566

Journal of Urban History 41(4)

17. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006).
18. Michael B. Katz, Mathew Creighton, Daniel Amsterdam, and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Immigration
and the New Metropolitan Geography,” Journal of Urban Affairs 32, no. 5 (2010): 523–547.
19. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991).
20. Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012).
21. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
22. Harvey Kantor and Barbara Brenzel, “Urban Education and the ‘Truly Disadvantaged: The Historical
Roots of the Contemporary Crisis, 1945-1990,” in The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, ed.
Michael B. Katz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Kathryn M. Neckerman, Schools
Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Author Biography
Michael B. Katz was Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania at the time
of his passing in August 2014. He was the author or coauthor of over a dozen books on a wide range of topics,
from the social ramifications of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the history of public
education and social welfare and a variety of other issues related to urban history. His most recent works
include Why Don’t American Cities Burn? and an updated and thoroughly revised version of his 1989 The
Undeserving Poor (published in 2013 by Oxford University Press). Katz also edited and coedited multiple
volumes, including The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (1993) and most recently Public
Education under Siege with Mike Rose (2013). Among many other awards and honors, he was the recipient
of a Senior Scholar Award—a lifetime achievement award—from the Spencer Foundation and was a mem-
ber of the American Philosophical Society. He served as president of the Urban History Association in 2006.

Urban History and the

Construction of Social Difference

Lilia Fernandez1
DOI: 10.1177/0096144215579377

Keywords
race, space, ethnic minorities, Chicano history, immigration

As Michael Katz outlined so eloquently in his opening essay, the field of urban history has
changed dramatically from one that examines the city as “site” to the city as “place.” This

1The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

Corresponding Author:
Lilia Fernandez, History Department, The Ohio State University, 106 Dulles Hall, 230 West 17th Avenue, Columbus,
OH 43210, USA.
Email: fernandez.96@osu.edu
Forum 567

geographical turn has generated a great deal of exciting scholarship on a wide variety of topics.
One of the most fruitful and promising developments in exploring the geography of cities has
been the analytical union with questions of class, race, and other categories of social difference.
In the past several decades, the city has no longer been studied as simply the terrain upon which
historical actors either asserted their agency or alternately became victims of capitalism and rac-
ism; it has become an active agent in constructing and reifying social difference and spatializing
it. Race and space have been interpreted as mutually constitutive, and the best urban history on
racial minorities and immigrants has revealed how race has been spatialized and space racialized
based upon the social ascriptions and value assigned to marginalized populations by those in
power. If geographer Don Mitchell famously declared, “the city is where difference lives,” urban
histories on race, immigration, gender, and sexuality have also proclaimed, “the city is where
difference is produced.”1
The focus on the “urban crisis” in the second half of the twentieth century has stimulated
much of this groundbreaking scholarship. Indeed, postwar cities underwent dramatic transforma-
tions in terms of physical structure, political economy, and demography that were shaped, to
varying degrees, by race or perceptions of racial difference among urban dwellers. One of the
earlier scholars to examine the racial segregation of African Americans, for example, Arnold
Hirsch, helped us understand how racially based policies shaped by real estate interests in
Chicago entrenched and reinforced racial segregation of African Americans.2 His work and that
of others point to the ways in which capital and the value attached to “whiteness” drove the post-
war development of urban residential communities and both public and private housing
markets.
As I have argued in my own work, however, postwar urban demographic changes have not
been strictly black and white, although they manifested themselves most visibly through social
tensions between African Americans and “whites” (native-born European Americans and
European immigrants who assimilated and became “white”).3 While a number of historians have
explored the dynamics between these two populations,4 others have paid significant attention to
non-European immigrants and other “racial minorities.” The work of those who document the
experiences of urban Latin American immigrants, Native Americans, or Asian Americans has
often been identified as ethnic history or social history because of their focus on distinctive
racial/ethnic groups. Yet their analyses of the integration, settlement, labor, and political activism
of these populations has shed significant light on urban planning policies, how urban cultures
have developed, how residential districts have been organized, and how labor markets have been
shaped by non-white and non-black people.5 Importantly, these historians have also illustrated
that the demographic diversity of American cities—beyond European immigrants and African
Americans—dates back much earlier in the twentieth century and as far back as the late 1800s.
Chicanos/as or Mexican Americans became the subject of foundational urban histories of
California in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Caught between the label of a “racial minority” and
an “immigrant group,” Chicanos/as were understood by Marxist scholars as a colonized minority.
Al Camarillo, Richard Griswold del Castillo, and Ricardo Romo provided groundbreaking analy-
ses of the history of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.6 Their work laid the
ground for subsequent scholars to take up additional questions about the experiences of people of
Mexican descent in Southwestern cities. Edward Escobar’s Race, Police and the Making of a
Political Identity, for example, examined Mexican Americans’ relations with the Los Angeles
Police Department, revealing how Mexican Americans became criminalized as a population with
the professionalization of criminology and law enforcement in the 1930s and 1940s. George
Sanchez’s Becoming Mexican American drew upon extensive quantitative data as well as cultural
analysis to understand Mexican migrants who settled in East Los Angeles after fleeing the
Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century. His monograph also provided a model for
how to incorporate popular culture and questions of generation into analyses of the city.7
568 Journal of Urban History 41(4)

As the urban center with the largest Mexican population in the country, Los Angeles certainly
has received the most attention from Chicano/a historians. Yet a few scholars have shifted our
gaze to the Midwest to address urban Mexican American populations in this region. Zaragosa
Vargas introduced us to Mexican auto workers in Detroit’s Ford plants in the 1920s and 1930s.
Gabriela Arredondo explored Mexican immigrants in Chicago during this same time period.
Tracing the migration northward of thousands of Mexicans, Arredondo demonstrates that they
were not received in the same ways as European immigrants or southern African Americans.
Instead, Mexicans had a unique experience that prompted them to “turn inward” toward their
fellow countrymen and women to find refuge from the discrimination and prejudice many expe-
rienced from employers and landlords.8
Historians have produced considerable work on Asian immigrants as well, such as Judy
Yung’s Unbound Feet and Nayah Shah’s Contagious Divides, both of which chronicled San
Francisco’s Chinatown communities. Linda Maram-España’s treatment of Filipino male
migrants sheds light on themes of masculinity, race, youth, and popular culture in Los Angeles.9
Nicholas Rosenthal has traced the migration of Native Americans who settled in Los Angeles
in the early twentieth century and during the era of federal Indian urbanization policies. James
LaGrand followed Native people to Chicago during the latter period as well.10 Perhaps most
innovative, however, has been scholarship that has recognized the multiethnic and multiracial
diversity of urban communities, particularly the comparative racialization and interactions
between various populations. Natalia Molina’s Fit to Be Citizens?, Mark Wild’s Street Meeting,
Scott Kurashige’s Shifting Grounds of Race, and George Sanchez’s work on Boyle Heights
easily come to mind.11 Not surprisingly, Los Angeles again has dominated much of this schol-
arship on cities and race.
In the decades after the initial scholarship on Los Angeles’s Mexican American community,
however, a number of scholars have challenged our understanding of Mexican American settle-
ment in central cities and expanded the narrowness of “urban” histories to include broader met-
ropolitan regions where the urban becomes rural, or at least, suburban. (I will return to this topic
at the end.) Blurring the line between urban and rural, such scholars have documented Mexican
workers in citrus industries, mining, and food processing. Matt Garcia, Gilbert Gonzalez, and
Jose Alamillo each examined Mexican communities beyond Los Angeles proper to include the
San Gabriel Valley, Orange County, and Ventura County, all extensions of the city’s suburban
sprawl by the mid-twentieth century. Stephen Pitti similarly explored the long history of Mexican
Americans in the Santa Clara Valley and San Jose from the nineteenth through the twentieth
centuries.12 Thus, while the field of “suburban” or “metropolitan” history has become increas-
ingly popular in the last several years, urban historians well read in Chicano/a history will find
this geographical reconceptualization quite familiar.
On the East Coast, other scholars have focused their attention on Puerto Rican urban com-
munities, especially in New York City. Virginia-Sanchez-Korrol’s From Colonia to Community
documented the early twentieth-century migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City. This was
followed by Ruth Glasser’s study of Puerto Rican musicians in the city. Lorrin Thomas’s more
recent Puerto Rican Citizen adds to this scholarship. Few other histories exist on Puerto Ricans
in other cities. Carmen Whalen’s monograph on Philadelphia was a welcome but perhaps under-
appreciated contribution in the way that it engages and disproves culturally grounded models of
social science research on Puerto Ricans. From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia challenged the “cul-
ture of poverty” thesis that has been applied to Puerto Ricans both on the island and in mainland
cities with a structural analysis of urban settlement and attention to the political economy of labor
migration in the age of declining industrial employment.13 For histories of Puerto Ricans else-
where, however, we must turn to book chapters, articles, or unpublished dissertations or look
beyond the discipline to ethnographic work.14
Forum 569

Histories of race in the city and of racialized populations like Latinos/as, Asian Americans,
and others have immensely enriched our understanding of American cities. Still other historians
have offered rich interpretations of the history of women, sexual minorities, and other marginal-
ized groups in ways that have broadened the narratives we tell about cities and the spatialization
of gender, sexuality, class, youth, and race. Christine Stansell, Nan Enstad, Joanne Meyerowitz,
Sarah Deutsch, Gabriela Arredondo, and Natalia Molina have each explored women’s experi-
ences and the ways they shaped their communities and gendered mores in cities across the coun-
try. George Chauncey, Nayan Shah, and some of the above-mentioned women have examined
sexuality as well.15 George Sanchez, Linda Maram-España, Andrew Diamond, Luis Alvarez,
Catherine Ramirez, and Elizabeth Escobedo have attended to the experiences of youth and popu-
lar culture in urban centers.16
Michael Katz’s remarkable legacy on the study of urban poverty leaves us a formidable
foundation on which to continue analyzing economic inequality and its intersections with race,
gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference. Indeed, because poverty has been a per-
sistent condition for so many racially marginalized urban populations throughout the twentieth
century, we cannot discuss questions of race in the city without also analyzing the ways that
class-based urban planning and public policies, and the unequal distribution of resources, edu-
cation, and employment opportunities have cemented the economic and social marginalization
of so many African Americans, Latinos/as, and other nonwhite populations. Gendered social
policies toward the poor and the policing of poor women of color’s sexuality and reproductive
practices have contributed further to the racial and economic marginalization of women and
their families.
Future scholarship should build upon this work but may also want to borrow the analytical
frameworks and lessons offered in other disciplines, especially anthropology and sociology.
Nonetheless, scholars may want to continue exploring two threads in particular. First, as a num-
ber of urban historians have demonstrated, racially marginalized communities are often incredi-
bly diverse and encounter, interact, and mingle with other racialized subjects. Thus, the field
should encourage the development of more comparative, relational, integrated and interethnic
analysis that reflects the diversity of urban areas like the early twentieth-century neighborhoods
where Puerto Ricans settled in New York City or the multiethnic and multiracial communities
where Mexican Americans lived in Chicago and Los Angeles. Analyzing these populations
alongside their neighbors, coworkers, landlords, and schoolmates will further enrich our knowl-
edge about race and space.
Second, the subfield of metropolitan or suburban history that has taken off in recent years
should account for the surprising diversity of these areas as well. Mexican Americans, Asian
Americans, and others, for example, have had a longstanding presence in rural and suburban
communities. Several scholars are currently producing monographs on this very topic and their
work will demonstrate that the suburbs have not always been exclusively “white” as we have
argued, but have been home to a range of residents for decades.17 In the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, new and recent immigrants are increasingly settling directly in the sub-
urbs, bypassing cities and urban labor markets altogether. Michael Katz and his colleagues have
documented this with a case study of Philadelphia.18 This phenomenon is the result of a number
of factors: the relocation of many manufacturing and industrial employers, the global recruitment
of middle- and upper-class skilled workers, the continued gentrification of inner cities, and the
concomitant displacement of the working poor to surrounding suburbs. The growing impoverish-
ment of inner ring suburban communities and the disinvestment in municipal resources—public
transit networks, for example—upon which many low-wage workers depend will need to be a
focus for future urban historians as well. The field has many directions in which to grow and a
very bright future in the years ahead.
570 Journal of Urban History 41(4)

Notes
  1. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford,
2003), 18.
  2. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
  3. Lilia Fernandez, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012).
  4. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the
Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).
  5. See, for example, Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Ethnicity and Nation: 1916-1939
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and
Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); James B. LaGrand,
Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2002); Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity
in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Nayan
Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San
Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Huping Ling, Chinese Chicago: Race,
Transnational Migration, and Community since 1870 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
  6. Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in
Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1979); Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850-1890: A Social History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979); Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1983).
  7. Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the
Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); George
J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles,
1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
  8. Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the
Midwest, 1917-1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican
Chicago: Race, Ethnicity and Nation: 1916-1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
 9. Shah, Contagious Divides; Yung, Unbound Feet; Linda España-Maram, Creating Masculinity in Los
Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006). On Japanese resettlers after internment, see Charlotte Brooks, “In
the Twilight Zone between Black and White: Japanese American Resettlement and Community in
Chicago, 1942-1945,” Journal of American History 86, no. 4 (March 2000): 1655–87. On Filipinos in
Chicago, see Barbara Posadas extensive work, including Posadas and Roland Guyotte, “Unintentional
Immigrants: Chicago’s Filipino Foreign Students become Settlers, 1900-1941,” Journal of American
Ethnic History 9, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 26–48.
10. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country; LaGrand, Indian Metropolis.
11. Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese
Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2008); Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los
Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); George Sanchez, “What’s Good for Boyle
Heights Is Good for the Jews: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside During the 1950s,” American
Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 2004): 633–61.
12. Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,
1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Labor and
Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950 (Urbana:
Forum 571

University of Illinois Press, 1994); Jose Alamillo, Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican
American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2006); Stephen Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003).
13. Virginia Sánchez-Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Ruth Glasser, My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican
Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995); Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New
York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Carmen Teresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to
Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2001).
14. See, for example, Carmen Teresa Whalen and Víctor Vázquez-Hernández, eds., The Puerto Rican
Diaspora: Historical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005). Mérida Rúa’s
study of Puerto Ricans in Chicago offers a historical account blended with contemporary ethno-
graphic research. Mérida Rúa, A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican
Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Gina Perez and Ana Ramos-Zayas have
both written similarly fascinating ethnographic accounts of Puerto Rican Chicago. See Gina Pérez,
The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004); Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, National Performances: The Politics of
Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
15. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1987);
Nan Enstad; Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Sarah
Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago,
1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender,
Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994);
Shah, Contagious Divides.
16. Cultural and labor historian George Lipsitz stands as a leading scholar of urban cultural studies.
Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American; Maram-España, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’ Little
Manila; Andrew Diamond; Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment
in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Luis Alvarez,
The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008); Catherine Ramirez, The Woman in the Zoot: Gender, Nationalism, and the
Cultural Politics of Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Elizabeth R. Escobedo,
From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Homefront
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
17. Jerry Gonzalez, “A Place in El Sol: Mexican Americans in Suburban Los Angeles” (book manuscript
in progress); Aaron Cavin, “The Borders of Citizenship: The Politics of Race and Metropolitan Space
in Silicon Valley” (manuscript in progress).
18. Michael B. Katz, Matthew Creighton, Daniel Amsterdam, and Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Immigration
and the New Metropolitan Geography,” Journal of Urban Affairs 32, no. 5 (2010): 532–47.

Author Biography
Lilia Fernandez is associate professor in the Department of History and a faculty affiliate of the Latino/a
Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and
Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2012).