Reviewed by Graham Russell Gao Hodges | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.2

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Reviewed by Graham Russell Gao Hodges | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City. By Biju Mathew. New York: New Press, 2005. xii + 228 pp. Notes and index. $24.95 (cloth).

New York City's taxi drivers bear multiple meanings for the city's residents, visitors, and observers from near and far. If the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty are globally renowned architectural symbols of the city's might and embrace of immigrants, so taxi drivers are immediately recognizable as New York's most memorable human characters. No film, television show, or tourist video seems complete without the presence of lumbering yellow taxis and their drivers. At the same time, cabbies caught in the tight regulatory embrace of city government, bossed by tough garage owners and brokers, and in constant competition with each other occupy a uniquely revealing position. Presently, over 95 percent of the city's forty-thousand-odd cab drivers are foreign born. As immigrant workers, cab drivers epitomize the struggles newcomers have to undertake to become Americans. Once cab drivers fit securely in the lower middle classes; now, as Biju Mathew demonstrates in his fine study of the past ten years of hacking in New York, they have slipped into the proletariat. This is quite a transformation, as many decades ago, the great union organizer Mike Quill had dismissed them as the "limping proletariat" after many frustrated attempts to organize them.

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