How does a so-called bad neighborhood go about changing its reputation? Is it simply a matter of improving material conditions or picking the savviest marketing strategy? What kind of role can or should the arts play in that process? Does gentrification always entail a betrayal of a neighborhood’s roots? Tackling these questions and offering a fresh take on the dynamics of urban revitalization, The Philadelphia Barrio examines one neighborhood’s fight to erase the stigma of devastation. Frederick F. Wherry shows how, in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Centro de Oro, entrepreneurs and community leaders forged connections between local businesses and cultural institutions to rebrand a place once nicknamed the Badlands. Artists and performers negotiated with government organizations and national foundations, Wherry reveals, and took to local galleries, stages, storefronts, and street parades in a concerted, canny effort to reanimate the spirit of their neighborhood. Complicating our notions of neighborhood change by exploring the ways the process is driven by local residents, The Philadelphia Barrio presents a nuanced look at how city dwellers can make commercial interests serve the local culture, rather than exploit it.

Stories from an important, if little noticed, neighborhood of Philadelphia

Students in the Spring 2002 Community Publishing class at Temple University participated in an oral history project focused on capturing stories from the Forgotten Bottom neighborhood in South Philadelphia. The life histories of many of the community's residents have been collected as interviews in this book.

This book covers the 20 years that transformed Philadelphia into a city of neighborhoods, from Kingsessing to Wissahickon. At the turn of the 20th century, Philadelphia was the "workshop of the world," with builders toiling tirelessly to fill the staggering demand for housing. This golden age of construction resulted in whole new neighborhoods for the city's burgeoning population, transforming it into a place where immigrants could easily find jobs and a community to call their own. More than 200 vintage photos and postcards whisk readers back to the neighborhoods as they once were, exactly as our grandparents and great-grandparents knew them, before modern influences altered them beyond recognition. Arranged by neighborhood, this Philadelphia family album, a scrapbook for the city, is filled with rare vintage photographs and comprehensive information about the houses, the builders, the neighborhoods, and the people who lived in them.

Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious demonstrates that psychoanalytic principles can be applied successfully in disenfranchised Latino populations, refuting the misguided idea that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy. As opposed to most Latin American countries, where psychoanalysis is seen as a practice tied to the promotion of social justice, in the United States psychoanalysis has been viewed as reserved for the well-to-do, assuming that poor people lack the "sophistication" that psychoanalysis requires, thus heeding invisible but no less rigid class boundaries. Challenging such discrimination, the authors testify to the efficacy of psychoanalysis in the barrios, upending the unfounded widespread belief that poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday survival that they only benefit from symptom-focused interventions. Sharing vivid vignettes of psychoanalytic treatments, this collection sheds light on the psychological complexities of life in the barrio that is often marked by poverty, migration, marginalization, and barriers of language, class, and race. This interdisciplinary collection features essays by distinguished international scholars and clinicians. It represents a unique crossover that will appeal to readers in clinical practice, social work, counselling, anthropology, psychology, cultural and Latino studies, queer studies, urban studies, and sociology.

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.

Since the time of William Penn, the Philadelphia neighborhood of Northern Liberties has had a tradition of hard work and innovation. This former Leni-Lenape territory became one of the industrial River Wards of North Philadelphia after being annexed by the city in 1854. The district's mills and factories were powered not just by the Delaware River and its tributaries but also by immigrants from across Europe and the city's largest community of free African Americans. The Liberties' diverse narrative, however, was marred by political and social problems, such as the anti-Irish Nativist Riots of 1844. Local historian Harry Kyriakodis traces over three hundred years of the district's evolution, from its rise as a premier manufacturing precinct to the destruction of much of the original cityscape in the 1960s and its subsequent rebirth as an eclectic and vibrant urban neighborhood. In this first history of Northern Liberties, Kyriakodis unearths the story of this remarkable riverside community.