Selling EthniCity: Urban Cultural Politics in the Americas (review)

Latin American Studies is alive, well, and vibrant, at least if this excellent collection of essays is an indication. Editor and historian Olaf Kaltmeier assembled a trans-Atlantic collection of scholars, mainly from the social sciences and humanities, to examine variant courses taken in nation-building and city promotion. If, as the contributors argue, the city is "understood as a kind of business or company with marketing departments" (p. 13), then we need to understand "the importance of ethnicity and the culture economy in the post-Fordist city of the Americas [because] [c]ultural, political, and economic elites make use of cultural and ethnic elements in city planning and architecture in order to construct a unique image for a particular city" (p. 15). Geographers will recognize this use of international heritage programs, festivals, performances, and the flow of tourists and investors in fashioning these images.

This highly readable collection of essays should be full of rich illustrations, and for the princely sum demanded by the publisher, a CD-Rom or other value-added item should be part of the package. However, only eight figures and a single table adorn the volume, which is parsed into fifteen chapters across four parts.

The first part, 'The Spectacular City and Performance of Ethnicity,' provides examples from New Orleans (John Gold), Chicago (Wilfried Raussert and Christina Seeliger), Oaxaca (Jens Kastner), and Sucre, Bolivia (Juliana Ströbele-Gregor). We learn that the use of Mardi Gras, blues, graffiti and racism convey powerful meanings -good and bad—about how places are perceived by insiders and outsiders.

A second section explores ethnicity and the 'imagineering' of urban landscapes. Kaltmeier tackles the much-neglected topic of middle-class consumption as reflected by upscale shopping malls in Latin America by studying one in Quito. Julie TalRav shifts both scale and content way north to explore a fascinating urban relic: a Jewish community center in downtown Detroit. Ruxandra Radulescu concentrates on indigenous identities in Seattle as expressed in popular stories about Native Americans. We learn that American literature is "little welcoming toward Native American authors who do not write about reservation life" (p. 142). Continuing on the U.S. west coast is Jens Martin Gurr and Martin Butler's examination of digital fiction and re-ethnicising Los Angeles. The authors complement the works of Mike Davis, Ed Soja and Allen Scott by understanding how the symbolic system of literature becomes a culturally and socially productive agent. There are many teaching opportunities to be drawn here for college courses on urbanization, politics, and representation.

A penultimate part explores ethnic heritage and cultural commodification in selected cities. Carrión Mena and Dammert Guardia unpack the layers of meaning behind Quito's historic center by exploring how tourism, street trading, and petty commerce shape the city's public spaces. We learn that struggles over the inclusion/exclusion of the historic district "have generated a high level of urban segregation" (p. 183). Readers will recognize the regional work by geographers Gareth Jones and the conceptual contributions of Neil Smith in the Quito case. Nina Möllers then turns to a discussion of New Orleans' cultural wealth and multicultural politics. We see how the meanings behind Louisiana Creole or Cajun have unfolded in ways that North Atlantic readers might have assumed was just a function of Latin America. Contrasting New Orleans creole with meanings of Latin American and Caribbean criollo offers teaching moments for Latinamericanists teaching North American students. López Santillán furthers the ethnicity theme through a case study of marketing indigenous folks in Mérida and the tensions inherent in their "Mexicanization" and "acculturation" (p. 205). Her contrast of a traditional Maya village with the annual German Oktoberfest is enlightening. Part 3 concludes with Menéndez Tazaro's study of Vancouver's ethnic diversity. The author shows how various narratives of the immigrant experience in this Pacific-coast melting...