The neighborhood of Bronzeville on the South Side of Chicago has been gentrifying now for more than a decade. Formerly boarded-up beautiful brick homes along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive have come to life. New construction has gone up on land where high-rise public housing projects were spectacularly imploded starting in the 1990s. Median incomes and property values have soared.

Gentrification, though, means something different in Bronzeville than it does in other neighborhoods. In most U.S. cities the word has generally come to imply the gradual taking of a place from one group (usually poor people, usually minorities) by another (usually middle- or upper-class whites). But in Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood – once Chicago’s version of Harlem, the city’s “Black Metropolis” – the gentrifiers are black, too.

Some of them have been there for years, ascending the income ladder as the black middle-class nationwide has dramatically expanded. Then there is the sense that others are "returning" 30 or 40 years after the black middle-class left Bronzville. Either way, there seems to be space enough in the neighborhood amid the vacant lots.

Bronzeville's historic "blackness" appears to overwhelm any sense of its identity as a neighborhood on the way up.

"The idea of gentrification as necessitating displacement – that understanding changed in this particular neighborhood," says Matthew Anderson, who teaches at Montana State University in Billings and grew up not far from Bronzeville. "Gentrification became a positive word."

Non-white gentrification is still a relatively new phenomenon in American cities, and an even newer one in the academic literature on urban neighborhoods. Some of Bronzeville's experience stretches our conception of the word. Anderson’s research in the area raises some curious questions about what happens in a community when the gentrifiers aren’t white – and what this means for a neighborhood’s public perception.

Community leaders in Bronzeville want middle-class outsiders to come in, at least to consume the redeveloped neighborhood as a quasi-tourist destination on par with the city’s Chinatown or Greektown, as a mecca for black history and culture. Bronzeville was the final destination in Chicago for many southern blacks on the Great Migration in the 1920s and '30s. The neighborhood claims close connections to Richard Wright, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. For a while, local residents were hoping to recast Bronzeville as a historic "Blues District." The rest of the city, though, has largely declined to come by. Why is that?

Anderson and colleague Carolina Sternberg published a study, in the journal Urban Affairs Review, comparing Bronzeville to another gentrifying neighborhood on Chicago’s near southwest side. Pilsen has been a historic point of entry for immigrants into Chicago, most recently for Mexican migrants over the past half-century. Like Bronzeville, community activists in Pilsen have managed to keep the neighborhood’s historic identity intact. Pilsen is both gentrifying and becoming a draw for residents across the city in search of Mexican food and culture. It has successfully turned itself, as Anderson and Sternberg put it, into a site for “ethnic consumption.”

In this way, Pilsen has pulled off what Bronzeville hasn’t. And the reasons for this reveal something peculiar about the way the rest of the city views non-white gentrification. In the local media, Pilsen is now celebrated as a colorful, lively place where the sidewalks smell like Mexican baked goods and everything sounds like Latin music. Past stereotypes of low-income Latinos living there have been replaced, Anderson and Sternberg write, by "a new racialized subject: the hardworking, professional, and civically reliable Mexican citizen."

Their culture seems somehow more marketable. As a former Bronzeville resident put it to the researchers:

Mexicans, I feel, to folks I know, seem more festive . . . the culture I would say is perceived as more fun and mainstream . . . you think of good food before anything else… If anything, they get flak for stealing our jobs . . . but people are still gonna love drinking margaritas and eating burritos.

The city seems less willing or able to change its perception of Bronzeville. In Anderson’s interviews with white middle-class Chicago residents, it sounds almost as if they can’t distinguish between poor and middle-class blacks living there. It’s as if gentrification can’t happen without an influx of white residents, and so it must not be happening there. How can the neighborhood’s prospects have really changed if its demographics haven’t? Bronzeville's historic "blackness" – to borrow a term from the academics – appears to overwhelm any sense of its identity as a neighborhood on the way up.