Abstract Barrios

ABSTRACT BARRIOS The Crises of Latinx VisibiLity in Cities Johana Londoño AbstrAct bArrios 218-85846_ch01_5P.indd 1 7/23/20 4:57 PM 218-85846_ch01_5P.indd 2 7/23/20 4:57 PM ABSTRACT BARRIOS ciss o in ciis Johana Londoño Duke university Press / Durham and London / 2020 218-85846_ch01_5P.indd 3 7/23/20 4:57 PM © 2020 Duke university Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 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 rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2019054731 lc ebook rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 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. 218-85846_ch01_5P.indd 4 7/23/20 4:57 PM contents Preface: The Trou ble with Representing Barrios / vii Acknowl edgments / xix introDuction / Brokers and the Visibility of Barrios / 1 one / Design for the “Puerto Rican Prob lem” / 23 two / Colors and the “Culture of Poverty” / 70 three / A Fiesta for “White Flight” / 112 four / Barrio Affinities and the Diversity Prob lem / 144 five / Brokering, or Gentrification by Another Name / 184 coDa / Colorful Abstraction as Critique / 219 Notes / 229 Bibliography / 273 Index / 293 218-85846_ch01_5P.indd 5 7/23/20 4:57 PM 218-85846_ch01_5P.indd 6 7/23/20 4:57 PM preFAce The Trou ble 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 century. Barrios— generally defi ned as Latinx spatial concentrations— have been historically marginal- ized in US cities.1 In contrast, in the early twenty- fi rst century, 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 window 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 pop u- lism” that espoused sociocultural inclusivity but was really at the ser vice of a cap i tal ist 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 indiff erent, if not oppressive. Similarly, in the fi elds 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 fi rst able to bring the barrio culture I had grown up in to bear on design circles. When my college typography instructor assigned us to 218-85846_ch01_5P.indd 7 7/23/20 4:57 PM viii Preface photo graph 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 Eu ro pean and white American innova- tors, 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 differ ent from the professionally designed landscapes of power and wealth depicted in design magazines, commercials, tourism, and glamorous life- styles. 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 commu- nities. 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 arrange- ments on the slivers of concrete that served as a “front yard” between the sidewalk and door. Though I would not know it until after 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 clus- tered in space, in barrios, are unseemly urban subjects who pose a prob- 218-85846_ch01_5P.indd 8 7/23/20 4:57 PM Preface ix 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 proj ects, urban renewal, housing regulations, social movements, and community organ izing were debated as solutions to the ostensible prob lems 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 prob lem that urban Latinxs supposedly pre sent by championing barrio culture and directly offering barrio residents murals, posters, community-based architecture, and gar- dens. 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 see- ing, 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 gradu ate 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- i talist spatial order. With the exception of Arlene Dávila’s pioneering research on the neoliberal marketability of Latinx culture in East Harlem’s

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