Barrios, the most pronounced of Latinx spaces, have been considered central to a prolonged Latinx crisis of belonging in the United States. They have inspired many responses, from destruction to a defense of its cultural value. This book additionally considers how barrios are a cultural force that has been manipulated in order to create landscapes that do not stoke the supposed threat of urban Latinidad. The individuals who do this and their expression of the built environment are a less frequently discussed response to the anxiety felt over Latinx transgression of normative expectations of urbanness. This book offers an original, interdisciplinary, and wide-ranging examination of urban planners, architects, designers, settlement workers, policy makers, and business owners who sublimate barrios during key moments from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The book attends to how their selective barrio visibility—abstraction—may sustain the economic and cultural viability of normative white urbanism.

Johana Londoño is an assistant professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). She holds a PhD and MPhil in American studies from New York University (NYU) and a BFA from The Cooper Union. She teaches courses that explore the role that race and ethnicity play in shaping US cities. Her published work appears in several edited volumes, such as Latino Urbanism (NYU Press 2012), and journals including American Quarterly and Social Semiotics. Her research has benefitted from fellowships at the Ford Foundation, Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program, NYU, and Northeast Consortium for Faculty Diversity at Northeastern University. More recently, she was an inaugural fellow of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities (2014–15). She is currently completing her book manuscript while on a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017–18).