La Calle ─ Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City

"Otero is re-voicing the silenced and examining the role of power and voice in creating an imagined history. She offers a rich understanding of how resistance exists in everyday practices by individuals and how such resistance continues in the face of powerful-and disempowering---institutional and social relations." Gabriela F. Arredondo, author of Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity and Nation, 1916-1939

"Based on meticulous research and oral histories, Lydia Otero's La Calle documents the Tucson Mexican American community's tragic experience with urban renewal during the 1960s. It is an indictment of the politics, greed, and racism that led to the destruction of the Mexican American economic, historical, cultural, and architectural heart of the Old Pneblo. It is also an elegy and a eulogy honoring those who fought city hall, often in vain, to preserve Tucson's Mexican past. We owe them, as well as Lydia, our profound gratitude for telling their stories." Patricia Preciado Martin, author of Beloved Land: An Oral History of Mexican Americans in Southern Arizona

On March 1, 1900, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project---Arizona's first Injor urban reneat project---which targeted the most densely populated eighty ares in the state. For Close to one hundred years, tuesonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexiacan American heart of the city, an area most called "la calle".

Here, ainid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and certainment vernues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make Way for the Puehlo Cemten's new buildings, city ofticials proceeded to displace la calle;s residents and to demolisbh their ethuically diverse neighborhoods, which, Contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatral an cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbra, and urban Planning.