Urban and regional restructuring and barrio formation in Massachusetts: The cases of Lowell, Lawrence, and Holyoke

Urban and regional restructuring and barrio formation in Massachusetts: The cases of Lowell, Lawrence, and Holyoke

barrio, urban restructuring, regional restructuring, barrio formation, Massachusetts, Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke, Puerto Rican, ethnic enclave

In the last decade, the number of Puerto Ricans in small cities and towns of the Northeastern United States has been growing steadily. This regionalization is in part the result of two processes: barrio formation and barrio differentation. The former is a multi-stage process of development mediated by social networks wherein Puerto Ricans use their ethnic and social bonds as a strategy to cope with drastic social and economic change both in the island and in the mainland. Three main stages of barrio formation can be identified: colonia formation, colonia expansion, and barrio maturation. During the latter two stages of barrio formation, population dynamics, economic restructuring, urban renewal and urban policies, and sociocultural dynamics are the four main factors of differentiation which transform the spatial/residential, family/household, labor-market, and organizational characteristics of barrios and their residents. The result of this process of barrio differentiation is barrios which exhibit a mix of characteristics from three types of barrios: working-class barrios, underclass barrios, and ethnic enclaves. Our research has shown that the mix of characteristics exhibited by barrios is critically framed and defined by the factors of differentiation. However, in some specific instances the mix of characteristics can be countervailed by the interaction between human agency and the factors of differentiation. To investigate this process of barrio formation and differentiation our research compared three case-studies of development of Puerto Rican communities in Lowell, Lawrence and Holyoke, Massachusetts between the late 1950's and the early 1990's. In all three cities the colonias formed as a result of a dual situation of employment instability in Puerto Rico and in the US, and of the conditions of social hardship and isolation in the new locales.

Borges-Méndez, Ramón

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1995

Meléndez, Edwin. Advisor

en

Thesis

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/11733

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/items/show/1118

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/archive/files/ed1175b99b93c5296db8fa0ae5cd9bfb.jpg