This panel examines the politics of gentrification from multiple vantage points, perspectives, and disciplines to understand how Latina/os are narrated and experience gentrification. Gentrification is one of the most important... [ view full abstract ]
This panel examines the politics of gentrification from multiple vantage points, perspectives, and disciplines to understand how Latina/os are narrated and experience gentrification. Gentrification is one of the most important spatial and locative phenomena of the 21st century. Its impact on redefining class, privilege, and access is dramatic. Its ability to easily transform and erase populations of color from geographic spaces is daunting.
Nancy Mirabal’s paper, “Spatial Archives: The Gentrified Politics of Invisibilities and Forgettings,” looks at how academic, popular, and media discourses on gentrification have effectively erased the very communities being displaced. It argues that the deliberate silencing of Latina/o communities in major cities undergoing gentrification is part of the colonial trick of redefining space without being accountable to racialized displacement and the promotion of suburban poverty and dis-location.
Zaire Dinzey-Flores’ paper, “The Racial Aesthetics of Real Estate,” examines the role of real estate companies in reconfiguring access and privilege to space. It argues that real estate companies actively promote certain neighborhoods, primarily in New York City, in a manner that emphasizes whiteness at all costs. In doing so, real estate companies are not only able to “sell” neighborhoods that only a few years early were considered “uninhabitable,” but have completely reworked who has the right to certain spaces.
Johana Londoño’s paper, “Aspirational Gentrification at the Edge of Metropolis,” explores how gentrification—loosely defined as a process by which people with higher income and normative forms of cultural capital shape the ability of long-standing low-income residents to claim belonging in cities-- takes its energy and strength from a varied group’s aspirations for upward mobility and locational parity across the metropolitan area. According to Londoño, “aspirational gentrification” points to the ways in which people of multiple socio-economic, cultural, and racial backgrounds support gentrification without seeming to understand the actual ramifications for their own, and their neighborhood’s, future. The paper focuses on Latina/o-majority Union City, NJ, a city that, although existing within the reaches of Manhattan’s ever-expanding outward gentrification into peripheral neighborhoods, has yet to develop as nearby Hoboken or Brooklyn, the poster-children of a pro-gentrification stance. To overcome the uneven time and space of gentrification in metro NYC Union City’s urban elites, business owners and residents use culture, aesthetics, and emotions to diminish socio-economic class, racial and inter-Latina/o differences that might preclude gentrification.
