| Abstract |
"ABSTRACT BARRIOS centers the Latinx barrio-a spatially bound community formation within the city center or its edges-as the site of both public crises and inspiration. Throughout the twentieth century-as discriminatory policies in the labor and housing markets, as well as urban renewal policies, created forced concentrations of racialized populations within city centers-the barrio came to be seen, in the dominant public imagination, as a poor, working-class, and racialized space. At the same time, the barrio, particularly as a result of Chicanx and Puerto Rican activism in the 1960s and 1970s, emerged as a place of political, artistic, and cultural importance for Latinxs in America. Johana Londoño investigates what happens when the barrio is abstracted by cultural mediators-or "brokers"-for large-scale public architecture as a means of making the barrio palatable for white Americans who view concentrated areas of Latinx populations as a crisis. She argues that by drawing inspiration from barrios, brokers effectively "Latinize" the city, taking abstracted elements from barrio design and mobilizing them in ways that do not threaten capitalist and white urban identities. Each chapter in the book analyzes a case of brokering the barrio for public infrastructure. In chapter 1 Londoño examines how the "problem" of Puerto Rican migrants in 1940s and 1950s New York City was solved by promoting idealized versions of "authentic" Puerto Rican culture in the interior designs of public housing. Chapter 2 looks at the 1960s-when Latinx presence became coded as a "crisis of poverty"-and examines how bright color was abstracted from Puerto Rican barrio contexts to modernize, humanize, and domesticate Latinxs in urban spaces while simultaneously linking bright colors-and the barrios-to racialized and poor spaces. Chapter 3 turns to Santa Ana, California in the 1970s and 1980s, when white flight threatened the urban identity of the city, and explores how the creation of the downtown "Fiesta Marketplace" camouflaged a white effort to distance Santa Ana from its barrios. Chapter 4 examines three high-profile brokers-Henry Cisneros, Henry Muñoz and James Rojas-who, unlike other brokers in the book, represent an affinity with the barrio. Chapter 5 examines how abstractions of Latinx culture in Union City, New Jersey, are used to disavow low-income Latinxs in favor of gentrifiers. The Coda positions the bright pink "Prison Wall" design for the southwestern border with Mexico as the latest emblem of abstracted barrios"-- Provided by publisher. |
