All Together Now? African Americans, Immigrants, and the Future of California
Manuel Pastor, Juan De Lara, and Justin Scoggins
September 2011
The movement of immigrants, particularly Latinos, into traditionally African American neighborhoods has transformed the urban landscape with new businesses, new churches and new ways of living, but it has also generated a palpable sense of loss in the Black community - one exacerbated by the negative impact of immigrants on less skilled and less connected Black workers.
While the overall media focus on interethnic tensions and conflicts makes for good reporting, it misses daily accommodations in neighborhoods and schools, common struggles to reduce over-policing and disproportionate incarceration, and efforts to organize across race and ethnicity for safer housing, better jobs and a healthier environment.
“All Together Now? African Americans, Immigrants and the Future of California” “provides organizers and activists with much needed facts and insightful analysis surrounding African American-immigration relations in California,” according to the Black Alliance for Just Immigration’s Gerald Lenoir. The authors dug deep into data on residential integration, wage and employment outcomes, and best practices of grassroots organizers to understand what’s happening in neighborhoods, and ultimately offered implications for building a new set of alliances through the frame of “everyday social justice.”
