Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (review)

Raúl Homero Villa’s thought-provoking study opens with the words of Edward “Lalo” Guerrero’s song, “Barrio Viejo,” which juxtaposes fond memories of his childhood raza neighborhood with the present-day ruin and loss visited upon that barrio by urban development. The song indicates the central concerns of Barrio-Logos: the intertwined articulation of geography, politics, memory, aesthetics, history, community, and identity in Chicano(a) literature and struggle. This book explores how essays, poetry, music, fiction, visual art, and community arts projects express the conflict between Chicano(a) efforts to build community and urbanization programs that effectively fragment or destroy those communities.

Villa’s project is three-part. First, he examines the continuity of the battles for physical and social spaces for Chicano(a) cultures in accounts of encroachments upon and displacements of California Mexicano(a) and Chicano(a) communities from the nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on Los Angeles, Villa discerns the “tense relationship between socially deforming (barrioizing) and culturally affirming (barriological) spatial practices—which together produce the form and meaning of the barrio” (8).

Villa then analyzes how this dialectic informs barriological literature. Examining the works of Helena María Viramontes, Los Illegals, Gil Cuadros, Luis Alfaro, and Gloria Alvarez, Villa suggests that the memory of place is inseparable from the multifaceted and not always comforting “wisdom of the barrio” that these works convey (118). He also reveals the degree to which lament and (or) anger over the loss of what he terms a “communitarian ethos” (116) in Chicano(a) texts takes place against the backdrop of destructive urban reform. Villa concludes that in contrast to nostalgia, which aims to forget, these representations convey “deeply affective attachments” (12) that enable community building by recalling the lived experience of previous community-enabling activities.

Barrio-Logos also rethinks art and activism. In his discussion of the work of the Chicano Park collective and other Chicano(a) artists, Villa explores the development of organic links between community activism and art, foregrounding activism as generative rather than reactive. Here he reveals that the “deployment of historico-geographic knowledge, very often informed by personal experience, has been a fundamental tenet in the socio-aesthetical expressive practices of Chicanas and Chicanos who document and contest the sociospatial subordination of their communities” (94).

Finally, Villa investigates the feminist critique of nationalist conceptions of place and space. Villa’s discussion of Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poetry begins to unravel the “masculinist and heterosexist ideologies regarding ‘land,’ ‘culture,’ and ‘family’” that inhere in an uncritical perspective on continuity (224). He critically reads Cervantes’s intracultural critique, her valorization of Chicana labor and knowledge, and her representation of shifting models of urban survival. In shifting his attention to gender and engaging an important discussion about claims for continuity, Villa deepens and further illuminates his earlier discussion of Chicano(a) battles for communal physical space.

Drawing on geography, cultural and literary studies, and history, Barrio-Logos provides an innovative analysis of Chicano(a) representations of and participation in struggles to define urban spaces and communities. In both efforts, as Villa reveals, memory is central.