La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City

On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project--Arizona's first major urban renewal project--which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called "la calle." Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center's new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle's residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning.

Otero examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. She gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance.

La Calle explores the forces behind the mass displacement: an unrelenting desire for order, a local economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the pivotal power of federal housing policies. To understand how urban renewal resulted in the spatial reconfiguration of downtown Tucson, Otero draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines: Chicana/o, ethnic, and cultural studies; urban history, sociology, and anthropology; city planning; and cultural and feminist geography.

Author: Lydia R. Otero
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 11/15/2010
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 8.92h x 6.08w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780816528882

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2011 pg. 130

About the Author
Lydia Otero is an assistant professor in the Department of Mexican American and Raza Studies at the University of Arizona. Her work on claiming place, historic preservation, and Mexican American resistance in the 1930s has appeared as contributions to various anthologies. Otero has family roots in Southern Arizona on both sides and for several generations.