Phantoms of the Barrio: Chicana/o urban spatial politics and muralism, 1965-1985

Ettinger, Sean Nicholas

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120248 Copy

Description

Title

Phantoms of the Barrio: Chicana/o urban spatial politics and muralism, 1965-1985

Author(s)

Ettinger, Sean Nicholas

Issue Date

2023-04-13

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Burgos, Adrian

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Burgos, Adrian

Committee Member(s)

• Hertzman, Marc
• Brennan, James
• Ramírez, Yuridia

Department of Study

History

Discipline

History

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Chicana/o
• Muralism
• The Chicano Movement
• Urban spatial politics
• Placemaking
• Barrio Logan
• Pilsen
• East Los Angeles
• Chicano Park
• Casa Aztlán
• Asco.

Abstract

Between the 1960s and 1980s, Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the United States participated in civil rights activism confronting social, cultural, political, and economic inequality rooted in ethnoracial discrimination against people of Mexican descent. This era is known as El Movimiento. During this period, Mexican and Mexican American activists in the U.S. embraced Chicana/o identities, a self-identifier signaling commitment to El Movimiento’s goals of challenging white hegemonic control over institutions of power that upheld Mexicans’ and Mexican Americans’ marginality and second-class citizenship. I examine how poor and working-class Chicana/os redefined their place within U.S. cities by confronting the historical and ongoing spatialization of inequality that characterized the neighborhoods they called home. I detail how Chicana/os engaged the spatial discourses that El Movimiento activism cultivated in relation to urban barrios, or neighborhoods, predominantly comprised of Mexican and Mexican American residents. This process nurtured a distinct Chicana/o urban spatial politics that worked to protect these urban communities as places of ethnic Mexican congregation. I present three case studies that examine how Barrio Logan in San Diego, California; Pilsen in Chicago, Illinois; and East Los Angeles in unincorporated Los Angeles County, California; were distinct sites of conflict that placed Chicana/os in competition with elected city officials, urban planners, business leaders, law enforcement officials, and white urban residents over the nature, use, and development of these neighborhoods. I reveal how El Movimiento galvanized Chicana/os to confront this spatialization of inequality by challenging ethnoracial discrimination, residential displacement, urban renewal, and political marginality. Through grassroots challenges to structures of power that upheld urban inequality and spatial exclusion for ethnic and racial minorities, Chicana/os developed an urban spatial outlook that affirmed processes of community control and self-determination. In doing so, Chicana/os engaged in a process of placemaking that allowed them to define and use space according to their needs. This placemaking showed how residents’ everyday actions constituted a form of activism that transformed space, while also providing insight into how they constructed attachment to urban spaces. I argue that Chicana/os interweaved muralism with grassroots activism to address the spatialization of inequality shaping their respective barrios. This established muralism as a vital component and expression of Chicana/os’ spatial recalibration. In each location, public murals were viewed as particularly effective in their ability to remake the barrio’s visual, social, and cultural environment through their conspicuous locations and capacity to draw broad public engagement. Each case study examines how Mexican and Mexican American artists and residents utilized muralism to communicate the struggles that defined life in their respective barrios. Residents further utilized murals to depict specific changes they worked to enact in their communities and to celebrate their identity, culture, and history. In doing so, muralism encompassed a range of practices that facilitated solidarity among residents and fostered a sense of ownership over community space, making it critical to Chicana/o placemaking efforts. Though Chicana/os in Barrio Logan, Pilsen, and East L.A. similarly pursued grassroots solutions to issues that shaped their daily lives, the outcomes of these efforts varied and resulted in both success and failure. Yet, Chicana/os’ accomplishments in reinscribing their respective communities with a new spatial knowledge should be viewed as a resource that still holds bearing for Latinx people’s contemporary struggles over urban space. The efforts of artists and ordinary residents between the 1960s and 1980s provide current Latinx communities with a legacy of struggle to draw from and to reimagine in their attempts to assert community control and self-determination over their neighborhoods.

Graduation Semester

2023-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Sean Ettinger

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