Lexington Books
Pages: 180
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7391-4626-2 • eBook • September 2010 • $92.00 • (£71.00)
Miranda J. Martinez is assistant professor in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
1 Chapter 1: Introduction
2 Chapter 2: Class Cultures in Conflict
3 Chapter 3: How to Tame a Neighborhood
4 Chapter 4: Bello Amanecer Borincano
5 Chapter 5: The Symbolic Lower East Side
A nuanced and captivating story of community gardens and the gentrification process in New York's Lower East Side in the late 1990s, Power at the Roots shows how Puerto Ricans resisted the larger political and economic processes. Through her detailed knowledge of the gardeners and political activists, Miranda Martinez creates an engaging tale of efforts by gardeners, both Puerto Rican and gentrifiers, to frame their needs to stave off the economic and political pressures for sale of the land for housing. While recent studies of gentrification have argued that the process improves life for all groups, this book demonstrates that the Puerto Rican community was deeply affected by the process and lost both gardens and housing.
— Ruth Horowitz, New York University and author of Honor and the American Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community
Beneath the sweeping generalizations about "gentrification" and "racial conflict" lie the stories of how diverse people create, fight over, and sometimes come to share the public spaces of the city. Looking at one of America's most fascinating neighborhoods, Manhattan's Lower East Side, Miranda Martinez has given us a nuanced portrait of how a rich urban community life has been created, why it is now under threat, and how, sometimes, it can be defended.
— Philip Kasinitz, City University of New York
Martinez's brilliant and timely ethnography offers great insight into the interaction between urban policy, governance, and Latino social movements by providing a missing piece to much of the sociological and geographical scholarship on New York City: the story of the gardeners who made Loisaida and transformed the landscape of the Lower East Side. This is a must-read work for anyone interested in the origins and effects of local activism.
— Arlene Davila, New York University
The empirically rich and politically engaged analysis of the community garden experiences in the context of gentrification of the Lower East Side is useful for academics interested in the detailed recent history of community gardens in the Lower East Side, in critical race studies and in accounts of local struggles against gentrification.... Moreover, as it is a very accessible book avoiding too much academic jargon, it is certainly also of interest to activists and other people who lived through these experiences, preserving the memory of their struggles.
— Urban Studies