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Reviews
| A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in New York City's Garment Industry. Edited by Daniel Soyer. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. xiii + 284 pp. Photographs, illustrations, notes, and index. $75.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper).
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Daniel Soyer's edited collection of essays on New York City's garment industry is an achievement. It combines a focused collaborative project—indeed, several contributors participated in the Sweatshop Project from which this book originated—with an impressive range. Whilst there is some necessary repetition across the chapters, this has been well judged, allowing the book to be read as a coherent whole or on a selective basis with each chapter containing sufficient context to stand alone. |
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Soyer's Introduction both whets the reader's appetite and is itself a significant contribution that offers an overview of the garment industry since the 1850s. For 150 years, the garment industry was the most significant manufacturing industry in New York in terms of employment and output, but the absence of large factories—and the high proportion of women workers—have contributed to the relative invisibility of the city's needle trades. Despite a recent decline, versatility has ensured its survival, but now in niche designer markets. Part I is a geography of the industry, locating its activity at several levels: within the city; within work and living spaces; and, in Florence Palpacuer's chapter in particular, on a global scale. In Part II there is a shift of focus onto the people—manufacturers, contractors, homeworkers, union organizers—engaged in the industry. It is fascinating to see the linkages between different groups of migrant workers across the decades of the twentieth century. Part III concludes the book with Eileen Boris's excellent discussion of social responsibility, reform, and the global politics of consumption to highlight parallels between the beginning and end of the twentieth century. |
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Several chapters powerfully evoke work settings. Nancy L. Green's discussion of the proximity of home and work underlines garment-making as "a neighborhood activity": "Shops and factories were frequently within walking distance for those who worked outside the home, but there were many who took work in; rather than the worker going to work, work came to the worker" (p. 32). Nancy C. Carnevale makes a related point in her discussion of sweatshops: "Rather than Italians entering the sweatshops, the sweatshop entered the homes of Italian immigrants, through homeworking [married] Italian women" (p. 147). The photographs on pages 34–35 highlight the changing spatial arrangements of work arising from the construction of loft factories around the 1930s, which were spacious compared to the cramped tenement shops. Soyer's vivid description on page 100 conjures up the look, smell, and sound of an early workplace. |
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In the five chapters of Part II, the complexity of relations between class, nation, ethnicity, and gender is carefully unpacked. Soyer highlights shifts across class and status where low start-up costs made it possible for workers to become contractors quite literally overnight. However, "it was just as easy to fall out of business" (p. 98). Hadasssa Kosak's study of Jewish militancy exemplifies how ethnic identity is forged through politics, as does Xiaolan Bao's discussion of class and Chinese workers striking against their Chinese bosses several decades later (p. 75). Ramona Hernández reveals how the "enclave economy" does not necessarily mean a "safe haven" for Dominican workers (p. 190). Margaret M. Chin's chapter draws attention to the importance of local context in the gendered construction of work in the garment industry. |
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Some stunning images are reproduced in the book, although I wished for a more extensive and varied use of visual material. Despite explanatory captions, the images tend to sit alongside rather than illuminate the main text. Given the recent rise across the humanities and social sciences of interest in the visual, this would have been, or might in the future be, a rich source and approach for further analysis of this field. It would also be useful to include a series of maps of New York and the shifting locations and size of the garment district and the ethnic communities discussed. However, as it is, this is a well-crafted book, an important resource, and a very good read.
Dawn Lyon
University of Kent
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