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Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán, "Detroit Never Left: Black Space, White Borders, Latino Crossings" (NYU Press, 2025)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan about her book titled Detroit Never Black Space, White Borders, Latino crossings, published by NYU Press in 2026. Now, obviously, Detroit is a city that is the front of all sorts of news and politics in the US and beyond, often very famously for things like bankruptcy. But because of things like that, I think quite often there's sort of a moment of attention on Detroit. And this book makes the argument that, hang on a second, there isn't a moment where things are important. Detroit Never left. Right. The title suggests it that there is a lot more than one moment, one piece of policy, one community that needs to be examined to really understand what's going on in the city in terms of people who live there, how they interact with each other, how that has changed or not over time and space. So this book really helps us kind of avoid some of the overgeneralizations we might get from the headlines and therefore gives us a lot to discuss. So, Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:03]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Thank you for having me.
- [02:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Why does it matter what people say about Detroit?
- [02:14]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
As you said, my name is Nicole Druille and I'm originally a New Yorker and I moved to Detroit in 2006 to take this job at Wayne State University. Before that, I had been at the University of Michigan, which is where I got my PhD. So it's funny, it's only 45 minutes away from Detroit, but really, it operates as if it was a world away. Because when I got here in 2006, I felt very much as if it was New York city in the 1970s. You know, in the 1970s, New York was going through its own fiscal crisis and facing potential bankruptcy. And it was just, I don't know, surprising and devastating simultaneously. To see where Detroit was at in 2006. You remember maybe that the foreclosure crisis happened across the country in 2008. It happened earlier here in Detroit. And then There was a 2008, 2009 auto industry bailout. So things happened really quickly when I got here, and I think just it has taken so long to try to understand what was happening in that period, and that's what shaped the making of this book.
- [03:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think it's very hard often to do proper analysis of something as it's happening or even immediately afterwards. Like, sometimes we do need time to kind of figure out what's going on and what sorts of stories are being told and need to be told. And I think that's a point you make early on in the book, that kind of what people say about Detroit is. Isn't just a sort of like, oh, that's nice to look at. Like, it has stakes, what those conversations are. Do you want to tell us a little bit about kind of why it matters what people say?
- [03:56]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Yeah, I really appreciate that. I think that it's true for a lot of sociologists we're interested in. You know, we take something for granted. And sociologists tend to find things that are different from what we anticipate. And so I remember clearly one of the first courses I taught here was Social Problems. And we were in the week where we were talking about crime, you know, and I had a picture of RoboCop. The movie was shot here. And I was talking about crime statistics. And you could tell the students were really uncomfortable. You know, there was a lot of conversation that the numbers were different than their reality. And then, you know, over the course of the first semester here, other scholars helped me understand that then the sort of narrative that the nation has about Detroit is really different than where homicides happen or the kinds of homicides that we see that are very, very specific and located in particular areas within the city. And so it's kind of funny because even the Detroit News had a headline that that Detroit bashing was A national, convenient, but ill informed and tiresome pastime. So there was really widespread consensus that there was this phenomenon. The ways people talked about Detroit, a predominantly black city, the largest black city in the country, and the way people lived here. And I felt like that was something that I really wanted to lean into because it was much more right then six and stones and individual name calling. What people said about Detroit determined whether people were going to come to spend their money in the city to shop here, whether investors wanted to invest in the city, whether people were willing to move here and live here. And so what I came to find out, what I learned in the process of researching the book, is that what some people say about Detroit miners. Right. And what they say is not just what they think, but it's an expression of a relationship that they have to the city, its residents and the investors who profit from portraying the city as one that lacks resources.
- [06:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, Words have consequences. Right? That's very key to establish. Can you maybe to make sure for those of us who are not in Detroit that we really kind of get the types of problems you're highlighting here. Can you give us some of the particular words or tropes that show up in journalist coverage of Detroit that exemplify this problem you're describing?
- [06:41]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Yeah, I really appreciate that question. Because there are different tropes, there are different words. I call them empty abstractions.
- [06:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Right.
- [06:49]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Because they're simply words and what matters is the relation that underpins them. So media has some, developers have other, politicians have others, investors have others, but the ones that media was very interested in. It's funny, the period between the 2010 census and 2013 when the state declares an emergency manager who files for bankruptcy, the papers were filled with stories about nature taking over the city. And so what those stories did is they put all kinds of animals wandering wild in the city in proximity with vacant houses. And since they didn't really interview a lot of residents, you don't see quotes from average everyday people. It's almost as if I remember one headline said, people who live this way, it really otherized. Right. It further isolated and marginalized real Detroiters from how the world and how the nation thought about the city.
- [07:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really great example of what is, and also crucially, what isn't included in these sorts of reports and kind of what the effect it has on it.
- [08:08]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
We don't think about that as an, as an, as an act of silencing. Right. If I don't talk to a resident, we don't think of it as an act of silencing. But when you put all these Detroiters in close proximity with vacant buildings and apparently dead bodies in these vacant buildings and animals wandering around, you know, and dilapidation and decay, then you do. You. You do something. Silence and erase the voice of the city's residents. It's an action. And I think that that's really an important finding that my book has, that I. That worry gets overlooked. We focus so much on words, and words mobilize ideas, but what I'm focusing on are the actions that are driving those words. The word here is always act.
- [08:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, right. The word doesn't just kind of magically appear on a page. Right. Like it. There's a decision that goes into what is and isn't there. And of course, as you mentioned, that is absolutely one of the interventions you're making in this book to kind of highlight. Hang on a second. There is a choice being made here. Are there any other key interventions you're making in the book that we want to sort of lay out on the table at this point in our discussion?
- [09:19]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Well, you know, there is one that I really want to talk about. I mentioned that, the one about crime, and I wanted to talk about. I interviewed so many people for this book, but it started with interviewing Latino youth. I teach in Latino Studies center here at the university, and I think that that was some of my exploratory data. But I started to collect interviews with predominantly Latino youth who live in southwest Detroit. And that's an area of the city that you first enter if you're crossing the border from Canada. It's also where you leave if you're. If you're leaving Michigan and, you know, going down to Ohio. So it's kind of this. It is a border city, but it feels like a bordered space. And so in this space, I remember I interviewed this youth. I called him Felix in the book. And he talks about this house that's maybe a block or two away from his home and how the police keep showing up when the criminal activity is not happening. So the criminal activity happens at night, and the police happen during the day. And it's kind of funny because as I interview him and I interviewed him, I think it was four times. His narrative was about associating crime with misunderstanding. Right. Crime was something that outsiders invented. Crime was something that belonged outside. Because as I talked to him about his life in his neighborhood, he said that he felt proud of his neighborhood and that he felt safe in his neighborhood. And what's ironic is his neighbor engaged in illegal activity. But Felix saw it as, you know, the neighbor being entrepreneurial. So I think this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say an empty abstraction, right? The empty abstraction is crime. That's something that statistics give us, the media gives us. Maybe we have rankings of cities and which is the most dangerous, but that's not how people actually live here. And in fact, not only did it feel safe, but he thought that his neighbor was like a businessman without a degree. And so that's his concrete experience. And I think it's very interesting how it happens so frequently that the empty abstraction was inverted in terms of how people lived in the city. Does that make sense?
- [11:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it definitely makes sense and also speaks to the power of not making these silences, right? Of, like, actually going and talking to people, being like, hey, you live here, what do you think is actually going on?
- [12:04]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That example was a clear instance of you doing this. But obviously you spoke to more than one person. So can you tell us a little bit about the methods you've used throughout this project? One thing.
- [12:14]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Well, it started out and as a interview project, right? I interviewed a lot of Latino youth, but. And then I ended up referring to a lot of other kinds of data. A lot of media, a lot of press releases, annual reports, foundation reports. And what I was really looking at, it started trying to understand how these youth imagined their future in a city that I thought had no jobs. You know, all of my students and class were very optimistic, and I, you know, would I guess, naively say, so where are you going to go after you graduate? And they looked at me puzzled, like, what do you mean, where am I going to go? I'm going to stay right where I am. Why would I go anywhere? And I thought, well, you know, you're graduating. How are you going to find a job here in Detroit? You know, the city is going through real financial trouble. And so what I started to do is focus researchers. We call this in vivo coding the words that people use. But I think that average people can see these patterns, for example, when politicians speak or when they read their paper, that there are these patterned words. And so that's what I focused on. Regardless of the data source, whether it started with the interviews or whether it was media, I looked at these patterned words, and I focused on the ones that had real material consequences in people's lives. And that was the analysis that I did. In fact, I want to say one more thing. It's true that I analyzed my data the way sociologists analyze qualitative data. But it was very much in conversation also with my interviewees. And I think it's important for people who are not from Detroit to consider that there's a really common expression here that Detroiters say is the overlay for the underplay. And what they mean when they use that expression is that powerful groups say something. Right? That's the overlay that conceals or mystifies. Right. Or misrepresents their objective, which is the underplay. And so one great example is how politicians justify, you know, the incentives that they offer developers and investors that Detroiters feel come at their expense. For example, we have tax increment financing, right, where property, part of your property taxes are directed towards downtown development, but those taxes are taken at the expense of the city's public schools and libraries. So when Detroiters talk about the overlay for the underplay, that certainly is something that I use when I thought about those empty abstractions. How do people live and how does that compare to what these politicians, investors, and media are saying?
- [15:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So that's really helpful to understand kind of who you talk to. And also crucially, as you said, how you approached this.
- [15:22]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Right.
- [15:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's such a big part of what you're doing in the project and the intervention you're making more broadly. Thinking then about kind of sources of information to make sense of this within and beyond, of course, your interviews, I want to pick up on a thread you mentioned a little bit earlier around sort of data and statistics.
- [15:40]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Because you sort of made a bit of an offhand comment about like, yeah, they can show us some things, but they don't really show us all the things. And I think that's really interesting. So can we talk a little bit more about what data can and cannot show and sort of who gets left out of these sorts of stories?
- [15:57]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Yeah, I think that it's. It's important to consider that I, like any sociologist, came to Detroit with my own sense of, you know, what poverty looks like, what areas of concentrated disadvantage look like. And I thought, and I think this is a really important insight in my book, I thought that I was speaking to people to understand their reality. But this is why I think the overlay for the underplay was so important. Sure, I understood their reality, but perhaps more importantly, they taught me how to see. In other words, they changed my perspective on how to understand problems that they were facing. And I think that that's also true for how we think about space and sociology. I think we tend to think about space in really static ways. This is our census Tract. This is our zip code. These are the district boundaries, these are the city boundaries. Then we analyze, using statistics based on those boundaries. We take them for granted. I think it's really important to understand that these spaces are products. They're not just things that are. I think sociologists naturalize space instead of questioning how it came to be the way it is. And, you know, you can't understand segregation. You can't understand how segregation shifts. You can't understand how investment gets directed to some spaces at the expense of other spaces. Unless you get clear that space is not a thing, it's not a container. It's not just the frame for action. It is the action as well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, And I think that shows up, as you said, in some of these spaces still in ways that we may not think. Right. Like, I think quite often we look at sort of redlining and go, oh, well, that was an official policy. But that hasn't been for ages, right? Today it's all about, like, zip codes. That's not the same thing. And yet, as you show in the book, it's like, well, hang on a second. If we look at these spaces and don't just, as you said, take them for granted, then maybe that gives a different conception on how official or unofficial redlining is still very much with us. Is that something you can tell us a bit more about?
- [18:40]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Well, you know, Miranda, I really appreciate this question because it was very surprising to me to see redlining alive and well. And I, I guess I, I, like many people, assumed it's something that was in our past. So let's just take a second and think about what redlining is so that people who. Listeners who aren't familiar with how this practice happened have some context. Redlining was a practice that was used by banks and lenders to estimate the risk of a loan. Right. But it was a public private partnership that the US government had instituted under President Roosevelt's administration. It was during the Depression. And so that will sound familiar when we think about the US housing bubble. It was during the Depression, and his administration wanted to lessen the impact on homeowners who were facing potential foreclosure. So they developed the Homeowners Loan Corporation and they hire real estate agents to appraise properties, but they appraise properties using color coded maps that estimate risk based on the presence of African American residents. Right. Those areas would get coded red. That's the idea of the red line. But areas were marked green if they didn't have a single foreigner or an African American. So we think this is something that happened in the 30s, maybe that continued through the 50s, when we have this wave of suburbanization and that's something of the past. But no, in fact, Keanga Taylor writes a book, Raise for Profit, where she says this is resurrected in the mid-60s where again, we have these public private partnerships where the US Government starts to see urban areas as a frontier of economic investment and extraction. And I thought, wow, well, that's really incredible. But again, she's a historian and you think, well, that's something from the 60s. What I found is that that's alive and well in Detroit today. First you have the Detroit Futures City Report that was released in 2012, which was the year before the city's bankruptcy. And it laid out a strategic framework for how to target investment and repurpose vacant land. What's interesting about this report is that it anticipates vacancy, so it discourages investment and ignores the disparate impact that racism had on the city. And this is important because it's not just documenting what is, but it's predicting what it thinks will be true. And it's important to consider that a lot of the people who are developing this report really try to get feedback from city residents. But this becomes a subject of extensive controversy because a lot of residents don't feel that they're heard in that report. It's followed in 2014 by the Detroit Flight Removal Task Force report that underpinned the city's demolition program. So what's important about that report is that it continues to predict future vacancy. So like the Detroit Futures CITA report, it was producing a fiction around property to create markets for investment. And I think this is really important for Americans to think about because it runs counter to the idea of a free market. Right. Or. Or of an invisible hand. We're talking about actively creating markets for investment. And so the Blight Removal Task Force also reproduces the pattern of identifying areas that can be ignored. Right. It identifies properties that should be demolished that people might be living in. Residents complained that there was recyclable material that they could use that was lost with those demolitions. And further, there was a lot of public health problems that resulted from those demolitions. Because lead, chromium and arsenic were found at those sites. The demolition program was investigated for fraud. And now we're starting to learn that the contaminants that we use in the backfill exceeded state thresholds. So it's ironic because we're creating these markets for investment to solve supposedly the problem of blight, but we're creating new debt and another disaster in the process. And finally, and I think this is a really important case, you have JP Morgan and Chase using consumer spending data to support the mayor's efforts to create 20 minute neighborhoods. And their head of research for corporate investment banking explained, it's like an investment banking where you rank an opportunity, green, amber and red. So she's quite explicit, right. About this coding of maps in Detroit to direct investment. And you would think that in JP Morgan's case we're just thinking about commercial financing. But of course, right. The, that commercial financing happens in neighborhoods and it. So it's going to affect people's, the price of their homes, the value of their home. So the public private partnership in all three of these cases. Right. Both, both preceding and following the bankruptcy is in fact running counter to and undermining the public interest.
- [24:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really key to highlight, I admit. I was also a little bit surprised to be like, wait, redlining, Hang on. I didn't realize this book was kind of set in the 40s.
- [24:15]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And yet it was still there. Can we kind of, I mean, obviously we can, but could you for us here, please draw a direct line between these practices you're outlining and what this means for inequalities that are either already there and expanding or being created by this.
- [24:34]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Yeah, I think that you see the inequalities all over the city. Something that my respondents, you know, because they can see it physically, is that you have these green lights in businesses where. Right. This is private. A private property. A private business owner can pay the city. I think it was like $1,500 to get a green light installed on their property and have surveillance cameras. Now, the software that's being used disproportionately targets or misrecords black and brown faces because the software was developed using white faces out of, you know, San Francisco. Nonetheless, we're right. Directing all these public resources, the police, towards private businesses. And so this is another great example about how these public private partnerships are very concretely producing inequalities across the city, taking public resources, directing them in the private interest at the expense of the public interest. Now that's immediate Right. In terms of walking down the street and how you can see this happening. But certainly it's being coded into the value of different neighborhoods, into the value of homes. Yeah. And when you think about that contaminated backfill, you're talking about entire neighborhoods. We're supposed to be remediating brownfields. Instead we're creating new ones. So, yeah, definitely reproducing a lot of problems that, you know, new generations will unfortunately inherit.
- [26:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So I think it's really important that you've emphasized how redlining is still very much apparent and the impacts that that has. But the thing I think we want to pick up from that next is you've mentioned investment a whole bunch of times and public private partnerships a whole bunch of times. And I want to make sure we don't just kind of fall into the trap you mentioned earlier of like, taking that for granted as if that's just a normal thing, that of course it's there because as you show in the book, it isn't inevitable necessarily. So why have public private partnerships been such a big thing in Detroit, obviously, since the bankruptcy, but as you mentioned, like, it doesn't just start then. So what's going on with this being such a consistent feature?
- [26:49]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Well, so I think it's important to keep in mind that public private partnerships have a long history of in this country. And, you know, public private partnerships have, for the most part, been seen as fundamental to completing big projects. For example, developing transit authorities were often public private partnerships. So they have, you know, been part of our history since the beginning of the country. What becomes interesting is that they are like laboratories. A lot of people talk about Detroit as being a laboratory because of the bankruptcy. And so it seems appropriate, right, that you would have these public private partnerships being so involved in thinking about and working on the city's recovery. But it's important for New Work Network listeners to keep in mind that public private partnerships start to shift in the 1980s under the Reagan administration when conservative politicians start to say that government intervention causes urban decay. And I think that this is fascinating because that might be happening at the national level, but here at the local level, you have an internationally renowned urbanist, Richard Florida, basically saying the same thing, that big government programs, all they've ever caused were problems. And lo and behold, a couple of months later, the state appoints an emergency manager to declare bankruptcy, which is a very big form of government intervention. What I think makes the public private partnerships that we're talking about after the 80s so important is that we start to see that they Benefit private interests at the expense of public interest. So rather than a partnership that can simply capitalize on the innovativeness that the private sector offers, what I see happening in Detroit's case is that we're taking private public dollars to fund private research and development and private profit, you know, at the public expense.
- [29:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can we talk a little bit more about what at the public expense means? Like what are the impacts of there being so many public private partnerships in Detroit?
- [29:20]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Well, I think the most immediate one that I, that I find particularly sensitive is the redirection of tax dollars to downtown development at the expense of schools and libraries. And the reason why is because, you know, before we had an emergency manager declare bankruptcy, there was a very long period of emergency management that closed a lot of schools in Detroit and really reshaped Detroit public schools such that a lot of students ended up going to charter schools. I mean, Michigan has sort of been ground zero for the charter school movement. And I guess that's one of the most immediate ways I can think about at the public expense, because you have a lot of young kids at the prime of their life. They're just starting out and they're either going to a school that's been closed or they're going to a school under the EAA where they're pioneering a software that hasn't even been fully tested yet, being tested on Detroit students. Some of the reports from the EAA were that students were being disciplined at rates much higher than suburban students. And so I guess when I think about at the public expense, that's what it's not in this book, but it was a section that I had written that started the Detroit Never Left is thinking about these kids facing closed schools, schools that lack resources. And it's all because you have the increasing private interest in seeing students as ways to generate profit for their shareholders.
- [31:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And that's obviously both, as you said, a very immediate impact, but also really a long term one.
- [31:10]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Right.
- [31:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Because what students do and don't get educated with has huge, huge repercussions and implications. And I think that's true of a lot of the things in the book where there's kind of the immediate, hey, wait, no, this is something you need to look at now, but also there's longer term repercussions of this. So as we kind of conclude our discussion on the book, are there any sort of big implications of this research you want to make sure we take away?
- [31:35]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Yeah, actually, I really appreciate that question. So I want, I mean, we talked about abstractions and I think that it's important for us to keep in mind this overlay for the underplay is really a way that Detroiters feel that they survive. You know, it's this way of living in the world, being somewhat skeptical so that they can, you know, literally survive and live another day. I think the idea of knowing laws and having time to fight to put the law to your advantage is one of the ways that we can think about empty and concrete abstractions. The second one, I feel the book talks a lot more than we have today. How much urbanists and media lean into these very naturalistic kind of abstractions. And the reason why those are so important is because they tend to mystify, conceal the economic and the political actions and the decisions that are shaping cities and their development and unequal outcomes. Right. For residents, the third really important lesson was that when we talked about how markets are created, you know, they're not free and they're certainly not an equally in everybody's interests. But this issue about, you know, Detroit public schools, that, like, as I said, is not in the book, there's another story that I feel very profoundly because I feel that it's happening every day in the news where I had a youth that I had interviewed. Her family had been deported. She was a US Citizen. She was born here, and she was in grade school. I forgot the grade that she was in. Let's say it was like sixth or seventh. So her family gets deported to Mexico, and she's going to go with her parents, but she says that she gets to Mexico and she doesn't speak Spanish. And she remembers being so humiliated, so humiliated, so ashamed when the teacher calls on her that she doesn't speak Spanish, that she literally, you know, has an accident, right? She. She. She urinates on herself. It's. It's a terrible thing, but it just. It speaks to the kind of suffering, right, that a US citizen is experiencing at a critical time in their life when they're a kid. This is such a formative experience. So her family seeing and, you know, what a situation she's in, sends her back to Detroit to live with her aunt. But, you know, this is not her aunt's child. And her aunt is struggling and, you know, now has to sort of, you know, take care of her niece. And the uncle tries to help. But, you know, this. This person's story there, the interview was all about a life of struggle that she didn't deserve, right? She was a US Citizen. She didn't deserve to be deported. But she is suffering the consequences of the deportation of her parents. And I guess, yeah, it speaks to the erosion not just of her life chances, but to democracy more generally. And I feel like that's an important lesson from Detroit Never left.
- [34:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a really powerful set of takeaways from the book, and I'm so glad you linked them to the kind of on all the different levels, right? To the immediate, to individual people and their experiences, but also to the. More I don't know if we can call it even abstract.
- [35:08]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Because questions of democracy aren't really abstract even when people want them to be. So that's, I think, a really helpful way to conclude our discussion on the book, but not quite conclude our interview, because I do have one question left, which is one what you might be working on now that this book is off your desk. I know sometimes people have related projects or maybe you're going to take a nap for six months. Like, I don't know. What are you up to now?
- [35:32]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Well, you know, I think that I, as I said, teach in the Latino Studies center here at Wayne State University. I'm Latina myself, and I feel that the Latino population in the United States is a really important one for thinking about issues related to race and democracy. And so I'm going to continue that research. But now I really want to think concretely about blackness. You may not know your listeners may not know that in 2023 there will be the first census that Latinos are considered a race. And that has generated a lot of controversy because up until now we've considered that Latinos can be of any race. They can be white, Latino, black, Latino or mixed Latino. Now, to consider Latinos a race may unwittingly cause us to overlook the black experience amongst the Latino population. So what I'm looking for are people who may be considered black or may consider themselves black, but have a mother or father who was born in Puerto Rico, Cuba or the Dominican Republic. And I think it's really interesting to think about how they understand themselves, how they identify racially and how they understand their city, because I have found that being non Latino in different parts of this country mean very different things. And I think that that is a sentiment that's shared amongst many Latinos. So I want to continue asking those questions about how race and space produce each other, but more concretely with the Latino population in the black Latino population.
- [37:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That sounds fascinating and in many ways related to the book we've been discussing. So for anyone who wants to get into more details on all of this, they can go read the book titled Detroit Never Left Black Space, White Borders, Latino crossings, published by NYU Press in 2026. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [37:34]
Dr. Nicole Trujillo Pagan
Thank you so much. I really appreciate your talking to me about the book.
- [37:50]
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