“Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Invisibility in Cities” [REVIEW]
Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities by Johana Londoño (Duke University Press, 2020).
In Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Invisibility in Cities (Duke UP, 2020) Johana Londoño demonstrates how urban planners, architects, designers, policy makers, real estate proprietors, and other brokers who exert power in city design have played a crucial role in helping shape Latinx in/visibility in urban built environments with large Latinx populations, otherwise known as barrios. Covering nearly seventy years of history of the Latinx presence in barrios from New York City to Santa Ana, California, Londoño shows how brokers, a term she uses “to capture how diverse intermediary actors negotiate normative environments with barrios to create interpretations of Latinx urban life and culture,” have contributed to Latinizing cities in the U.S. by abstracting barrio cultures through urban design to accomodate and appease privileged ethnic groups such as white Americans. In this process, she also notes that Latinx urban residents have struggled to make a place for themselves by belonging in key U.S. cities that have often rendered them as invisible.
Londoño employs an innovative multidisciplinary approach in her methodology in Abstract Barrios. She incorporates archival materials, interviews, visual texts (i.e. posters, photographs) and criticism from architecture, history, urban studies, Latinx studies, ethnic studies and cultural studies to provide a more complete portrait of Latinx urban barrios. By doing so, Londoño opens a critical dialogue to reconsider the gaps in these traditional disciplines and to rethink the emerging field of Latinx urban studies.
The preface discusses the inspiration for this book. By growing up as the only child of a Colombian immigrant single mother in Union City, New Jersey, in the 1990s, she visited and walked on the well-known Bergenline Avenue, becoming familiar with the commercial center of this Latinx urban landscape. In later years, she traveled by public transportation to complete her graduate studies in New York City, where she gained a critical perspective on Latinx barrios and their significance in U.S. society historically and in the present.
Since the 19th century, the United States has taken great strides in intervening in Latin American politics and cultures, but this gesture escalated during World War II under the facade of the Good Neighbor policy. While migrants from Mexico and Puerto Rico have become the dominant Latinx groups to arrive and settle in various urban landscapes in the north through government-sponsored programs (i.e. Bracero Program, the Migrant Program), those from Central and South America have also marked their presence in U.S. cities in later decades. As the U.S. was in the process of modernizing its cities in the twentieth century, many Latin American cities tried to imitate these urban models at the expense of creating wider gaps among social classes which clashed in the metropolitan areas and thus, suffered from the contradictions of modernity. As a consequence of these efforts in progress, people in Latin American were not only displaced internally in their respective nations, but they had to undertake migrations from the South to the North. Many of these migrants became urban residents in U.S. cities and experienced further exclusion through segregation, discrimination, and alienation.
In chapter 1, “Design for the Puerto Rican Problem,” Londoño chronicles the arrival of Puerto Ricans from the island to their settlement in different barrios, specifically the Lower East Side (Losaida) in New York City, in the 1940s and 1950s. While this Latinx group may have the privilege of citizenship in the U.S., they are often perceived and treated like second-class citizens, and thus, relegated to housing environments in barrios with limited resources. Londoño draws attention to the Henry Street Settlement for their efforts in trying to make Puerto Ricans feel at home through their designs in barrios. Unlike their European counterparts who had settled in their neighborhoods in previous generations, the racialization of Puerto Ricans.
In chapter 2, “Colors and the ‘Culture of Poverty,’” Londoño deepens the analysis of the built environment of Puerto Ricans in New York City by deconstructing works such as anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty -San Juan and New York (1966) and the politics of color in the Hollywood film West Side Story (1961). Londoño exemplifies how both narratives, textual and visual, use the trope of tropicalization to exoticize Puerto Ricans in barrios. She critiques this form of rhetoric which reproduces colonialism through strategically implementing color in costume design and the built environment in the twentieth century that contains rather than liberates Puerto Ricans by never allowing them neither autonomy nor a voice in the city. Unlike previous ethnic groups from Europe who were able to assimilate to mainstream society due to their close proximity to whiteness, Puerto Ricans did not receive a warm welcome but rather suffered at the hands of personal and institutional discrimination upon arrival in the city due to their racialized difference. This chapter reconfigures how color became instrumental in objectifying Latinx barrios and its urban residents.
In chapter 3, “A Fiesta for White Flight,” Londoño examines a dual process of Latinx demographic increase and a decline in urban living via white flight into the suburbs in Santa Ana, California, in the 1970s and 1980s. By looking at the growth of the Mexican population that began with their arrival in the 1910s after the Mexican Revolution, in this urban space in conservative Orange County, California, she observes that this Latinx group revived this city with the presence of Mexican culture via commercial stores, shops, restaurants, and cultural practices in public spaces, most notably downtown. While residents of Latinx barrios celebrated the idea of Fiesta, this effort was not resistant to white power. Londoño notes that the design models for these built environments were often captured by visiting touristic sites such as Tijuana, Mexico, of a different era and transplanted in this California space in abstracted form. Once white residents were able to regain control of this urban space, a reversal of inward migration occurs that threatens the Fiesta theme in downtown Santa Ana and resitutates Latinx visibility once again.
In chapter 4, “Barrio Affinities and the Diversity Problem,” Londoño presents the career trajectories of three powerful Latinx brokers, Texans Henry Cisneros and Henry Muñoz, and Californian James Rojas in the 1990s. This decade witnesses the rise of Latinx brokers who serve as professional intermediaries between Latinx immigrant communities and corporate/real estate America. Although all are of Mexican descent, their experiences with urban barrios differ as second-generation urban brokers. While Cisneros and Muñoz’s families were involved and influenced by the civil rights movement in the 1960s in Texas, Rojas came of age in white suburban Alhambra, California, and developed a different perspective as an insider/outsider of the historical barrio, East Los Angeles/Boyle Heights. Nonetheless, all three urban planners and designers became key players in the Latinization process by incorporating barrio culture in urban designs via abstraction for mainstream consumption. In doing so, they mediate the process of Latinx belonging in cities by representing cultural practices of Latinx urbanism.
In chapter 5, “Brokering or Gentrification by Another Name,” Londoño takes a circular voyage by returning to her urban experiences in Union City, New Jersey, that she presented in the preface as an example of a majority-minority city of Latinx urban residents in the twenty-first century. She explores the cultural diversity among Latinx communities from the arrival of Cubans in the 1960s after the Cuban Revolution through the migration of South Americans displaced during the civil wars in the 1980s from countries such as Colombia to produce a socioeconomically mixed group of Latinidad in Union City. Londoño reflects on how much the main downtown area of Bergenline Avenue has changed since the 1980s into the twenty-first century by moving Latinx cultures into the interior of public spaces to welcome a more elite class and clientele. In other words, Union City has undergone a process of gentrification which she equates with brokering. In a city that counts with 85% of Latinx residents, she is concerned with how government officials prefer to build memorials of dead Latin Americans, a metaphor for death, rather than celebrate the presence or visibility of current Latinx cultures.
Finally, in the Coda, “Colorful Abstraction as Critique,” Londoño draws parallels between the urgency of migrants crossing the U.S./Mexico border and Latinx urban belonging. By presenting a provocative pink image entitled “Prison Wall” with border crossers in this section of her book, she finds common ground with the abstraction of color and urban design in silencing Latinx urban residents in earlier chapters. She asks if this allusion to the real wall at the U.S./Mexico border is another way to control the “neighbors” from the South who “threaten” the safety and security of the “neighbors,” meaning white ethnic groups, in the North. In many ways, these transnational migrations do not differ greatly from the rapidly growing Latinx concentrations or barrios in urban America who have fought long and hard to belong and celebrate their Latinx cultures in cities.
Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities
by Johana Londoño
328 pgs. Duke University Press. $27.95
Juanita Heredia is a Full Professor of Spanish at Northern Arizona University. She specializes in U.S. Latinx literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and urban studies. She is the author of Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century: The Politics of Gender, Race and Migrations (2009), editor of Mapping South American Latina/o Literature in the United States: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (2018) and co-editor of Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers (2000). She was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA working on her monograph, Transnational Latinxs and the City: Negotiating Urban Experiences in Twenty-first Century Literature and Popular Culture. She has contributed to important collections such as The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (2012), The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (2018) and The Aztlán Mexican Studies Reader, 1974-2016 (2018). She has disseminated her scholarship internationally as well as nationally.