Immigrant City

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE Award-winning author David Bezmozgis’s first story collection in more than a decade, hailed by the Toronto Star as “intelligent, funny, unfailingly sympathetic” In the title story, a father and his young daughter stumble into a bizarre version of his immigrant childhood. A mysterious tech conference brings a writer to Montreal, where he discovers new designs on the past in “How It Used to Be.” A grandfather’s Yiddish letters expose a love affair and a wartime secret in “Little Rooster.” In “Childhood,” Mark’s concern about his son’s phobias evokes a shameful incident from his own adolescence. In “Roman’s Song,” Roman’s desire to help a new immigrant brings him into contact with a sordid underworld. At his father’s request, Victor returns to Riga, the city of his birth, where his loyalties are tested by the man he might have been in “A New Gravestone for an Old Grave.” And, in the noir-inspired “The Russian Riviera,” Kostya leaves Russia to pursue a boxing career only to find himself working as a doorman in a garish nightclub in the Toronto suburbs. In these deeply felt, slyly humorous stories, Bezmozgis pleads no special causes but presents immigrant characters with all their contradictions and complexities, their earnest and divided hearts.

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE Award-winning author David Bezmozgis's first story collection in more than a decade, hailed by the Toronto Star as "intelligent, funny, unfailingly sympathetic" In the title story, a father and his young daughter stumble into a bizarre version of his immigrant childhood. A mysterious tech conference brings a writer to Montreal, where he discovers new designs on the past in "How It Used to Be." A grandfather's Yiddish letters expose a love affair and a wartime secret in "Little Rooster." In "Childhood," Mark's concern about his son's phobias evokes a shameful incident from his own adolescence. In "Roman's Song," Roman's desire to help a new immigrant brings him into contact with a sordid underworld. At his father's request, Victor returns to Riga, the city of his birth, where his loyalties are tested by the man he might have been in "A New Gravestone for an Old Grave." And, in the noir-inspired "The Russian Riviera," Kostya leaves Russia to pursue a boxing career only to find himself working as a doorman in a garish nightclub in the Toronto suburbs. In these deeply felt, slyly humorous stories, Bezmozgis pleads no special causes but presents immigrant characters with all their contradictions and complexities, their earnest and divided hearts.

David Bezmozgis, the writer who brought us the “pointed, emotionally resonant tales” (The Globe and Mail) of Natasha and Other Stories, brings us a new collection, his first in more than a decade. In the title story, a father and his young daughter stumble into a bizarre version of his immigrant childhood. A mysterious tech conference brings a writer to Montreal where he discovers new designs on the past in “How it Used to Be.” A grandfather’s Yiddish letters expose a love affair and a wartime secret in “Little Rooster.” In “Roman’s Song,” Roman’s desire to help a new immigrant brings him into contact with a sordid underworld. At his father’s request, Victor returns to Riga, the city of his birth, and has his loyalties tested by the man he might have been in “A New Gravestone for an Old Grave.” And, in the noir-inspired “The Russian Riviera,” Kostya leaves Russia to pursue a boxing career only to find himself working as a doorman in a garish nightclub in the Toronto suburbs. In these deeply-felt, slyly humorous stories, Bezmozgis pleads no special causes but presents immigrant characters with all their contradictions and complexities, their earnest and divided hearts.

The violence and radicalism connected with the Industrial Workers of the World textile strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, left the popular impression that Lawrence was a slum-ridden city inhabited by un-American revolutionaries. Immigrant City is a study of Lawrence which reveals that the city was far different. The book opens with an account of the strike of 1912. It then traces the development of Lawrence from the founding of the city in 1845, when its builders hoped to establish a model mill town, through its years of immigration and growth of 1912. Donald Cole puts the strike in its proper perspective by examining the history of the city, and he emphasizes the immigrant's constant search for security and explores the very important question of whether the immigrant, from his own point of view, found security. The population of Lawrence was almost completely immigrant in nature; in 1910, 90 per cent of its people were either first or second generation Americans, and they represented nearly every nation in the world. The period covered by the book--1845 through 1921--is the great middle period of American immigration, which began with the Irish Famine and ended with the Quota Law of 1921. While Immigrant City concentrates on one American city, it reveals much about American immigration in general and demonstrates clearly that, in spite of the poverty that most immigrants fought, life for the foreign-born in America was not as grim as some writers have suggested.

The United States is an immigrant nation—nowhere is the truth of this statement more evident than in its major cities. Immigrants and their children comprise nearly three-fifths of New York City's population and even more of Miami and Los Angeles. But the United States is also a nation with entrenched racial divisions that are being complicated by the arrival of newcomers. While immigrant parents may often fear that their children will "disappear" into American mainstream society, leaving behind their ethnic ties, many experts fear that they won't—evolving instead into a permanent unassimilated and underemployed underclass. Inheriting the City confronts these fears with evidence, reporting the results of a major study examining the social, cultural, political, and economic lives of today's second generation in metropolitan New York, and showing how they fare relative to their first-generation parents and native-stock counterparts. Focused on New York but providing lessons for metropolitan areas across the country, Inheriting the City is a comprehensive analysis of how mass immigration is transforming life in America's largest metropolitan area. The authors studied the young adult offspring of West Indian, Chinese, Dominican, South American, and Russian Jewish immigrants and compared them to blacks, whites, and Puerto Ricans with native-born parents. They find that today's second generation is generally faring better than their parents, with Chinese and Russian Jewish young adults achieving the greatest education and economic advancement, beyond their first-generation parents and even beyond their native-white peers. Every second-generation group is doing at least marginally—and, in many cases, significantly—better than natives of the same racial group across several domains of life. Economically, each second-generation group earns as much or more than its native-born comparison group, especially African Americans and Puerto Ricans, who experience the most persistent disadvantage. Inheriting the City shows the children of immigrants can often take advantage of policies and programs that were designed for native-born minorities in the wake of the civil rights era. Indeed, the ability to choose elements from both immigrant and native-born cultures has produced, the authors argue, a second-generation advantage that catalyzes both upward mobility and an evolution of mainstream American culture. Inheriting the City leads the chorus of recent research indicating that we need not fear an immigrant underclass. Although racial discrimination and economic exclusion persist to varying degrees across all the groups studied, this absorbing book shows that the new generation is also beginning to ease the intransigence of U.S. racial categories. Adapting elements from their parents' cultures as well as from their native-born peers, the children of immigrants are not only transforming the American city but also what it means to be American.

Migrant City tells the story of contemporary London from the perspective of thirty adult migrants and two sociologists. Connecting migrants’ private struggles to the public issues at stake in the way mobility is regulated, channelled and managed in a globalised world, this volume explores what migration means in a world that is hyper connected – but where we see increasingly mobile, invasive and technologically sophisticated forms of border regulation and control. Migrant City is an innovative collaborative ethnography based on research with migrants from a wide variety of social backgrounds, spanning in some cases a decade. It utilises recollections, photographs, poems, paintings, journals and drawings to explore a wide range of issues. These range from the impact of immigration control and surveillance on everyday life, to the experience of waiting for the Home Office to process their claims and the limits this places on their lives, to the friendships and relationships with neighbours that help to make London a home. This title will appeal to students, scholars, community workers and general readers interested in migration, race and ethnicity, social exclusion, globalisation, urban sociology, and inventive social research methods.

The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida’s long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists’ sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.

Latino City explores the transformation of Lawrence, Massachusetts, into New England's first Latino-majority city. Like many industrial cities, Lawrence entered a downward economic spiral in the decades after World War II due to deindustrialization and suburbanization. The arrival of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the late twentieth century brought new life to the struggling city, but settling in Lawrence was fraught with challenges. Facing hostility from their neighbors, exclusion from local governance, inadequate city services, and limited job prospects, Latinos fought and organized for the right to make a home in the city. In this book, Llana Barber interweaves the histories of urban crisis in U.S. cities and imperial migration from Latin America. Pushed to migrate by political and economic circumstances shaped by the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, poor and working-class Latinos then had to reckon with the segregation, joblessness, disinvestment, and profound stigma that plagued U.S. cities during the crisis era, particularly in the Rust Belt. For many Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, there was no "American Dream" awaiting them in Lawrence; instead, Latinos struggled to build lives for themselves in the ruins of industrial America.