Entre la casa y la calle: Latinx childhood re-memories of space and place

ABSTRACT

This article challenges previous deficit narratives on Latinx communities by centering childhood re-memories of Latinxs and complicating our understanding of their childhood experiences in historically disinvested communities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and fieldnotes, we examined how Latinx participants recounted the impact that everyday racism, violence, patriarchy, and gentrification had on their childhoods, their neighborhoods, and their families. Although their re-memories were at least a decade old, they vividly remembered ambivalent and contradictory re-memories entre la casa y la calle. Through these re-memories, Latinx participants mapped the competing systems that shaped their experiences and how they impacted their communities. We conclude this article by exploring the resistance strategies that Latinxs deployed to negotiate these spatialities and their place in them.

KEYWORDS:

• Latinx
• Chicana/Latina feminisms
• patriarchy
• education
• resistance
• gentrification

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term Latinx is a form of identity that is open to subjectivity. When using the term, we need to be cautious about how we as researchers are labeling and imposing Latinx on our participants. As researchers, we need to honor and respect how participants self-identify. Furthermore, the term Latinx aims to be geographically inclusive of Latin American origin and descent and inclusive of gender and sexual identities (Salinas 2020). According to Salinas (2020), the term is mainly used within academic and activist spaces. Although the term aims to be inclusive, it can also exclude along with gender, sexual, and linguistic identities. Additionally, we recognize that Latinx is not its own racial category as Latinxs are not a racial monolith. Nonetheless, Latinxs are a racialized group and are often assumed to be a singular race. Latinxs can be any race, including Black, Indigenous, Asian, and white. Latinxs are implicated in racial hierarchies within and outside their countries of origin that perpetuate global anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. Latinxs is used as the plural form of Latinx.

2 We use Toni Morrison’s term re-memory (1987) to capture how People of Color negotiate post-colonial powers between the past and present.

3 We defy linguistic borders by translanguaging, an approach commonly used by Chicana/Latina feminists, which includes multiple linguistic codes and mixtures of genres to reclaim home languages, like Spanish (although still the colonizers language), and which refuses to subordinate one tongue for another (García and Leiva 2013).

4 Both community organizers and public policymakers have moved away from using the concept of food deserts to conversations around food insecure neighborhoods or food oasis. Food insecure neighboohs have been described as high-poverty urban areas where residents struggle to purchase affordable and healthy foods.

5 Students in the Chicago Public Schools have the option to enroll in a selective-enrollment high school. Admissions depend on a student’s grades, scores on the Measures of Academic Progress exam, and score on an admissions test for selective schools.

6 The rivalry between Norteños and Sureños has its origin in the 1960s and was based on divisions between the US born and immigrant Latinx.

7 The trend of Latinx immigrants moving into the suburbs instead of starting in a major city has increased across the country (Rodriguez 2020).