Richard E. Ocejo

The Early Gentrifier: Weaving a Nostalgia Narrative on the Lower East Side

Focusing on the consequences of social and cultural displacement from commercial gentrification, this article examines the perspective of “early gentrifiers” decades after they moved into the neighborhood. Based on ethnographic data collected on the Lower East Side—a gentrified neighborhood with new bars—this article analyzes how new nightlife triggered early gentrifiers to weave a “nostalgia narrative” from their experiences. They use this narrative to construct a new local identity as the neighborhoods symbolic “owners,” which helps them in their collective action against bars. Their narrative, however, contains internal contradictions that reveal several issues with their new identity. I argue that a cultural analysis of early gentrifiers reveals significant social configurations in gentrified neighborhoods and informs us of the relationship between ideology and action. Los pioneros del aburguesamiento urbano: creando una narrativa de la nostalgia en el Lower East Side (Richard E. Ocejo) Resumen Enfatizando las consecuencias del desplazamiento social y cultural resultantes del aburguesamiento urbano (“gentrification”), este artículo examina la perspectiva de los pioneros de dicho proceso (“early gentrifiers”) décadas después de haberse mudado a la comunidad. En base a datos etnográficos recogidos en el Lower East Side de la ciudad de Nueva York –un área aburguesada en la que se han instalado nuevos bares– este artículo analiza cómo la vida nocturna más reciente llevó a los pioneros del aburguesamiento urbano a entretejer una “narrativa de la nostalgia” a partir de sus experiencias. Los pioneros usan esta narrativa para construir una nueva identidad local como los “dueños” simbólicos del barrio, lo cual les ayuda en su acción colectiva contra los bares. Sin embargo, su narrativa contiene contradicciones internas que revelan la existencia de varios problemas con su nueva identidad. Mi argumento es que llevar a cabo un análisis cultural de estos pioneros revela la presencia de configuraciones sociales significativas en los barrios aburguesados y nos instruye sobre la relación entre ideología y acción.

At your service: The meanings and practices of contemporary bartenders

Focusing on the differences between the devices and dispositions of cocktail and neighborhood bartenders, this article examines how service industry jobs become cultural intermediaries. Unlike other types of bartenders, cocktail bartenders engage in forms of professionalization to make legitimacy claims and use interactive service work to add value to their products. They possess autonomy and exclusivity over their work in the sense that they control the conditions of entry and legitimacy for a niche within the drinks industry. The conditions that construct this niche are the same that allow bartenders to emerge as cultural intermediaries. They simultaneously bridge and extend the divide between production and consumption. A comparison between the attitudes (dispositions) and practices (devices) that bartenders use to add value to their products and services illuminates the distinctions between positions in this service profession and reveals the selective manner in which cultural intermediaries emerge in contemporary service industries.

Subway diaries: How people experience and practice riding the train

This article examines the diverse ways in which people experience being strangers in public space. Based primarily on the journal entries of teenagers in New York City on their trips, we show the different ways in which riders experience being a rider amid diversity and norm violations. Some teenagers see being a rider as an engaging role, some as a detached role, and others as a precarious role. All the teenagers use folk theories to navigate the social world, but how they use them varies depending on how they experience being a rider. Finally, riding in groups shifts their experiences and interpretations in complex ways that make riding more enjoyable, but filled with additional emotional tensions. Building from previous theories and studies on strangers and public spaces, this article contributes to longstanding debates in sociology over how people interact with others in urban environments.

Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of ProductionDivided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production, by BowenSarah. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 280 pp.

origins of Buraku outcaste status in order to contextualize it in the present. Bondy ranges over much of the literature on these issues without developing a clear framework of his own. This is a question grounded in historical sociology, whereas the strength of Bondy’s analysis is that of contemporary society through the lens of social interaction. While race, ethnicity, and religion are prominent features of discrimination and unequal life chances in the United States and other ‘‘western’’ societies, the living legacy of outmoded caste status is a significant aspect of many Asian societies, including Japan. U.S. conceptions of ‘‘race’’ have reached Asian societies, but ideas about caste and other outgroup statuses are less well understood in the United States. As Bondy notes, even in Japan itself, there is general confusion or lack of knowledge about the Burakumin, while at the same time there is substantial discrimination against them. This represents a challenging problem for scholars writing about the circumstances facing Buraku people. Bondy is correct that silence is the ‘‘normal’’ response to Buraku discrimination by Japanese society. It is a silence that has been intensified by Japanese government policy—or the lack thereof. This book is a commendable response to that silence. Despite any criticisms to be made, Voice, Silence, and Self should be read by anyone who wants a better and deeper understanding of the contemporary Buraku experience.

29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520281059.

A neighborhood’s bars can help tell the complex story of gentrification, symbolic ownership, and public space in today’s New York City.

Bar Fights on the Bowery

At first glance, the responses to the September 11, 2001, attack in New York and Hurricane Katrina’s destruction in New Orleans in 2005 could not have been more different. In the first, victims were hailed as heroes and federal aid surpassed all previous levels. In the second, survivors were labeled criminals and the federal government notoriously stood by as more than 1,800 lives were lost in the storm and ensuing flood. But as Kevin Fox Gotham and Miriam Greenberg point out in Crisis Cities, the responses to the two disasters bore historic similarities. In this comparative study, the authors argue that such crises can be “rupture and frame,” disrupting existing social, economic, and environmental systems, and an opportunity for elites to expand policies they identify as “crisis-driven urbanization.” Gotham and Greenberg demonstrate that both recovery programs were products of neoliberalism, characterized by neoliberal priorities such as selective privatization and abandonment of social welfare responsibilities, exacerbated inequality, and funding priorities that reward the wealthiest interests while dodging persistent problems. The book traces the trajectories of the two cities from 1970s through early neoliberalism, disaster, and recovery. Both experienced urban crises in the decades before their respective disasters in the form of deindustrialization and municipal fiscal shortfalls. The framing of the two events and of their survivors—as an attack suffered by patriots in New York, and as a natural disaster that produced “refugees” in New Orleans—then set the stage for new recovery guidelines. Federal policies that had previously set income targets and public benefit requirements were eliminated, after which grants, loans, and other assistance flowed, most dramatically in New York, to some of the nation’s wealthiest corporations. (Gotham and Greenberg point out that although federal funds after September 11 dwarfed previous disaster support, Wall Street’s bonuses in 2006 alone, at

Urban Nightlife: Entertaining Race, Class, and Culture in Public Space, by Reuben A. Buford May. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. 242 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8135-6938-3 (

26 billion, were as large as the whole federal recovery program.) A subsequent chapter examines how both cities engaged in extensive “rebranding” campaigns, defining both cities as business-friendly places, distancing themselves from images of the disasters, and ignoring continued inequality.

72 Cloth,

at least, situationally so. In addition, it would require an ethnicity/gender/class analysis to ascertain if working class 1.5ers’ weaker pride in Koreanness could also be explained by their greater entrenchment in male-dominated family obligations than middle class 1.5 women. It is plausible that Danico’s data could not speak to such comparisons, as the eight case studies included only two females and as the Jaycees case studies were both men. Along lines of race, the book intensified my interest in Hawaiian race relations and the 1.5ers’ navigation of identities with respect to them. In this vein, I would like to have learned more about how Asian Americans’ racialization as perpetual foreigners complicates Hawaii’s vertical white-overnative hierarchy, its construction of itself as multiculturally open, and the 1.5ers’ fluid and situational identifiers with respect to Hawaii’s own contradictions on Korean Americans. It is my hope that future works will elaborate on these class, gender, and race bases and intersections of ethnic identity formation. Yet, in doing so, these future works should pay respect to and draw on Danico’s pioneering book The 1.5 Generation. Despite room for more layered analyses, this clearly argued, well researched, and timely contribution is vital to the sociology of immigration and ethnicity, to Asian American Studies scholarship, and to undergraduate and graduate classrooms alike.