Overview

Drawing from almost a decade of ethnographic research in largely Brazilian and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, in Street Therapists,examines how affect, emotion, and sentiment serve as waypoints for the navigation of interracial relationships among US-born Latinos, Latin American migrants, blacks, and white ethnics. Tackling a rarely studied dynamic approach to affect, Ramos-Zayas offers a thorough—and sometimes paradoxical—new articulation of race, space, and neoliberalism in US urban communities. After looking at the historical, political, and economic contexts in which an intensified connection between affect and race has emerged in Newark, New Jersey, Street Therapists engages in detailed examinations of  various community sites—including high schools, workplaces, beauty salons, and funeral homes, among others—and secondary sites in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and San Juan to uncover the ways US-born Latinos and Latin American migrants interpret and analyze everyday racial encounters through a language of psychology and emotions. As Ramos-Zayas notes, this emotive approach to race resurrects Latin American and Caribbean ideologies of “racial democracy” in an urban US context—and often leads to new psychological stereotypes and forms of social exclusion. Extensively researched and thoughtfully argued, Street Therapists theorizes the conflictive connection between race, affect, and urban neoliberalism.  

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9780226703619

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Reviews

There are many books that try to look at affect/emotion and contemporary urban life, or at the logic of neoliberalism, or even at the many complex links between race/ethnicity/multiculturalism and gender/sexuality, but I can't think of one that takes them all on - and so compellingly. Indeed, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas does a masterful job of emphasizing emotion/affect as significant to the social science of diverse urban communities while putting all of these other themes in conversation with that central concern. It is a tremendously smart, useful, and ambitious piece of urban ethnography. (John L. Jackson Jr., University of Pennsylvania)

Author Information

Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is the Valentin Lizana y Parrague Endowed Chair in Latin American Studies and professor at Baruch College, CUNY. She is the author of National Performances: Race, Class, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coauthor of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship.

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