ABSTRACT
The political struggles in Mount Kisco are intimately linked to the rural aesthetic in Bedford. In Mount Kisco1 there is a politics of the aesthetic as well, but it is openly inflected by race in a way that is masked in Bedford. Over the past decade the burning political issue in the village of Mount Kisco has been what is perceived to be an invasion of Hispanics2 or “Guatemalans,” as they are often called locally.3 In this regard, the village and many suburban towns across the United States are at the leading edge of contemporary cultural change, for, as Michael Suarez-Orozco (1998, 5) points out, “Immigration is the driving force behind a significant transformation of American society…. Few other social phenomena are likely to affect the future character of American culture and society as much as the ongoing wave of the ‘new immigration’.”4 Mike Davis (2000, 5) speaks of a “far reaching ‘Latin Americanization”’ of New York and other metropolitan areas of the United States. He (2000, 15) states that U.S. Latinos are already the fourth largest “nation” in “Latin America” and in a half century will be second only to Mexico.5 According to the U.S. Census of 2000, Latinos have become 25% of the population of Mount Kisco, but this figure is a minimal estimate. We argue that the perception of an invasion can be explained in large part by conflicting cultural conventions of public space based in an ethnocentric and class-based aesthetic.6 It also points to a paradoxical situation in which those whose labor maintains Bedford’s landscape aesthetic are themselves considered an unaesthetic element of the streetscape of Mount Kisco where Bedford residents habitually go for shopping and services.7 Many residents of Mount Kisco and other nearby towns resent their towns becoming what they describe as “dumping grounds” or “servant’s quarters” for places like Bedford.
