This, the first book on Latinos in America from an urban planning/policy perspective, covers the last century, and includes a substantial historical overview the subject. The authors trace the movement of Latinos (primarily Chicanos) into American cities from Mexico and then describe the problems facing them in those cities. They then show how the planning profession and developers consistently failed to meet their needs due to both poverty and racism. Attention is also paid to the most pressing concerns in Latino barrios during recent times, including environmental degradation and justice, land use policy, and others. The book closes with a consideration of the issues that will face Latinos as they become the nation's largest minority in the 21st century.

The compelling history of how Latino immigrants revitalized the nation's cities after decades of disinvestment and white flight Thirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class" of young professionals who revived a moribund urban America in the 1990s and 2000s. But this stunning reversal owes much more to another, far less visible group: Latino and Latina newcomers. Award-winning historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz reveals this history by focusing on two barrios: Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff. These neighborhoods lost residents and jobs for decades before Latin American immigration turned them around beginning in the 1970s. As Sandoval-Strausz shows, Latinos made cities dynamic, stable, and safe by purchasing homes, opening businesses, and reviving street life. Barrio America uses vivid oral histories and detailed statistics to show how the great Latino migrations transformed America for the better.

America'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 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 issues and 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.

In Abstract Barrios Johana Londoño examines how Latinized urban landscapes are made palatable for white Americans. Such Latinized urban landscapes, she observes, especially appear when whites feel threatened by concentrations of Latinx populations, commonly known as barrios. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis of barrio built environments, Londoño shows how over the past seventy years urban planners, architects, designers, policy makers, business owners, and other brokers took abstracted elements from barrio design—such as spatial layouts or bright colors—to safely “Latinize” cities and manage a long-standing urban crisis of Latinx belonging. The built environments that resulted ranged from idealized notions of authentic Puerto Rican culture in the interior design of New York City’s public housing in the 1950s, which sought to diminish concerns over Puerto Rican settlement, to the Fiesta Marketplace in downtown Santa Ana, California, built to counteract white flight in the 1980s. Ultimately, Londoño demonstrates that abstracted barrio culture and aesthetics sustain the economic and cultural viability of normalized, white, and middle-class urban spaces.

An encyclopedia about various topics relating to urban studies.

Introduces new approaches, theoretical trends, and understudied topics in Latinx Studies This groundbreaking work offers a multidisciplinary, social-science oriented perspective on Latinx studies, including the social histories and contemporary lives of a diverse range of Latina and Latino populations. Editors Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa have crafted an anthology that is unique in both form and content. The book combines previously published canonical pieces with original, cutting-edge works created for this volume. The sections of the text are arranged thematically as critical dialogues, each with a brief preface that provides context and a conceptual direction for the scholarly conversation that ensues. The editors frame the volume around the “humanistic social sciences,” using the term to highlight the historical and social contexts under which expressive cultural forms and archival records are created. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies masterfully sheds light on the diversity and complexity of the everyday lives of Latinx populations, the political economic structures that shape enduring racialization and cultural stereotyping, and the continuing efforts to carve out new lives as diasporic, transnational, global, and colonial subjects.

At the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, the Latino minority, the biggest and fastest growing in the United States, is at a crossroads. Is assimilation taking place in comparable ways to previous immigrant groups? Are the links to the countries of origin being redefined in the age of contested globalism? How are Latinos changing America and how is America changing Latinos? The Oxford Handbook of Latino Studies reflects on these questions, offering a sweeping exploration of Latinas and Latinos' complex experiences in the United States. Edited by leading expert Ilan Stavans, the handbook traces the emergence of Latino studies as a vibrant and interdisciplinary field of research starting in the 1980s, assessing the current state of the discipline while suggesting new paths for exploration. With its twenty-three essays and a conversation by established and emerging scholars, the book discusses various aspects of Latino life and history, from literature, popular culture, and music, to religion, philosophy, and language identity. The articles present new interpretations of important themes such as the Chicano Movement, gender and race relations, the changes in demographics, the tension between rural and urban communities, immigration and the US/Mexico border, the legacy of colonialism, and the controversy surrounding Spanglish. The first handbook on Latino Studies, this collection offers a multifaceted and thought-provoking look at how Latinos are redefining the American identity.