Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture

Raúl Homero Villa

Published by University of Texas Press 2000

Barrio-Logos

Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture

Raúl Homero Villa

In the series CMAS History, Culture, and Society Series

https://doi.org/10.7560/787414

Overview
Contents

About this book

Struggles over space and resistance to geographic displacement gave birth to much of Chicano history and culture. In this pathfinding book, Raúl Villa explores how California Chicano/a activists, journalists, writers, artists, and musicians have used expressive culture to oppose the community-destroying forces of urban renewal programs and massive freeway development and to create and defend a sense of Chicano place-identity.

Villa opens with a historical overview that shows how Chicano communities and culture have grown in response to conflicts over space ever since the United States' annexation of Mexican territory in the 1840s. Then, turning to the work of contemporary members of the Chicano intelligentsia such as Helena Maria Viramontes, Ron Arias, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, Villa demonstrates how their expressive practices re-imagine and re-create the dominant urban space as a community enabling place. In doing so, he illuminates the endless interplay in which cultural texts and practices are shaped by and act upon their social and political contexts.

Author / Editor information

Raúl Homero Villa is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Reviews

Villa's work locates artistic production within its proper social and historical contexts without reducing art to an unmediated reflection of unjust social relations.... This will be an important book for scholars in Chicano studies, but perhaps even more important as a model for blending cultural texts with their sociological contexts.

— George Lipsitz

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction. Spatial Practice and Place-Consciousness in Chicano Urban Culture Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
ONE. Creative Destruction: Founding Anglo Los Angeles on the Ruins of El Pueblo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
TWO. From Military-Industrial Complex to Urban-Industrial Complex: Promoting and Protesting the Supercity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
THREE. ‘‘Phantoms in Urban Exile’’: Critical Soundings from Los Angeles’ Expressway Generation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
FOUR. Art against Social Death: Symbolic and Material Spaces of Chicano Cultural Re-creation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	156
FIVE. Between Nationalism and Women’s Standpoint: Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Freeway Poems Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
EPILOGUE. Return to the Source Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	234
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
WORKS CITED Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 286

eBook

Published: March 6, 2009
ISBN: 9780292798922