American Neighborhood Organizing in Historical Change

Robert Fisher, a famous American sociologist, a professor of social work at the University of Connecticut and an enthusiastic participant in the neighborhood movement, has engaged in social work for a long time. Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America is a revision of its first edition published in 1984. The author summarizes the developmental process and the basic approaches of neighborhood organizing from the end of the 19th century to the 1990s, and proposes, from a left-wing perspective, that this movement can be revived only when the idealism of the 1960s is injected into the realism of the 1980s and the 1990s. A masterpiece examining the United States from the perspective of actions of the lower class and scrutinizing the actions of the lower class against the backdrops of the United States, this work is of a global significance and contemporary value, and also provokes useful thinking and inspiration for Chinese scholars to pay more attention to and conduct in-depth research on social movements.

Taming the War on Poverty

President Johnson’s War on Poverty encountered significant opposition in southern states where impoverishment and race served to reinforce both social and economic systems. In Memphis, the War on Poverty underwent political attacks primarily aimed at neighborhood organizing. However, two agencies used Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) recruits to implement significant antipoverty initiatives. VISTAs developed a prisoner release–mentoring program and a pretrial release for indigent detainees who could not post bail. The Metropolitan Inter Faith Association recruited savvy local residents to design VISTA services for the poor. The latter drew on local volunteers and reflected a paternalistic approach rather than one that reflected the voice of the poor.

Becoming a Force in the Zone: Hedonopolitics, Masculinity, and the Quest for Respect on Haiti’s Streets

This article explores neighborhood organizing among young men in urban Haiti as a vernacular enactment of sovereignty that involves both a hedonistic and a gendered logic. Under conditions of democratization and global governance, the urban block, or base, has become a key site for building political community and creating connections to those in power. Central to base politics are public outings that engender power and respect for the organizers by demonstrating their force not through violence but through masculine social pleasures. This article elaborates three key outings—a street party, a soccer tournament, and a beach day—organized by neighbors and supported by state, NGO, and criminal actors. By focusing on hedonopolitics, rather than on the common tropes of violence and death, this article extends recent work on the embodiment of sovereign power, while also showing that masculine pleasure represents an underanalyzed yet important dimension of sovereignty.

Urban Activism in a Downsizing World: Neighborhood Organizing in Postindustrial Chicago

In this article, I examine the origins and development of the National Training and Information Center (NTIC) in Chicago as part of a broader neighborhood organizing movement. I am particularly interested in the development of a philosophy and strategy of civic action in a postindustrial era. One of the most influential forms of grassroots urban activism in the 20th century was Saul Alinsky's community organizing movement. This movement, I argue, relied upon a relatively stable cadre of mass institutions including unions, the New Deal Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church. However, by the 1960s, these institutions fell into decline alongside the changing political, economic, and social conditions of the city wrought by deindustrialization. Neighborhood organizing arose in the late 1960s as one response to these changing conditions, and its emergence reflects an important shift in the methodologies of urban social action. Yet I conclude that the lack of a broad agenda for social change is a weakness of neighborhood organizing inherited from Alinsky, and that this weakness constitutes a major challenge for NTIC and like groups.

Framing Puerto Rican Identity: Political Opportunity Structures and Neighborhood Organizing in New York City

This article examines three decades of Puerto Rican social movement organizing in three New York City neighborhoods. It begins with a look at Puerto Rican nationalist movements in the late sixties and early seventies, moves to the housing movements in the mid-seventies to early eighties and concludes with the AIDS activist movements from the mid-eighties through the nineties. It argues that mobilizing frames and trajectories of these neighborhood movements were determined by differences in the local political opportunity structure, in particular (1) the distribution of political power among competing ethnic groups, (2) the opportunity to form political coalitions, and (3) the divergent trajectories and frames of previous movements. These different frames shaped the way organizers responded to new issues, influencing in particular activists' selection of targets, alliance partners, tactics, and discourse.