Urban Conversations | Latinizing Cities and the Origins of Political Xenophobia in Deindustrializing America

URBAN CONVERSATIONS

Speaker: Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, Pennsylvania State University College of the Liberal Arts

The path to understanding the origins of Trumpism runs through communities undergoing rapid demographic and economic change; we thus need a detailed history of Latina/o/e migration and political response. Pennsylvania is the perfect place to do that: it is the nation’s largest industrial swing state and is home to a more recent population of nearly 1,000,000 people of Latin American ancestry.

Since around 1980, some of the state's industrial cities have changed from overwhelmingly white Anglo to predominantly Hispanic at the same time as they lost working-class job opportunities. The basic historical raw material here is places like Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, York and Hazelton, and their highly political bellwether counties of Lehigh, Berks, Lancaster, York and Luzerne — four of the ten biggest cities and five of the ten most populous counties in Pennsylvania. There’s an existing narrative of blue-collar disenchantment that seeks to explain this, though that narrative has been largely debunked by political scientists and other observers. If we’re going to understand political change in Rust Belt communities, we need to know exactly what happened in these smaller metropolitan areas. And we need to look at all these communities specifically in historical time—because xenophobia became political over the course of decades, with people and elected officials drawing upon their sense of what had happened previously in the next city over.

Lunch will be provided.

About the Speakers

Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz was born in New York City to immigrant parents. He teaches courses in Latino studies, urban history, spatial theory, sociability, and immigration. He is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians.

Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard.

About the Series

As our planet becomes increasingly urban, this series seeks to expand our understanding of cities and urbanization across sites and scales. The Urban Conversations aim in particular to link humanistic approaches with spatial investigations. We host public talks, and provide a venue for researchers to share works-in-progress with an interdisciplinary community, in a conversational format.

Urban Conversations is chaired by Bruno Carvalho and Daniel Agbiboa.

This event is co-sponsored with Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative.