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

FOUR: Art against Social Death: Symbolic and Material Spaces of Chicano Cultural Re-creation

Art against Social Death F O U R Symbolic and Material Spaces of Chicano Cultural Re-creation But our research has concentrated above all on the uses of space, on the ways of frequenting or dwelling in a place . . . and on the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual , that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires—an art of manipulating and enjoying. —michel de certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life The motif of social death has been shown to be among the most persistent figures of Chicano structural oppression within an aggressive dominant culture . If many Chicanos in contemporary California, like their mexicano and Californio ancestors, have not yet retired to the land of the dead, it is not for lack of external pressures to do so. The disparate impacts of hegemonic urban planning and its attendant social ills continue to pose real material threats to the cultural well-being—if not the very lives—of poor and working-class Chicanos. However, the impulse among barrio residents to defend and enrich their threatened or violated social spaces also continues to flourish in dialectical opposition to the intended or unintended consequences of external domination . In this chapter, I will look at significant expressions—both fictional and real—of this impulse, manifest in Chicano recreational and residential spaces in three different urban centers: Elysian Valley (known popularly as Frog Town) in Los Angeles; the Logan Heights barrio of San Diego; and the downtown barrios of Sacramento. As an initial gesture toward the broader consideration of California Chicano aesthetic and grassroots barriological activism promised in my introduction, I am moving beyond the parameters of Chicano community places in Greater Los Angeles. The homology of circumstances and effects between the represented and practiced community spatial actions in the various urban sites calls for such a comparative discussion . My intention is to illustrate the multiform creative practices by which Chicanos have attempted to materially reconstitute and expressively represent places of community well-being against the degradations to which those places have been subject. T H E U T O P I A N P O E T I C S O F S O C I A L G E O G R A P H Y I N T H E R O A D T O TA M A Z U N C H A L E Mapping the Second City of Los Angeles Ron Arias’ novel The Road to Tamazunchale is a deceptively playful and fantastic fiction. As the novel begins, we are introduced to Don Fausto Tejeda, who is apathetically awaiting death in the dystopian confines of his neighborhood on the other side of the tracks from downtown Los Angeles. The actual geographic referent for Fausto’s urban milieu is the Elysian Valley barrio immediately northeast of the city center. Known popularly as Frog Town, it is situated at the intersection of the 110 (Pasadena) and Interstate 5 (Golden State) freeways and is an urban residential isthmus produced by a historical succession of infrastructural developments (see Fig. 40). The out-jutting finger of the isthmus is marked by the highway interchange, while its southern and northern barriers are respectively defined by Elysian Park’s north-facing escarpment (itself partially carved away by the construction of the parallel Golden State Freeway) and the Los Angeles River and parallel Taylor Yards of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Like Goethe’s Faust, who is shaken out of a socially reclusive stupor by the epiphanic tolling of a church bell, Don Fausto suddenly resolves to pursue ‘‘the song of life’’ rather than accept his passive death. Fausto subsequently becomes the Quixotic hero of a fantastic quest, conjured by his imaginative will, embarking on a surreal odyssey across the boundaries of time and space. Fausto starts his trip on a Los Angeles city bus, meeting up with his fellow traveler, a young street-wise hipster named Mario, whom Fausto identifies as his ‘‘apprentice wizard.’’ Mario acts as a vato loco (crazy dude) version of Sancho Panza to Fausto’s Quixote. Thereupon begins a hallucinatory makeover of the barrio and downtown cityscape, as Fausto and Mario soon come across Art against Social Death 1 5 7 a third wayfarer, Marcelino, an indigenous Andean alpaca herder, who suddenly appears with...