Abstract Barrios by Johana LondoñoISBN: 9781478008798
Publication Date: 2020-09-25
ABSTRACT BARRIOS centers the Latinx barrio-a spatially bound community formation within the city center or its edges-as the site of both public crises and inspiration. Throughout the twentieth century-as discriminatory policies in the labor and housing markets, as well as urban renewal policies, created forced concentrations of racialized populations within city centers-the barrio came to be seen, in the dominant public imagination, as a poor, working-class, and racialized space. At the same time, the barrio, particularly as a result of Chicanx and Puerto Rican activism in the 1960s and 1970s, emerged as a place of political, artistic, and cultural importance for Latinxs in America. Johana Londoño investigates what happens when the barrio is abstracted by cultural mediators-or "brokers"-for large-scale public architecture as a means of making the barrio palatable for white Americans who view concentrated areas of Latinx populations as a crisis.