The Latino-ness of type: making design identities socially significant

Abstract

To reflect on current Latino-themed typography in built environments and marketing venues, this paper examines the early 1990s, barrio-inspired typographic design of Pablo Medina, a Cuban-Colombian-American award-winning designer currently working in NYC, in relation to two diverse socio-aesthetic value systems. The first value system is a modernist ideology, which insists that language and expression can be universal and communicate across racial, ethnic, and cultural differences without carrying any particular meaning, bias, or identity. In contrast, Medina's Cuba typeface is in conversation with an ethnic place approach to cultural production that has its origins in 1960s Latino social movements that sought to affirm the cultural value of barrios. This design approach is often associated with postmodern socio-aesthetic preferences that “localize” culture. I argue that this type's articulation with the urban requires rethinking its postmodern categorization. This short article offers a window into new ways of thinking about hand-painted lettering – produced by designers and sign artists – that indexes barrio landscapes.

Keywords:

• lettering
• barrio
• design
• Latino urban culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Johana Londoño is a Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism and Humanities at Princeton University and an Assistant Professor on leave from the Dept. of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. Interested in the intersection between cultural studies, urban studies, and Latina/o studies, she is currently at work on a book manuscript titled Abstract Barrios: The Latinization of Cities, Urban Design, and Representations of Poverty. She has also written on the topic of Latino design, Latino urbanism, and the Latino-majority places of Union City, NJ and Santa Ana, CA.

Notes

1. My use of vernacular is meant to highlight the hand-painted lettering that professional discourse and design literature differentiates from professionally designed objects.

2. Latino is used sparingly in the 1960s and 1970s. It has become most popular in the past two decades. Today the term is used concurrently with Hispanic, the latter which is most found in the social sciences, policy, and mainstream press.

3. Professor Welby Ings of Auckland University of Technology and Professor Sydney Shep of Victoria University of Wellington offered helpful feedback and critical analysis of the uses of this typeface during the Typographic Landscaping Symposium at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, June 2013.