The Other Tribeca: Immigrant Work and Incorporation Amid Affluence
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2014 The Other Tribeca: Immigrant Work and Incorporation amid Affluence Elizabeth A. Miller Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/77 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] THE OTHER TRIBECA: IMMIGRANT WORK AND INCORPORATION AMID AFFLUENCE by ELIZABETH A. MILLER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Sociology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2014 © 2014 ELIZABETH A. MILLER All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Sociology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Nancy Foner Date Chair of Examining Committee John Torpey Date Executive Officer Mehdi Bozorgmehr Mitchell Duneier Nancy Foner William Kornblum THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT THE OTHER TRIBECA: IMMIGRANT WORK AND INCORPORATION AMID AFFLUENCE by ELIZABETH A. MILLER Advisor: Nancy Foner Tribeca, a small, affluent neighborhood in the lower west side of Manhattan, is a microcosm of the service-and-information-based economic structure that characterizes many communities in other American cities today, and thus provides an opportunity to study the effects of this system. Tribeca residents are predominantly wealthy and work in high-end service-oriented professions, so they consume low-end personal services produced locally. Many of the people who provide these personal services in the neighborhood are foreign born. Although they share space and have regular interactions, conventional assumptions might suggest that Tribeca residents and immigrant service workers lack much in common, and have little meaningful interpersonal contact with one another. This study explores the actual nature of intergroup contact and how the people in Tribeca navigate the symbolic and social boundaries between them. In order to understand these processes of contact and boundary navigation, I collected extensive ethnographic and interview data from 66 participants. The perspectives of both immigrant workers and Tribeca residents—as well as Tribeca’s local history, identity, and culture—are taken into account to clarify how their perceptions of the neighborhood and of one another influence their interactions, their feelings of belonging, and their criteria for inclusion in the community. iv Although intergroup contact between residents and immigrants fails to alter the host of boundaries that separate them, they are still able to interpersonally connect in ways that are meaningful to them. They do this by bridging, or overlooking, the significance of symbolic and social boundaries. Because of these interpersonal interactions that go beyond service transactions, the local community is defined in a way that incorporates the immigrants who work in the neighborhood in a social way. Tribeca has become an inclusive and unexpected community—to borrow a term from Hochschild (1973)—one in which residents and workers from varying backgrounds are considered an integral and social part. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe thanks and gratitude to dozens of people who helped me though my dissertation. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to all of my informants who took time out of their busy lives and schedules to welcome me into their workplaces and homes and talk with me. Members of the Graduate Center Immigration Working Group served as my sounding board for my research ideas early on in the process. When I began fieldwork, April Koral was tireless and indispensable in helping me to build a network in Tribeca. Valuable feedback and direction on my fieldwork and writing came from my committee, including my chair and advisor Nancy Foner, who thoughtfully guided me through my fieldwork and writing, Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Mitch Duneier and Bill Kornmblum. Eva Garrett sat across from me for numerous hours of writing and served the in the instrumental position of making sure I start writing at a reasonable hour of the day. Bernadette Ludwig was present throughout the process, from discussing the challenges of doing ethnographic work to reading multiple drafts of chapters, and everything in between. She, along with Jessica Sperling, who provided excellent organizational suggestions and other ideas in response to my drafts, helped me navigate the “contextual complexities” of completing a dissertation. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables viii List of Figures ix 1. Introduction 1 2. Tribeca’s History and People 21 3. Tribeca is Being Botoxed: Perceptions of the Neighborhood 52 4. The Hand Has Five Fingers, Every One is Different: Interactions 79 5. The Unexpected Community: Defining Belonging in Tribeca 116 6. Conclusion 152 Methods 169 Appendix A: Photographs of Tribeca 187 Appendix B: Informants’ Characteristics 192 References 194 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Immigrant informants’ characteristics {192 Table 2: Resident informants’ characteristics {193 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Tribeca’s location in Manhattan {22 Figure 2: Tribeca’s boundaries {23 Figure 3: Tribeca’s location in relation to surrounding neighborhoods {31 Figure 4: Change in personal services in Tribeca {45 ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Tribeca, one of New York City’s wealthiest neighborhoods, is known for its restaurants, galleries, film festival, celebrity-spotting, and astronomically-priced real estate. But of all the neighborhood’s invaluable assets, the working immigrant population rarely makes the list. While most immigrants who work in Tribeca do not live there, and commute in from all over the city, they are a vital part of the neighborhood’s everyday operation. Without Tribeca’s immigrant workforce, sidewalks would go uncleaned, children would be unattended, beds would remain unmade, luxury units would fall into disrepair, and meals would go unprepared. They are the people who make Tribeca the neighborhood that we think of when we hear the (rather geometrically inaccurate) acronym for Triangle Below Canal. The goal of this study is to understand how people interact in this diverse environment. I investigate the nature of contact between immigrants who work in service jobs in Tribeca and local residents, how interpersonal intergroup contact arises in this particular context, and how intergroup contact changes the way Tribeca residents and immigrant workersi perceive and navigate the myriad boundaries between them. In short, I build on our understanding of the effects of intergroup contact on boundaries by exploring whether boundaries are broken down, upheld, or bridged between Tribecans and immigrant workers. Ultimately, I look at how belonging and community are defined by all social actors in Tribeca. Existing studies of intergroup contact in diverse settings have come up with wildly different conclusions about individuals’ propensity to be able to make significant social connections. Some theories state that shared space does not automatically make for frequent, interpersonal interaction (Abrahamson 1996) or a sense of community (Zorbaugh 1929), and that i I use the term immigrant worker(s) to distinguish immigrant service workers from Tribeca residents who are foreign-born. 1 individuals within diverse neighborhoods or institutions may lead very separate lives from one another (Bach 1993; Foner and Fredrickson 2004). Extreme social distance, as Harvey Warren Zorbaugh (1929) pointed out in his study of Chicago’s Near North Side, makes it particularly difficult to build an all-inclusive community. More recently, Robert Putnam’s (2007) quantitative study exemplified this, as he found that individuals lack trust in one another and “hunker down,” or engage in few kinds of cooperative or community interaction in diverse neighborhoods. However, other scholars argue that shared space allows for the possibility for social boundaries to be challenged through routine interactions; repeated interactions at the micro level can change ideas of what constitutes difference, as social distance widens or narrows depending upon the extent to which individuals see themselves as similar or distinct (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Alba and Nee 2003; van Tubergen, Maas, and Flap 2004). Jane Jacobs (1961), for example, noted in her observations of the West Village’s Hudson Street in New York City that informal relations between people on the street can create a common identity, and that those categorized as different from one another can still forge meaningful ties. In his study of street vendors in Greenwich Village, Mitchell Duneier (1999) found that social barriers between the black vendors and panhandlers and affluent white residents were often weakened as a result of interaction. William Kornblum (1974) also found that the steel mills in south Chicago were an important place for social barriers to be broken down between some members of the racially and ethnically heterogeneous workforce. Integration can challenge ethnoracial boundaries (Kim and White 2010), as in the case Elmhurst, Queens, which went from being 98 percent non-Hispanic white in 1960 to one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country over the course of 30 years. There, residents have