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Urban Space and Representation: Further Papers

Sallie Westwood:
Imagining America, Remembering Home: Latino/a Cultures in Urban America

DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT CITE  (MAY98)

INTRODUCTION

"I want to be in America" - the familiar refrain from the musical West Side Story contains both dreams of consumption and a critique of the folk wisdom that constitutes 'America' as the land of abundance available to all.. As James Donald (1992) wrote in relation to the city, 'there is no such thing as a city', equally there is no such 'thing' as a nation-state, a country and yet it is constantly produced and reproduced through the imaginings of the peoples within and beyond the borders. Rather like Walter Benjamin's call to read cities as texts comprising a multitude of stories so, too, we can attempt to reconstruct the imaginaries of nations and the place of the urban within these imaginings.

The imagining of the USA and of Latin America constitute a two-way process in which, not surprisingly, the US is constructed as a land of things to be bought and sold, of high technology, wealth and power for many in Latin America. It is constituted, as the film showed, as 'el Norte' part of a binary between the poverty and hardship of the South and the opportunities and money of the North. It is a space geographically somewhere to the North encompassing the 'rest of the world'. It is only on arrival that the complexities of this space become apparent. From the North, Latin America is constructed and read as both exotic, with shamans and ancient peoples defending the Amazonian forest, and as a place of corruption, generals and drug cartels which need policing by the ever-vigilant U.S. military, CIA and agents of the State Department. But, even within this imaginary, there are fractures and from within civil society groups of human rights activists, of aid workers and musicians and artists whose connections within Latin America are distinctive. While both of the hegemonic visions have long histories it is the age of television which has made such an impact and it is, in part, a televisual imagination which provides the texture and nuance to these constructions of ,on the one hand ,the land of plenty -'God's own country' and, on the other, the land of corruption, poverty and hard times. A major factor in the more recent Latin American view is the impact of the Miami based telenovelas which are made for the Spanish-speaking Latin American market. Many depict the good life in Miami or Mexico City with large houses, large cars, lots of food, shopping malls, servants and ,of course, like most soap operas, little hint of work. For the migrant, on the other hand, paid work is the reason for moving and comes to fill the spaces of the North in terms of the trajectories of migration.

The imaginings of these territorially governed spaces of nation-states are, however, powerfully undermined by popular cultures and the forms of cultural capitalism that trade in music, film and television. Latin America hosts the same huge pop concerts held in the cities of the US and imports rock music and jazz while it exports salsa, son, tango, rock music recast with a Latin beat like the Mexican band Maná, jazz musicians and those who use indigenous rhythms recast for the global market-Carlos Vives, for example, or Los Lobos. Globo television from Brazil exports programmes and personalities like Xuxa to the US.In this circulation of sounds and commodities an alternative account of the imaginary of Latin America is produced which encourages the possibility of exploring the ethnic and cultural diversity of Latin America -that 'outsized reality' as Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called this imaginary. Novelists also play a role in the ways in which the exotic is privileged having created a whole genre of magical realism which is copied, tried out and used globally. It has been appropriated most successfully by Indian writers writing in English (Salman Rushdie, Arundharti Roy for example). Compare the complexity of this form with the pulp fiction of books like Body of Truth a thriller set in Guatemala. Latterly, new genre of 'diasporic'; Latin American writing is being created by young novelists like Junot Díaz .Cultural products offer the possibility of a decolonisation of the imagination despite the power of television to construct images of 'the other' and recycle the myths of Latin America and of the USA.

BORDERS

Against the globalisation of cultural products and the commodification of specific arts and crafts there is the commodification of whole nations through the tourist trade which offers sun, sex, and pleasure as well as the opportunity to consume Aztec ruins, old Mexico, haciendas and the folkloric worlds of Latin America. These imaginings and the tourist trade do ,at one level, also differentiate the world of Latino culture into nation-states with borders, cultures and geographical features. The tourists who travel to Ecuador to visit the Galapagos islands visit an Ecuador not much travelled by Ecuadoreans themselves who are more likely to belong to an urban world whether of the coast or the highlands. Part of this urban world, especially for the middle classes, looks to the USA for employment opportunities, training, consumption patterns and style and reproduces this within the cities of Latin America. High rise blocks in Quito and Cali are modelled in part on Miami, notwithstanding the maids quarters which are still a part of the architecture of middle class enclaves. Similarly, houses are hybrid in style ,matching Spanish colonial style with US 'dens', basements and plumbing. This is a two way process evidenced in the middle class enclaves of California where the same Spanish styles are commonplace. While these ideas travel, people from the nation-states of Latin America face 'the border' and US immigration control, as aliens and subject to the indignities of immigration control. This is part of the globalisation process-a process which moves not just capital and commodities around the world but people ,as Sassoon (1996) emphasises. The borders that greet people in Miami or Texas or California are policed in ways that the borders of Latin America nation-states are not in relation to the incursions of the multi-nationals ,especially the oil companies in Amazonia that now have interests in shrimp fishing (BP) and other basic utilities, power, water, minerals, previously acknowledged to be 'national resources'. These economic incursions have not been effected without contestations, demonstrations in Ecuador, law suits against Texaco and guerilla groups in Colombia who regularly blow up the pipelines.

The US is everywhere in Latin America but it is also clear that Latin America is everywhere in the US. Miami is a bi-lingual city as are parts of Chicago, Los Angeles and New York . There has been historically, and continues to be, a mirror dance between the two Americas. One step in the dance is the constant transgression of borders -legally through the ongoing numbers of people who enter the US-and illegally. It was suggested, for example, in 1995 that New York had 14,000 plus illegal Ecuadoreans (New York Times).Given the size of Ecuador, with a population of 10 million at the last census, whatever the truth or falsehood of the above figure, it gives some idea of the mobility of Ecuadoreans and that the Latin American population throughout the States is growing a pace .In part this is the outcome of the global economy but it is also the large numbers of second and third generation US born people of Latin American descent who now make their home in the cities of the US. Puerto Ricans are already US citizens but it is estimated that Latinos (classified in the US Census as Hispanics) will outnumber the black population in the next ten years (as they do currently in 21 states) and that they comprise 27% of the workforce,14% of the population some 20 million people and rising numerically. It is also clear that this population is an increasingly diverse population.

LIVING THE IMAGINARY

When I was living in Quito I rented a flat from Cecilia who owned a hotel, flats and property in the city and in the town of Otavalo, famous for its market, crafts which are sold globally, and tourism. I asked Cecilia where she felt she belonged and to which country ,where was her 'patria chica'. Cecilia had spent twenty years in Miami and replied that she was both Ecuadorean and American and that America was her 'patria chica' as much her home, 'maybe more so', than Quito or Otavalo. Similarly, friends in Colombia who had studied in the US always spoke of their 'American families' with whom they maintained ongoing and close ties over decades .In these cases individuals saw no borders and the 'Americas' were all part of one world. It is often very different for rural migrants or those from the small towns of Mexico who come to the US to work in the fields. As labour they move from California to Texas to work in tomato fields where the crop has been engineered and organised for the forms of imported labour that these migrants constitute. The ties that they have to their home towns are strong and they have obligations in the form of community roles and service, political office, families, and a sense of home outside the US (Frederico Besserer:1998). Migrants like these from Mexico are important both to the Mexican economy and the US economy. Many learn Spanish and English in the US because they speak an indigenous language in a specific local dialect and they come to occupy a series of spaces that are not bi-national but are better undeerstood as multi-centric. The place of work may be California or they are moved to Texas, but for many of the workers ,earning below the minumim wage, places in 'America' are not designated or named they are all part of 'the tomatoes'. Lives defined by the products that they sustain.

These are the rural migrants who provide material for the ways in which Latino/a peoples and cultures are constructed and represented in the US. However, it is within the urban spaces that the cities of America are being made over by the growing presence of Spanish speaking peoples. The growing bi-lingualism of cities and states in the US has been racialised is particular ways generating a nation-wide organisation for the hegemony of the English language- a form of cultural defence it is claimed against the growing 'threat' from Spanish (Urcioli:1997). The growing sense of a Hispanisized world within the cities has generated hostility and a new hierachy of ethnicities in which 'chicanos' and 'latinos' are the new 'others' of the urban landscape. In this process diversity is conflated and homogenised and individuals come to stand in for a category -to represent the Spanish speaking alien. The lived reality with its texture and nuance is very different.

The Latin presence in American cities has come to know and lay claims to these urban landscapes and to create homes and a sense of belonging within this. Puerto Ricans ,speaking Spanish and sharing both a Latin and a Caribbean culture have, suggests, Sciorra (1996) contributed to the 'caribbeanization' of New York, most especially through the reclamation of parts of the South Bronx in which Puerto Ricans have built, on derelict land, the kind of small houses ,casita, reminiscent of the island of Puerto Rico with two or three rooms and a veranda .When a fire destroyed much of this in 1990 people in the locality came together to rebuild the area. This is an importation of vernacular architecture which changes the visual and aesthetic spaces of the urban, contributing to the sense of a hybrid, diasporic spatial aesthetic. The remaking of housing, just like the dance halls and Friday night celebrations are part of a re-membering which is active, not simply a nostalgia for the familiarity of home but an attempt to make a home in a new landscape.

This new landscape ,especially in New York, is fuelled by the rise of the global city which has had a major impact on the ethnoscape of the city with the arrival of more migrants from Latin America and South East Asia . This has also meant the gentrification of parts of the city (comparable with London) in which the poor and dispossessed are usurped from the marginal spaces they claimed as their own. One example of this ,discussed by Neil Smith as an example of the 'revanchist city', was the struggle over Tompkins Square on the Lower East Side in New York in which the homeless were removed from the park in part by a Neighbourhood Association which included developers ,homeowners and Antonio Pagan, a Latino property developer, who came to lead the coalition against the homeless, housing for people with aids, and a drug rehabilitation unit . Although out as a gay man Pagan found himself opposed by both sections of the gay community and by 'a coalition of progressive Latinos' . The park was reopened but as part of the gentrified Lower East Side and Pagan's victory was secured in the 1993 elections (Smith:1996) The story of Tompkins Square also elaborates the fractures within the Latino population and the cultural and political remixing that is current. This is a politics of urban America not concerned, as the Cuban population in Miami, with struggles over the places from which migrants have migrated. The Cuban population in the US is a very specific population held together by the ongoing war with Fidel Castro.

For those who are not professionals or students the inner city is the fabric within which a sense of place is built and this has been the source of often fierce contestations in relation to the territorialization of urban spaces. The most celebrated expressions of this politics of space are to be found in the gangs of young men who contest spaces with other gangs in the neighbourhood. Some of these contestations bring young black men into conflict with young Latino men over space but also over resources, income and trade. Many Latinos now occupy positions once occupied by sections of the black population-from workers in agriculture to routine manual work. But, within the cities there are a myriad ways to generate income and many do not related to a job in the conventional sense. Ducking and diving, trading in goods, casualised forms of work are the mainstay of life. The public spaces of the urban are fought over and won, defended and lost in an ongoing attempt to exercise power in the spaces of locale and it is a complex ethnic politics consistent with the ethnoscapes of urban America. It is also a predominantly masculine and youth struggle over 'turf' ,forms of nationalism of the neighbourhood recognisable in the UK as much as the US. These processes are also constitutive of identities, local, ethnic and city based in which the struggles provide locations constantly in need of policing, defending and reasserting by the different gangs.

This is a very different route to a sense of home and belonging from that produced by sections of the population coming together in churches, dance halls and associations some of which link places of origin to the new milieu while others are concerned to foster a sense of place within the cities of the US. The notion of home is complex and contains within it the sense of loss and of the new , but for one group of workers it is more ambivalent. These are the women who come to the US as domestic workers contributing through their labour to the reproduction of the households of the middle classes, predominantly the white middles classes ,but not exclusively so. The maids, carers of children and the elderly live within the space of the home, but are simultaneously outside the family and home of their employers in a relational and emotional sense. Many of these women, like the women working in the factories, are sending money 'home' back to Mexico or Guatemala in order to assist family, buy bricks or land to build a house. Some women do return but many ,'develop ineradicable ties over time to the communities where they live and work in the United States' (Repack:1997,256) The differences between household strategies are explored in a paper by Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia (1997) in a study of Cuban and Mexican women working in factories in Florida and California. The Cuban women in Florida had a very high rate of economic activity and worked in relation to a household strategy aimed at raising family income for education, consumer durables and generally raising standards of living whereas the Mexican women in California were more likely to be heads of households or members of relatively impoverished households where their earnings were crucial to subsistence. These differences are repeated throughout the US and contribute to the developing differentiations by class of the Latin American descent populations in the country, or to the consolidations of class distinctions within the populations.

DIASPORIC POLITICS

The Latin American entrants to the U.S. come from the racialised, diasporic spaces of the nation-states of the region in which European, Jewish, Palestinian and Japanese to name some of the ethnicities familiar throughout Latin America are part of a world in which hybridity and mestizaje are the official ideology of nation-building. States in Latin America do not collect statistics on ethnicity within the national censuses. Officially mestizaje marks the racial mixture which is common throughout but, while the ideology suggests this is a democratic conception it is actually allied with a hierarchy of colour denoting race with white at the apex. The ideology is ,in fact, about valorising whitening and whiteness rather than racial mixture. Thus, sections of the Mexican social formation claiming indigenous roots, speaking an indigenous language rather than Spanish are not part of the imaginary of the Mexican nation. The United States with its legally sanctioned individual freedoms, discourse of rights and democratic traditions is, however, no less a vehicle for the valorisation of whiteness and is marked by the binary black/white against which black people have fought for the vote, for civil rights and for recognition as part of the nation. Thus, migrants are moving from one racialised diasporic space into another with some easily recognised attributes, racism against black people, the dessimation of the indigenous peoples and a complex ethnoscape of Italians, Greeks, Asians, Jews, South Asians and many more who may or may not be identified by a hyphenated designation ,for example, "Jewish-American". Culturally complex, the officially celebrated melting pot, has welded diversity into an account of white American identity which has been fostered over decades. Latin Americans come into a space in which they are homogenised and through this marginalised and offered a place on the periphery. Further, coming into a city like Miami which saw the Hispanic population rise very quickly in a decade Latino/as face the white backlash deflected through the issue of language. The Latinization of Miami happened very quickly ,from 5.3% in 1960 to 35.7% in 1980 and within this time the Latin population secured a place in the economy not just as manual workers but as entrepreneurs. While the official ideology was assimilationist and Dade county gave official recogniition to the state as bicultural and bilingual in 1973, by 1980 the white backlash had organised the English Only campaign which they took onto the national stage later in the decade. The black population of Miami, viewing this as racially motivated, was lukewarm despite the difficulties that some sections of the black population had encountered through competition for jobs, housing and health care(Castro:1997) Sections of the black population were more organised and directly hostile to the arrival of Nicaraguan migrants and refugees in Miami. In South Central Los Angeles there have been a number of violent encounters between young men from black and Latino gangs fighting for control of the locality. However, the gangs succeeded in calling a truce and coming together against the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) when the graffiti announced "Crips, Bloods, Mexicans. Together . Forever. Tonite (sic) with "LAPD" crossed out and "187" underneath.

Ambivalence marks many of these encounters and coalitions are fragile and often contingent. Nevertheless, the outcomes are not determined as recent accounts illustrate. Flores (1997) explores the ways in which Puerto Rican and African American young people share rap and graffiti, dance forms and social space in New York which promotes a 'growing together' out of which comes a sense of 'AmeRican' or in the cityscape of New York, 'Nuyoricans'. The suggestions is that the Caribbean cultural mix of Puerto Rico creates a basis for the coming together of Black -Americans and Puerto Ricans especially among the young men. Flores's account is not gendered in the sense of suggesting the ways in which masculinities are recognisable between these groups compared with the situation for girls and women and the social constructions of femininity in the North American context. The account of New York does suggest the fluidity and malleability of ethnic identities in the city and the importance of the spatial in producing cultural identities.

One facet of popular culture not much explored is the role of sport in Latino/a ethnic identifications and the articulation between the hyphen of hyphenated US identities. The staging of the World Cup in 1994 provided a space for soccer enthusiasts from Latin America to show the United States what soccer was all about, why it is a passion and in what ways it could be promoted. Although volley ball, basket ball and base ball are also played throughout the Latin American states nothing excites the passionate response, the carnivalesque atmosphere and spectacle in the way that soccer does. Young Latinos kick soccer balls in neighbourhoods throughout US cities to Latin rhythms from the surrounding windows and cars. Despite Pelé's performances for the New York Cosmos in the late seventies and the revival of Major League Soccer in 1992 ,the big money has not yet bought into soccer so what is a passion, as it is for kids throughout Latin American cities, and world wide, cannot yet be traded and turned into a career with the kind of rewards available to American football, baseball and basket ball players.

Diasporic politics is worked through within the complex ethnoscapes of the urban in the U.S. in which in a variety of sites identities are made and re-framed in the processes of interaction. In the factories, for example, where racism positions Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, as 'Latino/as' or ,"Chicano/as", as different and ideologically constituted as less than white workers expressed materially through the hours, the anti-social shifts and the low pay. These differentials may be recast in the neighbourhood through the power of young men to police their space and claim it as their own, or through the churches and the attempt to generate community, integrity and status in a hostile environment, and through food cultures as an antidote to 'Tex/Mex' and Tacobel. Schooling, healthcare, the criminal justice system and the institutional nexus of US states present rules for living, regimes through which all sections of society are inducted into the national codes, national space and time. Forms of governance in which the outcomes are uncertain and may have unintended consequences for conceptions of the citizen and the consumer. However, it is within the realms of popular culture, from the Teatro Viva of Los Angeles in which Gay and Lesbian Latino/as tackled the issue of AIDS, to the singers and poets, rap artists and musicians, writers and artists that some part of the engagement with the US and the generation of Latin identities is being forged .It can be seen in the play with language ,the witty 'AmeRican' which is placing the new generations in the urban world of the cityscape. Equally, it is present in the writing of Junot Diáz who ,in the short story 'How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie' writes, 'She'll say ,I like Spanish guys,and even though you've never been to Spain, say, I like you. You'll sound smooth'

The new ethnicities of the urban world of U.S. cities, of New York and Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington are part of a much older story in which cities have been racialised. From the earliest period of settlements cities have been decentred through the delineation of racialised space. .But, this spatial pattern which constitutes for so many the 'geographies of exclusion'(Sibley:1995) is also part of the imaginary of cities which brings the social and subjectivities together (Westwood:1997). It is this story of racialised space which is undermined by the graffiti -'Crips, Bloods, Mexicans-Forever, Tonite (sic)" and which is also a response to the forms of racism which police 'the others' of the city through modes of constant surveillance which make black people and people with their origins in Latin America constantly visible within a discourse of racism constituted in time and space. Surveillance is exercised in relation to the Latino/a population in relation to the discourse of migration and the construction of 'the illegal' who is an ever present threat to the borders of the United States ,to order and to whiteness as part of the American dream . It is ,as many from the Latin American states discover, a racialised dream and one in which they are not imagined. This does not, however, halt the production of dreams. Dreams, ideals are re-framed in the cities of the US within the development of vibrant, complex and resistant Latin cultures where people while remembering home are creating their own sense belonging in 'el Norte'.

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