Arlene Dávila

Empowered Culture? New York City’s Empowerment Zone and the Selling of El Barrio

This article explores the implementation of empowerment zone (EZ) legislation in East Harlem, or what some describe as El Barrio in New York City. The EZ is used as a case study for a critique of tourism as an urban development strategy. El Barrio is difficult to market within a framework of tourism defined by EZ standards, especially the heightened conflicts that ensue as minority communities attempt to reconstitute their cultures for tourist aims. Ultimately, this article shows a growing contradiction between the disavowal of ethnicity and race as grounds for equity and empowerment and the fact that ethnicity and race are the bases on which urban spatial transformations are taking place. Furthermore, the case study suggests that the politicization (and mobilization) of race and ethnicity are not the greatest perils to intra-Latino and interracial alliances in U.S. cities or to people’s aspirations regarding urban space at the local level. Rather, the ascendancy of neoliberal tenets presents obstacles to multiethnic and multiracial coalitions on behalf of livable and enjoyable communities for all people.

Negotiating culture and dollars: The politics of corporate sponsorship in Puerto Rico

This study discusses the involvement of commercial interests in Puerto Rican cultural politics through an analysis of the corporate sponsorship of grassroots cultural festivals. It examines how corporate funding affects what is included or excluded and recognized as “culturally relevant” in such festivals. By exploring these issues, this article presents a case study of the dual nature of global processes as mediated in a local context where corporate sponsors are helping both to reproduce and challenge dominant standards about national identity.

To stop tip-toeing around race: what Arizona's battle against ethnic studies can teach academics

A look at what recent debates over Mexican-American and ethnic studies in Arizona reveals about racial dynamics in the American academy and beyond. Author argues that academics have much to learn from activists challenging the current ban on ethnic studies.

Locating Neoliberalism in Time, Space, and "Culture"

This article examines culture and neoliberalism across the Americas and discusses strategies to develop comparative analyses that engage with matters of race and power.

Race and the Cultural Spaces of Neoliberalism: Introduction

Scholars have long noted that neoliberalism functions through the structuring of space. The organization of space and mapping of difference onto space are central to its privatization and to the dominance of market-driven logics in urban development. However, space is also central to popular interventions and debates over citizenship and belonging. These issues become especially salient in twenty-first century American cities and suburban neighborhoods, where the outnumbering of whites by former “minorities” poses challenges to normative neoliberal logics and modes of belonging that seek to domesticate and subordinate difference from the mainstream American landscape. This special issue of Identities presents three interdisciplinary articles by scholars working at the intersection of cultural geography, anthropology, urban design, and American studies to explore the cultural dimensions of these ongoing contestations over space in light of the diversification of the United States that is increasing apace. In particular, the articles shed light onto how culture is being deployed by actors across various positions of power to resist or reproduce social and racial inequalities. Branding and marketing technologies for selling and marking identity onto space, as well as domains in culture and the arts, such as museums and urban design, all come to the forefront as means to transform and resignify space, evoking processes of inclusion and exclusion that are central to the shaping of the new cultural spaces of neoliberalism. We understand these cultural spaces to consist of not only particular neighborhoods and physical places undergoing processes of privatization, gentrification and the logics of market governance, but also institutional and professional spaces that have been restructured according to neoliberal strategies of market-based competition. Although the recent economic crisis has impelled media figures and academics to debate the vitality of a neoliberal economy, the twilight