Ahh - Help! I lost this book with perhaps two chapters to go!!! If you happen to see it please contact me!

Alright - problem solved. I picked up a copy at the library so I could read the last 12 pages. Good, typical Davis production where he utilizes the most provocative examples of statistics and stories of abuse to discuss the numerous issues of post-NAFTA hispanic growth in the United States. He focuses generally on the major US cities and, as his some base, more specifically within the Los Angeles/ San Diego region. It’s an engaging read and very timely in regard to the 2000 Census.

Like many of the other commenters, I was rather disappointed by this book's short and disjointed chapters, and somewhat exoticizing approach.

A slim but informative book on the plight of Latinos in the US. I especially liked the "Twin" chapter.

Check back on JIMBOTIMES.COM for the review.

Judging this book by its cover, title, and general paratext, I expected it to be more about Latinos' cultural influence on U.S. cities. Instead, Davis focuses more on demographic shifts and enduring socioeconomic and educational inequalities. Overall, though, I enjoy the historical context he provides, but I wish I had read Magical Urbanism 10 years ago.

Salsa is becoming the predominant ethnic flavour—and rhythm—in other large metropolitan cores. In six of the ten biggest cities—New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Diego, Phoenix, and San Antonio, in that order—Latinos now outnumber Blacks; and in Los Angeles, Houston, and San Antonio, non-Hispanic whites as well. Within five years, both Dallas and Fort Worth will have Spanish-surname pluralities, while in Chicago—Drake and Cayton’s paradigmatic ‘Black Metropolis’—the surging Latino population, although still only half of the size of the African-American community, now holds the balance of political power in most city elections. Philadelphia’s Latinos may be in distant third place, but they account for a majority of the city’s population influx since 1980. Only Detroit—with the most threadbare private-sector economy of any major central city—clearly bucks the trend.

I always fascinated about cities are being built with their intertwined narratives and this book always gives almost everything.

Classic Mike Davis. A broad look at how Latinos are mistreated despite their enormous contribution to North American cities. My favorite part of the book was chapter 6, which dealt directly with urban planning and design issues. I love the "tropicalizing" trope - Davis' way of describing how Latinos revivify boring urban spaces. I also want to remember his critique of planning practices that make it illegal for people to modify their homes, either with a fresh coat of lively paint, or by adding a granny flat. These restraints on Latino urbanism are ironic, particularly in view of the myraid mini malls in "Taco Bell Moderne."

The title of this book really led me to expect something different--basically I thought I would be diving into all the ways Latinos have invigorated cities and public spaces, etc. There were about five pages of that....and the rest was a bit of a demographic tour of barriers this community was facing in the country circa 2000. So, not a bad book per se, but definitely not what is advertised by the title.

Mike Davis is a thoroughly persuasive writer, and a couple of his books in particular -- City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts -- have had a lasting impact on the way I see the world. I was hoping for a lot more from Magical Urbanism, and I had read snippets before. And I appreciate the way he shows how Latino communities bring life back to North American cities that have undergone deindustrialization and depopulation -- go to any of the miserable towns I grew up around in Central Iowa, for instance, and see how the only businesses that are thriving are those that cater to the Latino community.

But as the title may suggest, his analysis comes off at points as this fawning fetishization of a foreign culture (look at the way they paint their houses! like, so exotic!). And while it's not Mike Davis' fault that this was written nearly 20 years ago, it was written nearly 20 years ago, and a lot has changed since. Worth it for the perspective, but don't expect a masterpiece.

A well-researched if scant overview of the complex position of Latinos in US cities written at the beginning of the 21st century. I understand the role this book plays as a crash course but I wish it was longer!

The rating should be read as 3.5 stars.

This book was not what I expected. Davis writes it as a bunch of intro chapters to potentially longer stories rather than a story of itself, or at least, that’s how I felt going through it.

They aren’t necessarily independent articles as much as really short excerpts. Puzzle pieces that are part of the same puzzle, but probably work better forming separate puzzles. A mosaic!

That said, Mike Davis still has a lot of good ideas and a unique assemblage of interviews/sources to capture aspects of Hispanics/urbanism that so rarely get covered by the major theorists/works.

Surprisingly, my major criticism comes from the few quantitative aspects of the book. He is *very unclear* in his writing on how he is defining his metropolises (e.g. city? Urban Area? County? MSA? CBSA?), and thus some of the numbers appear rather inflated when cited. I don’t believe there is any falsification, I just wish there was more transparency on the particular geographies when he includes these statistics.

Other than that, this is still a very fun book. Dated? Yes. But I don’t interpret that as a negative. This was a pivotal demographic moment for the US, and I think Mike really captures (if briefly) all the aspects relevant to his subjects. The short chapters make this a breezy read, and a phenomenal primer for doing more research/reading. Though even if you just want to get the big ideas, the books has you covered.

Additionally, 20 years of developments has only strengthened many of Davis’ claims. Hispanics have only become more relevant politically, and many of the methods Davis identified as priming that demographic for voting was successfully harvested by the Bernie campaign and other major pro-Hispanic political movements. The demographic shifts have indeed fulfilled the high expectations set out by Davis. While some of the fights have taken on different contours than what’s outlined here, the spirit and fundamental challenges remain the same.

Maybe more works like this will finally enlighten us on how to repair that broken rainbow.

It opens with the best quote ever from Diego Rivera in 1931:

When you say "American" you refer to the territory stretching between the icecaps of the two poles. So to hell with your barriers and frontier guards!

Much of this I really liked as I like Mike Davis. It is a quick read, a survey really. It describes the changing face of America, the next few decades in which Latinos will become majorities...and it even breaks down some of the divisions in this blanket term that so many wield as though it were a united group: Carribeans, Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americams: 1st generation, 2nd and 3rd. The hybridity along the borders, the dual identities and chicano identities and straight nationalisms in exile always looking back towards the old country. It might not do this enough.

Nothing can capture Tijuana, but it tries. It might not do this enough.

It recovers a history of violence against immgrants along the border that is chilling, and rarely reported on in mainstream news. This I liked the best.

So given all this, given how the growing numbers of latinos in cities not along the border have not been enough studied (though I don't know if he is counting New York, Philly, Miami), there is this call to understand how latinos are transforming these cities. He creates a typology of settlements - primate barrio with satellites (LA 1960), polycentric barrio (Chicago), mosaic (NY), and city within a city (LA 1990). I needed more detail, wanted this set into conversation with other settlement patterns, how does this fit into African-American and Asian grographies? There is a little, but not enough.

Of course, this 'latinoization' of the city is where I feel we move onto problematic ground. He has a chapter called 'Tropicalizing Urban Space'. Uh oh, I think to myself. He writes:

Here, in teh aftermath of the 1965 Watts riot, bank "redlining," civic indifference and absentee landlordism accelerated the decay of an ageing, poorly built housing stock. Yet today, even in the historically poorest census tracts, including most of the Central-Vernon, Florence-Firestone and Watts-Willowbrook districts, there is not a street that has not been dramatically brightened by new immigrants (61)

He describes this restoration of neighborhoods to 'trim respectability', a process that has allowed 'older African-American residents to reap unexpected gains in homes sales: a serendipitous aspect of "ethnic succession" that has been ignored by analysts who focus only on the rough edges of Black/Latino relations' (62). There are no rough edges in this account, but the amount I have studied the embattled history of these neighborhoods, this sentence pains me greatly. South Central has always been a mosaic of trim respectability and beautiful gardens alongside absentee owned rentals falling down from neglect. Sadly many African-Americans have felt this dynamic as a push, not serendipity.
He writes further:

In the most fundamental sense, the Latinos are struggling to reconfigure the "cold" frozen geometries of the old spatial order to accomodate a "hotter," more exuberent urbanism...a rich proliferation of public space (65).

This essentialising a widely divergent group of people into binaries of hot and cold, private and public is so strange to me. That new immigrants should bring different conceptions of space with them, yes...that all of them should want to recreate the old in a new country I balk at, that their children should want to continue with this, layered onto Latinos that have lived here generations, that are as much part of these 'frozen geometries' as any other ethnic or racial group apart from WASPy whites, who undoubtedly had the most power, money, and ability to define the shape of the city. This is more complex, no?

And then we are back to a survey of anti-immigrant sentiment, the highlighting of representative setting up of checkpoints, the activities of immigration, the bulldowzing of encampments, the dangers faced by workers. Some lovely stories of solidarity, villages moving en masse, buying up buildings. I wish this were more representative, but in all my years of neighborhood work I never came across anything like what he describes. Networks and remittances yes. Property? No.

There is some acknowledgement that where immigration does affect workers is at the very bottom, though he says it is not significant. But there is not enough here to help me imagine this escaping that zero sum game that people of colour have always been forced to play in America, one group rising at the other's expense. The intersections of race and ethnicity are also not explored, how much a third generation Black Puerto-Rican's experience (and 'tropicality') differs from the African-American experience, particularly of racism.

One important point I liked near the end, was how the new Latino majorities are winning bittersweet victories, taking political control of suburban cities, but with their high debt, high taxes and looted infrastructues, 'In the most extreme cases Latino majorities simply inherit wreckage' (155). But not enough about the work needed to turn this around, the colaition building that has to happen...