Patricia L. Price

At the crossroads: critical race theory and critical geographies of race

Critical geographers of race and critical race theory share common theoretical, conceptual, and political goals, yet we have not engaged with each other in a substantive fashion. I discuss critical race theory’s development within critical legal studies. I then discuss three points of mutually informative intersection: the all-pervasiveness of race, a difficult relationship with the black/white binary, and strategic deployment of narrative. Elián González is used to briefly illustrate these insights. In conclusion, I note that criticality, activism, and anti-racism are particularly vexed issues for critical geographers of race, and suggest further avenues of inquiry to address them.

Race and ethnicity II: Skin and other intimacies

The intimate turn in geography has centralized approaches to race and ethnicity which foreground bodily encounters. The quirky spatialities of intimacy, involving not just proximities but also distancing and borders, operate in racial and ethnic ‘contact zones’. Skin is one of these, and it is central to an understanding of race and ethnicity as arising through bodily encounters in places. Geographic scholarship emphasizing embodied racial and ethnic topics has highlighted processes of approximation, distancing, and bordering in race and ethnicity as lived events. Set within the intimate turn, this work has the potential to inform geographers and geographic scholarship with respect to criticality, the stickiness of place, and visceral geographies. In addition, the need to elucidate further the relationship between race and ethnicity is underscored.

Inscribing the border: Schizophrenia and the aesthetics of Aztla´n

Late modernity is replete with new borders that defy traditional geographic notions of scale. The irruption of such transverse borders is seen by some as signalling a threatening loss of the link between place and identity. Yet others have viewed this as a productive decentring. The Chicano movement and the aesthetic production that arises from it illustrates this productivity. Chicano national identity is actively produced through the revisioning of space that both draws from and defies geopolitical borders. This challenges geographers and other border-based scholars to rethink the ways that borders manage late modern power.

Introduction: Protecting Human Subjects Across the Geographic Research Process

This collection of articles examines diverse aspects of human subjects protection. All are authored by geographers actively engaged with human subjects, whether as administrators, active researchers, or both. The articles’ common point of departure is that human subjects protection is not a one-off event; rather, it is a process that is stretched out temporally and spatially, involving multiple actors. Our aim is pragmatic inasmuch as we focus on pushing beyond recounting “IRB horror stories” to engaging productively with conceptual, thematic, and operational aspects of human subjects protection across the research process from a geography-specific perspective.

Rethinking “Diversity” Through Analyzing Residential Segregation Among Hispanics in Phoenix, Miami, and Chicago

Hispanics are an internally diverse population, yet residential segregation within census-defined groups is often overlooked. Census data are used to examine evenness and exposure segregation among Hispanics in Chicago, Miami, and Phoenix along the lines of national origin, race, year of arrival, and income. Results suggest that segregation exists in Miami where there is more national origin diversity, between white and black Hispanics in Chicago, in all three cities for foreign-born Hispanic recent arrivals, and especially between high- and low-income Hispanics. Attempts to theorize immigration, social capital and solidarity, and the future of democratic society have inadequately conceptualized “diversity”; our work critically employs quantitative analysis to suggest an enriched and more nuanced socio-spatial understanding of the term.

Race and ethnicity Latino/a immigrants and emerging geographies of race and place in the USA

Over the past 20 years, Latino/a immigration to the USA has transformed how place and race are lived. The scale of the city-region has emerged as key to understanding these changes. Latino/a immigrants challenge the stark black-white binary that has long shaped race relations in the USA. Labor relations, racial stereotyping, and Latino/a alliances with other demographic groups have emerged as provocative themes in the recent scholarship on Latino/a immigration. Because race and place work iteratively to shape one another, geographic thought on place may be used to sophisticate our conceptual understanding of race. In particular, the fluidity of race is challenged through its close relationship with place.

Cohering Culture on Calle Ocho: The Pause and Flow of Latinidad

Abstract The term latinidad invokes a pan-Latino/a solidarity which is at once intriguing and problematic. In this article, I explore latinidad as a situational coherence of place-specific social relations. In other words, latinidad is a contingent and cultural event. When culture is defined in this mutable, rather than static, fashion, the notion of situational coherence, decomposition, and recomposition becomes central. Thus culture, and latinidad as a cultural event, involves a dynamic interplay between flow and pause. This is an interplay which is mirrored at a broader level in my discussion of globalization, as well as more narrowly in the role of city streets from which the examples to illustrate the pause and flow of latinidad are drawn. Using examples from Miami, I suggest that solidarity amongst Latinos/as materializes—or fails to do so—in ways that illuminate an understanding of identity, place, and belonging.

No Pain, No Gain: Bordering the Hungry New World Order

The late-modern discourses of female slenderness and free-market reform share striking rhetorical similarities. Furthermore, their corporeal effects are quite similar. The historical coincidence of their deployment is no accident; rather, they represent two gestures of a (re)figured late-modern hegemonic practice that feeds, ultimately, on hunger. By juxtaposing and critically interrogating these two discursive practices, it is apparent that a familiar binary opposition—thin/fat—was substituted for an unfamiliar pair—adjusted/unadjusted. This discursive swap drew upon a long history of filtering between bodies and economies, and acted to naturalize a new disciplinary phase in late modernity. This phase is unsurprisingly profoundly gendered. It is also spatialized via connection with another binary chain: First World/Third World, North/South, West/East, developed/underdeveloped, here/there. However, the relationship of these two binary chains is contradictory, and this has given rise to a contestation of power that coalesces, literally and figuratively, around borders.

Of bandits and saints: Jesús Malverde and the struggle for place in Sinaloa, Mexico

Jesús Malverde, a bandit who was assassinated in 1909, crystallizes the struggle for place-understood both literally and metaphorically-in northern Mexico. The socially and economically marginal people who revered him in the nineteenth century adore him as a lay saint today. Contention over building a chapel to Malverde in Culiacán, the capital city of the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa, distils broader tensions over the Mexican state’s persistent deferral of the poor from inclusion in the official landscape of the nation. Malverde’s appropriation by Sinaloa’s narcotraffickers as their patron saint extends this symbolic and material claim to legitimacy to include those who exist outside the official boundaries. The border between the sacred and the profane is often a site of social struggle, and the case of Malverde is no exception. While the legend of Malverde may well have been invented, its negotiation has proven remarkably long-lived and powerful in shaping and reshaping the iconographic and material landscapes of social inclusion and exclusion. Malverde thus offers an empty signifier whose multiple interpretations yield a surplus of symbolic meanings and material production based on the circulation, negotiation, appropriation, and reinterpretation of those meanings.

Race and ethnicity III Geographies of diversity

Geographic research and our practices in the higher education environment have long been concerned with diversity. Yet diversity is difficult to define and measure, and diversity efforts increasingly go unsupported. Furthermore, geography has been bedeviled by a stubborn lack of meaningful diversity in terms of who we are and what we do. More broadly, multiculturalism and affirmative action oriented toward increasing the numbers and success of underrepresented minorities are largely viewed as failed policies. Thus it has been suggested that diversity has effectively been silenced; alternatively, that it be diversified, or simply waited out. Others seem to view diversity through a hopeful lens, as an aspirational horizon. In this scholarship, encounters across diversity, whether fleeting or more managed, kindle the possibility of curiosity, understanding, and reconciliation.