A Good Reputation : How Residents Fight for an American Barrio

A historic Houston barrio provides an illuminating lens on neighborhood reputation. Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities.A neighborhood’s reputation, however, doesn’t always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen.The distance between residents’ desires and their environment can profoundly shape neighborhood life. In A Good Reputation, sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga delve into the development and transformation of the reputation of Northside, a predominantly Latinx barrio in Houston.Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with residents, developers, and other neighborhood stakeholders, the authors show that people’s perceptions of their neighborhoods are essential to understanding urban inequality and poverty.Korver-Glenn and Mayorga’s empirically detailed account of disputes over neighborhood reputation helps readers understand the complexity of high-poverty urban neighborhoods, demonstrating that gentrification is a more complicated and irregular process than existing accounts of urban inequality would suggest.Offering insightful theoretical analysis and compelling narrative threads from understudied communities, A Good Reputation will yield insights for scholars of race and ethnicity, urban planning, and beyond.