Making the cosmopolitan canopy in Boston's Haymarket Square

Abstract

Using ethnographic data on Boston's Haymarket Square, this paper demonstrates how public space and a market opportunity can generate solidarity among people of different ethnicities in the form of a cosmopolitan canopy, and how a single ethnic tradition can nurture an open, public multi-ethnic environment. The paper illustrates how Haymarket vendors' treatment of ethnic and racial difference is actively deployed in the construction of new groups that largely transcend such distinctions. This article outlines the mechanisms by which a cosmopolitan canopy is sustained, and how it serves a constructive social function within the city.

Keywords:

• Haymarket Square
• cosmopolitan canopy
• Boston
• Italians
• open-air market
• ethnicity

Notes

1. The Big Dig was a construction project that took place in Boston, rerouting Interstate 93 to a tunnel under the heart of the city. It was concluded in 2007, nearly ten years behind schedule.

2. All names, including nicknames, have been changed.

3. There are perhaps twenty women among perhaps 130 vendors, and with one exception, they dress differently from the men (in clean, relatively stylish clothes; many of them wear make-up) as if to emphasize their femininity. The women work hard, but largely invisibly. With one exception, and myself when I was there, women vendors are of colour. Latino stalls have proportionally far more women; Italian stall owners tell me that they have never been in the habit of having women working for them. ‘I wouldn't let a woman work down [h]ere,’ one says firmly, ‘It's too vulgar.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman

MEGHAN KALLMAN is graduate fellow and doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Brown University.