In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • América's Home:A Dialogue about Displacement, Globalization, and Activism
  • María Célleri (bio), Denise Delgado (bio), Delia Fernández (bio), and Danielle Olden (bio)

Introduction

The 2012 documentary América's Home, directed by C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan, delves into the history of gentrification and Puerto Rican grassroots community activism.1 The film examines the consequences of policies that privilege progress over individuals, community formation, and cultural memories. Beginning with a brief description of the colonization of Puerto Rico, the documentary focuses on América Sorrentini Blaut (Meca), an activist in both Puerto Rico and Humboldt Park, a Chicago neighborhood. Meca's childhood home, Casa Sofia, is a historical building that faces destruction to accommodate modern development in Santurce, one of the most populated working-class communities in Puerto Rico. América's Home is unique for its woman-centered narrative. Meca's voice guides viewers through the lived experiences of urban renewal, and we see women playing a central role in the grassroots efforts to preserve community and home, although both men and women work to resist gentrification.

The editors of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies asked four emerging scholars from different disciplines to collectively review and analyze the film. The resulting discussion centers on several major themes: progress, cultural displacement, community activism, renewal, and affect, as well as the ways in which these themes inform one another in both our historical understanding and our contemporary lives.

Danielle:

My upbringing as a Latina in Wyoming and my work as a historian of the modern US has stimulated my interest in Manifest Destiny, which celebrates American progress at the expense of colonization and dispossession. In watching the film, I found myself asking what place "home" has in our historical memory, individually and collectively. What role does [End Page 130] "home" play in our understanding of American progress, which has remained a central—though not uncontested—paradigm of the American story? In this narrative "home" is most closely associated with single-family domestic bliss, a gendered and heteronormative construction of family and living that privileges whiteness and ignores the poor and dislocated. Frequently missing is a conversation on the multiple kinds of homes in which people live. América's Home engages us in that dialogue. For the people in the film "home" is community. It is a physical space as well as a network of close ties that provide security and fellowship. I was struck, therefore, by the interconnections I gleaned from this film in terms of questions of progress and home and the ways in which the filmmakers wove these two narratives together to demonstrate the social and cultural demolition that takes place when homes are displaced by so-called progress.

Delia:

Growing up in a Mexican American and Puerto Rican family in the Midwest, I've always been fascinated by how (im)migrants interact with their surroundings and the extent of their relationships with their culture and places of origin. Consequently, what I found most interesting was the film's comparison between Santurce and Humboldt Park. Both spaces were safe havens—Santurce as a place for runaway slaves and Humboldt Park as a neighborhood for Puerto Rican migrants as they left the poverty-stricken island in the mid-twentieth century as a result of Operation Bootstrap. Now, however, both places are in danger of gentrification. The threat of loss and disappearance goes beyond the physical space.

Danielle:

Absolutely. It was not simply about Meca's struggle to save Casa Sofia; it was also about her struggle to save Santurce. I like that you brought up the connections between Santurce and Humboldt Park because as I watched the film, I could not help but see this story as the US story as well, depicting the historical struggles that were born out of American notions of progress: expansion, development, capital growth and migration, and the gendered and racialized nature of these processes. This kind of progress actually increases social inequalities.

Denise:

Right. As a Chicana growing up in Arizona, a state intent on erasing its colonial history, and with my current interest in studying immigration in the context of neoliberalism, I recognize...

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