How Racism Takes Place, by George LipsitzHow racism shapes urban spaces and how African Americans create vibrant communities that offer models for more equitable social arrangements
ISBN: 9781439902554
Publication Date: 2011-03-11
Abstract Barrios, by Johana LondoñoIn Abstract Barrios Johana Londoño examines how Latinized urban landscapes are made palatable for white Americans. Such Latinized urban landscapes, she observes, especially appear when whites feel threatened by concentrations of Latinx populations, commonly known as barrios. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis of barrio built environments, Londoño shows how over the past seventy years urban planners, architects, designers, policy makers, business owners, and other brokers took abstracted elements from barrio design--such as spatial layouts or bright colors--to safely "Latinize" cities and manage a long-standing urban crisis of Latinx belonging. The built environments that resulted ranged from idealized notions of authentic Puerto Rican culture in the interior design of New York City's public housing in the 1950s, which sought to diminish concerns over Puerto Rican settlement, to the Fiesta Marketplace in downtown Santa Ana, California, built to counteract white flight in the 1980s. Ultimately, Londoño demonstrates that abstracted barrio culture and aesthetics sustain the economic and cultural viability of normalized, white, and middle-class urban spaces.
ISBN: 9781478008798
Publication Date: 2020-09-25
The Right to the City, by Don MitchellIncludes a 2014 Postscript addressing Occupy Wall Street and other developments. Efforts to secure the American city have life-or-death implications, yet demands for heightened surveillance and security throw into sharp relief timeless questions about the nature of public space, how it is to be used, and under what conditions. Blending historical and geographical analysis, this book examines the vital relationship between struggles over public space and movements for social justice in the United States. Don Mitchell explores how political dissent gains meaning and momentum--and is regulated and policed--in the real, physical spaces of the city. A series of linked cases provides in-depth analyses of early twentieth-century labor demonstrations, the Free Speech Movement and the history of People's Park in Berkeley, contemporary anti-abortion protests, and efforts to remove homeless people from urban streets.
ISBN: 1572308478
Publication Date: 2003-02-24
In the shadows of the freeway : Growning up brown & queer, by Lydia R. OteroRaised in an adobe house built by their mother, the author takes readers to a mid-20th century barrio that existed on the social margins of Tucson, Arizona despite sitting a little more than a mile away from the central business district. Born in 1955, and nicknamed La Butch by their family, Lydia Otero knew they were queer the moment their consciousness had evolved enough to formulate thoughts.
ISBN: 9787341180011
Publication Date: 2019
La calle : spatial conflicts and urban renewal in a southwest city, by Lydia R. OteroOn March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project - Arizona's first major urban renewalproject - which targeted the most densely populated eighty acresin the state. For close to one hundred years, Tucsonenses had createdtheir own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly MexicanAmerican heart of the city, an area most called "la calle."But to make way for the Pueblo Center's new buildings, cityofficials proceeded to displace la calle's residents andto demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contendsLydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwarmodernity, suburbia, and urban planning. La Calle explores theforces behind the mass displacement: an unrelenting desire for order, alocal economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the pivotal powerof federal housing policies.
Barrio-logos space and place in urban Chicano literature and culture, by Raúl Villa"Villa's work locates artistic production within its proper social and historical contexts without reducing art to an unmediated reflection of unjust social relations.... This will be an important book for scholars in Chicano studies, but perhaps even more important as a model for blending cultural texts with their sociological contexts." -- George Lipsitz, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego Struggles over space and resistance to geographic displacement gave birth to much of Chicano history and culture. In this pathfinding book, Rau l Villa explores how California Chicano/a activists, journalists, writers, artists, and musicians have used expressive culture to oppose the community-destroying forces of urban renewal programs and massive freeway development and to create and defend a sense of Chicano place-identity. Villa opens with a historical overview that shows how Chicano communities and culture have grown in response to conflicts over space ever since the United States' annexation of Mexican territory in the 1840s. Then, turning to the work of contemporary members of the Chicano intelligentsia such as Helena Maria Viramontes, Ron Arias, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, Villa demonstrates how their expressive practices re-imagine and re-create the dominant urban space as a community enabling place. In doing so, he illuminates the endless interplay in which cultural texts and practices are shaped by and act upon their social and political contexts.
