Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment

How local Black and Brown communities can resist gentrification and fight for their interests 
Despite promises from politicians, nonprofits, and government agencies, Chicago's most disadvantaged neighborhoods remain plagued by poverty, failing schools, and gang activity. In Building a Better Chicago, Teresa Irene Gonzales shows us how, and why, these promises have gone unfulfilled, revealing tensions between neighborhood residents and the institutions that claim to represent them. 
Focusing on Little Village, the largest Mexican immigrant community in the Midwest, and Greater Englewood, a predominantly Black neighborhood, Gonzales gives us an on-the-ground look at Chicago's inner city. She shows us how philanthropists, nonprofits, and government agencies struggle for power and control--often against the interests of residents themselves--with the result of further marginalizing the communities of color they seek to help. But Gonzales also shows how these communities have advocated for themselves and demanded accountability from the politicians and agencies in their midst. Building a Better Chicago explores the many high-stakes battles taking place on the streets of Chicago, illuminating a more promising pathway to empowering communities of color in the twenty-first century.


Author: Teresa Irene Gonzales
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 06/29/2021
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9781479839759
About the Author
Teresa Irene Gonzales is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. A native of Mexican Chicago, she received her doctorate and master's degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in sociology, and her bachelor's degree from Smith College in Latin American & Latina/o studies with a focus on literature and history. She firmly believes in the capacity of sociology to redress social injustices and inequalities. As a feminist, and a woman of color urbanist, Gonzales is rooted in community-engaged pedagogy and scholarship and strives toward a practice of reciprocity in research. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Urban Affairs and Social Problems, in edited volumes, and on Academic Minute. She has received both internal and extramural funding/support, notably from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the SSRC-Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program, the Community Development Society, and the UC Berkeley Center for Latino Policy Research.