“Revitalizing the Hood”: Local Religious Institutions, Immigrant Concentration, and Informal Social Control in an Arab Ethnic Enclave

This study seeks to investigate the ways in which local religious institutions shape mechanisms of informal social control within one of the largest Arab ethnic enclave communities in the northeastern United States, where a high concentration of working-class Muslim immigrants reside. The study draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 58 first- and second-generation Muslim-Arab immigrants and 10 community agency members who work in local institutions. The findings reveal the pivotal role two local mosques played in facilitating and mobilizing collective efficacy among Muslim residents to confront neighborhood crime. In addition to promoting social organization and boosting various levels of social control within the community (e.g., private, parochial, public), the analysis shows that local mosques also contributed to the physical revitalization of the Arab neighborhood by investing in vacant land and run-down properties, further improving the physical and economic conditions in and around the ethnic enclave. This study extends the immigrant revitalization perspective by elucidating the distinct ways in which the spatial concentration of Muslim immigrants, along with their religious institutions, can reshape disadvantaged urban spaces.