The image of the "underclass," framed by persistent poverty, long-term joblessness, school dropout, teenage pregnancy, and drug use, has become synonymous with urban poverty. But does this image tell us enough about how the diverse minorities among the urban poor actually experience and cope with poverty? No, say the contributors to In the Barrios. Their portraits of eight Latino communities—in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Chicago, Albuquerque, Laredo, and Tucson—reveal a far more complex reality.

In the Barrios responds directly to current debates on the origins of the "underclass" and depicts the cultural, demographic, and historical forces that have shaped poor Latino communities. These neighborhoods share many hardships, yet they manifest no "typical" form of poverty. Instead, each group adapts its own cultural and social resources to the difficult economic circumstances of American urban life. The editors point to continued immigration as an issue of overriding importance in understanding urban Latino poverty. Newcomers to concentrated Latino areas build a local economy that provides affordable amenities and promotes ethnic institutional development. In many of these neighborhoods, a network of emotional as well as economic support extends across families and borders.

The first major assessment of inner-city Latino communities in the United States, In the Barrios will change the way we approach the current debate on urban poverty, immigration, and the underclass.

JOAN MOORE is professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

RAQUEL PINDERHUGHES is assistant professor of urban studies at San Francisco State University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Phillip Gonzales, Guillermo J. Grenier, Nora Hamilton, James Loucky, Joan Moore, Felix M. Padilla, Raquel Pinderhughes, Nestor P. Rodriquez, Alex Stepick, Mercer Sullivan, Avelardo Valdez, Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez, James Diego Vigil.

Have the last two decades produced a New York composed of two separate and unequal cities? As the contributors to Dual City reveal, the complexity of inequality in New York defies simple distinctions between black and white, the Yuppies and the homeless. The city's changing economic structure has intersected with an increasingly diversified population, providing upward mobility for some groups while isolating others. As race, gender, ethnicity, and class become ever more critical components of the postindustrial city, the New York experience illuminates not just one great city, or indeed all large cities, but the forces affecting most of the globe.

"The authors constitute an impressive assemblage of seasoned scholars, representing a wide array of pertinent disciplines. Their product is a pioneering volume in the social sciences and urban studies...the twenty-page bibliography is a major research tool on its own." —Choice

JOHN H. MOLLENKOPF is associate professor of political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

MANUEL CASTELLS is professor of planning at the University of California, Berkeley and professor of sociology at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.

CONTRIBUTORS: Thomas Bailey, Charles Brecher, Steven Brint, Manuel Castells, Frank DeGiovanni, Matthew Drennan, Stephen Duncombe, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Norman Fainstein, Susan Fainstein, Ian Gordon, Michael Harloe, Richard Harris, Raymond Horton, Sarah Ludwig, Lorraine Minnite, John Mollenkopf, Mitchell Moss, Saskia Sassen, Edward Soja, Mercer Sullivan, Ida Susser, and Roger Waldinger

Few public projects have ever dealt with economic and emotional issues as large as those surrounding the rebuilding of lower Manhattan following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Picking up the pieces involved substantial challenges: deciding how to memorialize one of America's greatest tragedies, how to balance the legal claim of landowners against the moral claim of survivors who want a say in the future of Ground Zero, and how to rebuild the Trade Center site while preserving the sacredness and solemnity that Americans now attribute to the area. All the while, the governor, the mayor, the Port Authority, and the leaseholder competed with one another to advance their own interests and visions of the redevelopment, while at least leaving the impression that the decisions were the public's to make. In Contentious City, editor John Mollenkopf and a team of leading scholars analyze the wide-ranging political dimensions of the recovery process.

Contentious City takes an in-depth look at the competing interests and demands of the numerous stakeholders who have sought to influence the direction of the recovery process. Lynne Sagalyn addresses the complicated institutional politics behind the rebuilding, which involve a newly formed development commission seeking legitimacy, a two-state transportation agency whose brief venture into land ownership puts it in control of the world's most famous 16 acres of land, and a private business group whose affiliation with the World Trade Center places it squarely in a fight for billions of dollars in insurance funds. Arielle Goldberg profiles five civic associations that sprouted up to voice public opinion about the redevelopment process. While the groups did not gain much leverage over policy outcomes, Goldberg argues that they were influential in steering the agenda of decision-makers and establishing what values would be prioritized in the development plans. James Young, a member of the jury that selected the design for the World Trade Center site memorial, discusses the challenge of trying to simultaneously memorialize a tragic event, while helping those who suffered find renewal and move on with their lives. Editor John Mollenkopf contributes a chapter on how the September 11 terrorist attacks altered the course of politics in New York, and how politicians at the city and state level adapted to the new political climate after 9/11 to win elected office.

Moving forward after the destruction of the Twin Towers was a daunting task, made more difficult by the numerous competing claims on the site, and the varied opinions on how it should be used in the future. Contentious City brings together the voices surrounding this intense debate, and helps make sense of the rival interests vying for control over one of the most controversial urban development programs in history.
 

JOHN MOLLENKOPF is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology and director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

CONTRIBUTORS: Susan S. Fainstein, Arielle Goldberg, Lorraine C. Minnite, John Mollenkopf, Mitchell L. Moss, Lynne B. Sagalyn, and James E. Young.

A September 11 Initiative Volume

With a population and budget exceeding that of many nations, a central position in the world's cultural and corporate networks, and enormous concentrations off wealth and poverty, New York City intensifies interactions among social forces that elsewhere may be hidden or safely separated. The essays in Power, Culture, and Place represent the first comprehensive program of research on this city in a quarter century.

Focusing on three historical transformations—the mercantile, industrial, and postindustrial—several contributors explore economic growth and change and the social conflicts that accompanied them. Other papers suggest how popular culture, public space, and street life served as sources of order amidst conflict and disorder. Essays on politics and pluralism offer further reflections on how social tensions are harnessed in the framework of political participation. By examining the intersection of economics, culture, and politics in a shared spatial context, these multidisciplinary essays not only illuminate the City's fascinating and complex development, but also highlight the significance of a sense of "place" for social research.

It has been said that cities gave birth to the social sciences, exemplifying and propagating dramatic social changes and proving ideal laboratories for the study of social patterns and their evolution. As John Mollenkopf and his colleagues argue, New York City remains the quintessential case in point.

JOHN HULL MOLLENKOPF is at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

CONTRIBUTORS: Thomas Bender,  James Beshers,  Amy Bridges Peter G. Buckley,  Norman Fainstein,  Ira Katznelson,  William Kornblum,  Diane Lindstrom,  John Hull Mollenkopf,  Martin Shefter, William R. Taylor,  Emanuel Tobier. 

"Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival: Korean Greengrocers in New York City is an exemplary contribution to the literature on international migration, Asian American studies, ethnic economies, and ethnic conflict. It advances our understanding of the social position of Korean American business owners from the early 1990s to the present and in so doing provides a timely portrait of contemporary conditions in urban America."
-JOURNAL OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

"Min has provided a highly readable account of how Korean business owners collectively handle their relationships with other ethnic groups. It reminds us that the study of ethnic businesses should also explore their collective activities."
-AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

"In Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival, Pyong Gap Min draws on ethnography, in-depth interviews, survey research and an analysis of the ethnic and mainstream press between the 1980s and the present to explore a paradigmatic case of immigrant entrepreneurship-that of Korean greengrocers in New York. Min's research shows how the entrepreneurs relied on high levels of ethnic solidarity to address their conflicts with white suppliers, black customers. and government agencies. Once conflicts subsided, so did levels of ethnic solidarity. This elegantly theorized book adds considerably to our understanding of the Korean-American experience, ethnic entrepreneurship, and contemporary urban America."
-STEVEN J. GOLD, professor, graduate program director, and associate chair, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University

"Pyong Gap Min's Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival returns to and amplifies our knowledge of the celebrated black-Korean economic conflicts of the early 1990s in New York City. Here finally is the scholarly follow-up that explains why those ethnic conflicts ended. However, Min's richly detailed book also disperses persistent misunderstandings of the whole era by showing that Korean immigrant entrepreneurs had collective conflicts with whites and Latinos as well as blacks in that stormy period. In explaining all this, with very rich evidence, Min criticizes a social science community that has paid lip service to the role of ethnic organizations without empirically examining that role .... Min depicts a gritty ethic entrepreneurship as it is, not as it's supposed to be."
-IVAN LIGHT, professor of sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

"Based on more than fifteen years of fieldwork in New York City, in-depth surveys, and secondary sources (census data, newspapers), Min has written the definitive social history of Korean small businesses and their struggles and also breathed new life into middleman minority theory. Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival will be required reading for scholars and student in immigrant and ethic studies and also in economic sociology."
-CHARLES HIRSCHMAN, Boeing International Professsor of Sociology and Public Affairs, University of Washington

Generations of immigrants have relied on small family businesses in their pursuit of the American dream. This entrepreneurial tradition remains highly visible among Korean immigrants in New York City, who have carved out a thriving business niche for themselves operating many of the city’s small grocery stores and produce markets. But this success has come at a price, leading to dramatic, highly publicized conflicts between Koreans and other ethnic groups. In Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival, Pyong Gap Min takes Korean produce retailers as a case study to explore how involvement in ethnic businesses—especially where it collides with the economic interests of other ethnic groups—powerfully shapes the social, cultural, and economic unity of immigrant groups.

Korean produce merchants, caught between white distributors, black customers, Hispanic employees, and assertive labor unions, provide a unique opportunity to study the formation of group solidarity in the face of inter-group conflicts. Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival draws on census and survey data, interviews with community leaders and merchants, and a review of ethnic newspaper articles to trace the growth and evolution of Korean collective action in response to challenges produce merchants received from both white suppliers and black customers.

When Korean produce merchants first attempted to gain a foothold in the city’s economy, they encountered pervasive discrimination from white wholesale suppliers at Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. In response, Korean merchants formed the Korean Produce Association (KPA), a business organization that gradually evolved into a powerful engine for promoting Korean interests. The KPA used boycotts, pickets, and group purchasing to effect enduring improvements in supplier-merchant relations.

Pyong Gap Min returns to the racially charged events surrounding black boycotts of Korean stores in the 1990s, which were fueled by frustration among African Americans at a perceived economic invasion of their neighborhoods. The Korean community responded with rallies, political negotiations, and publicity campaigns of their own. The disappearance of such disputes in recent years has been accompanied by a corresponding reduction in Korean collective action, suggesting that ethnic unity is not inevitable but rather emerges, often as a form of self-defense, under certain contentious conditions. Solidarity, Min argues, is situational.

This important new book charts a novel course in immigrant research by demonstrating how business conflicts can give rise to demonstrations of group solidarity. Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival is at once a sophisticated empirical analysis and a riveting collection of stories—about immigration, race, work, and the American dream.

PYONG GAP MIN is professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Winner of the 2008 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association

"Ivan Light's Deflecting Immigration makes a valuable contribution, one that illuminates various trends either overlooked or left unaddressed in the standard scholarship about immigration in the United States."
-SCIENCE MAGAZINE

"Ivan Light offers a bold thesis of how local policies shape immigrant incorporation in middle-class America ... Deflecting Immigration argues immigration policy in America is implemented at the municipal, not federal level."
-DOWELL MYERS, professor of urban planning and demography, University of Southern California

"Ivan Light's Deflecting Immigration is a book of multiple and long overdue contributions to immigration research at a time when existing paradigms are reaching exhaustion ... [T]his book has filled a gap in the emerging literature on new immigrant destinations, showing that in order to explain what is happening in uncharted areas of settlement, we need to understand what is unfolding in America's premier immigrant gateway."
-RUBÉN HERNÁNDEZ-LEÓN, assistant professor of sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

"Deflecting Immigration provides a new and insightful interpretation of the reason for the growing immigrant diaspora from the coastal gateway cites of the United States ... The book is an important contribution to the debate about immigration, its intersection with local communities, and the long-term implications for the spatial redistribution of immigrants."
-WILLIAM A. V. CLARK, professor of geography, University of California, Los Angeles

As international travel became cheaper and national economies grew more connected over the past thirty years, millions of people from the Third World emigrated to richer countries. A tenth of the population of Mexico relocated to the United States between 1980 and 2000. Globalization theorists claimed that reception cities could do nothing about this trend, since nations make immigration policy, not cities. In Deflecting Immigration, sociologist Ivan Light shows how Los Angeles reduced the sustained, high-volume influx of poor Latinos who settled there by deflecting a portion of the migration to other cities in the United States. In this manner, Los Angeles tamed globalization’s local impact, and helped to nationalize what had been a regional immigration issue.

Los Angeles deflected immigration elsewhere in two ways. First, the protracted network-driven settlement of Mexicans naturally drove up rents in Mexican neighborhoods while reducing immigrants’ wages, rendering Los Angeles a less attractive place to settle. Second, as migration outstripped the city’s capacity to absorb newcomers, Los Angeles gradually became poverty-intolerant. By enforcing existing industrial, occupational, and housing ordinances, Los Angeles shut down some unwanted sweatshops and reduced slums. Their loss reduced the metropolitan region’s accessibility to poor immigrants without reducing its attractiveness to wealthier immigrants. Additionally, ordinances mandating that homes be built on minimum-sized plots of land with attached garages made home ownership in L.A.’s suburbs unaffordable for poor immigrants and prevented low-cost rental housing from being built. Local rules concerning home occupancy and yard maintenance also prevented poor immigrants from crowding together to share housing costs. Unable to find affordable housing or low-wage jobs, approximately one million Latinos were deflected from Los Angeles between 1980 and 2000.

The realities of a new global economy are still unfolding, with uncertain consequences for the future of advanced societies, but mass migration from the Third World is unlikely to stop in the next generation. Deflecting Immigration offers a shrewd analysis of how America’s largest immigrant destination independently managed the challenges posed by millions of poor immigrants and, in the process, helped focus attention on immigration as an issue of national importance.

IVAN LIGHT is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Marginalism and Discontinuity is an account of the culture of models employed in the natural and social sciences, showing how such models are instruments for getting hold of the world, tools for the crafts of knowing and deciding. Like other tools, these models are interpretable cultural objects, objects that embody traditional themes of smoothness and discontinuity, exchange and incommensurability, parts and wholes.

Martin Krieger interprets the calculus and neoclassical economics, for example, as tools for adding up a smoothed world, a world of marginal changes identified by those tools. In contrast, other models suggest that economies might be sticky and ratchety or perverted and fetishistic. There are as well models that posit discontinuity or discreteness. In every city, for example, some location has been marked as distinctive and optimal; around this created differentiation, a city center and a city periphery eventually develop. Sometimes more than one model is applicable—the possibility of doom may be seen both as the consequence of a series of mundane events and as a transcendent moment. We might model big decisions or entrepreneurial endeavors as sums of several marginal decisions, or as sudden, marked transitions, changes of state like freezing or religious conversion.

Once we take models and theory as tools, we find that analogy is destiny. Our experiences make sense because of the analogies or tools used to interpret them, and our intellectual disciplines are justified and made meaningful through the employment of characteristic toolkits—a physicist's toolkit, for example, is equipped with a certain set of mathematical and rhetorical models.

Marginalism and Discontinuity offers a provocative and wide-ranging consideration of the technologies by which we attempt to apprehend the world. It will appeal to social and natural scientists, mathematicians and philosophers, and thoughtful educators, policymakers, and planners.

MARTIN H. KRIEGER is associate professor of planning at the School of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Southern California.

"Most of the book's facts and interpretations will be familiar to American historians and sociologists, but they can be thankful to have them integrated in a single, well-organized survey."
-THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY

"In this richly documented history, Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern brilliantly capture the dynamics of change and continuity that have shaped American society since the beginning of the twentieth century. With narrative grace and analytic rigor, they tell a story that weaves large-scale structural forces into the fabric of everyday life, and that challenges comforting notions about what it is that separates us from the past. Above all, it is a story that opens our eyes to the new, and old, and in some ways hardening patterns of inequality that continue to divide the United States in the new millennium. For historians, social scientists, and general readers alike, One Nation Divisible is an invaluable resource for understanding the nature, consequences, and manifestations of enduring inequality in a society that claims to embrace opportunity as its defining theme."
-ALICE O'CONNOR, associate professor of history, University of California, Santa Barbara

"To know where you are going, you need to know where you have been. No other book to my knowledge so succinctly, yet so masterfully, teases out the patterns and processes for the 'American Century,' providing both guidebook and compass for our history and identity-and for what we must confront to realize the American Dream for all."
-MIKE ROSE, professor of education, University of California, Los Angeles

"In One Nation Divisible, Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern offer a masterful review of how the United States came apart socially, economically, and demographically in the early decades of the twentieth century, how government was instrumental in putting the nation back together again in the wake of the Great Depression, and how social changes and economic transformations after the 1970s have combined with passive government and weak public leadership to divide us once again. Let us hope that many read this book to learn that government is not antithetical to a healthy market economy, but essential to its short-term viability and long-term success."
-DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, professor of sociology and public affairs, Office of Population Research, Princeton University and codirector of the Mexican Migration Project

American society today is hardly recognizable from what it was a century ago. Integrated schools, an information economy, and independently successful women are just a few of the remarkable changes that have occurred over just a few generations. Still, the country today is influenced by many of the same factors that revolutionized life in the late nineteenth century—immigration, globalization, technology, and shifting social norms—and is plagued by many of the same problems—economic, social, and racial inequality. One Nation Divisible, a sweeping history of twentieth-century American life by Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern, weaves together information from the latest census with a century’s worth of data to show how trends in American life have changed while inequality and diversity have endured.

One Nation Divisible examines all aspects of work, family, and social life to paint a broad picture of the American experience over the long arc of the twentieth century. Katz and Stern track the transformations of the U.S. workforce, from the farm to the factory to the office tower. Technological advances at the beginning and end of the twentieth century altered the demand for work, causing large population movements between regions. These labor market shifts fed both the explosive growth of cities at the dawn of the industrial age and the sprawling suburbanization of today. One Nation Divisible also discusses how the norms of growing up and growing old have shifted. Whereas the typical life course once involved early marriage and living with large, extended families, Americans today commonly take years before marrying or settling on a career path, and often live in non-traditional households. Katz and Stern examine the growing influence of government on trends in American life, showing how new laws have contributed to more diverse neighborhoods and schools, and increased opportunities for minorities, women, and the elderly. One Nation Divisible also explores the abiding economic paradox in American life: while many individuals are able to climb the financial ladder, inequality of income and wealth remains pervasive throughout society.

The last hundred years have been marked by incredible transformations in American society. Great advances in civil rights have been tempered significantly by rising economic inequality. One Nation Divisible provides a compelling new analysis of the issues that continue to divide this country and the powerful role of government in both mitigating and exacerbating them.

MICHAEL B. KATZ is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and research associate at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

MARK J. STERN is professor of social welfare and history in the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2009 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2009 Mirra Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society

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.

PHILIP KASINITZ is professor of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Hunter College.

JOHN H. MOLLENKOPF is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

MARY C. WATERS is M. E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.

JENNIFER HOLDAWAY is a program director at the Social Science Research Council.

"Despite all the attention paid to the biracial paradigm of big city politics, there is a dearth of scholarship analyzing the impact of the new immigrants on emerging urban political realities. Governing American Cities makes an important contribution to filling this void. With a major focus upon New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, the authors offer sophisticated theoretical perspectives on intergroup cooperation, conflict and coalition building, and provide detailed analyses of the class and generational dynamics affecting the political behavior of diverse immigrant groups."
-STEVEN P. ERIE, University of California, San Diego

"The recent wave of immigration is as large as any in U.S. history, and the great majority of these new Americans have moved to the nation's major metropolitan areas. This outstanding volume provides what is clearly the best available analysis of how this immigration has reshaped urban politics in the United States."
-MARTIN SHEFTER, Cornell University

The new immigrants who have poured into the United States over the past thirty years are rapidly changing the political landscape of American cities. Like their predecessors at the turn of the century, recent immigrants have settled overwhelmingly in a few large urban areas, where they receive their first sustained experience with government in this country, including its role in policing, housing, health care, education, and the job market. Governing American Cities brings together the best research from both established and rising scholars to examine the changing demographics of America's cities, the experience of these new immigrants, and their impact on urban politics.

Building on the experiences of such large ports of entry as Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, Chicago, and Washington D.C., Governing American Cities addresses important questions about the incorporation of the newest immigrants into American political life. Are the new arrivals joining existing political coalitions or forming new ones? Where competition exists among new and old ethnic and racial groups, what are its characteristics and how can it be harnessed to meet the needs of each group? How do the answers to these questions vary across cities and regions?

In one chapter, Peter Kwong uses New York's Chinatown to demonstrate how divisions within immigrant communities can cripple efforts to mobilize immigrants politically. Sociologist Guillermo Grenier uses the relationship between blacks and Latinos in Cuban-American dominated Miami to examine the nature of competition in a city largely controlled by a single ethnic group. And Matthew McKeever takes the 1997 mayoral race in Houston as an example of the importance of inter-ethnic relations in forging a successful political consensus. Other contributors compare the response of cities with different institutional set-ups; some cities have turned to the private sector to help incorporate the new arrivals, while others rely on traditional political channels.

Governing American Cities crosses geographic and disciplinary borders to provide an illuminating review of the complex political negotiations taking place between new immigrants and previous residents as cities adjust to the newest ethnic succession. A solution-oriented book, the authors use concrete case studies to help formulate suggestions and strategies, and to highlight the importance of reframing urban issues away from the zero-sum battles of the past.

MICHAEL JONES-CORREA is associate professor of government at Cornell University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Jones-Correa, Max Castro, Guillermo J. Grenier, Patrick D. Joyce, Peter Kwong, Paula D. McClain, Matthew McKeever, John Mollenkopf, David Olson, Edward J. W. Park, John S. W. Park, Timothy Ross, Raphael J. Sonenshein, and Steven C. Tauber.