Latino Design in an Age of Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Contemporary Changes in Latin/o American Urban Cultural Representation

Abstract

This article considers an emerging shift in Latino cultural politics of design representation and urbanism. To illustrate this shift, I include interviews with designers whose imaginative and geographic locations across the Americas have fostered a global attitude that challenges previous Latino designs that follow nationalist cultural politics of differentiation and are shaped by neoliberal multicultural imperatives. This article serves as an analytical study for scholars interested in understanding the ways in which cultural difference is included in a creative industry that has a large role to play in the configuration, evaluation, and theorization of poor, urban, and ethnic spaces. In particular, this article stimulates a debate about the different modes of incorporating Latino culture in design and generates future discussion on how to achieve more inclusive urban representations.

Keywords:

• Neoliberal multiculturalism
• Latino representation
• barrio
• design

I thank Professor Arlene Dvila for her encouragement, guidance, and constructive feedback throughout the writing of this article. I am also grateful to Zachary Schwartz-Weinstein for his generous comments and support. The designers who agreed to be interviewed, the editors of Identities, and two anonymous reviewers also influenced my thoughts and writing, and I thank them for their contributions to this article. The author takes full responsibility for the thoughts and analyses expressed in the text.

Notes

1. Few works of scholarship bring together graphic design, typography, architecture, and urban planning. However, in this article, I include design professionals from all of these disciplines because it is from within them that designers are rethinking the cultural, social, and economic value of barrio landscapes.

2. Little consensus exists on a definition of minimalist design. It is usually considered an offshoot of modernist design, bare of any decoration and composed in a reductionist way but still communicative of its purpose to an audience.

3. Data on employed Latino designers—a professional body that, in this essay, includes architects, urban designers, and graphic designers—can be found in the 2009 Household Data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of the 204,000 architects in the United States, 6.9 percent are Hispanic, and approximately 85 percent are non-Hispanic white. There are 764,000 designers, 7.9 percent of whom are Hispanic and approximately 82 percent of whom are non-Hispanic white. The categories used make it impossible to ascertain how many urban designers—designers that engage with the urban environment—are included in these figures. Neither is it possible to differentiate among the many design fields: animation design, fashion design, graphic design, etc. Of course, the new attention afforded to Latino designers also exists within cultural spaces only tangentially related to marketing agendas. An example of the ways Latino designers have been highlighted in multicultural projects is the Latino/Hispanic Archive at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which was established in 1995 in the context of increasing multicultural awareness and a polemical diversity agenda carried out by the Smithsonian Institution.

4. Ricardo Legorreta works and lives in Mexico. However, because his architectural design projects in the Southwest of the United States claim to incorporate aspects of Mexican culture that speak to the large Latino population living in the area, I consider his work “Latino.” Henry Muñoz is not a professionally trained architect, but he is the president and CEO of one of the largest Latino-owned design firms in the United States and is active in conceptualizing some of its architectural designs.

5. The use of gothic in the name of this typeface can be confusing. Here, gothic does not refer to medieval type, but instead to a modernist sans serif font.

6. Cruz's modular constructions have also been proposed for a redevelopment project in Hudson, New York (Ouroussoff 2006, 2008; Ross 2009).

7. For a longer discussion on the differences between modernism as style and modernism as a discourse, please see Sarah Williams Goldhagen (2005).

8. This is translated from a text written in Spanish (Harte et al. 1992).

9. Twentieth-century Latin American modern architecture is usually attributed to Latin America's most famous and influential designers, such as Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer, Colombian Rogelio Salmona, and Mexican Luis Barragan, who are intellectual disciples of the revered modernist Le Corbusier (Quantrill 2000).

10. Quoted by Mauro F. Guillen (2004).