Introduction: Luxury’s Timely Arrival in the Bronx
In 2015, Sam Shalem, owner of Prestige Properties, cut the ribbon for the opening of the Mall at Bay Plaza (MBP), New York City’s first enclosed mall in over forty years. Two years before its opening, Shalem said, “we are building something that we – and the community – will be proud of” (Nerej 2011). Finally, the Bronx would get its own mall of the future (Sanchez, A., & Loree, J 2022). The mall would become part of the 6.5 million square feet in Prestige’s retail portfolio and go on to be the most successful indoor mall in the city. However, what was missing from his praise for the development was a clear connection to the ways that the mall would benefit the local community, and where this sense of “pride” would originate from.
This essay investigates the intersection of consumerism, capitalism, and Latinx identity through an ethnographic study of the mall. Focusing on MBP, in the Bronx, New York, I examine how the mall allows Latinx shoppers to mediate national and local dynamics of race and ethnicity with neoliberal dispositions of class and status. My study of MBP explores how consumption among migrants from Latin America and US-born Latinxs is embedded within everyday politics as shaped by the very construction of the mall and the affective worlds of consumers themselves. Rather than seeing the structure of feeling (Williams 1970) as something that derives its urgency and force during displacement, I propose that the affective attachments of Latinx shoppers to the mall demonstrate how these communities are at the center of capitalist projects that present themselves as natural, necessary, and beneficent, perfectly situating themselves for the cultivation of shopping neutrality.
Scholars have examined key linkages between global neo-liberalizing processes in relation to the mall and social imaginaries for “new middle classes” (Dávila 2016). However, this essay suggests that a close relationship between consumption and personhood is mobilized by the mall’s contextual embeddedness within local histories about race and aspirational desires for upward mobility. Turning to the affective worlds of Latinx shoppers, the project of the mall is effective in engaging emerging meanings of upwardly mobile social and class identities while neutralizing power inequalities hidden behind conceptions of ethnic consumers. Latinx shoppers engage with the idea of the mall as a democratic, racially inclusive space, which often overshadows political-economic processes with aspirational language. This is what I call “shopping neutrality,” the process by which social imaginaries about race and class become entangled in a physical consumption space that is deliberately staged to induce specific fantasies of upward mobility, affective belonging, and forms of neoliberal personhood. The “shopping neutrality” framework I am proposing allows us to understand Latinx populations more robustly while considering how imagination impacts class and racial identity-making. Ultimately, processes of shopping neutrality lead Latinx populations to aspire to a packaged U.S. middle class, by viewing global consumer culture at the modern mall as liberatory. The feel of shopping, in this context, invokes transnational imaginaries, aspirations to upward mobility, and racial learning processes, but at the same time, this feeling must remain neutral and unspoken.
Methodology
This study uses a qualitative research design that involves in-depth interviews with Latinx consumers who regularly shop at malls, particularly Bronx residents who shop at MBP. Over the span of four months, from October 2023 to January 2024, I conducted thirteen interviews, in Spanish and English, with Latinx shoppers, security guards, and store clerks. I also conducted participant observation at MBP. Of my thirteen interviewees, eleven identified as Latinx, one identified as African American, and one identified as South Asian. Of the interviews with Latinx informants, seven were Latin American immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Peru, Mexico, and Ecuador, and the rest identified as U.S.-born Latinxs. I also conducted archival research at the Bronx Historical Society, where I examined documents about financiers, agencies, and political actors involved in the development of Co-Op City and the Bronx more broadly.
The Bronx & Co-Op City
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bronx gained national notoriety for urban deterioration, marked by arson, crime, and housing abandonment. During the 1970s, the Bronx was plagued by its worst era of urban decay and poverty. Popular images of the Bronx during this era include burning buildings as many landlords began destroying unoccupied buildings to claim insurance money. Media outlets cast blame on the residents, but scholars such as Joe Flood (2010) have outlined how a combination of systemic issues including economic decline, social unrest, and city policies led to the neglect that caused the fires. The South Bronx had transitioned from a predominantly white neighborhood in the 1950s to a predominantly African American and Hispanic community by 1960. In the present-day, nearly 57% of the Bronx identifies as Hispanic (NYU Furman Center).
MBP sits at the northern section of the Bronx next to a cooperative housing development known as “Co-op City.” Up until 1960, the neighborhood was a flat marshland that was known to locals as “the dump.” After being the site for an amusement park that went bankrupt in a few years, plans to construct the world’s largest co-op were announced in 1965, making way for 15,372 residential units within 35 high-rise buildings (Co Op City). The development was part of the institution of the Mitchell-Lama program, which since 1955 has provided affordable rental and cooperative housing to moderate-and middle-income families in the State of New York (NYC Housing Preservation and Development). As a step in the West Side Urban Renewal Plan, the project was made possible by the availability of federal funds for the purpose of urban renewal. Eventually, the original shopping center arrived in Co-Op City in the 1980s as part of the expansion of Co-Op City and its offerings (Co-Op City).
Race and class discourses upholding a white, middle-class standard of life and comportment were a central tension in residents’ and board members’ preservation of Co-Op City (Verhovek 1987). Members of the Co-op’s board of directors initiated a marketing campaign to attract more “decent middle-class type people” to sustain the community as a “clean, safe and good place to raise your family” in response to its growing Black and Latinx population (Verhovek 1987). The preservation of Co-Op City as an integrated yet white, middle-class neighborhood demonstrates how complex negotiations of race and class unfolded in this urban environment which tried to situate integration amid white, middle-class normativity. Co-Op City’s original purpose–to provide settlement away from the perceived disorder of the city’s poorer neighborhoods—in line with the goals of urban renewal—was part of a social geography constructed by mutually constitutive neoliberal policy outlooks which, on one hand saw redlined communities neglected by city officials as responsible for the decay and destruction of their own neighborhoods, and on the other, aimed to establish a new community whose aesthetics and pedigree differentiated them from their neighbors in the southern parts of the borough.
Studying Up: NYC Commercial Real Estate and Prestige Properties
Sam Shalem, CEO of Prestige Properties, the owners of the mall properties, is one consistent figure who has been a spokesman for the mall’s developments since the late 1980s. Today, Shalem’s company, which specializes in retail assets, has more than 6.5 million square feet in its retail portfolio (TRD).
Even with urban redevelopment efforts, legacies of urban decay and poverty as a result of the neoliberal era of the 1970s and 1980s cast the populations of the Bronx as an undesirable population in the eyes of financiers. In the early 1990s, Prestige Properties failed to secure a bank to finance construction for the mall project. The authors of a 1992 Crain’s Business article write that this failure suggests that lenders and investors remain “extremely skittish about major Bronx projects” (Breznick 1992). The developers invested in constructing a suburban-style mall in Co-Op City wanted to bring what was an important fabric of American suburban communities to the neighborhood, hoping to expand on the offerings of the middle-class haven. Examining the history of development in Co-Op City thus tells a story of competing logics that sought to empower populations by giving them the right to participate in consumerism against those that sought to cast them as undesirable and unworthy. The conundrum surrounding investing in the Bronx reveals the importance of shopping neutrality on the level of individual consumers. These shoppers must conceptualize the mall as part of a colorblind, democratic sphere of consumption rather than an outcome of complex financial negotiations, the actions of local actors responsible for the movement of capital, and global neo-liberalizing processes that rely on activating particular social imaginaries for “new middle classes” (Dávila 2016).
“Shopping Neutrality” and Latinx Aspirational Landscapes: Embodiment, Affect, Personhood
The theme of neutrality that undergirds this work aims to illuminate how understandings of race and class are informed by aspirational belonging to global consumer culture. Latinx shoppers with longer ties to the United States and who were born in the Bronx expressed more explicitly a prideful orientation towards the opening of MBP. Jessica, a 35-year-old Puerto Rican woman waiting for her daughter to finish her shift at the Apple Store, told me that she was extremely grateful for the mall and said that it was a “long time coming.” Her description of the mall as a “long-time coming” suggests it is seen not just as a commercial space but as a rightful enhancement to the community, deserving of pride and gratitude. For U.S.-born Latinxs who grew up in the Bronx, the development of the mall signifies economic opportunities and social progress that affirms their identities as coming-of-age consumers. Jessica’s engagement with the mall—viewing shopping as a neutral and enjoyable activity—further reflects a strategic acceptance of consumer culture that aligns individual actions with communal economic growth.
However, many interviewees complained about the inaccessible prices at the mall and the pressure of economic hardship, showcasing the material limits to shopping neutrality. After all, in asking them to reflect on their identities as consumers, I was also prompting them to think about the contradictions of living in a city that is increasingly unlivable but welcomes global brands rather than people and local economies. Milagros, a 56-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic, claimed that the mall offered “siempre la misma cosa” (always the same thing) and complained that the prices at mall stores were too high. Many other informants identified the sheer unaffordability of the items at MBP and identified few stores within their budgets. Latinx shoppers with such a view navigate the mall on the fringes of consumerism and caution due to their socioeconomic precarity.
Capturing the aesthetic imagery of the modern and sleek mall together with a recognition that MBP is not like any other, Jessica described the mall to me as “Modern, Elegant, and Crazy.” Many interlocutors pointed to this commonsense understanding among the local community that in light of what it offered there was something about the mall’s unique social and cultural context that characterized it as “crazy,” referring to an everyday chaos that they associated with mallgoers who were youth of color. Many indicated that they were in favor of banning youth under the age of eighteen from the mall because of the behaviors they associated with them. Juanita, an 18-year-old worker at a toy stand, said, “these crazy kids, they skip school and come here and start causing a ruckus. I think they shouldn’t be able to come without a parent.” That is, there were expectations for comportment and respectability that shoppers and shop owners upheld in their assessment of the mall’s problems. Although built-in modes of surveillance make apparent the vigilance surrounding abnormal moments of behavior caused by problematic youth of color, the interlocutors in favor of bans sidestepped the ways that they too were being surveilled. The erratic behavior of youth of color is seen as the disruption of a space where people stake claim to middle-class, neoliberal personhood through comportment and respectability that makes this status earned. Those who disrupt the feeling of shopping neutrality are seen as less worthy of access to the mall. Indeed, ensconced within this idea of “crazy” is not only the common understanding that MBP is more disordered and unsafe than other malls but also that this condition requires solutions that justify the need for surveillance and hypersecurity. In referring to the mall as crazy, the mall users I interviewed revealed the tension that shopping neutrality holds when legacies of racialization and criminalization echo despite the presumption that shopping is a socially neutral, everyday act.
Images of the pathologic ethnic consumer were another way in which race came up in my interviews. On a Saturday afternoon, Humberto, a 35-year-old immigrant from Peru, was visiting the mall with his family after touring city sights with a cousin who was visiting. Initially, Humberto wanted to affirm that consumption at the modern mall was not a novel experience, expressing his status as an upwardly mobile consumer, stating, “somos latinos y nos gusta comprar” (we are Latinos and we like to shop). However, it was Humberto’s opinion that African Americans and Latinxs are more likely to spend irresponsibly, with “dinero que no tienen” (money they don’t have). Consumption among Black and Latinx populations is associated with poorness and thus become the basis of moral critique (Chin 2001), categorizing their consumer spending as inherently problematic. Nonetheless, mall worker Adam, a 42-year-old man originally from South Asia, attributed the success of his business to Black and Latinx customers because they can afford to “spend more in times of inflation.” Although Adam considers these groups to be vital drivers of economic growth, he similarly critiques them for lacking in economic strategies geared toward the planning of one’s future. Among both of these respondents, consumption was a pathologic and problematic feature of Black and Latinx ethnic groups but at the same time a necessary driver of economic growth, keeping the consumption sphere within the realm of neutrality. The maintenance of the consumption sphere as a colorblind, democratized and neutral space does not, however, erase the image of the pathologized ethnic consumer.
Conclusion
This paper examines what we uncover when we track the footprints of urban developments which align access to the modern with a rhetoric of pride and empowerment for local populations. Luxury shopping malls that bring about change within urban spaces are mobilized by speculative processes around land and real estate that hide their materiality behind narratives of empowerment.
Shopping neutrality proposes that the everyday act of shopping is at the crux of social imaginaries about class and race in the historically stigmatized and marginalized borough of the Bronx. Once plagued by urban policies that destroyed homes and cast blame onto its Black and Latinx populations for that destruction, developers believed that the Bronx was going to see its populations empowered by their newfound potential as a consumer base. The idea that populations should be proud about finally being seen as worthy of a shopping mall paints a weary picture of how urban transformations are being framed according to the goals of neoliberal capital accumulation and governmentality. As I have considered, Latinx shoppers are engaging with this idea in their disposition to engage with shopping as a socially neutral, everyday act. The structure of feeling which affirms the sense that shopping is a democratic, colorblind sphere welcomes Latinx shoppers into global consumer culture and suspends the marginality that they may feel elsewhere albeit in limited ways. However, this also gives way to the expression of racialized affect and logics of surveillance and policing that are employed in defense of their own safety and thus of the safety of capital.
Note: Thank you to Douglas Rogers and Ana Ramos-Zayas for advising this project.
Featured Image: “Shopping” by ebruli on Flickr. August 28, 2005. CC BY 2.0
Bibliography
Bay Plaza Shopping Center, BCHS Photographic collection, Call Number BUS S-5.1, The Bronx
County Archives at The Bronx County Historical Society Research Library.
Breznick, Alan. “Big Bronx Mall Plan Collapses.” Crain’s New York Business, vol. 8, no. 41,
1992, p.1. Proquest, https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/big-bronx-mall-plan-
collapses/docview/219172702/se-2.
Chin, Elizabeth. Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture. NED-New
edition, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Co-Op City, BCHS Vertical File collection, The Bronx County Archives at The Bronx County
Historical Society Research Library.
Dávila, Arlene. El Mall: The Spatial and Class Politics of Shopping Malls in Latin America.
University of California Press, 2016.
Flood, J. The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned
Down New York City — and Determined the Future of Cities. Random House, 2010.
“Mitchell-Lama Program – HPD.” NYC.gov, www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-
information/mitchell-lama-program.page.
New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. “Hispanic Immigrant Fact Sheet”
www.nyc.gov/assets/immigrants/downloads/pdf/Hispanic-Immigrant-Fact-Sheet.pdf.
NYU Furman Center. “The Bronx Neighborhood Profile.” Furman Center for Real Estate and
Urban Policy,, https://furmancenter.org/neighborhoods/view/the-bronx.
“Prestige Properties Pays $69M for Huge Long Island Shopping Center.” The Real Deal, 15 May 2023,
https://therealdeal.com/new-york/tristate/2023/05/15/prestige-properties-pays-69m-for-huge-long-
“Prestige Properties Unveils Plans for $270 Million the Mall Bay Plaza Shopping Center in the
Bronx. Nerej.com, nerej.com/51639/.
Sanchez, A., and J. Loree. “The Mall of the Future.” Building Design + Construction, 22 Aug.
2023, https://www.bdcnetwork.com/blog/mall-future.
Verhovek, S. H. “Co-op City Sets Goal: Attract More Whites.” The New York Times, 30 Nov. 1987,
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/30/nyregion/co-op-city-sets-new-goal-attract-more-whites.html.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977.