Latino Design in an Age of Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Contemporary Changes in Latin/o American Urban Cultural Representation

Abstract

This article considers an emerging shift in Latino cultural politics of design representation and urbanism. To illustrate this shift, I include interviews with designers whose imaginative and geographic locations across the Americas have fostered a global attitude that challenges previous Latino designs that follow nationalist cultural politics of differentiation and are shaped by neoliberal multicultural imperatives. This article serves as an analytical study for scholars interested in understanding the ways in which cultural difference is included in a creativeindustry that has a large role to play in the configuration, evaluation, and theorization of poor, urban, and ethnic spaces. In particular, this article stimulates a debate about the different modes of incorporating Latino culture in design and generates future discussion on how to achieve more inclusive urban representations.

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

“…To do so, I analyze the early 1990s typographic design of Pablo Medina, a Cuban-Colombian-American award-winning designer currently working in NYC. In particular, I position his Cuba typeface, a type that was inspired by barrio signage and follows the genre of hand-painted bold lettering, in relation to two socioaesthetic value systems that dominate design history: modernism and postmodernism (Londoño 2010). Simply put, while the aesthetic tenets of modernist design stress universal applicability and communication, postmodernism disrupted a straightforward trajectory of meaning from producer to reader by making typography into an artistic medium whose meaning was expressive and variously interpretable.…”