Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City
By Mike Davis
LATINOS ARE BRINGING redemptive energies to the neglected, worn-out cores and inner suburbs of many metropolitan areas. The process is most vivid in cities, especially in the Southwest…
Immigrants are indeed anonymous heroes. No medals have been handed out for community reinvestment nor has the City of Los Angeles —which has thrown away hundreds of millions in tax dollars unsuccessfully trying to induce middle-class professionals to gentrify downtown—ever geared its redevelopment programs to support, rather than displace, inner-city residents. Instead Latino immigrants (and here Los Angeles rejoins the general case) are confronted with a labyrinth of laws, regulations and prejudices that frustrate, even criminalize, their attempts to build vibrant neighborhoods…
Inter-cultural skirmishes also take place on purely audio-visual fronts. Neighborhoods aesthetic wars have become commonplace as Latino carnivality collides with the psychosexual anxieties of Truman Show white residential culture. The the glorious sorbet palette of Mexican and Caribbean house paint—verde limón, rosa mexicano, azul añil, morado—is perceived as sheer visual terrorism by non-Hispanic homeowners who believe that their equity directly depends upon a neighborhood color order of subdued pastels and white picket fences. Even upwardly mobile Chicanos have joined in the backlash against “un-American” hues, as in the L.A. suburb of South Gate where the City Council recently weighed an ordinance against tropical house colors, or in San Antonio where writer Sandra Cisneros has long outraged city fathers with her deeply expressive purple home…
In the most fundamental sense, the Latinos are struggling to reconfigure the “cold” frozen geometries of the old spatial order to accommodate a “hotter,” more exuberant urbanism. Across the vast pan-American range of cultural nuance, the social reproduction of latinidad, however defined, presupposes a rich proliferation of public space. The most intense and creative convergence of Ibero-Mediterranean and Meso-American cultures is precisely their shared conviction that civilized sociality is constituted in the daily intercourse of the plaza. Latin American immigrants and their children, perhaps more than any other element in the population, exult in playgrounds, squares, libraries and other endangered species of US public space, and thus form one of the most important constituencies for the preservation of our urban commons.
They also have a genius for transforming dead urban spaces into convivial social places. What monolith of corporate sculpture brooding over a fountain in a bank plaza can compete with the great community murals of EastLos, the Mission District or Pilsen? Thirty years ago, Pacific Avenue in L.A. 's blue-collar suburb of Huntington Park was another geriatric Main Street with little future beyond the Salvation Army outlet. Today it reigns in restored art-deco glory as the shopping and festive center of Mexican immigrant life in Los Angeles County .
Yet again mainstream planning and architectural theory lag far behind grassroots urban imagination. Almost a generation ago, Los Angeles 's pioneer design firm, Barrio Planners, boldly proposed to retrofit Eastside neighborhoods with small plazas, each of which would become a colorful stage for local identity. “Let a hundred placitas bloom!” was the slogan, but the concept of reshaping urban space to celebrate Mexican culture or, even more radically, to stimulate neighborhood self-design, was not well received by a planning bureaucracy still committed—consciously or unconsciously—to architectural Americanization. Los Angeles city and county planners instead allowed private speculators to build almost 2000 minimalls in the late 1970s and early 1980s (most of them, ironically, in Taco Bell moderne). Neighborhoods were drowned in junk retail space guarded by armies of minimum-wage security guards whose principal duty is to reduce “loitering” and other non-profit activities. The one populist proposal to win reluctant city hall approval—a tiny mariachi plaza” in Boyle Heights —has taken more than twenty years to come to fruition.
As Barrio Planners long ago foresaw, the emergent “Latino metropolis” requires its own design strategy, a counter-plan not merely to resist the dumping of noxious land uses (the toxic industries, landfills, jails and freeways that despoil Latino communities across the country) but to elaborate its own audacious cultural hegemony. The seeds for visionary activism, of course, are already planted. All of Latin America is now a dynamo turning the lights back on in the dead spaces of North American cities. While there is much abstract talk in planning and architectural schools about the need to “reurbanize” American cities, there is little recognition that Latino and Asian immigrants are already doing so on an epic scale. Perhaps the time is ripe (as Latinos locally move from minority to majority politics) to tropicalize the national vision of “the city on the hill.”
This piece is an excerpt from the chapter "Tropicalizing Cold Urban Space" in the book Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City by Mike Davis. Davis is also the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and Prisoners of the American Dream.
