Abstract
As one of the fastest growing demographic populations, Latinx representation is increasing in communities across the United States. However, in Abstract Barrios: The Crisis of Latinx Visibility in Cities, Johana Londoño argues that their cultural representation in the built environment is lagging. The author masterfully weaves an interdisciplinary account of how abstractions of Latinx culture have been integrated into the built environment and design while continuing to exclude true representation of low-income and marginalized members of those communities.
The book is laid out chronologically, describing examples of how different eras addressed different anxieties surrounding the growing ethnic enclaves or “barrios.” Londoño guides the reader by first framing the “problem” that the ethnic Latinx group pose to the cities where they cluster, followed by the design “solution,” with the help of brokers. These brokers, often Latinx-self identified or barrio-affiliated individuals, play a role in “latinizing” the space to varying degrees of success and are an important feature of Londoño’s story. This stakeholder’s role is present throughout, but takes center stage in Chapter 4, where rather than concentrating on case studies in particular cities, Londoño focuses on the careers of three prominent Latinx architects and their influence.
Displaying a knowledge base rooted in sociology as well as architecture, urban planning, and Latinx Studies, Londoño describes the built environment as a racial project “that employs various signifiers to build on the racial hierarchies that social structures maintain” (p. 3). She uses case studies from New York City, NA; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; San Antonio, TX; Union City, NJ; and Santa Ana, CA. The author argues that Latinization of space is allowed primarily when the overall market is thereby served. Brokers who facilitate Latinization must ultimately make the space palatable to the client (in the case of architects), buyers and homeowners (i.e., attracting gentrifiers), and tourists.
Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is the skillful integration of historical and political contexts in which the discussion on design and built environment take place. For example, in Chapter 2, “Colors and the ‘Culture of Poverty,’” Londoño describes color in design aesthetics as a racial marker, using Oscar Lewis’s La Vida, an author now notorious for popularizing the concept of “culture of poverty” through an ethnography of a Puerto Rican family in New York City, as an illustration. She highlights her viewpoint that Lewis’s “fetish” for the physical environment is under-analyzed as he spends several chapters describing it. In self-justification, he suggests that immersion in the detail of the physical environment might be an objective view of the family’s daily lives. However, Londoño disagrees, pointing out that “…race, class, and difference rooted in colonial encounters, and not in the very least the subjective interests of observers, are inscribed in these environments” (p. 82). Londoño draws a parallel between Lewis’s detailed descriptions of his subjects' colorful household items and his equally graphic descriptions of one of the family members’ sexual behavior. She suggests that “For Lewis, Soledad’s concupiscence seemed quotidian excess, similar to that of her colorful apartment furnishings and décor” (p. 83). Londoño’s power analysis successfully makes the link between the historical colonial images of exoticized, oversexualized, tropical foreigners and the depictions of the subjects of the ethnography clear to the reader.
Another of Abstract Barrios’s major strengths is Londoño’s ability to capture a variety of U.S. regions in her examples and interviews. Though Latinx communities share a sociopolitical ethnic category, they also experience significant heterogeneity in migration patterns, culture, and reception in the United States. Londoño highlights some of this diversity explicitly, particularly in Chapter 5. In presenting the arrival of Cubans in Union City, NJ, Londoño is able to juxtapose the way that discrimination radicalized some (i.e., Chicano and Puerto Rican during the 1960s and 1970s), which led to barrio formation and identities tied to place, but not others. The latter was the case for Cuban refugees in Union City. Cubans were able to seek assimilation and integration into mainstream society through active recruitment and financial support provided by officials looking to revive a city suffering from white flight. The financial aid supported home and business ownership. The already politically conservative, largely middle-class refugees had little need for barrio-identity formation. Thus, in Union City, Latinization was located inside property rather than the outside in order to maintain market values and to create distance between the upwardly mobile and low-income Latinx cultures.
Overall, though Londoño’s arguments are convincing, they may have been strengthened by a mention of the isolating effects of residential segregation. Though residential segregation, particularly hyper-segregation, is commonly invoked in relation to black communities in the United States, as of 2000, at least two Latinx cities met the threshold for this definition: Los Angeles and New York. In framing her arguments around high-density Latinx neighborhoods and including case examples in these cities, she opened the door to reference the effects of segregation, which is one of the primary manners by which “space [is a] crucial mode of racializing people,” in her words. This omission misses an opportunity to emphasize the broader implications of her findings.
Abstract Barrios is a timely addition to literature on urban planning, design, and architecture in relation to an increasingly important demographic. Though at times perhaps the author delves too much into the weeds on the specifics of design for an audience of social workers, they still may be interested in the macro-level analysis of urban spaces and benefit from the discussions on the sociopolitical influences that shape the neighborhoods we live in.
