Gentrification scholarship often focuses on the vulnerability of long-term residents in general (for example homeowners, renters, and low-income older adults) to displacement, though not necessarily with focal attention to how this process specifically affects low-income minority older adults. Using ethnographic data, the authors prioritise and examine the experiences of aging low-income Puerto Ricans who, by way of senior-designated affordable housing, remain in some of Chicago’s most rapidly gentrifying communities. Interviews, focus groups, and participant observations are supplemented with data from the US Census from 1970 to 2010 in order to document some of the demographic changes that have been taking place in what were once majority Puerto Rican neighbourhoods. We find that while low-income older Latina and Latino residents are able to stay in a gentrifying neighbourhood, surrounded by new amenities, they still find limited spaces where they feel welcomed, resulting in indirect displacement. We argue that considerations of aging in place should not only include affordable housing, but should also include an accessible neighbourhood in terms of mixed-uses that support the wants and needs of low-income and minority older adults.
Displacement has marked the individual and collective lives of Puerto Ricans in Chicago, especially those who migrated in the 1950s and 1960s. For these older persons, the arrival of the gentry and the yuppies of yesterday, the hipsters of today, and the disappearance of familiar faces in their current neighborhoods are not new phenomena, but rather parts of a profoundly familiar process. They came of age in displacement. Today some Puerto Rican older adults have achieved housing security and are able to age in place because they live in low-income senior housing. Yet a sense of displacement still looms large in their daily lives with the upscaling of and new-build gentrification in their current neighborhood. This work sheds light on the meaning of place for older adult Puerto Ricans who have experienced what psychiatrist and urban studies scholar Mindy T. Fullilove calls a history of "serial displacement." Through life history narratives and ethnographic snapshots, this paper highlights the neglected reality of "aging in displacement," or the experience of growing up and growing older in a context of repeated socio-spatial dislocation and how individual and collective life histories of community upheaval texture the spatial and social meanings of place.
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Inspired by Jesús Colón's A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches, the introduction highlights the role that history, memoir, and autobiographical fiction invariably play in most empirically sound and theoretically sophisticated Latinx humanistic social sciences. The open-endedness of Colón’s “sketches”—their critical pedagogical aspect and how they lend themselves to pointed yet fluid discussions—drives our approach to the humanistic social sciences in Latinx/a/o studies in the form of critical diálogos. For Colón, sketches were intended to bequeath a historical record and tradition and to provide a tool for critical consciousness-raising. For us, the editors, Colón’s deployment of the sketch serves as a template for how to approach our proposition of critical diálogos in this anthology. Our central concern in Critical Dialogues is not merely to document or do a genealogy of Latinx/a/o studies as an academic field, but to stretch its points of reference and contributions. We continue Colón’s tradition of studying Latinx/a/o populations beyond an exclusive US framework and at the intersection of a Latin American, Caribbean, US empire, global, international, and transnational optics. What we articulate in this volume is an approach to Latinx/a/o Studies that actively and continuously works towards a dialogue-based, multidirectional analysis.
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