Huddle Fever: Living in the Immigrant City

A decade-long resident of the once-legendary textile mill city of Lawrence, Mass., Schinto offers a modest, intriguing blend of reportage, history and reflection on her former home. The real trouble with blighted Lawrence, she states at the outset, is the loss of not the middle class but the working class. Yet, having moved there with her husband, returning to his family's business, she grew to enjoy the bonds of neighborhood and recognized, unlike some old-timers, that the downtown was not so much dead as transformed by the city's new, Latino population. Delving into the city's past, Schinto reports on Lawrence's haphazard housing history, its strikes and its churches. Her portrait of the contemporary city includes interviews with recent immigrants and an account of her husband's unsuccessful campaign for city council against a machine pol. Overcrowding, she observes, cramps people both physically and psychically: hence her title. But in a town where welfare offices occupy old mill space, it will take not only local self-reliance, the author argues, but also state and national strategies to revive a long-suffering economy. (Sept.)