| Sumario: | Working-class history museums face immense challenges in trying to reconcile being socially progressive and class-oriented while also maintaining relevance and success in gentrifying areas. Museums are embedded within political economic structures of power, and thus face considerable limitations in their efforts to act as meaningful sites of political or ideological contestation. This article examines Manhattan's Tenement Museum as a case study to explore the inherent tensions that exist in the representation of working-class heritage in a capitalist, gentrifying city. Synthesising research collected from extensive fieldwork between 2009 and 2017, as well as public records and published media, ethnographic analyses of museum space and exhibitions are performed in an effort to understand how the museum constructs and disseminates working-class history. Although the museum is careful to emphasise the socio-political agency of the people it represents, it largely downplays the Lower East Side's activist, labour-oriented past and present. In order to more fully delve into questions of economic power and cultural production, the political economy of communication is used as an analytic lens to explore questions of identity politics and cultural struggle, urban sustainability, and finally, the precarious labour of the museum's own workers.
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