Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City

1. Fortress Gates of the Rich and Poor: Past and Present

C h a p t e r 1 Fortress Gates of the Rich and Poor: Past and Present With every foundation of the city one should expect definitions and boundaries. —Lewis Mumford, The City in History On November 8, 1993, Dr. Manuel de la Pila, the largest public housing project in the city of Ponce in Puerto Rico (the second-largest public housing authority in the U.S. federal system), became a gated community. Up until then, gates had kept people out rather than keeping people in. Gates had become the exclusive privilege of the affluent communities; their residents, for at least a decade, from about 1987, had been quietly erecting gates and fences to surround their homes and communities. Gates of the rich protected elegant homes and gardens and shut out intruders. In 1993, the first new gates of the poor in Ponce went up noisily under the supervision of law enforcement helicopters engaged in drug raids on public housing and under the eyes of television cameras. To some government functionaries, the public housing gates gave the poor in Puerto Rico access to a privilege heretofore exclusive to private homeowners; the residents of public housing disagreed. While the gates of privilege locked out urban chaos, in the words of a Dr. Pila resident the public housing gates simply “lock up” and in. The public and private housing gates of Puerto Rico are visual symbols of a historical trend that has lasted for centuries within unequal communities around the globe. Gates have been an integral part of city design from Rome to Britain to the colonies of the New World.1 In San Juan, Havana, and Santo 10 Chapter 1 Domingo, gated fortresses protected the new colonies from impending attacks from the sea. Gates controlled and banished the powerless from being able to access the cities. Modern gates in residential communities have a similar function in the United States, in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Most have been erected as private enclaves, in the name of protection from crime, locking out an increasingly complex city.2 The gated communities in public housing extended the gating apparatus to nonprivileged communities. Gates to control the poor have been erected in New York, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.; in favelas in Brazil; in the fortresses that mark racial and ethnic cleavages in South Africa; and as strategic camouflaging within slum cities throughout the world.3 In private communities , gating arranged by insiders keeps others out; in public housing, gates are controlled by outsiders to gain protection for themselves from those inside. In locking themselves in, the privileged lock undesirables out. Gates for the poor reverse this order; they shut undesirables in. In both, the gates are erected in the interest of an upper class and, in modern cities, of the primarily white. The Enemy Outside and Inside Historically, gates have assumed an enemy: an enemy inside, an enemy outside . In elite neighborhoods, retirement communities, resorts, and even on military bases and bulwarks, gates have been intended to create a safe and protected sanctuary. In prisons, as in poor neighborhoods, and even in schools, gates are mechanisms of control and discipline of those inside. Gates are symbols of power that defend and protect monarchs, governments, religious institutions, military posts, colonizing migrant bodies, and empires; they afford power by segregation, locking in access to resources and material wealth. Lewis Mumford wrote that fortresses originated as symbols of exclusivity, reserved for medieval aristocrats: “As late as 1750 bc in Palestine the tribal chieftains occupied fortresses, while most of their subjects lived in surrounding hamlets, and moved into the fortified enclosure only in times of peril.”4 But the gate quickly became “a practical necessity, not just a symbol” that “magnified the selfish absorptions and the anxious preoccupations of the city’s king or governor.”5 By the fifteenth century, the old citizen-policed walls had become vulnerable to the new artilleries of European power mongering, “a complicated system, with enclosures within enclosures,” with “outworks, salients, bastions, in spearhead forms.”6 Fortress Gates 11 Elaborate gates—external and internal—were considered necessary when constructing the foundations of colonial America. In San Juan, as in Havana and Santo Domingo, centuries ago, fortresses and gated towns helped imprint the Spanish empire on American geography. “The new colonial towns . . . looked backward, not forward—for they followed the...