Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities ed. by Michael Rios and Leonardo Vazquez, with Lucrezia Miranda (review)

In recent decades the number of Latinos who call the United States home has increased dramatically. Largely as a consequence of global economic restructuring, these newer arrivals have challenged and transformed the cultural and vernacular character of cities and communities across the nation. In response some states have passed laws such as Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act to restrict Latinos’ citizenship and to police their places of residence. The surging Latino population continues, however, to adapt and remake public and private spaces to fit their cultural expressions and consumer desires. Missing from the scholarship until now were culturally sensitive diálogos, or conversations, that explored the dynamics of Latino placemaking—with actual case studies to illustrate how Latinos have given new meanings to their built environments in both urban and rural settings. Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities does an admirable job of providing these. Each of the ten chapters offers insights into how Latino cultural forms and energies have revitalized communities and ascribed new cultural purposes and expressions to fading landscapes. Indeed, together they show how the social, political, and physical changes brought about by Latino placemaking have been nothing less than insurgent.

The contributors to Diálogos make it clear that placemaking occurs with or without planners or designers; they remind readers that these formally trained professionals consider it their primary responsibility to ensure socio-economic “order” by shaping and minimizing risk in the physical environment. For their part, Latino placemakers in effect challenge planners to look beyond traditional vernacular forms and to seek alternatives and innovative remedies that do more than facilitate the economic integration of Latinos. Ideally, informed planners and designers should also seek to integrate Latinos into the civic fabric and to provide pathways that allow them to collectively shape policy; however, engaging in these transformational possibilities requires a heightened level of cultural competency. Diálogos provides an entry point for planners and designers to achieve what the editors call “an understanding and appreciation for different cultural histories; and of how power relations manifest in a range of settings and across scales of decision making—from geographies of the body to the globe” (203).

The various chapters of Diálogos provide actual examples of community struggles and partnerships that have challenged restrictive policies and forced the integration of Latino concerns into land-use policy. They highlight Latino resistance, praxis, and advocacy through detailed discussion of local networks and issues of spatial justice. Thus, the first chapter, “Historical Overview of Latinos and Planning in the Southwest,” by Clara Irazábal and Ramzi Farhat, stretches back to 1900 to examine ingrained xenophobic sentiments and the refusal to recognize Latinos as anything other than newcomers—a repudiation that resulted in the systematic segregation and redlining of Latino communities. Subsequent chapters expand the conversations by exploring Latinos’ geocultural presence not only in colonias along the U.S.–Mexico border but also in places such as Iowa, Florida, and New York. For example, the chapter by Gerardo Francisco Sandoval examines the transformation of a once ethnically homogeneous white place in a small Iowa town into a multicultural landscape. Responding to the restructuring of the meatpacking industry, immigrant Latino entrepreneurs opened new stores, restaurants, and other businesses, infusing new capital and new energies into a previously shrinking community. Indeed, Sandoval shows how, thanks to immigrant Latinos, small towns in the United States are “at the cutting edge of globalization” (161). In doing so, he shifts the conversation toward the practical and applied aspects of Latino placemaking.

Part 2 of Diálogos, “Space: Urban Design and the Built Environment,” considers the correlation between innovative planning and positive possibilities for bridging ethnic divisions and appreciating Latino placemaking. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris has written one of the strongest contributions, “Using Culture as a Competitive Advantage...