Latino City by Llana Barber

Author:Llana Barber [Barber, Llana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469631349
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

BACKLASH AND RECONCILIATION

Although the riots enabled a remarkable upswing in Latino political activism in the city, there was also a serious reentrenchment of white racism after the riots. This white backlash took two forms: renewed white flight and, in some cases, increased prejudice and discrimination. After Lawrence was broadly shamed in the media as a bigoted city during the riots, however, explicit prejudice generally yielded to coded scapegoating in the city’s political discourse.

As discussed in Chapter 1, between 1940 and 1980, Lawrence had already lost 40 percent of its white population, even before Latinos made up a significant proportion of the city’s population. This early white flight, encouraged by the pull of the suburbs, exploded in the 1980s as rejection of Lawrence’s growing Latino presence fueled an unprecedented exodus of white residents. Although the total population of the city actually increased in the 1980s, from 63,000 to 70,000, the white population of the city decreased from 52,000 to 38,000, for a loss of 14,000 residents. In other words, a full quarter of the white people living in Lawrence in 1980 had left the city by 1990. This would be equivalent to a four-person family leaving the tiny city almost every day throughout the decade. Given the narrative examples in Chapter 4 of white residents whose decision to leave the city was spurred by the riots, it is very possible that the bulk of this exodus occurred in the latter half of the decade. Between 1990 and 2000, although slightly fewer than 14,000 white people left, this still amounted to 36 percent, or more than one-third, of the remaining white population leaving the city in these years.39

Within Lawrence, it seems that racial tension and quotidian expressions of anti-Latino sentiment actually grew after the riots. The surface calm in the Oxford Street neighborhood after the riots masked an underlying current of apprehension. As one Dominican resident recalled, “If you walked down the street, people looked at you funny. . . . It was calm, but you knew if somebody said something bad it would probably start all over again.”40 As Latina organizer Briseida Quiles explained it, the apparent calm in Lower Tower Hill a year after the riots was entirely attributable to the peace-oriented efforts of its residents, because little had changed structurally in the city: “The poverty is still here, and the aggressive police are still here.”41 As could be predicted from the plans expressed by white neighborhood residents to leave the city, the Lower Tower Hill neighborhood became predominantly Latino within a few years after the riots.42 In the most basic sense, Latino rioters won the right to the neighborhood.

In addition to this tension and white flight, it seems that employment discrimination may have increased after the riots as well. One unemployed Latino reported, “I do not like to think it is discrimination but since the riots people seem afraid to hire us. . . . Others [employers] have told me plain to my face that I should go back where I came from.

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