Detroit Never Left

Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán is Associate Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University. She is the author of Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention: U.S. Medicine in Puerto Rico.

"Detroit Never Left is a gem! Using an impressive array of data, Nicole Trujillo-Pagán shows that the abstractions elites and outsiders use to describe Detroit's 'impoverished life' mostly miss how people negotiate, resist, and help produce alternative meanings of the spaces in which they live. Her book will force researchers and commentators to take seriously the meaning-making of the people and communities they examine." – Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States "Detroit Never Left urges us to see our cities not as abstractions – size, tax-base, demographics – but as arenas of specific social and political transactions within and across urban boundaries. From Trujillo-Pagán's telling, we need to see a Detroit beyond bumper-sticker sloganeering of decline or renaissance, and more fully as ongoing arrangements, near and far, that spell out capacity to secure life resources. Detroit lives on in ways this book helps explain." – Harvey Molotch, co-author of Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place "Detroit Never Left presents dispatches from the frontlines of privatization's war on the people of Detroit. Trujillo-Pagán shows how policies that purport to solve the city's problems actually reward the profiteers and predatory lenders who caused them in the first place. This book shows how abstract concepts advanced by wealthy investors and owners (and the politicians that they prop up) hide the concrete realities that confront the vast majority of Detroit's residents who suffer from an endless array of old and new forms of extraction and exploitation." – George Lipsitz, author of The Danger Zone Is Everywhere: How Housing Discrimination Harms Health and Steals Wealth "Detroit Never Left is a uniquely important contribution to real-world understandings of how race and space are actually lived and felt by Detroiters. Trujillo-Pagán lays bare the stickiness of abstract imaginations of Detroit's city spaces that obscure the violence of white supremacy and antiblackness. Nuanced and thoughtful, Detroit Never Left beautifully challenges the terms by which we have come to understand this oft studied but rarely understood city." – Brandi T. Summers, author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City