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Space of Resistance: The Puerto Rican Cultural Center and Humboldt Park

Author(s): Rachel Rinaldo

Source: Cultural Critique , Winter, 2002, No. 50 (Winter, 2002), pp. 135-174

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1354691

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE THE PUERTO RICAN CULTURAL CENTER AND HUMBOLDT PARK

Rachel Rinaldo

est of the lofts and rehabbed townhouses of Chicago's Wicker Park lies the country's second largest Puerto Rican commu- nity, Humboldt Park. Politics here are fierce, and at the core of several

stormy controversies in the neighborhood is the Puerto Rican Cul-

tural Center (PRCC). The twenty-five-year-old institution is a bastion

of support for Puerto Rican independence and barrio autonomy. Nationalist ideology permeates the Center's practices of cultural re- sistance and community building.

In this ethnography of the PRCC, I examine its multifaceted forms of community activism and use its work as a way to probe the

forms of power and domination impinging on Puerto Ricans in Humboldt Park. The PRCC's resistance alone is a worthy story, but it

can also be used as an analytics of power, as Lila Abu-Lughod pro- poses. Resistance here is broadly defined, comprising both direct and more subtle responses to prevailing power structures. The PRCC has

utilized various strategies of resistance, from demonstrations to per- formances in art galleries, and their efforts are vital to the fate of a

Puerto Rican community in Humboldt Park. Despite the fragmenta- tion and destruction of the left from which it emerged, the Center is a

power to be reckoned with in the community. The PRCC also provides a way to understand the broader con-

nection between space and community in a global city such as Chicago. The digitalization and mobility of our global era have called

into question any necessary link between community and a physical space. However, as many theorists have argued, globalization often heightens the significance of territory, most notably in the urban

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136 | RACHEL RINALDO

space of global cities (Sassen 1994, 4-8; Harvey, 293-96). Battles over the gentrification of neighborhoods have become emblematic of urban redevelopment in the information age. Yet what is not clear is

where, when, and why some contestations over urban space turn on associating a specific community with a precise territorial location. Is

every struggle over gentrification one in which members of a com-

munity see their identity as tied to an exact geographical location in

the city? Posed more simply, when do community and physical space

become synonymous? In order to address the broader questions regarding community and space, we need to understand space as more than just a way to describe a physical location. It is also a means

of circumscribing a zone of shared representations. This conceptual framework will help to clarify how a physical territory, in this case

Humboldt Park, can be tied to a metaphorical space, here the Puerto Rican community of Chicago. I argue that the PRCC's success and significance emerges in large part from its incorporation of space and spatial strategies into its own tactics of resistance. The PRCC's

diverse struggles often are about space as much as anything else, and

they provide a way of understanding why space is of such funda- mental importance in Humboldt Park.

Henri Lefebvre's work is valuable for developing a theoretical scaffold. For Lefebvre, space is a map not just to be read, but also to

be produced and consumed by collective social practice and so a part of everyday experience. Lefebvre contends that space involves social

relationships, and so is an arena of social struggle. Space may be dominated by technology and power or appropriated to serve the needs of a resistant group. Recognizing the quotidian dimensions of space allows us to understand that not only does power produce

space, but also everyday acts of resistance contest the dominant map- ping of space (165).

This theoretical conception of space helps to frame my central question, why have community and physical space become so inter- twined in some urban spaces? More specifically, why has the PRCC structured much of its resistance around maintaining the physical location of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago? Why have the two become synonymous for the PRCC and what does that tell us about how power is structured in Humboldt Park? Why is the PRCC engaged in so many struggles around space? And why, in an era of

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 137

globalization, often characterized by the transcendence of spatial boundaries, are space and community so tightly linked? I argue that space is important for the PRCC because colonialism collides with gentrification in Humboldt Park, heightening conflicts over community and identity. In addition, these forces confront a commu-

nity with a history of displacement in a city with a history of spatial

segregation.

It is important to stress that the PRCC's actions are not explicitly

targeted on gentrification. They focus on a broader goal of "self- determination" for the Puerto Rican community. However, I interpret

this goal as encompassing antigentrification work, and I think many

PRCC activists agree. Although they are not fighting an outright battle against gentrification that many, including myself, might hope

for, they are effectively framing the neighborhood as Puerto Rican as

a way to resist displacement.

So I argue that the PRCC's struggles are fundamentally about space, both material and metaphorical. They are material in their attempt to demarcate a specific area of the city as a Puerto Rican neighborhood, and metaphorical in their efforts to forge a Puerto

Rican cultural space within Chicago. Space pervades and joins the PRCC's nationalist and anticolonial struggles, their community- building efforts, their stress on bilingualism, and the fight against gentrification. These battles are deeply linked with Chicago's emer- gence as a global city,1 which raises the stakes and leads to the close

association between community and territory for the PRCC and many other Puerto Ricans in Humboldt Park.2

METHODS

I do not think it would have been possible to carry out this ethnogra- phy without contributing to the activist work of the PRCC. Staff, vol-

unteers, and clients of their services are very sensitive to the idea of

being "studied," and my entry as a white ethnographer, I believe, was partly premised on the fact that I had an activist background and

wanted to participate in a way that would help the organization. From January through June 1998 I conducted my fieldwork as a par- ticipant observer, which meant that I took part in a candlelight vigil

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138 1 RACHEL RINALDO

to free the prisoners, passed out flyers in the community, helped with

fund-raisers, wrote an article for the National Committee's newspa-

per, and used my video skills to tape events for airing on public access television. I volunteered in the PRCC's library and joined the associated National Committee to Free Puerto Rican Prisoners of

War and Political Prisoners, which organized vigils, letter writing, and more. I attended demonstrations, cultural events, and other

activities organized by the PRCC and the National Committee. I observed classes in the Center's high school and went on a class field

trip. Since then, I continue to attend PRCC activities.

During my fieldwork, I rarely conducted interviews because I wanted to derive my data from actual participation-this paper therefore uses fewer direct quotations than traditional ethnographies

because I almost never used a tape recorder. I wrote field notes after

attending events or meetings, but rarely wrote them while on site so

as not to make people uncomfortable.

Finally, it is important to note that this article is not an ethnogra-

phy of Humboldt Park. The PRCC is not representative of the Puerto

Rican community in Humboldt Park-but it is certainly one of its more recognized and controversial institutions. It is also the most

prominent source of radical Puerto Rican politics in Chicago. How- ever, political opinions within the Puerto Rican community vary widely, especially on issues such as independence and political rep- resentation. With that in mind, I have undertaken to explain the PRCC with reference to its surrounding community without attempt-

ing to use my fieldwork to generalize about Chicago's Puerto Rican community as a whole.

THE PUERTO RICAN CULTURAL CENTER

The green flyer for the 1998 Puerto Rican Day Parade proclaims, "Resist 100 Years of U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico. Support Self- Determination for the Puerto Rican community." It urges readers to join the contingent of the Friends of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center

at the corner of Division and Western (see Figures 1 and 2). On a bright, blue June afternoon, the parade starts at that corner,

the eastern boundary of Humboldt Park, the core of Chicago's Puerto

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 139

Rican community. At the intersection, a monumental steel sculpture

of a Puerto Rican flag spans the entrance to the Paseo Boricua, the symbolic artery of Humboldt Park. Thousands throng the sidewalks as the parade makes its way west on Division, past the Paseo Boricua's bodegas and bakeries, past restaurants like the popular La Bruquena, past vendors hawking Puerto Rican flags in every shape and size and Puerto Rican flag T-shirts and jewelry, past La Casita, a reconstruction of a traditional Puerto Rican rural house and garden,

past offices of community and religious organizations, to the coun- terpart flag sculpture at the corner of Division and California, and finally into the expanse of the park.

The nights before the parade crowds of teenagers cruise down the boulevards, Puerto Rican flags streaming from their antennas and bumpers, thumping salsa or house music spilling out of rolled-

down windows. Girls in tiny halter tops lean out of sunroofs scream-

ing "Viva Puerto Rico!" as their boyfriends bump their cars down the street.

The parade and the huge fair inside the park offer a vibrant dis-

play of street culture. The Latin American Motorcycle Association riders gun their bikes noisily down the street, eliciting cheers from

the crowds. Boys pose on the grass with their tricked-out, low-rider

Schwinn bikes, while their older brothers show off purebred pit bulls

(sometimes a sign of gang allegiance). One stall plays a salsa tape, and several teenage couples dance. Another group of teenagers forms

a rowdy circle around bare-chested young men who are challeng- ing each other with sexually suggestive break dances to the beat of house music.

One of the most prominent displays at the parade is that of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. They have thirty or forty people marching and carrying Puerto Rican flags, an elaborate float, and

banners calling for the freeing of the Puerto Rican political prisoners. They are one of the largest contingents in the parade itself, and cer- tainly the most political group there. They sing "La Borinquefia," the

anthem of the Puerto Rican nationalists, as they march. They don't quite fit in with the more raucous elements of the parade, but their enthusiasm and cultural pride is palpable.

The PRCC is at the epicenter of years of political struggles in Humboldt Park. A community center staunchly supportive of Puerto

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140 | RACHEL RINALDO

Rican independence, it operates the Pedro Albizu Campos Alterna- tive High School, which caters to students who have dropped out of other schools, a daycare center, an infant creche, literacy programs, a

library, La Casita, and an AIDS outreach and prevention clinic (called Vida/Sida). It has been instrumental in the creation of the Paseo

Boricua Puerto Rican business district and in getting the city of Chicago to subsidize the flag sculptures on Division Street.

Run by a board of directors, with a few paid employees and numerous volunteers, the PRCC is unlike most other institutions in

Chicago. It combines day-to-day community service with cultural

c West Town (see Figure 2 for detail) Central Business District

Figure 1. City of Chicago (partial)

It Scale: 0.5 inches = 1 inile

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 141

programs and left-leaning political activism. Many PRCC activists are involved with other grassroots organizations, and executive director Juan Torres3 gives speeches everywhere from union halls to demonstrations to social movement conferences.

The PRCC emerged out of a period of militant community activism in the early 1970s, activism that was especially focused around schooling and education for young Puerto Ricans. Two of its founders, Oscar Lopez Rivera and Carmen Valentin, were later imprisoned in 1981 for their alleged participation in the FALN (Armed Forces of Liberation), a nationalist armed struggle group. Since its inception and its association with the Puerto Rican left, the

PRCC has been a constant target for FBI surveillance and harass- ment.4 Until most of the prisoners accepted a clemency deal from President Clinton in 1999,5 many of the activities of the PRCC and especially of a separate but affiliated group, the National Committee to Free Puerto Rican Prisoners of War and Political Prisoners, were

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142 I RACHEL RINALDO

targeted toward raising money and support to gain the freedom of the sixteen Puerto Rican FALN prisoners.

The largely Puerto Rican, but also Mexican and white, activists of the PRCC frame their activities as cultural resistance, and their stated

goal is to forge a self-sustaining Puerto Rican community in Hum- boldt Park as well as build the movement against U.S. colonialism in

Puerto Rico. They argue that not only are Puerto Ricans colonized in Puerto Rico, but that as a racialized minority in the United States,

they are internally colonized as well. Juan, the PRCC's chief theorist,

contends, "I don't really think we can talk about a nation, within the

context of the U.S. empire. I am talking about people that have his- torically been objectified, who have been treated as objects, which is what colonialism is. They are in this country within the contour of

the fifty states.... It has been the exclusion of those people, putting them in ghettos, putting them in areas that obviously they don't want

them to be part of your society."

Although the various community programs operated by the PRCC, particularly the alternative high school, make up the vast majority of its daily activities and enjoy community support (receiv-

ing city funding in some cases), the organization and its programs are

still controversial. The main source of antagonism toward the PRCC comes from a set of local Puerto Rican politicians and their support- ers who are strong advocates of statehood for Puerto Rico. The PRCC

has accused these politicians of working with the FBI to launch witch-hunts against Puerto Rican nationalist activists and of being in the pocket of real estate developers who are gentrifying many of

Chicago's neighborhoods. Other Puerto Rican activists perceive the PRCC as narrowly nationalistic, take issue with its emphasis on colo-

nialism, or criticize it for not taking on gentrification as a primary

issue. Many consider it insular and preoccupied with the prisoners. Some of these views reflect old ideological divisions, but they are probably justified. The PRCC demands so much work and sacrifice from volunteers that they have little time for much else. My own experience as part of the 1990s radical activist/cultural scene in New

York City taught me that more militant activists are often prone to insularity.

In recent years, the PRCC's profile in the community has faded, and many nonpolitical Puerto Ricans have never heard of it. With

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 143

limited resources, the PRCC has invested so much effort on the high

school (which has always been its chief focus), the prisoners, and most recently, the campaign around Vieques,6 that they may not be able or willing to launch the kind of antigentrification effort that could be necessary to preserve a Puerto Rican community in Hum- boldt Park. Nevertheless, there are few comparable radical organiza- tions in Chicago, much less in Humboldt Park.

Still very much of a barrio, the neighborhood of Humboldt Park

occupies a diminishing swath of territory west of the restaurants

and condos of Wicker Park. The battles in this politically polarized community of close to one hundred thousand Latinos, of whom nearly forty thousand are Puerto Rican,7 are intense, and the stakes

are high-political positions, authority over the schools, real estate profits, jail terms, the future of the neighborhood.

The PRCC has become a strange presence in its original location. The old building remains a stark reminder of how much West Town

has changed. It is decorated with murals and portraits of the prison- ers, but the once operating factories that surround it have all been turned into pricey lofts, and the modest wooden houses on the street

have been expensively rehabbed. In September 1999, squeezed by higher taxes and diminished grants, the PRCC began relocating from

a longtime location in rapidly gentrifying Bucktown to a building on West Division Street, a section of Humboldt Park that is the heart of

the Puerto Rican community. Though fond of the old building, most PRCC activists are relieved by the move, feeling that it is time the PRCC rejoined the Puerto Rican community as it moves further west.

Since the new PRCC is still somewhat under construction as of

this writing, I will briefly describe the interior of the old building, in

which it has been housed for over twenty years. The first floor has a library and a museum of Puerto Rican nationalism. The unusual collection contains the complete works of Marx and Lenin as well as books about Puerto Rican history and culture, Latin American rev-

olutionary movements, the black liberation movement, leftist pam- phlets and magazines from the 1970s and 1980s, and much more. There are historic posters and political artwork of all kinds. The high school, with its sixty or so students, takes up the top floor. There are offices for teachers, classrooms, a computer lab, an art room, and a large common space.

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144 1 RACHEL RINALDO

There are forty or fifty volunteers and paid staff members partic-

ipating in the various PRCC projects, but there is also a broader group of supporters who are clients of their services or simply sym- pathizers. The kinship networks in and around the PRCC have been noticed by other observers. For instance, Juan Torres is the brother of

one of the prisoners, and the children of several of the prisoners have

attended the high school. Relatives of some of the prisoners are also active with the PRCC.

On this balmy afternoon at the parade, though, the community feels very Puerto Rican. There are almost no white people, though some, like myself, live just a few blocks away. Nearly everyone has a

Puerto Rican flag or a Puerto Rican T-shirt, the buildings and stores

are decorated with flags and murals, and Puerto Rican music from

plena to hip-hop echoes all around. As I follow the boisterous crowds,

it is hard to believe that gentrification is happening all over Division Street.

THE PRCC, THE COMMUNITY, AND WEST DIVISION STREET

Puerto Ricans began settling in West Town (see Figure 2), originally a

neighborhood of Eastern European immigrants on the northwest side

of Chicago, in the 1950s. The main Puerto Rican neighborhood was in

Lincoln Park, on the North Side, but as that area experienced urban renewal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Puerto Ricans increasingly

congregated in West Town.

By the mid-1980s, gentrification was altering the eastern area of West Town, now known as Wicker Park. Young, mostly white stu-

dents and artists moved to the neighborhood in droves, followed somewhat later by professionals. Now the western section of the area, Humboldt Park, is slowly being gentrified-its inhabitants pushed west and north by rising rents. With Western Avenue the ever

thinning line between white and Puerto Rican, the Puerto Rican com-

munity has enough solidarity to be enmeshed in a struggle over con- tested space. Friction around gentrification is visible at times-the ethnic pride so much in evidence the week prior to the parade is occa-

sionally directed toward white people. On these unruly evenings, as cars adorned with flags cruise by, I am a target for screams of "Viva

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 145

Puerto Rico" and "Yo Soy Boricua!" The implication is clear-we are

Puerto Ricans and this is our neighborhood. Humboldt Park is mostly residential, consisting of single family

houses, as well as buildings with two to eight apartments, and a few

larger apartment buildings. There are several commercial streets, where many of the businesses are struggling storefront establish-

ments or fast food outlets. Although some of the building stock shows clear signs of decay, the neighborhood is more dense and vibrant than many on Chicago's largely African-American South Side. Beautiful, well-maintained greystones coexist with scattered-

site public housing, and middle-class families live next to gang mem-

bers. Though safety has improved in the past decade, shootings, drugs, and prostitution are still a problem in some areas.

The center of the neighborhood is a park with heavily utilized public facilities including a lake, a fishing pond, playground, and baseball diamonds. On any late spring or summer weekend, dozens of baseball games are underway, and hundreds of spectators mill around the fields, munching on pork rinds and ice cream.

It is within this setting that the PRCC is striving to create and sustain a community bound together by identity and culture, as well as a much vaguer battle for Puerto Rican independence. A relic of nationalist left movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the PRCC's

struggle has turned far more local, focusing on building the barrio community.

West Division Street is ground zero for the battles over space in Humboldt Park. The street is called the Paseo Boricua, and it is

anchored by two enormous metal sculptures of the Puerto Rican flag. In the early 1990s, the PRCC and local organizations and businesses formed the Division Street Development Consortium to stimulate commercial revitalization. The Paseo Boricua commercial strip and the flags (erected in 1995) came out of this effort. Though a bit run- down in parts, the stretch bustles with locally owned restaurants, music stores, a supermarket, Banco Popular, and community organi- zations. Prominent among these are the PRCC and its institutions: the

Isabel Rosado gallery, La Casita, and Vida/Sida. There has been a conscious attempt to make the Paseo Boricua feel like a street in a

Puerto Rican city, and so there are concrete tables where people can socialize or play dominoes, as well as ornate lampposts.

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146 | RACHEL RINALDO

The Paseo Boricua contrasts sharply with Division Street just east

of Western Avenue (literally a couple of blocks away). Once a lonely stretch with just a few bars and bodegas, populated by a mixture of Eastern Europeans, Puerto Ricans, students, and artists, the strip of Division between Ashland and Western is now home to white stu-

dents and professionals. In the past three years, many of its buildings

have been torn down and replaced by condominium developments,

many with garages facing the street. On the leafy side streets, tear-

downs are supplanting older houses with cheaply built, multistory

condos. Expensive restaurants and stores have sprung up-they draw mostly white crowds-while smaller, usually Latino-owned businesses have closed. Division Street's multicultural appeal has given way to a more sanitized, quasi-suburban atmosphere. It is one of the hippest places in the city, evidenced by the fact that glamorous

businesses like the Web site SuperSphere have located there. Division Street's transformation became complete when Chicago Magazine, the

arbiter of middle-class taste in the city, anointed it "the next hot restaurant row" (Danko, 27).

What happens when this gentrification moves five or six blocks further west? Humboldt Park, with its public park and historic build-

ings, is an attractive target for developers. Already, loft conversions

are popping up in former warehouses, and rents have risen as land- lords evict low-income tenants to rehab apartment units. If gentrifi-

cation evolves further in Humboldt Park, it could mean the dispersal

of the predominantly working-class Puerto Rican enclave and the displacement of the other Latinos and African-Americans who share

the neighborhood. It would mean that the suburbanization overtak-

ing Wicker Park would spread here, whitening the neighborhood, replacing its heterogeneous urban feel with townhouses and condos.

It is doubtful that the Puerto Rican community would relocate en

masse to another area-it would be complicated politically and logis- tically to accomplish such a move. Puerto Ricans would more likely end up scattered through the low-income African-American and Mexican communities west and south of Humboldt Park and in the

poor minority suburbs developing on the outskirts of the city.

Another place where the tension over gentrification has been evident is the local high school. The political battles for bureaucratic control of Roberto Clemente High School, a mostly Puerto Rican

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 147

and African-American high school at the corner of Western and Division, have been interpreted by the PRCC as a manifestation of gentrification. The PRCC became involved with local control of the school in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1998 and 1999, a local Puerto Rican

politician and longtime foe of the PRCC convened a special commis- sion to investigate whether the PRCC had improperly used federal funds earmarked for Clemente to benefit the independence move- ment. No serious evidence to either prove or disprove the charges was found.

Though the school's student body remains overwhelmingly minority, in the wake of the Clemente hearings many Puerto Rican

activists are concerned that it will eventually turn into a magnet school catering to affluent whites. A longtime PRCC activist and for-

mer Clemente teacher believes that people in Humboldt Park iden- tify with the school, but that it will eventually "be lost":

It is named after a Puerto Rican, it has been a center of cultural expres-

sion, it has been a school in this community that most of the kids ... have gone through for the last twenty-five years. But people are not

fooled.... They know that on the other side of Western the yuppies are

moving in, and they understand that the school is right now on the bor-

derline between a gentrified community and the Puerto Rican commu-

nity itself, so I think people are aware that Clemente will be lost. And

it's already in a big way lost as it is, but people don't, I think, have a lot

of faith that it could be won back given the fact of the demographic

changes that are taking place here in Chicago.

As gentrification and the tearing down of public housing have pro- ceeded in Chicago, low-income minorities are moving to bleak, mostly African-American suburbs like Harvey, on the edge of the city, far from public transportation or urban amenities. Juan labels

this process "spatial de-concentration," and views it as a conscious effort on the part of city leaders to remove pesky minorities from the

city center.

But the Paseo Boricua remains a Puerto Rican stronghold for now. It is hard to overstate the immense importance the Paseo Boricua and the Puerto Rican flag sculptures have for the PRCC. Some Chicago Puerto Ricans recall a time when the display of the flag was against the law in Puerto Rico-perhaps this is why so many

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148 | RACHEL RINALDO

revel in displaying the flag, as well as depictions of the flag sculp-

tures, on T-shirts, car windows, stickers, and jewelry.

The PRCC considers the flags a response to gentrification, a sign

to mark Puerto Rican territory. Running through discussion of the flags is a sense of space. Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas, who wrote a dis- sertation on nationalism in the Chicago Puerto Rican community, quotes a PRCC activist and artist writing after the flag dedication ceremony: "here in Chicago a flag is planted in the most total sense:

to reclaim space, to mark a point, to announce that our presence is much more than a transitory passage, that we have history made in Chicago and that we are going to stay to continue making it" (Ramos- Zayas, 329).

A strong affection for the flags and an awareness of gentrification

are noticeable among students at Pedro Albizu Campos High School. One day, while I was interviewing three young women for a video, I

asked about the gentrification and the changes in the neighborhood.

One responded angrily, "Those flags on Division Street-that's ours! No one can ever take that away from us. Division Street is ours!"

One of the frequent activities of the PRCC is walking tours of the Paseo Boricua. These tours are enthusiastically led by Juan. As

two dozen or more people follow him, creating something of a pub- lic spectacle, Juan takes the group to a mural outside Clemente to talk

about how the students who created it learned about their identity and history. We walk to the flags, where he discusses their impor-

tance as a symbol to Puerto Ricans, and continue on to the gallery, where Juan mentions the prisoners and explains the National Com- mittee's campaign to free them. Across the street, he points out the

colorful bakery owned and operated by his sister, and then the group enters La Casita de Don Pedro, a one-room wooden house, meant

to evoke a rural Puerto Rican dwelling. The Paseo Boricua is also the venue for a number of festivals. The

aforementioned Fiesta Boricua is an annual one-day event that began in 1993. Held on Labor Day weekend, it attracts over one hundred thousand people, and features music, food, and art exhibits. The annual Puerto Rican Day Parade is in June, and includes a huge fair in the park. And in January, on Three Kings Day, community mem- bers and PRCC activists dress up as the Three Wise Men and hand out gifts to local children.

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE 149

OTHER PRCC PROJECTS

It is worthwhile to consider in greater detail some of the PRCC insti-

tutions I have already mentioned. Anthropologist and artist Enrique was the force behind the creation of La Casita de Don Pedro (built in

1997). Inside are revolving art exhibitions, as well as Enrique's own works. Events there range from dance performances to lectures, to classes on Puerto Rican history. Recently, Enrique curated an exhibi-

tion of police photos from the 1950 uprising in Puerto Rico. At the

opening, Enrique discusses La Casita, saying that it is a reclamation of space, as the lot was formerly empty, home only to gangbangers and drug dealers, and this reclamation will also prevent the space from eventually falling into the hands of gentrifiers. He relates it to

similar community gardens and casitas built in other Puerto Rican communities, such as in New York. In contrast to those short-lived

projects, he says, the PRCC owns this land, and so La Casita will be

permanent. La Casita's lot now includes a landscaped garden area, benches

to sit on, and a space for performances. There are often barbecues here in the summer. When two of the freed prisoners returned to

Chicago in September 1999, the welcome-home party was held there.

In front stands a bronze statue of Pedro Albizu Campos, the Puerto Rican nationalist leader revered by the PRCC and by the Young Lords.

In the mid-1990s, the PRCC wanted to place the statue in Hum-

boldt Park, but the Park District objected. The statue was eventually

moved to La Casita, where it is a spot on the Paseo Boricua walking tours. It remains a sore point for the PRCC-one of the instances in which domination of space by the powers that be has prevailed. The Paseo Boricua Directory points out, "The placement of the Statue of Albizu needs to be resolved, since Humboldt Park has been denied to

us. The Casita is therefore the most appropriate place for the place- ment of the statue."

Another PRCC projects, Vida/Sida, is intended both to empower people to fight AIDS in their community by fostering Puerto Rican identity and to build a community strong enough to push back the tide of gentrification through autonomous institutions and collective solidarity. AIDS has been the leading cause of death since 1991 for young Latino men in the United States, and Latinos accounted for 20

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150 1 RACHEL RINALDO

percent of all the AIDS cases reported to the Centers for Disease Con-

trol in 1998 (Campo, 20). Vida/Sida features an array of programs, including teams of young peer educators who conduct safe sex work-

shops at local high schools, handing out safe sex kits to young gay men at clubs and bathhouses, involvement in local needle exchange efforts, and initiatives to work with gang members and drive them to

the clinic (across rival gang territory) for free HIV testing.

At a meeting at Vida/Sida, staff, PRCC activists, and community

members consult with a grant writer to discuss Vida/Sida's vision

and strengths. When the grant writer asks the group to define Vida/Sida, the answers are infused with the rhetoric of community and empowerment. One staff member replies that Vida/Sida is "about empowering the community, creating change by and for the community." A young man says that through the connection to the PRCC, there is "empowerment through pride to be Puerto Rican."

When the grant writer asks how Vida/Sida describes empower- ment, the answers are revealing. Norma, the director of Vida/Sida, says that empowerment is about trying to prevent gentrification, and

everyone murmurs and nods vigorously in agreement. One man becomes very animated and says, "land is value, and if we don't become self-sufficient and empower ourselves ... we're gonna lose Humboldt Park, we're gonna lose everything.... Somebody has to stand up for the health of the people but also for what they've got." He continues, saying that people don't want Humboldt Park to turn

into a Greektown or Taylor Street, "a symbolic community." Another

person adds, "this agency is a source of hope and power for people.... That's why Vida/Sida and the PRCC are controversial."

Throughout the meeting, the discussants link Vida/Sida to Puerto Rican empowerment, to changing the community, and to re-

sistance to gentrification. Running through all of it is the emphasis

on community, and the repeated use of the term. When people say "community," they are describing a physical and cultural space that they inhabit and desire to preserve. Several people, for instance, ges-

ture to the window and Division Street outside as they speak. On another occasion, I am attending an opening at the Isabel

Rosado gallery of a show entitled "Our Third Root: The African Influence in Puerto Rico." The art is by the prisoners, including a piece by Elizam Escobar, who during his prison term became a recognized

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 151

painter and essayist. People are actively circulating through the crowd

throughout her talk and handing out flyers for upcoming events. One

of the photocopied flyers passed out is a letter to a disliked local politician, which ends, "We understand that you advocate for State- hood. We know that you represent the realty industry which contin-

ues to gentrify our community. You do not represent us." Even at an

art opening, where people are dancing and singing bomba songs, the

politics of gentrification and the struggle for Puerto Rican indepen-

dence pervade the gathering.

GENTRIFICATION, CHICAGO, AND PUERTO RICAN IDENTITY

The PRCC has survived for a quarter century, despite its often embat-

tled state. Its leadership and activists are dedicated and resourceful,

but that alone is not enough to explain the organization's significance

in the community. How is it, at a time when radical institutions are so

difficult to sustain and the left remains weak and disorganized, that

the PRCC endures? Why is the PRCC still such a focus of controversy

in the community that some opponents spend real effort and time to

attack it? The answer to these questions is that space is incredibly salient in Humboldt Park, and the PRCC has done well to structure

much of their resistance around it. But why is the PRCC so consis-

tently engaged in ongoing struggles around space? And why is space so important in Humboldt Park?

Using Abu-Lughod's suggestion that resistance is an analytics of power, I find that gentrification is the obvious answer for why space

matters in Humboldt Park. It is the most immediately encroaching force, one that directly threatens the homes and livelihoods of Hum-

boldt Park residents, and, at its core, it is an issue of physical space and of displacement. It is a process with historical resonance for Chicago Puerto Ricans, but it is happening here and now. Despite the economic downturn, residents speak of real estate agencies knocking on doors asking them if they are interested in selling their buildings and of landlords evicting Puerto Rican tenants to rehabili- tate buildings for upscale renters. Loft conversions are appearing west of Western Avenue, previously uncharted territory for their intended dwellers.

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152 1 RACHEL RINALDO

As Felix Padilla has discussed at length, the Chicago Puerto Rican

community is one with a legacy of displacement. When urban renewal took effect in Lincoln Park in the late 1960s, the Puerto Ricans who

lived there increasingly moved to West Town and Humboldt Park. But the history of Chicago as a segregated city is also integral to

this story. Chicago is a city of exceedingly territorial neighborhoods

often defined along stringent ethnic and racial lines. The city's pro-

motional literature implicitly acknowledges this past, advertising "a city of neighborhoods."

The Chicago school sociologists were some of the first to notice this feature. They derived their theories of human ecology from the

spatial distribution of class and ethnic groups they noted in Chicago.

Burgess wrote, "This differentiation into natural economic and cul-

tural groupings gives form and character to the city. For segregation

offers the group, and thereby the individuals who compose the group, a place and a role in the total organization of city life" (56). Until recently, Burgess's concentric circle drawings illustrating the growth of the city and its areas still gave a fairly accurate representa-

tion of Chicago-a downtown, surrounded by a transitional zone that

included a ghetto and red light area, and then the zones of working-

class residential areas, followed by residential and commuter zones. Other Chicago school sociologists and their fellow travelers went

on to study some of these neighborhood areas in great detail. Studies

such as Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis (1945) and Gerald Sut-

tles's The Social Order of the Slum (1968) highlighted the importance

of segregation in creating slums, as well as the significance of terri- tory to the inhabitants of those slums. Suttles commented, "In the

Addams area this segmentary system of spatial and ethnic units is so

well understood that the residents seldom bother to tell you of it.... It would be easy to label this a myth.... All the same, it is a myth that

is shared by all the people of the Addams area. In this sense, it is one of those myths that is taken as information and becomes the basis on

which people predicate their action" (35).

Others have also remarked on Chicago's intense segregation. In American Apartheid (1994), Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton labeled Chicago a "hyper-segregated city."

Historically, there have been few instances of whites and Puerto

Ricans living in integrated neighborhoods-the growing presence of

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 153

white students and professionals encourages landlords to raise rents

and evict undesirable tenants (usually nonwhite, but some poor whites fall victim to this practice). More valuable real estate means

that property taxes rise and many homeowners can no longer afford the area. According to a local paper, property taxes in West Town east

of Western Avenue have increased 550 percent since the 1990 census

("Urban Renewal or Gentrification?" 4). This process of gentrification

is hardly confined to Chicago, but it has special significance in a city with such profound spatial segregation.

Sharon Zukin defines gentrification as a spatial restructuring that includes an expansion of downtown's physical area and of its cultural power. Gentrifiers, she argues, seek "authenticity," which they find in older urban neighborhoods. "Regardless of topography, building stock, and even existing populations, gentrification persists as a collective effort to appropriate the center for elements of a new

urban middle class" (187), namely, those who work in the culture and

information industries and participate in cosmopolitan forms of con-

sumption. From my own observation, culture producers account for

many of the new, prosperous renters and buyers flooding West Town.

Similarly, Neil Smith contends that gentrification is the forefront

of a new urbanism that "embodies a widespread and drastic repolar-

ization of the city along political, economic, cultural and geographic lines since the 1970s, and is integral with larger global shifts" (8). Smith identifies the shifts as global economic expansion, the rise of

the service and information economy, and the emergence of a hier- archy of world, national, and regional cities.

Gentrification in Chicago is more than a by-product of global

economic transformation-it also results from intentional planning on the part of city government and elites. The "Chicago 21" plan developed by business leaders following the 1968 riots called for redevelopment of poor, minority communities near the business dis-

trict, as well as tearing down giant public housing projects. Thirty years later, much of the renewal has succeeded, and many of these neighborhoods have become largely white and middle class.

Smith observes characteristics of gentrification in New York City

that are also evident in Chicago. This is not surprising, as many of the same dynamics are at work. Both Puerto Rican communities are in

major urban areas where rising rents are impelling young whites to

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154 | RACHEL RINALDO

search for cheaper housing in minority communities. In the Lower

East Side, the culture industry fueled gentrification by representing

the neighborhood as a cultural hot spot-in Chicago, artists have spearheaded gentrification in Wicker Park, and increasingly, in Hum-

boldt Park, as they search for inexpensive apartments or are drawn to the loft lifestyle. Smith notes that the New York Lower East Side

was frequently described and sold as "a new frontier." Significantly,

this frontier language is echoed in real estate advertising in Chicago:

rental ads published by the North Clybourn real estate company, which targets young artists and students, exhort, "Be a Pioneer! Move

to East Humboldt Park." The so-called rawness of the neighborhood is part of its frontier appeal, but as history might predict, the meta-

phor of the frontier is no accident, and neither is it simply a harm-

less method of advertising. Smith argues that the frontier ideology rationalizes exclusion and defines the poor as uncivilized.

The frontier ideology is also at work in the increased police pres-

ence in the community. Under the rubric of gang control, police harass minority youth throughout the city. However, they choose specific areas on which to focus their efforts, and Humboldt Park has

been one of those areas. A twenty-something woman who works at Vida/Sida and is active with the National Committee gave me a gloomy account of one of her recent experiences:

Recently I had been harassed because I was double-parked, and he was giving me a ticket, and I said it was fine, that I would pay the ticket.

And he automatically instigated this argument with me, and the next

thing I knew I was laying on the hood of this cop car being charged with

battery of a P.O. when I never touched him. And the first thing they

asked me when they were writing up the report was, "What gang do you belong in?" as if I was a gang member.... if you are Latino or Latina

and if you look young, automatically it's what gang are you from and

how many times have you been arrested. So police brutality has always been a problem, but now with gentrification and the police officers so-

called cleaning the neighborhood and getting rid of all the "bad people," which happens to be all the black people and Puerto Ricans and Lati- nos, as far as they see, they see it as doing some miraculous work for the yuppies and the white people who want to come take over our com- munity that we tried so hard to build.

Identity becomes most salient when challenged, and with a history of

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 155

displacement and a pressing struggle around gentrification, Puerto Rican identity in Humboldt Park is increasingly embattled. Likewise,

in a climate such as Chicago's recent real estate boom, space is more valuable than ever, and it is increasingly threatened in a very direct, material sense.

PUERTO RICAN IDENTITY: COLONIALISM AND DIASPORA

Though space is obviously important in a community facing gentrifi-

cation, does resistance against gentrification always occur around space? For an answer to this question, it is useful to examine the cases

of two other gentrifying communities. In Resisting Gentrification and

Displacement: Voices of Puerto Rican Women of the Barrio, Vicky Muniz

probes the somewhat successful 1980s resistance to gentrification in Sunset Park, a Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, New York. She finds a salience of space similar to that in Humboldt Park and depicts

a community in which identity and culture map onto place. Feeling the need for a territorial base, the inhabitants of Sunset Park consider

the physical space of the barrio a major component of their identity.

"In defending the barrio they actually sought to preserve their very

essence as a people," argues Muniz (160). Oddly, however, the modes of resistance Muniz describes do not seem very spatial. They are based around electoral politics and tenant organizing and include few explicit appeals to fight for space in the manner of the PRCC.

Even though space assumes heightened importance in many urban communities, resistance around space is not an inevitable product. In Humboldt Park, spatial contestation occurs partly because

an institution with an ideology that includes an understanding of the

importance of space has organized community resistance to displace-

ment and produced a certain consciousness around space and Puerto Rican identity. The otherwise nonpolitical students at the PRCC's high

school, for instance, are comfortable with words like "gentrification,"

and make jokes about yuppies. Some are sufficiently conscious of dispersal that they criticize other Puerto Ricans for their lack of awareness. One pessimistic female student, a single mother, told me: "I think that most of the community is not even aware of what is going on. Because, it is kind of sad to say, most Puerto Ricans are not

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156 1 RACHEL RINALDO

involved with anything ... so they really don't know what is going on.

But you can see that everyone is getting moved out toward the Brick-

yard, and there won't be no Latino Humboldt Park in a minute." There is no equivalent institution in Muniz's account. Moreover,

the pressures of gentrification seem to have been less powerful than in Humboldt Park. Sunset Park faced a threat from middle-class fam-

ilies buying houses, but never became a trendy neighborhood, partly

because it lacked proximity to Manhattan. In contrast, Wicker Park and Humboldt Park have historic buildings, one of the city's largest

parks, and are relatively close to downtown, on a twenty-four-hour

subway line. San Francisco's Mission District is another community undergo-

ing rapid gentrification. In some ways, its advanced state of gentrifi-

cation, with its restaurants, boutiques, and lofts, as well as a rampant

drug problem, is more akin to Wicker Park than to Humboldt Park. On the other hand, it shares features with Humboldt Park including

proximity to downtown areas and public transportation and a stock of Victorian-style housing and industrial buildings ripe for rehab.

A predominantly Mexican neighborhood since the early 1970s, in

the past decade the Mission has experienced gentrification, with artists

in the vanguard. The last five years have seen an explosive growth of

clubs, restaurants, software companies, and expensive lofts, with a

corresponding displacement of the Latino population and closing of Latino-owned businesses. The same language of frontier and urban pioneering that appeared in New York and Humboldt Park is evident in the Mission (Seligman; Zoll; Levy).

Until recently there was not much major resistance to gentri- fication in the Mission. At the height of the recent economic boom, there were numerous rallies, tenant organizing, and activist art pro-

jects, such as a spate of posters for a "Yuppie Eradication Project" encouraging people to vandalize expensive cars-an action directed toward the symbols of material consumption. Anti-dot-com senti- ment rose, though many of the area's dot-coms shut down as the economy slowed in 2001. Despite the economic downturn lifting some of the pressure on rents, this resistance seems like it is coming much too late in the game to preserve anything but small pieces of the neighborhood.

Though more Latinos are getting involved, the antigentrification

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 157

movement involves a large number of the white artists and students

who were themselves the protogentrifiers, although they may not understand their role this way. This is quite different from the Puerto

Rican-led activism the PRCC envisions. White artists were priced out in the late 1990s as the Mission moved into a later stage of gentri-

fication. The San Francisco Chronicle, in a revealing article, focused on

artists who opposed gentrification: "'I think the Mission is the most attractive part of town,' said artist Judy West, who lives at the Project

Artaud Lofts, a pioneering live-work project on Alabama Street that has become a center of opposition to the development wave. 'We want

to make sure that this remains an arts district,' West said. 'Twenty-five

years ago, the artists cleaned up the neighborhood. Now, all our indus-

trial buildings are being turned into software companies'" (Levy, Al).

What explains the contrasts between the Mission and Humboldt Park, and the resemblance between Humboldt Park and Sunset Park?

Although there are certainly highly localized factors that play impor-

tant roles in producing or not producing spatial struggles in a com- munity, there is one overriding similarity between Humboldt Park and Sunset Park that differentiates them from the Mission: their

inhabitants' current colonial relationship with the United States.8

COLONIALISM

From my first few excursions into the field, I found that, for activists

in the PRCC's milieu, colonialism is the major framework for under-

standing the lives of Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora.

Luis, the principal of the high school, told me, "When you begin to analyze the Puerto Rican reality and history and culture ... you're going to find out that there is a very important issue that needs to be addressed, and that's colonialism. So here at the Center ... we don't

go 'we need to develop our programs because of colonialism'-it is because of colonialism that we live the way we do."

"Colonialism" is a word that is very much alive at the PRCC. Juan and others constantly use the term and lecture about it. At the

opening of an exhibit of Puerto Rican artists hosted by the PRCC, the

audience watches a video in which Enrique didactically explains how the art featured in the show relates to colonialism (though most

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158 | RACHEL RINALDO

of the art is not exactly subtle). On another occasion, Norma, of Vida/Sida, tells me that the high rate of AIDS in the Puerto Rican community is a matter of colonialism.

The PRCC also considers the diasporic situation of Puerto Ricans

significant in explaining cultural practices. Certainly, one may dis- agree with their assessment, but if these are the forces that the PRCC activists believe structure their lives and the lives of other Puerto

Ricans in Humboldt Park, then it is appropriate to analyze them. Moreover, that Puerto Ricans historically are subject to colonialism,

and as a result are a diasporic group, seems indisputable. It is difficult to know whether or not the PRCC's ideology is rep-

resentative of Humboldt Park Puerto Ricans. While most residents

may not think about colonialism on a day-to-day basis, many are angrily aware of the power differentials between Puerto Ricans and

whites. As a white person walking around Humboldt Park, I have encountered resentment against yuppies moving into the neighbor- hood (in the form of comments and shouts from people on the street).

Certainly, colonialism is widely understood by Puerto Ricans in the

United States and on the island, and many scholars view it as a key

factor in constructing Puerto Rican identity.

Colonialism is more than a political or economic relationship. John and Jean Comaroff and other scholars assert that colonialism is

also cultural, involving hegemony over representation as well as domination of physical space. In an anticolonial struggle, representa-

tional space takes on added importance because "the final objective of generations of colonizers has been to colonize their consciousness with the axioms and aesthetics of an alien culture" (Comaroff and

Comaroff, 4). They argue that colonialism penetrates and inhabits the

space of the collective imagination of the colonized. As inhabitants of one of the world's last colonies, Puerto Ricans

are products of American colonialism, and as a racialized minority in the United States, they continue to be colonized in a looser sense.

The United States won Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, and the colonialism that followed depended heavily on sugar and tobacco agriculture and, later, industrialization. Early on, the United States forced schools to teach classes in English and disallowed the celebra- tion of indigenous holidays like Three Kings Day.

Operation Bootstrap, the industrialization program initiated in

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 159

1952, was partly a response to the growing independence movement.

The U.S. Congress declared Puerto Rico a commonwealth, maintain-

ing power over citizenship, migration, currency, communication, labor relations, and military use of land. In return, the United States

built a modern infrastructure. However, according to Alfredo Lopez,

Operation Bootstrap nearly eliminated the agricultural sector, trig- gering massive migrations to the mainland United States. Most of the

manufacturers and new businesses lured to Puerto Rico under Oper-

ation Bootstrap's tax incentive programs were U.S. owned, though multinational corporations like Citibank and Westinghouse also set

up shop. Lopez claims that Puerto Rico is the fifth largest consumer

of U.S. goods in the world. "In an economy that produces what it does not consume and consumes what it does not produce, these companies control over 95 percent of all capital investment and all production" (63).

Puerto Rico has been notable for its use as a military base by the

United States. There are over twenty active military installations on

the island, many of the roads were originally built for military use, and Puerto Rico is the principal U.S. military base in Latin America.

This base and its bombing range, on the island of Vieques, became a

focus of controversy in April 1999 when a Marine Corps jet acciden-

tally dropped a bomb on a civilian. Since then, protests and demon-

strations have escalated. Newspaper articles have suggested that the Vieques issue has reignited nationalist sentiment on the island, and

Puerto Ricans in New York and Chicago, including the PRCC, have actively opposed the base (which is now likely to close).

Puerto Rico remains poorer than the rest of the United States,

with higher unemployment and widespread dependence on welfare.

Puerto Rico's rapid industrialization has also produced deep integra- tion into the U.S. economy, as well as increasing regulation of the state by the federal government (Baver, 118).

Following the 1998 plebiscite, in which a majority of Puerto Ricans marked the "none of the above" option on the ballot, Puerto Rico remains a commonwealth of the United States. Puerto Ricans are U.S.

citizens and eligible for substantial federal aid, but island residents

cannot vote in presidential elections and do not pay federal income taxes. Puerto Rico is not subject to the same labor or environmental laws as the United States.

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160 | RACHEL RINALDO

Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres assert that the colonial rela-

tionship has recently been strengthened as a result of economic glob-

alization, which ties Puerto Rico more closely to the United States. Whether or not that is accurate, Puerto Rico remains economically, socially, and physically marginal, on the periphery of the United States. The relationship of mainland Puerto Rican barrios to U.S. cities like New York and Chicago is comparable.

The internal colonial situation of Puerto Ricans is perhaps most

palpable in their status as an ethnic minority, segregated and margin-

alized geographically and economically, subject to racialized dis- courses and representations. Scholars on the Puerto Rican experience in the United States, such as Juan Flores, consider the colonial rela-

tionship a major factor in the identity of Puerto Rican immigrants. Next to inner-city African-Americans, Puerto Ricans remain one of

the poorest groups in the country, with a median household income

of $23,729 (compared to $27,088 for Mexicans, $29,110 for all Hispan-

ics, and $26,608 for African-Americans). Their 1999 unemployment

rate, 8.3 percent, was higher than that of any other Hispanic group (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract). Historically, Puerto Ricans

in Chicago have experienced the highest levels of segregation from African-Americans and from whites of any Puerto Rican community in the United States (Ramos-Zayas, 72). This pattern also reflects Chicago's segregated structure.9 Such disheartening statistics help to explain the PRCC's claim of internal colonialism.

DIASPORA

A diaspora resulting from colonialism is another relationship that the

PRCC believes affects the lives of Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Puerto

Ricans are a diaspora people in the classic sense, coming to escape economic hardship. Puerto Ricans are also a diaspora people in Paul Gilroy's cultural sense of the concept, which defines culture not con-

fined in "racial, ethnic or national essences" (155), but involving ties and cultural syncretism between people scattered across the globe. James Clifford argues that diasporas connect various communities of a dispersed population, who practice selective accommodation.

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 161

They create forms of community consciousness and solidarity that

"maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to

live inside with a difference" (308). These are, he says, ways to stay and be different. The nostalgic image of a Puerto Rican homeland and its history animates Puerto Rican cultural expressions in the United States and is a focal point for urban Puerto Rican communi- ties such as Humboldt Park. Sprawled across the urban landscape of

the United States, Puerto Ricans are linked by hybrid forms of culture

such as plena and salsa music, Nuyorican poetry, and language. One of the best demonstrations of diaspora culture in Humboldt

Park is the annual Fiesta Boricua, organized by local politicians, busi-

nesses, and community groups, including the PRCC. The Fiesta Boricua in September 2000 coincides with a gorgeous late summer day, drawing well over 150,000 people. Vendors of food, music, and

crafts take over the stretch of Division from Western to the park, and

bandstands feature live music all day. There is a stage where children

from local dance academies perform traditional and contemporary

dances in elaborate outfits. Salsa and plena bands play from the large bandstands, while in other sections, DJs and hip-hop MCs entertain teenagers. The tiny hip-hop and house music store blasts music from

a DJ setup, attracting some kids to start a break dance circle. Nearby,

at the gate of La Casita, a bomba group bangs their drums to the beat

of the house music while a girl in a traditional frilly white dress per-

forms a hip-shaking, chest-thrusting bomba dance. Gimmicky, beaded

Puerto Rican flag necklaces and T-shirts abound-you can even get a graffiti-styled shirt with the flag airbrushed on as you watch. And though white people are living in the area, I spot few whites at the fiesta. The Fiesta Boricua suggests to me that concern with Puerto

Rican cultural identity and a tendency toward hybridity exist in Humboldt Park independently of the PRCC.

Juan Flores conceives of Puerto Rican identity in the United States as a diaspora culture of resistance. Puerto Ricans do not want

to become Americanized, he says, and their culture is defined by Puerto Rico as a symbolic focal point, regardless of its political status. In Divided Borders, Flores argues that resistance to colonialism and

assimilation and a stress on self-affirmation underlie the diaspora culture, Puerto Ricans' ties to other subordinate groups, and their

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162 | RACHEL RINALDO

evolution of a hybrid language, Spanglish. Though most meetings and events at the PRCC are conducted in English, with speakers sometimes speaking in Spanish first and then translating to English, in casual conversation the activists often mix Spanish and English.

Bilingualism is an important political tenet for the PRCC, and stu- dents at the high school, who mostly grew up speaking English, are taught Spanish.

A statement by Enrique at a PRCC event illustrates the link between language and identity at the PRCC. Discussing the historical

forcing of English on students in Puerto Rico and the subordination

of Puerto Rican holidays to American ones, Enrique asks rhetorically,

"Is it that there is something in common between learning English and going to school on Three Kings Day?" The reaction is murmurs

and nods of assent from the mostly Puerto Rican audience.

The Puerto Rican identity propounded by the PRCC seems rela-

tively fluid, based on shared and created cultural expressions, and allied with Mexicans, African-Americans, and other marginalized groups.?1 Frequent activities like bomba performances (a Puerto Rican

music and dance style inherited from African slaves), and events such as an International Women's Day fundraiser honoring an African-American state representative, indicate that the PRCC tries

to align itself with the African-American struggle, highlighting Puerto Ricans' connection to African culture. The PRCC has also

recently collaborated on events and activities with a local Mexican

organization. I suspect that the PRCC's de-emphasis of Puerto Rico's European heritage comes out of a broader attempt to link Puerto Rico

as a nation with the Third World, focusing on its native, mestizo, and African influence.

Flores also underlines the importance of hybridity, recognizing the intermingled historical influences of African, Native American,

and European cultures in Puerto Rico. This hybridity, he contends, expresses itself through numerous cultural forms and practices, including language, musical styles such as salsa and bomba, visual arts, dance, and the vibrant oral tradition.

Hybrid forms of culture and language play a substantial role in Puerto Rican political struggles. The dominant U.S. discourse insists on the usage of official English, defined against vernacular forms such as black English and, increasingly, in opposition to bilingualism.

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 163

Bilingualism resists the attempted domination of language by the

proponents of official English. In doing so, language becomes an essential component of diasporic and resistant identity.

A comparison with Mexicans in the United States is instructive, since Mexicans face similar structural oppression, as well as lan- guage, with Puerto Ricans, and in many cases, including Humboldt Park, share communities. Yet, when I interview Carlos, a Mexican-

born activist at the PRCC, he says that Puerto Rican identity is more

oppositional than that of most Mexicans:

In all the years that I've been active, with two deliberately political and

conscious exceptions I haven't heard anybody call themselves a Puerto

Rican-American.... you ask a young Puerto Rican woman or man- fourteen or fifteen years old, doesn't know how to speak Spanish, came

from New Jersey, doesn't know anything about Puerto Rico's history-

what are they? They are Puerto Rican.... You could argue with them, put on a Ph.D. and go and argue with them, and they'll end up fighting

with you.... During the civil rights period the Mexicans tried to enter

through the same door, and part of that meant accepting the Great Soci-

ety, the argument that there were better things to be had. But by doing

that they changed. They became the Mexican-Americans. And Chi- canos, of course, were the radical alternatives.

Carlos's analysis might be debatable, given the visibility of Mex-

ican identity in some Chicago neighborhoods. Surprisingly, though, recent histories of the Puerto Rican and Mexican experiences in the United States by George Sanchez and Virginia Sanchez Korrol lend credence to his interpretation. The difference between Mexico's sta-

tus as a sovereign government and Puerto Rico's colonial status may account for some of the contrasts between the two groups (as

it did for Humboldt Park and the Mission). Ironically, while many Mexican-Americans struggled for full American citizenship, Puerto Ricans' status as colonials may have contributed to their stronger resistance to assimilation and acculturation. They understand the reality of being second-class American citizens all too well. They have tended to be supportive of Puerto Rican nationalism and more

interested in the possibility of gaining an independent Puerto Rican state. They have had to rapidly develop their own organizations and associations to cement their community. And local communities

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164 I RACHEL RINALDO

become self-contained because that is where they create their sense of common nationhood.

The core of the second largest Puerto Rican population in the United States, Humboldt Park is a community structured by colonial-

ism and diaspora culture-in fact, it is probably highly representative

of such a community. Politics and culture are plainly implicated in both relationships. Colonialism and diaspora, however, are distin- guished not only by culture, but by their spatial implications.

COLONIALISM, DIASPORA, AND SPACE

Edward Said writes that culture and imperialism are fundamentally

related and that colonialism's cultural practices of ordering and map-

ping are spatial. Imperialism essentializes and silences the colonized

subject, and so anticolonialism is very much oriented toward space, both geographical and cultural. Anticolonial nationalism also entails

a spatial relationship, for what is the nation-state but an entity that controls territory and sets borders?

In fact, the core of Said's argument is that there is a significant

relationship between the anticolonial struggle and physical and rep- resentational space. Said writes:

If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-

imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical element. Imperialism,

after all, is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under

control. For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated

by loss of the locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored. Because of the pres-

ence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination. (225)

Said's work is helpful in explaining the structural and cultural cir-

cumstances of Puerto Ricans in Chicago, as well as in theorizing the powerful connection between colonialism, space, and culture.

Space is also rather obviously relevant to diaspora. The very definition of diaspora entails a dispersement of people away from the space of a homeland to scattered places. Clifford argues that diaspora

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 165

cultures work to create community, so the space of the local is crucial.

"Thus the term diaspora is a signifier, not simply of transnationality

and movement, but of political struggles to define the local, as dis- tinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement" (308). Rep-

resentational space mapped onto physical space creates a local that is both imagined and material, that is, lived space.

Colonialism is not merely an overriding structure but, as the Comaroffs explain, a constitutive one. It intermixes with local forces

active in a given moment. In this case, the history of the Puerto Rican

community in Chicago and diasporic identity politics in Puerto Rican communities are relevant factors. It is less a matter of which structure

came first than of how they mutually influence each other.

The existence of gentrification or colonialism, and the fact that

space is implicated in both, does not necessarily determine the PRCC's resistance around space. It is the concentration of colonialism

and diaspora with local histories and relationships that spawn this resistance and fuel its intensity. When Puerto Rican nationalists in the

diasporic experience gentrification, they may experience it as part of

a colonial relationship. This convergence intensifies struggles around

space because Puerto Ricans have a strong territorial relationship due to their history of colonialism and U.S. imperialism and because of a

relationship of the state to mainland Puerto Ricans in which they feel like colonial subjects.

Clearly, the heightened salience of identity in a gentrifying com-

munity, as well as Puerto Rican identity and culture, are sources of

cultural resistance. But the specific conjunction in Humboldt Park of colonial and diasporic relationships with gentrification creates a community in which space takes on special significance. These fac- tors manifest themselves in the activities, ideology, and institutions

of the PRCC. The PRCC's cultural community building is an attempt to forge a powerful and resistant Puerto Rican identity in Humboldt

Park, and such cultural resistance often focuses on issues of space. It is apparent that many Puerto Ricans beyond the PRCC in

Humboldt Park are engaged in some forms of resistance about the

production of physical and representative space. The ubiquitous flag images and the hybrid language do more than just bolster individual Puerto Rican identities-they create a sense of distinctiveness. Many Puerto Ricans in Humboldt Park appear to have a sharpened sense

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166 1 RACHEL RINALDO

of their shared identity. Though it is not an overt resistance, this con-

stant expression of solidarity reinforces the sense of a Puerto Rican community of Humboldt Park. A colonized, marginalized group expressing collective identity, asserting a right to self-definition through cultural representation through physical space, seems to be some form of resistance to colonial domination.

Said claims that because imperialism is an act of geographical violence that takes locality away from its inhabitants, geographical identity must first be conjured up through the imagination of the

inhabitants. This is what the PRCC is trying to do with the space of

Humboldt Park, and it is the foundation of their strategy for fighting

gentrification and political attacks. The creation of community for the

PRCC is also about defining and framing a local space. In Humboldt

Park at the turn of the millennium, culture, encompassing physical space, is a forceful tool in the endeavor of strengthening collective identity, and this explains the success of the PRCC's resistance.

In the diaspora community of Humboldt Park, representational and physical space interact. The PRCC's activism and cultural resis-

tance have focused on physical and representational space, con- tributing to building the local Puerto Rican community. Institutions

such as the parade, the Paseo Boricua, and Vida/Sida have helped make Puerto Rican identity more appealing and cohesive, contribut-

ing to the production of local space and community. This is dis- cernible among the Pedro Albizu Campos High School students, who, though otherwise mostly uninvolved in PRCC activities, have picked up on identity politics. In their classroom conversation and

work, I discern a valorization of Puerto Rican identity. In a local radio

documentary on Humboldt Park, these same students are quick to comment on yuppies moving into their neighborhood.

The PRCC has identified gentrification as a threat (Juan calls it a "plan for spatial deconcentration" of minorities into "bantustans" on

the margins of the city), and its activities and ideology have made gentrification more contested than it might be otherwise. The PRCC's

recent (albeit quiet) campaign for Puerto Ricans and sympathetic non-Puerto Ricans to buy property in Humboldt Park is a new tactic

intended to target gentrification and displacement more explicitly. La Casita is emblematic of the PRCC's enfolding of space into cul-

tural resistance. In his statement that the space had been reclaimed,

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 167

and his stress on its permanence, Enrique echoed scholars who have

studied the phenomenon of casitas in New York. Luis Aponte-Pares has argued that the casitas validate Puerto Rican identity in space, that they are newly invented traditions. "Building Casitas is an act of

reterritorialization that affirms the power of culture in space while

offering resistance to further deterritorialization by appropriating place in the urban environment" (Aponte-Pares, 275).

La Casita continues the production of Puerto Rican space begun with the Paseo Boricua. The fact that the PRCC conducts tours of the

Puerto Rican community that focus on the Paseo Boricua is telling. With the casita, the flags, the cement tables, the Puerto Rican busi- nesses, the Paseo Boricua is now more of an inhabited, lived Puerto

Rican space. And it is precisely these kinds of representations, stories,

and practices, according to de Certeau, that transform space into place, a site of stability in a particular location (117). As one activist

told me, "You can go anywhere in Chicago and you're not going to find another Puerto Rican community that is identified by its busi-

nesses, by the people in the street, by the different icons.... you have

businesses coming back, Puerto Rican-run businesses, that are say- ing to the Puerto Rican people, we want to stay here, and in turn the

Puerto Rican people are saying, 'yeah, let's do this, let's develop this."'

Carlos might be correct in arguing that Puerto Ricans tend toward a resistant, anti-assimilationist identity, but like any other identity, it must be constantly constructed and maintained. Mcre-

over, resistant identity alone does not always translate into action.

The PRCC's conscious linkage of physical and cultural space in pro- jects like La Casita and the Paseo Boricua, in building the Center itself, and in the more tacit encouragement of Puerto Ricans to buy property has helped to sustain community in Humboldt Park-

reinforcing a historically oppositional identity and fashioning a re- sistance that speaks to the community's structures of power and domination, as well as its diaspora culture.

Colonialism in Puerto Rico and in the Puerto Rican barrio pro- duces a marked salience of space and the enmeshment of physical and representational space, but this alone is not sufficient to explain the PRCC's resistance or why that resistance is appropriate for Hum- boldt Park. A colonized, diasporic Puerto Rican identity, culture, and local history collides with gentrification, generating opposition and

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168 I RACHEL RINALDO

resistance. With Humboldt Park located at the intersection of all these

forces, space is central to the resistance found there. The PRCC's effort to build a tangible community through nationalist identity and

institutions focuses resistance around space, challenging colonial domination and gentrification, but also articulating the diasporic cir- cumstances of Puerto Ricans.

Colonialism and diaspora are now intertwined with urban rede-

velopment in the global city of Chicago. And that is what makes the

connection between community and territory so salient.

CONCLUSION: GLOBALIZATION, SPACE, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR RESISTANCE

Cyberspace is one of the most common tropes in popular discourse

about globalization. Part of its attraction lies in its ability to capture

how our global era has drastically altered our notions of space. Social

groups now coalesce in ways that have little to do with conventional

ideas of territorial boundaries and propinquity. Although such rhet-

oric often overstates the significance of such virtual social relation-

ships, it destabilizes traditional ways of thinking about space and community. Earlier generations of social scientists, exemplified by the Chicago school sociologists, identified communities as rooted in

particular places, but today it would be hard to argue for a necessary

connection between space and community. Clearly, communities can

transcend spatial barriers-cyberspace groups, as well as highly dis- persed diasporas, function as communities.

But new communities such as game players or affinity-based organizations often lack the experience of exclusion and opposition that can cement a territorial-based community. And if one examines

some of the diasporic groups engaged in cultural and political resis- tance-Palestinians and Kurds come to mind-many of these dias- poras are fighting for control over very concrete territories. For these

groups, contestation is not just about living in a space, but about the power to define that space as their own.

However, it is important to recognize that some struggles over territorial control are also products of globalization. Many theorists have argued about the spatial implications of globalization and the

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE 1 169

rise of the information and service economy. In The Condition of Post-

modernity, for example, David Harvey suggests that because global capitalism diminishes spatial barriers, space is an intensifying point of social struggle in the contemporary world (226-39).

While global connectedness facilitates community formations that transcend space, it also heightens struggles where community is

explicitly linked to territorial space. Ironically, globalization, a phe- nomenon that annihilates space and time, also makes space much more salient in some circumstances. As Saskia Sassen has repeatedly

argued, it is in global cities, the key production sites in the global economy, that place takes on special significance. What is often implied, yet left undeveloped in studies of global cities, is how the salience of space is central to the politics of community, especially communities of color. Sassen asserts that in globalizing cities such as

Chicago, new kinds of identities and spaces are arising. She argues that the centrality of place structured by global processes creates an

opening for new claims, especially rights to place, by marginalized

groups. The contestation is all about whose city it is. "The space con-

stituted by the worldwide grid of global cities, a space with new eco-

nomic and political potentialities, is perhaps one of the most strategic

spaces for the formation of transnational identities and communities" (Sassen 1999, 142).

What is not clear, however, is under what circumstances space

becomes so central to notions of community in a global city. Is any neighborhood threatened with gentrification going to see its struggle

as one that connects a particular territory with its identity as a com-

munity? Where are battles waged when physical space and commu- nity become synonymous? And why?

I have attempted to explain that the PRCC views Humboldt Park as just such a place, where battles over space and community have become one and the same. In Humboldt Park, when a commu-

nity is threatened with complete dispersion and shares a history of colonial oppression, space and community become mutually depen- dent. Because of the confluence of many historically specific factors, the physical space of Humboldt Park has become linked to the metaphorical and representational space that is Chicago's Puerto Rican community. Both the activists at the PRCC and the developers interested in gentrification have recognized this confluence of forces

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170 | RACHEL RINALDO

and used them to structure their battle for control of the space of Humboldt Park.

The conditions I describe are highly specific to Humboldt Park,

but I believe that they may be representative of circumstances facing

other marginalized groups in the Western world. Phenomena such as urban renewal, the gathering of excolonial peoples in metropoles, diasporas, and racialization are not unique; they may even be endemic to contemporary society. And perhaps, if the PRCC is any guide, these conditions could become a focal point for radical social

movements. Resistance around space responds to a desperate need to confront renewed terms of social and economic stratification found in

many urban areas. The PRCC's resistance may not necessarily win the battles being waged in Humboldt Park, but it points to new fron-

tiers for creative resistance in the global city.

Notes

Special thanks to Robert Wyrod for help with the maps and for support through-

out. Thanks also to Leslie Salzinger for guidance, to Andreas Glaeser for com- ments on a previous draft, and to the anonymous Cultural Critique reviewers for

their useful insights. Finally, I am indebted to the staff and volunteers of the

Puerto Rican Cultural Center for allowing me a glimpse into their world.

1. I use Saskia Sassen's definition of the global city-a place that produces the managerial and information services necessary to manage the global econ- omy. Although Chicago does not rank with premier global cities like New York

and London, it does have the Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, as well as a variety of offices and regional headquarters of transnational legal, advertising, accounting, and real estate firms.

2. Entire volumes could be written dealing with some of the other major

issues at the PRCC and in the larger community-in particular, ethnic identity, colonialism, cultural practices, gender and nationalism, and language politics. In fact, one of my important sources is the 1997 dissertation of Ana Yolanda Ramos-

Zayas, called "'La Patria es valor y sacrificio': Nationalist Ideologies, Cultural Authenticity, and Community Building among Puerto Ricans in Chicago." Ramos-Zayas studies the multiple ways in which the PRCC's discourses of cultural nationalism and authenticity pervade the neighborhood through its community building and social services.

3. All names have been changed except those of the former prisoners, who are recognized public figures.

4. In 2000, several PRCC activists and teachers at the high school were sub- poenaed to appear before a grand jury investigating connections to the FALN.

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SPACE OF RESISTANCE | 171

5. In a highly controversial decision, Clinton offered clemency to sixteen political prisoners who had been convicted in 1981 of their association with the

FALN, a Chicago and New York-based group blamed for over one hundred bombings in the 1970s. The amnesty, however, came with the condition that the

prisoners renounce violence. Of the sixteen offered the amnesty deal, twelve eventually accepted the offer, two were already out of prison, and two, Oscar Lopez Rivera and Antonio Camacho Negron, rejected the deal and are still in prison. Most of the twelve moved to Puerto Rico, but two of them decided to

remain in Chicago, where their respective parents are community activists and

closely allied with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. For more on the clemency deal, see Charles Babington, "Puerto Rican Nationalists Freed from Prison," Washington Post final edition, September 11, 1999, A2.

6. Puerto Ricans both on the island and the mainland have been active in

opposing the U.S. military base on Vieques. The PRCC has held several demon- strations and attended a major march in Washington, D.C.

7. These rough figures were obtained from the 2000 census by adding the numbers of Hispanics in the zip codes for Humboldt Park (60647) and Wicker Park (60622), which cover most of Humboldt Park and West Town. Because it is

now possible for people to list themselves as more than one "race," exact demo-

graphics are difficult to gauge. However, the census does show that the number

of Puerto Ricans in the city as a whole fell from 119,866 in 1990 to 113,055 in 2000.

Moreover, the number of Puerto Ricans in these two zip code areas has declined

sharply since 1990. In the Wicker Park zip code area, the Puerto Rican population

declined from 18,000 to 12,000, while in Humboldt Park, it dropped from 32,000

to less than 24,000. The Mexican population, as a comparison, dropped in Wicker

Park, but gained considerably in Humboldt Park. Although I have not seen any

close analyses of the past decade's demographic change in Wicker Park, my own analysis of the population change from 1980 to 1990 reveals a loss of total His-

panic population and a gain in white population in precisely the census tracts that are generally considered the most gentrified-that is, the area close to the Mil-

waukee/Damen/North intersection and the area surrounding the old PRCC building.

8. This is not to deny the obvious colonial history of Mexico or of Mexican-

Americans who were incorporated into the United States. Instead, what I am sug- gesting is that Puerto Ricans, with their current, unsettled colonial status, are in

a different relationship to the U.S. government than are Mexican-Americans, who have a sovereign country to call home.

9. However, the southern section of Humboldt Park is becoming increas- ingly African-American, as families are moved out of the closing public housing projects and into Section 8 housing here.

10. Here I differ from Ramos-Zayas, who concludes that the Puerto Rican identity emanating from the PRCC is essentialist. She argues that the existence of

rigid boundaries between non-Puerto Ricans and Puerto Ricans and the depen- dence on discourses of cultural authenticity makes for a very bounded notion of

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172 | RACHEL RINALDO

identity. I believe that the PRCC, in response to changing conditions, has recently

moved away from such a rigid identity. Moreover, I think the fact that the PRCC

is so willing to declare Puerto Ricans who seem to favor statehood or gentrifica- tion positions as "anti-Puerto Rican" or "enemies of Puerto Ricans" demonstrates that nationality is not the only binding force for the PRCC. Finally, I think the

facts that several core PRCC functions are filled by Mexicans and that so many

whites are very involved with the organization show its growing openness to working with other groups, while still attempting to forge a distinctive Puerto

Rican space.

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Issue Table of Contents

Cultural Critique, Vol. 0, No. 50, Winter, 2002

Front Matter [pp. 213 - 213]
Unsinkable Masculinity: The Artist and the Work of Art in James Cameron's "Titanic" [pp. 1 - 22]
(Re)Writing the Genetic Body-Text: Disability, Textuality, and the Human Genome Project [pp. 23 - 39]
Nation and Identification: Psychoanalysis, Race, and Sexual Difference [pp. 40 - 73]
English and the Audience of an African Popular Culture: The Case of Nigerian Video Film [pp. 74 - 103]
Re-Placing the Border in Ethnic American Literature [pp. 104 - 134]
Space of Resistance: The Puerto Rican Cultural Center and Humboldt Park [pp. 135 - 174]
Police and Postcolonial Rationality in Amitav Ghosh's "The Circle of Reason" [pp. 175 - 211]
Book Reviews

untitled [pp. 215 - 218]
untitled [pp. 219 - 222]
untitled [pp. 223 - 229]

Books Received [pp. 230 - 234]
Back Matter [pp. 235 - 236]