The Barrio Suburbanism map is a collaborative research project created by
undergraduate students at UCLA in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies during the Winter of 2016. Combining archival research, personal photography, census data, fieldwork, geolocating key sites, and a review of secondary sources, students have assembled a metropolitan story of Latino/a (sub)urbanization. Taken together, their investigations underscore themes of community formation, immigration, education, art, and public space within the frameworks of (sub)urban studies and planning history.
Their work adds a new primary source that can be used to contextualize national trends, in which Latino/as--immigrant and non-immigrant alike--are increasingly choosing suburbs and rural areas as their sites of settlement. As the first major metropolitan area in the nation to historically double its non-white suburban population, this question is particularly important to investigate in Los Angeles. Together, we ask, how does Chicano/a and Latino/a (sub)urbanism shape metropolitan space? What do individual suburbs reveal about broader (sub)urbanization processes impacting Chicano/a and Latino/a communities? And, what lessons does this bird’s-eye perspective hold for those seeking to promote metropolitan equity?
This project uses the Boulevardier framework developed by UCLA scholar Dawn Childress and USC librarian Nathan Day, as well as a Map Marker icon developed by Berkay Sargin of the Noun Project. This is a front-end-only application that delivers TEI-encoded content to your webserver. It was developed using GitHub, a free web-based hosting site and collection of open source software. Each author contributed five XML files with site analysis, visual references, coordinates, and bibliographic sources related to five sites within a suburb of their choosing.
