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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 opportunities changed in the years leading up to and following bankruptcy.
Based on a variety of data, including in-depth interviews with people who identify as “Latina/o/x” in their early 20s, ethnographic observation, and media coverage, Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán shows how a dialectic between empty and concrete abstractions created new opportunities for outside investment, often at the expense of residents' fortunes. She reveals space is much more than a neutral backdrop; It is continually produced through abstractions that act like bordering and crossing practices to control resources and opportunities. With broad implications for analyses of space and opportunity, Detroit Never Left tackles important contradictions in the post-bankruptcy city. For example, 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.
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-Pagán’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.
Detroit Never Left presents dispatches from the frontlines of privatization’s war on the people of Detroit. Trujillo-Pagán 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.
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-Pagán 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.