Hispanas de Queens: Latino Panethnicity in a New York City Neighborhood

Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003, xii + 168 pages (paper).Reviewer: Marilyn Gates Simon Fraser UniversityLiving to most North Americans means some form of co-habitation, especially as sexual partners, without being married to each other. As such, it is a private, domestic arrangement, although it may be widely known among family and friends and even to more casual acquaintances in the public sphere. Ultimately, though, it is no one's business other than the consenting adults involved how and with whom they live within the confines of their own four walls. It is a personal decision undertaken by individuals in dyadic contracts.The equivalent Latino term convivencia, on the other hand, involves both broader and deeper connotations of as interactions and mutual involvement in the course of occupation of a common space in everyday lives. Not confined to the home and family, permeates the public places where social life is conducted as diverse individuals often previously unknown to each other actively construct community as part of the working out of identity politics. In this way, can cannote a level of intimacy and shared experience far beyond the narrow confines of the non-Latino urban experience. It is an ongoing, collective, polyadic process of negotiating multiple sites of cultural-meaning construction.In Hispanas de Queens: Latino Panethnicity in a New York City Neighborhood, Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta ask what happens when women of diverse Latin American nationalities reside in the same neighbourhood? Focussing on convivencia diaria, or daily-life interaction, Ricourt and Danta show how immigrant women--Columbian, Cuban, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Uruguayan, and others--who live together in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in Queens, have constructed a new pan-Latino identity from these mundane encounters. This new overarching identity does not simply replace one's self-identification as an immigrant from a particular country. Rather, these repeated intersections between individuals from various nations may foster cultural exchange, syncretisms and other selective adaptations and resistances and forge an additional identity that can be mobilized by Latino panethnic leaders and organizations. This book analyzes the social forces that structure this identity-creation process in both the everyday interactions and the organizational and institutional life of immigrants currently residing in Corona and elsewhere in Queens, emphasizing four critical factors--Spanish language, geographic propinquity, class and gender.The book is organized in two parts. Part 1 deals with the roots of experiential Latino panethnicity as it is constructed from convivencia diaria, the routine exchanges and associations of everyday living in apartments and houses, on the streets, in stores, in workplaces, in playgrounds, at fiestas, in hospitals, in parks, at sporting events and in both Catholic and Protestant churches. Part 2 examines how Latino leaders, often middle-class and female, have built on these grassroots foundations emergent Latino panethnic organizations and an embryonic Latino political voice in Corona and Queens, within social service organizations, in cultural activities and in formal politics. First, from the bottom up, experientially, then, subsequently, from the top down, institutionally, a new, pan-Latino presence gains momentum as a force to be reckoned with both in local and national political arenas. The concluding chapter reflects on the roles of women in the creation of Latino panethnicity as experiential forms of identity construction extend to organizational expressions of community self-designation via a female consciousness centred in their obligations to nurture, and to preserve and protect their families and neighborhoods.Hispanas de Queens is a richly textured ethnography, the product of fieldwork spanning almost 20 years beginning in the mid-1980s. …

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