Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities 9781478012276

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Abstract Barrios

ABSTRACT BARRIOS The Crises of L at i n x V i s i b i l i t y in Cities

Johana Londoño

duke university press ​/ ​Durham and London ​/ ​2020

 © 2020 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Portrait Text by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Londoño, Johana, [date] author. Title: Abstract barrios : the crises of Latinx visibility in cities / Johana Londoño. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019054731 (print) | lccn 2019054732 (ebook) |   isbn 9781478008798 (hardcover) | isbn 9781478009658 (paperback) |   isbn 9781478012276 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Hispanic American neighborhoods—­History. | Hispanic   Americans—­Social life and customs. | Hispanic Americans—­Ethnic identity. |   Urban policy—­United States—­History. | City planning—­Social aspects—­   United States. | Gentrification—­United States—­History. | United States—­   Ethnic relations. Classification: lcc e184.s75 l67 2020 (print) | lcc e184.s75 (ebook) |   ddc 305.868/073—­dc23 lc rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2019054731 lc ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.g­ ov​/­2019054732 Cover art: (top) Salomón Huerta, Untitled House (#1), 2001, oil on canvas panel, 24 × 24 inches; (bottom) Salomón Huerta, Untitled Head (#8), 2001, oil on canvas panel, 12 × 11¾ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Louise-Alexander Gallery. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which provided funds ­toward the publication of this book.

Contents

Preface: The Trou­ble with Representing Barrios ​/ ​vii Acknowl­edgments ​/ ​xix

introduction ​/ ​ Brokers and the Visibility of Barrios ​/ ​1 one ​/ ​ Design for the “Puerto Rican Prob­lem” ​/ ​23 two ​/ ​ Colors and the “Culture of Poverty” ​/ ​70 three ​/ ​ A Fiesta for “White Flight” ​/ ​112 four ​ /  ​ Barrio Affinities and the Diversity Prob­lem ​/ ​144 five ​/ ​ Brokering, or Gentrification by Another Name ​/ ​184 Coda ​/ ​ Colorful Abstraction as Critique ​/ ​219

Notes ​/ ​229 Bibliography ​/ ​273 Index ​/ ​293

Preface The Trou­ble with Representing Barrios

It was easy for me to fall in love with barrio environments and to feel that institutional trends somewhat validated the admiration I felt. Such a feeling would have been rare for much of the twentieth c­ entury. Barrios—­generally defined as Latinx spatial concentrations—­have been historically marginalized in US cities.1 In contrast, in the early twenty-­first c­ entury, while I was in art school in New York City, designers widely discussed the inclusion of messy, garish, and even impoverished landscapes in professional design. By then, architects Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown had published Learning from Las Vegas. That collection of essays about the commercial storefronts of the Las Vegas Strip as observed from a car win­ dow had inspired a generation of designers to look at vernacular culture for creative inspiration.2 ­There ­were critics of this type of work, of course. The theorist Fredric Jameson saw the trend as a postmodern “aesthetic pop­u­ lism” that espoused sociocultural inclusivity but was ­really at the ser­vice of a cap­i­tal­ist logic of exploitation and exclusion. Among design professionals though, the vernacular, that is to say the ordinary, nonprofessionally made built environment, was regularly heralded as an antidote to a modernist architecture perceived as sterile and socially indifferent, if not oppressive. Similarly, in the fields of two-­dimensional design, vernacular urban culture was seen as an alternative to clinical, digital modernist typefaces, such as the ubiquitous Helvetica. It was precisely in a postmodern design context that I was first able to bring the barrio culture I had grown up in to bear on design circles. When my college typography instructor assigned us to

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photo­graph street text for a new font proj­ect, I seized on the opportunity to include an ethnoracial difference that was absent from the modernist design curriculum that surrounded me; design history books assigned in my courses predominantly featured Eu­ro­pean and white American innovators, and white men ­were the majority in the design faculty at my college.3 I took a NJ Transit bus to get across the Hudson River and into Union City, the low-­income barrio where I was raised, to mine the city for aesthetic inspiration. From my bus win­dow, Union City’s facades looked remarkably dif­fer­ent from the professionally designed landscapes of power and wealth depicted in design magazines, commercials, tourism, and glamorous lifestyles. To fulfill my class assignment, I photographed the hand-­painted lettering found on outdoor advertisements along Bergenline Ave­nue, the city’s main commercial corridor, but I also took note of the Latin American flag colors on storefronts that catered to their respective national communities. I contemplated the inventive simulacra of painted stone and brick on business exteriors. The real materials, I speculated, ­were too difficult or expensive to come by. I saw murals of tropical, mountainous lands and colonial ­houses. I noticed Virgin Mary statues and artificial flower arrangements on the slivers of concrete that served as a “front yard” between the sidewalk and door. Though I would not know it u ­ ntil a­ fter years of academic research, this enthusiasm for postmodern vernacular was already evident among Latinx designers, such as graphic designer Pablo Medina’s early twenty-­first-­century typography based on the Latinx commercial landscape in Union City (and the surrounding North Jersey area) and James Rojas’s 1991 MA thesis on urban planning in East Los Angeles, the latter of which was also influenced by the Chicano movement of the 1970s.4 Like them, I embraced barrio visuals as underappreciated assets whose value could enrich institutionalized design culture. I was, in the terms set forth by this book to describe the major actors analyzed herein, beginning to assume a “broker” identity by visually cata­loging that which made spaces “Latinx” and adjudicating their value in relation to the aesthetic preferences of professional circles that in my mind needed cultural difference. This book is in large part an assessment of that practice. Compromises are made to render barrio landscapes for mainstream consumption, compromises that are at times disconnected from the visuals of said barrios. Putting this aside for a moment, it is impor­tant to underscore that the mere desire to identify Latinx culture and life as a contribution to US urbanism is a notable contrast to the long-­held view that low-­income Latinxs clustered in space, in barrios, are unseemly urban subjects who pose a prob­

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lem for modern cities. A sweeping view of twentieth-­century urban history shows that the latter formulation has been the source of much attention. Throughout that time period and well into the twenty-­first ­century, social welfare programs, assimilation efforts, health campaigns, redevelopment proj­ects, urban renewal, housing regulations, social movements, and community organ­izing w ­ ere debated as solutions to the ostensible prob­lems Latinxs, and poor ­people of color, bring to cities. This book examines a less frequently discussed solution: the aesthetic depiction and manipulation of Latinx urban life and culture as a way to counteract the fear that Latinxs and their culture ­were transgressing normative expectations of urbanness. I refer to this as a brokered solution that differs from the work of artists and community organizers who have, since the Latinx social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, altogether challenged the prob­lem that urban Latinxs supposedly pre­sent by championing barrio culture and directly offering barrio residents murals, posters, community-­based architecture, and gardens. This book focuses on a set of privileged actors whom I call brokers—­a group of architects, urban planners, policy makers, ethnographers, business ­owners, and settlement workers—­whose reactions to the barrio and its role in urbanization generated new Latinized landscapes. While the following chapters cover multiple instances of a brokered Latinization of space, the initial spark for the book was my personal encounter with a politics of seeing, appreciating, and representing barrio culture and life. Moving between the field of design, gradu­ate school, and Union City offered lessons in the differing values attributed to barrio landscapes and their consequences for low-­income residents. In 2004, as a new gradu­ate student in the New York University (nyu) American Studies Program, my interest in Latinx built environments was sustained by geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians whose research was expanding the field of Latinx urban studies. Their books and articles told of the potential of barrio culture to reshape a cap­ i­tal­ist spatial order. With the exception of Arlene Dávila’s pioneering research on the neoliberal marketability of Latinx culture in East Harlem’s urban redevelopment and the community’s opposition to it, ­these publications did not address the po­liti­cal contradictions of Latinized built environments. Nor did they highlight the brokers I describe ­here. Instead, the prevailing subject formation evinced in t­ hese works is defiant and engaged in po­liti­cal re­sis­tance and community organ­izing. This is a seductive and galvanizing narrative of Latinx urbanization. For example, at the heels of a 2000 census that reenergized talk of a Latinx “sleeping ­giant,” Mike Davis

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described a Latinx “magical urbanism” that was, despite unwelcoming policies, spreading across US cities and suburbs and reinventing dilapidated landscapes. Luis Aponte-­Parés and Juan Flores respectively wrote about “casitas” and the accompanying community gardens that Puerto Ricans created as social and visual alternatives to a postindustrial landscape of loss in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods. Raúl Homero Villa told the history of cultural and social activism against displacement in the Logan Barrio in San Diego. Mario Luis Small researched a 1960s Puerto Rican tenants’ council whose organ­izing efforts compelled the Boston Redevelopment Authority to design a public housing development in a style reminiscent of colorful Puerto Rican h ­ ouses. James Rojas argued that the East Los Angeles landscape was an underexamined alternative to urban planning typologies. Also referencing the murals, h ­ ouses, and spatial configurations of late twentieth-­century East Los Angeles, Margaret Crawford saw a landscape that reinvigorated the demo­cratic possibility of public space. Gustavo Leclerc and Michael Dear referred to the “cultures of everyday life” in barrios as part of a larger “cultural revolution.” David Diaz championed “barrio urbanism,” specifically “Chicana/o urbanism” in the US Southwest and California, as a way to c­ ounter the racism that plagued the urban planning profession. Through works such as t­ hese, the built environment that Latinxs ­shaped entered academic lit­er­a­ture as an object of activism, evidence of a Latinx population ready and willing to make its social, po­liti­cal, and economic mark against the odds.5 Intending to follow in this vein, my gradu­ate research began by examining the politics of Union City’s Latinx landscape. The po­liti­cal dynamics I found, however, ­were dif­fer­ent. I conducted my research by walking, a practice that urban theorist Michel de Certeau preferred to the top-­down, voy­eur­is­tic perspective that high, enclosed places, such as a bus, or the car in Learning from Las Vegas, offer.6 I also interviewed locals. Both methods dissuaded me from falling into the trap of romanticizing barrio culture based purely on its visual differences vis-­à-­vis non-­Latinx landscapes. Indeed, interview-­based research offered two impor­tant lessons. First, my visual study of Union City while in college was a flat aestheticization of the landscape that overlooked the ways locals experienced the city. Second, the community activism and cultural re­sis­tance that prevailed in scholarship on barrios was not evident in all Latinx built environments. Some interviewees in Union City had ­little interest in discussing their built environment. They would interrupt my questions and demand to know if I was with “la migra” (immigration enforcement) or a vendor trying to sell them goods.7 My focus on aesthet-

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ics felt petty, bourgeois, removed from the issues affecting this vulnerable, policed community. To my chagrin, my visual preoccupation with the landscape betrayed a distance between me and the barrio I had grown up in. This distance, I realized, had been long in the making. By attending a magnet high school in a nearby middle-­class suburb, I missed much of the everyday experience of walking on Bergenline Ave­nue during my formative teenage years. Whereas I felt a certain nostalgia for Bergenline, my friends who attended Union City high schools disdained it, perhaps ­because its familiarity felt oppressive, a reminder of economic stagnation and the difficulties ahead for t­ hose striving to join the middle-­class mainstream. Friends and f­ amily visiting from Latin Amer­i­ca would comment on how ugly Union City was, how it resembled a poor barrio in their native country. It became clear to me that my everyday distance, in addition to my accumulation of artistic cultural capital in college and an academic propensity to search for the po­liti­cal in culture, contributed to my appreciation of the city’s built environment. ­Doing what was expected of low-­ income students—­leaving for educational opportunities elsewhere—­also cast doubt on my belonging. One interviewee, a Cuban storeowner on Bergenline Ave­nue, reacted astonished when, responding to his questions, I told him I was raised in Union City: “You talk like a ­really, ­really, white girl.” I had trained my eye to see beauty and novelty in undervalued landscapes as a way to minimize the very distance I had accumulated throughout the years of living in white contexts. Now I had to come to terms with the fact that an intrinsic risk of that aestheticization was cultivating a privileged, selective, and socially distant gaze. Many of the nearly sixty interviewees in Union City, Santa Ana, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, San Antonio, and Mexico City and historic and con­temporary actors I encountered in archival research for this book grappled with how to aesthetically manage their social distance from the barrio. Some of them kept this distance reluctantly and do not self-­identify as brokers. They are critical of how an assemblage of elites who decide how built environments look continues to require that this distance from the barrio be performed aesthetically. O ­ thers, including some who live and work in barrios, purposefully seek to visualize their distance, to abstract from the materiality of life in barrios, in an effort to accomplish higher retail returns and real estate values or emulate middle-­class suburbia or newly gentrified spaces. Still ­others are implicated in a distance they are unaware of. In all cases, distancing is at the crux of the cultural politics of brokering that I examine in this book and which, through an analy­sis of the

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built environment as a primary source, I argue is implicated in low-­income barrio invisibility. Invisibility, of course, is the result of more than the aesthetic brokering discussed h ­ ere. Anti-­immigration policies, gentrification, exclusionary housing practices, the policing of communities of color, and intra-­Latinx racism have all made it difficult for Latinxs to be in public view in urban spaces. During the early stages of writing this book, I regularly visited the rental apartment where I grew up and where my mom still lived. T ­ here, the po­liti­cal and economic ­factors shaping Latinx visibility in urban space ­were inescapable and the possibility of redressing Latinx exclusion via aesthetics proved wanting, a reminder of the possibilities and challenges of merging the po­liti­cal and the visual. My mom migrated from Medellín, Colombia, to Union City with me, a toddler in tow, in 1983. A ­ fter a few months of living with f­ amily in a crowded railroad apartment, she secured employment at an embroidery factory and the two of us moved into a third-­floor studio in a multifamily, owner-­ occupied ­house. The apartment had a side entrance that opened through an iron gate. Once at the gate, we would walk through a narrow path lined with garbage pails, and then take a left turn at the own­er’s backyard and go up metal stairs. The entrance was undesirable, but we ­were lucky to find housing. The large numbers of new immigrants and refugees entering the city barely fit in a landscape of worn-­down row h ­ ouses, where landlords ­were converting rental units into condominiums in an early effort to entice New York City gentrifiers, and landlords’ discrimination created a severe housing shortage that hit low-­income racialized Latinxs particularly hard. Our landlord, a light-­skinned, middle-­aged Cuban man, had agreed to rent to my mom, despite having disapproved of her being unwed and single, ­because every­one ­else who had viewed the apartment was, according to him, a “Marielito.” That was the moniker given to the mostly dark-­skinned Cubans who left the port of Mariel and arrived at Florida’s shores ­after Fidel Castro reportedly proclaimed to “flush” his “toilets” of Cubans unfit for the revolution. Union City’s established middle-­class and light-­skinned Cuban population, including the aforementioned landlord, suspected that Marielitos had lived with communist ideology for too long to truly appreciate cap­i­tal­ist values or follow a bootstrap ideology of hard work. Some worried the new arrivals would tarnish the reputation ­earlier Cuban mi­grants had established in the city’s commercial and housing sectors. Race played a major role in the icy welcome Mariel refugees received. While dark-­skinned Cubans arriving to the United States at this time had lived nearly twenty

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years ­under a regime built on the expectation of racial equality, light-­skinned Cuban Americans saw the new arrivals through the lens of racial hierarchies that prevailed in Cuba prior to the revolution and w ­ ere validated by the institutional racism in the United States that denied black ­people equal access and opportunities.8 Though my mom was the d ­ aughter of a dark-­ skinned man of indigenous descent, she was racialized as “una Italiana” and therefore deemed acceptable despite the landlord moralizing about our ­family. My mom took the apartment and in ­doing so made us complicit in practices that upheld the racial privilege of light-­skinned Latinxs and left undisturbed the hold that elite Cubans had over the city’s landscape, its shape, its aesthetics, and its owner­ship. My mom lived in the apartment for twenty-­nine years before receiving notice to vacate the premises. T ­ hose years saw major changes in the economy and population of the city. The once-­dominant Cuban population had largely moved to nearby suburbs or metropolitan Miami. The garment industry that employed my mom and many o­ thers had mostly left the area by the 1990s. My mom, like many ­others, turned to the nation’s public assistance programs for housing and food aid while working part-­time jobs in the low-­wage ser­vice and child care industries that had replaced manufacturing. Her use of Housing Choice Voucher Program Section 8, a federal program that appealed to t­ hose unable to get on what was then an eight-­ year wait list for public housing units, allowed her to pay 30 ­percent of her income on rent regardless of the landlord’s rent increases. The multifamily ­house my mom lived in also saw major changes. A South American c­ ouple had bought the ­house in the 1990s and since then worked to gradually convert it into fewer units by evicting tenants or raising rents so that tenants would be pressured to move. T ­ here was incentive to do this. In Union City, owner-­occupied dwellings with four units or fewer are exempt from rent control. My mom, who had the longest tenancy in the ­house, put up the longest fight to stay in the apartment. Housing officials at Section 8, as the program is succinctly called, ­were key to helping persuade the landlord to renew her lease. Section 8 had leverage in ­these negotiations. They could ensure that landlords would have a steady rent in their pockets instead of dealing with high tenant turnover or delinquent renters. By 2011, however, the possibility of cashing in on the city’s creeping gentrification outweighed the advantages that Section 8 offered. The homeowner next door was making plans to unite with my mom’s landlord to capitalize on the street’s proximity to the city’s recently designated “gateway” area to New York City by selling their plots together as one large land

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mass to the highest bidder—­a private developer or Union City’s municipal­ ere higher ity.9 Thus, for the landlord, the benefits of removing my mom w than usual as gentrification intensified. The landlord devised a way of kicking my mom out by avoiding necessary repairs and maintenance. In the year leading up to her move, the trash cans ­were overflowing. The path from the gate to the stairs leading to the apartment was pockmarked with the own­er’s dog’s shit. It was nearly impossible not to step on the shit. Our feet barely fit in the space between one pile of shit and the other. The metal stairs leading to the apartment ­were rusty and with holes big enough for our feet to fall through. The metal fire escape was coming unhinged. Only a third of the fencing on the porch from which the fire escape hung was upright and sturdy. The ceiling was leaking. The wooden floors had holes. The shingles that covered the exterior of the ­house along the path leading to the apartment ­were falling off. When the state’s building inspectors ­were called in, they ­were unwilling to pressure the landlord to make changes, preferring instead to condemn the apartment as unfit for habitation. A notice for evacuation came soon thereafter. In the letter, the landlord cited wanting to convert the ­house for single-­family owner use. A few months a­ fter my mom left, the porch, metal stairs, and fire escape w ­ ere fixed. The rent for the apartment was deregulated and if the landlord wished, he could rent the apartment without the constraints of rent control and well beyond the “fair market rent” Section 8 requires of participating landlords. My mom confined her search for a new apartment to Union City b­ ecause she wanted to keep the networks and con­ve­niences to which she had become accustomed. She searched for an apartment that looked “mejor” (better) than her previous apartment ­because, she thought, if she (with the help of Section 8) ­were to pay significantly more for an apartment, it should be stylistically and structurally superior. She equated a “good” aesthetic of clean, modern buildings with a higher price in the way that nearby condo developers expecting a return on their new investments did. Contrary to a Latinx studies lit­er­a­ture that examines the aesthetic preferences of low-­ income Latinxs in opposition to mainstream culture, my mom showed that low-­income residents appreciate and perceive the aesthetics of new development and renewal proj­ects to be visualizations of pro­gress even when high-­ cost housing excludes low-­income renters and consumers from ­those very lifestyles.10 Indeed, unlike developers and buyers of real estate, my mom had few housing choices. Most apartments in her price range ­were substandard and smaller than her previous apartment. Additionally, she experienced dis-

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crimination, including landlords questioning her profession, ­whether she had small ­children, and ­whether she worked in New York City—­indicators of a person’s gentrifier status. When calling to inquire about vacancies over the phone, her Spanish accent triggered quick hang-­ups. The new apartment, a renovated unit in a sixteen-­unit building constructed in 1900, costs nearly $400 more even though it is only slightly larger than my mom’s previous apartment. A dirty hallway, sometimes littered with dead roaches, leads to the unit with shiny parquet floors and bright white paint. The apartment was not intended for someone of my mom’s socioeconomic status nor for the building’s long-­term, low-­income residents. When the building’s tenants saw my mom moving in, they asked if they could stop by to view the apartment, among only a few the landlord had recently renovated. I was ­there helping with the move when two el­derly Afro-­Cuban ­women peeped in and with large eyes and a sound of slight disapproval said, “Hmmm esto esta muy lindo” (this is very pretty). The building’s super, acting as a proxy for the faceless New York City–­based ­limited liability com­pany (llc) that owns the building, had initially rejected my mom’s tenant application, claiming that Section 8 recipients w ­ ere prohibited from the market-­rate building. Section 8 officials quickly checked the building’s tenant history and upon finding current and previous Section 8 tenants told my mom to contest it. The building’s super told her the apartment could be hers for $100 more than Section 8 policy allows (and even suggested that my mom slip the additional $100 without Section 8 knowing). My mom, who thought this apartment was the best that she would find, repeatedly asked the super to negotiate with the anonymous landlord on her behalf for the initial Section 8 compliant rent. My mom’s application was eventually accepted. But the trou­bles she went through to rent this apartment, despite the fact that it is illegal in New Jersey to reject potential renters ­because they use Section 8 vouchers, is instructive of how the forces of gentrification are intent on changing the socioeconomic composition of Union City and reducing the presence of low-­income Latinxs in the city. 11 David Madden and Peter Marcuse call such urban vulnerability the “experience of residential alienation.” The phrase builds on the concept of “alienation” frequently deployed in Marxist scholarship to describe how capitalism isolates the working class from society in order to extract value from them.12 Low-­income tenants in cities are alienated from the social and po­liti­cal relations that shape space, what geographer Henri Lefebvre calls the “production of space,” and they are, with some exceptions, unable to consume, visibly imprint their culture in space, or feel they belong.13

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This alienation is at odds with what a researcher of Latinx urbanism, accustomed to reading about resistant Latinx cultural expression in urban space, may expect to find. That is b­ ecause spatial powerlessness and invisibility, landlord neglect and their literal shit, and the po­liti­cal economic structures that circumscribe tenant mobility and expression are much more difficult to bear witness to than Latinx commercial built environments and homeowner decorations. In Union City, for example, this alienation is invisible, but government-­sanctioned Latin American In­de­pen­ dence Day festivities and, by the 2010s, the rise of memorials to historical Latin American figures erected throughout the city are not. The brokered spaces of municipal parks, streets, murals, and plazas named ­after Cubans, Colombians, Ec­ua­dor­ians, and Dominicans enjoy hypervisibility just as low-­income tenants are subjected to ever more precarious living spaces and fleeting experiences of walking and consuming the city. This contradiction is not happenstance but key to the brokering described in this book. Visually con­spic­u­ous Latinx landscapes can galvanize, unify, and amuse. They are easy to fall in love with. Spatial disempowerment, in contrast, can be repulsive, difficult to find and mobilize around but nonetheless impor­ tant to bring to light. In fact, it may reveal power relations that easily go unnoticed if we limit the study of the Latinization of the built environment to only what we see in public spaces s­ haped by community strug­g les over space, property o­ wners, or t­ hose with control over property such as public officials. In Union City, where activist and community appropriations of space are absent, I found that the Latinization I found so appealing was contingent on access to the outer, vis­i­ble features of property and thus rested in the hands of p ­ eople with the privilege to shape public space. To put it a dif­fer­ent way, reflecting on precarious renters showed just how consequential the role of the broker, and their privileged access to property, was in making a Latinx aesthetic vis­i­ble in cities where low-­income Latinxs ­were believed to be incompatible with urban pro­gress. And yet ­these brokers are underexamined. This book is an attempt to contribute to this gap. And while spatially disempowered ­people are not the focus of the book, they are critical in influencing how I analyze my subject m ­ atter. This book attends to brokers’ production of space not to fetishize it as representative of Latinxs but to understand how repre­sen­ ta­tions of Latinidad can at times be removed from marginalized urban residents and their barrios. For while brokered spaces can be construed as humanizing Latinx urban subjects by their mere recognition and inclusion of difference, they are very much intertwined with cir­cuits of capital that

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value some landscapes and residents over o­ thers. In examining brokers, I want to draw attention to how much of cap­i­tal­ist urbanization’s approval of Latinxs has been premised on the selective visibility of racialized and eco­nom­ically classed aesthetics, which is to say on an abstraction of barrios that produces a Latinization that does not interfere in the economic and cultural interests of normative urbanity: a Latinization that would not, in other words, enflame a crisis of urban belonging. Union City is an example of a brokered Latinization where low-­income presence is increasingly managed and contained. My experiences in the city animated my thinking of the outsized role that brokers play in making Latinx culture vis­i­ble in urban space. But as a small city it does not, in the com­pany of Latinx studies scholarship that addresses large metropolitan spaces, register as powerfully as tracing a brokered Latinization across multiple spaces and times. The book is or­ga­nized to reflect the broader scope of brokering in several places where major twentieth-­and twenty-­ first-­century crises in urban belonging identified Latinx culture and life as excessive and where, in turn, brokers curbed ­these excesses. Though expansive, the book is by no means exhaustive. Rather, it underscores a long-­term pro­cess whereby cultural repre­sen­ta­tions of Latinx culture and life repeatedly coexist with anxious portrayals of Latinxs. In so d ­ oing, it draws attention to the inability of cultural repre­sen­ta­tions to deter ­future crises from forming, a testament to the limits of a brokered Latinization of cities and a reminder that Latinx visibility ­matters, but the repre­sen­ta­tions used to promote this visibility need to be read in light of their limitations and the actors who produce them.

Acknowl­edgments

In the long course of writing a book that spans a wide time and spatial frame, I have incurred many debts. I am thrilled to fi­nally have the opportunity to convey my gratitude. I am afraid, however, that my list is not exhaustive. I can only hope that all t­ hose who helped me along the way know how grateful I am for their research support and collaboration. All errors are of course my own. Arlene Dávila at nyu has inspired my research and writing. Without Arlene’s brilliant insights, indefatigable belief in my scholarship, and consistent good humor, this book would not have been written. I, and academia at large, have benefited enormously from her dedication to the success of working-­class scholars and the development of Latinx studies. I am also grateful for the advice and incisive comments of Andrew Ross and Harvey Molotch. Their respective research provided models of how to study design outside the disciplines of architecture and design. Thuy Linh Tu and Neil Brenner pushed my research in productive directions. George Yúdice, Adam Green, and Juan Flores profoundly influenced my thinking on race, Latinx identity, and culture. My transition from art school to gradu­ate school was pos­si­ble with the guidance of Maren Stange and Kirsten Schultz at the Cooper Union and Kelly Wise at the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers. They encouraged me to connect my art education with the fields of Latinx studies and American studies. The MacCracken Fellowship and Gradu­ate School of Arts and Science Dean’s Supplement Fellowship financed my gradu­ate education at nyu. I had the opportunity to workshop versions of my research with the Gradu­ate Forum on Forms of Seeing at the nyu Institute for the Fine Arts. Early stages of my research and writing ­were made pos­si­ble by a Ford Foundation Dissertation fellowship and Northeast Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellowship at Northeastern University, School of Public Policy

xx Acknowledgments

and Urban Affairs. At Northeastern I presented my research and benefited from the thoughtful feedback of Christopher J. Bosso, Thomas J. Vicino, and Amílcar A. Barreto. Additional research and extensive revisions for this book ­were made pos­si­ble by the Mellon-­Princeton Fellowship in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities, which provided a year to develop my book and the opportunity to or­ga­nize talks related to my research, especially the State Between Symposium at Prince­ton University. Alison Isenberg, William Gleason, Lilian Knorr, Bruno Carvalho, Fabrizio Gallanti, Mariana Mogilevich, Mario Torres, and Aaron Shkuda ­were critical interlocutors at Prince­ton. A Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, hosted by Columbia University, provided much-needed time away from teaching and ser­vice work to complete the book. A Graham Foundation Grant helped me secure images and supported the production of the book. I am fortunate to have encountered many p­ eople who took the time to read vari­ous stages of my research, comment on my work, write letters of recommendation, or invite me to pre­sent my research. I specifically want to thank Mérida Rúa, George Lipsitz, Aldo Lauria-­Santiago, Mabel Wilson, Andrew K. Sandoval-­Strausz, Alyshia Gálvez, Ana Aparicio, Mike Amezcua, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Zaire Z. Dinzey-­Flores, Clara Irazábal, Wendy Cheng, Macarena Gómez-­Barris, Christina B. Hanhardt, and David R. Diaz. Pre­sen­ta­tions at interdisciplinary venues motivated me to think of my research from multiple perspectives: Latino Museum Studies Program at the Smithsonian Institution; American Studies Association; American Anthropological Association; Social Science History Association; Cultural Studies Association; Association of American Geographers; Latin American Studies Association; and Voz Latina: A Symposium on Latinos in Amer­i­ca at Prince­ton University. Travel grants from Rail-­Volution, nyu’s Gradu­ate School of Arts and Science, the Social Science History Association, and the University at Albany made it pos­si­ble to attend ­these conferences. I am thankful for the support of former and current colleagues at the University at Albany, State University of New York (suny), including Pedro Cabán and Carmen Serrano, who read parts of the book. ­There are many to thank h ­ ere but I especially want to convey gratitude to Patricio Pinho, Carlos Balsas, Walter ­Little, Gabriel Hetland, Jose Cruz, Glyne A. Griffith, Michitake Aso, Susan Gauss, Librada Pimentel, Christine Vassallo-­Oby, and Alejandra Bronfman. Jesus Alonso-­Regalado generously located several sources crucial to the introduction. The undergraduate students who have taken

Acknowledgments

xxi

my Latinization of US Cities course and have shared their experiences with gentrification kept me abreast of current developments. I especially want to thank Shelley Polanco and Briana Dominguez. I am lucky to have had gradu­ate students Eric Macias, Benoît Vallée, Narcisa Núñez, and Ramon Luciano Cappellan comment on several chapters of the book. In Union City and Santa Ana many storeowners, government officials, and professional urbanists took time out of their busy days to talk with me. In Santa Ana, Erualdo R. González at Cal State Fullerton, Carlos C., and members of the Centro Cultural de Santa Ana and the Orange County Dream Team introduced me to local politics. Alfonso Gonzalez, then at nyu, put me in contact with Debbie and Juan, both of whom, barely knowing me, helped me navigate Santa Ana, drove me around the city, and made sure I ate and had a place to sleep. The archival research for this book was made pos­si­ble by many helpful librarians and archivists at the Latino-­American Design Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York; Linnea Anderson at the Social Welfare History Archives at the Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; David Favaloro at the Oral Histories at the Tenement Museum, New York; Rare Books and Manuscripts, Prince­ton University; Rare Book and Manuscripts Library collection at Columbia University Libraries; Douglas Dicarlo at the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, New York City Housing Authority (nycha) collection at La Guardia Community College in New York City; staff at the San Antonio Public Library in San Antonio, Texas; Cindy Gonzalez, Kevin Cabrera, and Manuel J. Escamilla at the Santa Ana History Room at the Santa Ana Public Library, Santa Ana, California; Nancy Hadley at the American Institute of Architects; and staff at the Getty Research Institute. I am thankful to the architects, urban planners, designers, and policy makers in New York City, San Antonio, Santa Ana, Miami, Mexico City, and Los Angeles who granted me interviews. Some interviewees had public profiles and ­were easy to get a hold of. ­Others, especially ­those retired, ­were harder to find. I am grateful to ­those who helped me track down in­for­ mants, including Luis Aponte-­Parés, Clara E. Rodriguez, and Jorge Matos. Several friends and colleagues influenced my thinking or helped with vari­ous stages of the book. I would like to thank Robin Randisi, Firelei Báez, Jan Maghinay Padios, Andy Cornell, André Carrington, Emma Kreyche, Lena Sze, Eva Hageman, Maria Vizcaino, Ana Perez, Jennifer Garcia Peacock, Stephanie Sadre-­Orafai, Sarah DeMott, Sarah Wald, and Jesús Hernández. At nyu I am lucky to have been surrounded by Marisol

xxii Acknowledgments

Lebrón, Ariana Ochoa Camacho, and Leticia Alvarado, who as gradu­ate students ­were already pushing the bound­aries of Latinx studies. Ariana not only read and commented on parts of the book but has been a co-­ conspirator, helping plot our way through academia. I am grateful to Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press for encouraging me when I was in the early stages of writing. Ken allowed me the flexibility to develop my thoughts while helping me realize how all the parts of the book could fit together into a larger picture. Joshua Tranen has been a reassuring guide through the pro­cess of completing the book. I am grateful to Elizabeth Ault for supporting the proj­ect from the beginning and to Ellen Goldlust and Sheila McMahon for their careful edits. I am particularly thankful to the anonymous reviewers who invested time to thoughtfully and rigorously engage with my writing. Their generous feedback made the book so much better. Lastly, this book would have been inconceivable without my ­family’s love, sustenance, and encouragement. My m ­ other and grand­mother have been exemplars of strength, hard work, and determination. My grand­ mother Luz Stella was told she should only envision a life of rearing nine ­children. My ­mother, Nancy, grew up thinking that ­women could at best aspire to be secretaries while men could be doctors. I thank them for always imagining a dif­f er­ent life for me and letting me choose what that meant. My achievements can never make up for the sacrifices they made, pues creo que sus sacrificios nunca valdran la pena, but I hope they at the very least made our collective ­future sunnier. Thank you to the Schwartz-­Weinsteins—­Fran, Michael, and Lev—­for welcoming me into your ­family and nurturing me with food as I complained about yet another deadline. Fran, your text messages on popu­lar culture are always a welcome distraction. Zach Schwartz-­ Weinstein has been a constant cheerleader throughout the research and writing pro­cess, an obliging pasta-­maker and coffee-­runner when I could not bear to get up from my computer, and a consistent source of love, affection, and critical conversation. I learn from you e­ very day. Judith Stella, I edited much of the book while you w ­ ere growing inside me, and nursing and sleeping on me. Thank you for melting my stress away with your smiles. I am excited for the many walks we w ­ ill take through the streets featured in this book.

Introduction  Brokers and the Visibility of Barrios

I ­can’t do barrio architecture for the University of Texas ­system. They would get very ner­vous. If you go in and say I want this to look like my Tia’s garden that is in front of her h­ ouse . . . ​ they ­will go “what?” ​/ ​henry muñoz, june 2011

Sitting in the lobby of a luxury h ­ otel in Manhattan, Henry Muñoz recounted the obstacles he faced when attempting to include barrio landscapes in clients’ design proj­ects. Muñoz, the head of Muñoz and Com­ pany, one of the largest minority-­owned design firms in Texas, and a longtime po­liti­cal insider of the Demo­cratic Party, did not fit the usual designer type. Instead of the minimalist, casual chic accoutrements commonly associated with creative workers, Muñoz wore a polished business suit that matched his neatly coiffed gray-­speckled hair. Inside the Trump ­Hotel, where he requested that I meet him ­after graciously accepting to be interviewed, his power dressing took on an added aura of luxury. The ­hotel’s “neutral” interiors and black glass exteriors professed an aesthetic superiority that catered to wealthy patrons. The irony of discussing the difficulties of representing barrios usually associated with low-­income Latinxs in a place named ­after a man whose presidential campaign promised to build a border wall to prevent Latinxs from crossing and contributing to life in the United States was unknown to us that summer, five years before the 2016 election. Yet it was ironic in itself that Muñoz’s concern for more

2 Introduction

inclusive design was voiced in that space. The setting for our interview was a reminder of the contradictions that Muñoz navigated while pursuing an architecture representative of Latinx communities. As with many of the architects, designers, urban planners, and other urban professionals I spoke with and researched for this book, privilege easily surfaced in my interview with Muñoz. Not all privilege is alike, of course. In contrast to the racially marked Latinx interviewees whose attenuated privilege was achieved through socioeconomic mobility, Muñoz was quick to note that his upbringing differed from that of his contemporaries who had been raised in marginalized barrios. Muñoz grew up in a lily-­white suburb of San Antonio in the 1960s, a time when many Chicana/os experienced housing exclusion and segregation. He attended private schools. He began his ­career working alongside high-­powered Texan and national politicians, a po­liti­cal network that would serve him well years ­later when his firm procured design contracts in the public sector. But he was also quick to stress that, beyond ­these advantages, it was his ­family’s roots in community organ­izing that ­shaped his desire to include barrio culture and life in design proj­ects. Muñoz’s ­father, “el Fox,” was a well-­known Mexican American ­labor or­ga­nizer and his ­uncle, William C. Velásquez, established the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Proj­ect and cofounded the Mexican American Youth Organ­ization (mayo) and the Raza Unida Party, hallmark institutions of the Chicana/o movement’s strug­g les for justice. As he grew older and took stock of his c­ areer, Muñoz believed he had a responsibility to continue his f­ amily’s legacy and do work that was relevant to Latinxs living in the barrios of San Antonio and other Texan cities. In a previously published interview, he explained that this revelation came to him while looking for the “perfect puffy taco” in San Antonio: “I started looking around at the t­ hings that I saw in my own city that I thought w ­ ere beautiful that I d ­ idn’t think ­people particularly understood, and it had to do with the cultural imprint of Latinos in this country. . . . ​I just knew that I fi­nally found what I was supposed to be about, and it was right ­here [in the barrio] all the time. I just d ­ idn’t know it.”1 He told me further in our interview that he had grown tired of not finding an architecture that “looked like myself.” He had examined the design pedagogy of vari­ous universities and found that “even [in] the schools of architecture in the State of Texas . . . ​ nobody was interested” in designing with Latinx culture. “Latino architects had all been drilled into their head in architecture school that the appropriate architecture for the place that we lived in ­didn’t look anything like the growth in demographics in the state of Texas, ­didn’t look like . . . ​

Introduction

3

their culture or reflect their aesthetic.” In contrast to the aforementioned architects and their distance from local communities, Muñoz attempted to include barrio features in his design work. His firm’s clients, however, even ­those who espoused diversity, w ­ ere not as receptive to the idea. The University of Texas (ut), for example, had made an effort to serve the state’s Mexican student population since the Mexican American ­Legal Defense and Education Fund (maldef) filed a lawsuit in 1987 for discriminating against the Mexican-­majority border areas of the state.2 It encouraged signing contracts with minority-­owned businesses for campus construction, and even presented Muñoz and Com­pany an award for contributing to the university’s goal of a more “inclusive” campus by designing buildings whose construction employed workers from underrepresented groups.3 However, and as suggested by Muñoz, when it came to aesthetics, the issue of diversity did not merit a similar repre­sen­ta­tional calculus for ut. Unlike individual identities, designed landscapes do not count ­toward diversity numbers. What Muñoz referred to as “barrio architecture,” the mimetic design of landscapes found in Latinx neighborhoods, could be construed as excessive and a long-­term commitment compared to the cycling through of diverse bodies whose very inclusion in professional realms implied a familiarity with, if not desire for, assimilation. Built environments designed to be long-­lasting marketing tools are subject to strict mea­sures of normativity. Responding to the client, Muñoz ultimately de­cided to abstract nonfigurative ele­ments from the barrio. His firm’s building for the Math, Science, and Engineering Teaching Center at ut Dallas, for example, was pared down to an intense blue that was as indexical of Latinx culture as it was of the Swedish flag or a deep blue sky (figure I.1). Repre­sen­ta­tional ambiguity was less controversial for institutional clients and less likely to make them “ner­vous” about public depictions of otherness in the built environments. This book is about a long-­standing anxiety over the spatial concentration of Latinx culture and life—­specifically barrios—in US cities and the ways vari­ous actors with the power to shape the built environment, and a desire to represent Latinx culture, tried to lessen the perceived threat or, following Muñoz, the ner­vous­ness that barrios provoke.4 Abstract Barrios is or­ga­nized into chapters that discuss how environments ­were manipulated in response to the postwar “Puerto Rican prob­lem,” the “culture of poverty” of the 1960s, “white flight” in the 1970s and 1980s, the diversity prob­lem gaining traction in design circles in the early twenty-­first c­ entury, and turn-­of-­the-­century gentrification and its cultural preoccupations. Though the time and space and characteristics of the subjects that inform

4 Introduction

Figure I.1 ​~ ​University of Texas at Dallas mset Building, Richardson, Texas, 2007. Photo­graph by Chris Cooper. Courtesy of Muñoz and Com­pany / Henry Muñoz.

their anxiety vary, t­ hese periods speak to a longue durée of “urban crisis” as it relates to the dilemma of Latinx belonging to cities and the concomitant work done to maintain or restore the economic viability and cultural normativity of mainstream urban spaces. With few exceptions, academic writing on the ethnoracial dimensions of the “urban crisis” has examined black Americans living in eco­nom­ically battered cities in the 1960s and 1970s and how their disaffection, protest, rioting, looting, and spatial concentration in ghettoes w ­ ere thought to contrib5 ute to urban decay. The link forged between racialized urban residents and dilapidated built environments has proven to be po­liti­cally and eco­nom­ically damning. It entrenched ideas about which actors are v­ iable contributors to modern urban landscapes. It also justified economic disinvestment and—­once residents of color ­were no longer thought of as threatening or could be easily displaced elsewhere—­reinvestment by way of gentrification. Historian Robert Beauregard writes in his wide-­ranging exploration of the concept of “decline”

Introduction

5

that repre­sen­ta­tions of decay ­were projected onto landscapes to shape a procapitalist urban policy. “U.S.-­style capitalism requires decline,” Beauregard succinctly states, signaling a connection to economist Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.”6 Schumpeter, who coined the term during World War II, is frequently cited to note the incessant impulse of cap­i­tal­ ist agents to demolish and build anew—or in some instances to create more subtle alterations to built environments—­with the intention of increasing profit. A discourse of decline makes reinvestment, repurposing, and new construction reasonable if not necessary. Importantly, a language of decline not only enables the interests of urban capitalism but also protects racial interests, especially when a teleology of cap­i­tal­ist urban pro­gress based on whiteness is u ­ nder question—­because a white population is ­either losing demographic power or having to share urban space with racialized ­others. When decline is yoked to black and brown bodies, it allows white and eco­nom­ically advantaged p ­ eople, including light-­skinned Latinxs, to distance and distinguish their urbanness from that of low-­income ­people of color. As long as low-­ income blacks and Latinxs are deemed to be catalysts of urban decline, whites and the culture associated with whiteness could gain value and secure a role as savior of urban capitalism and assert the right to shape space. How whiteness is mobilized to save urbanism is not always explicit. This book shows how the normative values associated with whiteness seep into design styles and institutional prerogatives, including, at times, consumer-­friendly diversity developments and Latinx cultural expressions rendered in brilliant, seemingly affirming chromatic colors. The built environment is, borrowing from Michael Omi and Howard Winant, a “racial proj­ect” that employs vari­ous signifiers to build on the racial hierarchies that social structures maintain.7 It is a tool wielded by ­those who believe they have something to gain from what George Lipsitz calls a “possessive investment in whiteness.”8 This book is not only in conversation with the oft-­discussed period of “urban crisis”; it reinterprets and reperiodizes it by including multiple iterations of crisis and their cultural workings throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. By focusing on an expansive urban crisis, I can better show how central Latinxs and their visibility in built environments are to both the formation and, with some manipulation, the appeasement of US anx­i­eties about urban decline. In other words, I argue that Latinx visibility has been made key to the cyclical nature of US cap­i­tal­ist urbanism: its decay and the reconstitution of its normativity. Not all actors discussed in the book outright discuss a “crisis,” but I found the contexts in which they w ­ ere working to be descriptive of such. This

6 Introduction

book is an attempt to make sense of how t­ hese disparate moments connect. While I agree with several authors that extending “crisis talk” can serve as an excuse for cap­i­tal­ist elites to render their work as a solution to that crisis, the crises of urban Latinidad can also reveal, as Leo Chavez notes in The Latino Threat, how a perennial unbelonging has defined the Latinx experience in the United States and in par­tic­u­lar how that unbelonging has ­shaped access to and expression in urban space.9 This book asks what cultural tropes, tastes, subjectivities, spatial reconfigurations, and ways of belonging to urban Amer­ i­ca are created during periods of crisis and how they relate to long-­standing barrios and the needs and self-­representations of their low-­income Latinx residents. This question suggests that crisis is generative. Indeed, a Marxist view sustains this idea and sees in t­ hese junctures a potential for interrupting a cap­it­ al­ist system. But ­these moments are productive in creating a wide range of visual landscapes, not only radical forms of expression but also ­those abstracted spaces that appeal to urban capitalism. Crisis, in other words, produces an urban Latinidad with varying politics of visibility. Muñoz carefully managed the appearance of Latinx cultural difference in design in an attempt to avert the controversy that permanently fixing diversity—­specifically the socioeconomic class markers associated with barrios—on a university campus pursuing revenue would have caused. For Muñoz, and the ­others included in this book who want to minimize ­these uncomfortable feelings, the inclusion of Latinx culture in public space is contingent upon its distance from that which has long defined the racialized barrio as a dense site for impoverished, undereducated residents and a blighted environment that, along with the ghetto, gives American urban life a gritty, depressed image. This distancing is enabled via iconographies, typologies, and aesthetics of urban life and culture that signal Latinx barrios in the United States but are not reducible to their living conditions and cultures. T ­ hese cultural practices are an abstraction that allow Latinx culture to influence the built environment beyond the borders of the spatially segregated barrio, but at a cost. The abstraction of Latinx urban culture spatializes the material and place-­based barrio that has been a home and cultural center for many.10 The circulation of iconographies, aesthetics, and typologies of Latinx urban life and culture can be read as a specter, a reminder of a history of social dispersal that has occurred over de­cades of (im)migration, displacement, gentrification, and suburbanization via subprime lending. It is reminiscent of what l­ egal scholar Steven Bender calls a “legacy of loss,” a dispossession of land, that hinders Latinx belonging to urban space.11 Yet

Introduction

7

even if attempts to make barrio culture acceptable to elites and design and housing professions resemble long-­standing pressures to disperse and be placeless, they are driven by dif­fer­ent feelings and responsibilities. While the actors who displace populations show an indifference to Latinx placemaking, the actors discussed in this book make creative decisions based on an affinity for (some version of ) Latinx urban culture. Abstract Barrios focuses on urban planners, architects, designers, municipal government officials, settlement workers, policy makers, business ­owners, developers, and urban ethnographers who, like Muñoz, manipulate Latinx urban culture to make it vis­i­ble in mainstream spaces. I refer to t­ hese individuals as “brokers” of the barrio who have stakes in how repre­sen­ta­ tions circulate and become vis­i­ble in cities. The brokers in the book cover an expansive period of time spanning from a postwar period dominated by three subgroups—­Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans—to the early twenty-­first ­century ­shaped by the migration and immigration of vari­ous other sub-­Latinx groups. Major po­liti­cal and economic transformations drove Latinx growth in the United States over this time: the US annexation of Mexican territories and Puerto Rico, which created the foundations for mi­grant worker programs such as the Bracero Program and the Puerto Rico Migration Division; violent US imperial interventions in Central and South Amer­i­ca; po­liti­cal regime changes in the Ca­rib­be­an; and the rise of neoliberal policies that impoverished Latin American countries and forced many to flee to El Norte. The United States, as e­ ither a colonial or a neo­co­lo­nial power, was involved in ­these pro­cesses, creating what journalist Juan Gon­ zález evocatively calls the “harvest of empire.”12 The brokers I discuss in my research are spread across some of the cities—­large and small—­where Latinxs concentrated during t­ hose six de­cades, including Los Angeles; New York; Miami; San Antonio; Union City, New Jersey; and Santa Ana, California. Since the 1960s, brokers have been working at the same time that a set of scholars, activists, journalists, and art producers has produced an inner-­city barrio culture that has become synonymous with the urban experience of Latinxs in the United States. The work of t­ hese latter actors in barrios has marked Latinx subjects more than any other geographic demarcation; it has fixed an urban, “inner-­city” identity onto an other­wise complex and multiply located Latinx socio-­spatial identity. Through their repre­sen­ta­tions, Latinxs, and especially Mexicans and Puerto Ricans living in marginalized areas of US cities, appear as inner-­city activists demanding equal rights and opportunities, artists challenging the culture of segregated landscapes, organizers invested in community formation, and builders nostalgically

8 Introduction

re-­creating Latin Amer­i­ca’s tropics. ­These recurrent subjects populate accounts of Latinx in US cities in order to ­counter, if not overwhelm, the delinquent, dysfunctional, and impoverished characters that unsympathetic observers of the barrio foreground. While it is true that brokers are also actors producing Latinx urban culture, their production is not always located in barrios or resistant to normative landscapes. Thus, their work is best captured by the more encompassing concept of a Latinization of cities, a term that vari­ous scholars use to make sense of the varying power relations that shape Latinx communities.13 ­These two urban concepts—­barrios and a Latinization of cities—­ mutually shape each other, but they are dif­fer­ent.14 The role of the barrio as the primary urban Latinx site in the United States transforms and, at times, takes a back seat to a pro­cess of Latinization that has diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic actors. Examining the work that brokers do in this regard is essential to understanding how through it the barrio unfolds as an ongoing cultural force that shapes a larger pro­cess of Latinizing cities. For even as the barrio is sublimated, it is traceable, showing brokering’s complicated politics of place and visibility. ­ ere echoes the use of brokering in previous scholThe term broker used h arship. Historian William Leach employs the term to describe professionals, museum curators, investment bankers, corporate ­lawyers, and art school instructors who ushered in the rise of consumer culture in US cities in the late nineteenth c­ entury. It is also reminiscent of biographer Robert A. Caro’s use of “the power-­broker” to explain how city-­appointed technocrat Robert Moses wielded his power over elected officers to carve out postwar New York City and displace large swaths of the city’s most vulnerable communities. In ethnic studies, the term broker has had wide appeal. Historian Sonia Song-­Ha Lee uses the term in a more positive light to describe the po­liti­cal empowerment of New York City Puerto Rican social workers and m ­ others who mobilized to assist their communities in the 1960s. Curator Mari Carmen Ramírez argues that as curators grapple with changes in US demographics, they must avoid stereotyping Latino American art as a “fantastic” nonwestern curiosity and instead adopt the role of a “cultural broker” that mediates between the increasingly diverse subjects of art and the museum audiences new to ­these cultural repre­sen­ta­tions. Anthropologist Arlene Dávila uses the term to refer to spokespeople who, in contrast to “outside agents,” act as community intermediaries in late twentieth-­century redevelopment in East ­Harlem.15 Po­liti­cal scientist Alfonso Gonzales writes how “professional middle-­ class and wealthy Latino brokers,” who mediated between the state and

Introduction

9

working-­class Latinxs in order to conceive of immigration reform, ­were “locked into a game of perpetual compromise.”16 Similarly, in her study of Chicago, sociologist Mary Patillo elaborates on brokers’ class privilege with a “theory of the ­middle” that explains how black gentrifiers in low-­income black neighborhoods act as “middlemen” moving between institutions and low-­income neighbors, at times vocalizing the needs of the latter and at other times showing allegiances to both sides.17 Author bell hooks more forcefully critiques privileged black brokers, such as filmmakers and writers, who exploit the image of black vio­lence for their own gains.18 The individuals described as brokers do not always relish their position of power. The role may be foisted on some by a racist system that denies them the authority to exclusively navigate white social settings. T ­ hese brokers are forced to take on a “double consciousness,” to borrow from sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, without being seen or recognized by the white establishment.19 Historian Daniel Matlin uses the kindred term interpreters to describe black scholars and artists in the 1960s who, unable to take on other subject m ­ atter, ­were compelled to focus on black life and convey its value to white audiences. Most of ­these examples describe brokering as a contact point between the elite or upwardly mobile and marginal populations of the same ethnoracial group. They show how for marginalized nonintermediaries, brokering may si­mul­ta­neously be an uneasy reminder of their lack of power and a welcome opportunity to have an intermediary communicate their interests. For the broker, especially ­those who are racial “­others,” the experience of brokering can be, channeling Gloria Anzaldúa, akin to being on the border, inhabiting a space that bridges two dissimilar worlds to create a new mode of being, knowing, and expression.20 This book’s use of broker aims to capture how diverse intermediary actors negotiate normative environments with barrios to create interpretations of Latinx urban life and culture. The brokers I discuss are united less by their professions, or their politics, than by how their aesthetic practice interacts with barrios to create or reimagine their built environments and ­people as solutions to the very crisis they are thought to represent. This book specifically focuses on how brokers reframe barrio culture at moments when urban development, institutional neglect, economic decline, and gentrification threaten to make Latinx belonging to cities precarious. The work that brokers do to make the barrio digestible for mainstream audiences raises the question: What is so undesirable about the barrio, its residents and culture, that experts refrain from visualizing it in full? ­Because barrios in US cities are largely the result of unequal forces, reproducing barrio culture and spatial layouts, besides being parodic, would

10 Introduction

make plain the failures of liberalism to treat all individuals equally. The abstraction of Latinx urban culture, on the other hand, renders Latinxs legible in normative spaces, urban discourses, paradigms, and lifestyles in a way that distracts from this long-­standing, unequal status quo. Thus, the act of abstracting, its intertwining of culture, visibility, and politics, is implicated in a cap­it­ al­ist spatial order. For some, urban abstractions are freeing precisely b­ ecause they are not always wedded to didactic repre­sen­ta­tional styles, such as the murals found in low-­income barrios, or to static cultural signifiers of Latinx identity. In this sense, ­these abstractions echo widely known abstract modern ­expressions, be it in the fields of painting, architecture, or ­music, that are understood to break away from the staidness of tradition. That is not to say that brokering is a means by which Latinx urban culture becomes modern. That would elide the fact that many barrios ­were newly created or reconstituted by a midcentury urban modernization that segregated ­people of color in space. Whereas the infrastructure, aesthetics, and planning of white, Eurocentric urban modernity defined itself in opposition to the excess and unruliness associated with low-­income, racialized spatial concentrations, ­people of color experienced the latter as intrinsic to urban modernity. For some Latinxs, segregation made it so that the barrio was the twentieth-­century modern city. In this light, brokers’ abstraction does not make barrios modern but is instead the aesthetic language of the contradictions of modernity. Moreover, abstractions may animate Latinx inclusion in visual landscapes where it is rarely pre­sent. Some may even argue that abstractions are a form of re­sis­tance, but they also require caution, for positing that barrio culture exists in a realm beyond that of its segregated place validates faulty ideas of pro­gress based on the virtues of mobility but blind to the trou­bles Latinxs continue to face when asserting their right to be grounded in place.21 The abstraction of barrios links to an identifiable place while proposing the “melting” that Karl Marx saw as a quality of the universality and exchangeability of capitalism.22 The dilution and dispersion of Latinxs and their culture to stave off a crisis cautions us not to assume that all Latinx visual repre­sen­ta­tions are endowed with a politics that resists mainstream, white culture. Indeed, as the following chapters show, the repre­sen­ta­tional politics of brokers vary. This interdisciplinary, multisited, and multimethodological book uses the low-­income, racialized, and grounded barrio as a category of analy­sis to reveal what is at stake in a brokered Latinization of cities. How are Latinx urban subjectivities transformed in conjunction with the cultural work-

Introduction

11

ings of brokers? Brokers articulate anew urban Latinx subject formations and cultures and their significance to the barrio. By emphasizing the role of brokers, this book demonstrates that in addition to being a marginalized place that delimits socioeconomic belonging to the nation, the barrio has a complex function to play as aesthetic inspiration and generator of other modes of thinking about Latinxs and their urban culture.

Barrios: A Category of Analy­sis Definitions of the barrio have evolved over time. Writers of the Chicana/o/x and Puerto Rican nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s describe a dichotomous midcentury racialized urbanization that made barrios and their inner-­city counter­parts—­ghettos and Chinatowns—­the cultural and po­liti­cal antithesis of majority-­white suburbia. In “I am Joaquín, an Epic Poem” of 1967, Chicano activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, a leader of el movimiento, writes, “I have existed / In the barrios of the city / In the suburbs of bigotry.” From the perspective of the barrio streets of New York City, Puerto Rican activist and poet Pedro Pietri wrote in 1969: Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel All died yesterday ­today and ­will die again Tomorrow Dreaming Dreaming about queens Clean-­cut lily-­white neighborhood Puerto Ricanless scene Thirty-­thousand-­dollar home The first spics on the block Proud to belong to a community of gringos who want them lynched Proud to be a long distance away from the sacred phrase: Que Pasa23 Both Gonzales’s “Joaquin” and Pietri’s “Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, Manuel” represent a larger ethnic group, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in

12 Introduction

New York, respectively. The geographic immobility of the characters that populate ­these poems stresses the restricted spaces inhabited by both ethnic groups in the United States in the 1960s. The emergence of the barrio as an urban “other” of the metropolitan area, as described in these poems, has a long and complicated story that is rarely discussed. The history of the term stretches back to Moorish Spain, where distinct residential and commercial districts existed within and beyond the walled Medina, the religious, economic, and governmental center of power. Arabic words rabad (pl. arbad) and hara (pl. harat) ­were used interchangeably to refer to neighborhoods in general and at other times to specifically categorize the districts lying at the interior edge or outside Medina, where specialized markets and Christian, Jewish, leper, and other communities cast aside by the ruling power ­were located.24 Hara eventually translated to barrio, though the latter term was phonetically closer to the Arabic words barri, meaning “outside” or at the “exterior,” or barriya, meaning “open country.”25 One of the earliest documented uses of barrio occurred in 817 ad as the Christian Kingdoms of northern Spain sought to reclaim southern lands ­under Moorish control, what was known as the Reconquista.26 With the reestablishment of Castilian Spanish, rabad was translated to arrabal and the use of barrio was further entrenched. The subsequent Spanish urbanization of the Amer­i­cas, ­under the guidance of the planning rulebook Laws of the Indies, did not lay out specific plans for building arrabales or barrios, but it did cite the latter, stating that “indios” (natives) living in “pueblos or barrios” should build the religious edifices necessary for their Catholic indoctrination. Barrios w ­ ere also used to distinguish between socioeconomic classes of the same ethnoracial group. In colonial Costa Rica, barrio referred to a settlement composed of lower-­class indigenous and mixed-­race ­people located outside cities inhabited by Spaniards, whereas pueblo referred to a settlement of higher-­class indigenous ­people.27 Meanwhile, arrabales in colonial Costa Rica lay further out and w ­ ere home to “mulattos, f­ ree p ­ eople of color, and lower-­class mestizos.”28 Throughout many Latin American countries, native, mixed-­ race, and black subjects made the edges within and the extramuros of the colonial city their home and place of work. Historian Guadalupe García notes that although period maps and plans visualizing the wealthy and power­ful concentration in and around the plaza left out the built environment of the outer neighborhoods, their erasure did not preclude the Spanish crown from imposing ­legal rules that racially and eco­nom­ically subordinated already spatially marginalized residents.29

Introduction

13

As the administrative power of the colonial city spatially expanded centuries ­after colonization, the status of barrios near the center fluctuated as they w ­ ere incorporated and regulated. At times the barrio was elevated, especially vis-­à-­vis the arrabal, which e­ ither lost linguistic currency or was deemed inferior. Dominicans, for example, use arrabalizar to denote the pro­cess by which a barrio becomes a less desirable place.30 In other parts of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­rib­bean, the distinction between the two terms is not so obvious, and “to be of the barrio [ser del barrio]” is to be a poor, working-­class individual with ­little means of spatial mobility. In Cuba a barriotero/a describes a person perceived to have vulgar manners.31 The “barrio” has also been neutralized and used to refer to any urbanized district regardless of income across Spanish-­speaking Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­rib­bean. The term’s generic status is evidenced when adjectives modify it to connote a specific socioeconomic character. In Argentina, for example, a barrio bajo is a marginal, low-­income place.32 Affluent gated communities in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Colombia are called barrios privados. Slums are known as barrios populares in Colombia and barriadas in Peru and Nicaragua. Epitomizing neutralization, the term barrio was deployed for the business of US colonial administration in Puerto Rico. ­There, the US census used the term as a minor civil division (mcd) entity to officially map barrios that other­wise existed as ­imagined, fluid spaces among Puerto Rican residents.33 Over time, multiple variables made Latin American barrios abstract formations defined by culture and the imagination, not only social and geographic facts. In contrast, due to twentieth-­century discriminatory policies of work, housing, urban renewal, and anti-­immigration, barrios in the continental United States predominantly materialized into poor, working-­ class, and racialized places made concrete in juxtaposition to white spaces. This is the case in the three main strands of scholarship about Latinxs in cities. The first strand, which emerged at the same time as the nation’s postwar affluence grew and propelled Eu­ro­pean immigrants and their ­children to the ­middle class, blames spatial segregation and socioeconomic and po­liti­cal marginalization on individual pathologies. Impoverished residents appear to pass down bad be­hav­ior to their ­children, who then pass it to their ­children in a cycle of poverty. Emblematizing this type of research is Oscar Lewis’s La Vida. Similar to Patrick Moynihan’s widely discussed The Negro ­Family, Lewis put the onus of poverty on impoverished individuals. Despite the liberal roots of both authors (by some accounts Lewis was a socialist and Moynihan an anticommunist liberal), their use of cultural and

14 Introduction

behavioral attributes to explain poverty would gain most traction among conservatives in the following de­cades.34 With this lit­er­at­ ure, the barrio becomes not just an ethnic enclave but a site of dire poverty, one of many “places of social stigma” equivalent to the degraded black ghetto, where, it is believed, dysfunctional residents are unable to reverse the dreaded fate of their communities.35 The second strand of thought critiques this cultural explanation as misguided b­ ecause it blames downtrodden residents rather than pointing the fin­ger at structural in­equality. As early as 1979, social science researchers coined the term barrioization, akin to ghettoization, to name the po­liti­cal, economic, and social pro­cesses that force Latinxs to move into and stay in downtrodden urban spaces.36 In this line of argument, barrioization in the Southwest is the result of Anglo theft of Mexican land during and immediately a­ fter the Mexican American war (1846–48) and the eviction of residents and use of eminent domain for the sake of midcentury urban renewal proj­ects and freeway development.37 It is also, in the case of Mexicans in California, the result of deportation and repatriation campaigns of the 1930s.38 Dispossessed of land and in fear of removal, Mexicans resided in ethnic clusters. Indeed, the first response to the perceived threat of Latinx belonging in the United States was to segregate and concentrate Latinxs to form, in effect, barrios. In the 1960s, Chicana/o and Puerto Rican scholars and activists employed the “internal colony” concept popu­lar among black scholars and US Third World leftists to describe the po­liti­cal alienation from urban centers and ­labor exploitation that barrio residents experienced.39 The sense of prolonged marginalization and disenfranchisement central to barrioization and the making of second-­class citizens continued to be discussed in academic lit­er­a­ture through the twentieth c­ entury as discriminatory housing policies and policies that undereducated and overcriminalized Latinxs (i.e., the drug wars) offered residents few resources to make the barrio a safe, eco­nom­ically secure place to live. A third strand of thought acknowledges while it also resists the reduction of the barrio to oppression and economic neglect. Authors ­under this framework f­ avor a cultural studies approach that shows how residents use creative expression, including murals, lowriders, graffiti, m ­ usic, and bright colors to challenge the barrio’s socioeconomic marginality. Like the second strand, this strand grows out of the Chicana/o and Puerto Rican urban activism of the 1960s and 1970s when mostly young, po­liti­cally conscious Latinxs turned to the barrio as a major site of strug­g le against unequal policies. Authors particularly focus on the work of artists and other local

Introduction

15

cultural producers who ­were active in reclaiming spaces for creative expression and community affirmation in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Chicago. Transforming the barrio from a disparaged place to a site of affective attachment and cultural pride gave form to a Latinx cultural politics of urban space that literary and cultural studies scholar Raúl Homero Villa’s Barrio-­Logos memorably calls barriological, a set of practices resisting external, top-­down barrioization.40 This community affirmation endures in con­ temporary celebratory accounts of the barrio and enlivens the arguments of ­those defending barrios undergoing gentrification and urban development. All three approaches speak to the intimate connection between barrios and Latinx identity formation in the United States, created ­either from below in what ethnographer Mérida Rúa refers to as a “grounded identidad” or from above by scholars and policy officials.41 In his book Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, sociologist Mitchell Duneier graphed the use of ghetto in more than eight hundred thousand available books via Google Ngrams to examine the history of this term.42 Inputting the terms barrio, Latino, Chicano, and Puerto Rican in Google Ngrams shows that a use of barrio coincides with the rise of identity categories “Chicano” and “Puerto Rican” in books published at the height of Latinx social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Popu­lar culture also reinforces the idea that to be Latinx is more often than not to be from the barrio. A 2011 Fiat commercial shows Jennifer Lopez driving through her native Bronx while saying in a smoky, confident voice: “­Here, this is my world; this place inspires me to be tougher, to stay sharper, to think faster. They may be just streets to you, but to me ­they’re a playground.” Ironically, while the commercial attempts to appeal to an audience favoring au­then­tic urban grit, Lopez’s shots w ­ ere filmed in a studio in Los Angeles and ­later superimposed onto the street pa­noramas of Bronx murals and ­people playing and walking.43 Locating Latinxs, be they celebrities or ordinary ­people, in inner-­city barrio spaces with murals can be uplifting; it can affirm the value of usually disparaged spaces and populations. But as numerous scholars of race, American studies, and geography remind us, space is a crucial mode of racializing ­people.44 The fixity of the inner-­city barrio in Latinx repre­sen­ta­tions can perpetuate spatially discriminatory ideas of where Latinxs belong in US society. Latinx studies scholar Lisa Marie Cacho writes that the barrio is among a list of “so-­imagined ‘lawless’ places” that are “ontologized” and central to the criminalization of p ­ eople of color.45 The editors of Beyond El Barrio, Gina Pérez, Frank Guridy, and Adrian Burgos, question the benefits of maintaining the barrio as a spatial category of

16 Introduction

analy­sis for understanding Latinx urban culture and identity. They worry that similar to how the ghetto influences perceptions of blacks regardless of where they live, attention to barrios reproduces racialized assumptions of where bodies of color are located.46 While taking ­great care to state that they do not intend “to suggest a notion of ‘post-­barrio’ that jettisons the barrio concept completely,” the authors’ overarching argument assumes that the study of barrios has been exhausted, and that the spatial entity itself is a solid concept.47 Instead of the barrio, the editors promote thinking of Latinx urban community formation through a transnational framework of analy­sis and social variables, such as gender, sexuality, citizenship, and popu­lar culture.48 As they explain, “The notion of moving ‘beyond el barrio,’ therefore, is a reminder to Latina/o Studies (as well as to other) scholars to be attuned to how new social and spatial relations beyond the acad­emy create new ways of knowing and being that can challenge the assumptions, questions, and frameworks we employ in our scholarly work.”49 ­These are, without a doubt, well-­intentioned efforts to advance scholarship about Latinxs in cities, but the urge to move beyond the barrio may lose sight of how barrios over the twentieth c­ entury have lingered in spatial imaginaries, policy discourse, and design practice. As urban planner David Diaz writes about late twentieth-­century urban planning, “the cultural impact of el barrio has superseded its historic center and is at the precipice of influencing urban society more broadly.”50 Rather than eschewing a barrio category, Abstract Barrios proposes a fourth line that examines how brokers consider the barrio to be a generative, cultural, and aesthetic object of contemplation, inspiration, and angst with the potential to shape additional—­abstract—­urban formations, subjectivities, and cultures. Contributing to and expanding on research that links Latinx identity with grounded barrios, h ­ ere I ask: What kinds of subject formations and cultures does the barrio create when it is not just a spatial context but a cultural force? How does the barrio influence brokers’ inclusion and exclusion of Latinx urban culture in landscapes? By their very impulse to represent, brokers seem to obey the rules of “barriology”—­that which Villa describes as a culturally affirmative engagement with the barrio.51 But by brokering the barrio for mainstream audiences, they are distancing their repre­sen­ta­tions from the very sites of their inspiration. As such, they point to vari­ous degrees and politics of an affirmative “barriological” practice. For some brokers, especially ­those who are new to the barrio, social distancing translates to what Frances Aparicio and Susana Chávez-­Silverman describe as a hegemonic “tropicalization,” a pro­cess analogous to an “ori-

Introduction

17

entalism” that, recalling Edward Said, is an outsider’s top-­down, colonial repre­sen­ta­tion of the Global South.52 In an examination of the Harlem Re­nais­sance as a site of US imperial influence, Fiona I. B. Ngô observes the impact of orientalism on ethnically marked urban space. Ngô writes that “orientalisms made the distant proximate, the national intimate, and the domestic foreign.”53 The simultaneous distancing from and intimate desire for the barrio that the broker with roots in the barrio—­the “native” broker—­experiences can lead to “self-­tropicalization,” an internalization and self-­expression of colonial repre­sen­ta­tions of the racialized “other.”54 Other brokers who exhibit an affinity for and understanding of the barrio may pull away—­culturally or socially—­from the barrio to engage with normative and top-­down forms of urban culture that are unrelated to Latinx repre­sen­ta­tions.55 Intimacy and distance coexist in brokering. Attending to this dynamic reveals the politics of brokering the barrio. Brokers unsettle assumptions that categorize creative work associated with barrios as a bottom-up, community expression. I argue that it is impor­tant to maintain the racialized and classed aspects of the US barrio as a category of analy­sis to make sense of brokers’ distancing. ­Doing so allows us to question and interpret the meanings, associations, and values involved in abstractions and to scrutinize the degree to which the barrio continues to shape Latinx belonging and visibility in cities.

The Chapters Henry Muñoz’s abstractions and the prob­lem they ­were designed to solve have historical pre­ce­dent. They also have con­temporary parallels. The book is or­ga­nized chronologically to underscore the enduring appeal of t­ hese aesthetic strategies and the per­sis­tent crisis of Latinx belonging they are meant to appease. Chapter 1 focuses on the earliest example my research uncovered: postwar brokers on the Lower East Side who diverted from a dominant narrative that described Puerto Rican mi­grants and their emerging barrio concentrations in the 1940s and 1950s as the “prob­lem” facing a modernizing New York City. To alleviate concerns about the social unrest and decaying built environment that the “prob­lem” was thought to cause, urban planners, interior designers, Henry Street Settlement workers, architects, retail executives, and policy makers promoted idealized versions of au­then­tic Puerto Rican culture in the interior design of newly erected public housing. Their ideas landed on the desks of New York City’s art and

18 Introduction

design elite. ­These “solutions” ­were aesthetic diversions that looked away from the barrios emerging nearby and looked t­ oward transnational professional networks between Puerto Rico and New York to find an urban design deemed appropriate for facilitating mi­grant assimilation to New York City. In the following de­cade, the 1960s, pseudoscientific discourse remade the crisis of Latinx belonging and described it as a “culture of poverty.” By this time, barrios in New York City and elsewhere in the United States ­were more established and the crisis they represented seemed increasingly insurmountable. Chapter 2 examines the colorful abstractions that distract from this growing pessimism, beginning with visual and literary texts, including the film West Side Story and Oscar Lewis’s book La Vida, that document New York City barrios of the era. I examine how social scientists, journalists, realtors, and other urbanists abstracted bright color from Puerto Rican–­majority barrio contexts and used it as a device with which to modernize, humanize, and domesticate Latinxs in urban space, all the while risking the reproduction of racialized and stigmatizing narratives of poverty. I then use a wide array of visual sources from fashion, art, and lit­er­a­ture, in addition to other more obviously spatial sources, to contextualize midcentury texts in a short history of brightly colored Latinidad. Bright color paradoxically barrioizes—­renders Latinxs knowable and links them to poor spaces in the United States—­and proposes a symbolic distance from barrios. The former aspect limits the spatiality of bright color while the latter aspect of color makes Latinidad redeemable and appreciable among a wide audience across class and ethnoracial differences. Color is one mode through which Latinx urban culture gains the privilege of visual and interpretative aesthetic abstraction, albeit not the same privilege long mobilized by white color experts in art, design, and architecture to create modern expressions unlike the mimetic repre­sen­ta­tion of natu­ral and man-­made environments. Bright colors linked to Latinxs exist in a circumscribed space. To examine the power relations of color, I end the chapter with a history of colonization that deployed color as a way to racially other and render knowable and digestible foreign populations and environments that ­were other­wise considered too strange and threatening. A similar logic of color informs brokers’ abstractions, including ­those more recently evident in the neo­co­lo­nial spaces of gentrification. This chapter’s analy­sis of color is the foundation for understanding one of the main abstractions evident in the book. In chapter 3, colorful abstraction appears at the largest scale examined in this book: Santa Ana, California, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the out-­ migration of white homeowners to suburbs, known as “white flight,” and a

Introduction

19

si­mul­ta­neously growing Mexican barrioization set the stage for urban crisis. At the center of this crisis was Santa Ana’s urban identity and the issue of which population—­white or Latinx—­could best sustain it. Santa Ana’s brokers turned to Tijuana, Mexico, to alleviate anx­i­eties over local barrio formation—­what policy makers at dif­f er­ent times referred to as a “menace” or “cancer”—­with a transnationally inspired abstract Latinization. I use interviews, archival research, and visual analy­sis of the built environment to examine the result of their brokering: a colorful, four-­block wide “Fiesta Marketplace” in the city’s downtown. I make sense of how business ­owners and government officials managed to place this development downtown in the 1980s, when the city was the po­liti­cal center of conservative Orange County. Colorful Fiesta camouflaged a white revanchism intended to maintain control of downtown and distance Santa Ana from its growing barrios. Local Mexicans grew to love and identify with Fiesta and the larger Fourth Street on which it sat, nurturing the idea that this place subverted white dominance. As gentrification-­focused revitalization began to replace Fiesta’s Mexican-­themed decor and the businesses that catered to low-­income residents, however, white revanchism asserted itself and revealed the precarity ­ ere of a brokered Latinization.56 Thus, though Latinx consumers of Fiesta w initially thought to alleviate the economic losses of white flight, enthusiasm for white gentrifiers showed the long-­standing perception of white subjects as ideal actors of urbanism. By naming whites as the agents of crisis, white flight also foreshadowed their return as the ultimate solution to said crisis. Chapter 3 thus shows how a brokered Latinization is a temporary solution, one that is conditional to white residential trends. This is a pattern that brokers themselves can change if they ally with local barrio residents and foreground their socioeconomic needs and culture of place. And yet it is true that even power­ful brokers are not always f­ ree to act upon the built environment as they would like or in ways that maximize the participation of low-­income residents. Chapter 4 examines three high-­ profile brokers who, despite their elite networks, face challenges when trying to include barrio spatialities and cultures in the white-­dominant fields of urban design. This chapter relies on interviews with developer and former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud) Henry Cisneros; Henry Muñoz, the designer discussed at the beginning of this introduction; and urban planner James Rojas. T ­ hese brokers are in dialogue with the repre­sen­ta­tional politics of Chicana/o activism of the 1960s and 1970s but they are active in the 1990s and the following de­cade, a neoliberal period that saw a rise in the use of diversity mea­sures as a

20 Introduction

progressive solution to the still meager incorporation of Latinxs. “Crisis,” as a descriptor for an ethnoracial group or urban decline, was largely absent at this time. Yet as Latinxs continued to face discrimination and exclusion due to culturally insensitive and impoverishing policies, as well as the lingering effects of historical oppression and exclusion from institutions and positions of power, spatially concentrated Latinx poverty remained at the center of concerns over urban decline. The brokers modernizing and promoting Latinized environments ­were sanguine that they could have an impact, in part b­ ecause years of a multicultural ethos promulgated in educational sectors made it seem that more cultural inclusion and repre­ sen­ta­tion of p ­ eople of color could redress negative views about Latinxs. But “more” continued to mean a mediated, managed diversity similar to that pre­sent since the 1950s (at least in this book) and sometimes, in the case of Cisneros, with an explicit commercial purpose. The nominal antiracist position of mid-­twentieth-­century racial liberalism had given way to a “neoliberal multiculturalism” that commodified the cultural contributions of ­people of color while still drawing lines dividing supposedly worthy and unworthy populations and their spaces.57 The barrio in East Harlem, for example, as Dávila shows, became a space of possibility for a multicultural neoliberal practice while remaining a stigmatized site.58 The brokers in this chapter tout barrios for their brightly colored, dense, pedestrian-­oriented, street-­centered, and family-­focused spaces and insist on their relevance to the development of US cities and the design professions where dominant ideas of “good” urbanism ignore, if not devalue, Latinxs and their urban culture. Unlike other brokers discussed in this book, brokers ­here exhibit an affinity for the barrio that values and frames the marginal. Although categorizing Latinx culture and subjects as avant-­garde is an understandable response to the marginalization of ­people of color, it is a solution that may accentuate the prob­lem of underrepre­sen­ta­tion it seeks to solve. I examine how t­ hese brokers’ reliance on owner­ship of or access to property underscores the socioeconomic and racial disparity of a Latinized expression. Chapter 5 returns to the site with which the book began—my hometown, Union City, New Jersey. This chapter focuses on Latinx business ­owners and city officials and how their abstractions disavow low-­income Latinxs in order to appeal to gentrifiers. This chapter takes head-on a reoccurring yet heretofore latent theme of this book—­the socioeconomic differences that brokers negotiate and sometimes aggravate. The chapter raises the question of ­whether brokering, as discussed throughout the book, is but another name for gentrification. Union City has a long history of avoiding low-­income

Introduction

21

barrio formation and its negative associations. Midcentury policy makers curbed the city’s economic decline by resettling Cuban exiles and favoring middle-­class Cubans with access to property. The cultural expressions and spatial visibility of subsequent arrivals of low-­income Latinx immigrants have been policed to attract wealthier newcomers. Revitalization programs have more recently built consent around a taste for normative exteriors on the main commercial ave­nue in an effort to support gentrification. Meanwhile, interiors are colorfully painted and commemorations of dead Latin American figures pepper marginal streets of the city. Brokers arrange for this kind of Latinization thinking that even as they appeal to a potential influx of wealthier outsiders, they must manifest Latinx inclusion. This chapter closes by thinking about phi­los­o­pher Henri Lefebvre’s description of “abstract space” as a death-­dealing pro­cess to consider how the city’s dead Latin American figures, at first glance a contrast to ethnicity-­depleting gentrification, point to an aggravated loss of Latinx urban visibility.59 The book closes with a coda that considers the latest high-­profile moment in the longue durée of crisis, its Latinized solutions, and the visibility produced. In t­ hese last pages I look at the bright-­pink “Prison-­Wall” design for the southwest border that circulated in 2017 as a response to the Donald Trump administration’s call for increased security to fend off an immigration crisis of its own making. Never to be built, the “Prison-­Wall” is a hyperbolized example of the brokered barrio discussed in this book. In its capacity as an urban imaginary, it magnifies the dangers and benefits of abstraction. ­Here I explore what is at stake in the diminishment of low-­income barrios and the concomitant cultural pro­cess of abstraction. If Latinx belonging in place is in perpetual crisis, are we moving into a ­future where abstract barrios rather than place-­based barrios are the norm, as the title of this book suggests? What kind of vision does abstraction encourage and how can it more purposefully contribute to ­actual Latinx belonging in cities?

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One Design for the “Puerto Rican Prob­lem”

In postwar New York City, just as urban elites and the media described Puerto Rican migration as the “Puerto Rican prob­lem,” an invitation to the unveiling of a Puerto Rican–­themed mural in the newly opened La Guardia public ­houses on the Lower East Side was sent to editors at prestigious art and architecture journals and magazines. Many of the editors oversaw publications that promoted modern art and design, the latter often described, presumptuously so, as “good design.”1 Douglas Haskell, editor of Architectural Forum (where Jane Jacobs, well-­known critic of modern public housing, was associate editor); Emerson Goble, editor of Architectural Rec­ord; Thomas H. Creighton, editor of Progressive Architecture; Vivian Campbell Stoll of the art department at Life Magazine; Alexander Elliott, the art news editor at Time; John Entenza, a champion of modernism and editor of Arts and Architecture; and numerous other editors at Art News, Art in Amer­i­ca, Pictures on Exhibit, ­ ere invited. Keen on attracting not The Studio, Look, and the New Yorker w only cultural elites but also New York City– and San Juan–­based Spanish­and English-­language newspapers, the Henry Street Settlement, which had administered the contest that chose the mural, also invited El Diario de Nueva York, the New York Times, the Puerto Rican workers’ newspaper Justicia, La Voz Hispana, La Prensa, the San Juan desk of the United Press International, El Imparcial of San Juan, Station wwrl, New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, and New York World-­Telegram and Sun.2 Helen Hall, director of the Henry Street Settlement, envisioned the 29 × 5.5 foot mural, depicting Puerto Ricans side by side with Eu­ro­pean

24 Chapter One

immigrants of the Lower East Side, as countering the negative portrayal that the so-­called Puerto Rican prob­lem presented. In a letter requesting partial sponsorship from the Batsheva de Rothschild Foundation, Hall explains the mural’s significance. The Lower East Side is so historical and significant in the history of the United States, that we would like to have our old and new neighbors think of it in that way, seeing themselves fall into line with the rest of Amer­i­ca. We started with Indians, Dutch, En­glish, Irish, Germans, Italians, Jewish and now our newest folk are the Puerto Ricans. We felt that seeing all our ancestors taking their place among with the newest neighbors would not only give status to the last comers, but perhaps mitigate some of the hostilities with which they are greeted.3 The “hostilities” Hall mentions stemmed from Eu­ro­pean American residents of the Lower East Side who, besides exhibiting the usual skepticism and coldness reserved for impoverished newcomers from unfamiliar ethnic groups, racialized Puerto Ricans as a supposedly foreign group and located them on the lowest rung of the social order. Residents of Eu­ro­pean descent had long inhabited a Lower East Side disregarded as an immigrant slum. By the 1950s, they w ­ ere fi­nally seeing a glimmer of hope in the modernity that postwar urban renewal and mass consumption promised. Puerto Rican social and cultural differences ­were thought of as a threat to Eu­ro­pean immigrant assimilation, mobility, and urban improvement. As early as the 1920s, journalists, politicians, ethnographers, and social workers circulated the concept of the “Puerto Rican prob­lem” to give shape to Eu­ro­pean American misgivings and xenophobia about mi­grants entering Manhattan and Brooklyn. Over the course of three de­cades of Puerto Rican migration, some aspects of the “prob­lem” took on more importance than o­ thers. On the list of concerns was racial ambiguity (Puerto Ricans’ multiple categorization as white, black, and mestizo), increasing tuberculosis and typhoid infections, gang vio­lence, welfare de­pen­dency, radical left politics, high birth rates, and low English-­language proficiency. By the 1940s and 1950s, the looming specter of reslumming New York City’s long-­standing low-­income immigrant neighborhoods was also ascribed to Puerto Ricans and used to define the “prob­lem.” The “prob­lem” not only put u ­ nder question the ability of new Puerto Rican arrivals to “adapt” or “adjust” to their new urban environment; it betrayed a preoccupation with an antithesis of assimilation—­barrioization—or the congealing in place of Puerto Rican difference.

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25

Before and concurrent to the “Puerto Rican prob­lem” ­there was a pattern of describing new populations settling in cities as prob­lems. Historian William Deverell writes that the “Mexican prob­lem” in the 1910s was part of “the popu­lar pseudoscientific argot of the day.”4 Anglo observers in the 1910s, and more so in the 1920s and 1930s, regarded immigrants fleeing the Mexican Revolution and entering Los Angeles, Pasadena, and other US cities as the “Mexican prob­lem.”5 Appearing even e­ arlier on what could be called a chronology of classifying populations as a “prob­lem” was the “slavery prob­lem,” which historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad writes “became the negro prob­lem” when African Americans migrated, postemancipation, to developing urban centers in the North.6 While the “Italian prob­lem” and the “Irish prob­lem” w ­ ere also used in the late nineteenth c­ entury to point to the respective differences of ­these immigrant groups when compared to Anglo-­whites, out of ­these so-­called prob­lems the most enduring in academic lit­er­a­ture and public discourse ­were ­those linked to African Americans and Latinxs living in cities.7 This long fixation with “prob­lem” rhe­toric made belonging to cities formidable but not impossible for ­people of color. ­After all, the word prob­lem invokes its corollary, a solution. T ­ hese solutions, however, sometimes merely set circumscribed modes of belonging that failed to secure full membership or equitable inclusion in the city. Hall, for instance, saw the mural as a way of creating, at the very least, repre­sen­ta­tional parity for Puerto Ricans in the built environment. Picturing Puerto Ricans “fall into line with the rest of Amer­i­ca” was also a way to reassure skeptics of the impor­tant role that public housing played in the pro­cess of Americanizing populations. It made sense, then, to want the city’s cultural authorities at the unveiling, pre­sent to witness and report on the work that the city, along with the settlement, was ­doing to change a public debate that had for so long treated Puerto Rican mi­grants as deficient urban subjects. The mural was the settlement’s opportunity to show a brokered Puerto Rican barrio, an urban environment that, with the help of the city’s housing authority, offered sanitized spaces for mainstream consumption and approval. The urban contours of the “Puerto Rican prob­lem” in the late 1940s and 1950s became vis­i­ble when New York City saw peak in-­migration of Puerto Ricans, out-­migration of whites to nearby suburbs, and the many social and cultural upheavals that resulted from major urban renewal proj­ects that razed tenements to build new modern public housing.8 ­These population shifts and spatial reconfigurations put the city’s poorest areas, lagging as they purportedly ­were b­ ehind the city’s modernization, ­under scrutiny. The

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pool of experts who discussed the “prob­lem” also crafted myriad solutions, some social in nature, and ­others with the built environment in mind. Among the latter “brokers” who ­were thinking of solutions ­were social workers from the Henry Street Settlement, policy makers, architects, and urban planners who envisioned a ­future in which Puerto Ricans and their culture ­were a contribution, not a detriment, to the city. In ­doing so, however, ­these brokers also revealed anx­i­eties over the barrios forming in New York City’s low-­income neighborhoods, specifically the nascent Loisaida, as the Lower East Side would become known in Spanglish. While the “prob­lem” shows up frequently in histories of Puerto Rican migration to the urban North, scholars have rarely linked this rhe­toric to the built environment. The activities of the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side offer an opportunity to explore this link. Brokers working for the Henry Street Settlement selectively abstracted from Puerto Rican urban cultures both in New York City and Puerto Rico to create a Puerto Rican–­themed mural as well as a model apartment in the newly built La Guardia Houses on the Lower East Side. T ­ hese cultural productions tangentially mobilized numerous other experts whose work in the settlement movement, public housing, and the rarified fields of design, urban planning, and architecture was crucial in shaping modern New York City. By d ­ oing so, t­ hese brokers sought to legitimize low-­income Puerto Rican mi­grants who ­were deemed inadequate and deficient in a modernizing postwar city. This impulse is consistent with how brokers since that postwar period have attempted to Latinize built environments without overtly representing the visual unpredictability and sociospatial messiness of barrios. But this impulse also particularly highlights how even before Puerto Rican ­people and culture congealed into place—­a barrio—­its impending occurrence was enough to catalyze alternative forms of Latinizing urban space.

Deficient Urbanites and the “Puerto Rican Prob­lem” as Urban Regression For some experts, the “prob­lem” was an intractable mode of being. They wrote of a Puerto Rican urban culture that was distinct from the urban life and culture s­ haped by working-­class whites and Euro-­American immigrants and numerous housing laws that sought to modernize the built environment.9 As relative newcomers in long-­standing immigrant neighborhoods, Puerto Ricans ­were not seen as contributors to urban moder-

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nity. Instead, they ­were described as backward and unmodern, far from the city’s repre­sen­ta­tion as the capital of modern culture and life. Other experts sympathetic to the plight of Puerto Ricans thought the “prob­lem” was temporal. Instead of characterizing Puerto Ricans as unmodern, t­ hese experts saw them as not being modern yet. Heads of Puerto Rican–­serving agencies, social scientists, and social workers at city settlement h ­ ouses drew parallels between the trou­bles Puerto Ricans and ­earlier Eu­ro­pean immigrants faced and suggested that it was only a m ­ atter of time, a passing of generations perhaps, when Puerto Ricans would adapt to the city in the way prior immigrants had. This was a strained narrative of parity, one that neglected Puerto Ricans’ nonimmigrant status as statutory citizens since the Jones Act of 1917 and their experience as racialized subjects who would encounter prejudices Eu­ro­pean immigrants would not.10 This hopeful narrative of Puerto Rican adaptation and pro­gress seemed to be the justification some experts needed to hone in on ways for thinking through and minimizing the “prob­lem.” For t­ hese experts, differences in adaptation between Puerto Ricans and Eu­ro­pean immigrants ­were not solely about time of arrival but more importantly about Puerto Rican culture, its origins in a “Latin” background, and its manifestation in urban space. Prob­lems and solutions thus pivoted around cultural repre­sen­ta­tions. The Migration Division of the Puerto Rican Department of ­Labor, the main agency tasked with the goal of facilitating Puerto Rican migration to and settlement in New York City, sought to prevent negative perceptions of Puerto Ricans.11 Its 1948 report, “The Puerto Ricans of New York City,” for example, was a guidebook for teachers, judges, doctors, and social workers, “the professional persons” who, according to Manuel Cabranes, the first director of the agency, interacted in “any way with the New York Puerto Rican Community.”12 Cabranes believed that “a thorough reading ­will help anyone understand the background of the Puerto Rican mi­grant. Social workers and all interested ­people ­will want to read it carefully and keep it on hand for reference. They may then transmit their understanding, as occasion arises, so that it may eventually pervade the ­whole community.” Clarence Se­nior, who prepared the report, also encouraged the dissemination of the report’s findings to c­ ounter simplistic ideas circulating among demographers who saw Puerto Rico as nothing more than an overcrowded island in the Ca­rib­bean. Puerto Rico, Se­nior wrote, “is not only a space with ­people on it; the ­people have a history.” While conceding that 40 ­percent of ­those living in Puerto Rican cities resided in “slums,” Se­nior—­keeping with classist and racist arguments of what counts as the proud heritage of Latin

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Amer­i­ca—­emphasized the Spanish-­centric and upper-­class aesthetic markers and romanticized rural housing as uniquely characteristic of a Puerto Rican built environment. He wrote that the “Spanish-­oriented section of the upper class of the island displays wrought-­iron gates and fences and mudejar tiles,” thereby foregrounding architectural contributions to the “Iberian peninsula by the Moors during the seven centuries they helped build the glory that was Spain.” He added that ­houses ranging “from crude bird-­like huts to mansions furnished with all the con­ve­nience of modern living” could be found in Puerto Rico.13 Se­nior’s desire to prove t­ here was more to Puerto Ricans than their dense living quarters, more to them than being passive subjects of urbanization in Puerto Rico, was curious considering that during his tenure he advanced an overpopulation discourse to justify modernization programs on the island.14 In fact, four years ­later he would outright argue that migration was the only way to relieve what he saw as the “population prob­lem” in Puerto Rico.15 Importantly, he would also note that the government’s policy was to encourage mi­grant dispersion on the mainland.16 He was thus aware of how easily the overpopulation argument could be transposed onto Puerto Rican settlements in New York City. When directing his gaze at New York’s Puerto Ricans, in the 1948 report, the tribulations of city life and the urban environment that predated mi­grant arrivals w ­ ere of utmost importance. They w ­ ere determining ­factors that created a vulnerable experience for low-­ income Puerto Ricans in the city. Density, which Se­nior had initially dismissed as too narrow of a focus, was l­ ater in the report of g­ reat consequence to mi­grants: “The population density of 628 per square mile in the mi­grant’s island is ­great in the setting of its economy, but he is utterly unprepared for the 85,905 persons per square mile on the island of Manhattan.”17 As leading government appointees working to facilitate Puerto Rican migration and settlement, it made sense that Se­nior and Cabranes tried to set the rec­ord straight on ­whether Puerto Rican mi­grants ­were responsible for the reslummification of the city. By underlining the power preexisting crowding and dilapidated housing conditions had over the psyche and physical well-­being of new arrivals, they engendered a more sympathetic public outlook to Puerto Rican mi­grants’ precarious situation. Moreover, understanding Puerto Ricans as victims of urban forces rendered Cabranes’s and Se­nior’s respective government jobs, assisting ­these very constituents, especially relevant and necessary. By 1951, when Se­nior replaced Cabranes as the new director of the Migration Division, a surge of federal money reenergized the agency’s mission to help mi­grants in the continental United

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States with employment, housing, and health ­matters. As funding and the expectations for the agency grew, Se­nior and the success of the Mi­grant Division depended on Puerto Rican mi­grants needing help. For this reason it seems that, despite admitting that the terrible conditions Puerto Ricans encountered w ­ ere not of their own making, Se­nior, like many of his contemporaries, concluded that Puerto Ricans ­were unready for life in the metropolis. He was not casting blame on Puerto Ricans, but he was allowing for difference, an apparent cultural deviation, that made adaptation to New York difficult. Se­nior highlighted the dissonance Puerto Ricans experienced once they arrived and noted that for mi­grants, “the small shop in the old home becomes in the new city a plant with hundreds or thousands of workers, the short bus ­ride turns into the nightmare of the subway juggernaut packed with humanity to each of whom life seems to depend on getting into a par­tic­u­lar car.” Se­nior wrote of the difficult transitions his team of social scientists saw Puerto Ricans endure, “the handicap of knowing l­ ittle En­glish, of coming from a culture which stressed enjoying life through poetry, ­music and dancing rather than the accumulation of money by hard work, conscientiousness, promptness, dependability, and toadying up to the foreman.” Conjuring long-­held distinctions between Spanish and En­glish colonial regimes, Se­nior sought to explain that a Spanish way of life, inherited over centuries of colonial domination, left Puerto Ricans unprepared for modern life in New York.18 Public expressions of sexuality offered more evidence of Puerto Ricans’ susceptibility to the new urban environment. “New York is for many Puerto Ricans a means of escape from rigid moral standards,” wrote Se­nior. It is a place where “Puerto Rican men and w ­ omen hold hands, embrace and even kiss each other in public without shame” and where “a ­woman who has had experience outside of a l­egal marriage does not have as much trou­ble in finding a man who is willing to marry her.”19 Corrupted by the metropolis, mi­grants, and especially Puerto Rican w ­ omen, ­were allowing their sexuality ­free rein and risking their virtues. Already at a disadvantage by not meeting expectations for a decent urban life (ascribed to Anglo-­Americans), Se­nior suggested that promiscuous activity would render Puerto Ricans even more prone to racialization and occupying a lower status in the city. House­keeping, and the w ­ omen who did much of this work, was yet another ominous sign that Puerto Rican adaptability would not come easily. In Puerto Rico, Se­nior wrote, “the w ­ ater which comes from the faucet is warm enough to overlook the advantage of hot w ­ ater, as a quicker and more hygienic mea­sure. Soot does not accumulate as quickly in the woodwork,

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the sun can bleach the washed clothes nicely. Garbage thrown out of the win­dow can even fertilize the soil in the yard, used for planting flowers, and the menace to health does not become as obvious as when living in a crowded tenement.”20 In New York City this way of life, which was in many occasions a rural life, was deemed troubling. Regarding Puerto Ricans, Samuel Frant, the New York City deputy health commissioner in 1947, noted, “We must educate them in the simplest rules of health, to wash a­ fter the toilet, to cover the garbage, not to throw it out of the win­dows.”21 Puerto Rican ­women carried the weight of learning ­these new “rules” and preparing their mi­grant families for New York’s modern urban environments. If they did not comply with normative cultural and behavioral standards of modern urban living, Se­nior warned that f­ uture generations of Puerto Rican New Yorkers would have ­limited—­social and spatial—­mobility. Second-­ generation Puerto Rican New Yorkers ­will be “unable to disperse themselves into society at large” and ­will “remain in the minority status of their immigrant parents.” Worse yet, Se­nior implied, ­these second-­generation Puerto Ricans, equipped with a culture that has rendered them inadequate in their new context, ­will remain stuck in place, subject to a barrioization that ­will continue to make it so that “many Puerto Ricans inhabit the ‘rotten core’ ” of New York City.22 Echoing this sentiment, one journalist discussed the practical and cultural aspects of Puerto Rican overcrowding and concentration: “Overcrowding saves rent, and even if t­ here w ­ ere spare places to rent the Puerto Ricans might not spread out, for they are clannish. They like their own folk around them. They seem to need each other. They create a ­family situation for themselves. Generally, they do not get along well alone. In-­laws, cousins and blood relations hold together ­whether they live in one room or 10.”23 According to this way of thinking, Puerto Rican culture, not poverty and racial discrimination in the New York City rental housing market, would make barrios and their concentration of p ­ eople inevitable. By the late 1940s, Puerto Rican concentrations ­were found in several New York City neighborhoods: Morrisania in the Bronx, Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn, East Harlem, and a small but growing concentration on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.24 By 1953 one in twenty New Yorkers was Puerto Rican and the once Jewish-­majority southeast corner of the Lower East Side was the site of “Puerto Rican ­children playing on the sidewalks, Spanish names on the stores, a Spanish travel agency, Catholic stores selling religious emblems” showing, according to the Henry Street Settlement, that “Puerto Ricans ­were a growing ele­ment in the tenement buildings to the south of us.”25 This section of the Lower East Side was

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teeming with tenements and (since its zoning as a low-­income housing area in 1939) public housing. Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood tended to be younger, have more c­ hildren, and garner less income than their Jew­ ere almost twice as likely as their Eu­ro­ ish neighbors.26 Puerto Ricans w pean neighbors in tenement buildings to share a toilet in the hall and live without heat. The settlement’s 1953 report, which was based on interviews with 497 ­house­holds living on twelve linear blocks of tenements in the neighborhood, revealed that while 80 ­percent of Puerto Ricans liked the neighborhood, young and married Jewish families complained that Puerto Ricans w ­ ere noisy and rowdy, and that their c­ hildren’s low En­glish proficiency stagnated other students’ development in the classroom.27 Long-­ standing residents worried that, by moving in, Puerto Ricans w ­ ere setting the “clock back” on the Lower East Side, making it what it once was when low-­income Eu­ro­pean immigrants dominated the area. One interviewee said, “I know it was this way before but every­thing settled down and got civilized.”28 For sure, ­there had been changes to the area since the turn-­of-­ the-­century arrival of low-­income Southern and Eastern Eu­ro­pe­ans into the area. The Johnson-­Reed Act of 1924 ebbed immigration flows from ­these parts of Eu­rope and its effects ­were, by the 1950s, seen in the urban life of the area. Demographic changes led low-­income Eu­ro­pean Americans to regard themselves as having surpassed the physical determinism of the slums that projected physical slum characteristics onto residents. Living in a rapidly modernizing city, residents in tenements ­adopted the belief that they too w ­ ere on a set path of modern pro­gress, and as such they must be living in a community better than what their immigrant parents and grandparents had called home. Even if per­sis­tent decay and landlords’ housing violations made their slice of New York City less modern in form than the new international style reshaping the skyline in other areas of the city, tenants of the neighborhood perceived themselves to be a better, more assimilated group. They believed incoming Puerto Ricans and their be­hav­ior ­were putting at risk the social and cultural gains they had made. Puerto Ricans’ cultural characteristics and lifestyles, which according to social workers at the Henry Street Settlement “appear[ed] to stem from their Latin origin” in Spain, aggravated the belief that they would reslum the Lower East Side. As one social worker noted, “so far as the interviewers could judge, neighboring families go to bed e­ arlier and prob­ably entertain more quietly than t­ hese less socially inhibited p ­ eople of Latin descent.”29 In using “prob­ably” to describe the lifestyle of non–­Puerto Ricans, the author makes it clear that they are presuming a cultural chasm between Puerto

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Ricans and non–­Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood. A July 1953 New York Post article found among the possessions of Henry Street Settlement workers describes how Puerto Ricans, who “already constitute one out of 20 New Yorkers,” are “changing neighborhoods.” “Pulsating Latin tunes blare from their radios. They gather on the stoops and sidewalks” b­ ecause, the Post wrote, “back home, every­one lives ‘outdoors.’ ” 30 Like Se­nior, social workers at the settlement w ­ ere in search of an origin story to explain why Puerto Rican culture produced a dif­fer­ent urbanism, and they found it in a Spanish colonial past and “Latin” cultural excess. Throughout the 1950s, encouraged by the creation of the “Urban Renewal Program” ­under Title 1 of the 1949 Housing Act, the city underwent intense and expansive public construction that displaced thousands of p ­ eople living in tenements and exacerbated cultural explanations for poverty. For some experts, displacement was a necessary but temporary evil, paving the way for a ­future of modern affordable housing for families in need. For notorious urban technocrat Robert Moses, urban renewal was a l­ egal tool for dispersing undesirable populations.31 Critics saw urban renewal as a government-­abetted dispossession of low-­income ­people of color from their communities, a pro­cess they alternatively dubbed “Negro removal” or “Puerto Rican removal.” 32 Puerto Ricans who w ­ ere not re­housed in the newly built public housing developments seemed caught in an inevitable cycle of transience. O ­ thers had no choice but to rent from landlords demanding exorbitant rents and sometimes bribes for apartments in alarming disrepair. The housing shortage caused by slum-­ clearance proj­ects made housing a landlord’s market. Desperate, Puerto Ricans ­were compelled to inhabit deplorable housing. Experts observed the wretched environments that many low-­income Puerto Ricans had no other alternative but to call home and drew from it evidence that Puerto Ricans needed to acquire a set of skills and be­hav­iors in order to improve their living conditions. Rarely focusing on proposals to change urban policy and land-­use management, ­these experts honed in on educating low-­income Puerto Rican mi­grants to solve the “prob­lem.” Even Charles Abrams, whose classic 1955 article for Commentary magazine forcefully critiqued “slum clearance” and defended the right of Puerto Ricans to migrate to the continental United States and be treated as “fellow citizens,” offered a condescending solution to the “prob­lem.” In his capacity as New York State rent administrator, Abrams wrote that “preparation for the new conditions they ­will meet on the mainland, would speed their settlement and adjustment.” 33 In a letter agreeing with Abrams, commissioner of the

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Department of Housing and Buildings of New York City Bernard J. Gillroy surmised that when Puerto Ricans “learn the benefits of better living conditions, they ­will not be exploited and ­will not create slum conditions.” 34 ­These discourses on the “prob­lem” proved Puerto Ricans doubly dispossessed, first of a physical home and secondly of urban cultural know-­how. In the late 1950s, when Puerto Ricans began to enter public housing in force, anx­i­eties regarding their cultural impact on the built environment began to shift from the tenements and onto the publicly funded modernist buildings. At stake was the very mission of public-­assisted housing, the extent to which government was responsible for the environments low-­ income individuals inhabited, and the very worthiness of public housing tenants. Settlement workers, at the Henry Street Settlement and elsewhere, ­were aware of the tendency to blame Puerto Ricans for the city’s deteriorating housing conditions and sensitive to how this would affect the building of f­ uture public housing whose development the settlement movement had long supported. A Henry Street Settlement study, planned together with the New York School of Social Work and concerning the tenant population living in the newly built La Guardia Houses on the Lower East Side, stated that “public housing has been u ­ nder severe public attack.” The authors had heard some say that “families moving into t­ hese proj­ects have wantonly and purposefully defaced, destroyed, and in innumerable ways set about to make of the new housing a duplicate of the slums from whence they came.”35 While the authors did not specify the ethnic and racial identity of the tenants, by 1960 Puerto Ricans represented 48 ­percent of the tenant population at La Guardia Houses and, as such, w ­ ere the likely targets of such complaints.36 Settlement staff would play a significant role in investigating and even diminishing worries about the “prob­lem.” As a primary contact for both tenants and government agencies, settlement workers w ­ ere uniquely situated to gather data on low-­income Puerto Rican tenants, interpret the conditions they faced in the city, and work with tenants to help craft ­future plans for the neighborhood. Though tenant and settlement worker collaboration was often the premise of such work, it was nonetheless social workers interpreting the data and making sense of the low-­income communities to which many only belonged by virtue of their jobs. Without minimizing the impor­tant role settlement workers played in nurturing leaders for Latinx civil rights strug­g les in New York, which historian Sonia Song-­Ha Lee documents, it is also clear that like Se­nior and Cabranes, and ­others working in the myriad agencies and organ­izations devoted to the “prob­lem” and its impact on the urban life and built environment of New York, settlement

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workers came to depend on a characterization of Puerto Ricans as derelict to buttress their profession.37 If the settlement movement was rightly perceived to have reached its “nadir ­after World War II,” then sustaining its relevance to the changing demographics in New York City was crucial.38 Social workers needed to work on social prob­lems. In conflating the blight of the environment with p ­ eople, they helped produce a version of the “prob­ lem,” namely one of Puerto Ricans as deficient, if not abject, urban subjects responsible for New York City’s urban regression. By arguing that Puerto Rican mi­grants w ­ ere lacking urban modernity, settlement workers and other actors created the very impetus necessary to devise solutions. Highlighting social workers’ reliance on constructing Puerto Ricans as lacking modernity is more than a cynical criticism of social work. I draw attention to social workers’ desire to pathologize individuals and render them useless, inadequate, and in need of the expertise of professionals ­because it shows the extent to which experts w ­ ere active in creating the conditions they sought to fix. ­There ­were other ways to help Puerto Ricans that did not involve characterizing them in such a poor light. And yet, ­because rendering them culturally deficient was demonstrably dif­fer­ent from blaming Puerto Ricans for New York’s housing trou­bles or advocating for their resettlement out of the city—as some policy makers did—­experts who took it upon themselves to redress the “prob­lem” could reassure themselves of their liberal values. However, b­ ecause their rhetorical paternalism proposed to provide Puerto Ricans with the gift of new urban life skills while debasing their current skills, they articulated the contradictions of a liberal tradition and maintained the existing power structure that benefited whites. This was a preestablished pattern in settlement work. Early twentieth-­ century settlements and their mostly white w ­ omen leaders had established multiple forms of ser­vice and offered vari­ous skills necessary to assist southern and eastern Eu­ro­pean immigrants in New York City. While the plight of immigrants stirred the empathy of settlement workers, African Americans, on the other hand, most of whom w ­ ere native-­born to the United States, w ­ ere largely segregated in African American–­serving settlement ­houses.39 The Henry Street Settlement, ­under the leadership of its founder, Lillian Wald, a Jewish ­woman who advocated for African American civil rights, somewhat followed this pattern.40 In the 1910s, the settlement established a branch, named Lincoln House, in the black-­majority San Juan Hill neighborhood that would eventually be razed to build public housing and Lincoln Center in the late 1950s.41 Lincoln House employed both white and black workers. According to Wald, it was started a­ fter a

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“race ­woman,” a black w ­ oman who sought to uplift the marginalized black community, “almost challenged” her in 1906 to “face their prob­lem,” that is, the “negro prob­lem.”42 Though it is unclear if the settlement’s separate black branch was the result of an ideological belief in segregation or the consequence of segregated spaces producing race-­specific settlements, the fragility of the proposed goal of adaptation among settlement workers was exposed. By participating in this segregation, the settlement was helping ­people adapt to the status quo of the city—­a segregated city. By the 1950s, however, Puerto Ricans, who w ­ ere not immigrants but a racialized minority citizen body whose twentieth-­century experiences paralleled in many ways that of black New Yorkers, attracted the attention of settlement h ­ ouses in New York.43 Cultural excess and difference—­some of it consciously performed by speaking Spanish even if they could speak English—­would make Puerto Ricans appear foreign, as an immigrant group that did not inflame the specter of slavery that haunted white-­black relations. As such, Puerto Ricans, including dark-­skinned Puerto Ricans, w ­ ere seen as worthy of settlement workers’ assistance. By treating Puerto Ricans as newcomers akin to immigrants in all but l­ egal status, settlement workers ­were continuing a trend of prioritizing the “foreign” newcomer over the marginalized native-­born long ago established by their professional pre­de­ ces­sors. Thus, when the Henry Street Settlement opened its doors on the Lower East Side to Puerto Ricans and began to coordinate programming and events to cater to this population, it was not a complete shift from its segregationist past—if only b­ ecause dominant discourse of the time did not equate Puerto Ricans’ arrival in the city, nor their belonging to the nation, with that of African Americans. Rather, by invoking their transnational ties, Puerto Ricans, as Frances Negrón-­Muntaner, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Chloé Georas note, w ­ ere “racialized O ­ thers of a dif­fer­ent kind.”44 Puerto Rican urban life and be­hav­ior was a slightly more familiar “prob­lem” for settlement workers than that of African Americans. Experts, including settlement workers, revealed that while unhealthy, unsanitary, unsafe, and crowded housing conditions—­the basic ele­ments defining a slum—­were crucial terms formulating the “prob­lem,” at issue was more than the so-­called slum. ­After all, some non–­Puerto Rican residents w ­ ere also dealing with similar conditions, yet Puerto Ricans w ­ ere disproportionately targeted as offenders. The “prob­lem” rested on the culture ascribed to Puerto Rican mi­grants. Ironically, the “solution” would partly lie in Puerto Rican culture too, as long as this culture could be culled from its purported source of origin: Puerto Rico.

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The “Tropical Laboratory”: A Transnational Solution to “the Prob­lem” A July 1953 New York Post article exclaimed: “This prob­lem was not imported ­ ere responding to allegations that from Puerto Rico.”45 The authors w mi­grants in New York ­were reproducing the slums they had known in Puerto Rico. Instead, the article directed blame at the failure of local ­agencies to enforce housing laws. In ­doing so, the article spoke to a growing sentiment that not all Puerto Rican urban practice was bad, that instead context was key to evaluating Puerto Rican urban culture. Along ­those lines, Puerto Rican be­hav­ior and culture might be abject, even alarming, in the streets of New York, but it was not always so in Puerto Rico. Some believed that urban life and culture in Puerto Rico could have lessons to offer urban planners, technocrats, and community leaders working with Puerto Rican mi­grants in New York. Throughout the 1950s, settlement workers, social workers, u ­ nion organizers, policy makers, and journalists visited Puerto Rico to learn about the customs and places of origin of their new neighbors. Some traveled to learn innovative urban planning methods and modes of community organ­ization from Puerto Rican experts. In this way, just as the discourse around the housing trou­bles of the “prob­lem” in New York City escalated, a counternarrative arose that framed Puerto Rico as a valuable, generative site that could produce new ideas to solve the “prob­lem” in New York. Advocates of the island’s massive mid-­twentieth-­century industrialization or­ga­nized and facilitated many of the visits to Puerto Rico. Operación Manos a la Obra (Operation Bootstrap), a number of initiatives that Puerto Rico’s governor Luis Muñoz Marín began in the late 1940s, drew the most attention and led some journalists and experts to proclaim the arrival of a new, more just era in Puerto Rico. Speaking of Muñoz Marín’s efforts, the July 1953 New York Post article identified Puerto Rico as a “tropical laboratory” for development, “a model for the world.” Muñoz Marín, the article noted, told visitors that “Puerto Rico is the ‘House of Amer­ic­ a’ where the two cultures of the hemi­sphere are always at home” and where innovative methods are being devised to combat poverty. Critiques of Operation Bootstrap, the ways it diminished u ­ nion power and used tax abatements and exemptions to lure industry that failed to stay long enough to ensure long-­ term benefits, rarely entered such celebratory rhe­toric, nor did it seem to affect the stream of visitors e­ ager to learn about Puerto Rico’s so-­called suc-

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cess.46 By 1954 the Planning Board of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, in cooperation with the United States Housing and Home Finance Agency, touted having seen in just four years more than one thousand guests from seventy countries enter the island to study urban planning, public administration, housing, and sanitation, among other subjects.47 Settlement workers whose neighborhoods saw a rise in Puerto Rican residents w ­ ere among t­ hose flying to Puerto Rico. In April 1955, the director of the Henry Street Settlement, Helen Hall, visited Puerto Rico for ten days. Prior to her departure, Hall wrote to Mary Antoinette Cannon, who had two years e­ arlier conducted the first social workers’ workshop in Puerto Rico with a group from the New York City Department of Welfare, and said, “I am looking forward to the trip even though it is so short, for I have wanted to go ­there for a long time. Our work with Puerto Ricans ­here has grown greatly, and is so very rewarding.”48 Hall stayed at the Caribe Hilton, built just six years prior. Featured in several news articles and magazines for its innovative use of “tropical modernism,” a combination of design and fine arts in the “international style” and “tropical” sensibilities, the h ­ otel nonetheless exhibited, according to architectural historian Luz Marie Rodriguez, a refusal to engage with a Puerto Ricanness outside its US formulation.49 In its emphasis on abstracted tropical culture, the ­hotel evinced the limits of the “tropical laboratory,” namely the ways in which the repre­sen­ta­tional difference of Puerto Rico was regulated to satisfy tourist desires of the other and the modern aspirations of pro-­Americanizing elites on the island. The polished culture to which Hall was exposed to at the Caribe Hilton echoed her interactions with experts who, like the aesthetics of the building, offered an image of Puerto Rico molded to and subordinate to the imperatives of the metropole. Before leaving New York, Hall also wrote to Clarence Se­nior, who in turn was e­ ager to put her in contact with his colleagues in Puerto Rico, Fred Wale, director of the División de Educación de la Comunidad (divedco, Division of Community Education); and Luis Rivera Santos, director of the Social Programs Administration in Santurce and the head of the self-­help housing program. In a letter to Wale, Se­nior wrote about Hall: “She is one of the best friends the Puerto Ricans have in New York City and she is all a glow about an opportunity she now has to see the home environment of the Puerto Rican mi­grant.”50 To Rivera Santos, Se­nior asked that he “help Miss Hall get an idea of the tremendous ­things which are being done in the Island, among which is your own program which is attracting worldwide attention, aided self-­help housing. Anything you can do to help Miss Hall

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see Puerto Rico in proper perspective and understand the programs which are part of ‘Operation Bootstrap’ ­will be deeply appreciated.”51 Self-­help housing resonated with Hall, who recognized a similar ethos in ­earlier New Deal programs on the mainland.52 Started in 1949, self-­help housing provided low-­income Puerto Ricans skills and tools to replace rural straw huts, wooden h ­ ouses, and ramshackle dwellings in slums.53 It was one of the more popu­lar programs luring mainland experts to Puerto Rico and was particularly lauded for succeeding at organ­izing community members and convincing them to volunteer their time to build each h ­ ouse.54 Government workers reassured the population that they ­were acting in a new “spirit,” one in which government had “faith in the p ­ eople” and what they could accomplish as a community.55 Both self-­help housing and Puerto Rico’s divedco w ­ ere seen as examples of the island’s modernization and ­were used to announce Puerto Rico’s new image ­under the administration of Muñoz Marín. The Planning Board of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico envisioned lofty goals for self-­help housing and described it as a Puerto Rican contribution to the global “improvement of demo­cratic pro­ cesses, in the solution of serious economic prob­lems, and in the raising of living standards.” In the eyes of Puerto Rican government officials, self-­help housing made Puerto Rico “a training center for students from all over the world,” and the attention it was receiving was a sign of the colony’s uplifted position vis-­à-­vis the metropole.56 While for some the colony became the metropole’s showpiece, for ­others self-­help housing had double-­edged implications. Geographer Rod Burgess was critical of self-­help housing and saw it as ­little more than an “effective po­liti­cal and social palliative” and a cost-­saving tool.57 Scholar Alyosha Goldstein writes that in Puerto Rico, “self-­help ideology offered the possibility of working” in an economic context devastated by colonialism and crippled by low public expenditures.58 Though self-­help was sold to the Puerto Rican public as empowerment, it was also a con­ve­nient way of freeing the state from some of its responsibility by putting surplus ­labor to work to build a modern Puerto Rico. Even though self-­help housing would not be replicated in its exact form in New York City, its top-­down mission of fostering self-­reliance was evident in ­future settlement programs with Puerto Ricans in the city.59 On her trip, Hall raked in a number of visits with members of the Partido Popu­lar Democrático (ppd, Popu­lar Demo­cratic Party) to which Luis Muñoz Marín belonged, including San Juan mayor Felisa Rincón de Gautier and her ­sister and city man­ag­er of San Juan, Josefina Rincón Mar-

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rero. Se­nior also advised Hall to visit Muñoz Marín’s wife, Doña Ines, who can “make it pos­si­ble for Miss Hall to meet ­people in the rural areas and in the towns who are still in the very places from which your Puerto Ricans in NY come.” For years, ppd officials, including Muñoz Marín and Rincón de Gautier, had cultivated a relationship with the liberal establishment of New York City to promote Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status. The ppd framed Puerto Ricans as both Puerto Rican and worthy US citizens at the expense of marginalizing radical compatriots who w ­ ere in ­favor of a decolonized Puerto Rico. Hall’s visit was yet another step in the development of a transnational liberal partnership between Puerto Rico and New York City that deployed an expert’s heavy hand to shape urban belonging for Puerto Rican mi­grants in New York City. Transnational connections between experts continued through the 1950s. A few months a­ fter Hall’s visit, Ralph and Ruth Tefferteller, both of whom held several positions during their nearly twenty years at the Henry Street Settlement (1946–67), flew to Puerto Rico as representatives of the settlement. The objective of the ­couple’s trip was to get to know the issues affecting Puerto Ricans on the island and how ­these may follow mi­grants as they s­ ettle in New York. Hall contacted Fred Wale; Celestina Zalduondo, director of Public Welfare in Puerto Rico; Margarita Higuera, director of the Department of ­Labor, Puerto Rico Employment Ser­vice; Mayor Felisa Rincón de Gautier; Josefina Rincón Marrero; and Luis Rivera Santos, asking them to meet the Teffertellers. ­After meeting with the Teffertellers, Higuera wrote to Hall: “I am sure, nevertheless, that their stay in Puerto Rico has been a useful one and they have learned a ­great deal about the prob­lems and ways of living of Puerto Ricans.” Government leaders, notably Se­nior and Cabranes, encouraged transnational understandings that looked t­ oward Puerto Rico for au­then­tic culture, explanations for mi­grants’ way of life, and ideas to help Puerto Rican mi­grants cope with their new environments and facilitate their modernization. As Puerto Rico gained a reputation as the “house of the Amer­ i­cas” and a “tropical laboratory” of urbanism, it ­shaped how Puerto Rican cultural excess in New York City was perceived, making it seem more like an issue in need of curbing rather than erasing for full assimilation into Anglo-­America.60 This back and forth between Puerto Rico and New York would convince brokers, including settlement workers, of the need for Puerto Rican cultural representation—­albeit one regulated by experts—in New York City’s modernizing built environment.

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Designing for Puerto Rican Tenants in Public Housing At the peak of Puerto Rican migration to New York City and the emergence of a Puerto Rican barrio identity on the Lower East Side, several proj­ ects and ideas arose to represent Puerto Ricans in the built environment. Settlement workers, in par­tic­u­lar, ­were e­ ager to patronize Puerto Rican culture but found that to do so they would have to negotiate the developing modernist landscape of the time. Planners, architects, magazine editors, retail executives, and journalists publicized and elaborated on settlement workers’ ideas and ­were, thus, also intermediaries between a Puerto Rican culture deemed foreign and even unassimilable and a new environment deemed homogenous and monotonous but key to urban pro­gress. T ­ hese brokers of low-­income Puerto Rican New York and their emerging barrios, as well as new modern sites, sought to bring order to the urban commotion in which they found themselves. They did so through design, by attending to the aesthetics of the built environment, and by turning to Puerto Rico for inspiration. The Henry Street Settlement had a long history of working to ease poverty on the Lower East Side and advocating on behalf of the neighborhood’s impoverished residents before elite po­liti­cal and philanthropic circles. In addition to carry­ing out the settlement movement’s pro-­assimilation antipoverty work begun in the racially segregated progressive period, settlement workers in a postwar climate took on the charge of helping modernize a racially diverse Lower East Side. It was up to ­these workers to realize the ideals inherited from early twentieth-­century social reformers, such as the Henry Street Settlement’s founder, Lillian Wald, who believed that eradicating tenements through slum clearance proj­ects and building new modern housing developments would lead to social pro­gress. Moreover, settlement workers of the postwar era had a more immediate legacy to live up to. The settlement had successfully lobbied for low-­income public housing in the 1930s and staved off a gentrification driven by “high-­class development” on the Lower East Side.61 Guaranteeing the success of public housing, specifically in terms of tenant permanency and public image, would not come easy. First, not all ­those living in tenements perceived public housing as an improvement and thus w ­ ere reluctant to move, and o­ thers who did move left quickly, creating high vacancy rates.62 Concerns over intake and transience morphed in the late 1950s into classed and racial-

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ized concerns about the suitability of an increasingly Puerto Rican tenant population. To mitigate growing opposition to public housing, settlement workers provided homemaking lessons to tenants and steered them t­ oward modern ways of living. In ­doing so, settlement workers ensured the longevity of a multi-­agency, decade-­long advocacy that laid the groundwork for public housing and in the pro­cess also positioned themselves as regulators of moral values, purveyors of middle-­class culture and be­hav­ior, and legislators of taste and appropriate Puerto Rican culture. Settlement workers first refined their unique role as brokers of culture with the white tenants who moved into the public housing of the New Deal era. How they did so illuminates much of the settlement’s subsequent involvement with Puerto Rican tenants on the midcentury Lower East Side. Vladeck Houses in the southeast section of the Lower East Side, often considered the “worst slum in the city,” was the first housing development built on the ashes of slum clearance and in cooperation with funds from municipal government and the federal government’s housing program.63 ­Because it was at the forefront of this new financial model, the success of Vladeck Houses could set a pre­ce­dent for f­ uture slum-­clearance public housing construction. To ensure the development’s viability, housing man­ ag­ers prioritized tenants whose salaries ­were slightly higher than that of most tenement dwellers. Settlement workers, e­ ager to assist new tenants in their transition from tenements and to public housing, focused their attention on home furnishings. A division of the Federal Art Proj­ect of the Works Pro­gress Administration (wpa), known as the Interior Design Staff, had initiated similar proj­ects in the late 1930s at the Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn, Red Hook Houses, and Queensbridge Houses in Queens. But unlike the wpa’s interior design work, settlement workers communicated a sense of urgency for interior design plans and warned of social consequences when discussing their design proj­ects for public housing. One concern among settlement workers was the predatory installment buying to which many local tenants fell prey. Settlement staff addressed this concern by increasing consumer education outreach and promoting the settlement’s credit u ­ nion. The integrity of tenants’ furniture was another concern. Hall explained that the settlement workers “knew that most families would ­really need some new furniture when they moved into the new homes.” Most of the families moving out of the old tenements had never had a living room before. Besides, as she recounted one tenant saying, the “old furniture ­wouldn’t last to move across the street.”64 To tackle this issue, the Henry Street Settlement established the Home Planning Workshops,

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where staff supplied instruction and tools without charge to families who brought their own materials and wanted to make new or refurbish old furniture.65 The settlement’s interest in furniture was institutionalized within the New York City Housing Authority (nycha). ­After tenants met with Vladeck’s management to receive their apartment assignments, they would be relayed to the Home Planning staff, who would inform them of the ser­ vices available at the workshops.66 Settlement workers also disseminated a brochure inviting tenants from Vladeck and “old law” tenements to visit the Home Planning Workshops. Once at the workshops, tenants would receive “help in the furnishing and management of a new home” (figure 1.1). Dean Fausett, a young American painter who would ­later go on to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship and paint the portraits of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, provided guidance in drape design.67 The New York Herald Tribune praised the Henry Street Settlement for bringing “the art of interior decoration within the means of the tenement dweller” and observed that the tenants “transformed the dilapidated assortment into a bright, cheerful room decorated in s­ imple, modern style.” As if to preempt accusations that settlement workers w ­ ere taking part in aesthetic moralizing, the Herald explained that “the proj­ect directors do not try to dictate styles to” tenants, “but they do encourage them to scrape off gingerbread encrustations,” the decor that epitomized the excess of Victorian wooden furniture, “and remodel in the s­ imple, modern style, a style that is easy to keep clean and is well adapted to apartments” (figure 1.2). According to Esther Wolkofsky, a local tenant, “the Home Planning Proj­ect is a course in interior decorating. The purpose for this activity is to teach the less fortunate class how to make their home more modern and attractive. . . . . Old furniture can be remodeled and made to look as if [sic] ­were new. Every­one is eligible to join and take advantage of ­these classes. . . . ​You have no idea how much life and color the furniture has given to my home.”68 Clearly, though research on modernist public housing has mostly focused on exteriors, in the early stage of public housing construction, apartment interiors also attracted attention. Local and national newspapers and magazines advertised the workshops and the San Francisco Housing Association commended the work of the Henry Street Settlement in Vladeck.69 The Citizens Housing Council of New York (now the Citizens Housing and Planning Council) went so far as to recommend that the Department of Welfare “make furniture replacements when necessary so that their clients may make adequate use of new apartments.”70 The Welfare Council of New York City, a coordinating center for hundreds of

Figure 1.1  ~  A Henry Street Settlement brochure advertising a model apartment in the newly built Vladeck Houses, 1939. Courtesy of Henry Street Settlement and Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

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Figure 1.2  ~  Left: A Lower East Side resident is encouraged to modernize furniture by removing gingerbread decorations, 1940. Right: A “model room” furnished by the Henry Street Settlement demonstrates the preferred clean, modern style at the center of redevelopment ideas, 1940. The Henry Street Settlement played a key role in extending the modernist aesthetic of high-­rise urban renewal into low-­income interiors. “Henry Street Settlement Teaches East Siders to Refurbish Homes,” New York Herald Tribune, February 4, 1940. Courtesy of Henry Street Settlement and Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

private and public agencies in the field of social work, observed that the popularity of the workshops at Vladeck could be partly explained by the fact that “lots of Henry Street families think you have to possess a complete new set of furniture to qualify for occupancy.” 71 Their assumptions spoke to the stringent evaluation pro­cess to which potential and existing tenants ­were subjected. Several historians note that tenant se­lection in the early to mid-­twentieth ­century tended to ­favor “worthy” white heteronormative, two-­parent families that could prove adaptable to more modern environments and willing to prevent new apartments from becoming yet another “slum.” 72 Housing man­ag­ers would regularly visit tenants to ensure compliance and cleanliness ­after residents ­were granted an apartment. In effect, Vladeck’s tenants became what urban historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom describes as “model tenants.” 73 In addition to pressure from nycha, ­there was a palpable desire to start fresh in slum-­clearance sites, to match the modern architecture of public

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housing with the decor of new apartment interiors. The chief architect of Vladeck was Richmond Harold Shreve of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Architecture Firm, the designers of the Empire State Building, the most vis­i­ble marker of New York City’s rise as a thriving, preeminently modern, urban center.74 While the sober, functional brick exterior of Vladeck Houses differed greatly from the art deco style of the Empire State, in the context of the Lower East Side and in the eyes of nycha, Vladeck Houses pointed to a similar change in the built environment—­a move t­ oward the new and the modern. To confirm public housing’s improved stature over and beyond that of tenement environments, and in an attempt to continue providing local families with the culture necessary to avoid fomenting slums, the settlement took its aesthetic instruction to another level—­one that the Interior Design Staff of the wpa discussed but had not been able to materialize—by opening the first model apartment in Vladeck Houses in the summer of 1940 and a second in January 1941.75 As a result, “model tenants” got model apartments with rooms furnished in affordable modern furniture and carefully laid out to teach tenants how to maximize space. The model apartment’s existence in public housing was a curious occurrence since most model units w ­ ere located in commercial spaces. Historian William Leach writes that model rooms ­were popu­lar in 1920s New York City department stores, a trend he partly traces to the 1924 opening of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, in an expanse of sixteen period rooms, American antiques w ­ ere exhibited in “au­then­tic colonial settings” devoid of the ­labor and racial contexts that had given shape to t­ hese settings.76 Like its museum counterpart, model rooms of early twentieth-­century department stores promoted “ideal homes,” settings that showed consumers how they could stake their belonging in a white, exclusionary culture. In its department store iteration, the model room brought together vari­ous consumer goods to create a compelling narrative, an aspirational milieu so enticing the customer would want to purchase and re-­create it at home. Suburbanization in the 1950s further precipitated the use of model units to “stage” an ideal way of life. Interiors ­were furnished and showcased to sell property in a market flooded with housing supply and white home mortgage ­owners fleeing cities.77 The under­lying reason for model apartments in public housing was not so clear cut. Was the point to sell the goods on display? To inculcate good tastes among a low-­income immigrant or second-­generation population? To promote cleanliness and thus maintain the value of public property? To help the new tenants feel they belonged to an Amer­i­ca increasingly defined by a

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mainstream white identity and culture and a burgeoning housing market? In effect, to make them feel like nominal buyers of housing, while in actuality being recipients of public housing assistance? The settlement’s postwar model units in public housing offer vari­ous answers to t­ hese questions. One of the most impor­tant adherents of the model unit approach was Karin Peterfy, a Danish designer who began working at the Henry Street Settlement in 1942. She is largely absent in the rec­ords of the settlement, yet attention to design and its role in making public housing amenable to tenants, including Puerto Ricans, was strongest during her nearly two de­cades of working t­ here. In par­tic­u­lar, Peterfy stands out for her user-­driven approach to design, an interest shared by Hall. Almost ten years prior to Hall witnessing self-­help proj­ects in Puerto Rico, Hall and Peterfy described the Home Planning Workshops as “self-­help units” through which the less privileged would acquire training and equipment to make do in a city where “the smallest ser­vice is bought and paid for” and where they, “therefore, e­ ither pay or do without ser­vices which with some training and equipment would cost them nothing but a ­little time.” Besides assisting with the making of furniture, Hall and Peterfy wrote that the workshop, ­under the expert supervision of settlement workers moonlighting as designers and artists, “develops the creative faculties and enhances leisure time” of local populations.78 The settlement prioritized the work of tenants in the making of their public housing environment while also acknowledging the role of experts (figure 1.3). Discussing one of Peterfy’s major accomplishments at Vladeck Houses—­the “Kitchen of Tomorrow,” a model kitchen that addressed the impracticalities of conventional, male-­dominated kitchen design—­a settlement press release in 1946 noted that “voluntary” expert collaborators for the kitchen’s design ranged “from editors of ­women’s pages of the New York press, from the domestic science departments of New York universities, the United States Federal Housing Authorities and from architects and engineers.” 79 Editors from Ladies Home Journal and McCall’s magazine, agents from nycha and the Federal Public Housing Authority, the Jewish Educational Alliance, and Persia Campbell, a professor at Queens College and advocate of consumer rights of low-­income groups, ­were invited to the unveiling of the kitchen. William Lescaze, a modernist architect who designed Williamsburg Houses, and nyc radio host Mary Margaret McBride, the “First Lady of Radio” whose show reached millions of listeners, w ­ ere guests of honor. “But,” insisted Hall, “back of them have been 150 ­house­keepers living in Vladeck ­houses, who have shares in [the model kitchen] from the start, and whose experience has gone into changes which

Figure 1.3  ~  Barbara Joseph, drawing of “A Kitchen for Low-­Income Housing,” March 12, 1946. This blueprint for a kitchen redesign for public housing apartments is an early example of the Henry Street Settlement’s commitment to including residents and their ideas in interior decor. Courtesy of Henry Street Settlement and Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

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­ ill meet their needs more deftly—­and that without increasing the cost of w construction or maintenance. T ­ hese neighbors of ours are the real exhibitors, with Karin Peterfy,” who is “the prime designer of the new model, and the or­ga­nizer of this pro­cess of reaching a collective ‘­recipe’ among so many cooks.”80 Indeed, during the year and a half that it took to complete the kitchen design, Peterfy put a participatory ethos into practice whereby local tenement dwellers and public housing tenants became “practical critics.”81 While working on the model kitchen, tenants joined an assemblage of state, retail, private and public housing, and nonprofit actors, designers, and other cultural experts. Together they made public housing a laboratory for new ideas that could be replicated and commodified. “The hope,” explained settlement leaders in their press release for the model kitchen, “is that the demonstration ­will prove of value to the architects of new large scale housing developments, public and private. And also to builders of low cost detached ­houses in the suburbs.” By 1956 “plans ­were sent upon request all over the country for private as well as public building.” 82 Thus, the model unit allowed designers to learn from and capitalize on low-­income and middle-­income tenants, most of whom w ­ ere white. The kitchen’s “ventilated broom closet” especially resonated with the built-­in-­closets, cabinetry, and storage systems that, as architectural historian Dianne Harris writes, w ­ ere “central to the construction of white, middle-­class American identities” in the 1950s and 1960s.83 By the late 1940s, the ethnic and racial composition of New York City was shifting and along with it the tenant population of public housing. Between 1940 and 1950, the black population in the city grew by 63 ­percent and the Puerto Rican population grew by 200 ­percent.84 Incoming Puerto Ricans, having been largely described as unprepared for New York’s urban life and culture, w ­ ere not readily thought of as “practical critics” or, in general, collaborators. Nonetheless, t­ here was an acknowl­edgment that Puerto Ricans too could fashion their environments in ways acceptable to normative society. Referring to her experience with Puerto Ricans in East Harlem in the late 1940s, a social worker in East Harlem noted: “When I was newer in this field and first began g­ oing into the Puerto Rican flats, I was disturbed that they did not use sheets, u ­ ntil I realized that I was judging them by our standards. They did not have sheets on their beds in Puerto Rico, so they felt no lack in not having them up ­here. Nevertheless, they are quite resourceful in putting a ­little place together. In no time at all they manage to have a front-­room suite.”85 In the ensuing de­cade, Henry Street Settlement work-

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ers would reflect a similar belief that Puerto Ricans could adapt to the city by filling their supposed lack of modernity with furnishings. In 1955, in anticipation of the completion of La Guardia Houses—­the newest sign of modernity in the neighborhood located just three blocks away from Vladeck Houses—­Hall wrote to nycha to ask if the settlement could assem­ble a model apartment in the new h ­ ouses. Hall had visited Puerto Rico a few months ­earlier, looking at self-­help housing that, like the model units, encouraged tenant participation in design. Unlike Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico who ­were building ­houses, however, mi­grants in New York ­were entering a top-­down public housing where their contribution was relegated to abstracted interiors managed by experts. In her letter, Hall assured nycha, as if to persuade them, that the Henry Street Settlement had Spanish-­language speakers to oversee the proj­ect and staff the apartment.86 Her letter appealed to a nycha that understood the importance of catering to a rising Puerto Rican population. In a time when “white flight” to the suburbs and slum-­ clearance-­led displacement had forced or influenced most of the white population, with the exception of el­derly Jews, to leave the Lower East Side, Puerto Ricans ­were becoming the likely tenants of public housing. Within two months of their proposal, Peterfy and Hall ­were making plans to decorate the model apartment. This time, instead of relying exclusively on the workshop for furnishings, they availed themselves of leading philanthropists in the retail industry. A ­ fter receiving permission from nycha to seek out “institutions or agencies of a non-­profit nature to furnish model apartments,” Hall busied herself with looking for the ideal department store to ask for donations. She first reached out to the president of Macy’s department store in New York, but her request seems to have gone unanswered.87 Sachs Quality Stores, a family-­owned, Jewish chain store with multiple locations in the New York metro area, including the Bronx and Newark, New Jersey, agreed to donate. Sachs’s leadership was aware of the city’s demographic changes. Several top players in the com­pany held posts on local organ­izations that put them in contact with Puerto Ricans and the decision makers grappling with the so-­called prob­lem. Philip H. Michaels, l­ awyer, philanthropist, and vice president of Sachs Quality Stores in the 1950s, had two years prior to Hall’s request publicly praised the arrival of Puerto Ricans in New York City. “I believe that New York has benefitted by their coming,” Michaels said. “They bring additional skills to us. The men have mechanical aptitude and the ­women have skill in needlework. Puerto Ricans do well in the

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ser­vice groups, which always need newcomers.”88 Michaels’s pro–­Puerto Rican stance coincided with that of his colleagues on the Puerto Rican serving organ­izations of which he was a part, including the Melrose Settlement House in the South Bronx, where he was trea­surer, and the Mayor’s Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs, a committee formed by Mayor William O’Dwyer.89 Michaels’s numerous positions in welfare and community groups in the city ­were in tune with his idea that “a department store can be a community’s living room.”90 He received awards from Jewish, black, and Puerto Rican communities in the city for trying to bridge retail with urgent social issues.91 In 1954 Richard Sachs, the new vice president of Sachs and grand­son of the com­pany’s founder, visited Puerto Rico as part of a del­e­ga­tion that sought “to learn what attitudes about race and color Puerto Ricans may take with them to New York and what attitudes are brought about as a result of the mainland culture.” The purpose was to prevent a pos­si­ble “explosion” and “ ‘serious friction’ between Negroes and Puerto Ricans” due to “a tightening of the job market and the continued crisis in housing.”92 Cosponsored by the Migration Division and the Urban League of Greater New York, the mainland del­e­ga­tion was received by Puerto Rico governor Luis Muñoz-­ Marín and met with government officials, educators, and business and l­ abor leaders, and visited factories, housing proj­ects, schools, and farms. Working to appease the “prob­lem” throughout the 1950s allowed Sachs’s leadership to cement the com­pany’s long-­standing, influential role in public debates about interracial relations and community development. The com­pany’s e­ arlier commitments to the issue of race in the public realm included its 1946 appointment of former councilmember Gertrude Weil Klein to head the com­pany’s developing community program, which aspired to “meet the prob­lems of the vari­ous communities in which its stores are located.”93 Sachs converted some of its stores during closing hours to “youth canteens” with the aim of deterring teenage delinquency. One such canteen welcomed African American, white, Jewish, Spanish, and Puerto Rican teen­agers without, according to Weil Klein, any “untoward incidents” occurring. ­These canteens, or social clubs, ­were thought to be particularly useful in “areas that are underprivileged and where t­ here are constant shifts in population.” In the midst of growing concern over anti-­ Semitic and antiblack hate brewing in a “congested” “trou­ble zone” of the South Bronx, Weil Klein wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in which she reminded readers of the “constructive efforts” businesses ­were making to assist local communities, and particularly highlighted the social

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benefits of youth canteens.94 The New York Age, a notable black publication known for promoting self-­help and middle-­class values, gave Sachs its imprimatur in m ­ atters of urban race relations when in 1947 it recognized Israel Sachs in an award for his efforts in the “fight against discrimination and delinquency.”95 Sachs’s leadership took a keen interest in catering to white tenants and tenants of color entering public and private, low-­income and middle-­ income housing of the postwar urban renewal era. Urban historian ­Samuel Zipp notes that in 1946 Sachs advertised its furnishings to upwardly mobile ­women moving to the controversial Stuyvesant Town. Located on the northern edge of the Lower East Side, this new proj­ect was portrayed as a “suburb in the city,” an antithesis to the city’s decaying tenements and their unadapted immigrant tenants.96 Stuyvesant Town’s developers, Met Life, had come u ­ nder fire for barring blacks (and Latinxs) from tenancy. In response to critiques over housing discrimination, Met Life ­adopted a separate but equal stance and proposed building Riverton Houses in Harlem for middle-­income black tenants, many of whom w ­ ere distinguished professionals.97 As both developments opened doors to their first tenants in 1947, Sachs, already having demonstrated an interest in social equity and ­eager to market its goods and ser­vices to consumers regardless of color, publicized its interior decorating courses (offered jointly by the Adult Education Department at City College) to “­those living in housing proj­ects, small homes and ‘prob­lem’ apartments,” including the newly moved-in residents of Riverton Houses and James Weldon Johnson Housing in East Harlem, a mixed-­race, low-­income complex.98 Sachs’s leadership’s interest in public housing was further highlighted in 1947 when Nathan Sachs, trea­surer of the com­pany and vice president of the Museum Design Proj­ect Inc., a nonprofit group of national furniture retailers, helped convince the Museum of Modern Art and its president, Nelson Rocke­fel­ler, to sponsor an international competition for low-­cost furniture design. The New York Times reported that Nathan Sachs “cited the pressing need for new furniture suitable for this city’s low-­cost housing proj­ects.” “No furniture made ­today is properly scaled for the small rooms of such buildings. . . . ​It is ­really criminal, what ­people have to buy for low-­cost homes,” Sachs said. Sachs “believes,” wrote the Times, that “the public is hungry for well-­designed furniture at prices it can afford.” 99 Henri Laugier, assistant secretary general of the United Nations in charge of social affairs, described the competition as “a proj­ect in harmony with the broader aims of the Secretariat of the United Nations in the prob­lem of

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raising the standards of living everywhere.” “This proj­ect,” declared Laugier, “shows a realization on the part of its initiators that in a rehabilitated world the machine must become a means to an end—­a means to help make life more liveable and more pleasant for the greatest pos­si­ble number of men and w ­ omen everywhere.” H ­ ere, thus, was an opportunity to fulfill modern design’s demo­cratic ethos of production for the masses—­widely upheld by many avant-­garde designers. Executive director of the Museum Design Proj­ect, Ira Hirschmann, Bloomingdale’s executive and a former attaché to Turkey u ­ nder President Franklin D. Roo­se­velt, echoed the urgency by noting that “­unless ­there is coordination between furniture and architecture, obsolete furniture ­will counteract ­every progressive step on the part of architects of homes.”100 Functional furniture that could serve dual purposes for both a bedroom and living room ­were particularly sought ­after in the competition’s call for submissions.101 Besides functionality, aesthetics w ­ ere also addressed. Hirschmann lamented the popularity of so-­called borax furniture, cheap furniture ornately covered with wood-­inlay effect meant to mimic hand-­carved wood, among lower-­income populations in his appeal for modernist design.102 While many involved in the competition, including Nathan Sachs, drew attention to the needs of low-­income tenants, the competition awarded $50,000 worth of prizes to the best furniture designed with “the man earning $75 a week” in mind, a wage that by con­temporary standards roughly equals $825 and would position a white ­family of four in 1947 above the nationwide median income.103 The median income of racialized groups that same year, groups classified as “nonwhite” by the Census of 1947, earned roughly half ($35–­$45) of that sum in a week.104 The modern designs submitted to the competition, including classics such as the Eames molded plastic chairs, ­were not for the consumption of low-­income tenants; their price tags ­were geared at the higher-­earning tenant populations of the city’s new housing proj­ects—­public and private. Installment buying, a payment plan included in Sachs’s home decor course instruction, would allow the lowest earners access to the new furniture.105 Betting on the popularity of this form of payment, Sachs stores—at the same time as the MoMA exhibited the new furniture—­laid out the new furniture in their show­ ouses.106 By 1949 Sachs’s modern rooms and lent their furniture to nycha h dual-­purpose furniture, influenced by the winning entries of the MoMA competition, appeared in the model apartment of the newly opened white and middle-­class Woodside Houses in Long Island City.107

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Considering Sachs’s leadership’s work to appease racial tensions, delinquency, and other issues feeding the “prob­lem,” and their avowed interest in catering to a community of consumers regardless of race and income, it made sense that Sachs would assist Hall when she reached out in 1955 asking to borrow furniture. Besides, by lending furniture to nycha, Sachs was in effect maximizing display space for advertising its goods. An itemized price list for furnishings hung in the model apartment.108 Store model rooms w ­ ere extending out of Sachs stores and into public and private low-­ income housing, whose residents, especially “Puerto Rican newcomers,” may not have had the chance to visit ­actual Sachs stores. Indeed, Sachs’s desire to reach both low-­income and middle-­class customers of multiple ethnoracial backgrounds during urban renewal’s reconstitution of ethnic and racial segregation in New York City’s housing landscape was not just about demonstrating its commitment to improving racial relations; it was also about staking its claim in the growing local population of consumers of color, including Puerto Ricans.109 The willingness of nycha to accommodate f­ ree advertising in its new housing coincided with a Keynesian ideology and its belief that enabling poor and low-­income p ­ eople in becoming consumers could fuel demand for goods and benefit the national economy as a w ­ hole. The suburban ideal of “purchaser as citizen” that Lizabeth Cohen describes in her history about the centrality of consumer culture to the fulfillment of citizenship in postwar suburbia, however, did not find an easy counterpart in public housing.110 While installment buying was an option, most public housing tenants did not buy the furnishings displayed in the model apartment to satisfy their own interests and prove they ­were good citizens. Instead, tenants of La Guardia used the model apartment as inspiration for making or refurbishing their own furnishings at the settlement’s workshops. A flyer translated into the Spanish language announcing the model apartment suggested that the settlement encouraged a “do it yourself ” approach: “visite el departamento modelo y tome ideas para decorar su hogar. Luego visite nuestros Talleres de Planes Domesticos, y aprenda como hacerlo ud. mismo (see the model apartment and get ideas for beautifying your own home. Then come to our Home Planning Workshops and do it yourself!)” (figure 1.4).111 Yet the Henry Street Settlement did not expect strict emulation from Puerto Rican tenants. On the contrary, the settlement was intent on understanding Puerto Rican culture and society and applying what brokers learned to the settlement’s proj­ects. To this end, trips to Puerto Rico

Figure 1.4  ~  “Departamento Modelo” flyer, 1956. Unlike the more affluent audience of model apartments in private housing, the audience of the model apartment in public housing relied on a “do it yourself ” approach. Courtesy of Henry Street Settlement and Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

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Figure 1.5  ~ Sachs Quality Stores announcing the  low-­budget model apartment it helped the Henry Street Settlement furnish. Collaboration between private business and public housing was essential to promoting the modernizing agenda of urban renewal. New York Daily News, March 10, 1956. Courtesy of Henry Street Settlement and Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

­ ere key. Presumably foreign and authentically situated in Puerto Rico, w Puerto Rican culture would be brokered by the settlement workers moving between the island of Puerto Rico and New York City, who upon their return to nyc would become emissaries of worthy Puerto Rican culture on the Lower East Side. They used what they learned in Puerto Rico to temper their judgment of Puerto Ricans’ tastes in New York City. The model apartment’s interior design reflected t­ hese aesthetic negotiations. To announce the opening of La Guardia’s model apartment, Sachs placed an ad in the New York Daily News. Referencing the Oscar-­winning 1947 film set in the Macy’s midtown-­Manhattan location, Miracle on 34th Street, the ad described the model apartment as a “Miracle on Madison Street” and encouraged anyone near the Lower East Side apartment complex to stop in and see it (figure 1.5).112 Around 1,800 ­people did. A New York Times profile marveled at how social workers took time from working on “bleak case

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histories in drab offices” to furnish the model apartment. The apartment, wrote the New York Times, intended “to guide lower-­income families, many of them Puerto Ricans, in furnishing their apartments on low bud­gets.” Faith Corrigan, the New York Times reporter covering the model apartment, had over the course of the year reported on the rising popularity of model apartments and their modish decor in private suburban and urban housing. In contrast, for the public La Guardia apartments, she wrote, “money, ­children and cultural backgrounds set the limitations in decorating the apartment.” Black iron, which was prominent in the International Low-­Cost Furniture design submissions and ­later in MoMA’s 1951 “Good Design” exhibit, was widely used in the furniture Sachs lent ­because it “can withstand the heavy wear that inevitably comes with a child in the h ­ ouse.” In addition to plastic furnishings from Sachs and local inexpensive department store Kress and Co., “bright colors, appealing to Puerto Rican taste, are used on draperies and bedspreads and in accessories. A Picasso print of a bullfight, purchased for $1, hangs on the living room wall.”113 The model apartment was a nexus where Puerto Rican culture, modern design, and the main social issues of the time converged. First, while c­ hildren’s needs ­were a leading national issue during the 1950s “baby boom” period, on the Lower East Side the issue was inextricably linked to Puerto Ricans ­because Puerto Rican birth rates ­were much higher compared to that of local whites. Second, the assuredness with which Corrigan stated a Puerto Rican predilection for bright colors is part of a greater trend whereby colonial contact and the cultural differences it produced reverberate in con­temporary US urban contexts where Latinxs clash with dominant whites. Indeed, in their attempts to include “Puerto Rican taste” in the decor of the apartment, settlement workers w ­ ere si­mul­ta­neously reinforcing Puerto Rican difference vis-­à-­vis Eu­ro­pean immigrants and second-­generation Euro-­Americans, a multicultural approach divulging cultural essentialisms. Third, flyers and pamphlets translated into the Spanish language, including an itemized price list for the model apartment’s furnishings, viewing hours for said apartment, the activities and hours of the Home Planning Workshops, and information about buying on the installment plan or using the Henry Street Settlement Credit Union, further helped attract local Puerto Ricans to the new La Guardia Houses and the Henry Street Settlement’s ser­vices.114 The model apartment in La Guardia Houses greatly stimulated workshop attendance. The total attendance of the Home Planning Workshops more than doubled to about 7,400 ­people for the year 1955–56.115 More than half of the year’s visitors came from neighborhood tenements and the rest

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from Vladeck and La Guardia Houses.116 “The Workshops,” described Peterfy, “­were buzzing with busy neighbors of all races and creeds, fixing, building and sewing every­thing imaginable for their homes.”117 “­Because the new Puerto Rican neighbors have many c­ hildren,” Peterfy added, “a nursery was started so ­mothers could set and sew with small ­children u ­ nder their eyes, cared for by 118 a nurse.” Clearly, Puerto Ricans and their specific needs ­were increasingly influencing the settlement’s programs (figures 1.6 and 1.7). Home decorating proj­ects ­were not exclusively about facilitating Puerto Rican belonging to New York City, however. Catering to Puerto Ricans and imprinting Puerto Rican culture in the built environment benefited settlement and nycha brokers in vari­ous ways. The highly regulated and mediated inclusion of Puerto Ricans in the new spaces of urban renewal eased the worries of ­those who believed new tenants ­were “about to make of the new housing a duplicate of the slums from whence they came” and the governmental actors who, in part responding to such fear-­mongering, evicted tenants and withheld funds requested for additional housing construction.119 By demonstrating the tasteful inclusion of Puerto Rican creative expression in the new modern landscape, settlement workers thought they could “guide” tenants and prevent the slummification of public housing.120 Recall that the fear of slums was linked to the “prob­lem” rhe­toric that continued to feed the ideas of New York City’s expert and residential urbanites in the late 1950s. Moreover, as the early barrio on the Lower East Side developed, planning for and teaching how to express Puerto Rican culture in the built environment was a way to manage initial barrio formation. Indeed, besides offering socioeco­nom­ically marginalized residents adequate housing and si­mul­ta­neously relieving wealthy residents from the eyesores of dilapidated tenements, public housing developed to c­ ounter the development of barrios, even if eventually racially exclusive housing policies would make public housing on the Lower East Side feel a lot like a barrio, in terms of the geographic concentration of Latinx tenants. Incorporating Puerto Rican cultural expression in the ideal ways prefigured by the model apartment could circumvent less predictable cultural expression in the interiors and exteriors of new modern housing, such as the Puerto Rican flags on win­dows and tagging on facades that in the following years would become commonplace. In training Puerto Rican locals in design skills, settlement workers and nycha inculcated a multicultural design that addressed Puerto Rican tastes without undermining the conventional expectations for proper uses of public and private spaces or the values impressed upon white tenants of Vladeck a de­cade ­earlier. As long

Figures 1.6 and 1.7  ~  Flyer announcing the Henry Street Settlement Home Workshops and inviting tenants to bring their ­children, circa 1964. Written in Spanish and En­glish, this flyer is a testament to the Lower East Side’s shift to a Spanish-­speaking tenant population. Courtesy of Henry Street Settlement and Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

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as emerging barrio culture stuck to mainstream cultures and spaces, allowing its excess to be reined by expert opinion and design knowledge, it could reverse ­those aspects of the “prob­lem” that cast Puerto Ricans as lacking in proper urban culture. In 1957, the year La Guardia Houses w ­ ere completed, the settlement once more imprinted a Puerto Rican presence in the landscape by planning for the aforementioned mural.121 Writing to Mary Car­ter Jones, a board member at the settlement, Hall outlined the import of the mural and the staffing needs to fulfill the proj­ect. Two of our most urgent needs concern the rapid changes which are taking place in our neighborhood. In the new low-­income housing development, La Guardia Houses, where we are r­ unning the community facilities, half of the eleven hundred families are Puerto Rican. A steady flow of bewildered p ­ eople come to all our doors needing interpretation and help of all kinds in their adjustment to a new neighborhood. Along with this are the old tenements all down Henry Street, including many from ­every background. H ­ ere on Henry Street the “Dragons” and other teen-­ age gangs have formed to protect themselves from the hostility of other teen­-a­ gers already living ­here. It is a turbulent situation we face each day and we are trying to deal with it in many dif­fer­ent ways, as you know. But we always come back to the need for Spanish-­speaking p ­ eople on our staff who reach through to non-­English speaking parents, as they try hard to cope with prob­lems p ­ eople in much better circumstances find difficult to solve. We would like to take on ­under the supervision of an older Spanish speaking staff member a number of young ­people of the community who could be employed some eve­nings to help new families feel themselves a part of their new neighborhood. It would be good for them and of ­great value to us.122 The Dragons, a Puerto Rican gang, was one of several ethnic and racial gangs in Manhattan in the 1950s. At the time Hall wrote to Car­ter Jones in 1957, the issue of youth delinquency was at the center of conversations about the f­ uture of New York and the “prob­lem.” Weeks prior to Hall’s letter, the play West Side Story, which its creators had once considered titling Gangland, opened on Broadway and reinforced the image of warring ethnic and racial factions in the city’s low-­income neighborhoods. Puerto Rican youth vio­lence and disaffection with society ­were central to the play, as they w ­ ere to ideas about the “prob­lem.” Hall’s suggestion that art and decor could drive Puerto Rican youth away from vio­lence and delinquency was

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thus a proposal to grapple with the “prob­lem” without having to name it. Indeed, when asked by a local newspaper if the mural could be subject to vandalism, a question likely intended to kindle a reaction to the prevailing rhe­toric of the “prob­lem,” Hall deflected and reassured the reporter that the mural would be “an integral part of the settlement’s over-­all program to stimulate esthetic interest among the residents.”123 By involving young tenants “in building beauty in the place they are to use,” Hall wanted to help them claim “a stake in the building itself,” an impor­tant imperative not just in the context of the “prob­lem” but also as public housing came ­under attack for its increased dilapidation and austere modernism. The purpose of Hall’s letter was, thus, also to celebrate Puerto Rican artistic aptitude and show how creativity could be channeled into nycha’s most pressing concerns. We find the new neighbors so creative and responsive that it is hard not to have enough staff to help them participate in this very creative part of our program. ­These are the ­things that cross all barriers of language or race or even crowded quarters. ­Here, when home is too crowded, is an opportunity to have what counts in a very special way. A fourteen year old boy who had made tiles for a column said when I asked him if he was making something for his home, “Oh no, t­ here ­ain’t room ­there and the ­children would break it anyway.”124 Creative activities, Hall found, w ­ ere a salve for racial rifts and an escape from overcrowded housing and large families with young c­ hildren. And yet, despite highlighting the importance of local participation in the artistic refashioning of the built environment, Hall—­just as she had done with the model apartments and model kitchen—­took advantage of the settlement’s extensive elite networks to make the mural a real­ity. ­Under the supervision of Henry Street Settlement art director and muralist Lilli Ann Rosenberg, MoMA’s ju­nior advisory board and publicity director got involved in the creation of the mural competition and facilitated the recruitment and appointment of Ben Shahn, a well-­regarded artist whose murals often portrayed leftist l­ abor politics; art historian Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art; and Roy Neuberger, a wealthy financier and art collector, to the jury. Within a year, Elemér Polony, a Hungarian-­born artist, was chosen to create a mural of his own design. The result was a 29 by 5.5 foot mural in the auditorium with five panels of about 160,000 bits of colored stone portraying the folklore of vari­ous ethnic groups. The Puerto Rican panel consisted of a musical ensemble of men with brimmed hats dancing and playing a

Figure 1.8  ~  Opening ceremony to unveil the mural by Elemér Polony, 1960. Left to right: Helen Hall, director of the Henry Street Settlement; Felisa Rincón de Gautier, San Juan mayor; Robert F. Wagner Jr., New York City mayor; and Elemér Polony. They stand in front of the mural section devoted to Puerto Ricans, the “newest neighbors.” “Felisa Regresa a Recibir Galardón de Ciudad Model Otorgado a S.J.,” El Diario, February 17, 1960. Courtesy of Henry Street Settlement and Social Welfare History Archives, ­University of Minnesota Libraries.

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bandurria, guitar, and accordion, and ­women wearing mantillas and shawls and clapping along to the m ­ usic, their skin shaded in vari­ous tones. Besides inviting editors of art and architecture publications, New York City and San Juan newspapers, and leaders from nycha, other settlements, local colleges, and religious organ­izations, the Henry Street Settlement asked the mayor of San Juan, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, to deliver an address at the opening ceremony for the mural (figure 1.8). In her speech, Rincón de Gautier noted that although Puerto Ricans “are not immigrants in the sense that we are not foreigners b­ ecause we are citizens of the United States, we have been the latest ones to arrive, and therefore, we need to learn and understand the ways of life in our new environment.”125 Her comment rehashed what many Puerto Rican and New York government elites alike observed, namely that Puerto Ricans ­were unprepared for New York City’s urban life and culture. And while her comment also reminded the audience of the Jones Act of 1917 that conferred US citizenship to Puerto Ricans, in expressing her admiration for Polony’s art, the mayor ultimately capitulated to the general narrative thrust of the mural and created parity with Eu­ro­pean immigrants by referring to Puerto Ricans as immigrants. Praising Polony’s talent, Rincón de Gautier noted: Only a ­great talent could picture the combined dreams, ideals and accomplishments of all the immigrants who have arrived in Manhattan for hundreds of years. Each immigrant was, and is ­today, an artist. An Artist is a man who dreams with open eyes in order to bring his dreams to real­ity. The immigrants are the artists who built this new world of ­free men: The United States. The Puerto Ricans are among the most recent immigrants to arrive in this country, and I should like to mention some of their qualities this after­noon.126 Rincón de Gautier’s willingness to flip-­flop on the immigrant classification and propose that her compatriots adapt to New York City, without discussing Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States, was unsurprising given her pro-­commonwealth stance. It had been almost a de­cade prior to the unveiling of the mural that Rincón de Gautier visited East Harlem to campaign for incumbent Demo­crat William O’Dwyer in El Barrio. Rincón de Gautier dismissed the opposing mayoral candidate, Congress Representative Vito Marcantonio of the American ­Labor Party, who championed Puerto Rican in­de­pen­dence and cultural sovereignty of the island, as a communist and played on fears of a red scare to dissuade Puerto Ricans in New York from voting for him. Well ­after O’Dwyer’s reelection, Rincón de

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Gautier continued to downplay the discrimination Puerto Ricans encountered and promoted a more palatable image of Puerto Rican settlement in New York City. Speaking to wnyc radio station in 1957, the mayor mentioned: “Puerto Ricans are not prob­lem in New York. I am pretty sure that they have wonderful opportunities h ­ ere in New York. As a m ­ atter of fact 127 they have a wonderful f­ uture h ­ ere, a brilliant f­ uture.” Three years l­ ater, at the opening ceremony at La Guardia, Rincón de Gautier stuck to this preestablished script and opined on a range of pos­si­ble Puerto Rican contributions to the urban landscape. The central theme of this after­noon’s gathering is Art and Housing, or in other words, Art and Community Life. What can be the artistic contribution of the Puerto Rican to the Housing Authority and to the City in general? I think that it has been clearly stated by one of the residents of La Guardia Proj­ect, who is the President of the Domino Club, when he referred to the Fiesta they are planning for next summer. . . . ​Juan Vanderpool said: “If we want this to be a 100% Puerto Rican cele­bration, we could hope to see a Puerto Rican Pavillion built upon the Proj­ect grounds, giving examples of our beautiful grilled win­dows and the colors of Spanish architecture with its ‘glorietas’ or Spanish closed gardens, patios, mosaicos, and arcades, ­etc. The Spanish and Puerto Ricans have an artistic sense, which, if applied to the architecture of New York City, and especially to the housing Proj­ects, could greatly alleviate monotony and dullness.”128 Rincón de Gautier’s critique of “dull” modernist housing was observable among nycha officials too. At the opening, nycha officials conceded the mural’s “beauty and color” successfully broke the monotony of modernist housing. Ira S. Robbins, vice chairman of nycha, spoke on behalf of the agency and said, “We believe that the residents and their neighbors ­will enjoy the excitement and contrast the arts can give to the often severe appearance of modern architecture,” which is “dictated partly by the economics of present-­day building and technological considerations and partly ­because” modern architecture is “favored by so many architects.” Polony’s mural was so favorably received that Robbins announced the formation of the Advisory Council on the Arts “to bring fine art into all public housing,” reasoning that “if art is appropriate in the lobbies of office buildings, it is certainly desirable in places where ­people congregate in more leisurely fashion, and where they can appreciate and be stimulated by it.”129 “Who knows,” Robbins added, “perhaps we w ­ ill find more than one potential artist among the 416,000 ­people who live in our developments.”130

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Rincón de Gautier was less vague and specifically highlighted the involvement of ­actual Puerto Ricans in the built environment, literally asking the audience to imagine a role for Puerto Rican locals in New York City’s public spaces. She identified by name Puerto Rican tenant Juan Vanderpool as a pos­si­ble contributor to the city’s landscape. In her speech, Puerto Rican residents ­were not only nameless subjects of the “prob­lem” to be spoken about; they ­were locals to speak with as they partook in solutions to the issues facing New York City at-­large. Still, like Hall and nycha, she upheld the role of professional urbanites in mediating Puerto Rican culture. In the West and Southwest of the United States, the Spanish tradition in architecture, currently being brought to the United States by the Puerto Ricans, is preserved and trea­sured. In the Urban Planning Schools of this country, special attention is being given to the study of new urban patterns, and a new focal point or axis is being sought, in order to give a more ­human scale to the modern metropolis. T ­ oday they speak of balanced communities and make careful studies of the social aspects of architectural design. The artistic contribution of the Puerto Ricans in urban planning could play a major role in the shaping of a changing New York. The work done by the Henry Street Settlement in La Guardia in discovering and exploring new methods for solving the social aspects of public housing would lend itself very well to observing the artistic potential of the Puerto Ricans and its social implications. I hope that the New York Housing Authority, which has, in its three new Commissioners, persons of creative spirit and artistic and practical sense, w ­ ill initiate this artistic and social venture jointly with the Henry Street Settlement, not only in La Guardia, but in other proj­ects throughout the city.131 Rincón de Gautier’s proposal that architecture, urban planning, and design experts take into account hispanophile Puerto Rican building styles encouraged a transnational extension of the “Spanish” style she and her ppd allies helped consolidate into the national architecture of Puerto Rico. In 1955, u ­ nder her administration, the newly created Institute of Puerto Rican Culture began a massive restoration proj­ect to beautify and revive buildings in San Juan. The colorful buildings ­were often categorized as “Spanish colonial” architecture even though they consisted of several styles, including Second Empire Baroque and High Victorian Gothic.132 Rincón de Gautier’s whitewashing of “Puerto Rican” urban culture with a Spanish heritage provided a colonial solution to the “prob­lem” in New York. This

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in turn validated the trips that Hall and other New York elites had taken to understand the so-­called prob­lem that Puerto Ricans presented. Rincón de Gautier proposed, like few had before, an extensive f­ uture for Puerto Rican culture in New York City’s landscape. Moreover, by paralleling Puerto Rican building styles to the popu­lar pseudo-­Spanish, Mediterranean aesthetic in the US Southwest, the “Spanish Fantasy Heritage” that writer and l­ awyer Carey McWilliams critiqued for subsuming a hybrid Mexican culture, Rincón de Gautier drew a wide map of a Latinx aesthetic ­ hese colonial expressions of Puerto Rican impact on the US landscape.133 T and Mexican urbanization in the United States seemed to do ­little to empower local marginalized tenants. Instead, they reassured urban elites that the supposedly unruly Puerto Rican and Mexican populations that had been primarily absorbed via colonization could be easily managed and included in modern urban development. On the day of the opening, Rincón de Gautier said, “The Puerto Ricans and the Spanish World have an artistic tradition for building beautiful towns and cities, which seems to be in their very blood” and that is why, she insisted, “they are proud of their cities.”134 The implication was clear: allowing for a hispanophile Puerto Rican imprint in the environment could rein in the “prob­lem” aspects of Puerto Rican barrioization. That Rincón de Gautier proclaimed Puerto Rican urban culture on the Lower East Side, five miles from what was already then understood to be the epicenter of Puerto Rican po­liti­cal and cultural life—­El Barrio of East Harlem—­and thus also a generative location for the “prob­lem,” was notable. It spoke to the growing significance of the Lower East Side barrio in the late 1950s, and therefore the expanding geography of Puerto Rican New York. The Spanish-­language newspaper La Prensa described Rincón de Gautier’s visit as an homage to the Lower East Side “barrio” whose population was “un ejemplo extraordinario” (an extraordinary example) of Puerto Rican leadership in the city.135 The po­liti­cal contours of this leadership ­were generally dif­fer­ent to ­those found in East Harlem. In proto-­Loisaida, Puerto Ricans had yet to become politicized as a minority, racialized group in the way El Barrio in East Harlem had been through years of radical electoral politics, strikes, and riots. Leadership development proj­ects or­ga­nized by the settlement for Puerto Rican locals in the late 1950s—­including the Mobilization for Youth proj­ect—­were regulated to avoid po­liti­cal “mili­ ere aesthetic solutions to the tancy” and radicalism.136 Interior spaces w “prob­lem” and an opportunity to mold the image of Puerto Rican Lower East Siders as “good,” adaptable, new New Yorkers.

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Abstractions ­after the “Puerto Rican Prob­lem” The “prob­lem” was a rhetorical tool for othering a mi­grant population, for highlighting mi­grants’ inability to conform and assimilate to a modernizing urban environment in the way Euro-­American urbanites ­were seemingly proving able to. The solution to the prob­lem incorporated the most assimilable ele­ments, the most essentialized and digestible forms of culture from Puerto Rico into the built environment of New York City. By the 1960s, the narrative justifying this mode of abstraction began to morph u ­ nder the pressures of the “urban crisis,” “culture of poverty,” race riots, and the entrenchment of a metropolitan racial geography that further ghettoized Puerto Ricans and blacks in the inner city. In this context, Puerto Ricans ­were seen as disaffected aggressors with ­little way out of their self-­induced poverty. One major turning point was the Harlem Riot of 1964, arguably the first Puerto Rican riot.137 Six nights of vio­lence erupted in central Harlem in response to a white police officer shooting fifteen-­year-­old James Powell, a black student from the Bronx. Thousands of ­people took to the streets, looted stores, and confronted the police.138 About a month l­ater, in September, internationally known urban planner Albert Mayer, a major proponent of large-­scale modernist public housing, inaugurated a “plaza” for the nearby Park Ave­nue Market in collaboration with local social worker Ellen Lurie.139 By November, Commissioner Albert S. Pacetta of the New York City Department of Markets proposed to close down the market, claiming it was financially unsustainable.140 In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, the Union Settlement of East Harlem, Professor Preston R. Wilcox at the Columbia University School of Social Work, and the chairman of the East Harlem Council for Community Planning defended the existence of the redesigned market, saying that this “almost all Negro and Puerto Rican” market where “tropical foods used by neighbors from the Ca­rib­bean area can be obtained . . . ​in abundance and excellent quality” was one of few neighborhood businesses the Harlem Riots of 1964 left untouched.141 The letter implied that Mayer’s redesigned market insured it against the unpredictability of an unruly, riotous population. The market, in other words, meant ­ uture, Mayer reinforced this idea, something to locals. In his book The Urgent F noting that he had succeeded in making the plaza “allegiance-­arousing,” a space that provides “emotional lift to drab areas” and makes “the glitter of the city” fi­nally available to low-­income places such as Harlem.142

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How this allegiance was won is not so easily determined. It is unclear ­whether Puerto Rican culture specifically inspired the plaza. What is known is that Mayer had previously taken an explicit interest in designing with Puerto Ricans in mind. In a 1959 memo to Hall, Jose Villegas, a gradu­ ate student at the Columbia School of Architecture who taught urban planning courses at Fordham University and served as coordinator of the settlement’s Community Center, wrote that Mayer “wants to find out how our Puerto Ricans react to his artistic ideas of the plaza competition” and had asked him to personally “comment on the design of the plaza that he is ­doing for the New York Public Housing Authority in East H ­ arlem.” Mayer wanted Villegas’s input on the then recently built East Harlem Plaza at ­Jefferson Houses, a plaza that Mayer described as a “colorful, gay place” that provided the “fiesta requirements of that area,” and Franklin Plaza at Benjamin Franklin Houses.143 Excited about his interaction, ­Villegas encouraged Hall to invite Mayer for dinner: he “needs to discover the Lower East Side and the Henry Street Settlement’s combination of art and social work. . . . ​I would like to see his ­great talents used on the Lower East Side, especially at the Henry Street Settlement, and to break this mono­ poly from East Harlem.”144 ­There is no evidence that Mayer worked on the Lower East Side or that his discussion with Villegas influenced his plaza design for the East Harlem market. Plazas ­were a common architectural typology and not exclusive to Puerto Rico. Moreover, the Spanish word plaza aside, the redesign of the market was described using Greek-­origin words: “agoras, pergolas, trees and benches.”145 Nonetheless, Mayer and Villegas’s relationship highlights just how noticeable Puerto Rican mi­grants ­were in postwar design and urban planning circles and how probable it was that the plaza was catering to Puerto Rican culture. Regardless of original intent, by the 1970s this ambiguously Latinx space was known as La Marqueta (“market” in Spanish), and the surrounding, more established, East Harlem Puerto Rican community was claiming spaces in culturally nuanced and more radical ways. Puerto Rican expressions of belonging on the Lower East Side also changed in the 1960s. No other plans to bring Puerto Rican culture to the built environment ­were made during this period, at least not from the top down. Instead, a younger generation of Puerto Ricans was developing a fierce pride in place, stronger than anything the brokers of the 1950s could have foreseen.146 By the late 1960s, the majority of the Lower East Side’s Puerto Rican population was born in New York City and many w ­ ere adopting a radical consciousness. Together with blacks, Puerto Ricans mobilized for better housing and edu-

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cation and against police brutality. ­These young Puerto Rican New Yorkers saw themselves as creating a new hybrid identity. Less interested in turning to Puerto Rico for au­then­tic culture, local youth began to embrace a once pejorative identity term, Nuyorican, and refer to the Lower East Side by its Spanish pronunciation, Loisaida. The barrio was vis­i­ble in the Puerto Rican cultural nationalism expressed on the storefronts of beauty parlors, bodegas, social clubs, restaurants, and cuchifrito stands.147 Puerto Ricans ­were taking the built environment of the Lower East Side into their own hands. They w ­ ere becoming brokers but of a dif­fer­ent kind, more inclined to partake in the grassroots politics of a marginalized minority population and less willing to let their built environments conform to the interests of the existing power structure. The next chapter examines how, despite this radical awakening, the culture of poverty and the rigid, unassimilable, and destitute Puerto Rican urbanite it described gained traction and inspired an abstraction that in addition to turning to Puerto Rico for an au­then­tic culture also took from the US barrios that ­were developing.

Two Colors and the “Culture of Poverty”

In 1957, when the musical West Side Story opened on Broadway, the dominant image of Puerto Ricans in New York City was that of the “Puerto Rican prob­lem.” As the musical toured in vari­ous cities, the idea of the “prob­lem” circulated with it. In one review, a drama critic in Dallas wrote that across the United States, audiences recognized that the musical “transposed” Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy onto “New York’s Puerto Rican prob­lem.”1 Indeed, the musical’s depiction of violent, deviant, oversexed, and maladapted urban Puerto Ricans repeated many of the central tenets of the “prob­lem” rhe­toric. But by the time the film version of the musical was released in 1961, a rhetorical transformation was underway. The “prob­lem” was being replaced with other buzzwords. Throughout the 1960s, the “culture of poverty,” first coined by anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959 and ­later elaborated in his book La Vida: A ­Family in the Culture of Poverty—­San Juan and New York, came to the fore and, by emphasizing the per­sis­tent cross-­generational be­hav­ior of low-­income Puerto Ricans, recalibrated the myriad trou­bles Puerto Ricans w ­ ere thought to pose.2 While the “prob­lem” could be solved by providing resources—to the boon of social workers and liberal politicians—­the culture of poverty and the rigid, unchanging culture it described w ­ ere widely interpreted by conservatives to mean that no amount of resources could make Puerto Ricans upwardly mobile, assimilable urbanites. Moreover, as white residents and capital left cities for suburbs, barrioization became more entrenched, making it obvious that Latinxs (and blacks) ­were not temporary residents of cities

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en route to assimilation.3 As a choice or due to discriminatory suburban housing policies, p ­ eople of color ­were staying in cities to raise families. For some, ­these communities ­were morally deficient and violent, proof that cities w ­ ere undergoing an irreversible decline. The shift in conceptualization between one crisis and another was slight but the repercussions for policy ­were significant and led to what the nation would most often come to describe as the “urban crisis.”4 Lewis’s best-­selling, award-­winning book La Vida and the Oscar-­winning West Side Story ­were the most prominent depictions of Puerto Rican life and culture in this era of “urban crisis.” The popularity of the two texts hinged in part on the differing opinions regarding their repre­sen­ta­tion of real­ity. Some saw in ­these depictions an alarming realness that justified draconian policies governing low-­income ­people of color in cities. ­Others saw a selective realness that was sensationalist and failed to offer a broader account of Puerto Ricans living in New York City or the economic and po­liti­cal reasons leading to their impoverishment. It is useful to think of La Vida’s New York City chapters and West Side Story as texts that describe a brokered Latinization of space. Their creators occupy a similar position to that of other brokers of Latinx urban life and culture discussed in this book who curate parts of the urban context in which Latinxs live for broad audiences. Admittedly, both texts are well-­ worn examples of the anx­ie­ ties aroused by Puerto Rican migration to postwar New York City. Scholar Frances Negrón-­Muntaner suggests the ubiquity of West Side Story in scholarship may lie in how the musical evokes the Puerto Rican “diaspora’s ‘trauma’ ” across generations by reminding Puerto Ricans of their perpetual foreignness and cultural misrepre­sen­ta­tion.5 La Vida lives on in repeated references to the “culture of poverty,” though often in the shadows of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s indictment of African American families, which came years ­after Lewis coined the term.6 Why continue to dig into ­these familiar texts? Besides the impor­tant ways in which they document, albeit imperfectly, the urban issues and tribulations of Puerto Rican belonging in postwar New York City, their observations of Latinx life and culture show the nuanced differences between the so-­called Puerto Rican prob­lem and the culture of poverty. Situated at a critical turning point in the racialization of US cities, they also reveal an interest in chromatic color that is underanalyzed despite its common use by brokers to gesture t­ oward what color, in its aesthetic veneer, intends precisely not to be—­racially, ethnically, spatially, and po­liti­cally significant.7 Color is the visual abstraction of the challenge of Latinx urban belonging.

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In the following pages, I situate midcentury repre­sen­ta­tions about low-­ income Latinxs in a more detailed history of color by examining how colorful connections to the colonial South marked US interior spaces in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury and how postwar Latinx population growth and Latinx cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s made broad swaths of color a public affair. ­These spatial politics of racialized color linger in late twentieth-­and early twenty-­first-­century Latinx cultural expression in the built environment. Even though colorful touches ­were acceptable in discreet volumes in white-­dominated private spaces and put up with in the disinvested inner cities of the late twentieth ­century, broad uses of color in suburbs and other environments generally out of reach to Latinxs w ­ ere repeatedly branded as transgressive, too loud and po­liti­cal. A sociospatial logic of color emerges out of t­ hese examples, showing that the colorful is regularly thought to belong in specific spaces: interiors, Latin Amer­i­ca, and segregated US barrios. Fi­nally, gentrification’s uses of small amounts of chromatic color represent a pro­cess that can be interpreted as upholding diversity while also displacing barrio residents. The differences between the 1960s culture of poverty and turn-­of-­the-­century gentrification may seem vast, but placing t­ hese two examples at the beginning and end of the chapter encourages us to consider if the use of color ­today functions in the same way as it did at midcentury. The method used in this chapter is an archaeology of sorts that unearths and weaves together examples dug up from a vast, inexhaustible pool of colorful discourses and materials used to describe p­ eople of color.8 This short, selective history of color lays out a long-­established visual pattern of colorful language that emerges during specific moments in which Latinx belonging is ­under question—­whether it is the “urban crisis” of the 1960s or other instances in a prolonged cycle of crises developing out of an encounter between dominant and racialized groups. A more expansive study that looks beyond the Amer­ic­ as can be found in anthropologist Michael Taussig’s fascinating history of color, in which he notes that Western colonization in Africa, Asia, and the Amer­i­cas developed in part out of an encounter with “colored otherness.”9 “Centuries of Western fantasies about non-­Western ­people,” Taussig writes, ­were “fantasies that effectively divided the world into chromophobes and chromophiliacs.”10 If vivid color is the abstract form of colonial relations that ­shaped the Amer­i­cas, this chapter examines how color is pre­sent in the afterlives of colonization and how a Western equation of racialized ­others with colorful culture continues to condition debates and anx­i­eties about the spatiality of Latinx urbanization.

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Colorfully Redeeming Urban Poverty The cover of the 1966 London edition of La Vida, a solid magenta background with sans serif block type abutting against a minimalist illustration of an exterior fire escape, is strikingly similar to the solid tomato-­red background of the promotional poster for the 1961 film version of West Side Story (figures 2.1 and 2.2). Both are as brightly colored as the costumes worn by Puerto Rican characters in the film. The poster’s typographic and figurative ele­ments also convey the film’s urban setting.11 Taking almost half of the poster, the title of the film is typeset in stenciled lettering filled in black fading paint, evocative of worn signage on building exteriors. Each word in the title is stacked upon the other without much space in between; their massive quality weighs down on the page as if the letters amounted to a building in itself, extending and interlocking with an illustration of an outdoor metal fire escape. That a book so central to the conceptualization of the “culture of poverty”—­and the body of lit­er­a­ture about ­people of color living in urban poverty that followed it—­would be packaged and marketed using the same visual language of West Side Story is indicative of how bright color was dually deployed in the 1960s to visualize Puerto Rican belonging in cities in a threatening and exotically alluring otherness. Both Lewis’s team of interviewers and the musical’s creators observed Puerto Ricans and their living arrangements in New York City as part of their research. This is largely where the similarities end, however. Though their fieldwork was carried out only a few years apart, they each reached dif­f er­ent ideas about how to tell the story of mi­grant life. Puerto Rican characters in the musical do not adhere to the descriptions that populate Oscar Lewis’s book. Instead, the musical offers a safer repre­sen­ta­tion of Puerto Ricans, at times approximating the conventional aspirations of upwardly mobile whites. While Lewis peppers his ethnographic accounts of Puerto Rican mi­grants with notes of intrafamily sexual desires, lack of middle-­ class values, prostitution, unwed m ­ others, women-­headed ­house­holds, and other ele­ments of the so-­called broken ­family, the Puerto Rican siblings in the film, Maria and Bernardo, the latter the leader of the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks, are the teenage c­ hildren of a nuclear f­ amily with traditional values. Bernardo is a paternal figure. He appears as the protective big ­brother guarding Maria’s chastity. Maria is a faithful Catholic, even if she strays from the mandate of virginity by sleeping with Tony, her “American” love interest. Maria and Bernardo’s parents own a store, pointing to their

Figure 2.1  ~  Magenta cover of a London 1967 edition of Oscar Lewis’s La Vida: A Puerto Rican ­Family in the Culture of Poverty—­San Juan and New York. Strikingly similar in design to the poster for the film West Side Story, the cover is a reminder of the bold, urban, and colorful visual language associated with Latinxs.

Figure 2.2  ~  Poster for the 1961 film West Side Story. The poster’s colors gesture ­toward the visual language of the film—­wherein bold, bright colors are ­synonymous with the exoticized, racial other and the whiteness of the main characters is ­underscored with light-­colored costumes.

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entrepreneurial, middle-­class aspirations. And even though the hallway in the tenement in which they live has peeling paint and graffiti, typical indicators of a “slum” environment, Maria has a modestly furnished bedroom in her ­family’s apartment. The bedroom even has a win­dow, a trea­sured feature in usually dark tenements such as t­ hose inhabited by Lewis’s New York City subjects. The character that comes closest to the w ­ omen profiled in Lewis’s book would be Anita, Bernardo’s girlfriend and Maria’s best friend. Played by Rita Moreno, the only Puerto Rican actor cast in the film, Anita displays the sexual gusto and willingness to contest male power and authority that Lewis attributed to ­women living a culture of poverty. But Anita also has a sense of propriety and hopes her amiga Maria does too. Moreover, whereas oversexed Puerto Ricans fill La Vida’s pages almost exclusively, the film’s desire to impress on the viewer that in an environment where space and other resources are scarce, anyone—­not only Puerto Ricans—­can be driven to deviant be­hav­ior, makes it so that the female companions of the “American” gang, the Jets, are also, though to a lesser extent, portrayed as sexually promiscuous. Unlike La Vida, which mostly overlooks the streetscapes of its barrio setting in New York City, the film shows barrio exteriors, albeit carefully refashioned ones. ­Actual Puerto Rican barrios ­were avoided during the film’s shooting. Indeed, the 1961 film never mentions a neighborhood; “west side” in the title of the musical is an ambiguous geographic reference.12 The film only acquires a specific place referent a­ fter the prologue to the musical was, at the insistence of director Robert Wise, shot on location on the Upper West Side streets of the San Juan Hill district. The area was home to a low-­ income and densely populated African American community, with a significant Puerto Rican and Cuban population, though by the time the film began shooting, the streets ­were marked for de­mo­li­tion to build Lincoln Towers Apartments (part of the Lincoln Square Urban Renewal Area).13 Opening shots of Sharks and Jets frenetically dancing on Sixty-­Eighth Street show signs of impending destruction: a­ ctual buildings with boarded-up win­dows and scaffold fencing shoddily constructed out of old doors likely torn from within buildings awaiting de­mo­li­tion. Attempting to cover up the ruins of urban renewal, the film re-­created a sanitized version of the urban life that once existed. White curtains w ­ ere hung on broken win­dows and “Se habla español” and “bodega” signs ­were displayed to indicate local Latinx customers.14 The fabricated scenes of a barrio in San Juan Hill w ­ ere intercut with shots of a playground on East 110th Street in El Barrio, East Harlem, an ­actual Puerto Rican barrio where some of ­those displaced by the Lin-

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coln Square construction moved.15 Despite it being an a­ ctual barrio, East ­Harlem’s Puerto Ricanness and Latinidad ­were still left out of the frame. Puerto Ricans and their spaces are portrayed as a colorful threat from the start of the film. The opening scene zooms in, in bird’s-­eye view, to show a pa­norama of tenements in which the hostile gangs confront each other in dance. While both gangs wear colorful clothing—­undoubtedly due to the novelty of Technicolor/Panavision color television—­the Puerto Rican characters in the film wear more hues of red and purple. T ­ hese colors follow Puerto Ricans as they move around the city. In contrast to their “American” counter­parts, Puerto Rican characters are repeatedly placed against colorful backdrops. For an art historical parallel, the landscape portrayed is akin to the flat color planes in Romare Bearden’s 1960s collages of Harlem or Stuart Davis’s neon abstract paintings of Depression-­era New York City. According to Irene Sharaff, costume designer for both the play and the film, ­these colors gave Puerto Rican characters an “aggressive quality.”16 In his first solo appearance on screen, Bernardo wears a shirt in (an “aggressive”?) red, an intensity in sync with his Spanish matador silhouette. A ­ fter a confrontation with the Jets, Bernardo lunges from the grayish backdrop in which the Jets ­were prancing and onto a fiery red brick facade that matches his shirt. Once Bernardo finds his footing, he bangs his fist in rage against the wall and recoups his fighting energy. In an ensuing chase, Bernardo and another Shark corner a Jet from the top of a stand-­alone wall. The ­angle of the camera is tilted upward, from the base of the wall, showing a Shark about to jump on a Jet, “Baby John” (figure 2.3). From this vantage point, the viewer is recruited into the Jets, compelled to look up in fear at a person of color who is about to attack and who is, I argue not coincidentally, framed by a background of clotheslines buckling with the weight of polyester purple comforters and royal-­blue and cherry-­red clothing. As if maneuvering the edge of that wall ­were not enough to indicate the Sharks’ mastery over this urban space, the colorful clothesline reminds us that this is indeed the Puerto Rican part of the neighborhood. G ­ reat lengths w ­ ere taken to ensure that desired colors hung from tenements for the shooting of the film. While filming in El Barrio, local Puerto Rican gang leaders w ­ ere enlisted to convince a local ­woman to hang blue laundry from her clotheslines ­after she had resentfully ignored the film staff ’s request.17 With this carefully manicured backdrop, the Sharks and their brightly colored clothing meld into a landscape of otherness. Color was a recurring theme in costume designer Sharaff ’s aesthetic, but it would be myopic to think of color in the film as a ­simple ­matter

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Figure 2.3  ~  A Puerto Rican member of the Sharks gang closes in on a white member of the Jets gang. The colorful backdrop of laundry hanging on a clothesline accentuates the spatial threat of Latinidad embodied by the young man on top of the ledge, seemingly about to pounce upon a young white man, whose defenselessness the narrative emphasizes by calling him “Baby John.” West Side Story, dir. Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961.

of taste or a visual scheme to distinguish two gangs engaged in a forceful display of dance.18 Rather, color indexes the racial, sexual, and gendered differences ascribed to Puerto Ricans. While media and po­liti­cal discourse more often color-­code Latinxs as a racial category of brown than a vibrant (non-­skin) color, in the film the two color categories work together, reinforcing how each serves to racialize individuals.19 In fact, most Puerto Rican characters in West Side Story are non–­Puerto Rican actors in brownface wearing vibrantly colored clothing. The film’s color-­coding of Puerto Ricans in vivid tones is especially apparent in the clothing worn by the ­women cast as Puerto Ricans. At a chaperoned dance, an innocent game turns into a mambo dance-­off between Puerto Rican ­couples dressed in vari­ous tones of bright purple and red and ethnic whites dressed in tan, mustard yellow, burnt orange, and blue pastels. The significance of t­ hese colors is augmented when we consider Maria’s attire for the dance—­a white dress with red sash the protagonist repeatedly complains makes her look too young. The white dress is a clichéd symbol of virginity. But additionally, insofar as color is indicative of her Puerto Ricanness, the white dress is also a sign of Maria’s willingness to assimilate through her relationship with a white man.20 For a film about racial tensions, several instances evoke a possibility of racial parity that contrasts the 1960s period of racialized spatial discrimination and displacement. The film portrays whites faring almost as badly as Latinxs. The fictional Puerto Rican youth and the white charac-

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ters of the film are fighting for a turf filled with poverty and vio­lence. In contrast, their real counter­parts of color have been ghettoized in similar neighborhoods while many of their white counter­parts have largely left for the suburbs. When the film references the suburbs, it does so as an idyllic place for both assimilated Puerto Ricans and whites. While preparing to run away together, Tony makes a promise to Maria—­“ ­There’s a place for us / Somewhere a place for us / Peace and quiet and open air wait for us somewhere”—­that gestures ­toward suburban life. The “quiet” and “open air” of the suburb is where “American” Tony can escape with Maria, who upon marriage to Tony ­will be able to pass as white, and then presumably become fully American. Upon closer inspection, then, West Side Story is also about the desire to escape the barrio and become upwardly mobile and assimilated. The threat that Puerto Ricans represented—­their colorfulness linked to the tropical island of Puerto Rico and thus foreign to the Upper West Side, their disruption of the social and visual order of urban space that the double menace of socially othered and colorfully dressed bodies posed, their barrio formations and strug­g les for urban space—­could be managed. Like the red ribbon on Maria’s dress, their threat could be minimized for inclusion in an early version of multicultural Amer­i­ca. The film resembled, in this way, the discussions over the “prob­lem” and its solutions. Color in West Side Story could be managed as the Henry Street Settlement managed colors in the interiors of LaGuardia Houses (see chapter 1). Whereas the possibility of assimilation is presented in West Side Story, Lewis thought assimilation was a nearly impossible achievement for the Ríos ­family. He found barrios to be a par­tic­ul­ar barrier to assimilation. Paradoxically, the very spatial proximity that cast the Ríoses as “provincial and locally oriented” was fortuitous to Lewis’s research design.21 Out of a sample size of one hundred families living in the low-­income barrios of San Juan and eighty-­one of their relatives living in New York City, the reason Lewis zeroed in on the Ríos f­ amily boiled down to geographic con­ ve­nience. Unlike most of the New York City relatives who w ­ ere scattered “from Coney Island to the Bronx,” the Ríos siblings all lived in the Bronx.22 In Lewis’s words, the Ríoses “formed l­ ittle islands within the city where the Spanish-­language and many Puerto Rican customs w ­ ere perpetuated.”23 By following the Ríoses as they visited each other, ran errands, and enjoyed their neighborhood, Lewis’s staff of interviewers observed the intrafamily relations that Lewis thought key to understanding the culture of poverty. In their spaces, Lewis found that the Ríoses had infrequent encounters with non–­Puerto Ricans and low levels of community organ­izing and activism

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that made them unstable and alienated. “It is the low level of organ­ization,” Lewis wrote, that “gives the culture of poverty its marginal and anachronistic quality in our highly complex, specialized, or­ga­nized society.” For Lewis, the most pernicious prob­lem of the culture of poverty was not low levels of income; it was the pattern of be­hav­ior and psychological state that ­people passed down to f­ uture generations.24 To further magnify his concern over the culture of poverty, Lewis, invoking the idea of “primitive ­people” as the antithesis of civilization, wrote: “Most primitive p­ eoples have achieved a higher level of socio-­cultural organ­ization than our modern urban slum dwellers.”25 By placing his urban subjects on a rung lower than “most primitive ­people,” Lewis inextricably wove urban Puerto Ricans into colonial understandings of culture and in turn distinguished himself, his staff, and his readers—­who secured their dominant position by the very act of reading—as civilized arbiters of backwardness. In a revelatory review comparing his previously published work about Mexicans living in the “culture of poverty” and the Ríos f­ amily, Lewis offers vivid impressions reminiscent of Eu­ro­pean awe and fascination over colonized p­ eople. Lewis writes that “like most of the other Puerto Rican slum dwellers I have studied,” the Ríos f­ amily in La Vida show a g­ reat zest for life, especially for sex, and a need for excitement, new experiences, and adventures. Theirs is an expressive style of life. They value acting-­out more than thinking-­out, self-­expression more than self-­c onstraint, plea­s ure more than productivity, spending more than saving, personal loyalty more than impersonal justice. They are fun-­loving and enjoy parties, dancing, and ­music​.­ ​.­ ​.­ ​.­ ​.­Compared with the low-­income Mexicans I have studied, they seem less reserved, less depressive, less controlled, and less stable. . . . ​The Ríos ­family is closer to the expression of an unbridled id than any other p­ eople I have studied. . . . ​The ­Children of Sánchez seem mild, repressed, and almost middle-­class by comparison.26 If the Sánchez ­family from Mexico City pales in comparison to the Puerto Rican Ríos ­family’s “greater variety of moods . . . ​from a mood of carnival to a mood of atonement,” the rural Tepoztecan ­family in Pedro Martínez have even “less flux, less color, less joy.”27 The “peasant village life” made the Martínez ­family reserved, traditional, and “emotionally constricted.”28 In contrast, Lewis believed that “urban slum life”—­its crowding, lack of privacy, and rapid pace—­together with the Ríoses’ personalities created a louder, livelier, and more disruptive social context.29 By living in a racially

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and eco­nom­ically marginalized pocket of a large city where the mainstream language and cultural traditions w ­ ere dif­fer­ent from their own, the Ríoses stood out to Lewis as the ­family most vulnerable to a culture of poverty. Although Lewis relied on the urban environment to explain the behavioral and cultural development of low-­income ­people, he spoke ­little of the racial politics that s­ haped this environment. The Ríoses in New York City lived in a borough experiencing tremendous racial and ethnic shifts in residential population. Urban renewal in Manhattan caused more than one hundred thousand African Americans and Puerto Ricans to relocate to the Bronx by 1960. The very year Lewis began his research in New York in 1964, a summer of rioting broke out in Harlem ­after police shot James Powell, a black teenager from the Bronx. This riot was one of the first in which Puerto Ricans played a significant role. The riot was widely documented in news media of the day. By neglecting the po­liti­cal economic context of New York City’s poverty, Lewis left the reader with a cultural explanation of poverty that lent itself to easy moralizing. The conservative right, for one, seized on the culture of poverty and (contrary to Lewis’s own progovernment stance) argued that government assistance programs could do ­little to stop this generational cycle.30 Several authors are critical of the “culture of poverty” and its po­liti­cal ramifications.31 Yet the cultural aspects of La Vida have been underexamined. In par­tic­u­lar, critics have left out Lewis’s descriptions of the physical environment, specifically the built interiors and material goods that permeate the ethnography of the Ríos f­ amily and make it a key text for understanding the racialization of Puerto Ricans in 1960s New York City. Lewis’s interest in the environment has also been underanalyzed. In 1962 Lewis was invited to talk at the twelfth annual Aspen International Design Conference, focused on the theme of the environment, and discussed “design and aesthetics as they are related to the needs of civilized society.”32 In his pre­sen­ta­tion, Lewis reiterated to the audience of scholars, designers, architects, and advertising professionals what urban experts had long sustained, namely that the physical environment determined poverty and the pathological be­hav­ior associated with low-­income status. He specifically stated that if he w ­ ere “to pick out the one characteristic that prob­ ably would spot the culture of poverty, it would be the fact that one to four families live in a single room.”33 For Clarence Se­nior, an expert on midcentury Puerto Rican migration to New York City, Lewis’s writing typified the “Zolaesque” style authors used when relying on environmental determinism for character development.34

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Indeed, several chapters in La Vida exhibited Lewis’s fetish for the physical environment. T ­ hese chapters, a compilation of several day-­long observations of intrafamily relations, all begin with rich descriptions of the domestic setting gathered from meticulous surveys on the quality, quantity, and provenance of material goods found in the Ríoses’ h ­ ouse­holds. For Lewis, ­these day-­length vignettes w ­ ere desirable companions to the other chapters in the book, t­ hose based on interview material with each f­ amily member and written in the voice of each in­for­mant, what Lewis likened to “autobiographies.” “­Because the days include a description not only of the ­people but also of the setting, of the domestic routines and material possessions,” Lewis insisted, “the reader gets a more integrated view of their lives” and “a greater sense of vividness and warmer glimpses of ” the Ríoses.35 Moreover, Lewis believed that chapters focused on “the day as a unit of study” could offer an “objective” counterpoint to the “subjective” telling of a person’s life story. 36 Lewis may be correct that the physical environment does a lot of work in the text to represent the Ríos ­family and their way of life, but the built layout and material goods are not as objective as Lewis claimed. Rather, race, class, and difference rooted in colonial encounters, and not in the very least the subjective interests of observers, are inscribed in ­these environments. ­Whether it was Lewis, a white Jewish professor, or one of his Puerto Rican, Mexican, or white assistants in New York, t­ hese researchers w ­ ere seduced or outraged—or in any case, their senses ­were aroused—by the domestic arrangements of the ­family. In the brief, six-­page chapter about Soledad, one of two adult Ríos siblings living in New York City, Lewis reserves two paragraphs to describe the chromatic colors found in Soledad’s ground-­floor railroad tenement apartment: “The kitchen walls had just been painted a bright green. They w ­ ere decorated with religious calendars, plastic flowers, a fancy match holder, a plaster plaque of brightly colored fruit, and a new set of aluminum pans.”37 Lewis goes on to note the blue, orange, and gray chairs in the living room, and the colorful curtains and dolls decorating the kitchen and living room. The observations included in ­these day-­long chapters ­were mostly of Puerto Rican researcher Francisca Muriente, one of several members of Lewis’s New York City research staff.38 It is difficult to determine ­whether Muriente, Lewis, or anyone on his staff had a special interest in or bias for color. What is clear is that the ethnographic notes of the Ríoses’ home life w ­ ere peppered with colorful descriptions that w ­ ere compelling enough for Lewis to keep them in the final book. Curiously, alongside this list of colorful material culture, Lewis gives ­free range to lurid descriptions of intrafamily relations. Carolina Luján,

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a Mexican clinical psychiatrist consulting with Lewis, warned him before publication that this “material may be used or misused as a legitimized form of sexual stimulation,” yet she also downplayed this possibility, saying that “so may the dictionary . . . ​yet I ­haven’t heard anyone clamoring for censorship of Noah Webster.”39 In her trenchant analy­sis of Lewis’s work, Laura Briggs reanimates Lujan’s initial reaction and convincingly labels La Vida a “pornography of poverty.”40 Indeed, “pornography” comes alive in this chapter, pulsating with salacious anecdotes of Soledad’s sexual be­hav­ior, her promiscuous youth and life as a sex worker, and occurrences of her groping her c­ hildren. The “pornography” of Soledad’s sexuality appears alongside pornography of another kind—­the inventory of colorful material culture likewise confined to the intimacies of domestic life. T ­ hese two seemingly dif­fer­ent descriptions of sex and colorfulness sensibly mesh together, if one considers that Lewis found talk of sex among the Ríoses “so ­matter of fact” that it lost the “quality of obscenity” and became “an intrinsic part of their everyday life.”41 For Lewis, Soledad’s concupiscence seemed quotidian excess, similar to that of her colorful apartment furnishings and decor. ­These written illustrations descend from colonial images of sexuality and otherness as documented by historians of empire, including Ann Laura Stoler, who in Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power writes that “the tropics provided a site for Eu­ro­pean pornographic fantasies long before conquest was u ­ nder way, with lurid descriptions of sexual license, promiscuity, gynecological aberrations, and general perversion marking the Otherness of the colonized for metropolitan consumption.”42 By drawing the reader to graphic accounts of Soledad’s sexuality, the text calls to mind the colonial “tropics” and its hierarchies of appropriate and indecent ways of living. The Bronx setting of the Ríos ­family is a transnational extension of the colonial encounter between the colorful, impoverished, immoral, racialized in­for­ mants and the modern, ethical, and rational ethnographer and their audience. The reproduction of this encounter in the intimate setting of the Ríos h ­ ouse­hold solidifies the image of the less-­than-­“primitive” Ríos f­ amily. A colonial reading of the culture of poverty is not new.43 Critics in the late 1960s ushered in the concept of the “internal colony” to ­counter how social scientists of the culture of poverty (and other approaches to the study of racialized space in the United States) produced power relations of domination similar to t­ hose the Global South was struggling against.44 Scholars of the internal colony spoke of how outsiders po­liti­cally dominated and extracted wealth from racialized communities and left them voiceless and powerless. The idea of the internal colony inspired civil rights organizers

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and radical groups such as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords Party to “decolonize” and forge links of re­sis­tance between black and Latinx marginalized communities and movements against colonialism in places such as Vietnam and Algeria.45 The internal colony approach captured the power imbalances of social scientists entering marginalized communities, but it did not describe how this pseudo-­colonial dynamic is manifest culturally and visualized in space despite the material evidence made available by ­these social scientists. Susan Rigdon, author of The Culture Facade, elucidates the reasons why material culture captivated Lewis. Having had unparalleled access to Lewis’s wife, Ruth Maslow Lewis, and the c­ ouple’s archives, Rigdon writes that Ruth Lewis, who helped edit most of the material on the Puerto Rican subjects, thought the Ríoses “­were far less articulate than the Sánchezes” and showed fewer signs of middle-­class propriety. ­Because of this, Lewis noted, “more of their lives had to be ‘pictured.’ ”46 For Lewis, the day-­long chapters offered “a greater sense of vividness and warmer glimpses of ” the Ríoses.47 Though Lewis did not directly address the function of color, the colorful descriptions appear in the text as adjectives, chromatic touches to domestic items that take on a less offensive meaning than the ­actual subjects and serve to humanize the allegedly uncivil Ríos ­family. In other words, colorful material culture could distract from the sex and pathology of racialized urban poverty. Consider that the colorful descriptions offer a glimpse of Soledad’s desire to decorate, a characteristic easily shared with an audience of middle-­class readers that thereby softens Soledad’s caustic character and crude language. Lewis was not the only social scientist to be drawn in by color. Such everyday colorfulness is also evident in sociologist Patricia Cayo Sexton’s Spanish Harlem: An Anatomy of Poverty, a book published a year before La Vida with a cover design illustrating tenements washed in a mix of West Side Story magenta and tomato red. Sexton interrupts her distressed account of Puerto Rican life in El Barrio to take on the aesthetic lens of a decorator: “The storefront church, resembling the Puerto Rican living room, may have green walls, bright colors, naked light bulbs, and baby carriages crowded in the aisles.”48 The numerous baby carriages bring her back to the social life of her subjects. A forerunner in documenting urban poverty, turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­ century muckraker Jacob Riis also used colorful asides to humanize the impoverished immigrants he wrote off as degenerate. Of Italians who had left their “Mediterranean exuberance” for the dilapidated slums of the

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Lower East Side, Riis wrote that even “with all his con­spic­u­ous faults, the swarthy Italian immigrant has his redeeming traits. . . . ​The w ­ omen are faithful wives and devoted ­mothers. Their vivid and picturesque costumes lend a tinge of color to the other­wise dull monotony of the slums they inhabit.”49 It is impor­tant to recall that in the late nineteenth ­century, southern Eu­ro­pe­ans ­were thought, together with so-­called exotic Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans, to be part of a vast and undifferentiated “south.” Painter Vincent van Gogh, Riis’s con­temporary, predicted from the “south” of Arles, France, that “­there is nothing that prevents me from thinking that in the ­future many paint­ers ­will go and work in tropical countries.” “Why did the greatest colorist of all, Eugéne Delacroix, think it essential to go South [Arles] and right to Africa?” Van Gogh asked rhetorically in a letter to his ­brother Theo. “Obviously, ­because not only Africa but from Arles onward you are bound to find beautiful contrasts of red and green, of blue and orange, of sulphur and lilac . . . ​all true colorists must come to this, must admit that ­there is another kind of color than that of the North.” Van Gogh further connected southern France with the colonized South, writing: “I am sure if Gauguin came, he would love this country.”50 Paul Gauguin was the archetype of the imperial artist, famous for exploiting the sexuality of scantily dressed French Polynesian ­women and girls in paintings made for Eu­ro­pean audiences. Impor­tant parallels arise ­here. The colors associated with Puerto Rico (what one could describe as part of the US South) punctuate depictions of postwar poverty in New York City, as the colors of the Eu­ro­pean South in Riis’s account punctuate the drabness of poverty on the Lower East Side, and as the artists who use the “colors of the South” intervene in the palette of the late nineteenth-­ century Eu­ro­pean fine art establishment. All find that colorfulness of the other amuses, astonishes, and even disrupts. In postwar New York, color was used as a way to calm anx­i­eties about Puerto Rican settlement in the city. When “panicky” residents and neighborhood stakeholders rushed to sell their properties, worried that Puerto Ricans would devalue the neighborhood, sociologist Rosalind Tough and Gordon D. MacDonald, director of research for the Real Estate Board of New York Inc., stated that even though “the ­great influx” of Puerto Ricans had “added to the overcrowding” and made already substandard housing conditions “progressively worse,” much of East Harlem “was a slum before the Puerto Ricans arrived.” The authors offered a more benign image of Puerto Rican residents by writing, as if in a rapturous mélange of color, that not all in “Spanish Harlem” was gloom and doom.

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The most colorful . . . ​S panish Harlem . . . ​h as a Ca­r ib­b ean atmosphere. . . . ​­Here dark-­skinned p ­ eople evidence a preference for bright colors; h ­ ere in the spring and summer are gay push-­carts with a choice of flowers available at modest prices; ­here from an ice-­cream vender can be purchased a delicacy topped with highly colored flavoring; h ­ ere in the shops, often with open sidewalk displays, can be obtained exotic fruits and vegetables; h ­ ere in adjacent shops is clothing of the brightest hues. . . . ​The gaiety and color of Spanish Harlem exists despite the sub-­ standard housing conditions ­under which many of the families live.51 In noting that colorfulness exists “despite” poverty, the authors cast a resilient glow over Puerto Ricans and ask the “panicky” reader to think of the new “colorful” landscape as a positive contribution rather than an impending drop in property values. Color emerged again as a balm to soothe anx­i­eties during the East Harlem Riot of July 1967, a major “antipolice rioting by teen-­age Puerto Rican mobs” in New York.52 Peter Kihss of the New York Times was at pains to explain the reasons why Puerto Ricans, “historically considered passive,” took to the streets in protest.53 Social science experts had for years written about Puerto Ricans’ deficient urban skills, their ­limited interactions with non–­Puerto Ricans, and their po­liti­cal passivity. In the influential Beyond the Melting Pot, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan reinforced the idea that Puerto Ricans ­were docile and had a weak cultural identity. In La ­ ere po­liti­cally apathetic, Vida, Lewis wrote how his Puerto Rican subjects w unlike African Americans, whose participation in the civil rights movement could help detangle them from the culture of poverty even if they remained eco­nom­ically poor.54 When Kihss interviewed locals to evaluate the changes in attitude among New York City’s Puerto Ricans, he heard similar patronizing comments. Rev. James Sugrue, pastor of All Saints Church, said, “We never expected this to happen in this part of Harlem. It’s not that the Puerto Ricans ­aren’t as bad off as the Negroes, but the Puerto Ricans ­don’t have the Negroes’ sense of ‘revolution of expectations.’ The Puerto Ricans sort of celebrate their own poverty.” Reverend Raymond J. Byrne of St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in East Harlem maintained: “­There’s a sense of fiesta to it. . . . ​The ­people find it exciting and come out to watch.”55 To be certain, events of July 26 ­were not part of a chaotic street “fiesta” but a response to what local African American and Latinx rioters believed had been the unfair shooting of twenty-­seven-­year-­old Puerto Rican Renaldo Rodriguez by an off-­duty police officer.56 The three-­day-­long riot, which had expanded

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to the South Bronx, led to three deaths and dozens of injured. As one in a long list of riots that took place in the summer of 1967, the July riot was a key moment in the early stages of black and Latinx militant politics.57 Nonetheless, observers of El Barrio that summer could not help but portray Puerto Ricans in a celebratory manner to explain the community’s agitation and cries for justice. The “culture of poverty” had seeped into the sinews of US urban policy and the nation’s ideas about ­people of color, giving birth to an era in which cultural explanations not only trumped structural explanations for poverty but ­were instrumental for understanding the uprisings upsetting the status quo of white elite power. Sociologists David L. Harvey and Michael H. Reed argue that the aesthetic license that Lewis took to redeem his research subjects could rehabilitate Lewis himself. Harvey and Reed join several o­ thers who tried to set Lewis’s rec­ord straight by explaining that he was a misunderstood social scientist, an anticolonialist with a Marxist bent whose true politics are obvious in his research on Fidel Castro and his lifelong pursuit of devising solutions to poverty. O ­ thers point to Lewis’s impoverished beginnings on the Lower East Side and his upbringing in rural Upstate New York to show where his sympathies lie. Harvey and Reed argue that rather than “blaming the victim’s culture for the victim’s poverty,” Lewis was a liberal who celebrated the creativity, resilience, resourcefulness, and desire for upward mobility of low-­ income ­people. To better understand Lewis’s intentions, they argue, attention must be placed on the aesthetic aspects of his work. They insist that Lewis “strived to craft an aesthetic object that communicated to his readers a full sense of the everyday plight of poor ­people.” Furthermore, they write, “Lewis’s ­family ethnographies, in fact, resonate with the curiously eclectic politics and aesthetic realism of a Depression Era Marxism in which proletarian artists celebrated the ‘resourcefulness of the poor.’ ”58 This alternative interpretation of Lewis’s writings turns La Vida into creative lit­er­a­ture, an artistic product of Lewis’s creative editing and aesthetic interests. It is a revisionist sweep that makes the w ­ hole public policy–­making enterprise that resulted from the culture of poverty thesis the effect of an artist seduced by the resiliency and colorfulness of low-­income Puerto Ricans. It is difficult to understand how Lewis’s observations, which include detailing Soledad grabbing her young ­daughter’s vagina in public and asking her to whom it belonged, helps a reader understand “the everyday plight of poor ­people.” Aesthetic editing and colorful asides should not condone Lewis’s assumption that “deviant” sexuality was a cultural trait of poverty. Neither should Lewis’s colorful descriptions, nor that of other

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observers discussed in this section, distract from the social context. Nor should the foolish suggestion be made that insofar as low-­income p ­ eople are colorful they are not po­liti­cal; they are just poor and e­ ager to show their colorful culture. And yet casual and expert observers, including reporters, sociologists, and anthropologists, have repeatedly used color throughout the twentieth ­century for that effect. Taussig writes in his history of color that “color is the genie that lets ethnography out of the ­bottle.”59 Colorful descriptions, suggests Taussig, disclose more about the encounter between subjects and outside researchers than what the category of color usually details, that is, tint, shade, hue. The observers discussed in this section illustrate the nexus between colorfulness and poverty that frequently informs a Latinx urban imaginary. U ­ nder the gaze of t­ hese observers, color is mobilized to redeem a racialized and sexualized poor population that might be disturbing and threatening to a cap­i­tal­ist social and spatial order. To humanize the poor, ­these observers bank on the universal ele­ment of color, its ability to be ­free from owner­ship by any par­tic­u­lar group or individual and thus appeal to vari­ous socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial groups.60 Curated color, evaluated by white observers such as Lewis, Sexton, Riis, and the other observers included h ­ ere, could elevate, if only briefly, low-­ income, deviant, less-­than-­“primitive” p ­ eople. At the same time, chromatic color in broader brushes created by ­people of color and taking up commodified urban space of the “North” was a marker of difference that was not so easily accepted. In La Vida’s New York City, Simplicio, Soledad’s younger b­ rother who lived walking distance from her in the Bronx, addressed a politics of color that Lewis and the other observers of New York did not. Talking about his po­liti­cal priorities, Simplicio relates how chromatic color was used to discriminate against Puerto Ricans and leave them out of covetable housing. Another ­thing I would like to work for is better housing. Puerto Ricans ­can’t get good apartments h ­ ere ­because the landlords begin raising the rent. They ­don’t want us ­because they say ­we’re dirty and messy. All pay for what a few of us do. What happens is that when a Puerto Rican rents a place he cracks the plaster on the walls by driving in nails to hang pictures. And then he paints the dif­f er­ent rooms dif­f er­ent colors. Americans d ­ on’t like that. So if a Puerto Rican goes to look for an apartment in a pretty part of the city, he finds they charge a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars’ rent. How can we pay that? A Puerto Rican ­here barely earns enough to pay for rent and food.61

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Lewis did not elaborate on the politics of color implicit in Simplicio’s comment. But as Simplicio’s discontent implies, washes of color could render Puerto Ricans excessive to the modernity the city’s urban renewal campaigns touted. Already shut out from the exclusionary urban and suburban neighborhoods that urban renewal made available—­making colorfulness only admissible in barrio spaces—­further barrioized Puerto Ricans in leftover spaces undesired by most, except landlords exacting exorbitant rents. What follows takes a closer look at the spatiality of color. The interior, decorative colors of the culture of poverty era are compared with early twentieth-­century consumer goods that sought to convince shoppers that supposedly foreign, strange, and dangerous Latin American colors could be domesticated. The insistent linking of a consumable, assimilable bright color with Latin Amer­i­ca evades barrio streetscapes. In part this is b­ ecause it is easier for a white imaginary to picture a colonial relationship of pillage, what Renato Rosaldo calls an “imperialist nostalgia,” but also b­ ecause US barrios had yet to congeal in the national imaginary as sites of culture.62 This would happen during the Latinx social movements of the 1960s. That subsequent barrioization of color s­ haped how and where color would be made public and, as such, the power relations of its use as a tool of abstraction.

The Origins of Color Colorful postwar, brokered repre­sen­ta­tions of Puerto Ricans w ­ ere based on the commonly accepted idea that Latin Americans w ­ ere exceptionally colorful. This idea had circulated in early twentieth-­century US newspapers, fashion circles, and fine art. In the 1910s, when the Mexican Revolution accelerated Mexican migration to the United States, Knox model cars in Springfield, Mas­sa­chu­setts, advertised their “Mexican red” upholstering.63 “Mexican red” ribbons for ­children ­were in vogue in Oregon.64 In 1915 the widely circulated Dry Goods Economist named a tone of yellow in its fall color guide for retailers “maize,” the Spanish-­language word for corn appropriated from Taino Indians.65 Historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk notes that developments in the US chemical industry ­after World War I allowed for this rise in “color merchandising” as an innovative marketing strategy that specifically enticed ­women consumers.66 In the 1930s, interest in colorful design grew in conjunction with a new turn in Latin American and US relations. ­After de­cades of US military occupations, annexation of territories, and economic exploitation in the

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region, in the early 1930s President Herbert Hoover withdrew US forces from Nicaragua and began to talk about a “pan-­Americanism” based on fraternity. His successor, President Franklin D. Roo­se­velt, took the agenda further and in 1933, his first year in office, instituted the “Good Neighbor policy” that gave way to developmental aid proj­ects and cultural exchanges. Historians of Latin Amer­i­ca point out that this period of alleged nonintervention actually paved the way for further US intervention, exploitation, and cultural imperialism in the region.67 With the Good Neighbor policy, color associations with Latin Amer­i­ca ­were even more popu­lar in fashion, design, and art, far surpassing the rare occurrences of “Chinese colors,” “Italian colors,” or “Irish colors.”68 Color rhe­toric was one innocuous way to absorb Latin Amer­i­ca and bring its perceived excesses u ­ nder US control. A New York Times article of 1930 advised decorators and homemakers to bring Mexican and Native American rugs, blankets, pottery, and decorative motifs, widely in use throughout the Southwest and Southern California, into modern, middle-­class East Coast homes to add a “primitive note” and “lend rooms color.”69 The reporter assured readers the “primitive” decor would not be seen as gaudy, as long as it was “properly encouraged” and carefully assimilated into popu­lar decor of the time.70 Transnational elites ­were involved in making Mexican culture fash­ion­able. Art historian Anna Indych-­López writes that Frances Flynn Paine—­a businesswoman who lived in Mexico for some time and listed among her contacts Abby Aldrich Rocke­fel­ler, a cofounder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Dwight Morrow, the ambassador to Mexico—­was a major promoter of Mexican crafts. Throughout the 1930s, Paine wrote about Mexican crafts in interior design magazines such as House Beautiful and sold crafts to well-­ known department stores.71 As part of this new era of “soft power,” Mexican artists visited and worked in the United States and US artists and designers created new work inspired by their travels to Mexico. The “three ­great” Mexican muralists—­ Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco—­were commissioned to create murals in vari­ous cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Detroit.72 The murals displayed indigenous iconography, industrial machinery, industrial and rural laborers, peasants, and radical po­liti­cal figures in bold colors and expressive strokes. According to one scholar, Rivera’s murals shook “mural painting [in the United States] out of its de­cades of colorless and banal civic allegory.”73 In awe of the murals’ sumptuous colors, some categorized Mexican murals as decorative, diminishing their social significance. Art historian Anthony W.

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Lee notes how media coverage of Rivera’s 1931 Allegory of California for the Stock Exchange Lunch Club, a place for San Francisco’s stockbrokers, emphasized the mural’s colors, only occasionally described its iconography, and largely evaded its polemical visuals.74 When the architecture room at MoMA in New York City opened in 1933 ­under the direction of Philip Johnson, the first color reproductions of Rivera’s frescoes ­were included as “example[s] of modern interior architecture,” not public architecture.75 The gallery’s blue, gray, and brown wall paint and white curtains seemed to mitigate the brightness of the mural’s colors.76 By confining the colorful folklore and communist politics of the murals to interior decor, exhibitors avoided troubling public space. US-­based artists and designers, inspired by Mexico, also contained their colors in interior and private spaces. Architect Robert Stacy-­Judd’s design for the Aztec H ­ otel in Monrovia, California, emblematic of the Mayan Revival style of the 1920s and 1930s, had pale and muted exteriors with Mayan motifs and colorful interiors.77 Bauhaus color theorist Josef Albers and Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers visited Mexico and distilled from their numerous trips the colors of the residential landscapes and ancient ruins for their abstract expressions displayed in galleries of the North.78 Their work was part of a burgeoning modernist movement that followed a strict asceticism in which flat planes of color created an alternative real­ity to mimetic repre­sen­ta­tions of natu­ral and man-­made environments. The geopolitics that drove a desire to regulate and distill Mexican culture proved true with other Latin American countries, especially as tourism to Latin Amer­i­ca began to rise in the 1930s. In the years leading to World War II, newspapers and magazines instructed consumers in the United States on how to adapt the vivid colors found across Latin Amer­ i­ca. In the late 1930s and 1940s, articles and ads in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Daily Tribune, Atlanta Journal-­Constitution, and Washington Post, among other metropolitan newspapers, used Mexico or another Latin American country to describe dif­fer­ent colors, most of them bright but sometimes earth tones as well. T ­ hese pages w ­ ere printed in black and white and few included cultural iconography. The description of the colors depended on a reader’s associations with place to imagine the a­ ctual tint and shade. In lieu of ­actual reader contact with ­these countries, their ­people, or cultures, the ads elicited ste­reo­types about ­these places. A John Wanamaker Sports Shop ad for “northern classics in south-­of-­the-­border colors” boasted: “Even our gentle dusty beiges, sunset shadow plaids, soft sweet potato tans—­are done in the racy Rio manner. Dangerous Guatemala

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prints, warm Mexican sombrero colors, yellow ochres, terra cotta reds! . . . ​ ­There’s a tropical Pan American print shirt to blend with your soft-­as-­soap suds knit jacket and skirt. . . . ​Even our misty tweed jacket of deep flagship plaid is vivid as Southern seas. You’ll love t­ hese North American Casuals with a South American air—­all at low, John Wanamaker prices.” 79 It helped but was not necessary to know a bit about Rio, Guatemala, and Mexico to understand the differences between tones. In fact, the very marketers of the ad seemed to know very l­ ittle of the region, as demonstrated in their faulty geography. What the advertisement wanted to convey to the reader was that the “racy,” “dangerous,” and “warm” South was in deep contrast to the gentle and soft North and that by bringing the colors of the former into the everyday middle-­class environments of the latter, consumers could assert US cultural superiority while demonstrating their cosmopolitanism. A Bloomingdales ad coyly announced the colorful neo­co­lo­nial­ism of the late 1930s (figure 2.4): “Bloomingdale’s, the modern conquistador, made fashion history on January 5th with the introduction of South American native inspired hats. We had discovered a new fashion frontier! Since then we have blazed a trail into the very heart of the ancient Inca empire. An invasion, not to destroy, but to glorify the picturesque life of the country in design and in color for you.”80 The “pillaging” of color from Peru was again on display in a 1939 Macy’s Department Store ad. In collaboration with Pan American Airways System, Pan American–­Grace Airways, and Eastern Air Lines, Macy’s sent artist Katharine Sturges Knight “with her unerring eye for the fresh primitive values” to Peru to bring back “sketch books rich with completely new fashion inspiration.” In “the heart of Peru,” Macy’s found “Peruvian colors: Pisac pink, Chan-­chan yellow, Chincheras blue, Cuzac red, Nasca green, Misti light blue, Urubumba violet.”81 It did not ­really ­matter that most of the Peruvian places named ­were misspelled, for the marketers had established the cultural difference they needed to dress their blonde and brunette white models in “new fashion.” Consumers in Southern California could access t­ hese colors too. At a fashion show at the Biltmore H ­ otel in Los Angeles, “South American colors,” including “Andes pink, magenta, orange, amaya green, and Peruvian purple,” ­were evident in dress design.82 In 1938, coming on the heels of repatriation and deportation campaigns that forced Mexicans (including citizens and l­egal residents) to leave the United States with the purpose of relieving local relief rolls and raising wages and living standards during the G ­ reat Depression, the Chicago Daily Tribune sold an unseemly hot iron transfer pattern of “eight dancing Mexicans” (figure 2.5).83 The ad for the hot iron transfer promised customers

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Figure 2.4  ~  “South American Intrigue,” 1937. A Bloomingdale’s fashion advertisement promoting the com­pany’s discovery of a “new fashion frontier” in the Andes underscores the colonial logic that frames discourse about bright color. New York Times, April 4, 1937. Figure 2.5  ~  “Transfer Pattern Offers Festive Mexican Figures,” 1938. In this advertisement for a transfer pattern, “vivid Mexican colors” and culture are domesticated, brought inside “to perform for you.” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 18, 1938.

that “gay, dancing senoritas and the equally brilliant caballeros” would “create a festive mood as they perform for you from wall hangings, pillows, curtains, tray cloths, or tea towels.” Similar to previous ads, marketers of the iron transfer also felt the need to instruct readers on how to offset the visual stimulation of colors coming from Latin Amer­i­ca: “Natu­ral linen is a perfect background for ­these vivid Mexican colors.”84 One reporter skipped the travel chronicles and romanticized encounters with the Latin American other, and instead directly referenced the po­liti­cal

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Figure 2.6  ~  “Mexican Colors Are on the Fashion Map . . . ​in Summer Suit-­Dresses,” 1943. At the tail end of US cultural diplomatic efforts throughout the Amer­i­cas known as the “Good Neighbor” policy, the Hecht Co. promotes “Mexican colors” as “good neighbors.” By promoting its consumption, the implied foreignness of bright color is mitigated. Washington Post, April 29, 1943.

realities of the time: “Yes, the ‘good neighbor’ colors and silhouettes are with us American w ­ omen for this springtime. This is a new hemi­sphere patriotism, a high-­style color scheme, which goes hand in hand with the more popu­lar militarism of spring styles, the ever-­recurring red, white and blue.”85 An ad for the Hecht Co. announced fashion in “throbbing Mexican colors . . . ​wonderfully ‘good neighbors’ for the suit-­dress you’ll live in and work in all Summer long” (figure 2.6). With trade between the United States and Latin Amer­i­ca increasing during World War II, the everyday visual rhe­toric available to American audiences in such reports helped assimilate Latin American culture in private realms. Meanwhile, in the United States, the war led to l­abor shortages and a newfound interest in Latinx workers. In the 1940s, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans ­were recruited to work in unpre­ce­dented numbers in factories and

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agricultural fields in the continental United States. Despite the increase of a mi­grant and native-­born Latinx population, colors associated with Latinxs remained linked to Latin Amer­i­ca well into the 1960s. A ­women’s clothing store raved about available fashions in “Mexican colors: burnt orange, hot pink, grape, olive and blue,” another store offered the “ ‘local color’ ” of Mexico in “red Tabasco, Mexican jade, mosaic blue, raw copper, and navy,” while another offered more imaginative names such as “green pepper,” “pimento red,” and “Guadalupe Blue.”86 The hue of “Mexican color” varied across the color spectrum at the whim of designers and marketers. Their origins w ­ ere also all over the map. One ad linked “Mexican colors” to Argentina, noting that the colors w ­ ere as “exciting as tango rhythms.”87 But most advertisements agreed on one t­ hing: t­ hese so-­called Mexican colors w ­ ere to accentuate the neutral colors of the “North,” not overwhelm them. If Mexican color, and Latin American colors in general, w ­ ere to exist in the continental United States, their excesses had to be carefully managed to capture the interest and imagination of the colorfully reluctant northern aesthetes. In the late 1950s, a journalist writing from Mexico City explained that what fashion circles called “Mexican color” derived from a “solferino red” used by indigenous Mexicans.88 The journalist failed to mention that “solferino” is named ­after the village in Italy where the French and Sardinian armies won the 1859 B ­ attle of Solferino against the Austrian army. The specific geographic origins of chromatic color are not always certain. Art historians, geographers, and economic historians have traced the origins of bright colors to pre-­Columbian times. By some accounts “cochineal red,” a “brilliant crimson red dye” coveted by Eu­ro­pean metropoles, and similar to the purplish shade of red found on the cover of Lewis’s La Vida and in the title on the cover of Sexton’s Spanish Harlem, was produced out of cochineal, scale insects that fed on the prickly pear cactus native to precolonial Mexico and South Amer­ic­ a.89 The cochineal, however, curator Elena Phipps tells us, belongs to the superfamily Coccoidea, which includes other scale insects that live in Armenia, the Mediterranean, and Poland, and w ­ ere used since antiquity to create red tones.90 ­There is something provocative, even subversive, about thinking that the culture, fine art, and clothing of Eu­ro­pean civilization used colors extracted from the colonized Amer­i­cas even if it is pos­si­ble that similar tones could be sourced from within Eurasia.91 The postwar rise in abstract expressionism, modern design, and architecture, however, deemphasized origins and urged a universality of color.92 Creatives, including artists and designers of color who desired a non-­identity-­ driven analy­sis of their cultural expression, emphasized the technical aspects

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of color over the social.93 “Color experts” reveled in reining in the multiple meanings and arrangements of color. Josef Albers, who besides being an artist was a leader in color education, was known for sometimes erupting in the classroom and disposing of student assignments in the trash when he found them unsatisfactory.94 In modern art and design, color became more than ever a value with calculable “right” solutions and meanings. At the end of the twentieth c­ entury, multicultural consumer culture would combine the rigor of such expertise with enduring colonial notions of difference to market to racially and ethnically diverse consumers. Some marketers, taking the liberties of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century observers who blamed the sun and heat for “lazy,” “hot-­tempered” Africans and natives in the Amer­i­cas, mobilized pseudoscientific discourse to link Latinx tastes to the tropical climates of Latin Amer­i­ca. Aida Levitan, the president of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, declared that “the use of bright colors actually has a scientific basis. Hispanics tend to gravitate ­toward bright colors ­because they are easily discernible in the strong sunlight conditions found in Latin Amer­i­ca.” Levitan further detailed differences in taste between Latin American nationalities. Mexicans, she said, “are the most traditional of Latino groups, preferring reds, blues and blacks.” Puerto Ricans “tend to gravitate ­toward colors that are more lively, such as pinks and purples,” and Cubans “­favor vibrant colors, such as flamingo pink and salmon.”95 The Color Association of the United States, a color forecasting organ­ization that helps marketers determine the meaning and uses of color, echoes Levitan’s color “science.” ­ omen and minorities, especially the Latinos, have recently brought W a greater appreciation of color to business. Navy blues, corporate gray, and just plain black-­and-­white now seem old-­fashioned and predictable for real estate, ­legal firms and even banks. Multicolored and “pretty” designs are now routinely used to attract clients and customers. . . . ​This attraction stems mostly from cultural traditions and the surrounding landscape and climate. Studies show that African Americans are drawn to strong, saturated color, often in the red, yellow and brown range, that are rooted in their African heritage. Similarly, Hispanic color preferences also lean ­toward lively shades like orange-­reds, hot pink and yellow, which are often on brilliant display during one of their many festivals and holidays. The preference among Hispanics for bright colors is a reflection of the intense lighting conditions in Latin Amer­i­ca, since only strong colors keep their character in bright sunlight. When mar-

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keting to the Hispanic population, one would want to warm-­tone the palette very much, by adding yellow and red undertones.96 The colonial fantasy of colorful difference once used to attract white consumers was now being used to attract Latinx consumers.97 Latin Amer­i­ca was produced as exceptionally colorful in contradistinction to the supposedly less colorful North. It is unclear, however, why the language of color in design and fashion was rarely linked to a US Latinx population. This omission was not due to lack of domestic inspiration. The cultural heritage discussed in the examples given h ­ ere traveled with Latinx mi­grant populations to the north, where it furnished home interiors and sat in store shelves. T ­ hose without access to the interior spaces of Latinx communities could see Mexican-­owned brightly colored ­houses peppered throughout the Spanish colonial missions of the Southwest, as geographer Daniel Arreola reminds us.98 What appears to be an absence should be read as a sublimation of a US Latinx presence in a discourse of Latin American colorfulness that seemed more exotic and alluring, and perhaps safer in its distance, than the cultures of domestic racialized spaces.

The Politics of Making Color Public If early twentieth-­century barrios had yet to resonate as a cultural space, observers of Latin American cities frequently spoke of the colorfulness that washed over urban centers. On a trip to Spanish colonial Havana, George Reno, an “Americano,” saw ­houses predominantly covered in pearly pink, cream, lilac, and magenta that “offer the city a soft brilliancy notably dif­ fer­ent from the long and shadowy streets . . . ​that sadden the . . . ​countries of the North.”99 Exceptionally colorful built environments, such as Reno describes, ­were a fixture in twentieth-­century travelogues, essays, and ethnographies about Latin Amer­i­ca. Most narratives attribute the colors of the built environment to the mixing of Spanish, African, and indigenous ­ thers emphasized the role of colonizers in the coloring of citcultures.100 O ies. Peruvian artist Felipe Cossío del Pomar wrote in 1941 that the destruction of Incan cities demanded so much effort that “the invader had no other recourse but to allow the existence of their structures.” 101 Though colonizers avoided demolishing the Incan built environment in its w ­ hole, they did not restrain from decoration. Cossío del Pomar noted that by taking over Incan building blocks with a Spanish baroque Churriguera style,

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acanthus vines, and coat of arms, “the most conquistadores achieve is to give form to their own nostalgia. . . . ​All the styles appear smeared in vivid colors over the ­simple architecture of Cuzco.”102 The impulse to color the built environment was not exclusive to Spanish colonizers. The director of the Puerto Rico State Historic Preservation Office, architect Carlos A. Rubio Cancela, surmised that Old San Juan’s “pastel color facades in rainbow hues that enchant tourists from all corners of the world are a mid-20th ­century interpretation” of the “darker earth colors and white stucco” that were prob­ably the “preferred chromatic choices” of San Juaneros before the Spanish-­American War.103 Two years ­after the United States took over Puerto Rico, a tourist in San Juan noted the city’s “gayly colored buildings” ­were “tinted blue, yellow, drab or any other color but pink.”104 A prominent pink building arrived in the 1920s in the form of the United States Customs House. Rubio Cancela remarked that the building “defied every­thing that sanjuanero architecture had represented for eons, from color palette to decor.”105 This colorful aesthetic developed further in the mid-1950s u ­ nder the mayoralty of Felisa Rincón de Gautier, since, Rubio Cancela added, “facades have been painted in pastel hues while encadrements ­were usually colored in white.”106 As Puerto Rico adjusted to its new role as a US commonwealth, augmenting San Juan’s colorful urban character reinforced Puerto Rican identity as distinct from the United States. Anthropologist Carol Jopling cata­loged and assessed architectural typologies on the island and noted that “most US Influence h ­ ouses are modestly painted in neutral colors, indicators of a participatory or conforming and less individualistic or dominating attitude.”107 Puerto Rican colorfulness became exceptional, even aggressive, in contrast to that of the metropole. The social and cultural upheaval that gripped the United States in the 1960s and 1970s complicated the link between color and Latin Amer­i­ca. Chicana/o and Puerto Rican activism inspired Latinxs to brightly color the urban environments that deindustrialization and careless landlords had dilapidated. Chicana/os borrowed from the bright visual toolkit of Mexican muralism—­images of ­humble and peaceful indigenous p ­ eople, workers laboring in agricultural fields, rural and agricultural motifs, and Catholic and indigenous symbolism—­but added images of César Chávez, local barrio heroes, raised fists, and picket signs to create locally relevant murals on ­ ere deterstreet facades.108 As a muralist in Santa Fe put it, Chicana/os w mined to tell the stories of their barrio in “colores tan relumbrones [colors so bright] that it’s . . . ​more than enough to send a mole back to its hole (so much for the petty bureaucrats).” The “bureaucrats” they referred to ­were

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t­ hose who plied muralists, while they painted out on the streets, with questions about the legality of their public art.109 Color emerged as a tool for decolonizing barrios and their ­people and cultures from the power relations that marginalized them. Besides the built environment, color seeped into other material culture of the Chicana/o movement. Lowriders and posters ­were fashioned in what cultural scholar Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto has called a rasquache style, “the cultural sensibility of the poor and excluded,” a “decorative sense whose basic axiom might be ‘too much is not enough,’ ” and which creates “an environment replete with color, texture and pattern.” 110 Curtis Márez explains that “working-­class Chicanos often self-­consciously sublimate their flamboyant tastes to an uptight, jaitón (high-­toned) Anglo aesthetic which valorizes simplicity, subtlety, and elegance.” 111 It was believed that the popu­lar style of rasquache allowed low-­income Chicana/ os to confidently express themselves and reject the pressures of dominant white culture and assimilated middle-­class Mexican Americans.112 Similar to Mexicans in barrios of the Southwest, Puerto Rican mi­grants brought rural iconography from Puerto Rico to the bleak urban environments of the North.113 Puerto Ricans in New York painted vivid murals, planted gardens, and built brightly colored casitas, akin to Puerto Rico’s rural ­houses, in abandoned city lots. The casitas ­were, according to Luis Aponte-­Parés, an “architecture of re­sis­tance” that allowed Puerto Ricans to appropriate place and validate their identity in a city where they ­were likely to be segregated in the most impoverished areas and shut off from institutional aid.114 While some scholars stress the radical potential of this imagery, ­others soften the po­liti­cal tone and hold that the imagery rather pointed to Latinx nostalgia for their homeland and a longing for a more sustainable lifestyle.115 ­These generalized interpretations are made in light of the difficulty of determining the motivations of each person involved in creating this imagery. What is certain is that the visual interventions that emerged at the height of Mexican and Puerto Rican po­liti­cal consciousness visually expressed what spatial segregation and dominant notions of what was publicly acceptable often suppressed. ­These visuals brought the colors that had furnished interior domestic spaces of white middle-­class Americans and defined the foreign colonial other out to city streets and, in many instances, onto po­liti­cal iconography. The vivid contrast between Latinx barrio culture of the 1960s and 1970s and its national context generated new epistemologies and ontologies, and a new way of visualizing urban poverty in the United States. Whereas poor Eu­ro­pean immigrant urban neighborhoods had been equated with

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aesthetic monotony and dullness, postwar “inner cities” transitioning from mostly white to black and Latinx populations became sites of, on the one hand, a culture of poverty in the throes of an urban crisis whose prob­lems would be solved by outside technocrats and, on the other hand, a site of cultural awakening.116 In par­tic­u­lar, low-­income barrios became, for better or worse, articulated to colorfulness, a link that has since s­ haped how Latinx urban visuality is received. At the turn of the twenty-­first-­century, colorful shopping centers in areas with large Latinx populations popped up as mall developers, for whom historically the mall had been an exclusive shopping symbol of white leisure and privilege, de­cided to tap into the purchasing power of a growing Latinx population.117 Though the malls catered to Latinx customers, architects did not go to the barrio for inspiration. Instead, similar to early twentieth-­century advertisements, architects traveled to Mexico City and Monte Alban, at times with archaeologists, to study the built environment and copy its vivid orange, red, and lavender colors and Spanish colonial styles.118 A similar trend was at play in the development of Fiesta Marketplace in Santa Ana, California (see chapter 3). Again, though, abstract colors w ­ ere controversial when displayed in public spaces that dominant whites w ­ ere accustomed to claiming for themselves. In May 1995, when Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta celebrated the unveiling of his design for the San Antonio Public Library amid energizing cheers of “Viva Legorreta!,” his bright—­almost neon—­orange-­red modern square design with touches of purple and yellow was disputed (figure 2.7).119 While supporters thought the building could help boost tourism and o­ thers thought it fi­nally asserted San Antonio as a “proud Mexican Village,” architecture critics, politicians, residents, and local media debated the repre­sen­ta­tional appropriateness of the new library.120 A local newspaper or­ga­nized a name-­that-­color contest. The winner of the contest, chosen by Legorreta himself, was “enchilada red,” but more odious names w ­ ere also entered. Submissions such as “Bleeding heart Liberal red,” “Dried-­Blood-­ of-­Taxpayers-­Squeezed-­Till-­They-­Bleed-­Red,” and “truly repulsive red” showed the vehemence with which certain sectors of the public received the building.121 About the red facade, a former city council member, Helen Dutmar, declared: “I’m not too thrilled with enchilada red buildings. . . . ​It just overshadows every­thing. The Spanish culture is beautiful, but sometimes you can go overboard. ­These ­people came to San Antonio to escape the Mexican influence.”122 Dutmar and o­ thers linked this red facade to a local, unassimilated Mexican population and blamed its construction on

Figure 2.7  ~  San Antonio Public Library, San Antonio, Texas, 2010. Architect Ricardo Legorreta’s “enchilada red” design caused much controversy at the library’s inauguration in 1995, but the color has since faded from sun exposure. Photo­graph by author.

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guilt-­stricken liberals who capitulate to multimillion-­dollar public proj­ects geared at local Mexicans. In San Antonio, a city where a public “au­then­tic” Mexican culture was often associated with the beige, red clay, and white of a Spanish colonial revival architecture, the controversy over Legorreta’s design reveals how a colorful aesthetic, even an abstract color devoid of explicit working-­class or immigrant iconography, could seem transgressive, especially when linked to local Mexican immigrants.123 The link between the library’s color and Mexico was not entirely in the public’s imagination. The library’s design followed Legorreta’s belief that designing spectacles, with bold visual and spatial Mexican referents, could act as “a rebellion against all the [modernist architectural] discipline” he had known “and the foreign domination of my country.”124 The commotion over the new library eventually died down as the sun began to chip and fade the neon-­ red paint, consequently leading Legorreta to repaint the facade in a more muted red.125 For some, color ranks high ­after overcrowding as one of the most egregious Latinx practices in urban space. In 2005 a pistachio-­colored ­house in suburban Lawrenceville, Georgia, came ­under fire. An op-ed columnist for the Atlanta Journal-­Constitution wrote: Let’s be honest. You stand a pretty good chance of being called racist or xenophobic if you speak out against a Hispanic or other minority who owns a brightly colored abode. It’s unavoidable. The best ­thing to do is let the homeowner’s group fight the good fight to preserve the curb appeal of the neighborhood. . . . ​Buying a ­house is the single most impor­tant investment most of us w ­ ill ever make, and ­people want to protect it. If that means forging a united front to keep pistachio-­green colored ­houses from becoming a trend in the neighborhood, so be it. It ­ain’t racial.126 A Colombian-­born, decade-­long resident of the working-­class, Latinx-­ majority Los Angeles suburb South Gate complained about the brilliant ­house colors of her Latinx neighbors: “It’s ugly, you know? . . . ​I say this, I sound racist. I’m not racist. But ­people coming from Mexico, ­people coming from other countries, they should know that this is Amer­i­ca, that ­here is dif­fer­ent. . . . ​We have to keep our country nice. . . . ​­They’re trying to put this country (down) like we are in a country where they grow drugs and all that stuff. They put down this country with ­those colors.”127 When even Latinxs who have achieved the venerated goal of the American Dream premised on homeownership are suspect for their color choices, the fragility of upward mobility and belonging among Latinxs is

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underscored. Color stands in for the threat of unassimilated immigrants, downward mobility, and the devaluation of property. The mayor of South Gate, the first Latino to serve in this position, ordered a “census of the city’s palette” and sought a ban on what he called “Day-­glo colors.”128 In 2008 South Gate approved an ordinance that ­limited business facades to “earth tones-­muted colors.” In other cities, such as San Fernando near Los Angeles, officials have also instituted ordinances to regulate bright colors on the built environment.129 Municipal ordinances may seem innocuous, but in shaping the aesthetics of urban space they may also shape the social ordering of space, a pro­cess that is deeply po­liti­cal. Similarly, privately enforced aesthetic mea­sures also have sociospatial consequences. As ­legal scholar Steven Bender reminds us, private covenants and home associations that limit cultural expression are legally race-­neutral but “can help maintain segregated neighborhoods without the need for unenforceable racially restrictive covenants.”130 Historic districts can likewise play a role in maintaining historically segregated spaces, as was the case in San Antonio, when, two years a­ fter the unveiling of the San Antonio Public Library, Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, de­cided to paint her pale custard-­yellow Victorian cottage in the historic residential neighborhood of King William bright purple. Before painting, Cisneros applied to the city’s Historic and Design Review Commission for a “certificate of appropriateness” to authorize the new paint color. A misunderstanding led Cisneros to assume the paint color was approved. Before the paint was even dry, it was the subject of media and public debate. Members of the Commission thought purple was historically inappropriate and “too vivid and modern” for a neighborhood peppered with Victorian mansions erected by wealthy German merchants in the late nineteenth c­ entury.131 Hinting at its incorrect placement, one editorial stated that in the nearby Lavaca barrio, brightly colored homes are several and noncontentious.132 An editorial for Texas Monthly took this observation further and asked why Cisneros had moved to King William instead of nearby barrios where purple would be accepted.133 Cisneros’s purple ­house was suspect for straying from historically segregated maps that codified the barrio as a place for ­people of color and bright colors. Cisneros refuted such culture-­place reductionism and argued that while bright colors reflected the barrios of Texas and the border, they w ­ ere also part of American diversity; they ­were “another way of being American.” 134 At a city Historic and Design Review Commission meeting, Cisneros defended her use of purple: “This is ­really a story about the absence of color—­about

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the absence of Mexican ­people when you talk about history in this part of the world.”135 “We d ­ on’t have beautiful showcase ­houses to tell the story of the class of ­people I come from.” Cisneros emphasized, “but our inheritance is our sense of color—­and it’s something that has withstood a conquest, plagues, genocide, death, defeat. Our colors have survived.”136 The only commission member to defend the purple paint agreed and said that King William homes are “using a northeastern palette for colors. What you [the commission] should do is realize where ­you’re at.”137 Cisneros, echoing the 1960s and 1970s movements, was thinking about color as a decolonial instrument for intervening in normative aesthetic communities and the power relations they reflect. Bright colors are often considered bad taste and unwelcomed when they do not fit a dominant notion of architectural history; when they threaten white, elite, or propertied claims to urban space; when they portend barrioization; and when they go beyond the confines of the intimate—­the interior decor of middle-­class homes or individual fashion tastes.138 To be appropriate, color, even that which appears alone without repre­sen­ta­ tional imagery, must be subject to the careful manipulation of an expert who controls its tone and meanings. To be accepted in public spaces, bright colors must “know their place” in Latinx commercial areas and low-­income neighborhoods. Knowing what that place is, however, is challenging at the turn of the twentieth ­century, when gentrification is changing so much of the racial composition of US metropolitan areas. Higher-­income residents, many of them white, have settled in racially segregated pockets of cities and ushered in changes to neighborhood businesses, housing prices, and culture. As a result, long-­term residents have been evicted or pressured to leave so landlords can refurbish apartments for wealthier tenants or sell lots to make way for newly designed luxury apartment buildings. Years of activism in ­favor of low-­income inner-­city housing that mitigates the socioeconomic impact and displacement of gentrification led to “affordable” housing developments. Many, however, have argued that in some cities where the middle-­and upper-­middle class has difficulty finding a place to live, affordability is too broad a term and often ­favors wealthier and recently arrived populations over the least wealthy and precariously h ­ oused, long-­term residents of the neighborhood. Government-­assisted “affordable housing” thus slows down but does not completely halt gentrification. “Supportive housing,” a kind of affordable housing that includes on-­site ser­vices for special needs populations such as the formerly homeless, ­people with hiv/aids,

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Figure 2.8  ~  Harlem Dowling, a supportive housing proj­ect in gentrifying Central Harlem, 2017. The architects claim the red touches are reminiscent of Harlem’s “rich ­ rbanquotient​.­com​/­work​/­harlem​-­dowling​/­. cultural history.” https://­www​.u

and disabled tenants, may seem to withstand gentrification by the nature of its target population. But that is not always the case. Supportive housing that is mixed in with affordable and market-rate housing units can do l­ ittle to deescalate gentrification.139 Color reappeared in the 2010s in affordable housing to signal to the racial other whose very residence in the neighborhood was made uncertain by gentrification. An affordable supportive housing proj­ect in Central Harlem, Harlem Dowling, includes red and pale-­yellow metal panels on its facade, which, according to the architects, serve as “a counterpoint to the more traditional brick” and offer “a rhythmic syncopation, evocative of Harlem’s rich cultural history” (figure 2.8).140 Another supportive housing proj­ect in East Harlem combined multicolored materials on its exterior “to mimic West African cloth.”141 In the gentrifying Brooklyn Navy Yards where ware­houses once defined the landscape, a supportive housing building is dressed in variegated tones of bright reds. The building, which h ­ ouses chronically homeless p­ eople, is set next to a large white-­and-­gray brick-­and-­ concrete complex with low-­and moderate-­income rental and owner­ship units and market-­rate co-­ops.142 Color, ­here, sets apart the neediest tenants.

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Architectural magazines and design experts have applauded ­these colorful designs. Some critics argue that t­ hese colorful buildings, designed by architects who work on private developments, offer marginalized residents a chance to live in designs reminiscent of higher-­income housing. They especially like that designers consulted with local communities, strayed from the postwar “towers in the park” public housing design that created a feeling of placelessness, and challenged the dictum that publicly funded housing must deprioritize aesthetics.143 Ironically, the colors of famed modernist architect Le Corbusier’s French housing, Unite d’Habitation, more commonly known as the inspiration for maligned, colorless midcentury high-rise public housing, is a precursor to the colorful panels of the abovenamed projects. Designers of affordable housing in the South Bronx, the Via Verde building with multicolored panels, specifically attribute their design to Unite d’Habitation. Unite d’Habitation, it turns out, was inspired by Le Corbusier’s travels in North Africa, amplifying the links between color and the encounter with racial difference.144 Private housing in gentrifying neighborhoods also incorporates color to call to mind local populations of color and their culture. The gesture sometimes backfires. An architectural rendering for a bright-­pink and turquoise apartment building in East Harlem drove locals to protest (figure 2.9). While the saturated colors w ­ ere a key issue for residents, at heart was the very construction of the market-­rate building in a rapidly gentrifying area. The developer of the building responded to community concerns by inviting them to participate in a vote on the colors of the building facade.145 Color, in this instance, became the vehicle through which to pacify concerns over displacement. In the Mission District in San Francisco, a Latinx neighborhood since the 1950s, architectural renderings of Vida, a new modern condominium, included a luminous facade with colors similar to ­those found in murals depicted nearby (figure 2.10). To make sure the new development “would relate both physically and culturally to its context,” Oyster Development Corp., the developer, chose a design that “evokes both color and texture of Latin-­influenced murals and craft.”146 The development’s website, covered with colorful lettering reminiscent of Latinx, hand-­painted business signage, reiterates that “Vida echoes the rhythms that ­those who love the neighborhood know so well. . . . ​Just like the Mission itself, the building invites you to explore, uncover and participate in the joy of the local culture.”147 In coloring its facades, the building ­counters previous allegations that gentrification in the Mission District was depleting local culture. Fifteen years prior to the opening of Vida, the Latinx

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magazine El Andar wrote that dot-­com “invaders” leading gentrification in the Mission District ­were “changing the sounds and colors of the familiar.” The New York Times agreed, writing in 2013 that the changes brought by the technology industry ­were putting San Francisco’s “colorful neighborhoods” at risk of “losing their character.”148 The loss of chromatic and affective color is now a familiar urban discourse on gentrification.149 Gray, white, and other “neutral” paints are the predictable colors on newly gentrified buildings. Colorful facades, on the other hand, attempt to downplay the injuries of gentrification by gesturing ­toward cultural diversity. Color has become an abstracted version of the barrio that used to be; it is a spectacle of neoliberal urbanization whereby once-­marginalized ­people and their cultures are distilled and sanitized for their exchange value and ability to distract from the ­actual racial changes underway in cities.150 The depoliticized colorful abstractions of barrios that appear on gentrification-­generating developments, devoid of the meanings acquired when long-­standing communities colored ­those streets to prove them valuable, may challenge the subdued colors deemed acceptable in dominant built environments. They may also serve as memorials to a tenuously ­housed population. But they are not to be mistaken for the social belonging of low-­income residents of color in cities. Amid escalating gentrification, color also reasserts itself as the visual language of colonization, of a capitalism that feeds on power imbalances and spatial displacement. Alexander Gorlin Architects chose US “colonial era” colors of red, blue, and yellow for the exterior of Boston Road, a supportive housing proj­ect built by Breaking Ground in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, to honor the area’s eighteenth-­century history as a recommended site for the US capital (figure 2.11). In contrast to the supposed dreary colors of the Puritans, the architects’ choice of colors is a reminder of how bright the taste of colonists w ­ ere, especially if they w ­ ere wealthy and had access to dyes brought from faraway places, including the cochineal from Central Amer­i­ca.151 The building was thus a reminder of centuries of extraction. Down in East Harlem, a private condominium building designed by pm Architecture on East 110th Street, other­wise known as Tito Puente Way, includes yellow and red panels interspersed with gray and black. Posted on an Instagram account, the image of the building elicited critical feedback. “Gentrification at its most colorful,” one said, and another added, “colonialism in pro­gress” (figure 2.12). Similar to the syncretism of a colonial era that blended clashing cultures to make a new culture, colorfully inflected design tries to reconcile

Figure 2.9  ~  Pleasant Ave. Condo, designed by Karim Rashid, 2015. A ­ fter the proposed bright-­pink and turquoise balconies of the original proved controversial, East Harlem neighbors approved the bright-­pink accents on this revised design. http://­www​.­karimrashid​.­com. Figure 2.10  ~  Vida, 2015. The website for the housing development Vida, private apartments in the Mission District of San Francisco, claims that the “bold, vibrant colors” on the exterior of the building are characteristic of neighborhood life and culture. http://­vidasf​.­com.

Figure 2.11  ~  Boston Road, a supportive housing proj­ect built by Breaking Ground in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, 2016. Alexander Gorlin Architects chose early American “colonial era” colors for the exterior. http://­gorlinarchitects​.­com​/­projects​ /­boston​-­road​/­. Figure 2.12  ~  Critical feedback for 77 Condominiums on East 110th Street, designed by pm Architecture, 2015. Comments posted on the Instagram account of brucejbickley, March 25, 2016.

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gentrification’s disparate cultures for a reconfigured urbanism. In gentrifying spaces, color resumes its role as the prism through which Latinx identity and culture in cities is understood—an aesthetic relationship between observer and observed that carries over from colonial contact zones when the outsider, seduced by vibrant color, fixed colorful identities onto racial o­ thers. Whereas racial ­others who apply color to po­liti­cal iconography or contested spaces are deemed transgressive, the colors used by the colonizer-­as-­gentrifier are legitimate by their privileged status in the housing market. Critical voices have repeatedly framed gentrification as a mode of colonization to ­counter claims that gentrification is innocuous and inevitable. The latter argument is popu­lar among con­temporary Social Darwinists who see the displaced poor as unfit, unable to thrive in developing cities. Neil Smith’s language of the “frontier” and its encroachment on a poor Lower East Side was an early critical invocation of the colonial meta­phor for gentrification.152 Years ­later, the idea resonated in David H ­ arvey’s note that a “developmental drive” in cities “seeks to colonize space for the affluent.”153 Numerous activist groups have also a­ dopted a colonial framework to highlight what is at stake in gentrification. Missing from this discourse is color, even though it is, as I have shown, a prominent visual language in colonization-­cum-­gentrification. Taussig’s observations on color are again relevant. He contends that color is a “colonial subject.” 154 In being so, color manifests the contradictions of being colonial: it informs a colonial social order but also the identity-­making practices of the colonized. Colorful Latinx urbanization ­today is a visual language of multiple power relations that descends from unequal histories. A colonial explanation should not foreclose on other associations and motivations b­ ehind the use of color. Artists continue to use bright color to resist bland, monotonous imagery of a white establishment. But colonial power relations nonetheless offer a convincing explanation in urban contexts defined by social tension. Like so much of colonized culture, color lies on a spectrum between enchanting and an assault to a normative way of living. For Latinxs, color is affirming in its universality, culturally defining in its particularity, a reminder of incomplete assimilation, and a display of the instability facing cities. Color is a phantasmagoria whose meaning changes with diverse contexts, viewers, and users.155 It is for this reason that color attracts the attention of brokers of barrios, who find in color the permissiveness unavailable in literal iconography. This, however, is a restricted freedom. As long as color, even abstract color, is linked to Latinxs, it is unable to wholly achieve the universal privileges and status

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afforded to Euro-­centric modern design and art.156 To get to the politics of this color, I suggest that it is impor­tant to treat color as if it w ­ ere a “dialectical image” of opposing historical and con­temporary narratives from which a politics can be extrapolated.157 In an effort to do so, I want to end by drawing closer attention to the two sets of brokers that bookend this chapter, the brokers of the 1960s, the de­cade in which barrios became more vis­i­ble and US cities fell in “decline,” and brokers of turn-­of-­the-­twenty-­first-­century cities undergoing gentrification, a so-­called rebirth that displaces barrios. In both moments, color is used as a device with which to control the meanings and impact of barrio life and culture. By highlighting the colors of the barrio while keeping distance from low-­income concentrations and their potential for urban radical politics, both midcentury social scientists and con­temporary urbanists curate and transform color into a redeemable feature of Latinidad, a feature appreciable among a socioeconomic and ethnoracially diverse audience. In the 1960s, it was the social science outsider researching the spaces of culture of poverty and now it is the gentrifier who marks Latinx culture as colorful while making low-­income Latinx belonging in cities tenuous. Is gentrification the new culture of poverty? Possibly, and not just b­ ecause the impulse driving gentrification pathologizes poor ­p eople of color and their culture but b­ ecause it si­mul­ta­neously does so by humanizing them through a chromatic color with a colonial history.

Three A Fiesta for “White Flight”

In 1985 a developer, a proj­ect man­ag­er, and two business o­ wners drove two hours south to the border city of Tijuana to research Mexico’s historic urban markets and architecture. Their findings led to the opening of an outdoor shopping plaza, painted in a medley of pink, green, and blue of equally muted intensity, on Fourth Street in downtown Santa Ana (figure 3.1). The city was the county seat of then ultraconservative Orange County, known first as “Nixonland” and l­ ater as “Reagan country.” Thinking back to the politics of locating color in public spaces, how did the business o­ wners and government officials who brokered this large, colorful Mexican-­oriented complex into existence get away with placing it downtown? ­Were Santa Ana’s elites ahead of their time in making room for Latinxs in the city’s governmental and commercial center, or had downtown become so undesirable as residents and consumers left for new outlying suburbs that they resigned themselves to cater to local Mexican consumers? Months before the trip to Tijuana, the city man­ag­er of Santa Ana had put out a call for “a festival-­type shopping center.”1 The call was inspired by real estate developer James W. Rouse and architect Benjamin C. Thompson, whose historically themed “festival” idea for Faneuil Hall in Boston had by 1985 spawned acclaimed waterfront redevelopment in Baltimore and New York City.2 Similar to the already existing developments in northern Rust ­Belt cities, Santa Ana’s initial plans for a festival included a historical Eurocentric design that would appeal to the middle-­class white consumers who had abandoned downtown, the “white flight” migration out

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Figure 3.1  ~  Fiesta Marketplace, Santa Ana, California, 2011. Photo­graph by author.

of cities. Unlike deindustrialized cities of the North, however, Santa Ana was located on the Sun ­Belt, attracting industrial jobs and experiencing population growth. Santa Ana’s “festival” was to be located in a commercial slice of downtown known for attracting working-­class Mexicans who, since the 1910s, had settled in barrios throughout Santa Ana and grown to be the largest residential group. By the mid-1980s, years of redevelopment had galvanized local Mexican business and residential groups to or­ga­nize together against displacement.3 This organ­izing, compounded with the realization that exclusively focusing on the task of reversing white flight lost sight of other opportunities for economic growth, compelled city officials to include Mexican culture and Mexican consumers in redevelopment plans. Downtown’s existing Euro-­American architecture fused with Tijuana’s built environment and the consumer preferences of local Mexicans. Fiesta Marketplace, as the proj­ect came to be known, was the product of brokering barrios to address the cultural and social changes that white flight and Mexican in-­migration signaled.4 What was meant by white flight, however, requires unpacking. As city officials lost hope of bringing back white residents and consumers, they reconceptualized the crisis that white flight represented. While northern cities worried about the economic and

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population losses that white flight sparked, the primary crisis of white flight in mid-1980s Santa Ana was the loss of white power that a Latinx, mostly Mexican, majority could set into motion. This chapter examines how Fiesta was key for managing this crisis, since its appearance camouflaged a white revanchism intent on maintaining control of downtown and distancing the growing city of Santa Ana from its developing barrios.5 Although I mention them h ­ ere as key producers of crisis, whites have not been publicly understood as such. Instead, much of “crisis” language of the time took p ­ eople of color as its primary subjects. In interviews I conducted and news articles I pored over at local archives in Santa Ana, the language of decline—­blight, decay, sex work, and public drunk be­hav­ior—­ was often linked to Mexicans and explicit in the redevelopment discussions that led to Fiesta. Academic lit­er­a­ture reminds us that despite how focused policy makers may have been on black and Latinx residents, whites and their choices to leave—­take “flight”—­also had an active role to play in the urban crisis of the time. The 1968 Kerner Commission report, created ­under executive order of President Johnson, underscored “white exodus” from cities as a principal catalyst of ghettoization and marginalization of p ­ eople of color.6 Released three years a­ fter Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s leaked report laid the onus for “pathology of poverty” squarely on the “broken,” single-­mother-­headed African American f­ amily, the Kerner Commission report, drafted by the eleven-­person National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was seen as an opportunity to move beyond the f­ amily and onto other socioeconomic issues that contributed to urban riots in the late 1960s.7 In subsequent de­cades, historians of postwar US cities identified whites moving to suburbs, government officials offering racially exclusive mortgages, state and corporate disinvestment, realtors steering racial segregation, and employers moving away in search of bigger tax abatements as key actors of the urban crisis, responsible for creating a schism in the midcentury metropolitan area whereby black and Latinx cities ­were associated with decline and white suburbs associated with growth.8 By the early twenty-­first ­century, gentrifying whites moving from suburbs to cities ­were seen as the saviors of the crisis created by ­earlier generations. Thus, if they had not always been underlined as the actors generating the crisis, whites ­were certainly thought to be ­behind the reversal of the crisis. This chapter tells a story slightly dif­fer­ent from that of typical urban “rebirth.” In Santa Ana, solutions to downtown “decline” and white flight emerged out of a Mexican population and culture de­cades before white gentrifiers from the suburbs came to “save” it in the early twenty-­first

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c­ entury. Government officials and business ­owners turned their attention to local Mexican consumers and Tijuana’s architecture to counteract what they perceived to be the simultaneous prob­lem of white residential relocation to nearby suburbs and growing Mexican barrios nearby.9 While some may celebrate Fiesta as a vindication of the role that Latinx consumers play in cities facing economic trou­ble, I want to stress that Fiesta was not resistant to white power.10 It was a sanitized, white-­approved, brokered version of a Mexican-­inspired space whose consumers had existed in the area well before developers and business ­owners dreamed up its plan.11 City councilperson Daniel E. Griset, a proponent of Fiesta, justified the new development by saying: “It was apparent to me that if we had let the downtown fail, it would have been a cancer eating at ever-­widening circles” of the city.12 According to Griset and like-­minded supporters of Fiesta, this new proj­ect was an antidote, but an antidote to what specifically? What was the “cancer” and which spaces of the city did the “ever-­widening circles” it was about to invade encompass?13 Turning attention to the ways Santa Ana Latinx consumer spaces and nearby barrios w ­ ere discussed as plans for Fiesta unfolded, it is clear that while Fiesta depended on Latinx consumers for its existence, the spaces Latinxs used and ­shaped ­were maligned as “blighted” and became the unspecified “cancer” in Griset’s euphemism for decline. Indeed, Fiesta had not s­ topped the tendency to blame low-­income Mexican neighborhoods for hindering cap­i­tal­ist development. What Fiesta did prevent was the further expansion of barrios and their nonconformist (by choice or imposed neglect) spatial and aesthetic configuration in downtown. Though unable to reverse white flight, Fiesta’s built environment, dressed in a US tourist imaginary of historic Mexico, was able to keep white dominance alive downtown, all the while reaping the advantages of local low-­income Latinx consumption. While local Mexican and Latinx consumers became key components of Fiesta, Latinx spaces ­were ousted from a government narrative of pro­gress. And so, like other brokered Latinization of space discussed in this book, advocates of Fiesta struck a balance between maintaining distance from and articulating to the less desirable barrios scattered throughout Santa Ana in order to fulfill the economic objectives of urban development and “solve” the crisis of white flight. Focusing on Fiesta, a proj­ect set downtown—­the oft-­declared cultural and economic heart of a city—­offers a large, ambitious, and overtly commercial example of brokering urban Latinx culture and life. White flight and concurrent barrio growth challenged the white-­centric urban identity of Santa Ana. As in other places experiencing white flight, ­people of color

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in Santa Ana, specifically the growing Mexican immigrant population and its spaces, became the beleaguered urban symbol of Orange County. In contrast to most cities, however, by the mid-1980s the buying potential of local Mexicans was thought to be a solution to the crisis set off by white flight. The actors who designed Fiesta to address Mexican and Latinx consumers cast aside barrio concentrations and low-­income Latinx consumer spaces as blighted urbanism. Fiesta’s repackaging and partial de­mo­li­tion in the early twenty-­first c­ entury occurred when business o­ wners and city officials, again concerned with attracting white and affluent consumers who could turn around diminishing values, dreamed up a new version of Fourth Street. This latest repurposing of downtown did away with indicators of Latinx culture and no longer positioned Latinxs as target consumers. ­These changes made clear the precarity of brokering Latinx urban culture and life for conventional urban market imperatives. As such, even a Latinization of cities that is developed and legitimized by actors that affirm cap­i­tal­ist urban development is contingent on the power of whites and eco­nom­ically advantaged p­ eople and the spaces they covet over time. If the thought that a brokered Latinization would offer a more stable public presence in cities for Latinxs was ever a consideration, the argument presented ­here may very well dispel it.

White Flight and a (Not-­Quite) Urban Mexican “Menace” In the eyes of early to mid-­twentieth-­century policy makers, a successful metropolitan Santa Ana hinged on white in-­migration. White arrivals in the 1920s had planted the seeds of an urban center. Postwar white flight into Santa Ana and the rest of Orange County had remade the area’s vast citrus and substantial bean, celery, and walnut fields into the emblem of well-­heeled, conservative suburbia. The opening in 1953 of the Santa Ana Freeway, which made commuting pos­si­ble between Orange County and Los Angeles, fueled this postwar dispersal into Santa Ana and its environs. As a consequence, housing developments spread throughout Orange County. The 1955 opening of Disneyland in Anaheim accelerated the housing boom. With suburban housing came other forms of entertainment and consumption, especially enclosed shopping malls. Following the Watts Riots of 1965, many more entered the county, leaving b­ ehind homes in Los Angeles, Inglewood, and Compton. Soon the new developments in Orange County began to attract eco­nom­ically advantaged Santa Ana consumers and residents.

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By the late 1960s, Santa Ana began to experience the downsides of “white flight.” “Parasitic urbanization,” the term historian Robert A. Beauregard uses to describe how postwar urbanization siphoned populations from old central cities to new suburban tracts, had begun to mutate and feed from the older areas of Orange County. The result was a reor­ga­nized, supposedly declining, Santa Ana distinct from the image of perfect and successful suburbia associated with the rest of the county.14 The Santa Ana that whites began to leave b­ ehind in the 1960s was very dif­fer­ent, in terms of density and built environment, from the large cities whites abandoned elsewhere in the United States. Postwar Santa Ana was still trying to make sense of its urban identity. An agricultural past was fresh in the minds of many residents who had worked in the fields as ­children and teen­agers. Less than forty years prior, the city had celebrated the first six-­story-­high building in its downtown at a time when Los Angeles buildings stood nearly twice as high and New York City buildings reached more than twenty stories.15 Ten years prior, the 1950 census, the first census to designate metropolitan areas as data units, included Santa Ana and all of Orange County in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, even though Orange County had separated from Los Angeles in 1889, and Santa Ana had since then been named county seat. The urban identity of Santa Ana, a sparsely populated city, had yet to s­ ettle in the spatial imaginary of the local population. By 1970 Santa Ana’s population had grown by slightly more than fifty thousand ­people, ranking it among the one hundred largest urban places in the nation, according to the US census. With this population increase, Santa Ana’s urban identity exhibited the growing pains of a Sun ­Belt city. In contrast to the shrinking populations and faltering economies of Rust ­Belt cities of the North and the Midwest, Sun ­Belt cities witnessed population and manufacturing growth. Despite this urbanization, Santa Ana’s rural history continued to outweigh and dominate the spatial imaginary of locals well into the postwar period. In 1972 Orange County ­grand jurors, in their investigation of ­whether local governments ­were hiring planning commissioners or other elected officials connected to industries involved in the county’s postwar building boom, explained the need for redevelopment, lamenting: “visual pollution has spread throughout Orange County like the blight of decline that ravaged our orange trees in e­ arlier days.”16 Like in many other cities across the nation, Orange County politicians and residents bemoaned the “urban blight” caused by white flight. But the newness of Santa Ana’s urban identity made it so that the devastation of “urban

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blight” was best understood in connection to diseases that had spoiled the county’s agricultural fields. What actually constituted blight frequently changed. In the late 1960s, some residents believed the ubiquitous billboards along the Santa Ana Freeway scarred the picturesque rural landscape.17 A few years l­ater, a report prepared by con­sul­tants hired by the city of Santa Ana noted that blight became vis­i­ble on Fourth Street as old buildings ­were “replaced by gas stations, parking lots, neon signs and pasted-on ‘decorative’ siding reflecting the values of a fast-­growing, non-­craft oriented society.”18 White out-­migration from French Park in the 1980s had led the neighborhood, known as “Nob Hill” ­because of its tony Victorian homes, to become a “run down and crime-­ridden” area where old h ­ ouses w ­ ere replaced with 19 multistory apartment complexes and condominiums. What looked like modern urban landscapes elsewhere looked like blight to some of Santa Ana’s residents. In contrast, some business o­ wners and politicians worried that the lack of parking in downtown Santa Ana would force downtown businesses to close and lead to economic decline and its physical manifestation of blight. Failing to embrace new construction could, it seemed, be as detrimental as d ­ oing so. Despite its amorphous meaning in Santa Ana, ­there was some consistency to blight among research experts. One urban policy analyst in the late 1960s wrote that a­ fter the Housing Act of 1954 led to mass “urban renewal” campaigns, blight came to mean generally “almost all that men found manifestly offensive in the city.”20 Blight was thus a con­ ve­nient way to disregard and destroy that which “men,” ­those men whose destruction of built environments urban policy legally supported, found uneasy and inappropriate for their vision of urban culture. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the “men” in Santa Ana frequently expressed worry about increasing populations of color and their effects on the fiscal health of the municipality. The city had grown with— or one might say it achieved “city” status ­because of—an additional fifty thousand ­people, most of them black and Latinx.21 Though politicians did not outright blame growing communities of color for blight, they implied that the two came hand in hand. As scholars have pointed out, racial and ethnic prejudices underpinned blight discourse and choices regarding which properties ­were deemed in danger of becoming weathered and los­ ere varied and included ing value.22 In Santa Ana, tactics to control blight w annexing bordering land from what would eventually become Irvine, a prosperous place whose tax revenue, if absorbed, could contribute to city coffers. When annexation plans failed, and Irvine was established in the

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early 1970s, Santa Ana politicians demanded that the new city develop low-­income housing to attract African Americans and Mexicans who would other­wise live in Santa Ana.23 City man­ag­er Carl J. Thornton griped that u ­ nless Irvine did so, it would exclusively lure Santa Ana’s eco­nom­ ically advantaged residents to its new housing tracts and leave Santa Ana “looking like the decaying central cores of major cities across the country.”24 Upon learning that the borders and development of Irvine had been fixed without favoring Santa Ana, one government official remarked that Irvine would “be the City Beautiful for beautiful ­people.”25 What may have been merely a quip—in the context of the deepening spatial segregation Irvine and larger patterns of white flight set off, the idea that Santa Ana was becoming a poor, racialized, and, by implication, “uglier” place in the midst of advantaged “beautiful” whites—­was evocative of the normative standards that rendered whites more beautiful than ­people of color. This was not the first time populations of color ­were thought to pose a threat to Santa Ana’s urban image. Historians have documented how the Chinese who settled in Santa Ana in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury to work in celery fields and on the Southern Pacific rail lines formed a small Chinese community on Third Street downtown that white residents reviled and begrudgingly accepted, if only ­because of the crucial role Chinese residents played in local business.26 With the opening of a new city hall a block away in 1904, disdain for Chinatown grew. Its redwood structures seemed ever more an eyesore compared to the pro­gress and modernity the new city hall represented. In 1906, ­under the pretense of a Chinese leper living on Third Street, Santa Ana’s government officials quarantined ­those it believed to be infected, evicted the rest of Chinatown’s residents, and burned all their dwellings and belongings in a spectacle that news reports of the time said attracted almost one thousand p ­ eople to witness the “fun.”27 The leprosy case went unverified, but the fear it incited caused Chinese locals to flee, resulting in what some of Santa Ana’s white residents had hoped for—­a whiter downtown. Two years ­later, the chamber of commerce proclaimed that Santa Ana had “passed the crucial village stage and has now entered the city list.”28 Thus, from the beginning, white revanchism and vio­lence against residents of color who ­were gaining spatial prominence ­shaped Santa Ana’s urbanness. In the 1960s and 1970s, government officials and business ­owners, worried about the impact suburban developments in Orange County would have on Santa Ana’s downtown, evoked similar racial anguish. Though Chinese, Japa­nese, and Viet­nam­ese would also call Santa Ana their home during this time, the larger African American and Mexican

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populations ­were the targets of this latest manifestation of white concern. Participants at an Orange County–­wide seminar on the national urban crisis of the 1960s told a nearly all-­white audience that ­there was a dominant perception in the county that a middle-­class white suburban lifestyle was “ordained by God” and black and Mexican participation and inclusion would undermine this privilege.29 Since the 1940s, African Americans had moved from Texas and elsewhere to Santa Ana to work in the local army air base and electronics manufacturing. The Watts Riots of 1965 led African Americans to migrate from Los Angeles to Santa Ana. Unlike whites leaving ­after the riots, African Americans tended to ­settle in the black neighborhood of Jerome Park, a half mile southwest of Fiesta, or near the Mexican barrio south of downtown.30 African Americans recounting the postwar years tell stories of being refused ser­vice in restaurants, denied housing, excluded from employment and educational opportunities available to whites, and segregated in places such as city pools and the balconies of movie theaters. It may have been “harder to see the poor blacks” in Santa Ana than “on Chicago’s South Side or Atlanta’s Vine City,” as one observer put it, but the city’s history of discrimination and with nearly seven thousand of the county’s ten thousand African American residents in 1970, Santa Ana was a center of black po­liti­cal activism and racial tension, a fact that made some elites uneasy.31 The larger Mexican population attracted specific attention, however. Officials warned in 1966 that Orange County has “a growing Watts area in its Mexican American ghettoes” that is difficult to pacify ­because “contributing money ­won’t help and learning Spanish ­won’t help ­because they speak Mexican.” 32 Whereas in Los Angeles, as geographer Laura Pulido tells us, the Watts Riots created an urban racial hierarchy in which African Americans ­were perceived as dangerous and volatile and Mexicans acquiescent by virtue of not having joined the riots, anx­i­eties over urban vio­ lence in Santa Ana did not cut along the same racial lines.33 This was made plain almost three months a­ fter the 1968 publication of the Kerner Report explained the c­ auses of nationwide rioting and mere weeks a­ fter the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. convulsed the nation with even more riots, when the mayor of Santa Ana asked the Planning Department to mea­sure rage in the city. The Planning Department report concluded ­there was “­great potential for vio­lence” among both African American (at the time about 5 ­percent of Santa Ana’s total population) and Mexican (at the time about 15 ­percent) residents who had long suffered discrimination, segregation, and everyday humiliation.34

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Wary of the possibility that Santa Ana would be added to the national list of riots, officials made efforts to redress poverty in Orange County that ­were vari­ous and stemmed from multiple directions, but few ­were effective or grappled with per­sis­tent racial discrimination. The Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo), created to supervise the war on poverty programs President Johnson initiated in 1964, provided resources in 1965 for the opening of the Community Action Council (cac) in Santa Ana.35 In its first year, the Orange County cac failed to spend the funds oeo provisioned, to maintain communication between the vari­ous neighborhood organ­ izations it was meant to serve, or to address the racial discrimination that undergirded poverty. The director of cac, Harry Holmberg, explained the organ­ization’s in­effec­tive­ness by saying that “poverty does not show ­here ­because we are a new, sprawling community and poor ­people are not concentrated h ­ ere as they are, for example, in Los Angeles.”36 This may have been true for some parts of Orange County, but certainly not for Santa Ana, where ghettoes and barrios had been forming for vari­ous de­cades. As racial tensions continued to boil around the country, some local residents of color disappointed with cac or­ga­nized without government sanction and partook in protests that belied the idea of their invisibility.37 In 1969 a riot erupted downtown at the Broadway Theater, which was co-­owned by Allan Fainbarg, ­later one of the investors in Fiesta. The riot broke out ­after African American moviegoers ­were harassed by white moviegoers and battered by police.38 Mexicans participated in the downtown riot alongside African Americans. According to a lieutenant at the Broadway Theater, “­every time something was thrown and I looked where it came from, I saw Mexican-­Americans.”39 W ­ hether or not Mexican moviegoers partook in the riot to the extent the lieutenant claimed, Mexicans, by far the largest population of color in Santa Ana throughout the twentieth ­century, had much to be upset about.40 While t­ here would be no Watts Riots in Santa Ana—no extensive property damage and no continuous days of rioting—­the racial discrimination, segregation, and substandard and unequal ser­vice and opportunities that Santa Ana’s Mexican and African American populations w ­ ere subjected to, as well as the rise in Black Power and Chicana/o Power throughout Southern California and the nation, continued to influence protests in Santa Ana. For Mexican residents, the list of grievances was long and historically deep, even though the city was founded in 1869, l­ater than most other southwestern cities the United States annexed through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.41 Residents with Spanish surnames began to ­settle in

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large numbers in the 1910s.42 Some of ­these early residents fled the vio­ lence and disruption of the Mexican Revolution; o­ thers came from elsewhere in the Southwest. Though a small population, they asserted their right to fair and equal opportunities. In 1919, before the Santa Ana Board of Education, a group of parents protested the construction of segregated schools and, though their concerns went ignored, set an impor­tant pre­ce­ dent for postwar Mexican activism in the city. Well into the 1940s, schools in Santa Ana as in the rest of Orange County remained segregated ­under the premise that Mexican c­ hildren had “special needs” and lower iqs than white ­children. Schools tracked Mexican students into home economics courses or vocational training, employed vari­ous tactics to “Americanize” the students, and disallowed speaking Spanish.43 Still, throughout the 1940s, many more Mexicans continued to arrive via the Bracero Program or on their own to work in military production. Many learned of available jobs in agriculture, factories, and railroad construction in Santa Ana upon arriving at the border city of El Paso, Texas. A ­ fter the war, returning veterans and second-­generation students, as elsewhere in the Southwest, grew increasingly indignant about discrimination and began to loudly demand equal rights, especially in the realm of education.44 In 1946 the landmark case Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County, et al., which desegregated schools in Orange County, included Santa Ana as a defendant in the class-­action lawsuit.45 Nearly two de­cades ­later, the local Mexican population would be galvanized once more as the Chicana/o movement took the Mexican barrios in nearby Los Angeles and San Diego, and other barrios across the Southwest, by storm. A group from the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) at Santa Ana College or­ga­nized cultural activities to celebrate Mexican culture.46 Activists pressed the University of California at Irvine to enroll more Mexican students from Orange County. In 1971, in support of the Chicano Moratorium, an anti–­Vietnam War committee, local Brown Berets marched from the Artesia barrio to the Santa Ana police station, where they protested police brutality and then traveled for a rally in East Los Angeles.47 Anti-­Vietnam protests brought ­these two Chicana/o communities closer, a connection that troubled government officials. In fact, Santa Ana student actions and networks with barrios in Los Angeles provoked Orange County officials to start a “riot and disorder training program.”48 Still, despite a further militarized police force, protests in Santa Ana continued. Mexican and black students led walkouts to protest discrimination in public schools and parents protested the placing of Mexican students in “mentally retarded classes.”49

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Minimizing the range of the Chicano Moratorium’s demonstrations of re­sis­tance, some middle-­class, middle-­aged Mexicans in Santa Ana patted themselves on the back for having prevented the same level of youth militancy and vio­lence observed in East Los Angeles, which had left three ­people dead, including Santa Ana resident and journalist Rubén Salazar. For Santa Ana’s upwardly mobile Mexican residents, ­there was much at stake in showing a pliable, law-­and-­order Mexican image to the rest of the county. In the early 1970s, populations of color continued to be woefully underrepresented in government jobs despite California governor Ronald Reagan directing government officials to ameliorate race relations by focusing on black and Latinx employment in 1968. The impression of a radical Chicana/o community could forestall the additional employment of Mexicans in county government. To prevent this from happening, middle-­class Mexican residents communicated with local young Chicana/os and convinced them to tone down their protests.50 According to members of the middle-­class Mexican American association named the Council, this was hardly necessary. For them, the geographic layout of Mexican Orange County already proved to be a helpful deterrent to a unified and larger Chicana/o activist bloc. The Los Angeles Times wrote that the members believed that “Orange County’s militant ele­ ment has not caused the vio­lence experienced in Los Angeles ­because local barrios are geo­graph­i­cally split.”51 By some accounts, t­ here w ­ ere nearly forty-­seven barrios in Orange County in the 1940s. By 1970 some of t­ hese barrios had dispersed or reconstituted elsewhere, but at least six w ­ ere located in Santa Ana, including Delhi, about a mile southwest of what would become Fiesta; Logan, one of the oldest barrios, located about eight blocks north of Fiesta; Artesia, about a mile west of Fiesta; Lacy, encompassing parts of downtown, on the eastern border of Fiesta; Civic Center barrio in downtown, five blocks west of Fiesta; and Santa Anita barrio, northwest of Fiesta near Artesia.52 ­These neighborhoods arose b­ ecause exclusionary policies prevented Mexicans from living elsewhere, and b­ ecause the factory, agricultural, or railroad employment jobs that hired Mexicans ­were located ­there. Years of a nationwide “urban crisis” rhe­toric of decline magnified awareness of barrios and ghettoes. Santa Ana’s barrios faced intense scrutiny, and some demise, as the “crisis” aligned with a growing Mexican immigration in the 1970s that augmented elite fears over the “menace” of a soon-­ to-be majority-­minority city. The dispersed barrios that some believed to

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be po­liti­cally neutralizing w ­ ere to o­ thers spreading poverty, blight, vio­ lence, or, as Griset seemed to be implying, a “cancer.” The chairman of the Orange County supervisors suggested moving the county seat from Santa Ana ­because it did not have a “normal ethnic balance,” a plan that would have further distanced white power from Santa Ana’s growing Mexican city.53 County officials did not agree to do so, opting instead to focus on a discourse of blight that targeted barrios in the downtown area and justified their de­mo­li­tion. In 1972 Santa Ana’s city council passed a vote that declared downtown a “blighted area” and named the council “a community redevelopment agency” with the power to carry out any proj­ects necessary to remove said blight.54 Given carte blanche, the city council reenacted a pattern that used de­mo­li­tion and the alteration of built environments to retake downtown for whites. In 1977 private con­sul­tants working for the city council recommended the “demise” of Logan barrio, calling it “an essentially blighted area.”55 Its mixed residential and industrial land uses, hodgepodge architectural styles, and “rear dwellings” added to the back of older ­houses ­were in deep contrast to the bungalow housing pattern seen in wealthier areas of Santa Ana. Officials had intervened in Logan before, displacing Mexicans in the 1950s to build the Santa Ana Freeway, which increased white migration into the city, and l­ ater to enlarge Santa Ana Boulevard. But by the 1970s, residents of the Logan barrio w ­ ere ready to mobilize, and they successfully prevented city officials from further destroying their neighborhood. The Civic Center barrio, consisting of about four hundred residents about a mile south of Logan, on the other hand, was razed to build condominiums. David N. Ream, then the head of the city’s redevelopment agency, had delivered the Civic Center barrio its death-­knell when he called it “prob­ably the worst residential blight in Orange County.”56 Condemning racialized spatial concentrations did not halt Mexican population growth. By 1984 the Latinx population of the city—­mostly Mexicans but also Central Americans and South Americans—­was the majority.57 The tilt to a Latinx majority had come with a steady drop in the African American population, partially a result of middle-­class blacks who, once relegated to black neighborhoods of Santa Ana by de jure housing segregation, ­were moving to other parts of Orange County.58 Additionally, whites kept leaving for wealthier suburbs of Orange County. The rise in suburbanization led to a rise in demand for more ser­vice workers, many who by necessity or choice lived in Santa Ana’s more affordable, majority-­ Mexican communities. This Latinx population growth entrenched a “poly-

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centric barrio” formation long in development.59 If in the 1920s, as inferred in Ricardo Romo’s history of East Los Angeles, Mexican Santa Ana was a satellite barrio of East Los Angeles (an observation that still held true in the 1960s and the rise of Chicana/o power), by the late twentieth ­century, Mexicans ­were dispersed throughout the city in several neighborhoods with their own history of social strug­g les, in­de­pen­dent of East Los Angeles.60 Not only did the number of barrios increase, but the size of historic barrios also expanded as “blockbusting”—­a practice by which white homeowners ­were induced to sell to preempt incoming neighbors of color from diminishing their property values—­made new property available to Mexicans in previously middle-­class white areas. No other major migrations would shape the urban image of Santa Ana as much as the dual movement of whites out of the city and Mexicans into it. As Santa Ana was increasingly racialized, whites made nearby wealthy Newport Beach the site of po­liti­cal fund­rais­ing and Anaheim a magnet for ­family entertainment.61 This weakened Santa Ana’s central status in Orange County and in turn put into question the quality of its urban character. Santa Ana’s urban identity had never been too strong to begin with—­recall that well into the 1960s, rural attachments overdetermined Santa Ana’s identity. For some, however, the demographic shift threatened to foreclose on Santa Ana’s f­ uture as a thriving urban center. Mexican and Latinx concentrations in urban space, the polycentric barrios of Santa Ana, ­were thus seen at odds with good urbanism. In the midst of ­these reactions to the city’s ethnoracial changes and despite Santa Ana’s numerical ascendency to city status, outside observers scrambled to find ways to categorize the county seat. Highlighting this can provide insights on how race and ethnicity, sometimes unintentionally, underlie definitions of urbanism. Journalists, detailing the growing African American and Mexican populations, avoided calling Santa Ana a city or a suburb and preferred the designation “outer city,” a term that while not characterizing Santa Ana as “sub” still made it appear less urban than the “inner cities” of the nation’s Rust B ­ elt.62 The New York Times wrote that Santa Ana, with “two-­thirds of the black population, a third of the welfare caseload and at least a third of the poor Mexican-­American barrios” in Orange County, was an “outer city” whose population growth was “turning into a menace.”63 This language gave Mexican Santa Ana ­little chance to affirm its urban centrality in Orange County. The use of “outer city” coincided with t­ hose of other journalists and scholars of the time trying to make sense of how changes to the built environment and increasing

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populations of color w ­ ere, in their eyes, making suburbs across the nation appear more urban. At the core was an unwillingness to accept that the suburb, what historian Robert Fishman called “bourgeois utopias” and ­others described in comparable terms, could continue to be a suburb with ethnoracial changes in population.64 Surfacing just as the 1960s “urban crisis” in the inner city began to die down, the “outer city” discourse came across as the suburban counterpart of that ­earlier racially induced fear rhe­toric over urban concentrations of p ­ eople of color.65 Scholars working de­cades ­later in­ven­ted new nomenclature to emphasize the county’s uniqueness. It is impor­tant to note that ­these new terms did not intend to play into the racialized fears of the 1970s, but they nonetheless contributed to Santa Ana’s not-­quite-­urban or suburban depiction. Rob Kling, Spencer C. Olin, and Mark Poster categorized Santa Ana as emblematic of “postsuburban.”66 Citing the aforementioned, critical geographer Edward Soja writes that Orange County was the “heartless center of postsuburban California,” what in his point of view amounted to the end of “the era of the modern metropolis.”67 At the Brookings Institution, Robert E. Lang and Jennifer B. LeFurgy categorized Santa Ana as a “boomburb,” a fast-­growing suburb that did not expect to become a city but due to its high levels of immigration began to resemble a “new Brooklyn.” By this term they did not mean twenty-­first-­century gentrified Brooklyn but a new version of “old” twentieth-­century Brooklyn where “working immigrant families” live in densely populated areas and despite “relatively large populations . . . ​play a secondary role in their region.”68 From this point of view, Brooklyn’s subordinate status to Manhattan paralleled Santa Ana’s relation to Los Angeles. Neither of ­these categorizations coincides with how Santa Ana’s residents viewed their city throughout the c­ entury; nor did they grapple with how white flight had deprived Santa Ana of its nascent central urban role just as populations of color r­ ose to numerical dominance. Indeed, while the rise in population made Santa Ana urban according to the census, observers saw Santa Ana as lacking an urban culture, built environment, and lifestyle. ­Whether white flight deprived Santa Ana of a central urban role was very much in the eye of the beholder and their perception of what it meant to be urban and whom the center was meant to attract. Lang and LeFurgy admitted the categorical conundrum that Santa Ana presented, saying it was “urban in fact, but not in feel.”69 It is precisely subjective definitions of urbanness that challenge less-­ than-­urban understandings of Santa Ana. Santa Ana felt like a city to the ­people of color who would travel from across the county for its shopping

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and entertainment. It was an impor­tant urban center of Latinx economic potential for Hector Godinez, postmaster of Santa Ana and founder of Banco del Pueblo in downtown Santa Ana. He chose Santa Ana to open the first Chicana/o-­owned bank in California “to introduce savings, checking and loan procedures to the many Mexican Americans who, through language barriers, never have banked.” 70 Santa Ana was a city to residents who by the end of the ­century ­were stigmatized for living in the county’s epicenter of gang activity, blight, and poverty. Downtown Santa Ana was perceived by residents as declining in the 1970s not entirely as a consequence of economic or population losses, like ­those experienced by cities in the Rust B ­ elt, or of Santa Ana’s role as an urban center. ­After all, the city was a metropolitan center for ­people of color. A key f­ actor was that growing populations of color in downtown Santa Ana did not replicate the urbanism white and eco­nom­ically advantaged ­people embraced. A rhe­toric of blight emerged as a power­ful tool for maligning Latinx spaces and justifying redevelopment that could restore the visual order and traditional urbanism associated with whiteness in Santa Ana’s downtown. A group of Latinx and white business o­ wners from Fourth Street, what by then was known as La Cuatro, came together and assumed the task of remaking this part of downtown. They offered a plan that capitalized on the purchasing power of local Latinxs. But instead of looking at local Latinx spaces, they turned to Tijuana for design inspiration. By divorcing Latinx ­people from Latinx spaces, they made it easier to judge one over the other for the sake of redevelopment while still projecting a semblance of inclusivity. Brokers ­eager to distance their proj­ect from growing barrio formations looked to Latin Amer­ic­ a for development ideas that they believed could si­mul­ta­neously reference and elevate the culture of local Latinxs.71

La Malinchada of Downtown Fiesta While ­doing research in Tijuana in 1985, the Orange County business ­owners and experts commemorated their trip with a souvenir black-­and-­ white photo aboard a donkey cart on Avenida Revolución, the legendary hotspot for nighttime revelers from across the border looking for booze, Mexican ste­reo­types, and sex workers (figure 3.2).72 The keepsake’s customary donkey—­called a zonkey ­because its body was painted with stripes to look like a zebra—­nearly missed the frame, captured in a haze in the

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Figure 3.2  ~  Santa Ana business and government elites on a “zonkey” cart in Tijuana, Mexico, 1985. Their visit inspired the design of Fiesta ­Marketplace in Santa Ana. Posted on the Instagram account of unapocha, May 17, 2013.

bottom-­right corner of the photo. At the center of the photo­graph are key leaders of Fiesta, with the exception of two who are not pictured: Raymond A. Rangel, Mexican American owner of r&r Sportswear, and Allan Fainbarg, white Jewish owner of s&a Properties. Wearing casual collared shirts and pants and serapes draped over their shoulder, the men in the photo­graph grin directly at the camera from beneath sombreros. José Ceballos, a Mexican local who owned Libreria y Discoteca Mexico in downtown, wore a sombrero that read, “I Love You.” Irving M. “Irv” Chase, son-­in-­law of Fainbarg, wore a sombrero that read, “Drunk Again.” Edward Henning, proj­ect man­ag­er for the city of Santa Ana, donned a sombrero

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painted with the word Pancho, a nickname for Francisco in Mexico and for the racist bandido caricature that evolved from a derogatory view of Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Roberto Escalante, a Santa Ana resident who owned Custom Auto Ser­vice (renamed Packard’s International Motor), smiled from u ­ nder the words Just Married. Chase and Henning, the two non-­Latinxs in the photo, donned the most polemical messages, ­those that reference the illicit images of “south of the border” Tijuana. The photo’s quirkiness, as evidenced in the magical realism of donkeys-­turned-­zonkeys, and its escapism, shown in the donkey cart’s painted backdrop of remote and ancient images of Mexico, including the cacti and pre-­Columbian iconography that contrast the informal urbanization and Americanized culture of Baja California, encapsulated the clichéd Mexico ­these men would ­later re-­create in downtown Santa Ana. It was unusual to choose Tijuana as inspiration for historical Mexican urbanism. Unlike central Mexico, Spanish colonial urbanism largely left the Baja California peninsula untouched.73 Tijuana’s first urban plan was devised in 1898, de­cades ­after Mexico’s in­de­pen­dence from Spain and the Mexican American War redefined Mexico’s northernmost border. The city’s urban character took its most definitive contours in the early de­cades of the twentieth c­ entury when Tijuana tried to take advantage of spillover tourism from San Diego by appealing to a Southern California nostalgia for a Spanish colonial past. Thereafter, US business ­owners and consumers seeking escape from the prohibition era remade the young city into what horrified observers dubbed “Satan’s playground.” 74 ­Shaped into the desires of American tourists, Tijuana’s main commercial drag emerged as a loud, colorful, gaudy fantasy, a “south of the border” town.75 By the mid-1980s, when Santa Ana’s business ­owners ­were touring Tijuana, several shopping centers ­were about to or had already opened their doors about a mile east of Avenida Revolución near the Tijuana River. Plaza Rio Tijuana, Plaza Fiesta, and Centro Comercial Viva Tijuana, among ­others, borrowed designs of Spanish colonial architecture from elsewhere in Mexico.76 ­Going to Tijuana for au­then­tic Mexican architecture, as the Orange County businessmen did, was thus the equivalent of ­going to Vegas to experience Manhattan—­a curated simulacra of heritage made primarily for consumption. ­Because US foreign interests penetrated Tijuana for so long, observers have recognized in Tijuana a modern legacy of Malinche, the indigenous ­woman who, according to legend, betrayed Mexico by translating for conqueror Hernán Cortés and, as the legend goes, giving birth to their mestizo child, Mexico’s first. Tijuana—­never fully belonging to Mexico, nor part

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Figure 3.3  ~  Danny Melendez, born in Santa Ana, rides a “zonkey” on a visit to Tijuana, ca. 1965/66. Courtesy of Santa Ana Public Library.

of the US, and far from the sober landscapes of Main Street Amer­i­ca—is a border town that has been ridiculed and discredited for denying Mexican authenticity in ­favor of American tourists.77 Chicana feminist Norma Alarcón writes that Malinche was betrayed by her own ­people, made the victimizer when she was likely the victim of rape at the hands of Cortés. In response, Chicana feminists redeemed Malinche by replacing her image as a traitor with an image of a heroine and reframing her mestiza c­ hildren as the revolutionary masses of the Chicana/o movement.78 Following this way of thinking, Tijuana’s Mexican and American syncretism, repackaged as Fiesta, could rehabilitate Santa Ana’s maligned Mexican urbanism. In looking through archived photo­graphs acquired from the personal collections of longtime residents of the Logan barrio, I found that Santa Ana’s Mexican residents also vacationed in Tijuana. Similar to the Fiesta business o­ wners, residents of Logan commemorated their trips with photo­ graphs of ­family members wearing sombreros and riding zonkeys on Avenida Revolución (figure 3.3).79 To them, Tijuana was the mestizo child that deserved to be loved, or was at the very least worthy of a visit. On the other hand, some thought that Fiesta unfairly benefited from the Mexican commercial environment the rest of the Fourth Street business community had created but for which it had not received the same

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government support. In thinking of how some of Santa Ana’s residents reacted to Fiesta, Fiesta takes on some of Tijuana’s other traits; Fiesta was treacherous, a betrayal of the local business community that involved—as with Malinche—­compatriots, in this case other downtown Mexican business ­owners. Robert C. Bobb, the first African American to hold the position of city man­ag­er and the highest-­serving African American in city government, presided over the controversial beginnings of Fiesta. It was Bobb’s call for proposals for a “festival” concept to two hundred developers that triggered local Latinxs to challenge what they saw as impending displacement and exclusion from the planning pro­cess. In response, city government changed course and scaled down plans for outsider input by passing an ordinance that allowed property o­ wners on Fourth Street to “form a corporation or ­legal partnership showing the capacity to build the area themselves.” 80 In par­tic­u­lar, the entity was to cooperate with the Community Redevelopment Agency of the city of Santa Ana to create a public-­private ­partnership, a hallmark of neoliberal economies.81 Bobb was an expert in neoliberal arrangements. In his previous position as city man­ag­er of ­Kalamazoo, ­Michigan, he showed re­sis­tance to raising taxes and a willingness to undertake ample job cuts and defund public safety departments. By similarly limiting the role of government downtown, Bobb’s plan followed the po­liti­cal scene in Orange County, which had reaffirmed its reputation as a bastion of conservatism when it voted, more than any other county in California, in ­favor of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 primary. The National Private Sector Initiative Award from the National Council for Urban Economic Development in 1986 praised the partnership and a $689,000 hud grant supported the development.82 In the view of some local business o­ wners, signs of a malinchada—­ betrayal—­arose when Latinx business owner Escalante, once president of the Greater Eastern Development Corporation that represented almost eigh­teen downtown business ­owners, turned his attention to Fiesta Marketplace Partnership and invited, as one of a select few, his friend and developer Irv Chase, who then involved his father-­in-­law, Fainberg.83 In an interview, Escalante recognized that trying to hold on to a growing symbol of Mexican Santa Ana with ­little regard for what city elites preferred had garnered him and his partners the reputation of “anarchist.”84 Bringing in ­these two non-­Latinx local developers to help propose an ethnic-­specific proj­ect was one way to avoid this characterization. Dave Ream, city man­ ag­er for Santa Ana from 1980 to 2011, explained that involving Chase and

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Fainbarg, who offered crucial financial backing, made it easier for the city council to approve the proj­ect.85 Even as the city defined the agreement as “a community-­based economic venture emphasizing business and property owner retention and participation,” local resentment grew as the consequences of this newly created “growth machine,” a term used by sociologists John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch to describe a co­ali­tion of urban elites working together to increase rents, became evident.86 Louie Olivos, the owner of Yost Theater on Fourth Street, for example, was a prominent Mexican merchant who did not participate in Fiesta, even though ­under his management the Yost had done much to enhance the downtown Mexican commerce on which Fiesta’s development depended. Formerly a theater that discriminated against Mexicans and persons of color, the Olivos f­ amily’s theater featured Spanish-­language films from Mexico’s Golden Age and legendary Mexican musicians such as Lucha Villa, Vicente Fernández, Antonio Aguilar, and Juan Gabriel.87 Such popu­lar events brought in an audience from the nearby barrios of Santa Ana and Orange County.88 Still, as critics have argued, neither city officials nor Fiesta did much to include the Olivoses. Louie Olivos was told by the city that in order to remain at the site, he would have to bring the theater up to seismic code. Olivos took out a high-­interest loan but was unable to make final payments. The bank threatened to foreclose. The city then bought the theater for $600,000, less than the value of Olivos’s loan, and sold it in 1985 to the Fiesta Partnership for $50,000 even though, as the Olivos ­family argues, the Olivoses offered to buy back the theater from the city for the selling price of $600,000.89 Yost Theater remained on site, but bars and a pawn shop did not.90 The latter businesses complained that local law enforcement and state and county officials harassed them with late-­night inspections.91 By not fully including preexisting downtown Mexican-­owned businesses, Fiesta, similar to the many neoliberal urban redevelopment proj­ects popping up across cities in the United States at the time, showed how government subsidies ­under public-­private partnerships gave preference to some businesses and ­people over ­others.92 Though the city’s eventual participation and support seemed to indicate other­wise, a Tijuana-­inspired Fiesta development—or a Mexican-­ themed development in general—­was not an obvious or exciting choice for all city officials. Bobb, who had initially wanted to build Orange County’s tallest building, hesitated to focus on a Mexican-­themed proj­ect and eventually de­cided to do so a­ fter local protests and a report by the Urban Land Institute advised the city to take a less risky approach to redevelopment.93

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Other aspects also contributed to making a top-­down Latinization look like a v­ iable proj­ect. Starting in the 1970s, city officials expressed low expectations for downtown Santa Ana. Believing that downtown Santa Ana would never be like “Wilshire Boulevard,” a major commercial artery in Los Angeles, or “South Coast Metro,” a 1984 mixed-­use complex touted as a new downtown for the county, officials committed to a bearish outlook and opted for low-­risk developments.94 But as proj­ects deemed “low risk” failed to live up to their expectations, officials continued to debate ­whether they could be ­doing more. Councilmember and former mayor Gordon Bricken admitted that the 1981 Civic Center government offices (“government center”), whose raison d’être squarely fit with Santa Ana’s county seat status and was thus presumably a safe investment, had “simply not materialized the numbers we had anticipated.” Bricken continued: “We had a con­sul­tant hired . . . ​to determine what the market was for downtown, and he came back and said that the market was all Mexican and had a median income of $13,000. I ­didn’t need a $30,000 con­sul­tant to tell me that. So what does it mean? Do we try to bring p ­ eople ­here who earn more money or hang to the ­people ­here now?” Responding to his own question, Bricken flirted with the idea of a h ­ otel to “bring p ­ eople with money.”95 Speaking to the same issue of redevelopment, councilmember Dan Young suggested a more modest approach, saying, with a nod to historic preservation of Euro-­American landscapes, that the city had to “pick and choose proj­ects selectively so that much of what is already ­here is retained.”96 As government officials considered w ­ hether building new or repurposing (what planners and architects call “adaptive reuse”) was the best way to increase city coffers, they also grappled with the question of whom they w ­ ere developing for. Bricken acknowledged that “downtown has not become a special destination, but has been a collection of small businesses serving a neighborhood community. This is why we now need to assess what’s happened and decide ­whether we want to accent the Hispanic flavor of downtown.” 97 In the context of a population shift ­toward a Latinx, mostly Mexican, majority and failed attempts at bringing back wealthier white consumers from nearby suburbs, low-­income Mexicans with ­limited consumer options and a history of shopping downtown appeared as the best bet for safe, reliable subjects of redevelopment. The idea of building with “Hispanic flavor” had been circulating for years. In 1968, as Southern California tried to make sense of a rise in Chicana/o power and the race riots that roiled the nation, San Francisco architect Piero Patri prepared plans for a downtown open-­air mall on Fourth Street that included a “Mexican American”-­themed section.98

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Five years ­later, City Planning Director Chuck Zimmerman suggested “a Mexican motif ” for revamping downtown.99 One year ­after that, a Mexican “village”-­style shopping plaza on Broadway and Second Street with 147 specialty shops was ­under consideration.100 In 1982 Mexican and non-­Mexican businesspeople proposed a Mexican-­themed proj­ect near Fourth Street that included a nine-­block h ­ otel complex designed to look like an Aztec pyramid.101 All ­these plans failed to materialize. The call for proposals City Man­ag­er Bobb sent out in 1984 encouraged a “festival” concept similar to Olvera Street in Los Angeles and in d ­ oing so spoke to the historical gravitas advocates of historic preservation such as Young and other councilmembers preferred.102 In the 1930s, a historic preservation campaign to preserve colonial architecture renovated Olvera Street, located on the site of the founding of El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles—­what l­ater became Los Angeles—­for Anglo tourism. Olvera Street merged a Mexican history of place in the United States with an Anglo desire for colonizing and consuming that space. Santa Ana’s officials celebrated Olvera but they avoided reproducing the methods that gave it shape. To follow the pre­ce­dent Olvera Street set would have meant recognizing the low-­income and immigrant-­driven commercial environments of Fourth Street as foundational to downtown. This was not so easy for ­those in charge of redevelopment to accept. Former mayor Bricken said as much in an interview with Rob Richardson, local city official and champion of historical preservation of the Euro-­American architecture downtown: “The idea of an Olvera Street surfaces so that the area is a special destination, but also means that the Hispanics ­won’t be driven out of the area. T ­ hey’ve been in place for a long time and should improve. The idea of some kind of downtown theme is impor­tant, and perhaps your historic theme ­doesn’t have much relevance to t­ hese ­people or their experience.”103 Though Bricken acknowledged the impact Latinxs had downtown, he and ­others perceived Mexican Santa Ana to be outside valued history. At this time, Eurocentric historic downtown architecture was gaining advocates. Renovating existing turn-­of-­the-­century structures and buildings with a historical concept was an objective with which redevelopment plans had to engage. Local officials de­cided that a Mexican-­relevant historical theme included in the commodification of downtown would have to be borrowed from elsewhere. Tijuana became the purveyor of this historical significance. Just how much the design of Fiesta borrowed from what brokers on their Tijuana trip in 1985 saw in the built environment is unclear. Sam Romero, a well-­known or­ga­nizer in the Mexican community and the owner of

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St. Teresa’s Catholic store near Fiesta, jokingly told me that on a trip in Guadalajara, Mexico, he felt disoriented, lost. ­Because he found the built environment so similar to Fiesta, Romero thought he had never left downtown Santa Ana. At the same time, the exterior of Fiesta resembled a colorful version of the usually whitewashed or beige-­colored Mediterranean built environment favored in the Southwest.104 Fiesta’s landscape was abstract enough to offer multiple references. Even the most essentialized additions of Mexican culture to the Anglo-­American-­built environment that made up Fiesta seemed too general to be pinned down to the Baja region: the colorful exterior washes suggestive of the exotic other, an image of La Virgen de Guadalupe placed on a corner off to the side of the main drag, spare use of tile work as trim on buildings, and the Mesoamerican icons adorning the rounding board of a carousel located in the eastern part of Fiesta. It may be Fiesta’s multireferent character that most resembles Tijuana, a place Néstor García Canclini writes is a hybrid collection of meanings.105 McClellan Cruz Gaylord and Associates (now mcg Architecture) from Newport Beach was responsible for designing Fiesta. Architect Robert McClellan, founder of the firm, recalled, de­cades a­ fter Fiesta’s construction, that “every­one thought” his partner at the firm and head designer on the proj­ect, Adolfo R. “Al” Cruz, “was Mexican American but he was Filipino . . . ​and very active in the Filipino community.” Al Cruz, who held an architecture degree from uc Berkeley, became an associate of mcg in 1970, at a time when the architecture profession was only beginning to grapple with its low numbers of architects of color and the practices that ­limited minority participation in design proj­ects. The work on Fiesta reflected mcg’s early commercial work, which according to McClellan “did not allow for innovation,” only facade revitalization with terra cotta tiles: “Every­one wanted Tuscan and Spanish styles . . . ​­rose colored.” McClellan acknowledged that this work “­wasn’t ­going to scare anyone.” He added, “We w ­ eren’t very happy with the stuff. . . . ​I think [Fiesta] was a success ­because it did what ‘they’ wanted it to do” but “that ­doesn’t mean that it’s a total architectural accomplishment.”106 McClellan did not elaborate on who “they” referred to, but subsequent to our interview I found that the tiles and colors of Fiesta w ­ ere chosen by two s­ isters of Mexican and Anglo descent. One of them was married to one of the top city officials in charge of overseeing Fiesta. In designing a place that addressed Latinx and Mexican culture while it also distinguished itself in style and order from local barrio concentrations, t­ hese designers allowed Fiesta to accomplish the fine line of brokering.

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Till its end, Fiesta maintained its aseptic look. Posters w ­ ere prohibited. Signage was designed to avoid standing out too much. Vendors, most of whom rented homogeneous stands from a licensed proprietor, ­were carefully monitored. According to police officers and local residents alike, Fiesta was one of the most heavi­ly policed areas of the city during holidays and special events.107 Fiesta served to attract and contain Latinx residents dispersed in multiple barrios. In Fiesta, local Latinxs w ­ ere implicitly instructed in what city officials and commercial actors believed was an ideal Mexican urbanism. By the 1980s, several urban developments in the Southwest expressed a nostalgia for a Spanish colonial past that also showed a pattern of sublimating Mexican culture. In addition to Olvera Street, the San Antonio River Walk also dates to the late 1930s, when wpa funding helped the city clean the San Antonio River.108 In the mid-1980s, ­under Henry Cisneros’s mayoral administration, Fiesta Plaza, a pink-­colored stucco shopping mall, opened in the low-­and moderate-­income Mexican-­majority west side of San Antonio. Within months and nearly two hundred miles east, El Mercado del Sol, a “Mexican-­themed” fifteen-­acre shopping center, opened in a rehabilitated 1903 ware­house building on the east side of Houston, adjacent to low-­income public housing in Segundo barrio, a low-­income neighborhood near downtown of mostly Mexicans and Salvadorans.109 Similar to Santa Ana, the imprint of Mexican culture in Houston was rather new, with most of it dating to the early twentieth-­century surge in Mexican migration into the city.110 Out of t­ hese proj­ects, Fiesta Plaza in San Antonio and El Mercado del Sol, the two that emerge at around the same time as Fiesta Marketplace and are most similar to it in their desire to cater to a local Mexican and Latinx population, closed. Fiesta Plaza shut its doors about a year ­after its opening and was bulldozed to erect the University of Texas, San Antonio, downtown. El Mercado del Sol was repurposed and transformed into lofts. Fiesta in Santa Ana outlived both in part b­ ecause a large and growing marginalized Mexican population continued to clamor around the politics of ethnic repre­sen­ta­tion that generated Fiesta Marketplace in the first place. Clara Irazábal and Macarena Gómez-­Barris, writing about Plaza Mexico, a Korean-­owned Mexican-­themed shopping plaza in Lynwood, California, that opened in the early twenty-­first c­ entury, suggest that marketing success of nostalgic simulacra of Mexican landscapes relies on “diasporic subjects trapped in place.” 111 In other words, the very barrio formation, composed of immigrants who may not have the ­legal freedom to travel back to their home countries, is crucial to sustaining ­these ethnic developments, even if their very expression was carefully curtailed.

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­ here ­were clear business interests at play in the development of Fiesta. T Organ­izing Fiesta helped the partners preserve their property and consumer base, all of which, if other­wise altered, could affect their profits.112 ­These interests s­ haped the design of the development and the consumers and businesses that ­were included. But it would be myopic to reduce the cultural impetus b­ ehind Fiesta to market logics. Some business ­owners got involved with Fiesta ­because they saw it as a way to redress the history of racial and ethnic segregation on Fourth Street. A young Rangel, for example, had sold knickknacks downtown when Mexican use of space was segregated.113 For Rangel, Fiesta was an appropriation of a place to which he once had only marginal access. Ceballos, before the city agreed to offer local business o­ wners the opportunity to make their own redevelopment plans, objected to police raids he said ­were meant to “scare” the bars out of downtown.114 In d ­ oing so, Ceballos joined the chorus of business o­ wners protesting displacement for the sake of new redevelopment that appealed to white suburbanites. Chase, speaking with the Los Angeles Times, said that Fiesta was a way to foster belonging: “We wanted to delineate a separate area . . . ​a place t­ hese p ­ eople [could] call their own, where they w ­ ouldn’t feel alienated” as if they ­were “walking through the marble pillars” of the nearby upscale shopping mall “South Coast Plaza.” 115 Indeed, Fiesta had not simply emerged as a cynical commodification of culture. Nor was it a po­liti­cal demonstration of re­sis­tance. To best understand brokers’ desire to make Latinxs vis­i­ble on this slice of Fourth Street, surrounded by majority-­ white suburbs and abutting the government center of a white conservative county, one must temper it with the knowledge that they ­were e­ ager to change and sanitize the Latinx spaces that previously existed in its place. This is the contradiction that brokering embodies. When it opened in 1989, the press lauded Fiesta as a “colorful experiment in reviving downtown” and a cross-­cultural shopping destination, equally attractive for government workers in the nearby county offices and Latinx families coming to shop and eat a­ fter work and on the weekends.116 According to the residents who spoke with me, most shoppers w ­ ere Latinxs from Orange County searching for quinceañera dresses, wedding dresses, jewelry, religious goods, discount clothing, and country gear, as well as food and entertainment. ­These customers saw Fiesta and the greater Fourth Street area as an urban center. When I first visited Fiesta, several urbanists had recently directed their attention to this slice of downtown and claimed it as an ideal example of a new trend in urban planning and design. Latino New Urbanism (lnu), as

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the trend was called, aimed to show the overlap between “Latino cultural preferences” and Eurocentric “new urbanism,” one of the most popu­lar urban design movements in recent history.117 usa ­Today excitedly declared Fiesta and some of the surrounding stores and nearby art galleries that drew in more affluent consumers a model for f­ uture developments in Latinx-­ majority places.118 Katherine Perez, an early proponent of lnu, approved of the addition of Starbucks on Fourth Street as an example of lnu moving “beyond ethnic retail.” “It ­doesn’t say to the Latino community, ‘Starbucks is not for you.’ As ­people are ­here [in the United States] longer, they begin to change their taste about where they like to shop, where they like to relax and enjoy themselves.”119 In the eyes of ­these urbanists, Fourth Street was improved by middle-­class consumer options. I heard a similar way of thinking when I sat down with Irv Chase in 2008. City man­ag­er Dave Ream had helped me arrange the meeting. From the onset, Chase stressed how he had gone out of his way in the 1980s to assist the local Mexican business ­owners in their strug­gle to keep their property and clientele. Chase particularly emphasized his high regard for Santa Ana’s Mexican community and, as if to underscore his support, asked to meet me at a Mexican taqueria near Fourth Street. Notwithstanding his expressed sympathies, Chase was determined to redevelop Fiesta. He noted that Latinx consumers w ­ ere shopping at malls and big-­lot stores with more amenities and cheaper goods. ­There was ­little reason in his mind to sustain an ethnic market. Moreover, he said, local businesses ­were coming short on their rent and losing consumer traffic. As a result, he subsequently told the Orange County Register, he was hoping his proposed redevelopment would be “appealing to every­body. . . . ​­We’re trying to get [merchants] to understand that t­ here are more customers out t­ here than the Spanish-­speaking customers. . . . ​When that happens, t­ hey’ll be successful.”120 Fiesta was being penalized for ­doing what it was initially tasked to do: cater to Latinx consumers. Fiesta was now too barriofied, just another low-­income Latinx concentration in a Santa Ana where the Latinx population now reached nearly 80 ­percent. Fiesta’s uniqueness had worn off, for both Fiesta Marketplace Partnership and consumers. No longer the antidote to Griset’s downtown “cancer,” it had become the cancer. ­After several partners sold their stake in the Fiesta Marketplace Partnership, Chase and Fainbarg ­were left with 98 ­percent owner­ship. Chase’s plan to rebrand the area as an extension of the nearby Artists Village, an outdoor complex that had started in the 1990s and included trendy restaurants and galleries geared to the interests of wealthier Orange County youth,

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Figure 3.4  ~  East End, Santa Ana, California, 2014. In an attempt to cater to a new, younger, and not exclusively Latinx population, gray, black, and beige facades replaced the pinks, blues, yellows, and greens of the former Fiesta Marketplace. Photo­graph by author.

could now proceed unfettered and with momentum.121 By this time, Santa Ana was located in the second-­largest metropolitan area in the nation and its population topped three hundred thousand.122 Its status as a city was now undeniable but its attraction f­ actor was still debated. As if trying to impose its centrality, the city council voted to plaster the city’s new slogan, “Downtown Orange County,” on a ­water tower near the city’s freeway. Revisiting the urban character and its ability to fulfill market imperatives, as Chase did, resonated with how government officials ­were thinking. Moreover, Richard Florida’s “creative class,” which defined workers in creative industries as crucial to urban economic growth, was by then widely read and debated among scholars and policy prac­ti­tion­ers.123 Chase’s son, a recent gradu­ate of the University of Southern California e­ ager to learn the ­family business, spearheaded the plan to bring the creative class downtown. By 2014 Fiesta was gone. The East End emerged in its place, occupying much of the same structures Fiesta had but with a fresh new coat of beige paint and black awnings and trim (figure 3.4). The other visual language connoting Mexico was gone too: the tiles, La Virgen de Guadalupe,

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and the carousel. A new restaurant named Playground stood next to the site of the old carousel. Brooklyn, a new clothing store presumably named ­after the gentrified Brooklyn borough in New York City, opened on Fourth Street. The Yost Theater opened as a concert hall, showcasing mostly non-­ Latinx artists. Downtown Santa Ana, once off-­script with Fiesta’s embrace of low-­income Latinx consumers, was back on the urban script set by white actors—­white gentrification would reverse white flight. In looking back to its rise and fall, Fiesta appears as a multicultural interlude between moments of white loss and white hipster-­led gentrification. Locals who viewed Fiesta as a crucial site of their Latinx identity vocalized their opposition to the city’s opportunistic appreciation of Latino culture. Reflecting on the changes, local business owner and activist Romero told me: “Now they want to change the demographics. I just exploded on [the owner of Fiesta]. It’s true the business downtown has dropped a bit. Several ­factors . . . ​the economy has bottomed out. Second, the Hispanic community has learned about credit cards. So now they go to malls, especially the second generation. So right now t­ here is a lot of thinking of how to bring Hispanics and non-­Hispanics downtown. . . . ​I have the feeling that it is ­going . . . ​to look less like Mexico.”124 One critic said the redevelopment amounted to an “ethnic cleansing” of the low-­income Mexican and Latinx community and culture downtown.125 Community organizers and activists demanded fair and inclusive development practices.126 Local business and property o­ wners thought developers and city officials should focus on helping existing small businesses obtain extra amenities that could attract more shoppers, such as “validated parking and better lighting to help them compete with the suburban shopping malls.”127 Antigentrification activists mobilized the language of colonization to point to the displacement the removal of Fiesta produces. ­These reactions revealed just how much Fiesta and its surroundings had become a center of ethnic association that locals ­were not ready to see dis­appear. Moreover, they show how a Latinization of cities, even as a shopping mall, could be reappropriated as a community space and not just for the economic opportunism of a propertied group. ­These reactions are worth considering, for they show that it is pos­si­ble to move beyond the repre­sen­ta­tional constraints of a brokered Latinization of cities and capture it for marginalized p ­ eople. Not all Latinxs cared for Fiesta and the Latinx-­and Mexican-­oriented Fourth Street. Their distaste in part led to Fiesta’s destruction. Some Latinxs in Santa Ana believed the area to be a bad Mexican ste­reo­type, only relevant to low-­income immigrants, not multiple Latinx generations,

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and they wanted it gone. An all-­Latino city council, bolstered by public opinion, de­cided in f­ avor of the de­mo­li­tion of Fiesta.128 Councilmember Michele Martinez, a fourth-­generation Mexican American, remarked to the Los Angeles Times that she did not equate redevelopment with lacking Mexican cultural pride; rather, “it is just that not all Latinos are immigrants.”129 She added, “I have nothing against 50 quinceañera shops, but I ­don’t shop ­there. Many of my friends ­don’t shop ­there. Parents and grandparents may shop t­ here, but young kids are not g­ oing to shop t­ here, ­unless ­they’re immigrants.”130 Councilmember Carlos Bustamante, a first-­ generation Mexican American, told the New York Times, “I ­don’t want to go someplace ­else to buy my suits. . . . ​­There should be options for every­ body ­here. The city is not changing ethnically; it’s changing socioeco­nom­ ical­ly.”131 Martinez and Bustamante, like some of the residents I spoke with, wanted downtown consumer spaces to recognize their assimilation into mainstream tastes. To support redevelopment, they framed Fiesta as an immigrant space, imbued with a temporality that justified its replacement. The immigrant experience was d ­ oing the work the language of decline did during the crisis of white flight. By solidifying the control whites and the eco­nom­ically advantaged had over downtown space, Latinx supporters of redevelopment showed that white revanchism could just as well unfold through the actions of Latinxs in power.

The Precarity of Brokered Latinization It may seem odd to speak of precarity in relation to an urban development proj­ect that government officials legitimized and business elites brokered into existence. Urban precarity usually describes the working poor, the destitute and marginalized whose ability to survive depends on policies and practices that elites institute. And yet, as a proj­ect whose resiliency over time depended on low-­income and marginalized consumers, the end of Fiesta was bound to send some consumers and residents who used this space into an unstable state of belonging, not knowing where to go for their purchases, losing their favorite sitting spot to talk with neighbors and observe passersby, or losing a place to take their c­ hildren for a carousel r­ ide or a ­simple walk. This instability reminds us that a brokered Latinization of cities is often a temporary phenomenon. The impermanence of brokered Latinization proj­ects can be explained in two ways. Brokering requires concessions that render its relation to

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low-­income Latinxs suspect and its relation to urban capitalism never fully legitimate. Without support from the former, a brokered Latinization can lose symbolic claims to space. Without support from the latter, it can lose not only symbolic but also l­egal claims to space. At times, to justify changes to the built environment, advocates of redevelopment may con­ve­niently downplay or strip away a brokered proj­ect’s repre­sen­ta­tional significance. Think ­here of the Latinxs denouncing Fiesta’s relevancy as too narrowly geared at immigrants. Other modes of Latinizing space, such as the Latinx spaces re­sis­ tance movements forged, are also frequently threatened with evictions and redevelopment. Both spaces are erased for the sake of reaffirming a white grip on space. That t­ hese two ways of Latinizing space can share the same fate shows that neither is protected from the racial and economic concerns of urban cap­i­tal­ists. Both are made temporary to sustain the idea of whiteness as a fixed, nontemporal, ordained solution to successful urbanization. It is true that much of our built environment has an expiration date. Schumpeter’s term creative destruction suggests the commonplace nature of spatial destruction in a cap­i­tal­ist society.132 But the brokering examined in this book stands out from the usual built environments that arise u ­ nder the logic of creative destruction in that it expresses an interest in representing marginalized Latinx populations. In places like Santa Ana, the end of brokered built environments is not exclusively preordained by the economic interests of capitalism but by a continuing desire to maintain white control over urban spaces. This highlights how the danger that Latinx spaces are thought to offer suffuses even t­ hose proj­ects, such as Fiesta, that are e­ ager to tame the most maligned aspect of Latinx spaces—­the barrio and low-­ income Latinx spatial concentrations. No m ­ atter how much distance separates it from barrios, then, a brokered Latinization of space and its ability to fulfill urban market imperatives is suspect. Sociologist George Lipsitz writes that “dif­fer­ent spatial imaginaries produce dif­f er­ent temporalities.”133 Lipsitz explains that in contrast to a “black spatial imaginary” that looks back to history to understand how the pre­sent came to be, a “white spatial imaginary” refuses to acknowledge a history of racism lest it get in the way of its purported universal claims over space. Brokered spaces emerge with a temporality dif­f er­ent from that of white cap­ i­tal­ist spaces. They depend not on forgetting racial exclusion but on borrowing and abstracting from the urban cultures that formed in response to it in order to negotiate the best repre­sen­ta­tion to sell urban cap­i­tal­ists. The very in-­betweenness that lends to its rise also points to its fall.

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Santa Ana’s experience with brokered Latinization offers hope nonetheless. Gender theorist Judith Butler writes in Precarious Life that she would like a return of “a consideration of the structure of address itself.” The “address,” the moment in which language is directed at you, is important for Butler because she believes “that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails.”134 This is interesting to consider, even if the address did not acknowledge its addressees as fully deserving. Fiesta’s built environment visually “addressed” low-income Latinxs and Mexicans, which impacted their relation to the city. This address made Latinxs, albeit a sanitized, consumer-friendly version of Latinxs, appear to be central subjects of the city. With this address Fiesta also shaped its very own meaning, becoming not just an appropriation of Mexican culture but reappropriated by local Mexican and Latinxs who found in it and the rest of Fourth Street a sense of belonging and a site of visibility. The end of Fiesta makes Latinx subjects and their centrality to the city unstable, precarious. This precarity, according to a philosopher of the city, Marshall Berman, is endemic to modernism. Berman elaborates on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s observation that with the arrival of capitalist modernity, “all that is solid melts into air.” For Berman, this phrase explains how capitalists destroy built environments to create new ones that better serve their interests and in their wake leave a certain dread of the unknown.135 But the end of Fiesta also opens a politics of possibility. When Fiesta was about to be demolished and the “address” about to end, those who associated with Fiesta came out on the streets asking for fair development and their right to the city. It is in the break of a brokered Latinization that we may find once more a bottom-up Latinization, one that serves low-income constituents. Seizing this moment means also realizing that the longevity of Latinx urban culture and life and its public presence is contingent on challenging the continued white control over cities, a process that would benefit from a wide range of people, including brokers with the leverage to create and maintain a Latinized space that is at the service of local low-income residents. The following chapter takes a closer look at elite brokers who, though presumably with more power, do not always create design projects that advocate on behalf of low-income residents.

Four Barrio Affinities and the Diversity Prob­lem

In late June 1968, the African American civil rights leader Whitney M. Young Jr., then president of the National Urban League, gave a searing keynote address at the meeting of the American Institute of Architects (aia), the leading association for architects in the United States. Young was known for his willingness to ingratiate himself with white government and business elites who could change the racially discriminatory employment practices that blocked African Americans from jobs.1 At meetings with white elites, Young would frame African Americans as useful contributors to capitalism, economic assets for the white establishment rather than citizens with rights. For his approach, Young was seen as a “sellout,” a traitor to black communities.2 The Black Power movement, whose anticapitalist and antigovernment protests most clearly contrasted with Young’s aim to integrate African Americans in the mainstream, was particularly vocal in denouncing Young as an “­Uncle Tom.” Young’s speech at the aia was more aggressive and urgent in tone than his professional persona would have one expect. It was the late 1960s and the Black Power movement had set roots in African American communities nationwide. Moreover, the very year Young spoke, Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy had been shot to death. Riots had erupted in vari­ous cities. Young’s usual nonviolent negotiation seemed of another era. “You are most distinguished by your thunderous silence and your complete irrelevance,” he rebuked the architects in the audience. He added, “You are key p­ eople in the planning of our cities t­ oday. You share

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the responsibility for the mess we are in in terms of the white noose around the central city.” 3 The violent imagery of the “white noose” spatialized the lynching of African Americans and illustrated the deadening grip of suburban white supremacy on cities. Used in 1958 by the Demo­cratic mayor of Philadelphia, Richardson P. Dillworth, in an interview with Time magazine, the phrase was in wide circulation in the 1960s.4 The 1961 US Commission on Civil Rights report on housing, Life magazine, and numerous politicians and reporters had all used this phrase to stress the gravity of a segregated metropolitan Amer­i­ca. The wording was also part of the language that residents used to make sense of urban renewal. An African American resident told the New Republic in 1963 that “they want to keep the black neck in the white noose.”5 Young’s attention to the role that designers played in this segregation gave the phrase an additional layer of relevance. He expected architects to resist the association and even anticipated architects’ common defense against such criticisms, namely their insistence that their client’s satisfaction was their primary responsibility: “Now, you have a nice, normal escape hatch in your historical ethical code or something that says a­ fter all, you are the designers and not the builders; your role is to give ­people what they want. That’s a nice, easy way to cop out.” But such objections did not convince Young. He insisted on taking the architects sitting in the audience to task for not building for a diverse group of users. Moreover, he suggested that a lack of diversity in the profession—­ African American membership at the aia that year was 0.5 ­percent—­was entangled with and responsible for the urban crisis. “One need only take a casual look at this audience to see that we have a long way to go in this field of integration of the architects. . . . ​I’m not sure yet ­whether I ­will charge you formally with discrimination.”6 He called, in sum, for the profession to make it pos­si­ble for blacks to be the subjects, consumers, and creators of architecture. Following his speech, which was reported on by the New York Times and televised in the Northwest, the aia created a task force on equal opportunity and established the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award to recognize architects for their social work.7 In 1971 the aia actively supported a bill before the Senate to fund “community design centers” that attracted the support of urbanists of color working in inner cities across the nation, through the Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo).8 That same year, African American architects started the National Organ­ization of Minority Architects (noma). By 1972 “black and other” nonwhite groups ­were 4.5 ­percent of the total number of employed architects in the nation.9

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If it seemed that a precipitous rise in urbanists of color was forthcoming, ­little actually changed by the first de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century. In 2009, of the total 204,000 employed architects, 2.5 ­percent ­were African American, 6.9 ­percent w ­ ere Latinx, and 4.8 ­percent w ­ ere Asian.10 Whites, more than 80 ­percent of the total employed architects, exceeded their share of the overall white population of the United States, which in 2009 stood at 69 ­percent. Related professions involved in the making of the built environment such as urban planners, who have had a closer relationship with city governance and thus have had to grapple with the issue of building for heterogeneous populations, w ­ ere not a very diverse group ­either. The Bureau of ­Labor Statistics, whose statistics on architects are given h ­ ere, does not offer a racial and ethnic breakdown for the total number of employed planners in the United States ­because, at less than fifty thousand ­people, they consider the population too small. However, the American Planning Association (apa), the leading national association for urban planning, indicates that more than 90 ­percent of its membership was non-­Latinx white in 2004.11 Young’s call for diversity in 1968 was premised on the idea that individuals of color ­were likely to feel responsible for designing equitably and inclusively. My interviews with architects, urban planners, and ­others practicing urban design in the early twenty-­first c­ entury did not always bear out this connection. This chapter takes shape thanks to the multiple interviews I conducted from 2009 to 2015 with architects, urban planners, and urban designers located in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Ohio, San Antonio, and Queretaro, Mexico, who ­either identified as Latinx or ­were designing for Latinxs and with Latinx culture. Among t­ hese interviewees w ­ ere individuals who, like the architects Young addressed, only felt responsible for their clients, not low-­income Latinx users of their designs. In the following pages, however, I primarily focus on three Latinx urbanists whose way of seeing and appreciating the barrio stems from a position of affinity with marginalized spaces and the ­people who live in them. The affective stance of kinship from which they look is best described as a barrio affinity, a scopic regime that values and frames the marginal.12 ­These three urbanists recast the oft-­devalued barrio as an innovative urban unit with qualities that they believe are worthy of inclusion in the fields of architecture and urban planning, and in housing industries, and worthy of moving out of the ghettoized space of the barrio. The end result of this affinity thus contributes to a sometimes reluctant distancing from the barrio. The primary brokers discussed in this chapter are not responding to one par­tic­u­lar era of crisis neatly delimited by time. They are responding

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to a perennial condition of l­ imited Latinx belonging and participation in the shaping of the built environment of cities. The response they chose—­ praising the barrio for inclusion, even if a ­limited inclusion—­can, however, be traced to the radical movements of the late 1960s and 1970s.13 The Latinx social movements of that period, specifically the Chicana/o movement, made cultural repre­sen­ta­tions in the built environment an essential objective of activists. The activism of that time also reframed the prob­ lem that racialized minorities w ­ ere perceived to pre­sent. Instead of racialized bodies being the prob­lem, their lack of inclusion in white-­dominated spaces became the prob­lem. The brokers I focus on ­here tackle the issue of inclusion in the twenty-­first ­century, when the lack of racial diversity was prominently discussed in the fields of urban design. I examine Henry Cisneros, urban developer and former secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (hud), and his promotion of “Latino New Urbanism” in the building and housing industries. I also consider the work of Henry R. Muñoz, the president of Muñoz and Com­pany, one of the largest minority-­owned design firms in Texas, and as of 2013 the chairman of the National Finance Committee of the Demo­ cratic National Committee. In par­tic­u­lar, I examine Muñoz’s development of “Mestizo Urbanism.” Fi­nally, I examine James Rojas, an urban planner and author on urban issues. His concept of “Latino Urbanism” introduced vari­ous Latinx-­influenced typologies of urban space to academics and journalists writing about cities. The affinity-­based revaluation and recategorization of barrio spaces of t­ hese brokers suggest a desire to challenge white-­dominant ideas of urban space, but the fact that so much of the urbanism they advocate for depends on owner­ship of and sanctioned access to property raises the question of just how much equity and inclusivity t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions offer the low-­income, marginalized ­people living in barrios. Can an affinity for the barrio translate into improving the lives of ­actual barrios and the low-­income ­people who live ­there? This question points to the power dynamics that brokering barrios—­and its enthusiasm for representation—­can conceal. In what follows, I examine the economic, po­liti­cal, and cultural impulses driving Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas to think of new barrio-­inspired designs. Though each have their own motivations, collectively they are producing a shift in Latinx cultural politics of urban space that can teach us much about the challenges and possibilities of barrio visibility at the end of the first de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century, when diversity and inclusion agendas intersect with gentrification-­induced and subprime mortgage–­led displacement and dispersion.

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Latinx Social Movements and the Rise of the Barrio Broker In my interviews, Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas revealed a common past filled with stories of Chicana/o activism. This past, as tangential as it may have been to their lives, gave their design ideas liberal heft. As prominently discussed in the manifestoes written in 1969, the Chicana/o movement identified barrios as crucial sites of activism and cultural empowerment. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán of March 1969 enlisted “all levels of Chicana/o society—­the barrio, the campo, the ranchero, the writer, the teacher, the worker, the professional—to La Causa.”14 The Plan de Santa Barbara, a­ dopted by a group of students in April 1969 at the University of California at Santa Barbara in an effort to establish Chicana/o studies programs in higher education, further zoomed in on a Chicana/o map of activism that emphasized ­ ere informal, unincorporated residential setbarrios (and colonias, which w tlements found along the Texas border).15 For de­cades Mexican ­people in the United States strug­g led to realize the “American Dream.” And some, a few, have. But the cost, the ultimate cost of assimilation, required turning away from el barrio and la colonia. In the meantime, due to the racist structure of this society, to our essentially dif­fer­ent life style, and to the socioeconomic functions assigned to our community by Anglo-­American society—as suppliers of cheap l­ abor and dumping ground for the small-­time cap­i­tal­ist entrepreneur—­the barrio and colonia remained exploited, impoverished, and marginal. . . . ​ As a result, the self-­determination of our community is now the only acceptable mandate for social and po­liti­cal action; it is the essence of Chicano commitment. . . . ​The best educational device is being in the barrio as often as pos­si­ble. More often than not the members of M.E.Ch.A. w ­ ill be products of the barrio; but many have lost contact with their former surroundings, and this tie must be re-­established if M.E.Ch.A. is to or­ga­nize and work for La Raza.16 The Plan de Santa Barbara redefined the segregated barrios and colonias as generative spaces where Chicana/o cultural identity, po­liti­cal protest, and community organ­ization, where el movimiento, as the Chicana/o movement was sometimes called, could flourish. By referencing this period of activism in their discussion of their own proj­ects, Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas ­were asking that their ideas, in

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addition to being commercially and institutionally accepted, be considered interventions in the exclusionary practices that continue to make barrios segregated, unequal places. Latinx studies scholar Randy Ontiveros writes that the Chicana/o movement purposefully declined to claim equality based on Chicana/o commercial participation and demographic growth, opting instead to demand recognition of their humanity and dignity.17 Even though some of the proj­ects of the brokers discussed h ­ ere aligned with the current commercial and demographic hype around Latinxs, ­these brokers—­some more than o­ thers—­gave me the impression that they wanted to be considered the descendants of that po­liti­cal moment. Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas w ­ ere closely affiliated with some of the po­liti­cal leaders and activists who emerged out of the movimiento. Cisneros grew up in the west-­side barrio of San Antonio alongside major Chicana/o activists, including Ernesto “Ernie” Cortés Jr., who founded Communities Or­ga­nized for Public Ser­vices (cops) in 1973; and William C. “Willie” Velásquez, who cofounded the Mexican American Youth Organ­ ization (mayo) in 1967 and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Proj­ect in 1974. Cisneros, who was about three years younger, attended the same Central Catholic High School from which Cortés and Velásquez graduated. As noted in the introduction to this book, Muñoz’s cousin was Willie Velásquez. His f­ ather was l­abor or­ga­nizer Henry “El Fox” Muñoz, and his mom, Elida, was a civil rights advocate. Rojas was the son of Chicana/o activists from East Los Angeles. He remembers playing in his backyard when thousands marched on the streets of East Los Angeles during the National Chicano Moratorium in 1970. In an article connecting his “Latino Urbanism” concept to the Chicana/o civil rights movement, Rojas remarked that the moratorium’s effect on the community influenced his decision to become an urban planner.18 Such relationships with Chicana/o leaders and strug­ gles for social justice shape ­these brokers’ affinity for the barrio. Just as the Plan de Santa Barbara had done, Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas have sought to empower low-­income marginalized communities by proudly elevating the barrio as a critical contribution to design and planning. As w ­ ill be evident, they also sustain the Plan de Santa Barbara’s idea that Chicana/os have an “essentially dif­fer­ent life style” by listing visual and spatial typologies they believe are “Latino” cultural preferences. Additionally, the Plan de Santa Barbara stated that the distance between the barrio and college-­educated Chicana/o youth had to be reduced in order for the movimiento to engage in its most revolutionary aims. Rojas, Cisneros, and Muñoz established considerable distance from the barrio by leaving

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to pursue higher education and employment opportunities, but they all returned. In ­doing work inspired by low-­income communities, all three brokers complicate the urban expert’s relationship with low-­income barrios. That relationship had been particularly untrusting and paternalistic throughout the twentieth ­century, when white experts ­were sent into barrio communities to assess Latinx housing and urban life and culture. ­There, ­these early experts purportedly found deficient and uncivilized Puerto Rican and Mexican urbanites. In the 1960s, barrio residents came together to explic­ itly resist the authority of the expert outsider. In 1969 a “Barriology Examination,” written by “Barriologist Emeritus, Antonio Gomez, PhD ’t,brr,” appeared in several issues of the Chicana/o Con Safos magazine to test Chicana/o readers on their cultural authenticity. The exam coined “barriologist” to refer tongue-­and-­cheek to Latinx “experts” learned in the knowledge and culture of the barrio. The provocative term could also be interpreted as an effort to parallel, perhaps even elevate, the status of barrio residents vis-­à-­vis that of the non-­Latinx expert ­going into barrios to study the “other” for social science research or to condemn the barrio for urban renewal.19 The term barriologist reclaims everyday residents as the experts of their own neighborhoods. They contrast the urbanists who displaced low-­income residents, many of them p ­ eople of color, to make way for a midcentury landscape of freeways, highways, and public housing towers. Throughout the 1960s, barrio residents trained in urban design would give additional meaning to the category of barriologist. The Real G ­ reat Society Urban Planning Studio (rgs/ups), founded by local Puerto Rican Angelo “Papo” Giordani, Willie Vázquez, Harry Quintana, and Victor Feliciano with professors and students at Columbia University in the wake of the East Harlem riot of 1967, nurtured local designers by following an “advocacy planning” model. 20 Urban planner Luis Aponte-­Parés writes, in one of the few accounts of the Real G ­ reat Society, that rgs/ups members took a critical view of architecture and planning professionals, including the Columbia University professionals with whom they had a conflicted relationship, and proposed an “architectural and planning resource completely controlled by the community.”21 The rgs/ups members applied to design the language of community self-­determination that their contemporaries in the Young Lords and other militant groups ­were cultivating. They committed to build locally and constructed vest-­pocket parks and what eventually became Taíno Towers, a housing complex in Upper Manhattan.

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They also participated in local protests for social justice, at times joining the Young Lords.22 They worked ­toward their plan to “increase the number of indigenous architects and planners in East Harlem” by protesting meetings at the aia along with a co­ali­tion of concerned planning groups and advocating for African Americans and Latinxs to sit on the City Planning Commission.23 They eventually dissolved ­because of lack of funding, the difficulty of representing the vari­ous interests of the local community, and internal ideological and class differences between the Puerto Rican members who had grown up in the barrios of New York and ­those who had arrived in East Harlem upon graduating from college.24 In Los Angeles, Frank Villalobos, Manuel Orozco, Raul Escobedo, David Angelo, recent college gradu­ates from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and the University of Southern California, dreamed of being “the architects and planners for Chicano neighborhoods.” They founded the nonprofit Barrio Planners Inc. in 1970.25 They had all come of age during the Chicana/o movement. Some of their families had been displaced as a consequence of urban renewal. Freeway construction, for instance, had forced Villalobos’s ­family out of their east-­side Maravilla barrio.26 Influenced by t­ hese experiences and the ethnic affirmation of the Chicana/o movement, Barrio Planners concocted its slogan, “Let a hundred placitas bloom!,” and created some of the most emblematic Mexican-­themed landmarks in East Los Angeles. Barrio Planners designed Ramona Gardens Vest Pocket Park in Lincoln Heights and designed and advocated for sound barriers to line the San Bernardino Freeway that surrounded it.27 The organ­ ization designed El Parque de Mexico, also in Lincoln Heights. Barrio Planners won city hall approval to design Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights and placed a kiosko, a band shell, donated by the governor of Jalisco, Mexico. The group designed the Whittier Boulevard arch and nearby Aztec-­ themed plaques as part of the area’s revitalization.28 Barrio Planners sought to include Chicana/o culture in urban design and—­like its counter­parts in New York City—­encouraged the formation of local designers of color. In a magazine interview, Villalobos remarked that architecture is “in our blood. We have it in us. A large percentage of our ­people are in construction—­they can as easily be architects.”29 Barrio Planners, like the rgs/ups, would also, at least in its original nonprofit formation, cease to exist. ­These early precursors focused on offering technical support and design skills to their local barrios. Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas abstract from the spatial and aesthetic configuration of low-­income barrios the aspects that

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they deem to be appealing for the fields of urban planning and architecture and the housing industries. T ­ hese brokers produce new urban concepts by ruminating on their middleness—on the one hand, their existence between professional networks and the cultural and social capital acquired while studying at prestigious universities and, on the other, the barrios either in which they grew up or for which they developed an affinity. Indeed, while many of the brokers discussed in this book take on a transnational search for au­then­tic Latinx urban cultures rooted in a Spanish-­influenced Latin American heritage that they believe can help redeem Latinx urban life and culture, Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas turn to local barrios, even though they at times turn away from these spaces to build and enhance their professional careers. They promote this brokering in a highly public way, in large part thanks to a pro-­diversity platform that reshaped their industries. Indeed, the ways that Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas abstract from the low-­income barrio to create new modes of urbanism apt for institutional inclusion and/ or marketability cannot be fully understood without also understanding the many movements for inclusion that followed the Chicana/o and other radical movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Literary and Africana studies scholar Jodi Melamed writes that “the real victories that came from official, state-­recognized antiracism in Cold War Amer­i­ca,” such as civil rights acts, “also stabilized po­liti­cal limits, interpretative tendencies, and economic forces that readjusted and inevitably extended U.S. and transnational cap­i­tal­ist structures of racial domination.” 30 The radical black and Latinx movements of this period had tried to resist the co-­optation that ­earlier movements had faced by emphasizing cultural decolonization and self-­affirmation. As historian Vincent Harding put it, the ultimate goal of the social justice movements of the period was not to gain “equal opportunity employment with the pain deliverers.”31 Their demands, however, ­were eventually recruited into larger multicultural and diversity initiatives that focused on bringing in dif­fer­ent bodies and dif­fer­ent cultures but did not generate the racial and economic equality and structural change that the late 1960s and 1970s movements had demanded. Literary scholar Lisa Lowe writes that multiculturalism integrates “differences as cultural equivalents abstracted from the histories of racial in­equality unresolved in the economic and po­liti­cal domains.”32 The critique of multiculturalism as abstraction that Lowe lays out is apt for understanding the work of Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas. By the late 1990s, when the ­careers of Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas ­were rising, the conservative backlash against this aesthetic multiculturalism encouraged liberals

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to defend cultural repre­sen­ta­tion and inclusion as a form of equality. I see Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas as having taken up this mantle. They w ­ ere interested in using culture to redress repre­sen­ta­tional in­equality, a kind of urban crisis revealing the precarious belonging of Latinxs in cities. By the time I interviewed Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas, diversity initiatives had subsumed much of multicultural discourse. The aia 2009–13 Diversity Action Plan and the apa Diversity Task Force, instituted in 2004, rarely mention multiculturalism.33 This shift showed a reluctance in presuming that diverse individuals would determine the cultural expression of design work. Such an idea, ­after all, would go against the prevailing mantra in the design professions that client needs dictate design solutions. In that vein of thought, lack of cultural diversity could only be solved by diversifying the needs of the client, not the architects. Increasing the racial or gender diversity of experts had larger institutional advantages. It was essential to fend off allegations of discrimination. Interestingly, according to ­these initiatives, it also facilitated the work of US designers among a global clientele. In d ­ oing so, they gave the impression that while demographic diversity counted in the United States, cultural difference was most valuable to a global clientele. Considering all this, the work of the brokers discussed in this chapter pushes the bound­aries of a professional field of practice that is interested in embracing the diversity of prac­ti­tion­ers but remains apathetic t­ oward the cultural practices and trends of low-income communities of color living in the United States.34 It was clear during my interviews with Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas that as public figures accustomed to the limelight, they ­were not the usual subjects whose marginalized voices research on barrios commonly examines. At times, for example, Cisneros’s answers to my questions sounded rehearsed. This may have been b­ ecause of his high demand among reporters and conference organizers. A subsequent interview Cisneros gave Spanish-­language tele­vi­sion network Univision, of which he was president from 1997 to 2000 following his tenure as secretary of hud, confirmed my suspicion. Many of the comments he shared with me ­were aired on that interview. Moreover, much information regarding the lives and ­careers of t­ hese three men has been published in vari­ous formats. They has been widely written about and they themselves have written about their ideas and proj­ects. Yet the texts that cover their stories are not exhaustive, especially in regard to how barrios inspired their designs, which is reflected in their dif­fer­ent approaches.

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“Latino New Urbanism” and the Newness of the Barrio Henry G. Cisneros is the most high-­profile advocate of “Latino New Urbanism,” but the term was coined by Michael Mendez, a native Californian. Mendez first used Latino New Urbanism in his 2003 master’s thesis for the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at mit.35 In his thesis, Mendez proposed a new paradigm for urban practice comparable to “New Urbanism” but focused on Latinos’ “cultural preferences” and a growing Latinx population whose socioeconomic mobility could provide housing and real estate industries significant profits.36 New Urbanism, which developed as an antidote to suburban sprawl, homogeneous suburban environments, and automobile de­pen­dency, was known for promoting small-­town, main-­ street, traditional styles with Victorian architectural styles.37 In contrast, Latinxs, according to Mendez, require housing that “acknowledges Latino architecture and designs.” 38 “Latinos’ strong inclinations for close social interactions,” wrote Mendez, “created a spicier new urbanism.”39 According to this way of thinking, New Urbanism, and Anglo-­American architecture at large, ignored the urban practices and landscapes of Latinx-­majority places to their own detriment. Latinx urban culture, Mendez argued, was an “untapped resource.”40 Among the Latinx “preferences” Mendez ascertained to be of value ­were adaptive reuse, compact neighborhoods, large public places such as public parks, and a strong sense of community.41 “California Mission style or Southwestern adobe designs with courtyards or patios in the center of the home, and verandas situated in front of the residence” may also, according to Mendez, appeal to Latinxs. Mendez barely mentioned the barrio in his writing but the photo­graphs he chose to illustrate lnu show how essential the barrio was to his conceptualization. In his entry for the volume Casa y Comunidad: Latino Home and Neighborhood Design, edited by Cisneros and John Rosales, Mendez includes murals and h ­ ouses in East Los Angeles and Fiesta Marketplace in Santa Ana. Both images are sited in Latinx-­majority places, in or adjacent to barrios.42 The omission of the word barrio underscores how lnu aspires to the spaces of upwardly mobile, propertied Latinxs. Mendez sanitizes the spaces of inspiration, stating that existing Latinx landscapes do not “radically digress” from middle-­class housing styles and thus it would be easy to market lnu among public officials, non-­Latinos, and middle-­ class homebuyers.43 Mendez writes that lnu ­will contribute to an already

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changing definition of “what constitutes the desired middle-­class lifestyle in California.”44 Mendez’s lnu inspired vari­ous urban planners and urban planning organ­izations and was the subject of several conferences and events. The Transportation and Land Use Collaborative of Southern California (tluc) created (a now defunct) website to circulate information regarding the lnu movement, which it broadly defined as a “public education initiative focusing on culturally appropriate development models for the growing Latino population.” The tluc also or­ga­nized a symposium on lnu in 2003, promoted by the Smart Growth Network, a co­ali­tion of government agencies, including the US Environmental Protection Agency, and for-­profit groups that promote urban development serving the interests of communities, businesses, and the environment. That same year, the University of Southern California brought together vari­ous scholars and prac­ti­tion­ers at a conference to examine lnu. Inspired by Mendez’s thesis, Katherine Perez, an urban planner and former executive director of the tluc, and then executive director of the Urban Land Institute of Los Angeles, declared Latinos’ placemaking practices a “healthier vision of the American Dream.”45 Many lnu advocates prioritized the owner-­occupied ­house, but Antonio Villaraigosa, speaking about lnu at a conference mere months away from becoming the first Mexican American mayor of Los Angeles in more than a ­century, expressed admiration for building compact, multifamily, mixed-­ use developments.46 ­These ­were the features that he found most useful for his low-­income Latinx constituents. Thus, as planners and politicians celebrated lnu, they borrowed from Mendez’s idea to fit their own needs and visions. Prior to promoting lnu, Cisneros was a New Urbanism enthusiast. He was particularly fond of using New Urbanist styles in the redevelopment of public housing. While secretary of hud from 1993 to 1997 ­under the Bill Clinton administration, he scorned the design of high-­rise housing, describing it as coldly impersonal and holding its concentration of residents responsible for generational poverty, crime, and low expectations. A similar way of thinking had captured the minds of many for de­cades.47 Legendary author Jane Jacobs penned her most stringent critiques against postwar modernist public housing in 1961. T ­ here ­were dif­fer­ent stakes at play with the anti-­high-­rise public housing views of the 1990s, however. Clinton’s neoliberal administration had privatized many features of the social safety net. By adopting a view of environmental determinism, Cisneros was able to rationalize the privatization of public housing. Specifically, he garnered

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support for the hope VI program (the Urban Revitalization Demonstration program that was part of Homeownership and Opportunity for ­People Everywhere), which demolished high-­rise public housing and replaced it with low-­rise, mixed-­income, multifamily housing that followed the aesthetic tenets of New Urbanism, including Colonial Revival and Victorian ­ ere believed to styles of building.48 The smaller, compact building scales w produce “defensible spaces” that tenants, feeling a renewed sense of owner­ ship over their buildings, would be more willing to watch over and care for.49 Jane Jacobs’s midcentury idea of “eyes on the street” morphed into an overt mechanism of community policing.50 The smaller building scale had other serious effects. Thousands of public housing tenants w ­ ere displaced from their neighborhoods. Some tenants ­were re­housed in existing, unrenovated public housing or offered Section 8 vouchers that could be used, landlord willing, in private housing.51 No assurances w ­ ere made that this new housing would be available in the same communities where the high-­rise buildings w ­ ere located. While hope VI was lauded for deconcentrating racialized poverty and providing low-­income tenants with the opportunity to live in places aesthetically similar to market-­rate housing, it was also denounced for disregarding the communities formed in high-­rise public housing and displacing low-­income tenants.52 Critics questioned the program’s attempt to create aesthetic parity when only a few of t­ hose once ­housed on site would be able to benefit from the new housing. Still, Cisneros’s interest in New Urbanism did not wane in the years ­after he left hud. Rather, it was reenergized while working in private housing, where he believed lnu could be a major business opportunity. He was not as optimistic about the role of lnu in public housing policy: “I ­don’t see it right now, overtly, but . . . ​this may all be included in policy.” If it happens, it is most likely to occur, he added, in the Southwest and small towns or communities outside Los Angeles or in the Tucson area. We are just “at the beginning of [the] pro­cess,” Cisneros stated, by which professionals in policy and private sectors mediate the Latinization of cities and respond to and build for a “Latinx lifestyle.” Builders in par­tic­u­lar, Cisneros thought, need to recognize the importance of catering to a Latinx population: “It is time to think about this group and build for them, and do it in a conscious way, and recognize that t­ here w ­ ill be market rewards for t­ hose who get it right. Frankly, I want to continue to explore that in my own ­career.” By the time we spoke, he was an urban developer and executive chairman of CityView, an urban investment and building firm focused on moderate-­ income home buyers. His more emphatic promotion of Latinx-­themed

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built environments during this time was a reminder of how much more e­ ager the market is to accept and absorb cultural difference, specifically an essentialized vision of Latinx urban culture, than a public urban policy invested in the idea of a universal citizen and in need of addressing diverse constituents. Cisneros’s upbringing in a San Antonio barrio appeared in our interview to be a major motivation and key to his penchant for lnu. Conveying his attachment to the barrio during our interview, he noted, “I’ve seen the nation, but I’m back in the hood.” The barrio of Cisneros’s childhood was not homogeneously low-­income. Cisneros grew up in Prospect Hill, a neighborhood “populated by civil ser­vice workers . . . ​Latino GIs, like my ­father,” who moved ­there ­after returning from World War II. The neighborhood was “not the poorest of the barrio,” Cisneros observed, but rather an upwardly mobile slice in the largely impoverished West Side of San Antonio.53 According to Cisneros, Mexicans in the neighborhood “did not feel the overt sting of discrimination,” but outside the barrio “­people may have been held down by the traditional prejudice of the economy.”54 Marginalization was certainly evident on the West Side of Cisneros’s youth. Many of San Antonio’s Chicana/o movement organ­izations and events developed ­there precisely for that reason. Several of the leaders of the movimiento grew up alongside Cisneros. He recalled attending the same school as Willie Velásquez, who was three years older than Cisneros and had grown up in a low-­income neighborhood on the West Side. Ernie Cortés was about four years older and had also grown up in a low-­income area. Slightly younger than the city’s Chicana/o movement activists of the 1960s, Cisneros was “not actively involved” in the local movement. He suggested that his upbringing explained his lack of participation in the radical politics of the time. His parents “­were never on the front lines, picketing or engaging in activism, but they ­were all about ser­vice.” Cisneros’s ­father was “not inclined to carry a picket sign. He conveyed to me a sense of ­doing it within the rules, within the system.” His f­ ather taught “citizenship to Latinos in the front parlor of our ­house.” His ­mother was active in “neighborhood revitalization” and at eighty-­six years of age was on the board of “two or three dif­fer­ent organ­izations in the neighborhood.” From an early age, Cisneros remembers that his m ­ other inculcated in him the importance of taking a moral ground on the racial injustices shaping San Antonio. As a result, Cisneros noted that “most of my life has been about trying to change the system by cajoling . . . ​as opposed to beating it down from the outside.” Indeed, while obtaining his master’s degree in urban and regional planning from Texas a&m, where he also received his undergraduate degree,

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Cisneros was posted to San Antonio’s Model Cities program, part of Lyndon Johnson’s ­Great Society programs. While ­doing this work, Cisneros began to forge his brokering skills between San Antonio’s low-­income Latinxs and city elites. He honed ­these skills with a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University and a PhD in public administration from George Washington University. Having accumulated a national pedigree, he returned to San Antonio and became the city’s first Latinx mayor. Most of my life has been about being a bridge between the community and resources, power structures, and trying to be an honest interpreter and broker. . . . ​As mayor of San Antonio that was the role I played, an honest effort to deliver for the community, and yet recognize that the larger economic pro­gress . . . ​was a precondition for the kind of opportunity we wanted to create in poor neighborhoods. . . . ​And so I was both a bridge in the sense of dialogue but also a bridge in the sense of ideas, of persuasion on both sides. Cisneros emphasized how his brokering prioritized the interests of San Antonio’s low-­income communities: “I have never been able from a personal conscience standpoint to leave it b­ ehind.” He always returned to San Antonio’s barrios ­because he “cannot deny,” “escape,” or “ignore the difficulties of the poor ­people who live around me.” To underscore this point, he added that he still lives in the ­house his grandparents owned. By the time of our interview, Cisneros’s development of an explic­itly “Latino New Urbanist” landscape had yet to come to fruition but he was involved in several proj­ects that, in their attempt to include Latinx culture and residents, would have somewhat fulfilled the criteria had it not been for the ­Great Recession. As chairman of CityView, he was building thirty communities in fourteen states by 2007 as well as providing “cultural advice” to kb Home, a builder and one of the largest mortgage lenders in the United States that had previously championed the decor of magnate Martha Stewart’s multimillion-­dollar homes in Long Island and Maine.55 The com­pany’s newfound interest in Latinxs coincided with a housing ­bubble in the first de­cade of the twenty-­first c­ entury that grew as subprime mortgage loans—­risky, high-­interest loans—­were made available to Latinxs who had historically been unable to buy into the so-­called American Dream of property owner­ship ­because of exclusionary housing policies. One of the proj­ects CityView advised kb Home on was Lago Vista in San Antonio, a proj­ect with 428 homes.56 Located in a poor industrial neighborhood “where nothing had been built in thirty years,” Lago Vista

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“completely sold out,” Cisneros noted triumphantly. Two similar proj­ ects arose in Austin and Houston. All three had majority-­Latinx residents and, according to Cisneros, all three “bridge[d] a suburban lifestyle and a Latino—­not aesthetic—­but Latino lifestyle. . . . ​­There was no Latino aesthetic in the sense of Mediterranean aesthetic, but it was homey and in the way that we know Latinos would like.” By 2010, foreclosures had forced out many homeowners from Lago Vista and kb Home became embroiled in the subprime mortgage crisis.57 Centro 18, another proj­ect Cisneros was involved in via CityView, also languished during the housing crisis. CityView and the private building com­pany Kimball Hill Urban Centers had planned for Centro 18 to be a mixed-­income development in the majority-­Mexican Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago.58 In a response to an opinion piece Cisneros co­wrote about affordable housing for the Chicago Sun-­Times, a local resident from Pilsen stated that Centro 18 was “not a step up for the ‘salt of the earth’ ” urban residents on whose behalf Cisneros advocated.59 Rather, the new development was “a wedge causing gentrification that would displace the immigrant working class who are truly ‘the working ­people who make our neighborhoods vibrant.’ ”60 In addition to writing articles in local papers, Cisneros attended a community meeting in Pilsen to help ease community relations as antigentrification community organizers criticized the proj­ect.61 It all seemed to have been in vain. In 2008 the housing market was in crisis and Kimball Hill filed for bankruptcy. Cisneros was an envoy of urban Latinidad. He visited barrios and appeared in major newspapers and conferences to put his years of brokering barrios, his association with Chicanx communities and their leaders, and his barrio affinity to work on profit-­making proj­ects. But his attempt to leverage his repre­sen­ta­tional capabilities was weak when faced with the displacement and impoverishment of the very populations he claimed to be representing. Between 2007 and 2012, the roughly nine million foreclosures affected a large portion of African Americans and Latinxs, widening the wealth gap between black and Latinx, on the one hand, and white ­house­holds, on the other.62 T ­ hese facts did not deter Cisneros from thinking that Latinxs would be central to the ­future of housing and urban development. In fact, he never even mentioned the housing crisis during our interview. This is striking, considering that his 2006 publication of Casa y Comunidad: Latino Home and Neighborhood Design, coedited with John Rosales, was published with the sponsorship of Freddie Mac, the government-­chartered mortgage corporation that was accused of inciting

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massive foreclosures.63 Moreover, by 2011 when we talked, media pointed to Cisneros as sharing responsibility for the housing bust. Analysts pointed to policies Cisneros implemented during his tenure at hud as the roots of the crisis and his close association with kb Home. Perhaps ­because of ­these connections, Cisneros deemphasized the role of the expert in lnu: “I ­don’t think that ­there is such a ­thing as anyone driving the Latinization of cities. I think it is happening demographically.” “This is a long-­term” pro­cess, he said, “in fact so long, that one could call it indefinite. But this ­will be the new pattern for the United States, ­going forward.” Seeing its spaces and aesthetics as first and foremost people-­centered, Cisneros vacillated in defining the features of lnu. “I ­don’t agree that Mediterranean in and of itself ” is ideal, he said. “I live in a craft h ­ ouse myself.” Cisneros added that Latinxs enjoy something beyond the pastels. They certainly ­don’t enjoy . . . ​ the monotonous tan of some modern subdivisions. ­There is also the ­handling of outside spaces, such as enclosed yards where ­children can play and be safe and the h ­ andling of the porch where p­ eople can sit outdoors. Latinos do enjoy the outdoors. Sitting on the porch in the eve­ning saves some money on air-­conditioning. The backyard, active, bbqs, ­family gathering . . . ​Families are larger. . . . ​A grandparent ­will have grandchildren over on the weekend. It all requires space. It requires rethinking the interior, how the cooking occurs. How do you put that many ­people to watch the Dallas Cowboys game on the weekend? For Cisneros, ­family size and age, enjoying the outdoors, and being with each other ­were key to lnu. Cisneros drew again on his own experience growing up in the west-­side barrio of San Antonio to describe lnu: “One of the most common ­things in San Antonio is f­ amily members living adjacent to each other. My sister-­in-­law lives across the street from me and my ­brother lives in the next ­house ­after that. My ­mother, three doors down from her.” Upon reflecting on his upbringing, Cisneros concludes that “the way we live, define new urbanism . . . ​I d ­ on’t know if I want to say [Latinos] are perfect, but they are New Urbanists.” Though the “Latino” in lnu largely serves as an adjective to New Urbanism, it is curious to also think of how the word new implies that ­there is something old about the barrio that lnu advocates, such as Cisneros, need to curate, refine, and market. In his book Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities, urban planning historian David Diaz discusses

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the development of Chicanx barrios in the American Southwest and how racist “Eurocentric urban visions” of urban planning and theory prevented professionals from recognizing barrio contributions to urban practice. To demonstrate how this exclusion persists in recent urban planning and urban studies scholarship, Diaz insists that “what is being claimed as ‘new urbanism’ is in real­ity ‘barrio urbanism’ or ‘Chicana/o urbanism.’ ”64 Diaz understands how a reformulation of the barrio as “new” erases the historical development of American barrios.65 Unlike the antiracist politics ­running through Diaz’s assertion that barrio urbanism is the “new urbanism,” for Cisneros the link between new urbanism and “Latino cultural preferences” is one premised on maximizing market outcomes in a housing industry that had already found “new urbanism” and a growing Latinx home-­buying population to be profitable. Unfortunately for Cisneros, this reliance on a housing market weakened by reckless choices undermined the very impact he hoped his ideas would have. The housing bust made plain that the repackaging of the barrio in its “new” lnu form would only be prized if it synced with the vagaries of the market.

“Mestizo Urbanism” and the Non-­Blackness of Barrio Abstractions I first came across Henry Muñoz and his work while researching the Latino-­American Designer Archive at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. The archive was begun less than a year ­after a group of cultural critics and scholars denounced the Smithsonian Institution’s “willful neglect” of Latinx professionals and Latinx art in Smithsonian administrative offices, galleries, and museums.66 At a panel inaugurating the archive, a group of architects agreed that ­because “traditional regionalist associations no longer describe the diversity of work produced by this multiethnic group,” this archive was needed more than ever.67 My encounter with Muñoz was thus the result of a growing realization that Latinxs should be represented in the art and design world. When I sat down to talk with Muñoz, he was the president of a design firm in San Antonio, one of the largest minority-­owned design firms in the United States. He was also the chair of the National Museum of the American Latino Commission, an initiative seeking to establish the first Latino museum of the Smithsonian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. By the end of the 2010s, Muñoz, whom cultural critic Ed Morales has

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labeled a “progressive technocrat,” sat on numerous boards and councils, including that of the National Parks Foundation and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.68 Muñoz’s activist upbringing s­ haped his Latinx-­influenced design: “I’m very much a product of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but I lived in a very nice neighborhood and I went to private schools.”69 Muñoz grew up in a suburb on the north side of San Antonio. It was, according to Muñoz, as “1960s version of the American Dream as you could get.” The majority population was Anglo white and only about 20 ­percent of the residents ­were of Mexican descent. The neighborhood was “very dif­fer­ent,” Muñoz opined, “from where Henry [Cisneros] grew up.” Growing up in a middle-­class environment while also spending almost “­every weekend . . . ​ on picket lines and marches” with his parents made him realize t­ here ­were “dif­fer­ent vision[s] of the United States.” Negotiating t­ hese two worlds became a focus of his approach to design and the built environment. Muñoz found his way into architecture in the early 1980s while working as a marketing director for the architectural firm he would eventually preside over two de­cades l­ ater. In the 1980s, the firm was run by white executives. A managing partner commissioned a public relations specialist to come in and do a study on the f­ uture potential of the firm. The study found that ­future growth depended on architects taking a more vis­i­ble role in the local Latinx community.70 As was the case across the nation, San Antonio saw large Latinx population growth in the 1980s. Particularly noteworthy for the firm was the fact that San Antonio’s Latinx elites ­were also becoming more prominent. Henry Cisneros was elected mayor of the city in 1981. Historian Laura Hernández-­Ehrisman notes that his “win represented a new alliance between Anglo and Mexican American middle-­class leaders.” 71 The con­sul­tant convinced the firm that Latinx elites serving as “school board trustees,” for instance, would be the p­ eople making decisions about architecture in the ­future. The firm’s willingness to embrace local Latinxs encouraged Muñoz to stay at the firm even though he did not have a degree in architecture. One of his early proj­ects was bringing National Public Radio to San Antonio, one of the largest cities in the United States to not have this ser­vice. ­After four years of working on this task, Muñoz became the founding president of Texas Public Radio.72 The reaction, Muñoz recalls, was very positive. His partner at the firm supported this work ­because it exposed the firm to a wide group of p­ eople and improved its business network. “Our relations with the rest of the city became better. . . . ​We ended up being very

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successful,” Muñoz recalled. The firm’s new approach to having a public face and having Muñoz as its representative was validated. With Muñoz’s work, and partner John Kell’s approval, the design firm went from being a “San Antonio country club firm” to a firm that was “primarily about public architecture and design.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Muñoz continued to cultivate the “public” side of the firm. In the 1980s, he served as chair of Leadership San Antonio, a program to cultivate the leadership skills of promising individuals, and was on the board of several civic organ­izations, including, among o­ thers, the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, which Muñoz called “the bastion of Anglo business leadership”; the Texas Park Research Foundation; the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center; and the San Antonio Symphony.73 Despite his active participation in ­these organ­ izations, Muñoz’s ­family thought he could do more on a national scale. He recalls that in the late 1980s, his cousin Willie Velásquez, the prominent civil rights or­ga­nizer, asked him, “What are you ­doing? Your legacy is activism and po­liti­cal involvement, and y­ ou’re not d ­ oing anything with it.” Velásquez suggested that Muñoz meet with his friend, Michael Dukakis, who was then a candidate in the Demo­cratic Party presidential primaries. Within a few days, Muñoz was sitting with Kitty Dukakis at the Demo­ cratic National Convention listening to Ann Richards give her keynote address. Meeting Richards that night would lead to his appointment years ­later, when she was governor of Texas, as the first Latinx member of the Texas Transportation Commission, an agency that controlled billions of dollars in public money. In 1996, ­after working with Governor Richards, Muñoz de­cided to return to the design firm and dedicate himself fully to its operation. He returned with a renewed commitment to ensuring the firm’s success. As the new president of the firm and owner of almost 50 ­percent of it, he could control the direction that the firm would take. Serving on the commission taught him that the government was spending “money in schools and universities, and infrastructure” but the buildings they “­were building did not look like me or like the young ­people we ­were hoping to inspire.” For example, in his pre-­lnu days, Henry Cisneros, Muñoz recalled, described an ideal architecture that was not the typical Spanish colonial but what Muñoz labeled “rural, Texas modernism.” National and regional politics also influenced his interest in bringing Latinx culture into the architecture profession. Against the anti-­ immigration politics of the 1990s and in ­favor of the concurrent rise of ­free

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trade policy that he had championed at the state level as a member of the Transportation Commission, he thought a Latinized built environment would make a po­liti­cal statement of belonging. As Governor Richards fostered business relations with Mexico, San Antonio was in the midst of new developments geared at catering to the needs of a new North American ­Free Trade Agreement (nafta) era. For Muñoz, the timing was right to establish a new relationship with Mexico, one of economic and cultural cooperation.74 He consulted with professionals and found that schools of architecture, even ­those in the state of Texas, w ­ ere uninterested in the idea of “Mexican American” architecture. The closest t­ hing to this kind of architecture he found in professional fields was the Spanish Mission style. “Even the Latino architects,” he said, ­were designing without taking into consideration the Latinx population in Texas. “I d ­ idn’t understand why they could allow that to happen.” Seeking to challenge this dominant way of thinking about design, he began “looking around the community of San Antonio and the communities of south Texas trying to understand ­whether t­ here was an architecture of ­people who looked like myself.” He photographed the built environment of the barrios that he had not grown up in but had developed an affinity for. As he explained, “I fell in love with the kind of tacky homemade ­aesthetics. . . . ​I love rasquache.” Engaging with cultural studies scholar Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, who describes rasquache as “the cultural sensibility of the poor and excluded” who create colorful, highly textured environments that relish in the idea that “more is more,” encouraged Muñoz to further pursue the idea of rasquachismo in the built environment.75 Moreover, artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz helped Muñoz see that “­there was something about ­those princi­ples in Latino urbanism: the way your grand­ mother would treat your front yard, l­ittle tia’s garden, with t­ hose tires around the trees, what [Mondini Ruiz] would call ‘barrio baroque.’ ” As a result, when Muñoz saw a h ­ ouse on the West Side barrio painted an “in­ter­ est­ing shade of yellow,” for instance, he thought he had found the closest example of “Mexican American” architecture. And yet the more he traveled through Texas, the more he realized the essentialist pitfalls of thinking of a “Mexican American architecture.” In Texas alone, he saw a Mexican American population with varied cultural interests. Muñoz concluded that if he promoted “Mexican American architecture,” he “would be just as exclusive as the p­ eople who are d ­ oing the German-­inspired Hill country architecture.” He was referring to the building

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style of German immigrants in the Hill country of central and south Texas, a stonework style experiencing a revival of sorts among Texan architecture firms focused on luxury home construction.76 Muñoz began to consider other ways of making an impact in the field of design by developing a “Mestizo Regionalism” of “blended aesthetics.” 77 The approach considered the proclivities of younger ­people who, unlike his generation, Muñoz thought, “­don’t need labels. They sample, as if it ­were m ­ usic, and take bits and pieces that fit their identity. That is what this architecture is about. We ­don’t live in a pure country, in landscapes of ‘purity’ [as in] the Spanish Colonial Missions.” The Spanish missions erected in newly “discovered” spaces ­were, as Muñoz has us recall ­here, built at the expense of indigenous inhabitants. The formation of the categories of Mexican, Chicanx, and Latinx ­were less violent but nonetheless also exclusive. For Muñoz, ethnoracial changes to the population of the United States represented a new era in which absolute ethnic identities and cultural histories, at times cultivated to marginalize subaltern p­ eople, would be challenged. Mestizaje, especially when defined as a cross between Spaniard and indigenous, a mixing that in the early twentieth ­century Mexican educator José Vasconcelos elevated to a “raza cósmica” (cosmic race) that would dominate the world, has a long history in the Southwest of the United States.78 Chicana/o activists and intellectuals used it, as literary scholar Ilan Stavans explains, to craft their identities for the purpose of cultural self-­determination during the civil rights era of the 1960s.79 Rafael Pérez-­ Torres writes that “Chicana critical discourse” valued mestizaje ­because it helped “embody the idea of multiple subjectivities.”80 Gloria Anzaldúa theorized the “new mestiza” as an embodied, cultural, and spatial category of in-­betweenness.81 Muñoz’s idea of mestizaje could be thought of in this vein, as a way to disrupt the static categories employed to describe built environments as ­either modern or vernacular, high art or low art, and populations as Mexican or American or Mexican American. One of Muñoz’s first proposed proj­ects to include a “mestizo” language was the International Center at HemisFair Park in San Antonio, a building that would ­house several offices, including the North American Development Bank created by nafta. The building was a symbol of San Antonio’s rising stature in binational politics. The building design had a hyperbolic paraboloid wall, doors that swung up for ventilation, and a courtyard that linked indoor and outdoor space. Local journalist David Anthony Richelieu wrote regular opinion pieces in the San Antonio Express-­News, criticizing the

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design and referring to it as a “leaning tower of pesos.”82 The San Antonio City Council, which had initially supported the design, began to backtrack. Councilmember Billa Burke noted that she would prefer a building similar to the “stone and stucco 19th ­century historic homes around the site”: in other words, the design vernacular of German immigrants in Texas.83 Similar arguments based on the Euro-­American history of the area would also be used in the 1990s to dismiss Sandra Cisneros’s purple ­house and Ricardo Legoretta’s red library in San Antonio. Muñoz’s design for the International Trade Center was canceled, and the proj­ect was passed along to a design firm specializing in German-­inspired architecture. It was the first setback for Muñoz’s idea of mestizo architecture and it underlined the challenges of ­doing design work that was visually dif­fer­ent from the traditional Euro-­ American architecture public officials and elites ­were accustomed to. Muñoz and his partner at the firm, Kell, persevered and moved onto other Latinx-­inspired designs. An opportunity to test out mestizo architecture came in 1997, while Muñoz served as chair of the nonprofit Centro Alameda, an organ­ization dedicated to the restoration of the Alameda Theater.84 Built in 1949 in what was known as San Antonio’s “­Little Mexico,” or “Laredito” neighborhood, the theater was open to Mexicans when many other spaces in San Antonio denied or l­imited their entry.85 Legendary Mexican artists performed at the Alameda, such as Lola Beltrán, Pedro Infante, and Cantinflas, but by the 1990s the theater sat empty. Urban renewal and the construction of a highway had cut off the area from the city’s West Side barrio and led to its decline. The theater’s renovations ­were part of the formation of a “cultural zone” that would revitalize ­Little Mexico and celebrate local Mexican culture.86 In collaboration with the Smithsonian, the theater reopened in 2007 in its new incarnation as Museo Alameda, a museum for Latinx art.87 The Historic and Design Review Commission, which had chastised author Sandra Cisneros for painting her Victorian ­house in a tony area of San Antonio purple, disagreed with the architecture firm’s new, stark modern design that replaced the theater’s archways. Instead, the commission recommended that the Museo resemble the turquoise and multi-­pastel-­colored tourist market nearby that sells Mexican ponchos and sombreros. Instances such as ­these underscore the segregated spatiality of bright color. This neighborhood’s history of barrio formation and its subsequent designation as a destination for a white tourist imaginary of what constitutes Mexicanidad made it seem less of a threatening site for a colorful building. Muñoz, determined to bring a con­temporary style to the site, “drilled holes in all of their arguments” and

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insisted that “the real architectural history of San Antonio is eclectic.” To deflect attention away from the architects, Muñoz de­cided to consult with residents about the design. What many architects and urban planners call charettes, sessions in which locals collaborate and contribute to the design pro­cess, Muñoz and his colleagues called “design pachangas,” celebratory focus group sessions. With the leadership of Jeffrey Ryan of Jackson and Ryan Architects of Houston, the input of Muñoz, and the design pachangas, the building’s final design resulted in a stainless steel facade with cutouts resembling Mexican hojalata art arranged so that when the light hits, it appears to be a luminaria, a lamp (figures 4.1 and 4.2). Part of the building facade was awash in bright-­pink paint, a brightness that paralleled that of the nearby tourist market but refused its colonial understanding of cultural value (figure 4.3 and 4.4). Muñoz acknowledged that the symbolism of the building may not be legible to all viewers, including barrio residents: “Many ­people d ­ on’t understand architecture, but they know when they feel good in a building. They can see something and say, ‘I see myself in that.’ ” Besides, recognition was precisely what the design pachangas w ­ ere for, to remind p­ eople that they had exercised their urban citizenship, that their ideas ­were heard and could shape the f­ uture design of the building even if, like in the case of some charettes, ­these ideas did not always materialize in the final design. Another chance to explore Mestizo regionalism came with the design for a biotechnology building for the University of Texas, San Antonio, where in the late 1990s Muñoz had led a campaign that raised $1.2 million for the new campus.88 Muñoz envisioned altering the campus, where brick and stone architecture dominates, by connecting curanderismo, folk-­healing practices in Latin Amer­i­ca, and the biosciences. Flat planes of bright color devoid of iconography w ­ ere a theme in this proj­ect and o­ thers. The 2007 Fine Arts Center for the Edcouch-­Elsa In­de­pen­dent School District was also designed to convey mestizo regionalism (figure 4.5). The center was built to serve two small cities near McAllen, Texas, where the population was more than 90 ­percent Latinx and nearly half lived below the poverty line. Since its construction was made pos­si­ble by an increase in local taxes, the community expected to have its culture and needs represented in the new building. ­After vari­ous design pachangas, the design team de­cided to focus on the song “La Maquina Amarilla” (the yellow machine), a local corrido played on the radio during football season. Corridos, notes cultural historian Américo Paredes, are ballads that communicate the cultural conflicts between Anglos and Mexicans in the greater M ­ exico

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area encompassing Texas.89 The flat panels of the Fine Arts Center ­were mostly yellow, accompanied with elongated and variegated panels in shades of red, blue, and green arranged to visually represent the sound waves of the corrido. The colorful facade also, according to Muñoz, si­mul­ ta­neously borrowed from “an international modernism associated” with Mexico, the kind of Mexican modernism made famous by Luis Barragán and Ricardo Legoretta.90 Moreover, the building’s exterior was reminiscent of murals, which the firm’s website says is its “most impor­tant gesture,” one “that imbed[s] identity in the building and give[s] voice to the community ­ ere placed itself.”91 No murals reminiscent of t­ hose seen on barrio streets w on the building, however, even though it would have been relatively easy to incorporate them into the design. In a design for the University of Texas Health Science Center, Muñoz focused on the diseases that affect Mexican Americans living in south Texas. He presented the design, a “red sculpture that was inspired by the shrines that sit out on ­people’s front yards,” to a regent of the university with a Spanish surname. The regent rejected the design ­because, Muñoz suspected, he was made uncomfortable with “the idea that a yard shrine from a poor neighborhood of a barrio of Laredo—­this guy is a multimillionaire—­ could be the inspiration for proper architecture.” Muñoz learned that even in a Mexican American region and with Latinx decision makers, his design theory could be a hard sell. His brokering did not always appease clients worried about straying too far from normative landscapes. Color can cause much anxiety and put Latinx belonging into question. As Muñoz succinctly noted in our interview, “color is very po­liti­cal.” Specifically, he noted, the issue of color, as it concerns Mexican Americans and Latinxs, is one of assimilation. “­People reject their tribe when they are trying to assimilate. If I want to be a successful banker on Wall Street, I am not g­ oing to walk in with a bright tie. I want a brick h ­ ouse; I d ­ on’t want a stucco ­house that is painted red. I want to live in an upward middle-­ class McMansion, not a yellow ­house on the West Side of San Antonio.” In another proj­ect for a school district in Latinx-­majority La Joya, Texas, the proj­ect’s coordinators saw the bright paint color he had chosen and “freaked out. They s­ topped the proj­ect.” He realized that ­there ­were places where even a brokered barrio architecture would not be accepted. Muñoz, like Cisneros, is hopeful that a brokered Latinx repre­sen­ta­tion ­will not be so challenging in the f­ uture as the Latinx population continues to grow and call for cultural repre­sen­ta­tion in public spaces. As more “decision makers recognize the value of the Latino situation, when they can see

Figure 4.1 ​~ ​The “Luminaria,” the cover on the exterior of the Museo Alameda, lights up the building’s glass facade, San Antonio, Texas, 2010. Designed by Jackson & Ryan Architects in collaboration with Henry Muñoz. Photo­graph by author. Figure 4.2 ​~ ​The “Luminaria” design resembles the lanterns made of plain or intricately cut paper that are popular on the US-Mexico borderlands. Designed by Jackson & Ryan Architects in c­ ollaboration with Henry Muñoz. Photo­ graph by author.

Figure 4.3  ​~  ​Museo Alameda, San Antonio, Texas, 2010. Designed by Jackson & Ryan Architects in collaboration with Henry Muñoz. Photo­graph by author.

Figure 4.4 ​~ ​The light and shadow play on the bright pink facade of the Museo Alameda, San ­Antonio, Texas, 2010. Designed by Jackson & Ryan Architects in ­collaboration with Henry Muñoz. Photo­graph by author.

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Figure 4.5  ~  Fine Arts Center, Edcouch-­Elsa In­de­pen­dent School District, Edcouch, Texas, 2007. Photo­graph by Chris Cooper. Courtesy of Muñoz and Com­pany / Henry Muñoz.

an economic opportunity, a po­liti­cal opportunity,” remarked Muñoz, “they are willing to accept a more adventurous design.” In this vein, brokers of barrios, like him, ­will continue to play an impor­tant role. If t­ hese two years as chairman of [the National Museum of the American Latino] commission has taught me anything, it is that we are everywhere. We are ­going to continue to grow in terms of our influence. We are . . . ​in decision-­making roles about what our environment, our cities, our neighborhoods, are ­going to look like in the f­ uture. That means that ­there ­will be a Latinization of the urban landscape b­ ecause we are ­going to demand it. . . . ​And it i­ sn’t an image of purity. It is an image of mestizaje, of blendedness. I am of Mexican heritage, but I am very proud of my American citizenship. It is the two coming together; that dialogue is what makes our country what it is ­today. To understand the politics of Muñoz’s cultural mestizaje, it is worth recalling again the history of racial mestizaje in Latin Amer­ic­ a and, in par­tic­u­lar, in Mexico. Critiques of colonial mestizaje in early twentieth-­ century Latin Amer­i­ca nation-­building pro­cesses examine how its implicit commitment to mixing masked the objective of whitening indigenous populations. Similarly, critiques of the term in late twentieth-­century US contexts appreciate its ability to foster a sense of belonging among Chicanxs while also underscoring its continued subsumption, if not neglect, of the unmixed Latinx indigenous and black populations. Mestizaje thus

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abstracts from subaltern groups while also encouraging new subjectivities that challenge colonial notions of valuable cultures and racial identities. An examination of Muñoz’s design needs to grapple with the complex challenges and opportunities that an architecture using Mestizo language inherits. When Muñoz states that the mestizo “blendedness” he is calling for exists in “the rasquache in the abandoned inner cities of the United States,” it is imperative that this not put black and indigenous community formations on the back burner. Muñoz implies, and his work as an expert navigating hostile reactions to low-­income Latinx culture positions him to think, that this “blendedness” requires abstracting that which is too much, too Latinx, in order to create a new, “­future” Latinization of cities. Even if such compromises are necessary, the oral and written language describing the design work of Mestizo Urbanism can recognize and discuss how abstractions may exclude other racialized populations and their urban spatial expression. At the 2012 Design Miami/ fair, part of Art Basel Miami, Muñoz and Com­pany installed a 6,700 square foot, temporary “Mestizo City.” The city, which won a 2014 Design Award from the Texas Society of Architects and a Citation Award from the San Antonio Chapter of aia, was surrounded by an inflatable border of storefronts reminiscent of high-­end stores, such as Breakfast Tacos at Tiffani’s, with a “modernist cube” at the center constructed out of lit Mexican Jarritos soda b­ ottles in orange, lime, and fruit punch flavors (figures 4.6 and 4.7).92 In a video promoting the installation, Muñoz described it as “a colonia on the border between the United States and Mexico. It is a place that is not permanent in structure but should be permanent in thought.” 93 According to Muñoz, the colorful Jarritos ­bottles represent a “visual history of many of the phenomenon that occur in communities throughout the United States.” 94 In an interview with Texas Architect magazine, Muñoz added that Jarritos “are part of everyday culture on both side of the Texas-­Mexico border, and we thought the colors would resonate in Miami.”95 Color in this instance formed a transnationally expansive map of a US Latinization of cities. It was rooted in Latinx communities and Mexico and linked to San Antonio and Miami. Again ­here, Muñoz’s use of color was a way of visualizing Latinidad in a public space evoking the xenophobic and racist policies of the border. In order to enter and see the glowing, Jarritos-­made center of the city, visitors w ­ ere asked to create fake visas. The Mestizo City is t­ here to “provoke thought,” Muñoz said, and “have p­ eople begin to ask questions of what the imprint of Latinos has been in the past but also what it should be in the ­future.” It shows, he added, that Latinx contributions “deserve

Figure 4.6  ~  “Breakfast Tacos at Tiffani’s,” part of the Mestizo City installation at Art Basel, Miami, Florida, 2012. Photo­graph by Christopher Paul Gutierrez. Courtesy of Muñoz and Com­pany / Henry Muñoz.

Figure 4.7  ~  Jarritos cube, part of the Mestizo City installation at Art Basel, Miami, Florida, 2012. Photo­graph by Christopher Paul Gutierrez. Courtesy of Muñoz and ­Com­pany / Henry Muñoz.

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to be discussed” in major forums like Miami Design/.96 The com­pany’s website described the installation as relevant to the recent election of President Barack Obama, who had won in large part ­because Latinx voters thought he would take a more pro-­immigrant position. Muñoz, who also served as the national chairman of the Futuro Fund, a fund­rais­ing organ­ ization he created along with actress Eva Longoria and l­ awyer Andrés W. López, raised $32 million and was widely seen to mobilize Latinxs to secure Obama’s reelection.97 Press materials highlighted the intersections of national politics and Mestizo City. Attending to the local politics of its location in Miami, however, reveals another layer of untapped urgency. In the late twentieth c­ entury, the neighborhood where the installation was located was surrounded by a majority Haitian community in the North, Puerto Rican and black Wynwood in the Southwest, and black-­majority Overtown in the West. In the 2010s, all ­these neighborhoods ­were being scrutinized and assessed by gentrifying real estate developers. The erection of Mestizo City, and its colorful abstraction of barrios, in an area where low-­income populations of color ­were at risk of losing their homes was a harbinger of the cultural workings of impending displacement—­the cultures of low-­income Latinxs could be carefully curated for consumption and entertainment but black populations ­were a liability to urban pro­gress. Mestizo City, the most emblematic proj­ect of Mestizo Urbanism, was thus a missed opportunity to draw connections and alliances between communities of color undergoing a crisis of belonging in the spaces that capitalism had again deemed worthy of investment.

“Latino Urbanism” and Latin American Urbanists I first met Rojas at the Latino Urbanism symposium in 2011 in Phoenix, Arizona, a conference named ­after the very concept he coined. Despite its title, the conference presenters largely discussed lnu. In an interview with Rojas, I asked him to explain what the relationship was. Latino Urbanism, he said, was distinct from lnu. Rojas saw lnu as concerned with the aesthetics and planning of “building Latino buildings,” but the placemaking he is interested in “is more a collective, sociocultural activity. . . . ​It is more about how ­people use buildings.” ­There is, he added, “a fine line between form-­based and people-­based. I think Latino Urbanism is people-­ based. . . . ​[It] is not a physical form. It is a way of using space.” Rojas disagreed with urbanists who simply say “build a plaza, a church, a kiosko, and

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they [Latinxs] are happy.” Instead, Rojas sees his role as expert as dedicated to observing and encouraging the kinds of placemaking that Latinx residents themselves create. “­People think of my work as a typology and it is not,” he remarked.98 Rojas told me that he began to think about the spatial practices of the barrio while a gradu­ate student in a course at mit that discussed “good cities” and “bad cities.” It made him think of where East Los Angeles, his hometown, and other Latinx-­majority places fit into this dichotomy. “It’s not the ghetto,” he reflected. “Well, it’s not the ghetto for me.” Rojas was invoking the common way in which a black-­white racial binary has ­shaped US geography into “bad” ghettoes and “good” suburbs. In this binary, the barrio takes on a position similar to that of a Latinx racial category—it can waver from one to the other side, black or white, lie in the m ­ iddle, or outside of it. The desire to understand where East Los Angeles sat on this spectrum would shape Rojas’s research and urban practice. By the time Rojas was in gradu­ate school, Chicana/os had defended and embraced the barrios of East Los Angeles. They had “enacted” a place, to use Rojas’s words, despite the stigma and blight that planners and other elite urbanists associated with t­ hose places. Rojas admired this placemaking largely from afar. Distance is an impor­tant f­ actor for cultivating an affinity for the barrio, and Rojas’s distancing from the barrio began early. When he was in his late teens, Rojas moved from East L.A. to Alhambra, a then mostly white suburb of Los Angeles. As he explained, “You could see the contrast between East LA and middle-­class Amer­i­ca; it was r­ eally blatant. . . . ​I think that is where I started to [understand] differences in place.” His f­ amily ties to East Los Angeles w ­ ere further loosened when in the 1970s his grandparents’ ­house in Boyle Heights was demolished to build part of a high school.99 But it was precisely that forced detachment that may have escalated his interest in the place. His grandparents’ h ­ ouse featured the key aspects that Rojas would cite l­ ater as being foundational to Latino Urbanism, including a small yard that opened to the life of the street. His grand­ mother’s new h ­ ouse in Montebello was a small Spanish colonial revival ­house “on a conventional suburban lot with a small front yard and large back yard.”100 He recalls that when his extended f­ amily gathered t­ here, “it felt crowded and awkward.”101 ­There was no equivalent to the street that had operated as an extension of his grandparents’ h ­ ouse in Boyle Heights. Rojas’s experiences led him to believe that middle-­class, white suburbs ­were very dif­fer­ent from Chicanx h ­ ouses in East Los Angeles. In his master’s research, and in subsequent publications, Rojas concluded that Latinxs

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Figure 4.8  ~  Evolution of an East Los Angeles vernacular housing style. Courtesy of James Rojas.

transpose the courtyard space that sits in the center of typical Mexican ­houses to the front yard spaces of East Los Angeles ­houses (figure 4.8). The front yard of the transnationalized ­house in East L.A. was usually closed off from the street with fencing but as inhabitants engaged with passersby from their front yards, they ­were exposed to the public life of the street and they contributed to the identity of the neighborhood, an identity that Rojas described as distinctly working class. “Working-­class Latinos,” Rojas said, are “what you visibly see on the street. Whereas middle-­class Latinos are in their car, in their ­house, you ­don’t ­really see that. But the working-­class culture is so strong, so vivid that you c­ an’t avoid it.” For Rojas, the front yards of Boyle Heights create a kind of plaza that enjoins the private space of the ­house and the public space of the street. Rojas contrasted this spatial practice with the Anglo propensity to extinguish the social life of front yards and cut the front of the h ­ ouse from the street. He also contrasted it with the typical Spanish colonial plaza in Mexico. In his view, the front yard was unique to working-­class Latinx urbanism. Working-­class Latinxs repurpose spaces and use them in new and more intense ways than do whites who live in single-­family detached homes—­the “good” urban places. Inspired by the work of Rojas, urban historian Margaret Crawford, and Architects, Artists, and Designers Opening the Border Edge of Los Angeles (adobe la), a group of Latino artists and architects, argue that by altering their h ­ ouses, the residents of East Los Angeles “remove them from the context of the mass-­market values, and thereby decommodify them.” Moreover, they add, residents’ “plea­sure in transformation and self-­expression reclaim a central aspect of homeownership that many other Angelenos, ­ hese revamped h ­ ouses obsessed with property values, have forgotten.102 T

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are, Crawford and adobe la add, “a vehicle for mobilizing social identity, making a publicly legible statement that provides residents with a new sense of agency” in a city that has historically segregated this population.103 Rojas described other noteworthy Latinx urban spatial practices. He pointed out that Latinxs walked more than other groups. Their use of public transportation, he said, offered a “grassroots model for sustainable transportation.”104 Latinx street vendors also exemplify a novel way to use space. Their temporary, mobile work stations add “a rhythm to the streets.”105 “In East Los Angeles e­ very person, vendor and prop created the identity of place that was a genuine orchestration of events. Nothing,” observed Rojas, “was pre-­planned ­here by any architects, or urban designers.”106 Rojas’s critics say he generalizes based on his personal experiences and longings for the barrio. They also disapprove of the essentialism conveyed in the concept “Latino Urbanism.” Certainly, the spatial uses and cultural practices that Rojas documents in Latinx communities can also be observed in non-­Latinx spaces. Rojas recognized this and remarked to me, “Other ethnic groups in the United States do similar t­ hings to their h ­ ouses.” Still, he sustained that the visual and spatial activism of the Chicana/o movement created a distinct environment. While noting that African American civil rights movements influenced the formation of Chicana/o civil rights activism, he believed t­ here w ­ ere marked differences. In his eyes, “if you look at the Chicano movement in East L.A.” in contrast to the concurrent African American movement, the Chicana/o movement was social activism “plus design.” “We [Chicana/os] had buildings with murals. That makes it ­really unique. . . . ​The Latino presence in the city is ­really defined.” A 1978 issue of Radical Amer­i­ca, a magazine of the New Left, complicates the belief that muralism was distinctively a Chicana/o urban culture. The editors traced the origins of the community mural movement to 1967 Chicago, when a group of nearly twenty black artists painted “The Wall of Re­spect,” ­under the direction of artist William Walker, in a neighborhood about to vanish in the midst of urban renewal.107 The wall was demolished but its significance to the community lived on. One of the muralists involved in the creation of the wall recalled de­cades ­later that the mural was part of the 1960s and 1970s black arts movement that had affirmed black cultural belonging in urban space.108 In the same Radical Amer­i­ca issue, Tim Drescher and Rupert Garcia write that though the community “mural re­nais­ sance” was begun in black Chicago, “Raza murals” had existed prior to the 1960s.109 “Chicano communities,” they note, “are particularly rich in a tradition of public visual expression through murals, and this helps explain

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the fact that more murals have been painted in t­ hese communities over the past de­cade than in any other comparable locations.” 110 Rojas’s observations ­were thus not new. Contradictory statements on the origins of muralism in communities of color are the effect of black and Latinx segregation. This segregation reverberates in Rojas’s statement. Of course, blacks and Latinxs sometimes lived in close proximity. Sometimes they shared the same neighborhoods. But when they did not, the divisions between their communities created competing spatial imaginaries that had long-­lasting implications on the production of knowledge about the artistic innovation and built environments of each community. Rojas’s discussion of the working-­class Latinx yard takes on another meaning when juxtaposed, for example, with bell hooks’s discussion of the centrality of the front yard and porch in her ­family’s history. For hooks, her f­ amily’s experience is evidence of a black “cultural genealogy of re­sis­tance.”111 She writes that it was “often” the case in her ­family’s southern black community that “the rural black folks who lived in shacks on the edges and margins of town conceptualized the yard as a continuation of living space.”112 Numerous other scholars have in the past few de­cades recovered African American placemaking as a form of self-­determination before, during, and ­after the civil rights movement. They describe an imprint of visual, ethnic-­specific blackness on the built environment.113 Rojas’s Latino Urbanism concept has been most often critiqued for its nostalgia and description of Latinx uniqueness. When we talked, he willingly engaged with ­these critiques and even conceded some of them, especially his nostalgia for the barrio. But he was also adamant about making sure that his ideas about Latinx spatial and cultural practice not be reduced to urban ste­reo­types. Latino Urbanism may have certain key features, but they did not wholly explain Latinx urban practice. As if to further the idea that Latinx urbanism was first and foremost a community pro­cess, Rojas founded a participatory design practice called Place It! that offers interactive model-­building workshops to elected officials, ngos, and municipalities interested in engaging residents in the role of planning and design. The workshops target “overlooked stakeholders, such as w ­ omen, youth, immigrants, and p­ eople of color,” and show them how “to translate their dreams and ideas into physical forms and models.”114 At the workshops, a rasquache aesthetic of play is on full display. Hair rollers stand in for buildings, halves of empty Easter eggs represent domes, and colored beads, Legos, wooden blocks, and buttons make up the rest of the built environment.115 The ways that participants at the workshops

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repurpose t­ hese items inform the plans, drawings, or policy recommendations that Place It! creates for its clients. The workshops are, one might say—­though Rojas does not use ­these words—­rasquache planning extended nationwide to shape urban policy. While much of Rojas’s master’s thesis focused on Chicanx or Mexican placemaking, his concept of Latino Urbanism employs the more encompassing “Latino” ethnic qualifier that includes other Latinx subgroups in the nation and, according to Rojas, potentially links to Latin Amer­i­ca: “I think that t­ here is a movement t­ owards a more pan–­Latin American, Latino urbanism, that is looking at Caracas, Rio, Colombia, São Paulo, Salvador. All ­these patterns are being meshed together in the US. You ­can’t tell a Salvadoran ­house from a Chicano ­house in East L.A., right? They look the same. . . . ​It’s the same culture of the built environment. They are forging a bigger identity.” Transnational thinking has influenced the work of several Latinx urbanists and their work with low-­income populations.116 Latin American urbanists focusing on sprawling, low-­income neighborhoods have also interacted with Latinx professionals in the United States. By 2008, Rojas had worked with the Urban Think Tank, an interdisciplinary design practice started in Caracas, Venezuela, devoted to “social architecture and informal development.”117 Together they “looked at front yards, vendors, urban spaces . . . ​same kind of architecture and design, stucco, colors,” and began to consider the possibility of a “PanAmerican Urbanism.”118 However, Rojas told me he encountered Latin Americans who are “very Eurocentric” and do not understand Latinx-­themed environments in the United States. In Mexico he has been asked: “ ‘Why do Mexicanos [in the United States] want to create plazas . . . ​all t­ hese ranchos?’ They should be creating Frank Gehry, and modern stuff.” Similarly, architects who identify as Latin American or Hispanic and live in the United States resist identifying or engaging with US barrios in their design work. Informal conversations I had at conferences revealed that some middle-­class, professional Latin Americans and recent immigrants from Latin Amer­i­ca to the United States are unaware of the history of marginalization, disenfranchisement, and dispossession that has created a working-­class Latinx identity and cultural formation in the United States. At one conference, a Mexican-­based panelist exasperatedly asked why Latinx architecture was always thought to come from low-­income communities and mentioned that “we” had a g­ reat diversity of architecture. At another conference where Rojas presented on Latino Urbanism, a Mexican academic living in the Midwest angrily said he did not identify with the Latino Urbanism that Rojas described and

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suggested that the term Latino was overdetermined. T ­ hese individuals are apprehensive about being interpellated in a category that they perceive as narrow at best, stigmatizing at worst. They fail to understand that the “Latino” in Latino Urbanism is not a socioeco­nom­ically, racially diverse subject of the Amer­i­cas but a historically conditioned, working-­class, racialized subject of the United States, one regarded as an abject urbanite unworthy of being reframed and elevated into white-­dominated professional discourse, precisely what Rojas works to rectify. This racialized subject may have counter­parts in Latin Amer­i­ca’s poor barrios, but its referent, as it pertains to Rojas’s ideas, lies first and foremost in the marginalized barrios of the United States. As was the case for Cisneros and Muñoz, Rojas believes that the ­future of Latino Urbanism depends on population growth. Latino Urbanism w ­ ill change in the hands of the “immigrants coming up to the US from Mexico, from Latin Amer­i­ca,” he noted. Rojas’s work reminds us that t­ hose who observe and theorize this ongoing urbanization w ­ ill need to engage with and facilitate the agency and visibility of the new arrivals in the built environment. Moreover, they w ­ ill have to grapple with the extent to which socioeco­ nom­ically and nationally diverse Latin American immigrants w ­ ill participate in an urban Latinidad historically framed along racial and class lines.

From Deficient Urbanism to Ethnocentric Expressions of Property Owner­ship When I asked a Cuban Miami-­based architect if barrios have specific spatial layouts or cultures that could contribute to professional urban design, he remarked that “Mexican Americans w ­ ill prob­ably answer ‘yes’ to that, and Cuban Americans ­will prob­ably answer ‘no.’ ”119 It would be simplistic to assume that Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas all focused on barrios ­because of their Mexican American roots, but I take this interviewee as pointing to the dif­f er­ent histories of Latinx marginalization in the United States that make it so that some groups, Mexicans in this instance, and low-­income Mexicans in par­tic­u­lar, affirm the cultures formed in segregated spaces. Cubans, especially ­those middle-­class and upper-­middle-­class mi­grants who entered Miami ­after the Cuban Revolution, ­were largely concentrated in neighborhoods but did not take on a leftist po­liti­cal consciousness. Rather, their place identity cohered along the lines of entrepreneurship and anticommunism. Sociologists Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick do not mention

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the word barrio in their classic book on Cuban place formation in Miami, preferring instead to use the more neutral term enclave.120 The ethnic-­ centric urbanism that the brokers discussed h ­ ere call for is inspired by predominantly Mexican American regions—­south central Texas and Los Angeles—­formed out of a US imperial land grab of Mexican territories in the nineteenth c­ entury. This regional concentration and the inequalities that formed in the pro­cess of dispossession continue to define the identity and cultural practices of many Mexican descendants living in the area. The 1960s was one moment when this cultural identity crystallized, galvanizing the Chicana/o movement. The sociospatial identity-­making practices of that time reverberate in the work of ­these brokers and mark them as dif­fer­ ent in the eyes of the Cuban Miami architect. ­These brokers advocate for the movimiento’s princi­ple of fighting for repre­sen­ta­tion in white exclusionary realms. Principally, they embrace the barrio as a cultural force transforming expert urban knowledges and practices. Yet it is also true that t­ hese three brokers did not always follow the most radical politics closely associated with Chicana/o activism. Cisneros did not. Recall that he favored working “within the rules.” Questions have arisen regarding the success of Muñoz’s com­pany and ­whether he has used po­liti­cal networks to obtain design contracts.121 ­These three brokers diverge from Chicana/o cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s in another impor­tant way. Each of their paradigms subsumes the particularity of the Mexican American experience u ­ nder the categories of “Latino” or “mestizo,” allowing for a Latinx cultural politics to overshadow a Chicanx cultural politics. T ­ hese semantic changes reflect the growth and internal diversification of the Latinx population. T ­ hese three brokers, whose ­careers have taken them to many places outside the Chicanx-­dominant Southwest, seemed to understand the significance, if not merely the marketability, of more encompassing labels. The use of t­ hese larger categories, as essentializing as they may be, is impor­tant ­because it serves as a reminder of the collective historical formation of this marginalized identity in US history. The lens of “strategic” essentialism, an idea examined by postcolonial and literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, elucidates the ways in which t­ hese categories may dually ste­reo­type and enunciate group empowerment and social agency.122 Similar umbrella terms for urban paradigms surfaced in the early twenty-­first ­century to name the practices of vari­ous ethnoracial groups. Architect Melvin L. Mitchell proposed a “New (Black) Urbanism” that “ ‘re-­integrates’ black communities” in the United States.123 The term “black

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urbanism” appeared in urban planner Sara Zewde’s master’s thesis at mit and at an academic conference at Goldsmiths, University of London. Neither yoked the term to “New Urbanism.” 124 “Asian urbanism” has been an ongoing concern for prac­ti­tion­ers writing about cities in Asia and US Chinatowns have kindled new urban development outside Chinese neighborhoods.125 ­These reconceptualizations of US ethnoracial space are an understandable reaction to discrimination that segregated p­ eople of color in cities and characterized them as poor and lacking the cultural refinement necessary to pro­gress into white spaces. T ­ hese essentialized categories, like the categories in­ven­ted by the three brokers discussed ­here, are also an understandable reaction to the lack of diversity in the professional fields. But t­ hese terms may stray from the ­earlier repre­sen­ta­tional urgency and demands for structural change of the 1960s and 1970s activism if all they offer is more palliative aspects of the ghetto, barrio, or Chinatown. Moreover, t­ hese ethnocentric paradigms can discourage alliances between multiple marginalized groups. In considering the unique social, symbolic, and geographic aspects of Latinx urban life and culture, Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas are, by omission, imagining non-­Latinxs and their symbolic and material place in US urbanization as dif­fer­ent. When Cisneros intimates the possibility of reverse assimilation by suggesting that carefully curated Latinx urban culture could appeal to non-­Latinxs, the question arises w ­ hether the same is true for other historically marginalized ethnoracial concentrations. Asserting an essentialized Latinx urbanism lends itself to a balkanized, exclusive cultural commodification. Besides disconnecting with other ethnoracial groups, the Latinx-­centric urban paradigms discussed h ­ ere eclipse the socioeconomic limitations that may make some more than ­others able to manipulate the built environment.126 I believe this evasion is more the result of methodology and site specificity than of explicit socioeconomic class and racial bias. ­Because the ideas of the brokers in this chapter rely on visual observations, they tend to privilege Latinxs who own property or, in the event that they are not property ­owners, are able to modify the exterior spaces of property that are within the gaze of passersby. For example, Rojas notes about the community members he observes: “­These residents might not even ‘own’ the place they live in but their presence and actions do.”127 This way of claiming space is less frequent in urban areas where high-­rise buildings dominate the landscape. In the flatter, single-­or two-­family ­houses that dot the barrios of the Southwest and Southern California, renters may have more access to their exteriors.

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As ­these brokers bring to bear a shift from a cultural politics of re­sis­tance to a cultural politics of innovation—­the “new” Latinization of cities—­they are not only recasting abject, criminalized, and marginalized barrio subjects. They are also upholding the ability of Latinx property o­ wners or t­ hose with access to property to shape space.128 Cisneros, for example, directly exalted Latinxs buying their way to the so-­called American Dream with property owner­ship. Celebrating Latinx homeownership is noteworthy, given the pronounced history of marginalization and displacement that Latinxs, including property ­owners, have suffered.129 But in its prioritization of propertied Latinxs, the brokering of the barrio emerges as a moment in the Latinization of cities whereby Latinxs living in low-income barrios are the objects of inspiration but the least power­ful users of t­ hese developments. In order for t­ hese brokers to make their proposed paradigms relevant and applicable to Latinx (and, following the critique of ethnocentrism outlined h ­ ere, non-­Latinx) populations across the nation, they must attend to the challenges that renters face when trying to express their cultural preferences in space, such as regulatory urban policies, landlord rules that limit expression, and the gentrification and discriminatory housing practices that curtail the place-­making practices of low-­income ­people of color. The brokers discussed ­here attempt to foster Latinx belonging to cities by presenting repre­sen­ta­tions of Latinx urbanism. They are by some mea­sures exceptionally successful at ­doing so. Their concepts have garnered much attention. Their paradigms convey the possibility of a large, expansive Latinization vis­i­ble on the exteriors of a range of public and private built environments. Their Latinization of cities is pregnant with possibility. They also, however, bring to mind long-­standing racial and class exclusions. They are, in sum, a reminder of how repre­sen­ta­tions are minefields that need careful dissecting. The final chapter turns to brokers who abstract on site—in barrios instead of for other institutional or geographic spaces—­and in ­doing so participate in gentrification.

Five Brokering, or Gentrification by Another Name

The built environment has been repeatedly designed to express who does and does not belong in cities. Throughout the twentieth c­ entury, Latinized built environments w ­ ere heralded as solutions to an urban crisis that made Latinxs belonging to cities precarious, a prob­lem in need of solving. Brokers in Union City, New Jersey incorporated Latinx culture into the visual austerity of a gentrifying space to both claim inclusivity of local Latinxs and transform the space to appeal to outsiders. Acting on the idea that clean, neutral-­colored exteriors enable higher rents and convey an elevated status, brokers carefully manipulated and interiorized the racialized aesthetics of low-­income Latinxs. This chapter focuses on Union City, where low-­income, racialized Latinx culture was moved to the inside of buildings and off the main commercial ave­nue in order to appeal to turn-­of-­the-­ twenty-­first-­century gentrification. The impulse to prevent the appearance of low-­income concentrations in public space was evident since the city’s early Cuban settlement in the 1950s. Resettlement officials in charge of Cuban mi­grants fleeing Castro’s regime in the 1960s, as well as city officials, local business ­owners, and property ­owners throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first ­centuries, have participated, sometimes implicitly, in brokering a Latinization that would not interfere in the middle-­class image elites desired for the city. A pattern emerges over time that makes Union City a particularly in­ter­est­ing place to study. Brokering t­ here is indistinguishable from a gentrification that seeks to establish middle-­class norms. This chapter raises the question

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of ­whether brokering and its distance from barrio identities and formations can be but another name for gentrification. Considering w ­ hether brokering is simply gentrification requires complicating conventional definitions of gentrification that describe it as a class and racial pro­cess by which whites displace low-­income neighborhoods of color. Though that dynamic continues to be a concern, it does not account for all of gentrification. Turn-­of-­the-­twenty-­first-­century gentrification in Union City unfolds with diverse Latinxs playing the part of victims and generators of the bourgeoisification of the city. Scholars of ethnic and racial urbanization have advanced this more nuanced definition of gentrification. In scholarship about urban change, Chipsters (Chicano hipsters) and yucas (Young Urban Cuban Americans), among other Latinxs, contribute to gentefication (gente is ­people in Spanish), an ethnocultural spin on gentrification. This new gentrification focuses on Latinxs who act as middle-­class role models to their low-­income counter­parts.1 The role that brokers have played in Union City reveals a similar paternalistic relationship. Gentrifiers (gentefiers?) and brokers have in common a distancing from low-­income barrios, and it undergirds their Latinization of cities. Thinking of brokering as a gentrification practice also requires recon­ fter all, the brokering examtextualizing gentefication in a longer history. A ined in this book spans a much longer time period than that commonly associated with twenty-­first-­century gentefication. The brokers of the 1950s and 1960s who displayed Puerto Rican culture in public housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to avoid the less predictable and sanitized culture of Puerto Rican residents formerly h ­ oused in nearby tenements, the brokers who used bright colors as a more palatable version of Latinidad and barrioness throughout the twentieth c­ entury, the brokers who established Fiesta Marketplace in Santa Ana, California, in the 1980s to regulate undervalued barrio culture, and the urban design professionals who curate what they like about the barrio in ways that make it valuable to a diversity agenda of the turn of the twenty-­first ­century could all be understood as gentrifying barrio life and culture. In the vein of gentefication, they gentrified by adopting some less controversial version of Latinidad. Like brokering, gentrification is ushered in as a solution to the urban decline that barrios are thought to incite. Central to the writing of numerous Marxist urbanists is the idea that gentrification solves a cap­i­tal­ist crisis of diminishing profits by furthering economic and spatial inequalities.2 The aesthetic work of brokering, in par­tic­u­lar its abstractions of the barrio, is central to making gentrification a solution for capitalists seeking higher

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profits. Meanwhile, the long-standing, tenuously housed residents experience gentrification as a crisis. They participate in the profit-generating activity and its cultural expression from within the margins of the newly gentrified city, if at all. Not so much a solution, for them gentrification is probable dispossession. The usual pro­cess of gentrification instigated by white, middle-­class in-­ migration has been on the mind of Union City government officials, developers, business ­owners, and landlords since the 1980s. At that time, the adjacent city of Hoboken was becoming a hot spot for yuppies excited about the short commute to Manhattan aboard the Path train or ferry. Sitting on top of the Palisades escarpment rising above the Hudson River, Union City had views of the Manhattan skyline similar to ­those of Hoboken, but it did not have ferry or Path train ser­vice. The only way to cross the Hudson River from Union City to Manhattan was via a fifteen-­minute car ­ride or a bus destined for the Port Authority, a bus terminal many in the 1980s saw as a tawdry and seedy area filled with sex workers, pimps, peep shows, drug users, and trans and homeless ­people. This made Union City less appealing to middle-­class residents. Moreover, 1980s Union City was still a factory town that relied on the thousands of incoming Mariel refugees and immigrant workers from the Ca­rib­bean and from Central and South Amer­i­ca to fill low-­wage textile manufacturing positions. City officials of this period could not point to deindustrialization as the reason for needing high-­salaried professionals from New York City to strengthen Union City’s tax base—­a common public rationale for gentrification. Even in the 2010s, when nearly 80 ­percent of Union City residents w ­ ere renters, when the majority of the landscape consisted of multistory ­houses with low unit counts that can easily evade rent control, when deindustrialization was an overwhelming fact, and the circulation of Union City’s new Master Plan reenergized ideas of “Hobokenization,” white-­led gentrification in Union City still unfolded slowly. This slow gentrification was in contrast to cities where the gentrification begun de­cades ago was expanding and intensifying in the early twenty-­ first c­ entury. In New York City, for example, the gentrification begun in the 1950s by artists moving into empty manufacturing spaces in the Soho neighborhood had become evident on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and near subway stops in the southernmost reaches of the Bronx and western Brooklyn.3 Some of the middle-­class bohemian gentrifiers who in the 1980s relished their neo­co­lo­nial discovery of the cultures and spaces of low-­income Lower East Side, as geographer Neil Smith discusses, ­were, by

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the first de­cade of the twenty-­first ­century, being themselves displaced, “gentrified out” by wealthier residents and consumers.4 Geographer Loretta Lees writes of a “super-­gentrification” of the already gentrified, upper-­ middle-­class neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.5 Twenty-­first-­century gentrification showed that the cycle of disinvestment and reinvestment thought to be at the core of gentrification was not always necessary. Instead of disinvestment, a fantasy of lack and blight was projected onto spaces to justify destruction and the redevelopment or revitalization that could increase profits.6 In the case of what Lees observed in Brooklyn, sometimes all it took for a neighborhood to regentrify was the belief that paying more for a ­house would elevate the own­er’s status.7 ­Because gentrification in Union City was slow compared to nearby neighborhoods of color, property o­ wners and other public and private stakeholders in the city saw even subtle changes to the built environment as potentially decisive f­ actors for luring wealthier residents from Manhattan and nearby Hoboken. The brokers in Union City moved the culture and life explic­itly understood to be Latinx inward, out of sight from the gentrifier’s public gaze. In ­doing so, they ­were not appealing to the typical gentrifier who turns their back on suburban landscapes in search of excitement in diverse, “gritty” neighborhoods. They also w ­ ere not trying to attract the gentrifier looking for a creative, hipsterfied Latinx difference. This was not similar to East Harlem where, as anthropologist Arlene Dávila writes, gentrification was condoned by an Empowerment Zone (New York State’s version of uez) interested in “preserving the distinct character” of neighborhoods and driven by middle-­class Puerto Ricans who purchased real estate, dreaming of “Puerto Rican empowerment.”8 Rather, in Union City, brokers imagine a gentrifier who ­will like normative, unobtrusive landscapes. Gentrification in Union City was therefore not outright tied to ethnic affirmation. The Latinx markers that ­were brought into the interior of buildings and commemorated on the side streets w ­ ere seen as necessary to appease the still large Latinx residential population. They ­were not specifically meant to entice newcomers. Why did Union City not follow the same pattern of gentrification as other neighborhoods of color in the metropolitan area? Though the city had been a Latinx-­majority space for de­cades by the early twenty-­first ­century, its residents did not assume an ethnic or working-­class barrio identity. ­There was no Latinx solidarity rooted in the politics of place. Midcentury brokers had made it so. De­cades ­later, gentrifiers would find supporters among upwardly mobile individuals also interested in disassociating from

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low-­income barrios. T ­ hese pro-­gentrifiers highlighted their socioeconomic standing by assuming normative tastes as their own and contrasting t­ hese tastes to t­ hose of low-­income, racialized Latinxs. As a result, low-­income Latinx culture is becoming harder to see in the built environment of gentrifying cities, such as Union City, even when t­ hose cities are Latinx majority and producing Latinized built environments. The outsized role that brokers play in this selective visibility must be understood in direct relationship to their access to property. Latinization is often made vis­i­ble b­ ecause its proponents are property o­ wners or have access to property and are able to transform it. Yet a ­great majority of Latinxs do not own property. The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (nahrep), along with the Hispanic Wealth Proj­ect, a nonprofit that aims to “advance sustainable Hispanic homeownership,” boasts that Latinx homeownership rates are increasing and as of 2016 had surpassed all other groups in the United States.9 But while homeownership rates among Latinxs may be rising, the 2016 census data on homeownership show that compared to other ethnoracial groups, Latinxs are far ­behind. The Latinx homeownership rate in New Jersey is 35 ­percent, less than half of white homeownership in the state and trailing the 39 ­percent of non-­ Hispanic black New Jerseyans who own homes. New Jersey also falls ­behind most other states with large Latinx populations: the Latinx homeownership rate in California is 42 ­percent. In Texas, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, and Illinois, the rate is 50 ­percent or more. The only state, among ­those with a large Latinx population, with a lower rate than New Jersey is New York, where Latinx homeownership is 24 ­percent. Thus, New Jersey and New York, two northeastern states where the Latinx population respectively represents 19 ­percent of the total population, have the largest percentage of Latinx renters. ­These two states also have a high cost of living. Thus, being a renter does not necessarily make one low income. But the odds of being both low income and a renter are high for Latinxs living in New Jersey. Business ­owners who rent their locales do not fare all that well e­ ither. Less access to property owner­ship—­residential and commercial—­means less control over the visibility of Latinx culture and life in outdoor spaces. The opportunity to create a public sense of belonging is greatly ­limited. This observation is not a call for increasing Latinx property owner­ship. Nor do I envision it as a moment to rally together real estate and policy actors in an attempt to attract more Latinx buyers of real estate. For that we could turn to Henry Cisneros or his colleagues in the housing and real estate industry.

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Rather, I want to point to how much power over public space rests in the hands of the private market and the racially diverse group of brokers, from multiple institutional locations, that sustain it. T ­ hese inequities shape the expression and belonging of marginalized Latinxs in cities. From the start, Latinx urban life and culture in Union City ­were carefully managed to reduce the stigma of low-­income barrios. In the 1960s, Union City officials resolved white out-migration, popularly known as “white flight,” by welcoming Cuban arrivals and their contributions to the city. Cuban Union City became an example of a brokered Latinization of space anxious about being designated a “barrio.” This concern paved the way for the city’s progentrification stance and its curtailment of Latinx culture and life. Turn-­ of-­the-­twenty-­first-­century gentrification in Union City inherits the racial and class legacy of that midcentury brokering. Among other t­ hings, at stake is the retrenchment of Latinx cultural expression. Vari­ous scholars have noted how culture can be mobilized to express membership in a community. William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor elaborate on Renato Rosaldo’s concept of “cultural citizenship” and propose that the everyday practices that comprise it can “claim and establish a distinct social space for Latinos in this country,” a “space where p­ eople feel ‘safe’ and ‘at home,’ where they feel a sense of belonging and membership” and from which they can contribute to “an emergent Latino consciousness and social and po­liti­cal development.”10 When Latinidad is brought to interior and noncentral—in other words, marginal—­spaces in Union City, it limits the kind of belonging or “cultural citizenship” that can oppose nativist and classist assumptions of US culture and urbanism. By the early twenty-­first ­century, when local business ­owners along Bergenline Ave­nue, the city’s main commercial corridor, cleansed a Latinx presence from their storefronts, gentrification was more vis­i­ble. Business ­owners aimed to create an environment conducive for business investment and economic growth. A concurrent pro­cess of memorializing Latinx urban life and culture occurred during the naming of Union City parks, streets, and schools a­ fter historic Latin American figures. The public v­ isibility of this memorialization may seem to reverse the diminishing presence of Latinx expression. On the contrary, however, the commemoration of dead figures is the ultimate stage of abstraction, of a loss of low-­income visibility evident throughout the examples discussed in this book. This meta­phor of death brings to greater relief the cultural loss evident in the brokering previously considered.

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A Barrio That Was Not a “Barrio”: Setting the Stage for Gentrification The first wave of Latin American mi­grants that came to Union City included a few Cuban farm workers who first arrived in New York City and then relocated to northern New Jersey in search of work, open space, and quiet neighborhoods. They ­were part of a migration that fueled the expansion of the metropolitan area. As early as 1910, the news media celebrated that a “new suburban era is dawning in New Jersey. . . . ​­There is not a member of the New Jersey–­New York Real Estate Exchange whose dreams of the immediate f­ uture are not filled with visions of a glorious horizon, radiant with silver-­lined clouds.”11 A local Cuban I spoke with told me of his parents-­ in-­law, who, ­after living in the Bronx for a few years, moved to Union City in the 1920s. T ­ hese early Cubans settled in a city where Germans w ­ ere the majority and po­liti­cally influential, Swiss and Austrian groups w ­ ere smaller but commercially prominent, and the Armenian, Syrian, Irish, Italian, and Eastern Eu­ro­pean immigrant populations w ­ ere growing. As crackdowns on immigration swept across the nation, this early Cuban population came ­under scrutiny.12 In 1929 a Union City assistant city clerk was arrested for forging a birth certificate for a Cuban “alien.” 13 The fear of deportation continued through the 1950s. Some Cubans stayed in New York City, their initial destination, to mix in with Puerto Ricans, who, as American citizens, could elude immigration authorities.14 Still other Cubans I spoke with and researched in local media archives continued to leave New York City for Union City, where ­there was abundant factory work. By 1955 the Cuban population of Union City had grown large enough to compel a young Fidel Castro to stop ­there on his tour of prominent US Cuban communities to raise money for his overthrow of the Batista regime. By 1959, the year Castro took control of the island, two thousand Cubans lived in Union City.15 Thousands more Cubans would arrive ­after the revolution. ­Earlier settlers had maintained social networks with Cubans on the island, particularly t­ hose living in Havana, the rural town of Fomento, and the province of Las Villas in central Cuba. T ­ hese networks w ­ ere crucial to steering the arrival of the first Cuban refugees of the Castro revolution to North Jersey.16 When a congressional committee amended the Immigration Act of July 1960 to allow the executive branch to resettle refugees, an even larger number of postrevolution Cuban mi­grants in Miami relocated to Hudson

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County.17 Miami’s finances w ­ ere buckling u ­ nder the pressure of the large influx of refugees and the city’s officials pleaded with the federal government to enact a resettlement. The Cuban Refugee Program, begun in 1960 by the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was pivotal in assisting po­liti­cal refugees to resettle in Hudson County. The Cuban Refugee Program paid transportation costs from Miami. It also allocated millions of dollars for education, welfare, hospitals, and other public ser­ vices in cities where Cubans relocated.18 From 1961 to 1966, of all the states receiving resettled Cuban refugees, New Jersey received the most mi­grants, amounting to an estimated population of 20,000. By 1972 New Jersey had received 58,791 resettled Cuban refugees, the second state a­ fter New York to receive the most.19 The Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Newark, a private agency, managed offices in Union City from where it planned and coordinated Cuban resettlement.20 As non-­Latinx white families left Union City, part of the larger trend of white migration to middle-­class suburbs, city officials and business o­ wners welcomed the concurrent in-­migration of Cubans. Federal and local officials and private organ­izations ­were making Union City into a top-­down Latinx concentration. By most definitions they ­were constructing a barrio, even if it was not talked about as such. Cuban residents had middle-­class, professional backgrounds; they ­were light skinned, and hesitant to engage in, if not ideologically opposed to, leftist politics. Even ­those who ­were not ­middle class in Cuba, or light skinned, ­were ­eager to embrace the discourse of whiteness and middle-­class respectability with which the Cuban Refugee Program con­ve­niently framed them in order to justify the aid Cubans received.21 Without the overt group stigma and racial and economic marginalization that Chicana/os and Puerto Ricans w ­ ere subject to, Cuban refugees created a neighborhood that was, as several Cuban interviewees in Union City would note de­cades ­later, dif­f er­ent from the Chicana/o or Puerto Rican “barrios” of the 1960s. It would also not have the same connotations that barrios in the larger cities nearby—­New York or Jersey City—­had. The development of Union City’s Cuban community is the result of the confluence of cold war interests and racial inequities that s­ haped postwar metropolitan segregation. In the years of rising suburbanization and urban population decline, public officials and business ­owners scrambled to find ways to retain or bring back white residents and consumers. Middle-­class whites ­were thought to be the ideal population to reverse white flight. Yet most cities w ­ ere unable to attract whites. The pull of the suburb was too ­great. Some public officials felt they had no other recourse but to turn to Latinx consumers.

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­ here ­were challenges in ­doing so. Populations would have to be reframed T and their value to white-­dominant society rethought. Cubans, like Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, had also been discussed as a “prob­lem,” but the prob­ lem with Cubans was not one of assimilation or about their conduct or character, as it was for the other two groups; rather, it was a prob­lem of few jobs and lack of monetary and spatial resources available in what would be the first destination for many—­Miami.22 With resettlement and the increased aid from the Cuban Refugee Program, “prob­lem” language abated. By 1969 sociologist Alejandro Portes was writing that ­because Cuban refugees ­were not a “social prob­lem, since their adaptation to the host society has been generally unproblematic,” they w ­ ere the “golden exiles.”23 Ideas about Cuban refugees as white and homogeneously anticommunist prevailed. In Union City, Cubans ­were ideal subjects in the cap­i­tal­ist proj­ect to maintain and increase profits. Cubans integrating into the US mainstream of property and business owner­ship and upward mobility also served a symbolic function during the cold war. Po­liti­cal scientist María de los Angeles Torres suggests that Congress approved resettlement in part ­because of the ideological work that resettled anticommunist Cubans could do in their new neighborhoods.24 By uplifting Cubans to middle-­class normativity, the United States could posit itself as the noble guarantor of freedom and cap­ i­tal­ist enterprise vis-­à-­vis communist Cuba.25 As scholars of postwar suburbanization have shown, middle-­class normativity was solidified with a spatial order that segregated racialized ­others.26 A similar pro­cess was evident in Union City. As sociologist Ramon Grosfoguel and art historian Chloe S. Georas write, a portion of the funds coming from the Cuban Refugee Program was allotted to the Small Business Administration (sba), which in turn distributed the resources among several business loan and mortgage programs.27 Puerto Ricans, as well as African Americans, who largely settled in nearby Jersey City and Hoboken, ­were systematically excluded from attaining startup capital through sba. Whereas almost 80 ­percent of the first Cuban-­owned firms in Union City relied on sba bank loans, 75 ­percent of Puerto Ricans in New Jersey who requested information on loan attainment w ­ ere given misleading information and blocked from access.28 Puerto Ricans, whose population in New Jersey had nearly tripled from 1960 to 1970, with nearby Jersey City and Hoboken respectively becoming the second-­and fourth-­largest destination for Puerto Ricans in the state, ­were seen as racialized obstacles to and largely excluded from cap­i­tal­ist development. Grosfoguel deploys the concept of “coloniality of power,” that sociologist Anibal Quijano coined,

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to gesture ­toward the long-­term effects that this discrimination had on the county’s social and racial geography. Though research on the housing discrimination Puerto Ricans and African Americans faced in Union City is beyond the scope of this book, the large numbers of Puerto Ricans and African Americans in nearby Jersey City compared to their small numbers in Union City throughout the late twentieth c­ entury suggest that access to home owner­ship and rental apartments did indeed or­ga­nize the racialization of the area. While considering the implications of t­ hese racist practices is impor­ tant, it would be misguided to use a narrative of Cuban refugees as elite, highly educated, and privileged—­the “golden exiles” Portes described—to explain the entire experience of Cubans in Union City.29 Whereas some early Cuban refugees, specifically ­those in Miami, ­were wealthy (some had capital deposited in US banks before the revolution), North Hudson’s Cubans generally included a lower number of high school gradu­ates and a larger number of w ­ omen workers.30 Recall that prerevolution Cuban arrivals ­were mostly low-­income rural immigrants. In addition to that, as Yolanda Prieto writes in her book on the history of Cuban Union City, Cubans arriving to the city during the “Freedom Flights” between 1965 and 1973 ­were more working class than ­those who arrived in the years immediately following the revolution.31 Moreover, even the middle-­class and business-­owning Cuban refugees who arrived in the early years following the revolution experienced a downward mobility that marked them as working class. As a business owner for thirty-­three years on Bergenline Ave­nue told me: “La mayoria de la gente era decente, si no, no salía de Cuba. El Cubano que salió no necesitaba imigrar, salió por razones políticas [Most of the p­ eople w ­ ere decent, if they had not been, they would not have left Cuba. The Cuban who left did not need to migrate, he left for po­liti­cal reasons].” Explaining what he meant by “decent,” he continued and said that most of ­these Cubans “eran clase media, educados, profesionales. Pero en Union City todos eramos trabajadores [­were middle-­class, educated, professionals, but in Union City every­one was a worker].”32 His f­ ather, for example, owned a stationery business in Cuba but worked as a janitor at a local hospital in New Jersey. For Cuban w ­ omen working in the garment industry in Union City and the bordering cities of West New York and Jersey City, this also meant downward occupational mobility and a change in their traditional ­family role.33 Many Cuban arrivals ended up working in the embroidery industry that dominated the North Hudson area. Turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century Swiss and German entrepreneurs established the industry on the Palisades Cliffs, thinking it was an excellent place to locate the large and heavy (some weighing

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up to twenty tons) schiffli machinery that required secure and firm bedrock for the constant and clangorous vibrations of textile production.34 By 1970 Hudson County was home to 90 ­percent of the embroidery machinery in the United States.35 This large industry depended on new mi­grants. As the executive director of the Schiffli Lace and Embroidery Manufacturers Association noted: “Many Americans want a work week of only 35 hours . . . ​but we ­can’t function that way. The Spanish-­speaking p ­ eople are willing to work a long day. One owner says that ­they’re a godsend to the industry.”36 Despite the spatially concentrated ­labor exploitation, Union City would still not assume a barrio identity at this time. This was in large part due to how the middle-­class framework that the federal government applied to Cuban refugees as a ­whole, and the Cuban Refugee Program’s financial assistance sustained, made Cubans exceptional and thus their spatial concentration also exceptional. In 1966 Senate hearings presided by Chairman and Senator Edward M. Kennedy at New York University brought together several leaders and residents from the New York City metropolitan area to deliberate on the question of ­whether to grant Cuban refugees ­legal residency and a pathway to US citizenship. In his statement, New Jersey governor Richard Hughes applauded what he saw as the Cuban predilection for work, their minor impositions on welfare bankrolls, and their contribution to the “economic vitality of their environment.”37 Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York attended the hearing and stated that the new “middle-­class Cuban communities throughout the metropolitan area” ­were “a most salutary development.”38 Interestingly, Kennedy also underscored that the “task” of adjusting to the New York City area would have been “far, far more difficult” for Cubans without the “warm hospitality” and cultural institutions, such as “Spanish-­ language newspapers,” of the local Puerto Rican community.39 Though other statements on welfare bankrolls at the hearing suggested that the idea of undeserving Puerto Rican welfare recipients was the unnamed barometer by which Cuban refugees would be judged, the Demo­cratic senator of New York chose to specifically name Puerto Ricans and praise their neighborliness. It made sense that Kennedy would reference Puerto Ricans, the largest and most vis­i­ble Latinx voters in the state, in a positive light. But his comment neglected to mention that the Puerto Rican “pioneers” of Latinx communities in the New York City metropolitan area ­were not financially assisted, nor ­were they received in the same way as Cuban exiles.40 Senator Kennedy, who had, a year prior, visited rat-­infested Puerto Rican tenement apartments in Brooklyn, knew about the diverging fates of ­these two Latinx groups.41 Cubans receiving resettlement money and aid ­were not branded with the

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stigma of the undeserving welfare recipient that Puerto Ricans and African Americans had to bear. At the hearing, Reverend Hemsley of Grace Church in Union City took the opportunity to ask that the government increase its financial support to Union City in order to retain Cuban residents. He explained that it would be fair to do so. “I suspect,” he stated, “that while the Government is paying out money for the Cuban refugees, that in the long run it is ­going to get a lot back. . . . ​I am looking at Union City and I am seeing 48th street, which was a slum business area, looking rather nice t­ hese days and Bergenline Ave­nue, where the stores w ­ ere mostly vacant 4 years ago before the Cubans came, now the stores are occupied. And this is ­because ­people are putting energy and life into our community, and you ­can’t tell me this ­isn’t something that pays off.”42 Thus, not only would Cuban spatial concentration be of l­ ittle concern; it would actually be coveted. The favorable views expressed at the hearings ­were widely shared by Union City officials, residents, and business o­ wners years l­ater. In an interview with the New York Times, Union City mayor William J. Meehan emphatically declared about the Cuban population: “­They’ve changed the entire structure of the city.”43 “If it ­weren’t for the Cuban population ­here, Bergenline Ave­nue would be nothing but a parking lot,” said Lieutenant Paul G. Kelly of the Union City Police Department. “Ten years ago most of the stores w ­ ere empty, but now when a vacancy occurs, it is rented 44 immediately.” One non-­Cuban business owner simply remarked that “we have Mr. Castro to thank” for the rise in consumption.45 Mayor Meehan regarded the fashions and goods sold in new Cuban-­owned stores as far better than ­those offered by previous Eu­ro­pean ­owners.46 By the 1970s, the majority of retail stores along Bergenline Ave­nue w ­ ere owned by Cubans, and most employees spoke Spanish. Among the Cuban-­ owned places found along Bergenline Ave­nue ­were restaurants, social clubs, pastry shops, and other retail stores. A 1979 article from New York Magazine offers a vivid description of life on Bergenline, displaying a sensorial overload common to Manhattan journalists tasked with writing about a Latinx-­majority place. On Bergenline Ave­nue, the signs say cervesa and pollo, not beer or chicken. Late in the after­noon, the Latin [sic] girls in their bright-­ red and green sweaters, tight pants, and carefully painted f­ aces gather where salsa m ­ usic floats from rec­ord stores. They trade giggles and wave to their boyfriends riding down the ave­nue. And in the coffee bars, where the smell of the dark Cuban espresso swirls thickly in the air, the

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old men hunch over l­ ittle porcelain cups and spit out b­ itter memories of treachery and loss eigh­teen years ago on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. “La cia,” you ­will hear them grumble if you wait long enough.47 The Cuban business ­owners and other Latinx residents who remember this time wax nostalgically about the beautiful and luxurious goods offered in Cuban-­owned stores. One Cuban store owner I spoke with remembered the main commercial ave­nue: “Let me tell you, Union City used to be very unique; the p ­ eople, the clothing stores. We had nothing to envy Macy’s. . . . ​ We had very high-­class places. This used to be an outdoor mall.”48 Enthusiasm over Union City’s economic potential attracted Latinx investors from New York City. In 1971 Pedro L. Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican dentist, whose Bronx-­based clinic served Union City patients, frequently heard his patients complain about a lack of Spanish-­language ser­vice in Hudson County banks. He de­cided to open the Pan American Bank in Union City, the first non-­Mexican, Latinx-­owned bank in the country.49 Existing North Hudson banks resisted the opening of the new bank, fearing a loss of deposits from the growing Latinx community.50 Moreover, opponents, underscoring the fissures within the Latinx population, thought the bank was bound to fail and cited what they saw as insurmountable cultural differences between Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican, and the mostly Cuban clients, to which Rodriguez replied by revealing his wife to be Cuban-­born.51 Though the bank was insolvent by 1983 and subsequently taken over by Hudson United Bank, its impact was evident in my conversations with longtime Cuban business o­ wners who thought of it as a Cuban-­owned bank and nostalgically talked about “nuestro ­ ere crucial to bank-­client relabanco,” where friendliness and understanding w tionships. Pedro, the business owner discussed h ­ ere, remembers bank tellers personally calling him when a check overdrafted.52 Cubans w ­ ere also the darlings of Union City real estate. According to Mayor Meehan, by 1970 many Cubans had bought new $30,000–­$40,000 two-­family homes.53 At the end of the de­cade, enthusiasm had not waned, a Union City builder told the New York Times: “This town was on the way out. . . . ​The Cubans brought it back.”54 Robert DeRuggiero, a longtime real estate agent of Italian descent, noted that “before the Cubans came, t­ here was l­ ittle development and you c­ ouldn’t give property away. Now t­ here is a new spirit. T ­ here is a willingness to buy and improve.”55 A New York Times reporter noted that “an unusual feature of Union City is that t­ here seems to be no vacant buildings, no lofts or factories left to deteriorate, something that is not unusual in the state’s older cities.”56

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Indeed, across the river in New York City and other nearby communities of color in New Jersey, race riots, vacant lots, disinvestment, crime, and blight overwhelmed urban discourse in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1964 alone, economic misery and police brutality led Puerto Ricans and ­African Americans to riot in Elizabeth, New Jersey; Paterson, New Jersey; and East Harlem in Upper Manhattan. Union City did not riot.57 In 1968 the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican nationalist group inspired by the Black Panthers’ demands for social justice and racial equity, emerged out of East H ­ arlem, ten miles away. By the early 1970s, the Young Lords ­were branching out to Jersey City and Hoboken. About seventeen miles away, in the 1970s the South Bronx was “burning,” leaving ­behind rubble-­filled vacant lots. Most of the neighborhoods of color in the metropolitan area and on the Rust ­Belt that privileged, mobile non-­Latinx whites abandoned ­were written off as decay and subject to immigrant bashing and moralizing over the “culture” of low-­income ­people of color in the late 1960s and 1970s. Union City was mostly celebrated. The radical po­liti­cal organ­izations that did emerge out of Union City ­were right-­wing, anti-­Castro groups, such as the Cuban Nationalist Movement and Omega 7. In 1969 the Cuban Nationalist Movement was held responsible for planning bombings in Montreal.58 Members of Omega 7 claimed responsibility for more than twelve bombings in the metropolitan area and w ­ ere convicted of the 1976 killing of pro-­socialist and former Chilean ambassador to the United States Orlando Letelier and of the 1979 killing of Eulalio José Negrin, a Union City resident and administrator of the New Jersey Cuban Program, which helped Cuban refugees.59 The storefronts of business o­ wners sympathetic with a “dialogue” approach with Castro’s Cuba w ­ ere smashed. A Union City reverend said, “Terrorism ­here is worse than in the era of McCarthy. . . . ​The accusation of Communist comes against anyone who moves ­toward peace.”60 Still, as this radical po­liti­cal organ­izing was directed at the Cuban government and moderates in the exile community, it did not arouse the same worry among public officials as did the riots, property damage, and organ­izing in surrounding communities of color that ­were intended to draw attention to social injustice and urban in­equality and w ­ ere ripe with the possibility of revolution in US cities. In the 1970s, Union City public officials and local residents began to worry about the impact of a growing Cuban population on city resources. Mayor Meehan suggested that Cuban residents disenchant their compatriots from relocating to the city.61 City officials stressed the lack of housing space and overcrowding in public schools.

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With the 1980 Mariel boatlift, Cuban Americans joined the voices of apprehension. The city’s established Cubans thought “Marielitos” lacked the middle-­class sensibilities and business know-­how that had set apart ­earlier Cuban refugees and made them welcome additions to the city’s economy. Some Cuban residents also thought, as many at this time did, that this latest group of refugees ­were criminals and drug dealers and would give “law abiding Union City a bad name.”62 Moreover, many on the Mariel boatlift ­were Afro-­Cuban and their arrival in mostly light-­skinned Cuban communities such as Union City brought to relief long-­standing racial fissures within the Cuban population.63 A combination of racist attitudes, misconceptions, and the discontinuation of the federally sponsored Cuban Refugee Program and its financial assistance in the 1980s contributed to an inhospitable environment. With the funds drying out, t­ here was ­little economic incentive to glorify the newly arrived, poor, and racialized Cubans. Cubans of the Mariel and subsequent Cuban migrations of the 1990s ­were far from abandoned, however. In 1980 Demo­cratic governor Brendan T. Byrne of New Jersey set up a cabinet-­level Committee for Cuban Refugee Affairs.64 The Catholic Church in northern New Jersey continued to mediate between refugees and employers and government workers.65 Moreover, by the 1980s, Cubans in Union City had become a power­ful electorate that made demands on the city’s government and w ­ ere able to assist ­later waves of Cuban migration. In 1986 Robert Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, became the first Cuban American mayor of Union City. Menendez gained prominent status, first as mayor, then as New Jersey’s first Latinx congressman and one of the highest-­ranking Latinxs in congressional history. Since 2006 he has served as senator. The appearance of subsequent Cuban politicians fed an ethnic and national solidarity that assured Cuban repre­sen­ta­tion in municipal politics and local government agencies. It could be said that Cuban exiles’ distrust of social justice politics, along with the ways that refugee assistance shielded them from the structural racism other Latinx groups faced, led to their participation in electoral politics and government instead of radical urban politics. With re­sis­tance to marginalization absent in Union City, ­there was ­little reason for the barrio to develop as a rallying point for organ­izing. Instead of a barrio identity, a wide array of brokers, such as real estate agents, city officials, business ­owners, and resettlement workers, would make the city a state-­sanctioned Cuban po­liti­cal and commercial stronghold, a place where preselected, resettled Cubans could express themselves on the built environment and

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brand the city “the Havana on the Hudson.” Disavowed, this barrio nonetheless generated a Latinization of cities. The large numbers of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Central Americans, and other Latinxs that moved in in the late twentieth c­ entury changed Union City’s identity. Like early Cuban arrivals, some of t­ hese new mi­grants relocated across the Hudson “to escape the lack of decent jobs and housing in New York City. O ­ thers w ­ ere lured by relatives and friends who wrote of the good life to be found t­ here and of the many jobs.”66 One Colombian mi­grant, who landed in 1977 in Queens and within a few days found sewing work and housing in Union City, noted that her friends ­were having trou­ble finding work in New York City. Compared to the rapidly deindustrializing New York City, the garment industry in Union City was robust and hiring.67 Indeed, it was thanks to the embroidery industry’s need for low-­ wage workers that the city’s population kept growing. Factories had been leaving Manhattan for New Jersey for de­cades. According to ­union representatives in the 1930s, Hudson County’s proximity to Manhattan made it ideal for NYC-­owned “runaway shops” hoping to circumvent the city’s strict l­ abor laws and high rents.68 Union City’s location was also crucial b­ ecause factory ­owners could easily buy fabric in Midtown Manhattan, sew it in Union City, and then l­ater sell it to designers across the river.69 The Lincoln Tunnel, which was completed in the 1950s, made the short r­ ide between production in Union City and design and consumption in New York City con­ve­nient. In the 1970s fashion trends that prioritized embroidery also played a role in sustaining the garment manufacturing industry in Union City.70 By the early twenty-­first ­century, Union City was one of the most densely populated cities in the United States and more than 85 ­percent Latinx. Cubans no longer constituted such a large portion of the Latinx population. The city’s embroidery industry was in decline. Though a large sign on a New Jersey turnpike overpass could still be seen in 2018 proudly declaring “Northern New Jersey, Embroidery Capital of the World since 1872,” by the late 1990s most of the manufacturing in the city had largely gone to southern states or abroad.71 Residents I spoke with recalled that ­toward the end of the 1990s, t­ here was only part-­time and temporary employment available, workers ­were frequently sent home without paychecks, and factories closed without notice. The ser­vice economy that developed in nearby cities was unable to employ a comparable number of undereducated workers with low En­glish proficiency. The percentage of p ­ eople living in poverty jumped from 18.2 ­percent in 1989 to 21.4 ­percent in 2000.72 ­These changes affected the economic incorporation of the latest Latinx arrivals and thus

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their ability to perform an exceptional Latinization such as the early wave of Cubans had. The impoverishment of Union City is heightened by its location in New Jersey, one of the wealthiest states in the nation, and across the river from the luxurious high towers of Midtown Manhattan. The stark contrast is not lost on the middle-­class Cuban residents who remain and who feel that the hard work and investment they put in to initially uplift the city is now for naught. It is common to hear from a diverse group of long-­term Latinx residents (not just Cubans) that “­things are changing” on Bergenline Ave­nue. Waiting for the bus to take me into Manhattan on a spring morning in 2011, I overhead a telling conversation between a Cuban ­woman who seemed to be in her seventies and a Colombian w ­ oman who was prob­ably in her forties. The Cuban ­woman explained she was on her way to Midtown Manhattan to win­dow shop and walk b­ ecause “en Union City ya no hay nada que ver. Eso, en Bergenline, lo han vuelto como si fuera de otro país [n Union City t­ here is no longer anything to see. They have made that, over t­ here, Bergenline, look like another country].” The other w ­ oman interjected with a similar dismissiveness but one that might be, due to the paused way in which she expressed herself, construed as kowtowing to the older w ­ oman: “Sí, hay puros checheres, ropa fea [Yes, ­there are pure knickknacks, ugly clothing].” Once we arrived at the bus terminal, the Cuban ­woman walked off dressed in all black slim-­fitting clothing and gold jewelry to Rocke­fel­ler Center and the Colombian w ­ oman dressed in an oversized jean jacket, well-­worn black cotton pants, and orthopedic shoes rushed off to work with what appeared to be a plastic lunch bag in hand. Conflating Union City’s nonuniform urban landscape with “another country” gave the Cuban ­woman an opportunity to express her elevated social and cultural position vis-­à-­vis immigrant Union City. Her use of the words no longer confer a temporality to the new racialized and “foreign” landscape of Bergenline and thus imply, as many o­ thers have said outright, that ­earlier Cuban-­majority Bergenline was more worthy of praise. She was Cuban (as she identified herself to the Colombian w ­ oman), but by paying the round-­trip ticket to spend her leisure time looking through stores in Rocke­ fel­ler Center, she was also showing that she had adapted to a lifestyle that prefers middle-­and high-­brow chain stores. Whereas the “other” Latinxs assume a “foreignness,” she has the wherewithal to navigate marginalized and racialized Union City and tourist and wealthy Midtown Manhattan. In mapping out her judgment of taste across the metropolitan area, the Cuban ­woman conveyed city officials’ and business ­owners’ ideas about the

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recent racially and nationally diverse immigration into Union City—­the “they” she noted—­that makes Bergenline look like “another country.” She also justifies the plans of public officials to look t­ oward upscale Manhattan as the barometer of good taste and urban economic success. Indeed, the Cuban ­woman’s assessment of the commercial landscape echoes ­those who support inserting Union City in an interurban competition that can lure in outsiders and compress the spaces that divide this now low-­income “foreign” barrio space from its bordering wealthier areas. The Colombian ­woman is representative of residents who by agreeing to t­ hese social distinctions of taste provide the consent city officials need to gentrify Union City. Changing Union City’s built environment so that it resembles mainstream commercial ave­nues ­will make the status-­conscious resident, such as the Cuban w ­ oman, feel that her socioeco­nom­ically distinct neighborhood at least aesthetically parallels better-­off places. For the Colombian ­woman, the homogenization of the built environment may be appealing, but it w ­ ill not reduce a work commute that vividly depicts the po­liti­cal economic divisions in the metropolitan area between residential sites for exploitable ­labor and elite sites of work and entertainment. Business ­owners guided, and at times pressured, by public officials moved Latinx signifiers into the interiors of businesses in an effort to generate the order and homogeneity assumed necessary for gentrifying the city.

The Marginal Spaces of a Brokered Latinization In the late 1980s, as Hoboken and Jersey City, the so-­called gold coast, ­were gentrifying, local real estate agents assumed that second-­generation Cubans in Union City would also buy property and encourage new development.73 The owner of one of the city’s first condominium conversions remarked that Cubans w ­ ere likely to lead demand for new residential developments b­ ecause Cubans w ­ ere “very Americanized in that their dream is to own their own home.” 74 This Cuban-­led, one might say yuca-­led, investment did not materialize. T ­ hose desiring interurban competition had to grapple with a combined out-­migration of second-­generation Cubans and the influx of poorer Latinxs without the government assistance provided to ­earlier Cuban refugees. In light of this, public officials and business o­ wners sought a new population of professional Manhattan workers who, priced out of a New York City market, could buy less expensive property and attract and patronize new stores on Bergenline.

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To successfully attract this new population, they diminished the cultural markers of Latinx socioeconomic class and racial differences that could preclude gentrification. In the early twenty-­first c­ entury, the built environment of Union City consisted of vari­ous iconographies, textures, colors, and scales on private homes and business facades: hand-­painted typography of varied and rich coloring; statues of Virgin Mary outside front doors; tiled roofing reminiscent of Latin American roofs and exteriors composed of a mix of brick, vinyl ­house siding, and glossy tiles of many materials and patterns. This visual dynamism was evident to a greater degree on Bergenline Ave­nue, where buildings butted against each other showing a compact, dense commercial environment. Space on the ave­nue was a l­imited resource and advertising was necessary for businesses that wanted to stand out and compete for customers. Most buildings on the ave­nue ­were three floors high and mixed use with businesses on the bottom and residential units on top. Cuban pastelerias, Colombian restaurants with colonial-­era architecture frontage, Peruvian restaurants with stucco and bright exteriors, Mexican taquerias with brightly colored interiors, Salvadoran restaurants with white-­and-­blue exteriors, and pan–­Latin American restaurants with clay tile awnings w ­ ere among the businesses on the ave­nue. T ­ hese storefronts, together with the consumers and passersby on the street, produced a dynamic sociocultural space. This visual montage of Latinidad on Bergenline Ave­nue offered a contrasting landscape to Manhattan’s glimmering skyscrapers to the east, the mainstream suburban environments of well-­off Bergen County to the north and west, and the gentrified neighborhoods of Hoboken and Jersey City to the south. ­These contrasts influenced how advocates of gentrification viewed, represented, and chose to reshape Union City. The Urban Enterprise Zone (uez) of New Jersey was pivotal in transforming Bergenline’s landscape into a homogeneous main street style. ­ ngland during Margaret The uez was inspired by programs initiated in E Thatcher’s administration. With pressure from the conservative Heritage Foundation, the idea developed in and spread throughout the United States. Stuart Butler, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, argued that the program would help “tackle the urban frontier in the same way as the western pioneers.” 75 The urban “frontier” they ­imagined was one of destitution, vio­lence, and protest, of the “urban crisis,” in Butler’s own words.76 “Frontier” language, Marxist geographer Neil Smith reminds us, was a racialized discourse that justified the movement of white middle-­class gentrifiers into low-­income neighborhoods and unleashed a “class war” on existing residents.77 Despite their use of “frontier” language, the Heritage Foundation

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was at pains to dispel ideas that the uez was ­going to encourage outsiders to move in. Instead, they spoke of a uez that would allow ­free enterprise to flourish from within low-­income communities without the heavy hand of government. The Reagan administration took up this latter version of the uez and made it a part of its plans for providing investors in distressed neighborhoods with the funding and tax incentives needed to build and compete with business in other locations.78 New Jersey’s uez began in 1983, during his presidential term, but Union City would be designated a uez zone in 1994.79 Stores in the zone could charge 3.5 ­percent sales tax—­about half of the New Jersey sales tax. The sales tax collected went back to the city to be invested in infrastructure and other improvements. By 2007 uez membership in Union City had increased to about two hundred enrolled businesses and accrued an estimated $6 million in tax revenue.80 The uez funds ­were used to hire police, operate trucks for picking up litter in the designated zones, and to advertise Union City businesses through low-­ quality tv commercials and print media.81 The uez’s “facade improvement program,” which was responsible for many of the changes to the visual landscape, ramped up in 2007. Initially it allocated monies for the redesign of the commercial district’s awnings. For the fiscal year 2007, $235,000 was approved for storefront facade improvements for businesses included in Union City’s uez. The uez’s facade improvement program and its standard design ­were meant to promote a positive government-­business relationship and a pleasant environment appealing to visitors and investment. Its objective was to turn the city into what Mayor Brian Stack called a “business destination about to make its mark.”82 According to Larry Wainstein, chairman of the Union City uez in 2007, the program would be “cleaning up the clutter throughout the commercial district to have a more pleasing, aesthetic environment.” The point, said Wainstein, was to have a “uniformed look” to give the “commercial district a more professional image” and “to be able to compete with larger shopping malls and big box stores in adjacent municipalities.”83 Amada Avila, the uez Coordinator in Union City, added that with uniformity, they ­were “trying to get away from the shocking green awnings next to a pink awning and the next one may be yellow.”84 Within a few years of the program’s implementation, dark-­blue, burgundy, and dark-­green awnings replaced storefronts with hanging signs and multicolored awnings (figure 5.1). Computer-­generated sans serif lettering superseded hand-­painted illustrations and typography, including the work of local commercial artists such as Leonard “Chino,” a Cuban man who

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Figure 5.1  ~  Storefronts are standardized with dark-­blue awnings, signage, and Victorian spotlights. Barbershop, Bergenline Ave­nue, Union City, New Jersey, May 2011. Photo­graph by author.

arrived in the 1960s and had dedicated most of his working life to painting signs and murals commissioned by local businesses. New gooseneck light fixtures w ­ ere angled over awnings. Victorian lamps, reminiscent of a time period in the city when ethnic whites w ­ ere the majority, w ­ ere installed on newly repaved streets along Bergenline Ave­nue. To the chagrin of business o­ wners, uez emboldened property o­ wners to make unilateral aesthetic decisions regarding facade renovations. The changes moved colorful expressions indoor. A barbershop on Bergenline painted its interior walls green, the color “of money,” according to an employee (figure 5.2). One Latinx business owner on Bergenline Ave­nue resented his landlord’s decision to change the awning’s blue-­and-­white colors connoting the flags of his store’s Central American patrons to a burgundy color with ­simple white lettering and a hardly legible stenciled map of Central Amer­i­ca.85 To make up for what he saw as the banality of the new signage, the business owner made hand-­painted posters announcing the nationalities of his customers and lined them up along with several flags against the storefront win­dow (figure 5.3). Now that his advertising space was confined to the

Figure 5.2  ~  A brightly colored interior contrasts the mainstreamed exterior. Barbershop, Bergenline Ave­nue, Union City, New Jersey, May 2011. Photo­graph by author.

Figure 5.3  ~  A business owner tries to c­ ounter the neutrality of an awning with nation-­specific marketing. Centroamerican Inc., Bergenline Ave­nue, Union City, New Jersey, May 2011. Photo­graph by author.

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Figure 5.4  ~  A controversial mural affixed to the facade of a storefront. Mercado de las Amer­ic­ as, Bergenline Ave­nue, Union City, New Jersey, May 2014. Photo­graph by author.

win­dow, t­ here was l­ ittle room to show the goods he was selling. To make ­matters worse, the posters and flags he placed w ­ ere of ­little avail. The burgundy awning hung so low, its shadow obfuscated much of what was displayed on the win­dow. The owner also complained that the matching burgundy light fixtures placed over the awning to light up the signage at night had fallen or ­stopped working. In my interviews, vari­ous other business ­owners complained about the gooseneck light fixtures and insinuated that their cheap quality was indicative of the in­effec­tive­ness of the facade revitalization program as a ­whole. Instead of ameliorating blight, uez was producing it. A Cuban property owner had a tough time dealing with the uez when planning to renovate his sprawling market (figure 5.4). The uez asked him to take down several painted murals affixed to his facade ­because of the possibility that the facade might collapse and fall on pedestrians walking below. Rumor had it, however, that the uez asked the business owner to

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remove the sign ­because of the black man dressed in guajiro clothing, said to be an icon of Cuban Santería, depicted on the left side of the mural. The market owner complied and relocated the mural to the interior of the business. He quickly brought it out again, faithful that the religious icon would bring customers and good luck. Even though he was subjected to the heavy hand of city officials who dictated the color and size of signage, as a property owner he ultimately had final say over his aesthetic choices.86 The Cuban owner of a restaurant on Bergenline Ave­nue had flexibility when it came to his storefront ­because he had a close relationship with his landlord.87 Still, he had to discuss his design pro­cess with the uez: “They had a big say on it; I had to go back with a few designs. They d ­ idn’t want me to do the stucco. They wanted me to use metal. But that would kill the idea I had. I had to do a sample to show them how it was ­going to be done.” The restaurateur eventually made the changes without any monetary support from uez. Businesses with liquor licenses, such as his, are disqualified from applying for uez aid. Though not financially assisted by uez, this business owner still followed its general aesthetics. The vis­i­ble signs of low-­income Latinx consumption, such as the posters announcing Latinx concerts and food that had taken up most of the previous glass-­dominated facade, ­were minimized. Latinx referents moved inside. Interior walls ­were painted red and orange and decorated with paintings of Afro-­Cuban musicians (figure 5.5). A straw-­thatched roof decorated the bar kiosk. The side exterior of the restaurant was painted a light blue, and black iron gates similar to ­those used in Spanish colonial architecture covered the win­dows (figure 5.6). The new facade used a combination of reddish-­brown and beige stone, stucco, and brick styled ­after the ­house designs the restaurateur, who also owns a construction business, uses to build in suburban Bergen County and nearby Secaucus. Not ­every business owner on the ave­nue could or wanted to take on the costs of refashioning their facades. As the Cuban restaurateur explained, ­ on’t have the money uez “wanted every­one to look the same, but p­ eople d for that, that’s very expensive. . . . ​A lot of p ­ eople have had issues with uez.” The business community’s dwindling participation coincided with the reduction in uez funds during the administration of Republican governor Chris Christie beginning in 2010.88 This left business o­ wners like the Cuban restaurateur feeling betrayed. “I got sucked into it,” he said. “If I w ­ ould’ve waited I ­wouldn’t have had to spend so much money. I spent $11,000.”89 As the facade revitalization program receded, the municipal government contracted Heyer, Gruel and Associates to design the city’s Master

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Figure 5.5  ~  A restaurant’s colorful interiors. Bergenline Ave­nue, Union City, New Jersey, May 2011. Photo­graph by author.

Plan. One of the largest design and urban planning firms in New Jersey specializing in New Urbanist placemaking, the firm laid out the city’s f­ uture development, aesthetics, preservation, and design of open space in an effort to make it, in its words, a “complete city.”90 It was the first time in forty-­ eight years that such a plan was drafted for the city. Municipal land use law required municipalities to undergo a review of development e­ very six years. The reason for the time lag was not discussed but the plan’s timing binds it to the gentrification aspirations of government officials.

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Figure 5.6  ~  A restaurant’s colonial exteriors. Bergenline Ave­nue, Union City, New Jersey, February 2011. Photo­graph by author.

The plan insinuated its gentrification goals, stating that the development it encouraged was to “capitalize on the City’s proximity to Manhattan and job markets.”91 An ­earlier draft of the plan offered more detail: “When one looks across the Hudson River, they see infinite possibilities ­today that ­were certainly yesterday’s dreams. Hudson County is an extension of the Manhattan marketplace, not its second best choice. Union City is, and can become, an even better place to live, work and raise a f­ amily.”92 Like the Cuban ­woman waiting for the bus, and many ­others I heard justify the mainstreaming of the city’s landscape, the authors of the Master Plan looked to transform Union City to appeal to ­those coming from Manhattan. The target audience for new development plans w ­ ere not the low-­ income Latinx residents of the city but potential new residents and investors coming from New York. While pro-­g entrification plans gained momentum, some business ­owners began to use their own money to alter their facades to attract a

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changing consumer population. T ­ hese new facades did not copy the dark colors the uez encouraged in awnings. They did, however, retain a desire for an uncluttered, neutral-­colored aesthetic. In my interviews, the reasons business ­owners opted to change their storefronts reveal the racial and class prejudices that underlie the facade revitalization in Union City but that uez was careful not to spell out. A Colombian owner of a beauty salon on Bergenline Ave­nue explained why she had de­cided to renovate a­ fter buying the salon from a Dominican ­woman: “When we first took over the site the facade was dark blue. Their [Dominican] flag is dark blue and red. I deduce that’s the reason why they chose that color. The majority of Dominican ­people think that way. . . . ​ South Americans are very conservative. We use a lot of common sense when we use color.”93 The “we” presumably included me. As with many of the interviewees in this book, this salon owner inquired about my ethnoracial identity at the start of our interview. As a Colombian w ­ oman myself, interested in design by virtue of asking her questions on the topic, I sensed that she wanted me to agree with her observations. Regardless if I did, she was prepared to justify her design expertise: “We follow magazines a lot. . . . ​Also, we listen to how our bodies feel with certain colors. That is the general concept. I learned much of it from my f­ amily.” Whereas the store owner believed that the aesthetic preference of the previous Dominican o­ wners was based on raw nationalist fervor, she thought her preferences w ­ ere based on an educated decision, natu­ral abilities, and her ­family’s upbringing. The differences she was so keen on making ­were deeply racialized. Many Dominican mi­grants are dark-­skinned Afro-­descendants. This Colombian salon owner was light skinned. The store own­er’s racialization of aesthetics was a way for her to elevate her socioeconomic and cultural capital, and racial superiority, over other business ­owners. It was also a way of showing that she was equipped with the superior aesthetic sensibilities thought necessary to attract gentrifiers. Commenting on her choice of a light-­colored, nearly white sign and the light gray faux-­marble Formica that covered the facade, she said, “Lighter colors attract p ­ eople of many dif­fer­ent ethnoracial backgrounds” (figure 5.7). For the salon’s interior decor, she chose purple, yellowish-­green, and red paint. According to the salon owner, the brighter colors ­were chosen ­because it made customers—­most of whom, she noted, are still Latinxs—­“feel at home” (figure 5.8). Indeed, the day we met for the interview, Latinx workers and Latinx clients occupied the salon. An older Latinx ­couple, prob­ably in their sixties, sat in the waiting area while the ­woman’s rollers cooled. They ­were a reminder that as Latinx-­associated culture moved inward, Latinx life

Figure 5.7  ~ Whitewashed exterior. Sugar Divine Salon, Bergenline Ave­nue, Union City, New Jersey, October 2014. Photo­graph by author. Figure 5.8  ~ Colorful interiors make Latinx customers “feel at home.” Sugar Divine Salon, Bergenline Ave­nue, Union City, New Jersey, October 2014. Photo­graph by author.

Figure 5.9  ~  The Hobokenization of Bergenline Ave­nue. Cuban bakery, Union City, New Jersey, November 2014. Photo­graph by author.

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in the city resumed. The ability of low-­income Latinxs to claim belonging in public urban space, however, was tenuous. Several blocks away on Bergenline Ave­nue, the Cuban owner of a reopened Cuban bakery whose bare-­boned, worn-­beige interiors had for de­cades catered to low-­wage workers and retirees looking for “un cortadito” told me about his distaste for the brightly colored walls he saw in Latinx businesses of the area. Instead, he said he admired “modern” decor, which he equated with “white” paint and exposed brick (figure 5.9). He attributed his style to his time working as an electrical contractor at hip restaurants and boutiques in nearby Hoboken. His linking of modern aesthetics with white-­dominant and gentrified Hoboken located racialized cultural differences. The Cuban bakery owner effusively noted how the “modern” white interior with touches of bright pink and green could attract a young clientele of assimilated Latinxs or non-­Latinxs coming from Hoboken and wealthier suburbs of New Jersey.94 However, like the owner of the beauty salon, he realized that his current clientele consists of low-­income Latinxs. Ten blocks north on Bergenline Ave­nue, a Dominican restaurateur took over a Cuban restaurant whose facade was plastered with the colorful signage hand-­painted by local artist and muralist Chino. The signs listed prices and depicted illustrations of Cuban food offered on the menu. A Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre statue, the patron saint of Cubans, sat on the restaurant c­ ounter by the win­dow display. The new owner took down the statue, repainted the exterior, and changed the red awning to black. Black, white, and gray became the favorite color choices among new investors moving into Union City and local middle-­class business ­owners aspiring to gentrification. This was the preferred palette of gentrification in other cities as well. In Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Chicago, gray paint was an indicator of gentrification in black and Latinx neighborhoods.95 Moreover, in Union City glass panels replaced wooden and vinyl exteriors. For example, ­after a fire forced a Colombian restaurateur on Bergenline to remodel, he replaced the traditional red and white of the Spanish colonial Antioqueño facade of his business with a glass and concrete exterior reminiscent of large pharmacy chains. The business o­ wners whose stories of revitalization I relate h ­ ere assumed the position of brokers who knew they would lose customers if they ­were to completely repudiate the city’s Latinx culture and life. At the same time, they wanted to participate in the larger gentrification wave and its new aesthetic order that saw low-­income, racialized Latinx visibility as an obstacle to cap­i­tal­ist accumulation. To resolve this contradiction, they spatially

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segregated visuals tied to Latinx culture and ­people to interiors. And yet despite ­these efforts, the gentrification in Union City in the early part of the twenty-­first c­ entury appears to be mostly aspirational. That is b­ ecause the capital accumulation that gentrification promises depends not only on visuals but on financial investment and population shifts, which Union City was only slowly beginning to see. The increased invisibility of low-­income Latinxs in public space that I saw as a harbinger of displacement was not always seen as such by local low-­income renters, not even t­ hose most likely to be affected by depleting affordable housing. Some of the residents I spoke with praised the work of public officials, who in their eyes had turned Union City into a better place with clean streets, new building construction, and enforced dog waste removal. Some wanted more renewal proj­ects. They showed how taste for normative aesthetics of order and sameness could generate consensus across a wide range of actors and desensitize radical opposition to new development and renewal.

Gentrification and Death: Memorializing Latinx Culture and Life Much has been said about how brokers reframe Latinx urban life and culture. But this brokering is also about a loss intrinsic to abstraction. Writing about reification, Timothy Bewes notes that the “double movement of abstraction and crystallization” is “inherent in all representation—­all art and all politics—­and it suggests the loss of an original w ­ hole or integrity.”96 Brokers abstract from that which has been identified, crystalized as Latinx, low income, and unfavorable to urban pro­gress. This is a pro­cess of reification that keeps a messy, not easily categorizable urbanism out of sight. Brokering for gentrification, in other words, misses the “original ­whole.”97 It is premised on the loss of racialized, low-­income communities. Sometimes this loss is best described as death. In his classic text on the production of space, phi­los­o­pher Henri Lefebvre writes that the illusion of safety and normality that bourgeois space offers is an abstraction. This “abstract space” is “inherently violent” and indicative of “the inability of male or manly designs to embrace anything but joyless domination, renunciation—­and death.”98 A brokered Latinization that has been made in the interest of gentrification is a space of loss and death. Several authors have explored this nexus. Illustrating her concept the “structure of feeling of the barrio,” a mode

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of experiencing barrio life that is ­under threat by gentrification, scholar Mérida Rúa discusses how Puerto Rican Chicagoans in 2001 participated in a funeral pro­cession with cardboard ­houses to mourn the “deaths of ­houses.”99 Journalist Peter Moskowitz makes the connection plain in the title of his book, How to Kill a City: Gentrification, In­equality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.100 In the early twenty-­first c­ entury, headlines in mainstream news outlets frequently deployed a similar meta­phor. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, Michael Henry Adams wrote about the “end of black Harlem.” The Huffington Post announced the “slow death of urban grit.” The Guardian proclaimed the “slow death of Soho” and the progressive news site Common Dreams offered similar fatalistic accounts of gentrification. 101 ­These articles spoke to a widespread feeling of doom that settled among individuals and communities adversely affected by gentrification. More concretely, gentrification c­ auses the death of p ­ eople. Young men of color have died at the hands of police tasked with enforcing the new cultures of gentrified places. El­derly p ­ eople have died from complications exacerbated by gentrification-­caused displacement.102 T ­ hese examples humanize the stakes of a gentrification-­led “death” that can sometimes seem merely symbolic. By emphasizing death and not just loss, ­these morbid accounts of gentrification renounce the cycle of creative destruction—­the idea that destruction leads to more creation—­that pro-­gentrifiers rely on to normalize the loss of place. Highlighting gentrification as a space of death is a form of critique. A Latinization of Union City in the early twenty-­first ­century by most mea­sures appeared to reverse the visual retrenchment of Latinx cultural expression in interior, noncentral spaces of the city. During this period, in addition to pruning the landscape for potential gentrification, public officials in Union City sought to gain public approval by naming streets, parks, and monuments ­after dead Latinx or Latin American historical figures that represented the largest Latinx subgroups in the city. A mural in 2003 and, a year ­later, a street sign in uptown Union City ­were erected to honor the Cuban musician Celia Cruz, who lived her last years in nearby Fort Lee, New Jersey. The mural and its environs eventually became a place marker known in real estate circles as “Celia Cruz Park Community.” In 2011 the New York Daily News counted Celia Cruz Park Community among the “Best Places to Live in NY.”103 In 2002 city officials inaugurated a park honoring Cuban national hero José Martí with a bronze bust on the far side of the park. Two years l­ ater, Union City opened a new public school, the first in

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seventy years, also named ­after José Martí. That same year a ­children’s park was named ­after Juan Pablo Duarte, the founding ­father of the Dominican Republic. In 2008 a small green space adjacent to the public library became Plaza Vicente Rocafuerte, named ­after a former president of Ec­ua­dor. In 2007 the city opened the Eugenio María de Hostos Center for Early Childhood Education, named a­ fter the celebrated nineteenth-­century Puerto Rican educator. Commemorations of historic Latin American figures are common in major US cities with large Latinx populations. New York City alone had, by the start of the twenty-­first c­ entury, markers commemorating most of the figures listed ­here. I discuss the commemorations in Union City not for their uniqueness but for their timing. Mayor Brian Stack and the city council likely opted for such historic markers to target the largest national groups ­because including vari­ous Latinx groups was a way to retain their relevance to a changing voting population. As Cubans who once dominated the electorate aged or moved out of the city, politicians had to grapple with how to cater to non-­Cuban Latinos. In an interview with the New York Times, Mayor Stack said as much, remarking that he would give several ethnic groups in the city a chance to name new buildings.104 Union City’s Master Plan supported this wave of historical Latinx markers for its economic potential and encouraged Union City to continue to “celebrate its history” and “promote historic preservation as a tool for successful economic development.”105 The politics of disavowing Latinx culture are not always obvious and need to be parsed through. If we entertain the idea that the living’s engagement with the dead can re-­create the past, as literary scholar Joseph Roach reminds us, ­these commemorations are active symbols of transnational ties that hold Union City Latinxs in symbolic proximity to their Latin American countries and in ­doing so reimagine our borders, extending the histories of ­these countries into the very pockets of an “Amer­ic­ a” usually described in contrast to “Latin” Amer­i­ca.106 At the same time, ­these commemorations are abstract references to a faraway citizenship and delinked from Latinx strug­g les to assert their local cultural citizenship and their federal citizenship, the kind of citizenship that may be most useful to local politicians. Considering, as visual culture theorist Marita Sturkin does, that the objects that memorialize events and ­people can produce forgetting and exclusion, the selectivity of this commemoration and their identification with Latin Amer­i­ca more so than Latinx implies a varying value placed on Latinx versus Latin American commemorations.107 ­These are commemorations that vie for space with

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Union City’s low-­and moderate-­income Latinxs whose life and culture signify (im)migration, cultural hybridity, and in-­betweenness, and whose public display in the early twenty-­first ­century diminished. Ethnic studies scholar Deborah Paredes notes the dif­fer­ent ways public commemorations ­handle dead Latinxs and Latin Americans. In her book on the Tejana musician Selena, Paredes writes that ­after Selena’s death, her body was deployed “by a range of communities in efforts to claim or to contest Latinidad.”108 However, Paredes observes, ­because Selena was associated with a “working-­ class aesthetic,” her image was not used to sell name-­brand products as dead Latin American w ­ omen, such as Argentine Evita Perón and Mexican Frida Kahlo, ­were. ­There is an imbalance in how actors with the power to shape public space publicly recognize and make vis­i­ble Latinxs and Latin Americans. In Union City, the government-­sponsored sculptures and placards are bittersweet commemorations that alienate a diverse group of Latinx residents from their history in the making. This Latinx memorialization does not detract from the dominant trend t­ oward increasing invisibility of Latinidad; it may in fact be the most conclusive statement of loss. Brokering in this city produced a Latinx culture that would not challenge gentrification and its pro­cess of capital accumulation. Commemorations ­were another example showing the city’s need to control and model the best repre­sen­ta­tion of Latinx p ­ eople and culture in public space. Death served a dif­fer­ent rhetorical function in Union City than it did in the articles discussed h ­ ere or in the Chicago case described by Rúa. The commemoration of dead figures was “addressing” Latinx residents, to again link to Judith Butler’s term, but it was not asking residents to dwell on the loss of their ethnoracial community.109 Rather, it was asking them to dwell on a history that could distract from an impending loss. It was melancholic. American studies scholar Alicia Schmidt-­Camacho, referencing Sigmund Freud, notes that melancholia is a state of “thwarted rebellion.”110 It is difficult to mourn what is not yet fully lost, least of all fight for it. In other words, dead figures inspire a state of melancholia that distracts from the death of community and the opposition that may arise when the other­wise slow gentrification speeds up. One of the luminaries of the 1960s and 1970s Young Lords movement, Pedro Pietri, writes in his poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” about the connection between death and ethnic affirmation and expression. Dead Puerto Ricans Who never knew they ­were Puerto Ricans Who never took a coffee break

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from the ten commandments to kill kill kill the landlords of their cracked skulls and communicate with their latino souls111 Pietri suggests that u ­ nless Puerto Ricans embrace their ethnic particularities, they ­will be “dead.” Institutions, such as or­ga­nized religion referenced in the “ten commandments,” produce this death by clamping down on ­these alternative forms of association and organ­ization. The poem’s reference to the property-­owning class, “the landlords,” who manage the incomplete beings, the dead Puerto Ricans’ “cracked skulls,” and their inhibited expressions of identity are suggestive of the power that a propertied class has over Latinx expressions and visibility in space. Unleashing an unencumbered Puerto Rican identity and expression emboldened by an emerging black and class consciousness was key to Puerto Rican claims over space in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the coeval Chicana/o movement, the barrio was a prominent site for activism and ethnic-­based social justice strug­g les. “Dead Puerto Ricans” who do not “communicate with their Latino souls” are precipitating the death of the barrio as a culturally affirmative place. Death is thus the ultimate abstraction from the barrio. The dead Latin Americans who pepper Union City’s landscape anticipate what seems, in light of new gentrifying luxury condominiums and rentals and high-­end coffee shops, to be the coming death of low-­income Latinx expression in public space. This was a death long in the making as the city’s Latinization resisted its barrioness from the start. Like Pietri, my invoking of death ­here is not meant to be simply fatalistic. It is meant to be provocative and to underscore the right of low-­income Latinxs to express their belonging, their history, and their right to occupy and be vis­i­ble in space.

Coda Colorful Abstraction as Critique

This book offers a bleak history of a US urbanization that has developed in response to anx­i­eties about barrio formations. The desire to make the case that Latinxs ­were contributors to cities has an equally long history. The abstraction of the built environment was a frequent aesthetic technique for addressing barrio-­induced anxiety ­because it represented without reducing to a grounded, maligned barrio referent. This book has yet to discuss why the built environment has been a key site for manipulating and engendering a palatable inclusion that solves the threat that low-­income Latinxs supposedly represent. I therefore do so ­here. ­There are multiple ways of making a population appear worthy of normative society. Social, economic, and cultural resources could be mobilized to provide low-­income ­people with the tools needed to exhibit middle-­class virtue. So why does the built environment garner so much attention and play such a central role in marking Latinx belonging in the United States? The built environment is a vector of power in cap­it­ al­ist urbanism. For low-­ income, racialized Latinxs living in barrios, the built environment is the setting for strug­g les over power and the very object of ­those strug­g les. It is a stage for inclusion and exclusion, exploitation, and re­sis­tance. It is easily appropriated for cap­it­ al­ist accumulation and reworked for financial gains. Indeed, if ­there was any doubt, this book belies any notion that the built design that contains, frames, and organizes the urban is of no consequence to the po­liti­cal, social, and economic condition of Latinxs. Considering the potential of the built environment, it is thus impor­tant to examine the

220 Coda

extent to which the spatial display of Latinx culture undoes, reconfigures, and mirrors cap­i­tal­ist spatial power relations. If Latinized abstract solutions continue to arise in the face of per­sis­tent crisis, how do we make them more useful in actually fostering belonging for low-­income populations? How can they challenge the cyclical nature of US cap­i­tal­ist urbanism—­its decay and reconstitution of its cultures—to which Latinxs have been interpolated? In the past two de­cades, Latinx population growth—an increase of nearly twenty-­two million ­people from 2000 to 2016—­and settlement beyond the traditional pattern of big cities, along with emboldened racist and anti-­immigration policies, have raised the stakes for Latinized solutions that defy negative assumptions.1 President Donald Trump’s rise to power and his call for a US-­Mexico border wall presented, in par­tic­u­lar, a key flash point. The most common reactions to the Trump administration’s border wall had been discursive. Some of his backers welcomed increased enforcement, entrusting him with the wall’s design and rollout, while o­ thers worried that tax increases would go into effect to pay for the ambitious proj­ect. Immigrant advocates condemned the proj­ect for its nativist premise and pointed out its in­effec­tive­ness at regulating undocumented mi­grants flying into the United States and overstaying their visas. Some scoffed at the idea that a bricks-­and-­mortar solution could curb global transnational connections. Trump’s idea that Mexico pay for the wall was ridiculed both in Mexico and the United States. But in 2017 Trump’s order for a “big, beautiful wall” was met with two design competitions or­ga­nized and solicited by the Department of Homeland Security (dhs) in order to address “cross-­ border threats.”2 The design competition added a layer of seriousness to the enterprise of building a border wall. To fulfill Trump’s decorative aims, submissions for the border wall w ­ ere to be judged based not only on their ability to prevent “illegal crossers” but also on their aesthetics. The request for proposal (rfp) detailed the following: “The north side of [the] wall (i.e. U.S. facing side) s­ hall be aesthetically pleasing in color, anti-­climb texture, ­etc., to be consistent with general surrounding environment.” 3 What the “general surrounding environment” meant, however, was left unclear. ­Were submitters being encouraged to integrate the cultural environment of the Mexico-­US borderlands? Did the “environment” refer to the native reservations, the barrios, the colonias, and the slums that occupy the border and, in some cases, extend across both Mexico and the United States? Or did the “environment” refer to the natu­ral landscape, the desert, the river, and the mountains found along the topographically diverse 1,900-­mile-­long border with Mexico? The

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Figure C.1  ~ ­People walking up and on top of the Prison-­Wall, 2016. Estudio Pi S.C., Hassanaly Ladha, and Agustín I. Ávalos, The  Prison-­Wall. https://­www​ .­mamertinegroup​.­com​/p ­ rison​-­wall​.­html.

eight proposals approved for prototype construction offer some clarification. Four of the prototypes ­were made of concrete. Four ­were built with other materials. The gray, beige, and pale-­yellow prototypes blended into the patch of dry, cleared land where they stood in the Otay Mesa neighborhood of San Diego. The off-­white prototype blended with the white containers strewn around in an adjacent truck depot on the Tijuana side. Some of the prototypes on the US side ­were made of smooth materials. ­Others on the Mexican side included barbed wire. Some w ­ ere solid throughout. ­Others w ­ ere heavy and solid at the top with bars extending downward. About eight feet wide, with space separating one from the other, the prototypes resembled guillotines or, at best, mandolin vegetable slicers. They ­were examples of how the contentious geopolitics of immigration could be transmuted into a geopolitics of aesthetics, textures, materials, and color. As submissions w ­ ere announced, other designers circulated what I call “counterproposals,” proposals they did not submit to dhs but that they nonetheless wanted to share with the public. Among the most prominent and critical of t­ hese was the “Prison-­Wall” (heretofore identified as the “Wall”) created by Estudio 3.14 from Guadalajara, Mexico, in conjunction with students

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Figure C.2  ~  Bird’s-­eye view of the Prison-­Wall’s massive intervention on the natu­ral landscape, 2016. Estudio Pi S.C., Hassanaly Ladha, and Agustín I. Ávalos, The  Prison-­Wall. https://­www​.­mamertinegroup​.­com​/­prison​-­wall​.­html.

from three Guadalajara architecture schools and the Mamertine Group, a student design lab led by architecture professor Hassanaly Ladha at the University of Connecticut (figures C.1 and C.2). Their proposal took the border wall, ordinarily emblematic of the capacity of the built landscape to exclude, and made it into the subject of a Latinized architecture. Mea­sur­ing the length of the border, the Wall is, according to Norberto Miranda, spokesperson for Estudio 3.14, “a prison where 11 million undocumented ­people w ­ ill be pro­cessed, classified, indoctrinated and/or deported.”4 The Wall is also a shopping mall, “with a Macy’s, in the Tijuana section.”5 The Mamertine group explains on its website that it “­imagined” the Wall “as a continuous, self-­sufficient city with shopping, health care, residences for prison staff, and other facilities required to sustain life.” In ­doing so, they added, this city “duplicates the nation it protects from the outside.”6 I prefer to read “the nation” duplicated in the Wall’s construction as a transnational composite. The Wall’s bright-­pink exterior is reminiscent of Mexico, a nation long associated with that color. Creative director of Estudio 3.14 Leonardo Díaz Borioli confirmed the connection in saying that the designers ­were “inspired by iconic modern architect Luis Barragán,” whose walls, he noted, “are emblematic of Mexico.” Barragán’s famed Casa Gilardi in Mexico City, a cultural destination awash in this pink and other bright hues, reiterates the prevalent idea, evident in other cultural objects, that Mexico is extraordinarily colorful. The color paying homage to Barragán’s architecture could just as well, in its abstraction, be a nod to the colorful streetscape sometimes found in US

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barrios. In that sense, the Wall is analogous to the abstractions evident during the “Puerto Rican prob­lem,” “culture of poverty” debates, “white flight,” diversity agendas, and gentrification. In all ­these examples, abstract cultural properties of the barrio are highlighted—at times by drawing transnational links to Latin Amer­i­ca—to avoid the fraught politics of representing barrio culture in moments of urban crises. The Wall differs from ­these examples in its more revealing portrayal. The Wall is a sociospatial simulation of the injustice and exploitation of barrio life. It functions as a segregated space intended to serve both “good” and “bad” subjects—­shoppers, inmates, the working class, and immigrants—­the very array of subjects who populate Latinx repre­sen­ta­tions in marketing, government, and industry. The conflation the Wall proposes resonates with academic assessments, such as that of sociologist Loïc Wacquant, who describes the “ghetto” as a “social prison.” 7 Curiously missing from this i­magined “self-­sufficient city” are activists and artists. The Wall, it seems, is not a space for subjects with radical inclinations. It is not a replica of the storied barrios where social movements formed and continue to or­ga­nize. Rather, the Wall is a site of governmentality where, to borrow from anthropologist Aihwa Ong, “a politics of subjection and subject-­making” is enacted.8 The barrio, in other words, lingers in this Latinized urban imaginary but in a repressive form. The Wall is made for a racialized neoliberal subject whose body the state disciplines and whose culture the market shapes and usurps. The Wall polices t­ hese subjects with border security checkpoints, detention centers, and prisons. Meanwhile the pink exterior, in its capacity as symbol of Mexico, presumably appeals to ­those who have a choice to be at the border site: retail shoppers at stores, such as Macy’s, or the Latinx agents who, as of 2016, comprise more than 50 ­percent of the Border Patrol. Some might envision the Wall as a multicultural mode of policing that softens the blow of state terror. What is clear is how racist policies of exclusion, difference, dispossession, alienation, and criminalization concentrate subjects in this pink, abstracted barrio, as they do, or did, in ­actual barrios. The past tense is impor­tant to consider since the Wall makes what a set of draconian anti-­immigration laws, together with pro-­gentrification policies, have increasingly made impossible elsewhere in the United States: Latinx spatial concentration. This architectural rendering critiques how barrio life is treated and increasingly destroyed. The Wall abstracts consciously with a twofold purpose. To understand the first, geographer Ruth Gilmore’s spatial definition of “racism as a practice of abstraction, a death-­ dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that or­ga­nize relations

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Figure C.3  ~  An architectural rendering of the interior of the Prison-­Wall, 2016. Estudio Pi S.C., Hassanaly Ladha, and Aranzazú Alvirde, The  Prison-­Wall. Text by ­Hassanaly  Ladha. https://­www​.­mamertinegroup​.­com​/­prison​-­wall​.­html.

within and between the planet’s sovereign po­liti­cal territories,” is relevant.9 The Wall is a racial production of space that abstracts ­people of color as less ­human and their experiences and social relations as less concrete. Second, the wall also abstracts culture from barrios. In the Wall, the racialized immigrant poor carry out lives at the margins of the nation while nonetheless providing decor, generating value, and sustaining—in their attempts to find a better life in the United States—­its key tenet of universal, abstract citizenship. The designers describe their proposal as “satire.” The Mamertine group writes: “We hope that the visuals w ­ ill allow the public to imagine the policy proposal in all of its gorgeous perversity.”10 The pink color, in par­tic­ul­ ar, does a lot of the heavy lifting in the dialectic the designers hope to convey. The pink tropicalizes the walls to mock the infatuation with and consumption of exotic otherness just as state vio­lence is exerted upon the racialized immigrant poor. The pink is also defiant; in its massive scale it appears as if to say that despite the Trump administration’s caging and criminalization of Latinxs and its reinvigoration of a crisis of Latinx belonging, Latinx

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Figure C.4  ~  Alternative levels of the interior of the Prison-­Wall, 2016. Estudio Pi S.C., Hassanaly Ladha, and Aranzazú Alvirde, The  Prison-­Wall. Text by ­Hassanaly  Ladha. https://­www​.­mamertinegroup​.­com​/­prison​-­wall​.­html.

culture ­will endure and occupy space and be vis­i­ble. The scale and location of pink may even shock, though the interior spatiality it decorates should not (figures C.3 and C.4). It is worth noting that the Wall has real counter­parts: shopping malls and immigrant detention centers currently dot the borderline. In the summer of 2019, the largest anti-­Latinx massacre occurred in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, making this border city where more than 80 ­percent of the population is Latinx a site of death. The pink dresses this vio­lence and magnifies the very cultural and social excess it intends to ward off. It caricatures the contradiction embedded in the Wall, reminding one of the point already made in this book: that a Latinized built environment is not always tantamount to inclusion. The Wall also demands a more nuanced assessment. It asks one to consider the ease with which a Latinized built environment can be both at the ser­vice of normative urbanism and, importantly, a critique of it. ­There are several ­factors that limit the critical power of a Latinized built environment. Property relations play a key role in determining the politics of a landscape. T ­ here are also the limits innate to a fixed built environment

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Figure C.5  ~  Caleb Duarte, “Walking the Beast,” an ongoing collaborative per­for­ mance, Suchiate River, Guatemala-­Mexico border, 2014. Alberge [Refugee Center] La 72, Tenosique, Tabasco, Mexico, and Alberge El Buen Pastor, Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico. Video still by Caleb Duarte. With artist Saul Kack Mendez and Mia Eve Rollow.

in a globalized world where mobile cultures and ­peoples constitute publics and politics. Artist Caleb Duarte’s “Walking the Beast,” a collaborative performative art proj­ect with Central American refugees whose torsos and heads are painted bright pink as they travel to El Norte, brings into view the latter (figure C.5).11 Juxtaposed with the Wall, the photo­graphs documenting the proj­ect ask the viewer to consider how much more menacing moving mi­grant bodies can be. While the Wall’s abstraction offers a vague social referent set in place, the pink refugees crossing into the United States trespass territorial bound­aries. In a context of anti-­immigrant hate, mi­grant brown bodies are a troubling, walking referent even if they appear in the coveted pink of Mesoamerican tourist-­friendly export commodities.12 As much as this book has focused on the maligned places of Latinidad, the moving bodies of low-­income mi­grants and their US-­born ­children more immediately enflame a longue durée of Latinx urban crisis. Their actions are unpredictable. They embody the possibility of concentrating in barrios and turning ­those barrios into contested spaces. In contrast, the fixed built environment is readily manipulated and regulated by ­those in power, making it a very difficult site for radical politics despite how revolutionary much of Latinx urban studies lit­er­a­ture has professed it to be.13 This is why brokers, who work with routine, readily vis­i­ble Latinized spaces, are impor­ tant to examine.

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Brokers and their actions point to the per­sis­tent need to redeem barrio life and culture from the imperfect condition it has been relegated to. Brokers pre­sent alternative visions of what a Latinization of cities can look like. Often this is the result of an elite, distant, and alienated gaze, even when brokers abstract from barrios while maintaining an affinity for them. This way of seeing despatializes the segregated barrio to produce a visual urban culture that mainstreams, classifies, and curates for larger publics. Still, the barrio is an under­lying cultural force, and even when it is denigrated and sublimated, it shapes a brokered Latinization of cities. But in order to reinvigorate Latinx urban culture and bring out its radical politics, which so much of the lit­er­a­ture on the topic reminds us is at its roots, brokers w ­ ill have to fix their gaze on the barrio to build it from within. This is a controversial proposal. Much of urban pro­gress equates upward socioeconomic mobility with moving out of segregated, ethnic enclaves. But the dispersion of the poor does not always mean socioeconomic uplift. Barrios are a respite, a place to call home. They are a historical reminder of strug­ gles for belonging and of the imperative to take space in an urban society where space means profit. Reactivating the radical potential of Latinized spaces ­will require using the built environment not just as a decorative setting but as space for intervening in the racial and classed hierarchies that shape property relations. Several actors have a role to play in this. Brokers and their intermediary position can also be helpful as long as they advocate alongside marginalized residents and the interests and needs they invoke.

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Notes

Preface 1 The term used to describe the population of Latin American descent living in the United States has varied greatly over time. This book uses the term Latinx with the understanding that the “x” is gender inclusive and stands in for “a” and “o” gendered endings as well as allows for identities that complicate or refuse identifying with a gender. I use an “a/o” ending when referring to national groups in time periods when the “x” ending was not in use. For instance, I use Chicana/o, not “Chicanx,” when discussing the 1960s social movements. Quoted material is unchanged. 2 Jameson, Postmodernism, 2; Venturi, Izenour, and Brown, Learning from Las Vegas. 3 For example, see Meggs, History of Graphic Design. 4 Rojas, “Enacted Environment,” 50; Rojas, “Latino Placemaking.” For my analy­sis of Pablo Medina’s barrio-­inspired typography, see Londoño, “Barrio Affinities.” 5 Dávila, Barrio Dreams; Davis, Magical Urbanism; Aponte-­Parés, “Casitas Place and Culture”; J. Flores, From Bomba to Hip Hop; Villa, Barrio-­Logos; Small, Villa Victoria; Rojas, “Latino Placemaking”; Crawford, “Blurring the Bound­aries”; Dear, Villa, and Leclerc, Urban Latino Cultures; Diaz, Barrio Urbanism. 6 Though Michel de Certeau specifically disapproved of the scopic perspective that standing at the top of the World Trade Center provided, his understanding of visual hierarchies and the knowledge they produce translate to vari­ous scenarios. Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in Practice of Everyday Life. 7 All translations are mine ­unless other­wise indicated. 8 Similar observations about the relations between refugees of the Mariel and established Cuban American exiles in Miami abound. See, for example, Sawyer, Racial Politics, 160. 9 Heyer, Gruel and Associates, “Union City Master Plan,” April 2009. 10 ­Here I have in mind the lit­e r­a t­ ure on rasquachismo. See Ybarra-­F rausto, “Rasquachismo.” 11 “Tenants’s Rights in New Jersey: A ­Legal Manual for Tenants in New Jersey,” ­Legal Ser­vices of New Jersey, 2014, http://­www​.­lsnjlaw​.­org ​/­publications​/­pages​/­manuals​ /­tenantsrights​.­pdf.

230 Notes to Preface 12 Madden and Marcuse, In Defense of Housing, 53–83. 13 Lefebvre, Production of Space.

Introduction 1 Jennie Badger, “The Visionaries, P ­ eople Who Are Changing the City: The Cultural Activist, a Leader in Latino Art and Architecture Discovers His Life’s Passion in the City’s Barrios,” accessed April 20, 2010, http://­www​.­henrymunoz​.c­ om​/­. 2 In the past two de­cades, the ut system has increased its funding in the border area. And since 2003, when the state’s population become majority-­minority, several ut institutions have been designated “Hispanic-­serving.” “It Took a Lawsuit to Improve Higher Education,” Corpus Christi Caller Times, May 28, 2016. 3 For more on ut’s commitment to working with minority-­owned businesses, see “Firms Honored for Building Diversity into Proj­ects,” University of Texas at Dallas News Center, January 12, 2011. 4 Considering that some segregated barrios ­were the result of racially exclusive housing policies intended to put Latinxs out of sight in order to appease white concerns over interracial mixing, it may seem odd to say that barrio concentrations generate anx­ i­eties. However, this is not a contradiction. Both Latinx barrio concentrations and Latinx spatial dispersal are threatening; they underscore the challenges that come with the spatial presence of low-­income Latinxs in the United States. 5 Notable publications discussing the urban crisis in relation to African Americans are Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Steinberger, Ideology and the Urban Crisis; Matlin, On the Corner. One exception is Llana Barber, who in Latino City squarely relates the development of Latinx Lawrence to a postwar urban crisis. 6 Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 7, 241; Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 7 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 13, 125. 8 Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness. 9 Chavez, Latino Threat. For more on how elites construct and manipulate crisis narratives, see Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; Weaver, “Urban Crisis”; Bayirbağ, Davies, and Münch, “Interrogating Urban Crisis”; Roitman, Anti-­Crisis. 10 A comparable argument regarding black urbanization can be found in Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness. 11 Bender, Tierra y Libertad; Harvey “Right to the City.” 12 J. Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire. 13 The Latinization of cities is best described as the pro­cess by which Latinxs or non-­ Latinxs create an urban culture and environment that is readily associated with Latinx culture and ­people. My use of Latinization follows the encompassing approach to Latinidad that Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-­Silverman discuss in their book on “tropicalization.” For t­ hese authors, Latinidad dually points to repre­sen­ta­ tions imposed on Latinxs and repre­sen­ta­tions that challenge normative, hegemonic ideas of Latinx culture. Agustín Laó-­Montes and Arlene Dávila also distinguish

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between “Anglo strategies of Latinization and Latino tactics of self-­definition and self-­representation.” Moreover, I use the term ­because the noun suffix “-­ization” underscores a pro­cess of creating Latinx urban environments that the terms Latino urbanism and Latinx urban life and culture may unintentionally reify. See Aparicio and Chávez-­Silverman, Tropicalizations, 15; Laó-­Montes and Dávila, Mambo Montage, 4. 14 The term urban is also a semiotic minefield. Sociologist Neil Brenner critically analyzes the ubiquitous use of it (and urbanism) and its multiple referents, arguing that the field (of urban studies) suffers from “theoretical indeterminacy.” According to Brenner, what exactly is meant by urban or urbanism in a world that is increasingly urbanizing at dif­fer­ent rates and in dif­fer­ent ways is unclear. The use of urban in this book refers to a location in metropolitan areas. Differences in the “urban” contours of places ­will be discussed as necessary. Brenner, “­Theses on Urbanization,” 90, 92. 15 Leach, Land of Desire; Caro, Power-­Broker; S. Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement; Ramírez, “Beyond ‘the Fantastic’ ”; Dávila, Barrio Dreams. 16 A. Gonzales, Reform without Justice, 9. 17 Patillo, Black on the Block. 18 hooks, Where We Stand, 94. 19 Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk. 20 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, La Frontera. 21 Scholars have written about the urgency of gentrification and its destabilization of Latinx places. See Dávila, Barrio Dreams. Mérida Rúa theorizes the significance of “groundedness” in Latinx urban belonging that is impor­tant for thinking of the implications of gentrification. Rúa, Grounded Identidad. 22 For an exploration of Marx and Friedrich Engels’s quote “all that is solid melts into air,” see Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air. 23 R. Gonzales, “I Am Joaquín,” 86; Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary.” 24 Torres Balbás, “Estructura de las ciudades hispanomusulmanas.” 25 Corominas, Breve diccionario, 87. 26 Menéndez Pidal, Léxico hispánico primitivo, 87. 27 Velázquez, Diccionario de términos coloniales, 16–17. 28 Velázquez, Diccionario de términos coloniales, 11. Velázquez cites a 1676 document from the National Archive of Costa Rica that describes “los mulatos, morenos libres y mestizos bajos,” living in arrabales. Translation mine, with the understanding that in seventeenth-­ century colonial Latin Amer­ic­ a, moreno could describe e­ ither a person’s brown skin color or a black person whose freedom elevated them above the negro category. For more on the fluidity of racial categories in Latin Amer­i­ca, see Wade, “Race in Latin Amer­i­ca.” 29 García, Beyond the Walled City, 45–46. For a discussion of colonial walls in Puerto Rico, see Dinzey-­Flores, Locked In, Locked Out, 11–12. 30 Uribe, Diccionario de dominicanismos y americanismos, 73. 31 Cárdenas Molina et al., Diccionario del español de Cuba, 63. 32 Seco Reymundo, Andrés Puente, and Ramos Gonzáles, Diccionario del español ­actual. 33 In their article about the 1910 and 1920 censuses, scholars Kristen Velyvis, Theresa Thompson-­Colón, and Halliman Winsborough include the following statement writ-

232 Notes to Introduction ten by D. A. Skinner, “Supervisor for the District of Porto [sic] Rico,” to the director of the census in Washington, DC: “­These barrios, with the exception of a few urban barrios in the larger cities, have no fixed geo-­graphical bound­aries, the division lines being purely imaginary, thus making it very difficult clearly to describe their limits. This being the case, it can easily be understood how difficult it would be to divide the island accurately into enumeration districts and to describe the limits of each district.” Skinner’s letter is located in the US National Archives, Washington, DC, Rec­ord Group 29, Entry 254. For more, see Velyvis, Thompson-­Colón, and Winsborough, “Public Use Samples,” 26. 34 Coates, “Black ­Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” 35 Sociologist Ernesto Castañeda proposes the term places of stigma to parallel the common “categorical pro­cesses” that produce barrios, banlieues, and ghettos. Castañeda, “Places of Stigma,” 185. 36 Camarillo, Chicanos in Changing Society, 53–78; J. Gonzalez and Portillo, “Undereducation and Overcriminalization of U.S. Latinas/os.” Importantly, Daniel D. Arreola reminds us, in his work on South Texas, that “not ­every Mexican American barrio is the equivalent of a ghetto.” See Arreola, Tejano South Texas, 83. 37 Vigil, “Barrio Genealogy,” 366; Villa, Barrio-­Logos, 1. 38 Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, 225. 39 Barrera, Muñoz, and Ornelas, “Barrio as an Internal Colony.” In advocating for Latino “self-­determination” and “community control” of land, the Young Lords connote the idea of the “internal colony.” See Young Lords, “13 Point Program.” Also in 1969, young Chicana/os wrote a manifesto that described the need for the self-­determination of their community, “el barrio and la colonia.” See Chicano Coordinating Council, Plan de Santa Barbara, 9. 40 Villa, Barrio-­Logos, 6–9. 41 Anthropologists and geographers have shown that place figures prominently in identity formation. See, for example, Low and Lawrence-­Zunigais, Anthropology of Space and Place; Crow, Geography and Identity; Gupta, Culture, Power, Place; Yaeger, Geography of Identity; Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness; Rúa, Grounded Identidad. 42 Duneier, Ghetto, 82–83. 43 Jim Edwards, “Every­one Hates Jennifer Lopez’s Fiat Ads (and She D ­ idn’t Even Go to the Bronx to Film Them).” Business Insider, November 22, 2011, https://­www​ .­businessinsider​.­com​/­everyone​-­hates​-­jennifer​-­lopezs​-­fiat​-­ads​-­and​-­she​-­didnt​-­even​-­go​ -­to​-t­ he​-­bronx​-t­ o​-­film​-­them​-­2011​-­11. 44 See, for example, Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place. 45 Cacho, Social Death, 9. 46 Pérez, Guridy, and Burgos, Beyond El Barrio, 2. 47 Pérez, Guridy, and Burgos, Beyond El Barrio, 17. 48 Pérez, Guridy, and Burgos, Beyond El Barrio, 8. 49 Pérez, Guridy, and Burgos, Beyond El Barrio, 6–7. 50 Diaz, Barrio Urbanism, 73. 51 Villa, Barrio-­Logos, 6–9.

Notes to Chapter 1 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

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Aparicio and Chávez-­Silverman, Tropicalizations, 1–17; Said, Orientalism. Ngô, Imperial Blues, 7. Aparicio and Chávez-­Silverman, Tropicalizations, 11. In her study on Asian designers in Manhattan, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines how Asian designers’ “intimacy” with f­ amily and fellow Asian workers in the g­ arment industry inure them to fashion trends that commodify Asianness. Tu, Beautiful ­Generation, 17–19. Geographer Neil Smith examines the revanchism under­lying gentrification practices. See N. Smith, New Urban Frontier. Melamed, “Spirit of Neoliberalism.” Dávila, Barrio Dreams. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 387.

Chapter 1. Design for the “Puerto Rican Prob­lem” 1 See, for example, the widely influential exhibit series “What Is Good Design?” that began in 1950 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). 2 Mural Unveiling—­Invitation List, Box 73, Folder 73.5, La Guardia Community Center, Mural Competition, 1959–1960, Henry Street Settlement Rec­ords, Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota (hereafter hssr/swha). 3 Helen Hall to Craig Barton, Executive Secretary of B. de Rothschild Foundation of nyc, March 14, 1957, Box 73, Folder 73.4, La Guardia Community Center, Mural Competition, 1957–1958, hssr/swha. 4 Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 214. 5 For a multilayered account of the “Mexican prob­lem,” see Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American. For work on the “Mexican prob­lem” as an issue of assimilation, see Arredondo, Mexican Chicago. The “Mexican prob­lem” sometimes referred to the underdevelopment of Mexico and its “lazy” and childlike indigenous and mestizo population; see G. Gonzalez, Culture of Empire. For more on the “Mexican prob­lem” defined by Mexicans living in ­house courts (a West Coast version of tenements), see Fuller, “Mexican Housing Prob­lem in Los Angeles”; McWilliams, “Mexican Prob­lem”; Lewthwaite, Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles. For more on the “Mexican prob­lem” as a refugee issue, see Romo, History of a Barrio, 92; Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe. 6 Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 20. 7 For more on how Eu­ro­pean immigrants w ­ ere differentiated from Anglo-­Americans, see Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Dif­fer­ent Color. 8 Hereafter the “Puerto Rican prob­lem” w ­ ill be referred to as the “prob­lem.” 9 Plunz, History of Housing in New York City. 10 Parallels between Eu­ro­pean immigration and Puerto Rican mi­grants are found in the work of midcentury Puerto Rican anthropologist Elena Padilla. Moreover, she echoed

234 Notes to Chapter 1

11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

the “ecological” (as in spatially determinist) work of the Chicago School urban sociologists that emphasized the role of space in shaping immigrant assimilation. For more on Padilla’s research approach, see Rúa, Latino Urban Ethnography, 4. For more detail on the implications of Puerto Rican citizenship, see Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen. The Migration Division was formerly named the New York Office Employment and Migration Bureau, Puerto Rico Department of L ­ abor. The name change occurred in 1951. See New York Office Employment and Migration Bureau, Puerto Rico Department of ­Labor, “The Puerto Ricans of New York City,” 1948, Box 123, Folder 123.10, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans-­General, 1948, 1951, hssr/swha. Clarence Se­nior, associate director of the Columbia University Puerto Rican Migration Study and former director of the Social Science Research Center, University of Puerto Rico, prepared the material included in the report. Se­nior was assisted by Carmen Isales, chief of the Office of In-­Service Training, Division of Public Welfare, Department of Health, Puerto Rico. They worked ­under the general direction of C. Wright Mills, director of the ­Labor Research Division of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. Mills was an odd contributor, seemingly compelled by contract with Columbia University to offer “general direction” for the report despite his ­little understanding of Latin American issues. Lapp, “Managing Migration,” 93. New York Office Employment and Migration Bureau, “Puerto Ricans of New York City,” 65. It is unclear what Se­nior meant by “modern.” He did not specify w ­ hether he was referring to a specific modernist architectural style or to the general renewal and replacement of older housing. Puerto Rican public and private sector elites of this period ­were actively engaged in modernizing the built environment using multiple styles. Se­nior’s statement ­here could be seen as publicizing ­these plans. For more on the midcentury modernization of Puerto Rican housing, see Dinzey-­Flores, “Temporary Housing, Permanent Communities,” 481. Anthropologist Carol F. Jopling documents a wide range of architectural styles on the island in the 1940s and 1950s, including “U.S. influence ­houses” that w ­ ere mainly designed rather than representative of vernacular architecture and consisted of two stories. See Jopling, Puerto Rican Houses. Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen, 169. Se­nior, “Migration and Puerto Rico’s Population Prob­lem,” 132. Se­nior, “Migration and Puerto Rico’s Population Prob­lem,” 132. New York Office Employment and Migration Bureau, “Puerto Ricans of New York City,” 33. New York Office Employment and Migration Bureau, “Puerto Ricans of New York City,” 2–5, 32, 36. New York Office Employment and Migration Bureau, “Puerto Ricans of New York City,” 38. New York Office Employment and Migration Bureau, “Puerto Ricans of New York City,” 51–59. Allan Keller, “Puerto Ricans Cramming New York Slums Create Big Health, School Prob­lems,” Pittsburgh Press, November 4, 1947. Nearly twenty years ­earlier, sociologist

Notes to Chapter 1

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

235

Louis Wirth had a bleak view of the rural mi­grant moving to cities. He, and many of his contemporaries, w ­ ere pessimistic of the mi­grant’s ability to make the transition to urban life and avoid falling into its supposed traps of crime, vio­lence, and poverty. Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” New York Office Employment and Migration Bureau, “Puerto Ricans of New York City,” 63. Mary Hirschfeld, “Welfare Agency Gives Puerto Ricans Aid,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 17, 1948. Sánchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community, 51–84. Ann Barley, “Survey of Puerto Rican Community,” Department of Community Studies at the Henry Street Settlement, Box 19, Folder 19:1, Community Studies, Survey Of Puerto Rican Community, 1954, hssr/swha. The report uses data from 1953. The ­house­holds interviewed ­were likely to be f­ uture tenants of La Guardia Houses. Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 112. Barley, “Survey of Puerto Rican Community,” 14. Barley, “Survey of Puerto Rican Community,” 8. Barley, “Survey of Puerto Rican Community,” 14. “Why W ­ e’re Telling the Puerto Rican Story,” July 20, 1953, Box 123, Folder 123.11, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans—­General, 1953–1954, hssr/swha. For a biography of Moses and his involvement in urban renewal, see Caro, Power-­Broker. Kenneth Clark, “A Conversation with James Baldwin: Interview with James Baldwin,” June 24, 1963, wgbh Media Library and Archives, http://­openvault​.­wgbh​.­org​/­catalog​ /­V​_­C03ED1927DCF46B5A8C82275DF4239F9. Baldwin refers to “Negro removal” in this interview. Abrams, “How to Remedy Our ‘Puerto Rican Prob­lem.’ ” Gillroy, “Letter to the Editor.” “Proj­ect Outline for a Study of Existing Social Controls and Social Sanctions in a Large Multiple-­Dwelling Low Income Proj­ect,” Box 73, Folder 73.8, La Guardia Community Center Staff, 1958–1963, hssr/swha. nycha, “La Guardia Proj­ect Statistics,” Box 73, Folder 73.1, La Guardia Community Center, Correspondence and Memoranda, 1960–1966, hssr/swha. S. Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, 96. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, 308. Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness, 104; Lasch-­Quinn, Black Neighbors. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, 118–63. Lasch-­Quinn, Black Neighbors, 29. Wald, House on Henry Street, 161–62. In 1917 US Congress passed the Jones Act, which declared Puerto Ricans US citizens. This citizenship, however, was l­ imited in rights and reinforced Puerto Rico’s continued status as a colony. See Cabranes, Notes on the Legislative History. Negrón-­Muntaner, Grosfoguel, and Georas, “Beyond Nationalist and Colonialist Discourses,” 21.

236 Notes to Chapter 1 45 Robert Williams, “New York’s Puerto Ricans [series]: Jobs Beckon—­Mi­grants Fill the Need,” Article VIII, New York Post Corp., 1953, Box 123, Folder 123.11, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans—­General, 1953–1954, hssr/swha. 46 Fernandez, Disenchanted Island, 169–71. 47 Planning Board of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in Cooperation with the United States Housing and Home Finance Agency for the United States Foreign Operations Administration, “Faith in P ­ eople: A Picture Story of Aided Self-­Help Housing as a Part of Community Development in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico,” San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1954, Box 123, Folder 123.11, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans—­General, 1953–1954, hssr/swha. 48 Helen Hall to Mary Antoinette Cannon, May 6, 1955, Box 13, Helen Hall Correspondence-­ Puerto Rican trip, 1955–1957, Helen Hall Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota (hereafter Hall Papers/swha). Cannon had previously been director of social work of the University of Puerto Rico, con­sul­tant to the New York Office of the Commonwealth’s Department of L ­ abor, and an instructor at what is now the Columbia University School of Social Work. See National Association of Social Workers, “Social Work Pioneers,” accessed December 19, 2019, https://­www​.­naswfoundation​.­org ​/­Our​-­Work​/­NASW​ -­Social​-­Workers​-­Pioneers​/­NASW​-­Social​-­Workers​-­Pioneers​-L ­ isting​.­aspx​?­id​=­576. 49 Aline B. Louchheim, “Art Interest Stirs in Puerto Rico,” New York Times, October 16, 1949; L. Rodriguez, “To Be for (An)Other.” 50 divedco, begun as a pi­lot program in 1947, distributed educational materials, including graphics, posters, books, and motion pictures, among poor neighborhoods to foster community participation and engender self-­sufficiency and motivation. For more on divedco, see A. Goldstein, Poverty in Common, 31–76. 51 Clarence Se­nior to Helen Hall, April 15, 1955, Box 13, Helen Hall Correspondence-­ Puerto Rican trip, 1955–1957, Hall Papers/swha; Clarence Se­nior to Fred Wale, April 15, 1955, Box 13, Helen Hall Correspondence-­Puerto Rican trip, 1955–1957, Hall Papers/swha; Clarence Se­nior to Luis Rivera Santos, April 15, 1955, Box 13, Helen Hall Correspondence-­Puerto Rican trip, 1955–1957, Hall Papers/swha. 52 Hall to Cannon, May 6, 1955. 53 Luis Rivera-­Santos, “An Analy­sis of Existing Housing Programs in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico with Special Emphasis on Aided Self-­Help Activities,” Social Programs Administration of the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, Box 123, Folder 123.10, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans—­General, 1948, 1951, hssr/swha. For more on variations of the self-­help program in Puerto Rico, see Dinzey-­Flores, “Temporary Housing, Permanent Communities,” 477–78. 54 According to government workers, “the fact that the potential candidates have small uncomfortable dwellings is not enough stimulus for them to be willing to participate. . . . ​They have to be taught on the prob­lem and the possibility to solve it.” See Low Cost Housing Bureau, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Department of Agriculture and Commerce, Social Programs Administration, “The Aided Self-­Help

Notes to Chapter 1

55 56 57

58 59

60 61 62

63 64

65

66

67

68 69

70

237

Housing Program in Puerto Rico,” March 31, 1960, Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, http://­dspace​.­cai​.­sg​.­inter​.­edu​/­xmlui​/­bitstream​/­handle​/­123456789​/­12809​ /­B40c008d002​.­pdf ?​ ­sequence​=­1. “Faith in ­People,” 12. “Faith in ­People,” 30. Burgess, “Limits of Self-­Help Housing Programmes.” For more on self-­help housing, see Conway and Potter, “Ca­rib­bean Housing ­Futures”; Alvarado, “Public Housing in Puerto Rico.” A. Goldstein, Poverty in Common, 69–70. Historian Nancy H. Kwak notes that mainland US housing officials “latched onto Puerto Rican housing successes” to show that “the US had know-­how of value to other tropical nations.” Indeed, despite Hall’s interest, the settlement’s programs would only gesture to self-­help. The self-­help housing model would gain more currency in the Global South. Kwak, World of Homeowners, 100, 106. On the historical development of Puerto Rico as the mainland’s “research laboratory,” see Alamo-­Pastrana, Seams of Empire, 88–97. Buttenwieser, “Shelter for What and for Whom?” A similar pro­cess is evident in Puerto Rico’s public housing of the period. It suggests that new Puerto Rican arrivals in New York City could have been entering a familiar set of tensions. See Dinzey-­Flores, “Puerto Rican ‘Spatio-­Temporal Rhythms,’ ” 121. That same year, New York State passed the Public Housing Law and launched the country’s first state-­subsidized public housing program. “Henry Street Settlement Home Planning Workshops and Craft Rooms in Vladeck Houses, 334 Madison Street,” Box 60, Folder 60.7, Home Planning Workshops Reports, 1947–1957, 1960, hssr/swha. “Henry Street Settlement Home Planning Workshops and Craft Rooms in Vladeck Houses, 334 Madison Street,” Box 60, Folder 60.7, Home Planning Workshops Reports, 1947–1957, 1960, hssr/swha. Karin V. Peterfy, “Report on the Henry Street Settlement Home Planning Workshops and Craft Rooms in Vladeck Houses,” Box 60, Folder 60.8, Home Planning Workshop Histories, 1960, 1967, hssr/swha. “Henry Street Settlement Demonstration Unit Shows Home Furnishings for Slender Bud­gets,” February 1940, Box 60, Folder 60.10 Home Planning Workshops, Correspondence and Memoranda, 1939–1945, hssr/swha. Esther Wolkofsky to Henry Street Settlement, Box 60, Folder 60.10, Home Planning Workshops, Correspondence and Memoranda, 1939–1945, hssr/swha. Alice Griffith (signature unclear) to Paul Kellog, February 8, 1940, Box 60, Folder 60.10, Home Planning Workshops, Correspondence and Memoranda, 1939–1945, hssr/swha. Citizens Housing Council of New York, “Furniture Ser­vice for Low-­Income Families,” May 1, 1941, Box 60, Folder 60.10, Home Planning Workshops, Correspondence and Memoranda, 1939–1945, hssr/swha.

238 Notes to Chapter 1 71 “Home Planning on Henry Street: It’s Surprising What Junk Plus Brains W ­ ill Achieve,” Better Times, January 26, 1940, Box 60, Folder 60.9, Home Planning Workshops, Newspaper Clippings 1940–1954, hssr/swha. 72 Bloom and Lasner, Affordable Housing in New York, 85–86. 73 Bloom, Public Housing That Worked, 85. 74 Shreve would l­ ater design Stuyvesant Town, a middle-­income housing proj­ect that came ­under fire for barring black residents. See Zipp, Manhattan Proj­ects, 104. 75 The settlement initially planned to design monthly “show rooms.” “Henry Street ­S ettlement Teaches East Siders to Refurbish Homes,” New York Herald Tribune, ­February 4, 1940, Box 60, Folder 60.9, Home Planning Workshops, Newspaper ­Clippings, 1940–1954, hssr/swha. 76 Art historian Karen Mary Davalos, citing Michael Ettema, writes that the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art sought to elevate white history to national history at the expense of marginalized black and working-­class histories whose work made the furnishings pos­si­ble. Davalos, Exhibiting Mestizaje, 45; Ettema, “History Museums and the Culture of Materialism.” For more on model rooms in department stores, see Leach, Land of Desire, 318–19; Whitaker, Ser­vice and Style, 312–16. 77 Wright, Building the Dream, 252. 78 Helen Hall and Karin Peterfy, “The Self Help Units,” April 1, 1945, Box 60, Folder 60.10, Home Planning Workshops, Correspondence and Memoranda, 1939–1945, hssr/swha. 79 Press release from Henry Street Settlement, March 9, 1946, Box 60, Folder 60.14, Home Planning Workshops, Model Kitchen, 1946–1950, hssr/swha; “Henry Street Teen-­Age,” Modern Miss, Spring 1946, Box 60, Folder 60.9, Home Planning Workshops, Newspaper Clippings, 1940–1954, hssr/swha; Beatrice Oppenhem, “One Way to Beat Inflation,” Coronet, October 1946, Box 60, Folder 60.9, Home Planning Workshops, Newspaper Clippings, 1940–1954, hssr/swha. 80 Press release from Henry Street Settlement, March 9, 1946. 81 Oppenhem, “One Way to Beat Inflation.” 82 “Henry Street Settlement—­Home Planning Workshops, Craft Rooms and Older ­People’s Program,” Box 60, Folder 60.7, Home Planning Workshops Reports, 1947– 1957, 1960, hssr/swha. 83 Harris, ­Little White Houses, 186. 84 Bloom, Public Housing That Worked, 169. 85 Hirschfeld, “Welfare Agency Gives Puerto Ricans Aid.” 86 Helen Hall to Warren Moscow at nycha, September 13, 1955, Box 60, Folder 60.15, Home Planning Workshops, Model Apartment, 1955–1957, hssr/swha. 87 Alice M. Brophy, Community Activities Division of nycha, to Helen Hall, November 7, 1955, Box 60, Folder 60.15, Home Planning Workshops, Model Apartment, 1955– 1957, hssr/swha. 88 Robert Williams, “New York’s Puerto Ricans [series]: Jobs Beckon—­Mi­grants Fill the Need,” Article V, New York Post Corp., 1953, Box 123, Folder 123.11, Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans—­General, 1953–1954, hssr/swha.

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239

89 “Guidance Is Asked for Puerto Ricans,” New York Times, October 28, 1947; “Philip Hope Michaels, 64, Dies,” New York Times, February 15, 1968. 90 Michaels described his interest in community-­oriented business in The Community Is Good Business. Richard Sachs, grand­son of the founder of Sachs, also promoted the store’s community involvement in “Community Upheaval and Profits.” 91 “Philip Hope Michaels, 64, Dies.” 92 “Puerto Rican Tie to Be Explored,” New York Times, September 13, 1954. 93 “La Guardia Tells of ­Career Plans,” New York Times, December 31, 1945; “Heads Sachs Community Plan,” New York Times, February 21, 1946. 94 Gertrude Weil Klein, “Program for Youth in the Bronx,” letter to the editor, New York Times, May 14, 1947. 95 “Israel Sachs, 75, Merchant, Dead,” New York Times, September 30, 1949. 96 Zipp, Manhattan Proj­ects, 19, 132. 97 For more on the origins of Riverton Houses, see Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 123–25. 98 The interior decorating classes covered topics such as “color harmony, room arrangements, and period designs.” The Adult Education Department at City College granted certificates upon completing the full six-­week session. Sachs coordinated with local educational institutions and supported high school classes to educate students, the “customers of tomorrow,” on how to buy furniture on installments and sponsored design competitions to promote the interior design profession among New York City’s youth. Sachs also awarded prizes to the best graduating se­nior in interior decorating at nyu. “Youth Canteens Set Up for Teen­-­Agers by Store Chain to Combat Delinquency,” New York Times, February 8, 1947; “Decoration Prizes Given to Youths,” New York Times, March 27, 1946; “Schools Now Give Lessons in Buying,” New York Times, February 20, 1948; “Decoration Classes to Open,” New York Times, May 24, 1947; “Home Decorating Courses,” New York Times, April 12, 1949; “College Courses Help House­wives,” New York Times, September 13, 1947. 99 Mary Roche, “Furniture Design Subject of Contest,” New York Times, October 24, 1947. 100 “Henri Laugier Speaks at Dinner for International Furniture Competition,” Museum of Modern Art, Press Release Archives, August 8, 1947, https://­www​.­moma​.­org​ /­momaorg ​/­shared​/­pdfs​/­docs​/­press​_­archives​/­1230​/­releases​/­MOMA​_­1946​-­1948​_­0104​ _­1947​-­08​-­08​_­47808​.­pdf ?​ ­2010. 101 “International Competition,” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 15, no. 2 (1948): 13–16. 102 Hirschmann, Caution to the Winds. 103 Roche, “Furniture Design Subject of Contest.”; “International Furniture Competition to Be Launched,” Museum of Modern Art, Press Release Archives, August 8, 1947, https://­www​.­m oma​ .­o rg ​ /­m omaorg ​ /­shared​ /­p dfs​ /­d ocs​ /­p ress​ _­a rchives​ /­1 230​ /­releases​/­MOMA​_­1946​-­1948​_­0104​_­1947​-­08​-­08​_­47808​.­pdf ​?­2010; “Henri Laugier Speaks at Dinner for International Furniture Competition,” 13–16. 104 US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, “Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, Income of Families and Persons in the United States: 1963,” ­Table E on Median Income of Families, by Color of Head, for the United States: 1947 to

240 Notes to Chapter 1

105 106 107

108

109

110 111 112 113

114

115

116

117 118

1963, Series P-60, no. 43, September 29, 1964, http://­www2​.c­ ensus​.­gov​/­prod2​/­popscan​ /­p60​-0 ­ 43​.p ­ df. “Schools Now Give Lessons in Buying.” “Display Is Enhanced by Glass Storefront,” New York Times, May 20, 1949. “Tiny Rooms Gain by Traffic Lanes,” New York Times, July 15, 1949; “Simmons Com­pany Contributes Additional Prize to International Competition for the Design of Low-­ Cost Furniture,” Museum of Modern Art, Press Release Archives, January 19, 1948, https://­www​.­moma​.­org ​/­momaorg ​/­shared​/­pdfs​/­docs​/­press​_­archives​/­1241​/­releases​ /­MOMA​_­1946​-­1948​_­0115​_­1948​-­01​-­19​_­48119​-­5​.­pdf ​?­2010. On Woodside Houses, see Richard Rothstein, “Public Housing: Government-­Sponsored Segregation,” American Prospect, October 11, 2012, http://­prospect​.­org ​/­article​/­public​-­housing​-­government​ -­sponsored​-­segregation. Karin V. Peterfy, Director of Home Planning Workshops and Craftrooms, “Report on Model Apartment 1956 in La Guardia Houses,” Henry Street Settlement’s Home Planning Department, Box 89, Folder 89.13, hssr/swha. A 1963 article in Ebony magazine cites a Sachs president assuring readers that the furniture market is considering blacks’ growing purchasing power and willing to “close the American consumer gap” between racial groups. See Bill Van Alstine, “Impact of the Negro on the Furniture Market,” Ebony, April 1963, 99–104. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic. Flyer announcing model apartment in Spanish and En­glish languages, Box 60, Folder 60.15, Home Planning Workshops, Model Apartment, 1955–1957, hssr/swha. Sachs Quality Stores advertisement, New York Daily News, March 10, 1956, Box 60, Folder 60.15, Home Planning Workshops, Model Apartment, 1955–1957, hssr/swha. Faith Corrigan, “Color Is Put in City Flat at Low Cost,” New York Times, March 8, 1956. The same year the model apartment opened in La Guardia Houses, one opened in an apartment complex built by Alfred Levitt of the Levitt ­family in Levittown, Long Island, and a model apartment in Executive Houses in Midtown Manhattan. See Faith Corrigan, “Decorators Make Room for Favorite Pictures: Builders Now Attract Customers with Model Rooms,” New York Times, June 23, 1956. Karin V. Peterfy, director of Home Planning Workshops and Craftrooms, “Report on Model Apartment 1956 in La Guardia Houses,” Henry Street Settlement’s Home Planning Department, Box 89, Folder 89.13, hssr/swha. “Henry Street Settlement Home Planning Workshops and Craft Rooms in Vladeck Houses, 334 Madison Street,” Box 60, Folder 60.7, Part 2, Home Planning Workshops Reports, 1947–1957, 1960, hssr/swha. Karin V. Peterfy, director of Home Planning Workshops and Craftrooms, “Report 1955–56,” Home Planning Workshops and Craftrooms, Box 60, Folder 60.7, Home Planning Workshops Reports, 1947–1957, 1960, hssr/swha. Peterfy, “Report 1955–56.” “Henry Street Settlement—­Home Planning Workshops, Craft Rooms and Older ­People’s Program,” 2.

Notes to Chapter 1

241

119 A year ­later the Robert F. Wagner administration reor­ga­nized the Housing Authority in response to rank-­and-­file complaints about “unjust” evictions and demands for a tenant board of appeals. See Schwartz, New York Approach, 291. 120 Sociologist Zaire Z. Dinzey-­Flores notes that in Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín similarly believed that public housing could educate residents on how to better live in cities. Dinzey-­Flores, “Temporary Housing, Permanent Communities,” 481. 121 nycha sponsored several art proj­ects throughout its housing developments that attempted to portray African American p­ eople or African heritage. Examples include the 1949 sculpture Abraham Lincoln and Child by Charles Keck located in Abraham Lincoln Houses in East Harlem and the 1937 Green Pastures: Walls of Jericho by African American sculptor Richmond Barthe located at Kingsborough Houses in Bedford-­ Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. 122 Helen Hall to Mary Jones, October 15, 1957, Box 73, Folder 73.4, La Guardia Community Center, Mural Competition, 1957–1958, hssr/swha. Mary Jones was a Henry Street Settlement board member and the wife of Alfred M. Jones, a sociologist and founder of one of the first hedge funds on Wall Street. 123 John Molleson, “Artists May Adorn City Housing: Mural Unveiled at La Guardia Proj­ect as Prototype,” New York Herald Tribune, February 16, 1960, Box 73, Folder 73.1, La Guardia Community Center, Correspondence and Memoranda, 1960–1966, hssr/swha. 124 Hall to Jones, October 15, 1957. 125 Press release by Jose Villegas, Henry Street Settlement, February 15, 1960, Box 73, Folder 73.5, La Guardia Community Center, Mural Competition, 1959–1960, hssr/ swha. 126 Press release by Jose Villegas, Henry Street Settlement, February 15, 1960. 127 “Felisa de Rincón de Gautier, mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico,” Campus Press Conference, July 16, 1957, nyc Municipal Archives, wnyc Collection, New York. 128 Press release by Jose Villegas, Henry Street Settlement, February 15, 1960, Box 73, Folder 73.5, La Guardia Community Center, Mural Competition, 1959–1960, hssr/ swha. 129 “City Seeking Art for Its Housing,” New York Times, February 16, 1960, Box 73, Folder 73.5, La Guardia Community Center, Mural Competition, 1959–1960, hssr/swha. 130 Molleson, “Artists May Adorn City Housing.” 131 Press release by Jose Villegas, Henry Street Settlement, February 15, 1960. 132 For more on the mid-­twentieth-­century restoration proj­ect of Old San Juan, see Merrill, Negotiating Paradise, 41; US Department of the Interior, National Park Ser­ vice, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Distrito Histórico del Viejo San Juan, https://­www​.­nps​.g­ ov​/­nr​/f­ eature​/­weekly​_­features​/­2012​/­PR​_­12000465​ .­pdf​.­ For more on the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, see Dávila, Sponsored Identities. 133 McWilliams, North from Mexico, 15–25. 134 Press release by Jose Villegas, Henry Street Settlement, February 15, 1960.

242 Notes to Chapter 1 135 “Doña Fela Visita hogar Puertorriqueño en N.Y.,” La Prensa, February 16, 1960, Box 73, Folder 73.11, La Guardia Community Center—­Tenants Association, 1958–1967, hssr/ swha. 136 The idea for the Mobilization for Youth developed in 1957 at the Henry Street Settlement but the organ­ization opened its first neighborhood centers in 1962; by that time, it was a high-­profile program with funding from the Ford Foundation, the City of New York, and the federal government. For more on the development of Mobilization for Youth, see S. Lee, Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, 115; A. Goldstein, Poverty in Common, 122–27. The experience of Mike Miller, a tenant or­ga­nizer at the Henry Street Settlement, illustrates how the settlement controlled politics on the ground. Miller was fired in 1960, ­after less than a year on the job, “for being too militant.” He ­later became an or­ga­nizer with vari­ous organ­izations, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc). See Miller (Michael J.) Civil Rights Collection, University of Southern Mississippi, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg. 137 Car­ter, “Hispanic Rioting during the Civil Rights Era.” 138 Flamm, In the Heat of the Summer, 2-3. 139 Albert Mayer, “Culture for the Subcities,” recorded at the New York studio of Pacifica Radio, broadcast February 10, 1963, bb3058, Pacifica Radio Archives. 140 Lawrence O’Kane, “Indoor Markets of City Opposed,” New York Times, November 3, 1964, Box 39, Folder 6, Park Ave­nue Market, 1964, Union Settlement Association Rec­ords, 1896–1995, Rare Book and Manuscript Library collection, Columbia University Libraries, New York (hereafter usar). 141 Albert Mayer Architects, “Park Ave­nue Market, East Harlem, New York City: New Plazas and Entrances to Existing Park Ave­nue Market” (booklet of architecture plans and drawings), Department of Public Works, City of New York, Box 39, Folder 3, Correspondence-­Union, 1960–1976, usar; Preston R. Wilcox and Mildred Zucker, Letter to the Editor, “Harlem’s Public Market,” New York Times, November 13, 1964, Box 39, Folder 3, Correspondence-­Union, 1960–76, usar. 142 Mayer, Urgent ­Future, 44; Mayer, “Culture for the Subcities.” 143 Mayer, “Culture for the Subcities.” 144 Jose A. Villegas to Helen Hall, November 14, 1960, Box 73, Folder 73.7, La Guardia Community Center, Puerto Rican Council, 1960–1961, hssr/swha. 145 Department of Markets, City of New York, News Release, September 30, 1964, Box 39, Folder 3, Correspondence-­Union, 1960–1976, usar. 146 Aponte-­Parés, “Lessons from El Barrio,” 400–401. 147 Mele, Selling the Lower East Side, 183.

Chapter 2. Colors and the “Culture of Poverty” 1 Raul Askew, “Opera-­Sung-­in-­English Prob­lem Clouds Met’s Vanessa Version,” Dallas Morning News, February 4, 1959.

Notes to Chapter 2

243

2 Oscar Lewis coined the term culture of poverty in his first book, Five Families, on low-­ income Mexicans living in Mexico City, though his l­ ater book La Vida would be most associated with the term. 3 As racialized populations of color whose housing choices ­were l­ imited by discriminatory housing policies, blacks and Latinxs did not follow the popu­lar theory, ingrained by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, found­ers of the 1920s “Chicago School” of urban sociology, that immigrant groups would eventually assimilate as they moved from the inner core of the city to its outlying areas. Park, Burgess, and Mc­Ken­zie, The City. African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who was trained in the “Chicago School,” questioned the omission of racial relations in Park and Burgess’s theories. See Hutter, Experiencing Cities, 311. 4 For more on how the term urban crisis has been mobilized by ­people across the po­liti­cal spectrum, see Pritchett, “Which Urban Crisis?” 5 Negrón-­Muntaner, Boricua Pop, 58. 6 Conservatives would find even more support for their policies in Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s memo on black poverty for the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Commonly known as the “Moynihan Report,” the memo blamed poor black single-­ women-­headed h ­ ouse­holds and their lack of normative middle-­class values for their ­family’s generational poverty. Moynihan, Negro ­Family. 7 Art historian Darby En­glish writes about a related concept that he calls “artifactual color,” a “sense of color generated in the tension between color’s racial connotations and its aesthetic meanings.” En­glish, 1971, 9. 8 ­Here I am indebted to Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge. 9 Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 9. 10 Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 16. 11 Saul Bass, a leading graphic designer of motion picture title sequences and posters, designed the poster for the 1961 film. Bass was also credited as a visual con­sul­tant on the story­boards for the prologue of the film. 12 At first, the creators of the musical considered storylines centered on ­battles between Rus­sian Jews and Irish Catholics on the Lower East Side or among Mexicans in the Los Angeles area, but by opening time the show’s creators had agreed on New York and, as the play’s title indicates, the west side of Manhattan. With the shooting of the film on Sixty-­Eighth Street, ­there was some clarity as to the location, though the neighborhood setting is still debated. Some historians believe that the location on Sixty-­Eighth Street falls within the Upper West Side San Juan Hill district. ­Others, however, believe that San Juan Hill spanned fewer blocks, which would leave the shooting of West Side Story out of the district. Tran, “Finding New York”; Foulkes, “Seeing the City.” 13 Black and white tension had long ­shaped San Juan Hill and yet black ­people are missing from the film. Alberto Sandoval-­Sánchez points out that this omission in “West Side Story is a discursive articulation of racial discrimination in the U.S.” Sandoval-­ Sánchez, José, Can You See?, 74. For more on Puerto Ricans living in San Juan Hill, see Gertrude Samuels, “Two Case Histories Out of Puerto Rico: The Lopezes and the

244 Notes to Chapter 2

14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32

Solers Take Their Families out of the Poverty of a Tropical Island to Make a Fresh Start in the Complex New World of New York,” New York Times, January 22, 1956; Robert E. Baker, “Integration Difficulties Embarrass New York: New York Integration ‘­Matter of Time,’ ” Washington Post and Times Herald, August 25, 1957. Keenan, Films of Robert Wise, 117. Deplorable housing conditions in San Juan Hill had for de­cades motivated A ­ frican American movement north to Harlem. Puerto Ricans followed a similar route. ­L ayhmond Robinson Jr., “Our Changing City: Harlem Now on the Upswing: ­Turbulent Area, Still Beset by Grave Prob­lems, Sees a New Dawn for Itself,” New York Times, July 8, 1955. Sharaff, Broadway and Hollywood, 100. Relyea, Not So Quiet on the Set, 150. Sharaff downplayed the social meanings of her use of color when she said, “I see every­ thing in blocks of color . . . ​rather like a painting. If I have a leitmotif, a logo, I suspect it is associated with the colors I prefer: reds, pinks, oranges.” Sharaff, Broadway and Hollywood, 100. For an analy­sis of how light-­brown ­women are preferred in advertisements targeting Latinxs, see Dávila, Latinos, Inc. Sandoval-­Sánchez, José, Can You See?, 81. Sandoval-­Sánchez, José, Can You See?, 11. Lewis, Study of Slum Culture, 23. The “­little islands within the city” included Bedford-­Stuyvesant and Flatbush in Brooklyn, El Barrio in East Harlem and the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and the South Bronx. Lewis, Study of Slum Culture, 110–11. Lewis, Study of Slum Culture, 5; Rigdon, Culture Facade, 245. Lewis, La Vida, xlvii. For a contextualization of Lewis’s use of primitive in a larger body of anthropological research about “primitive ­people,” see Drucker, “Cognitive Styles and Class Ste­reo­types.” Lewis, La Vida, xxvi. Lewis, “Children of Sanchez,” 481. Lewis, “­Children of Sánchez,” 481. Lewis, “­Children of Sánchez,” 481. The appendix in Susan Rigdon’s book includes correspondence between Lewis, his research staff, and con­temporary interlocutors that show Lewis deliberating over the very generalizations about poverty on which conservatives would l­ ater focus. Rigdon, Culture Facade, 256. See, for example, Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 170–85. Conference presenters included anthropologists, psychologists, biophysicists, economists, theologians, historians, architects, graphic designers, and advertising professionals. Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, Annual Report 1962, Box 7, Folder 8, International Design Conference in Aspen Rec­ords, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Los Angeles; International Design Conference Aspen 1962 (conference proceedings, Aspen, CO, June 24–30, 1962).

Notes to Chapter 2

245

33 Lewis, quoted in International Design Conference Aspen 1962. Claude S. Fischer argues that Lewis, unlike most of the scholars linked to the Chicago School of Sociology, was not a determinist. Instead, Fischer views Lewis as focusing on economic position, culture, and marital and ­family status as key explanations of the social. Fischer, Urban Experience, 33. 34 Lewis’s research is discussed in Se­nior and Watkins, ­Toward a Balance Sheet of Puerto Rican Migration, 775. 35 Lewis, La Vida, xxv. 36 Lewis, Study of Slum Culture, xxv, 26–29. 37 Lewis, La Vida, 128. 38 Besides US gradu­ate students, including Douglas Butterworth at the University at Illinois, Lewis relied on a list of Latin American researchers. Francisca Muriente was recommended by Rosa Celeste Marín, head of the University of Puerto Rico’s School of Social Work. Aida Torres de Estepan, a Dominican exile, was hired in San Juan and continued to work on the New York branch of the proj­ect. Muna Muñoz Lee, the ­daughter of the first governor of Puerto Rico, served as Lewis’s translator. See Rigdon, Culture Facade, 74. In the San Juan research site, two previous in­for­mants from Lewis’s research proj­ects in Mexico, siblings Consuelo and Manuel Sánchez, joined on as part of the research staff. Lewis explained in A Study of Slum Culture that the siblings “gave me a Mexican view of Puerto Rican poverty and helped point up the similarities and differences between Mexican and Puerto Rican slum life.” See Lewis, Study of Slum Culture, 24. Echoing the recommendation of Laura Briggs in Reproducing Empire, a study of the Latin American staff working on La Vida, exploring how their vari­ous backgrounds influenced the collection of data and the manuscript would be a fascinating f­ uture proj­ect for researchers. 39 Carolina Luján to Oscar Lewis, January 25, 1966, excerpt of letter reprinted in Rigdon, Culture Facade, 256. 40 Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 170–85. 41 Lewis, La Vida, xxvi 42 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 43. 43 Katz, Undeserving Poor, 51, 68–84; Ladner, Death of White Sociology, 311; O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 268. 44 For an analy­sis of the internal colony, see Omi and Winant. Racial Formation in the United States, 44–47. 45 Barrera, Muñoz, and Ornelas, “Barrio as an Internal Colony.” 46 Rigdon, Culture Facade, 143. 47 Lewis, La Vida, xxv. 48 Sexton, Spanish Harlem, 74. 49 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 53. 50 Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, ca. September 1888, in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 37; Vincent van Gogh to Wilhelmina van Gogh, Arles, March 30, 1888, in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, 31. 51 Tough and MacDonald, “Manhattan’s Real Property Values,” 5–6.

246 Notes to Chapter 2 52 Homer Bigart, “Looters Invaded Midtown; East Harlem Stays Calm,” New York Times, July 27, 1967. 53 Peter Kihss, “Puerto Rican Story: A Sensitive ­People Erupt,” New York Times, July 26, 1967. 54 Lewis, La Vida, xlviii 55 Kihss, “Puerto Rican Story.” 56 Cannato, Ungovernable City, 132–35. 57 Three days a­ fter the uprising, President Johnson gathered a group of experts and leaders from across the nation to head the Kerner Commission to investigate the reasons ­behind the riots. Officially known as the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the commission released its findings, a condemnation of racism in the United States, a year ­later in what is known as the Kerner Report. Schneider, Police Power and Race Riots, 57–58. For more on the events that led to Latinx radical politics in the 1960s, see Fernandez, “Young Lords and the Social and Structural Roots.” 58 Harvey and Reed, “Culture of Poverty,” 481. 59 Taussig bases his analy­sis on a meticulous reading of Bronisław Malinowski’s ethnography and field photography in the Trobriand Islands. Taussig suggests that Malinowski, a founding figure of ethnography, documents his research as if bewitched by color. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 83. 60 Color on its own cannot be copyrighted u ­ nless, courts in the United States and Eu­rope have de­cided, it is used in association with consumer goods. Shoe designer Christian Louboutin, Cadbury choco­lates, and Home Depot, to name a few companies, have copyrighted their brand’s key colors. 61 Lewis, La Vida, 452. 62 Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 68–90. 63 “Hartford’s G ­ reat Show,” Springfield Sunday Republican, February 25, 1912. 64 “Hats and Coats of Like Material Give a Jaunty Air to L ­ ittle Folks,” Morning Oregonian, March 15, 1914. 65 Dry Goods Economist, April 10, 1915, 9, 12. 66 Blaszczyk, “Colors of Modernism,” 231–32. 67 On the Good Neighbor policy, see Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 50. 68 In my research I found only one instance of “luck-­of-­the-­Irish color” or “Italian colors” to describe chromatic color. Both examples ­were included in advertisements in the New York Times. Several instances of “Chinese color” appeared, again in the New York Times, from the 1910s through the 1940s. 69 Walter Rendell Storey, “A Primitive Note in Modern Interiors,” New York Times, April 13, 1930. 70 Storey, “Primitive Note in Modern Interiors.” 71 Indych-­López, Muralism without Walls, 88–95. 72 For more on how late 1920s and 1930s US diplomatic ties to Mexico led to the arrival of Mexican murals in the United States, see A. Lee, Painting on the Left. 73 Wolfe, “Diego Rivera,” 100. 74 A. Lee, Painting on the Left, 64–65.

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75 Del Real, “Diego vs. Philip.” 76 “Mexican Mural of Diego Rivera in a Setting of Modern Interior Architecture Opens,” Museum of Modern Art, Press Release Archives, February 18, 1933, https://­www​.­moma​ .­org ​/­momaorg ​/­shared​/­pdfs​/­docs​/­press​_­archives​/­113​/­releases​/­MOMA​_­1933​_­0013​_­1933​ -­02​-­18​.­pdf ​?­2010. 77 For more on the Mayan Revival Style and other Mexican-­inspired art and material culture made popu­lar in the early twentieth-­century United States, see Delpar, Enormous Vogue of ­Things Mexican. 78 Fay, “Anni and Josef Albers.” 79 Ad, New York Times, March 3, 1941. 80 Ad, New York Times, April 4, 1937. 81 Ad, New York Times, May 14, 1939. 82 Washburn, “Analy­sis of the effects of economic and social conditions.” 83 For more on the repatriation and deportation campaigns, see Balderrama and Rodriguez, De­cade of Betrayal, 226. 84 Ad, Chicago Daily Tribune, December 18, 1938. 85 Sylva Weaver, “Spring Styles Spur Amity of Amer­i­cas,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1941. 86 Ad, New York Times, March 22, 1964; ad, New York Times, March 15, 1942, 34; ad, New York Times, June 4, 1943, 22. 87 Ad, New York Times, June 4, 1943. 88 Antonio Menendez, “Tres mil años de moda mexicana,” La Prensa (San Antonio), May 16, 1954. 89 Phipps, “Cochineal Red.” 90 Phipps, “Cochineal Red.” 91 Taussig makes a similar suggestion. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 160. 92 Dianne Harris points out that architectural renderings of the 1950s frequently depicted middle-class suburban houses with colorful interiors. Harris argues, citing Andrew Hurley, that the colors conveyed a “middle-class modernity” appealing to residents trying to distance themselves from the drab tenements from where they came. See Harris, Little White Houses, 192; Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks, 298. 93 En­glish, 1971. 94 I had a casual conversation with a color theory professor who described his experience in Albers’s classroom. 95 Holmes, “Culturally Relevant Packaging: Use Images That Appeal to Hispanics: Latinos Want to See ‘Themselves’ and Their Lifestyles Reflected in Packaging and P-­O-­P Displays; Vibrant Colors Also Catch Their Eye,” Brand Packaging, October 1, 2003, accessed October 23, 2010, http://­www​.­allbusiness​.­com​/­marketing​-­advertising​ /­branding​-­brand​-­development​/­700716​-­1​.­html. 96 Color Association of the US, “Color Trends in the Corporate World.” 97 In 2004 at least ninety-­seven Sears retail department stores in the United States added brightly colored fashion to attract a burgeoning Latina consumer market. See

248 Notes to Chapter 2 Nancy Luna, “Sears Targets Latino Market,” Orange County Register, December 28, 2004. 98 Arreola, “Mexican American House­scapes.” 99 George Reno, “La Habana visto por un Americano,” El Heraldo de México (Los ­Angeles), March 16, 1921: “Todas las paredes por dentro y fuera están repelladas, con el major pulimento y acabado que es pos­si­ble conseguir y entonces se las colorea con todos los tonos del iris y algunos más, predominando el rosado nacarado, crema, lila y magenta. Los colores son cuestión del gusto exclusivo del dueño, pero pocas veces chocan, y prestan a la ciudad una brillantez suave en notable contraste con las largas y sombrías calles de edificios que entristecen las avenidas residenciales de los países del Norte.” 100 Archaeologists have found rusty red paint in the built environment of Meso-­American architecture at the archaeological site in Cuicuilco, Mexico City, and used this evidence to assert that Aztec ­temples ­were once painted in bright colors. “Design for Eternity” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 2016. The brilliant coloring of the Latinx and Latin American landscape is also believed to have roots in Spanish Islamic architecture. Lack of documentation makes the syncretic origin of bright color speculative, but it is nonetheless an appealing argument given the popu­lar use of color throughout the Amer­ic­ as. For more on color as syncretism, see Arreola, “Mexican American House­scapes,” 304–7; Herzog, From Aztec to High Tech, 133. 101 Felipe Cossío del Pomar, “Cuzco colonial,” La Nueva Democracia, June 25, 1941. A similar argument is found in Mumford, Vertical Empire. 102 In 1941 Cossío del Pomar wrote the following in La Nueva Democracia, a monthly magazine published in New York by the missionary group Committee on Cooperation in Latin Amer­ic­ a: “Tal es el esfuerzo que demanda la destrucción, que al invasor no le queda más remedio que dejar subsistir la estructura de la ciudad incaica. La maciza arquitectura india se corona de casonas, aleros, portales, arcos y balcones. Churriguerra y su fantasía se encaraman por los sillares indios, adornana las calles estrechas y ciñen con guirnaladas de hojas de acanto y blasones a la ciudad imperial. Por primera vez el blanco victorioso se somete al commando telúrico del Ande, encarnado en los cimientos del Cuzco. . . . ​Lo más que logran los conquistadores es plasma las saudades del terruño en cada una de sus casas. Todos los estilos lucen embadurnados de vivos colores sobre la simplicidad de la arquitectura cuzqueña.” Cossío del Pomar, “Cuzco colonial.” 103 United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Ser­vice, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, June 15, 2012, 161. The US-­led Spanish Re­nais­ sance Revival in Puerto Rico is discussed in Vivoni-­Farage, “Architecture of Power.” 104 George, ­Little Journey to Puerto Rico. 105 United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Ser­vice, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 114. 106 Anthropologist Ricardo Alegria was a key actor in the revitalization of Old San Juan. United States Department of the Interior, National Parks Ser­vice, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, 63, 65. 107 Jopling, Puerto Rican Houses, 225.

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108 Goldman, “How, Why, Where, and When It All Happened,” 26. 109 “Que Viva el Arte de la Raza,” El Grito del Norte (Española, New Mexico), June 27, 1972. See also Drescher and Garcia, “Recent Raza Murals in the U.S.” 110 Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo,” 156. See also Ybarra-­Frausto, “Chicano Movement.” 111 Márez, “Brown,” 122–23. 112 Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo”; Márez, “Brown.” 113 Aponte-­Parés, “Casitas Place and Culture.” 114 Aponte-­Parés, “Casitas Place and Culture.” See also the work of historian Dolores Hayden, who, borrowing from theorist Henri Lefebvre, labels casitas “counter-­ spaces.” Hayden, Power of Place, 36. 115 Olalquiaga stresses the nostalgic meanings of rural imagery rather than its politics. Olalquiaga, Megalopolis. Barbara Deutsch Lynch notes, however, that gardens offered “ties to the rural landscapes of other times and places, and is an act of rebellion against the North American definition of urban space with its clearly defined zones and segregated land uses. In short, it transforms an alienated and alienating environment into a nurturing one.” Lynch and Brusi, “Garden and the Sea,” 109, 112. For a more nuanced view, see J. Flores, From Bomba to Hip Hop; Rinaldo, “Space of Re­sis­ tance,” 148; J. Smith, “Rural Place Attachment.” 116 Chicana/o public art was also created in rural areas, but the murals painted in urban contexts are more widely documented. See Drescher and Garcia, “Recent Raza Murals in the U.S.,” 15. 117 On why Latinx-­themed urban developments are sound economic investments, see Anderson, “­Drivers for Town Centers,” 68; Nyren, “ulx Recharging Retail,” 42; Renee DeGross, “Updated Looks for Older Malls Reincarnation: Dated Area Shopping Centers Aim at New Demographics to Join the ‘In’ Crowd,” Atlanta Journal-­ Constitution, April 15, 2000. 118 Legaspi Com­pany of Los Angeles built Latinx-­themed shopping malls in Atlanta, Georgia; Fort Worth, Texas; and North Las Vegas, Nevada. Legaspi malls usually have bright red-­and-­orange facades, stone accents, big archways, and bell-­tower domes. Grupo Zocalo, a subsidiary of Boxer Property of Texas, manages, leases, and administers retail commercial properties, including Legaspi’s mall in Fort Worth. Grupo Zocalo advised Legaspi on the right design “to build value” and “create an environment closely reminiscent of a small zócalo,” a Mexican town square where ­people gather and socialize. David Hidalgo, the architect of La Gran Plaza, joined with archaeologist Luis Felipe Nieto to design yet another mall, Plaza Mexico, operated by md Properties. Opened in 2003 in Lynwood, a low-­income suburb of Los Angeles, Plaza Mexico was designed following Spanish colonial architecture. Its facades are painted in “festive Mexican colors” such as red, orange, and lavender and its spatial configuration reflects the ancient city of Monte Alban in northern Mexico. Debbie Howell, “Zocalo Mall Concept Targets Hispanic Americans with Decidedly Latin Flavor,” dsn Retailing ­Today 44, no. 7 (2005): 4. See also the Plaza Mexico website, http://­www​.­plazamexico​.­com​/­menu​/­abouttheplaza​.­html. For a scholarly analy­ sis of Plaza Mexico in Lynwood, see Irazábal and Gómez-­Barris, “Bounded Tourism.”

250 Notes to Chapter 2

119 120

121

122 123

124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132

In Fort Mill, South Carolina, Capital City Development built Plaza Fiesta Carolinas in 2007 with “the flare, style, smells, and sounds of a typical Latin American Plaza.” The mall was designed with bright colors, cobblestone streets, and balconies. Though inspired by Mexico City, the mall was planned to become an “international shopping destination.” Colombians, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans had national cele­brations t­ here and non-­Latinx businesses showed interest in opening small shops before the mall closed in 2014. Plaza Fiesta Carolinas website, accessed March 22, 2011, http://­www​.­plazafiestacarolinas​.­com​/­site​/­index​.­p&p​?­option​=­com​ _­content&task​=v­ iew&id​=1­2&Itemid​=3­ 7&; Dan Huntley, “Latin-­Themed Mall Takes Off: Plaza Fiesta Carolinas Is Something Special,” Charlotte Observer, January 13, 2007. “Library in Texas: A Shade Too Much?,” New York Times, November 26, 1995. The library, funded with a $28 million bond issue established with the help of former mayor Henry Cisneros, was expected to generate tourism for one of the poorest cities in Texas. See “Library in Texas”; Mike Greenberg, “Reading the Library,” San Antonio Express News, September 1, 1991. In Texas Monthly, Jan Russell wrote, “What Santa Anna c­ ouldn’t do at the B ­ attle of the Alamo—­and what Henry Cisneros d ­ idn’t do in his ten years as mayor—­Legorreta did with his design: He affirmed San Antonio’s past as a proud Mexican village.” Jan Russell, “Seeing Red,” 112; Greenberg, “Reading the Library.” Articles provided by the Texana/Genealogy Department, San Antonio Public Library, San Antonio, Texas. “Library in Texas”; Carla Koehl and Lucy Howard, “You Say Tomato, I Say Hate It,” Newsweek, February 27, 1995. Articles provided by the Texana/Genealogy Department, San Antonio Public Library, San Antonio, Texas. “Library in Texas.” Arreola, “Mexican American Cultural Capital”; McWilliams, North from Mexico. For more on spatial segregation of San Antonio’s African American, white, and Latinx communities, see Hernández-­Ehrisman, Inventing the Fiesta City. Christopher Hawthorne, “Ricardo Legorreta Dies at 80; Mexican Modernist Architect,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2012. Kitty Prevost, “Library’s Architect Honored at Reception,” San Antonio Express-­News, January 17, 1992. Rick Badie, “If Color Is the Issue, Let It Be Paint Color,” Atlanta Journal–­Constitution, January 30, 2005. Nita Lelyveld, “Infusion of Fuchsia Rattles a Calif. City’s Staid Beige,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 5, 1998. Nadya Labi, “Hue Must Be Joking,” Time, June 24, 2001. Julio Moran, “San Fernando Votes to Extend Color Scheme Citywide,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1991. Bender, Tierra y Libertad, 89. Jesse Katz, “Purple Passions Swirl about Texas Abode,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1997. Carlos Guerra, “Color Purple Obscures Bigger Historic Issue,” San Antonio Express-­ News, August 7, 1997.

Notes to Chapter 2 133 134 135 136

251

Lowry, “Purple Passion of Sandra Cisneros.” Lowry, “Purple Passion of Sandra Cisneros.” Katz, “Purple Passions Swirl about Texas Abode.” Sandra Cisneros, “Purple Politics: Our Tejano History Has Become Invisible,” San Antonio Express-­News, August 17, 1997. 137 Sara Rimer, “San Antonio Journal; Novelist’s Purple Palette Is Not to Every­one’s Taste,” New York Times, July 13, 1998. 138 Bright color is a threat to a mainstream aesthetic community of taste and its class aspirations. For more on the role of aesthetics in creating communities, see the introduction to Hinderliter et al., Communities of Sense. 139 ­Because of the common concern that supportive housing depresses neighborhood ­house values, most of supportive housing is built in neighborhoods where low-­income tenants are the majority. See Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, “The Impact of Supportive Housing on Surrounding Neighborhoods.” 140 “Harlem Dowling,” Urban Quotient, accessed August 29, 2016, https://­w ww​ .­urbanquotient​.­com​/­work​/­harlem​-­dowling​/­. 141 uai, Greenhope Kandake House, accessed January 27, 2020, http://­uai​-­ny​.­com​ /­project​/­greenhope​-­kandake​-­house​/­; Rebecca Baird-­Remba, “Balancing Cost and Beauty: Architects Talk Affordable Housing Design,” New York: yimby, May 1, 2015. 142 Minutillo, “Navy Green Supportive Housing.” 143 Michael Kimmelman, “In a Bronx Complex, ­Doing Good Mixes with Looking Good,” New York Times, September 26, 2011; Baird-­Remba, “Balancing Cost and Beauty.” 144 Overy, Light, Air, and Openness, 151–52. 145 Claire Moses, “Residents to Vote on hap’s East Harlem Building Colors,” Real Deal, September 24, 2014. 146 Oyster Development, “45 Bartlett,” accessed January 29, 2020, http://­oysterdev​.­com​ /­property​/­vida​/­. 147 For more on how the hand-­painted signage of small Latinx business facades have been incorporated into mainstream design, see Londoño, “Barrio Affinities”; “The Art of Design,” website for Vida in Mission District, San Francisco, accessed August 31, 2016, http://­vidasf​.­com​/­art​-­of​-­design​/­#. 148 Beatriz Johnson Hernandez, “The Invaders,” El Andar, October 31, 2000; Sean Patrick Farrell, “The Changing Mission,” New York Times, November 25, 2013. 149 A year ­later, the New York Times said the same about gentrification on the Lower East Side. Alison Gregor, “The East Village Clings to a Colorful Past,” New York Times, December 10, 2014. By 2015 the New York Times was taking a dif­fer­ent approach to the nexus of gentrification and color and writing that artist-­led gentrification in Bushwick, Brooklyn, had transformed a low-­income, vandalized community into an area that “has become associated with colorful street art.” Alison Gregor, “Bushwick, Brooklyn, Colorful and Eclectic,” New York Times, June 15, 2016. See also Amy O’Leary, “Bushwick Gets a Fresh Coat,” New York Times, May 3, 2013. 150 For more on neoliberal urbanization, see Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place; Dávila, Barrio Dreams.

252 Notes to Chapter 2 151 152 153 154 155

Wright, “Coloring Their World,” 9. N. Smith, New Urban Frontier. Harvey, “Right to the City,” 39. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 106 Vari­ous scholars have discussed the phantasmagoria and its role in cap­it­ al­ist society. In her study of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect, Susan Buck-­Morss notes that in addition to Karl Marx’s understanding of phantasmagoria as a commodity concealing ­human activity, a fetish, Benjamin understood the concept of phantasmagoria as having po­liti­cal potential. The “wish image,” Buck-­Morss adds, is the “dream form of that potential.” Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 211–12, 245. 156 According to early twentieth-­century theorist Walter Benjamin, who wrote about color sometime during 1914–15 before his acclaimed Arcades Proj­ect, some adults adopt a gaze similar to ­children who, enthralled by color, perceive color as if it had a life irreducible to the object it washes over. Adults, suggested Benjamin, differentiate colors and consider color as a secondary, decorative aspect of objects. Benjamin writes that “for the person who sees with a child’s eyes, [color] marks bound­aries, is not a layer of something superimposed on ­matter, as it is for adults. The latter abstract from color, regarding it as a deceptive cloak for individual objects existing in time and space.” I read this as meaning that color can be perceived as both a universal, nonpo­liti­cal, affective experience and a socially significant expression. Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1:50–51. I first came across Benjamin’s writing on color in Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 48. 157 ­Here I am relying on Susan Buck-­Morss’s writing to understand the dialectical image as a mode of making history relevant to the pre­sent. See Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 245, 290.

Chapter 3. A Fiesta for “White Flight” 1 “Santa Ana: Tentative OK Reached on ‘Festival’ Center,” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1984. 2 Rouse and Thompson pop­ul­ ar­ized the historically themed “festival” as a way to heal racial rifts following the 1960s race riots that gripped the nation. I first came across this detail in Isenberg, Downtown Amer­i­ca, 254. Isenberg quotes Michael Demarest, “He Digs Downtown,” Time, August 24, 1981, 48. 3 C. Lowe, “Protecting Neighborhoods,” 245–47. 4 Hereafter I ­will refer to Fiesta Marketplace as simply Fiesta. 5 Eric Avila offers an examination of how white flight generated myriad forms of popu­ lar culture that solidified a white identity. One might argue that white flight from Santa Ana generated Fiesta; even though it was inspired by Mexican urban culture, it upheld a social order common to white spaces and the imperatives of urban capitalism.

Notes to Chapter 3

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Avila, Popu­lar Culture in the Age of White Flight. Neil Smith notably examines the rise of a white-­led policy of revenge in relation to the gentrification of the late twentieth ­century. N. Smith, New Urban Frontier. 6 Zelizer, “Introduction.” 7 Moynihan, Negro ­Family. For more on the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, see Zelizer, “Introduction,” xxiii. 8 For an example of this lit­er­a­ture, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis. Some scholars have questioned the degree to which white residential choice was responsible for forming segregated neighborhoods of color. In 1969 sociologist Harvey Molotch found in his examination of Chicago neighborhoods that structural housing market discrimination was much more responsible for residential changes than whites fleeing in response to in-­migration of blacks. Molotch, “Racial Change in a Stable Community.” 9 I take my cue from historian Alison Isenberg, who, focusing on American downtowns, suggests avoiding sweeping narratives of gradual decline, and instead asks us to think about how a range of actors, including consumers and developers, mobilized par­tic­ u­lar social and cultural values to configure and reconfigure the commercial heart of cities. Isenberg, Downtown Amer­i­ca, 8–9, 260–61. 10 The argument that Latinx migration to cities during the height of “urban crisis” discourse of the 1970s and 1980s presented a fix, a commercial and residential rebirth that historians have underexamined, is carefully laid out in Sandoval-­Strausz, Barrio Amer­i­ca. 11 I am indebted to urban planner, urban studies scholar, and Santa Ana native Erualdo R. González for discussing downtown development with me and helping me understand how the vitality of Fourth Street, known locally as La Cuatro, was downplayed for the sake of building Fiesta. See E. González, Latino City. 12 Bob Schwartz, “A Comeback on 4th Street,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1989. 13 Christina B. Hanhardt (Safe Space, 44) notes how the cancer meta­phor was used to describe the threat posed by social outcasts in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Hanhardt links this description to the legacy of the early twentieth-­century Chicago School of urban sociology that approached the city as an organism susceptible to pathologies. 14 Beauregard, When Amer­i­ca Became Suburban, 3–4. 15 “Orange County Is Building Fast,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1923. 16 Don Smith, “Visual Pollution Growth Assailed by G ­ rand Jurors,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1972. 17 “Beauty and the Beastly Billboard,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1968. 18 The city of Santa Ana hired con­sul­tants Woodward Dike and Associates to write this report. Lynn O’Dell, “Santa Ana Seeking a New Way to Preserve Past,” Orange County Register, n.d. (pre-1987), copy in possession of the author. 19 “Historic Homes Are the hallmark of French Park,” Orange County Register, April 23, 1988, Santa Ana Historic Districts Envelope, Santa Ana History Room, Santa Ana Public Library, Santa Ana, California (hereafter sahr).

254 Notes to Chapter 3 20 Breger, “Concept and ­Causes of Urban Blight,” 371. 21 Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States,” US Census Bureau, February 2005. 22 Wendell Pritchett calls urban blight a “rhetorical device” for urban renewal advocates to get rid of the old built environments and reconceptualize property rights in a way that benefited urban elites. He also speaks about how blight was used to displace African Americans and Latinxs and further segregate them in ghettoes and barrios. Pritchett, “ ‘Public Menace’ of Blight,” 4, 33. 23 Douglas E. Kneeland, “The Outer City: T ­ here Is No Firm Ste­reo­type,” New York Times, May 31, 1971; W. B. Rood, “Santa Ana Sees Its Ruin in City of Irvine Incorporation,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1971. 24 Rood, “Santa Ana Sees Its Ruin.” 25 Herman Wong, “Planned Communities Strug­g le to Keep Their Promises,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1974. 26 Janet Whitcomb, “ ‘A Municipal Fire’: The Demise of Santa Ana’s Chinatown,” April 1986, sahr; Gould, Burning of Santa Ana’s Chinatown; Gustavo Arellano, “Santa Ana Deliberately Burned Down Its Chinatown in 1906—­and Let a Man Die to Do It,” oc Weekly, December 30, 2014. 27 Arellano, “Santa Ana Deliberately Burned Down Its Chinatown.” 28 Quoted in Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 176. 29 The quote is the reporter’s summary of what was said at the seminar. William Endicott, “Seminar Hits at Image of White Supremacy,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 1968. 30 For more on the housing discrimination African Americans faced in Santa Ana and Orange County as a ­whole, see Helen Johnson, “Improvement Predicted in Negro Housing Opportunities,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1967. 31 Paul Delaney, “The Outer City: Negroes Find Few Tangible Gains,” New York Times, June 1, 1971. 32 Herbert Car­ter, staff con­sul­tant to the Los Angeles County Commission on H ­ uman Relations, said this as part of the uc Extension special “Beyond the McCone Report.” Dorothy Townsend, “Antipoverty Officials’ Approach Criticized,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1966. 33 Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left, 45, 72–73. 34 The report was ordered by the mayor of Santa Ana, Tom McMichael, and its findings ­were made public in early May 1968. William Endicott, “Minorities Study Shows ‘Potential for Vio­lence,’ ” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1968. The report drafted by the Santa Ana Planning Department included excerpted interviews with local Mexican and African American residents. See also Endicott, “Seminar Hits at Image of White Supremacy”; David Shaw, “What It Is to Be Black in This County,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1969. 35 The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 established the Office of Economic Opportunity. Herman Wong, “New Poverty War Director Critical of False Spokesmen,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1968.

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36 Hal Schulz, “Poverty Well Hidden in County, Aide Says,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1967. 37 In 1969 a branch of the Black Panthers briefly opened headquarters on Fourth Street. The Los Angeles Black Panthers asked the Santa Ana Panthers to change their first meeting place, a store on First and Raitt Streets on the southwestern part of the city where the majority of African Americans and Mexicans lived, ­after they heard the store was selling African clothing and items. Bobby Seale of the Los Angeles Black Panthers claimed that rather than fighting “white capitalism,” the Santa Ana ­storeowner was engaging in counterrevolutionary practices and fomenting nationalism in the ser­vice of the “black capitalism” that recently elected president Richard Nixon touted. David Shaw, “Who Are They? What Do They Want? Black Panthers Emerge Within. . . . ,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1969. For a list of other organ­izations and community groups African Americans started in Santa Ana, see De Graaf, “African American Suburbanization in California,” 433. 38 David Shaw, “Growing Hostility to Ushers and Police Blamed for Melee,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1969. 39 Shaw, “Growing Hostility.” 40 Several of my interviewees in Santa Ana recounted stories of discrimination in the postwar period. 41 The land on which Santa Ana sits ­today was previously known as Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, a colonial grant presided over by multiple Spanish families, most notably the Yorbas, and their descendants u ­ ntil the 1860s. In 1869, nearly twenty years a­ fter the United States annexed the territory through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, William Spurgeon purchased some of this land and divided it into city blocks. Santa Ana was incorporated as an American city in 1886. Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 47–48, 67–68. 42 Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 165. 43 G. Gonzalez, Chicano Education. 44 G. Gonzalez, Chicano Education, 190. 45 Mendez v. Westminster occurred nearly eight years before the federal ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. 46 The MEChA Mural at the college’s Nealley Library depicts indigenous and folkloric iconography common to the murals of David Alfaro Siqueiros and the agricultural motifs that connote the l­abor of many of Santa Ana’s Mexican residents. Latorre, Walls of Empowerment, 42–45. 47 “Chicanos Due to Picket 3 Police Stations,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1971. 48 Bill Hazlett, “County to Get U.S. Funds for Riot Training,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1971. 49 Meier and Stewart, Politics of Hispanic Education, 80. 50 A year ­later, it became evident that regardless of ­whether the Chicana/o movement gave middle-­class Mexican Americans a bad name, whites would continue associating Mexicans with deviancy. At a 1972 protest of more than three hundred ­people, the largest protest ever seen in Santa Ana, the chairman of the Santa Ana County

256 Notes to Chapter 3

51 52

53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60 61

supervisors referred to Adelante, a group of Mexican American government employees who w ­ ere advocating for an affirmative action program to diversify government employees, as “bandidos.” Bandido was a long-­held ste­reo­type, circulated in vari­ous media, that portrayed Mexicans as criminals. Robert M. Gettemy, “Chicano Leaders Ask Apology for Caspers ‘Bandidos’ Remark,” Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1972. John Gregory, “The Bristol Street Gang: Clout for the Barrio,” Los Angeles Times, ­January 17, 1971. Gregory interviewed members of the Council. Scholars have described several other barrios that no longer exist. The Santa Fe barrio east of Fiesta, near what used to be the interurban railroad depot (established in 1890), partly reconstituted a few blocks southeast into the Pine Street barrio, which also no longer exists ­under that name. Haas, “Barrios of Santa Ana,” 91; Romo, East Los Angeles, 68–69, 81, 84. See also Bitetti, Ball, and Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society, Early Santa Ana, 113. Mary Lisbeth Haas (“Barrios of Santa Ana,” 91) locates the Santa Anita barrio across the Santa Ana River from Artesia and outside the limits of Santa Ana. By 1974 the Los Angeles Times, however, located Santa Anita within the limits of the city of Santa Ana. For more on the Logan barrio, see Mary Garcia, Santa Ana’s Logan Barrio. Gettemy, “Chicano Leaders Ask Apology.” Proponents of the community redevelopment agency argued they would be able to freeze assessments in the designated areas picked for redevelopment, and thus stop property values from being considered in decline. Critics of the agency argued that the “frozen” areas would not have to shoulder the same tax responsibility as the rest of the city and thus that the freeze was intrinsically unfair. Moreover, the rest of the city would be subsidizing the private business interests that took over the redevelopment area. Marv Olsen, “sa’s Redevelopment—­Why?,” Orange County Register, February 11, 1973, sahr. Lynn O’Dell, “Rundown sa Community Fighting to Stay Alive,” Orange County Register, May 15, 1977, sahr. Local protests had at first convinced the city to subsidize 58 of the 316 new apartments for the barrio’s former low-­income tenants, but in 1979 the condominium’s developers de­cided to leave out the subsidized apartments. A lawsuit followed, and eventually developers agreed to pay Civic Center Barrio Housing Corp., the newly or­ga­nized group representing the interests of displaced residents, $1.4 million. The corporation subsequently put the money t­ oward a renovated housing proj­ect elsewhere in Santa Ana. Bob Schwartz, “ ‘I Need a Place of My Own,’ ” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1989. Frank Clifford and Eric Bailey, “Orange County Hispanic, Asian Growth Surges,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1991; Gottlieb et al., Next Los Angeles, 77. Doreen Carvajal, “Bittersweet Nostalgia: Housing Gains Disbanded Much of Santa Ana’s Black Community,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1994. Mike Davis (Magical Urbanism, 40) uses the term polycentric barrio to refer to Chicago’s multiple barrios. Romo, East Los Angeles, 10, 69. Doyle Mc­Manus, “Newport Beach: Enough Glimmer to Go Around?,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1982.

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62 For an example from the news, see Jack Rosenthal, “The Outer City: U.S. in Suburban Turmoil,” New York Times, May 30, 1971. 63 The New York Times noted that the “outer city” is “becoming the city they thought they had left b­ ehind, with many of the same prob­lems and responsibilities.” The “prob­ lems” included, I surmise, the “prob­lem” populations of de­cades prior—­Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans. Linda Green­house, “The Outer City: Growth Turning into a Menace,” New York Times, June 3, 1971. 64 Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias. 65 William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock note that in “the early 1970s, as concern about the inner-­city crisis waned and the decentralization of the metropolis reached new proportions, ‘the urbanization of the suburbs’ suddenly became a topic of national interest.” Sharpe and Wallock, “Bold New City or Built-­Up ’Burb?,” 4. 66 Kling, Olin, and Poster, Postsuburban California, 21. 67 Soja, Postmetropolis, 238. I first came across Kling’s interpretation in this work. 68 Lang and LeFurgy, Boomburbs, 61. 69 Lang and LeFurgy, Boomburbs, 65, 84. 70 Gregory, “Bristol Street Gang.” Banco del Pueblo was established in 1971 on North Sycamore Street in Santa Ana and relocated to West Fourth Street in 1976. The bank moved to Los Angeles in 1981, where it was renamed the Pan American Bank of Los Angeles. 71 For a study of a similar proj­ect that arose in the early twenty-­first c­ entury, see Irazábal and Gómez-­Barris, “Bounded Tourism.” 72 Vaquera-­Vásquez, “Postcards from the Border,” 123. 73 See Padilla Corona, “El Centro Histórico de Tijuana,” 123. I first read about Tijuana’s urban history in Peralta, “Illicit Acts of Urbanism,” 137. 74 Vanderwood, Satan’s Playground. 75 Kun and Montezemolo, Tijuana Dreaming. 76 Herzog, Return to the Center. 77 Heriberto Yépez writes that Tijuana was born her “own pimp.” Yépez, “Tijuanologies,” 52. 78 Alarcón, “Traddutora, Traditora.” 79 Photo­graphs of the Logan barrio, sahr. 80 “Some Santa Ana Property O ­ wners May Join in Development Venture,” Los Angeles Daily Journal, July 11, 1984, sahr. 81 Hackworth, Neoliberal City. 82 “Santa Ana Marketplace Wins Initiative Award,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1986. 83 “Santa Ana: Tentative OK Reached.” 84 Author interview with Robert Escalante, Santa Ana, November 2008. 85 Author interview with Dave Ream, Santa Ana, November 2008. 86 Molotch and Logan, Urban Fortunes. 87 Jennifer Delson, “An Old Theater Is Cast in a New Role,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2007.

258 Notes to Chapter 3 88 Author interview with Louie Olivos Jr., Santa Ana, August 2014. 89 Dennis McLellan, “The Show Must Go On,” Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1999. 90 Bob Schwartz, “For Some, Fiesta Is Nothing to Celebrate,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1989. 91 Barry S. Surman, “Harassment Charged by Santa Ana Bar ­Owners,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1984. 92 Hackworth, Neoliberal City. 93 G. M. Bush, “Downtown Planners Urge Santa Ana to Follow a Slower Course,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1984. 94 On Wilshire Boulevard, see Olsen, “sa’s Redevelopment—­Why?” 95 Rob Richardson, “Report from Meeting with Councilman Bricken,” Rob Richardson interview with Bricken, 1984, sahr. 96 Rob Richardson, “Report from Meeting with Councilman Dan Young,” Rob Richardson interview with Dan Young, 1984, sahr. 97 Rob Richardson, “Report from Meeting with Councilman Bricken,” Rob Richardson interview with Bricken, 1984, sahr. 98 Helen Johnson, “Revival of Downtown Santa Ana Rests on 3 Proj­ects, Aides Say,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1968. 99 John Gregory, “New Hopes, Plans for Downtown Santa Ana,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1973. 100 “Hope for New Life in Santa Ana,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1974. 101 Leo C. Wolinsky, “9-­Block Proj­ect Proposal for Downtown Santa Ana,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1982, sahr. 102 Julie Stutts and G. M. Bush, “Central County: Santa Ana Delays Decision on ­Future of Downtown Swap Meet,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1984. 103 Rob Richardson, “Report from Meeting with Councilman Bricken,” Rob Richardson interview with Bricken, 1984, sahr. 104 Author interview with Sam Romero, Santa Ana, November 2008. 105 García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures. For more on the Tijuana landscape of the 1970s, see Ford and Griffin, “Tijuana Landscape.” 106 Author phone interview with Robert McClellan, July 2013. 107 Author interview with Carlos, local resident and activist, November 2008. 108 The San Antonio River Walk is filled with restaurants and outdoor entertainment. 109 Ayele, “Cite Survey.” 110 Lin, Power of Urban Ethnic Places; Wayne King, “Houston’s Spanish Accent Gets More Pronounced,” New York Times, June 10, 1985. By 1987 El Mercado del Sol was described as “ailing” by Texas Monthly magazine. Listings, Texas Monthly, August 1987, 48; listings, Texas Monthly, October 1986, 68. 111 Irazábal and Gómez-­Barris, “Bounded Tourism,” 188. 112 Clifford and Bailey, “Orange County Hispanic, Asian Growth Surges.” 113 Author interview with Raymond A. Rangel, downtown Santa Ana, November 2008. 114 Barry S. Surman, “Harassment Charged by Santa Ana Bar ­Owners,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1984.

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115 Schwartz, “A Comeback on 4th Street.” 116 Schwartz, “A Comeback on 4th Street”; Karen Newell Young, “Fiesta Marketplace in Santa Ana Offers Cross-­Cultural Shopping,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1989. 117 Leading proponents of New Urbanism envision an urban design movement that is an antidote to suburban sprawl and other shortcomings of suburban living, such as automobile de­pen­dency. According to the “Charter of the New Urbanism,” ratified in 1996 by a group of architects and urban planners, princi­ples of New Urbanism also include high population density, pedestrian activity, public transportation, public space, sustainability, compact mixed-­use spaces, mixed-­income neighborhoods, citizen-­based participatory design, and a variety of architectural forms. Congress for the New Urbanism, “Charter of the New Urbanism”; Duany, Plater-­Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation; P. Katz, New Urbanism. 118 Haya El Nasser, “New Urbanism Embraces Latinos,” usa ­Today, February 15, 2005; Holtzman, “Latin Invasion.” 119 “Katherine Perez: Latino New Urbanism,” Active Living Network, accessed June 20, 2012, http://­www​.­activeliving​.­org​/n ­ ode​/3­ 4. 120 Doug Irving, “In Santa Ana’s Downtown, a Push for Change,” Orange County Register, September 6, 2010. 121 For more on the Artists Village, see E. González, Latino City, 63–65. 122 Santa Ana is listed as a city in the Metropolitan Area of Los Angeles–­Long Beach–­ Santa Ana, California. See US Census Bureau, “Largest Urbanized Areas with Selected Cities and Metro Areas,” November 15, 2012, https://­www​.c­ ensus​.­gov​/­dataviz​ /­visualizations​/­026​/5­ 08​.p ­ hp. 123 Florida, Rise of the Creative Class. 124 Author interview with Sam Romero, Santa Ana, November 2008. 125 Londoño and Gonzalez, Race and Retail. 126 Local community members, several of whom ­were urban planners by training, created Santa Ana Collaborative for Responsible Development (SACReD) to ensure that new development had the interests of vari­ous community stakeholders in mind. This antigentrification organ­izing is not antiproperty, antibusiness, or antigovernment; instead members want a fair share of the redevelopment and commercial arena and demand that the city’s diverse municipal government body represent working-­ class, as much as middle-­class, Latinos. For more on SACReD, see E. González et al., “Grassroots and New Urbanism.” 127 Irving, “In Santa Ana’s Downtown.” 128 According to Erualdo González and R. Lejano, “This c­ ounters much of American urban history which documents elite Anglo policy actors perpetuating ethnic and racial discrimination in barrios, specifically, and in marginalized communities of color, generally.” E. González and Lejano, “New Urbanism and the Barrio,” 2960. 129 Hector Becerra, “Latino, Yes, but with New Tastes: Cities Are Rejecting New ‘Amigo’ Stores as More Mexican Americans Go Mainstream,” Los Angeles Times, May 28, 2008. 130 Becerra, “Latino, Yes, but with New Tastes.”

260 Notes to Chapter 3 131 Jennifer Medina, “New ­Faces and a Contentious Revival,” New York Times, October 30, 2011. 132 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 133 Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place, 245–47. 134 J. Butler, Precarious Life, 129. 135 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 13.

Chapter 4. Barrio Affinities and the Diversity Prob­lem 1 Emma Harrison, “ ‘Better’ Rights for Negro Urged,” New York Times, May 21, 1963; Jack Langguth, “Urban League Drafts Plan to Increase Opportunity for Negroes,” New York Times, July 30, 1963. 2 Dickerson, Militant Mediator, 209. 3 Transcript of proceedings of the American Institute of Architects (aia) 100th Convention on “Man/Architecture/Nature,” Whitney M. Young Jr. Keynote Address, Portland, Oregon, June 23–27, 1968, American Institute of Architects Archives, Washington DC. 4 “Philadelphia’s New Prob­lem,” Time, February 24, 1958. 5 Wolf Von Eckardt, “Black Neck in the White Noose,” New Republic, October 19, 1963. 6 Transcript of proceedings of the American Institute of Architects (aia) 100th Convention on “Man/Architecture/Nature,” Whitney M. Young Jr. Keynote Address, Portland, Oregon, June 23–27, 1968, American Institute of Architects Archives, Washington DC. 7 Robert E. Koehler, “Man/Architecture/Nature,” aia Journal, September 1968, American Institute of Architects Archives, Washington DC; Eve M. Kahn, “Renewed Hope for Black Architects,” New York Times, April 9, 1992. 8 Barrio Planners Inc., “Community Design Centers and the Environmental Protection Act of 1969” (pre­sen­ta­tion, joint Environmental Design Research Association and aia Architect Researcher’s Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA, January 24–27, 1972). For more on community design centers, see Peter Aeschbacher, “Voices in the Thunderous Silence: Minority Architects in the Early Years of the Community Design Center Movement,” noma magazine, Fall 2014. As Aeschbacher points out, community design centers existed prior to 1971; some ­were begun in the early 1960s. 9 US Bureau of ­Labor Statistics, “Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, and Race, 1972–81,” L ­ abor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: A Databook, Bulletin 2096, September 1982. 10 Data on employed Latinx architects can be found in the 2009 House­hold Data published by the US Bureau of L ­ abor Statistics, “Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity,” 2009 Annual Averages—­Household Data—­ Tables from Employment and Earnings. For more on the low number of black architects in the United States, see Kaplan, Structural In­equality; Anthony, Designing for Diversity. 11 ­These numbers are representative of membership in the association and may include retired architects and urban planners. See the website of the apa, accessed Febru-

Notes to Chapter 4

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13

14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21

22 23

24 25

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ary 12, 2019, http://­www​.­planning​.­org; Vazquez, “Improving the Purpose and Accountability of the American Planning Association”; Vazquez and Kanai, Lagging ­Behind. I first began to examine a barrio affinity in relation to the graphic design work of Pablo Medina. See Londoño, “Barrio Affinities.” On scopic regimes, see Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” The work of Cisneros, Muñoz, and Rojas could be read alongside the litany of artists and authors that Latinx studies scholar Randy Ontiveros examines to better understand the con­temporary vestiges of the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Ontiveros, In the Spirit of a New ­People. El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, accessed January 20, 2020, http://­umich​.­edu​/­~mechaum​ /­Aztlan​.­html. For more on the differences between barrios and colonias, see Arreola, Tejano South Texas, 83. Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, Plan de Santa Barbara. MEChA is short for Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán), a movement begun in the 1960s and currently represented by vari­ous student groups in university campuses across the United States. Ontiveros, In the Spirit of a New ­People. James Rojas, “How the Civil Rights Movement ­Shaped Latino Urbanism in East L.A.,” kcet, January 21, 2015, https://­www​.­kcet​.­org ​/­history​-­society​/­how​-­the​-­civil​-­rights​ -­movement​-s­ haped​-­latino​-­urbanism​-­in​-­east​-­la. I was made initially aware of this fact by Raúl Homero Villa in his book Barrio-­Logos. The term first appears in Gomez, “A Barriology Examination.” rgs/ups was an offshoot of the Real G ­ reat Society (rgs). Founded in 1964 by Chino Garcia, Angelo Gonzalez, Rabbit Nazario, and Armando Perez on the Lower East Side, rgs primarily focused on fighting poverty, reducing youth delinquency, and increasing literacy. Roger Vaughan, “The Real ­Great Society: Some Tough New York Slum Kids Team Up to Fight Poverty Instead of Each Other,” Life, September 15, 1967, 76–91; Aponte-­Parés, “Lessons from El Barrio,” 409. This quote stems from the funding proposal the rgs submitted to the Ford Foundation, which Luis Aponte-­Parés examines in his unparalleled study of the organ­ization. Aponte-­Parés, “Lessons from El Barrio,” 408. The rgs/ups took part in the G ­ reat Garbage Offensive that has been largely attributed to the Young Lords. The quote ­here is from the funding proposal the rgs submitted to the Ford Foundation. Aponte-­Parés, “Lessons from El Barrio,” 408–12; Walter Thabit, “History of peo (Planners for Equal Opportunity),” May 1999, accessed March 1, 2017, https://­ ecommons​.­cornell​.­edu​/­handle​/1­ 813​/­41472. Aponte-­Parés, “Lessons from El Barrio,” 417–18. Early on Alex Man, an environmentalist, joined the organ­ization. By 1975 Man, Angelo, and Orozco had left Barrio Planners. Man would become a critic of Barrio Planners, castigating it for transitioning to a profit-­making com­pany and taking up proj­ects that ­were not locally based, a move he saw as a severe deviation from

262 Notes to Chapter 4

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

the group’s initial nonprofit status as a “community design center.” George Ramos, “Drawing the Line: Planners Meld Activism, Urban Proj­ects Incomplete Source,” Los Angeles Times, June 5, 1988. The many proj­ects Barrio Planners participated in outside East Los Angeles included work the organ­ization did with John Mutlow of Mutlow Dimster Partnership in the design of Cabrillo Village, a residential complex for farm workers in Saticoy, California, near Ventura. See B. Goldstein, “Harvest the Sun.” In the late 1980s, Barrio Planners was also active in challenging the siting of a prison in East Los Angeles. Ramos, “Drawing the Line.” Proceedings of the joint Environmental Design Research Association and aia Architect Researcher’s Annual Conference, Los Angeles, CA, January 24–27, 1972. Ramos, “Drawing the Line.” Roberto Rodriguez, “Architecture and Barrio Planners,” 28. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 26. I first came across Harding’s stance on desegregation in Lipsitz, “Blood Lines and Blood Shed,” 155. See also Harding, “Responsibilities of the Black Scholar,” 281. L. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 30. aia’s “2009–2013 Diversity Action Plan,” accessed March 24, 2009. “Multicultural environments” are mentioned once in Vazquez and Kanai, Lagging ­Behind. Vari­ous design proj­ects that focus on the needs of low-­income populations have entered the foreground of institutions such as the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where numerous exhibits in the first de­cade of the twentieth ­century focused on design for the masses. ­These proj­ects rarely grapple with cultural difference, however. Mendez, “Latino Lifestyle and the New Urbanism.” Mendez, “Latino Lifestyle and the New Urbanism,” 40. Duany, Plater-­Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation; P. Katz, New Urbanism. Mendez, “Latino New Urbanism: Building on Cultural Preferences,” 44. Mendez, “Latino New Urbanism,” 104. Mendez, “Latino Lifestyle and the New Urbanism,” 34. Mendez, “Latino New Urbanism: Building on Cultural Preferences,” 34. Mendez, “Latino New Urbanism.” Mendez, “Latino New Urbanism: Building on Cultural Preferences,” 41–42, 45–46. Mendez, “Latino New Urbanism: Building on Cultural Preferences,” 41. “Katherine Perez: Latino New Urbanism,” Active Living Network, accessed June 20, 2012, http://­www​.­activeliving​.­org​/n ­ ode​/3­ 4. Villaraigosa, “Antonio Villaraigosa Offers an Agenda.” Cisneros and Engdahl, From Despair to Hope. Cisneros and Engdahl, From Despair to Hope. Architect Oscar Newman coined the term defensible space in his book Defensible Space. ­ nder Cisneros’s leadership, asked Newman to prepare a casebook In 1996 hud, u to “assist public and private organ­izations with implementation of Defensible Space theory.” US Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy

Notes to Chapter 4

50 51

52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66

67 68

263

Development and Research, Creating Defensible Spaces, by Oscar Newman, Institute for Community Design Analy­sis, April 1996, iii. Jacobs, Death and Life of ­Great American Cities. “False Hope: A Critical assessment of the hope VI Public Housing Redevelopment Program” (National Housing Law Proj­ect, San Francisco, June 2002), 26, https://­www​ .­nhlp​.­org​/­files​/­FalseHOPE​.­pdf. In 1995 Congress repealed the “one-­for-­one rule” that required that each public housing apartment unit demolished be replaced. This allowed hope VI to replace high-­rise housing without having to re­house all the tenants on the same site. The result of this was displacement. Many tenants lost a community, their neighbors, and their sense of place. For more on the history of the West Side barrio, see Márquez, Mendoza, and Blanchard, “Neighborhood Formation.” All quotes in this section, ­unless other­wise noted, are from a phone interview with Henry G. Cisneros conducted by the author, May 2011. Wendy Pedrero, “What Is Henry Cisneros D ­ oing ­These Days?,” Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, July–­August 2007; Rick Lyman, “Builder to Offer Martha Stewart-­Style Homes,” New York Times, October 12, 2005. David Streitfeld and Gretchen Morgenson, “Building Flawed American Dreams,” New York Times, October 18, 2008. Streitfeld and Morgenson, “Building Flawed American Dreams.” Sternberg, “Dynamics of Contingency,” 37–47. Henry G. Cisneros and Stephen Goldsmith, “Affordability Gap Destroying Dream of Owning Home,” Chicago Sun-­Times, April 28, 2007. Victoria Romero, “Selling Out a Neighborhood,” Chicago Sun-­Times, May 9, 2007. Sharon Stangenes, “Carpentersville Proj­ect Eyed: Cisneros, Ex-­h ud Chief, Heads Effort,” Chicago Tribune, February 18, 2006. By 2013 the median white h ­ ouse­h old wealth was thirteen times that of black ­house­holds and ten times that of Latinx h ­ ouse­holds. Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry, “Wealth In­equality Has Widened along Racial, Ethnic Lines since End of ­Great Recession,” Pew Research Center, December 12, 2014. Cisneros and Rosales, Casa y Comunidad. Diaz, Barrio Urbanism, 73. Diaz, Barrio Urbanism, 11, 16. The Latino-­American Design Archive at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the only of its kind that focuses on twentieth-­century Latinx designers, was begun in 1995. “Willful Neglect: The Smithsonian Institution and US Latinos, Report of the Smithsonian Institution Task Force on Latino Issues” (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1994), Box Publications, Latino-­American Design Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design. Jose Sanchez, “Southern Exposure,” Oculus 59, no. 6 (February 1997): 15–16, Box Publications, Latino-­American Design Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design. Morales, Latinx, 200.

264 Notes to Chapter 4 69 ­Unless other­wise stated, all quotes in this section are from an interview with Henry Muñoz conducted by the author, New York, June 2011. 70 “Mag. Dossier Henry Munoz III: Name: Henry Munoz III Age: 32,” San Antonio Express-­ News, March 15, 1992. 71 Hernández-­Ehrisman, Inventing the Fiesta City. 72 Brian Chasnoff, “He Pushes the Limits,” San Antonio Express-­News, January 23, 2011. 73 Daniel J. Vargas, “Henry R. Munoz III: El Rey Feo,” San Antonio Express-­News, April 19, 1998. 74 Christopher Anderson, “Alameda Theater Would Be the Star of New ‘Cultural Zone,’ ” San Antonio Express-­News, July 7, 1996. 75 Ybarra-­Frausto, “Rasquachismo,” 156. See also Ybarra-­Frausto, “Chicano Movement.” 76 Terry G. Jordan, “German Vernacular Architecture,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed August 15, 2019, http://­www​.t­ shaonline​.o­ rg​/­handbook​/­online​/a­ rticles​/c­ bg01. 77 Booklet by MuñozWigodsky Architects, Box M, Latino-­American Design Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design. 78 Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race. 79 Stavans, José Vasconcelos, 4–5. 80 Pérez-­Torres, Mestizaje, 3. 81 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, La Frontera. 82 David Anthony Richelieu, “Dancing with Design Diplomacy,” San Antonio Express-­ News, February 26, 1995. 83 David Anthony Richelieu, “Leaning Wall Toppled by Criticism,” San Antonio Express-­ News, March 3, 1995. 84 Linda Morales-­Zamarripa, “Alameda Restores Hope, Interest in Community,” San Antonio Express-­News, November 28, 1996. 85 Anderson, “Alameda Theater Would Be the Star.” 86 Anderson, “Alameda Theater Would Be the Star.” 87 Elizabeth Lunday, “The Alameda, ‘San Antonio’s Apollo,’ Receiving a Make­over,” Architectural Rec­ord, June 2007. 88 Vargas, “Henry R. Munoz III.” 89 A. Paredes, Folklore and Culture. 90 Muñoz and Com­pany, “Edcouch-­Elsa isd Fine Arts Center,” accessed February 21, 2011, http://­munozandcompany​.­com​/p ­ ortfolio​/­edcouch​-­elsa​/­. 91 Muñoz and Com­pany, “Edcouch-­Elsa isd Fine Arts Center.” 92 Mestizo City was readapted in 2015 and installed in Calder Plaza in downtown G ­ rand Rapids, Michigan. Latinx residents ­there are the largest minority group. For this installation, a sign with stenciled lettering that read “port of entry” was placed on the entrance of the cube. The more direct message perhaps stemmed from the fact that the 2016 campaign had started and Donald Trump had announced his presidential bid for the White House, claiming he would build a border wall. ArtPrize, “Port of Entry,” accessed February 6, 2019, https://­www​.­artprize​.­org​/6 ­ 1826. 93 “Mestizo City,” Vimeo, December 8, 2012, https://­vimeo​.­com​/­55180874. 94 “Mestizo City,” Vimeo.

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95 Phil Zimmerman, “Mestizo City,” Texas Architect, September–­October 2014, 89. 96 “Mestizo City,” Vimeo. 97 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Latinos Gain Po­liti­cal Muscle, and Fund-­Raisers Show How,” New York Times, March 7, 2013. 98 ­Unless other­wise noted, all quotes in this section are from a phone interview with James Rojas conducted by the author, June 2011. We arranged a subsequent in-­person interview in San Francisco. Rojas is also a prolific presenter of his work and we have reconnected at vari­ous conferences and symposia. 99 James Rojas, “A Place Erased: ­Family, Latino Urbanism, and Displacement on L.A.’s Eastside,” kcet, March 4, 2016, https://­www​.­kcet​.­org ​/­shows​/­lost​-­la​/­a​-­place​-­erased​ -­family​-­latino​-­urbanism​-­and​-­displacement​-­on​-­las​-­eastside. 100 Rojas, “A Place Erased.” 101 Rojas, “A Place Erased.” 102 Crawford and adobe la, “Mi casa es su casa,” 12. 103 Crawford and adobe la, “Mi casa es su casa,” 13. 104 Rojas, “Latino Urbanism in Los Angeles.” 105 Rojas, “Enacted Environment,” 50. 106 Rojas, “Enacted Environment,” 91. 107 “Introduction,” Radical Amer­i­ca 12, no. 2 (March–­April 1978): 3. 108 Patrick T. Reardon, “Flashback: Chicago’s ‘Wall of Re­spect’ Inspired Neighborhood Murals across U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, July 29, 2017. 109 Drescher and Garcia, “Recent Raza Murals in the U.S.,” 18. 110 Drescher and Garcia, “Recent Raza Murals in the U.S.,” 18. 111 hooks, Art on My Mind, 147. 112 hooks, Art on My Mind, 149. 113 See, for example, Nieves, “Cultural Landscapes of Re­sis­tance and Self-­Definition.” 114 Rojas, “A Planning Primer: Validating the Lived Experience,” Planetizen, September 9, 2015, https://­www​.­planetizen​.­com​/­node​/­80889​/­planning​-­primer​-­validating​-­lived​ -­experiences​-­immigrants​.­%C2%A0; “About,” Place It!, accessed January 25, 2020, http://­www​.­placeit​.­org​/­about​.­html. 115 “Gallery,” Place It!, accessed January 25, 2020, http://­www​.p ­ laceit​.o­ rg​/­gallery​.­html. 116 One prominent example is Teddy Cruz, a recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture, who is internationally known for conceiving of designs for low-­income ­people in the United States, Mexico, and Nicaragua that are inspired by the informal developments of Tijuana. 117 Urban Think Tank, accessed February 14, 2020, http://­u​-t­ t​.­com. 118 Efrén Santana and James Rojas, “PanAmerican Urbanism” (pre­sen­ta­tion, mak Center, West Hollywood, CA, August 13, 2008), http://­makcenter​.­org ​/­programming​ /­panamerican​-­urbanism​/­. 119 Author interview with Cuban architect, Miami, April 2015. 120 Portes and Stepick, City on the Edge. 121 Stolberg, “Latinos Gain Po­liti­cal Muscle.” 122 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 3.

266 Notes to Chapter 4 123 M. Mitchell, Crisis of the African-­American Architect, 217. 124 Zewde, “Theory, Place, and Opportunity”; “Re-­Thinking Black Urbanism” (conference at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2006–7), http://­www​.­gold​.­ac​.­uk​ /­cucr​/r­ esearch​/­revisioning​-­black​-­urbanism​/­. 125 Bonnie Tsui, “Chinatown Revisited,” New York Times, January 24, 2014. 126 Paralleling the critical vein I offer ­here, urban planner and professor Clara Irazábal questions ­whether lnu romanticizes poverty. Irazábal, “Beyond ‘Latino New Urbanism.’ ” 127 Rojas, “Enacted Environment,” 19. 128 The same could be said of Mike Davis, an urban theorist on the left, who described Latinx landscapes as a “magical urbanism.” Meant to celebrate Latinx creative energies vis-­à-­vis hostile policies, and undoubtedly to gesture ­toward Latin Amer­i­ca’s “magical realism” style, Davis’s magical urbanism fetishized as re­sis­tance the cultural expression allowed by property owner­ship. Unlike the brokers discussed in this book, however, he had l­ ittle to gain from proposing a discursive dichotomy between the crisis that Latinx urbanism represents and its magical contributions. Davis, Magical Urbanism. 129 Bender, Tierra y Libertad.

Chapter 5. Brokering, or Gentrification by Another Name 1 See Feldman and Jolivet, “Back to ­Little Havana”; Dávila, Barrio Dreams; Jennifer Medina, “Los Angeles Neighborhood Tries to Change, but Avoid the Pitfalls,” New York Times, August 17, 2013. For an examination of black-­led gentrification, see, for example, Patillo, Black on the Block. 2 See, for example, N. Smith, “Gentrification and Uneven Development,” 139. 3 Zukin, Loft Living. 4 N. Smith, New Urban Frontier. 5 Lees, “Super-­gentrification.” 6 In a note to his classic article on how uneven development in metropolitan areas leads to gentrification, Neil Smith suggests as much. Writing that “very vital working-­class communities are de-­vitalized through gentrification,” Smith implies that economic devalorization does not always precede the “revalorization” of gentrification but rather can be its result. N. Smith, “Gentrification and Uneven Development,” 139. 7 Lees, “Super-­gentrification.” 8 Dávila, Barrio Dreams, 30, 97. 9 National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, “Latino Homeownership Rate Outpacing O ­ thers,” March 23, 2016, http://­nahrep​.­org ​/­nahrep​-­in​-­the​ -­news​/­2016​/­03​/­23​/­latino​-­homeownership​-­rate​-­outpacing​-­others​/­. The same article appears on the website of the Hispanic Wealth Proj­ect (hwp), March 23, 2016, http://­ hispanicwealthproject​.­org ​/­resources​/­blog ​/­latino​-­homeownership​-­rate​-­outpacing​ -­others​/­.

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10 W. Flores and Benmayor, Latino Cultural Citizenship, 1, 15; Rosaldo, Culture and Truth. 11 Otto Kempner, “New Suburban Era Dawning in Jersey,” New York Times, April 24, 2010. 12 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 60. 13 See “Plot to Aid Alien Charged,” New York Times, August 23, 1929. Mae Ngai writes that in the 1920s, “deportation assumed a central place in immigration policy” due to the passing of the Immigrant Act of 1924. By 1929 unauthorized entry had become a criminal offense, thus augmenting the downsides of deportation. Though temporary workers from Cuba w ­ ere allowed to cross into the United States without a passport or visa, overstaying the period designated as “temporary” made one illegal. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 57, 60, 71. 14 Alfonso Narvaez, “50,000 Cubans Add Prosperity and Prob­lems to Jersey,” New York Times, November 24, 1970. 15 Evelyn Nieves, “Union City and Miami: A Sisterhood Born of Cuban Roots,” New York Times, November 30, 1992. 16 Boswell, “Cuban Americans.” 17 Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 68. 18 Grosfoguel and Georas, “Latino Ca­rib­bean Diasporas in New York.” 19 This data is included in Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 81. Torres cites Prohias and Casal, Cuban Minority in the U.S., 111. 20 Cuban resettlement was aided by religious organ­izations around the country. In Hudson County the Catholic Church was an impor­tant actor in Cuban relocation. See Rogg and Cooney, Adaptation and Adjustment of Cubans, 16; J. Thomas, “Cuban Refugees in the United States.” 21 Current, “Normalizing Cuban Refugees.” See also Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate. 22 W. Mitchell, “Cuban Refugee Program,” 3. 23 Portes, “Dilemmas of a Golden Exile,” 508. 24 Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 68. 25 Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 68. 26 Roediger, Working ­toward Whiteness; Avila, Popu­lar Culture in the Age of White Flight. 27 Grosfoguel and Georas, “Latino Ca­rib­bean Diasporas in New York.” 28 Grosfoguel and Georas, “Latino Ca­rib­bean Diasporas in New York.” Grosfoguel and Georas derive their information from Cronin, “Ethnicity, Opportunity and Occupational Mobility.” See also Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects, 169. 29 Portes, “Dilemmas of a Golden Exile,” 508. 30 Rogg and Cooney, Adaptation and Adjustment of Cubans, 15. 31 Prieto, Cubans of Union City, 9. 32 Author interview with business owner, Union City, NJ, May 2011. 33 Author interview with business owner, Union City, NJ, May 2011; Rogg and Cooney, Adaptation and Adjustment of Cubans, 15. 34 Steve Strunsky, “For 125 Years, a Big Industry That Produces Delicate Lace,” New York Times, August 31, 1997. 35 “Embroidery Field in Midst of a Boom,” New York Times, December 10, 1972. 36 “Embroidery Field in Midst of a Boom.”

268 Notes to Chapter 5 37 “Hughes Says Cubans Are Asset in Jersey,” New York Times, April 16, 1966. 38 Hearings before the Committee to Investigate Prob­lems Connected with Refugees and Escapees of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate Cuban Refugee Prob­lem, 89th Cong., 140 (1966) (statement of Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York). 39 Hearings before the Committee to Investigate Prob­lems, 139. 40 My use of “pioneer” h ­ ere echoes Juan Gonzalez, who uses the word pioneer to refer to the first Mexicans to establish cities, industries, and communities in the United States. J. Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire, 96. 41 Weingarten, “ ‘To Thine Own Self Be True,’ ” 52. 42 Hearings before the Committee to Investigate Prob­lems (statement of Reverend Hemsley). 43 Narvaez, “50,000 Cubans.” 44 Narvaez, “50,000 Cubans.” 45 Jesus Rangel, “A Touch of Havana Brings Life to Union City,” New York Times, ­February 22, 1988. 46 Narvaez, “50,000 Cubans.” 47 Jeff Stein, “An Army in Exile,” New York Magazine, September 10, 1979, 44–45. 48 Author interview with business owner, Union City, NJ, May 2011. 49 Robert D. Hershey Jr., “Dentist Envisions New Bank for Spanish-­Speaking Community,” New York Times, December 29, 1969. 50 “New National Bank Opposed in Jersey,” New York Times, November 25, 1969. 51 Hershey, “Dentist Envisions New Bank.” 52 Author interview with business owner, Union City, NJ, May 2011. 53 Narvaez, “50,000 Cubans.” 54 David Vidal, “In Union City, the Memories of the Bay of Pigs D ­ on’t Die,” New York Times, December 2, 1979. 55 Rangel, “Touch of Havana.” 56 “Crowded Union City Glum on Change,” New York Times, November 3, 1974. 57 During the Newark riot of the summer of 1967, Newark police used so much ammunition that they borrowed twenty cases of r­ ifle cartridges from Union City. This underscores just how safe and predictable Union City officials thought the Cuban population was compared to local Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Homer Bigart, “Newark Riot Deaths at 21 as Negro Sniping Widens; Hughes May Seek U.S. Aid,” New York Times, July 16, 1967. 58 Douglas Robinson, “2 Cubans Seized in Jersey in Montreal Bomb Plot,” New York Times, May 21, 1969. 59 The Cubans who ­were convicted ­were l­ ater acquitted in 1981. It was found that Michael Vernon Townley, a former American-­born cia agent and Chilean secret police member u ­ nder Pinochet’s regime, was directly responsible for the murder and had recruited the men for assistance u ­ nder false pretenses. “2 Cuban Exiles Acquitted at Retrial of Letelier Murder,” New York Times, May 31, 1981; Robert D. McFadden, “Cuban Refugee Leader Slain in Union City,” New York Times, November 26, 1979.

Notes to Chapter 5

269

60 Vidal, “In Union City, the Memories of the Bay of Pigs ­Don’t Die.” The use of the word dialogue refers to a set of conversations and meetings that took place in Havana in 1978 between Cuban exiles living in the United States and the Cuban government. See Torres, In the Land of Mirrors, 94–100. 61 Walter H. Waggoner, “Union City, with Cuban Exiles in Mind, Withdraws Welcome,” New York Times, September 5, 1970. 62 Jerry Cheslow, “Union City Angered by Cuban Pact,” New York Times, January 3, 1988. 63 Boswell cites his own comparative study of Miami and the North Hudson area of Union City and West New York and notes that the largest Afro-­Cuban mi­grant population was found in the Northeast. See Boswell, “Cuban Americans,” 162. 64 Alfonso A. Narvaez, “Cubans Finding the Good Life Is Elusive,” New York Times, June 15, 1980. 65 Narvaez, “Cubans Finding the Good Life.” 66 Narvaez, “50,000 Cubans.” 67 Author interview with Colombian mi­grant, Union City, NJ, August 2014. Material from this interview first appeared in Londoño, “Critical Latina/o Urban Studies.” 68 Green, “From Downtown Tenements to Midtown Lofts.” 69 Leonard Sloane, “Tides of Fashion Delight Weavers of Schiffi Lace: Gains Predicted in Schiffi Lace,” New York Times, June 11, 1964. 70 For how shifts in fashion trends boosted the embroidery industry, see Sloane, “Tides of Fashion Delight Weavers of Schiffli Lace”; “Embroidery Field in Midst of a Boom.” 71 Strunsky, “For 125 Years, a Big Industry That Produces Delicate Lace.” 72 From 1989 to 2000, the city’s population grew by nearly nine thousand. For 1989 data, see State of New Jersey Department of L ­ abor and Workforce Development, “1989 Persons below Poverty: State, Counties, and Municipalities,” http://­lwd​.­dol​.­state​.­nj​ .­us​/­labor​/­lpa​/­industry​/­incpov​/­poverty​/­percenpv​.­htm. For 1999 data, see New Jersey Department of ­Labor, “njsdc 2000 Census Publication.” 73 Antoinette Martin, “The Gold Coast Alternative,” New York Times, April 24, 2009. 74 Thomas L. Waite, “N.J. Conversions, Union City Blooms,” New York Times, July 31, 1988. 75 S. Butler, “Enterprise Zone.” 76 S. Butler, “Enterprise Zone,” 16. 77 N. Smith, New Urban Frontier, 17. 78 For an account of the emergence and development of enterprise zone programs in the United States, see Wong, “Local Enterprise Zone Programs,” 17. See also Mossberger, Politics of Ideas, 2. 79 Urban Enterprise Zone Program, “Urban Enterprise Zone Tax Questions and Answers, May 2009, https://­www​.­state​.­nj​.­us​/­dca​/­affiliates​/­uez​/­publications​/­pdf​/­tax​ _­q&a​_­052709​.­pdf. 80 Jessica Rosero, “Shopping/Business District Gets Make­over uez Hosts Dinner Meeting, Introduces Façade Improvement Program,” Hudson Reporter, March 18, 2007;

270 Notes to Chapter 5 Jessica Rosero, “What’s Happening at Your Meeting? Vari­ous Resolutions Passed at Union City Board of Commissioners Meeting,” Hudson Reporter, September 2, 2007. 81 Santo Sanabria, “Keeping Bergenline and Tonnelle Pumping,” Hudson Reporter, July 3, 2011. 82 See “Our uez,” accessed September 23, 2010, www​.fi ­ rstlookagency​.­com​/­unioncity​/u ­ ez​ .­html. 83 Rosero, “Shopping/Business District Gets Make­over.” 84 “Changing ­Faces uc uez Completes First Façade Improvement Proj­ect,” Hudson Reporter, December 14, 2001. 85 Author interview with business owner, Union City, NJ, May 2011. 86 I examine this Cuban-­owned business in more detail in Londoño, “Barrio Affinities”; Londoño, “The Latino-­ness of Type.” 87 Author interview with restaurateur, Union City, NJ, May 2011. 88 Jason Laday, “State Senate fails to save Urban Enterprise Zone funds,” South Jersey Times, July 13, 2011, https://­www​.­nj​.­com​/­cumberland​/­2011​/­07​/­state​_­senate​_­fails​_­to​ _­save​_­urb​.­html. 89 Author interview with restaurateur, Union City, NJ, May 2011. 90 The initial plan was circulated in 2008 and updated, extended, and uploaded to the municipal website in 2009. See Charles Latini Jr., pp, aicp, Heyer, Gruel and Associates, Master Plan, Plan Maestro: Executive Summary, Resumen Ejecutivo, Draft (City of Union City, August 2008), v; Charles Latini Jr., pp, aicp, Heyer, Gruel and Associates, Master Plan (City of Union City, April 2009), 5, 42. 91 Latini, Master Plan (2009), 5, 42. 92 Latini, Master Plan (2008), v. 93 Author interview with salon owner, Union City, NJ, October 2014. 94 Author interview with bakery owner, Union City, NJ, November 2014. 95 Amanda Kolson Hurley, “Grayed Expectations: What’s with All the Gray Houses,” Washington City Paper, December 23, 2015, https://­www​.­washingtoncitypaper​.­com​ /­news​/­housing​-­complex​/­blog ​/­13124714 ​/­grayed​-­expectations​-­that​-­rowhouse​-­is​-­gray​ -­why; Sofie Kodner, “San Francisco Is Turning Gray—­One House at a Time,” kalw Public Radio, September 10, 2019, https://­www​.­kalw​.­org ​/­post​/­san​-­francisco​-­turning​ -­gray​-­one​-­house​-­time#stream​/­0; Jacqueline Serrato, “ ‘Casa Aztlan’ Developer Promises to Re­create Mural in Pilsen,” Chicago Tribune, June 23, 2017. 96 Bewes, Reification, 4. 97 Bewes, Reification, 4. 98 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 380, 387. 99 Rúa, A Grounded Identidad, 51, 71–77. 100 Moskowitz, How to Kill a City. 101 Michael Henry Adams, “The End of Black Harlem,” New York Times, May 27, 2016; Justin Hernandez, “The Slow Death of Urban Grit,” Huffington Post, May 28, 2013; Pete Clark, “The Slow Death of Soho: Farewell to London’s Sleazy Heartland,” The

Notes to Coda

102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111

271

Guardian, November 25, 2014; Margaret Kimberley, “Gentrification and the Death of Black Communities,” Common Dreams, May 29, 2015. Rebecca Solnit, “Death by Gentrification: The Killing That Shamed San Francisco,” The Guardian, March 21, 2016. “Celia Cruz Park Community,” accessed 2011. http://­bestplaces​.­nydailynews​.­com​ /­neighborhoods​/c­ elia​-­cruz​-­park. Damien Cave, “Union City Journal: A Park’s Dominican Name, Reflecting Quirky Diversity,” New York Times, August 15, 2004. Latini, Master Plan (2008), 5 Roach, Cities of the Dead. Sturkin, Tangled Memories. The Latinx identity category and who it includes and excludes is complex and not confined to t­ hose Latinxs who w ­ ere born on the mainland of the United States. Both José Martí and Celia Cruz lived in the United States for many years. Some may describe them as Latinxs. Some may also categorize Puerto Rican Eugenio María de Hostos as Latinx ­because of Puerto Rico’s status as a US territory. D. Paredes, Selenidad, 9–10. J. Butler, Precarious Life, 129. Schmidt-­Camacho, Mi­grant Imaginaries, 59. Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary.”

Coda: Colorful Abstraction as Critique 1 For an expansive look at late twentieth-­and early twenty-­first-­century immigration policies, see A. Gonzales, Reform without Justice. Details on Latinx population gains can be found in A. Flores, “How the U.S. Hispanic Population Is Changing.” 2 “Written testimony of cbp U.S. Border Patrol Acting Chief Carla Provost and cbp Office of Field Operations Deputy Executive Assistant Commissioner John Wagner for a House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Homeland Security Hearing Titled ‘Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection fy18 Bud­get Request,’ ” June 13, 2017, https://­www​.­dhs​.­gov​/­news​/­2017​/­06​ /­13​/­written​-­testimony​-­cbp​-­house​-­appropriations​-­subcommittee​-­homeland​-­security​ -­hearing. 3 Other Border Wall Design / Build idiq Contract, hsbp1017R0023, March 17, 2017, https://­www​.­scribd​.­com​/­document​/­342280325​/C ­ BP​-­RFP​-­for​-­Other​-­Border​-­Wall. 4 Quoted in Elizabeth Williamson, “Trump Plans to View Wall Prototypes: ­Here Are Some He ­Won’t See,” New York Times, March 12, 2018. 5 Williamson, “Trump Plans to View Wall Prototypes.” 6 Hassanaly Ladha, The Prison-­Wall, Mamertine Group, 2016, accessed December 20, 2018, https://­www​.­mamertinegroup​.­com​/­prison​-w ­ all​.­html. 7 Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 198. 8 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 13.

272 Notes to Coda 9 Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings,” 16. 10 Ladha, The Prison-­Wall. 11 Caleb Duarte, “Walking the Beast,” 2017, http://­www​.­calebduarte​.­org ​/­chasing​-­the​ -­beast​/­4587431571. 12 Rebecca Schreiber, “Performing Asylum: ‘Urgent Art’ and the Uses of Testimony” (pre­ sen­ta­tion, American Studies Association Conference, Atlanta, GA, November 9, 2018). 13 See, for example, Dear, Villa, and Lecler, Urban Latino Cultures; Davis, Magical Urbanism.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures or information in captions. Abrams, Charles, 32 abstraction, 10, 17, 172, 185; of the barrio, 185, 218, 223, 227; colorful, 18, 71, 89, 107, 174, 222; multiculturalism as, 152; “Puerto Rican prob­lem” and, 67, 223; of space, 21, 214, 224 activism: antigentrification, 140, 158, 259n126; black po­liti­cal, 120, 255n37; idea of internal colony and, 14, 83–84, 232n39; inner city, 7. See also Chicana/o movement; organ­izing; social movements adaptation, 27, 29, 35, 49, 192, 235n21. See also assimilation adobe la, 176–77 advertisements: Henry Street Settlement, 43; promoting Latin American colors, 91–95, 93, 94; Sachs, 53, 55; Union City businesses, 203 aesthetics: Anglo, 99; blended, 165; class, xvii, 28; community, 104, 251n138; diversity and, 3; of furniture, 52; gentrification, 213–14; geopolitics of, 221; Latinx, xii, 159, 160; Lewis and, 87; lnu, 174; modern, xiv, 42, 44, 44–45, 91, 213; New Urbanism, 155–56; racialized, 184, 210; of space, 103; Spanish colonial, 65–66; of wealth, 1. See also color affordable and supportive housing. See housing African Americans, 25, 96, 241n121, 254n22; architects, 145–46; in the Bronx, 67, 81;

civil rights, 34, 86, 144–45, 177, 178; in Jersey City, 192–93; muralists, 177; placemaking, 178; poverty, 71, 114, 245n5; purchasing power, 53, 240n109; in San Juan Hill, 76, 243n13; in Santa Ana, 119–20, 121, 124, 125, 255n37; settlement ­houses, 34–35, 51 Afro-­Cubans, 198, 207, 269n63 Alarcón, Norma, 130 Albers, Josef and Anni, 91, 96 Alegria, Ricardo, 248n106 Alexander Gorlin Architects, 107, 109 alienation, xv–­xvi, 14 American Institute of Architects (aia), 144–45, 151, 153, 172 American Planning Association (apa), 146, 153, 260n11 anx­i­eties, 5, 71, 121; color and, 85–86; barrios and, 3–4, 19, 26, 218, 230n4 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 9, 165 Aparicio, Frances R., 16, 230n13 Aponte-­Parés, Luis, x, 99, 150, 261n21 architects, 45, 46, 91, 151, 162; diversity and, 144–46, 161; Latinx, 2, 164, 176, 179, 222. See also developers architecture journals and magazines, 23, 106, 172 arrabal, 12–13, 231n28 Arreola, Daniel, 97, 232n36 Aspen International Design Conference (1962), 81, 244n32

294 index assimilation, 3, 110, 213, 243n3; Mexican Americans, 99, 100, 141, 168; Puerto Rican mi­grants, 18, 24, 39, 67, 71, 79; reverse, 182 Avila, Eric, 252n5 Baja California, 129 “bandidos,” 129, 256n50 bank loans, 192 Barber, Llana, 230n5 Barragán, Luis, 168, 222 barrioization, 14–15, 19, 30, 66, 70, 89 barriologist, 150 barriology, 16 Barrio Planners, 151, 261n25 barrios: activism in, 148–49, 218; border wall proposal and, 223; brokers’ affinities, 17, 20, 146, 147, 149, 152, 159, 164, 227; concentrations, 17, 30, 116, 135, 142, 230n4; culture and identity contexts, 13–16, 180; death and, 218; distancing from, 175, 185; general definition, vii; gentrification and, 185, 214–15; historical evolution, 11–13, 125; polycentric, 124–25, 256n59; as racial category, 175; urbanism, x, 160–61 Beauregard, Robert, 4–5, 117 belonging, 14, 45, 164, 227, 231n21; black cultural, 177; Chicana/o, 171; to cities, 25, 107, 111, 183, 184, 189; crisis of, 6, 17, 18, 21, 72, 174, 224; Latinx, 137, 141, 147, 168, 213, 218, 219–20; Puerto Rican, 39, 57, 68, 71, 73 Bender, Steven, 6, 103 Benjamin, Walter, 252nn155–56 Benmayor, Rina, 189 Bergenline Ave­nue (NJ): changing landscape of, 200–201; Cuban business ­owners, 195–96, 206–7, 212, 213; gentrification and, 189; storefronts and interiors, viii, 203–9, 204–6, 208–10; visual dynamism of, 201–202. See also Union City (NJ) Berman, Marshall, 143 Bewes, Timothy, 214 Black Panthers, 84, 197, 255n37 Black Power movement, 121, 144 Blaszczyk, Regina Lee, 89

Bloom, Nicholas Dagen, 44 Bloomingdale’s, 92, 93 Bobb, Robert C., 131, 132, 134 Brenner, Neil, 231n14 Bricken, Gordon, 133–34 Briggs, Laura, 83, 245n38 brokers: abstractions, 10, 18, 227; black, 9; business ­owners as, 213; Chicana/o movement and, 148–49, 151, 157, 162, 181; colors and, 110–11; description and role of, ix, 7–9, 11, 227; gentrification and, 20–21; inclusion and exclusion, 16, 183; production of space and, xvi–­xvii; Santa Ana’s, 19, 112, 127–29, 128, 137; settlement workers as, 26, 40–41, 55; social distancing of, 16–17; Union City, 184, 187 Bronx (NY), 15, 81, 186; Morrisania, 107, 109; South Bronx, 50, 87, 106, 197, 244n23. See also New York City Brooklyn (NY), 30, 41, 126, 194, 244n23; gentrification, 105, 140, 186–87, 251n149. See also New York City Buck-­Morss, Susan, 252n155, 252n157 built environment: blackness and, 178; brokers/brokering, 19, 134–35, 146; changes or destruction of, 118, 124, 125, 142; colors of, 97–98, 100, 107; fixed, 225–26; general discussion, 3–5; Latinized, 147, 164, 183, 184, 188, 225; power strug­g les of, 219; Puerto Ricans in, 25–26, 28, 33, 40, 57, 65, 67–69; in Union City, 187, 188, 199 Burgess, Ernest W., 243n3 Burgess, Rod, 38 Burgos, Adrian, 15 Bustamante, Carlos, 141 Butler, Judith, 143, 217 Cabranes, Manuel, 27, 28, 33, 39 Cacho, Lisa Marie, 15 cancer meta­phor, 115, 124, 138, 253n13 Cannon, Mary Antoinette, 37, 236n48 capitalism, xv, 107, 143, 174, 255n37; decline and, 4–5; gentrification and, 185–86, 213–14, 219; Marx and, 10; urban, 6, 142, 252n5

index Caro, Robert A., 8 casitas, x, 99, 249n114 Castañeda, Ernesto, 232n35 Castro, Fidel, 87, 184, 190, 197 Catholic Church, 191, 198, 267n20 Ceballos, José, 128–29, 137 Celia Cruz Park Community, 215 Centro 18, 159 Certeau, Michel de, x, 229n6 Chase, Irving M. “Irv,” 128–29, 131, 137, 138–39 Chavez, Leo, 6 Chávez-­Silverman, Susana, 16, 230n13 Chicago, 159, 177 Chicago Daily Tribune, 92, 93 Chicana/o movement, 2, 130, 147, 165; barrio brokers and, 19, 148–49, 151, 155, 162, 181; in East Los Angeles, 175, 177; middle-­class Mexican Americans and, 99, 123, 255n50; poems, 11; prominent leaders, 149; role of barrios and colonias, 148, 175, 218; role of colors, 98–99; in Santa Ana, 122–23. See also activism; social movements Chinatowns, 11, 119, 182 Chinese immigrants, 119 chromatic color, 5, 71, 82, 88, 111, 246n68; gentrification and, 72; origins of, 95. See also color Cisneros, Henry, 19–20, 151–53, 163, 182, 183, 250n120; Chicana/o activism and upbringing, 148–49, 157, 181; education and mayoralty, 136, 157–58, 162; and New Urbanism, 155–56; promotion of lnu, 147, 158–61 Cisneros, Sandra, 103–4, 166 citizenship, 53, 167, 171, 224; for Cuban refugees, 194; cultural, 187, 216; for Puerto Ricans, 63, 235n43 CityView, 156, 158–59 Civic Center Barrio Housing Corp., 124, 256n56 civil rights: acts, 152; African American, 34, 86, 144–45, 177, 178; internal colony approach to, 83–84; Latinx, 33, 149, 177. See also Chicana/o movement Clinton, Bill, 155

295 cochineal, 95, 107 Cohen, Lizabeth, 53 Colombians, 199, 200–201, 210 colonization, 12–13, 18, 129, 140; architecture and aesthetics and, 65–66, 97–98, 156; color and, 72, 85, 95, 97–98, 107, 109, 110–11; re­sis­tance to, 83–84; sexuality and, 83 color: anx­i­eties and, 85–86; barrios and, 18, 103, 111; Benjamin on, 252n156; border wall proposal and, 222–25; business interiors, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213; colonization and, 72, 85, 95, 97–98, 107, 109, 110–11; copyrighted, 246n60; in fashion advertisements, 92–95, 93, 94; housing and gentrification and, 104–7, 105, 108; Latin American origins of, 89–95; marketing of, 96–97; politics and identity of, 88–89, 98–99, 111, 168; in public spaces, 100, 101, 102–4, 112, 249–50n118; racial connotations of, 71, 210, 243n7; store facades, 203–4, 204, 205, 206–7, 210, 211; of southern Eu­rope, 85; urban poverty and, 84–85, 99–100; in La Vida, 73, 74, 82–83, 84, 87; in West Side Story, 73, 75, 77–79, 243n11. See also chromatic color; skin color Color Association of the United States, 96–97 colorists, 85, 91, 95–96, 151 commemorations, 21, 189, 215–17 condominium development, 118, 124, 201, 218, 256n56; colors and gentrification, 106, 107, 108, 109 consumers: colors conveyed to, 91–93; culture, 8, 53, 96; Fiesta Marketplace, 137–38; goods, 45, 51, 89; Latinx, 97, 140, 191; Mexican, 112, 113, 115, 141; white, 97, 112, 133; ­women, 89 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 161–62, 262n34, 263n66 corridos, 167–68 Corrigan, Faith, 56 Cortés, Ernesto “Ernie,” Jr., 149, 157 Cortés, Hernán, 129–30 Cossío del Pomar, Felipe, 97–98, 248n102 Costa Rica, 12, 231n28

296 index courtyards, 154, 165, 176 Crawford, Margaret, x, 176–77 creative class, 139 creative destruction, 5, 142, 215 criminalization, 15, 223, 224 Cruz, Al, 135 Cruz, Celia, 215, 271n107 Cruz, Teddy, 265n116 Cuban Nationalist Movement, 197 Cuban Refugee Program, 191–92, 194, 198 Cubans: business ­owners, 201, 206–7, 212, 213; color preferences, 96; Miami mi­grants, 180–81, 190–91; radical po­liti­cal organ­izations, 197, 268n59; skin color, xii–­xii, 191, 198; Union City mi­grants, 184, 189, 191–98 culture of poverty, 3, 18, 69, 73, 100, 111, 223; colonial reading of, 83; deviant sexuality and, 87; East Harlem riots and, 86–87, 246n57; gentrification and, 72; low level of organ­ization and, 79–80; Mexicans/ Puerto Ricans comparison, 80; origin of term, 70, 243n2; physical environment and, 81. See also poverty Davalos, Karen Mary, 238n76 Dávila, Arlene, ix, 8, 20, 187, 230n13 Davis, Mike, ix–­x, 266n128 Dear, Michael, x death meta­phor, 189, 214–18 decline: concept of, 4–5, 114 Department of Homeland Security (dhs), 220, 221 department stores, 45, 90; Bloomingdale’s, 92, 93; Hecht Co., 94; Macy’s, 92, 223; Sears, 247n97. See also Sachs Quality Stores deportation, 14, 92, 190, 267n13 developers, 51, 131, 140; condominium, 256n56; housing, 106, 107, 158–59; real estate, 112, 174; shopping mall, 100, 133–35, 249–50n118 Deverell, William, 25 Diaz, David, x, 16, 160–61 Díaz Borioli, Leonardo, 222

difference: class and racial, 18, 82, 96, 151, 202; cultural, 6, 92, 152–53, 157, 196, 213, 262n34; markers of, 88; Puerto Rican, 24, 35, 37, 56, 78 Dinzey-­Flores, Zaire Z., 241n120 discrimination, 20, 64, 78, 145, 153, 182; housing, xii, 51, 183, 193, 253n8; in Santa Ana, 120–23, 256n50. See also racism disinvestment and reinvestment, cycle of, 4–5, 187 displacement, 7, 49, 174, 183, 214, 223; barrio destruction and, 124, 151, 256n56; gentrification and, 4, 104, 106, 107, 110, 187, 215; of high-­rise tenants, 156, 263n52; local businesses and, 131, 137, 140; organ­izing against, x, 113; subprime lending and, 6, 147, 158–59; urban renewal and, 32, 76–77, 254n22 dispossession, 6, 14, 32–33, 179, 181, 223 diversity, 5, 19–20, 72, 107; American, 103; architects and, 144–47, 179; multicultural discourse and, 152–53; university goals of, 3, 6 División de Educación de la Comunidad (divedco), 37–38, 236n50 Dominicans, 210 Duarte, Caleb, 226 Du Bois, W. E. B., 9 Duneier, Mitchell, 15 East Harlem (NY), 8, 20, 48, 151, 241n121; El Barrio, 66, 76–77, 84; colorfulness of, 85–86; condominium development, 106, 107, 108, 109; gentrification, 187; Park Ave­ nue Market, 67; plazas, 67–68; Rincón de Gautier’s visit, 63; riot, 86–87, 150, 197, 246n57; Riverton Houses, 51; supportive housing, 105. See also New York City East Los Angeles (CA), x, 122–23, 125, 151, 154; Chicana/o movement, 175, 177; housing style, 175–77, 176, 179; Rojas’s upbringing in, 149, 175. See also Los Angeles (CA) elites, xi, 6, 7, 87, 144, 184, 259n128; Cuban, 193; in New York City, 23, 63, 66; Puerto Rican, 37, 234n13; in San Antonio, 158,

index 162; in Santa Ana, 112, 127–29, 128, 131, 141; urban, 66, 132, 175, 254n22 embroidery industry, 193–94, 199 Engels, Friedrich, 143 En­glish, Darby, 243n7 Escalante, Roberto, 129, 131 Estudio 3.14, 221–22, 225 Eu­ro­pean immigrants, 13, 34, 190; Lower East Side, 23–24, 31; parallels with Puerto Ricans, 27, 56, 63, 233n10; urban poverty, 84–85, 99–100 Fainbarg, Allan, 121, 128, 132, 138 fashion, 92–95, 93, 94, 247n97 Fausett, Dean, 42 feminists, 130 Fiesta Marketplace (Santa Ana, CA): brokers, 19, 127–29, 128, 137; colors, 112, 113, 135, 139; consumers, 137–38; destruction, 139, 140–41, 143; development and design, 100, 112–13, 115, 134–37; Latinization of space and, 142–43; local businesses ­owners, 130–32, 138, 140 Fischer, Claude S., 245n33 Fishman, Robert, 126 Flores, William V., 189 Florida, Richard, 139 foreclosures, 159–60 Frazier, E. Franklin, 243n3 front yards, 164, 168, 176, 178, 179 furniture, 41–42, 44, 44–45; Sachs, 51–53 gangs: Dragons, 60; Sharks/Jets, 73, 76, 77–78, 78 García, Guadalupe, 12 gardens, x, 249n115 garment industry, 193, 199, 233n55 Gauguin, Paul, 85 gentefication, 185 gentrification, 4, 9, 15, 18, 40, 231n21; aesthetics, 213–14; affordable and supportive housing and, 104–6, 105, 109, 159, 251n139; artist-­led, 251n149; brokering as, 184–86, 214; color and colonization and, 72, 106–7, 110–11; condominium development and,

297 106–7, 108; death meta­phor, 214–15, 217–18; rental housing market and, xiii–­xiv, 104; Neil Smith on, 110, 186–87, 202, 233n56, 253n5, 266n6; Union City, xii, xv, 186–88, 208–9, 213–14; white dominance of, 19, 140 Georas, Chloe S., 35, 192 German-­inspired architecture, 164–65, 166 ghettoes/ghettoization, 14, 15, 114, 175, 223, 232n36. See also slums Gilmore, Ruth, 223 Goldstein, Alyosha, 38 Gonzales, Alfonso, 8 González, Erualdo, 253n11, 259n128 González, Juan, 7, 268n40 Gonzalez, Rodolfo “Corky,” 11 Good Neighbor policy, 90, 94 Griset, Daniel E., 115, 124, 138 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 35, 192 Grupo Zocalo, 249n118 Guridy, Frank, 15 Haas, Lisbeth, 256n52 Hall, Helen, 41, 46, 49, 53, 68; Puerto Rican mural proj­ect and, 23–24, 25, 60–61, 62; visits to Puerto Rico, 37–39, 237n59 Hanhardt, Christina, 253n13 Harding, Vincent, 152 Harlem (NY). See East Harlem (NY) Harlem Dowling, 105 Harlem Riot (1964), 67, 81 Harris, Dianne, 48, 247n92 Harvey, David, 110 Harvey, David L., 87 Hecht Co., 94 Henning, Edward, 128–29 Henry Street Settlement: Home Planning Workshops, 41–42, 46, 53, 54, 56–57, 58, 59; interior decorations, 42, 44; Lincoln House, 34–35; Mobilization for Youth proj­ect, 66, 242n136; model apartments, 43, 45–46, 47, 48–49, 55–56; mural proj­ect, 23–24, 60–61, 62, 63; Puerto Rican inclusion, 56–57, 64–65; social workers, 17, 26, 31–32, 37–41 Heritage Foundation, 202–3

298 index Hernández-­Ehrisman, Laura, 162 high-­rise buildings, 106, 155–56, 182, 263n52 Higuera, Margarita, 39 Hirschmann, Ira, 52 Hoboken (NJ), 186, 187, 192, 197, 202, 213 hooks, bell, 9, 178 hope VI, 156, 263n52 Hostos, Eugenio María de, 216, 271n107 ­hotels, 134; Aztec ­Hotel (Monrovia), 91; Caribe Hilton (Puerto Rico), 37; Trump ­Hotel (New York City), 1 houses: colors, 102–4; in East Los Angeles, 175–77, 176, 179; Latinx preferences, 154, 159, 160–61; mortgages, 158–59, 192; in Puerto Rico, 28, 98, 234n13; in Santa Ana, 124; Spanish colonial, 97. See also property owner­ship housing: affordable and supportive, 104–6, 105, 109, 159, 214, 251n139; choices, 71, 243n3, 253n8; crisis, 50, 159–60; developers, 106, 107, 158–59; gentrification and, 104–7; modernist, 42, 64, 67, 155; policy, 14, 57, 71, 156, 230n4; private, 106, 108; segregation and discrimination, xii, 51, 124, 144, 193, 253n8; self-­help, 37–38, 49, 236n54, 237n59; suburban, 116, 175, 247n92; Union City rental, xii–xv, 186. See also public housing Housing and Urban Development, US Department of (hud), 19, 131, 147, 153, 155, 156, 160 Housing Choice Voucher Program Section 8, xiii, xv, 156 Hudson County (NJ), 190–91, 194, 196, 199, 209, 267n20. See also Union City (NJ) iconography: Mexican, 129, 135, 139, 168; religious, 207; rural, 99, 249n115 identity: barrio, 40, 185, 187, 194, 198; Cuban, 180; homeownership and, 176–77; Latinx, 7, 10, 15–16, 110, 140, 271n107; mestizaje, 165, 172; Mexican American, 181; Puerto Rican, 40, 69, 98, 218; Santa Ana’s urban, 19, 117, 125–27; white, 46, 48, 115, 252n5; working-­class, 176, 179, 187

immigration policies, 190, 220, 267n13 Incan cities, 97 inclusion, 3, 25, 152, 219, 225; barrios and, 146–47; of Latinx culture, 6, 16, 20–21; Mexican American, 120; Puerto Rican, 56–57 indigenous populations, 171–72 Indych-­López, Anna, 90 interior design: Bergenline Ave­nue businesses, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213; courses and schools, 51, 239n98; diy approach, 53, 54; Mexican-­inspired, 90–91; middle-­class homes, 97, 104, 247n92; “Prison-­Wall” proposal, 224, 225; public housing, 41–42, 44, 44–45; Puerto Rican cultural inclusion, 55–57 internal colony, 14, 83–84, 232n39 Irvine (CA), 118–19 Isenberg, Alison, 252n2, 253n9 Italian immigrants, 84–85 Jackson & Ryan Architects, 168, 169, 170 Jacobs, Jane, 23, 155–56 Jameson, Fredric, vii Jarritos ­bottles, 172, 173 Jersey City (NJ), 192–93, 197, 202 Jews, 30–31, 49, 243n12 Johnson, Lyndon, 114, 121, 158, 243n6, 246n57 Johnson-­Reed Act (1954), 31 Jones Act (1917), 27, 63, 235n43 Jopling, Carol, 98, 234n13 kb Home, 158–59, 160 Kell, John, 163, 166 Kennedy, Robert F., 194 Kerner Report (1968), 114, 120, 246n57 Kihss, Peter, 86 Kimball Hill Urban Centers, 159 kitchen design, 46, 47, 48, 82 Kwak, Nancy H., 237n59 Ladha, Hassanaly, 222 La Guardia Houses: model apartment, 49, 53, 54, 55–56; Puerto Rican-­themed mural,

index 23–24, 60–61, 62, 63; Rincón de Gautier’s speech at, 64–65; tenant population, 33 landlords, 104, 204, 218; discrimination, xii–­xv; rent increases, xiii, 32, 88–89 landscapes, viii, 3, 60; Bergenline Ave­ nue, 200, 202; colorful, 86, 91; East Los Angeles, x; Latinx, xvi, 154, 171, 266n128; Mexican, 136; natu­ral, 220, 222; normative, 168; of otherness, 77; politics of, 225; rural, 99, 249n115; Union City, x–­xiii, 186, 200–201, 218 Laó-­Montes, Agustín, 230n13 Latin American–­US relations, 89–90, 94 Latinidad, 6, 159, 180, 217, 226; colors and, 18, 111, 172, 185; repre­sen­ta­tions of, 230n13; spatial threat of, 78; in Union City, 189 Latinization of cities, 156, 160, 199; brokered, xvii, 10, 19, 21, 140–41, 185, 227; “new,” 172, 183; pro­cess, 8, 230n13; of Union City, 215, 218 Latino-­American Designer Archive, 161, 263n66 Latino New Urbanism (lnu), 137–38; Cisneros’s promotion of, 147, 158–61; conferences, 155, 174; and Latino Urbanism, 174–75; Mendez’s idea of, 154–55. See also New Urbanism Latino Urbanism, 147, 149, 174–75, 177–80 Latinx: term usage, 229n1 Laugier, Henri, 51–52 Leach, William, 8, 45 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi/Izenour/ Brown), vii, x Leclerc, Gustavo, x Le Corbusier, 106 Lee, Anthony W., 90–91 Lee, Sonia Song-­Ha, 8, 33 Lees, Loretta, 187 Lefebvre, Henri, xv, 21, 214, 249n114 Legaspi Com­pany, 249n118 Legorreta, Ricardo, 100, 101, 102, 166, 168, 250n120 Letelier, Orlando, 197, 268n59 Levitan, Aida, 96

299 Lewis, Oscar, 71, 74, 95, 243n2, 244n30, 245n33; aesthetic interests, 87; colorful descriptions, 82–83, 84, 87–88; on poverty, 13, 70, 79–81; and physical environment, 81–82; and “primitive ­people,” 80; and Puerto Ricans, 73, 76, 86; research staff, 82, 245n38 Lewis, Ruth Maslow, 84 liberals, 34, 102, 152 Lincoln House, 34–35 Lincoln Square, 76–77 Lipsitz, George, 5, 142 Lopez, Jennifer, 15 Los Angeles (CA), 126, 155, 257n70; barrios, 122; Olvera Street, 134, 136; riots, 116, 120; South Gate suburb, 102–3. See also East Los Angeles (CA) Los Angeles Times, 123, 137, 141, 256n52 Lowe, Lisa, 152 Lower East Side (NY): baby boom, 56; brokers, 17, 26; Eu­ro­pean immigrants, 23–24, 31; gentrification, 110, 186, 251n149; as Loisaida, 26, 66, 69; public housing development, 40–41, 57; Puerto Rican concentrations, 30–31, 40, 68–69; Stuyvesant Town, 51, 238n74; white flight, 49. See also Henry Street Settlement; New York City Luján, Carolina, 82–83 Lynch, Barbara Deutsch, 249n115 Madden, David, xv Malinche, 129–30, 131 Malinowski, Bronisław, 246n59 malls. See shopping malls Mamertine Group, 222, 224 Marcuse, Peter, xv Márez, Curtis, 99 marginalization, 13, 20, 69, 84, 157, 182, 191; barrios and, vii, 14, 198; histories of, 179, 180, 183, 238n76; white flight and, 114 Marielitos, xii, 198, 229n8 Martí, José, 215–16, 271n107 Marx, Karl, 6, 10, 87, 143, 252n155 Matlin, Daniel, 9, 230n5 Mayan Revival Style, 91

300 index Mayer, Albert, 67–68 McClellan, Robert, 135 McClellan Cruz Gaylord and Associates (mcg), 135 MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), 122, 148, 255n46, 261n16 median income, 52, 133 Medina, 12 Medina, Pablo, viii Meehan, William J., 195, 196, 197 Melamed, Jodi, 152 Mendez, Michael, 154–55 Mendez v. Westminster, 122, 255n45 Menendez, Robert, 198 El Mercado del Sol (Houston), 136, 258n110 Meso-­American architecture, 248n100 mestizaje, 165, 171–72 Mestizo City: ­Grand Rapids installation, 264n92; Miami installation, 172, 173, 174 mestizo regionalism and architecture, 165–68, 169, 170, 171 Mestizo Urbanism, 147, 172, 174 Met Life, 51 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 45, 238n76, 248n100 Mexican American ­Legal Defense and Education Fund (maldef), 3 Mexican Americans, 180, 232n36; assimilation and unassimilation, 100, 103, 141, 168; identity, 181; middle-­class, 99, 123, 162, 255n50; repatriation and deportation, 14, 92; in Santa Ana, 113–15, 120–25, 255n50; in Texas, 136, 167–68 “Mexican prob­lem,” 25, 233n5 Mexican-­themed architecture, 133–35, 136, 151, 249–50n118 Mexico: artists and designers inspired by, 90–91, 100, 112; colors associated with, 89, 93, 93–96, 94, 222, 249–50n118; crafts and fashion, 90; iconography, 129, 135, 139, 168; modernism, 168; muralists, 90–91; ­musicians, 132; US imaginary of, 115. See also Tijuana; US-­Mexico border Miami (FL): Art Basel, 172, 173, 174; Cubans, 180–81, 190–91

Michaels, Philip H., 49–50, 239n90 middle-­class normativity, 184, 191–92, 198, 219 mi­grant workers, 94–95, 186, 267n13; ­programs, 7, 122 Migration Division (for Puerto Ricans), 27, 28–29, 50, 234n11 Miller, Mike, 242n136 Mills, C. Wright, 234n12 Miranda, Norberto, 222 Mission District (San Francisco), 106–7, 108 Mitchell, Melvin L., 181 Macy’s, 92, 223 mobility: socioeconomic, 2, 30, 154, 227; spatial, 13, 30; upward/downward, 70, 79, 87, 102–3, 123, 154, 192, 193 model apartments: advertising for, 43; diy approach to decoration, 53, 54; furnishings, 49, 52–53, 55, 55–56; kitchens, 46, 47, 48; on Long Island, 52, 240n113; reasons for, 45–46 modern architecture, 44, 64, 102, 106, 163, 234n13 modernization, 10, 234n13; New York City, 17, 25–26, 31, 39; of public housing, 42, 44, 44–45; Puerto Rico, 38 Molotch, Harvey, 253n8 Mondini-­Ruiz, Franco, 164 Moses, Robert, 8, 32 Moskowitz, Peter, 215 Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 122, 148, 255n46, 261n16 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 13, 71, 86, 114, 243n6 Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, 25 multiculturalism, 20, 79, 152–53 Muñoz, Henry R., 6, 17, 19, 147, 151–53; architecture ­career and politics, 1–3, 162–65, 174; Chicana/o activism and, 148–49, 162, 181; on mestizo “blendedness,” 171–72; mestizo proj­ects, 165–68, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173; museum affiliations, 161–62 Muñoz and Com­pany, 1, 147, 162–63; buildings, 3, 4, 171; Mestizo City, 172, 173 Muñoz Marín, Luis, 36, 38–39, 50, 241n120

index murals, 168, 215; Chicana/o, 98–99, 177, 249n116, 255n46; Henry Street Settlement, 23–24, 25, 60–61, 62, 63; origins of, 177–78; Rivera’s, 90–91 Muriente, Francisca, 82, 245n38 Museo Alameda (San Antonio), 166–67, 169, 170 Museum Design Proj­ect Inc., 51–52 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 51, 52, 56, 61, 90, 91, 233n1 National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (nahrep), 188 National Organ­ization of Minority ­Architects (noma), 145 Negrón-­Muntaner, Frances, 35, 71 New Jersey, 191, 197, 198, 199; homeownership rate, 188; sales tax, 203; uez, 202–3. See also Bergenline Ave­nue (NJ); Hudson County (NJ); Union City (NJ) Newman, Oscar, 262n49 New Urbanism, 138, 160–61, 208; “black,” 181; princi­ples of, 154, 259n117; public housing development and, 155–56. See also Latino New Urbanism (lnu) New York Age, 51 New York City, x, 8, 199; barrios, 18, 76; Cuban mi­grants, 190–91, 194; gentrification, 186–87; islands within, 79, 244n22; modernization, 17, 25–26, 31, 39; partnership with Puerto Rico, 39, 55; poverty, 81, 85; Puerto Rican mi­grants, 17–18, 23–24, 28–35; racial composition, 48; urban renewal/regression, 32, 34, 81. See also Brooklyn (NY); East Harlem (NY); Lower East Side (NY) New York City Housing Authority (nycha), 42, 44–45, 46, 49, 57, 241n121; furniture loaned to, 52–53; officials, 63, 64, 65 New York Daily News, 55, 215 New York Times, 50, 67, 86, 107, 141, 215, 251n149; advertisements, 90, 93, 246n68; on La Guardia model apartment, 55–56; on Sachs, 51; on Santa Ana, 125, 257n63; on Union City, 195, 196

301 Ngai, Mae, 267n13 Ngô, Fiona I. B., 17 Obama, Barack, 174 O’Dwyer, William, 63 Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo), 121, 145 Olalquiaga, Celeste, 249n115 Olivos, Louie, 132 Omega 7, 197 Omi, Michael, 5 Ong, Aihwa, 223 Ontiveros, Randy, 149, 261n13 Orange County (CA), 19, 112, 120, 126, 131, 138–39; barrios, 123–24, 125; poverty, 121; segregated schools, 122; suburban development, 116–17, 119, 124. See also Santa Ana (CA) organ­izing, ix, 2, 36, 87, 140, 148; antigentrification, 140, 259n126; low-­level, 79–80; Mexican-­led, 113, 122; radical po­liti­cal, 197, 268n59 orientalism, 16–17 other/otherness, 3, 17, 35, 73; colors and, 18, 72, 75, 77, 110, 224; sexuality and, 83 outer/inner cities, 125–26, 257n63 Oyster Development Corp., 106 Padilla, Elena, 233n10 Paine, Frances Flynne, 90 Paredes, Américo, 167 Paredes, Deborah, 217 Park, Robert E., 243n3 Partido Popu­lar Democrático (ppd), 38–39, 65 Patillo, Mary, 9 Patri, Piero, 133 Pérez, Gina, 15 Perez, Katherine, 138, 155 Pérez-­Torres, Rafael, 165 Peru, 92 Peterfy, Karin, 46, 48, 49, 57 phantasmagoria, 110, 252n155 Pietri, Pedro, 11, 217–18 Place It!, 178–79

302 index placemaking: African American, 178; Cuban, 180–81; Latinx, 7, 155, 174–75, 179, 183, 232n41; New Urbanist, 208 Plan de Santa Barbara, 148, 149 Planning Board of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, 37, 38 plazas, 67–68, 176 pm Architecture, 107, 109 police brutality. See vio­lence politics, 66, 223, 225, 242n136; of brokers/ brokering, 10, 17, 19, 181; of color, 88–89, 99, 168; communist, 91; Cuban repre­ sen­ta­tion in, 198; cultural, xi, 15, 147, 181, 183, 216; Muñoz and, 163, 174; racial, 81, 172; radical, 111, 157, 181, 197, 226, 227; of visibility, 6, 8 Polony, Elemér, 61, 62, 63, 64 popu­lar culture, 15, 252n5 Portes, Alejandro, 180, 192, 193 postmodern design, vii poverty, 18, 20, 67; black, 86, 114, 243n6; colorfulness and, 84–85, 88, 99–100; cultural explanations for, 13–14, 32, 79–81, 86–87; Lower East Side, 40; Mexican/ Puerto Rican comparison, 80, 241n43; Orange County, 121; physical environment and, 81; “pornography” of, 83; Union City, 199–200. See also culture of poverty power relations: of brokers, 8, 9; built environment and, 219; colonial, 110; color and, 18, 89, 99, 104; spatial, xvi, 220; white, 114, 115, 124 Prieto, Yolanda, 193 “Prison-­Wall,” 21, 221–26; exterior views, 221, 222; interior design, 224, 225 Pritchett, Wendell, 254n22 privilege, 2, 9, 18, 110, 120 “prob­lem” rhe­toric, 25, 35, 57, 61, 192. See also “Puerto Rican prob­lem” property owner­ship, 158–59, 182–83, 184, 266n128; Cuban business ­owners, 192, 196, 202, 206–7; landlords, 218; Latinxs and, 188; property values, 125; racialization of, 193. See also ­houses

public housing, x, 64, 237n63, 241n120; complaints and concerns, 33, 40–41, 61; displacement and, 156, 263n52; Lower East Side developments, 40–41; model apartments, 43, 45–46; New Urbanist styles, 155–56; Sachs’s leadership in, 51–53; settlement workers, 33–35, 40–41; tenant se­lection, 45; wait lists, xiii. See also Henry Street Settlement; housing public space, x, xvi, 65, 176, 214; color in, 89, 91, 98–100, 101, 102–4, 172; Latinx cultural inclusion, 6, 168, 217, 218; private markets and, 189. See also space “Puerto Rican Obituary” (Pietri), 11, 217–18 “Puerto Rican prob­lem”: abstractions and, 67, 223; actors devoted to, 33–34; culture of poverty and, 70, 71; origin of, 35, 36; overview, 23–26; reasons for, 26–27, 60–61; Rincón de Gautier and, 64, 65; solutions to, 17, 32, 36, 65–66, 67. See also “prob­lem” rhe­toric Puerto Ricans: adaptation to urban life, 26–30, 39, 48–49; birth rate, 56; citizenship rights, 63, 233n43; colors and, 85–86, 96, 99; cultural and artistic expression, 55–57, 61, 64–65, 68; cultural characteristics and lifestyles, 31–32, 36, 48; Eu­ro­pean immigrants and, 23–24, 233n10; identity, 69, 86, 98, 99, 218; in Jersey City, 192–93; as lacking modernity, 34, 49; in New York City, 17, 30–31; in public housing, 32–33, 35, 49; Sachs’s involvement with, 49–50; welfare recipients, 194–95. See also Henry Street Settlement; West Side Story “Puerto Ricans of New York City” report (1948), 27, 234n12 Puerto Rico, 7, 27–28, 241n120; barrios of, 13, 232n33; colors and architecture, 65–66, 85, 98; Operation Bootstrap, 36, 38; Sachs’s visit to, 50; San Juan, 98, 248n106; self-­ help housing program, 37–38, 49, 236n54, 237n59; settlement workers’ visits to, 36–39, 53, 55 Pulido, Laura, 120

index Quijano, Anibal, 192 race relations, 50–51, 53, 243n3; in Santa Ana, 120–24; tensions and parity, 78–79 racial categories, 24, 78, 175, 231n28 racial hierarchies, xiii, 5, 120, 223, 227 racialization, xiii, 147, 180, 193, 243n3; of aesthetics, 184, 210; “frontier” language and, 202–3; median income and, 52; of poverty, 18, 114; of Puerto Ricans, 24, 27, 29, 35, 77–78, 81; of space, 15–16, 124; of Union City, 200–201; urban decline and, 4–5; of US cities, 71. See also other/otherness racism, x, xii, xiii, 142, 152, 198, 223, 246n57. See also discrimination Radical Amer­i­ca, 177 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 8 Rangel, Raymond A., 128, 137 rasquache, 99, 164, 172, 178–79 Reagan, Ronald, 42, 112, 123, 131, 203 Real ­Great Society Urban Planning Studio (rgs/ups), 150, 151, 261nn20–22 Ream, Dave, 124, 131, 138 Reed, Michael H., 87 refugees: Central American, 226; Cuban/ Mariel, xii, 186, 180–98, 229n8 reification, 214 rental housing market: evictions, xiii, 14, 57, 142, 241n119; New York City, 30, 32; Union City, xii–xv. See also tenements repre­sen­ta­tional in­equality, 152–53 revitalization programs, 21, 203–4, 206–7, 210. See also Fiesta Marketplace (Santa Ana, CA) Richards, Ann, 163–64 Rigdon, Susan, 84, 244n30 Riis, Jacob, 84–85, 88 Rincón de Gautier, Felisa, 38–39, 98; at Henry Street Settlement mural ceremony, 62, 63; on Puerto Rican cultural contributions, 64–66 riots, 144, 252n2; Harlem, 67, 81, 86–87, 150, 246n57; Los Angeles, 116, 120; New Jersey, 197, 268n57; Santa Ana, 121. See also vio­lence

303 Rivera, Diego, 90–91 Rivera Santos, Luis, 37, 39 Roach, Joseph, 216 Robbins, Ira S., 64 Rodriguez, Luz Marie, 37 Rodriguez, Pedro L., 196 Rojas, James, viii, 19, 147, 151–53, 182; barrio affinity, 147, 175; Chicana/o activism, 148–49; on East Los Angeles housing style, 175–76, 176; Latino Urbanism concept, 147, 174, 177–80 Romero, Sam, 134–35, 140 Rosaldo, Renato, 89, 189 Rouse, James W., 112, 252n2 Rúa, Mérida, 15, 215, 217, 231n21 Rubio Cancela, Carlos A., 98 Rust ­Belt cities, 112, 117, 125, 127, 197 Sachs, Israel, 51 Sachs, Nathan, 51, 52 Sachs, Richard, 50, 239n90 Sachs Quality Stores: community development and race relations, 49–51, 53, 239n98; low-­cost furniture design ­competition, 51–52; model apartment furnishings, 55, 55–56 Said, Edward, 17 San Antonio (TX): barrios, 157, 158, 160, 166; Fiesta Plaza, 136; Fine Arts Center, 167–68, 171; International Trade Center, 165–66; King William historic district, 103–4; Lago Vista, 158–59; Museo Alameda, 166–67, 169, 170; National Public Radio, 162; Public Library, 100, 101, 102, 166, 250n120; River Walk, 136, 258n108; university buildings, 167, 168 Sandoval-­Sánchez, Alberto, 243n13 San Juan Hill, 34, 244n15; setting for West Side Story, 76, 243nn12–13 Santa Ana (CA), 18–19; Artists Village, 138; Banco del Pueblo, 127, 257n70; barrios, 123–25, 256n52, 256n56; Community Action Council (cac), 121; Community Redevelopment Agency, 131, 256n54; East End, 139, 139–40; founding, 121, 255n41;

304 index Santa Ana (CA) (continued) Fourth Street redevelopment, 112–13, 115–16, 132–34, 138–41, 253n11, 259n126; Mexican discrimination and activism, 120–22; populations of color, 118–20, 138; urban identity, 117, 125–27, 139; white flight and urban blight, 113–14, 116–18; Yost Theater, 132, 140. See also Fiesta Marketplace (Santa Ana, CA) Santa Ana Collaborative for Responsible Development (SACReD), 259n126 Santa Ana Freeway, 116, 118, 124 Schmidt-­Camacho, Alicia, 217 schools: architecture, 2–3, 68, 164, 222; interior decorating, 51, 239n98; segregated, 122 Schumpeter, Joseph, 5, 142 Sears, 247n97 segregation: of African Americans, 120, 143–44; barrios and, 6, 10, 72, 147–48, 227, 230n4, 254n22; historic districts and, 103–4; housing, 2, 53, 124, 253n8; schools, 122; settlement ­houses and, 34–35, 51, 238n74; spatial, 13, 99, 119, 137, 178, 223 self-­determination, 148, 150, 178, 232n39 Se­nior, Clarence, 27–30, 33, 37–38, 39, 81, 234nn12–13 settlement movement, 26, 33–35, 40. See also Henry Street Settlement Sexton, Patricia Cayo, 84, 88, 95 sexuality, 29, 76, 83, 85, 87 Sharaff, Irene, 77, 244n18 shopping malls, 100, 116, 140, 203, 222, 225; Plaza Fiesta Carolinas (Fort Mill), 250n118; Plaza Mexico (Lynwood), 136, 249n118; in Tijuana, 129 Shreve, Richmond Harold, 45, 238n74 skin color, 210, 226, 231n28; Cubans and, ­xii–­xiii, 191, 198; Puerto Ricans and, 35, 78. See also color; whiteness slums, 27, 33, 84, 85; clearance, 32, 40, 41, 49; ele­ments of, 35; prevention, 44; reproducing, 24, 28, 31, 36, 57. See also ghettoes/ ghettoization Small, Mario Luis, x Small Business Administration (sba), 192

Smart Growth Network, 155 Smith, Neil, 110, 186–87, 202, 233n56, 253n5, 266n6 Smithsonian: Cooper Hewitt, 161–62, 262n34, 263n66 social distancing, xi, 16–17, 175, 185 social movements, 15, 72, 89, 147, 152, 223, 229n1. See also activism; Chicana/o movement social workers, 8, 24, 27, 48, 55. See also Henry Street Settlement socioeconomic class, 6, 12–13, 28, 182, 202 Soja, Edward, 126 South Amer­i­ca, 92, 93 South Bronx (NY). See Bronx (NY) space: abstract, 21, 214; barrio, 89, 147, 201, 223, 226; belonging in, 218, 227; brokered Latinization of, 71, 115, 127, 137, 141–42, 189, 226–27; colonization of, 110; of color, 72, 89, 166; defensible, 156, 262n49; immigrant, 141, 234n10; marginalized, 146; production of, xv, xvi, 214, 224; property owner­ship and, 182–83; racialization of, 15–16, 182, 223; segregated, 6, 13, 99, 103, 119, 178; social order of, 103, 192; white-­dominated, 147; working-­class, 176. See also public space; urban space Spain, 12 Spanish colonial architecture, 97–98, 100, 102, 136, 248n100; missions, 97, 164, 165; plazas, 176; in Puerto Rico, 65–66; restaurant design, 207, 209; shopping centers, 129, 249n118 Spanish Harlem (NY). See East Harlem (NY) Spanish Harlem (Sexton), 84, 95 spatial imaginaries, 16, 117, 142, 178 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 181 Stack, Brian, 203, 216 Stacy-­Judd, Robert, 91 ste­reo­types, 91, 178, 181; Mexican, 127, 128, 129, 140, 256n50 Stoler, Ann Laura, 83 storefronts, 84, 172; in Las Vegas, vii; in Union City, 203–4, 204, 205, 206, 206–7, 209–10, 211

index strategic essentialism, 181 Sturkin, Marita, 216 suburbanization, 6, 79, 154; ­houses, 102, 247n92; middle-­class normativity and, 192; Orange County, 116–17, 119, 124; Santa Ana and, 125–26; use of model units, 45; white flight and, 18, 25, 49, 114–15, 191 Sun ­Belt cities, 117 supportive housing. See housing, affordable and supportive Taussig, Michael, 72, 88, 110, 246n59 Tefferteller, Ralph and Ruth, 39 tenements, 60, 194; conditions and colors, 76, 82, 84; displacement and, 32; eradication of, 25, 40; Lower East Side, 30–31; transition to public housing, 33, 40, 41 Texas: architecture, 163–65, 166, 171; El Paso, 225; Houston, 136; La Joya, 168; McAllen, 167; Public Radio, 162 Thompson, Benjamin C., 112, 252n2 Thornton, Carl J., 119 Tijuana, 221, 222; Santa Ana brokers in, 19, 112, 115, 127–29, 128, 134; tourists, 127–30, 130; urban plan, 129–30, 257n77 Torres, María de los Angeles, 192 tourism, 91, 98, 100, 134, 166, 250n120; Tijuana, 127–30 Transportation and Land Use Collaborative of Southern California (tluc), 155 tropicalization, 16–17, 230n13 tropical modernism, 37 Trump, Donald, 1, 21, 220, 224, 264n92 Tu, Thuy Linh Nguyen, 233n55 typefaces, vii–­viii, 73, 203 Union City (NJ): banks, 196; commemorations, xvi, 21, 189, 215–17; Cubans, xii, 21, 184, 189, 190–96; gentrification, 20–21, 185–88, 213–14; industry, 199; Master Plan, 207–9, 216, 270n90; politicians, 198; population and poverty, 199–200, 269n72; radical po­liti­cal organ­izations, 197,

305 268n59; real estate, 196; rental housing, xiii–xv, 186; uez, 203–4, 206–7; urban landscape, x–xi, 200–201. See also Bergenline Ave­nue (NJ) Unite d’Habitation, 106 University of Texas (ut), 1, 3, 136, 230n2; mset Building (Dallas), 4; San Antonio, 136, 167–68 urban blight, 117–18, 124, 127, 197, 254n22 urban crisis, 67, 71, 100, 123, 223, 253n10; African Americans and, 4, 144, 230n5; Latinx belonging and, 5–6, 18, 72, 153, 184; longue durée of, 4, 226; waning of, 126, 257n65; white flight and, 18–19, 113–14 urban design, 18, 19, 262n34; barrio residents trained in, 150, 151; charettes/pachangas, 167; community workshops, 178–79; movement, 138, 259n117; racial diversity in, 146–47, 153 Urban Enterprise Zone (uez), 187, 202–4, 206–7, 210 urbanism: “Asian,” 182; barrio, x, 160–61; “black,” 181–82; “good,” 20, 125, 176; magical, x, 266n128; Mexican, 129, 130, 136; normative, 225; PanAmerican, 179; Puerto Rican culture and, 32, 39; and urban term usage, 231n14; US cap­i­tal­ist, 5, 219–20; whiteness and, 5, 127. See also Latino New Urbanism (lnu); Latino Urbanism; New Urbanism urbanization, 12, 142, 182, 219, 257n65; colonial expressions of, 66, 110; Latinx, ix–­x, xvii, 179; neoliberal, 107; “parasitic,” 117; Puerto Rico, 28; racialized, 11, 185; Santa Ana, 117–18 urban planning, 16, 26, 65, 68, 161; activists, 150–51; lnu movement and, 155; for low-­ income populations, 179, 265n116; Puerto Rico, 36–37; Tijuana, 129–30; Union City, 207–9, 270n90. See also developers urban renewal, 14, 53, 57, 76, 144, 177, 254n22; modernizing agenda of, 24, 44, 55, 89; New York City, 25, 32, 76, 81; postwar, 24, 51; public-­private partnerships, 132; Santa Ana, 112–13, 118, 132–34, 138–41

306 index urban space, 4, 5, 26, 249n115; belonging/ unbelonging in, 6, 177, 213; colors and, 88, 102–4; cultural politics of, 15, 146; and Latinx identity, 176–77; orientalism and, 17; Puerto Rican repre­sen­ta­tion in, 27, 77, 79; white control over, 142, 146. See also space Urban Think Tank, 179 US census, 13, 52, 117, 188, 231n33 US imperialism, 7, 17, 89–90, 98 US-­Mexico border, 172; lanterns, 170; wall proposal, 1, 220–26, 264n92 van Gogh, Vincent, 85 Velásquez, William C. “Willie,” 2, 149, 150, 157, 163 vernacular culture: design and, vii, viii, 166; housing style, 176, 234n13 La Vida (Lewis), 13, 70, 71, 243n2; book cover, 73, 74, 95; colorful descriptions and sexual content, 82–83, 84, 87; Latin American researchers of, 245n38; physical environment and, 81–82; politics of color, 88–89; Puerto Ricans in, 73, 76, 86; Ríos ­family, 79–81 Villa, Raúl Homero, x, 15, 16, 261n19 Villalobos, Frank, 151 Villaraigosa, Antonio, 155 Villegas, Jose, 68 vio­lence, 9, 60, 224, 225; in East Los Angeles, 123; police brutality, 67, 69, 86, 122, 197; in Santa Ana, 119, 120, 122, 124. See also riots visibility: barrio, 111, 147; Latinx, xvi, xvii, 5, 17, 188, 213–14; of memorialization, 189, 217; politics of, 6, 8; spatial, 21, 218 Vladeck Houses, 41–42; model apartment, 43, 46, 47; tenants, 44, 57 Wacquant, Loïc, 223 Wagner, Robert F., 62, 241n119

Wald, Lillian, 34, 40 Wale, Fred, 37, 39 “Walking the Beast” (Duarte), 226 Watts Riots (1965), 116, 120, 121 wealth gap, 159, 263n62 Welfare Council of New York City, 42 welfare recipients, 194–95 West Side Story (film), 18, 73; cast, 76; color use and racialization, 77–79, 78; location and settings, 76–77, 243n12; omission of black ­people, 243n13; poster, 75, 243n11 West Side Story (musical), 60, 70, 71, 243n12; Puerto Ricans in, 73, 76 white flight, 3, 18, 45, 49, 112, 252n5, 253n8; barrio growth and, 115–16; crisis of, 19, 113–14, 141; population shift and, 125, 126; reversal of, 140, 191; suburban development and, 116–17, 124; Union City, 189, 191; urban blight and, 117–18 whiteness, 5, 75, 127, 142, 191. See also skin color white noose: term usage, 145 white revanchism, 19, 114, 119, 141, 233n56 Winant, Howard, 5 Wirth, Louis, 235n21 Wolkofsky, Esther, 42 working-­class Latinxs, 9, 175–76, 178, 179–80, 183, 187 Works Pro­gress Administration (wpa), 41, 45, 136 Ybarra-­Frausto, Tomás, 99, 163 Young, Dan, 133, 134 Young, Whitney M., Jr., 144–46 Young Lords Party, 84, 150–51, 197, 217, 232n39, 261n22 youth, 60–61, 66, 69, 242n136; canteens, 50–51; Chicana/os, 123, 149 Zipp, Samuel, 51