W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:46 PM Page 88

Can’t Live With Them; Can’t Landscape Without

Them: Racism and the Pastoral Aesthetic in
Suburban New York
James Duncan and Nancy Duncan

James Duncan has taught cultural Abstract: Landscapes are produced and maintained in ways that are largely unseen by
geography in Canada and the United those who happen to drive past, admiring the beauty of the landscape. Deeply embedded in
States. For the past seven years he has the landscape are human costs invisible to the eye. In this paper we investigate some of the
taught at the University of Cambridge many social and material relations that underlie the pastoral views that characterize one
and is a Fellow of Emmanuel Col- particularly beautiful village. Bedford, a suburb of New York City, is a site of aesthetic con-
lege. His research interests are in sumption practices in which the residents derive pleasure and achieve social status by pre-
landscape interpretation and elite serving and enhancing the beauty of their town. We explore the way in which the beautiful
landscapes in North America and landscape of Bedford is internally related to the poor living conditions of Latino day labor-
South Asia. He has been studying ers in a neighboring town, Mount Kisco. Global political and economic structures as well
Bedford, New York off and on for as the structure of local zoning, supported by a socio-spatial ideology of local autonomy
the past thirty years. His publications and home rule, lie beneath Bedford’s successful exclusion of its laborers and Mount Kisco’s
include The City as Text: The Politics failure to keep out what they see as Bedford’s and Latin America’s “negative externalities.”
of Landscape Interpretation in the Our argument is that aesthetic concerns dominate social and economic relations between
Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge Uni- Latino immigrants and receiving communities.
versity Press 1990) and Landscapes
of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic
in an American Suburb (Routledge
2004).
Nancy Duncan taught cultural
geography at Syracuse University
until 1996. Since then she has taught
at the University of Cambridge and
until 2001 was a Fellow of Fitzwilliam
College. Her research interests in-
clude landscape interpretation, gen-
der analysis, and culture theory. She
wrote her dissertation on exclusion-
ary zoning in Westchester County,
New York. Her publications include
BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies
of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge
1996), and Landscapes of Privilege: The
Politics of the Aesthetic in an American
Suburb (Routledge 2004).

L atino day laborers are

part of a story that ties
Bedford, an affluent village in sub-
urban New York where they work, to
Mount Kisco, an adjacent, middle-
income village, where many of them
live.1 There is also, of course, a larger
story that we don’t have time to tell: a
story that connects both Mount Kisco
and Bedford to New York City and to
poor villages in Central and South
America where the workers have im-
migrated from. There is an ongoing
political struggle in Mount Kisco that
is intimately tied to the pastoral aes-
thetic and place-based identity of
those who live in Bedford and hire
Latinos to maintain the landscape.
Local politics in Bedford are largely
driven by a concern for protecting its
pastoral aesthetic (Figures 1 and 2).
Its residents, many of whom work in
New York City in business, law, and
the media, see Bedford as a quiet and
beautiful country retreat away from
the city and what they perceive as its
characteristically urban problems of
race and poverty—problems they see
as costly, occasionally dangerous, and
unaesthetic. In Mount Kisco there is a

Landscape Journal 22:1– 03 ISSN 0277-2426

88 Landscape Journal 22:1– 03 © 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:46 PM Page 89
politics of the aesthetic as well, how-
ever, here it is inflected by race in
ways that are present but masked in
Bedford.
Landscapes are produced and
maintained in ways that are largely
unseen by those who happen to drive
past, admiring the beauty of the land-
scape. Deeply embedded in the land-
Figure 1. Pastoral scene (All photographs by James and Nancy Duncan)
Figure 2. Dirt road
scape are human costs invisible to
the eye. In this paper we investigate
some of the many social and material
relations that underlie the pastoral
views that characterize one particu-
larly beautiful village. Bedford is a
site of aesthetic consumption prac-
tices in which the residents derive
pleasure and achieve social status by
preserving and enhancing the beauty
of their town. They accomplish this
through the use of exclusionary zon-
ing, stringent environmental protec-
tion legislation, and the exploited
labor of recently arrived Latino day
workers. A class aesthetic based in
such ideologies as localism, anti-
urbanism, anti-modernism, anglo-
philia, and romanticism also under-
lies and lends a political dimension to
the desire to live in a beautiful place
such as Bedford. We believe that the
celebration of the natural environ-
ment, historic preservation, and the
proclaimed uniqueness of a local
landscape, while all positive in them-
selves, divert attention away from the
interrelatedness of aesthetics with
identity on the one hand, and with
social justice on the other. The seem-
ingly innocent pleasures derived
from natural and historical land-
scapes have complex cultural and
political histories. The numbers
and types of people who can live
and work in Bedford are restricted
through various social, economic, po-
litical, and legal practices legitimated
by appeals to an unquestioned desire
to preserve a valuable and unique
sense of place. This might not have
any significant social consequences if
Bedford were, in fact unique. How-
ever, a great many of New York City’s
northern suburbs are characterized
by similar aesthetic and exclusionary
practices. Cumulatively, these prac-
tices become in effect subsidies to the
rich that have the effect of reducing
available land for the potential devel-
opment of affordable housing and
contributing to the dearth of rental
housing in northern Westchester
County and thus to the exorbitant
rents the laborers are forced to pay.
Bedford Village is considered
by its residents to be an idyllically
beautiful landscape of gently rolling
hills. Tall maples and oaks overhang
dirt roads lined with stone walls and
wild flowers. Although they are hid-
den from view, the hilltops are dotted
with late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth century mansions, obscured by
tall trees and approached by long
winding gravel driveways. The aes-
thetic value of having a rural land-
scape is seen by most all of the resi-
dents of the town as unquestionable.
Duncan and Duncan 89
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:46 PM Page 90

According to an aestheticized view of

nature, Bedford’s many acres of pas-
ture, fields of wildflowers outlined by
stonewalls (some in disrepair but in-
creasingly being restored), forests,
and large wooded house lots indicate
that it has more nature than if the
town were composed principally of
houses surrounded by manicured
lawns and ornamental trees. This
romantic discourse lends support to
the exclusionary structures and natu-
ralistic design practices that maintain
Bedford’s scenic landscapes.
Andrew Sayer (2000, 169) has
argued that, “contemporary cultural
studies’ preoccupation with aesthetic
values is evident in its focus on style
and taste, indeed in the definition of
its object of study as ‘the stylization of
life’ (Featherstone, 1994). There is
less interest in moral-political values.”
We agree. However, we also believe Figure 3. House
that these two types of value are in ac-
tuality inextricably bound and can be
best theorized via the concepts of aes-
theticization and complex complicity. try life,” “rustic” or “rural charm,” garden. The richest people, having
Since the late nineteenth century, “farmer’s club” (actually an exclusive, both the greatest resources and feel-
Bedford’s residents have tended to elite association), “studied seedi- ings of entitlement, attempt to con-
be cosmopolitan and urbane in their ness,” and “old colonial simplicity.” trol long-distance views. They often
public and business lives, but deeply Self-assured in their attempts to go to great lengths to ensure that
anti-urban in many aspects of their maintain open green space, the resi- nothing they see from their own
private lives. Bedford has been pro- dents’ aesthetic pleasures are sus- property and nothing they pass by
duced as highly controlled space, a tained through spatial separation when they drive around their towns is
semi-privatized domain in which an (Figure 3). Residents spatially and unattractive (Figures 4 and 5). The
authentic rural republican American visually insulate themselves from un- pleasure they take in their property,
identity can be nurtured. Its land- comfortable questions of race and as well as its economic value, depends
scapes are treated as aesthetic pro- poverty and keep out of sight as many greatly upon control over the aes-
ductions, controlled so that as far as reminders as possible of the social thetic and spatial practices of a whole
the eye can see, even if one drives or consequences of what Steve Pile community. As residents of Bedford
rides on horseback for many miles, (1994) has referred to as “painless and similar towns believe, ownership
one views nothing industrial or dis- privilege.” of land gives them the right and re-
tasteful. Residents of Bedford main- The higher one goes up the sponsibility to produce a town’s land-
tain the illusion of disconnection scale of wealth in a community, the scape as a coherent whole, a visual
through the spatial separation of more control the owners of property production, or a unique work with
home and work and an aestheticized expect to have over their residential an aura derived from a sense of the
attitude that conflates images of the spaces. In the poorest neighborhoods town’s uniqueness.
English country gentleman, owner of people may have little choice about
all he surveys, with the sentimental the interiors of their rooms or apart- The Day Laborers of Mount Kisco
pastoralism of the Jeffersonian Amer- ments. Moving up the scale of wealth, The number of Latinos living in
ican small farmer and individualistic people begin to have control over Westchester County doubled between
agrarianism. their interiors and, if they own prop- 1980 and 1990. By 2000 it had in-
This conflation can be seen in erty, their front and back yards. With creased an additional 67 percent. In
the language of residents as found in more money to spend, the rich can Mount Kisco the number of Latinos
interviews, newspaper articles, town display more personal choice in pro- rose from 400 (or 5 percent of the
and club histories, and real estate ad- ducing a well-designed house and village’s population) in 1980 to 2500
vertisements in which the terms “aris- (or 25 percent of the village’s popula-
tocrat,” “great estate,” “commanding tion) in 2000. Latino immigrants
distant views,” sit comfortably along- have been drawn to places like West-
side terms such as “the simple coun- chester County where they fill a grow-

90 Landscape Journal
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:46 PM Page 91
Figure 4. Bedford Village
ing niche in the local service econ-
omy, especially in landscaping. The
jobs are typically seasonal, non-
union, and low pay, with few benefits
and little security. The increase in
wealth generated by Wall Street and
other sectors of the economy of the
New York metropolitan region, which
includes sprawling edge cities such
as White Plains, has produced a de-
mand for status-creating personal
services that poor Latino workers
are largely providing as there is little
competition for such jobs. While
there are clearly deep structural, eco-
nomic, and political inequalities that
explain why the Central Americans
find themselves in a hostile North
American environment, economic
and political factors alone are insuf-
ficient as an explanation of the unar-
ticulated, deep-seated psychological
insecurities and ambiguities that
shape social relations between im-
migrants and non-immigrants.
Over the past decade the burn-
ing political issue in the village of
Mount Kisco has been what is per-
ceived to be “an invasion” of Latinos.
In this regard, the village is one of
countless suburban towns that find
themselves at the leading edge of
contemporary cultural change, which
Mike Davis (2000, 5) speaks of as a
“far reaching ‘Latin Americaniza-
tion’” of New York and other metro-
politan areas of the U.S., driven by a
“formidable demographic engine: a
Spanish-surname population that is
increasing ten times faster than the
Anglo population.”
The perception of an invasion
can be explained in large part by
conflicting cultural conventions of
public space based in an ethnocen-
tric and class-based aesthetics. This
has created a paradoxical situation in
which those whose labor maintains
Bedford’s landscape aesthetic are
themselves considered an unaesthetic
element of the streetscape of neigh-
boring Mount Kisco where Bedford
residents habitually go for shopping
and services. Many residents of
Mount Kisco and other nearby towns
resent their towns becoming what
they describe as “dumping grounds”
or “servant’s quarters” for places like
Bedford. These are the negative ex-
ternalities of an increasingly labor-
intensive landscape taste.2
For a decade until 2001, every
weekday morning from 6:30 a.m. on,
groups of men (one hundred or
Figure 5. Village green
more) waited to be picked up by con-
tractors and householders on the
main streets of Mount Kisco. We in-
terviewed some of these men. One
group came from Chiquimula in the
highlands of Guatemala. One man
said, “We wait here every morning to
be picked up by someone who needs
workers. On a good day we can make
$70 or $80, but sometimes the boss
doesn’t pay us. We argue with him,
but what can we do? There is no one
to complain to.” Some Latino work-
ers have steady work and rarely or
never stand out waiting for work. We
talked to a man from Honduras who
came to the U.S. seven years ago. He
pays $250 a week and sleeps in a liv-
ing room with three other men. After
the first few years he managed to find
a patron who gave him part-time
work and helped him to find work
with other people.
The number of Latinos spend-
ing many hours either waiting for
offers of day-laboring jobs or social-
izing on the streets has, in the past
ten years, reached what many non-
Latinos consider to be an unaccept-
able critical mass. This highly visible
non-white presence has become a
constant topic of conversation, not
only in Mount Kisco but to a lesser
degree in Bedford as well. Local
Duncan and Duncan 91
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:46 PM Page 92
opinion ranges from what might be
termed moral panic to paternalistic
“tolerance,” including a desire to
help the newly immigrated assimilate
to proper American ways of using
public space. David Sibley (1995, 43)
uses the term “moral panic” to de-
scribe a situation in which a group
defined as different destabilizes the
social order. Such panics tend to
erupt when spatial and social bound-
aries are threatened. This is often
heightened by alarmist media cover-
age. Moral panics articulate beliefs
about belonging and not belonging,
about the sanctity of territory and the
fear of transgression. They bring
boundaries into focus by accentuat-
ing differences. Mike Davis (2000,
109) describes the panic associated
with the visibility of street corner day
labor markets in suburbia across the
country as “a nativist hysteria that fre-
quently reaches an occult pitch.”
In Mount Kisco, those who are
noticed as being Latinos are those
whose visible, physiologic charac-
teristics of skin color, stature, and
features mark them as indigenous
(Amerindian) or moreno (African
or West Indian), mestizo, or mulatto
looking. It is this racialized differ-
ence as well as certain highly visible
practices, especially among males
(such as socializing in public and
walking or bicycle riding along roads
designed for driving), that differenti-
ates them.
Many of the remarks made in
the residents’ survey reveal an im-
plicit, unreflexive form of national-
ism/racism.3 Among many non-
Latinos there is a strong, visceral
distaste for the foreign looking, in-
digenous Amerindian features and
skin color of Latino men whom they
accuse of loitering. Loitering here is
a racialized, gendered, and class-
based concept in that it is the differ-
ence in appearance, bodily comport-
ment, and ways of being male of
those socializing on street corners
that makes their behavior offensive
and sometimes threatening to non-
Latinos. The same behavior by un-
marked middle class whites might
not be so immediately defined as
loitering.
Furthermore, the very bodies of
undocumented immigrants act as a
92 Landscape Journal
metaphor for insecure national
boundaries. Immigrant bodies are
marked as separate, marginal, and
different. The idea of insecure bor-
ders is aggravating or alarming to
many Americans, especially after Sep-
tember 11. Many residents feel that
the visibility of racialized difference
acts as a daily reminder of the vulner-
ability of Mount Kisco to the negative
externalities of more affluent towns.
They say things like: “Our town is a
dumping ground.” “We want our
town back!”
Contemporary immigration
is generally viewed with suspicion.
Although diversity and multicultural-
ism are sometimes successfully em-
braced as enriching aesthetic and
commercial themes, as political val-
ues they are too often associated with
what is thought to be a political
correctness foisted on the non-
immigrant population.
White Privilege and Place-Based Identity
Iris Marion Young (1990, 141–
42) distinguishes between domina-
tive and aversive racism. While domi-
native racism characterized much of
nineteenth-century race relations, es-
pecially in the American South, the
most common form in the U.S. dur-
ing the twentieth century was aversive
racism. Aversive racism is avoidance
and separation. The change signals,
in part, a shift from racism at the dis-
cursive level to racism in practical
consciousness. Explicit theories of
white or Anglo-Saxon supremacism,
while not uncommon, tend to be
marginalized today. Although re-
actions of aversion are profound,
they are largely unacknowledged as
racism. Such reactions are primarily
bodily, material, and unconscious.
They include nervousness, avoid-
ance, disgust, and distancing. Nega-
tive aesthetic reactions to the bodily
presence, sounds of speech or music,
and consumption styles of the Latino
others are particularly apt examples
in this context.
Because places, especially
homeplaces, are so closely associated
with one’s sense of identity, the pres-
ence of cultural others attempting to
share one’s residential space can be
deeply threatening. The blurring of
insider and outsider undermines
place identity and leads to the rup-
ture of the relationship between
place and identity. Iris Marion Young
adopts Julia Kristeva’s (1982) notion
of the abject as a kind of loathing
and fear to explicate aversive racism.
The abject is that which perpetually
threatens the physical and psycho-
logical borders between the self and
others and thus undermines identity.
The abject upsets the proper func-
tioning of a spatial or moral order.
Racial others are considered pollut-
ing or dangerous when deemed out
of place and uncontrolled in relation
to a particular historical, cultural,
and landscape context.
People may feel aversive racism
for different reasons. Less affluent
non-Latinos of Mount Kisco often
feel it because their place-based iden-
tity is undermined by being spatially
and economically close to members
of a disliked group. Some of the
more highly educated residents of
Bedford and Mt. Kisco feel it, but
due to their social and educational
background, they are expected to re-
ject discursive racism. Kristeva’s con-
cept of the abject introduces the idea
of ambiguity as threatening or loath-
some. When one’s social relations to
others are not clear or agreed upon,
if they seem uncontrolled, illegal, or
disrespectful of norms, then these re-
lations become difficult to tolerate.
While some may indeed enjoy
the color and enrichment of “ethnic”
restaurants, world music, foreign
travel, and multiculturalism in their
urban experiences, they choose a
more familiar, culturally homoge-
neous aesthetic at home often pre-
cisely because their liberal ideology
requires them to embrace a narrative
of equality that disallows overt
racism. In other words, those persons
appreciated as romantic and colorful
in their proper foreign place may be-
come a repugnant and intrusive
presence in middle-class Americans’
own home spaces where they seek a
secure and stable retreat from the
complex challenges of a globalizing
world.
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:47 PM Page 93
The idea of white privilege can
be added to the notions of domina-
tive and aversive racism. White privi-
lege is an unconscious form of racism
that results from a lifelong inculca-
tion that takes as natural “the privi-
leges and benefits that accrue to
white people by virtue of their white-
ness.” It “thrives in highly racialized
societies that espouse racial equality,
but where whites will not tolerate be-
ing inconvenienced in order to
achieve racial equality, or being de-
nied the full benefits of their white-
ness” (Pulido 2000, 15). White privi-
lege is such a powerful force precisely
because most whites are unconscious
of it, and so whites may exonerate
themselves from any form of racism.
As George Lipsitz (1995, 71) points
Figure 6. Pastoral scene
Figure 8. Colonial copy
out, “as the unmarked category
against which difference is con-
structed, whiteness never has to
speak its name, never has to acknowl-
edge its role as an organizing prin-
ciple in social and cultural relations.”
According to Pulido (2000, 16), white
privilege underlies institutional
racism: “The full exploitation of
white privilege requires the produc-
tion of places with a very high pro-
portion of white people. ‘Too many’
people of color might reduce a
neighborhood’s status, property
value, or general level of comfort for
white people.” We would argue that,
as well as underpinning institutional
racism, white privilege is in turn also
greatly enabled by institutional
racism.
Figure 7. Manor house
Figure 9. Hispanic gardeners
While Mount Kisco has had
to face up to its racism in the public
and legal arenas, residents of affluent
towns like Bedford need not be
racists, or at least not confront any
racism they may harbor, in order to
enjoy their privilege because of insti-
tutional racism that creates uneven
geographies and mechanisms of
exclusion such as large lot zoning.
While many residents of such pas-
toral communities as Bedford are not
entirely unaware of the exclusionary
consequences of large lot zoning they
focus their political attention on
defending their aesthetic on environ-
mental grounds which they see as not
only wholly worthy but also in their
personal interests in terms of the use
value as well as resale value of their
Duncan and Duncan 93
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:47 PM Page 94
properties. In general they see the
landscape as innocent and pride
themselves on their environmental
consciousness. However, the immi-
grants who stand on the streets of
Mount Kisco are there in large part
because of the increasing demand
for their labor on Bedford’s estates
(Figures 6, 7 and 8). They help to sus-
tain Bedford’s pastoral landscape by
recreating and maintaining miles of
centuries-old dry stone walls, plant-
ing and tending gardens, mowing
lawns, and repairing and repainting
country houses (Figure 9). But they
don’t fit the Anglo-pastoral narrative
structure being created in the land-
scape. They don’t quite look like An-
glo-American farm workers; their
very presence is seen as a manifesta-
tion of the suburbanization of urban
racial and immigration problems.
They are, in other words, seen by
Bedford residents as a very mixed
blessing indeed.
Mount Kisco and the Politics of
Disappearance
In Mount Kisco it would appear
that the existence of illegal immi-
grants is a license for various forms of
disguised racism. Because as many as
40 percent of the Latinos in Mount
Kisco may be undocumented and are
unmarked as such, many of the other
residents act as though the whole
Latino population has forfeited the
right to be treated as belonging in
the village. To many residents of
towns such as Mount Kisco and Bed-
ford, every (recognized) Latino’s
bodily presence attests to the weak-
ness of the government of the United
States in the face of illegal immigra-
tion. Some respondents to the village
survey made such remarks as “there is
a lack of control over ‘diversity’ is-
sues. The Hispanic population seems
uncontrolled.” Such a perception of
the others as being “out of control” is
precisely how Kristeva describes ab-
jection. The presence of Latinos is
threatening because parents think
that the high quality of education
and other privileges they, as middle-
class whites deserve, are threatened.
Many of Mount Kisco’s Central
Americans live in appalling condi-
tions. Those we talked to told us of
sleeping in living rooms with four
94 Landscape Journal
and five others—sometimes of other
national origins whom they dislike.
One said, “I feel I am not really living
here, just working. I have only one
little window.” Because of inadequate
private space in which to entertain,
and a culture of male socializing in
large groups in public, they tend to
spend many hours of the day in
public places. This use of space
deeply troubles many non-Latino
Americans for it challenges key tenets
of privatism and individualism that
have become extended to the level
of community.
A suburban community for
many Anglo-Americans is an exclu-
sive, semi-private space where people
of like minds, incomes, and similar
tastes do not so much interact as
maintain similarly aestheticized
private lifestyles. The presence of
racially marked outsiders offends the
aesthetic of homogeneity necessary
to the maintenance of such a commu-
nity. It is not so much the actuality of
the presence of Latinos in the area as
their visibility that disrupts the spa-
tial/moral order of suburban society.
To put it bluntly (as many of our in-
formants did), the presence of the
Latino day laborers on village streets
is thought to “spoil the look of the
landscape” (Figure 10).
Towns in southern Westchester
composed a flier to familiarize immi-
grants with what one journalist
(Berger 1993) termed the “tacit
codes of the suburbs.” The fliers ex-
plain cultural differences between
Anglicized Americans and newly ar-
rived Latinos in the “proper” use of
public space. They point to the fact
that locals assume that public spaces
are to be used for walking and that
socializing is to be done in private,
either in the home or in a bar or
restaurant. In Mount Kisco, Latino
advocacy groups now provide this
kind of cultural information to day
laborers.
A large number of respondents
to the residents’ survey see loitering
as the major problem facing Mount
Kisco. The naturalized concept of
loitering is culturally and historically
specific in ways often unacknowl-
edged by those who complain. One
can see in the following remarks that
loitering is often seen in aesthetic
terms as a visually offensive behavior.
One person said, “The loitering prob-
lem on Maple Avenue and along Lex-
ington is getting to be an eyesore.”
Another said, “The beautiful benches
are occupied by day workers” (Figure
11), “young men perched on the
benches [are] unsightly,” and “illegal
aliens are cluttering up the Kirby
Plaza” (Figure 12). Given the large
number of comments made about
noise and the sounds of Spanish be-
ing spoken in town we can only as-
sume that people object to what they
see as aural as well as visual pollution
(Figure 13). As another person said,
“The new immigrants take away from
the beauty of the village by hanging
around and not learning the lan-
guage.” Others remarked that they
“despised” “the Latinos who hang out
in the town on the street corners and
gazebo,” and that “loitering detracts
from the quality of life in Mount
Kisco.” As Don Mitchell (1997, 326)
points out, this notion of “quality of
life,” prioritizes the aesthetic values of
the middle class over the survival of
the poor.
The public outcry in Mount
Kisco over what one interviewee
termed “the deteriorating ‘quality
of life’ in the town due to an influx
of a high number of illegal aliens”
became so insistent that the Mayor in
the mid–1990s created a Committee
on Community Relations to find a so-
lution to the problem. They met with
representatives of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, the Inter-
nal Revenue Service (IRS), and the
Department of Labor, but in effect,
were told that if they wanted to get
rid of the Latinos, they had to do it
themselves. Such agencies do not feel
they have the resources to spend on
small suburban towns. And in fact
this view has encouraged the subur-
banization of poor Latinos.
Having failed to enlist outside
help, the Committee recommended
that the village “help ensure that all
members of our community—His-
panic, Anglo and the rest—respect
the rules of our village and the cus-
toms of our culture.” One can see
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:47 PM Page 95

here how the American ideologies of

individualism and privacy are cross-
cut by a powerful desire for conform-
ity. Expressions of individualism are
encouraged only as long as the
broader cultural frameworks such as
the public-private space dichotomy
remain undisturbed.
The village’s attempted solution
to the problem of loitering was to
pass a set of laws to protect the day
workers from exploitation, thereby
significantly reducing their numbers
because they can only survive in a
place as expensive as Mount Kisco if
officials turn a blind eye to their ex-
ploitation. The village made it illegal
for workers standing on a street or
sidewalk to solicit employers or for
employers in a vehicle to hire work-
ers standing on the street. People
who employ casual workers were
henceforth to have licenses guar- Figure 10. Moger Avenue, Mt Kisco
anteeing that they would abide by
national and local laws. This had a
predictably chilling effect on employ-
ment, as employers feared the finan-
cial and legal implications of hiring
those they assumed were illegal
aliens.
The second part of the village’s
plan to “protect” the Latinos was to
designate the back of a parking lot
next to the railway tracks away from
the center of the village as the only
place where workers could be picked
up for work. When put into law, this
plan temporarily improved the ap-
pearance of the village from the
point of view of locals; however, it
soon became apparent to the workers
that they were no longer visible to
employers. A week later nearly 200
day workers met with village officials
to express concern about the new
law. An ad hoc committee was
formed which included representa-
tives of the Center of Immigrant Figure 11. Hispanics on benches
Rights, the Westchester Hispanic
Coalition, and the Civil Liberties
Union. The committee met with
Mount Kisco officials to urge them to
change the law. Workers said that be-
cause of the licensing requirement,
employers feared an IRS sting. This
requirement and a heavy police pres-
ence in the parking lot to enforce the
new law kept employers away.
A village official told us, “We
don’t want residents of Mount Kisco

Duncan and Duncan 95

W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:47 PM Page 96
Figure 12. Waiting for work
to be abused. That’s why we have
passed a no panhandling ordinance.
It is not safe for people to stand on
the street asking for money or jobs.”
It is disingenuous of this official to
label this an anti-panhandling law,
as the Latinos are waiting for work
rather than begging. Such language
can best be interpreted as official
spin intended to enforce a norm-
ative geography by delegitimizing the
Latinos’ behavior in public spaces
while professing to represent their
interests.
The Westchester Branch of the
American Civil Liberties Union filed
a class action suit against the Village
of Mount Kisco. One of the issues in
the suit was the right to free assembly
being denied to Hispanics by village
law. Some of Mount Kisco’s residents
cannot understand why the courts
and some newspaper reports paint
Mount Kisco as racist. One wrote,
“I have to question why the town
of Mount Kisco is being unfairly de-
picted as a racist town and how the
rights of workers have anything to
do with racism. It is unethical for
employers to exploit the day workers
and it is an issue that must be dealt
with.” It would appear that this
woman fails to recognize the village’s
unarticulated racist practices. In the
96 Landscape Journal
end the village settled the suit out of
court at great expense and rewrote
the local law. The residents and mer-
chants still wanted the workers out of
sight and the village next claimed to
be worried about workers impeding
traffic flow.
At the forefront of the drive for
cultural assimilation is the Neighbors
Link, organized by the Presbyterian
Church and the Westchester His-
panic Coalition. A local minister
argued that outdoor socializing is a
principal problem: “Anglos don’t do
that, so we assume [Latinos are] up
to no good when they do.” In re-
sponse to pressures for an indoor
place for Latinos to socialize, a com-
munity center and hiring site was
eventually opened in April 2001 in a
warehousing district on the outskirts
of the village (Figure 14). The Center
provides coffee, donuts, some pre-
arranged jobs, classes in English lan-
guage and American culture, voca-
tional skills, advice on citizenship,
housing and health care, and space
for socializing. The Center seems a
success from the point of view of
most day laborers. It is certainly help-
ing to hide the Latinos, for contrac-
tors are required to pick them up
for work here on the outskirts of
the village.
During the 1990s, midnight
raids on overcrowded housing, charg-
ing tenants as well as landlords, was
yet another tactic used by the village
to make life in Mount Kisco difficult
or impossible for Latinos, while pro-
fessing to protect their interests.
Spreading fears of disease and urban
problems thought to be caused by
overcrowding, and curtailing any
possibility of building more multi-
family housing through zoning legis-
lation, all work to limit the numbers
of poor Latinos who can live in the
village.
Again the Civil Liberties Union
filed a class action suit, this time
charging the village with selectively
enforcing the housing code. The vil-
lage settled this and another suit in-
volving the midnight raids out of
court at a cost of approximately
$900,000, a large bill for a small vil-
lage. The village survey showed the
non-Latino residents to be extremely
concerned about illegal apartments
and dirt and decay in the neighbor-
hoods. Along with loitering, the resi-
dents speak of these in coded terms
as “quality of life issues.” However,
the quality of life referred to is not
the quality of life of Latino residents
of overcrowded buildings. Rather, it
is the “white privilege” of the rest of
the village residents to not want to
see day laborers in the center of the
village.
In another round of legal
battles, the village has recently been
charged with modifying the housing
ordinance to exclude groups of
single men living together by impos-
ing a stricter definition of a family.
Once again the village has had to set-
tle out of court. They have rewritten
the ordinance and contributed
$10,000 to the Westchester Hispanic
Organization for the social services it
provides to Mount Kisco. Although
the past two mayors, one Democratic
and the other Republican, have lost
their jobs for what many residents see
as failure to solve this so-called
“Latino problem,” opposition contin-
ues to rally around the slogan “We
want our town back!”
In 1999 the owner of a Chinese
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:47 PM Page 97
restaurant in the center of the village
that began to serve Guatemalan food
and attract Latinos to eat and drink
beer in the evenings was served an
eviction notice after the Mayor told
the owner of the building to “get rid
of your problem tenant” (Gross
1999). The restauranteur filed a $1.5
million civil rights suit in Federal
Court against her landlord and the
Mayor. The Judge granted an injunc-
tion against the eviction saying, “no
one wanted to talk about race—but
race was the issue at hand.” She con-
cluded that they had showed hostility
towards those who were “culturally
alien to suburban Americans.” The
restauranteur’s attorney charged the
village with “ongoing efforts to re-
move the visibility of Latinos from
the Mount Kisco area which is de-
plorable and unconscionable.” The
Judge wrote, “The real problem in
the eyes of all was not that Mrs. Stern
(the restauranteur) served too much
alcohol but rather that it attracted
Hispanics to the downtown area.
Thus it appears that her lease was not
renewed because of hostility to the
presence of day workers. The land-
lord was basing his complaints on
people who exhibit racial animus.”
Again the population was outraged at
the charge of racism. Letters to the
editor argued that it was behavior,
not race, that was objected to.
Confusion among non-Latinos
about the legal status of the immi-
grants produces a profound uneasi-
ness. Their diasporic identities, con-
tinuing strong transnational familial
ties, their remittances home, the con-
tinued use of their native language,
and the “incompleteness” of their
families (wives, children, parents
often left behind), make it difficult
for other residents of Mount Kisco to
imagine them ever becoming equal
and fully participating members of
the community. As one of our inter-
viewees said:
I can’t imagine the Guatemalans
ever becoming volunteer fireman,
for example. They seem inwardly
focused as a community, or maybe
I should say outwardly focused on
Central America. Other immigrant
groups in the past couldn’t main-
tain the same links. They had to be-
come Americans to survive. They
couldn’t make weekly phone calls
or buy cheap airline tickets home
and stay all winter living well on
their 100 dollars a day they get
here in the summer.
The popular American assump-
tion that immigrants will slowly assim-
ilate to American culture is increas-
ingly thrown into doubt. Not only
are there increasing transnational
movements of people and goods, but
Figure 13. Sign in Spanish
whereas previously economic success
and social status depended exclu-
sively on rapid acculturation, now for
some it depends more on cultivating
strong social networks across national
borders.
A local Latino minister told us
that the dislike of Latinos is a visual
thing: “people don’t like the look of
these poor people.” He says, “We
need to assimilate to prosper. In
private we can have our own culture,
but in public we must fit in.” We can
see from his words that invisibility is Figure 14. Neighbor’s Link Center
considered necessary among some
Latinos who have adopted the domi-
nant culture’s view of themselves. being in a school full of kids who
The urge to teach a minority popula- don’t know English.
tion to conform to dominant ways
Compared to many Mount
and help them in an assimilation pro- Kisco residents, Bedford residents are
cess is an example of toleration in the
more ambivalent about the Latinos
sense that the other is incorporated living in Mount Kisco. As Bedford
only on one’s own terms. As we have
residents tend to use Mount Kisco for
seen, many of the village’s residents shopping and services, they too are
feel surprised and hurt at the nega-
concerned with its appearance. A
tive publicity they have received in long-time resident of Bedford de-
the press over the issue of racism.
scribed the difference between Bed-
There is also resentment to- ford and Mount Kisco as follows:
wards Bedford and other towns ex-
“When you step across the border
pressed by many of Mount Kisco’s res- into Mount Kisco, it’s like a frontier,
idents, sometimes with overtones of
like crossing into a different country.”
social class resentment. For example, One interviewee stated, “I don’t go to
one man we spoke to said:
Mount Kisco anymore because of all
We are portrayed in the press as the Guatemalans hanging around on
the bad guys. Now that’s unfair. In the streets. It looks dangerous.” An-
Bedford they aren’t called racist. other said, “It is horrific to walk into
They don’t have to be—they have a supermarket and no one speaks
exported their problem to us.
English.” One interviewee spoke in
We’re the ones offering affordable strongly nativist terms of Mount
housing and social services— Kisco as an extension of New York
they’re the ones with the big houses
City, which to him represents a
and gardens that they don’t want to
take care of themselves so they get disfigured, racialized landscape of
civil strife and illegal aliens.
Jose and Pedro to do all the work.
Then they send their kids to private
school so they aren’t held back by Conclusion
Our concern throughout the
larger research project from which
this paper is drawn is the active con-
Duncan and Duncan 97
W222LJ_ch2 12/18/03 1:47 PM Page 98
stitution of places through cultural
struggle (Duncan and Duncan
2004). It is about the relative success
of Bedford in keeping its social land-
scape unspoiled by the labor that
maintains its landscape aesthetic. It
is about the frustrated short-term
failure of the non-Latino residents of
Mount Kisco to enforce their norma-
tive geography of “proper” behavior
in public places. It is about how the
beautiful gardens in Bedford are in-
ternally related to the poor living
conditions in Mount Kisco. As Don
Mitchell (2000, 140) argues in an-
other context, “each sort of land-
scape depends on the other: Our
ability to consume is predicated on
‘their’ low wages and the miserable
conditions that exist elsewhere.”
Global political and economic struc-
tures, as well as the structure of local
zoning, supported by a socio-spatial
ideology of local autonomy and
home rule lie beneath Bedford’s suc-
cessful exclusion of its laborers and
Mount Kisco’s failure to keep out
what they see as Bedford’s and Latin
America’s “negative externalities.”
Our main argument, however, is that
aesthetic concerns dominate social
relations between Latino immigrants
and the receiving community. Racism
in the form of feelings of aversion
and abjection, nervousness and dis-
gust, and anxieties over maintaining
social distance and containing pollu-
tion appear most clearly in the closer
confines and integrated spaces of
Mount Kisco and less obviously in the
exclusivist residential spaces of Bed-
ford where laborers are seen prima-
rily in clearly marked service roles.
While residents of Bedford react to
poor Latinos on the streets of Mount
Kisco with aversion, their presence as
servants in Bedford is naturalized as
white privilege. One could even go so
far as to say that the Latino day labor-
ers, through their labor in the land-
scape, form a constitutive part of the
status claims and, by extension, the
identity of Bedford’s residents. It is
Latino labor that reproduces Anglo-
98 Landscape Journal
pastoral Bedford. And, unfortu-
nately, when one takes a sufficiently
critical look at the social relations
underlying many places such as Bed-
ford and Mount Kisco, it becomes
clear that there is often an equally
unhappy history and continuing so-
cial injustice deeply structured into
the beauty of the landscape.
Editors’ Note
An earlier version of this paper was presented
by Dr. James Duncan as a keynote address at
Groundwork: the CELA 2002 annual meeting
hosted by SUNY College of Environmental Sci-
ence and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, 25–-
28 September, 2002. The paper has since been
edited for clarity and length appropriate to
Landscape Journal.
All photographs by James and Nancy
Duncan.
Notes
1. The material in this article is drawn from a
long-term study of the politics of landscape
taste in Bedford, New York (Duncan and Dun-
can 2004). The data for this study were based
in part on three large surveys and 76 semi-
structured interviews with residents and public
officials of both Mount Kisco and Bedford.
The Mount Kisco village-wide survey of was
conducted by the village government in 1999
to help in the preparation of a new master
plan. The survey (Frederick Clark Associates)
was sent to 5,500 residents and returned by 710
or 13%. In addition some of the material came
from newspapers and government publica-
tions.
2. Many such remarks were written by resi-
dents and merchants in the Mount Kisco sur-
vey on problems facing Mount Kisco.
3. The terms “race,” “racist,” and “racialized”
are appropriate because non-Latinos see the
Latino population in Mount Kisco in racialized
terms. Latinos are in fact a heterogeneous
group ethnically, nationally and racially.
References
Berger, J. 1993. Bienvenidos a los suburbios:
Increasingly, New York’s outskirts take
on a Latin accent. New York Times ( July
29).
Davis, M. 2000. Magical Urbanism: Latinos Rein-
vent the U.S. City. New York: Verso.
Duncan, J. S., and Duncan N. G. 2004. Land-
scapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aes-
thetic in an American Suburb. New York:
Routledge.
Gross, J. 1999. In Westchester, trouble on the
menu: as Hispanic clientele grows, a
restaurant loses its lease. New York Times
(November 8).
Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Lipsitz, G. 1995. The possessive investment in
whiteness: racialized social democracy
and the ‘white’ problem in American
studies. American Quarterly 47: 369–387.
Mitchell, D. 1997. The annihilation of space by
law: the roots and implications of anti-
homelessness laws in the United States.
Antipode 29: 303–335.
_______. 2000. Cultural Geography. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Pile, S. 1994. Masculism, the use of epistem-
ologies, and third spaces. Antipode 26:
255–77.
Pulido, L. 2000. Rethinking environmental
racism: White privilege and urban
development in Southern California.
Annals, Association of American Geogra-
phers 90: 12–40.
Sayer, A. 2000. Critical and uncritical cultural
turns. Cultural Turns/Geographical
Turns. I. Cook, D. Crouch, S. Naylor,
and J. Ryans (eds.). Harlowe: Prentice
Hall, pp. 166–81.
Sibley, D. 1995. Geographies of Exclusion: Society
and Difference in the West. London: Rout-
ledge.
Young, I. M. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Dif-
ference. Princeton: Princeton University.