Barrio America How Latino Immigrants Saved The American City – AK Sandoval – Strausz (1)

The plan had its critics, particularly on the subject of its racial politics. They saw it as an effort to use municipal resources to wall off populations of color from downtown to create a neighborhood in which white people would feel comfortable. The placement of Chicago 21’s development zones reminded many observers of earlier projects that had been sited between poor minority and prosperous white populations.

The Carl Sandburg Village redevelopment, which in the 1960s had displaced thousands of Puerto Rican families to build a half-mile-long, three-hundred-foot-wide strip of middle- class residences between the Cabrini-Green housing projects and the ultra- wealthy Gold Coast, underscored a clear pattern of spending public funds to effectively build walls within the city. Indeed, it was hard to see it any other way after a leading backer of Chicago 21, who had also been the principal developer of Sandburg Village, told the Chicago Daily News, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the Loop.

It’s people’s perception of it. And the perception they have about it is one word—black. B-L-A-C-K. Black.… The ghetto areas have nothing but rotten slum buildings, nothing at all, and businessmen are afraid to move in, so the blacks come downtown for stores and restaurants.”8 Chicago’s Mexican and Puerto Rican communities certainly saw red when they examined the new plan. “So when we finally got down to the Department of Planning,” recalled a prominent neighborhood activist, people “went in and looked at these plans, and they said, ‘Hey, here’s the plan for Pilsen, and we’re not in it!’

You know, ‘Here’s Little Village, and we’re not going to be there!’” Community resistance soon emerged and consolidated: one poster showed a visage with a bandit mask labeled CHICAGO 21 glowering over the cityscape. Underneath were the words, “¡Atención, familias de Pilsen! ‘Big business’ wants to move in on our neighborhood!!!” while small figures in the foreground cried, “¡Ay ay!” And “¿Qué vamos a hacer? [What are we going to do?]” Indeed, the plan became one of the rallying points in a new era of political activism among Chicago Hispanics.9 Both Chicago’s Spanish-Speaking Population and Chicago 21 focused on new populations moving into the city proper.

The main difference was what city hall intended to do about the prospect. The answer could hardly be clearer: it expected the Hispanic population to continue growing, but it did not plan to offer these new Chicagoans any resources. By contrast, it proposed to spend many millions of dollars to encourage predominantly white middle- and professional-class people to come back to the city, by both developing industrial sites and renewing areas around the Loop.

And if those areas were populated by black people or Latinos, it was expected that they would simply depart to other parts of the city.

Copyright © 2019 by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz Cover design by Ann Kirchner Cover images © Kelly/Mooney Photography/Getty Images; Daarsan/Shutterstock.com Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc. Parts of this book appeared in different form as “Latino Vernaculars and the Emerging National Landscape,” Buildings & Landscapes: The Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 20 (2013), 1–18; “Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America,” Journal of American History 101 (2014), 804–831; “Migrantes, Negocios, and Infraestructura: Transnational Urban Revitalization in Chicago,” in Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization, eds.

Domenic Vitiello and Thomas J. Sugrue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Permission to use this material is gratefully acknowledged. “Carnaval del Barrio” (from In the Heights), “Finale” (from In the Heights). Words and music by Lin-Manuel Miranda © 2008. 5000 Broadway Music. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved.

Used by permission. Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected].

Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. Basic Books Hachette Book Group 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104 www.basicbooks.com First Edition: November 2019 Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Basic Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group. The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sandoval-Strausz, A. K., author. Title: Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City / A. K. Sandoval-Strausz. Description: First edition. | New York: Basic Books, Hachette Book Group, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019014405 (print) | LCCN 2019980679 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541697249 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541644434 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Urban renewal—United States—Case studies.

| Neighborhoods—United States—Case studies. | Cities and towns— Study and teaching—United States— Case studies. | Community development, Urban—United States—Case studies. | Hispanic Americans—Case studies.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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