Relocating Urban Lives: Negotiating Urban Identities and Urban Culture Beyond the City
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Sociology
First Advisor
Anderson, Elijah
Abstract
During the mid-2010s, I had done participant-observation with Puerto Ricans in Western Massachusetts who had relocated from various cities, attempting to understand their particular experiences and the particular challenges that they had faced. I had spent time with them in a neighborhood with concentrated poverty where they would often meet up to socialize, and through conversations, I had attempted to gain a more meaningful perspective on this demographic about which not that much research has been produced. By engaging with seven men who had relocated from as far away as Salinas, Puerto Rico and Jacksonville, Florida, and more proximate urban neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, Brooklyn, New York, The South Bronx, and Springfield, Massachusetts, I had become familiar enough with their particular pathways to make some more general conjectures. Taken together, this set of more general conjectures will be framed in the terms of an overarching concept, which I will now introduce as “relocating urban lives” and continue to build on throughout this dissertation. The first chapter will be centered around the motivations for and some of the actual processes of these relocations away from the city, looking at how family and desires for safety and a higher quality of life had factored into individual decisions. In the second chapter, I will look more specifically at the drug market-related identities that had been formed in the context of the more rural market in Crawford (a pseudonym), and how some of the men in my research who had sold drugs in the city had positioned their identities to reflect this. Finally, the third chapter will examine urban fashion and how it had allowed some of them to signify an association with the city. It will use the ideas of a regional culture that I will advance in this discussion to talk about regional lives more broadly, and how certain relationships had allowed some men to maintain more of a connection to the city than others. Across these three chapters, I will make the cumulative argument that relocation away from the city is worthy of academic attention, and that as much can be learned from the study of moving over its boundaries as from the study of moving within them.
Recommended Citation
Kearns, Nicholas Payne, "Relocating Urban Lives: Negotiating Urban Identities and Urban Culture Beyond the City" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1230.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1230
