Latino Urbanism

The Politics of Planning, Policy and Redevelopment

David R. Diaz, Rodolfo D. Torres

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814724835
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The nation’s Latina/o population has now reached over 50 million, or 15% of the estimated total U.S. population of 300 million, and a growing portion of the world’s population now lives and works in cities that are increasingly diverse. Latino Urbanism provides the first national perspective on Latina/o urban policy, addressing a wide range of planning policy issues that impact both Latinas/os in the US, as well as the nation as a whole, tracing how cities develop, function, and are affected by socio-economic change. The contributors are a diverse group of Latina/o scholars attempting to link their own unique theoretical interpretations and approaches to political and policy interventions in the spaces and cultures of everyday life. The three sections of the book address the politics of planning and its historic relationship with Latinas/os, the relationship between the Latina/o community and conventional urban planning issue sand challenges, and the future of urban policy and Latina/o barrios. Moving beyond a traditional analysis of Latinas/os in the Southwest, the volume expands the understanding of the important relationships between urbanization and Latinas/os including Mexican Americans of several generations within the context of the restructuring of cities, in view of the cultural and political transformation currently encompassing the nation.

Introduction

David R. Diaz and Rodolfo D. Torres

The last three decades of the twentieth century marked the beginning of epochal socioeconomic transformation of U.S. society. The economic reverberations of these changes have continued through the first decade of the twenty-first century as the income and wealth gap continues to widen. Nowhere is this more obvious than in U.S. cities and surrounding metropolitan areas, where the damaging effects of the deep recession on the living standards of working-class, lower-class, and middle-class American workers and their families are felt the most.

In addition to macroeconomic trends, immigration and population shifts have had a tremendous economic impact on U.S. cities. Recent protests in major cities across the United States against several proposed changes in U.S. immigration policy and citizenship status have once again brought attention to big cities, where much of the precipitous growth of immigrant populations has occurred.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2011), as of April 1, 2010, an estimated 50.5 million Latinos lived in the United States, making people of “Latino origin” the nation’s largest ethnic minority group. Latinos constituted 16.3 percent of the nation’s total population of nearly 308.7 million. It was projected that this population would grow to nearly 132.8 million by July 1, 2050, and that Latino men, women, and children would then constitute 30 percent of the nation’s population. The Mexican American population constituted 63 percent of the nation’s current 50.5 million Latinos, with Puerto Ricans another 9.2 percent, Cubans 3.5 percent, and Salvadorans 3.2 percent. The remainder were of some other Central American, South American, or other Hispanic or Latino origin.

William H. Frey (2001), in a recent publication of the Brookings Institute, asserts that over half of America’s cities are now majority nonwhite. Primary cities in fifty-eight metropolitan areas were “majority minority” in 2010, up from forty-three in 2000. Cities lost only about half as many whites in the 2000s as in the 1990s, but “black flight” from cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Detroit accelerated in the 2000s.

Frey also reports that ethnic minorities represent 35 percent of suburban residents, a proportion similar to their share of the overall U.S. population. Among the hundred largest metro areas, thirty-six feature “melting pot” suburbs where at least 35 percent of residents are nonwhite. The suburbs of Houston, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., became majority minority in the 2000s.

More important than the sheer numbers is the fact that Latina/o men and women and their families are a growing sector of the U.S. working class and a fragile first-generation middle class. Equally significant, they are increasingly concentrated in the very industries that have been most influenced by the economic restructuring of the United States. They are trapped in low-wage jobs in an economy that is producing far too few living-wage jobs to accommodate the increasing number of workers entering the labor market and to sustain a robust and democratic economy.

Principles of critical urbanism will guide the reader through this volume, which examines Latinos within the context of the changing role of cities in a market-driven and racialized environment. A growing portion of the world’s population lives and works in cities, thus the knowledge of how cities develop and function is a critical component of a planner’s intellectual tool kit. Applying an understanding of the effects of socioeconomic change on cities to other major areas of urban theory will enhance planners’ ability to develop appropriate policy measures. In addition, the dramatic social changes that are reshaping the terrain of planning politics are predominantly an urban phenomena. The characteristics of contemporary cities—increasing diversity, globalization of production and consumption, new sources of inequality, and uneven development—are creating different terrains for the policy actions that are the primary focus of the urban studies under late capitalism.

The contributors to this book represent a diverse group of scholars attempting to link their own unique theoretical interpretations and approaches to political and policy interventions in the spaces and cultures of Latino everyday life. It matters how cities are theorized, as this underpins the ideological and political designs and the policy frameworks adopted. Given the gaps between explanatory and normative concepts underlying urban planning and the radical changes in the United States, as well as globally, regarding economies, political systems, and information technologies, many subject areas must be considered experimentally.

On a range of levels, urban environmental crises are traceable to racism and market-driven forces. But the approach called New Urbanism or Smart Growth, which claims to address the latest iteration of urban crisis, fails to adequately analyze and address these factors. When Bullard, Johnson, and Torres (2000) denounced planning’s main production in the modern era, sprawl, as “stupid growth,” they implicitly exposed the profession’s dubious history of complicity in creating a failed suburbia (Diaz 2005). The current race to envelop planning practice in a new ideology is a shallow and intellectually dishonest evasion of the task of thoroughly and painfully acknowledging planning’s institutional and intellectual failure. Eurocentrists, who continue to control the educational and administrative functions of planning, are reluctant to give credit where credit is due, especially in the necessary discourse over why the suburban model and the programs promising federally funded revitalization in the post–World War II era have been characterized by systemic irrationalities with regard to planning, public policy, and the environment.

The class and racial hierarchy that persists in the planning profession is not “new,” nor will the construction of a “new” ideology undo a history of failed urban policy. On a multitude of levels, uncritically adopted rational-functional principles have been reified by an elitist, Eurocentric planning profession that has proven resistant to critique from ethnic communities (Taylor 1998). Innumerable planning graduate programs maintain only token minority representation, with the University of California system being among the worst. One of the editors of this volume is one such token faculty member in a planning department. Power in the profession, whether in the public or the private sector, remains concentrated among a cloistered Euro-American elite. Yet when this system of dominance is challenged, the tried-and-true class-based defense emerges, asserting technical knowledge, professional experience, managerial proficiency, bureaucratic power relations, and/or privileged educational attainment over public ignorance.

The structural economic, psychological, and environmental crises of suburbia that now confront planning were created and defended by this very hierarchy (Beatley 2000; Deleage 1994; Barry 2005; Booth 2004). Current planning discourse, despite its claims to novelty, is still rife with contradictions and irrationalities that are evidence of the fundamental failure of Eurocentric control over planning education and practice for over two generations. Thus, any claim to enlightened discourse will be initiated only by addressing who was (and is) most responsible for the failures of planning into the current era. This analysis, which must incorporate the voices of excluded ethnic others, will necessarily confront a legacy of racism in planning on multiple levels: in planning education, in the training of students, in private and public sector practice, and in the blatant manipulation of redistributive federal programs and planning ideology. Only then will planning create the potential space for meaningful transformations and potentially egalitarian transitions in both practice and urban social change. Specifically, this historical and critical approach is a necessary initial stage for restructuring an urban planning strategy that is based on barrio urbanism and that includes and engages Latina/o community leaders. Latino scholarship on the urban condition must also be included: for example, the urban writings of Ernesto Galarza, a progressive public intellectual and prominent in Mexican American community activist whose wide-ranging and groundbreaking work in urban politics and human geography has been largely neglected by the planning community as well as by urban scholars.

Situating “El Barrio” in Planning Discourse: Lessons from the Front Line

Though barrios were historically created and maintained by segregation and discrimination, their everyday life has kept a vitality and sense of place that validate the importance of the urban in the midst of the logic of decentralized sprawl that permeates planning. The power of Latina/o culture is a fundamental characteristic of barrio urbanism, a symbolic resistance to racism and a celebration of culturally situated social practices. Interwoven into this urban milieu is an internally defended concept of the importance of the social, testifying that the significance of what Alain Touraine (1988) described as “the social actor” persists, despite its loss in academic discourse in the rush to a postmodern explanation for all things urban. Without the reconstruction of the art of the social that barrio communities vividly exemplify, sustainable urbanism is unlikely to succeed in this consumption-obsessed society.

The concept of the ciudadano, the citizen situated in everyday life and urban culture, is linked to the most mundane and fundamental act, the act of walking. Walking makes possible the evolution of a cultural community over time through shared experiences on the human scale of relationships. Visually, walking in the neighborhood lends itself to an appreciation of jardines, color, calles, árboles, tiendas, arte publico, y la vida de la calle. Culturally, it has offered a historic respite from a repressive, discriminatory society that has traditionally marginalized everyday life as much as ethnic difference. The art of traversing through a neighborhood, both practical and pleasurable, is part of an aesthetic that planning has only recently and lamely attempted to reclaim.

Historically, environmental sustainability is fundamental to spatial relations within el barrio. The defense and utilization of la tierra for food production in collective gardens and farms, watershed management, communal celebrations, and the protection of nature have all been normative in the barrio; these practices predate European immigration to the Western Hemisphere. Other essential features of barrio life, such as mixed use, reliance on public transportation, recycling and adaptive reuse, collective sharing of space, and eclectic reproduction of the urban landscape through public art, have only recently been rediscovered as important reforms to past planning practice.

Because of discriminatory redistribution of public funds, barrios have received little in the way of formally recognized public spaces such as parks and recreational facilities, but they have developed numerous ways of maximizing the utilization of space for the community and particularly for children. La tierra es par los niños, even when the spaces available are merely neighbors’ side or front yards, streets, and vacant lots. Even private spaces may be turned into civic resources and made inviting (Gámez 2002; Rojas 1999). Most barrio residents would be amused to learn that in trendy architectural discourse front porches are a “must amenity.”

Further, everyday life in barrios has always involved recycling. Responding to economic marginalization and necessity, barrio residents have actively recycled a wide range of materials (Peña 2005). Ropa, madera, pipas, ventanas, puertas, ladrillos, y tinas have been adaptively reused for personal use, landscape design, structures, and/or art. In fact, no other social sector has been more directly engaged in active recycling throughout the twentieth century than barrio residents.

For centuries barrio residents have also produced food, as a leisure activity and to supplement household nutrition. Particularly in the past quarter century, a vibrant jardinero movement has turned numerous vacant lots to productive use. Una explosion de verde, yerbas, floras, verduras y fruta has resulted from intensive labor that beautifies the city and offers nontoxic food resources for local and regional residents (Pinderhughes 2004).

El barrio thus has important contributions to make to the sustainable urban policy that will be needed in the future: not only in relation to efficient energy use, maximization of existing resources, support for collective public amenities, urban density, adaptive reuse, and eclectic uses of space, but in the role of the ciudadano, which exemplifies the vibrant social agency within urbanism that planners of virtually all ideologies hope to restore (Katz 1994; Fung 2001; Calthorpe 1993; Bailly et al. 2000). Arguments to reconceptualize urban design, create open space in neighborhoods, revert to mixed uses, and abandon rational functional zoning logic are all predicated on the vision that Alain Touraine has articulated: “Political and social institutions can no longer be the servants of a supposedly rational order or a progress that is supposedly inscribed in the laws of historical evolution; they must be made to serve the Subject . . . to defend the radiant future from the past” (2000, 303). Henri Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) demand that urbanism challenge the gentrification that has displaced the working class from the center of the city must also be met if this vision is to be fulfilled; the defense of barrio space is thus critical to the project of urban restoration.

Yet planners seeking solutions to the urban crisis have been unaware of the barrio’s living demonstration of a rational, economically and environmentally sustainable form of urbanism in their midst. One reason for their ignorance may well be the history of pathetic Eurocentric fear of the other (Doob 1999; Bowser and Hunt 1996). El barrio has been stereotyped as a mysterious, dangerous, and threatening space. Unwarranted assumptions about barrio life are reinforced by racist ideology and skew perceptions: thus, for example, el ciudadano caminando por la calle is viewed as a frightening figure to be surveiled and controlled rather than a citizen interacting socially with his community. Everyday cultural practices are perceived as sinister resistance to mainstream society, and a suburban mindset imagines cities as zones of crime and degeneracy. Cloaked in mystery, barrio culture has been ignored and misunderstood.

Planners have also had little awareness of the rich and eclectic history of Latino urbanism. Along with the initial settlements of First Nations, barrios and colonias have been some of the earliest urban forms in the Southwest, dating from the 1600s. In fact, until the era of railroad expansion, barrios were the only urban centers. The influx of Euro-Americans into the Southwest in the latter stages of the nineteenth century ushered in a fundamental ethnic transition (Rosenbaum 1981), that has been reversed only in the last two decades. The evolution of cities is directly correlated with the growth of barrios and colonias. The three largest Latina/o urban communities in the United States are in El Paso, San Antonio, and Los Angeles.

In the past twenty-five years, barrio communities of the Southwest have significantly expanded their territory and are on the verge of achieving an ethnic reconquista (Diaz 2005; Suro and Singer 2002). The most substantial Latina/o community in the country, East Los Angeles (Valle and Torres 2000; Romo 1983; Acuña 1988), has expanded into what is now considered “the Greater Eastside.” This is a zone of approximately 450 square miles, stretching east of the Los Angeles River into the central San Gabriel Valley and south from Highland Park into the small cities that constitute Southeast Los Angeles County. This ethnic and cultural transformation is the most fundamental aspect of urban change associated with virtually every city in the Southwest and, increasingly, cities throughout the nation. Barrios are rapidly making inroads into surrounding urban communities and working-class suburbs and in some areas are taking over entire counties. Los Angeles County is now 50 percent Latina/o and is largely a system of barrios showing the polynucleated pattern of growth that Mark Gottdiener, in an enlightened theoretical analysis, projected for suburbs in this region in 1985.

Latinas/os have had a history throughout the last century of challenging planning and spatial relations. It has spanned land grant battles in New Mexico from the 1880s through the 1960s (Peña 2005; Rosenbaum 1981); rent strikes in Spanish Harlem in the 1940s (Cayo-Sexton 1965); and numerous struggles, over the decades, to save Chicano neighborhoods from urban renewal, whether Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s (Lopez 2002; Parson 2005), Varrio Viejo in Tucson in the 1960s (Dimas 1999), or Chicano Park in Logan Heights, San Diego, in the 1960s and 1970s (Cockcroft and Barnet-Sanchez [1990] 1993). The Crusade for Justice in Denver, one of the first organizations of the Chicano Power Movement, evolved from a critique of that city’s racist redevelopment and redistributive policies (Vigil 1999). Throughout the Southwest, barrio social movements like La Raza Unida in the 1960s engaged cities over their failure to provide the most basic urban amenities, such as sewer and water systems, storm drains, paved streets, and recreational facilities for youth (Vigil 1999). One of the first Chicano protest movements in California was a result of the dismantling of the entire western sector of Barrio Logan by California’s state transportation agency; by claiming land for a community park where Chicano artists painted murals that portrayed Chicano politics and history, the protesters gave cultural workers a unique interventionist role in redefining space in a distinct culture image. Since the 1970s, the Chicano environmental justice movement has attempted to halt the environmental poisoning of working class Latino communities.

Oppositional movements have been barrio leaders’ only recourse, due to the fact that Latinos both in and on the periphery of planning have had limited agency in advancing the promise of Model Cities, advocacy planning, and working-class community revitalization. These social actors, marginalized by the profession, have had few avenues available to proactively shape policy. Yet in any project of barrio revitalization, those most at risk should have the most influence over matters that will be affecting their everyday lives. Self-determination, direct control over actions that have potentially have long-term or even permanent impacts on individuals, families, and communities, is a fundamental human right.

The legacy of planning documents the opposite. Barrio residents have sensed that they are under attack by urban policy mandates that they have had no political influence to challenge (Acuña 1988). From the beginning of eminent domain in the post-World War II era of redevelopment and transportation route designations, the state has viewed barrio space as vulnerable and expendable. The destruction of barrios, involving the demolition of massive amounts of affordable housing, the dismantling of zones of minority property ownership, and radical reconfigurations of space, has been carried out with a dismissal of minority concerns that expressed a racist contempt for marginalized communities. In the aftermath of the enlightened federally financed War on Poverty, only minimal influence has been ceded to representatives from disenfranchised zones of the city. Since that era, as documented in this volume, the relationship between a Euro-American planning profession and Latinas/os has been opp...