Revisiting the Politics of Planning and Action in Latino Urban America

In Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy, and Redevelopment, editors David R. Diaz and Rodolfo D. Torres offer a range of scholarship examining the way socioeconomic and political change and urban policy interventions influence the nature and functioning of cities with large Latino populations. They argue that the volume blends traditional critical urbanism perspectives with varied theoretical perspectives on political and policy interventions. The volume has three themes: (1) the limits of popular community development models in neighborhood and commercial spaces, (2) urban living experiences and the role of market-driven and racialized public policy, and (3) community organizations and change. Scholars with varied disciplinary backgrounds provide a mix of contemporary and historical case studies and essays.

One group of readings examines the extent to which popular urban design principles are culturally and class appropriate and novel to Latino urban areas. Diaz argues that “barrio urbanism” (Diaz, 2005), a term he coined to refer to common lifeways in Mexican immigrant and Chicana/o barrios in the Southwest, requires acknowledgment in the mainstream planning literature. Barrio urbanism has been shown to involve normative planning and urban health ideals such as walking, socializing, using public transportation, and other environmental sustainable practices. Much of the analysis is historical, dating from the 1880s to the 1960s–1990s, but the historical is bridged with the contemporary in a critique of the New Urbanism movement of the early 1990s. The Congress for the New Urbanism, mostly architects, urban designers, planners, and developers committed to “traditional” American master-planned neighborhoods with minimal sprawl, initiated the movement in 1993, promoting and implementing an approach it says is common in white and economically prosperous neighborhoods such as Princeton, New Jersey (Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, 2000; Saab, 2001). The New Urbanism emphasizes urban design to create dense, mixed-used, and pedestrian-friendly housing and commercial zones. Diaz argues that many of the model’s principles, such as those focused on pedestrian-health-promoting and environmentally friendly outcomes, are not new to ordinary barrio life and culture. The mainstream and critical urbanism literature often overlooks this argument. He also argues that the private sector and city officials tend to support New Urbanism projects that help gentrify city centers and are economically out of reach for working families. The New Urbanism is a model “perpetuating an old [planning] tradition by deepening the divide between privileged and minority communities” (38). Consideration of recent in-depth case studies and related data would have strengthened his contribution.

Appropriately, Johana Londoño’s case study examines the way the politics of community development policy initiatives and New Urbanism practices help erase Latino cultural urban design elements from commercial built environments. She examines Bergenline Avenue in Union City, New Jersey, a diverse Latin American immigrant and working-class suburban barrio. Focusing on the 1990s and 2000s, she chronicles these changes to the built environment and argues that they are steps in the direction of commercial gentrification. The Bergenline case study includes an analysis of an urban enterprise zone initiative, including its façade improvement program, in the area and the “new pleasant environment = personal economic development for merchants” messaging that some city officials and the initiative’s advisory board members touted to business owners. Londoño offers a brief description of some of these changes, such as uniform-color business awnings across adjacent businesses. Her case study also shows that community development processes include broader strategic engineering by the city to sustain a particular Latino image in the area, such as naming a street, plaza, or school after a popular Latin American artist or political figure while simultaneously deemphasizing immigration and socioeconomic status. In spite of its substantial contribution, I would have liked to learn more from Londoño’s interviews. Pre- and post- visuals from the façade program would also have made a nice addition to the chapter.

José L. Gámez compares and contrasts the appropriation of and experiences with private and public space of transnational communities in Charlotte, North Carolina, and multigenerational communities in East Los Angeles. His comparative analysis looks at group behavior across different built environments and public spaces. He makes a compelling case for broadening traditional descriptions of Latino urban living in Los Angeles, pointing out that since the 1990s recent immigrants have helped regenerate new cultural vibrancy in a number of decaying semisuburban landscapes. Gámez concludes by arguing that migrant social life and social rituals in public spaces, which he calls an “insurgent form of urbanism,” cannot always be neatly planned for via urban design. The implication, he adds, is that models that privilege images of the past such as the New Urbanism require serious rethinking by planning and policy stakeholders in response to established and emerging Latino landscapes. We are left to wonder, however, what this might look like in practice. The chapter could have been improved by a more systematic, in-depth, and balanced discussion of the examples across the two cases.

The volume is also concerned with the pervasive real estate and finance interests that have limited or excluded affordable market-rate housing, public housing opportunities, and community development resources for working-class barrios and lower-income home buyers. Kee Warner, for example, examines pre- and post-civil-rights laws and 1970s devolution and more contemporary public-private partnerships and suggests that a housing crisis nevertheless persists throughout the United States. Warner’s chapter offers housing and community development practitioners and advocates a “people in place” strategy to help reverse these lingering trends. By contrast, Nestor Rodriguez examines community development more broadly and argues that federal redevelopment dollars, especially from the 1940s to the 1970s, have tended to favor commercial district redevelopment in and around downtowns at the expense of a host of barrio needs and aspirations. His coverage of public housing and community development policy fills a glaring void in Latino-focused urban scholarship.

The book adds to an ethnic studies and community development tradition of looking at community organizing and activism at the neighborhood level, where racial, ethnic, and class debates over redevelopment are especially noticeable (Irazábal and Farhat, 2008). Silvia Dominguez’s comparative case study explores racial relations and social capital with regard to integration mandates in two public housing developments in Boston and the role of tenant organizations in facilitating racial and social cohesion and housing mandates. She focuses on Latina/o immigrant residents and organization membership and leadership and suggests that the presence of more than two racial/ethnic groups within a housing resident base could alleviate one racial/ethnic group’s antagonism toward and fear of another. Her study’s focus on organizing in public housing with Latina/o immigrants makes it a very important addition to the community development literature. However, her organizational analysis of the two tenant organizations is brief and uneven. Benjamin Marquez’s essay reviews pioneering Mexican-American environmental justice organizations and the political and corporate challenges that will likely confront them in the near future. He focuses on the South West Organizing Project in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and People Organized in Defense of the Earth and Her Resources in East Austin, Texas, and highlights the way communitywide determinants of health impact Latino communities and communities of color generally and the way groups address these impacts. He could, however, have offered more details on each organization’s change model in action.

The volume ends with an essay by Victor Valle and Rodolfo Torres that addresses the next generation of would-be scholars and urges a scholarship and activism/practice that squarely addresses “class relations based upon complete identification with the emergent immigrant majorities” (191). While its theoretical ideas and descriptions of present-day urban crises add to the literature, specific ideas to help readers craft specific basic and applied research agendas would have been welcome.

Latino Urbanism is an excellent and much-needed contribution to the planning literature on critical urbanism and Latino communities. The introduction, however, could have offered a working definition of “Latino urbanism,” and saving the final chapter for a discussion by the editors of the implications of the contributions for planning education, research, and practice would have significantly increased the value of the book. These criticisms notwithstanding, Latino Urbanism is a timely volume that expands the scrutiny of urban planning scholarship on Latino communities (see, e.g., Davis, 2000; Diaz, 2005; Rios, Vazquez, and Miranda, 2012; Valle and Torres, 2000). Most Latino urban scholarship sidesteps specificity with regard to urban revitalization, community development, public-private partnerships, and racialized environments (González, 2017). While the planning literature has historically ignored Latino-focused urban planning scholarship specifically and communities of color generally (González and Irazábal, 2015), this volume makes noteworthy progress in critiquing conceptual and practical developments in the field. I highly recommend it for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in urban studies, urban planning, public policy, and ethnic studies and for scholars and practitioners in these fields. These audiences will discover the critical need for broadening conventional thinking, research, and action to include Latino urbanism perspectives and help generate strategies for providing opportunities, conditions, and policies to Latina/os in urban environments throughout the United States.