In this paper I examine the interactions in urban communities between long-time residents and immigrant newcomers through the lens of citizenship. In what has been termed the``age of migration'' (Castles and Miller, 1993) cities are sites where new forms of citizenship are being constructed as multicultural populations come together. To Holston (1999;2008), the struggles that occur in urban spaces, as disenfranchised communities vie against modernist urban planning schemes for the space necessary to move beyond`mere life' and achieve the basic rights of full citizens of the state create spaces of`insurgent citizenship'. In this analysis I examine one struggle for insurgent citizenship: how Dominican grocery-store owners (bodegueros) in Philadelphia gain the ability to operate corner stores in urban neighborhoods within which they are often considered by long-term residents to be outsiders. For the grocers their pathway towards insurgent citizenship is not a fight against the modernist state but, rather, a struggle for acceptance within their community. As Ash Amin and Stephen Graham write, modern cities are``complex performative arenas where relational webs weave layers of order between heterogeneous social groups, filie© res of firms, governance agencies, etc'' (1997, page 420). The insurgent practices of grocers depend on their ability to position themselves within this multifaceted environment.Drawing on the work of Judith Butler (1990), I focus on the position of the grocers as newcomers within the`complex performative space' that is the modern city. I argue that, in order to overcome perceived antiimmigrant sentiment in the local community, the grocers bend over backwards in order to serve their clients and deliberatelỳ perform' to the expectations of community residents. These actions disrupt discrete notions of community`outsider' and`insider' and create an amicable feeling of coexistence at the stores. However, these actions are ineffectual at creating positive relationships with community development corporations and other elements of the urban community who do not shop at the stores on a daily basis. Their performances have a limited spatial scope: while they affect the customers who shop at their stores, they do not jump scales' (Smith, 1993) to affect local leaders or neighborhood institutions.
Using data from a survey of residents living in a United States Department of Agriculture defined food desert in Duluth, Minnesota, this article examines the diverse ways that people living in a neighborhood without a grocery store feed themselves. We found that there is no singular experience of living in a food desert. Many neighborhood residents were highly mobile and shopped at a wide variety of local grocery stores, and a small group of neighborhood residents without cars relied on public transit, neighborhood convenience stores, and borrowing vehicles in order to provision themselves. These coping strategies were expensive and time-consuming, especially for the most vulnerable members of the community such as single parents and those without cars. We use the variety of experiences of people living in a food desert to propose interventions that would help improve food access in the community.
Drawn from a larger project examining immigration and economic redevelopment in Philadelphia, this article examines the way bodegas (small neighborhood‐based variety stores) challenge relations of competitiveness inherent in neoliberal urban development. I argue that while the rhetoric of competition and entrepreneurialism abound in discussions of urban development, ethnographic research in urban neighborhoods suggest that the caring labor of social reproduction also plays a strong role in how immigrant communities establish themselves and neighborhoods develop. I use the experience of bodegueros to demonstrate how care operates to support families, businesses, and communities within the competitive, neoliberal city. I argue care work is often juxtaposed with neoliberalism, while in reality this is a false dichotomy. Urban neoliberalism is undergirded with care labor, and it is central to the institutionalization of bodegas within urban neighborhoods as it helps sustain neighborhoods and supports the upward mobility of families who work in bodegas.
The relationship between "neighbourhood" and "community" is contentious: while neighbourhoods are spatially based, communities are more amorphous institutions that are connected to local places through far-flung transnational networks. Dominican corner-store owners (bodegueros) in Philadelphia, USA, understand their role in their local neighbourhood community as a form of "temporary permanence" because their economic development model involves building networks between the US and the Dominican Republic. The mobility practices of grocers and interviews with community leaders in Philadelphia are used to make two propositions about constructions of place-based "neighbourhood communities" in the US: the mobility of the grocers highlights the spatial entrapment experienced by other urban residents and thus their embrace of place-based communities; and, in the mobility of the grocers and conversations with some neighbourhood leaders, we see actualised a more fluid and expansive understanding of the concept of a "neighbourhood community" which is embedded in transnational networks.
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