Gentrification in Color and Time

88 CENTRO JOURNAL
VOLUME XXVIII • NUMBER II • FALL 2016
Gentrification in Color and Time: White and

Puerto Rican Racial Histories at Work in
Humboldt Park
JESSE MUMM
ABSTRACT
The Puerto Rican community in Humboldt Park is at the center of a contentious public
struggle over gentrification, which l explore through housing life histories and ethnographic
data in light of historic displacements, racialization, segregation, suburbanization, and
claims to place. In Chicago an ambivalence of welcome and resistance are rooted in legacies
of racial subjection and coerced moves embedded in the colonial relations of the US and
Puerto Rico. Gentrification evokes distinct racial histories, activating tropes of sovereignty
and memories of place for Puerto Ricans, and for white newcomers moral minimalism,
public avoidance, and racial ascriptions linked to historical white privilege. [Key words:
gentrification, race, Puerto Ricans, whiteness, discourse, Humboldt Park, Chicago]
The author (jmumm2@depaul.edu) is an urban ethnographer with a doctorate in cultural

anthropology from Northwestern University. I-le teaches in the Department of Latin American and
Latino Studies and in Community Service Studies at Del'aul University. I-le grew up in Chicago in
the Logan Square neighborhood and taught high school at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. I le
presents in public debates on gentrification and racial displacement, and is developing GIS analyses of
neighborhood change, as well as a digital ethnography of online discourses on race, community and
belonging in Chicago.
Gentrification in Color and Time • Jesse Mumm 89
[H]e will not permit himself to be pushed around indefinitely.

- Mayor's Committee on New Residents,
from the report "Puerto Ricans in Chicago," 1960
"They're taking over, man. It's not good," says Daniel Vega, 1 a Puerto Rican man
in Chicago who has owned a building on Haddon Street near Paseo Boricua for a
generation in Humboldt Park, where he now sees white newcomers pouring into
his neighborhood."[The police] pass through," he tells me, "not for to say 'Hi,'
but to check on our houses." Humboldt Park is one of the most recognized
communities in the Puerto Rican diaspora, and the center of a contentious
and documented public struggle over gentrification. "I tell them, 'I think you're
working for the real estate,"' he says. \X!hy does he suspect this? Why is it a
takeover? Daniel and many of his Puerto Rican neighbors read their world
through a specific cultural history in Chicago.
A few blocks away lives Ken Caldwell, a white newcomer in his thirties
who bought an old cottage he had been rehabbing for two years when we
spoke. As Ken describes Humboldt Park to me through horror stories of
gangs, drugs, fear, and violence, I ask him whether he has ever been directly
attacked or threatened, and he says more than a simple "no":
What arc they gonna do? They know my reaction to everything is I am going to call the
police, you know? .. .l'm just gonna call the police, cause I'm white. I speak English and
the police like to deal with people like me, not you. It's an unfortunate fact of life.
Daniel's and Ken's divergent and complimentary perceptions and imaginations

inform sets of practices and ways of envisioning and occupying space that
originate in the distinct racial histories of whites and Puerto Ricans in the
United States-but particularly Chicago.
Gentrification in color and time

In Humboldt Park gentrification reveals divergent and intersecting racial
histories, activating for Puerto Ricans memories of displacement, tropes of
sovereignty, and the power of place, and conversely for whites evoking moral
minimalism, avoidance, entitlement, and racial boundary-making. An ambivalent
90 CENTRO JOURNAL • VOLUME ><XVIII • NUMBER II • 2016
stance of Puerto Rican welcome and engagement, or defense and resistance,

is rooted in histories of racial subjection and forced moves embedded in the
colonial relations of the US and Puerto Rico. \Xlhite newcomers mostly raised
in majority white suburbs, small towns, and exurban areas largely defined by
midcentury segregation in turn apprehend and act on their new neighborhood
in ways consistent with tl1e social conventions of whiteness. This article
draws on two years of participant-observation, surveys, public observations,
formal interviews, and twenty housing life histories of Puerto Ricans and
other Latinos and white newcomers in Humboldt Park posing tl1e question:
How does gentrification reveal and construct race in Chicago? What does
gentrification reveal about tl1e history of race in organizing and designating
neighborhood spaces, economic disparities, and divergent forms of political
power? What does gentrification reveal about how whites and people of
color perceive, experience, and imagine each otl1er, and how tl1ese collective
behavior patterns inform political economic consequences?
I build on valuable research on Puerto Rican Chicago and its racializations,
claims to place, and historical displacements, in the light of white history
and the legacies of separation and suburbanization and return that equally
inform gentrification. I begin by explaining my approach to race from an
interactional perspective, then present an overview of the Humboldt Park
neighborhood, followed by a review of previous literature on the community.
I then discuss the racial history of Puerto Ricans in Chicago and white
racial settlement history in the contemporary era, before presenting a range
of ethnographic data from observations and interviews with local Puerto
Rican, Latino, and white residents. I conclude tl1at racial histories intersect
here, as Puerto Rican challenge and engagement impacts the lives and
subject positions of white newcomers, who themselves seek to transform
the landscape. Gentrification makes the distinct racial histories legible in its
process, built enviromnent, and forms of representation and contestation.
In this article I demonstrate how tl1ese patterns emerge in social and spatial
practices, common perceptions, discursive positions, and the life stories of
residents. I work from the premise that if race is to be genuinely understood,
it must be in relational, comparative, and interactional terms-that despite
the social chasms between Puerto Ricans and white people in Chicago, we
must read tl1eir engagements and entanglements together. In this interactional
perspective, "both the people who claim history as their own," as Eric
\v'olf writes, "and the people to whom history has been denied emerge as
participants in the same historical trajectory" (1982: 23; see also Van der veer
2001: 8).
Race In lnteractlonal perspective

Anthropology has firmly established what race is not (\Vade 2005; Goodman
and Leatherman 1998; Littlefield et al. 1982; Boas 1940)-tliat is, discrete sets
of genetically and biologically defined human types-but rather a strong set of
historical socially produced ideas witl1 real structural and physical consequences.
Leith Mullings has called for "a critical interpretation of race not as a quality
of people of color, but as an unequal relationship involving both accumulation
and dispossession" (2005: 685). In this vein I identi�r race as the interactive
dynamics of accumulation and dispossession that define a set of power relations
between social groups commonly essentialized in reference to physical bodies
and ancestry. Race is present in structural inequalities, dominant institutions,
racialized geography, civic and political organizations, and individual and public
interactions and intersections. Racial regimes are historically constructed and
periodically change (eg. Wacquant 2002), contingent on shifts in tl1e ideologies
and practices of whiteness in relation to black, native and otl1er peoples (Painter
2010), and are locally enacted while also globally resonant (Clarke and Thomas
2006). Race and racism serve the possessive investment in whiteness, as legible
in the broad contours of midcent:ury urban divestment and suburban valuation
(Lipsitz 1998), as in, for example, local patterns of management of space in
gated communities (Low 2009). These ordinary relations to social space can be
read in the "everyday language of race" (Hill 2008) and often manifest in racial
micro-aggressions in public interactions (Sue et al. 2007) that cohere in larger
"racial projects" (Omi and Winant 1994: 55-6).
By contrast, in places like Humboldt Park, white people and whiteness are strikingly,
resonant/y visibll}--eften the main topic of discussion-pmise/y because their presence in a
historicaljy Puerto Rican landscape is so clear/y a spatial shift in radal history.
In the contemporary era whiteness is under slowly increasing scrutiny

in scholarship as in social milieus. \Vhiteness is a moveable currency that
relies for its power to transform landscapes on histories of valuation and
exclusion, while simultaneously the subject of intense revanchism as white
Table I, RACIAL ASCRIPTIONS OF PUERTO RICANS BY THEIR CHICAGO

NEIGHBORS IN 1960
some
"just" unsure
racial white "just"
white Colored Negroes mixed Spanish Puerto orno
category and some people
Rican answer
colored
responses 12% 12% 2% 22% 24% 10% 10% 2% 6%
The above figures illustrate proportionate responses by largely white neighbors in three Near Northwest
Side census tracts with significant Puerto Rican population to the survey question of how they would
classify Puerto Ricans by race (MCNR 1960: 82).
people again seek to reinvent its powers and processes in the early twenty
first century (Alcoff 2015). Whiteness has been rendered so normative that
race scholars argue that it is the "invisible race" (Frankenberg 1997) and that
white people and discourses and practices extending white privilege need to
be identified, targeted and studied far more closely than we have (Bonilla
Silva 2003; Hartigan 1997). By contrast, in places like Humboldt Park, white
people and whiteness are strikingly, resonantly visible--often the main topic
of discussion-precisely because their presence in a historically Puerto Rican
landscape is so clearly a spatial shift in racial history. By comparison, Puerto
Ricans have been variously and ambiguously racialized, at local and regional
scales, and especially in historically white and black cities like Chicago. As
peoples witl1 African, European and indigenous ancestors, Puerto Ricans and
other Latinos have confounded and disrupted tl1e US black/white racial binary
system since tl1e first mass migrations from Mexico and Puerto Rico in tl1e
early twentieth century (Rodriguez 2000). White Chicagoans have historically
assigned Puerto Ricans an ambiguous intermediary status as 'brown' people
ineligible for whiteness (Fernandez 2012), and linked tl1eir presence to the
devaluation sustaining real estate speculation and profit (Betancur 1996).
Inflecting both structure and agency, race often operates covertly as
habitus, as "systems of durable, transposable dispositions" and "regulated
improvisations" tl1at are "collectively orchestrated wiiliout being the product
of the orchestrating action of a conductor" (Bourdieu 1972: 72). I approach
tl1ese dispositions constructively as "funds of knowledge" (Olmedo 2001),
cultural resources and interpretive frames bridging collective and personal
historical memory with shifting present contexts. Particularly as one habitus

is literally changing shape, each set of forms becomes more visible through
the disjunction, articulation, and efforts at re-inscription undertaken by those
promoting, resisting or transforming those changes in practice and discourse.
Since space in human cities is always an ongoing social production reflecting
landscapes of power relations (Lefebvre 1973), their legibility in material spatial
practices, representations of space, and spaces of representation corresponds
to the experience, perception, and imagination of residents (Harvey 1989: 220-
1). Place and places are meaningful, active, and intersubjective, and oppressed
populations facing displacement often organize to reinvest signification in place
as outside capital seeks to transform their landscape into neutral space amenable
to capital (Casey 1998). Each side embodies what philosopher Charles Mills
calls "the ra.it1g of space, the depiction of space as dominated by individuals
(whether persons or subpersons) of a certain race" (1997: 41-2, italics in
original), embodied in spatial and discursive practices. As formerly segregated
populations now live proximally-but not socially integrated-in formerly
devaluated and gentrifying black and Latino landscapes, surprise, shock, disjunct
and uncanny moments of misrecognition make unequal racial histories newly
legible, discursive and valent. Across popular culture a growing number of
personal testimonials recognize these implicit contradictions with irony, humor,
anger and self-reflection (Gozamos 2015; Jones 2015; Otterbein 2015). In this
article I trace the qualitative content and spatial and discursive patterns of
whites and Puerto Ricans in Humboldt Park as clear evocations of the distinct
and segregated racial histories of groups now sharing the same blocks.
Landing In Humboldt Park

Humboldt Park is widely recognized in the media and in popular discourse
throughout Chicago as hot property for real estate speculation, as well
as a contested homeland for Puerto Ricans (Elejalde-Ruiz 2014; Buck
2001). The eastern edge of the neighborhood borders Wicker Park, an
extensively gentrified landscape of upscale consumption and majority white
residence, while the western edge is a diagonal rail embankment, beyond
which the blocks become lower income and lead into the majority black
neighborhood of Austin. To the north of Armitage Avenue lies Logan Square,
a neighborhood now nearly half Latino and half white, full of venues of elite,
upscale and eclectic consumption, but also strong familial and organizational
ties to the larger Puerto Rican and Latino Near Northwest Side. To the south
lies a bank of railroads and to the southeast Ukrainian Village, where white
newcomers, Latinos, and both immigrant and Chicago-born Ukrainians share
a mixed landscape of rehabbed and up-kept buildings. Humboldt Park is thus
surrounded by gentrified or gentrifying areas on three sides, all of which are
adjacent on the east to the larger gentrified swath of the North Loop, the Near
North Side, Lincoln Park, and the north lakefront. By the nineties outside
investors saw a set of beautiful buildings embodying the best of historic
Chicago architecture, surrounding one of the biggest and most elaborate parks
in the city, bordering areas receiving substantial new investment and white
newcomers, and the stage was set. The one problem that remained from the
previous racial regime in the history of Chicago was that-in the eyes of far
too many white people outside the neighborhood-Humboldt Park meant
poverty, pathology, gangs, drugs, danger, and Puerto Ricans. To make matters
worse for speculators, in 1995 two forty-ton for Puerto Rican flags were raised
like gates along Paseo Boricua, a reinvented and redeveloped half mile of
Division Street (see Flores-Gonzalez 2001), reportedly the largest momunents
to a flag in the world, and winners of the Building of the Year award by the
American Institute of Architecture.
ef
In my randomized survry racial attitudes in Humboldt Park (n=200), a little
ef
over ha!f both 111hites (55 percent) and nomvhites (51 percent) share near!J identical
assessments that "white people" are the reason the neighborhood is becoming very expensive,
whilefor both samples on!J about a quarter disagree.
'1ose Lopez's Last Stand" blares the headline of Chicago Magazine, in

an article highlighting the Executive Director of the Puerto Rican Cultural
Center and the battle to preserve Puerto Rican Chicago, while also natu1·alizing
gentrification in ways common in popular media accounts (E. Fishman 2014).
In the first decade of the millennium average home values in the area doubled
to a rate over $70,000 higher than the city median (Cintron et al. 2012: 23). In
a familiar pattern, this meant a dramatic surge in property taxes for existing
homeowners, and led to a comparable increase in rents, even for buildings tl1at
had seen little mate11al improvement, and tl1e local Puerto Rican population
has been on a steady decline since. A survey of residents on tl1e blocks
surrounding Paseo Boricua showed tlrnt 66 percent see the white population
Table 2, PERCEPTION THAT WHITE PEOPLE CAUSE DIS PLACEMENT
sample agreement disagreement neutral
nonwhite 51% 26% 23%
white 55% 25% 19%
This table illustrates for the following statement the raw percentage of Humboldt Park residents who
agree, disagree, or respond with neutrality, no opinion, or not sure: "White people are making it very
expensive for Latinos to live here in the neighborhood." For this statement whites' and nonwhites'
responses nearly correspond.
Table 3. PERCEPTION OF LOC A L LABOR DISCRIMINATION DUE TO R ACIS M
sample agreement disagreement neutral
nonwhite 58% 25% 17%
white 20% 23% 57%
This table illustrates for the following statement the raw percentage of Humboldt Park residents who
agree, disagree, or respond with neutrality, no opinion, or not sure: "It is very common for Latinos
in this neighborhood not to get jobs and promotions because of discrimination and racism." While
disagreement holds steady, the agreement and neutrality proportions are nearly reversed for whites
and nonwhites.
increasing, and half see the Puerto Rican or Latino population decreasing,
while over 70 percent affu:med their intention to stay in the neighborhood
(Garcia Flores 2008: 9). In my randomized survey of racial attitudes in
Humboldt Park (n = 200), a little over half of both whites (55 percent) and
nonwhites (51 percent) share nearly identical assessments that "white people"
arc the reason the neighborhood is becoming very expensive, while for both
samples only about a guarter disagrcc.2 But when asked a basic guestion on
whether tl1ere is racial discrimination against local Latinos in the labor market,
the majority of nonwhites agreed (58 percent) but only a fifth of whites (20
percent)-three times less-echoing longstanding denials of racism among
white Americans (Hill 2008; Bonilla-Silva 2003; Steinberg 1995). Latinos and
I 'ig111v I. A /·louse 011 Pamde. A /Jou.re 1JJt1/k.r through the /'ue,to Rim11 pamde adomed JVilh .r/ic/w:rproclaiming
"I-ICJMHOUJ'/' /'ARK IS NO'/'FOR .l'/11 Ii!" (l/lflpai11ted JVith the 111e.r.rage"PRESERV/\NDO NUESTRO
1 IOG/\RES COMUNID/\D Y CUU'URA" /l'RUSELWING OUR 1 -/0MUJ COMMUNITY AND
CUUVRU). Pbotogmph i!Y the au/ho,:
whites may not recognize white racism in the same proportions, but tend to
agree that white people directly influence the real estate market.
The level of overt social and cultural production around tl1e issue of
gentrification is high in Humboldt Park, including youili summits, seminars and
colloquia, film screenings, rallies, testimonials and publications too numerous
and complex to provide a full account here. The idea of gentrification, tl1e
threat of displacement, and Puerto Rican claims to space emerge during tl1e
September street festival Fiesta Boricua, the holiday procession on el clia de los
tres nyes magos, cover articles in La Voz de/ Paseo Boricua, and in everyday talk.
Displacement also abounds, and I watched many venues literally close
before my eyes and later reopen as "white spaces" (e.g., Page and Thomas 1994)
cate1·ing to majority white clienteles. Yabucoa Foods on Nortl1 and Rockwell is
now Illumination Art & Design, a private arts firm replacing not just a Latino
grocery store but literally erasing the very name of a Puerto Rican pueblo. Local
Gentrification in Color· and Time • Jesse Mumm 97
f'-i�mi 2. Fies/a /Jo11i·11a cro11.rl. The crm,rlfills the slml t1/011g />aseo /JmiC11a 11111/er theflag ,mh 11ear the ea.r/em .,Jage
d111i11g Fies/a /Jo11i·11r1. l'hotogmph i?Y the ,111/ho1:
bar El Secreto Escondido lThe Hidden Secret] lost its liquor license, briefly
became a "key club," and then shut down completely and remained vacant.
Puerto Rico Cafeteria once hosted young and old Puerto Ricans, Latinos and
black residents, and made some of the best caft con leche around. The storefront
now houses a cafe and restaurant called Grandma J's Local Kitchen, catering to
a supermajority white clientele, named to reference both locally grown produce
on the menu as well as the white newcomer owner's grandmother. The irony
is lost on most customers that it replaced a restaurant once so identified with
'local' people that it was literally called "Puerto Rico," in a neighborhood steadily
losing its abuelas to displacement. The local landscape of public venues and
consumption, with the exception of liquor stores or \v'algreens, tends to divide
evenly into supermajority Latino or white spaces.
Literature on Chicago's pedac/to de patrla

Humboldt Park and the Puerto Rican Near Northwest Side have been the
subject of a vibrant literature investigating migration, race, gender, settlement
and community formation (Toro-Morn 2005; Perez 2004; Alicea 2001; Flores
Gonzalez 2001), and in particular tl1e work of its Puerto Rican nationalist
activists (Ramos-Zayas 2003; Rinaldo 2002). Nilda Flores-Gonzalez describes
the Paseo Boricua project and landscape in terms botl1 glowing and critical, as
a work in progress to wield cultural capital in defense of community (2001).
Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas in turn made the notion of a Puerto Rican space
"turning white now" a centerpiece of tl1e 2001 CENTRO Journal (vol. 13
no. 2) issue on Puerto Rican Chicago. Gina Perez (2004) furilier examines
tl1e constant "intrametropolitan migration" of Puerto Rican families here
with particular attention to gender and household formation. She also found
increasing harassment of Latino youth by white newcomers and police as tl1e
pace of investment increased in West Town in the nineties, and traces the
losses of valuable webs of support, information and mutual aid with each
move (Perez 2004: 143-6, 149-51). In her ethnography of the Juan Antonio
Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC), Rachel Rinaldo argues that
its success in defining Humboldt Park and fighting gentrification is about
claiming space as a mode of resistance (2002: 136). She concludes that the
PRCC's "effort to build a tangible community through nationalist identity and
institutions focuses resistance around space, challeri.ging colonial domination
and gentrification, but also articulating the diasporic circumstances of Puerto
Ricans" (Rinaldo 2002: 169). T\vo decades earlier tl1e first overview of Puerto
Rican Chicago by Felix Padilla (1987) foreshadowed and predicted both the
gentrification of West Town and Humboldt Park, and outlined the political
and organizational groundwork that set the foundation for its resistance. Taken
together, these scholars demonstrate the resilience of Puerto Rican households
in tl1e face of intersecting modalities of marginalization, tl1e constant
intrametropolitan migration following dispersal from la is/a, and the centrality
of Puerto Rican nationalist mobilizations to local community building. W hile
I build on these premises, my contribution is in situating a neighborhood
analysis of Puerto Rican life in interactional perspective, incorporating white
people and whiteness, in the interests of a furtl1ering a fuller appreciation of
the mutual embeddedness of racial histories. In addition I link the words and
works of Puerto Rican activists, whose defense of Humboldt Park resonates
across the diaspora, witl1 a search for meaningful patterns in tl1e evetyday lives
Table 4, PUERTO RICAN POPULATION IN CHICAGO
year 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
residents 255 32,371 73,000 112,074 119,800 157,851 102,703
These numbers demonstrate the accelerated migration of Puerto Ricans to Chicago in the decades after
the labor force recruitment of the late forties. Population increase then remains steady until the effects
of displacement appear in the early millennial years (Cintron et al. 2012).
of a broad swath of white and Latino residents and their relationships to white
and Puerto Rican racial histories. For these reasons the ethnographic work
presented here deals less with the main organizations, leaders and activists
rightfully identified in previous work as architects of Puerto Rican claims
to space in Humboldt Park (e.g. Rinaldo 2002), than with residents largely
randomly sampled or encountered publicly and recruited for interviews. I am
also less concerned here with the familiar subject of tactical re-imagi11alio11s of
history in the present (Anderson 1983)-relevant as it may be-but with the
pervasive ways racial histories, regardless of their overt deployment, imbue the
present with meaning for Puerto Rican and white residents.
Settling Puerto Rican Chicago

Puerto Ricans migrated to Chicago as a direct result of their colonial
relationship with the United States, as well as the constrained labor, housing
and political conditions in earlier East Coast settlements (Fernandez 2012:
25-9; Grosfoguel 2003; Padilla 1987: 23-55; Sanchez Korrol 1983: 11-50).
From the late forties in Chicago, Puerto Ricans lived among whites, blacks
and Mexicans in multiracial areas to the west, north and northwest of the
Loop for generations, but faced immediate patterns of racism and exclusion
in housing, education and labor and racist street violence from white gangs
(Fernandez 2012). For their first generation in Chicago they were sometimes
viewed and portrayed as a docile, obedient, hardworking model minority, until
the decline of tl1e industries they were recruited to fill (Perez 2004: 61-85).
They then became increasingly portrayed as a threatening underclass in tl1e
popular sphere, and subsequently pathologized using the "culture of poverty"
thesis made famous by Oscar Lewis in regards to Puerto Rican and Mexican
families (Lewis 1965, 2011; Perez 2004: 85-91) and often deployed against the
black community (Glazer and Moynihan 1963).
Puerto Ricans experienced job discrimination and labor abuses, a long and
bitter exclusion from Catholic churches, persistent racism and marginalization
in the school system, open and covert discrimination in rental housing, and
widespread and endemic police brutality (Fernandez 2012: 91-205). Migrants
faced a grim housing situation as they arrived in Chicago: absentee landlords,
overcrowding, rent gouging, the lack of hot water or private working toilets
were conunon (MCNR 1960: 33-4). Puerto Ricans thus made continual
strategic moves-to escape an abusive landlord, leaky plumbing, to gain
needed extra space-but without substantively changing their situation (Forni
1971: 66). The recruitment of Puerto Rican workers at lower wages while
white workers were leaving for management-and suburbia-allowed many
industries to remain in US cities longer after the start of deindustrialization (A.
Maldonado 1997; R. Maldonado 1976; C. Rodriguez 1979: 213). Though Puerto
Ricans in effect slowed the decline of industrial Chicago, later they would be
associated with urban deterioration and often rhetorically positioned as the cause
of disinvestment. ''As these people [whites] move on, they think of Wicker
Park as the neighborhood they remember from the old days," said Rev. Henry
Murray of Association House, "and they forget that itwas pretty well used up
by the time they abandoned it to the Puerto Ricans" (cited in Cross 1971: 23).
For their first generations in Chicago, far from fearing the specter of
concentrated poverty, Puerto Rican leadership instead bemoaned "the lack
of concentration of these people in any one parish or in several, language
and cultural differential, and the lack of community among Puerto Rican
immigrants" (Martinez 1989: 134). Puerto Ricans did not form a "natural"
ethnic enclave, but rather sought housing anywhere nearby places of work,
clustering for protection and mutual assistance on the scale of a block or a
single apartment building (Fernandez 2012: 23-89). I spoke with older Puerto
Ricans who remember this as their lived experience, including a great woman
who was like another mother to me, Clara Lopez Rivera-que en paz descanse.
Dofia Clary's life story encompasses living in West Town as disinvestment,
arson, abandonment, and urban renewal made life more precarious, the
perpetual and dehumanizing presence of racism, and finally "un terrof' when
they knew "que vienen los blancol' ["that the white people are coming"].
Why did she identify the arrival of white newcomers with terror? The
answer lies in the experiences of Urban Renewal and growing funds of
Gentrification in Color and Time • Jesse Murnrn IOI
lmowledge (Olmedo 2001) around gentrification. Perhaps more than any other
single ethnic group in the city of Chicago, Puerto Ricans have a comparatively
long tenure in experiencing the effects of displacement (Fernandez 2012: 131-
72). As early as the fifties the confluence of DePaul University, city officials
and banking interests considered plans to redevelop the lakefront Lincoln
Park neighborhood for a more upscale clientele (Pacyga and Skerrett 1986:
64). During the seventies the area lost 4,000 residents-disproportionately
Puerto Rican families with children-as property value and rents soared and
"[a]fter more than a century, Lincoln Park once again has become an exclusive
residential district" (Pacyga and Skerrett 1986: 67). Within their first generation
here, Puerto Ricans were displaced from their single largest settlement, a
memory never far from current debates over the future of Humboldt Park.
''1-'or the firstfour orjive years of my life I was on the South Side of Chicago in the
Woodlawn area,where there was a lot of Puerto Ricans migrating at that time, "sqys
former alderman Rey Colon, "and I remember living in a building 1vith,you know,lots
of apartments and lots of other Puerto Ricans living in the same building. And there was
kind of a little support nehvork there. "
Puerto Ricans settled to the south in Woodlawn, the Southeast Side, and
Pilsen, and to the west on the Near West Side, along Western and Taylor
further west, east Austin, and along \Xlest Madison in Garfield Parle "For tl1e
first four or five years of my life I was on the South Side of Chicago in the
\Xloodlawn area, where there was a lot of Puerto Ricans migrating at that time,"
says former alderman Rey Colon, "and I remember living in a building with,
you knO\V, lots of apartments and lots of other Puerto Ricans living in the
same building. And there was kind of a little support network there." Along
West Madison Street near California in East Garfield Park Puerto Ricans
formed the Maypole Social Club in the fifties and hosted dances at nearby
Marillac House. "T here was always a Puerto Rican family, and Puerto Ricans
around us," Rafael Lugo says, "Iviadison Street was almost like Division." To
the north they lived in the old immigrant enclave at Chicago and LaSalle on the
Near North Side, Old Town, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview, where various forms
of state-sponsored and private industry displacement erased the majority of
the Puerto Rican presence by the eighties. Puerto Ricans coalesced on the
102 CENTRO JOURNAL • VOLUME XXVIII • NUMBER II • 2016
larger Near Northwest Side, including the neighborhoods of \v'est Town,

Logan Square and Hermosa, but centered around Humboldt Park, which
became linked in community festivals and popular portrayals as the residential
and spiritual home of Boricua Chicago. By then the need for spatial claim at the
scale of a neighborhood was learned over many generations: growing funds
of knowledge within the particular racial history of Puerto Ricans in Chicago.
Puerto Ricans have organized opposition to displacement from the
present day back to the fifties, when two dozen leaders met with Mayor
Daley about their concerns "before relocations were made at the LaSalle
Street project" (MCNR 1960: 113). As early as 1958 West Town was declared
a "conservation area" and faced proposed slum clearance, high-rise and
highway construction, later including all of "East Humboldt Park" up to the
Park under the Chicago 21 Plan (Pacyga and Skerrett 1986: 180-1). In the
sixties the threat of gentrification in Lincoln Park was a .major impetus in the
founding of the Young Lords Party as a radical and revolutionaiy project to
take control of urban space and resist ongoing displacement (Cruz 2004: 9).
In \v'est Town activists protested against arson for profit, holding absentee
landlords accountable, promoting and subsidizing home repair, preventing
abandonment, and fighting state-sponsored urban renewal demolitions. Facing
organized local resistance, city officials began shifting policies and practices
away from formal Urban Renewal to greasing the wheels of independent,
privately undertaken gentrification, and disavowing a state role in the process.
Still Puerto Ricans lived within a racial geography of "clustering, displacement,
and reconcentration" (Betancur 1996: 1299), in which the terms of their
movement were largely dictated by the needs and profits of white business and
property owners speculating on them. T hey were:
forced into this by the combined forces of real-estate speculation...and racism rather
than as a result of upward mobility or integration. Mobility was largely horizontal.
Forced and continuous moves also made many of them live in permanent transition.
They have not displaced other ethnics. Latino-related speculation has been dictating the
terms, rather than assimilation, choice, competition, and mobility. (Betancur 1996: 1306)
Puerto Ricans in Humboldt Park thus stand at the end of a history of labor
recruitment, US colonial depopulation policy, displacement by urban renewal,
and a gentrification process in which their racialization is used to fix the market
for devaluation and later real estate speculation.
Opening white racial history

This racial history runs parallel, simultaneously and deeply conversely embedded
in the racial history of the reconstruction of white privilege over the twentieth
century. The devaluation and disinvestment of the inner cities that were left to
newly arrived black and Latino residents operated in direct relationship with
the collusion of the state and business interests in underwriting white suburbs
and white wealth creation (Kruse and Sugrue 2006; Kruse 2005; Sugrue 1996).
The postwar boom in the construction and settlement of the suburbs, the
development of infrastructure, and the underwriting of the mortgage market,
were all supported by policies and subsidies directed by tl1e federal government
and largely profiting the real estate industry (Jackson 1985: 190-218).
Throughout the era of Urban Renewal and white flight this "dual metropolis"
of city and suburb has shaped Chicago, and federal and local policies divided
the "ghetto of exclusion" from the "fortified enclave" (Marcuse 1997) by what
one historian calls a "gentleman's agreement" 1·evolving around race (Jackson
2000). The periphe1·y is valued because of the decrease in congestion, the
flexibility of land use, the social value long attached to it, and tl1e younger
relative age of construction. But beyond the geographical lens, tl1e suburb
is valued because it is associated with a higher social class agglomerated into
greater racial homogeneity and whiteness (Hirsch 2006). These values reflect
social assurances loaded into ostensibly colorblind phrases about the quality
of schools, the safety of streets, and the feeling of "knowing your neighbors,"
despite the fact that suburbanites tend to know their neighbors comparatively
less but, rather, iclenti()' with them more (e.g. Low 2009; Baumgartner 1988).
The identification of spatial mobili!J with up111ard class mobili!J neatfy aligns with the
status and capital rewarding those who lift the ci!Jfor the s11b11rbs, and like111ise do11bfy
stigmatizes those who 111ere lift behind in racialfy segregated inner cities.
The suburb has been interrogated as a "bourgeois utopia" predicated

on escaping the moral evils of the city for an idyllic, white, heteronormative,
and middle-class landscape of sprawl and consumption in which political and
social policies increasingly reflect privatization and market-driven solutions
(Cohen 2003; Hayden 2003; Marsh 1990; R. Fishman 1987; Jackson 1985).
Yet what spatial practices, dispositions and funds of knowledge does this
104 CENTRO JOURNAL • VOLUME ><XVIII • NUMBER II • 20 I 6
landscape engender in those socialized there as children? Cultural geographer

\X/ilbur Zelinsky identifies four themes associated with triumphalist American
building and expansion: "an intense, almost anarchistic individualism, a high
valuation placed upon mobility and change, a mechanistic vision of the world,
and a messianic perfectionism" (Zelinsky 1992: 40). The identification of
spatial mobility with upward class mobility neatly aligns with the status and
capital rewarding those who left tl1e city for the suburbs, and likewise doubly
stigmatizes those who were left behind in racially segregated inner cities.
In comparison to migrants coerced by structural conditions of constant
displacement, white Americans arriving in urban centers tend to view
rootedness as a false virtue, movement as a recipe for personal happiness, and
to celebrate their power to remake any landscape in their own image.
In The Moral Order ef a Suburb, Mary Pat Baumgartner (1988) writes a
fascinating account of suburban life and what she calls its pervasive "moral
minimalism." This "culture of avoidance" involves weak social ties, an
indifference to community, diffuse social interactions, high mobility, lack
of attachment to place, and a general aversion to confrontation, conflict
and tl1e recognition and settlement of differences (Baumgartner 1988: 3,
10-3). The moral minimalism of white newcomers to gentrifying central
city neighborhoods balances with their "moral credentialing" (Krumm and
Korning 2008; Manin and Miller 2001) as racially tolerant persons due to
their willingness leave behind tl1ose white suburbs, small towns and rural areas
and to reside proximate to nonwhites. In Humboldt Park a plurality of white
newcomers we surveyed were of suburban origins, and a supermajority raised
. majority white areas, and in tl1eir practices and discourses patterns emerged
in
of engagement and disengagement, moral minimalism and moral credentialing,
illustrative of white racial history. Interestingly, the present-day Latino
population is now growing in formerly white suburbs (see Ishizawa 2009; Rotl1
2008; Camarillo 2007), another reversal of previous patterns of segregation
that is also not resulting in idealized social integration. But importantly for
this article, in our randomized door-to-door surveying we found not a single
Latino respondent (n = 100) who had been raised in US suburbs-all had spent
tl1eir childhoods in Chicago, in otl1er cities, or in Puerto Rico, Mexico, or other
places in Latin America. By comparison a super.majority of white respondents
were raised in majority white areas, a plurality of which were suburbs-firstly
those outside Chicago, then the Midwest, then throughout tl1e country. Each
group carries with tl1em from tl1ese segregated settlement experiences an
"ability to read race in conjunction with both contemporary institutional and

democratic hierarchies and their historical antecedents" (Guinier 2004: 118).
Ethnographic findings In Humboldt Park

\Vhile anyone with the money can rent an apartment, rehab a greystone, or buy
a condo, these racial histories evoked in Humboldt Park are largely separate
and unequal. For white newcomers mostly arriving from suburbs, small towns
and rural areas, this means carrying particular forms of social separation,
assumptions about the residents around them, and ways of enacting white
privilege and entitlement. In contrast, for Puerto Ricans in Chicago today,
displacement means more than making a simple household calculation of
another move in reaction to changing economic and housing conditions. It is
about having any right of choice as a people at all, and strikes a telling note
about who in fact is entitled to a right to live in community and in place. "So we
just move to the next neighborhood and get pushed out of there?" local poet
Janeida Rivera poses. "Then do it all over again?" her voice rises, ''When does
it stop? When do we get to choose to stqy?" Puerto Ricans in Humboldt Park
talk about gentrification in terms of sovereignty that are expressed and felt in
intimate, personal ways. "Colonialism displaces us, and so does gentrification,"
Zenaida Lopez says, and wryly adds, "So I can relate to the both of them."
A tnove to the suburbs and awqyfrotn the barrio does not have the satne meaning.for hitn
as it didfar theprevious white exodus, but rather a return to the overt 1vhite racism he
alreacjy encountered on anivaL
Rafael does not want to leave Humboldt Park, though his city property
taxes skyrocketed, and he is regularly offered a third of a million dollars for
his modest brick cottage, but his reasons are less purely economic, and more
about kinship and the history of racial geography. "First of all it's my family,"
he says, "If I see tl1e area getting tranquil, why would I wanna move out?"
He once looked at houses in suburban Lombard near his former workplace
a few years ago but says he reconsidered after seeing how people looked at
him. "It seems like I wasn't welcome, driving by, they look at you like, 'What's
he want?"' he says, "So I don't think I wanna, I could live, knowing tlrnt I was
not welcome. I can walk out of my house here right now and no one has that,
that look of, 'What are you doing around here?"' A move to the suburbs and
away from the barrio does not have the same meaning for him as it did for the
previous white exodus, but rather a return to the overt white racism he already
encountered on arrival. Racial history is alive in his present decision to remain
in Humboldt Park.
"Aquf luchamos, aquf nos quedamol' [Here we struggle, here we stay]
read bumper stickers proclaiming a phrase repeated popularly throughout
Humboldt Park, evoking histories of racism and discrimination, 1·iots and
community building efforts to declare a right not to be displaced. As elsewhere
in the diaspora, the art of expressing Puerto Rican heritage appears on the
body, clothing, home and car decorations in a constantly changing series of
proclamations of pride, many referencing each other or previous incarnations,
but here often reinforcing the popular currency of the project of Paseo
Boricua. When I ask white newcomer Ken Caldwell his opinion about Paseo
and the No Se Vende campaign, he is succinct in his assessment:
Market. Economics, man, that's what I say. It's a nice concept. I'm sure the Germans
were saying the same thing to each other a hundred years ago. Uh, people in a certain
income bracket do not want gentrification. Most of them are in a much lower income
bracket than I am. I can't do anything about that. But the woman who bought this
house before me was out of place, per se ....She was an.older white woman. She didn't
belong here. She probably moved in because it was cheap too.
While lightly mocking efforts to preserve the Puerto Rican community, Ken
deploys tl1e history of white flight to achieve a fascinating reversal in which
the European inm1igrants' upward mobility to tl1e suburbs is rendered as a
respectively coerced loss. In the scenario he presents the older generation of
whites were once and still are tl1e real victims, not-so-subtly suggesting that
he himself is "out of place" and does not "belong here" but tl1at tl1e real
·perpetrators of racial exclusion may in fact be Puerto Rican. As he names
gentrification and the income disparity between hini.self and his neighbors, a
brief invocation of naturalized free market forces absolves himself of any role
in tl1e process, in a classically moral minimalist stance.
The leaders and nonprofit and cultural workers involved in tl1e Paseo
Boricua project are overt in ilieir identification of tl1e historical origins of
gentrification. For over a quarter century Jose E. Lopez has been the Executive
Director of tl1e Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC),
a community institution composed of a dozen educational, health, economic

development and youth programs. As a diaspora leader in the political
movement for the independence of Puerto Rico, it is perhaps no surprise that
Lopez depicts gentrification as a process of colonialism. Yet his portrait of
white newcomers in relation to his community is grounded in recent urban
history and in the ongoing lived reality of social segregation by race:
So what happens is yon create an illusion where, especially among this generation of
young u1·ban professionals, that you've overcome the problems of racism. They exist
in multicultural environments, for the most part....And it's an illusion. It's an illusion
because in the long run the society continues to be quite segregated. People continue
to be judged on the color of their skin .... Somebody can come from the outside and
see a community that's falling apart, that obviously has not integrated itself, that has
all these problems of acculturation and socialization and assimilation, and all of those
issues could be raised as problems. Well, we're looking at the fact that we have been
able to transform this space into a Puerto Rican space that this has become part of onr
historical legacy as a people, that five, six generations of Puerto Ricans have lived here
and have nrnde this area.
An ongoing transformation into "Puerto Rican space" involves large, planned

public events like Fiesta Boricua, but also informal and daily iterations of
communication and interaction. In my fieldwork I intentionally relied on an
even spatial distribution of respondents throughout the neighborhood, and
targeted residents who were not themselves nonprofit workers or activists,
and I found racial histories invoked in ways that were patterned, pervasive, and
compelling. "So gentrification is, it starts with the big political guys," Rafael
says, "It's not just the people moving in, somebody's got to spread the rug.
\Xlith that comes political power, not from the Hispanics, but from the whites,
that will favor the mayor."
\Xlhite newcomers to Humboldt Park are heterogeneous in their sensibilities
and positions on the gentrification issue, yet they tend demonstrate lower
public social engagement and contact, and forms of racial boundary-making
evocative of segregated white suburbs. \X/hether and how they interact in
public both illustrates their low levels of comfort and familiarity with street
social codes as well as their racial apprehensions and fears of the community.
Dan Bridges says he was surprised from the moment he moved in how the
men who occupied that street corner were quite friendly to him, a repeated
refrain among white newcomers startled by forms of public greeting and

recognition. "There were a couple of guys who kinda greeted me," he says,
"I don't know any of their names." He has also felt welcome, camaraderie
and. reassurance from local Puerto Ricans, who "have made me feel real
comfortable," he says, as well as challenge, insult and threat. '"Hey, white boy
in my neighborhood? What are you do.in'?"' he mimics an intoxicated Latino
man who called out at him late one night. In any case, most white newcomers
to I-hunboldt Park reported to me some form of direct welcome by their new
Puerto Rican, Mexican and black neighbors, giving the lie to the idea tlrnt a
neighborhood with organizations opposing gentrification is necessarily an
unfriendly or unwelcoming place.
Still it can be. In Humboldt Park I was publicly accosted in the street and
identified as a white outsider. One sunny afternoon a Latina woman yells at
me out of a passing car window, a moment after I step into a crosswalk just as
her car approaches the stop sign and she has to brake fast. She and her Latino
male passenger eye me coldly, and as they speed away the woman throws out
the one word that successfully ascribes whiteness, outsider and class status all
at once. "YUPPIE!" she yells. Drinking on a neighbor's front porch one night,
Angel Cordoba interrupts me several times, and denies the validity of anything
I say, because "people like you" get the neighborhood-and Puerto Ricans
wrong all the time. This is a claim with which I ultimately agree: people who
look like me do in fact keep getting Puerto Ricans wrong, and he cannot in his
personal life confront all of those white people at once.
''You re coming into my house,yott gotta respect it," he sqys, 'We are not criminals."
In Humboldt Park I heard repeated recognitions that white newcomers

express little interest in the life stories or tl1e local history of Puerto Ricans.
"From what I can see," Rafael says, "personally tl1ey won't tell you, but they
don't want to hear none of your part of tl1e story." He links that lack of
recognition witl1 the ascriptions of Puerto Ricans that white newcomers
bring witl1 tl1em and a pervasive disinterest in tl1e landscape beyond tl1eir own
individual successes within it. "You're coming into my house, you gotta respect
it," he says, "\Ve are not criminals." Rafael feels in tl1e detachment of his white
neighbors, and their obliviousness and lack of interest in his local knowledge
Gent,·ification in Color and Time • Jesse Mumm 109
and history, the underlying, perennial racial positioning of the Puerto Rican as
inferior. "En otra paiabra, puerco" ["In other words, pig"], he says.
Puerto Ricans here welcome and accommodate newcomers, but also
show dis.inclusion and challenge, and these polar threads of interaction often
manifest as disaffected ambiguity or ambivalence. Puerto Rican scholars have
identified in th.is a set of slippery practices of indirect resistance, of progress
through sustained ambivalence, of refusal without a blunt 110---moving
fonvard by walking sideways like the Puerto Rican highland mountain crab
known as thejaiba. A person showing "jaiber!a favors endurance over physical
strength, and privileges ambiguity over clarity," adopting a stance in which
"complicitous critique or subversive complicity point to an acknowledgement
of being in a disadvantageous position within a particular field of power"
(Negr6n-Muntaner, Grosfoguel and Georas 1997: 30; Garcia Passalacc1ua
1993). Ramon Grosfoguel in particular links this kind of ambivalent challenge
to a history of colonial conditions in which most people did not feel they had
recourse to direct opposition to authority and power. I am accustomed to
these mixtures of welcome and challenge and trust that complicitous critique
allows two parties to arrive at a more genuine place of engagement after more
interaction and conversation. But for many white newcomers this good place
may never come, if their initial reaction to being challenged is to withdraw and
feel justified in their existing negative racial apprehensions of Puerto Ricans.
My own whiteness arose as the topic itself, as illustrated by a friendly
prank on el dia de los tres rryes [Three Kings' Day; the Epiphany], January 6th . I
accompany the community procession from Pasco Boricua to the Humboldt Park
Boathouse to observe the crowd, and by the end Janeida Rivera calls out to the
crowd to ask everyone to stay within two lines entering the building to receive
presents for their children. As a participant-observer, I am not there to receive
a gift for a child, and for a moment I am literally not sure where to stand.
"Even me?" I ask.
"All white people will be thrown off the balcony," she deadpans. I
begin to oblige by leaning over the rail, and three more Puerto Rican friends
join in, with big grins, pretending to toss me over the Boathouse veranda.
We laugh, it feels fun, lighthearted, like good, real commiseration, to do
these little jokes. But I reflect on how serious and necessary they actually
are to the power dynamics here, and how important it is that a white male,
despite being accepted on some level as a friend and an ally, recognize tl1at
Puerto Rican women are in fact in charge here. The vast majority of white
newcomers do not regularly meet with the small number of Latinos who
keep the local nonprofit, political, church and business infrastructures intact,
and thus the majority of Puerto Ricans, blacks and Latinos do not represent
a daily interpersonal political challenge to outsiders. But the challenge is there
nonetheless in the larger symbolic landscape, and part of ongoing discourses
and a persistent conversation in the public sphere.
But fighting racialized displacement does not always mean simply preventing
present evictions, but also actively recruiting those who left to move back to
the neighborhood, seeking to reverse previous intrametropolitan migration
another dimension of racial history. Printed on handbills, promoted at festivals,
spoken door to door, handwritten on signs, and broadcast on parade floats,
Puerto Ricans here called out to Puerto Ricans everywhere some version of
the words, "Come back to El Barrio, this is your home." This approach evolved
later into a more controversial initiative targeting local residents, encapsulated
in the phrase: "I-Iumboldt Park No Se Vende." Literally meaning "Humboldt
Park is not for sale," it is at once an imperative urging local residents not to
leave, opposition to a general capitalization of the area and a challenge to
prospective outsider buyers to look elsewhere. Launched through events at
the Batey Urbano youth center, printed on signs in windows, banners on floats
at the parade, painted on t-shirts and chanted in the streets, a tremendous
amount of political and cultural production has been organized around the
campaign, including marches, rallies, murals, film screenings, informal surveys
and forums on housing and gentrification attended by hunch-eds of people.
The No Se Vende campaign organized a march led by youth down several
residential blocks in the eastern portion of Humboldt Park, replete with
banners, Puerto Rican flags and chants challenging gentrification. Marchers
flow down Artesian Avenue with a bullhorn and the crowd repeating each line
in a call and response pattern:
You can scream! YOU CAN SCREAM!

You can yell! YOU CAN YELL!
Humboldt Park, HUMBOLDT PARK,
We won't sell! WE WON'T SELL!
Latino participants twice change their chants in order to direct them at a

blonde white man jogging, or two white women leaning out the open window
of a new condo building, raising their voices to say: 'j·Boricua si! iYuppie no!"
f'i'g11re 3. )'rmlh !vlmi:h. Vo11lhjoi11 a mmdJjor the Humboldt Park No Sc Vcndc /I /11111hold1 />ark ix Not.for
,\'{I/cl mmpaig11 {l/1111� f)i/.irion .fore/. 1vbm 011c .r(�11 rcarlr, 'Boricua SI Yuppie NO" f'l'11el10 /{i,,111 )'/ iJ ri,ppic
NO,' /'Ol(�hlyj. l'hotogmph i?Y the a111hm:
["Puerto Rican, yes! Yuppie, no"]. The bewildered jogger changes his course
and literally runs away, and many youths in the march begin laughing; the
women close their window but remain staring, apprehensive, behind glass.
Beyond scaring joggers local community groups have at times scheduled
open public workshops or trainings on gentrification intended to educate
newcomers to the area on local history, present economic realities, and the
need for solidarity, to both positive and mixed reviews. "I don't think we really
engaged the dialogue," :tvfichael Bancroft says after one such roundtable, "I
think we scratched the surface." :tvfike is a white artist who has spent years
developing an arts organization intended to serve youth the Humboldt Park
community: Co-op Image. He was born to a liberal, middle class family in
Lincoln Park just as it gentrified, and grew up in the far Northwest Side
neighborhood of Edgebrook and then Winnetka, a wealthy North Shore
suburb. His story constantly references his collaborators both from the graffiti
and the formal arts worlds-Andres, Yajaira, Jasmin, Gabriel-and tl1e long,
uncertain road toward new local relationships. His involvement with local
community gardens was marked at first by mistrust and confrontation by older
Puerto Ricans who had cultivated these spaces for years. "Wilma didn't like me
at first," he says, "but she loves me nmv."
112 CENTRO JOURNAL • VOLUME XXVIII • NUMBER II • 20 I 6
ef
Over and over, the Puerto Rican community Humboldt Park finds ways to challenge
ef
111hite newcomers to declare where thry stand in relation to them and to the future the
neighborhood
Eventually Mike was questioned and scrutinized by Jose Lopez, who

"asked what my intentions were" in the community. "It was a little heated,"
1viike recalls, but "it was notlung personal." Jose challenged Mike to be clear
on what he wanted to do witl1 the community, his understanding of its history,
and despite his own criticisms of ilie PR.CC, tl1ey managed to establish a
relationship that led to future collaborations. "It wasn't a blessing," he says,
"but it wasn't disdain." In bridging the racial divide in the neighborhood he
has seen Lati.nos "having to be the one willing to cross the line, no matter
how awl<'.vard it is," and he poses a challenge to other white newcomers.
"It's the responsibility of the organization or the artist," he says, to make
overtures, cross tlrnt divide, and engage directly witl1 the community through
support and collaboration. "It's so inherent to the culture that comes with
gentrification," Mike says, ''You don't have to meet your neighbor." He both
recognizes the moral minimalism, social isolation and avoidance of interracial
contact of white newcomers, while personally tasking himself witl1 changing
that in dialogue witl1 the challenges of local Puerto Rican residents and leaders.
Over and over, the Puerto Rican community of Humboldt Park finds ways to
challenge white newcomers to declare where they stand in relation to them
and to tl1e future of tl1e neighborhood. White newcomer interracial interaction
here tends to follow a pattern of Puerto Rican challenge, dialogue, negotiation,
rejection, acceptance, collaboration, and this tends to run along organizational
and institutional lines far more than incorporation into social and kin circles.
I complemented life histories and interviews with key leaders and
community workers with a randomized and targeted survey of interracial
interactions and racial attitudes conducted by race-matched surveyors witl1
100 white and 100 people of color living in Humboldt Park. For whites in
Humboldt Park, their years of residence showed a medium correlation with tl1e
deptl1 of their contact witl1 people of color. White newcomers to tl1e Puerto
Rican pedatito de patria are over time far more likely to share organizational and
community ties, exchange favors, information and resources, and consider
people of color tl1eir friends. Importantly, this correlation was not in relation
to .frequenry of interracial contact for whites, but rather for the survey proxy
indicating the depth of that contact, indicating that the white newcomers
who chose to engage at all tended to be drawn into more complex forms of
exchange. The longer whites lived in Humboldt Park, the more likely they
were to engage with people of color on a more than superficial level, in a
neighborhood where residents constantly broach contact with tl1em, amid a
community with extensive organizing to resist gentrification. In a divergent
and equally compelling finding, tl1e longer whites lived in the neighborhood
the more their likelihood to agree witl1 the statement that Latinos held too
much local power.
The local experiences of white newcomers here lead tl1em either on the
one hand to resent, deny or oppose the power of local Puerto Rican leadership,
or to support, sympathize and collaborate with the community-sometimes
both in the same person. Somehow living among Puerto Ricans in Humboldt
Park forces white people to take a position.
Finally, gentrification also provides a crucial window into the ways in
which generations of life in a segregated and dis.invested Latino landscape
also leave a record of internalized racism (Pyke 2010; Gonzalez 2007). Luz
Carrion would prefer to live around "white people" on ilie far Northwest Side
or in the inner suburbs, because "they keep things nice," rather than dirty,
rundown, and full of crime-her fixed impression of Humboldt Park. Many
Puerto Ricans, as well as blacks and other Latinos, reflect this same internalized
Table 5, DEPTH OF INTERRACIAL CONTA C T CORRELATED WITH YEARS OF

LOCAL RESIDENCE
Garfield Park Humboldt Park Pilsen
sample nonwhite white nonwhite white nonwhite white
correlation nil nil nil medium nil nil
raw score 0.00461 0.0701 0.00692 0.0485** 0.00968 0.0171
This table illustrates the correlation between stated years of residence in each given
neighborhood and a numerical proxy for depth of interracial contact as indicated by four questions
regarding interracial friendships, forms of association, and information and resource exchange.
Table 6, PERCEPTION OF TOO MUCH LOCAL LATINO OR BLACK POWER

CORRELATED WITH YEARS OF LOCAL RESIDENCE
Garfield Park Humboldt Park Pilsen
sample nonwhite white nonwhite whi,e nonwhite white
correlation nil nil nil medium nil nil
raw score 0.00166 -0.00247 0.00175 0.0566** -0.000945 0.0143
This table illustrates the correlation between stated years of residence in each of the three study neigh
borhoods and agreement with the statement: "Over the past few years, Latinos have had too much
power and influence over what goes on in this neighborhood."Pilsen is a majority Mexican neighbor
hood southwest of downtown, and Garfield Park is a majority black neighborhood in the center of the
West Side, where in the survey question "blacks" was substituted for "Latinos."
set of assumptions that improvement equates to white people, and that

their own people cannot improve a place they call their own. And when city
services follow this uneven trajectory throughout. the Chicago landscape,
unofficially but fairly consistently improving along witl1 an increase in white
population in formerly Latino and black majority areas, that sense of social
inferiority is confirmed in structural geography. Neitl1er income nor working
conditions have changed for the better for Luz, even as white people return to
Humboldt Park, as upscale businesses open where she has neither the money
nor the interest to enter, and both places and people she knew disappear. Her
memories of hardship and deprivation here remain vivid, but for otl1ers the
history of Puerto Ricans in Chicago speaks in multiple valences.
Carlos Vega, a lifelong Puerto Rican resident, suggests in a qualified
voice tl1at "in a way, it's improving because you have all tl1ese high developers
coming in." Then immediately in an ambivalent turn he loudly asserts that it is
a mistake to assume that any in1provement is "for those white people," citing
an internal change in the Puerto Rican community in taking more pride in tl1eir
neighborhood and keeping it clean themselves. One Puerto Rican woman in
her forties, dressed to tl1e nines and having a drink at a bar on Paseo Boricua
on tl1e Saturday of tl1e parade, talks about how her family moved out "by
Brickyard" years ago, but she comes back to Humboldt Park a lot. She loves
how Division Street looks way better now, how much cleaner it is, and less
publicly dominated by gang members, even if they may still be there. It does
not register to her that this is the result of a complex, deliberate, intensive
process of change led by Puerto Rican nonprofit and cultural workers, elected
officials, and business people-instead, she breezily assumes that it is because
"the white people came."
\X/hen Evelyn Rivera speaks to me of Humboldt Park her stories are
historically informed by her and her family's experiences living in \X/est
Town before it became \Vicker Park. As she describes how so many Latinos
are moving further west, I ask her if that appears to be the future of the
community, and her response both stokes the themes of attachment to place
as well as powerful symbolic fears of loss embodied in the flag sculptures.
"I remember them putting the flags up," she says, "It was very huge for all
Latinos in this community." Her language here becomes an extended sentence
loaded with equal parts passion and conviction as tension and uncertainty,
significantly avoids landing on an answer, and remains deeply ambivalent about
the power to control the future of tl1e neighborhood:
You know the way things are going, I strongly believe, you know, as much as the Latino
community, like with Pasco Boric11a and all the good stuff that's going on over there, no
matter how hard they're trying to save Humboldt Park, and I pray and I hope it does
happen and it is saved, but, for example, they're trying to take down the flags, after
they, how could, that's like a huge symbol for us, you know, that, that, that represents
who we arc, where we come from, you know, what the park is, you know, people that
live there that arc homeowners, and been there for so many years and don't know
nothing else.
Ultimately Evelyn is positive about tl1e community she identifies as Puerto

Rican space and place, but still renders tl1is an uncertain project, a work in
progress, not just to remain here but to remake Humboldt Park-her firm
conviction as strident as her ambivalence.
White potential clients considering bt!)ling in Humboldt Park asked the most about the
nearest mqjor grocery store and the nearest train line, and eften wanted to be within close
driving distance of the shopping plaza along North Elston Avenue.
116 CENTRO JOURNAL • VOLUME ><XVIII • NUMBER II • 20 I 6
On the flipside, white newcomers over time become aware of the many
and subtle forms of race and class disparity historically built into a gentrifying
landscape. Holly Berman notes that undocumented Mexican neighbors never
call the police even when their white newcomer neighbors throw loud backyard
parties, and Mark DePhillipis realizes that his many calls to the police-and
their subsequent street sweeps-meant that fewer Latinos now congregate
on his block. In one poignant example, only after living in the neighborhood
and also doing real estate there, did Rebecca Shapiro begin to realize that
Humboldt Park was a food desert. White potential clients considering buying
in Humboldt Park asked the most about the nearest major grocery store and
the nearest train line, and often wanted to be witlun close driving distance of
the shopping plaza along North Elston Avenue. \X!hen enough of Wicker Park
and \X!est Town to the east had been gentrified, a very modern, extensively
outfitted Dominick's opened a mile east on Chicago Avenue near Damen,
complete with its own Starbucks, which made tl1is form of disparity legible
to Rebecca. "I didn't realize tlrnt the reason there are no Dominick's in this
neighborhood is because the socioeconomic level is not high enough," she
intones, tl1oughtfully drawing on her cigarette, "I just never tl10ught of it."
These examples illustrate how gentrification makes class and race inequality
newly legible in space in ways that a purely segregated social environment may
not, as amenities that many white newcomers assume are necessities-and
Latinos long lived without-suddenly appear.
Racial histories at work in Humboldt Park

The overt and public defense of community by Puerto Ricans organized in
nonprofit groups and institutions and emblazoned on tl1e landscape in public
inscriptions of spatial clain1 emerges from histories of displacement from
the island and throughout the urban landscape of Cllicago. Fmther, however,
the moment and site of gentrification reveals histories of exclusion and racial
marginalization of Puerto Ricans and Latinos in Humboldt Park, and marks
the changes in the landscape as registers of newly legible distinctions between
the value ascribed to wllite or Latino bodies in place. Here Puerto Rican
cultural foll{Ways as well as historical economic positions contribute to forms
of personal and public dialogue between wllites and Latinos that involve
critical engagement, cultural critique, and political challenge. These situations
often evoke internalized racism, illustrate historical racial disparities, enabled
and enacted precisely because tl1ey are now sharing neighborhood space once
Figure 4. Living Racial History
Contrary to a deterministic model that posits qualitative outcomes as the result of singular social fac
tors, the notion of living racial history suggests a constant, agentive and integrated cultural process of
reimagination and reinvention in which all factors intersect.
racialized by white flight. If the attitude among Puerto Ricans in Humboldt

Park is ambivalent, defensive, collaborative and engaging, this is not arbitrary
and iconclastic cultural patterning, but relates directly to the political economic
history of Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood and in Chicago.
Puerto Ricans have spent roughly seventy years in Chicago constantly
learning and reading the racial ascriptions applied to them by white residents
and elites and the political and economic consequences they would entail.
The histories of tl1e migration experience from the island and constant
intrametropolitan movement within Chicago is importantly remembered
as both strategic agency and coerced imposition by economic, material and
geographic realities. ''\Xie are tl1e displacees," says Tabatha Gonzalez, after a
developer bought her building and evicted every Latino family, but when Luz
Carrion was evicted she told the story as a simple decision to live nearer to
her sister and save money. There is no reason to assume a cultural or political
attaclunent to place is part of the essentialized nature of Puerto Ricans or
human beings at all, and agency is to be found by marginalized people in all
forms of constrained and coerced movement. But in the historically racially
segregated and unequal landscape of Chicago it is also not difficult to find
political reasons to cultivate a centralized residential base, cultural reasons to
localize community bonds of mutual exchange, and personal desires to end
constant cycles of uprooting and rebuilding social institutions. In fact, ongoing
and overlapping conununity building efforts in Humboldt Park demonstrate
that attachment to place may in fact be a central strategy in combating racial
marginalization and colonial subjection in the longue dttree.
Most white newcomers did not move here to consume Puerto Ricanfoods, ef!J'r(y their
festivities or share in their triumphs and pains, but rather to 1vait out the transformation
of Humboldt Park into white space, as thry know happened in the past in neighborhoods
to the east.
For their part white newcomers speak and a�t with a sense of their
power to rearrange, .dismiss and displace the community, a sense that their
proclivities, affinities and preferences should take precedence over the most
basic survival needs of affordable shelter for people of color. Those who
take public and organized action to support Latino community initiatives
and oppose gentrification tend also to recognize that in the main this is not
how white newcomers position themselves in Humboldt Park and often act
through dialogue and challenges posed by Puerto Rican residents. Practices
and discourses of entitlement find support and confirmation in the structural
changes to tl1e built environment sponsored by tl1e City of Chicago as well
as the private real estate industry, which togetl1er have acted to reinforce
white supremacy in urban geography throughout the past century. Most
white newcomers did not move here to consume Puerto Rican foods, enjoy
their festivities or share in their triumphs and pains, but rather to wait out tl1e
transformation of Humboldt Park into white space, as they know happened
m the past in neighborhoods to the east. Their narratives demonstrate
an understanding that risk here has been minimized, investment will pay
dividends, and that power and history are still on their side.
At least some Puerto Ricans here are betting instead that they can reverse
and resolve the historical problem of displacement. W ho sees the social unity
difficulty reconstructed around a place as historically heroic? Is any attachment
to place on some fundamental level deeply conservative or revolutionary
anti-colonialism? Is this to be determined and understood by peoples or by
scholars only in relation to specific historical conditions of subjection? These
active re-imaginations of community-both those of white newcomers
remaking the landscape in their interests, and Puerto Rican long-term residents
and activists transforming space and lives on their own terms-are equally
woven from the threads of history. Their distinct, separate and unequal racial
histories provide strong narratives from which material changes in the built
environment and the local political economy unfold (IVIumm 2014).
In the aftermath of the postmodern era it is de rigem· to position any
and all forms of "imagined community" (Anderson 1983) as nearly arbitrary
inventions, social constructions beholden only to the narrow interests of social
and political elites. I argue that the evidence here shows that conununity is not
a hallucination woven out of whole cloth but an ongoing and often intentional
project of reinvention. For many Puerto Ricans here the present moment is
not simply a rejection of historical displacement but a profound affmnation
of the right to political control over a sovereign collective destiny. For white
people here the present moment is not simply a series of individual decisions
about pricing and cultural tolerance but the extension of a historical legacy
of land appropriation that deepens the structural imprint of white privilege.
In Hwnboldt Park race is at the crux of JVhose reimagination will become the
landscape in which we live.
Here we live under 40-ton flag sculptures that overtly say Puerto Rico,
planted into tl1e ground explicitly to say Humboldt Park, but tl1ey resonate
with the racial histories that frame the present and contested racializations
of white people and of Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Well into his sixties after
a lifetime in Chicago, Rafael Lugo points out to me that while any material
improvement can start a speculation wave, the flag sculptures are not
convertible or changeable or subject to the newer claims of outsiders, because
their shape is unmistakably Puerto Rican. ''You could be blind and not want
to see it," he says, "It's there and it's written. It's part of Chicago's history that
can't be denied."
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Erika Abad and Lauren Zych for valuable editorial comments and
suggestions, as well as my anonymous reviewers.
NOTES
1 Personal names referenced throughout this text may be actual, given, common, and
legal names of respondents, and names of organizations may refer to verified groups in
existence during the time of fieldwork. However, many names of people and organizations
arc pseudonyms created for this text, in accordance with my Northwestern University
Jnstitutional Review Board (lR.13) protocol STU1510 and in the interest of the protection
of human subjects from the potential social harms of association with negatively ascribed
views or behaviors. As a further endeavor for the protection of anonymity, no distinction is
made in the text between actual or invented names and titles, though all generally known local
community leaders and elected officials arc identified by name.
2 This article references survey data gathered by Research Assistants Felicia Butts, Laura
Mieczkowski, Veronica Morales, Sofia Narvaez Gete, Sara Raftery, Myra Rodriguez and Luisa
Rollins, who conducted randomized surveys on interracial interactions and racial attitudes on
gentrification in three Chicago neighborhoods. 1\gain I. offer my thanks to them, and to the
National Science Foundation for the funding that enabled this clement of the larger project.
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88 CENTRO JOURNAL

VOLUME XXVIII • NUMBER II • FALL 2016

Gentrification in Color and Time: White and

The author (jmumm2@depaul.edu) is an urban ethnographer with a doctorate in cultural

[H]e will not permit himself to be pushed around indefinitely.

Daniel's and Ken's divergent and complimentary perceptions and imaginations

Gentrification in color and time

stance of Puerto Rican welcome and engagement, or defense and resistance,

Race In lnteractlonal perspective

In the contemporary era whiteness is under slowly increasing scrutiny

Table I, RACIAL ASCRIPTIONS OF PUERTO RICANS BY THEIR CHICAGO

responses 12% 12% 2% 22% 24% 10% 10% 2% 6%

historical memory with shifting present contexts. Particularly as one habitus

Landing In Humboldt Park

'1ose Lopez's Last Stand" blares the headline of Chicago Magazine, in

Table 2, PERCEPTION THAT WHITE PEOPLE CAUSE DIS PLACEMENT

sample agreement disagreement neutral

nonwhite 51% 26% 23%

white 55% 25% 19%

Table 3. PERCEPTION OF LOC A L LABOR DISCRIMINATION DUE TO R ACIS M

sample agreement disagreement neutral

nonwhite 58% 25% 17%

white 20% 23% 57%

Literature on Chicago's pedac/to de patrla

Table 4, PUERTO RICAN POPULATION IN CHICAGO

year 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

residents 255 32,371 73,000 112,074 119,800 157,851 102,703

Settling Puerto Rican Chicago

larger Near Northwest Side, including the neighborhoods of \v'est Town,

Opening white racial history

The suburb has been interrogated as a "bourgeois utopia" predicated

landscape engender in those socialized there as children? Cultural geographer

"ability to read race in conjunction with both contemporary institutional and

Ethnographic findings In Humboldt Park

a community institution composed of a dozen educational, health, economic

An ongoing transformation into "Puerto Rican space" involves large, planned

refrain among white newcomers startled by forms of public greeting and

In Humboldt Park I heard repeated recognitions that white newcomers

You can scream! YOU CAN SCREAM!

Latino participants twice change their chants in order to direct them at a

Eventually Mike was questioned and scrutinized by Jose Lopez, who

Table 5, DEPTH OF INTERRACIAL CONTA C T CORRELATED WITH YEARS OF

Garfield Park Humboldt Park Pilsen

sample nonwhite white nonwhite white nonwhite white

correlation nil nil nil medium nil nil

raw score 0.00461 0.0701 0.00692 0.0485** 0.00968 0.0171

Table 6, PERCEPTION OF TOO MUCH LOCAL LATINO OR BLACK POWER

Garfield Park Humboldt Park Pilsen

sample nonwhite white nonwhite whi,e nonwhite white

correlation nil nil nil medium nil nil

raw score 0.00166 -0.00247 0.00175 0.0566** -0.000945 0.0143

set of assumptions that improvement equates to white people, and that

Ultimately Evelyn is positive about tl1e community she identifies as Puerto

Racial histories at work in Humboldt Park

Figure 4. Living Racial History

racialized by white flight. If the attitude among Puerto Ricans in Humboldt

M. Kruse, and Thomas J. Sugrue. 13-56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Visalia, Ct\: Vintage Press.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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