Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities

Michael Rios, Leonardo Vazquez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136340741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Latinos are one of the largest and fastest growing social groups in the United States, and their increased presence is profoundly shaping the character of urban, suburban, and rural places. This is a response to these developments and is the first book written for readers seeking to learn about, engage and plan with Latino communities. It considers how placemaking in marginalized communities sheds light on, and can inform, community-building practices of professionals and place dwellers alike.

Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities will help readers better understand the conflicts and challenges inherent in placemaking, and to make effective and sustainable choices for practice in an increasingly multi-ethnic world. The essays explore three aspects of place: the appropriation and territorialization of the built environment, the claiming of rights through collective action, and a sense of belonging through civic participation. The authors illustrate their ideas through case studies and explain the implications of their work for placemaking practice.

A consistent theme about planning and design practice in Latino communities emerges throughout the book: placemaking happens with or without professional planners and designers. All of the essays in Diálogos demonstrate the need to not only imagine, build, and make places with local communities, but also to re-imagine how we practice democracy inclusive of cross-cultural exchange, understanding, and respect. This will require educators, students, and working professionals to incorporate the knowledge and skills of cultural competency into their everyday practices.

Part I

Placemaking: Conflict, Challenge, and Change

1

Historical Overview of Latinos and Planning in the Southwest

1900 to the Present

Clara Irazábal and Ramzi Farhat

The historical experience of Latino communities is marked by segregation, poverty, and discrimination. Through a critical understanding of the effects of cultural, economic, and governance processes on urbanization patterns, placemakers start to reverse these effects in the contemporary moment. This chapter presents an account of the challenges, opportunities, and agents of change in the three historical periods of pre-end of Second World War, post-war, and in contemporary Latino communities, with a focus on Mexican Americans in the US Southwest.¹

As with black communities in the South, for decades urban planning facilitated the segregationist management of Latino neighborhoods and proceeded unabated through the control of land use, discriminatory practices, and resistance to Latino social mobility.² Latinos over the years have been victims of the “barrioization” of their communities: the effect of policies and processes of domination by the mainstream non-Latino white society resulting in the formation of residentially and socially segregated Latino neighborhoods.³ Communities fought back through grassroots movements that created local civic institutions—such as community development corporations—that have been instrumental in resisting marginalization and subordination, and critical in refocusing and channeling policy to the specific needs of neighborhoods. To resist barrioization, Latino communities have engaged in “barriological” practices that recreate and re-imagine “dominant urban space as community-enabling place.”⁴ In other words, through a variety of tactics—many of them informal—and social actions, Latinos have reclaimed spaces that at best were insensitive to their cultural needs, and at worst, were designed to disenfranchise them.

Mexican-American Communities in the Pre-End of War Period: 1900–1945

At the conclusion of the Mexican–American War, the Latino population in the US stood at only 50,000; by 1930, it had already increased to 2.4 million people.⁵ Restrictions on immigration from Eastern Europe and Asia helped create conditions that drew hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to the United States. They found employment building railroads, harvesting agricultural crops, and manning factories.⁶ It was not until the Great Depression and the Second World War that this immigration was greatly tempered. The privatization of communal lands dispossessed many Mexican Americans of their property and heralded the siege of the Latino community.⁷ The archetypical Mexican-American settlement of the early twentieth century was the plaza-centered town.⁸ As non-Latino white settlement intensified, discrimination resulted in the formation of dual towns, where both Mexican and non-Latino white sections retained distinct commercial cores.⁹ Some of the distinctive features of the barrio today—the social use of semi-public space, the prevalence of vernacular architecture, and a vibrant small-retail economy—reflect a history of the struggle for survival under these conditions of adversity.¹⁰

The main cultural challenge in the early decades of the twentieth century was that of “Americanization,” a high priority on the agenda of the dominant Anglo-Protestant elite. Although Latino heritage was palpable through the survival of Mexican place names and bonds of community molded by propinquity and family ties, segregation and racism thrived under the aegis of an elite that equated patriotism with the trinity of productiveness, non-Latino white values, and Protestantism.¹¹ For progressive reformers who loathed urbanity’s vices, an alteration of values through assimilation was instrumental to socioeconomic advancement, as practiced through “Anglofication” campaigns derogatory of Mexican culture and Catholicism.¹²

Industrialization molded many Mexicans and Mexican Americans into an unskilled working class.¹³ The industrial expansion that accompanied the First World War fueled a demand for labor, but employers only reluctantly sought foreign nationals and minority workers.¹⁴ Although Latinos found employment in the railroad, tire manufacturing, agriculture, and construction sectors, unions were wary of the downward push on wages they might induce. As factories, railway stations, and depots sprung up, Mexicans and Mexican Americans were displaced into poorly serviced neighborhoods, such as Sonoratown in Los Angeles. They found little employment due to racist hiring practices, occupational structures, and logistical issues such as a lack of adequate transportation means to the plants.¹⁵ As the Great Depression took hold in the Southwest, Latinos found themselves being no more than a “Mexican problem” competing for “white jobs.”

In the pre-war city, Latinos’ quest for self-government was met by an impressive array of obstacles and severe opposition.¹⁶ Business interests carved out industry in and around Latino communities, preventing residents from being able to control the adverse environmental impacts of industrial growth.¹⁷ Police abuse flourished, using an impressive array of tools such as prostitution districts, no-speech zones, and anti-miscegenation laws.¹⁸ On the government level, the Federal Housing Administration’s discriminatory underwriting guidelines and widespread practices by housing authorities, which channeled residents into segregated projects, exacerbated the barrio phenomenon and also substantially limited Latinos’ mobility.¹⁹ While non-Latino whites moved into new suburbs, followed by retail and services, Latinos remained concentrated in communities with limited resources.

As social and cultural segregation intensified, Latinos found themselves “barrioized” and their access restricted from most public facilities: drugstores, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, maternity wards, bowling alleys, public parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, real estate, and public schools.²⁰ Discrimination was such that, in the Southwest, the Mexican Repatriation program of the 1930s, an effort at racial eviction, effectively emptied many Latino barrios of their inhabitants. Up to one million Mexican Americans, including US native-born citizens, were deported. Entire areas were sacrificed to industrial expansion in and around many of these already vulnerable Latino neighborhoods.²¹ As Latino communities were being decimated, they were (almost cynically) revived at another side of town in the form of themed “Mexican” environments, complete with “authentic” architectural styles and cultural festivals (e.g., the fiesta theme co-opted for city parades), all of which fostered the benign reception of contained and scripted Latino culture.

Latinos did seize opportunities that came their way. They built networks of solidarity through churches and activist groups, which provided the community with cohesion and a sense of belonging. In the cultural sphere, the nascent Latino media and cultural and sports associations were instrumental in constructing a Latino identity.²² These groups often provided the same kind of empowerment and social support that blacks found in churches and faith-based organizations. The quest for identity was particularly determined among the youth, whose exclusion from mainstream culture was counteracted by the formation of a unique Mexican-American subculture. After the Second World War, returning servicemen helped shape an emerging Mexican-American identity by fueling a nationalism that counterbalanced loyalty to the Mexican motherland.²³ The El Congreso and the Mexican-American movements helped nurture youth leaders. Building on nineteenth-century mutualista (literally “mutual aid”) organizations, Latinos fostered a tradition of self-help leading to the development of local institutions (e.g., the Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos) that helped the barrio weather social and economic storms.²⁴

Latino Communities in the Post-War Period: 1945–1980

While immigration from Mexico sustained pace, the post-war period saw rising immigration from the Caribbean and South America, where Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Colombians arrived in the US seeking opportunity and escaping political upheaval. By the 1970s, Latinos accounted for one-third of all immigrants, and more than 3.5 percent of the US population during that decade.²⁵ Although the Southwest continued to be home to the largest Latino population, many possessing skills or connections started to look for opportunities elsewhere. The Southwest continued to be marked by a stark inequality in opportunities for Latinos as a reflection of neighborhood segregation.²⁶

In the post-war period, Latinos grappled with how to position themselves culturally vis-à-vis an emerging ethnic majority consolidated from the various minorities of European descent, mostly through mutual identification as a rising, newly suburbanized middle class. A mainstream culture associated with suburban values took over where the segregationist Victorian values of the Reform Era (1890–1920) had left off in demonizing Latino culture.²⁷ Societal criminalization of poverty and an increased aversion to attitudes and actions that could be considered communist facilitated the construction of the barrio as an enclave of crime and poverty, with the associated prejudices against Latinos. Popular culture played no small part in demonizing city life and popularizing the suburban ideal of the post-war city, deriding the urban malaise resulting from racial impurity and cultural waywardness in the city.²⁸

Latino communities also had to contend with the peripheral position they held vis-à-vis centers of investment. During the years of robust growth following the Second World War, manufacturers relocated to cheaper and larger sites in outlying counties, where centers of Latino population, though they supplied the low-skilled labor for these sites, would not be recipients of investment. Cities collected much more in taxation than it spent in Latino communities.²⁹ The ensuing economic restructuring of the 1970s and the bifurcation of the labor force and decimation of union jobs were important factors in why poor barrios persisted and coalesced, as white flight to the suburbs picked up pace.³⁰

Latino communities of the post-war era were “under siege” by the development of industrial zoning and freeways, which contributed to the view of government and its agencies as being subservient to the interests of the elite.³¹ Cities engaged in selective, stringent enforcement of zoning, building, and housing codes in Latino neighborhoods and relegated public housing for Latinos to leased land, rendering them easily displaceable when large-scale redevelopment proposals matured.³² In Los Angeles and other growing metropolises, wealthy communities were incorporated, while patches of unincorporated poor Latino areas were left behind, such as the Florence-Firestone area. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Latino empowerment was also occasionally co-opted by elite-propped Latino organizations, whose policies often did not reflect communities’ interests pertaining to funding and development priorities.³³

In short, the spatial ghettoization of Latinos in inner city neighborhoods and inner-ring suburbs (e.g., Boyle Heights and Huntington Park in Los Angeles) sustained momentum as wealthier Americans abandoned these neighborhoods. These barrios were also enclosed and/or bisected by freeways and punctured by urban renewal projects, destroying their urban and social fabric, such as in Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles.³⁴ As racially homogenous suburbs emerged, the ghettoized centers had little choice but to keep accepting poor immigrants and those otherwise incapable of breaching barriers into the emerging suburbs.³⁵

In the face of these challenges, efforts at Latino empowerment in the post-war period gained momentum. The Chicano Movement contributed much to the reinvigoration of Latino communal pride as the barrio was reconstituted as a site of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword: a people, of peoples, makes its place
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: place as space, action, and identity
• Part I: Placemaking: conflict, challenge, and change
• Part II: Space: urban design and the built environment
• Part III: Action: collective organizing and claimsmaking
• Part IV: Identity: inclusion, voice, and capacity building
• Epilogue