Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, UNM associate professor of history, received a Faculty Research Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH grant supports research for his latest book project, Latino Landscapes: a Transnational History of Urban America. Sandoval-Strausz’s project explores the ways Latin American immigrants have transformed urban America by analyzing their use of architectural and social space.
Photo: Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz
“The historical literature on American cities since 1950, which details the decline of urban areas and the rise of suburbia, is superb, but it does not explain the cities we see around us, which after decades of relative population loss have made something of a comeback,” Sandoval-Strausz said.
Latino Landscapes focuses on a pivotal group of people who moved into urban areas in the period: at least 25 million new city-dwellers arriving from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, El Salvador and other nations in this hemisphere. Sandoval-Strausz notes that the largest populations of Latinos initially came to the United States to perform agricultural labor in rural areas. Yet most relocated to cities, establishing new colonias and urban economies at a time when other people and job opportunities were leaving for the suburbs.
“If we want to understand the fate of urban America, we have to understand how and why these newcomers bucked the suburban trend,” he said.
The first part of Sandoval-Strausz’s NEH-supported research will take place in Dallas, Texas, which, for more than 150 years, was a predominantly Anglo and African American city. “Recently, Latinos have become the largest population group. I will focus on Oak Cliff, a neighborhood that suffered ‘white flight’ in the wake of local battles over racial desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s,” he said, adding that today, central Oak Cliff is about 80 percent Hispanic, mostly Mexican, and has the lowest rates of unemployment and poverty in South Dallas.
The second phase of research will address the Mission District in San Francisco. The Mission is an older immigrant community, one that became strongly Hispanic beginning in the 1950s. While the local white population spent four decades leaving the area, beginning around 1990 many returned as surrounding parts of the city gentrified.
Sandoval-Strausz hopes that Latino Landscapes will challenge standard assumptions about how cities work by broadening historians’ perspective to include pan-American influences that have dramatically reshaped the urban landscape.
His research will advance the field of Latino history by setting it at the center of scholarly analysis of postwar urbanization and suburbanization, one of the most important debates in the field of United States history.