Toward Camden

In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses-her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Author: Mercy Romero
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 12/17/2021
Pages: 136
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.43lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9781478014706
ISBN10: 1478014709
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Sociology | Urban
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Hispanic American Studies
- Political Science | Public Policy | City Planning & Urban Development

About the Author
Mercy Romero is Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies at Sonoma State University.