Place, nature and masculinity in immigrant integration: Latino immigrant men in inner-city parks and community gardens

With this paper, I offer three contributions to the subfields of gender and migration scholarship, and to the sociology of immigration. Firstly, the paper argues for the importance of place and gender in immigrant integration, and seeks to nudge the sociology of immigration away from the dominant paradigms of assimilation and transnationalism, towards one that acknowledges how quotidian practices and the materiality and meanings of place constitute active assertions for the right to make a home in the city. Secondly, this paper builds on several decades of gender and migration scholarship, and seeks to bring immigrant men back into the frame, not as androcentric agents, but as actors with gendered, intersectional social locations imbued with both masculine privilege and social marginality. Thirdly, the sociology of immigration has mostly ignored the materiality of the local environment in processes of settlement and immigrant integration, and this paper adds a focus on how plant nature and landscape shape immigrant integration and public home-making practices in inner-city contexts. The empirical work informing this paper includes one and half years of team ethnography and interview data collected in public parks in South Los Angeles and a large community garden in Watts.