Gentrification today spreads and deepens in US cities. In this paper we examine the progentrification rhetoric and tactics confronted by the second largest Puerto Rican community in the United States, Chicago's Humboldt Park. Three points are documented in this current case. First, real-estate capital and the media now target and script Puerto Rican youth bodies to communicate a new gentrification-sanitizing theme: a disgust for ‘ghetto’ morals and social order. Second, this coding of bodies involves a key process, taking readers to imaginary spaces in discourse. Third, possibilities to thwart gentrification exist but organizing strategies are ineffective in that they fail to confront the politics of youth bodying. The results shed light on one of the ascendant strategies of capital to restructure Spanish-speaking neighborhoods and a subset of them, Puerto Rican communities.
IntroductionGentrification in US cities continues to be unpredictable and often contentious (Munoz, 1998;Wilson, 1996).`Protect community' undertakings are alive and well despite the engines of accumulation being acutely refined and deepened antipoor rhetoric and sentiment (the revanchist era) [see Munoz (1998) on New York and Mueller (1999) on St. Louis]. Successful antigentrification movements typically entail residents willing (or threatening) to obstruct development (for example, impeding construction, discouraging gentrifier in-movement, persuading retailers to resist upscaling') (Diskin and Dutton, 2002;Mele, 2000;Smith, 1996). Such actions, we now know, can make developers turn to other neighborhoods or other forms of investment. But how residents in such threatened neighborhoods ö often politically disorganized, self-doubting, and inexperienced in activismö become so transformed and active is unclear.This lack of knowledge stems from a superficial understanding of the discourses that transform and activate them. The most basic aspects of such discourses are still unexplored; for example, how such rhetorical projects are constructed, how central themes are made luminous and persuasive, how offered understandings are fitted into current bases of knowledge, and how such themes challenge and thwart gentrification. Such analysis in any setting is, we realize, potentially daunting. To Annette Hastings (1999) and Loretta Lees (2000), these discourses of opposition are complex human accomplishments that need to`sell' new ways of seeing while placing this in the terrain of normative and acceptable. Their making, to Hastings, requires diverse resources that meld in complicated and contingent ways ö use of space and history, use of language, and seizing and building on common understandings.
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