Slums of Aspen

Tracking the lives of immigrant labourers through several years of exhaustive fieldwork and archival digging, The Slums of Aspen tells a story that brings together some of the most pressing social problems of the day: environmental crises, immigration, and social inequality. Park and Pellow demonstrate how these issues are intertwined in the everyday experiences of people who work and live in this wealthy tourist community. Offering a new understanding of a little known class of the super-elite, of low-wage immigrants (mostly from Latin America) who have become the foundation for service and leisure in this famous resort, and of the recent history of the ski industry, Park and Pellow expose the ways in which Colorado boosters have reshaped the landscape and altered ecosystems in pursuit of profit and pleasure. Of even greater urgency, they frame how environmental degradation and immigration reform have become inextricably linked in many regions of the American West, a dynamic that interferes with the efforts of valorous environmental causes, often turning away from conservation and toward insidious racial privilege. Lee Sun-Hee Park is Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author (with David Pellow) of The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Immigrant Labor, Environmental Injustice, and the High Tech Global Economy. David Naguib Pellow is Professor and Don A. Martindale Endowed Chair of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago.