services Latino men and women could access elsewhere across the city. Although Conexión Américas continued to provide some direct services, such as its Spanish-language emergency hotline, the organization increasingly focused on connecting Latino families with support throughout Nashville and on campaigning for Latino political and social issues. Very soon, the organi-

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156      Nashville in the New Millennium zation shed its original image as neighborhood-based and became known as an advocacy group for Latinos in general. Through newer initiatives like the Parents as Partners program in local schools and a small-business development program, Conexión Américas moved beyond its roots as a local organization that worked directly with needy Latino immigrants in the neighborhoods where they lived and became a political force that kept immigrant needs in the public eye by working with a citywide Latino community and with broader Latino issues.20 In similar fashion, Metro’s Human Relations Commission, a department formed in response to Nashville’s racial unrest in 1965 and charged with “promoting Respect for Diversity and Encouraging Improved Race Relations” in the city, came to see its role vis-à-vis immigrants as indirect.21 Involved with Latino residents through the network of nonprofit organizations that represented them, it worked from the assumption that “they know we’re here” to make referrals, as one commission member explained. Although the issue of Hispanic representation on the commission surfaced in the late 1990s when an African American member resigned over concerns of “diluted” black power and a Latino candidate was nominated in his place (Winders 2006b), the Human Relations Commission, in its daily activities, had little direct contact with Nashville’s Latino population. When asked about the commission’s view of Nashville’s immigrant community, for example, an official in the department replied, “We need to be aware of them . . . and that’s happening. . . . Just to be more prepared in case something may happen where there needs to be some intervention where we just try to help groups that may have trouble communicating.” Although immigrant institutional invisibility is evident in a number of government departments and nonprofit organizations across Nashville, it is perhaps clearest in the context of the provision of social services, the topic of a number of studies of new destinations and the focus of many state- and local-level laws addressing immigrant settlement. Deeb-Sossa and Bickham Mendez (2008, 617), for example, suggest that in new destinations the administration of social services represents “a key site for the construction and enforcement of social membership” for Latino residents (see also Cabell 2007). Along similar lines, Marrow (2009a, 758), in a study based in rural North Carolina, found variation in immigrant incorporation across bureaucratic institutions and argued that an uneven but “emerging process of immigrant bureaucratic incorporation” was proceeding apace in new destinations. A key finding of these works is that it is social service providers in new destinations who often decide who is and is not seen as deserving of support and, thus, who merits social inclusion in the wider community (Cabell 2007). Social service providers’ inclusion of immi-

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      157  grants, however, is contingent on immigrants being institutionally visible to such providers as a constituency they might serve or include. In Nashville in the late 2000s, that initial step was missing in many institutions associated with social services. We can better understand how immigrants became institutionally less visible in Nashville in the 2000s when we look at the history of its dealings with a foreign-born population. Until 2005, Metro government was home to the Metro Refugee Services Program (MRSP), the only refugee services program in the United States that was run through local government. This location of refugee services within Metro government, rather than solely within nongovernmental or voluntary agencies, linked refugee communities to local government in Nashville in a way that elevated the visibility of this population across the city and changed the nature of local conversations about diversity (Winders 2006a). In 2005, however, at the recommendation of a performance audit of Metro Social Services (MSS), MRSP was discontinued, refugee services were returned to state government, and service provision to refugees in Nashville was handed off to voluntary agencies like Catholic Charities.22 The motivations behind this change in how Metro government distributed social services to the city’s foreign-born population were multiple.23 MRSP was formed prior to the arrival of Latino immigrants and in the context of a different, much smaller foreign-born population. Thus, when Latino men and women began to settle in Nashville in the late 1990s and early 2000s, an institutional mismatch arose between a Metro department designed to address the needs of a relatively small refugee population and a new, larger Latino population, many of whom were undocumented. This new demand on a program focused strictly on refugees, coupled with a post-9/11 decrease in federal funding for refugee resettlement (Singer and Wilson 2006, 2007), led MSS to work less with foreign-born residents directly—and not at all with undocumented residents—and more at providing technical assistance to other nongovernmental agencies working with immigrants or refugees. As Nashville’s Latino community grew, the city’s “international community” became increasingly Latino and outgrew the institutional structure in place to deal with the city’s foreign-born through the lens of refugees. In place of MRSP, Metro Social Services created the position of immigrant services coordinator, who would be responsible for services to both immigrants and refugees in Nashville and whose work shifted “from direct service delivery, case support and coordination for individual and/or refugee families” to “overall service planning and coordination.”24 Tapping both neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility and assimila-

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158      Nashville in the New Millennium tionist language of immigrant adjustment, this new system, according to those working with it, helped “immigrants and refugees develop a kind of independence . . . so that they can integrate rather than . . . go just to one office that always deals with that [one immigrant] issue.” In the words of a key official involved in MSS’s redesign, “We are trying to . . . support the infrastructure that allows them [immigrants] to navigate the system,” bringing immigrants into Metro government by eliminating a specific program to deal with them. Under this new infrastructure, the institutional opportunities to direct immigrants to available services outside local government expanded, while institutional opportunities to provide basic services to immigrants contracted across Metro government, as they did across the city. Bound up with this change in the services that MSS offered immigrants and how they did so was a redefinition of how MSS understood Nashville’s foreign-born population. In creating its immigrant services coordinator, MSS shifted from working with refugees in their own program, and in an institutionally clear location, to working with immigrants and refugees across its programs. In the process, MSS integrated immigrants into Nashville’s institutional infrastructure by dis-integrating the components of immigrant services across Metro departments. Under MSS’s new focus on “issues rather than ethnicity,” refugees, legal immigrants, and undocumented immigrants were rolled into one “immigrant” group whose internal differences the immigrant services coordinator was now responsible for making visible to Metro departments—at the same time that Metro departments were being asked to address immigrants as one component of the broader project of “representing everybody.”25 These changes markedly attenuated any clear institutional presence for immigrants in Metro government and, in some ways, eliminated it altogether. I should mention two clear exceptions to this attenuated institutional presence of immigrants in Nashville: the city’s wider debate over immigration and the realm of policing. At the same time that the institutional presence of immigrants, especially Latino immigrants, was diminishing in Metro government, the figure of the immigrant, especially the undocumented immigrant, was coming into sharp focus for state and local political actors in Nashville, as the border and border politics came to the Music City and other new destinations (Winders 2007; Coleman 2007, 2009). By 2005 a campaign to “de-magnetize Tennessee” for undocumented immigrants was becoming the “de-magnetize America” movement, and Tennessee was well on its way to outlawing opportunities for undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses. State and local elected officials were crafting legislation designed to restrict undocumented immigrants’ access to state services, affordable housing, work

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      159  opportunities, and other facets of daily life. In 2006 immigrants took to the streets of downtown Nashville to make their presence known and call for immigration reform. This visibility backfired in some ways, catalyzing wider efforts to exclude immigrants from the city’s social fabric and legally restrict their movements and life chances. By 2008 these efforts had culminated in a proposed ordinance to make Nashville “English only.” If the proposal had passed (it did not), Nashville would have been the largest such city in the country. In short, throughout the 2000s immigrants as residents may have been largely invisible within Nashville’s neighborhood governance and institutionally attenuated within its provision of social services. The issue of immigration, however, was hard to miss in the Music City. Of all these maneuvers, Davidson County’s entrance into the 287(g) program in 2007 had perhaps the most profound impacts on immigrant daily life and institutional visibility (Marrow 2009a; Parrado 2012; Armenta 2012). A provision of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the 287(g) program enabled “state, county, and city police to arrest and detain aliens for federal authorities as well as investigate immigration cases for prosecution in the courts” (Coleman 2009, 907). Post9/11, counties and states across the country, but especially in the South, touted the 287(g) program as a way to address undocumented immigration and public safety simultaneously, by allowing local law enforcement to act as border patrol (for a critique of this idea, see Nguyen and Gill 2010). As Metro departments and nonprofits across Nashville struggled to see immigrant residents in the city, the Davidson County sheriff‘s department began to see them through the eyes, and with the legal power, of the federal state. In Nashville, then, local police in the late 2000s had no problem finding immigrants in the city, even as undocumented immigrants worked not to be found. The same could not be said, however, for other institutions, which consistently missed immigrants in the city and sometimes missed altogether the political fray that initiatives like the 287(g) program precipitated in the late 2000s.

Missing Immigrant Nashville The transformations in local government described in the previous section are important reminders that planning for immigrant populations in new destinations took place amid wider reconfigurations in the management of service provision and new understandings by government and nongovernmental institutions of their roles in changing demographics. These changes were often not directly linked to immigrant settlement, but because they took place concurrently with the arrival and settlement of

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160      Nashville in the New Millennium Latino men and women, they profoundly shaped immigrant incorporation in places like Nashville. By the mid-2000s, such institutional changes in the Music City had solidified into a system in which many governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations interested in serving immigrants no longer did so directly. These changes also created a system in which Latino immigrants were missing from many big-picture assessments of the city. In conversations at institutions such as urban planning offices and urban design centers focused on Nashville’s future, for example, swaths of the city associated with immigrant settlement were often absent. This absence is perhaps best captured by the 2005 The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City, whose map of the city literally ended before southeast Nashville began. Although the relative invisibility of the southeast Nashville neighborhoods where Latino residents settled predated their arrival, the clustering of Latino immigrants in areas that were politically and socially marginal affected what institutional visibility immigrants could later muster as urban residents in Nashville. Whether because Latino immigrants were not understood to have noticeably affected Nashville’s urban landscapes or because they were understood to work with their own resources outside the confines of local government, Nashville’s immigrant population was not visible to many Nashville decisionmakers—a sentiment poignantly conveyed by an urban designer who remarked that a study of the impacts of Latino migration on Nashville in 2006 and 2007 was “a few years too early.” In some ways, then, the lack of institutional attention to Latino immigrants as urban residents was bound up with where southeast Nashville neighborhoods fit in overall visions of the city and its future. Located far from the urban core that was the focus of most revitalization efforts, southeast Nashville fell somewhere between inner city and outer suburbs. What is more, southeast Nashville neighborhoods, especially Woodbine, had previously received not only attention from Metro Planning but even federal and state community development grants in the early 2000s.26 Thus, these neighborhoods, reasoned urban planners and design experts, might not need attention from urban design initiatives focused on downtown areas. When immigrants did become visible in Nashville’s urban design, they did so in familiar ways. As a director of an urban design center explained in 2006, The changing of Nashville is a big thing. In the last five years, as we started to build stuff, the media started to write about the fact that there were people who weren’t from this country who were part of the construction process and that if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be building anything at all.

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      161  Perhaps in the next two or three years, the director added, the center would get “some Hispanic neighborhoods . . . organizations coming in and saying, ‘How could you help us? We want to do this.’” From the perspective of urban design, however, immigrants were still workers building Nashville’s urban landscape, not residents representing a notable part of its social fabric.27 Lacking their own neighborhoods, they remained institutionally invisible to the city and, thus, hard to represent in its present or future.

Representing Immigrant Nashville Around the same time as the visioning session described at the beginning of this chapter, I attended a forum on Nashville’s “New American Community,” a term that came into use in 2001, when Nashville was selected as one of three cities to test the federal Building the New American Community Initiative (Winders 2006a), and which has since gained currency in initiatives to build welcoming communities across the United States (see, for example, Jones-Correa 2011). This forum, held in the auditorium of a well-known private school in Nashville, was one in a series of over forty such gatherings for mayoral candidates in 2007 at which candidates met potential voters and discussed topics from neighborhood concerns to wider urban issues. At this forum on Nashville’s “New Americans,” immigrants were, not surprisingly, front and center. What was surprising was the mayoral candidates’ difficulties in recognizing the social and political contours of this new group (Marrow 2009a, 2011). Among the participating candidates (Bob Clement, the main Republican candidate, withdrew from the forum before it began), the range of approaches to immigration was startling even for someone accustomed to encountering a wide range of ideas on the subject. The session began with the claim that 25 percent of Davidson County’s immigrant population would be able to vote in 2008. In response to these figures, David Briley, a candidate whose base included trendy east Nashville, opened his presentation in Spanish, citing the rapid growth of Nashville’s foreign-born population and the need to address this “new complex issue with strength.” Karl Dean, the contest’s eventual winner, described his own experience of coming to Nashville in 1978 after college and hoped that immigrants would feel as welcome as he did—even if, he admitted, immigration was both a positive and a negative development in the city. Buck Dozier, a long-term Nashville resident, explained that immigrants had “always been welcome” in the community he knew and thanked them for “melting” into Nashville’s culture. Kenneth Eaton, who positioned himself as a businessman rather than a political candidate, felt that it was “nice to see cultures coming together”

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162      Nashville in the New Millennium in Nashville. Howard Gentry, the only African American candidate in the race, identified himself as an example of what Nashville could do. Born into a “different city,” he located Nashville’s strength in its diversity, noting his desire to unite the city “like never before.” In the questions that followed, candidates offered suggestions and proposals ranging from funding ESL classes through private-sector investment to issuing city identification cards to “try to get you legal”28 to a proposed Council for Immigrant Relations.29 Topics jumped around from how to create inclusive schools by creating inclusive communities to the politics of the 287(g) program and, in the words of Briley, “the complexity of the new situation in which we live.” Strategies offered to increase immigrant civic engagement ranged from the creation of a mayor’s board of “New Americans” to the redefinition of the Metro Human Relations Commission. Eaton felt that refugees needed to learn English and later expressed dismay that “good citizens” were being profiled and “locked up” under the 287(g) program. When he and Dozier explained that they supported human rights for only legal residents, the crowd was audibly upset. By the forum’s end, Briley, the candidate expected to have the most progressive stance on immigration, framed it as a challenge for the city. By the end it was also clear that all participating candidates, to one degree or another, supported Davidson County’s adoption of the 287(g) program. I have argued elsewhere that in the 2000s the place of Latino immigrants in Nashville’s racial formations and hierarchies remained “incomplete” (Winders 2008a). As a Metro official working with youth explained, cities like Nashville were “trying to figure out who is the number-one minority, or how do you deal with multiple groups like that on more equal footing?” Trying to move from a racial binary to a more complex racial hierarchy had been a difficult institutional move in Nashville and other Southern cities, where race has historically been a way to shorthand both urban populations and socioeconomic need. Prior to immigration, a Metro director explained, there was an established “power base” between black and white in Nashville. With immigrant settlement, however, that power base had shifted. Now you have this whole different dynamic in the situation where it’s difficult to know what the real issues are and who, where the power base now lies. . . . Instead of one group or two groups to deal with, you have three or four or five groups to deal with. Trying to get all those folks to come together for consensus is very difficult.

Under Nashville’s current multicultural mix, he admitted, “sometimes it’s hard to know who you are dealing with.” As the 2007 mayoral forum on

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      163  Nashville’s “New Americans” made clear, that uncertainty over how to represent immigrants in Nashville in the 2000s extended far beyond questions of race and racial politics. What explains this lack of clarity about the place of immigrants in Nashville’s racial formations and wider balance of power? Much research has documented the uneven geography of Latino reception and the uneven patterns of Latino access to resources at both the state and local levels in new destinations.30 As such work demonstrates, this “uneven geography of immigrant incorporation” (Nelson and Hiemstra 2008, 320) has consequences for how immigrant communities are approached by receiving communities. If we consider the wider context of not only immigrant reception by host communities but also immigrant recognition within new destinations, that picture becomes even more uneven, to the point of being chaotic. Reflecting such chaos, the radically different assessments of immigrant Nashville that coexisted among the city’s potential political leaders have implications for immigrant efforts to be visible as urban constituents and community members and to be recognized as politically relevant groups in new destinations. In the midst of heated debates about immigration, both locally and nationally (Winders 2007, Sampson 2008), some Nashville service providers, particularly those whose daily work was removed from direct service provision to immigrants, described a citywide welcoming of immigrants that was markedly different from the perception of organizations that were directly involved with immigrants and directly encountered a growing antiimmigrant rhetoric across the city. Other groups in Nashville were aware of an immigrant presence, and even immigrant needs, but did not see sufficient numbers to justify bilingual personnel. A crisis center for victims of sexual violence, for example, offered services to Latina women but often did not reach them. In a mutually reinforcing system, services that immigrants were eligible to use went untapped because immigrants were unaware of them. Because these immigrant services were underused, the motivation to expand such programs was not there. Meredith Cabell (2007, 24) argues that in new destinations “institutions are struggling to determine what their role should be in the integration” of immigrants. That struggle to sort out how and whether local institutions will integrate immigrants in new destinations is itself predicated on how those institutions do and do not see immigrants within and in relation to the overall urban constituency. If institutions do not see immigrants as constituents whom they might serve or work with, immigrant incorporation and political visibility will be limited. Simply put, it is hard for institutions to incorporate a group that they institutionally cannot see, or see clearly. While some of the uneven recognition and disparate assessments of immigrant political and social needs seen

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164      Nashville in the New Millennium in Nashville is expected in a city with both local and state, government and nongovernment offices, the extremes that it marks point to the limits, as well as material consequences, of how a new destination institutionally saw and did not see immigrant residents. The pace and nature of immigrant population growth is another factor in understanding immigrant invisibility in new destinations like Nashville. Because there were few flashpoints associated with Latino migration in Nashville, at least through the mid-2000s, Latino settlement became a situation with a restricted residential geography (and, thus, restricted visibility) and, according to key actors, no wider resolution. With steady population growth and patterns of settlement that did not spread beyond southeast Nashville, Latino migration simply grew day by day, sometimes unnoticed. When Latino population growth did become an issue, as the mayoral forum made clear, those with an overall view of the city were not always able to see immigrant Nashville, let alone bring it into focus.

Bringing Immigrant Nashville into Focus [Latino immigrants] are so family oriented . . . that they are the perfect candidates for . . . finding themselves in things that feel like neighborhoods, as opposed to high-rises. And so I think that as long as there are places that are affordable, they would be the next . . . generation of people who are in neighborhoods, wherever they can afford to be. I don’t know what happens once they have really become entrenched in part of the community and hit that next economic level. I don’t know what they do in terms of organizing or rebuilding or improving their neighborhoods. —Southeast Nashville political representative

In one of the final interviews in this study, I sat down with a political representative of a southeast Nashville district. Representing an array of neighborhoods in southeast Nashville, he had watched his district change, especially since 2000, when its immigrant population began to grow. As it grew, he found himself caught between dealing with the area’s longstanding issues and trying to understand a set of new dynamics generated by immigrant settlement. He did so, however, without a “go-to guy” for Latino residents in his area. Although he acknowledged that Latino immigrants would be the “next generation” in his neighborhoods, he did not know what would happen when they became “entrenched in part of the community.” This representative, like elected officials in other new destinations (Marrow 2009a, 2011), had yet to “throw out a hand of accep-

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      165  tance” to immigrants in his area in part because they had yet to come into focus as a recognized part of the community he represented. Having “nobody from that side of the aisle at the table” was problematic, he admitted, but it was not clear how he should bring immigrant Nashville into political focus. Figuring out how to institutionally see immigrants in Nashville has been an ongoing process. As this chapter has shown, immigrants in the 2000s were not only invisible to many of the institutions that governed Nashville neighborhoods and administered social services but also institutionally unclear to decision-makers charged with seeing and responding to the city as a whole. Much scholarship has shown that local government plays a key role in immigrant incorporation into the social fabric of American cities. Work in Latino studies, for example, has examined what Raymond Rocco (1997, 122) describes as Latinos’ “right to have access to major institutions” as “‘legitimate’ members of a community.” In sociology, Dina Okamoto and Kim Ebert (2010) suggest that institutional openings play important roles in immigrant political claims, especially for groups that traditionally have not had access to political power and especially in new destinations where that access has been even more limited. What this study of immigrant institutional visibility adds to these understandings, however, is a clearer sense of the unintended consequences for immigrant incorporation of wider urban transformations—in this case, neighborhood-based governance and neoliberal institutional streamlining. In Nashville in the 2000s, immigrant claims to community membership and political visibility were limited not only, or even mainly, by active efforts to socially exclude immigrants in the city or immigrant reluctance to participate in the city’s political system. Instead, immigrant claims to the city were also inhibited by the institutional structure of Nashville governance itself—a structure in which Latino immigrants were often invisible. This immigrant institutional invisibility arose from multiple sources. As Metro departments and nonprofit organizations sought a social and spatial distance from the messy details of Nashville’s urban landscape in the 2000s, the way the city saw its residential spaces, needs, and urban future rendered its immigrant constituents invisible. As neighborhood residents, Latino immigrants were institutionally invisible to Metro government because they were not present or active in the neighborhood associations—the institutional structure through which the city interacted with its residents—and so were not seen by Metro departments that relied on Nashville’s neighborhood-based governance to evaluate the city and its needs. Even as Nashville tried to be more locally responsive to the needs and desires of its residents, its institutional structure for doing so, by defining neighborhoods as geographically discrete, excluded an im-

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166      Nashville in the New Millennium migrant population that lived across southeast Nashville neighborhoods. As recipients of social services, Latino immigrants were institutionally invisible to Metro government because they were spread across departments, none of which focused specifically on immigrants but all of which dealt partially with immigrant residents. As Nashville tried to make its provision of social services more efficient, it inadvertently pushed immigrants out of the institutional picture of social need in the city. Finally, as urban constituents, Latino immigrants were institutionally invisible in visions of Nashville’s future because they were not seen to have had any impact on Nashville’s urban landscape as a whole. As a Metro planner explained, immigrants had “larger social-service issues, so they haven’t really started being concerned about planning per se,” placing the impact of Latino immigrants back on the same social service system that itself had dissolved their institutional place. Present as a necessary labor force to build the city but not seen as an established part of the Nashville community, Latino immigrants occupied a paradoxical place in the city’s present and future. How specific this immigrant institutional invisibility is to new destinations remains unclear in the absence of comparative studies across new and traditional urban destinations. What is clear, however, is that cities like Nashville face the challenges and complexities of immigrant incorporation not only in the context of new social relations and dynamics within social spaces like the school but also in the wider context of how local governments reflect and address a changing population. A first—and to date largely unacknowledged—step in immigrant incorporation is acknowledging how cities like Nashville and their institutions see and do not see immigrants as local residents. This question of immigrant institutional visibility must be addressed in studies of immigrant incorporation if we are to understand how and why immigrants are and are not integrated into and themselves transform the social fabric of American cities beyond gateways like Los Angeles. As was mentioned previously, part of the story of immigrants’ institutional invisibility in the 2000s was bound up with the geography of immigrant settlement in Nashville. Concentrated in the southeastern quadrant of Nashville, Latino immigrants settled in areas that both historically and currently had limited visibility within Nashville’s economic and political systems. “Nobody knows much about south[east] Nashville” was a recurring theme in interviews with key actors in the city as well as with southeast Nashville residents. As a Metro official working with immigrants explained, “Unless you have business there or you just have someone you meet, you don’t go there.” Even officials who did go to southeast Nashville brought along the public image of its neighborhoods. As an of-

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Seeing Immigrant Nashville      167  ficial involved with the Human Relations Commission explained, the direct impact of immigration “is not really there in government or people in nonprofits [or] the people in the neighborhoods, the more stylish neighborhoods. . . . But I think it’s more lower-middle class. . . . In the neighborhoods, people are a lot more raw, I guess. They speak their mind a lot.” In this way, there was a distinct geography to the impact of immigrant settlement across the city—one that followed lines of class, age, and race to concentrate in southeast Nashville. In these neighborhoods where people were “a lot more raw,” the transitions that were only partially clear within Nashville institutions were front and center. The remaining chapters of this book trace immigrant visibility and invisibility in southeast Nashville—both that created by immigrants and that imposed by long-term residents—and the emerging consensus about Nashville’s immigrant spaces from the perspectives and scale of the neighborhood. They interrogate how southeast Nashville neighborhoods were transformed in the 2000s through immigrant settlement and how immigrants and long-term residents understood and interacted with one another within neighborhoods. In thinking about Nashville as a whole and its immigrant communities in particular, the ambitions and visions of city planners and politicians and the everyday experiences of city dwellers may seem like separate aspects of Nashville’s urban fabric and politics (Dohan 2003). As chapters 7 and 8 show, however, in the Music City these different visions came together to map the geographies and frameworks through which immigrant Nashville came into being and became institutionally visible to long-term residents, to their organizations, and to new immigrants themselves. As the next chapter shows, one way in which Latino immigrants and long-term residents negotiated different meanings, geographies, and practices of neighborhood in southeast Nashville was by closely watching one another yet choosing not to interact. Although new immigrants’ decision not to interact with long-term residents was driven by the desire to be part of their new neighborhoods, their choice to be quiet had profound impacts on immigrant incorporation and reception in Nashville in the 2000s.

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Chapter 7  | Silent Streets: Assimilation, Race, and Place in the Neighborhood [In El Salvador] I was used to going out and playing with my friends. There, I was able to visit their houses . . . just get together with them to play or spend some time together. People here are not like that. Even if they live next door, sometimes, they don’t even share a word with you. —Leonardo, young Salvadoran man living in Glencliff

To explain how he understood life in Nashville, Leonardo, like most Latino immigrants who participated in this study, compared living in Nashville neighborhoods to living in his home town in El Salvador. Also like most other Latino immigrants, he described more differences than similarities between the two places. There, Leonardo felt more mobile and able to visit friends when he wished. Here in Nashville, life was more constricted. There, social connections came easily, but in Nashville getting to know people was more difficult. Perhaps the most prominent difference that Leonardo and others noted, however, was Nashville’s silent neighborhood streets. As he stressed, “Even if they [Americans] live next door, sometimes, they don’t even share a word with you.” Although Leonardo found this silence unusual compared to neighborhood living in El Salvador, he followed along with what he saw as American behavior and avoided interactions with long-term white and black residents in Glencliff. Like them, he was silent in his neighborhood. Across the social sciences, particularly in the context of immigrant settlement, many scholars have pointed to the possibilities of urban encounters across racial and class differences for improving social relations and increasing levels of understanding among racial and ethnic groups.1 In southeast Nashville, however, such contact across racial, ethnic, and lin-

168

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Silent Streets      169  guistic lines was fleeting at best. Throughout interviews in this study, there were widely divergent assessments, among long-term residents, of the timeline and nature of neighborhood change in southeast Nashville and, among Latino immigrants, of the extent and meaning of neighborhood and its boundaries. For both groups, however, as well as for key actors working with Nashville neighborhoods, there was near-unanimous agreement that long-term residents and Latino immigrants closely watched one another from across the street or in their apartment complexes but that face-to-face interactions were limited to “hello,” if any words at all were exchanged. Latino immigrants consistently described long-term residents as “seeming” nice, since most could offer few examples of direct interaction with “los americanos” in the neighborhood. Long-term residents described Latino immigrants as keeping to themselves and discussed what they had observed of them at a distance. In this way, Nashville neighborhoods, like many Nashville work sites (Winders 2008b), embodied both striking diversity and striking silence (Cuadros 2006; Chaney 2010). Flat­rock and much of Antioch, it seemed, had silent streets in the 2000s. This chapter, in conjunction with the next, develops a series of arguments about the institutional, spatial, and interpersonal outcomes of contact between Latino immigrants and long-term residents in Nashville neighborhoods. Immigrants and long-term residents in southeast Nashville closely observed how the other group behaved and interacted in neighborhood spaces and then adjusted their own behavior and use of the neighborhood accordingly. As immigrants stayed quiet, trying to be seen as appropriate residents of “American” neighborhoods, long-term residents tried to re-create the neighborhood they recalled from the past, drawing on nostalgic geographies and images of neighborhood that predated the arrival of immigrants in Nashville. In the process, long-term residents interpreted immigrant silence, not as searching for social belonging in the neighborhood, but as evidence of having no desire to be part of it. Immigrants themselves often intervened in long-term residents’ individual and institutional efforts to come to grips with and respond to neighborhood change simply by living their lives, unaware of long-term residents’ reactions to their presence. In the process, new and old ideas about race, local history, neighborhood, and social belonging collided in southeast Nashville as the social worlds, past and present, of Latino immigrants and long-term residents increasingly pulled apart. In Music City, immigrant settlement in the 2000s centered on southeast Nashville, especially the areas of Flat­rock and Antioch. Flat­rock in the northern portion of southeast Nashville includes three smaller neighborhoods: Woodbine and Radnor were working-class, predominantly white

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170      Nashville in the New Millennium

Figure 7.1 Southeast Nashville Neighborhoods

Source: Author’s compilation produced by Thor Ritz and Joe Stoll. Note: As with any attempt to map collective definitions or meanings of a place, these neighborhood boundaries are approximate and often contested. Flatrock, for example, is generally understood to encompass the three smaller neighborhoods of Woodbine, Radnor, and Glencliff, but its official southern boundary is mapped in different ways by different residents. Cane Ridge’s border is seen as fixed by most residents associated with its creation in 2006. Antioch, however, is typically understood to encompass nearly all territory in southeast Nashville, although some residents link it to the smaller community actually named Antioch.

neighborhoods that grew around a rail yard in the 1930s and 1940s and thrived through the late 1970s, and Glencliff was a middle-class, white neighborhood on Nashville’s suburban, if not rural, edge after World War II. In the late 1990s, Flat­rock experienced residential turnover as elderly white residents were replaced or joined by immigrant families, who helped

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Silent Streets      171  transform the area into Nashville’s “Little Mexico” and its schools into Nashville’s “United Nations.” Thus, by the 2000s, Flat­rock was a mix of whites, Latinos, and small refugee groups from around the world, as well as a smaller, long-standing black population. With elderly white residents, young immigrant children, lifetimers in the neighborhoods, and others who arrived only months before, Flat­rock embodied the ethnic, racial, age, linguistic, and cultural diversity increasingly associated with urban America. South of Flat­rock, Antioch is a larger, more racially diverse area that began to experience intense residential and commercial development in the 1970s, just as Flat­rock peaked. With rapid growth and diversification in the 1980s and 1990s, Antioch had become Nashville’s geographic and social fringe by the end of the twentieth century. In the 2000s, as Latino men and women moved into the apartment complexes lining Antioch’s major thoroughfares and into houses in its old and new subdivisions, parts of Antioch became “Hispanioch,” and its ethnic and racial transition moved to the forefront of conversations about immigration in Nashville. Across these neighborhoods and in the midst of these changes, how did residents understand what it meant to be a neighbor? In the case of Latino immigrants, many did so by deciding that being a good neighbor in southeast Nashville meant being quiet. Throughout the area, both longterm residents and Latino immigrants frequently commented on neighborhood noise, especially from Latino residents’ music, cars, and social gatherings. Both groups, however, commented just as frequently on the silent streets in their neighborhood and the lack of interaction among residents. Central to understanding these silent streets, which have been noted in other studies of new destinations (Naples 2000; Nelson and Hiemstra 2008), are the material and mental geographies through which Latino immigrants understood neighborhood norms, racial identities, and their own place in Nashville’s social fabric. On a basic level, silent streets in southeast Nashville seemed to reflect language barriers, cultural mistrust between immigrants and long-term residents, and the general lack of engagement noted across American neighborhoods. A closer examination of them, however, reveals that this silence also arose from immigrant understandings of what it meant to live in American, especially white, neighborhoods. Recognizing Nashville’s segregated social geography of race, immigrants opted not to speak in their neighborhoods in an effort to find their place in the Music City’s racial order and to distinguish their place from that of African Americans living elsewhere in the city. To make claims to both a social whiteness and an American identity in Nashville, Latino immigrants chose not to speak in its neighborhoods. Although Latino men and women in Nashville chose to be quiet and

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172      Nashville in the New Millennium worked hard to be accepted in their neighborhoods, they also often made social connections outside the neighborhood and, ironically, felt most comfortable, if still not welcome, at work. Workplaces, it seemed, carried more palatable public images of Latino immigrants, and fitting into accepted roles there was more straightforward for immigrants. Nonetheless, even understanding their place in Nashville as one organized around work could not stave off Latino immigrants’ longing for home and ambivalence about their uneasy place in Nashville neighborhoods. In making these arguments, this chapter demonstrates the role that geography—both the material geographies of Nashville’s urban landscape and the mental geographies of Nashville that Latino immigrants carried in their heads—played in how immigrants found and made their place in Nashville’s emerging racial order in the 2000s. More specifically, it shows how this new racial order was produced through immigrant interactions with both Nashville’s more general segregated urban landscape and southeast Nashville’s specific residential dynamics. The arguments that race and space are mutually constitutive and that race as a concept, as well as a set of categories and practices, is produced through and helps shape social spaces, from the household to the nation, is well established in geography and beyond.2 The texture and details of how racial formations are produced through and productive of different spatial arrangements, however, is less familiar. This chapter illustrates how the Music City’s specific social geographies of race and neighborhood created new racial formations and orders as Latino men and women learned where they fit in Nashville’s urban and racial fabric and how they should act within its racialized landscape by triangulating among the categories white, Latino, and black and the urban spaces associated with those categories. Studies of both historical and contemporary immigration and race have shown that immigrant understandings of their own and others’ place in urban “ethno-racial orders” (Arrendondo 2004, 401) are produced through contact and interaction with other groups, but immigrant understandings of urban racial orders can also be produced through the failure to interact.3 Examining immigrant/nativeborn dynamics in southeast Nashville neighborhoods where little direct or sustained interaction between long-term residents and immigrants took place, this chapter highlights the role of geography in producing and supporting racial formations and projects (Omi and Winant 1994), as well as the material consequences of Nashville’s historic segregated landscapes for contemporary immigrant incorporation. This chapter also contributes to the extensive body of work on immigrant reception and the complicated processes of immigrant adjustment to daily life in receiving communities (see, for example, Cravey 2003, 2005; Fennelly and Federico 2008; Newendorp 2008). Within this litera-

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Silent Streets      173  ture, only a handful of studies have examined these issues in new destinations (O’Neil and Tienda 2010). Many questions, thus, remain about the mechanisms through which public opinion about immigration, the racial positioning of immigrants, and immigrant adaptation itself proceed in nontraditional receiving areas like Nashville (Waters and Jiménez 2005; Massey et al. 2010). In particular, little attention has been paid to the details of how long-term residents and Latino immigrants interact and interpret one another’s actions and presence in the neighborhood. Intergroup contact, as various scholars argue, plays a key, although not determinative, role in multicultural understanding (Amin 2002).4 As this chapter suggests, contact in the absence of sustained interaction can also profoundly shape multicultural understandings, and not always for the ­better.

Silent Streets: “They Don’t Talk a Lot to You, but They Know We’re Here” In southeast Nashville, silent streets surfaced in discussions of crowded apartment complexes, spacious new subdivisions, and tight-knit older neighborhoods. A few examples will suffice to show the extent of this pattern. Ignacio, a Guatemalan man in his late thirties, came to Nashville in 2005 and lived in an apartment near the intersection of Murfreesboro Road and Antioch Pike. His apartment complex was filled with other Hispanic families and a handful of Americans. To describe interactions with his neighbors, Ignacio explained, “I just say ‘hi’ to them, but I don’t really know them.” Héctor, a young Nicaraguan man who came to Nashville from Miami in 2001 after a short stint in Kentucky, shared a rented house in Lebanon, a small town east of Nashville. He saw sharp differences between his neighbors in Tennessee and in Nicaragua. “Here, it is different. For example, there are some neighbors whose name I do not even know and maybe they live close by. . . . Not so over there. There, the whole world, the whole neighborhood knows each other.” In similar fashion, Débora and Jaime, a young Salvadoran couple who came to Nashville in 2003 and 2004, respectively, lived in an apartment complex along Bell Road in Antioch, just beyond the border of Cane Ridge, where they had almost no interactions with their American neighbors. These neighbors “seem[ed] to be nice people,” but as Débora explained, This is not like living in our own country, because you get to know everybody there, and if you get a new neighbor, you would go and say, “Hello, how are you? Where are you coming from?” You get acquainted with people easily. It is very different here. People go from work to do everything they

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174      Nashville in the New Millennium need to do, and it is difficult for people to get to know each other. Life here is very hectic.

Jaime added, “We haven’t had the chance to . . . get to know our neighbors or get together with friends because of my work. I don’t have the time.” Instead, he, like many other Latino residents, met people at church and work, where “you have the chance to talk to them.” When asked what his neighbors would say about him, Jaime replied, “It would be difficult for someone to give an opinion about us because we don’t have any relationship with our neighbors.” Hermosa, a Mexican woman in her late thirties, came to Nashville in 1999 and had lived along Nolensville Road, on Harding Place, and in other anchor points across immigrant Nashville. In 2007, when we spoke, she was renting a duplex in Hermitage to the east of Nashville, where, she was happy to say, there were fewer Hispanics and fewer problems. Even in her new home, however, she had no interaction with her neighbors. As she noted, “You say hello to someone, and they don’t say hello back. They don’t greet you, Hispanic people, Americans too.” As these remarks show, the motivations behind southeast Nashville’s silent streets were multiple—work demands, language barriers, cultural differences, neighborhood turnover, and the hectic pace of modern life all played a part. The outcome of silent streets, however, was the same across apartment complexes, subdivisions, and residential streets. Paloma, for example, came to Nashville from El Salvador in 1997 and moved into an apartment complex along Harding Place, where many Latino immigrants initially lived. In this complex, Paloma’s neighbors were white, black, and Latino, and there was almost no interaction among them. “I never had a conversation with any of my neighbors. People from all over the world were here, and no one attempted to make friends with me or anything.” In the midst of striking ethnic, racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity, Paloma, like many Latino residents, made no connections and simply enjoyed, or endured, the anonymity that diversity in southeast Nashville provided. In 2000 Paloma bought a house in a new subdivision farther south in Antioch. With more space and fewer residents, this area was calmer, but she and her sister felt more visible as the only residents who were not black or white. They also encountered neighbors who were critical of their presence. In her new neighborhood, Paloma explained, “we don’t talk with each other, but we all greet each other”; there were more interactions among neighbors than in the apartment complex on Harding Place, but still no sustained contact. Although her new neighborhood

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Silent Streets      175  had none of “the typical Latinos that drink every weekend” and provided a “calm” lifestyle, Paloma felt “locked up at home.” Like many Latinos in Nashville, she made friends outside her neighborhood, as she had done at her apartment complex. Quiet in both places, if for different reasons, Paloma adjusted to life in southeast Nashville by not talking in her neighborhood. Latino residents not only rarely spoke to their neighbors but often spent little time in their neighborhoods, thus magnifying the silence reported by both long-term and immigrant residents. What is more, because they spent limited time in the neighborhood, Latino residents frequently knew little about daily activities there. For example, Diego, a middle-aged man from Guatemala who came to Nashville in late 2005, described his apartment complex along Murfreesboro Road near Antioch Pike by listing “kids riding their bikes, people swimming in the pool, the postman delivering the mail. It is a neighborhood where you still can . . . go to the gym and you can still leave your car door open and nothing will happen.” To this idealized picture, however, Diego added the admission that he was there “only at night when I get to sleep.” Similarly, Alicia, a thirtysix-year-old Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 1996, spent most of her day caring for her young son and working for her husband’s contracting business. With no set routine and tasks that took her across Nashville, her time spent at home was brief: “I get to sleep there.” Latino residents, especially undocumented immigrants, also frequently cited the structural demands of work to explain why they were unfamiliar with their neighborhoods and spent little time there. Octavia, who came to the Nashville area from Veracruz, Mexico, in 2001, described neighborhood life in Nashville by comparing work demands for Americans and for undocumented immigrants. Life is more hectic here, maybe because of our legal situation—we can’t live as American people live. They work from . . . 8:00 to 5:00, and they have weekends off. We can’t do that. My husband works Saturdays, all day long. If I want to go out, I have to take the kids out myself.

With more work hours and a more irregular work schedule than the idealized American workday and with a heavy dose of unpaid care work, Octavia explained her complicity with silent streets by the fact that she, like many immigrants in Nashville, could not “live as American people live” and did not have time to make her neighborhood livelier. Laura, a young Honduran woman who had lived for ten years in the heart of Antioch—longer than almost any other Latino immigrant in this study—

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176      Nashville in the New Millennium shared similar sentiments: “We hardly ever see them [neighbors] because people are working all the time here. It is difficult to get to know our neighbors. As a matter of fact, the neighbors I got to meet, I didn’t even meet them here. I met them at my workplace [a poultry processing plant].” Moving in the same part of Antioch from a hotel room to a rented room to different apartment complexes, Laura bought a house in 2002. Nonetheless, even after ten years in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood that had not seen extensive turnover, Laura had almost no interaction with her neighbors: “I don’t . . . spend time with them. . . . I don’t interact with my neighbors at all. I don’t even get to see them. Whenever I am home, I am locked up inside.” With temporary protective status and quasi-legal resident status in the United States, Laura still saw her place in Nashville as work-driven.5 “There are not many places to have fun around here, but we are here to work. We are not looking for fun.”6 This sense, shared by many Latino residents, that life in Nashville was about work and, thus, left little time for developing relationships in the neighborhood undoubtedly was partly responsible for southeast Nashville’s silent streets. Ramona, for example, a young Mexican woman, came to Nashville in 2001 and moved out of her parents’ townhouse in Antioch in 2007. In her new neighborhood, her social interactions were limited. Instead, she maintained one friendship with a woman she met while working at a fast-food restaurant just after arriving in Nashville. For others, such as Natalia, a Mexican woman who came to the United States in 1989 and to Nashville in 2006, the speed of life in Nashville inhibited social interactions.7 As she explained, “Time flies here. You have to be current with all your money matters, your bills, your rent, and your payments. Everything happens fast here. Sometimes you don’t even have time to spend with your family, especially when you work.” This speed, along with her recent arrival in Nashville, inhibited Natalia’s social connections in the city. As she added, “I haven’t had time to make friends. I don’t think I have been here long enough for that.” Even Latino residents who had been in Nashville for some time often struggled to form social connections. Alicia, a 36-year-old Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 1996, stressed that meeting new people in Nashville was a challenge, particularly with other demands on her time. “We don’t go anywhere to get to know people,” she said, echoing the same constricted daily geographies that southeast Nashville teachers noted among immigrant students who rarely traveled into other parts of the city. Southeast Nashville may not have constituted an ethnic enclave in the formal sense of the term, but with few opportunities available to immigrant residents for activities, especially leisure activities, beyond its borders, it sometimes functioned as one.

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Silent Streets      177  Even in Woodbine, the heart of Nashville’s “Little Mexico,” Latino immigrants reported few interactions among residents. Octavio, a Mexican man who bought a house in Woodbine in 2003, for example, said that long-term residents “don’t talk a lot to you, but they know we’re here.” Although an area service provider and some neighborhood association presidents noted in 2006 that they had seen “increased haggling” in Wood­bine between immigrants and long-term residents, that haggling rarely took place through face-to-face contact. Instead, Metro departments working with neighborhoods, the listservs representing neighborhood associations, and neighborhood association meetings with no immigrants in attendance proxied for direct encounters across streets and became the venues for racial tensions and complaints from long-term residents. People in southeast Nashville talked about the issue of immigrant residents, but rarely did immigrants and long-term residents talk to each other. A director in the Codes Department admitted as much in 2006, when he explained that his office was often called “to deal with the changing dynamics of a neighborhood.” As he shared, “a lady . . . calls me regularly about where she lives, about the immigrants moving in. Hispanics, Kurds, Indians are moving into her neighborhood, and she don’t like it. She wants her neighborhood to stay the way it was.” In southeast Nashville, he suggested, “people are trying to use us [the Codes Department] . . . to effect change in their neighborhood, as an effort to—well, if you just keep hitting them with a violation, they’ll move.” What neither group tried, and what Latino immigrants in particular worked to avoid, was face-to-face interaction. This lack of communication between Latino and long-term residents in Nashville is not unusual in new destinations (see, for example, Cravey 2003; Shultz 2008). Scholars have pointed to a range of factors that inhibit intergroup interactions in these locales, from the obvious barrier of language differences to less obvious factors such as the different work schedules of immigrants and long-term residents living in the same community (Nelson and Hiemstra 2008). Interpersonal contact between immigrant and host communities is the goal of many local initiatives but is often tripped up by the cultural hostility of long-term residents, the cultural reticence of new immigrants, or more mundane factors such as the limited spatial mobility of immigrants without automobiles (Shultz 2008).8 Evidence of all these factors could, in fact, be found in southeast Nashville. One of the most common explanations for the area’s silent streets, however, came from Latino immigrants themselves and spoke not to structural limitations on intercultural dialogues but to their own interpretation of what they had observed of their neighbors in southeast Nashville: being quiet was seen as a way to be accepted as American.

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178      Nashville in the New Millennium

Observing Silence: Assimilation to a Quiet Standard Now, I live close to this American lady. She is very sensitive. If you have a party and the music is loud, she will complain about it. —Leonardo, a young Salvadoran man living in Glencliff

Leonardo, whose words began this chapter, moved to Glencliff after breaking up with his girlfriend, who had lived in a more densely settled part of southeast Nashville farther south along Murfreesboro Road. Having found his girlfriend’s neighborhood more relaxed than Glencliff, Leo­ nardo had to adjust his behavior to the unspoken norms he observed in his new surroundings. Aware that there was someone “in charge” of watching the neighborhood and reporting bad behavior to the police (his interpretation of the neighborhood association president’s role), Leo­ nardo learned that to be accepted in Glencliff, he had to be quiet and mimic what he and other Latino immigrants saw as quintessentially “American” behavior in Nashville neighborhoods (for similar views among Hispanic newcomers in North Carolina, see Marrow 2009b). In southeast Nashville, based on what they saw, many Latino immigrants like Leonardo determined that living in the neighborhood meant assimilating to a quiet norm.9 Over a decade ago, Rogers Brubaker (2001) noted the return of interest in assimilation as an analytic to gauge change and interaction between immigrant and host societies, a new purpose that freed the concept of the heavy-handed assumptions of earlier ideas about immigrant assimilation as Anglo conformity (Wright, Ellis, and Parks 2005). Through this observation, Brubaker joined an interdisciplinary debate over the relationship among and empirical realities of assimilation, multiculturalism, immigrant integration, and transnationalism as ways to describe and evaluate immigrant change over time and across generations.10 As the immense body of work on assimilation suggests, and as the tone of debates around it shows, scholarly arguments about assimilation push in multiple directions. Some scholars reject altogether the notion of assimilation as an accurate way to capture immigrant responses to a receiving community, preferring a language of transnationalism or, at minimum, immigrant integration to describe complex changes among both immigrant and host communities (see, for example, Nelson and Hiemstra 2008). Others debate not so much the existence of immigration assimilation, figured as an intergenerational dynamic, but rather how it is evaluated against a presumed white social and spatial norm (Wright et al. 2005) or how other native-born groups to which immigrant groups can be compared are

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Silent Streets      179  overlooked.11 Still other scholars critique the conflation of social and spatial integration in assessing immigrant adjustment (Phillips 2008), pointing to situations, such as the one this chapter describes, of spatially integrated neighborhoods in which residents lead socially separate lives. Scholars who do draw on a language of assimilation increasingly recognize that assimilation’s reference point in a pluralist or multicultural society is no longer fixed or necessarily white and that segmented assimilation and assimilation as geographically and racially contingent are preferable approaches (see, for example, Zhou 1997; Waters 1999). Scholars of assimilation have also become increasingly aware that different groups of immigrants “begin” from different starting points in their adjustment to host societies and that assimilation proceeds differently across axes from language acquisition to socioeconomic status to residential patterns to intermarriage. Finally, there is wide recognition that processes from transnational practices to intergenerational dynamics, from immigrant policies to race, have an impact on how immigrant communities change and how receiving communities respond. In short, while much scholarly attention has focused on how immigrant populations and cohorts change over time by adjusting to a new receiving context, the exact nature of these transformations remains the subject of much debate, especially in the context of new destinations (Waters and Jiménez 2005; Marrow 2011). These works share a sense of assimilation as “an unintended consequence of myriad individual actions and choices” (Brubaker 2001, 543), rather than as an intentional immigrant decision to conform to “mainstream” standards. In southeast Nashville, however, Latino immigrants often described their silence as just that kind of conscious choice: an intentional effort to mimic “American” residential behavior and, thus, merge with what they saw as the dominant way to be, and be accepted, in American neighborhoods. When asked how people in his apartment complex on Edmonson Pike would describe him, for example, Arturo, a Mexican man who arrived in the United States in 1996 and Nashville in 2006, listed Latino stereotypes—drinking, gang membership, and so on. In response to these negative images that, he felt, informed long-term residents’ understandings of Latino immigrants, Arturo orchestrated his behavior in particular ways, explaining, “There is nothing else for us to do but to remain silent and show them . . . that we are not that kind of people.” Arturo was largely correct in his understanding of how many longterm residents saw Latino immigrants, especially long-term residents who knew southeast Nashville intimately. Frank, for example, grew up in Flat­rock in the 1920s and 1930s but left the area in the late 1970s, when his neighborhood began to decline and he moved his family farther south to a newer, more spacious subdivision called Paragon Mills. Frank and his

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180      Nashville in the New Millennium wife lived in Paragon Mills until the early 1990s, when they moved to the rural edges of Davidson County, following a wider trend among longterm residents to move out of the city over the course of their lives. Although Frank never developed a tight bond with Paragon Mills, he and his wife returned there in the mid-2000s to see how it was doing. His description of his former neighborhood epitomizes many long-term residents’ image of immigrants in Nashville—an image that Latino immigrants consciously worked against. We went down on Paragon Mills Road and all those nice houses along by the creek. It was a pretty drive, just to drive down there and look. Every yard had four or five cars in it with a Mexican sitting on the hood, drinking beer . . . on a Saturday afternoon, with no shirt on, and yelling back and forth. I told my wife . . . “Forget Paragon Mills. We’ll never come through here again.” And we’ve never been back through. That’s not our way of life.

Long-term residents like Frank may never have explicitly shared their feelings about Latino lifestyles with Latino immigrants living in southeast Nashville in the 2000s, but many immigrant residents got the message loud and clear. In response, they actively worked against it by being silent. This sense of the need to be quiet to be accepted in southeast Nashville neighborhoods and to challenge negative images of Hispanics circulating across Nashville was pervasive in interviews with Latino residents, often as they compared their Nashville neighborhoods to those in their home countries or explained how living in Nashville had changed them. Bernardo, for example, a Honduran man who moved his family from Miami to Nashville in 2006 and bought a house in La Vergne just southeast of Nashville, explained in detail how he came to understand and adjust to life in his new neighborhood. “Los americanos,” he said, are quiet people. . . . Our culture is very different. We are noisy; we like loud music. They are quieter. They don’t—how can I say this? They don’t have bad habits or anything. They get home and they—I do the same now. . . . They clean the house. They work around . . . the house. . . . They are really good neighbors, even though we don’t speak. I don’t even know their names. . . . [They] are so quiet that you almost never hear them. There are times when it seems like they are not even there.

Learning how to live in his neighborhood by emulating his American neighbors’ habits and silence toward him, Bernardo remarked on the cultural differences between Latino and American residents to demonstrate

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Silent Streets      181  both his knowledge of how to live in Nashville neighborhoods and his strategic dis-identification with negative stereotypes of Hispanics. Along the same lines, Beatriz, a middle-aged Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 1994 and lived in the heart of Glencliff, announced that in her neighborhood, “I hardly speak to others. If someone says, ‘Good morning,’ then, ‘Good morning.’ If not, then no. . . . I try not to . . . have problems with anyone.” Equating interacting with her neighbors with creating problems in her neighborhood, she, like Bernardo, showed her knowledge of how to live in an American neighborhood by emulating the silence she observed from her neighbors. Later, Beatriz backtracked, explaining that on her street “people know each other. People greet you, but they do not reach out to you here. . . . I know who lives nearby because I see them. But they do not know me, nor do I know them.” These immigrant efforts to mimic a set of behaviors defined as American demonstrate that day-to-day activities in the neighborhood were central to the broader production and maintenance of American identities for both immigrants and long-term residents. As Caroline Brettell and Faith Nibbs (2011, 10) argue in the context of a diversifying suburb near Dallas, Texas, long-term residents’ responses to immigrant settlement are often bound up with the defense of “the American way of life” thought to be threatened by immigrant settlement—what Frank described in Paragon Mills as “not our way of life.” Equating local changes in the neighborhood with wider challenges to a middle-class, white, and American identity, long-term residents, Brettell and Nibbs suggest, defend their class, racial, and nationality position by resisting changes to their neighborhoods. In southeast Nashville, Latino immigrants were keenly aware of this scalar link between neighborhood comportment and national identity, between how one behaved in the neighborhood and whether one seemed appropriately “American.” In responding by being quiet, they were trying not only to avoid being seen as out of place in American neighborhoods but to move themselves closer to the category “American” itself. The normative American neighborhood behavior to which Latino immigrants responded was not only silent but also solitary. For Fabián, who came to Nashville in 2003 from El Salvador and, like many young Latino immigrants, lived in an apartment complex on Edmonson Pike with both Latino and American residents, the behaviors of Americans and Latinos differed not only in terms of what they did but also in the company they kept. Maybe because of the language barrier, Latinos, they are almost always, they tend to stick together. . . . Americans are different. They are either alone or with their partners or their kids, but you never see them in groups with

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182      Nashville in the New Millennium people. . . . Maybe they hang around with friends somewhere else, but not right where we live.

Defining American socializing as solitary and as taking place outside the neighborhood, Fabián distinguished between the two groups by what they did (did not do): hang out publicly in the neighborhood. Putting aside the structural imperatives of international migration that brought many Latino immigrants, especially men, to places like Nashville without their families (Cravey 2003, 2005), Fabián marked the differences in his neighborhood by remarking on how Latino use of neighborhood space differed from an American norm of silent solitude. Sofía, a young Mexican woman who came to Nashville from Michigan with her boyfriend in 2004, described similar patterns of Hispanic congregation and found them similarly problematic where she lived near the intersection of Haywood Lane and Nolensville Road. By watching longterm residents, however, she learned “the American way” of being not only quiet but also private. If she and her boyfriend wanted to be accepted in their apartment complex near Antioch, she explained, they had to be quiet. “American people are a little more private. I have noticed that some of the black families get together as well, but not so much. I imagine they live their lives the American way, you know? They keep some distance with their family members.” Carlos, an older Mexican man who came to Nashville in 2002 after almost twenty years in Chicago, also stressed the immigrant need to be quiet and alone, going so far as to argue that Latino immigrants should avoid clustering altogether: “Since I have been here longer, I can say that I know the way things are around here. I say to those I know, ‘You know what? Don’t walk around in groups, because they are going to get you. You should spread out and walk alone.’” He elaborated by describing how in Chicago, before obtaining legal status, he avoided the “immigrant” behavior of congregating. “When I was still an immigrant, when I still didn’t have my papers, I used to go to American restaurants rather than Hispanic ones.” By mimicking American use of public spaces and by being alone, he felt, immigrants in Nashville could also avoid being seen as immigrants—a strategy given additional import in 2007, when Davidson County entered the 287(g) program.12 Latino residents’ efforts to be seen as quiet and solitary were, in these ways, explicit responses to negative stereotypes of Hispanics circulating across Nashville in the 2000s—stereotypes about not only how Latino immigrants behaved but also where and how they lived. As Octavio, who came to Nashville with his wife from Mexico in 2000, explained, “You know where Hispanics are living. You can see the trucks outside.” Ed-

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Silent Streets      183  uardo, an older Mexican man who came to Nashville in 2001 and lived in Woodbine, had an easy way to identify Latino areas of Nashville: visible trash and multiple cars. Aware of this image, he organized his life accordingly. “I always try to be clean. I don’t want people saying, ‘It’s just another Latino. . . .’ I bought a lawn mower. Sometimes I get tired, but I do it so everybody sees that I am a clean Latino.” In similar fashion, Diego, a middle-aged Guatemalan, described how his neighbors in an apartment complex along Murfreesboro Road near Antioch Pike saw him by noting what they did not see: “[They] only see me getting off my truck at 6:00 pm, when I come back from work. I wave at them. . . . I am always saying ‘hi’ to the kids. That is what they see me doing. They have never seen me getting home drunk or being loud.” As these explanations make clear, Latino immigrants in Nashville organized their behavior not only to emulate what they observed of their American neighbors but also to reject what they felt the rest of the city thought about Hispanics. Alicia, a Mexican woman in her thirties who owned a condominium near Murfreesboro Road and Bell Road in Antioch, made this dual desire to emulate American standards and reject Hispanic behavior crystal clear when she explained that she and her husband did not play loud music or drink outside “because we care about our image.” Living in a neighborhood with no other Latino residents, she said, we always try to give a good image of ourselves. You will never see a car playing loud music out of my house, or people drinking outside, because my husband doesn’t drink. . . . Why? Because we care about our image. We don’t want anybody saying, “Look, those are Mexicans or Hispanics or whatever,” because that is the way people look at us. Hispanics have a bad reputation. We always try to step out of that image.

To “step out of that image” circulating throughout Nashville, Alicia ensured that “we behave like everyone around us. We are quiet.”13 Camila and Gregorio, a Salvadoran couple who came to Nashville in 2001, lived just off Bell Road in a subdivision nestled in the heart of Antioch. In their neighborhood and across Nashville, they felt the effects of Latino immigrants’ negative public image and, like Alicia, took active steps to avoid being identified with it. Camila and Gregorio avoided the negative stereotype, however, not only through how they behaved but also through where they lived. “Americans think that we are problematic, that we are drunkards,” Camila explained. “I prefer to live where Americans live.” Distinguishing between her own class position and that of other Latino immigrants, especially Mexicans, she noted that “Americans will not want to live where there is a majority of Hispanic people.” To

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184      Nashville in the New Millennium avoid being seen as problematic Hispanics, she and Gregorio maintained a clean house, made little noise, and, like their American neighbors, avoided living in Hispanic neighborhoods. In seeking not to live near other Latino residents, Camila and Gregorio were not alone. Sofía, the young Mexican woman who followed her boyfriend to Nashville in 2004 after living in Texas and Michigan, explained how she chose where she lived. I have always heard that the nearby [apartment] complex [at the intersection of Haywood Lane and Nolensville Road] is very problematic. People from there, all the people living there are Hispanics. I was fearful of living in a place where all the neighbors were Hispanics, because it is well known around here that Hispanic neighborhoods are dangerous. They would rob you, they would break in—well, everything, you know? I have always tried to avoid Hispanic neighborhoods.

Even though negative images of Hispanics circulated across Nashville, the content of those images and the American behaviors held up as the model for countering them were much more local. Throughout interviews, Latino residents repeatedly located the American behaviors they emulated, not in the workplace, but in the neighborhood, which was where they paid the most attention to American actions and where they located the source of negative stereotypes about Hispanics. As Elena, a Salvadoran woman who came to Nashville in 2005 and lived in Antioch, explained, Hispanics’ negative public image in Nashville emerged when Latino residents violated American neighborhood norms. Hispanics tend to drink a lot. Americans are not used to being as noisy as we are in our parties. . . . They [Hispanics] don’t have a good image because they don’t behave as they should. They don’t behave the way they are supposed to behave in a neighborhood. They are not clean. If people see that Hispanics are that dirty, they tend to think that all of us are the same.

Where seeing was knowing for both immigrants and long-term residents and where even fleeting encounters could form and reinforce wider racial and ethnic stereotypes, policing their own local performance in the neighborhood became a way for Latino immigrants to manage broader discourses of dirty Hispanics, making the public image of Latino immigrants local and citywide at once. This immigrant strategy of managing the public image of Hispanics through individual neighborhood actions renewed the pressure on Latino residents to adopt neighborhood behav-

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Silent Streets      185  iors of being quiet in an effort to avoid being conflated with the “dirty Hispanic” image also circulating across the city. The American norm to which Latino immigrants aspired in their neighborhoods and against which they judged Hispanic culture, however, was based not just on the particular space of the neighborhood but also on a particular notion of American as middle-class and white. Salvador, a ­middle-aged Mexican man, made this connection clear in a reflection on his apartment complex. After leaving behind a family and government job in Guadalajara in 2005, he found life in Nashville difficult; he re­ peatedly noted in his interview the pressure on immigrants to make money and the loneliness many felt. In Nashville, Salvador shared a fourbedroom apartment with several other Latino men at the border of Flat­ rock and Antioch along Nolensville Road. Despite the tight quarters, he had little interaction with his roommates, or with anyone else in his apartment complex. “As soon as I get home, I walk to my bedroom to get some rest,” he explained. Spending little time there, he used his spare time to play basketball at a nearby park or attend English classes at a community center. What he did observe in the apartment complex, however, contradicted Salvador’s understanding of the place of whiteness in the United States: There is only one apartment with [white] Americans in the place where I now live. It is funny because when you think of going to the U.S., you have this idea of going to a place where everybody is positive, you know?. . . Since this is a developed country, you have the idea that everybody is educated. Then you get here, and you realize that we are all just humans. . . . The Americans living in our neighborhood, they live in that area because they are not interested in improving their life. For them, being American and living in that place, it’s like, “What are they doing there?”. . . The complex has thirteen apartments. We are all Latinos. Latinos are not really looking to live in a nice place, you know? Americans are not going to live in a place like that. So for these people to live there is like, I don’t know.

Marking what a white American lifestyle should be (middle-class, educated, upwardly mobile) by pointing out an instance in which it was not, Salvador framed American whiteness as both a class position (well-off and educated) and a spatial location (not crowded apartments), neither of which were occupied by Latino immigrants in Nashville. Salvador prized open the process through which Latino men and women learned their place in Nashville’s racial and class order by puzzling over a moment when that order was turned on its head—a white family ending up in a

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186      Nashville in the New Millennium Latino apartment complex—and the humanistic moment that white poverty raised for him (we are all just humans). As southeast Nashville neighborhoods changed through immigrant settlement, the expectation that Latino immigrants, not long-term residents, had to adjust to their new setting was present in a number of venues. A Metro official involved with codes enforcement, for example, explained that immigrants brought to southeast Nashville a “whole cultural dynamic” and “all of the things that they are used to doing back home where they come from.” “A lot of those things,” he stressed, were “inconsistent with the code as it exists today,” and immigrants had to learn the spoken and unspoken rules of how to live in southeast Nashville neighborhoods. The same official acknowledged, however, that long-term residents were behind much of his involvement with immigrants, as well as the push for immigrants to adjust to life in Nashville neighborhoods. “There is conflict about the way that the new folks are used to living and the way the folks who are there live and what they expect,” he said. “And so there is a desire to have the immigrants conform completely to the landscape that is there.” Even Latino immigrants often placed responsibility for adjusting to life in Nashville neighborhoods in their own hands. Bernardo, for example, a Honduran man who moved his family from Miami to Nashville in 2006, explained that it was his responsibility as a newcomer to learn the norms of life in Nashville. “Since I am an outsider, I have to learn all the ways from here.” This expectation that Latino immigrants would adjust to life in Nashville was also clear in criticisms of immigrants who failed to do so, often criticisms from other Latino residents. Octavia, the Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 2001, had lived in her cousin’s house in Hermitage since arriving. Watching her neighborhood transition from elderly white residents to younger Hispanic neighbors, she lamented the changes associated with the arrival of “Latin” neighbors. You know that Latinos have some bad habits. For example, there are people who drink and listen to music very loud. We carry all these bad habits because people are like that in our country, you know? Sometimes, we don’t realize we are in a different country, and we have to respect the law. Even though we got here illegally, we should respect the customs.14

Sofía, the young Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 2004, made similar connections between neighborhood change, immigrant adjustment, and social acceptance in describing her apartment complex south of Harding Place and just off Nolensville Road.

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Silent Streets      187  There were a lot of American people, but . . . then the Mexicans started coming in. There were some disturbances then because . . . in Mexico we have different ideas. I have adapted to life in the U.S., but there are a lot of people who think they are still in their own country, and they try to do the same things they did over there. I mean, I understand the rules in the U.S. I know that you can’t be walking around outside whenever it is too late. I know the kids shouldn’t be noisy after 10:00 pm, but there are people who just don’t get it.

Showing her own adaptation to life in Nashville by pointing to Mexicans who “just don’t get it,” Sofía had discovered her neighborhood’s “codes” in her short time there: be indoors early and be quiet at night. She expected other immigrants to do the same. Although no immigrants in this study praised the lack of interaction in their neighborhoods (and in fact, most contrasted it with neighborhoods in their communities of origin), many identified silent streets as the new norm under which they now lived in Nashville and assumed that longterm residents wanted it that way as well. Diego, for example, a middleaged Guatemalan man who came to Nashville in 2005, explained that in his neighborhood, “I have had the chance to, not to interact, but at least to communicate with my neighbors” by saying hi; that superficial communication was sufficient for Diego and seemed to him appropriate behavior in an American neighborhood.15 Fabián, the young man who came to Nashville in 2003, estimated that his apartment complex was 50 percent Latino. In explaining his new residence to family members in El Salvador, “I always say that you don’t really have a close relationship with your neighbors here.” As he put it, “It is as if you have your own life and you don’t get involved with the neighbors.” Later, Fabián noted that, in his neighborhood, “since you don’t talk to them and they don’t talk to you, you just draw a line and move within.” Reflecting on this statement, he mused that “maybe we keep a better relationship like this. We respect each other, and we are fine like that.” Many long-term residents in southeast Nashville, however, were not fine with this separation and silence, and the distance between immigrant and long-term residents’ approaches to being neighbors drove at least some of the tensions surrounding neighborhood change in the area. In southeast Nashville, as in other cities experiencing immigrant settlement, two “social ontolog[ies] of the neighborhood” (Ley 1995, 197) spatially overlapped but socially pulled apart in the 2000s. For Latino immigrants, their observations and knowledge of Hispanic stereotypes led them to believe that being neighborly in an American neighborhood meant being

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188      Nashville in the New Millennium quiet. For long-term residents, however, being neighborly meant interacting, and this belief was based largely on what they recalled or idealized about the neighborhood in the past. Although the immigrant logic behind being quiet in the neighborhood was grounded in an effort to follow locally observed American norms, the American residents on whom those norms were based interpreted that silence as immigrant failure to follow them.16 Across interviews, long-term residents repeatedly expressed regret and frustration over not being able to speak with immigrant neighbors; for them, being a neighbor was defined as engaging in the very interaction and communication that immigrants avoided. This connection was perhaps clearest in an interview with Helen, a white woman who was born in the late 1920s and had lived in Glencliff and Woodbine since the 1940s. With nearly forty-five years on her street in Woodbine, Helen had seen many changes in her neighborhood. Although her street already had an aging white population when she moved there in the 1960s, “everybody was friends. You could maybe, if nothing else, talk over the fence, but this here is just so, so totally different.” Obviously pained by how her neighborhood had changed and increasingly concerned that she was no longer safe there, Helen was reluctant to blame immigrants for her neighborhood’s physical decline. In her eyes, however, they were at least partially responsible for its social demise, even if unintentionally. As she stressed, they “can’t be neighbors because I can’t communicate with them.” Without communication among residents, she felt, “it’s not really a neighborhood. It’s not a good neighborhood.” Caught between two definitions of how to be a neighbor—speaking and not speaking, social and silent—Woodbine, for Helen, simply could not be a good neighborhood. Similarly, Don, a white man who had lived in Glencliff since the late 1940s, explained that in the past in Glencliff, “they were neighbors” who knew everyone’s name and interacted with one another. Now, with no interaction between immigrants and long-term residents, there could be no neighborhood. Whether because they wanted to explain the norms and expectations of their neighborhoods or because they defined being neighbors as being able to communicate, long-term residents wished their streets were not so silent. Carl, for example, a white resident who had lived in Radnor for nearly fifty years, lamented that his Hispanic and Kurdish neighbors “don’t seem to want to mix. . . . They try to stay in their own relation.” He had invited them to neighborhood events, but to no avail. “They just do not intermingle, and I don’t know why. Maybe they don’t speak English, or maybe they just tend to keep to themselves.” If he could only talk to his new neighbors, he felt, things would be better in his neighborhood. He followed this speculation with an unsolicited re-

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Silent Streets      189  mark, corroborated by other long-term residents in his group interview. “We know there is some resentment from the black population against Hispanics.”

Blank (Black) Spots on the Map In this study, references to African American residents were relatively rare, despite the centrality of black-brown relations in discussions of new destinations.17 Southeast Nashville, especially Flat­ rock, was predominantly white, and many of its residents—both immigrant and native-born— had little direct contact with historically black neighborhoods in north Nashville. This spatial division manifested itself not only in interpersonal contact (or the lack thereof) between Latino immigrants and African Americans but also in organizing efforts between Latino and African American communities. In the words of one African American community leader, From my vantage point, I don’t see those relationships [between Latino residents and African Americans]. . . . It may exist in the middle class and the upper class, but at the grassroots level, there is too much tension to come together in a resolution format. . . . There is no campaign to bring Hispanics and blacks together. They are doing their thing; blacks are doing their things. . . . They’re over there. We are over here.

Despite this spatial and social division, Nashville’s historically black neighborhoods were drawn into immigrants’ discussions of the city in crucial ways. Although most Latino residents had little, if any, direct knowledge of African American neighborhoods, Nashville’s black spaces and black residents figured prominently in Latino understandings of Nashville as a social and spatial “other” against which Latino immigrants defined their own racial and social identities. In Nashville, Latino immigrants worked to distance their lives from black residents and neighborhoods (from which they were already spatially separate) in an effort to move themselves closer to wider constructs of whiteness and Americanness associated with their new neighborhoods in southeast Nashville (Foley 1997; Marrow 2009b). This operationalization of blackness as an other against which Latino immigrants defined their place in Nashville’s emerging racial order can be seen in the ways that Latino residents went out of their way to mark African Americans as distinct from “los americanos,” who constituted the majority of long-term residents in southeast Nashville. For example, Alicia, who owned a house in Antioch on “just a regular street,” said that in

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190      Nashville in the New Millennium her neighborhood “you see people walking around, adults walking around. The only thing is that sometimes . . . black people. You can hear them at 1:00 or 2:00 am, walking around, screaming, or doing things.” Noting black residents’ violation of both when and how neighborhood public spaces should be used (during the day and quietly), Alicia added that her neighbor would not rent to black or Hispanic tenants because both groups were “too loud.” Two Guatemalan women who lived in a wealthy subdivision in Antioch shared the same sentiment, explaining that they chose their neighborhood to avoid too many “morenos and Hispanics” in Flat­rock. Eduardo, an older Mexican man who lived in Woodbine, contrasted Latino and black behavior in Nashville based on a sample of one. His landlord, he explained, “trusts us [Hispanics] because we always pay the rent. . . . And he knows we are only here to work. We are not like black people. They get to a place, take a look at the apartment— I saw this with a neighbor—and then try to sell the stuff from the place.” Juana, a Mexican woman who followed her husband to Nashville in 2004, developed an image of African Americans as problematic through her son’s encounter with a black child on the school bus. Whether Latino residents were more aware of the behaviors and reactions of African Americans in southeast Nashville because there were fewer black residents there is not clear. What is clear from these examples, however, is that Latino immigrants noted key attributes of what they saw as black behavior and worked to distance themselves physically and socially from them in Nashville, as happened in some other new destinations (Marrow 2011). For other Latino residents, living in racially mixed neighborhoods but not interacting with other residents perpetuated racial stereotypes. Elena, a Salvadoran woman who lived in Antioch, described her initial residence along Harding Place by triangulating between the black, Latino, and white behavior she observed at a distance. My [Hispanic] neighbor left, and a black family moved to that apartment. We can’t really talk to black people; it is really difficult for us. White Americans would say, “Good morning. How are you today?” They would see [her roommate’s] baby and say, “How is the baby doing?” And I would feel more encouraged to practice my English. I couldn’t relate to my neighbors at first because there were no Hispanics in the place. It is a little different now. There are more Hispanics around. At first most of the people were Americans. I do like to get to know people living around, but with black people . . . not many of them would want to say hello to us, especially if they know we are Hispanics. White people are more polite, and they try at least to say hello to us, even when our English is not good.

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Silent Streets      191  Distinguishing between white residents who said hello and black residents who said nothing, Elena learned Nashville’s racial norms, and where Latino immigrants fit within them, by watching her neighbors. With little direct experience with African Americans in Nashville’s segregated neighborhoods but exposed to wider images of blackness in Nashville and elsewhere in the United States and Latin America (Cruz-Janzen 2002), Elena, like other Latino residents, extracted ideas about Nashville’s black population from single encounters, making one proxy for all in a racial formation circulating across the city but made meaningful through local encounters. Just as many Latino residents attempted to align their behavior with their perceptions of white neighborhood norms in southeast Nashville, some made equally strong distinctions between their behavior and that of the few African Americans they observed in Nashville. Being accepted in a (white) American neighborhood, it seemed, meant not only being quiet but also distancing oneself from “black” behaviors. Immigrant alignment with perceived white neighborhood norms and distancing from generalized African American behaviors are key mechanisms in the racial distancing between Latino immigrants and African Americans in new destinations documented by Paula McClain and her co-authors (2006) and studied more extensively by Helen Marrow (2009b, 2011). In a survey in Durham, North Carolina, McClain and her colleagues found negative stereotypes of African Americans among Latino residents, the significant majority of whom identified more strongly with white than with black residents. For Latino residents living in neighborhoods with African Americans, these patterns were even more intense. Echoing historical patterns in which different groups of immigrants moved toward whiteness by materially and metaphorically distancing themselves from black bodies, Latino residents in Southern locales, according to the few studies that have examined black-brown dynamics in the South, appear to find the line between Latino and white more permeable, and more advantageous to cross, than that between Latino and black (Marrow 2009b, 2011).18 Racial distancing between Latino immigrants and African Americans is compounded by the fact that Latino residents are often unfamiliar with histories of black struggle in the South and sometimes “find it difficult to empathize with the life experiences of their [African American] coworkers and neighbors” (Stuesse 2009, 92)—the same struggle encountered by teachers in southeast Nashville trying to help immigrant students see and understand Southern history. In southeast Nashville, limited, often fleeting, contact between Latino immigrants and African Americans combined with each group’s unfamiliarity with the history of the other to make interactions between them, in the words of an apart-

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192      Nashville in the New Millennium ment complex owner, “like oil and water.” In most cases, it just left them not interacting. Although some Latino residents described their direct observations of black neighbors and although parts of Antioch had substantial black populations (see figures 9.1 and 9.2), historically black neighborhoods outside southeast Nashville remained blank spaces on the mental maps that many Latino men and women used to understand Nashville. With tightly circumscribed daily geographies and hectic work schedules, most Latino immigrants with whom we spoke were unfamiliar with the city outside southeast Nashville, particularly historically black neighborhoods. When asked what she knew about other parts of Nashville, for example, Sofía, a young Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 2004, responded, “There is . . . this area on Charlotte [Avenue]. They say it is a black neighborhood. People are always like, ‘Never go in a black neighborhood. It is very dangerous.’ You just try to stay away from those places. . . . Whenever I rent, I avoid those neighborhoods.” With no firsthand knowledge of Charlotte Avenue and unsure where “Charlotte” actually was, Sofía learned to avoid it by learning that it was coded as “black.” When asked if there were places in Nashville where he was not comfortable, Ignacio, the Guatemalan man in his late thirties, replied, “I wouldn’t go to the area where black people live,” even though he did not know where those areas were in Nashville. An extended passage from an interview with Juana, the Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 2004, illustrates both this lack of familiarity with African American parts of Nashville and the racialized mental geographies through which immigrants learned about Nashville as a place. Trying to guide family members visiting from Mexico to their house in Antioch, Juana discovered that her family was lost in north Nashville and in danger, since they were brown in a black neighborhood. Interviewer: What have you heard about other places in Nashville? For example, have you heard about the places where different groups of people live? Or about things happening in a place where— Juana: No, just one time that my family came—my sister, my brother-in-law, and their son. They came by car. It was the first time they drove from Mexico. They got to Nashville . . . and they called my husband . . . and they said, “We are already in Nashville, but we are in”—I don’t know what place was. “But where? What is that place like?” And my husband said, “I don’t know.” He was looking at the map and saying, “I don’t know what place is that.” Then he told me, “Call Cristina,” a girlfriend. He said, “Ask her if she knows where they are. . . .” I called my friend, and I told her where they were. She said, “Ask them about the streets around.” I told her, and then she

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Silent Streets      193  was like, “Oh no! My husband says you should tell them to leave that place immediately because it is a black neighborhood.” She said that if black people saw them, they could beat them. And I said, “But why would they beat them if they don’t know them?” And she said, “Precisely, there are only black people there. They can’t be there.” Interviewer: Do you remember the name of this place? Juana: My husband called and said, “Hey, get out of that place! . . . Cristina’s husband says that is a black neighborhood.” And he [my brother-inlaw] said, “I asked at a gas station.” He said that no one would say anything to him, but he noticed they were all black. He also said the lady of the store told him to leave the place and asked them what they were looking for. And he said, “We are just—we came from Mexico. We are not from here.” “Oh no,” she said, and she gave them directions to get here. That was the only time I heard something like that, but my friend was like, “Tell them to leave that place!” And I was like, “Why?” “If people don’t know them, and they realize they are not black, they can beat them.” But why, if they don’t know them?

The same distance learning can be seen in an excerpt from an interview with Ramona, a young Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 2001. When asked if there were places in Nashville where she was uncomfortable, she replied, “People tell me, ‘Don’t go over there because that area is all black, and it is more likely that something can happen to you over there.’” Not knowing where “there” was or who lived in it, Ramona mapped blackness, and thus danger, onto the blank spaces of her mental map of Nashville and, at least initially, altered her behavior. When I first moved [into a new apartment near Harding Place], many assaults occurred. . . . My mom used to tell me that every day, there was a car that was robbed. At that time I had seen many blacks outside, playing around, talking, but I . . . never got used to it. Right now, I am more used to it because it is how they are—they talk, they hang out. Now, it is not out of the ordinary that I see them outside or talking. Sometimes, they even greet me. . . . So I think it is the language more than anything that causes one to be afraid.

Over time the same learning by observation that taught Latino immigrants to be quiet to be accepted in American neighborhoods altered Ramona’s image of black residents. As she formed a clearer picture of what constituted the “ordinary” for her African American neighbors, she became less afraid. Chalking up her initial fear to language differences, Ra-

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194      Nashville in the New Millennium mona overcame her concerns by translating what she saw of individual black residents into what she knew about race and place in Nashville, scaling up her local observations into wider ideas of racial groups in Nashville. These and other “racializing incidents” (Arrendondo 2004, 400) collectively contributed to the emerging consensus in the 2000s on not only where Latino immigrants fit in Nashville’s urban landscape but also where they fit in the city’s racial order. In southeast Nashville neighborhoods, long-term and Latino residents participated in that sorting by closely observing one another through a silence that meant different things to each group and that was produced through different social and racial geographies. Latino immigrants learned how to live as neighborhood residents in Nashville by watching their white neighbors, by defining their behavior in opposition to negative images of Hispanics circu­ lating across Nashville, and by positioning themselves in contrast to black stereotypes gleaned from indirect knowledge of black behavior and black parts of the city. Through these processes, southeast Nashville’s silent streets became central to Latino immigrants’ efforts to find their place in the city’s emerging racial order, at the same time that those same silent streets worked to exclude them from social belonging in the neighborhood. As Latino immigrants learned how to live in Nashville and sought a place within it, the workplace, the site that arguably drove Latino migration to Nashville in the first place, fell out of view. Nonetheless, as Latino immigrants assessed long-term residents’ responses to them and found ways to fit into Nashville’s social and racial order, they often continued to feel most at home at the workplace and as workers.

Work: “Almost Like Your Second Home” Although the workplace and job competition are often central to discussions of immigrant and native-born interactions across the United States, Latino men and women did not locate the tensions surrounding their presence in Nashville in the late 2000s in the workplace.19 Instead, and in contrast to what they observed in the neighborhood, Latino immigrants described more positive public images of immigrants in the workplace and often found an easier fit into Nashville’s social fabric as workers. Héctor, for example, the young Nicaraguan man who came to Nashville in 2001, laid out the different perceptions of immigrant labor and immigrant life in Nashville in no uncertain terms. “The truth is that Americans do not like Latinos much, since the cultures are different, especially since there is a lot of noise in Latino neighborhoods. There are people drinking

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Silent Streets      195  in the streets. . . . Americans do not like that.” Héctor added, however, a caveat: “As far as work is concerned, they have a good image of Hispanics.” Problematic in the neighborhood because of how they lived, Latino immigrants were accepted in the workplace because of how they worked, and this pattern of partial immigrant acceptance through the spaces and practices of work generated site-specific experiences of social belonging for many Latino immigrants. For this reason, the workplace figured prominently in Latino efforts to find a place in Nashville. In one of the first interviews conducted with Latino immigrants for this study, Arturo explained why his workplace was “almost like your second home.” “You even spend more time there than at home. You are home only for the weekends.” In his neighborhood, Arturo felt “calmer” and could “breathe better.” When asked what he did with his spare time, however, he mentioned activities outside his neighborhood (which, for Arturo, meant his apartment complex): attending nightly English classes, going to the mall, shopping at Wal-Mart—all ways to stay “active, so I don’t have to sit at home having negative thoughts.” Home, for Arturo, was both safe and uncomfortable, a place to relax after a day’s work and a place to reflect on how different life in Nashville had been from what he and many other immigrants thought it would be (Winders 2009). For Rafael, a young Honduran man who came to Nashville from Atlanta in 2006, the workplace, more so than the neighborhood, was a site of social interaction, if not deep friendships (Chaney 2010), because of how immigrant labor was structured in Nashville. We always . . . are working with other undocumented Hispanics, with whom they pair us. And we become friends, and we end up working together. From work, each person goes to his apartment. Then, on the following day, once again, we are working together and then going home again to the apartment.

For Héctor, who rented a house with a Honduran friend in Lebanon, thirty miles from Nashville, the construction crews with whom he worked were the source of his friends and social connections. Living in an “American” neighborhood and working with “American” coworkers, Héctor felt he had better relationships with his coworkers than with his neighbors “because we see each other every day. There is more trust because there is more time.” For similar reasons, Elena, who lived on Bell Road in Antioch amid a mix of white and Hispanic neighbors, admitted, “I’d rather be at work than be here [at home].” Although Latino men and women frequently made social contacts at work, those relations were typically fleeting in part because immigrant

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196      Nashville in the New Millennium labor was expected to be highly flexible (Smith and Winders 2008). Sofía, for example, found social interactions at work and in her neighborhood near the intersection of Haywood Lane and Nolensville Road equally superficial. Although you talk to people at work, they don’t really know about you, other than the things you say. . . . It’s the same with your neighbors. It is not the same saying hello or helping them with something. That doesn’t mean they know you because of that, right? You try to share things, but you don’t go too far.

In part because workplace friendships were so superficial and in part because many workplaces in Nashville had rapid turnover, Latino social networks also formed at churches, schools, and other social institutions. These immigrant social networks stretching across the city challenged the notion that the neighborhood captures a social or ethnic community (Zelinsky and Lee 1998; Odem 2004, 2009) and added to the sense that no one neighborhood in southeast Nashville was a clear immigrant enclave. A few Latino residents maintained friendships with other immigrants from their hometowns or countries, but the translocal migration networks documented in transnational studies of the early 1990s and in smaller Southern towns in the 2000s (Striffler 2007; Lacy 2009) did not emerge in Nashville. Instead, Latino residents described social connections that were often panLatino but not always deep. Manuel, for example, a young Salvadoran man who came to Nashville in 2006 and worked as a painter, had friends in La Vergne, in apartments along Harding Place, and in Antioch. Through his work, he interacted with people from across Nashville and parts of Latin America. He was quick to point out, however, that the people with whom he spent a large portion of his day were not really his friends. He just interacted with them. For some Latino residents, even a social and work life surrounded by other Latino immigrants seemed solitary. Toward the end of a long and winding interview, much of which consisted of personal reflection on difficulties in Nashville and elsewhere, Eduardo explained why he remained in Nashville after splitting with his wife and facing a range of personal challenges. “I’d rather be here. It would hurt sitting outside my house [in Mexico] and knowing I am a stranger for my friends and neighbors there. I know I am a stranger here too, but it doesn’t hurt that bad. I am a stranger now in my own country.” Eduardo concluded, “Sometimes I think that I have fought for nothing. I am sixty-three years old, and I keep fighting.” In other cases, however, being a stranger in the neighborhood did not preclude a feeling of belonging. Laura, the Honduran woman who owned

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Silent Streets      197  a house in the heart of Antioch, felt that she was unknown to her neighbors. When asked how they would describe her, she responded, “Who is Laura? They don’t know. I don’t even know their names either. . . . They would say they almost never get to see me, unless I am leaving for work or running my errands. I don’t really talk to them. I just wave like this. ‘Bye!’ ‘Hello!’ ” Isolated in her house, where she spent her limited time in the neighborhood, and separated from a son in Honduras whom she had not seen in ten years, Laura nonetheless felt at home in Nashville. “Why not? I feel a part of the state and I hope—I have faith—one day I will become a citizen. . . . I feel as comfortable as I would be in my own country.” Stressing earlier in her interview that Latino immigrants were only in Nashville to work and maintaining connections to her family back home through remittances and weekly phone calls, Laura had created a kind of transnational belonging that enabled her to justify being here to maintain (not) being there; this sense of belonging led her to feel at home in Nashville even as she felt anonymous and acknowledged the précarité of her home in the Music City (Constable 1999).

Conclusion At the beginning of our interview on a hot August afternoon, before I could even turn the recorder on, Helen explained that she felt “out of place” in her house in Woodbine. Having lived in Flat­rock since the late 1920s and having witnessed the stability of her Flat­rock neighborhood in the 1940s give way to rapid turnover and ethnic transition in the 1990s, Helen experienced her neighborhood’s transformation as a loss not only of friends and family but also of her own place and sense of belonging. When I asked when she began to feel this way, she responded, When the people, the Spanish people, or any other person like that. I mean, I’m not—they’ve gotta have a place to be. I don’t mean to be talking about them, but they’re not neighbors because I can’t communicate with them. But I feel out of place because there’s so much more of them here. . . . I mean, it just makes me sick, because it’s just so, so different, so Mexican.

Since there was “not anybody here that I can be neighbors with,” she explained, “I just feel like I’m out of place.” With no “real neighbors” to walk through the neighborhood with her, Helen stayed inside her house. She had contemplated moving, but the inertia of more than four decades kept her in her home even as she felt out of place in her neighborhood. Geographers have devoted much attention to “the ways that racial

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198      Nashville in the New Millennium identity is embedded in the cultural landscape, shaping new experiences and meanings of place and collective memory” (Inwood and Martin 2008, 393). That embedding of race in place through the social, political, cultural, and economic forces that maintained Nashville’s segregated urban landscape enabled Latino men and women to begin to find their place in the city’s social fabric and racial order, as they settled in particular neighborhoods. As Richard Schein (2006, 6) suggests, “Racial processes take place and racial categories get made, in part, through cultural landscapes” (see also Schein 1997, 2003). Through a discussion of southeast Nashville neighborhoods and their silent streets, the “enduring role” (Schein 2006, 6) of the geography of everyday life in shaping race becomes clear in the context of immigrant settlement. Latino immigrants based their efforts to become part of a locally defined American life on their understandings of the relationship between race and place in the Music City and between being quiet in the neighborhood and being seen as American. Their efforts were also based, however, on their understanding of the value of moving their local identities closer to notions of Americanness as whiteness by both policing their performance in the neighborhood and distancing themselves from black residents and neighborhoods elsewhere in the city. How long southeast Nashville’s streets will remain silent is unclear. Some studies of immigrant experiences point to shifts from pressures to assimilate to assertions of cultural or ethnic identities over time (Flores 1997a, 1997b, 2003), as immigrant political power grows and receiving communities change (Secor 2004). In southeast Nashville, children of Latino immigrants may create different social dynamics as they mature, tipping their neighborhoods toward more social interactions. As southeast Nashville neighborhoods become more Latino through white flight, Latino population growth, or the end point of a graying white population, the sense shared by a few Latino residents that their southeast Nashville neighborhood was “just like Mexico” might spread across the area, making it a series of true ethnic enclaves, at least residentially. The likelihood of these shifts, however, is hard to determine. In the face of ongoing economic difficulties brought about by the global financial crisis, the tense political situations created by Nashville’s (and the South’s) negative climate for immigrants, and changing demographics and economic opportunities in Mexico, if and when southeast Nashville streets will speak is as unclear as the shape of future immigration paths in Nashville. What is clear, however, is that even in the absence of interaction between old and new residents, Latino settlement in the 2000s reconfigured southeast Nashville in ways that destabilized how both immigrant and long-term residents understood their place in the city, the meanings of

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Silent Streets      199  neighborhood, and the social locations of home. Brettell and Nibbs (2011, 21) suggest that policymakers “need to understand that anti-immigrant sentiment is often a conflict over what people consider to be the central characteristics of an American identity.” Conflict over an American identity, however, is also a struggle to define a much more local identity— namely, that of the neighborhood. As Latino immigrants in Nashville sought to align themselves and their residential behavior with a locally observed American way of life understood as white and defined against a generalized blackness, long-term residents reacted not only, or even mainly, to challenges to an American identity but instead to challenges to their immediate local environment. Teresa Harmon, who cofounded Tennesseans for Responsible Immigration Policies and grew up in southeast Nashville, made this connection explicit in a 2005 article on Nashville. She described her childhood neighborhood as currently looking “nothing like the Nashville I grew up in. . . . All the signs are in Spanish. There is no English spoken here. We need to do something about this” (Farris 2005, 4). The next chapter examines a series of efforts to “do something” about the changes in southeast Nashville in the 2000s and describes long-term residents’ mobilization of past and present geographies to do so. As it makes clear, the two different ways of defining how to behave in the neighborhood laid out in this ­chapter are themselves embedded in two different understandings of neighborhood. These two different understandings, when acted upon in the same place, led to an inadvertent immigrant exclusion through history, as long-term residents came to grips with Nashville’s new “sonido” in the new millennium (Davis 2001).

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Chapter 8  | Ma(r)king the Neighborhood: New Immigrants, Old Boundaries, New Maps It’s not an easy row to hoe to try to get people with you. I keep telling people too, they are here. We better learn to get along with them. —Carl, white resident of Radnor for almost five decades

Carl was clearly a neighborhood leader and active resident when we spoke in 2006. Nearly a lifelong Radnor resident, he had observed many changes in his neighborhood, all of which he seemed to take in stride. School integration in the 1970s had changed Carl’s neighborhood and led to the ­closing of Central High School, which he attended and to which he still felt a strong attachment. Nashville’s interstate system and circle road had hemmed in his neighborhood, hurting its businesses and, along with busing, hastening its residential turnover. Finally, in the late 1990s, as Carl and other Flat­rock residents entered retirement, a new change came to southeast Nashville: immigrant settlement. Still committed to maintaining life in Radnor as he knew it, Carl regularly frequented the few remaining commercial bastions of Flat­rock in its heyday and kept up with old friends scattered throughout the area. He was also committed to his neighborhood, however, as it now was—caught somewhere between nostalgic Flat­rock and immigrant Nashville. Getting his neighbors to work with him was admittedly “a hard row to hoe.” For Carl, though, there was no other alternative, since Latino immigrants in southeast Nashville were there to stay (Smith and Winders 2008). “We better learn to get along with them,” Carl stressed, as he and other long-term residents of southeast Nashville struggled to make sense of an immigrant presence in and an immigrant present for their neighborhoods in the new millennium. How did people who had lived in southeast Nashville for some time make sense of the changes in their neighborhoods brought about by—or

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      201  happening concurrently with—immigrant settlement? How did they narrate the multicultural present developing around them, and how did they link what their neighborhoods were in the 2000s to what they had been in the past? As detailed in chapter 7, Latino and long-term residents lived side by side in southeast Nashville but did not necessarily share social worlds; instead, they interacted through a silence that meant different things to each group. This chapter adds to that argument by showing how long-term residents and Latino immigrants understood and enacted neighborhood itself in different ways. If many long-term residents in southeast Nashville could describe in detail not only their current neighborhood but also its features from as early as the 1930s, many Latino immigrants, as an area nonprofit director explained, had to pull out their wallets to check their driver’s license (for those who still had them) to tell you their home address. The details that Latino immigrants did not see—their neighborhood’s name, boundaries, landmarks, and especially local history—were the very features that defined it for long-term residents. In fact, the historically deep neighborhood knowledge that many long-term residents possessed provided the material and symbolic means by which they came to grips with their neighborhood’s conditions in the 2000s, especially its increasing asso­ ciation with immigrant settlement. The difference between how immigrants and long-term residents understood not only how to behave in the neighborhood but also what neighborhood itself meant was, thus, central to southeast Nashville’s politics of demographic and social change and shaped immigrant incorporation in Nashville in the new millennium. To get a sense of these different ways of understanding neighborhood and its changes, I asked a simple question across southeast Nashville: “What neighborhood do you live in?” Neighborhoods, like segregated water fountains, carry powerful material and symbolic weight as the places where people are understood to belong in a city—a ground-truth spatial identity for urban residents and social dynamics. People may be employed at multiple work sites and may travel across the city to visit friends, pick up children, or complete other tasks. The neighborhood itself may even have lost its saliency in some urban residents’ lives. Nonetheless, urban residents are still marked and measured by where they live in the city for the census, by state agencies, and in everyday understandings of urban populations. Neighborhood, simply put, remains a central part of how people experience and understand their places in cities, even as it remains hard to define.1 In southeast Nashville, questions about neighborhood rarely generated straightforward answers. Long-term residents’ descriptions of neighborhood often included landmarks and names not found on current Nashville

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202      Nashville in the New Millennium maps. In naming their present neighborhoods, long-term residents called on names and boundaries from the early twentieth century, replacing a confusing “now” with a nostalgic “then” that remained central to how they understood neighborhood even as these features were in­creasingly invisible in the urban landscape around them. For different reasons, Latino residents in the same areas found questions about neighborhood equally perplexing. Never citing the historic names that long-term residents used and rarely mentioning current neighborhood names, most Latino immigrants, even those who had been in Nashville for several years, described their neighborhood as “Nashville” or “Davidson County,” jumping from the intimate spaces of neighborhood to the sprawling scale of the urban. In southeast Nashville, then, residents living side by side often called on different moments in their neighborhood’s history and operationalized different scales to name and understand the neighborhood or place within which they all ostensibly lived. This chapter considers the challenges raised by these socially and historically different mental maps of neighborhood for immigrant incorporation and neighborhood dynamics in the 2000s. What connections between past and present geographies did long-term residents draw upon to make sense of change in southeast Nashville? How did immigrant settlement in southeast Nashville feed into long-term residents’ understanding of neighborhood and their decision to become involved in its physical maintenance and wider reputation? Addressing these questions requires an approach to immigrant settlement and its effects on cities like Nashville that closely follows how long-term residents mobilized local histories and collective memories to explain and narrate neighborhood change associated with immigrant settlement. This look at the efforts of long-term residents to place immigrant settlement within local histories can enrich our understandings of sociopolitical responses to immigrants in new destinations. In southeast Nashville, responses to an immigrant presence were informed not only by immigrants’ occupation and reconfiguration of the present urban landscape and social fabric but also by the focus an immigrant presence brought to neighborhoods’ historical events and collective memories, sometimes challenging them in the process. This chapter contributes to the growing body of work on the role of collective memory in Southern communities (Brundage 2009), bringing immigration into a scholarly debate focused largely on a black-white South. Equally important, it analyzes different spatial responses to immigrant settlement across southeast Nashville, demonstrating how immigrant exclusions of various sorts are produced through very local spatial practices. As a number of scholars suggest, immigrant belonging in host communities is “geographically mediated” (Nelson and Hiemstra 2008, 337)

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      203  through the social spaces in which immigrants and long-term residents interact and encounter one another.2 This chapter adds to this argument by showing that the spatial mediation of immigrant belonging in new destinations takes place not only through contestations over shared contemporary social spaces and institutions like schools and neighborhoods but also through contestations over historical social spaces and institutions that immigrants inadvertently redefine through their presence in them. To develop this argument, the chapter first lays out how long-term residents drew on collective memories of living in southeast Nashville to narrate its current form in the 2000s. It examines how long-term residents, with their different understanding of neighborhood, struggled to place immigrants vis-à-vis both the history of their neighborhoods and the contemporary urban landscapes of southeast Nashville. From there, the chapter turns to the two neighborhoods most strongly associated with immigrant settlement in Nashville—Woodbine/Flat­rock and Antioch—and lays out how long-term residents collectively responded to demographic change by literally recalling their neighborhoods’ past geographies. In both neighborhoods in the 2000s, the present—affected, but not solely defined, by immigrant settlement—was spatially contested by long-term residents who drew on particular versions and geographies of local histories to redefine the present image of their neighborhood and make sense of an immigrant presence. These versions of the local past, however, remained all but invisible to Latino immigrants not only because they were unfamiliar with Nashville’s history but also because the historical periods that long-term residents called upon to reinterpret their neighborhoods predated an immigrant arrival by decades. As a result, long-term residents’ use of local history to redefine a local present in their neighborhoods created an immigrant exclusion through history that was inadvertent but potent all the same.

Recalling Neighborhood In southeast Nashville, long-term residents recalled past versions of their neighborhoods to make sense of its current state in two ways. First, they recalled neighborhood by drawing on particular memories of growing up and living in these areas. This process was often complicated and incomplete, since most long-term residents’ histories in southeast Nashville were episodic. Residents and their families had moved in and out of southeast Nashville, spending more or less time there and being differently occupied at different stages of their lives. Thus, their narrations of neighborhood change often displayed significant gaps that left the arrival

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204      Nashville in the New Millennium of immigrants in their neighborhoods largely unexplained. Second, longterm residents, especially through their involvement with neighborhood associations, recalled neighborhood by drawing on particular historical geographies of neighborhood to intervene in the current public image of their neighborhood as an immigrant enclave (for a similar strategy in Dublin, see Gilmartin 2006). Together, these two strategies of recalling neighborhood helped long-term residents come to grips with changes in their neighborhoods, including immigrant settlement, from the 1940s onward. In doing so, however, they excluded immigrants from local definitions and images of neighborhood. Although this chapter focuses on how long-term residents recalled neighborhood in southeast Nashville, their understandings of neighborhood become clearer when juxtaposed against Latino immigrants’ understandings of the same places. Across interviews and informal conversations, Latino residents in southeast Nashville typically knew little about the boundaries, identities, or histories of the places where they lived. When asked to describe their neighborhoods, Latino immigrants frequently described larger-scale places, such as Nashville and Davidson County, if they could describe neighborhood at all. An extended passage from an interview with a young man from Mexico demonstrates this tendency. Interviewer: I have another question. . . . What is the name of your neighborhood? Arturo: The—? Interviewer: The name of your neighborhood? Arturo: Oh, the one I live in now? Well, it is a nice neighborhood more . . . Interviewer: No, what do you call it? Arturo: It is a more peaceful place, that’s the only thing I can tell you because . . . Interviewer: What name does that place have? What is the name you know it by? Arturo: Well, it is a. . . . They are apartments. I don’t really know what they are called. . . . No, I can’t remember, but it is a nice place compared to the other one.

Arturo, who had lived in Nashville since 2006, was not unusual in struggling to respond to a question about neighborhood. Knowing that his

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      205  apartment complex was nicer than others in which he had lived but not identifying where he lived as a neighborhood, Arturo did not see, and thus could not identify, the neighborhood so obvious to the long-term residents living around him. Although he lived in a neighborhood in one sense, in another he did not, if for no other reason than that he was unaware of living in a neighborhood. Bernardo, a Honduran man who brought his family from Miami to Nashville in 2006 and owned a home in La Vergne south of Nashville, also did not know the name or size of his neighborhood, which included both black and white residents. As he explained, “I only know that we are adjacent to Antioch . . . and this other [town] Smyrna, and that’s all I know.” Working at night, he spent little time in his neighborhood and had few interactions with his neighbors. As a result, the name of his neighborhood never crossed his mind. In similar fashion, Fabián, a young Salvadoran man who came to Nashville in 2003, could do little more than say that he knew his apartment complex was “located in Nashville.” Ignacio, a Guatemalan man in his thirties who came to Nashville in 2005 and shared an apartment along Murfreesboro Road with another Guatemalan man, skipped the scale of neighborhood altogether. “I only know the name of the streets. . . . I do know that right now we are in Davidson [County].” Sometimes questions about neighborhood became questions about community or personal networks more generally. Carlos, an older Mexican man who had lived south of Harding Place since 2002, could only explain that his neighborhood “belongs to Davidson [County] . . . near I-24.” When asked about his neighborhood’s boundaries, he stretched them to include his wider daily path and social connections—construction and cleaning work sites across middle Tennessee, his friends’ homes “even outside of Nashville,” and Indianapolis, Indiana, where he had friends as well. In this way, “neighborhood” for Carlos became not the geographic area where he lived but the spatially dispersed social network he maintained—a community without propinquity in every sense of the phrase (Zelinsky and Lee 1998). For Diego, a middle-aged Guatemalan man who came to Nashville from Chicago in late 2005, “the only thing I know [about my neighborhood] is that it’s toward Murfreesboro [Road]. I never worry about that stuff.” When pressed about why he chose his apartment complex, he explained that he did so “because of the neighborhood, because of the place. I don’t know if the word is ‘neighborhood.’” If Latino immigrants in southeast Nashville were unsure if where they lived constituted a neighborhood, the same was not true for long-term residents, especially older white residents, for whom neighborhood formed a central part of their sense of self and place. A few vignettes from their mem-

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206      Nashville in the New Millennium ories of neighborhood will suffice to show this difference in how immigrant and long-term residents understood their place within and connection to the neighborhood. Arnold had lived in southeast Nashville for seventy years when we spoke in 2007. His family moved there in 1937, when he was thirteen and his father took a job at Radnor Yards. Arnold lived in Radnor until 1942, when he graduated from Central High School and entered the armed services. After World War II, he returned to Radnor but, like other veterans, could not find housing in its crowded neighborhoods. Instead, he bought a house in Glencliff, which at the time was the “finest, nicest” neighborhood in the area. Settling there in 1959, he never left. Like nearly every long-term white resident interviewed for this study, Arnold explained that in the Flat­rock he remembered, everyone was “like a family member” and “knew everyone.” During Flat­rock’s heyday, he stressed, there were “no Spaniards,” whom Arnold first noticed along Nolensville Road in 2001 or 2002. “It just breaks my heart to drive down Nolensville Road and see all those yellow, brown, and orange buildings,” he shared, linking an immigrant presence to an urban landscape that was no longer familiar. Within Flat­rock, particularly Glencliff, Arnold drew a sharp distinction between the past, when everyone was “real particular” about how homes looked, and now, when “the Spaniards” let their properties “look ratty.” “Old-timers,” he mused, agreed that if the “illegals” had come to Flat­rock in the 1960s, they would have been “run out in a hurry.”3 How and why “the Spaniards” arrived in Flat­rock, however, remained a mystery to Arnold, although their impacts on the neighborhood he intimately knew were crystal clear. Across this study, many long-term residents lamented neighborhood change and sometimes linked it to immigrant settlement. Very few, however, vilified Latino residents the way Arnold did. Instead, consensus on the impacts of Latino settlement in southeast Nashville was hard to find, and Flat­rock’s internationalization was often taken in stride, if not fully understood, by long-term residents. Burton, for example, was born in 1926 in a neighborhood just north of Flat­rock. In 1929 his family moved to Radnor, where he lived until 1956, when he moved his wife and children farther south to Edmonson Pike. Burton owned a business along Nolensville Road, which kept him in Flat­rock every day until 1993. For Burton, as well as for many long-term residents, Flat­rock was defined by poverty and a tight-knit community. “We were so close up on the street there [in] Radnor,” he explained. “I could name every kid going up one street and another.” In contrast to Arnold, however, Burton approached a Latino presence more agnostically. Although he noted that “Mexicans, of course, they’re everywhere,” Burton did not see them as a homogenous or uniformly problematic group. As he explained, “Some of them are the nicest

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      207  people you ever saw, and some of them are not.” For Burton, immigrant settlement in his childhood neighborhood was just one of many transformations the area had experienced, and one that he lacked a way to narrate. As a result, he did not dwell on the changes that immigrant settlement had brought to southeast Nashville and, instead, recalled the area as it once was when he spoke of it in the present. In similar fashion, Don was born in east Nashville in 1929 and came to Glencliff in 1947, when his father built a house there. When we spoke in 2007, he had been in that house for sixty years. Over the years, Don had watched Glencliff’s transformation from Nashville’s most prized suburb in the 1950s and 1960s to a declining area in the late 1970s to an unfamiliar place in the 1990s, when neighbors “just died,” houses were sold, and Latino and black residents moved in. By the late 1990s, “the businesses I go to wasn’t there anymore,” Don observed, and he began to avoid shops on Nolensville and Murfreesboro Roads altogether—a trend noted in other new destinations as well (Brettell and Nibbs 2011). To drive home his point about neighborhood change, Don’s sister, who had accompanied me to my interview with him and had herself grown up in Glencliff, stressed that “you don’t dare go” to the Walgreen’s on Murfreesboro Road.4 Beyond a vague fear of the unknown at Walgreen’s, however, Don and his sister remained unsure how to describe southeast Nashville in its current form and how to mark its changes over time.

Marking Change Goodness, I don’t know what to tell you. I guess—I don’t know. Maybe in the 1970s? I don’t know. I really can’t—it’s hard to tell. —Burton, Flat­rock resident and business owner, 1929 to 1993

An ongoing challenge in this study was getting a sense of how southeast Nashville had changed for long-term residents. As Burton’s response to my question about when Flat­rock peaked makes clear, most long-term residents could say with certainty that their neighborhood had changed, but they were less sure about when those changes began, as well as what preceded or precipitated them. Equally important, although residents who had grown up or lived in southeast Nashville for some time could recall much about the area’s history, they struggled to articulate what transpired between the time when their neighborhoods peaked in the late 1970s and the time when Latinos, Hispanics, the Mexicans, the Spanish, or “the Spaniards” arrived in the late 1990s. As a result, many long-term residents were often unsure whether neighborhood decline and immi-

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208      Nashville in the New Millennium grant settlement were connected and what precipitated the latter. For these residents, immigrant settlement in southeast Nashville remained an unexplainable local phenomenon for which they lacked a clear narrative and to which they responded only by turning to local histories. Don, for example, after sixty years in Glencliff, had strong feelings about his neighborhood’s current state. Like other long-term residents, however, he found it hard to describe the changes in his neighborhood that had led to its current conditions. When pressed about neighborhood change, he responded, “Humph . . . I don’t know. It’s not like it was. It’s gone downhill,” marking a transition in his neighborhood but lacking a way to narrate it. Fiona, a middle-aged white woman who lived in Glencliff in the late 1980s and early 1990s and continued to visit family there, recalled Glencliff as a neighborhood where everyone “had been there forever.” In the 1990s, she explained, “riffraff” arrived, and the area “started going downhill.” Although Fiona was quick to note that “I don’t go around Nolensville [Road] to get to know” Latino immigrants, she also admitted that southeast Nashville was in decline before immigrants arrived and that the two events might not be connected. Her narration of neighborhood change, like that of many others, included the observation that things were different but offered no clear way to bring Latino settlement into the story of change in Glencliff. Rose, an older white woman who had lived in the heart of Woodbine since the 1930s, simply explained that everything about her neighborhood was now so different that she could not remember how it had changed.5 When I asked Burton, the older white man who had lived or worked in Radnor from the late 1920s through the early 1990s, how and when Flat­rock began to change, he described Flat­rock at different periods but had no overarching narrative to explain its present state. Each time I asked about neighborhood change, he marked a different starting point. From 1929, when his family arrived, to the late 1980s, when his personal involvement in the area tailed off, he had daily interactions in Flat­rock and could enumerate details about its residential and commercial areas, as well as key events in its history. In the 1950s, he explained, businesses had boomed along Nolensville Road. Sometime later the area began to change, but Burton was not sure how specifically it did so. At different points, Burton’s narration of neighborhood change jumped from his personal history to that of Flat­rock, intertwining changes in his own daily routine with changes across Flat­rock. At no point, however, could he tell me how Flat­rock reached its current situation in the late 2000s. As the interview progressed, I asked Burton more pointed questions about change in southeast Nashville, especially about the arrival of Latino immigrants and the dying off of long-term white residents. In response,

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      209  Burton, reflecting a trend across interviews, deflected direct connections between how the neighborhood was in the past and how it was now. Although he lamented the bankruptcy of Radnor Baptist Church, as well as the buying up of Radnor property by nonresidents, he did not know when Latino immigrants came to Flat­rock, nor did he identify their arrival as the most dominant change in his former neighborhood. Instead, Flat­rock, for Burton, had simply changed over time, reaching an endpoint that included immigrant settlement and other changes and that made little sense in relation to its past. The same difficulties in narrating change were evident in Antioch, if in different ways. Whereas in Flat­rock, long-term residents struggled to find a place for Latino immigrants in the area’s history, in Antioch, long-term residents struggled to place Latino residents in the area’s sprawling contemporary landscape and amorphous identity. When asked where Latinos lived in Antioch, for example, an elected official said, “All over where they can afford,” struggling to locate Latino immigrants within specific parts of Antioch. Frank, an elderly white man who had lived in southeast Nashville since the early 1920s, explained that Latino residents were “everywhere they can move” in Antioch. This inability to definitively place Latino residents in Antioch both enabled and inhibited long-term residents’ efforts to separate their own place in Antioch from more problematic images of the area (Campbell et al. 2009). Leslie, for instance, an African American woman who had lived in Antioch since the late 1980s, knew Latinos had settled in Antioch but had not seen them in her neighborhood, making fine-grained distinctions between her own place in Antioch and the immediate area around her home. Sandy, a white teacher at Morgan Elementary and longtime resident of a wealthier part of Antioch, similarly noted that her neighborhood had no immigrants but that two or three streets over, the area had been entirely immigrant since 2000. When I asked Ingrid, a white, fourthgrade teacher at Morgan Elementary, about her neighborhood near Davidson County’s southeastern edge, she explained that it had “white . . . Asian, Indian,” but no Hispanic residents. Latino residents, she explained, lived elsewhere—in apartment complexes on Old Hickory Boulevard in Antioch and especially along ­Flat­rock’s (not Antioch’s) stretch of Nolensville Road, which had become “just one big Hispanic world.” In this way, for Ingrid, Latino immigrants both were and were not part of Antioch—not included in her own sense of Antioch as her home but part of an “elsewhere” in Antioch that she stretched beyond Antioch’s borders and into parts of Flat­rock and Woodbine. This confusing trend of locating Latino residents in Antioch by referencing places beyond Antioch was perhaps clearest in an interview with Diane, an African American resident of Antioch since 1990. To describe life in An-

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210      Nashville in the New Millennium tioch, she, like others, drew a distinction between her neighborhood and others parts of Antioch, remarking that “the kinds of tensions we hear about [in Antioch] don’t happen in wealthier neighborhoods” like hers. Her use of socioeconomics to spatially contain Antioch’s negative public image, however, failed when she turned to the topic of Anti­och’s Latino residents. When I asked where Latinos in Antioch lived, she said the following, which I included in my fieldnotes. She had first noticed Latinos in Antioch in 1997. She had always stopped at the Mapco on Murfreesboro Road to get gas and started “feeling uncomfortable” there. Eventually, her husband said, “Don’t stop there.” Since this gas station was several miles from Antioch, I asked her again: where in Antioch do Latinos live? She paused and finally said, “I don’t know. . . . What is Antioch, anyways? Latinos live on Nolensville Road, in Woodbine, but Woodbine is not Antioch. I don’t know where the concentration is. I just see them at Wal-Mart, the Mexican Wal-Mart on Nolensville [Road].” For Diane, Latino residents were present in Antioch but not in her neighborhood. They were everywhere and nowhere in Antioch, the boundaries of which she stretched to include Woodbine several miles away to describe an immigrant geography that both defined and escaped Antioch as a place. In a similarly confusing moment, a neighborhood association president in Antioch explained that in his neighborhood, which encompassed a large swath of Antioch, “everybody’s out here, African Americans, European Americans, Hispanic Americans, a smattering of Native Americans, Middle Easterners.” He followed this remark, however, by noting that there were no immigrants in his neighborhood association because there were no immigrant enclaves; “they’re spread out” across neighborhoods, he stressed, so there was no identifiable group in any one neighborhood and no reason to seek immigrant involvement in the association, even though immigrants lived in his neighborhood. In this way, he understood Latino immigrants to be present in Antioch, and even in his neighborhood, but not present as a group with a clear place in Antioch or its system of representing itself. Instead, Latino immigrants were everywhere and nowhere in Antioch—a location with strong implications for how neighborhoods responded to an immigrant presence in the 2000s. For many long-term residents, locating a Latino residential presence in their neighborhoods was wrapped up with determining their definition of neighborhood in the first place. Rose, for example, the elderly white woman who had lived in Woodbine for nearly sixty years and in Flat­rock for nearly eighty, explained that Latino settlement had had no impact on her neighborhood, which she defined as her block, but that it had affected an area one block over, which was now “full of Mexicans.”6 Ingrid, a white teacher at Morgan Elementary, lived near a southeast Nashville middle

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      211  school with many Latino students. Her neighborhood, she explained, was mainly elderly white residents, but nearby apartments were filled with young Hispanic families. Ingrid, thus, used the line between renter and homeowner to bound her sense of neighborhood. In similar fashion, Beth and Eric, who moved to Glencliff in 2003, were pleased that zoning regulations did not allow duplexes in their neighborhood and used the absence of rental units to distinguish their part of Glencliff from elsewhere in Flat­ rock. Although there were several nice “classic bungalows” a few blocks away, these houses shared “a backdoor with tenants” because of their proximity to Glencliff schools and, as a result, were not desirable places to live. They were also not included in Beth and Eric’s sense of their own neighborhood. For Eric and Beth, this distinction between homeowner and renter interacted with the distinction between immigrant and native-born in complicated ways. In a conversation about Glencliff, I asked them how they described their neighbors. “Old and white,” Eric replied. Beth added that there were “a lot of young couples, but there really aren’t a lot of kids” in their Glencliff neighborhood, which they saw as separate from “the apartments, especially on the other side of Nolensville [Road],” that fed local schools (Campbell et al. 2009). This observation led to a discussion of whether Eric and Beth would renovate their home. Wanting to see how the neighborhood developed in the next few years, they were concerned not only about the quality of local schools but also about the “disproportionate number of apartments” adjacent to their neighborhood. “Renters,” Eric explained, “aren’t invested in the neighborhood, and that’s a huge deterrent” (for a similar sentiment in community policing, see Herbert 2005). When I asked about places where they were not comfortable in Nashville, Eric mentioned Paragon Mills because it was “too close to that huge apartment complex.” These links between homeownership, neighborhood boundaries, belonging, and immigrant settlement are perhaps clearest in an exchange between Eric and Beth about immigrant settlement’s effects on their neighborhood. Their immediate area had few Latino residents. Nonetheless, they lived close to Glencliff High School, where nearly one-third of the students were foreign-born in 2003, and, as a result, were aware of Glencliff’s growing immigrant presence.7 As they discussed the effects of this proximity, Eric and Beth debated what I was asking when I asked about Latino migration to southeast Nashville. Eric: I think that allowing single-family homes to become rentals is a huge detriment to our neighborhood. It’s a huge detriment to our neighborhood. It’s a huge detriment. Better to sell the house.

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212      Nashville in the New Millennium Beth: She asked about the Latino community moving into the neighborhood. Eric: That’s what I’m saying. It’s better to sell the house to a Latino family or a Kurdish family than to rent it to fifteen single guys working and living in one spot. Beth: I think it’s really changed the landscape of Nolensville Road in that most of the businesses seem to cater—I mean, not most—I would say a good percent seem to cater just to Spanish-speaking people so that they would not feel like—maybe they don’t speak English. . . . We have actually had that happen. We’ve gone in, and they don’t speak English. Actually, that was fine because it was great food.

Jumping from problematic Latino renters to acceptable Latino homeowners, from mobile Latino workers to stable Latino families, and from residential Glencliff to commercial Woodbine, Beth and Eric tried to come to grips with the effects of immigrant settlement as a demographic shift wrapped up in, but not solely responsible for, neighborhood change. Wanting to stress that they noticed change in Glencliff but that this change was not necessarily problematic, Eric and Beth sought ways to describe neighborhood change and its partial link to immigrant settlement. Later, when the interview turned to whether they had observed tensions around immigration, Eric again tried to explain his position, this time flipping the connection he had previously drawn between homeownership and Latino families: “I was saying . . . we are not living next to an immigrant family. We’re not living next to a rental. We haven’t felt that influx of immigration where we have conflict with the new people because our immediate area is different from the transitional area.” As these efforts by long-term residents to mark neighborhood change associated with immigrant settlement and to place it as a local phenomenon show, most of them could not isolate the impacts of immigration on the ground. Even as wider public discourse around immigration grew increasingly shrill in the late 2000s, from the perspective of the neighborhoods, immigration’s effects remained hard to tease out from the wider set of changes happening concurrently with immigrant settlement but not always linked to it. In southeast Nashville, as in other places, immigration was only one of many factors in overall social change and rarely an isolated causal factor. Even in a study of the effects of immigrant settlement in a new destination, it was hard to overlook the fact that the people ostensibly experiencing the greatest impacts of this phenomenon were themselves unsure what it meant for their neighborhood or its future.

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      213 

Narrating Neighborhood Transitions In the midst of uncertainties about how to narrate neighborhood change vis-à-vis immigrant settlement, transitions in particular kinds of spaces often become central to explaining an immigrant presence and immigrant reception: especially sites of consumption, such as Wal-Mart, malls, and grocery stores, and sites of health care, such as clinics and emergency rooms.8 As long-term residents and Latino immigrants increasingly overlap in these spaces in new destinations, some long-term residents become uncomfortable about the symbolic loss of community institutions. In southeast Nashville, for instance, some long-term residents responded to the “intrusive” merging of immigrant and long-term residents’ social worlds by altering their daily geographies to avoid “Hispanic” spaces. Fiona, who lived in Glencliff in the 1980s and now lived in one of southeast Nashville’s newest neighborhoods, steered clear of Nolensville and Murfreesboro Roads. When asked about Glencliff, she explained that “the Hispanics moved in, and the place went to hell in a handbasket.” As a result, she avoided the area completely. Don, who had lived in Glencliff since 1947, likewise did most of his shopping at a Wal-Mart farther south on Murfreesboro Road, avoiding two Wal-Marts that were closer to his house but that, in his mind, catered to a Hispanic clientele. He also refused to go “anywhere on Murfreesboro Road,” which he had ceded to Latino residents as well. Ending his comments with the claim that the rest of Nashville thought his neighborhood and Woodbine had “gone downhill because the Hispanics are here,” Don finished by placing southeast Nashville squarely within Nashville’s racialized and classed landscape: “You don’t see Hispanics on West End.” To say that Don and his sister were unhappy with how their childhood neighborhood along Murfreesboro Road had changed was an understatement. Although Don’s sister had warned me before our interview that her brother had strong views on his immigrant neighbors, by the end it was clear that she held even stronger, and more clearly articulated, views than he did. Prompting Don to tell certain stories, she guided her brother through the saga of watching his neighborhood change and not understanding why. No longer comfortable outside after dark, Don stayed in his house and had little contact with his neighbors. Admittedly, his neighborhood had begun to change in the early 1990s, before the arrival of ­Latino residents, but Don nevertheless understood and explained neighborhood change in terms of immigrant settlement. Although, as a young man, Don had few interactions with people in the neighborhood, the fact that he could have interacted with his neighbors defined not only his

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214      Nashville in the New Millennium sense of belonging in his neighborhood but also the act of being a neighbor. Now, the lack of interaction among neighbors generated tensions and conflicts as minor disagreements became major conflicts grounded in the politics of racial and ethnic change. When a Mexican family moved in next door to Don and built a privacy fence, a debate over the property line ensued. During the conflict, which never took place through face-to-face interactions, Don’s car was vandalized and the Mexican family moved. For Don, their leaving was evidence that they were “illegal” and that they had vandalized his car. He and his sister were “afraid to say anything,” however, because his neighbors “might burn down the house.” “We don’t know what they’ll do next,” she explained. Unable to get the Metro Codes Department involved in the dispute, Don and his sister simply did nothing. These kinds of neighborhood conflicts, as well as the cultural politics of neighborhood change associated with immigrant settlement, have been well documented in both academic studies and journalistic representations of new destinations (see, for example, Brettell and Nibbs 2011; Odem 2004, 2009). By framing Latino settlement within a longer historical trajectory and as part of wider neighborhood transitions, however, this study revealed the ways in which the cultural politics of immigrant integration and neighborhood change were also simultaneously the cultural politics of memory and the past. In other words, the spatial overlap between Latino immigrants and long-term residents—a sense of shared social spaces felt by both groups—was also a temporal overlap between an immigrant present and a remembered past for long-term residents. This temporal overlap was invisible to Latino immigrants, however, and as a result they sometimes inadvertently wandered into and transformed key sites of shared memories for long-term residents in southeast Nashville, with strong effects on immigrant reception across the area. In southeast Nashville, a handful of historical events and sites helped long-term residents frame and respond to neighborhood changes associated with immigrant settlement. Although many works in migration and Latino studies point to the “appropriation of social space” as “a critical means of empowerment for Latino immigrants” (Odem 2004, 123), this appropriation becomes particularly salient when it takes place within sites that are historically meaningful to long-term residents. When immigrant settlement’s spatial manifestations take shape on the grounds of key historical events and memories for long-term residents, the politics of immigrant adjustment gets caught up in the politics of collective memory, and immigrant reception becomes inseparable from local recollections of times past. This is especially true in new destinations, which lack a clear way to place immigration in a local historical context.

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      215  This interaction between immigrant claims to space and long-term residents’ recollections of place can be seen in debates over a day labor gathering site along Murfreesboro Road. This site near the Mapco gas station that Diane avoided in her daily commute anchored narrations of neighborhood change in southeast Nashville for many long-term residents. Across interviews, its transformation into a “little Mexican town,” in the words of an African American teacher in southeast Nashville, was described as a flashpoint in Nashville’s politics of immigration and, as early as 2001, “ground zero” for change in the area.9 In 2004 representatives for local neighborhood and business groups along Murfreesboro Road raised concerns over the impact of the presence of day laborers on business growth near the gas station, and in 2005 local ordinances to stop streetside solicitation of work were suggested.10 In 2006 Metro police identified the area as the heaviest concentration of Latino residents in the city, and by 2007 it was the subject of much concern for police and local residents.11 For many long-term residents, the Mapco station stood out not only because of the visibility of Latino men soliciting day labor there but also because of what the site had been in the 1960s and 1970s. Through the early 1970s, the intersection had been a bus stop and home to the Crescent Drive-In Theater, a popular gathering place for area teenagers and the heart of the Murfreesboro Road and Glencliff community.12 In interviews, the bus stop at this intersection was often the starting point for narrations of what the local community had been: long-term residents recalled their memories of the area by describing mile-long transects that ran into adjacent neighborhoods and along which they could identify every house and family. Now, the path that white residents once took from the bus stop to their homes in surrounding neighborhoods charted neighborhood change as they saw houses they no longer recognized and families they no longer knew at the same time that they saw Latino men gathering around the gas station. In the 2000s, the meanings and use of the Mapco station were contested indirectly, since most long-term residents had all but abandoned the businesses around the gas station and avoided contact with day laborers. Instead, conflicting claims to the site were mediated through what the Mapco station once meant to long-term residents and their memories of and historic claims to the neighborhood. Thus, the Mapco station became the site representing the greatest, and most contested, change in southeast Nashville not only through the arrival of Latino day laborers but also through the loss of a neighborhood landmark. Encapsulating wider neighborhood, urban, and societal change in concentrated form, a gas station where Mexican men waited for work came to embody neighborhood turnover as residents aged out, as business moved to the growing suburbs, and as long-term residents

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216      Nashville in the New Millennium lost all remains of childhood innocence. The Mexican men at the center of this loss of place were unaware of what the space they now occupied meant to the long-term residents who avoided it, as they were of how their contemporary presence articulated with a past experienced as loss for many long-term residents. Perhaps the strongest event through which long-term residents narrated neighborhood change associated with immigrant settlement was the busing of schoolchildren across Nashville from the 1970s to the late 1990s. As many long-term residents explained, busing “fragmented” southeast Nashville neighborhoods in ways that ultimately made them die out, in the words of one long-term resident who lived through the “trauma” of Central High School’s closing in 1971.13 For Arnold, who grew up in Flat­rock in the late 1930s and moved to Glencliff in 1959, the re­zoning of white children in the area to a school in a historically black neighborhood in the early 1970s began “the change” in Glencliff and the dispersal of his friends to Davidson County’s rural fringes. As a Flat­rock neighborhood association president put it, “As soon as busing came along, everybody got ripped up. . . . It left in its wake no sense of responsibility for what was happening in school.” Busing, however, did more than explain neighborhood change in southeast Nashville. Several longterm residents also used their experiences with busing in the 1970s to frame their responses to Latino immigrants in the 2000s. Carl, for example, explained that to understand how immigrant settlement had changed southeast Nashville’s residential dynamics, “you’ve got to go back before that. In our city, it goes back to school busing. Whether you’re for it or against it . . . one of the most detrimental effects of that was that it destroyed our neighborhood’s relationship with our children.” Understanding immigration’s impacts on neighborhoods in the 2000s, for Carl and others, meant understanding busing’s effects on the link between neighborhoods and schools, between new and old residents, and among past, present, and future. Part of busing’s role in narrating and making sense of immigrant set­ tlement in southeast Nashville was bound up with its class politics. Courtordered desegregation of public institutions like schools, though designed to address racial inequalities between blacks and whites, sometimes aggravated class divisions among whites (Kruse 2005), as some scholars suggest immigration itself has done in new destinations (HernándezLeón and Zúñiga 2005). When busing began in Nashville in 1971, some white families left southeast Nashville, moving out of the city or the county altogether. Those who stayed frequently positioned busing as the defining moment for their neighborhood and the death knell for its sense of “community.” Flat­rock lost its high school and some elementary

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      217  schools to busing, a loss that white residents continued to mourn. Larry, a white man who grew up in Woodbine during the era of busing and was still living in Glencliff in 2007, for example, used busing to describe how and why Glencliff had changed in his time there. The Glencliff he remembered—and against which he evaluated its current condition—“was back in the day of neighborhood schools,” when “you went to school in the neighborhood you grew up in, and it was supported by the neighborhood.”14 Now, he explained, everything was different because busing had broken the link between neighborhood and school. The memory of busing, however, did more than provide a historical marker for narrating neighborhood change. It also offered a frame of reference for interpreting and responding to the area’s current condition, especially its immigrant population. Across interviews, long-term white residents used their experiences with and understandings of the racial transitions in schools brought about by busing to explain their encounters with and understandings of the ethnic changes in their neighborhoods brought about by immigrant settlement. In both cases, long-term white residents stressed, they had had no control over demographic change and were expected to adjust to the realities of increasing racial and ethnic diversity.15 Often lacking the socioeconomic mobility to move and possessing a strong cultural connection to where they lived, many long-term residents felt that they had little say in the fate of their neighborhood. As Carl explained at a neighborhood meeting where the topic of immigrant residents came up, in the 1960s and 1970s, when school integration began in Nashville, he had to learn to accept life with black residents, “and that was fine.” Now, in the 2000s, he was learning again, this time to accept immigrants in his neighborhood. Some long-term white residents in Flat­rock who felt that immigrant settlement had been forced upon them did not have a conciliatory response. Just as desegregation itself led some working-class whites to believe “that these urban spaces, which they considered their own, had been ‘stolen’ from them and given to another race” (Kruse 2005, 624), some long-term residents in Flat­rock felt that immigrant settlement constituted not only a loss of historically meaningful neighborhood spaces and institutions but also an unwanted social imposition. In the words of Brian, a white man who moved to Flat­rock in 1965 at age two and grew up in Woodbine, people in southeast Nashville were “tired of the Hispanic influence” not only, or even primarily, because it changed their neighborhoods but also because it seemed to be a change beyond their control and one that the rest of the city did not experience. Desegregation was brought about by the government, Brian explained, and although Hispanic population growth was not driven by the government, the failure to regulate it

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218      Nashville in the New Millennium led to the same result, in his opinion: neighborhood change with no recourse. “It’s tough on Nashville,” he concluded. For a graying white population in Flat­rock, the change associated with immigrant settlement was made more difficult by the lingering effects of busing—especially the severing of the link between school and neighborhood that many felt had been precipitated by busing. As a local councilman explained, “it’s tough for the older folks in my . . . area to want to get back involved with the schools because it’s not their schools.” With the tie between neighborhood and school weakened for white residents through busing in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and then all but eliminated when they became empty-nesters, the “return” of neighborhood schools in the late 1990s simply happened too late. By then, neighborhood schools were filled with children with whom white elderly residents had no direct connection and whose parents, many long-term residents felt, chose not to be neighborly. Busing, in their eyes, began the death of the neighborhood. Immigrant settlement made what was left of the neighborhood’s social fabric even less familiar. As a result, long-term residents sometimes sought ways to bring the old neighborhood back.

Bringing Back the Old Neighborhood A key way in which long-term residents tried to re-create a sense of lost neighborliness in southeast Nashville was through neighborhood asso­ ciations. As a Flat­rock neighborhood association president explained, one of her group’s goals was “to preserve the single-family, owner-occupied situation,” “a place with trees, you know, in a real neighborhood.” In this way, she combined several characteristics used to assess the place of immigrants in the neighborhood—homeownership, families, and a suburban ideal. That effort to preserve a “real neighborhood” took many institutional forms. Although no neighborhood association in southeast Nashville formed specifically in response to immigrant settlement, neighborhood transformations driven by immigrant settlement often focused neighborhood associations’ attention on neighborhood change and provided a catalyst for increased involvement in them. In the 2000s, southeast Nashville neighborhood associations used a number of strategies to address the area’s changing racial and ethnic composition and to create a sense of community—holding neighborhood cleanups and chili nights, translating pamphlets on codes violations into Spanish, and so on. Nonetheless, a coherent and homogenous neighborhood identity in southeast Nashville was rarely uncontested. As one urban planner noted, “Even within the leadership of a group, you’ve got four different views of what the boundaries are.” Forming a neighborhood

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      219  a­ ssociation, thus, meant also forming a shared sense and spatial configuration of community by defining who belonged in and was seen as contributing to the neighborhood. For organizations working across southeast Nashville, marking the spatial and social limits of neighborhood in the midst of the area’s racial and ethnic diversification created new challenges. As a nonprofit director put it, “Residents aren’t really focused on trying to make sure that everyone in the neighborhood is included,” since total inclusion required addressing the area’s racial transitions and creating a more flexible definition of neighborhood. “While the neighborhood residents really want everybody to be welcomed,” she explained, “the fact is that it’s really awkward when you are trying to mix a lot of different cultures.” That awkwardness is evident in the history of key neighborhood organizations in southeast Nashville. In the 1920s, Fannie Williams, an African American resident of Woodbine, brought several women together to form the Woodbine Sewing Club, a quilting group with the mission of community outreach and aid. A racially integrated group well before formal integration, the Sewing Club persisted through the 1930s and 1940s, and Williams became a community advocate who lobbied for clean water and other basic needs in the neighborhood and beyond. In 1955, as Woodbine entered the era of rapid growth and expansion described earlier, the Woodbine Sewing Club became the Woodbine Welfare Organization, a key community institution in Woodbine’s heyday. By the 1970s, Woodbine residents were aging and, by all accounts, the neighborhood was in decline. The Woodbine Welfare Organization had become inactive, despite residents’ concerns about crime and social welfare as the neighborhood composition shifted and Woodbine’s housing stock deteriorated. In the late 1970s, change came to Woodbine when a new councilman with a background in affordable housing campaigns was elected to represent it. As Woodbine’s representative, he applied for and received a large federal grant that designated Woodbine a Neighborhood Strategy Area (NSA) and funneled federal dollars into it for neighborhood revitalization (Rosenthal 1987).16 A precursor of sorts to the neighborhood empowerment movement discussed in chapter 6, the NSA program, following the lead of both the Nixon and Ford administrations, focused on “assigning increased weight to state and local governments” (Rosenthal 1987, 1), especially through intergovernmental interactions and block grants. To be competitive for such block grants, local governments had to identify “neighborhoods experiencing some disinvestment but still at a relatively early stage of decay” (13); Woodbine’s slow decline in the 1970s made it ideal for this funding. Since the program also focused on neighborhoods that had been skipped by urban renewal and the Model

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220      Nashville in the New Millennium Cities programs, both of which focused on historically black inner-city areas (Jackson 2008), Woodbine again was an obvious choice. The NSA program, which made Woodbine eligible for block grants for minor neighborhood improvements that could be accomplished in five years, required direct neighborhood involvement through a citizens’ advisory council.17 To form this council, Woodbine’s councilman tapped the dormant Woodbine Welfare Organization, reactivating the organization and its mission of community improvement. Initially, the newly re-formed Woodbine citizens’ advisory council focused on neighborhood cleanup, crime reduction, and zoning issues. With the influx of federal money for neighborhood revitalization, however, the group became more active and more ambitious. Although nationwide, the NSA program was not a success and typically did not result in local decision-making (Rosenthal 1987), in Woodbine it set the stage for the emergence of an active Woodbine Community Organization and sustained involvement from neighborhood residents. Around the same time that the Woodbine Welfare Organization was being reenergized, Woodbine School, the neighborhood elementary school, was closed as Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) began busing to create racial balance in its schools and consolidated smaller schools to streamline the system.18 According to the councilman, the Woodbine Welfare Organization, seeing an opportunity to gain a community space and recognizing the dangers of an abandoned school building in the middle of a declining neighborhood, lobbied for control of Woodbine School. After a lengthy campaign, MNPS declared the school building surplus property and, thus, available to the Woodbine Welfare Organization. First, however, the group had to find a government agency willing to locate at the school; it eventually convinced the Health Department to open an office in the building. In Woodbine, then, securing space for a community center meant securing a site for community services, a combination with important implications for neighborhood politics down the road. In 1985 the Woodbine Community Organization (WCO) opened in the old Woodbine School, with half the building devoted to a health clinic and a Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) store and half the building devoted to neighborhood activities. Raising money through spaghetti dinners and offering activities from summer camps to senior programming, the WCO created a new, and largely unprecedented, model in Nashville of a neighborhood center run by residents rather than the city.19 As the councilman later explained, because other community centers in Nashville were controlled by the city and because resident-led initiatives had not been particularly successful elsewhere, there was initial debate about whether the WCO would endure. It did survive, however, with se-

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      221  nior programs as the “main sparkplug of the neighborhood,” in the words of its director, and senior residents themselves as the heart of the neighborhood the WCO worked for and represented. By the late 1990s, a decade after the WCO had begun, Woodbine had changed as its white and (smaller) black population aged and its immigrant population grew. Located a few blocks from what was becoming Nashville’s “Little Mexico,” the WCO also began to change; it moved away from involvement with the geographic neighborhood that had historically defined its mission and toward service to a wider community across Nashville, providing services like homeownership counseling for non-Woodbine residents, especially single black mothers in north and east Nashville, and health outreach for Latino residents, particularly Latina mothers in the Woodbine area. By the mid-2000s, the WCO was offering the Homebuyers’ Club in Spanish and English to 1,500 people across Nashville, the Maternal Infant Health Outreach Program to international residents, English and Spanish classes, free legal clinics in English and Spanish, citizenship classes, after-school tutoring, seniors groups, GED classes, and a WIC store. Alongside these and other programs in job and asset development, the WCO continued nonprofit housing development throughout Davidson County, moving even further away from its roots as a geographically focused neighborhood center.20 The redefinition of the WCO’s mission and the expansion of its board to include members who lived outside Woodbine were only partially associated with the neighborhood’s growing immigrant population and ­reflected, among other things, the organization’s reconfiguration from “a much more neighborhood organization” to a “much bigger, non-profit social service agency,” in the words of a former councilman.21 For many long-term residents, however, Woodbine’s demographic shift from aging white to young Latino became the change that explained the WCO’s transformation. Especially for residents who had been involved with the WCO for some time, the organization that had once welcomed “all kinds” with an open-door policy for neighborhood events had become a social service agency that focused on only a portion of the neighborhood—Latino immigrants. As the WCO shifted from hosting potlucks that drew three hundred Woodbine residents to providing monthly services to five thousand people from across the city, neighborhood activities and immigrant services began to diverge and eventually occupied separate floors in the building. In the process, the Woodbine neighborhood and the Woodbine Community Organization grew apart institutionally and socially. As an area resident involved with the WCO explained, “Many neighbors were very unhappy with the way the center was running and . . . the direction it was taking. One of the reasons that the neighbors weren’t happy was

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222      Nashville in the New Millennium because it was becoming a center for immigrants and slowly shifting away from the original ideas of a community center.” As the WCO moved away from “the original ideas of a community center” focused on neighborhood issues, it became a “focal point” for a wider immigrant community stretched across southeast Nashville became known as a safe place for immigrants. In 2006, for example, it hosted the Mexican consulate, drawing Nashville’s wider Latino community to the center, while continuing to run homeowner workshops that drew single black mothers from north and east Nashville. With a growing focus on immigrants and others in need across the city, the WCO, it was said, “could be anywhere.” By the early 2000s, many long-term residents were arguing that it no longer served the neighborhood of Woodbine. The WCO’s transformation from serving a geographically defined neighborhood to serving a geographically dispersed group of needy clients took place at the same time that Metro government was reconfiguring its provision of social services and transitioning to a clearinghouse model for providing immigrant services. Thus, as the WCO changed its mission, it became an increasingly visible node in a shrinking network of service providers. This was particularly true in the context of immigrant services, and the WCO was increasingly seen as a central institution for a community that stretched across southeast Nashville and moved to a Latin beat. The reconfiguration of the WCO’s mission and geography did not go unnoticed by long-term Woodbine residents, who chafed against the growing distance between their neighborhood and the community served by the WCO. As a result, many of them felt that the WCO no longer spoke for the Woodbine neighborhood. As the WCO expanded its mission and geography of outreach, filling in gaps left by the restructuring of service provision across Nashville, discontent grew among long-term residents who felt abandoned by the WCO and who felt the pressures of having one of the city’s few sites of direct service provision for Latino immigrants in their neighborhood. As a neighborhood association president put it, the WCO had “ceased to be a neighborhood association.” Critical, like others, of the WCO practice of buying houses in Woodbine, replacing them with multifamily dwellings, and using the rent to fund other projects, she noted a “great resentment” against the WCO in part because “they even do stuff in other parts of the city.” Although the WCO played “an intricate part in working with families that nobody else will work with,” according to one director, it ceased to be “the voice of the community” that surrounded it, in the words of a longtime resident and service provider. Amid transformations in what, where, and for whom the WCO worked “the neighborhood pulled away” through the growing gap between “neighborhood” and “community” in the WCO’s focus. Sensing that “our

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      223  neighborhood wasn’t being addressed” by the WCO, as one long-term resident explained, a group of residents formed Woodbine Neighbors, a neighborhood association designed to regain control of and resources for the neighborhood.22 An institutional distinction thus emerged between Woodbine Neighbors as an association representing the neighborhood of Woodbine and the WCO as an organization serving a wider urban community of need in Woodbine. As a key actor involved in both organizations at different times explained, when people needed information about learning English, learning Spanish, or obtaining social services, they called the WCO. When people wanted to complain about codes violations, they called Woodbine Neighbors, dividing community and neighborhood issues between the two groups. In this way, “neighborhood” and “community”—two concepts on whose overlap the legitimacy of Nashville’s neighborhood empowerment rested—were institutionally cleaved in Woodbine, even as they remained intertwined in its residential spaces.23 Around the same time that Woodbine Neighbors formed, another neighborhood organization in the area came into being—the Flat­rock Heritage Foundation (FHF). In 2000, using not only a different name for the area (Flat­rock, not Woodbine) but also a different scale (the larger area of Flat­rock, not the smaller neighborhood of Woodbine), the FHF resurrected the name Flat­rock, which had ostensibly been replaced by Woodbine in the late 1930s, when residents voted in favor of this latter name. According to its founders, the FHF was partially a response to Mayor Purcell’s efforts to make neighborhoods more proactive and to make neighborhood-based governance more prominent. It was also, however, an effort to create a wider, more unified image for the neighborhoods that made up Flat­rock (Glencliff, Radnor, and Woodbine) and to intervene in the increasing conflation of Woodbine and “Little Mexico” in public discourse across the city. The desire for this unified Flat­rock image can be seen in the reflections of Brian, the white man who moved to Flat­rock in 1965 and grew up in Woodbine. When we spoke in 2007, Brian had been at his current house near the southern edge of Flat­rock since the early 1990s. In recent years, his neighborhood—which, for Brian, included both the smaller area where he lived and the larger territory of Flat­rock—had become “fragmented” as the number of community institutions he recognized dwindled and the homes of his childhood friends were sold to new families. The FHF, for Brian, was a way to address this fragmenting by recalling a geography, and a name, from what for many long-term (white) residents had been a more unified time that could write over the area’s current condition and transformations. Operating as an umbrella organization that could receive and distribute grant monies, the FHF merged smaller neighborhood associations that continued operating independently but now also worked together as

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224      Nashville in the New Millennium the FHF. Through the FHF, these smaller groups could take on politically “sensitive” projects, such as translating pamphlets on codes violations into Spanish or inviting Latino residents to neighborhood cleanup days, which were more problematic activities within individual neighborhood associations.24 When members of one neighborhood association threatened to shred flyers advertising a “Neighborhood Night Out Against Crime” in Spanish, for example, the FHF, which was “a step removed” from the immediate neighborhood, in the words of one of its organizers, could temper this reaction and present it as an area-wide decision. The FHF also managed neighborhood audits so as to allow the broader organization “to carry the burden” of people’s reactions to being reported for codes violations by their neighbors. In some ways, reviving Flat­rock as a contemporary space was not necessary, since memories of it remained central to many long-term residents’ understandings of place. As early as the 1980s, Flat­rock Festivals, or Flat­rock Reunions, were held in the area, and older long-term residents continued to describe their neighborhoods as Flat­ rock.25 Nonetheless, ­Flat­rock as a formal space remained off the institutional map of southeast Nashville and out of view for many residents, until FHF began activities like “Nights Out Against Crime” and neighborhood cleanups, designed to enhance both neighbor interaction and its visibility as an organization. In 2007 Flat­rock became visible in a new way when the FHF unveiled a public arts project. Through a colorful mural at the southern entrance to the “Flat­rock Community,” Flat­rock returned to contemporary maps with an official “gateway to our community” and clearly marked border. Painted onto an old railroad trestle near the Nashville Zoo, the mural made no reference to Flat­rock’s history, aside from the symbolism of being painted on railroad trestles for a community that grew around a rail yard in the 1920s. Instead, the mural that now marked Flat­rock’s southern border incorporated zoo images on the concrete columns supporting the elevated train tracks above Nolensville Road. Although long-term residents debated the gateway’s location outside Flat­rock’s traditional boundaries, its dedication drew local and state politicians, local prison inmates who provided “free” labor, business owners, and neighborhood leaders. At the reception following the mural’s dedication, neighborhood association presidents and other participants were recognized for their work on the project, which was helping “to change the face of Nolensville Road” and bring the community of Flat­rock back to life. In speeches after the dedication, attendees spoke of the mural’s power to contribute to “the community” of Flat­rock, whose presence it formally marked for all to see. Although neighborhood association presidents at the dedication still wanted a community space for Flat­rock to parallel the WCO’s headquarters, at

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      225  least its borders were back on the map and its name was back in circulation.

Recalling Place in Antioch As the “gateway” to Flat­rock opened, another historical resurrection was taking place farther south. In the midst of Antioch’s spectacular growth and demographic transformation into what some Nashvillians called “Hispanioch,” a border was forming and an old community was being reborn. As Antioch changed in the 2000s through immigrant settlement, commercial development, and overall expansion, a group of long-term residents living in some of the remaining rural parts of Antioch began a campaign to carve a new community out of an existing one—that is, to recreate an old community. This “new” community in Antioch was an old one that, like Flat­rock, was resurrected to address changes that had made the local past invisible to long-term residents. In December 2006, Cane Ridge, an old community in Antioch, emerged as a new space.26 A small rural community that developed in the midst of greater Antioch, Cane Ridge had roots in the early nineteenth century (Johnson 1973), when it began as a small, tight-knit settlement. From 1908 to 1951, Cane Ridge had its own school, which was still used as a community center in the late 2000s. Although Cane Ridge was engulfed by Antioch over time, it was not forgotten by long-term residents, who continued to talk about Cane Ridge and who celebrated the centennial of its school in 2008.27 In 2007 the reestablishment of Cane Ridge was formally recognized. Mail could now be sent to Cane Ridge, and properties within its boundaries could be listed as Cane Ridge, not Antioch.28 Although the small road signs that marked Cane Ridge’s boundaries paled in comparison to the bright mural that welcomed drivers to Flat­rock, the ability to list properties as being in Cane Ridge, not Antioch, was huge for both current residents and potential buyers. For the (re)creators of Cane Ridge, the designation provided a means, and a space, through which to intervene in the dominant image of Antioch as a site of crime, low value, and immigrant settlement. It did so by recalling an old neighborhood through a new physical boundary designed, in the words of an African American resident familiar with the campaign, to “run out the riffraff” in Cane Ridge by running its borders around them. In its new form, Cane Ridge, like the Flat­rock Heritage Foundation, was not primarily a response to immigrant settlement in Antioch. Cane Ridge was an important community symbol for many Antioch residents, especially older ones, who had lived and grown up there, and its meaning did not link to an immigrant presence. Instead, Cane Ridge’s collective

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226      Nashville in the New Millennium image was grounded in a shared history of schools, churches, and other community institutions and reproduced through a strong sense of local identity for its residents amid transformations elsewhere in Antioch. Cane Ridge’s community club was still active in the 2000s, sponsoring events at the state fair and other agricultural venues, and people still met at the old Cane Ridge School to eat once a month. Because Antioch had a “bad rap” across Nashville and because its borders were increasingly stretched to include areas, such as Woodbine, that long-term residents did not consider part of Antioch, Cane Ridge was resurrected, its creators explained, and its borders formally marked, to trace the line between homeowners and “everything else”—between the familiar and unfamiliar in this rural but suburbanizing community. Concerned that they were being “painted with a broad brush” that mixed renters and homeowners, community members and “riffraff”in Antioch, Cane Ridge’s designers created new boundaries for the old community to mark themselves and their homes as separate from Antioch at large. The border separating Cane Ridge and Antioch “came to us gradually,” in the words of one organizer. What emerged was a community map designed to include those residents for whom Cane Ridge was meaningful and to exclude those for whom it was presumed not to be. Tapping wider discourses of immigrants as having no “sense of ownership” in the neighborhood, as a southeast Nashville police officer put it in a 2006 interview, Cane Ridge’s designers drew its boundaries to exclude strip development and nearby apartment complexes, where “Cane Ridge doesn’t mean anything” to residents. As I interviewed newly minted Cane Ridge residents, however, it became clear that some of them were also unclear about what Cane Ridge meant and what (and whom) its boundaries included. When I asked Wanda, an African American woman living in Cane Ridge, what she included in her neighborhood, she simply remarked, “I wouldn’t know how to describe it.” Now that she lived within Cane Ridge’s boundaries, however, she and other residents were “learning” that Cane Ridge and its history meant something to them and that this new meaning was bound up with responding to demographic change and urban transformation across Antioch. Wanda and other Cane Ridge residents were not the only ones who were unclear on the relationship between demographic change and Cane Ridge’s borders. When Cane Ridge was created in 2007, the most recent figures available from the census showed that Cane Ridge was 69 percent white, 14 percent African American, and 9 percent Hispanic, making it slightly whiter than Antioch (62 percent white, 27 percent black, and 5 percent Hispanic). An early Tennessean article on Cane Ridge suggested that its emergence “highlight[ed] the power of perception and class divi-

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      227  sions” in neighborhoods and was driven by a desire to raise property values by identifying the area as something other than Antioch.29 Cane Ridge’s designers framed it, however, not only as an economic solution to declining property values in Antioch but also as a political space and “something to rally around” within the broader Nashville community. As with any boundary project, the process of creating a new Cane Ridge defined what Cane Ridge was not by tracing the line between being in this community and being somewhere else. This exclusionary definition is perhaps clearest in notes from my interview with two older women who had lived all their lives in Cane Ridge. Both women first noticed Latinos in the Antioch area around 2000, when they started seeing them at work—mowing lawns, working in construction, doing general labor. They think most Latinos live on Nolensville Road but are also interspersed in Antioch. They’re starting to see Latinos in the subdivisions, but not much. Hispanics don’t have much money to live here, they explained, until their families from Mexico come. There are no Latinos in Cane Ridge. There are more, though, in Antioch—“all over.” I asked what neighborhoods Latinos lived in, or what was the name of the area where Latinos lived. Latinos live in the apartments up and down Bell Road, they said. “What’s its name?” I asked again. One woman finally explained, “That area doesn’t have a name. It’s where the Mexicans live. They live by Home Depot. If you leave early in the morning, you can see the kids catching the bus for school.”

Here, the “other” that some Cane Ridge residents were concerned would “swallow” their neighborhood and that sat just outside its borders without a name becomes clear. With Cane Ridge as an official place, even amid the change that threatened to engulf it and its way of life, “we won’t disappear,” an organizer stressed. Blunter than other residents involved in resurrecting Cane Ridge, he defined the new Cane Ridge by property ownership. Cane Ridge “starts after the renters” and includes “owners paying taxes,” he explained. This new voting bloc would speak for Cane Ridge, not Antioch. When I asked where Hispanics lived, he, like many others, traced spaces beyond Cane Ridge—main corridors in Antioch, apartments by Hickory Hollow Mall, and Nolensville Road in Woodbine— drawing sites outside Antioch into its immigrant geography. When I asked what those areas were called, he replied, “Just Antioch.”30 Cane Ridge, thus, became a spatial means to intervene in and limit the sense of Antioch being everywhere that crime was present and of Latino immigrants being everywhere that constituted Antioch. In the words of one of its organizers, re-creating Cane Ridge was “a way to preserve our

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228      Nashville in the New Millennium identity” against an unnamed but obvious presence “all over” Antioch. Portions of that presence pushed elderly white residents to shop at more distant Wal-Marts in Flat­rock and made long-term residents avoid the Mapco station on Murfreesboro Road. In Antioch, the areas of high density where many Latino immigrants settled—“the outcasts of urban housing, denied even the name of ‘home’ fit and proper” (Walker 1995, 45– 46)—were the spatial other to Cane Ridge’s small farms and subdivisions, the residential structures that allowed Cane Ridge’s creators to see and subsequently mark the boundaries between Cane Ridge and “just Antioch.” Equally important, these areas seen to be beyond the borders of Cane Ridge were also the unfamiliar presence that resurrecting the old community of Cane Ridge was designed to overwrite. By living near Cane Ridge and calling into question its historic identity, Latino immigrants problematized what being from this area meant for long-term residents, leading them to mark a new border to stabilize an old place-based identity. Latino residents living close to Cane Ridge knew little about it and were often unaware of being excluded from its territory. Débora and Jaime, for example, moved to Nashville from El Salvador in 2003 and 2004, respectively. After living separately in various parts of southeast Nashville, they married and moved into an apartment complex along Bell Road, just outside the sign marking the entrance to Cane Ridge. When asked what their neighborhood was named, Débora replied, “I just know it is Bell Road,” making no mention of Cane Ridge, which was literally across the road from their apartment. Elena, who came to Nashville from El Salvador, and Flor, who came from Mexico, were roommates in the same complex and were equally unfamiliar with Cane Ridge. Like Débora and Jaime, they lived across anchor points in Nashville’s immigrant neighborhoods before coming to “La Bell Road.” For Flor, her neighborhood just outside Cane Ridge was simply “Antioch.”

Conclusion If we really want to know what borders mean to people, then we need to listen to their personal and group narratives. (Newman 2006, 154)

What are the implications of competing, and conflicting, past and present maps of neighborhood in southeast Nashville? What are the outcomes of the various border projects embedded in and produced through them (Ray et al. 1997; Ley 1995)? How do neighborhoods handle “spaces that in reality support multiple publics” (Amin 2002, 972; Rocco 1997)? In such neighborhoods, how and where do residents, new and old, create “com-

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      229  munity”? In Nashville, the answers to these questions involved borders, both temporal and spatial, as new and old residents marked their neighborhood and its boundaries to create a sense of place and community. Deeb-Sossa and Mendez Bickham (2008) argue that social boundaries in new destinations are constructed by key actors from the state to local social service providers to limit Latino residents’ ability to become part of local communities and experience social belonging. As this chapter has shown, such borders can also assume spatial form through the mobilization of local histories that remain invisible to new immigrants but powerfully shape their capacity to be part of dominant social definitions of neighborhood and community. Woodbine/Flat­rock and Antioch, sliced by multiple publics, were sites of sometimes conflicting geographies of neighborhood and belonging in the 2000s. As long-term residents and the institutions they created to represent neighborhoods marked and remarked neighborhood boundaries, they drew on historical geographies to rewrite the present. In the process, they sometimes excluded immigrants from definitions of neighborhood by drawing on a local history that immigrants could not recognize. Steve Hoelscher (2003, 660) suggests that “the interpretation of the past is a salient form of power; and its control carries heavy consequences.” As rapid demographic changes transformed southeast Nashville’s urban landscapes and social fabric in the 2000s, local groups called on historical geographies to rewrite and reinterpret the present. By resurrecting Flat­ rock to compensate for a Woodbine Community Organization that no longer centered on the neighborhood, by creating a new gateway to recall a community’s golden era, and by displacing an immigrant presence beyond Cane Ridge’s borders, long-term residents came to grips with Nashville’s multicultural spaces by reproducing particular versions of its past through new maps of its present. While neither Flat­ rock’s nor Cane Ridge’s new borders were solely responses to immigrant settlement, both new (old) geographies spatially and discursively overwrote immigrant efforts to make place in southeast Nashville (Flores 2003). Latino immigrants also charted new cartographies of community in the 2000s. When asked about neighborhood relations in southeast Nashville, for example, an area pastor working with a Latino congregation explained that “the Hispanic community . . . would have community among their own family and their friends more than in neighborhood.” In this way, Latino residents linked the Woodbine Community Organization to their homes in Antioch and across middle Tennessee, made friends at work, and connected Nashville to Latin America through remittances, postcards, videos, and phone calls—as they do in other new and old immigrant destinations.31 These projects, like those in Cane Ridge and Flat­rock, cre-

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230      Nashville in the New Millennium ated new definitions and spatial patterns of community and place, even as they remained largely invisible to long-term residents. In southeast Nashville’s neighborhoods, Latino immigrants and long-term residents understood and performed neighborhood and community in ways that were often invisible to each other. Nevertheless, Latino residents for whom Nashville’s historical geographies of neighborhood were invisible and long-term residents for whom Nashville’s contemporary geographies of immigrant life were confusing now lived side by side in southeast Nashville. Within the social spaces they shared and the competing maps of neighborhood and community they mobilized, some new and old residents unknowingly mirrored each other in their feelings about life in southeast Nashville. Field notes from an interview with a Honduran man and with a white long-term resident illustrate this overlap quite poignantly. Bernardo doesn’t know much about his . . . neighborhood. He describes it as quiet place to raise a family. He said there is no communication among neighbors aside from “hi,” and he doesn’t know their names. Since he has moved to Nashville, however, his life has changed because he has something of his own, a house with a backyard. . . . Although he dreams of returning to Honduras, he now considers Nashville a home. (Arrived in Nashville in 2006.) Don doesn’t spend much time outside in his neighborhood anymore. There are only a few people he still knows in the neighborhood and mainly speaks to them when an ambulance shows up. “I really don’t know” when all this changed. They “just keep to themselves,” and so does he. . . . “At first we accepted them. Then, they came in droves.” Given all these feelings, I asked why he stayed. “I don’t know. This place is home to me. This place was willed to me. Here seems like forever.” (Born in Nashville in 1929.)

Immigrants who could not see the past that was the bedrock of longterm residents’ understanding of place and long-term residents who could not understand a present that was defined by Latino claims to place met in the intimate spaces of neighborhood, where they both claimed home even as they both felt out of place. Our understanding of these sites, and the politics and relations they produce, must account for these competing, yet overlapping, definitions of place, neighborhood, and home. It must also account for the different historical and spatial frameworks used to evaluate each construct. In the 2000s, Woodbine and Antioch were sites of multiple and conflicting geographies of belonging that operated on different temporal and spatial scales yet were equally bound up with the

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Ma(r)king the Neighborhood      231  politics and process of making southeast Nashville home for an increasingly diverse population (Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking 2010). Because immigration has only recently been a local phenomenon in most new destinations, long-term residents, as this chapter has shown, often struggle to narrate it in relation to the past. The kinds of interpretive frameworks available in places like Los Angeles and Chicago, with long and diverse histories of immigration, are simply not available in places like Nashville. With no recallable history of immigrant settlement, little sense of how their city or neighborhood became attractive to immigrants, and no obvious way to place immigrant settlement in local histories, longterm residents in new destinations, especially at the beginning, frame and make sense of immigrant settlement through a very local lens that draws on specific events and sites in their neighborhoods. When long-term residents mobilize local histories and memories that predate immigrant residents, immigrants, even if unintentionally, are left out of these local (re) definitions of place and the narratives used to define them. In the process, their position as outsiders is reinforced, and their efforts to claim place are inhibited. Brettell and Nibbs (2011, 10) suggest that in new destinations an “anxiety over American identity” sits at the center of anti-immigrant initiatives and negative reactions to an immigrant presence. As this chapter has argued, long-term residents’ anxieties over how their “community has been changing around them” (10–11) are as much about the ways that immigrant settlement forces them to reconsider how they remember their community as they are about material community change or a generalized American identity. In Woodbine and Antioch, long-term residents responded not so much to an erosion of a white middle-class suburban identity as to an erosion of a local (white) history that immigrants inadvertently trod upon and partially erased as they built their lives in southeast Nashville. As Latino settlement transformed southeast Nashville’s landscape and social fabric, long-term residents responded to a loss that did not even register as a presence for new immigrants. If teachers in southeast Nashville struggled to find ways to make Nashville’s history clear to immigrant students seeking their place in the city and its past, long-term residents struggled to find ways to reclaim that same past that immigrants overwrote in seeking their place in Nashville and its future. Although both groups were clearly invested in making or maintaining a place in southeast Nashville, their different understandings and identifications of the neighborhood and its boundaries made immigrant incorporation a challenging feat.

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Chapter 9  | At the Intersection of History and Diversity

Living with diversity is a matter of constant negotiation, trial and error, and sustained effort, with possibilities crucially shaped by the many strands that feed into the political culture of the public realm. (Amin 2002, 976)

Nashville entered the last decade of the twentieth century a black-andwhite city whose place on the map of country music was established but whose place on the map of international migration was questionable at best. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that image had changed. During the 2000s, Nashville’s immigrant communities grew through international migration from Latin America, secondary migration from other U.S. cities, and refugee resettlement from around the world. Immigrant Nashville became more diverse and more settled, reaching 10 percent of the city’s population by 2010 and transforming conversations about race, diversity, and social belonging in the city. At the same time, those conversations became more heated through the articulation of national, if not international, responses to 9/11 and local reactions to a growing immigrant presence. In this way, local, national, and international politics of immigration came together in Nashville schools and neighborhoods, where the social and cultural manifestations of new levels of racial and ethnic diversity combined with local histories to shape immigrant incorporation in the Music City in the new millennium. Because the impact of immigrant settlement was felt in some but not all Nashville neighborhoods, immigration politics took on a particular urban geography. In southeast Nashville, the overlapping social worlds of Latino immigrants and long-term residents changed local neighborhoods in ways that both groups struggled to understand in the 2000s, making them both more diverse and more segregated, both livelier and quieter. Southeast

232

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      233  Nashville schools also changed as a second generation of immigrants joined the first generation in the classroom and complicated the link between present and past, between race and place. As teachers struggled to find ways to situate immigrant students in locally available categories of race and ethnicity and to keep Nashville’s immigration politics out of their classrooms, immigrant students struggled to find their place in “American” cultural practices and identities, which were often seen and read through the actions of their teachers. Immigrant students also worked to find their place in the local and regional histories of racism and racial struggle that had created the very categories into which their teachers could not place them. As this book has suggested, Nashville, its residents, and its institutions negotiated the path from a politics of speed to a politics of settlement as the organizing grammar of immigration with few locally relevant examples of how they could or should proceed. Admittedly, there were ample instances of other cities, like Los Angeles and New York City, dealing with waves of immigrant settlement, but the linkages between these gateway cities and a city like Nashville were not clear in the 2000s. Instead, the comparative frames of reference deployed to understand Nashville were more modest. There was, for instance, a strong desire not to be “another Atlanta,” as city officials repeatedly stressed in explaining their desire to avoid re-creating Atlanta’s sprawling urban and suburban expanse in the decisions they made about Nashville’s urban future. The actors charged with making decisions for Nashville also had some awareness of other Southern cities like Charlotte as possible benchmarks for those decisions. More than anything, however, at the scale of daily life in the school and neighborhood, few long-term residents, teachers, or immigrants looked beyond their immediate surroundings to search for ways to contextualize and explain their view and experience of immigrant settlement. In the 2000s, teachers taught whoever came through their classroom doors and used that threshold to keep politics out of teaching and to sort and organize students whose racial and ethnic identities spilled out of a black-white racial binary. In the neighborhood, long-term residents saw immigrant settlement as a local phenomenon that lacked a clear explanation and did not fit in their understandings of local histories. At the same time, new immigrants closely watched these same long-term residents to determine how to behave and live in Nashville neighborhoods and responded to rumors of dangerous parts of the city by not going there. In the late 2000s, there were readily available ways in Nashville to describe Latino immigrants—as legal or illegal, Hispanic, Mexican, or Spanish—and the wider politics of immigration, driven by talk radio and political pundits, was gaining steam across the city. Nonetheless, in 2007, especially from the perspectives of Nashville schools, neighborhoods, and even urban politics, there was no clear sense of where

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234      Nashville in the New Millennium the city, its institutions, or its residents could turn to see what might lie ahead in its transition toward a new form of multiculturalism and an established immigrant presence. Instead, how Nashville would find its place among other immigrant-receiving cities in the new millennium remained an open question. To answer that question, this book has argued, people in Nashville made do with what was locally at hand. Long-term residents and teachers turned to local histories to contextualize, compare, and sometimes exclude immigrants, even if unintentionally. Latino immigrants turned to the local habits of their neighbors to pinpoint how to be seen as good neighbors and part of the local cultural fabric. In efforts across the city to empower local residents, institutions struggled to include immigrants in their work because they could not find immigrants through the ways they saw and approached the city. In short, Nashville, with few templates to work from, took a bumpy path toward becoming an established immigrant destination in the 2000s as it incorporated immigrants in fits and starts into local institutions, social spaces, and collective memories in the city. The local circumstances of the city’s schools and neighborhoods, especially their histories, were, thus, deeply involved in immigrant incorporation in Nashville. If teachers in southeast Nashville tried not to see or talk about racial and ethnic differences among students in order to work through Nashville’s racial and ethnic diversification, long-term residents saw those very differences as at least a partial way to explain how their neighborhoods had changed and as key to understanding what needed to be addressed to reclaim their neighborhoods as they were. In both contexts, immigrants failed to see the local histories mobilized to understand and address their presence, since these histories were grounded in events, such as busing, that preceded their arrival by decades and in places, such as the gas station on Murfreesboro Road, whose transformations were well under way before they arrived. Instead, immigrants saw Nashville not as a series of neighborhoods with readily identifiable local histories but as a largely unfamiliar urban landscape where the workplace and the homes of other Latino residents created a sense of community that stretched across Nashville in ways that made the neighborhoods so central to long-term residents largely irrelevant to immigrants’ own sense of self and place. Immigrants’ inability to see the history that shaped long-term residents’ understandings of place had material consequences for immigrant incorporation in Nashville. If, as many scholars have argued, the past profoundly contours the present in Southern cities (Doyle 1990; Lassiter and Kruse 2009), the absence of immigrants in that past made it hard for them to find a place in the local present. In the school, the difficulty of immigrant children’s efforts to locate themselves in relation to local histories of racial

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      235  struggle subtly reinforced the sense that their histories and that of African American residents, like their neighborhoods, were separate in the past and, thus, not linked in the present. In the neighborhood, immigrants’ inability to recognize the local histories mobilized by long-term residents to address neighborhood change reinforced their place outside the historically deep definitions of neighborhood that continued to shape the social meaning of being a neighbor in southeast Nashville. In both cases, the fact that immigrants could not easily see the local histories that long-term residents knew so well meant that immigrants were ultimately seen as separate from the local cultural fabric, grounded as it was in particular understandings of the past and its relevance for understanding the present. Distanced from African Americans in the school through an unfamiliarity with black historical struggles and distanced from white residents in the neighborhood through an unfamiliarity with the local past mobilized to understand them, Latino immigrants faced a form of exclusion through history that they were not aware was taking place. Similarly, although the structure of Nashville’s local governance—neighborhood empowerment through neighborhood associations—was designed to make the city more responsive to the needs of its residents, this model inadvertently made immigrants as residents difficult to see. Hypervisible to many long-term residents in southeast Nashville yet institutionally invisible across much of Nashville’s government, immigrants fell between the cracks of Nashville’s approach to its residential spaces as socially and spatially discrete parcels in which neighborhood associations spoke for neighborhoods. Difficult to place in the local histories of the neighborhoods where they lived, struggling to see the local histories of race and racism that shaped their lives, and institutionally absent from Nashville’s way of governing residential spaces, immigrants had a hard time finding a clear place in the city’s contemporary residential landscape, past social fabric, and collective future. None of these exclusions were intentionally directed at immigrants, but all had the same effect of pushing immigrants beyond the boundaries of neighborhood and away from social membership as city residents. Despite these challenges, immigrants in Nashville, as in other new destinations, worked to make a place in the city, sometimes with equally contradictory results. In the neighborhood, Latino immigrants tried to be quiet in an effort to fit in with white neighbors and avoid being seen as “dirty Hispanics.” Less concerned with—or perhaps more secure about—how Nashville thought about them as workers, Latino men and women identified the neighborhood as the space in which the stakes seemed highest in their efforts to be accepted. Their push for acceptance in the neighborhood, however, came at the expense of black residents. Because African Americans

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236      Nashville in the New Millennium lived in other parts of the city and had only limited contact with Latino immigrants, they formed a social and spatial “other” against which Latino immigrants evaluated their neighborhood behaviors in their efforts to move their own social identity closer to that of the white residents among whom they mostly lived. In the classroom, immigrant students sought their place in Nashville’s past and present racial hierarchies in relation to their teachers, reading race and na­tionality off their teachers’ bodies as teachers themselves variously placed immigrant students within or beyond an “American” fold defined through citizenship, culture, and some mix of race and ethnicity. In both cases, immigrant efforts to move closer to a locally defined American identity subtly reinforced the distance and difference between African American and Latino residents in Nashville, past and present. At a wider scale, immigrant efforts to find their place in Nashville were equally confounding. With immigrant social networks stretched across southeast Nashville and with Nashville’s political climate making public displays of community and social life increasingly precarious for Latino immigrants in the late 2000s, immigrant community in the Music City took on a geography that was all but invisible to the governmental and nongovernmental organizations that worked with Nashville neighborhoods and saw the city as a mosaic of residential parcels. As Nashville’s network of organizations providing direct services to immigrants shrank throughout the 2000s, the service nodes that did remain, like the Woodbine Community Organization, began to draw immigrants from across the city, reinforcing the sense of an immigrant community that stretched across space, not an ethnic enclave centered in one neighborhood. For all these reasons, immigrants’ collective efforts to make a place in Nashville often went undetected by local institutions charged with managing Nashville neighborhoods and were, instead, seen in relief through long-term residents’ complaints about such efforts or obliquely through attempts to curtail an immigrant presence in the city through practices like the 287(g) program. Making community, but not in a geographically contained manner, immigrants were institutionally hard to find as residents of Nashville. In the new millennium, determining how to live with new manifestations of diversity in Nashville was, as Ash Amin (2002, 976) suggests, a matter of “constant negotiation, trial and error,” for Latino immigrants, long-term residents, and the city as a whole. Amid that trial and error, the one constant was recognition that the city had changed. Although there were competing opinions on why Nashville had become more ethnically and racially diverse and how the city should respond to this transformation, no one could deny that Nashville had changed in the 2000s. Because of Nashville’s geography of immigrant settlement, many city residents rarely saw or interacted with southeast

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      237  Nashville’s growing diversity. Reading the local newspaper, watching the local news, or listening to local political candidates, however, drove home the reality that immigrant settlement had changed Nashville. With growing numbers of immigrants living in southeast Nashville apartment ­complexes and suburban neighborhoods and with growing numbers of immigrant students in its schools, Nashville in the 2000s watched the meaning of multiculturalism change from a way to talk about race through a language of culture to a way to describe the demographic realities of the city. In transforming what Nashville looked and sounded like, at least in places, immigrant settlement had changed how parts of the city, especially schools and neighborhoods, worked. Living with this new kind of diversity in the Music City required learning how the “many strands that feed into the political culture of the public realm” (Amin 2002, 976) entangled in new ways, and through new spaces. The realities of adjusting to immigrant settlement may have been most concentrated in southeast Nashville, but the effects reverberated across Nashville through the strands that linked urban social spaces and constituted wider urban social formations and politics. This reverberation was perhaps most clearly felt in Cane Ridge, the new (old) community resurrected in the midst of Antioch to address the area’s public image as the “dumping ground” for unwanted aspects of city life and to halt Antioch’s spatial creep as the container for anything negative in southeast Nashville. The citywide impacts of Cane Ridge’s rebirth in the late 2000s bring this book’s discussion of the effects of immigrant settlement on schools and neighborhoods full circle by joining the politics of immigrant incorporation and the politics of race, the era of busing and the era of immigration, into one thorny question about schools, neighborhoods, and racial equality. Immigrant settlement both transformed and reified racial politics in Nashville, even though the city’s history of race and racism far preceded an immigrant arrival.

“Multiculturalism Has Changed What We Do” Marsha Warden, the chairwoman of the Metropolitan Nashville Board of Education, wrote these words in an op-ed piece in The Tennessean in December 2006 in response to concerns over a proposed rezoning of Nashville public schools that had set off a fiery debate across the city. Much of that debate revolved around whether this rezoning decision was allowing school segregation to return.1 As the school board considered, and eventually put in place, a districtwide rezoning plan, accusations that it was resegregating schools reached a frenzied pitch in the late 2000s, when black leaders in particular argued for the retention of a race-conscious

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238      Nashville in the New Millennium zoning policy for at least parts of Nashville. Opposed to retaining any such policy, Warden stressed the change in the composition of Nashville public schools since the late 1990s, when the original busing order was lifted, and, thus, the need to adjust the city’s plan for educating students. In 1995, she noted, 71 of Nashville’s 119 schools were majority white, and white students constituted 55 percent of the district’s student population. A decade later, in 2006, 33 of the city’s 133 schools were majority white, and white enrollment had dropped to 35 percent. Thirteen percent of MNPS students in 2006 were Hispanic, and 83 countries and 78 languages were represented in the city’s student body. The 1998 plan that ended the busing era in Nashville was grounded in an urban geography of black and white and treated race, Warden noted, as “one of the minor factors” used to create new zone lines for Nashville schools. Since then, “what has changed are the demographics of students going to public schools.” Nashville, simply put, was a different and more diverse city. In 2006 it was home to a “multicultural school system” that, Warden felt, necessitated a different way of understanding the relationship between neighborhood and school. In Nashville public schools, she wrote, “multiculturalism has changed what we do” because it had changed what Nashville and its neighborhoods looked like. Warden’s statement about multiculturalism was both true and false, depending on how one saw Nashville as a city. Throughout the 2000s, Nashville schools and neighborhoods had become more ethnically and racially diverse, and even the geography of poverty in the city had changed, especially as reflected in the public schools. These economic and racial-ethnic transformations had precipitated changes in how Nashville schools worked, whom they taught, and how schools were and were not linked to their immediate neighborhoods. For all these reasons, there was little doubt that the increasing racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity among Nashville students had changed how Nashville schools worked. At the same time, however, Nashville’s growing racial and ethnic diversity, especially the diversity associated with immigrant settlement, had not undone the patterns of racial segregation and inequalities that had precipitated the original decision to bus Nashville students in 1971 and that continued to shape the city’s urban politics in the late 2000s. Because Nashville’s historic racial politics of separate-but-unequal black and white schools and neighborhoods and its contemporary cultural politics of ethnic diversity were linked to spaces and neighborhoods on opposite sides of the city map, however, it was only through efforts to see the city as a whole that the realities of how multiculturalism had and had not changed the ways Nashville schools worked, became clear. Change and stasis—charting new territory of ethnic and racial diversity

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      239  and rehashing old patterns of black and white inequalities—came to a head in Cane Ridge, whose resurrection in the heart of Antioch as a community with defined borders and a new map had consequences for residents on both sides of its boundary. The re-creation of Cane Ridge had an even more profound impact on Nashville schools. In late 2006, MNPS announced plans to open Cane Ridge High School to ease overcrowding at Antioch High School and address the phenomenal growth in southeast Nashville in recent years.2 The decision to open Cane Ridge High School, the city’s first new high school since 1997, began the contentious rezoning debate that led to Warden’s editorial, as the school board used the high school’s creation to propose new school zones throughout the county and attempt to return all Nashville students to neighborhood schools.3 The proposed rezoning had a particularly strong impact on a cluster of schools in north Nashville, where the last efforts to create racial balance in Nashville schools were still ongoing and where African American students were bused to majority-white schools in middle-class parts of the city. The new zoning plan would end this busing, closing the book on Nashville’s contentious history of transporting students across the city to create diverse schools in segregated neighborhoods. In this way, opening a new school in southeast Nashville would end busing in north Nashville. In 2007 a deeply divided school board voted in favor of rezoning. Almost immediately, the NAACP voiced concerns that the proposed zoning would resegregate schools, especially in north Nashville, and return the city to a system of separate-and-unequal education. In place of countywide rezoning, the NAACP called for more local shifts of students in southeast Nashville—in other words, de-linking Antioch’s population growth from the overall state of the county. This de-linking, they felt, was crucial for neighborhoods in north Nashville, where “the last remnants of busing” continued to work against the city’s historically deep patterns of racial and class segregation.4 Equally important, the NAACP called out MNPS for not consulting the plaintiffs from the initial 1955 lawsuit that forced the district to begin the racial integration of schools, again linking contemporary redistricting decisions bound up with southeast Nashville’s population growth and historic struggles to achieve racial equality bound up with Nashville’s longer history of racial segregation.5 What began as “a way to make space for Cane Ridge High School” in southeast Nashville became a question of making space at whose expense, when examined at a wider urban scale.6 North Nashville schools, on the opposite side of the city and quite removed from southeast Nashville’s growth and change, were now closely connected to the new school in southeast Nashville.7 In response to this growing controversy, the school board overturned

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240      Nashville in the New Millennium its decision to rezone the district in late 2007, deciding instead to rezone only some schools and creating a task force to address the issue of rezoning.8 In July 2008, this task force presented a new school assignment plan for the overall district, which the school board approved and set to go into effect in the fall of 2009. The NAACP immediately asked the board to rescind the plan, however, again citing its fear of a return to a doctrine of “separate but equal,” but was unsuccessful.9 A month later, in August 2008, Cane Ridge High School opened—ironically, outside Cane Ridge’s new borders.10 When the new zoning plan went into effect a year later in 2009, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against MNPS on behalf of parents whose children were affected by the rezoning, seeking to reverse the decision.11 As the lawsuit progressed, accusations of collusion and an interest on the part of the Chamber of Commerce in getting poor students out of affluent schools were made, and reports of blatant racism from constituents whom the board members represented were aired. Throughout the suit, the question of whether the new school rezoning plan was racially motivated remained central to the debate.12 By November 2009, testimony in the lawsuit highlighted claims that a state representative for a district in east Davidson County had spoken against busing at a 2008 meeting with critics of the new rezoning plan, framing it as a destructive force in the neighborhood. When contacted about this claim, the representative said that his comments were taken out of context and explained, echoing Warden’s claims, that a return to neighborhood schools in the late 2000s would create diverse schools in much of Nashville because Nashville neighborhoods were more diverse, at least in places.13 In the late 2000s, the creation of Cane Ridge High School raised familiar questions about Nashville’s commitment to racial balance in its schools and the relationship between the neighborhood and the school.14 As one Nashville teacher explained the zoning decision and ensuing debates to me, they “all started in Cane Ridge.” Through the linkages that constitute contemporary cities, however, a policy that began in Cane Ridge soon affected sites far beyond this pocket of southeast Nashville. In the 1980s, when Antioch’s racial diversification was driven by efforts to recruit black families so that its new high school could open, Antioch moved from the city’s edge to the center of its efforts to create racially balanced schools. Fast-forward to the late 2000s, and the outcomes of those initial efforts to bring more people to Antioch had combined with immigrant settlement and other factors to once again bring schools, neighborhoods, and race together in a debate about how best to educate all children in a city with segregated neighborhoods and uneven patterns of growth. These elements affecting the city as a whole came together in Antioch, whose past struggles with race and present interactions with immigration collided to

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      241  impact not only southeast Nashville but also north Nashville on the other side of town. Through this connection between neighborhoods and schools, past practices and current circumstances, Nashville’s historical practices of racial exclusion and contem­porary practices of ethnic diversification came together in several hard questions. How could Nashville balance the desire for neighborhood schools and equitable schools? How would the city address its new demographic situation—rapid population growth in southeast Nashville—while managing the long-standing inequalities that were still obvious in north Nashville? A history of racial inequalities and a present of ethnic diversity collided at Cane Ridge. As the Cane Ridge High School saga shows, multiculturalism clearly changed what was done in Nashville public schools in the late 2000s, as Warden suggested. It did not, however, undo the historical patterns of racial segregation that had driven the decision to bus students in Nashville in the 1970s and that continued to shape the city’s attempts to address new geographies of population growth, race, and ethnicity. Because multiculturalism in Nashville was produced through a concentrated geography of immigrant settlement, racial diversification, and population growth in southeast Nashville, other parts of the city continued to look much as they did in the mid-1990s. Since the city’s way of addressing multiculturalism in its schools worked at an urban scale, however, those concentrated patterns of ethnic and racial diversification in southeast Nashville became everyone’s issue in the late 2000s. Glenda Alexander (2001, 65), in a study of the desegregation process in Nashville public schools, wrote that schools face “a philosophical and legal question of when the desegregation process should be over.” In Nashville in the new millennium, to ask when desegregation should be over was also to ask where it should be evaluated and addressed. In the rezoning debate, Warden stressed that “it makes sense for us to look at the whole city—it would be foolish not to do so.”15 Looking at the whole city to evaluate the relationship between race, educational equality, and neighborhood could not be done, however, without acknowledging the ways that multiculturalism, and especially immigrant settlement, had both changed and not changed what schools did in Nashville. This dual answer came about as immigrant settlement in southeast Nashville became inseparable from questions of racial justice and equality across Nashville. Thus did black and Latino neighborhoods, even though they remained geographically separate, come into contact at the wider scale of the city, where adjustments to growth in one area required adjustments to loss in another. In the struggle to create equality for all groups in the midst of Nashville’s diversification, making space for a new school in southeast Nashville became a zero-sum game for north Nashville, which looked

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242      Nashville in the New Millennium very much as it did when busing began and where Nashville’s multicultural realities seemed far away. Ironically, in this debate over the city’s response to population growth and cultural diversity in southeast Nashville—both tightly linked to immigrant settlement—immigrants themselves were almost entirely absent. No public discussions of the debate specifically mentioned immigrant settlement, and immigrant students mainly figured in the statistics cited to describe Nashville’s new multicultural reality. Though multiculturalism had changed how Nashville schools worked, it had not created a framework that allowed the city to address concurrently its history of racial inequalities and its present of ethnic diversity. As Diane, an African American resident who had lived in Antioch since 1990, explained, “You can’t navigate new racial issues without dealing with old ones. It’s like someone with seven marriages. By that point, you’re carrying a lot of baggage.” That baggage became even heavier in Nashville when black neighborhoods in north Nashville and multicultural neighborhoods in southeast Nashville ended up at polar ends of a debate about the impact of multiculturalism in Nashville and competing visions of diversity in the Music City. Nancy Foner (2007, 1018), in a discussion of multiculturalism in New York City, calls for more research on “how constructions of race and ethnicity and intergroup relations develop in particular urban centres in the United States in the context of large-scale immigration.” While it remains to be seen whether immigration to new destinations like Nashville constitutes large-scale immigration of the kind seen in New York City, the need for such site-specific work on racial formations and intergroup dynamics is particularly pressing in new destinations. In them, immigrants settle in different neighborhoods, create different racial and ethnic mixes in schools, workplaces, and other institutions, and experience different degrees of welcome or exclusion as they encounter local, state, and national political and cultural practices. In new Southern destinations, these immigrant experiences take place in a context where questions of race infuse social, economic, political, and cultural processes and where the present is profoundly shaped by local histories of race and racism. In such places, the politics of immigrant settlement cannot be addressed without engaging broader racial politics and inequalities, since they are entangled in urban Southern landscapes in the past, present, and future. In new destinations, immigrant settlements’ articulation with local histories, especially of race and racism, plays a key role in how immigrant incorporation proceeds not only in the intimate spaces of the neighborhood or school but also at the wider scale of the city. In such places, the politics of race and the politics of immigration become entangled in the wider politics of diversity, but do not become interchange-

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      243  able. Understanding this entanglement while acknowledging the differences that drive both sets of dynamics is key not only to studies of new destinations but also, as Cane Ridge shows, to local understandings of how multiculturalism does and does not change how these cities work.

New Destinations in New Directions When I began studying new destinations, the term “new immigrant destinations” was barely in existence and the 2000 census figures, which would point to a new geography of immigrant settlement across the country, were still being released. At that early point, it was not clear what questions would shed the most light on immigrant experiences and reception in nontraditional destinations, and scholars faced a wide-open field. In Nashville, no one had a sense of where Latino immigrants were coming from or why they chose Nashville. No one, including service providers working with immigrants, seemed to know whether this migration was domestic, international, or both and whether it was permanent or fleeting. Everyone was clear that Nashville’s immigrant population was growing, and many service providers, advocates, and other actors across the city could see different slices of the overall picture of immigration to Nashville. No one, however, had any sense of what Nashville’s “new sonido” really meant (Davis 2000; Winders 2008b). A decade later, the features of immigrant settlement in a city like Nashville are clearer, both for individuals and institutions affected by it and for scholars studying it. Nonetheless, questions remain concerning how studies of the politics of immigrant settlement in new destinations should proceed. In some ways, studying immigration to a new destination is not that different from studying immigration to a gateway locale, since some aspects of immigrant settlement are the same across the different receiving contexts in the contemporary United States. In both new and traditional destinations, for instance, there are shared experiences of being an immigrant, such as linguistic differences, unfamiliar cultural practices, and adjusting to new neighbors. Moreover, the motivating factors for immigration to new destinations like Nashville have been primarily economic and, thus, are similar to those documented in gateway locales, although it is worth noting the number of studies that point to social factors, especially tranquil lifestyles, driving immigrant settlement in new destinations (Cuadros 2006; Marrow 2011). These basic features aside, there are not only differences in the politics of immigrant settlement in new destinations, some of which this book has outlined, but also key insights into the dynamics of immigration and immigrant reception that become evident when we pay atten-

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244      Nashville in the New Millennium tion to new destinations. Here, I lay out three interventions into the study of immigration—especially the study of immigrant experiences, incorporation, and reception—that a close examination of new destinations can make clear. While the literature on new destinations is too new to evaluate how these differences play out across new destinations or between new and traditional destinations, I highlight them here in an effort to push the study of new destinations into mainstream conversations about American cities and immigration and to call for future comparative work that begins from the perspective of new immigrant destinations. First, this book has shown the value of a methodological approach that centers on the experiences of both immigrants and long-term residents in the same social spaces and then moves across scales, especially between individual and institutional understandings of and responses to immigrant settlement. A dual focus on immigrants and long-term residents can be found, of course, in many studies of immigration, especially those interested in the politics of cultural contact.16 In the context of new destinations, however, this dual approach to immigrant experiences and reception is especially important, since neither group in these locales has a clear sense of what life with the other group might entail and, thus, comes to understand the other through the local circumstances of their shared lives. Simply put, intergroup dynamics in schools and neighborhoods powerfully shape wider racial categories, social relations, and cultural dynamics in new destinations like Nashville, where long-term residents adjust to immigrant neighbors for the first time and where immigrants, especially those who come directly from Latin America, often lack previous experience in U.S. cities or neighborhoods. In this context, local observations and experiences become central to the formation of wider intergroup dynamics and, subsequently, to examinations of those dynamics. What is more, in new destinations, each aspect of the development of an immigrant community—immigrant arrival, immigrant settlement, the growth of a second generation, and so on—constitutes a first not only for long-term residents but also for many immigrants. Each time the immigrant population changes in places like Nashville, it creates a new and unprecedented context of reception for both groups. Thus, examining how both long-term residents and immigrants understand and respond to life together in such cities can give us a clearer sense of how these transformations proceed, how they shape and influence wider public images of immigrants, and how they affect daily life in the institutions under study. Although at some point the window of newness will close in new destinations, for the foreseeable future it offers unusually clear access to the changing dynamics of intergroup contact. Equally important, studying the experiences of immigrant and long-

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      245  term residents together can shed light on the textured practices and mechanisms that drive immigrant incorporation, immigrant exclusions, and different senses of belonging. This insight was perhaps clearest in the examination of Nashville neighborhoods, where the perspectives of both immigrants and long-term residents on neighborhood life revealed contradictory understandings of how to be a neighbor. These conflicting understandings that led immigrants not to speak and long-term residents to expect communication point to how immigrant incorporation proceeds and is evaluated through very local practices—in this case, immigrants watching long-term residents and long-term residents expecting certain kinds of interactions based on what their neighborhood was like in the past. They also point, however, to the value of a dual approach for identifying sticking points in the process of immigrant incorporation. By revealing the two different interpretations of silent streets, this study highlighted a barrier to immigrant inclusion that was only visible because both groups were examined in the same study and in the same places. Designing research that examines immigrant experiences and reception in the same neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and so on is, thus, critical to understanding the evolving social dynamics of immigrant incorporation in new destinations. This book argues for another kind of methodological duality: that of moving between how individual residents saw, understood, and responded to immigrant settlement and how various institutions across Nashville did the same. In addition to working with long-term residents and immigrants, this study examined both institutions that worked with immigrants and those whose work was affected by immigrant settlement. As this analysis of institutions across Nashville made clear, the different ways in which government and nongovernment organizations and institutions see and interact with immigrants can inadvertently create immigrant exclusions. Campbell and her co-authors (2009, 465) suggest that “an awareness of residents’ subjective understanding of their neighborhood—its boundaries, problems, and use by residents—may be a critical component to effective resident empowerment and engagement in locally based citizen action.” In Nashville, that argument undergirded the city’s efforts to empower local residents and make the neighborhood the scale and space through which to address the city’s problems. In southeast Nashville, however, how could such an approach proceed when immigrants did not “see” the neighborhood in which they lived, let alone its history, and when the city itself could not institutionally see immigrants as residents? These gaps between how immigrants understood neighborhood, how long-term residents mobilized ideas of neighborhood, and how the city struggled to see immigrants in its neighborhoods only became evident when we examined immigrant settlement at

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246      Nashville in the New Millennium multiple scales—from the perspective of institutions working across Nashville, from the perspective of particular institutions such as schools and community centers, and from the perspectives of individuals living and working in southeast Nashville. Examining both individual and institutional responses to immigrant settlement, both the view from the street and the view from city hall, also raised broader questions about the mechanisms of power that privileged one claim to place and silenced others (Scott 1992). This dual focus took us from Woodbine and Antioch, where immigrant settlement was front and center, into government offices, where the neighborhood was the unit of planning and neighborhood associations were empowered to speak for presumably united neighbors. From this latter perspective, immigrants as residents were hard to find, and Woodbine and Antioch, although publicly recognized for their immigrant populations, became neighborhoods represented through their primary white neighborhood associations. The members of these associations were aware that there were missing immigrant voices and perspectives on the neighborhood but also recognized the imperative to represent the neighborhood to stay relevant to Nashville’s local government. The dual focus also took us into urban revitalization centers that placed Woodbine and Antioch outside the plans for Nashville’s future and into the offices of corporate and political leaders who felt that this study was premature since immigrants had an impact on parts of Nashville, but not the whole. From these perspectives, southeast Nashville neighborhoods did not count in how the city was seen or evaluated. In struggling to make their neighborhoods visible at this scale, long-term residents worked through neighborhood associations that overwrote immigrant claims to social belonging across neighborhoods, even as those same long-term residents were aware of and responded to that immigrant presence in their daily lives. The tensions between these different ways of seeing Nashville neighborhoods, and the place of immigrant settlement in them, became clear only when scale was taken seriously in the design of this study and when the analysis itself moved across scales. Second, this book has shown the value of a contextual approach to immigrant settlement—one that situates the topic within wider urban transformations and within a wider historical context. Framing immigrant settlement as one factor among many that had an impact on Nashville schools and neighborhoods in the 2000s, the study demonstrated the ways in which immigrant settlement articulated with, was shaped by, and itself transformed larger urban processes, from school zoning decisions to the workings of neighborhood associations, from policing practices to social service provision. To do so, it moved across not only scales but also across

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      247  methods, combining archival work, document and policy review, interviews, participant observation, and other approaches to immigrant settlement and community change. In its ethnographic aspect, it focused less on asking teachers and long-term residents directly what they thought about immigrants and more on asking them how they made sense of and explained immigrant settlement in the context of their work and lives. This approach made the book less a study of immigration’s direct impact on schools and neighborhoods and more an analysis of how individuals in these two social spaces saw and came to grips with immigrant settlement in their social and work worlds. Asking open-ended questions about how life in Nashville neighborhoods or work in Nashville classrooms had changed over time admittedly generated conversations in which the dynamics of immigration sometimes played a small part. Nonetheless, this approach gave a more realistic sense of how immigrant settlement, as one part of the changing content of people’s daily lives, shaped schools and neighborhoods, their relationship to the wider city, and their social dynamics. This different way of contextualizing immigration and its impacts was especially important for the insight it provided into how long-term residents and teachers mobilized particular aspects of the past to understand the present, especially an immigrant presence. Although immigrant settlement in Nashville began in the mid-1990s and although most work on immigrant settlement in new destinations begins at the point of immigrant arrival, my questions about neighborhood and school change charted earlier starting points in conversations with long-term residents. Since I was interested in how long-term residents made sense of immigrant settlement, not just in the context of change since the late 1990s but also in the context of their overall life and work experiences, my questions went back to the beginning of their own history in southeast Nashville. For immigrants, this contextualization was spatial. I asked them to compare life in Nashville with life in other places they had lived in the United States and abroad. With both immigrants and long-term residents, this way of contextualizing immigrant experiences and reception, of placing the politics of immigrant settlement in a wider spatial and temporal framework, captured how they all assessed its impacts in the context of their own lives and pointed to a practice—long-term residents’ mobilization of local histories to interpret immigrant settlement—that would have been occluded in studies focused on only the era of immigration. This different contextual approach to studying immigrant settlement highlighted a key difference in how the politics of immigrant incorporation is shaped in a new destination. Although immigrant settlement in new destinations may be a recent phenomenon that is spatially concentrated in some neigh-

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248      Nashville in the New Millennium borhoods, schools, and workplaces, the frameworks that long-term residents and immigrants use to understand this process and their role in it are not confined to the immediate neighborhood or the immediate present and instead stretch through the life experiences they bring to their current situation. The frameworks used to study immigration must expand in similar ways. In new destinations like Nashville, where it is not clear how long-term residents or immigrants will narrate and explain changes in their lives associated with immigrant settlement and where there is no readily available frame of reference to interpret immigrant settlement, this wider contextualization becomes all the more important in understanding the social and political dynamics associated with immigrant settlement. As this different way of contextualizing immigrant experiences and reception showed, in Nashville, long-term residents framed the impacts of immigrant settlement through specific elements of local history. Pointing to the advent of busing and the “loss” of neighborhood schools in the 1970s as key reference points for both understanding and addressing immigrant settlement, long-term residents and some teachers made sense of Nashville’s contemporary politics of immigrant settlement through its historical politics of racial desegregation. How specific this paralleling of the eras of immigration and busing is to Nashville is unclear in the absence of other studies that similarly contextualize immigration within wider urban transformations and longer historical frameworks. What is clear, however, is that in new destinations that lack recallable histories of immigrant settlement, long-term residents may turn to what is close at hand—which, in Southern cities, is a tortured history of racial segregation and efforts to work against it. Given the wider questions raised by white, working-class residents’ paralleling of immigrant settlement and desegregation for efforts to overcome racial and ethnic divisions, this way of historicizing immigrant incorporation in a new destination merits more attention from migration scholars. The need for contextualizing immigrant settlement in the wider histories of new destinations is evident in more than the interviews conducted for this study, however. Just as teachers in southeast Nashville were sometimes stumped on how to make Southern histories of racial struggle intelligible to immigrant students living in its multicultural present, efforts to address contemporary immigrant exclusions in Southern cities sometimes bump up against how to link their work to past struggles for equality.17 In Nashville in 2006, for example, amid spreading anti-immigrant sentiment, a “Welcoming Tennessee” campaign began, posting billboards that stressed the benefits of diversity and of being a “welcoming” community across the city. Some billboards quoted biblical verses that spoke of the value of welcoming strangers, a politically savvy strategy in a city in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      249  Another prominent billboard asked Nashville residents to “welcome the immigrants you once were” and included a montage of images of immigrants from the past and present. This slogan tapped widely circulating understandings of America as a nation of immigrants and American identity as rooted in a melting pot of immigrant history. These national myths, however, as chapter 1 discussed, are ill fitted to Southern locales. Where, for example, did Nashville’s African American residents—with a history of arrival via the Middle Passage, not Ellis Island—fit in this embrace of an immigrant past? In this way, contextualizing contemporary immigrant settlement within a longer historical trajectory in places like Nashville makes clear not only the ways in which long-term residents mobilize this history to understand an immigrant presence but also the ways in which awareness of this longer history can clarify what kinds of efforts to create immigrant inclusion will be effective and which ones may pile new divisions on top of preexisting ones. Finally, this book has made the case for a different way of analyzing immigrant and native-born interactions and for interrogating the ways identity is understood through the advent of immigrant settlement. This contribution, though admittedly difficult to articulate, is crucial for understanding intergroup dynamics in new destinations and the mechanisms that drive long-term residents’ and immigrants’ responses to one another. In places like Nashville, Latino immigrants encounter a city where race and place are so tightly fused that saying the names of schools, neighborhoods, and so on, describes them as white or black. This system in which place speaks race has deep roots in Nashville and often underlies the formation of neighborhoods themselves. For much of the city, for instance, “Woodbine” meant white and working class. The arrival of Latino immigrants in the 2000s, however, disrupted these links between race and place by not only transforming the racial composition of southeast Nashville but also problematizing the racial and ethnic categories used to describe its neighborhoods and, thus, the ability of place to speak race in a uniform or coherent manner. This disruption of the link between place and race through immigrant settlement, this upending of the relationship between being from Woodbine, Glencliff, or Flat­rock and being clearly identified with a particular racial and class identity, called into question many long-term residents’ understandings of self and of their place in Nashville’s social fabric. In southeast Nashville, a place-based framing of identity for long-term residents now had to account for neighborhoods that were also home to immigrants and that were increasingly identified in public discourse with this new group. For long-term residents, claiming their own identities through the neighborhood meant addressing its public image as an immigrant enclave.

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250      Nashville in the New Millennium Because immigrant settlement changed southeast Nashville neighborhoods but did not completely overwrite the previous identities of these locales, it brought a place-based framing of identity that long-term residents used to define themselves and a socially based framing of identity as racial, ethnic, or national that long-term residents and immigrants used to describe each other together in one space. Woodbine remained Woodbine for some long-term residents, even as it became Little Mexico for much of the city. In response, it became necessary, especially for long-term residents, to mobilize different discourses of race and place, and to decouple race and place, if they were to make sense of southeast Nashville’s transformations and claim a place-based identity separate from the public image of southeast Nashville as immigrant. As Woodbine became Little Mexico and parts of Antioch became Hispanioch, being seen as Latino increasingly meant being seen in specific parts of Nashville. Long-term residents in these areas resisted this identification of their neighborhoods with immigrant enclaves, seeking a range of individual and institutional responses to the solidifying public image of southeast Nashville as the city’s international district. As they did so, they faced the challenge of how to frame both their own and new immigrants’ identities in terms of place and race, since both groups were now associated with the same neighborhood spaces. One way in which long-term residents addressed this situation was by returning to old neighborhood names and boundaries—Flatrock and Cane Ridge—that overwrote, if in different ways, the public images of Woodbine and Antioch. Resurrecting these names that were not linked to the public image of contemporary southeast Nashville enabled race and place to return to their former relationship of isomorphism, where neither “new” label was associated with southeast Nashville’s current state because both predated it by decades. These new (old) names, then, gave long-term residents a way to address the conflation of their own and immigrants’ place in the city and to separate their own sense of self from that of new immigrants, even as they increasingly lived together. As immigrant settlement in southeast Nashville made place speak race-ethnicity in multiple languages, long-term residents turned to a local past to realign place and race in Nashville and rewrite its present. Latino immigrants in Nashville, at least in 2007, gave no indication that they were trying to claim a place-based identity in Nashville neighborhoods. In large part because Latino immigrants often failed to see the neighborhoods where they lived as identifiable spaces, they described their relationships to place in Nashville in vaguer terms—a generalized “Antioch,” “Bell Road,” “my apartment complex,” and so on. The category “Hispanic” had certainly come into circulation for many Latino resi-

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      251  dents as a way to describe how they were seen and how they saw themselves in the Music City. The connection of this social category of ethnicity with place, though, remained harder to see in Nashville. Being Latino or Hispanic in Nashville, for the immigrants with whom we spoke, had yet to be linked tightly to being from particular parts of the city, aside from a generalized southeast Nashville. Unaware of their neighborhoods’ histories, meanings, and even boundaries, Latino immigrants responded to the tensions between place-based and socially defined identities by not seeing the former. These multiple ways of understanding identity were also at work in schools, but in different ways. A place-based language of “neighborhood” and “apartment” kids, ELL and regular students gave teachers a more stable way to evaluate their changing classrooms, which otherwise confounded efforts to identify students through locally available categories of race and ethnicity. Although this place-based language became more problematic later in the 2000s, when ELL and regular classrooms began to resemble one another, it gave teachers a way to speak about a kind of diversity that called into question available categories of race and ethnicity. Since teachers themselves did not identify through the space of the school, this system for identifying students through place had no impact on their sense of self and place in the city. When they grappled with how immigrant students fit an American identity that they themselves claimed, however, things got more complicated; a place-based understanding of identity that sorted students into different parts of the school as ELL or regular rubbed up against a socially defined understanding of identity as American that now had to account for culture in a new way. In all these aspects of the politics of immigrant settlement in a place like Nashville, paying attention to how identity claims are made, contested, and transformed through categories of place or social categories of race and ethnicity can help tease out the dynamics and stakes in immigrant incorporation.

Areas for Future Work All research has its blind spots, and this study was no different. This book has suggested new directions for the study of new destinations, but it has also overlooked or downplayed other aspects of the dynamics of immigrant settlement in Nashville. Studying new immigrant destinations is, in many ways, an exercise in building from the ground up. While analyses of this topic are deepening, there remain few book-length studies. Although Leon Fink’s 2003 work on a wildcat strike among Guatemalan workers in a North Carolina chicken plant provided rich insight into the settlement

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252      Nashville in the New Millennium and work experiences of this group, it split its focus between Guatemalan workers in North Carolina, politics and civil war in Guatemala, and the challenges of labor organizing in the contemporary South. Karen Johnson-Webb’s 2003 book on immigrant labor recruitment shed light on how immigrants settled in North Carolina in the 1990s and the role of labor recruitment, but its lack of focus on immigrant workers left questions about immigrants’ understandings of and experiences with this transition. Helen Marrow’s (2011) recent book on the politics of immigrant incorporation in rural North Carolina is by far the most in-depth discussion of this subject and has provided key insight into the arguments made throughout this book. How urban and rural destinations in the South compare, though, remains an empirical question with few answers. The small number of extended discussions of the politics of immigrant settlement in new destinations indicates some of the challenges of de­ termining how to contextualize, address, and analyze immigrant experiences and reception in these locales, as well as the time it takes to complete a study that begins from an exceptionally small base. Across the social sciences, new urban destinations like Nashville are not only understudied by migration scholars but also, like other midsized cities, overlooked in the study of other social phenomena, such as gentrification, suburbanization, and overall urban transformations (Lassiter and Kruse 2009; Bell and Jayne 2009; Smith and Graves 2005). For all these reasons, there were several areas that merited more attention than I could give in the space of one book. Here, I discuss three such areas that point toward topics for future research. First, I downplayed the perspectives of students, both immigrant and native-born, in public schools, as well as the perspectives of parents. Although I conducted focus groups with students at Fellows Middle School and mapping exercises with students at Morgan and other elementary schools in southeast Nashville, incorporating this material into the arguments presented here would have been more than one book could handle. Equally important, there were methodological challenges in using this material. Focus groups with middle school students were organized by grade year and put together by teachers who volunteered to help with this project. As a result, the size and gender mix of the groups varied greatly, as did the amount of time each group had to discuss my questions. These meetings were squeezed into whatever spare time teachers and students could muster and, thus, did not always allow ample time for in-depth discussions of the issues facing Latino, African American, and other youth at school or in the neighborhood. Furthermore, most of the focus groups were one-time meetings with students. Although many of them had seen me in their school for months on end, my interactions with students and my ability to talk at length with them were limited. Accordingly, conversations about what it

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      253  was like to attend Fellows Middle School and how they interacted with other students were not always focused. Nonetheless, the transcripts from these focus groups indicate the same ambivalence shown by teachers over how race and ethnic relations played out among Fellows students and which ethnic and racial categories were even in play at the school. Black students, like their teachers, debated what it meant to be African American at Fellows Middle and whether they or other students fit that category, and Latino students were unsure what the category “Latino” meant and whether it was the same as Mexican. These quick observations indicate that the politics of ethnic and racial identification among youth in cities like Nashville is intense and merits more attention in future work on new destinations. The mental-mapping exercises conducted with elementary school students reinforced their teachers’ claims that Nashville, for them, was the neighborhood and that these students had constricted daily geographies. The details of their representations of their neighborhoods and the city, however, raise fascinating questions about what it means to grow up Latino, white, African American, or Kurdish in southeast Nashville (and whether those categories are meaningful to these children). Their drawings of Nashville also raise questions about how growing up in Nashville compares to the experiences of children elsewhere in the city or the country. Just as Yvonne, the school psychologist, wondered if immigrant children saw the city the way she did as a black child growing up in a segregated community, future work must interrogate the process of growing up as first- or second-generation immigrants in new destinations like Nashville and how these students’ views of Southern cities feed into new images of the region, new definitions of what being Southern means, and new understandings of social dynamics in these locales. Given the growing amount of restrictive state and local legislation directed at undocumented immigrants in new destinations, future work should also examine the impact of the political and legal climate on these students, their life chances, and their political outlooks over time. Second, the design of this study compelled me to downplay certain neighborhood dynamics and processes. Although few Latino immigrants described significant interactions with or observations of African Americans in southeast Nashville, a comparison of southeast Nashville in 2000 and 2010 shows that as the area became home to a growing Hispanic population, it also became home to a growing black population (figures 9.1 and 9.2). The census tracts that became proportionately blacker were generally not the same census tracts that proportionately became more Hispanic in the 2000s. (Compare figure 9.2 and figure 3.5. and the small triangle of black settlement west of I-24 on both maps.) Nonetheless, these two maps make it clear that in the 2000s parts of southeast Nashville were

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254      Nashville in the New Millennium

Figure 9.1 Percentage Black by Census Tract, 2000 Census

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Percent Black Less than 10 Percent 10.1 to 20 Percent 20.1 to 30 Percent

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50.1 to 94 Percent

Miles

Source: Author’s compilation based on Summary File 1, 2000 U.S. Census.

home to growing numbers of Latino and African American residents. Latino participants in this study may have described their immediate neighbors as white. Across southeast Nashville itself, however, a more diverse picture emerged in the 2000s. The racial dynamics in these areas were not fully addressed in this book, partly because much of the Latino population growth in southeast Nashville occurred west of census tracts with large and growing black populations and was separated from these areas by an interstate. Another reason, however, was how and where this study was conducted. In the three small neighborhoods that formed Flat­rock—Glencliff, Radnor, and Woodbine—

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      255  Figure 9.2 Percentage Black by Census Tract, 2010 Census

£ ¤ 40

£ ¤

J Percy Priest Reservoir

o

440

£ ¤ 24

£ ¤ 65

Percent White Less than 10 Percent 10.1 to 20 Percent 20.1 to 30 Percent

^ Nashville TENNESSEE

30.1 to 50 Percent 0

N

5

50.1 to 94 Percent

Miles

Source: Author’s compilation based on Summary File 1, 2010 U.S. Census.

and in the parts of Antioch where many Latino immigrants have settled, at the scale of individual subdivisions and apartment complexes, Latino immigrants seem to be living near and interacting primarily with white residents, at least according to their own telling. At the scale of the census tract, though, there is some spatial overlap between Latino immigrants and African American residents in neighborhoods, as there is in some schools. Accessing these sites of overlap and examining interactions between the two groups would have required a different methodological design that might have first identified where Latino and African American residents were interacting, or at least sharing social spaces, and then worked from these sites.

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256      Nashville in the New Millennium Beginning in parks, health clinics, and other sites of overlap would have yielded a study focused less on particular neighborhoods and community institutions and more on shared public spaces and other parts of southeast Nashville where Latino immigrants and African Americans were living in close proximity. In doing so, it would have contributed more fully to emerging dialogues on black-brown relations in Southern new destinations (for example, Marrow 2011; Stuesse 2009). Equally important, such a methodological design would have avoided reinforcing the sense that the two groups had little direct interaction—the general impression given by this study—by seeking out spaces where such interactions might have occurred. Finally, although this study went out of its way to include a diverse range of perspectives, especially from Latino immigrants, the dynamics of gender could have received more attention. Few studies have examined to any real degree how gender shapes immigrant experiences or reception in new destinations. Nonetheless, many of the sites at the center of the politics of immigrant reception—health clinics, grocery stores, schools— are also sites of social reproduction and, thus, gendered in particular ways. Almost nothing is known about how gender shapes immigrant reception in the neighborhood, workplace, and other institutions in new destinations. What is more, any number of migration studies point not only to the potentially transformative impact of the act of migrating on gender norms, roles, and relations but also to the challenges and struggles it places on households and relationships.18 Simply put, gender matters in who migrates and when, how migration proceeds and is experienced, and how it changes household dynamics and other factors. How it matters in new destinations remains to be examined. Moreover, the image of the immigrant in anti-immigrant campaigns in Southern destinations is itself gendered in powerful ways—the lone immigrant man who is a danger behind the wheel, the fecund immigrant woman who puts an undue strain on state resources, the loud young immigrant man who disrupts neighborhoods (Winders 2011). For all these reasons, gender clearly shaped the politics of immigrant settlement and incorporation in Nashville, but in ways that this study only alluded to and that merit more attention in future works.

Hands Together in History and Diversity The locus of immigrant integration is the local community. (Singer et al. 2008b, 7)

Across studies of immigration and across disciplines, the issue of immigrant integration has been a constant theme. Whether framed through a

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      257  lens of immigrant assimilation into a new setting, through a perspective of diasporic immigrant belonging in multiple sites, or through attention to transnational immigrant practices in the spaces of mobility itself, how immigrants adjust to and become part of the places to which they move has long been recognized as central to immigrant experiences and to studies of them. Increasingly, scholars are also acknowledging the centrality of immigrant integration to the experiences of long-term residents in receiving communities, calling for attention to such dynamics and highlighting the emergence of a “receiving community” initiative that parallels an immigrant rights focus (Jones-Correa 2011). While collectively, work on immigrant integration has shown the importance of factors from the global economy to national immigration policies to regional cultural politics (Striffler 2007; Marrow 2011; Barbara Ellen Smith 2006), the local community, as Audrey Singer and her co-authors (2008) suggest, is also crucial to immigrant integration. In new destinations the local community is all the more important because that is where long-term residents and new immigrants encounter one another, come to understand one another, and draw on elements from the local landscape and past to adjust to the realities of their new shared lives. Whether that mutual adjustment in new destinations will lead to immigrant inclusion in the local social fabric remains to be seen. What began as a new Southern hospitality in the late 1990s became a new Southern hostility in the late 2000s that some argued looked very much like old Southern white hostility toward African Americans (McKanders 2010). Others argued this change in public sentiment should temper cautious hopes for immigrant upward mobility and acceptance in the South (Marrow 2011). In a study of transnational practices among Mexican immigrants, for example, Steve Striffler (2007, 684) writes that “many immigrants are becoming as integrated into Arkansas communities as Arkansans will allow them, but it is hard for immigrants to fully identify with communities that are so ambivalent about their presence.” As this study has shown, many factors ­underlie long-term residents’ ambivalence toward immigrants in new destinations, including frustration over a failure to communicate, misinterpretation of immigrant silence, and outright hostility at immigrant settlement. That ambivalence in a place like Nashville, however, is also bound up with other factors that have yet to receive attention: uncertainty over how to place this newest chapter in their community’s history and a lack of clarity over its impact on the links between past and present, between race and place, that have shaped Southern locales for many years. In new destinations like Nashville, long-term residents and new immigrants struggle to think through local history and ethnic diversity at the same time, even as the two elements intertwine in their neighborhoods. The complexities of immigrants’ and long-term residents’ efforts to

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258      Nashville in the New Millennium make place in cities like Nashville, the entanglements of socially and place-based identities in these efforts, and the articulation of past and present in immigrant incorporation are issues facing not only scholars of new destinations but also local residents in them. This fact was clear in Flat­rock, where, in 2008, the first annual Hands Together in Flat­rock Music and Arts Festival was held to “celebrate the cultural changes of the past few years” in the area. The festival included a well-known country songwriter, a 1960s and 1970s tribute band, and a Latin “pop-rocker,” thus tapping into both ends of the spectrum of history and diversity that shaped Flat­ rock in the 2000s and gesturing toward Nashville’s wellknown link to country music. The festival “came from the heart,” according to one organizer, and was “done by many of the original residents of the area . . . to welcome the new ethnic groups.” As another organizer explained, “Glencliff has 45 different nationalities represented and a rich history of people who have lived there for years and are proud of that history. So we need to celebrate that history and the diversity we have” (emphasis added). In contrast to the roadblocks that many neighborhood associations described in their efforts to include immigrant residents, organizing meetings for the Hands Together festival were more diverse. As T. C. ­Weber, who led the organizing effort, shared, “We had Latinos, Kurdish residents and more represented at the meetings. It really looked like the neighborhood.”19 In its efforts to reflect the neighborhood, the Hands Together in Flat­ rock Music and Arts Festival sought a way to recognize Flat­rock’s history, which many long-term residents saw as crucial to how they defined neighborhood but which new immigrants struggled to see. It also sought to celebrate Flat­rock’s ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity, which many long-term residents struggled to understand but which immigrants saw as the local norm. In this way, the festival took a first step in trying to think along both ways of defining Flat­rock—through its deep history and through its new ethnic and racial diversity. History and diversity, the two axes along which southeast Nashville was evaluated and along which its new and old residents struggled to find their place in the 2000s, came together at a festival that celebrated music—that quintessential characteristic of Nashville. The festival is now a regular event and was set to attract more than five thousand residents in 2012. With a classic car show, local artists, and food from local restaurants, it has become a new tradition. At the same time, the Flat­rock Heritage Foundation has expanded. With a new mural and a new “Flat­rock Neighbors United Against Crime” in 2010, the FHF has become an “organization dedicated to preserving the history of the Flat­ rock Community of Nashville, Tennessee, as well as celebrating the diversity in art and culture that exists today.”20 In the intimate spaces of the

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At the Intersection of History and Diversity      259  neighborhood, history and diversity, past and present, have come together in a way that, at least institutionally and at least at a summer festival, thinks across the two axes that have shaped the processes of immigrant incorporation, immigrant experiences, and immigrant reception in southeast Nashville. This focus on immigrant incorporation at the scale of the neighborhood, of course, is not specific to Nashville. The Welcoming America initiative devoted to “Building a Nation of Neighbors,” works “to create a welcoming atmosphere—community by community—in which immi­ grants are more likely to integrate into the social fabric of their adopted hometowns” at the scale of the neighborhood.21 Starting from the idea that changes at the grassroots level and at the scale of interpersonal relations will cumulatively create welcoming environments for immigrants, the Welcoming America initiative, like the Hands Together festival, identifies the neighborhood as the key building block for creating mutual respect between long-term residents and new immigrants and for creating a welcoming nation. When that welcoming neighborhood is situated in a wider urban context, however, the picture becomes more complicated, as does the link between history and diversity. In Nashville, history and diversity came together at a local festival that celebrated the neighborhood, new and old. At a wider scale, however, and in the context of a different aspect of local history (racial segregation), making space for population growth and diversification in southeast Nashville came at the expense of historically black and poor neighborhoods in north Nashville, placing history and diversity at odds in addressing public schools across the city. In similar fashion, as Flat­rock worked in the late 2000s to link “hands together” across the neighborhood, Nashville as a whole worked to exclude immigrants through multiple rounds of anti-immigrant legislation. Welcomed in the neighborhood yet excluded by city ordinances and state laws, immigrants faced very different kinds of reception across scales. They also faced different levels of opportunity across the 2000s. While 2007 represented “good times” for Latino workers in Tennessee, a year later, Latino jobless rates were soaring and Latino workers were among the earliest and hardest hit by the economic recession in Nashville.22 As part of Nashville tried to create for immigrants a welcoming environment that recognized history and celebrated diversity, the global financial crisis made daily life itself increasingly precarious for Latino immigrants. For immigrants, then, the context of reception in places like Nashville, as well as the economic context of daily life, changed dramatically across the 2000s, becoming better in some neighborhoods while worse in some job sectors, more hopeful at a local festival and more pessimistic at the state capitol. In the midst of all these changes, many Latino immigrants put down

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260      Nashville in the New Millennium roots, had children, and became established in Nashville neighborhoods, even as they remained ambivalent about their place in Nashville and their future there. Ambivalence about staying in new places has been a part of immigrant experiences from the inception of migration itself. In new destinations, however, that ambivalence for both immigrants and long-term residents is arguably amplified as each group continually adjusts to the new context of reception created by the changing features of an immigrant population that is settling out, by the ever-sharper points of local and national debates over immigration, by the ever-smaller array of economic opportunities in a recession, and by the general absence of a way to make sense of all these changes in relation to a local past. With no recallable histories of immigrant settlement for either group to draw on, with no clear way for immigrants to become aware of a local history whose features they inadvertently changed, and with local efforts to welcome immigrants working against a wider political and economic context that sometimes made a settled immigrant life impossible, new destinations in the 2000s were often left at a loss as to how to proceed along the path of immigrant integration. Ambivalence toward Nashville’s new sonido came from multiple places. At the crossroad of immigrant settlement and community change in the first decade of the new millennium, Nashville and its immigrant population faced conflicting signs. Within the space of some neighborhoods, long-term residents and new immigrants found ways to join hands across history and diversity to create a new way of living in an old neighborhood. In others, they found ways to avoid each other altogether. At the scale of the city, and from the perspective of public schools, histories of race and a present of ethnic diversity remained at odds in a struggle over whose vision of diversity mattered most in determining the relationship between school and neighborhood, diversity and equity. At even wider scales, all of these efforts were overdetermined by an economic and political context that sent a message to immigrants that their place in Nashville was not permanent, and potentially untenable, if they could not find work. Moving further into the new millennium, Nashville, its residents, and its institutions will have to find ways to think about the relationship between history and diversity both in the neighborhood and across the city and to move an ambivalence about life in Nashville neighborhoods and schools on the part of immigrants and long-term residents toward an ambition to find links within and across them. Joining hands across history and diversity in the neighborhood is an important first step. Finding ways to do so across the city as a whole, and across its more complicated relationships between a history of racial inequalities and a present of ethnic diversity, must be the next one—and that is a much bigger step.

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Notes

Preface   1.  For discussions of immigrant incorporation as institutionally and geographically specific, see, among others, Ellis (2006), Foner (2007), Nelson and Hiemstra (2008), and Marrow (2011).   2.  In stressing the role of the local context, I, in no way, mean to sever the multiscalar links (not the least of which is international migration) that make this local context also a global sense of place (Massey 1994).

Chapter 1   1.  http://scarritbennett.org/programs/divdialogue.aspx#about (accessed December 18, 2012).   2.  U.S. Census 2010, “2010 Census Interactive Population Search: Tennessee,” available at: http://2010.census.gov/2010census/popmap/ipmtext.php?fl= 47 (accessed March 12, 2012). For studies of new destinations’ initial shock at the rapid immigrant arrival, see Cabell (2007), Murphy et al. (2001), Fink (2003), Odem (2004), and Rich and Miranda (2005). It is important to note that not all of Nashville’s foreign-born population is Latino or Hispanic. Refugee resettlement, which was handled in a program run by the city’s Metro government until 2005, is a visible urban issue in Nashville, which has been home to refugee populations since the late 1960s. Today, the city has the largest Kurdish community in the United States and a diverse group of refugees from eastern Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. Refugee and immigrant politics, and even service provision, are clearly related in Nashville (see chapter 6), but because they are also distinct in many ways (Win­ders 2006a), I focus almost exclusively on Latino immigrant experiences in Nashville rather than on the general immigrant or foreign-born experience, which is too diverse a category to make analytic sense in Nashville and too large a task for one book.   3.  For studies of new destinations that possess recallable histories of immigrant settlement, see Wortham et al. (2009), Torres (2006), and Shutika (2011). It is worth noting that these studies do not focus on Southern locations.   4.  A large literature looks at the context of immigrant reception in new destinations, including: Atiles and Bohon (2003), Bauer (2009), Benson (2008), Bullock and Hood (2006), Cabell (2007), Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), Fink (2009), Furuseth and Smith (2010), Hernández-León and Zúñiga (2005), Lich-

261

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262      Notes ter and Johnson (2009), Marrow (2011), McKanders (2010), Odem (2009), Popke (2011), Striffler (2007), Stuesse (2009), and Waters and Jiménez (2005).

Chapter 2  1.  For studies of bilocal connections between new rural destinations in the South and various Latin American communities, see Striffler (2007) and Fink (2003). For studies of transnationalism, see Mountz and Wright (1996), Rouse (1991), and Robert Smith (2006).   2.  The literature on 9/11’s impacts on immigrant daily lives is substantial. See, for example, Andreas (2003), Coleman (2007, 2009), Winders (2007), and Bhan­dar (2004).   3.  For studies of immigrant place-making in new destinations, see Lacy (2009), Marrow (2011), Odem (2009), Zarrugh (2008), and Wampler, Chavez, and Pedraza (2009).  4.  See, among others, Murphy et al. (2001), Atiles and Bohon (2002), and Johnson-Webb and Johnson (1996).   5.  For examples of theories developed from the perspectives of new destinations, see Massey (2008), Varsanyi (2010), Lichter and Johnson (2009), Marrow (2009a, 2009b, 2011), and O’Neil and Tienda (2010).   6.  For edited volumes, see Gozdziak and Martin (2005), Smith and Furuseth (2006), Singer, Hardwick, and Brettell (2008b), Murphy et al. (2001), Massey (2008), Zuñiga and Hernández-León (2005), Wortham, Murillo, and Hamman (2002), Odem and Lacy (2009), Lippard and Gallagher (2011), and Ansley and Shefner (2009). For journal special issues, see Southern Rural Sociology (2003, vol. 19, no. 1), Sociological Spectrum (2003, vol. 23, no. 2), Southeastern Geographer (2011, vol. 51, no. 2), and Latino Studies (2012, vol. 10, nos. 1–2). For book-length studies, see Cuadros (2006), Fink (2003), Hamann (2003), Marrow (2011), and Johnson-Webb (2003).   7.  New England also saw growing immigrant populations in the late 1990s and 2000s, although typically in places that had previous experience with foreignborn populations; thus, the dynamic was different from what was occurring in Southern states (see Torres 2006).   8.  Population figures cited in this paragraph are taken from Hope Yen, “New Census Milestone: Hispanics Reach 50 Million,” Associated Press, March 28, 2011.   9.  For discussions of this transition from a secondary domestic migration to a direct international migration, see Winders (2008a) and Odem (2004, 2009). A clear exception here is the stream of Latino migrant workers associated with the South’s agricultural economy. Whether they arrive on H-2A visas (Cravey 1997, 2003) or as part of more informal labor markets and circuits, these workers come to the South directly from various parts of Latin America and often follow crop cycles around the region.

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Notes      263  10.  Such recruitment efforts were made in the original “New South” as well. Don Doyle (1990, 264) discusses New South promoters who “launched state agencies to advertise the opportunities available to newcomers and sent agents overseas or to the North to recruit immigrants.” 11.  According to a study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (1999), the Latino population of the Nashville diocese—covering Nashville and its surrounding counties—grew from 14,000 to 62,000 in the same time period, mirroring almost exactly the rate of Latino population growth in Nashville itself. 12.  Michael Cass, “Nashville Becomes More Integrated,” The Tennessean, December 15, 2010. 13.  For studies of immigration and American cities, see, among others, Straughan and Hondagneu-Sotelo (2002), Waldinger (2007), Ellis, Wright, and Parks (2004), and Foner (2007). 14.  Cass, “Nashville Becomes More Integrated.” 15.  A large literature in Southern studies and other fields examines the ways in which the South has been “othered,” or treated as unique and exceptional, in a national context. See, for example, Winders (2005b), Ayers (1996), Gray (1986), Griffin and Doyle (1995), and Jansson (2010). 16.  Mid-State Economic Indicators 6(3, Fall 1996): 1. 17. Ibid. 18.  Mid-State Economic Indicators 6(2, Spring 1996): 1. 19.  Amy Marchese, 24 September 1997. “Jobs Bring New Americans,” The Tennessean, September 24, 1997. 20.  Anthony Eff, “Can This Continue Forever?” Midstate Economic Indicators 9(2, Summer 1999): 1. 21.  Kathleen Vinlove, “Cautious Optimism for Midstate Recovery,” Midstate Economic Indicators 12(1, Summer 2002): 1. 22.  Bush Bernard, “New Season May Invigorate Nashville Job Market,” The Tennessean, February 24, 2003. 23.  The shift from a domestic to an international migration may also have involved a change in the gender composition of this migration. Rubén Hernández-León and Víctor Zúñiga (2000) note that in their survey of immigrants in Dalton, Georgia, in the late 1990s, more than half of the direct arrivals from Mexico were women. 24.  Many academics and advocates have now studied this transition from hospitality to hostility. See, for example, Bauer (2009), Deaton (2008), Fink (2009), Furuseth and Smith (2010), McKanders (2010), Marrow (2011), Nguyen and Gill (2010), and Winders (2007). 25.  For studies of black-brown relations in neighborhoods and work sites, see Cravey (1997), Griffith (2000), Hernández-León and Zúñiga (2005), and Stuesse (2009). 26.  A number of scholars have analyzed the politics and possibilities of such

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264      Notes

27. 

28. 

29. 

30. 

31. 

32. 

33. 

Winders.indb 264

a­lliances; see Alvarado and Jaret (2009), Sziarto and Leitner (2010), and ­Winders and Smith (2010). There are examples of claims to an ethnic heritage in the South, although they are few in number. Parts of North Carolina celebrate Scottish heritage in spring and summer festivals, and some veins of Southern history claim a “Celtic” heritage for white Southerners, although those claims are also much disputed. Some celebrations of black heritage in Southern locales also tap generalized links to West African cultural practices. Many place names in Tennessee have Spanish roots, although the histories of these place names, which typically trace to either early Spanish explorers or the Mexican-American War (Winders 2008c), have been almost entirely forgotten. For research on immigrant assimilation from the perspective of new destinations, see Waters and Jiménez (2005). On immigrant incorporation in new destinations, see Marrow (2011). On transnationalism, see Striffler (2007), Lacy (2009), and Cravey (2003, 2005). On racial distancing, especially between Latinos and African Americans, see McClain et al. (2006) and Marrow (2009b). For studies of immigrant experiences at work in new destinations, see, among others, Bauer (2009), Murphy et al. (2001), Fink (2003), and Ciscel, Smith, and Mendoza (2003). For studies of immigrant experiences at home or in leisure spaces, see Lacy (2009), Cravey (1997, 2003, 2005), Odem (2004, 2009), and Shultz (2008). For studies of immigrant reception in the workplace in new destinations, see Ciscel et al. (2003) and Selby, Dixon, and Hapke (2001). For studies of immigrant reception in institutional settings, see Cabell (2007), Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), and Marrow (2005, 2009a). For discussions of immigrant reception in the neighborhood, see Brettell and Nibbs (2011). On views as reflected in public opinion, see Clark (2006), Neal and Bohon (2003), and O’Neil and Tienda (2010). For overall studies of immigrant reception in new destinations, see Deaton (2008), Furuseth and Smith (2010), and Rich and Miranda (2005). Key studies of intergroup dynamics in rural new destinations include McConnell and Miraftab (2009), Williams and Smith (2006), Cuadros (2006), and Marrow (2011). For studies of perceptions of long-term residents and immigrants in the workplace, see Benson (2008) and Stuesse (2009). For discussions of how immigrants redefine key social spaces in new destinations, see Nelson and Hiemstra (2008), Brettell and Nibbs (2011), Cuadros (2006), and Odem (2004, 2009). The geographic literature on immigrant settlement is substantial. Key works that show the active role played by space and place in immigrant settlement, experiences, and reception include Ellis (2006), Nelson and Hiemstra (2008), Robinson (2010), and Sziarto and Leitner (2010).

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Notes      265  34.  For sociological studies of immigrant needs in new destinations, see Atiles and Bohon (2002, 2003). For sociological work on immigrant reception in new destinations, see Neal and Bohon (2003), Dunn, Aragonés, and Shivers (2005), and O’Neil and Tienda (2010). For overall sociological assessments of immigrant settlement in new destinations, see Bankston (2003, 2007), Elliott and Ionescu (2003), and Hernández-León and Zúñiga (2000). 35.  Much sociological work on new destinations has addressed intergroup dynamics (Alvarado and Jaret 2009; Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2005; Marrow 2009b; McConnell and Miraftab 2009), the complexities of immigrant incorporation (Deeb-Sossa and Mendez 2008; Marrow 2005, 2009a, 2011; Rich and Miranda 2005; Smith 2001; Okamoto and Ebert 2010), and overall employment and settlement experiences (Donato, Bankston, and Robinson 2001; Kandel and Cromartie 2004; Kandel and Parrado 2004, 2005; Lichter and Johnson 2009). 36.  Key early anthropological studies of new destinations include Campion (2003), Duchon and Murphy (2001), Griffith (2000), Griffith et al. (2001), Rees (2001), and Mendoza, Ciscel, and Smith (2000, 2001). More recent detailed anthropological research can be found in Striffler (2007), Steusse (2009), Lacy (2009), Fink (2003), and Odem (2004, 2009). For one of the only historical discussions of Latino immigrants in the South, see Weise (2008). 37.  Both school names are pseudonyms. In subsequent chapters, I have changed minor details about each school to ensure their anonymity. The school portion of this study also included focus groups and participant-observation with twenty-five Latino adolescents and mental-mapping exercises with several classes of younger immigrant children. This work is not discussed here, primarily because of space constraints. 38.  For studies of low-wage immigrant workers in new destinations, see Benson (2008), Ciscel et al. (2003), Murphy et al. (2001), Easton (2007), Fink (2003), Marrow (2011), McDaniel and Casanova (2003), Selby et al. (2001), Stuesse (2009), and Winders (2008b). 39.  Studies of immigrant incorporation in new destinations have focused on a number of geographic or institutional settings. For research on social service agencies, see Cabell (2007), Donnelly (2005), Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), Erwin (2003), and Marrow (2011). On religious organizations, see Campion (2003) and Odem (2004, 2009). For studies of immigrant incorporation in the context of local policies or public opinion, see Atiles and Bohon (2003), Furu­ seth and Smith (2010), Clark (2006), Neal and Bohon (2003), and O’Neil and Tienda (2010). 40.  For studies of schools’ role in producing racial, class, and gender norms, see Hyams (2000), Nayak (2008), Rodriguez (2011), and Inwood and Martin (2008). For work on the impact of schools on students’ life chances and their transmission of social capital, see Fine et al. (2007) and Monkman, Ronald,

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266      Notes

41.  42.  43.  44. 

45. 

46. 

47. 

48. 

49. 

and Théraméne (2005). For research on schools’ impacts on understandings of race, see Pollock (2004), Dickar (2008), and Vaught and Castagno (2008). See, for example, Alabama’s focus on public schools in its sweeping 2011 immigration-related legislation (Winders forthcoming[a]). For work on schools as institutions involved in the politics of immigrant incorporation, see Guthey (2001), Cuadros (2006), and Striffler (2007). Exceptions to this claim include Cuadros (2006), Wortham et al. (2009), Marrow (2011), and Potochnick, Perreira, and Fuligni (2012). For studies of such key actors in new destinations, see Ciscel et al. (2003), Fink (2003), Hernández-León and Zúñiga (2005), McClain et al. (2006), Benson (2008), Alvarado and Jaret (2009), and Marrow (2009a). Obvious examples from the Chicago School include Park, Burgess, and Mc­ Kenzie (1925) and Wirth (1938). For more contemporary work on the role of neighborhoods in reproducing ideas about race, nation, and community, see Ley (1995), Lee (2002), Herbert (2005), and Jackson (2008). Research on the role of neighborhoods in immigrant experiences is substantial; see, for example, Davis (2000) and Robinson (2010). Mark Ellis and his colleagues (2004), it is important to note, stress the increasing importance of also looking at the role of workplaces in producing these constructs. Not surprisingly, the social science literature on neighborhoods is immense. Key works have used the neighborhood to evaluate economic status and change in cities (Wyly 1999; Newman 2001; Butler 2007; He and Wu 2009), examine urban activism and political practices (Martin 2003a, 2003b; Goldstein 2004; Herbert 2005; Kruse 2005; Jackson 2008; Campbell et al. 2009), and study racial and cultural identities (Ley 1995; Anderson 1988; Kelly 1994; Amin 2002; Lee 2002; Low 2003; Mendez 2005). For research on transnational social networks, see Cravey (2005), Robert Smith (2006), Striffler (2007), Frandberg (2008), Ho (2008), Huang et al. (2008), and Mok et al. (2010). See, for example, Cravey (2003, 2005), Odem (2004), Hernández-León and Zúñiga (2005), Cabell (2007), Striffler (2007), Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), and Shultz (2008). Michael Jones-Correa’s work (2006, 2008) on immigrant settlement in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., is key here. For work on immigrant suburban settlement in new urban destinations, see Odem (2004, 2009), Lacy (2009), and Smith and Furuseth (2004).

Chapter 3  1.  Through the 1970s, Nashville had more intersecting interstates than any other U.S. city, a reflection of the influence of Senator Al Gore Sr. in the passage of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956

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Notes      267 

  2.    3.    4. 

  5.    6.   7.    8. 

  9.  10.  11.  12.  13.  14.  15. 

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(Zuzak, McNeil, and Bergerson 1971). Because Nashville sits at the intersection of three main interstates—I-40 running between North Carolina and California, I-24 stretching between southern Illinois and Chattanooga, and I-65 linking Chicago and Mobile, the city lies “within one day’s truck drive from 70 percent of the U.S. population” (Eff 1998, 15). This confluence of interstates was an early explanation for Nashville’s emergence as an immigrant destination: newspaper articles noted that Latino migrant workers who followed the agricultural harvesting seasons across Southern states were exiting these interstates to settle in Nashville. Monica Whitaker, “Melting Pot Worries,” The Tennessean, November 7, 2001, 1A. Karen Jordan, “Past and Present Pioneers Build Nolensville’s Main Road,” The Tennessean, April 9, 2003, 2X. “A. N. Eshman and Radnor College,” by Mike Slate, available at http://www .civicscope.org/nashville-tn/ANEshmanRadnorCollege (accessed December 18, 2012). George Zepp, “Woodbine Area Sprouted from Rocky Past,” The Tennessean, June 21, 2006. See map of Nashville, Tennessee, 1922, published by Marshall & Bruce Co., housed at Nashville Public Library. See streetcar stops on revised map of Nashville, Tennessee, showing new ward boundaries, ca. 1925, housed at Nashville Public Library. The earliest Latino immigrants in Flatrock also noticed the area’s difference from the rest of Nashville. For example, Eduardo, an older Mexican man, came to Woodbine in 2001 after many years in New York City and Puerto Rico. When he arrived, “the people living in the place were Americans, but they were ‘country’ Americans—they liked drinking beer and being loud, but they lived peacefully.” Zepp, “Woodbine Area Sprouted from Rocky Past.” Interview with housing expert and former Woodbine councilman, conducted by Kris Bahlke, June 21, 2007. Transcript in possession of the author. Zepp, “Woodbine Area Sprouted from Rocky Past.” Woodbine Chamber of Commerce, Woodbine Is Our Home, 1946, in Woodbine File, Nashville Public Library. Jordan, “Past and Present Pioneers Build Nolensville’s Main Road.” Desiree Belmarez, “Groups Want Nolensville Road Makeover,” The Tennessean, July 24, 2006. Located in the heart of southeast Nashville, AVCO began in 1939 as one of the largest producers of war materiel during World War II (Doyle 1985). Merging with Vultee Aircraft Corporation in the 1940s, it became AVCO Corporations in 1959. See Triumph Group, Inc., “Overview: Triumph Aerostructures—Vought Aircraft Division,” available at: http://www.voughtaircraft

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268      Notes .com/newsFactGallery/factsheets/sites/nashville.htm (accessed December 18, 2012). The insurance company AGLA (American General Life and Accident) began in 1900 as the National Life and Accident Association of Nashville. In 2001, it was acquired by AIG (American International Group, Inc.). See http://www.americangeneral.com/lifeinternet2000/careernsf/contents/ aboutus_history (accessed December 18, 2012). 16.  Jordan, “Past and Present Pioneers Build Nolensville’s Main Road.” 17.  Other residents remembered Flatrock differently. For example, Rose, a white woman who had lived in Woodbine since the 1930s, recalled African American parts of Woodbine as “just part of the neighborhood” where black and white children played together. Interview conducted in 2007 by Lisa Martin. In possession of author. 18.  In a series of mystery novels set in Nashville, author Marco McPeek Villatoro enacts a similar erasure of a black presence in southeast Nashville (Padilla 2008). 19.  A 2005 community needs assessment reported a slightly lower homeownership rate for Flatrock than for the city: 49.3 percent versus 55.3 percent across all of Nashville (Perkins et al. 2005, 6). 20.  Chris Echegaray, “Hispanics Hold Key to Churches’ Future,” The Tennessean, January 10, 2010. 21.  A 2007 interview with two long-term residents, conducted by Lisa Martin. In possession of author. 22.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “Radnor Baptist Sells Church, Closes School,” The Tennessean, June 22, 2007; Bob Smietana, “Congregations Address Economic Challenges,” The Tennessean, January 6, 2009. 23.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “Radnor Baptist Plans to Build in Nolensville,” The Tennessean, January 2, 2008. A similar transition took place in Antioch when the Carmike Bell Forge 10 Cinema was purchased by the Islamic Center of Tennessee for conversion into a mosque. See Nancy DeVille, “Former Antioch Cinema Will Be a Mosque by 2011,” The Tennessean, October 13, 2010. 24.  Jannell Ross, “Churches Bear Witness to Nashville’s Population Shift,” The Tennessean, October 8, 2007. 25.  Blackwood, “Radnor Baptist Sells Church, Closes School.” 26.  Mike Kilen, “Nations United, People Torn,” The Tennessean, August 25, 1996, Woodbine Files, Nashville Public Library. 27. Ibid. 28.  Kurdish refugees were relocated to Nashville from northern Iraq as early as 1976 (Lydon 1988). 29.  Because southeast Nashville lacked public housing, some refugee groups, like the Somalis, were there only temporarily. When funding from voluntary agencies ran out, Somali refugees moved into public housing in north or east Nashville.

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Notes      269  30.  In 2011, Nashville ranked fourth in the nation for Hispanic self-employment and had more than 1,400 Hispanic-owned businesses. See G. Chambers Williams, “Nashville Sees Boom in Hispanic-Owned Businesses,” The Tennessean, May 29, 2011. 31.  During the 1990s, when Davidson County’s population grew by 12 percent, north Nashville’s population grew by less than 2 percent, with almost no shift in its racial composition. See Anita Wadhwani and Noble Sprayberry, “Growth and Diversity Bypass Black Enclave,” The Tennessean, April 23, 2001. 32.  From 1998 to 2003, the average total appraisal for a single-family dwelling in the Flatrock area was $73,596. For all of Davidson County, the average was $115,800 (Perkins et al. 2005). 33.  Christian Bottorff, “Numerous Apartment Complexes Complicate Policing,” The Tennessean, February 23, 2005. 34.  Natalia Mielczarek, “Glenview Celebrates Holidays with a Global Perspective,” The Tennessean, December 17, 2003. 35.  Bottorff, “Numerous Apartment Complexes Complicate Policing”; P. J. Tobia, “Thirsty for Company,” The Nashville Scene, June 28, 2007. 36.  Rebecca Denton, “Eclectic, Vibrant, Family Friendly Davidson,” The Tennessean, September 14, 2003. 37.  Rachel Stults, “Antioch Confronts Its Bad Image,” The Tennessean, July 14, 2008. 38.  Clark Parsons, “Antioch State of Mind: In Search of Nashville’s Forgotten World,” The Nashville Scene, October 7, 1993. 39.  Antioch Community File, Nashville Public Library. 40.  Clark Parsons, “Antioch State of Mind.” 41.  Nicole Garton, “Antioch Neighbors Strive to Clean Up,” The Tennessean, June 3, 2001. 42.  Joel Welin, “Nashville’s L.A. Boasts the Best of Both Worlds,” The Tennessean, October 13, 1991, Antioch Community File, Nashville Public Library. 43.  Gail McKnight, “Real Estate Section,” The Tennessean, March 17, 1985, Antioch Community File, Nashville Public Library. 44.  Most Southern cities annexed their surrounding suburbs, and so areas like Antioch were “nominally urban neighborhoods” (Lassitter and Kruse 2009, 697). 45.  Garton, “Antioch Neighbors Strive to Clean Up.” 46.  Dorren Klausnitzer, “Growth Stretches Antioch to the Limit,” The Tennessean, October 4, 1999, Antioch Community File, Nashville Public Library. 47.  Monica Whitaker and Noble Sprayberry, “New Diversity Is a Mixed Blessing,” The Tennessean, April 4, 2001. 48. Welin, “Nashville’s L.A. Boasts the Best of Both Worlds.” 49.  Garton, “Antioch Neighbors Strive to Clean Up.”

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270      Notes 50.  Pam Sherborne, “Finding a Home in Antioch Is Easy,” The Tennessean, February 16, 2007. 51.  More ominously, in 2007 Antioch’s diversity caught the attention of the Ku Klux Klan, which leafleted a racially mixed neighborhood in southern Antioch. See Lindsey Naylor, “KKK Cards Delivered to Antioch,” The Tennessean, July 17, 2007. 52.  Garton, “Antioch Neighbors Strive to Clean Up.” 53.  Wendy Lee, “Competition, Crime Drive Stores from Antioch Mall,” The Tennessean, June 3, 2008. 54.  Nancy DeVille, “Night Against Crime Set in Antioch,” The Tennessean, August 1, 2009; Nicole Young, “Hundreds Attend Antioch’s Night Out Against Crime,” The Tennessean, August 4, 2010. 55.  Michael Cass, “Antioch Mall Won’t Get Health Clinic for Low-Income Women, Children,” The Tennessean, December 16, 2009. 56.  Nicole Young, “Homeless Residents to Lose New Camp,” The Tennessean, June 16, 2010. 57.  In their interviews, Latino residents used “americanos” to describe white residents, as became clear when they distinguished in Spanish among “American, black, and Mexican” families living in their neighborhoods. Although few studies have examined the systems of racial categorization that Latino immigrants bring with them to new destinations, those that do have uncovered a similar way of conceptualizing U.S. racial categories (see Cuadros 2006; Marrow 2011). 58.  This sense of home as somewhere between here and there is common among immigrants; for work on immigrants’ deferred sense of home, see, among others, Western (1992), Constable (1999), Salih (2002), and Striffler (2007). 59.  The lyrics in Spanish are “No es de aquí porque su nombre no aparece en los archivos ni es de allá porque se fue.” 60.  Long-term residents, too, marked growing tensions. As a neighborhood association president explained, she felt a growing “them against us” tension in her neighborhood through both “aggressive” maneuvers from some Latino community leaders and “vile talk” from some long-term residents at yard sales and other informal neighborhood activities. 61.  Jannell Ross, “Sheriffs’ Offices Try to Navigate Immigration Law,” The Tennessean, June 20, 2008. 62.  Kate Howard, “3,000 Processed for Deportation in First Year of County Enforcement,” The Tennessean, March 24, 2008. 63.  Chris Echegaray, “Immigration Proposal Won’t Affect Davidson Jailers,” The Tennessean, September 11, 2010. 64.  Brian Haas, “Davidson County’s Rate of Deporting Immigrants for Minor Offenses Is Among Highest,” The Tennessean, February 4, 2011. A similar pattern was documented in North Carolina (Nguyen and Gill 2010).

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Notes      271  65.  In October 2012, Davidson County ended its participation in the 287(g) program, replacing it with the Secure Communities program. 66.  See Chaney (2010) and Marrow (2011) for similar sentiments expressed by Latino residents in new destinations.

Chapter 4   1.  In the Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) system in 2005, white teachers outnumbered Hispanic teachers 156 to 1, with a total of 26 Hispanic teachers across the district. See Lee Ann O’Neal, “Diversity of Metro Teachers Lags Behind Minority Student Numbers,” The Tennessean, April 13, 2005.  2.  This position echoes sentiments in Nashville’s low-wage service sector, where supervisors noted differences among an increasingly diverse workforce but faced the same challenges of getting tasks completed that they did before the arrival of immigrant workers (Winders 2008b).  3.  Nashville had racially segregated private schools much earlier. In 1833, Nashville’s first black school was organized in secrecy; it ran until 1856, when it was shut down by white vigilantes (Lovett 1999, 2005).   4.  The desegregation of Nashville teachers and school administrators began in the 1960s (Egerton 2009).   5.  See Egerton (2009) for a discussion of responses to the Nashville way, especially among Southern segregationists, and a description of the violence that erupted in 1957 over Nashville school desegregation.   6.  There were also structural problems with busing that drove some white parents out of the city. MNPS did not have enough buses to implement the new plan, and the city council would not fund additional buses. Thus, busing schedules were staggered over a three-hour window each morning and afternoon, creating headaches for parents with children in multiple schools (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1977).   7.  This position echoes findings from a 1977 report on school segregation in Nashville by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which found that white parents wanted to keep the status quo and African American parents wanted to improve education opportunities for their children. See Webster and Quinton (2010) for a discussion of how such political and social attitudes have fed into electoral geographies in the South.   8.  Jaime Sarrio, “NAACP May Take Rezoning Plan to Court,” The Tennessean, July 10, 2008.   9.  In 2004 English-language learner (ELL) students were allowed an additional year of schooling before their scores were counted. See Claudette Riley, “ESL Students Get More Time to Learn English,” The Tennessean, February 29, 2004. 10.  Jaime Sarrio, “State Tightens Control of Metro’s Schools,” The Tennessean, June 13, 2008.

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272      Notes 11.  Dorren Klausnitzer, “New Country, New Language,” The Tennessean, May 12, 2002. 12.  Clay Carey, “Influx of Immigrants Puts Pressure on Middle Tennessee Schools,” The Tennessean, March 16, 2009. 13.  Julie Hubbard, “Teaching Immigrants Is Growing Challenge for Nashville Schools,” The Tennessean, February 6, 2011. 14.  Lee Ann O’Neal, “Diversity of Metro Teachers Lags Behind Minority Student Numbers,” The Tennessean, April 13, 2005; Marsha Warden, “Metro After Desegregation; Multiculturalism Has Changed What We Do,” The Tennessean, December 18, 2006. 15.  Michael Cass, “Nashville Becomes More Integrated,” The Tennessean, December 15, 2010. 16.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “English-Learning Centers Vital to Children,” The Tennessean, July 20, 2005. In the 2000s, MNPS did have one bilingual program at an elementary school outside of southeast Nashville; see Karen Jordan, “Glendale Elementary Ready to Immerse Students in Spanish,” The Tennessean, July 28, 2004. 17.  Jay Hamburg, “Learning the Language,” The Tennessean, March 27, 1998. 18.  Leon Alligood, “Immigration Boom Hits Schools,” The Tennessean, November 17, 1998. 19.  Monica Whitaker, “Public Invited to Meeting on ESL Future,” The Tennessean, July 18, 2000. 20.  Catherine Veninga (2009) notes a similar language of worlds colliding through busing among participants in her oral history of busing in Seattle. 21.  Some teachers used “regular” and “ELL” to distinguish parents as well. For example, in response to my question about parental reactions to changes in the schools, one teacher asked if I meant “neighborhood,” or “regular,” parents who “get sort of insulted” when efforts are made to educate Hispanic parents about schools at parent-teacher meetings. 22.  See Sampson (2008) and Nguyen and Gill (2010) for a debunking of the myth that immigration causes crime. 23.  See Tenore (2006) for a discussion of this grouping of international students by students themselves and by others in the school (see also Brittain 2005). 24.  This approach echoes the hiring of Superintendent Pedro Garcia, Metro’s first Hispanic schools director and the most visible Latino employee in Metro government. Discussions of his hiring stressed that the selection process was “almost devoid of discussion about race or of lobbying along color lines.” See Diane Long and Monica Whitaker, “Schools Director Puts High Priority on ESL Classes,” The Tennessean, June 30, 2001. 25.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “Glencliff Elementary Celebrates Its Past,” The Tennessean, May 4, 2007.

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Notes      273  26.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “English-Learning Centers Vital to Children,” The Tennessean, July 20, 2005. 27.  Julie Hubbard, “Teaching Immigrants Is Growing Challenge for Nashville Schools,” The Tennessean, February 6, 2011. 28.  A theme that emerged in interviews with teachers but is not explored here is the placement of teachers with training in special education in ELL classrooms. Both positions were desirable because they guaranteed smaller classes. See Wortham et al. (2009) for a discussion of how the idea of ELL classes as slower leads to the idea of ELL students as slow learners and how special education becomes explicitly linked with ELL curricula. 29.  Kate Howard, “Hispanic Gangs Bring Feud, Violence to Nashville Streets,” The Tennessean, October 15, 2006.

Chapter 5   1.  For work on the politics of immigration in new destinations in the late 2000s, see Winders (2007), Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), McKanders (2010), and Varsanyi (2011).   2.  For studies of the transformations in understandings of race after the civil rights movement, see Omi and Winant (1994), Kruse (2005), and Lassiter and Kruse (2009).   3.  There is a large literature on the politics of cultural diversity and on the difference between a framework of diversity and a framework of difference. See, for example, Bhabha (1994), Gordon and Newfield (1996), Giroux (2003), Kim (2004), Jewett (2006), and Dickar (2008).   4.  From the perspective of teachers and school employees accustomed to seeing a white student body and still struggling to categorize nonwhite students, the clustering or mixing of white students was obvious in the midst of other patterns that were more difficult to tease out.   5.  Teachers at Fellows Middle dealt less with the politics of immigration for at least two reasons. First, because their school was geographically separate from where students lived, it was not close to an epicenter of Nashville’s ­immigration debate in the same way that Morgan Elementary was. Second, Fellows was a younger school, and the shorter tenure of its students and especially its teachers gave them a different view of how the dynamics of immigration changed throughout the 2000s.  6.  On changes in immigrant reception in new destinations, see McKanders (2010), O’Neil and Tienda (2010), and Varsanyi (2011).   7.  See, for example, Alabama’s 2011 state legislation that proposed to track undocumented children and children of undocumented immigrants in public schools (Winders, forthcoming[a]).

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274      Notes   8.  Julie Hubbard, “Teaching Immigrants Is Growing Challenge for Nashville Schools,” The Tennessean, February 6, 2011.  9.  On collective memory, identity, and space, see Flores (1997b), Alderman (2000), Owen Dwyer (2000), J. P. Jones (2000), Inwood and Martin (2008), and Brundage (2009). 10.  The literature on diasporic identities is large and interdisciplinary. See, among others, Anzaldúa (1987), Lowe (1991), Ang (1994), Clifford (1994), Lavie and Swedenburg (1996), Hall (1997), and Barkan and Shelton (1998).

Chapter 6   1.  Elements of this chapter were first explored in Winders (2012b) and Winders (forthcoming[b]).   2.  Desiree Belmarez, “Groups Want Nolensville Road Makeover,” The Tennessean, July 24, 2006.   3.  For studies of how new destinations adjusted to an immigrant presence, see Atiles and Bohon (2002), Odem (2004, 2009), Wainer (2004), Rich and Miranda (2005), and Cabell (2007).   4.  Works on immigrant incorporation in new destinations include Erwin (2003), Waters and Jiménez (2005), Cabell (2007), Marrow (2009a, 2011), and O’Neil and Tienda (2010).  5.  Portions of this section draw on arguments first developed in Winders (2006b).   6.  Nashville was not the only new destination to face accusations of police profiling of Latino residents; see Ansley (2005). As Southern communities began to participate in the 287(g) program, such accusations increased (Bauer 2009; Nguyen and Gill 2010).  7.  Karen Jordan, “130 Attend Hispanics’ Meeting with Metro Officials,” The Tennessean, April 23, 2004; Anita Wadhwani, “Hispanics Press Police for More Help,” The Tennessean, February 24, 2004.   8.  Kate Howard, “Police Try to Win Hispanics’ Trust,” The Tennessean, March 6, 2009.   9.  Rachel Stults, “West and Borges Spar on Illegal Immigration,” The Tennessean, October 17, 2006. 10.  Howard, “Police Try to Win Hispanics’ Trust.” 11.  See Winders (2006a) for a discussion of the complicated place of Latinos within these categories. 12.  Refugee organizations themselves changed as Nashville’s refugee population became more diverse. The Somali Community Center, for example, became the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee. In 2009 Metro schools began to address the needs of refugees through the International Newcomer Academy, where children unfamiliar with American life first

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Notes      275  went. See Chris Echegaray, “Nashville’s Refugee Population Grows in Size, Diversity,” The Tennessean, February 3, 2009. 13.  For discussions of new urbanism, see Till (1993), McCann (1995), and Falconer Al-Hindi and Staddon (1997). 14.  Neighborhood associations also became the conduit through which local ­actors, such as police officers and political candidates, reached the neigh­ borhood to communicate new policies and concerns or to campaign for election. 15.  When Karl Dean became mayor in 2008, he continued MON. 16.  See Odem (2004) for discussions of a similar trend in Atlanta. 17.  Kate Howard, “Living with Crime: Two Neighborhood Stories,” The Tennessean, March 16, 2008. 18.  The literature on urban neoliberalism is large. See, for example, Grant Jones (2000), Martin (2003a), Herbert (2005), Harvey (2006), and He and Wu (2009). 19.  While the relationship between neoliberal transformations and immigrant incorporation I trace here is indirect, Monica Varsanyi (2011) traces a direct relationship in her discussion of state- and local-level immigrant policy. 20.  Chris Echegaray, “Immigrants Find Home and Help in Middle Tennessee,” The Tennessean, February 21, 2009. G. Chambers Williams, “Nashville Sees Boom in Hispanic-Owned Businesses,” The Tennessean, May 29, 2011. In December 2012, Conexión Américas opened The Casa Azafrán Community Center just north of the heart of Nashville’s immigrant corridors. Home to Conexión Américas and a host of other nonprofit organizations, the center continues Conexión Américas’s multiple goals of community and economic development as well as cultural awareness. 21.  See the Human Relations Commission web page at: http://www.nashville .gov/humanrelations/index.asp (accessed October 25, 2010). 22.  Metro Social Services Board of Commissioners, meeting minutes, January 26, 2005. 23. Ibid. 24.  “Issue Brief: Immigrant Community Assessment,” Metropolitan Social Services 1(3, October 14, 2005), available at: http://www.nashville.gov/sservices/ docs/ImmigrantIssueBrief.pdf (accessed December 18, 2012). 25.  A combined focus on immigrants and refugees already prevailed in Nashville through organizations like the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition and the older Task Force on Immigrants and Refugees. What was new about MSS’s approach was establishing immigrant services as part of other programs rather than as a separate department. 26.  In 2001 Woodbine was awarded a $500,000 federal community development block grant. In 2002 the area received more than $1.3 million in state funding to make Woodbine pedestrian-friendly. See Woodbine File, Nashville Public Library.

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276      Notes 27.  Although through the mid-2000s public discourse surrounding Latino migration to Nashville tightly linked the presence of Latino workers to the value of their labor, that framing did not translate into an interest in Latino labor from the perspective of Nashville’s economic development. Metro offices responsible for economic and community development explained in 2006 that they had not felt the “full effects” of Latino migration. Although companies interested in Nashville were “aware” of its Latino labor force, Latino labor was not a recruitment tool for Metro government, which instead sought to highlight higher-paying jobs and higher-skill workers. Metro officials charged with economic development identified Latino migration’s strongest impacts in the arena of social reproduction—education, health care, and other sites where “contestations” and “battles” over funding allocation were taking place. 28.  The idea of urban citizenship is not without precedent, even in the United States; see Varsanyi (2006). 29.  As mayor, Dean established the Mayor’s New Americans Advisory Council in 2009 (Americas Society 2009). 30.  Studies of immigrant reception in new destinations include Marrow (2005, 2009a), Rich and Miranda (2005), Nelson and Hiemstra (2008), and Ray and Morse (2004).

Chapter 7   1.  On urban multiculturalism, see Amin (2002), Fincher and Jacobs (1998), Foner (2007), and Lee (2002).   2.  For studies of the relationship between race and space, see Anderson (1987, 1988, 1991), Baldoz (2004), Ellis et al. (2004), Kobayashi and Peake (2000), and Mendieta (2004).   3.  The literature on race and immigration is immense. For examples, see Baldoz (2004), Barrett and Roediger (1997), Lee and Bean (2007), and Marrow (2009b).   4.  The nature and politics of intergroup contact may be the most dominant aspect of research on immigration. In the context of new destinations, see Brettell and Nibbs (2011), Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), McClain et al. (2006), O’Neil and Tienda (2010), Popke (2011), Selby et al. (2001), Fennelly and Federico (2008), and Nelson and Hiemstra (2008).   5.  Temporary protective status is a federal designation for immigrants who, for a variety of reasons, temporarily cannot safely reenter their home country. Often issued in the case of natural disasters or armed conflicts and typically requiring continual residence since a date established by the federal government, temporary protective status enables immigrants to stay in the United States and to work legally but limits their ability to return to their home country, even for visits.   6.  Exceptions to southeast Nashville’s silent streets could be found. Juana, a

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Notes      277 

  7. 

  8. 

 9. 

10. 

11.  12.  13. 

14.  15.  16. 

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Mexican woman in her mid-thirties who came to Nashville in 2004, lived in the same neighborhood as Laura. With “Hispanics all around” and lots of interaction among residents, Juana often felt “like this was Mexico.” Although she admitted that in her previous neighborhood her “American” neighbors “would barely say hello to us,” her life in Nashville, as seen through her Antioch neighborhood, challenged what she expected of life in the United States. “Before coming here,” she explained, “everyone told me that in the United States people are just locked up, because nobody goes out here. . . . But here in my neighborhood, it’s not like that.” Although Natalia had been in the United States longer than most of the other Latino immigrants in this study, she had returned to Mexico only once, in 1999. For studies of initiatives in new destinations to increase contact between new immigrants and long-term residents, see Alvarado and Jaret (2009), Stuesse (2009), Valdivia et al. (2011), and Williams and Smith (2006). Several scholars (for example, Odem 2009; Chaney 2010) note that Latino residents also comment on the silence of American religious services, especially mass, and the need to be quiet during them. The interdisciplinary literature on immigrant assimilation is as large as it is contested. For examples, see Zelinsky and Lee (1998), Waters and Jiménez (2005), Nelson and Hiemstra (2008), Lacy (2009), Vertovec (2010), Rouse (1991), Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc (1995), Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1995), Mountz and Wright (1996), Torres (1998), and Waldinger (2007). For studies on immigrant assimilation in relation to nonwhite groups, see Zhou (1997), Waters (1999), and Straughan and Hondagneu-Sotelo (2002). Jannell Ross and Chris Echegaray, “Deportation Policies Steer Illegal Immigrants to Shadows,” The Tennessean, July 2, 2009. Immigrant silence sometimes came at a price, especially for children. Sofía, a young Mexican woman who came to Nashville in 2004, said that she felt torn about return trips to Mexico, but her children loved them. There, she noted, “it feels as if you have more freedom. Kids can play outside. They can be playing late at night, and nobody is upset. . . . They love Mexico because they feel free there.” Although highly critical of her Mexican neighbors in Nashville who “try to live their lives as if they were in Mexico . . . to bring a little from there,” Sofía was ambivalent about what her family had sacrificed to be accepted in her apartment complex along Harding Place. See Marrow (2011) for a similar discussion of undocumented immigrants’ wishes to be law-abiding in a new destination. Silence was also sometimes the norm in the workplace. Diego told of an informal policy of not speaking at his workplace. Some Latino community leaders interpreted immigrant silence in similar

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278      Notes ways. A Central American woman who worked at a community center said, “It is almost like they think they are still in their own country. They haven’t changed at all. They get here, and they don’t even intend to change their ways. They want to live the same way they lived over there. They still need to adapt.” 17.  Studies of black-brown dynamics in new destinations include Mohl (2003, 2005), Alvarado and Jaret (2009), Fink (2009), Marrow (2009b, 2011), and Stuesse (2009). 18.  Historical studies of immigrants’ distancing themselves from African Americans and defining their own identities as closer to whites include Morrison (1992), Barrett and Roediger (1997), Foley (1997), and Arrendondo (2004). 19.  From the substantial literature on immigrant and native-born interactions in the context of work, see Lamphere et al. (1994), Nissen and Grenier (2001), Selby et al. (2001), Waldinger and Lichter (2003), and Barbara Ellen Smith (2006).

Chapter 8   1.  Work in the social sciences on the neighborhood is immense. For studies of the link between the neighborhood and group identity, see Campbell et al. (2009), Herbert (2005), and Martin (2003a, 2003b). For arguments that the neighborhood as a geographic place is less salient in contemporary (Western) societies, see Andersson and Musterd (2010) and Castells (2010).   2.  For work on this theme, see Odem (2004, 2009), Ellis (2006), Robinson (2010), Arrendondo (2004), Brettell and Nibbs (2011), Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), Selby et al. (2001), Shultz (2008), and Stuesse (2009).   3.  Although long-term residents put great emphasis on neighborhood memories, many of them, particularly men, admitted to having spent little time in their neighborhoods as young and middle-aged adults. A former elected official stressed that Woodbine was never empty during the day, largely because of stay-at-home mothers and its aging population. Many older men, however, “didn’t tarry” in Flatrock as adults, leaving for work each day and only sometimes working in the yard. Although they mourned neighborhood change, their sense of loss was largely symbolic, since few had spent very much time in the neighborhood.   4.  Although many Flatrock residents were older, the area also attracted younger residents, who had different frameworks for understanding neighborhood change. Beth and Eric, a young white couple, moved to Glencliff in 2003. Knowing “little to nothing” about Nashville, they chose Glencliff for its short commute to their jobs, its affordable homes in good condition, its proximity to major interstates, and its lack of gentrification. In contrast to older residents’ nostalgic definitions of Flatrock, Beth and Eric described Glencliff as

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Notes      279  “a bargain for the money” in “a very international region.” For them, Flatrock came into view not in relation to its past but in relation to other parts of Nashville. When I asked Beth and Eric what they knew about Glencliff before they bought there, Eric exclaimed, “Thank God we didn’t buy in Paragon Mills!” contrasting Glencliff with a nearby neighborhood understood to be in decline. This geographic rather than temporal comparison made Flatrock’s ethnic diversity not a radical change from the past but the norm for the area. More recent arrivals also brought a different sense of how neighborhood was bounded. Lacking long histories in the area, they discovered neighborhood boundaries and histories through involvement with neighborhood associations and time in the area, learning their neighborhood by contrasting it with other parts of the city, not with its past.   5.  2007 interview with long-term white residents conducted by Lisa Martin. In possession of the author.  6.  Ibid.   7.  Natalia Mielczarek, “At Glencliff, ‘It’s All About Your Culture,’” The Tennessean, November 28, 2003.   8.  For studies of the spatialities of immigrant reception in new destinations, see Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), Erwin (2003), Marrow (2009a, 2011), Odem (2004, 2009), Hiemstra and Nelson (2008), and Smith and Winders (2008).   9.  Monica Whitaker, “Melting Pot Worries,” The Tennessean, November 7, 2001. 10.  Lee Ann O’Neal, “Residents Object to Workers’ Gathering Spot,” The Tennessean, August 11, 2005. 11.  Andy Humbles, “El Protector Comes to East Davidson to Help the Hispanic Community,” The Tennessean, January 11, 2006. 12.  2007 interview with long-term residents who grew up in Tennessee Industrial School. In possession of the author. 13. Ibid. 14.  Interview with long-term white residents by Kris Bahlke and Lisa Martin, June 26, 2007. In possession of the author. 15.  This framing of immigration as an exogenous or external force that happens to local communities resonates with both popular images of globalization and economic restructuring and wider images of immigration that overlook the local draw, especially the benefits of cheap immigrant labor; see Ansley and Williams (1999). 16.  Interview with housing expert and former Woodbine councilman, conducted by Kris Bahlke, June 21, 2007. Transcript in possession of the author. 17.  For a discussion of the demise of such citizen-driven programs, see Jackson (2008). 18.  Interview with housing expert and former Woodbine councilman, conducted by Kris Bahlke, June 21, 2007. Transcript in possession of the author. 19. Ibid.

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280      Notes 20.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “Woodbine Celebrating 20 Years of Service to Community,” The Tennessean, January 11, 2006. 21.  Interview with housing expert and former Woodbine councilman, conducted by Kris Bahlke, June 21, 2007. Transcript in possession of the author. 22.  In 2010 a new Woodbine Neighborhood Association was recognized by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods. See Nancy DeVille, “Woodbine Neighbors Form Association,” The Tennessean, October 5, 2010. 23.  In 2004 the WCO was reconfigured again as it lost funding for several programs. Because by this point the WCO had become too important to close, organizations across the city, including Catholic Charities and Vanderbilt University, picked up sponsorship of the WCO’s programs. Immigrant services became Hispanic Family Services of Catholic Charities, and its language classes, emergency aid, and other programs moved to the building’s basement. The South Nashville Family Resource Center (SNFRC), which had been headquartered in the WCO, moved to a site farther south on Nolensville Road and was handed over to Vanderbilt University. Shortly after fieldwork for this study ended, Hispanic Family Services of Catholic Charities moved into the old Radnor Baptist Church, thus finalizing the split between neighborhood and community in the area by pulling immigrant services out of Woodbine altogether. 24.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “Flatrock Heritage Foundation Reaches Out to Hispanic Neighbors,” The Tennessean, February 15, 2006. 25.  Woodbine file, Nashville Public Library. 26.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “Area Can Officially Call Itself Cane Ridge,” The Tennessean, December 15, 2006. 27.  Suzanne Normand Blackwood, “Cane Ridge Center Celebrates Centennial,” The Tennessean, October 6, 2008. 28.  Jannell Ross, “Post Office Puts Stamp on Cane Ridge Area,” The Tennessean, October 19, 2007. 29. Ibid. 30.  The exclusion of apartments was not universal for neighborhood associations. In another part of Antioch, closer to Flatrock, a neighborhood asso­ ciation was formed in 2005, the same year its president noticed a growing immigrant population. Although some residents wanted the association’s boundaries to skip “the problem area of the ghetto,” where immigrants, as well as residents displaced from demolished public housing, lived, the association president wanted to include these areas in the official boundaries of the neighborhood so that they could be monitored. 31.  Studies of such translocal, or transnational, connections include Lacy (2009), Striffler (2007), Mountz and Wright (1996), Rouse (1991), and Robert Smith (2006).

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Notes      281 

Chapter 9   1.  Marsha Warden, “Metro After Desegregation; Multiculturalism Has Changed What We Do,” The Tennessean, December 18, 2006.   2.  Jaime Sarrio, “Cane Ridge High to Open, Remain Under Construction,” The Tennessean, July 23, 2008.   3.  Jaime Sarrio, “Metro Schools Plan to Rezone,” The Tennessean, October 10, 2007.   4.  Jannell Ross, “NAACP Objects to Metro Schools Rezoning Plan,” The Tennessean, November 3, 2007; Jaime Sarrio, “School Zone Plan Rekindles Old Worries,” The Tennessean, October 14, 2007.   5.  Ross, “NAACP Objects to Metro Schools Rezoning Plan.”   6.  Sarrio, “School Zone Plan Rekindles Old Worries.”   7.  Ross, “NAACP Objects to Metro Schools Rezoning Plan.”   8.  Angela Patterson, “Stratford Cluster Rezoning on Hold, but Issues Remain,” The Tennessean, November 28, 2007; Jaime Sarrio, “School Board Delegates Panel to Create Zones,” The Tennessean, January 3, 2008.   9.  Jannell Ross, “NAACP Calls on Metro Schools to Reconsider Rezoning,” The Tennessean. August 4, 2008. 10.  Jaime Sarrio, “Cane Ridge High to Open in 2008,” The Tennessean, November 15, 2006. 11.  Chris Echegaray, “School Rezoning Fallout Lessens,” The Tennessean, September 8, 2010. The child of the parents named in the lawsuit attended John Early Middle School in north Nashville. Weeks into the school year, her school had no textbooks, leading the U.S. district judge to order the district to get textbooks into students’ hands within twenty-four hours. 12.  Clay Carey, “Witnesses Say Rezoning Resegregates,” The Tennessean, November 5, 2009. 13.  Clay Carey, “Race Issue Arose in Nashville Schools Rezoning Discussion,” The Tennessean, November 6, 2009. 14.  Ross, “NAACP Objects to Metro Schools Rezoning Plan.” 15.  Sarrio, “Metro Schools Plan to Rezone.” 16.  Work on cultural contact in new destinations that addresses both immigrants and long-term residents includes Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008), Ley (1995), Nelson and Hiemstra (2008), Marrow (2011), and Shutika (2005, 2011). 17.  Studies of the politics of these historical connections in new destinations include Winders and Smith (2010), Stuesse (2009), and Alvarado and Jaret (2009). 18.  Notable works on gender and immigration include Crespo (1994), Gonzalez (2001), Lawson (1998), Mahler and Pessar (2006), Silvey (2006), Parreñas (2005), and Constable (1999).

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282      Notes 19.  Rick Moore, “Flatrock Music and Arts Festival Shows Off Neighborhood Diversity,” The Tennessean, May 30, 2008. 20.  See the Flatrock Heritage Foundation website at http://flatrockheritage.com (accessed March 12, 2012). 21.  See the Welcoming America website at http://www.welcomingamerica.org (accessed March 12, 2012). 22.  Duane Marsteller, “Tennessee’s Job Gains Bypass Latinos,” The Tennessean, March 3, 2012.

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Index

Boldface numbers refer to figures and tables. affordable housing, 38 African Americans: busing support, 83; on Cane Ridge reestablishment, 226; cultural history, 24; in Murfreesboro Road area, 61; North Nashville, 60, 83, 132, 269n30; population, 254, 255; Providence neighborhood, 52–53; social interactions and tensions with Latinos, 23, 38, 189–94, 253–56. See also Antioch; race and racial issues AGLA (American General Life and Accident), 270n15 Alabama: racial issues, 23; undocumented immigrants, 273n7 Alexander, Glenda, 241 American identity, 119–20, 199, 231, 251 Amin, Ash, 236 amnesty, 18 anthropology, 29 anti-immigrant attitudes and laws: and American identity conflicts, 199; changes since late 2000s, 22, 71–73; of long-term residents, 206; against undocumented immigrants, 125, 158–59; white hostility, 22, 177, 257 Antioch: African American–Latino immigrant relations, 190; boundaries of, 46–47, 64; Cane Ridge reestablishment, 225–28, 237, 239; demographics and demographic changes, 64, 171, 209–10; development and ex-

pansion of, 51, 54, 63–64; history of, 62–63; map of, 170; public image of, 62, 65–66; school desegregation, 81 Antioch High School, 63, 64, 81, 239 Antioch Together, 65 apartments, 61, 63, 69, 70, 96 archival research, 33 Arkansas: immigrant incorporation challenges, 257; Latino immigrants in, 17 assimilation, 178–89, 264n28 Atlanta: Latino immigrant settlement, 23 auto dealers, 152 AVCO, 267n15 awareness, of race, ethnicity, and cultural differences, 135 Bean, Frank, 136 belonging, 73–75, 196, 202–3 bilingual education, 85, 272n16 birth rates, 18 blackness, 189–94 blacks. See African Americans border control, 14, 22, 159 Borges, Juan, 144 Brettell, Caroline, 59–60, 181, 199, 231 Briley, David, 161, 162 Brown v. Board of Education, 78 Brubaker, Rogers, 178 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, 45, 133 busing, 64, 78–83, 91–92, 94–96, 216–18

309

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310      Index Cabell, Meredith, 163 cafeterias, 116 California: new urbanism, 146; racial identity of high school students, 90– 91; racial issues, 22–23 Campbell, Elizabeth, 49, 245 Cane Ridge, 225–28, 237, 239 Cane Ridge High School, 239–41 Castagno, Angelina, 135 Catholics, 57, 263n11 census data. See U.S. Census Bureau Central High School, 53, 63, 216 Chaney, James, 70 Chicanos, 118. See also Mexican immigrants churches and religious institutions, 2–3, 56–57, 263n11, 265n39, 277n9 citizenship, 35, 119, 149 civil rights, 127–34, 273n2 classrooms, handling diversity in, 116–22 cleanliness, 183 codes enforcement, 152–54, 177, 186 Codes Department, 153–54, 177 collective memory, 202, 203–7, 274n9 (ch. 5) color-blind approach, 109–16 comparative analysis, 133–34 Conexión Américas, 155–56 conflicts, 214 construction, 13–14, 61 contextual approach, 246–48 corporate investment, 82 cost of living, 18, 20 Cuadros, Paul, 118, 123 Cuban refugees, 145 cultural context, for immigrant settlement, 23–24 cultural differences, 99–101, 112, 273n3 cultural festivals, 258–59 daily experiences, 67–73. See also social interactions Dallas, Texas: diversity study, 59–60, 181 Dalton, Georgia, 23 dances, school, 97–98

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Davidson County: foreign-born population, 149; public school merger with Metro Nashville Public Schools, 79–81; suburban expansion, 53–54; 287(g) program, 33, 72, 125, 159, 162. See also specific cities and neighborhoods Davis, Mike, 151 day laborers, 30, 61, 68, 215–16 Dean, Karl, 161 Deeb-Sossa, Natalia, 125, 156, 229 demographics and demographic changes: Cane Ridge, 226–27; longterm residents on, 207–12; Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, 19, 83, 85, 143, 238; Nashville, 5, 13–15, 18– 19, 233; southeast Nashville, 43–44, 54–62, 64, 149–50, 170–71, 207–12, 253–56 deportations, 72 de-raced language, 90, 98–101, 105, 108, 110 desegregation of schools: busing, 64, 78–83, 91–92, 94–96, 216–18; neighborhood activism, 145; and rezoning plan, 237–42 detentions, 159 Devine, Dympna, 102 Dickar, Maryann, 100–101, 111, 129–30 diasporic identity, 134 diversity: definition of, 114–16; political issues, 273n3; teachers’ descriptions of, 76–106; teachers’ responses to, 107–37 Diversity in Dialogue (DID), 1–4 domestic violence shelters, 163 Doyle, Don, 263n10 Dozier, Buck, 161, 162 driver’s licenses, 22, 72, 158 East Nashville, 60 Eaton, Kenneth, 161 Ebert, Kim, 165 economic growth, 18, 20–21 economics, 30 education, 35–36, 84, 85, 99, 272n16. See also public schools

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Index      311 Eff, Anthony, 263n20 elderly residents, 58–60 elementary schools, 106. See also Morgan Elementary ELLs (English-language learners). See English-language learners (ELLs) employment: day laborers, 30, 61, 215– 16; of early Latino immigrants, 13; literature review, 264n29; low-wage work, 34; recruitment of Latino workers, 18, 252; self-employment, 268n29; social interaction in workplace, 172, 194–97; violence against workers, 29; work hours and schedules, 175–76, 177 enclaves, immigrant, 6, 70 English as a second language (ESL) students, 84–86, 87 English-language learners (ELLs): history of programs for, 84–86; impact of label, 103–5; teachers’ descriptions of, 89–101, 112, 251. See also teachers’ responses to diversity in classrooms English language proficiency, 2, 71, 150, 177. See also English-language learners (ELLs) English-only ordinances, 159 ESL (English as a second language) students, 84–86, 87 ethnic identity, 264n27 exclusion through history, 27, 199, 203, 235 family reunification, 22 fear, 69–70 Fellows Middle School: ELL students, 88–89, 103–6; focus groups, 252; teachers’ diversity descriptions, 96– 99; teachers’ diversity responses, 115–16, 117, 121 Fenster, Tovi, 73 fieldwork, 32–34 Fink, Leon, 251 Flatrock: commercial development, 151–52; demographic changes, 54– 62, 170–71, 208–9; Hands Together in Flatrock Music and Art Festival, 258;

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history of, 48–54; long-term residents, 206–7; map of, 170; mural marking southern boundary, 224–25; neighborhood association, 223–25. See also Glencliff; Radnor; Woodbine Flatrock Heritage Foundation (FHF), 223–25 focus groups, 252 Foner, Nancy, 242 foreign-born population, 5, 13, 16, 149 framing, 246–48 friendship, 176, 195. See also social interactions Future of Neighborhoods Summit, 149 Garcia, Pedro, 272n24 gateway cities, 6, 17, 19–20, 233 gender issues, 256, 263n23 Gentry, Howard, 162 Georgia: anti-immigrant attitudes, 22, 38; Latino population, 17 German immigrants, 7 Gill, Hannah, 30 Glencliff: boundaries, 49; busing’s impact on, 217; demographic changes, 208, 211–12, 213–14; history of, 50, 51; long-term residents, 206, 207; public image of, 48; quiet norm, 178; social interactions, 188 Glencliff Neighborhood Association, 148 Grewal, Inderpal, 120 group identity, 278n1 Guatemalan immigrants: anti-black attitudes, 190, 192; assimilation to American neighborhood norms, 183; neighborhood understanding, 205; poultry worker strike in North Carolina, 251; social interactions, 173, 175, 187; study participation, 33 Hands Together in Flatrock Music and Art Festival, 258 Harding Place, 70 Harmon, Teresa, 199 health care, 143, 155 Hernández-León, Rubén, 263n23

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312      Index Hickory Hollow Mall, 63, 65–66 Hiemstra, Nancy, 74–75 higher education, 30 Hispanic Family Resource Center (HFRC), 155 Hispanioch, 19, 62, 171, 225. See also Antioch historical contextualization, 9, 78, 246 history lessons, 127–34 Hmong refugees, 13, 57–58 Hobson, Fred, 132 Hoelscher, Steve, 229 home, sense of, 270n56 homelessness, 66 homeownership, 211–12, 270n19 Honduran immigrants: assimilation to neighborhood norms, 180, 186; neighborhood experiences, 68; neighborhood understanding, 205; social interaction, 175–76, 195, 196– 97, 230 HOPE-VI projects, 65 hostility, 22, 177, 257 housing, 64–66, 69–70, 96, 269n30 Human Relations Commission, 156, 162 identity: American, 119–20, 199, 231, 251; of California high school students, 90–91; construction in relation to long-term residents, 29; definitions of, 26–28; diasporic, 134; multiracial, 91; place-based, 249–51 Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act (1996), 159 immigrant enclaves, 6, 70 immigrant incorporation: historical context, 26–27; literature review, 30, 31, 39, 264n3–5, 264n28, 265n35, 274n4; local community’s importance, 256–60; in local institutions, 141–42, 165; school’s role, 103–6, 122–23; and social interaction in neighborhoods, 172–73 immigrant reception: changes since

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late 2000s, 71–73; in institutional settings, 264n30; literature review, 25– 26, 261–62n4, 264n30, 265n34, 273n6, 276n30; neighborhood efforts, 259; in neighborhood efforts, 264n30; teachers’ responses, 122–27; in workplace, 264n30 Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), 18 incorporation, immigrant. See immigrant incorporation inequality, 35 institutional visibility of Latino immigrants, 138–67; and city’s lack of preparedness for Latino settlement, 142–45; and immigrant settlement geographies, 149–51; introduction, 138–42; invisibility problem, 164–67; and neighborhood activism, 145–49; New American Community Initiative, 161–64; and population growth, 164; social services, 154–59; through zoning and codes enforcement process, 151–54; in urban planning efforts, 138–40, 160–61 intergroup contact, 276n4. See also social interactions intergroup dynamics, 26, 29, 39, 242– 43, 244 International Newcomer Academy, 274n12 interstate expansion, 19, 47, 145 interviews, 31–32 Inwood, Josh, 106 Irish immigrants, 7 Ivy-Woods abuse scandal, 144 Jewett, Sarah, 89 Jim Crow laws, 127–29 Johnson-Webb, Karen, 252 Jones-Correa, Michael, 266n49 Kelly, Mary, 102 Kim, Claire, 114, 128 King, D. A., 38 Kruse, Kevin, 39, 82

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Index      313 Ku Klux Klan, 270n49 Kurdish refugees, 13, 57, 119, 128–29 Ladson-Billings, Gloria, 99–100 language: as proxy for race and ethnicity, 90, 91, 92–96; teachers’ use of deraced language, 90, 98–101, 105, 108, 110 language barriers, 2, 71, 150, 177. See also English-language learners (ELLs) Laotian immigrants, 57 Lassiter, Matthew, 39, 82 Latinos: arrival and settlement, 5–7, 13–15, 142–45; countries of origin, 14; definition of, 95; place-based identity, 250; population, 16–19, 57, 58, 59; public school enrollment, 85; social interactions and tensions with African Americans, 23, 38, 189–94, 253–56; stereotypes of, 179, 182–85, 190–91. See also specific groups; specific index headings La Vergne, 180, 205 law enforcement, 22, 71–72, 143–44, 159, 215 laws and legislation: Jim Crow laws, 127–29; local ordinances, 22. See also specific legislative acts Lee, Jennifer, 136 leisure, 264n29 “Little Mexico.” See Woodbine local government: anti-immigration laws, 22; immigrant incorporation role, 141–42, 165; neoliberal redistributions of service provision, 154–59. See also institutional visibility of Latino immigrants local past, 24, 26–27, 203, 225 loneliness, 69, 185 long-term residents, 200–231; desire to bring back old neighborhoods, 218– 28; immigrant incorporation impact, 256–60; introduction, 200–203; literature review, 25–26; memory of neighborhoods, 203–7; methodologi-

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cal approach, 244–45; on neighborhood changes, 198–99, 207–18; place-based identity, 250; social interaction with immigrants, 187–89, 197–98 low-wage work, 34 Maira, Sunaina, 134 Mapco gas station, 210, 215, 228 Marrow, Helen, 7, 8, 20, 38–39, 106, 122–23, 132–33, 141–42, 156, 191, 252 Martin, Deborah, 106 Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods (MON), 147–49, 150, 151, 152, 153 McClain, Paula, 191 McConnell, Eileen, 45 media, 47, 126 Medicaid, 143 Mendez, Jennifer Bickham, 125, 156, 229 mental mapping, 253 methodology, 28–40, 42–43, 86–89, 243– 47 Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, 143–44 Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS): bilingual programs, 272n16; English-language learners (ELL), 84– 86; establishment of, 79; high school graduation rates, 103; listening forums on racial justice, 136; No Child Left Behind, 84; participation in study, 31–32, 107, 114; refugee support programs, 274n12; rezoning plan, 237–42; student demographics, 19, 83, 85, 143, 238; teacher demographics, 271n1; teachers’ descriptions of diversity in classrooms, 89–101; teachers’ responses to diversity in classrooms, 107–37. See also desegregation of schools; Fellows Middle School; Morgan Elementary Metropolitan Refugee Services Program (MRSP), 157 Metropolitan Social Services (MSS), 157–58

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314      Index Mexican immigrants: on African American neighborhoods, 192–94; anti-black attitudes, 190; arrival and settlement of, 7; assimilation to American neighborhood norms, 182–83, 186–87; daily life, 67, 69, 175, 185; day laborers, 215–16; hostility toward, 72, 73; housing location decision, 70, 184; literature review, 23; long-term residents’ views, 206; neighborhood understanding, 68, 204, 205; population, 17; quiet norm, 179, 181; social interactions, 174, 176, 177, 181, 182, 196; stereotypes of, 182; study participation, 33; transnational practices, 257; on white American lifestyle, 185–86; in Woodbine, 56–57 migration, secondary domestic vs. direct international, 262n9 Migration Policy Institute, 72 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, new urbanism, 146 mimicry, 180–81 Miraftab, Faranak, 45 Mississippi: racial issues, 23 MNPS (Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools). See Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) mobility, population, 68–69, 177 MON (Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods), 147–49, 150, 151, 152, 153 Monkman, Karen, 135 Morgan Elementary: mapping of student and teacher birthplaces, 134–36; 9/11 impact, 120; study participation, 32; teachers’ diversity descriptions, 76, 87–88, 91–97, 102–6; teachers’ diversity responses, 115, 117 MRSP (Metropolitan Refugee Services Program), 157 MSS (Metropolitan Social Services), 157–58 multicultural education, 99–100, 110 multiculturalism, 23, 111, 237–43 multiracial identity, 91

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Murfreesboro Road: apartments along, 70, 175, 183, 205; businesses, 47, 207, 213; day laborers, 30, 61, 68, 215–16; Latino immigrants’ understanding of, 47; Mapco gas station, 210, 215, 228; map of, 46; public image of, 61, 207 music festivals, 258 Muslims, 119 NAACP, 239 Nashville: demographic changes, 5, 13–15, 18–19, 232; economic growth (1990s), 21; institutional visibility of Latino immigrants, 138–67; interstate expansion, 19, 47, 145; Latino immigrant arrival and settlement, 5–7, 23; map of, 14; research methodology, 28–40, 42–43, 86–89, 243–47; research scope, 4–5. See also Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS); neighborhoods The Nashville Scene, 144 national identity, 35 neighborhood associations: in Antioch, 63–64, 65; Diversity in Dialogue series, 3; in Flatrock, 223–25; in Glencliff, 148; and Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods, 147–49, 150, 151, 152, 153; role and missions of, 152, 218–25; study participation, 33; in Woodbine, 223; zoning request responses, 152–54 Neighborhood Resource Center for Neighborhoods of Nashville (NRC), 148–49, 151, 153 neighborhoods: boundaries, 229; Diversity in Dialogue series, 1–4; fieldwork, 33–34; future research needs, 253–56; historical frame of reference, 43; immigration issues, 34, 41; Latino immigrants’ sense of belonging, 73– 75, 202–3; literature review, 38–39, 278n2–3; Nashville’s planning for immigrants in, 140–41; role of, 37–40; understanding of, 67–69, 200–201, 204–5, 229–31, 245; welcoming initia-

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Index      315 tives, 259. See also long-term residents; social interactions; specific neighborhoods Neighborhoods Organized to Initiate Codes Enforcement (NOTICE) program, 153–54 Neighborhood Strategy Area (NSA) program, 219–20 Neighbors of Antioch, 63–64, 65 Nelson, Lise, 74–75 neoliberalism, 154–59 New American Community Initiative, 161–64 New England, immigrant population growth, 262n7 new immigrant destinations, 13–40; American identity, 231; assimilation, 179; future research needs, 251–56; vs. gateway cities, 20–21; introduction, 13–16; literature review, 16, 25– 28, 243–44; methodology, 243–47; results of study, 243–51; in the South, 16–25. See also Nashville new urbanism, 146–49 New York: color-blind education, 111; Indian youth culture, 134; multiculturalism in, 23, 93, 242; race discussions in schools, 100, 111, 129–30 Nguyen, Mai, 30 Nibbs, Faith, 59–60, 181, 199, 231 Nicaraguan immigrants, 72, 173, 194– 95 9/11/01, 14, 22, 120 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001), 84, 99 Nolensville Road: apartments along, 69, 184, 186, 211; businesses, 49, 52, 58–59, 70, 212; expansion (1950s), 50; Flatrock mural, 224; long-term residents’ views of, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210; map of, 46; Planning Department draft concept plan meeting, 138–40 nonprofit institutions, 154–59. See also institutional visibility of Latino immigrants

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norms, social, 178–89 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 18 North Carolina: African American-Latino immigrant relations, 191; busing, 80; Guatemalan poultry worker strike, 251; immigrant labor recruitment, 252; Latino immigrants in, 7, 17, 38, 122–23, 156, 252; Latino student cohorts, 118; racial issues, 23; Scottish heritage celebrations, 264n27; social services, 125 North Nashville, 60, 83, 132, 269n30 NOTICE (Neighborhoods Organized to Initiate Codes Enforcement) program, 153–54 NRC (Neighborhood Resource Center for Neighborhoods of Nashville), 148–49, 151, 153 NSA (Neighborhood Strategy Area) program, 219–20 Okamoto, Dina, 165 Omi, Michael, 82, 110, 131 O’Neil, Kevin, 122 Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, 57 Paragon Mills, 179–80, 211 place, as proxy for race and ethnicity, 90, 92–94, 96 place-based identity, 249–51 Planning Department, Metro Nashville, 138–40, 146–47, 152 The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City, 160 police, 22, 71–72, 143–44, 159, 215 political issues: diversity’s impact, 232–37; literature review, 30, 273n1; teachers’ responses in classrooms, 122–27, 137 political machines, 145 political participation, 30 political science, 30 politicians, 161–62, 164–65 Pollock, Mica, 37, 89, 90–91, 99, 100, 101, 113

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316      Index population: African Americans, 254, 255; foreign-born, 5, 13, 16, 149; Latinos, 16–19, 57, 58, 59; whites, 55, 56. See also demographics and demographic changes poultry-processing plants, 18 prejudice. See anti-immigrant attitudes and laws private schools, 83 profiling, 144 Providence, 52–53 public housing, 60, 65–66 public schools: desegregation, 64, 78– 83, 145; future research needs, 252– 56; and immigrant incorporation, 103–6; immigration issues, 34–37, 41; literature review, 35–36; place-based identity, 250–51; role of, 35–37, 106. See also Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) Purcell, Bill, 145–48, 223 race and racial issues: African American-Latino immigrant tensions, 189– 94; historical baggage, 242; immigration impact, 241–42; Latino immigrants’ knowledge of, 8, 29; Latino immigrants’ place in hierarchy, 162–63, 172, 194; literature review, 276n2–3; Metro Nashville Public Schools’ forum on, 136; segregation, 6, 38, 78–79, 104–5, 131–32; in the South, 22–23; stereotypes, 179, 182– 85, 190–91; teachers’ descriptions of, 89–91, 97–100, 108–9; young children, 118 racial categorization, 89–91, 99, 110, 270n55 racial distancing, 28, 30, 133, 191–92, 264n28 racial identity, 90–91, 127–34, 197– 98 Radnor: demographic changes, 208–9; history of, 49, 50, 51, 52; long-term residents, 200, 206; map of, 46; social interactions, 188–89

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Radnor Baptist Church, 57, 209 Radnor College, 49 Radnor Yards, 49, 50, 51 railroads, 49, 62, 224 real estate market, 269n31 reception of immigrants. See immigrant reception recession (2007-2008), 259–60 refugees, 145, 157. See also specific groups relationships, 74. See also social interactions religious institutions and churches, 2–3, 56–57, 263n11, 265n39, 277n9 research methodology, 28–40, 42–43, 86–89, 243–47 research participants, 32–34 resegregation, Metro Nashville Public Schools’ rezoning plan as, 237–42 residential segregation, 6, 38 rights, immigration marches for, 123– 24, 128, 158–59 Ritz, Thor, 170 Rocco, Raymond, 165 Roman Catholic Church, 57, 263n11 Ruben, Matthew, 66 rural areas: Antioch, 62, 63, 225; bilocal connections with Latin American communities, 262n1; Flatrock, 49, 51; future research needs, 252; intergroup dynamics, 264n31; literature review, 26; Nashville’s cultural links to, 6; North Carolina study, 123, 156, 252 Salvadoran immigrants: on African American-Latino immigrant relations, 190; assimilation to American neighborhood norms, 178, 183–84; belonging, 74; on Cane Ridge, 228; living arrangements, 69; loneliness, 69–70; neighborhood understanding, 205; settlement, 68; social interactions, 168, 173–75, 181–82, 187, 196; study participation, 33 sampling techniques, 33–34

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Index      317 Sanchez, Sandra, 32, 138 Schein, Richard, 198 secondary migration, 22 second-generation immigrants, 35, 85, 119, 134, 198 segregation, 6, 38, 78–79, 104–5, 131– 32 self-employment, 269n29 September 11, 2001, 14, 22, 120 service sector, 21 silence: assimilation through, 178–89; in southeast Nashville neighborhoods, 173–78 Singer, Audrey, 257 social distancing, 28–29, 30, 133, 191– 92, 264n28 social interactions, 168–99; between African Americans and Latino immigrants, 189–94; and immigrants’ understanding of racial hierarchy, 172; introduction, 168–73; lack of, 68, 173–78; Latinos’ assimilation to quiet norm, 178–89; in schools, 116; in workplace, 172, 194–97 socialization, 35 social networks, 38, 196, 205 social norms, 178–89 social services: children’s health care, 143; Hickory Hollow Mall clinic, 65– 66; Latinos’ access to and use of, 26, 30, 163, 166; literature review, 34, 265n34; neoliberal transition, 154–59; Woodbine Community Organization (WCO), 139, 155, 220–23. See also institutional visibility of Latino immigrants social space, appropriation of, 214 sociology, 29, 165 Somali refugees, 270n28, 274n12 Sontany, Janis, 102 the South: history taught in schools, 127–34; new immigrant destinations in, 16–25 southeast Nashville, 41–75; boundaries of, 45–48; demographic changes, 43– 44, 54–62, 64, 149–50, 253–56; foreign-

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born population, 149; immigrants’ experiences in, 67–73; immigrants’ sense of belonging, 73–75; introduction, 41–45; map of, 46, 170; public image, 166–67. See also Antioch; Flatrock Stack, Carol, 132 stereotypes, 179, 182–85, 190–91 Stoll, Joe, 170 Striffler, Steve, 20, 257 strikes, 251 students. See public schools suburbs and suburbanization, 39, 66, 82, 266n49 symbolism, 133 teachers: of ELLs, 273n28; immigrant student identities, 28; interview questions, 36–37; Latinos, 271n1; literature review, 36; training, 99–100, 135 teachers’ descriptions of diversity in classrooms, 76–106; at Fellows Middle School, 96–99; historical context, 78–86; immigrant incorporation implications, 102–6; introduction, 76– 78; methodology, 86–89; at Morgan Elementary, 91–97; racial and ethnic categorization of students, 89–91, 97–100, 108–9 teachers’ responses to diversity in classrooms, 107–37; classroom impact, 116–22; color-blind approach, 109–16; history lessons, 127–34; introduction, 107–9; political context, 122–27, 137 temporary protective status, 276n5 TENNderCARE, 143 The Tennessean, 57, 124, 144, 226, 237– 38 Tennessee: English-language learners, 84; foreign-born population, 17 Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), 2–3 Thompson Lane, 49, 50–51 Tienda, Marta, 122

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318      Index TIRRC (Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition), 2–3 transnational practices: of Arkansas immigrants, 257; and belonging, 196–97; literature review, 29, 262n1, 264n28, 280n31; neighborhood impact, 179; social networks, 266n47 transnational studies, 133–34 287(g) program, 33, 72, 125, 159, 162 undocumented immigrants: Alabama’s tracking of, 273n7; police surveillance, 71–72; political debate, 158–59; rights of, 123–24, 128, 158–59; sampling techniques, 33–34; teachers’ responses to, 122–27; 287(g) program, 33, 72, 125, 159, 162 unemployment rate, 21 urban citizenship, 276n28 urban planning, 138–40, 146–47, 152, 160–61 U.S. Census Bureau: African American population by census tract, 254, 255; Hispanic population by census tract, 58, 59; white population by census tract, 55, 56 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 263n11 Varsanyi, Monica, 275n20 Vaught, Sabina, 135 Veninga, Catherine, 272n20 Villatoro, Marco McPeek, 270n18 Vinlove, Kathleen, 263n21 violence, 29 Virginia: social services, 125 visibility of immigrants. See institutional visibility of Latino immigrants

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Wal-Mart, 213 Warden, Marsha, 237–38 “water fountain” question, teachers’ responses, 127–34 WCO (Woodbine Community Organization), 139, 155, 220–23 Weber, T. C., 258 Welcoming America initiative, 259 “Welcoming Tennessee” campaign, 248–49 white flight, 67, 79–83, 216–17 whiteness, 185–86, 189 whites: percentage of population by census tract, 55, 56, 57; school enrollment decline, 113–14. See also longterm residents Williams, Fannie, 219 Winant, Howard, 82, 110, 131 Woodbine: boundaries of, 47, 49–50, 51; community development block grants, 276n29; decline of, 54; demographic changes, 54–61, 208, 210; Diversity in Dialogue (DID) series, 1–4; history of, 50, 51, 52–53; population, 50; social interactions, 177, 188 Woodbine Community Organization (WCO), 139, 155, 220–23 Woodbine Neighbors, 223 Woodbine Sewing Club, 219 Woodbine Welfare Organization, 219– 20 Woodward, David, 81, 82 work hours and schedules, 175–76, 177 workplace. See employment zoning, 151–54 Zúñiga, Víctor, 263n23

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