A new perspective on the relationship between race and space in Detroit Detroit seemed to experience an explosive rebirth following its bankruptcy, the largest in US municipal history. It was as if the slate had been wiped clean and the color line erased in the nation's largest Black city. Detroit Never Left explains the relation between racism and space by analyzing the ways opportunity opportunities changed in the years leading up to and following bankruptcy. Based in part on in-depth interviews with people who identify as "Latina/o/x" in their early 20s, ethnographic observation, media coverage, and philanthropic activity in the metropolitan Detroit area, Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagan shows how a dialectic between empty and real, concrete abstractions created new opportunities for outside investment, often at the expense of public resources and residents' fortunes. She reveals space is much more than a neutral backdrop but instead is continually produced through abstractions that act like bordering and crossing practices in that are ongoing and competitive efforts to control resources and opportunities. With broad implications for analyses of space and opportunity, Detroit Never Left resolves two apparent contradictions: urban youth do not want to be moved out or isolated in their barrio. Similarly, many Detroiters feel spatial changes happen "to," instead of "for" them. Ultimately, residents' concerns underscored broader tensions between democratic inclusion and racialized capitalism.
Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagan is Associate Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University. She is the author of Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention: U.S. Medicine in Puerto Rico.
"Detroit Never Left is a gem! Using an impressive array of data, Nicole Trujillo-Pagan shows that the abstractions elites and outsiders use to describe Detroit 'impoverish life' and mostly miss how people negotiate, resist, and help produce alternative meanings of the spaces in which they live. Her book will force researchers and commentators to take seriously the meaning-making of the people and communities they examine." - Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States "Detroit Never Left urges us to see our cities not as abstractions - size, tax-base, demographics - but as arenas of specific social and political transactions within and across urban boundaries. From Trujillo-Pagan's telling, we need to see a Detroit beyond bumper-sticker sloganeering of decline or renaissance, and more fully as ongoing arrangements, near and far, that spell out capacity to secure life resources. Detroit lives on in ways this book helps explain." - Harvey Molotch, co-author of Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place "Detroit Never Left presents dispatches from the frontlines of privatization's war on the people of Detroit. Trujillo-Pagan shows how policies that purport to solve the city's problems actually reward the profiteers and predatory lenders who caused them in the first place. This book shows how abstract concepts advanced by wealthy investors and owners (and the politicians that they prop up) hide the concrete realities that confront the vast majority of Detroit's residents who suffer from an endless array of old and new forms of extraction and exploitation." - George Lipsitz, author of The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth "Detroit Never Left is a uniquely important contribution to real-world understandings of how race and space are actually lived and felt by Detroiters. Trujillo-Pagan lays bare the stickiness of abstract imaginations of Detroit's city spaces that obscure the violence of white supremacy and antiblackness. Nuanced and thoughtful, Detroit Never Left beautifully challenges the terms by which we have come to understand this oft studied but rarely understood city." - Brandi T. Summers, author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City
