Drawing on urban history methodologies that re-frame “white flight” as a racialized struggle over metropolitan space and resources, this dissertation examines the transition of Lawrence, Massachusetts to New England’s first Latino-majority city between 1945 and 2000. Although the population of this small, struggling mill city has never exceeded 100,000, it is not unique in its changing demographics; low-tier cities have become important nodal points in transnational networks in recent decades, as racialized patterns of urban disinvestment and gentrification encouraged a growing dispersal of Latinos from large cities like New York.

While Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans gradually began to arrive in Lawrence in the 1960s, tens of thousands of white residents were already leaving the city, moving (along with Lawrence’s industrial and retail establishments) out to the suburbs. As a result of this flight, the city was suffering from substantial economic decline by the time Latino settlement accelerated in the 1980s. Not all of Lawrence’s white population fled, however. Instead, many white Lawrencians fought to maintain control in the city and to discourage Latino settlement. I focus on two nights of rioting between white and Latino residents in 1984, as a spectacular example of the racialized contestations that accompanied the city’s social and economic transformations. Although the political power and public presence of Latinos dramatically increased in the years after the riots, half a century of uneven metropolitan development had left Lawrence without the resources or political clout to successfully confront the city’s pervasive poverty.

Lawrence’s history demonstrates the expansion of urban crisis during the 1980s, and its impact on Latino communities in the Northeast. The building of a Latino majority in Lawrence was not simply a demographic shift; rather it was an uphill struggle against a devastated economy and a resistant white population. The transformation of Lawrence in spite of these obstacles highlights the energy and commitment that Latinos have brought to U.S. cities in crisis during the second half of the twentieth century.