10 primary industry. Many small industrial cities were also shaped by the labor and presence of Black Americans, many of whom migrated from the South during the Great Migration seeking industrial work and an escape from Jim Crow, and by Indigenous communities who were displaced and dispossessed of their land to make settlement and extraction of resources from these places possible. Within their neighborhoods, newcomers of all kinds built their own social and cultural infrastructure. These community institutions and their physical spaces shaped the built environment and social bonds. Ethnic churches, fraternal lodges, social halls, and parish schools gave form to community identity and linked ethnic groups together to sustain themselves in a new place. While this social and urban landscape was fragmented at the onset, over time the boundaries between people groups eroded. As one Co-Lab participant described it, industrial employers “created a shared social consciousness” that continued to define relationships between people moving both in and out of small cities. Nativism and “Insiders and Outsiders” While many Co-Lab participants held relatively positive views of the social and cultural fabric in their small cities, many described the distinctions between those who are “from here” and those who “came here.” In Stamford, one participant observed that “old timers” are “less open to change and newcomers than when they arrived,” describing a pattern in which each generation of established newcomers can become the gatekeeping population for the next. This insideroutsider divide is a recurring condition, reinforced through successive waves of demographic and economic change. By the late 19th century, earlier immigrant communities from Western Europe had begun to claim “native” status, distinguishing themselves from newer arrivals from Eastern Europe, East Asia, and beyond. These claims erased the history of settler colonialism and Indigenous displacement, while Black Americans who migrated north for industrial work faced more durable forms of exclusion: racial covenants, segregated housing, and barriers to homeownership increasingly available to white ethnic groups. What began as informal social hierarchies were eventually codified through housing policies and land-use regulations. Many of these legal barriers continue to exist today. Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025
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