Abstract
This study examines often-overlooked youth perspectives on the sociospatial changes happening in a community experiencing Black displacement, mass Latinx immigration, and impending gentrification. To date, studies of complex urban change rarely consider the ways in which young people perceive and produce place differently from adults. Drawing on Critical Race Spatial Analysis and related literature, this critical phenomenological study centers the experiences youth of color living and learning in South Central Los Angeles. In doing so, this article draws on walking interview data from a larger place sensitive study. This study found that youth of color in South Central derive keen, intersectional insights into the dialectical relationship between the social and the spatial just by living their lives. They learn to “read the world” around them and in doing so, develop complex understandings of the sociospatial phenomena that surrounds them. The article concludes with a call to value the intellect of urban youth in research and public policy.
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Notes
All names are pseudonyms chosen by the participants.
Of course, more recent scholarship has also emphasized how discourses of place can be used to reclaim and resist racial hegemony, as Shange (2019) notes about Black-centric references to “Frisco.”.
This is an important detail, given the method of walking interviews.
Avoiding attention from local gangs was a serious concern, as the school was located on the border of multiple sets and there had been frequent homicides in the area over the years. As a former teacher, I felt responsible for keeping the youth participants as safe as possible.
I have chosen to omit the theme of “social realm” because it was not something salient to the project. Generally, experiencing the social realm involves substantive encounters with other people during the walking interview and such interactions were infrequent (e.g., brief and fleeting interaction with a bystander while looking over a mural).
Mescudi recounted a story with me while we were walking about a gang shooting that took place near a local liquor store. In part she shared, “You kind of start getting an instinct of when it’s not safe. Like, I was walking and I got like a weird vibe out of these group of people that are standing there […] When I got home, you just hear ‘pa pa pa pa pa’ […] And the guy got shot in front of a liquor store. And he died at the hospital due to his wounds.” And while she did not mention immigration enforcement explicitly, she did tell me that “we do have like, undocumented people in the community. So, I feel like they wouldn't feel safe calling the county to come pick up their trash.” Additionally, other youth like Damian, who has an undocumented grandmother, shared with me that in his neighborhood, “there's a lot of stuff going on like people getting deported, like they used to have checkpoints…” Similarly, there have been reports of driving under the influence (DUI) checkpoints targeting undocumented immigrants in South Central (ABC7, 2010).
Media Studies scholar Derilene (Dee) Marco (2021) uses this term in her analysis of cinema in apartheid South Africa as a means of “open[ing] up possibilities for thinking about the very particular legibility of race and belonging […] both as space and as feeling” (p. 71).
Becky’s usage of the word “illegal” here connotes the ways in which legal status may be racialized (see Menjívar, 2021). In general, legal status was not featured prominently in youth responses, though two students (Alina, TB) did have relatives deported and another worried about a possible relative’s deportation (Damian). To my knowledge, none of the participants themselves were undocumented. Thus, these patterns reflect the overall community pattern in which “more than half of all Latino youth in South L.A. live with at least one undocumented parent, and the vast majority (91 percent) of those youth are U.S.-born” (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Pastor, 2021, p. 71).
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their endlessly helpful comments. The author wishes to also thank Brande Otis and the late Mike Rose of the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies for their generous feedback on previous drafts of the manuscript. This manuscript is dedicated to Mike Rose for his life-changing friendship and guidance.
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Alicea, J.A. Placing Youth in the “Spatial Turn”: An Intersectional Analysis of Youth Experiences in a Changing Neighborhood. Urban Rev 55, 70–93 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-022-00641-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-022-00641-6