At its core, this is a timely case study of neighborhood resistance set in a majority-Latinx community and that probes at the reality of gentrification. Does gentrification always subsume and displace? Do disputes over the reputation of a neighborhood impede or expedite economic development? What Korver-Glenn and Mayorga do very well is push the reader past the surface of a “majority-Latinx community” and the assumption that all residents feel and act the same toward development. Instead, A Good Reputation illustrates the richness and intersectionality of Latinx identity (e.g., racial, cultural, political, socioeconomic), which helps explain why some residents wanted their Houston, Texas, neighborhood of Northside to gentrify while others feared and/or resisted the change. The authors use Bourdieu's concept of habitus to identify the two distinct dispositions within Northside: a racial capitalist habitus and a bienvenida habitus. At the beginning of Korver-Glenn's ethnographic study of Northside, the alarms of gentrification were ringing. Northside would be the next gentrified community, the impeding displacement and change foretold by the construction of a new light-rail transportation line. Nearly a decade later, with Mayorga now on the research team, the two discovered that not much had changed in Northside—reputationally and materially. There were changes to the community, with some housing and commercial development that succeeded in being built. But there was not mass displacement. The racial capitalist logic that foretold of younger, wealthier, and whiter incoming residents did not come to fruition. Korver-Glenn and Mayorga worked through the original fieldnotes and interviews to address an observation about gentrification: “even when gentrification seems on the horizon, it frequently doesn’t come to pass” (3).
Whitney Gecker (Tue,) studied this question.