Richard E. Ocejo - Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork

From his classic work The Urban Villagers, in this selection Herbert Gans analyzes how an Italian-American community reacts to impending displacement. By living in their Boston neighborhood Gans discovers how the primacy of the family and peer group in the lives of these working-class Italians and the urban village community that they constructed influences their inaction against displacement and the destruction of their neighborhood.

This piece showcases how Philippe Bourgois immerses himself in East Harlem (El Barrio) to understand the daily struggles and hardships of families and children in this dangerous and unstable environment. From living in the neighborhood and having a young son, Bourgois learns both the important role that children play among residents, as well as the harsh realities that they and their mothers face.

In this selection Richard Lloyd takes us inside the gentrifying Chicago neighborhood of Wicker Park to show how a bohemian aesthetic and work ethic gets contested within and integrated into a commercial nightlife scene. By living in Wicker Park and participating in its arts scene, Lloyd discovers the importance of leisure spaces in its construction and in transforming it into a postindustrial neighborhood of cultural production.

Seeing herself as a gentrifier in North Kenwood-Oakland, Mary Pattillo examines the intra-racial conflicts between newcomers and existing residents that emerge in a neighborhood experiencing black gentrification. As one of the newcomers against whom working-class residents show wariness and hostility, her work demonstrates the difficulties ethnographers face in immersing themselves in their field sites.

This piece pushes the community study beyond the boundaries of the urban neighborhood as Gina Perez goes to Humboldt Park in Chicago as well as San Sebastin in Puerto Rico to examine the transnational lives and identities of Puerto Rican migrants. An example of multi-sited ethnography, Perezs study highlights the importance of immersion across spatial boundaries to experience and understand the impact of social contexts and spatial and cultural distance on peoples lives.

Along with his extensive observations of vendors, Mitchell Duneier also gets behind the table to see the sidewalk from their perspective. In this selection he demonstrates the complex relationship between the police and the vendors when he creates a situation through which an officer confronts him.

Peter Moskos in this study goes through the Baltimore police academy and becomes an officer for a year. He provides a first-hand account of the varying perspectives and interpretations of their duties and decisions that officers make while policing in the inner city.

In this study David Grazian discovers the multiple interpretations that different actors have of authenticity in blues clubs. This piece shows how he uses his own musical abilities on the saxophone to reveal how a community of blues club regulars construct notions of authenticity and socialize people into the group.

As Jonathan Wynn shows, walking tour guides use storytelling tricks to weave imaginative urban narratives for their participants that parallel some of the tricks that sociologists use in their own work. By becoming a tour guide, Wynn also demonstrates the value of taking the role of the other in terms of validating claims.