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Theorizing the City

Ethnicity, gender and globalization


Setha M. Low
City University of New York

Abstract The city as a site of everyday practice provides valuable insights into
▪
the linkages of the global capitalist economy with the texture and fabric of
human experience. My comments focus on cities as centers of abuse, violence
and enslavement as documented in the papers of Ida Susser and Peter Kwong. I
place each author’s critique within this urban order by using the images of the
’ethnic city’, ’gendered city’, and ’global city’. By focusing on spatial images of
cities, I redirect our attention to the sites of social problems produced by expan-
sion of global capitalism, and to the location of possible resistance.
Keywords ▪ ethnicity ▪ gender ▪ globalization ▪ urban anthropology ▪ urban
theory
Introduction

I would like to focus my comments on cities as centers of abuse, violence


and enslavement directed at illegal workers, immigrants, poor women and
their children documented in the papers of Ida Susser, Peter Kwong and
Michael Blim. Cities contain the central core of poverty and marginaliza-
tion, and the clearest reconstructions of work and space that mark our
transformation to a global economy with flexible systems of capital accumu-
lation and a highly mobile labor force.
The city as a site of everyday practice provides valuable insights into the
linkages of this global capitalist economy with the texture and fabric of
human experience. It is not the only place where these linkages can be
studied, but the intensification of these processes - as well as their human
outcomes - occurs and can be understood best here. In this sense the ’city’
is not a reification, but a focus on the cultural and socio-political manifes-
tations of urban lives and everyday practices; as such it offers an important
location for the critique of the ’new world’ order.
I begin the process of identifying ways of understanding urban social
relations by exploring the images that structure our discourse. In each case,
I place the author’s critique within this urban order by using the images of
the ’ethnic city’, ’gendered city’ and ’global city’. By focusing on spatial
images of cities, I hope to redirect our attention to the sites of the social
problems produced by expansion of global capitalism, and to the locations
of political practice and resistance (Low, 1996).

403-

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404

The Ethnic City


Peter Kwong’s expos6 of the treatment of Chinese illegal immigrants, their
involuntary enslavement, restricted work opportunities and resulting
dependence on the ethnic enclave, presents a grim picture of the inade-
quacy and ambiguity of US immigration and labor policies: policies that
perpetuate the supply of and demand for sweatshop jobs under the control
of Chinese owner elites. The emergence of an involuntary labor source as
the result of exorbitant fees charged by operators known as ’snakeheads’
has created an international human smuggling network that American law
enforcement has never been successful in eliminating. Employers’ demand
for cheap labor and availability of global capital are fueling this traffic in
human beings, channeling workers into ethnically segregated sweatshops
that depend on language and cultural ties for recruitment and retention.
But the broader explanation for the growing numbers of illegal immi-
grants and the increasing number of sweatshops lies within the restructur-
ing of American corporations responding to global competition through
subcontracting to small suppliers who are the most likely to employ the
illegal aliens to reduce costs. Chinatown and Sunset Park in New York City
form an urban world where if workers have papers work is available no

because, from the bosses’ perspective, the illegals better because they
are
are young and willing to work longer hours. These issues and others are dis-
cussed at greater length in Kwong’s book (forthcoming).
In his article, however, even a raid by the Brooklyn District Attorney to
enforce labor standards and protect the workers’ interests, was met with
what seemed to uninformed observers to be a demonstration of ethnic soli-
darity and a political statement that Chinese workers did not mind working
under sweatshop conditions. The reality, though, is that workers had no
choice and were forced to march since the owners closed the factories and
paid workers for showing up at the rally. The constraints of being an illegal
immigrant, without adequate English, dependent on Chinese associations
and network of affiliations creates an ethnic enclave that limits new immi-
grants looking for other options, and plays into the hand of Chinese
employers (Kwong, forthcoming). Chinatown, like Little Italy in Philadel-
phia and Little Saigon in Los Angeles, is an urban neighborhood where
people of the same ethnic group exploit rather than support one another
based on their common cultural ties of language and custom.
This portrayal of ethnic group betrayal is one of the most salient aspects
of the ’ethnic city’. As illustrated by the difficulties facing the protagonist in
Little Odessa (1994), a movie about a man who is trying to escape the Russian
mafia who control the immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn,
it is impossible to escape the pressures of one’s cultural group when one stays
-
but trying to leave can lead to unexpected, and sometimes unfortunate cir-
cumstances such as one’s own death. Little Odessa depicts one of the mythic

images of an east coast ethnic city. This image, which has deep historical

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roots, gives increased attention to ethnic politics and ethnically based urban
social movements. These communities are different from other parts of the
city in their structure of job opportunity, access to local power, location of
headquarters and subsidiary relations, and self-conscious creation of collec-
tive identities that define the parameters of group success and failure.
There are two dominant streams of research in the study of the ethnic
city: first, the ethnic city as a mosaic of enclaves that are economically, lin-
guistically and socially self-contained as a strategy of political and economic
survival (Zhou, 1992); and, second, studies of ethnic groups that may or
may not function as enclaves, but are defined by their location in the occu-
pational structure (Markowitz, 1993), their position in the local immigrant
social structure (Margolis, 1994), their degree of marginality (Mahler,
1995) and/or their historical and racial distinctiveness as the basis of dis-
crimination and oppression (Fong, 1995).
Peter Kwong’s work on Chinatown and Sunset Park demonstrates how
studies of urban ethnic communities provide critical insights into collective
ethnic politics and how these politics can work against the worker, but also
generates questions about the intentions of the individual within this
system. Is there only the ’pull’ of the demand for low-cost illegal workers in
the United States, or is there an equally powerful push from the poverty
and family circumstances of prospective immigrants in China? How do we
include the individual’s motivation and experience within this structural
analysis? Where is the textured analysis of structure and experience, of the
social production of the sweatshops mediated by the social construction of
the world of the Chinese immigrant? These questions need to be answered
in order to understand fully the dialectic of how the needs of the individual
articulate with the larger, in this case oppressive, social system.

The Gendered City


Ida Susser’s unrelenting criticism of welfare policy that fosters gendered
responsibilities and in 1996 expanded the labor force at the expense of
poor women and children confronts us with the gendered consequences of
the global capitalist economy. According to Susser, poverty in the global
economy is clearly gendered: ’gender among poor people in the 1990s
United States is an area of open battles, violence and conflict, and some-
times of fatalities’ (1997: 397). In her analysis, the ’feminization of poverty’
of the 1980s meant that more children were brought up in female-headed
households in which working women earned less than men who might have
previously supported the family. Consequently, there was an increase in the
number of children reared in poverty. And along with this feminization of
poverty came an increase of violence against women; as more women
became responsible for poor households, the strain was expressed in more
domestic violence.

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In Susser’s scenario, unfair and unequal labor practices result in the


enslavement of women in dead-end and part-time jobs, thus they maintain
their families on lower wages and without the health benefits of full-time
work of their male counterparts. Even homelessness is experienced differ-
ently according to gender, for instance women with children are more likely
to be assigned private rooms while women without children and men find
themselves assigned to sex-segregated shelters or are left to brave the
dangers of spending time alone on the streets. This social order where one’s
access to resources is based upon gender depicts a world of growing vio-
lence and deprivation.
Susser’s critique of the changing construction of homelessness, class
and labor in US cities draws upon the image of a ’gendered city’, where
poor women and their struggles are made invisible. The city has often been
perceived primarily as a male place in which women, ’along with minori-
ties, children, the poor, are still not full citizens in the sense that they have
never been granted full and free access to the streets ... and they have sur-
vived and flourished in the interstices of the city, negotiating the contra-
dictions of the city in their own particular way’ (Wilson, 1992: 8).
Anthropological studies of the ’gendered city’ have focused on
women’s work and workplaces in the informal sphere: the market, home-
work and domestic service. With the increasing feminization of key sectors
of the informal economy and the informalization of economic and politi-
cal processes in Third World cities, more women are finding themselves
supporting their children in such ways as street vendors (Harrison, 1991),
market women (Clark, 1994), piece-workers (White, 1994) and domestic
workers (Gill, 1994). Repak (1995) argues that the structural forces in El
Salvador of no rural jobs, low marriage rates and multiple partners have
produced a gender-specific migration of women as a low-wage labor source
of domestics for Washington, DC households. This historical-structural
theory of ’gendered labor recruitment’ explains why single women come
to cities, but it is their newly acquired values of freedom, growth and indi-
vidual achievement that explain why they stay.
Another way of conceptualizing the gendered city has been to docu-
ment women’s urban protests against their ’silencing’ (Fine, 1992), their
exclusion from the sites of knowledge acquisition, and their control by tra-
ditional and Western hegemonies (Macleod, 1991). Hayden (1995) is par-
ticularly concerned about the absence of physical and spatial markers of
women’s contributions and designs reminders of the forgotten histories of
women who built and nourished Los Angeles.
It is here that I suggest Susser reconsider the dimensions of her analy-
sis by adding spatial relations and metropolitan knowledge. Do women
inhabit particular parts of the city at specific times throughout the day, and
do these spaces provide them with adequate control of their environment
and/or shelter for their everyday needs? Do women exchange information
that allows them to utilize the flawed welfare system in a more effective way?

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407

Do the spatial patterns of women’s lives, and the accumulation of women’s


knowledge of social and urban systems, provide insights into the way in
which the city is gendered to exclude or include women and their children?
The accumulation of strategies for dealing with urban poverty and place-
specific behaviors for dealing with danger and fear may provide women
with little-studied weapons in their struggle against disruptive and destruc-
tive social forces. With knowledge and a place to stand, resistance is often
possible.

The Global City


Michael Blim’s analysis of the end of history and/or capitalism’s end best
illustrates the contradictions and inconsistencies of the ’global city’. New
York, Tokyo and London are often cited as the pre-eminent global cities -
centers of technology, financial production and support services in which
translocal economic forces have more weight than local policies in shaping
urban economies. These cities have ’undergone massive and parallel
changes in their economic base, spatial organization, and social stmcture’
(Sassen, 1991: 4) in order to accommodate their ‘command post’ functions
as key locations for markets, finance and special services, and sites of pro-
duction and innovation. The resulting polarization of the city and the
economy, the internationalization and ’casualization’ of labor, and deter-
ritorialization of the social organization of work and community, are prod-
ucts of the same post-Fordist forces that have reshaped the ethnic and

gendered city.
Blim, however, finds something wrong with this global economic
picture. He is concerned with ’meaningful anomalies’ where there is no
adequate fit between the empirical evidence and the theory. He identifies
one area where the process of capital accumulation and outcomes of social

relations are now what would be predicted by the increasingly global and
flexible character of the capitalist world economy: property connections.
In terms of the global city it is still an open question whether a change
in property connections offers an alternative urban model. While Susser’s
and Kwong’s critiques respond to the city as a center of enslavement and
abuse, Blim’s critique suggests an oppositional urban image, one based on
collective and communal property rights found in industrializing China. It
is too early in his analysis for Blim to direct us to the urban consequences
of such restructuring, and the challenge will be to make these linkages
explicit. If Blim is correct that the changes we have observed in property
practices are not due to the globalizing of the economy, then are there
’global’ cities in his vision of late capitalism?
Is the image of a global city that fragments bodies and places useful in
Blim’s oppositional model, or does his critique also bring into question the
work of Sassen (1991) and the theory of the global city? Where would

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408

collective and communal property rights figure in the spatialization of the


city in the face of rapid privatization in Central America and the public
realm of the United States? (Low, n.d.).

Conclusion

A number of useful images of the city have been identified that organize
this commentary. The ethnic city provides a forum for discussing illegal
immigration and the development of ethnic politics, the gendered city
creates a new vision of urban poverty and homelessness, while the theory
of a global city has been called into question.
Some of these areas of research have been particularly influential. The
anthropological twist on globalization has focused attention on the trans-
national aspects of migration, culture-making and identity management,
and on the shifting cultural environments and meanings that contextualize
and decontextualize behavior. Ethnographies offer a critique of inner-city
life that provides a more complex understanding of the differences
between cities’ and residents’ responses to racial segregation, gender
degradation and class inequality. And these detailed examinations of the
relationship of labor practices and late capitalism illustrate how workers
have become enslaved within the global economy.

References

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Low, S.M. (1996) ’The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City’,
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Macleod, A.E. (1991) Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling and
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M Setha M. Low is Professor of Psychology and Anthropology and Director of the


Public Space Research Group at the Center for Human Environments. She is cur-
rently writing a book on spatializing culture based on ethnographic and ethnohis-
torical research on the plaza in Spanish America funded by a John Simon
Guggenheim Fellowship. Professor Low is also completing fieldwork and a series
of interviews with residents who live in gated communities in San Antonio, Los
Angeles, and New York City. As Director of the Public Space Research Group, she
is running a large research project that examines users needs and cultural diver-
sity in three parks within the outer boroughs of New York City. A~trlress: PhD
Program in Environmental Psychology, Graduate School and University Center of
the City University of New 1’ork, 33 West 42nd Street, NY 10036. [email:
slowC~email.gc.cuny.edu]

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