South Bronx Battles
South Bronx Battles

Author: Carolyn McLaughlin

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0520288998

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Community activist Carolyn McLaughlin takes us on a journey of the South Bronx through the eyes of its community members. Facing burned-out neighborhoods of the 1970s, the community fought back. McLaughlin illustrates the spirit of the community in creating a vibrant, diverse culture and its decades-long commitment to develop nonprofit housing and social-services, and to advocate for better education, health care, and a healthier environment. For the South Bronx to remain a safe haven for poor families, maintaining affordable housing is the central—but most challenging—task. South Bronx Battles is the comeback story of a community that was once in crisis but now serves as a beacon for other cities to rebuild, while keeping their neighborhoods affordable.

South Bronx Battles
South Bronx Battles

Author: Carolyn McLaughlin

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0520288971

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Community activist Carolyn McLaughlin takes us on a journey of the South Bronx through the eyes of its community members. Facing burned-out neighborhoods of the 1970s, the community fought back. McLaughlin illustrates the spirit of the community in creating a vibrant, diverse culture and its decades-long commitment to develop nonprofit housing and social-services, and to advocate for better education, health care, and a healthier environment. For the South Bronx to remain a safe haven for poor families, maintaining affordable housing is the central—but most challenging—task. South Bronx Battles is the comeback story of a community that was once in crisis but now serves as a beacon for other cities to rebuild, while keeping their neighborhoods affordable.

Urban Legends
Urban Legends

Author: Peter L'Official

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0674238079

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A cultural history of the South Bronx that reaches beyond familiar narratives of urban ruin and renaissance, beyond the “inner city” symbol, to reveal the place and people obscured by its myths. For decades, the South Bronx was America’s “inner city.” Synonymous with civic neglect, crime, and metropolitan decay, the Bronx became the preeminent symbol used to proclaim the failings of urban places and the communities of color who lived in them. Images of its ruins—none more infamous than the one broadcast live during the 1977 World Series: a building burning near Yankee Stadium—proclaimed the failures of urbanism. Yet this same South Bronx produced hip hop, arguably the most powerful artistic and cultural innovation of the past fifty years. Two narratives—urban crisis and cultural renaissance—have dominated understandings of the Bronx and other urban environments. Today, as gentrification transforms American cities economically and demographically, the twin narratives structure our thinking about urban life. A Bronx native, Peter L’Official draws on literature and the visual arts to recapture the history, people, and place beyond its myths and legends. Both fact and symbol, the Bronx was not a decades-long funeral pyre, nor was hip hop its lone cultural contribution. L’Official juxtaposes the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s carvings of abandoned buildings with the city’s trompe l’oeil decals program; examines the centrality of the Bronx’s infamous Charlotte Street to two Hollywood films; offers original readings of novels by Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe; and charts the emergence of a “global Bronx” as graffiti was brought into galleries and exhibited internationally, promoting a symbolic Bronx abroad. Urban Legends presents a new cultural history of what it meant to live, work, and create in the Bronx.

Bodega Dreams
Bodega Dreams

Author: Ernesto Quiñonez

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-01-21

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0804154058

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In this "thriller with literary merit" (Time Out New York), a stunning narrative combines the gritty rhythms of Junot Diaz with the noir genius of Walter Mosley. Bodega Dreams pulls us into Spanish Harlem, where the word is out: Willie Bodega is king. Need college tuition for your daughter? Start-up funds for your fruit stand? Bodega can help. He gives everyone a leg up, in exchange only for loyalty—and a steady income from the drugs he pushes. Lyrical, inspired, and darkly funny, this powerful debut novel brilliantly evokes the trial of Chino, a smart, promising young man to whom Bodega turns for a favor. Chino is drawn to Bodega's street-smart idealism, but soon finds himself over his head, navigating an underworld of switchblade tempers, turncoat morality, and murder. "Bodega is a fascinating character. . . . The story [Quiñonez] tells has energy and verve." —The New York Times Book Review

South Bronx Rising
South Bronx Rising

Author: Jill Jonnes

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2022-10-04

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1531501222

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Thirty-five years after this landmark of urban history first captured the rise, fall, and rebirth of a once-thriving New York City borough—ravaged in the 1970s and ’80s by disinvestment and fires, then heroically revived and rebuilt in the 1990s by community activists—Jill Jonnes returns to chronicle the ongoing revival of the South Bronx. Though now globally renowned as the birthplace of hip-hop, the South Bronx remains America’s poorest urban congressional district. In this new edition, we meet the present generation of activists who are transforming their communities with the arts and greening, notably the restoration of the Bronx River. For better or worse, real estate investors have noticed, setting off new gentrification struggles.

Lady Tigers in the Concrete Jungle
Lady Tigers in the Concrete Jungle

Author: Dibs Baer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1643132903

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Violence was a way of life for the girls of Mott Middle School in the South Bronx. Some woke up to it at home, and others dodged it on the way to school. Vicious physical fights broke out in classrooms, hallways, and bathrooms. These girls filed their fingernails into sharp points because they had to be ready to go at any time. Then a new coach joined the ranks at Mott Middle, and a new program began: girl's softball. Astacio offers the girls the time and attention they need to take their first steps to success. As they learned to throw, hit and field, they also dealt with the foul balls life threw at them: unwanted pregnancies, abusive boyfriends, and unsupportive families. But the biggest challenge they faced was learning to think and act like a team, not just a bunch of fierce girls against each other—and the world. Lady Tigers is a story of coming together with faith, courage, and new-found values to overcome fear, violence, and doubt. These girls have ushered in a new confidence and pride not only in themselves, but in their school, the faculty, and their friends. And while not all of them have continued down this new path, many are now the first in their families to go to college and are beginning to see how being a Lady Tiger will always be a part of their lives.

Fight the Power
Fight the Power

Author: Gregory S. Parks

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-02-03

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 131651997X

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Fight the Power considers timely social justice issues for Black people in America through the lens hip-hop lyrics.

Before the Fires
Before the Fires

Author: Mark Naison

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2016-09-01

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0823273547

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Residents of the South Bronx during its promising postwar decades tell their stories in their own words. In the 1930s, word spread in Harlem that there were spacious apartments for rent in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. Landlords, desperate to avoid foreclosure, began putting signs in windows and placing ads in New York’s black newspapers that said “We rent to select colored families”—by which they meant those with a securely employed wage earner and light complexions. Black families moved in by the score, beginning a period in which the Bronx served as a borough of hope and upward mobility. Chronicling a time when African Americans were suspended between the best and worst possibilities of New York City, Before the Fires tells the personal stories of men and women who lived in the South Bronx before the social and economic decline of the late 1960s. Located on a hill overlooking a large industrial district, Morrisania offered migrants from Harlem, the South, and the Caribbean an opportunity to raise children in a neighborhood with better schools, strong churches, more shopping, less crime, and clean air. It also boasted vibrant music venues, giving rise to such titans as Herbie Hancock, Eddie Palmieri, Valerie Simpson, the Chantels, and Jimmy Owens. Rich in detail, these interviews describe growing up and living in communities rarely mentioned in other histories. Before the Fires captures the optimism of the period—as well as the heartache of what was lost in the urban crisis and the burning of the Bronx. “Excellent . . . profound, moving.” —Robert W. Snyder, Rutgers University, Newark

Wild Cowboys
Wild Cowboys

Author: Robert Jackall

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2005-10-31

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780674018389

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Four bullet-torn bodies in a drug-ridden South Bronx alley. A college boy shot in the head on the West Side Highway. A wild shootout on the streets of Washington Heights, home of New York City's immigrant Dominican community and hub of the eastern seaboard's drug trade. All seemingly separate acts of violence. But investigators discover a pattern to the mayhem, with links to scores of assaults and murders throughout the city. In this bloody urban saga, Robert Jackall recounts how street cops, detectives, and prosecutors pieced together a puzzle-like story of narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and murders for hire, all centered on a vicious gang of Dominican youths known as the Wild Cowboys. These boyhood friends, operators of a lucrative crack business in the Bronx, routinely pistol-whipped their workers, murdered rivals, shot or slashed witnesses to their crimes, and eventually turned on one another in a deadly civil war. Jackall chronicles the crime-scene investigations, frantic car chases, street arrests at gunpoint, interviews with informants, and knuckle-breaking plea bargaining that culminated in prison terms for more than forty gang members. But he also tells a cautionary tale--one of a society with irreconcilable differences, fraught with self-doubt and moral ambivalence, where the institutional logics of law and bureaucracy often have perverse outcomes. A society where the forces of order battle not just violent criminals but elites seemingly aligned with forces of disorder: community activists who grab any pretext to further narrow causes; intellectuals who romanticize criminals; judges who refuse to lock up dangerous men; federal prosecutors who relish nailing cops more than crooks; and politicians who pander to the worst of our society behind rhetorics of social justice and moral probity. In such an up-for-grabs world, whose order will prevail?

The Stickup Kids
The Stickup Kids

Author: Randol Contreras

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0520273370

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Randol Contreras came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980s, a time when the community was devastated by cuts in social services, a rise in arson and abandonment, and the rise of crack-cocaine. For this riveting book, he returns to the South Bronx with a sociological eye and provides an unprecedented insiderÕs look at the workings of a group of Dominican drug robbers. Known on the streets as ÒStickup Kids,Ó these men raided and brutally tortured drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. As a participant observer, Randol Contreras offers both a personal and theoretical account for the rise of the Stickup Kids and their violence. He mainly focuses on the lives of neighborhood friends, who went from being crack dealers to drug robbers once their lucrative crack market opportunities disappeared. The result is a stunning, vivid, on-the-ground ethnographic description of a drug robberyÕs violence, the drug market high life, the criminal life course, and the eventual pain and suffering experienced by the casualties of the Crack Era. Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely absorbing.