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THREE: "Phantoms in Urban Exile": Critical Soundings from Los Angeles’ Expressway Generation
- University of Texas Press
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‘‘Phantoms in Urban Exile’’ T H R E E Critical Soundings from Los Angeles’ Expressway Generation In Los Angeles there is an impression that the fluidity of the environment and the absence of physical elements which anchor to the past are exciting and disturbing. Many descriptions of the scene by established residents, young or old, were accompanied by the ghosts of what used to be there. Changes, such as those wrought by the freeway system, have left scars on the mental image. —kevin lynch, The Image of the City The distinctive sign of nineteenth-century urbanism was the boulevard, a medium for bringing explosive material and human forces together; the hallmark of twentiethcentury urbanism has been the highway, a means for putting them asunder. —marshall berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air Cutting a broad swath through the central-city barrios, the juggernaut of Los Angeles’ postwar redevelopment effected its devastations upon a wide cross section of the Chicano community. For many contemporary writers and artists who grew up in the path or in the shadow of this voracious growth engine, lived experience provided the raw material that they would later transmute into compelling barriological expressions. Like the range of discourses treated in Chapter 2—including critical journalism, activist scholarship, and revi- F I G U R E 3 0 . East Los Angeles Interchange, 1962. Courtesy of California Department of Transportation. F I G U R E 3 1 . Geography of the expressway generation, greater East Los Angeles. Courtesy of United States Geological Survey. [54.173.221.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:06 GMT) sionist historical narratives—the creative forms and thematic contents of texts produced in the 1980s and 1990s also serve to ‘‘identify and clarify the issues that . . . [have] shaped’’ Raza urban social space and consciousness (Acuña 1984:274). In sharp contrast, therefore, to the glib pronouncements of freeway boosters and urban developers, who promoted their projects as monuments to Southern California’s celebrated ‘‘good life’’ (if not as its very conditions of possibility1 ), a counterdiscourse has emerged among a generation of contestatory Raza writers, informed by their cognizance of the many neighborhoods razed for the achievement of the city’s ‘‘modern marvel’’(Parson 1993). Among the notable examples discussed in this chapter are works by author Helena Marı́a Viramontes, lyricists Willie Herrón and Jesús Velo of the rock band Los Illegals, poet and author Gil Cuadros, playwright and performance artist Luis Alfaro, and poet Gloria Alvarez. These writers—and many other Raza artists whose work cannot be taken up here—exercise a specific modernist social-geographic aesthetic, described by Marshall Berman, which was engendered within and against the repressive effects of contemporary urbanism. This critical expressive ethos, was ‘‘at once more personal and more political . . . [and one] in which modern men and women could confront the new physical and social structures that had grown up around them. In this new modernism, the gigantic engines and systems of postwar construction played a central symbolic role’’ (1982:310; see Fig. 32). Berman here describes an experientially based and affectively compelled discourse of artistic ‘‘back talk,’’ or backlash, against the material and psychological ravages of the contemporary metropolis. This expressive impulse is commensurate with the exigencies of life in an imperious urbangrowth machine such as Los Angeles. As it has historically been demonstrated to many Chicanos that they ‘‘are not in a position to effectively claim that their neighborhood, as used by them, is . . . useful for attracting capital,’’ they have consequently been forced to ‘‘make a more ‘emotional,’ a less ‘publicregarding ’ . . . case for their rights to their homes and shops’’ (Logan and Molotch 1987:135–136). This affective case for place-rights canbemadethrough any number of publicly expressive activities, as presented in the opening chapters . However, it is particularly germane to the thematic and formalstructures of the works discussed here, in which the deeply felt, and often suffered, experience of urban deterritorialization has figured so prominently. I have purposefully drawn the first part of this chapter’s title, ‘‘Phantoms in Urban Exile,’’ from the work of Harry Gamboa, whose talent for laconic characterization of social truths was seen at the end of Chapter 2. This specific phrase was taken from the subject heading for his series of ten con- ‘‘Phantoms in Urban Exile’’ 1 1 3 cise Internet texts—each not more than a paragraph or two—posted to CHICLE, the Chicano Literature and Culture Internet discussion group, in late 1995...