The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (The anthropology of contemporary issues)

New
Paperback
2000
$26.69

Before the next century is out, Americans of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry will outnumber those of European origin. In the Elmhurst-Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York City, the transition occurred during the 1970s, and the area's two-decade experience of multiracial diversity offers us an early look at the future of urban America. The result of more than a dozen years' work, this remarkable book immerses us in Elmhurst-Corona's social and political life from the 1960s through the 1990s.

First settled in 1652, Elmhurst-Corona by 1960 housed a mix of Germans, Irish, Italians, and other white ethnics. In 1990 this population made up less than a fifth of its residents; Latin American and Asian immigrants and African Americans comprised the majority. The Future of Us All focuses on the combined impact of racial change, immigrant settlement, governmental decentralization, and assaults on local quality of life which stemmed from the city's 1975 fiscal crisis and the policies of its last three mayors. The book examines the ways in which residents-in everyday interactions, block and tenant associations, houses of worship, small business coalitions, civic rituals, incidents of ethnic and racial hostility, and political struggles against overdevelopment, for more schools, and for youth programs-have forged and tested alliances across lines of race, ethnicity, and language.

From the telling local details of daily life to the larger economic and regional frameworks, this account of a neighborhood's transformation illuminates the issues that American communities will be grappling with in the coming decades.

Synopsis

Before the next century is out, Americans of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry will outnumber those of European origin. In the Elmhurst-Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York City, the transition occurred during the 1970s, and the area's two-decade experience of multiracial diversity offers us an early look at the future of urban America. The result of more than a dozen years' work, this remarkable book immerses us in Elmhurst-Corona's social and political life from the 1960s through the 1990s.

First settled in 1652, Elmhurst-Corona by 1960 housed a mix of Germans, Irish, Italians, and other white ethnics. In 1990 this population made up less than a fifth of its residents; Latin American and Asian immigrants and African Americans comprised the majority. The Future of Us All focuses on the combined impact of racial change, immigrant settlement, governmental decentralization, and assaults on local quality of life which stemmed from the city's 1975 fiscal crisis and the policies of its last three mayors. The book examines the ways in which residents-in everyday interactions, block and tenant associations, houses of worship, small business coalitions, civic rituals, incidents of ethnic and racial hostility, and political struggles against overdevelopment, for more schools, and for youth programs-have forged and tested alliances across lines of race, ethnicity, and language.

From the telling local details of daily life to the larger economic and regional frameworks, this account of a neighborhood's transformation illuminates the issues that American communities will be grappling with in the coming decades.

$26.69

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Edition: illustrated edition
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 24 Feb 2000
ISBN 10: 0801484618
ISBN 13: 9780801484612

Media Reviews

The book is very well written. . . . and its conclusions are solid. . . . It has an excellent bibliography. -Choice
Roger Sanjek tells a complex tale with empathy, subtlety, and wit. . . . In Elmhurst-Corona, he has found a rough-and-tumble model of diversity that puts the torturously self-conscious multi-culturalism of elite college campuses to shame. It is a story that more Americans should know and one that should give New Yorkers a lot more to think about on their next ride to the airport. -Lingua Franca
This is a very optimistic book. . . . Sanjek's discussion of quality-of-life issues and the decline of manufacturing are especially important. . . . The Future of Us All is an interesting and important look at changes in urban America during the last third of the twentieth century. -Dominic A. Pacyga, Journal of American History
A major accomplishment, an important book, and a rich and readable social history. -Anthropology Newsletter
This impressive book brings together qualitative examination accompanying prolonged immersion in . . . the field and a sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity as these factors manifest themselves in the everyday lives of people. . . . Sanjek makes abundantly clear that Elmhurst-Corona is a microcosm of the racial and ethnic complexity that is and in a few years will even more visibly become characteristic of the entire country. . . . His appraisal is a healthy and invaluable reminder that the task ahead is not an easy one and requires the committed effort of both individual residents and the government. -Rajini Srikanth, Amerasia Journal
A blueprint for fieldwork in contemporary urban settings. . . . Roger Sanjek's The Future of Us All provides us with three gifts. First, we have an excellent ethnography of a diverse urban neighborhood. Second, Sanjek offers an admirable model for contemporary ethnographic context. Third, we are given hope for the future-the future of us all. -David S. Surrey, American Anthropologist
The author suggests that the politics of place is the best hope for building racial unity in the long run. -Sage Race Relations Abstracts
This is an excellent book and a welcome relief from the muddy stream of depressing studies . . . . Sanjek devoted most of thirteen years to the part-time study of the Elmhurst-Corona district of the Borough of Queens, thus ensuring as intimate and first-hand knowledge of a complex urban area as we are likely to see. This extended period of study produces a dense array of material on community action in which the purely local is illuminated by careful reference to developments in city, state, and national policy-political, social, and economic. . . . The overall tone of the study is decidedly optimistic for, as Sanjek rightly says in the very last sentence of the book, 'Nothing is impossible if we believe that people can change.' -Raymond D. Smith, Transforming Anthropology
This thoughtful, well-documented study of the life of a neighborhood as it changes over time is must reading for anyone who cares about New York, the life of cities, or the possibilities for integrating populations and creating communities in which everyone has a stake. -Diversity News
The Future of Us All offers a sophisticated theory about race, class, and governance in American cities, while the book's muckraking discussions of local and citywide politics make it a wonderful read. Drawing upon extraordinarily rich data, Roger Sanjek writes with clarity and passion. -Karen Brodkin, UCLA
For more than a decade, Roger Sanjek immersed himself in the life of a New York City neighborhood on the leading edge of racial and ethnic transition. This rich and readable account of the community life of Elmhurst-Corona is the result. Sanjek shows us people gradually overcoming racial and ethnic categories to recognize each other and work together, forging a vibrant neighborhood politics that sometimes prevails over the 'permanent government.' -Frances Fox Piven, author of The Breaking of the American Social Compact
The dramatic demographic shift in Elmhurst-Corona makes a great story, full of intrigue and personalities, but without the racial violence seen elsewhere in New York City or in Los Angeles. For this reason our nation's leaders would do well to read Roger Sanjek's account of the neighborhood's transformation. And they should pay special attention to how the women in the community-white, black, Latina, Asian, American-born and immigrant-provided the critical leadership during this transition by 'listening to each other.' It behooves the rest of us to listen as well, because this book is about the future of us all! -Evelyn Hu-DeHart, University of Colorado at Boulder
Roger Sanjek is an extremely knowledgeable anthropologist, tough-minded and with a great knack for synthesis. He is also a street-wise New Yorker who cares deeply about his city. In its skillful interweaving of urban and global political economy with local issues of ethnic diversity and quality of life, The Future of Us All has few equals among recent portrayals of late twentieth-century urban transformation. -Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm University

Author Bio

Roger Sanjek is a J. I. Staley Prize winner, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, and the author of The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (published by Cornell University Press), Gray Panthers, and Ethnography in Today's World:Color Full Before Color Blind; the editor of Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (published by Cornell) and the coeditor (with Steven Gregory) of Race, and the series editor of The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues, published by Cornell.