La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City (review)

In his analysis across feature films that stray from casting professional actors, film theorist Siegfried Kracauer writes of the “documentary touch.” Citing international classics such as The Bicycle Thief and Los olvidados, he remarks: “In all of them the emphasis is on the world about us; their protagonists are not so much particular individuals as types representative of whole groups of people. These narratives serve to dramatize social conditions in general” (98). In short, our voices, livelihoods, and daily existence are validated through the stories film reveals: “When history is made in the streets, the streets tend to move onto the screen” (98). What happens when the streets—those where this history is made—literally disappear? To where do “real life” protagonists turn, off screen? By whom are their voices heard, and stories re-told?

In the case of Lydia Otero’s La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City, those streets—and the cultural and historical value ascribed to them by generations of Mexican American (and most of the area’s Asian and African American) residents—were once found in downtown Tucson, Arizona. The Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project, approved in 1966 by the city’s predominantly white property-owning voting base that did not occupy or patronize the region, “targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in [the state]” (2). Within five years, city officials had successfully demolished adobe homes and bilingual community theatres, relocated churches and the remains of central plazas, paving over any dusty, Latino remains of a corazón tucsonsense with “modern” building materials. In an effort to appeal to local white, monolingual wealth and visitors that identified with such cultural comforts, Downtown Tucson had been repackaged in glass and concrete. A brand new cityscape accommodated new government offices, a conference facility, concert hall, a hotel, outdoor shopping mall and an imposing concrete pavilion known today as the Tucson Convention Center (TCC). By 1971, Governor Jack Williams welcomed over 7,000 to the Ice Capades, the first performance at TCC. With the homes of tucsonenses like Alva Torres and Guadalupe Castillo buried somewhere under his feet, Williams, flanked by red, white and blue décor, assured spectators that TCC “belong to ‘the people’ and that it represented ‘tomorrow’” (125).

Although cinematic in scope, this very eerie turn of events may not turn into a Buñuellian-style feature anytime soon. However, this exciting volume from The University of Arizona Associate Professor of Mexican American Studies offers a needed “documentary touch” to broadcast her interviews with Torres, Castillo and the once vibrant La Calle. The latter translates literally to “street” in Spanish, yet pragmatically conveys much more: flexible spaces familiar with tucsonense families for generations that extended immediately outside of private domains within the downtown area and inclusive of the “city’s commercial heart” (28).

Only pages into Otero’s book does it become sharply apparent that narratives from La Calle today symbolize an extermination of Tucson’s original bilingual cultural and social core, an event in the not-so-distant past that quickly went forgotten and for many remains unnoticed by the greater region’s monolingual, White inhabitants. And yet this research arrives at a time when the livelihoods and voices of tucsonenses and Arizonans are in danger of cultural extermination in new forms: Mexicano, bilingual and Chican@ agency and vitality risk institutional erasure through renewed Anti-English legislation, Anti-immigrant policing and fervor over ethnic studies curricula.

Regardless of one’s personal, political or geographic connection to Tucson, I have for the past year insisted that La Calle be read across audiences. All readers, for one, are likely to catch themselves engrossed in a tale complemented by stunning collection of source materials—including photographs, maps, advertisements and newspaper clippings, often getting lost in their detail for minutes each. As a scholastic piece, the book’s significance is incredibly wide reaching. La Calle introduces key conceptual frames that can be dissected and re-situated...