Placemaking and Latino Urbanism in a Phoenix Mexican immigrant community

Abstract

Latino immigrants are remaking residential landscapes in Phoenix, Arizona. This case study explores Garfield, a Mexican immigrant neighborhood, where transformations to residential landscape have altered existing community space creating Latino cultural space. Landscape study and visual documentation in Garfield demonstrate how Latino immigrants transform the living environment of a once decayed inner-city neighborhood. Findings suggest that placemaking changes brought by Latino immigrants, particularly residential housescapes, can be a culturally sustainable practice that enhances the neighborhood aesthetic. It remains problematic whether Mexican housescapes can be successfully incorporated into Latino Urbanism because the creation process carries social meaning that is difficult to reproduce.

Keywords:

• Latinos
• Mexican immigrants
• housescape
• neighborhood aesthetic
• Latino Urbanism

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank graduate research assistants J. Peters, N. Lopez, D. Meneses, A. Fox, L. Chavez, C. Smith and H.M. Fukui, and students in GCU 344 Hispanic Americans at Arizona State University who helped collect housescape information in Garfield. A. Fernández tabulated and processed housescape data collected in the field.

Notes

1. A forthcoming book, Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities edited by Michael Rios and Leonardo Vasquez (New York: Routledge, 2012) will begin to remedy this neglect.

2. One community response to the disruption brought by freeway construction and declining property values was the founding of the Garfield Organization (Peters 2007). This group of local residents emerged out of the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), a private, non-profit social change organization that targeted Garfield for community revitalization. In 1993, the City of Phoenix targeted Garfield as one of five Neighborhood Initiative Areas, a joint effort between the city and organizations to revive the community. City of Phoenix Neighborhood Services Department became an active agent in Garfield, and in conjunction with the Garfield Neighborhood Organization the community was designated an official Weed and Seed site by the US Department of Justice. This enabled government agencies, neighborhood residents, and private and non-profit groups to coordinate efforts to strengthen the community by allowing it to concentrate on four main revitalization themes: crime, housing, property maintenance, and land use issues. Official recognition as a Weed and Seed site expired in October 2005, but implementation continued until funding ran out in December 2006.