A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio

A Good Reputation

A Good Reputation

How Residents Fight for an American Barrio

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82577-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83385-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83384-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226833842.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Korver-Glenn, Elizabeth, author. | Mayorga, Sarah, author.

Title: A good reputation : how residents fight for an American barrio / Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023052477 | ISBN 9780226825779 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226833859 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226833842 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Hispanic American neighborhoods—Texas—Houston. | Urban renewal—Texas—Houston. | Poor—Texas—Houston. | Segregation—Texas—Houston. | Gentrification—Texas—Houston. | Hispanic American neighborhoods—Texas—Houston—Public opinion. | Urban renewal—Texas—Houston—Public opinion. | Gentrification—Texas—Houston—Public opinion. | City dwellers—Texas—Houston—Attitudes. | Public opinion—Texas—Houston. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / Hispanic American Studies

Classification: LCC HT177.H6 K678 2024 | DDC 305.868/07641411—dc23/eng/20231120

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052477

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Northside

Contents

Introduction: A Change That Never Came

1: Racial Capitalism, Placemaking, and Neighborhood Reputation

2: Jose Campos Torres and the Moody Park Uprising

3: Para Aquí Institutions

4: Para Llevar Institutions

5: Cleaning or Cultivating?

6: The (Re)Developing Barrio

Conclusion: The Good Fight

Acknowledgments

Methodological Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction: A Change That Never Came

Commonsense notions of gentrification and neighborhood development draw on fundamental changes to the neighborhood and its amenities to signal their beginnings—a new Starbucks or Whole Foods, the omnipresence of dog walking and strollers, or even significant investments in public transit. Although these references can be tongue-in-cheek, they share in common an assumption that certain kinds of change signal a point of no return. Once a neighborhood experiences one of these harbingers of development, people assume that gentrification and displacement are soon to follow. That same assumption is one we heard in Northside, a predominantly Latinx, high-poverty neighborhood just north of downtown Houston, Texas. The omen in question? The planned expansion—and later, the arrival—of the light rail through the neighborhood, connecting Northside with downtown.

Emilio, a Mexican American homeowner in his late fifties, was not convinced the light rail would do much good for him and his neighbors: I don’t think it’s gonna benefit that much. His father, Ignacio, in his eighties and also a homeowner, disagreed: "I think it’s a good thing for us. I mean, we’re one of the few cities that don’t have massive transit systems. And it’s good for us. I mean, we have to, we gotta keep movin’ along, and in that, we just keep gettin’ left behind. And the people that can ride it and wanna ride it, it’s good for them, you know, who knows, I might even get on it a few times."¹ Despite his willingness to ride the light rail occasionally, Ignacio acknowledged that, in the short term, local businesses were losing out—a refrain many residents repeated: As far as the businesses right now, they’re suffering because of the construction, and a lot of ’em have closed down, a lot of the little restaurants and stuff. And, I mean, they’re probably the ones that are complaining about it the most, but it’s gonna be good for the neighborhood in the long run.

Luz, a Mexican American resident in her early seventies who was semiretired, felt strongly that the light rail was a bad idea. I don’t like it, she stated plainly. She paused for eight seconds when asked why and then explained: Because it’s already very much low-income people here. And it’s gonna get like downtown. All them transients, homeless, people begging, people urinating on the street. I think that’s what’s gonna happen here. When asked about other types of development and the organizations leading the charge in Northside, Luz responded, as long as it’s not, it doesn’t cause no trouble, I have no problems with it. Luz objected to the light rail because she associated public transit with poverty and social disorder, but she made clear that she was pro-development in general—so long as it was the right kind of development.

Sixty-year-old Eric Gonzalez, a Mexican American homeowner, agreed that he didn’t like the light rail (I don’t agree with the light rail) but expressed the opposite fear as Luz. He tied his dislike of it to fears of displacement: Because that’s gonna force a lot of folks out. He explained that he thought young professionals would start moving in as soon as it was up:

The light rail should be up and running here by next year, so another four years, and like I said, to me, it just makes sense, the people that work downtown, a lot of those folks are affluent, younger people. And they don’t want to live in Kingwood or the Woodlands [both large Houston suburbs] when, you know, look at the commute times. OK, so it makes more sense; they buy someplace closer to work; what better place than a place you can jump on the light rail? You don’t pay four dollars a gallon for gas. You’re home in a matter of minutes. So yeah, we’re gonna see a big change.

For Eric, the light rail was a surefire sign of what was to come: neighborhood change.

We spoke with Emilio, Ignacio, Luz, and Eric in 2013, when residents could only speculate on what changes the light rail would bring. Yet the light rail has been up and running since late 2013, and Northside has remained much the same as it was at the time of our conversations. Ignacio, however, was right—some community businesses did close during construction. Among those shuttered was Doneraki’s, a local go-to for Mexican fare located on Fulton Avenue directly in the path of light-rail construction. But newer establishments that many locals considered markers of gentrification, such as Radical Eats and Bocca Deli, closed, too. The additional changes that others expected, such as younger professionals moving in, housing prices skyrocketing, and the loss of Northside’s Mexican American identity, did not happen, or at least not to the extent expected. For example, a few clusters of new homes built by the local development corporation, Avenue CDC, and other for-profit developers have been located here and there around the neighborhood, creating a sharp visual contrast with the longtime bungalow stock of the area. But housing stock has remained otherwise the same. The other common indicators of gentrification—shorter length of residential tenure, (rapidly) increasing median household incomes, and increasing or skyrocketing housing values have not materialized.²

Research on urban inequality has proposed multiple theories that help us understand how and why high-poverty urban neighborhoods gentrify and what the consequences of gentrification are.³ For instance, some theories help explain how pro-development elites and entities have dispossessed and exploited high-poverty urban neighborhoods of color that are undergoing or have undergone gentrification. Yet what is less often explained is the much larger set of high-poverty urban neighborhoods of color that have not been (successfully) targeted for development purposes by such elites or undergone gentrification.⁴ This is not a negligible phenomenon. One study of the period 2000–2013 found that the majority of low- to moderate-income neighborhoods across the United States did not gentrify, and that seven US cities (including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles) accounted for almost half of all instances of neighborhood gentrification.⁵ Put another way: even when gentrification seems on the horizon, it frequently doesn’t come to pass.

To foster deeper understanding of how and why gentrification doesn’t happen, even in places where it’s anticipated, we focus on the experience of Northside, exploring why development is a more complicated and uneven process than existing accounts of urban inequality would suggest. In line with the long arc of Du Boisian urban research, we position our account squarely against urban scholarship and popular portrayals that simplify high-poverty urban neighborhoods as homogeneous, pathological, and easily understood. At the same time that these accounts reify damaging stereotypes about these places, they perpetuate harm when politicians and community leaders enact them in public policy. Yet as we show, urban poverty is best contextualized and characterized by neighborhood complexity and diversity. Indeed, recognizing the multiple axes of urban heterogeneity can help explain why racial capitalist processes are less successful than might otherwise be expected. We show that alongside White racial and economic dominance in urban spaces, residents of high-poverty communities of color survive and thrive.

Much of the literature on urban poverty and its relationship to development has focused on Black neighborhoods, but many social scientists, policy makers, and developers have approached high-poverty Latinx neighborhoods through a similar lens of homogeneity, whether in terms of racial and class identity or attitudes. In contrast, we start our analysis from difference or, rather, conflict—for example, differences in understanding and action regarding the light rail. But even conflict is not so straightforward. In each battle we discuss, the players and their positions follow nonlinear paths that defy easy categorization. Race, class, religion, gender, generation since immigration—none of the typical identity markers on which social scientists base their analyses provide a clear picture of residents’ approaches to Northside’s development.

After speaking to residents, developers, and other neighborhood stakeholders, we find that a single, continuous thread runs through all these conflicts: concerns about neighborhood reputation. Although the site of a conflict, the context from which it emerges, or the players on each side may shift, the people we spoke with continually and consistently invoked ideas about how either insiders or outsiders saw or might see their neighborhood. For our case, studying disputes over neighborhood reputation was the most helpful approach to understanding the not-easily-pinned-down complexity of the Northside, its residents, and why gentrification never arrived.

By focusing on neighborhood reputation, we advance three significant contributions to existing urban and race/ethnicity research. First, we explain how (borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu) habitus best captures the interplay of structures of inequality and individual actions that reflect the competing approaches to neighborhood issues in Northside. Second, we reorient discussions about Latinx communities toward their intrinsic complexity amid structures of inequality, not just to add nuance but to see the forest for the trees.⁶ Finally, we resist simplified notions of high-poverty neighborhoods by foregrounding multiple forms of urban heterogeneity.⁷

Chapter 1 discusses our conceptualization of neighborhood reputation and its relationship to two structures, racial capitalism and placemaking. In short, we provide the theoretical base for the book’s discussion of neighborhood conflicts. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, we examine three different sites of neighborhood conflict to understand better how neighborhood reputation (as habitus) orients the values and actions of Northside residents in two distinct ways. In our study, key historical events (chapter 2) and the neighborhood’s located institutions (chapters 3 and 4) were the contexts in which residents’ conflicting values and actions were most apparent. Notably, residents’ description of the situation and even their position on the conflict in question fluctuated, but the logics (e.g., anti-Blackness, solidarity) and focus on neighborhood reputation were consistent. In chapters 5 and 6, we demonstrate how Northsiders brought these logics to bear in their interactions with one another—particularly in neighborhood organizations—and why they mattered for processes related to neighborhood inequality. In this way, we show how different groups wove together the threads of neighborhood reputation, producing two distinct tapestries that either advanced racial capitalism in the neighborhood or interrupted its progress.

Overall, we find that a particular habitus, the racial capitalist habitus, was apparent in all neighborhood conflicts. Latinx residents who enacted this habitus drew on the logics of civility, property, and anti-Blackness to justify their purge-and-clean orientation to and action in the neighborhood. Many of these Northsiders celebrated two types of ethnic located institutions in the barrio—ethnic restaurants and Catholic churches (chapter 3). At the same time, the bulk of their attention and action centered on distancing themselves and the neighborhood from what they perceived as its racially and economically stigmatized reputation and its association with Blackness (chapters 2 and 4). White stakeholders affirmed the racial capitalist habitus in White-oriented neighborhood organizations (chapter 5). And Northsiders activated it during neighborhood decision-making, advocating, and supporting neighborhood interventions and processes such as surveillance, policing, and development that were modalities of racial capitalism (chapters 5 and 6).

The other primary orientation that emerged during neighborhood conflicts was a bienvenida (welcome) habitus. Some non-Black Latinx Northsiders drew from and acted on the logics that affirmed the dignity of people of color to justify their support-and-cultivate orientation to and action in the neighborhood.⁸ These Latinx Northsiders consistently embraced and celebrated the neighborhood’s image, including its history (chapter 2) and located institutions.⁹ They especially heralded ethnic located institutions that they interpreted as authentic, legitimate expressions of Mexican and Mexican American identity (chapter 3), as well as other, not-specifically-ethnic located institutions that they believed played a vital role in their community (chapter 4). We demonstrate how they focused their attention and action on protecting and preserving the barrio. They pushed back on the racial capitalist habitus in White-oriented neighborhood organizations, acted informally outside those organizations, and supported their people-of-color-centered organizations (chapter 5). Those with a bienvenida habitus generally questioned and protested neighborhood interventions that they perceived would harm the barrio and pursued alternative strategies to create and support place (chapter 6). Yet even among some of these Northsiders, the bienvenida habitus was not expansive enough to include their Black Northside neighbors. Indeed, for some, their bienvenida orientation meant supporting and cultivating Latinx, not Black, places (chapter 4). In this way, anti-Blackness was a logic that sometimes connected Latinx Northsiders with otherwise competing orientations. While most racial capitalist logics encountered direct challenges and counterparts in the bienvenida habitus (e.g., civility and power), anti-Blackness was mainly countered by Black residents.

Although our case is empirically limited to the Northside barrio, our book echoes and advances research on barrios and other neighborhoods of color across the United States and their relationships to racial capitalism and placemaking’s ideologies, agents, and forms, such as Mario Luis Small’s Villa Victoria, María G. Rendón’s Stagnant Dreamers, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor’s South Central Dreams, and Teresa Irene Gonzales’s Building a Better Chicago. For instance, far from Northside in the more ethnically and socioeconomically homogeneous Villa Victoria barrio of Boston, the sociologist Mario Luis Small uncovered distinct logics framing neighborhoods as either beautiful or the projects. Like Small, we find that the differences in how residents framed their barrio mattered because how they participated in neighborhood life reflected their view of the neighborhood. Like Rendón, who examined second-generation Latino men’s prospects in two Los Angeles neighborhoods, we find that it is not only residents who construct neighborhood reputation habitus and use that construction to advance racial capitalism or placemaking. Multiple outside stakeholders (i.e., individuals, organizations, and institutions who are not of the neighborhood yet in some way shape the neighborhood and its residents’ well-being) also construct and act on neighborhood reputation habitus. Like Gonzales, we find that racial capitalists and agents of placemaking often relied on distinct ideologies to pursue different urban forms—displacement and dispossession on the one hand and protest and preservation on the other. So while A Good Reputation is very much a Houston and Northside story, it is also one that identifies processes that speak to neighborhoods across the country.

The importance of neighborhood reputation and conflict in understanding Northside’s past and present was an emergent finding. The first author, Elizabeth, collected data in Northside in 2013 and 2015 via participant observation and in-depth interviews with neighborhood stakeholders, including residents and developers (for more on the data collection, see the Methodological Appendix). It was in these conversations in and around Northside that a complex picture of the neighborhood and its residents emerged, challenging us to think beyond the traditional ways of understanding urban inequality. As an example, let us revisit Elizabeth’s tour of Northside alongside Elias and Greg.

* * *

At 10:00 a.m. on Friday, June 21, 2013, Elias and Greg met Elizabeth at one of their favorite breakfast places—Tacos Tremendos, located in a made-over gas station just north of I-610 and Irvington Boulevard. Elias, a middle-class, third-generation Mexican American retiree, wore his customary Stacy Adams hat and basketball-style sneakers. Greg, a middle-class, second-generation Mexican American retiree, wore a bright-orange golf shirt and pressed khaki pants. The two retired friends chatted over our breakfast tacos. After paying, they walked outside to Greg’s minivan. Greg and Elias insisted that Elizabeth sit in the front to ensure the best view. Then, they spent the next hour and a half driving her around, through, and across the Northside barrio, stopping at landmarks they wanted to point out, urging her to take photos, and interweaving their personal histories with specific barrio places (fig. I.1).

Figure I.1 Northside. Map created by Erin Greb.

As the drive began, they cut through the Lindale Park area on the neighborhood’s north end. Neatly and newly planted young trees were visible, lining the median on Irvington Boulevard north of Cavalcade. Although some small businesses dotted the landscape on either side of Irvington, the curb- and sidewalk-lined boulevard was flanked on both sides by broad residential streets with well-maintained brick homes that had large green lawns and mature trees that provided shade. Crossing Cavalcade heading south, many commercial buildings began to crowd Irvington’s edges. Greg pulled into the parking lot of Fiesta en Guadalajara, a large, Mexican-style restaurant with outdoor patio seating, to provide a closer look. Then, they turned right onto Collingsworth and headed east, stopping by a boarded-up, brightly colored building with the single words Mexican and Dinner (among others) painted on the exterior. This used to be a redneck place, Elias said, Blacks and Mexicans were not allowed in here.

Greg continued driving, turning left onto Robertson. This time, he pulled into the drive of a very dilapidated, old building: the former campus of St. Patrick Catholic Church. Two buildings still stood in the abandoned-looking lot: a small, squat one with flaking white paint and a small cross on the point of the roof—the old sanctuary—and another smaller building toward the back of the property perpendicular to the sanctuary. A tall, chain-linked fence ran the perimeter of the property. Does St. Patrick’s still own this? Elizabeth asked. Yep, they do, said Greg. They pulled out of the church property and continued heading south, zigzagging through narrow streets that lacked sidewalks, curbs, or covered ditches. Elias reminisced about the Melrose Bus, a city bus that used to take kids to school: "You remember how bumpy that used to be, Greg? This street was bumpy, I mean bumpy! You couldn’t hold a glass of water on that thing!"

Elias, Greg, and Elizabeth stopped at several more places—including one of the barrio’s two public housing projects and Rio Verdence, a pharmacy turned club turned sports bar. One iteration of the building was the Hurricane Club. Greg said, If you had a band that was anything to speak of, you played there. Rio Verdence was then a Mexican restaurant, painted bright red and yellow. They passed an empty lot (former bakery), Holy Name Catholic Church (Elias had some choice words about the new cardinal who had closed a lot of schools), and Martinez Café (That used to be Martin’s Café! exclaimed Elias).

When they approached a blue house south of Quitman Street where two men were doing yardwork out front, Elias noted, Oh, that must be a day care. Oh no, that’s a halfway house, said Greg. Oh no, I don’t want—I don’t like that, Elias replied, quickly pulling into the next driveway, reversing, and turning around to head back from where they had come. More buildings, more places—Monterrey Food City, Sherman Elementary School, an industrial-commercial complex that Elias said was a phone company—Lots of aliens work there, Elias said. Illegal? asked Greg. I didn’t say that, replied Elias. They went all the way to the southern tip of the neighborhood, near Saint Arnold Brewing Company just north of downtown Houston, then headed back west to north Main Street, turned right to head north, and stopped at the original Poppa Burger restaurant, located under the shadow of the under-construction light rail that promised to connect Northside to downtown, eastern, and southeastern Houston. Greg and Elias wanted to experience how the burgers were tasting these days.

As Greg and Elias proudly drove through the neighborhood, narrating and interpreting specific places, memories, and people, Elias’s description of the area during his interview a month prior played through Elizabeth’s head. Elizabeth had asked, So how would you describe the neighborhood to someone who’d never seen it before? Elias responded:

Mm, some people don’t like it. Because they say, well . . . they call it the ghetto. You call it a ghetto if you look at it that way. I don’t look at it that way. I was raised and born here, and, you know, born and raised here. To me, it’s a nice place to live, and like everybody says, it’s coming up. It’s coming up. It’s coming up; it’s coming up; it’s coming up. You never know what’s gonna happen today or tomorrow, you know?

Elias’s description—along with his and Greg’s live-narrated tour through Northside—exemplifies the competing claims residents made about the neighborhood and the dynamic nature of these claims (you never know). Was it a racially and economically stigmatized place—a ghetto? Or was it a nice place to live, a place that was coming up and worth showing off? Do these competing constructions of a place’s image matter for the neighborhood and its residents? If so, why?

In this book, we demonstrate how competing neighborhood images, or reputations, are socially constructed and imbue status to Northside and its residents, and how those competing orientations advance and challenge neighborhood development processes. We conceptualize neighborhood reputation as two habitus alternately structured by racial capitalism and placemaking. This way of thinking about urban heterogeneity best explains the contexts in which urban poverty unfolds and development stalls.

In the following chapters, we lay out a vision of Northside that speaks to the complexity of life amid its borders. We aim to challenge the idea of homogeneity that often flattens the experience of Latinx and poor people. There are no easy stories about Latinx people as a group, even those who share a neighborhood, identity, and class status. We use the example of what’s happening in a predominantly Latinx, high-poverty neighborhood to break down Latinx identity and push scholars to study this group in a structurally situated way. Our findings caution against taking the groupness of a given Latinx ethnic group for granted and instead point toward paying attention to the on-the-ground ways that Latinx meaning is constructed and put into motion.¹⁰ So, although this book centers on the experiences of Latinx and some Black residents of Northside, it is not a book about racial identity. Rather, it is about how identity is just one part