The New American Ghetto
Urban ghettos, as intrinsic to the identity of the United States as picturesque New England villages, vast national parks, and leafy suburbs, nevertheless remain unique in their social and physical isolation from the nation's mainstream. Semi-ruined, discarded and dangerous, our poor, minority communities are rarely visited by outsiders.
The New American Ghetto is an exploration, conducted over nearly two decades, of some of the poorest and most segregated neighborhoods in New York, Newark, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and other smaller cities. Through photographs and text, I chronicle the profound transformation that these places have experienced since the 1960s. Included here are successive photographs of the same places that track change over time -- the kinds of changes that have made the conditions of today's ghettos profoundly different from those of an earlier era.
My examination of scores of ghettos across the nation reveals three types: green ghettos characterized by depopulation and by vacant land and ruins overgrown by nature; institutionalized ghettos, publically financed places of confinement designed mainly for American-born minorities; and new immigrant ghettos, deriving their character from an influx of immigrants, mainly Latino and West Indian.
The New American Ghetto illustrates the ongoing entropy and struggling reconstruction existing in our urban centers today. Some communties have continued to lose population; others have emerged from what were once ethnic, blue-collar neighborhoods; some sections of older ghettos have remained stable, working neigborhoods or have been rebuilt.
Cityscapes that were once central to the life and identity of the nation are vanishing, raising fundamental questions: Do we need cities? Do we want cities? And how do we interpret what is left behind?
-- Camilo Vergara
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