Seeing Immigrants

Planning for Diversity

On an early evening in July 2007, my research assistant and I wandered into a Draft Concept Plan Meeting organized by Metro Nashville’s Planning Department. Held in the heart of southeast Nashville, this meeting was part of a visioning exercise designed to create a new land use plan for the area. At this gathering and others like it, Metro urban planners asked residents to brainstorm about what they wanted their neighborhoods to look like, compiling across meetings a collective sense of what attendees thought their neighborhoods could be and translating those aspirations into neighborhood design plans. Finding a seat along the edge of the room, close to but not at the tables set up for participants, I made the first entry in my field notes: “all white attendees.” This observation would be noted again at the meeting’s conclusion—this time, by attendees themselves—as it would be at similar meetings across southeast Nashville. It would also become a leitmotif of Nashville’s institutional interactions with immigrants.

To begin the session, the lead planner reminded people in the room that “the neighborhood spoke” at these sessions, mapping the idea of “neighborhood” onto the people at the meeting and linking their involvement to the neighborhood’s ability to be represented. At this session, as at others, conversations bounced between urban planners’ calls for the “diversity” necessary to transform the area into a functioning urban community and long-term residents’ hopes for the “small-town” feel that would re-create the neighborhood they nostalgically recalled. Planners stressed that this combination of diversity and quaintness was attainable, with the right planning approach. Mixed-used development, they explained, would give the area defined centers and make its main road more than a thoroughfare out of the city. To do so, however, residents had to “declare your neighborhood” and mark its limits, the facilitator reiterated.

The remainder of the meeting debated that “declared” neighborhood, with planners stressing that it was “up to the neighborhood” to drive changes. “You all are the watchdogs” who could pressure council representatives. “You, as a community, are watching over” the neighborhood, the planners explained. Throughout this discussion, participants periodically marked the demographic trend I recorded in my field notes. As one participant quipped, “I’m just gonna say it. There are no Hispanics here.” It was true that there were no Latino/as present at the session, aside from my Puerto Rican research assistant. To say that Latino/as were absent in the content of the meeting, however, was not true, as a Latino presence was central to the session in all sorts of ways. When facilitators turned to a proposed corridor to link a local park and a community center that served Latino immigrants, for example, a particularly vocal attendee opined that the community center was no longer a neighborhood center and “not what it once was,” obliquely referencing tensions surrounding its immigrant outreach and directly noting its failure to merit identification as a neighborhood node. An absent Latino presence was also central to how the meeting itself was organized. When organizers explained toward the end that budget limitations did not allow them to send out multiple announcements or announcements in multiple languages, an attendee lamented that despite its hard work, the “core group committed to the neighborhood . . . doesn’t represent the demographics of the community.” Through this immigrant absence, the distance between the neighborhood represented by and reproduced through a core group of active residents and the community constituted by an increasingly diverse residential population came to the fore in a meeting whose legitimacy was premised on their connection.

The remainder of this article examines what that immigrant presence looked like to government and nongovernment institutions across Nashville and how the invisibility of Latino immigrants as city residents impacted their efforts to find a place in the city. Coming on the coattails of smaller refugee populations (Winders 2006) and in the midst of overall population growth (Kocchar, Suro, and Tafoya 2005), Latino/as arriving in Nashville encountered a city unprepared for their presence. This situation, of course, is well documented across new destinations (e.g., Atiles and Bohon 2002; Odem 2004; Wainer 2004; Rich and Miranda 2005; Cabell 2007), almost none of which anticipated or were institutionally prepared for an immigrant influx. The discussion here, however, sharpens understandings of these patterns by focusing not only on instances of immigrant exclusion or oversight by ill-prepared cities but also on broader ways of seeing and not seeing Latino immigrants as part of urban dynamics and issues themselves. As it shows, immigrant institutional visibility is an unacknowledged precursor to immigrant incorporation and, as such, merits attention from migration and urban scholars as well as policymakers.

The impact of immigrant institutional invisibility is particularly clear in the context of neighborhoods, where the politics of immigrant settlement are often intense. In Nashville, however, Latino immigrants as residents occupied a paradoxical space as politically central to but institutionally marginal within official and grassroots efforts to manage neighborhoods. Because Latino immigrants were unevenly drawn into efforts to address Nashville neighborhoods, when Nashville’s local government did see immigrants as residents, it did so in ways that minimized opportunities for immigrant integration and further marginalized immigrants within the social fabric of the Music City. Immigrant institutional visibility, however, must also be situated vis-à-vis overall neoliberal transformations in Nashville’s government. Wider changes in the structure of Nashville’s local government, for example, made it difficult for government institutions to see immigrants and, thus, for immigrants to be seen by them as relevant constituents. Immigrant invisibility in Nashville, then, was driven by the way that the city engaged its neighborhoods and their governance and the way that local government parceled out immigrant issues across Metro departments. Through both sets of practices, the visibility of Latino immigrants in Nashville was institutionally attenuated, and immigrant Nashville became hard to see and, thus, plan for from an institutional perspective.

Planning to See Immigrants

The growth of Nashville’s Latino communities and the emergence of Latino social, political, and business organizations in the late 1990s and early 2000s transformed the Music City into a multiethnic city and, in the process, reworked the structure and daily practice of its governance. Institutions across the city began to notice an immigrant presence and to understand immigration as a phenomenon that potentially changed their missions and daily activities. At the same time, immigrant settlement in Nashville received little public attention. Latino immigrants moved into neighborhoods that were marginal to and within Nashville’s political and social systems, and immigrants’ residential impacts did not spread across the city. As immigration became a political and social debate across Nashville in the 2000s, immigrant settlement remained a localized phenomenon impacting parts of the city. The space between these two geographies sat at the heart of how Nashville saw Latino immigrants at the turn of the twenty-first century. In part because Latino immigrants in Nashville were initially seen as workers and in part because they settled in neighborhoods that were not visible across the city, Latino/as in the Music City, especially for the early years of this migration, were not seen, or planned for, as urban residents. ¹

For some Nashville institutions, awareness of Latino migration was filtered through understandings of the city’s refugee communities, portions of which date to the arrival of Cubans in the 1960s and Southeast Asians in the 1970s (Winders 2006). Thus, when Latino immigrants began to settle in Nashville, government and nonprofit agencies across the city initially interpreted a Latino presence through their experiences with a smaller, more diverse refugee population, smoothing ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences among Nashville’s foreign-born into an international community that could be discussed and addressed collectively (e.g., Ray and Morse 2004). Both governmental and nongovernmental institutions soon realized, however, especially with the jolt of the 9/11 attacks, that refugees and Latino immigrants were not institutionally interchangeable and faced different cultural and political issues. As a result, programs designed to work with refugees often found themselves unable to address Nashville’s growing Latino, especially undocumented, population. Even though an early refugee presence made Nashville institutions more sensitive to the idea of immigrants in the city, Latino immigrants coming to Nashville still entered through gaps in the city’s institutional frameworks, especially in relation to its neighborhoods.

Neighborhood activism in Nashville has a long history; but neighborhoods assumed an even greater role in local government in the early 2000s through two processes: on one hand, the neoliberal devolution of responsibility seen across American cities (Martin 2003; Herbert 2005; Ellis 2006), and on the other, specific transformations to Nashville governance. The bulk of both sets of changes began in 1999, when Bill Purcell was elected Nashville’s mayor on a platform of neighborhood empowerment that offered “a neighborhood-based approach to addressing the [city’s] problems and opportunities” (Jones 2000, 5). Shortly after taking office, Purcell made two decisions that transformed the governance of Nashville neighborhoods. Since these changes took place just as Nashville’s immigrant population was establishing itself residentially in the city, they had a direct impact on where immigrants fit into the management of Nashville’s neighborhoods.

First, in 2000, Purcell hired a new lead urban planner who brought Nashville a framework of new urbanism, a planning approach that has received critical attention and public praise since the early 1990s. Sampling idealized notions of community and marketing a nostalgic past, new urbanism taps a reservoir of collective longing for how things were to produce new community landscapes removed from, and defined against, both the urban and the suburban (Till 1993). With a focus on mixed land use and human-scale development, it works to “reform the sprawling pattern of suburban growth” while creating a “strong sense of community” (Mendez 2005, 34) that residents can, quite literally, purchase. For this reason, and especially through studies of high-profile experiments such as Disney’s Celebration, scholars have debated the politics of new urbanism’s spatial determinism, as well as its reliance on market dynamics to generate a residential mix that hearkens back to an envisioned, if not actual, golden era of neighborhoods.

More recently, new urbanism has moved from new developments to urban heartlands, as cities have embraced it as a planning paradigm (Kenny and Zimmerman 2003; Mendez 2005). In Nashville, new urbanism, in combination with Purcell’s focus on residents’ participation in planning decisions, reconfigured Nashville’s planning practices in the early 2000s, sending planners into neighborhoods and making the neighborhood the new planning unit. Under this model, urban planners envisioned Nashville as a mosaic of human-scale neighborhoods with streetscapes, limited traffic, and strong visual corridors. Although a focus on downtown development remained, especially in urban design and public arts campaigns, the Metro Planning Department from 2000 onward increasingly worked with and solicited input from local residents and neighborhood associations. In the process, neighborhood associations became the official venue through which the city saw its neighborhoods and the institutional link through which local government interacted with residents.

In addition to instituting a new focus on neighborhoods for urban planning, Purcell formed a Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods (MON) to link his office, other Metro departments, and Nashville neighborhoods. ² Designed to “give our constituents a voice in government,” in the words of its executive director in 2006, MON provided information and technical assistance to “help organize neighborhoods around their issues” and, equally important, to organize residents into formal neighborhood associations. In one of its earliest acts, for example, MON created a Neighborhood Training Institute designed “to build capacity and assist in the establishment and development of neighborhood associations” (How to Be a Better Neighbor 2006, 19). Sponsoring Mayor’s Nights Out, Neighborhood Nights Out against Crime, and the Neighborhood Response Team, MON worked to keep neighborhoods and Metro government on the same page. Through MON’s efforts, Metro government came to see the city through an institutional map in which residential Nashville—and, thus, city residents—was represented by neighborhood associations that covered the entire city.

This effort to blanket Nashville with neighborhood associations was largely successful. When MON began in 1999, approximately 125 neighborhood groups were identifiable across Nashville. By 2006, that number reached closer to 600, and neighborhood empowerment through neighborhood associations had become a mantra across the city. MON, however, also elevated neighborhood associations’ importance as the institutionally recognized representative of Nashville residents and the institutionally encouraged way for residents to see their neighborhood and its place in local government (e.g., Future of Neighborhoods 2006). The turn to neighborhood empowerment in Nashville, however, was not always smooth. Across the city, “expectations were way down because participation was way down,” as one neighborhood association president put it; convincing residents to get involved was a challenge, as is often the case in neighborhood activism (Martin 2003; Herbert 2005). Under Purcell’s administration, however, neighborhood associations had a new motivation to come and stay together to take advantage of grants, services, and other opportunities available to them. To access those services, local residents had to commit to active participation in neighborhood associations, thus creating a strong link between local governance of the neighborhood and local government of the city cultivated through neighborhood associations.

In southeast Nashville, maintaining that link was not easy. Even with increased incentives for neighborhoods to organize, the relationship between the cohesion necessary to create an association and the growing ethnic and racial diversity in neighborhoods was often tense (Martin 2003). As one nonprofit director in southeast Nashville described the process, groups “are really trying to work together but when it trickles down to the average Joe coming from whatever country, then I think there is still a lot of segregation.” Nonetheless, in Nashville, cohesive neighborhood participation, no matter the composition of residents, was cast as a duty for and expectation of local residents who wanted either visibility to or action from Metro government. Intent on empowering neighborhoods, Nashville followed wider trends in urban governance in the early 2000s and “recast [local participation] as a moral duty of active citizenship” (Grundy and Boudreau 2008, 348). Under this model, as Luke Desforges and his coauthors (2005, 441) suggest, “active citizens are judged to have succeeded or failed . . . as a place-based community, with repercussions for the further treatment of that locality by the state.” In Nashville, active citizenship through neighborhood associations became both the way the city saw and engaged its residential spaces and the necessary attribute for residents wishing to be acknowledged by local government. As residents worked to make themselves, their neighborhoods, and their local issues visible to Nashville government, however, immigrants in those same spaces became hard to find.

Finding Immigrant Nashville

Part of Latino immigrants’ limited institutional visibility in Nashville is bound up in the geography of immigrant settlement itself. Within Nashville, immigrants are residentially concentrated in southeast Nashville neighborhoods, which, since as early as the 1920s, have been white, working-class communities with strong local identities and a tight-knit group of residents. In the early 2000s, these areas began experiencing turnover, as residents aged and houses became available for purchase or rent, often by new Latino residents. ³ As a result, these neighborhoods soon saw marked change, from owner-occupied to rented, from English to Spanish, from elderly white residents to young Latino families. Because this transformation remained incomplete throughout the 2000s, both groups soon occupied the same residential, if not social, spaces and lived side by side.

How did Nashville’s neighborhood-empowerment movement proceed amid these demographic changes in southeast Nashville? Although Latino immigrants were discussed by neighborhood associations in southeast Nashville, most associations did not involve Latino immigrants and, instead, were led by and composed of white, often older, residents. Some neighborhood associations made attempts to involve Latino immigrants, and some immigrant organizations had outreach programs in southeast Nashville neighborhoods. Latino immigrants, however, were an absent presence in most neighborhood associations in the 2000s, influencing what associations addressed but having little say in how they did so. As the former MON executive director explained, neighborhood organizations in southeast Nashville “don’t have the participation of the immigrant population. . . . People are making decisions for those groups. They [immigrants] are not participating, but they are being discussed.”

The reasons for this immigrant absence included language barriers, cultural mistrust, and the general challenges of social activism in urban neighborhoods (Herbert 2005). It was also produced, however, through the gap between Nashville’s social geographies of immigrant settlement and the institutional structure of neighborhood governance. Because Latino residents lived across southeast Nashville neighborhoods, they were not visible as an ethnic enclave in any one neighborhood; nor were they concentrated, or established, enough to form their own neighborhood association. Instead, immigrant settlement took the form of a heterolocalist community (Zelinsky and Barrett 1998), with immigrant social networks, consumption spaces, and workplaces stretched throughout southeast Nashville and beyond. Equally important, Nashville’s network of immigrant or ethnic organizations worked with immigrants living anywhere in the city and, thus, did not address neighborhood issues per se. As a result, MON and other neighborhood-focused groups viewed immigrant organizations as institutionally separate from their own missions and worked on the assumption that immigrant communities, stretched as they were across neighborhoods, had their own organizations to address their concerns as immigrants, not neighborhood residents. As an official at MON explained, “most immigrant populations . . . have their own resources, so they don’t need us.” Other agencies, she noted, “give them [immigrants] the information and work with them through the system,” which was seen as separate from MON’s own work. In this way, Latino immigrants in Nashville sat in the space between geographically defined neighborhoods that were central to local government and ethnically defined communities that were central to Nashville’s immigrant organizations. Because immigrant organizations did not address neighborhood issues and because neighborhood organizations assumed immigrants had their own “system,” immigrants were not visible as residents who could contribute to Purcell’s neighborhood-based approach to addressing Nashville’s issues.

How, then, did Metro government eventually find immigrants within Nashville neighborhoods? A primary way was through the emergence of immigrants in complaints to Metro departments tasked with regulating residential spaces. This was especially true for zoning changes and codes violations—two aspects of neighborhood politics intimately linked to immigrant settlement in new destinations (McConnell and Miraftab 2009; Brettell and Nibbs 2011). Various scholars have noted that in new destinations, Latino residents often revitalize declining business districts (e.g., Wortham, Mortimer, and Allard 2009), and Nashville is no different. As its immigrant population grew, southeast Nashville’s business districts, which had struggled since the late 1970s, began to thrive again. In a short time, southeast Nashville roads were lined with Mexican groceries, clothing stores, Western Unions, and car dealerships, which seemed to emerge “overnight,” according to many. The form of this rejuvenation was often contested by long-term residents, who saw car lots as a commercial “intrusion” against which neighborhood associations had to “hold our boundaries,” as one member explained at a 2006 meeting on zoning change requests.

In the 2000s, under Nashville’s model of neighborhood empowerment, the ability to hold neighborhood boundaries lay in the hands of neighborhood associations, which partially vetted zoning proposals for the Metro Planning Department and often responded to such requests through an image of the neighborhood as it was remembered by long-term residents. Neighborhood associations, however, were empowered not only to make decisions about zoning requests but also to monitor residential spaces for codes violations, another topic tightly linked to immigrant settlement and cultural change. For long-term residents in southeast Nashville, codes enforcement was a tense topic, as questions of cultural and ethnic diversity among neighbors became inseparable from the changing material conditions of neighborhoods. Where (and how many) vehicles were parked at dwellings, how many residents lived in one house, and whose responsibility it was to maintain rental units became points of contention and surveillance for neighborhood associations (Erwin 2003). As these associations addressed factors from the visibility of Latino day laborers to language barriers between new and old residents, not only the composition but also the politics of neighborhoods and their governance became increasingly complex, and the process of democratizing decision-making through neighborhood empowerment rubbed up against the politics of ethnic diversification through immigration.

The Metro Department of Codes and Building Safety (hereafter, the Codes Department) became a key interface in this encounter between neighborhood empowerment and neighborhood diversity. It also became a key way that Latino immigrants as residents became institutionally visible to the city. As the codes director explained, throughout the 2000s, his department increasingly had contact with Latino immigrants, often at the urging of long-term residents, over codes violations. Through its work with residential structures and spaces, the Codes Department institutionally mediated contact between long-term residents and immigrants, who lived side by side but did not themselves interact, by intervening in how Latino immigrants used and occupied neighborhood spaces. In response to my question about how Latino migration had affected southeast Nashville’s neighborhood relations, for example, a codes official exclaimed, “I don’t think they are interacting. I got a call yesterday. A neighbor has a problem with his neighbor. They call me! They use me as their conduit.”

Amid demands for involvement from the Codes Department in the process of immigrant settlement, the department adopted a new approach to neighborhood monitoring through its N.O.T.I.C.E. (Neighborhoods Organized to Initiate Codes Enforcement) initiative. This neighborhood audit program, begun in 2002, trained local residents in neighborhood associations to detect, document, and report codes violations in their neighborhood (How to Be a Better Neighbor 2006). As the name suggests, N.O.T.I.C.E. enabled the Codes Department to become more involved in neighborhood management without additional personnel. From the perspective of neighborhood associations, it was a way to make Metro government “accountable” and “responsible” to the neighborhood, in the words of one president. N.O.T.I.C.E., however, also asked neighborhood associations to assume increased responsibility for their own streets and to step in where the state stepped back. In this way, the program made local residents equally accountable to Metro government and made sure, as the same association president stressed, “that the residents are keeping up their end of the job” to monitor neighborhoods at little cost to local government.

Neoliberalizing Immigrant Nashville

These shifts toward increased local involvement in and responsibility for Nashville neighborhoods were part of well-documented neoliberal redistributions of responsibility from urban governments to nonstate actors across U.S. cities (Jones 2000; Martin 2003; Herbert 2005). In Nashville, such transformations took off in the 2000s, when key Metro departments began to seek, in the words of one official, “a vantage point of 5,000 feet to help connect things and to give assistance and push when it was needed.” As a longtime Metro employee described the change, in the early 2000s, “a lot of folks in the community and groups—nonprofits, government agencies—[were] doing things . . . , but none of them were really coordinated.” In response, many governmental and nongovernmental institutions that previously provided direct services to different urban constituencies were redefined as clearinghouses that offered bird’s-eye views of Nashville’s network of service provision but provided few direct services themselves. Although this reconfiguration was not explicitly related to immigrant settlement, it impacted immigrant visibility across Nashville, as service providers came to see and respond to Latino immigrants in new ways.

This transition and its impacts on immigrant institutional visibility are evident in a number of nonprofit organizations working with immigrants across Nashville but are perhaps clearest in the context of local government and the provision of social services, the topic of a number of studies of new destinations. Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Jennifer Bickham Mendez (2008, 617), for example, suggest that in new destinations, the administration of social services represents “a key site for the construction and enforcement of social membership” for Latino immigrants (see also Cabell 2007). As they note, social service providers often decide who is and is not seen as deserving of support and, thus, who merits social inclusion in the wider community. In the realm of social service provision in new destinations, several scholars also suggest that Latino/as are often “othered” and framed as “undeserving” of aid or community resources, if in uneven ways across institutions (Cabell 2007; Marrow 2009). Such attitudes toward immigrants, however, are themselves contingent on immigrants’ first being institutionally visible to such organizations as a constituency that they might serve. In Nashville, this initial step was missing in many institutions addressing social services in the late 2000s.

Up to 2005, Metro government had a clear institutional place for foreign-born residents in Nashville through the Metro Refugee Services Program (MRSP), the only refugee services program in the United States run through local government. The location of refugee services within Metro government, rather than solely within nongovernmental agencies, linked refugee communities to local government in a way that elevated their visibility across Nashville and changed the nature of local conversations about diversity (Winders 2006). In 2005, however, at the recommendation of a performance audit of Metro Social Services (MSS), MRSP was discontinued, refugee services were returned to state government, ⁴ and refugee service provision was handed off to voluntary agencies like Catholic Charities.

The motivations behind this change in how Metro government distributed social services to the foreign-born population were multiple. ⁵ On a basic level, MRSP formed prior to the arrival of Latino immigrants and in the context of a different, much smaller foreign-born population. Thus, when Latino immigrants began to settle in Nashville, an institutional mismatch arose between a Metro department designed to address the needs of a relatively small refugee population and a larger Latino population, many of whom were undocumented. This new demand, coupled with a post-9/11 decrease in federal funding for refugee resettlement (Singer and Wilson 2006), led to MSS’s interest in working less with refugees and immigrants directly, and then only with legal ones, and more with providing technical assistance to agencies working with immigrants or refugees outside local government.

In place of MRSP, MSS created an Immigrant Services Coordinator who was responsible for both immigrants and refugees in Nashville and whose work shifted “from direct service delivery, case support and coordination for individual and/or refugee families” to “overall service planning and coordination.” ⁶ Tapping both neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility and assimilationist language of immigrant adjustment, this new system, according to those working with it, helped “immigrants and refugees develop a kind of independence . . . so that they can integrate rather than . . . go just to one office that always deals with that [one immigrant] issue.” In the words of a key official involved in MSS’s redesign, “we are trying to . . . support the infrastructure that allows them [immigrants] to navigate the system,” bringing immigrants into Metro government by eliminating a specific program to deal with them. Under this new infrastructure, institutional opportunities to direct immigrants to available services outside local government expanded but institutional opportunities to provide basic services to immigrants contracted across Metro government.

Wrapped up with this change in what services MSS offered immigrants and how they did so was a redefinition of how MSS understood Nashville’s foreign-born population itself. Through the creation of the Immigrant Services Coordinator, MSS shifted from working with refugees in their own program to working with immigrants and refugees across its programs, integrating immigrants into the city’s social service infrastructure by dis-integrating components of immigrant services across Metro departments. Under MSS’s new design and new focus on “issues rather than ethnicity,” refugees, legal immigrants, and undocumented immigrants were rolled into “immigrant.” The Immigrant Services Coordinator was, then, expected to make internal differences among immigrants visible to Metro departments and to make immigrant needs visible as part of Nashville’s wider landscape of social need. At the same time, Metro departments themselves were expected to address immigrants as a component of the broader project of “representing everybody.” In this way, as immigrant needs became part of a wider mission of service provision across Metro government, a clear institutional place for immigrants was eliminated in Metro government, and their institutional visibility as urban constituents was markedly attenuated.

Two clear exceptions to immigrants’ attenuated institutional presence merit mention: Nashville’s wider politics of immigration and the realm of policing. At the same time that the institutional presence of immigrants, especially Latino immigrants, was diminishing in local government, the figure of the immigrant, especially the undocumented immigrant, was coming into sharp focus for state and local political actors in Nashville, as in other new destinations (Winders 2007; Coleman 2009). By 2005, a campaign to “de-magnetize Tennessee” for undocumented immigrants was becoming the “de-magnetize America” movement and Tennessee was well on its way to outlawing opportunities for undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses. State and local elected officials in Nashville were crafting legislation to restrict undocumented immigrants’ access to state services, affordable housing, and other facets of daily life. In 2006, immigrants took to the streets of downtown Nashville to make their presence known and call for immigration reform, as they did across the country. This visibility backfired in some ways and became a catalyst for wider efforts to exclude immigrants from Nashville’s social fabric. By 2008, such efforts culminated in an unsuccessful ordinance to make Nashville “English only.”

Of all these maneuvers, Davidson County’s entrance into the 287(g) program in 2007 had the most profound impact on how immigrants were seen by the city (see Parrado this volume; Marrow 2009). Part of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the 287(g) program enables “state, county, and city police to arrest and detain aliens for federal authorities as well as investigate immigration cases for prosecution in the courts” (Coleman 2009, 907). Post-9/11, counties and states across the United States, but especially in the South, touted the 287(g) program as a way to address undocumented immigration and public safety simultaneously (for a critique of this idea, see Nguyen and Gill 2010) by allowing local law enforcement to act as border patrol. As Nashville’s local government struggled to see Latino immigrants as residents in the city, the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department began to see immigrants through the eyes, and with the legal power, of the federal state. By late 2010, local police had detained 7,887 immigrants and deported 68 percent of them. ⁷ Of those deported, nearly 80 percent were stopped for misdemeanors or traffic violations. ⁸ Throughout the late 2000s, then, local police in Nashville had no problem finding immigrants in the city. The same could not be said, however, for other institutions, which consistently missed immigrants across the city.

Missing Immigrant Nashville

The transformations in local government described above are important reminders that in new destinations, planning for immigrant populations takes place amid wider reconfigurations in how social services are managed and how government and nongovernmental institutions understand their roles in changing demographics. By the mid-2000s, such institutional changes in Nashville had solidified into a system in which many Metro departments serving Latino immigrants no longer did so directly and in which Latino immigrants were missing from many big-picture assessments of the city. In conversations about Nashville’s future in planning offices and design centers, for example, Latino immigrants were often absent—a sentiment conveyed most poignantly by an urban designer who remarked that this study of the impacts of Latino migration on Nashville was “a few years too early.” When immigrants did become visible in Nashville’s urban future, they did so in familiar ways. As a director of an urban-design center explained in 2006,

The changing of Nashville is a big thing. In the last five years, as we started to build stuff, the media started to write about the fact that there were people who weren’t from this country who were part of the construction process and that if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be building anything at all.

Perhaps in the next two or three years, the director noted, the center would get “some Hispanic neighborhoods . . . , organizations coming in and saying, ‘how could you help us? We want to do this.’” For now, though, Latino immigrants, from the perspective of urban design and Nashville’s urban future, remained workers, not residents, building Nashville’s urban landscape but not forming part of its social fabric. ⁹

What explains this immigrant institutional invisibility across much of Nashville? In new destinations, research has documented the uneven geography of Latino reception (e.g., Marrow 2009; Rich and Miranda 2005; Nelson and Hiemstra 2008), as well as uneven patterns of Latino access to resources at both the state and local levels (Ray and Morse 2004). Collectively, these works suggest that unevenness in how immigrants are received and what resources they can access has consequences for how immigrant communities themselves are addressed by new receiving communities. This uneven picture of immigrant incorporation in new destinations, however, is also produced through immigrant visibility or invisibility as urban constituents or community members. Meredith Cabell (2007, 24) argues that in new destinations, “governmental institutions are struggling to determine what their role should be in the integration” of immigrants. That struggle to sort out how and whether local institutions will integrate immigrants in new destinations is itself predicated on how those institutions do and do not see immigrants within and in relation to the overall urban constituency. If such institutions do not see immigrants as constituents whom they might serve or work with, immigrant incorporation or political participation will be limited. Simply put, it is hard for institutions to incorporate a group that they institutionally cannot see.

Another factor in understanding immigrant invisibility in new destinations is the geography of immigrant settlement. Because in Nashville, as in most new destinations, Latino immigrants moved into some, not all, parts of the city, and because there were, at least through the mid-2000s, few flashpoints associated with Latino migration in Nashville, Latino settlement became a situation with a restricted geography (and, thus, visibility) and, according to key actors in the city, no wider resolution. With steady growth but concentrated settlement, Latino migration to Nashville simply grew day by day. As an official with the Metro Human Relations Commission explained, in contrast to Nashville’s Muslim community, which experienced high-profile cases that were ultimately resolved, “with the Latino community, I don’t think there has been a case like that that has been resolved.”

Resolving Immigrant Nashville

[Latino immigrants] are so family oriented . . . that they are the perfect candidates for. . . finding themselves in things that feel like neighborhoods, as opposed to high rises. And so I think that as long as there are places that are affordable, they would be the next . . . generation of people who are in neighborhoods, wherever they can afford to be. I don’t know what happens once they have really become entrenched in part of the community and hit that next economic level. I don’t know what they do in terms of organizing or rebuilding or improving their neighborhoods. (Southeast Nashville political representative)

In one of the final interviews in this study, I sat down with a political representative in southeast Nashville. Representing an array of neighborhoods, this representative had watched his district change, especially since 2000, when its immigrant population began to grow. As the Latino population grew, he found himself caught between dealing with long-standing issues that the area faced and understanding the new dynamics that Latino settlement generated. He did so, however, without a “go-to guy” for Latino residents in his area. Although he acknowledged that Latino immigrants were the next generation in his neighborhoods, he did not know what happened when they became “entrenched in part of the community.” This representative, like elected officials in other new destinations (Marrow 2009), had yet to “throw out a hand of acceptance” to immigrants in his area in part because they had yet to come into view for him as a recognized part of the community. Having “nobody from that side of the aisle at the table” was problematic, but how to bring immigrant Nashville into focus was not clear.

Within Nashville, figuring out how to see and place immigrants in the city has been an ongoing process. As this article has shown, immigrants in the 2000s were not only invisible to many of the institutions that governed Nashville neighborhoods and administered social services but were also institutionally unclear to decision-makers charged with seeing and responding to the city as a whole. Much scholarship has shown that local government plays a role in immigrant incorporation into the social fabric of American cities. The field of Latino studies, for example, has examined what Raymond Rocco (1997, 122) describes as Latino/as’ “right to have access to major institutions” as “‘legitimate’ members of a community.” In sociology, Dina Okamoto and Kim Ebert (2010) argue that institutional openings play important roles in immigrant political claims, especially for groups that traditionally have not had access to political power and in new destinations where that access has been even more limited. What this study of immigrant institutional visibility in a new destination adds to these understandings, however, is a clearer sense of the unintended consequences of wider urban transformations—neighborhood-based governance and neoliberal institutional streamlining, in this case—on immigrant incorporation. In Nashville in the 2000s, immigrant claims to community membership and political visibility were limited not only because of active efforts to socially exclude immigrants in the city or immigrant reticence to actively participate in the city’s political system. Such claims were also inhibited by the institutional structure of Nashville government itself—a structure in which Latino immigrants were often invisible.

This immigrant institutional invisibility was produced in multiple ways. Latino immigrants as residents were institutionally invisible to Metro government because they were not present in neighborhood associations and, thus, not seen by Metro departments that relied on Nashville’s system of community-based governance to evaluate the city and its residents. Even as Nashville tried to be more locally responsive to the needs and desires of its residents, it did so through an institutional structure—neighborhood associations—that defined neighborhoods as geographically discrete and, thus, excluded immigrant residents who lived across southeast Nashville neighborhoods. Latino immigrants as recipients of social services were institutionally invisible to Metro government because they were spread across departments, none of which focused specifically on immigrants but all of which dealt with portions of immigrant needs. As Nashville tried to make its provision of social services more efficient, it inadvertently made immigrants fall out of the institutional picture of social need in the city. Finally, Latino immigrants were institutionally invisible as urban constituents in visions of Nashville’s future because they were not seen to have impacted Nashville’s urban landscapes as a whole. Present as a necessary labor force but not seen as an established part of the Nashville community, Latino immigrants occupied a paradoxical place in the city’s present and future. Through the ways that Latino immigrants were geographically located in and institutionally seen by the city, they remained hard to find across Nashville institutions and, thus, hard to address as urban constituents.

How specific this immigrant institutional invisibility is to new destinations such as Nashville remains unclear in the absence of comparative studies across new and traditional urban destinations. What is clear, however, is that cities such as Nashville face the challenges and complexities of immigrant incorporation in the context not only of urban social relations and dynamics but also of how local governments are structured to reflect and address a changing population. A first—and, to date, largely unacknowledged—step in the process of immigrant incorporation is how cities, and the institutions that compose them, see and do not see immigrants as local residents. This question of immigrant institutional visibility must be addressed in studies of immigrant incorporation, especially in new destinations, if we are to understand how and why immigrants are and are not integrated into and themselves transform the social fabric of American cities beyond gateways such as Los Angeles.

At the same time, the question of how immigrants are and are not visible to local government and other institutions must also be addressed in efforts to work with immigrant populations in U.S. cities. As this article has shown, attempts to empower local neighborhoods across American cities must acknowledge and institutionally account for the fact that “neighborhood” and “community” are not equivalent terms and do not necessarily work through the same residential geographies. In Nashville, recognition of this fact might lead local government to work not only with neighborhood associations but also with immigrant organizations involved across the city and its neighborhoods. In doing so, local government would have to expand how it sees its neighborhoods and how it institutionally responds to the different ways and geographies through which Nashville residents understand and practice “neighborhood” and “community.” As this study showed, the political, institutional, and cultural impacts of Latino settlement on cities such as Nashville are still coming into view for politicians, government officials, grassroots leaders, and long-term residents. A first step in understanding these impacts, and local responses to them, is drawing new destinations more fully onto the map of urban America and institutionally adjusting to the new demographic realities across American cities.