Declining Cities and Elective Belonging – The Case of Latin-American Immigrants in the Merrimack Valley, Massachusetts

Keywords: Elective Belonging, Habitus, Distinction, Latin immigrants, Middle-Class; Social Differentiation; Community Divide
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 68

Abstract

Suburbanization is one of the main forces that shape contemporary deindustrialized urban spaces. The process of suburbanization involves territorial differentiation of the middle class and practices of spatial distinction aimed to evade urban blight. The current study utilizes concepts of habitus, social class and elective belonging to investigate how mobility reflects peoples’ ability to fit between habitus and their place of residence, and thus to claim for belonging. Individuals in the middle class are expected to judge the suitability of their place of living in accordance to a social trajectory they went through and position in variant fields of life.
The theory was tested among LatinX immigrants who reside in Lawrence Massachusetts, a deindustrialized and impoverished city, and among those immigrants, who abandoned the city in favor to some of its affluent suburbs. The study's 30 in-depth interviews provided data on the immigrants' forms of economic and cultural capital, along with descriptions of their housing characteristics and everyday life. The analysis of the interviews revealed how choice of residential areas manifests a person's uneven embeddedness in different sets of power relations. The results also indicated that space reflects differences in the senses of belonging, between those who origin from the same ethnic group of immigrants, but with a different class habitus, thus encouraging spatial differentiation, class distinction and deepening suburbanization. The findings challenge planning for communities, under contemporary mobilities forms, that intersect between variant social classes on the one hand, and different immigration origins on the other.