COMMUNITY ACTIVISM IN OAK PARK: COMPETING AGENDAS ...

Leith Mulling’s (1987) critique of urban anthropology in the United States titled, Cities of
the United States: Studies in Urban Anthropology. While acknowledging the
contributions of that literature, I present a different approach to life in the city—an
ethnography of neighborhood activism—in an attempt to explore the conflict in the ways
three community groups define agendas for social change and how their agendas for
change shape claims, or resident’s rights to the city. In this thesis, I utilize Amin and
Thrift’s (2002) description of rights to the city as having a right of access to equal
participation in public spaces in the city.
This study responds to Steven Gregory’s call for a paradigmatic shift in urban
ethnography in order to “consider local activism as a real social force” (1998:19).
Gregory, in his ethnographic study of neighborhood activism in Corona, argues that it is
important to understand how collective identities are formed because we can better
understand the process of how and why people act collectively, and participate in
activism. Moreover, we can identify the formation of collective identities as a critical
axis of conflict in struggles between the people, the state, and capital. Such studies of
neighborhood activism can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between 1)
the formation of collective identities and 2) structural arrangements of power. My
research is an attempt to explore Gregory’s (1998) claim that local community activism,
occurring in the form of community groups and grassroots projects, generates diverse
forms of responses that are changing the social dynamics of Oak Park, Sacramento.
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