Spatial Justice: Resource Site for Gentrification of Highland Park

Carolina Cardoza

Education lacks the action to go hand in hand with its teachings. Everything that is learned in the classroom needs to be applied, put into action. Otherwise what is the point to teaching and what is the point to leaning. This class, Spatial Justice Spring ’16, has been very important because it is a community-based learning course. To me, community-based learning is one of the best ways to learn because we are interacting with the community. Interacting with the Highland Park community through this course has taught me to see the community through the quantifiable, the data and the digital mapping and through story telling that provides the emotions that the data cannot provide. This course has also helped me put the data, the mapping and the photography that we have done to actually document the changes, to my experiences and the experiences of my community of displacement, gentrification. I was born and raised in HLP, so it is about 22 years of being in HLP, and through this class I have learned so much about my community that I did not know before. The biggest association with HLP, growing up, was how everyone would call it the “ghetto” and how our community was and is still criminalized because we are a community of color, a working class, and lower socio-economic community, and many immigrant families. With this course I learned to see HLP in a way that was different than to what I always heard from other people. I learned to see HLP through the beautiful culture and history that it has, I learned to value my culture and community besides what people said while I was growing up. I never knew that HLP was a great part of the Chicano Art Movement. Community partners provided what the data could not provide us, it provided me the awareness of what I had not been taught growing up in HLP. I learned of the history of Highland Park that I did not know of, I learned the counter-narratives to the criminalization of my community. The play “Gentrification is Colonization” specially helped me see the sense of community and being proud of our culture that lacks in most narratives of our community. The readings for this class helped me understand my experiences growing up, that my experiences are not my fault but rather a result of so many systemic inequalities and oppression. I’ve come to learn more in depth what allows gentrification to occur, because it is not a natural occurrence, it is inflicted on communities of color, of lower socio-economics, on communities that have been criminalized which is caused because of the lack of resources, gentrification is inflicted on the communities that need it, the communities that have been deemed as nothing, as silenced. Because no one will care about these communities, because capitalism and profit comes before people of color who “do not have a culture”, who “do not have humanity” in the eyes of the gentrifiers/colonizers. In this dominant narrative the problematic part is that in reality we do not need to be saved, our communities do not need a culture to save ours, we need to be heard and no longer silenced. 
 
=========================================
Bio:
Carolina Cardoza is a senior Critical Theory and Social Justice Major. She is a first generation college student. Born and raised in Highland Park where her parents came to from El Salvador in the mid 1980s. When transferring to Occidental College in 2014 from Pasadena City College, Carolina has seen the active role that Occidental College has on gentrification in Highland Park and is currently Co-President of Occidental Students United Against Gentrification. OSUAG partners with the Northeast Los Angeles Alliance to bring awareness to the Oxy campus of their role on gentrification and the impacts it has on the community. Her other interests besides working with her community around gentrification are educational access, incarceration, immigration, and the intersectionality of these and other issues that show how so many systems of oppression are at work to predominantly affect people of color from low socio-economic communities. Carolina will be leaving to Guatemala in January 2017 to complete a year as a Fulbright Fellowship recipient.