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.
