DescriptionThis project looks at the emergence of the ‘dollar cab,’ an informal mode of transit similar to the minibuses and minivans of the Caribbean. This particular mode of transit allowed Caribbean people to “make the strange familiar” by bringing to the U.S. urban landscape a form of labor, a social space, and a vernacular common in the post- colonial world. Drawing on archival research and urban ethnography conducted with 20 residents and dollar van drivers in the Caribbean neighborhood of East Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York, as well as transit regulators the project maps geographies of postcolonial life and labor, and new forms of urbanity that emerge post-1965. Moving beyond narratives of urban decline, I argue that, within the place-making practices of black working class immigrants, we find a rich intellectual rubric for understanding shifting terrains of global capital and urbanization in U.S. cities. Interdisciplinary in nature, the work both draws on and complicates mobilities studies, post-colonial urban studies, and understandings of how the global city is mapped and produced.