QC2: A Tale of Two Queen Cities
Collaborators Queen City East Heather D. Freeman José L.S. Gámez Ronna Gardner Queen City West Ramón Ramírez Emily Cheng Clinton Evans John Huey Graphic Design Nicholas Ault
Meghan Meyers Stephanie Marie Orlich
Eric Lopez Chris Parsell Vestalis Pizaro Hector Solis
The works collected in this booklet and exhibition were produced in response to the changing urban landscapes that face two cities: Los Angeles, California and Charlotte, North Carolina. While it may seem a difficult pairing—LA and Charlotte—the issues found at play in their respective urban environments share some deep-seated commonalities. Charlotte, which is also known as “The Queen City,” has now become a part of the transnational loops in which Los Angeles has long participated.1 Such forces became the subject of investigation for this project, which sought to engage issues of urbanism, diversity and representation through a collaborative effort involving students and faculty from Architecture and the Arts at both the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Woodbury University in Burbank, California.
A Tale of Two Queen Cities grew out of extended conversations that first began with a project executed in Los Angeles and it has received support from two different university based grants: the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the Chancellor’s Diversity Challenge Fund as well as the Maxine Frankel Award Program at Woodbury University. The initial conversation engaged by this project began, in fact, as a result of a Maxine Frankel award in the spring of 2007. That award sponsored a project, which was led by the East LA-based Chicano artist Ramón Ramírez, that aimed to capture views from LA’s many invisible cultural landscapes. That project was, in essence, an effort to reaffirm the existence of a city of multiplicity, of multiple voices, and of a myriad of places often overlooked by mainstream representations of Los Angeles. The Woodbury project was, therefore, an exercise in establishing cultural voice through visual media. José L.S. Gámez, an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), served as a critic for the LA-based work that spring; using the internet, a blog site and an on-site visit to the group’s workspace in East LA, Gámez helped push the dialog about urbanity, identity and representation. This bi-coastal group-based effort resulted in several paintings that went on display in the Wedge Gallery on Woodbury’s campus in April 2007. At the same time, Gámez and Heather D. Freeman, an Assistant Professor of Digital Art, began discussing the possibility of creating a parallel collaborative art project on the UNCC campus. The project, loosely defined at the time, would carry on the thematic conversations held amongst the Woodbury group but now focused upon the urban conditions found in Charlotte. LA and Charlotte, it seemed, could be coupled and compared in productive ways.
Such a coupling has proved fruitful as our Charlotte-based team created a series of digital murals that speak to various dimensions of our shared urban landscapes. Again using the internet, our west coast counterparts were invited to provide feedback at various stages of our project’s development and this involvement led to a renewed Woodbury project and a second Maxine Frankel Award. The result has been a series of five digital murals (three created at UNCC and two created at Woodbury) that express collective interpretations of these two urban and cultural landscapes. More specifically, this bi-coastal project explores the impacts of Latino immigration upon the cultural landscapes of these two “Queen Cities.” 2
What’s in a Name? These two Queen Cities have more in common than simple nicknames. In fact, the growing number of Latinos within Charlotte and its surrounding areas has given rise to some very visible forms of similarity between these two separate but now related urban landscapes. For example, taco trucks, paleteros, and other evidence of what Mike Davis has called a “more ‘classical’ way of living in the city based on gregarious, communitarian uses of markets, boulevards (and) parks” can be found in many areas throughout Charlotte.3 Here, streets, sidewalks, yards and parking lots bristle with activity—often in contrast to the almost non-existent public life of many contemporary urban and suburban communities. But, this new urbanity has not come without a certain cost. Tensions around the city and region have begun to flare precisely because fundamental questions about the identity of local urban spaces have been challenged. Parts of Charlotte now feel like parts of East LA; Charlotte’s urbanity is no longer that of the traditional Southern city. One recent example of the tensions that have emerged was reported in Charlotte’s daily newspaper, the Charlotte Observer. The paper ran a story documenting the appearance of an A-frame commercial roadside 4 placard that encouraged drivers to “Honk if you hate Spanish.” This article was published at a time during which social service organizations catering to Latinos have reported hate-based emails and English-only initiatives have become fodder for local city-council debates. Charlotte, like many of its neighboring towns, is facing rising frustrations stemming from the impacts of recent immigration (the southeastern US has not been a significant part of global migration patterns historically but this has changed over the past two decades).5 In fact, many southern states have experienced the county’s most explosive immigration growth in the years between 1990 and 2005 during which Latino demographics rose by triple digits: 394% in North Carolina alone with growth of well over 100% in each of the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas.6 One result of this trend is that the largest percent increases occurred in what Roberto Suro and Audrey Singer have called “new Latino destinations”—cities such as Atlanta, Orlando, and Charlotte.7 The Solid South, which has historically been shaped by a Black/White binary, is melting into the air of multicultural modernity; and, states such as North Carolina are now confronting the “complex nature of race relations in a post-civil rights era” in which bi-racial frameworks are “unable to grasp the patterns of conflict and accommodation among several increasingly large racial/ethnic groups.”8
The permanent settlement of Latino immigrants has begun to reshape several areas of Charlotte—a city better known for its namesake, Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, than for its thriving immigrant communities. And, while Los Angeles remains a significant Latino immigration center, recent immigration patterns have changed, thereby introducing a Pan-Latin cultural dimension into the predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American landscape of places like East LA. Additionally, cities such as Los Angeles and New York (the five boroughs included) remain homes to the largest Latino populations in the US with over two million Latin residents in the two cities combined (as of the year 2000). Yet, despite their designations as the cities with the highest numbers of newly arrived migrants, the sheer local demographic volume of each population easily absorbs even high rates of newcomers—thus, long established migration centers such as LA demonstrate patterns of slow Latino growth. This scenario contrasts greatly with the relatively low Latino demographic pools in the southeastern US into which comparatively high numbers of migrants have jumped. This spatial shift has made virtually the entire US below Interstate 40 an emerging Latin heartland with significant Latino populations in both major cities and increasingly in many small town and rural areas. In a sense, the border between the US and its Latino Other seems to be shifting well beyond the line of demarcation established by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
It is within this context that our work has emerged. Los Angeles remains a Latino core and its successive layers of Latino residents (from both sides of the border) have helped to establish a variety of unique cultural landscapes. East Los Angeles, in particular, serves as a cultural homeland and it is, in some ways, a modern day Atzlán—“East Los” serves as both a physical and an imagined geography to which the roots of a particular hybrid American identity are tied. And, in this legacy of Latino urbanity, we see hints of what Charlotte may soon gain. However, it is unclear what form such an urban identity may take within this new context. The southeast, unlike the southwestern US, exhibits a fluid landscape in which the seeds of a pan-American cultural identity are only now beginning to become established. In the QC (local slang for the Queen City), one has to seek out the spatial practices of an emerging Latinidad in order to understand how changing migration patterns have begun to transform new Latino destinations.
Speaking in (Border) Tongues Writer and poet Rubén Martínez has described his life in Los Angeles as a “blend of cultures, languages, and ideologies (Anglo/Latino, Spanish/English, individualist/collectivist)”—as a life in both the North and the South and neither simultaneously.9 For Martínez, the cultural divisions that LA represents have become embodied and lived expressions of a border mentality. Los Angeles has long contended with such border conditions and with the need to speak multiple languages simultaneously; LA has long been a city that has had to address differing cultural groups with differing languages (both visual and spoken). Interestingly, Charlotte has not been unaware of such a need to community across multiple audiences. Like most southern cities shaped by a history of bi-racial struggles, Charlotte has a long history of speaking in differing tongues to reach at least two audiences simultaneously. However, the current era of immigration and urban change has forced Charlotte to adopt a new set of dialects—dialects in which “Mí reina ” is becoming as common a phrase in some areas of town as the “Queen City” might be in others. What unites these two cities in this context is their ability to hold multiple dialogs across a set of competing constituencies. And, it is this kind of multivalent dialog that the work on view here seeks to engage. Both groups of artists—the faculty and students at both UNCC and Woodbury—aimed to develop an ability to speak in the various tongues that one might hear within the borderlands of their respective urban locations. Each of the artists involved sought to become culturally flexible; each sought to establish a dialog across cultures, spaces, and times. In one sense, the artists involved exercised a form of cultural fluency that has become a necessity if the contemporary city is to be navigated successfully.
This is a type of cultural flexibility that has allowed these artists to operate within what cultural theorist Homi Bhabha has described as a thirdspace of cultural expression. From this perspective, the languages that emerge within a border landscape may be considered vehicles for intervention— vehicles for “an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not a part of the continuum of the past and present… (that creates) a sense of the new as an insurgent act cultural translation.”10 It is for this reason that the projects at UNCC and Woodbury focused upon a form of mural; each of the projects took the opportunity to conceive of and execute images in a form that could easily exist within the context of both the gallery and the urban landscape. And, murals have long been seen as a language of representation that helps to reclaim the public realm and to imbue the city with a form of visual voice. In this context, the vehicle of the mural provides a way to explore tensions within our collective Queen Cities. The resulting murals represent acts of insurgent cultural translation and, as such, the medium easily fits the goals of the two respective supporting grants—those having to do with investigations of diversity and creative expression. It is important to point out that each of the five murals on display was created collaboratively. Each of these murals was created using digital files that were handed from author to author in stages with each author contributing a set of transformations that helped push the dialog forward. Such a process was, in many ways, afforded to us through the decision to work in a digital format rather than in a traditional painterly mode. Our work emerged, therefore, through individual and collective engagement with the images themselves and the content that each image sought to capture. Such collaborative efforts are not without precedent: both the UNCC and Woodbury groups operated like grupos, or collective artistic groups, that are a legacy of many grassroots arts movements. Grupos were, in fact, a key component of the Chicano Movement in California, in particular, and they were often formed around local art centers interested in promoting the artistic integration of political expression, visual voice and community-based communication.
The process itself required that each mural emerge in sequential iterations. Each author contributed changes and new content before passing the document to another author in the group. Each iteration was then posted on a blog site for feedback from both the UNCC and Woodbury collaborators, and each image was discussed at group meetings held in each location. This process allowed for each of the murals to take form within both the specific contexts of our respective cities, institutions, and group members and that of a broad landscape of images that seek, or have sought, to connect artistic practices to issues of everyday urban life. In this sense, the works viewed here are not only related to the work produced at Woodbury University in the spring of 2007 but also to a tradition of muralism that dates back, in many ways, to several art movements of the 1960s and 70s. These works, therefore, may be seen as successive projects within a particular family of resemblances—entities within an on-going set of cultural negotiations and translations. 11
The making of these images represented a set of practices that enabled cultural voice and vision to emerge both in material and social form. The students, working with Gámez, Freeman and Ramírez, were invited into a set of symbolic worlds with ties to concrete realities that they collectively shared. However, this was not a process in which instructors taught students; the students themselves were empowered to bring their own visions to the process. They were introduced to a set of practices that provided them with a means to write their own narratives, to craft their own artistic expressions, to shape a set of landscapes. This was a process not only of making—one concerned with the art and craft of creating murals in the digital age—but also one of enactment, or of collective gathering and of collective cultural expression. Therefore, the process behind the production of these digital murals was not an end unto itself; this is/was a process that that helped to create a small subset of both Charlotte’s and LA’s diverse communities.
The fact that a collective process lies behind these images should not detract from their value. This process was not a form of mechanical reproduction in which authors simply stamped out sequential iterations of images without conscious engagement. This process was not simply a set of serial actions without added or cumulative meaning. Rather, this process resembles what theorist Marcia Roberts-Deutsch has described as a dialogical aesthetics, or a social practice aimed not only to redefine aesthetic value but also to redefine the role of art not as an object of gaze but as a tool for empowerment, for the cultivation of community, and for the shaping of relationships.12 Such a process requires that a form of trans-cultural aesthetics emerge—it requires that an ability to see with a form of double vision become widely shared. This is a practice that seeks a multivalent cultural condition in order to give voice(s) to competing visions of the city. In a certain way, Charlotte and Los Angeles now share the attribute of being border towns. Los Angeles has long engaged with the various languages that cut across cultural border conditions. It is a city that has witnessed the shifting of geo-political borderlines while its populations remained in place. It is a city that today continues to deal with the legacy of a border condition even as immigration and migration have blurred the lines that divide North from South, English from Spanish, and majority from minority. Charlotte too has begun to contend with the complex set of languages that emerge once a simple division between communities begins to blur. Charlotte has begun to witness the erasure of the line that has historically separated/united Black and White. The void left behind by the erasure of such a line has also provided a blurred field for new voices to enter into the text. This collective project—represented by the work produced both at UNCC and Woodbury—has stepped into the spaces left behind as older structures have begun to be displaced. This set of collective works created by two differing but related groups invites you to enter into that blurred space and to explore the emerging urbanities within. José L.S. Gámez Charlotte February 25, 2008
END NOTES 1. See: Roberto Suro and Audrey Singer, “Latino Growth in Metropolitan America: Changing Patterns, New Locations,” the Brookings Institution Survey Series Census 2000, July 2002. 2. Los Angeles, (as many readers will recall) is often referred to as the “City of Angels” and was once better known by its original Spanish moniker, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles (Our Town of our Lady Queen of the Angels). 3. Mike Davis, “Chinatown, Revisited? The Internationalization of Downtown Los Angeles,” in Sex, Death and God in LA, edited by David Reid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) 36. 4. The article recounted storeowner Earl Brown’s reaction to the dramatically altered landscape of Monroe, NC, as a result of recent immigration trends; see: Julia Oliver, “Store Owner Uses Sign to Criticize Latino Influx” in The Charlotte Observer 22 May 2007. 1A, 6A. 5. See: Kavita Pandit, “The Southern Migration Turn-around and Current Patterns,” in Southeastern Geographer 37 (November 1997): 238-50. 6. See: Karen Martin, “A City Transformed” in Planning (July 2002) 14-19. 7. See: Roberto Suro and Audrey Singer, “Latino Growth in Metropolitan America: Changing Patterns, New Locations,” the Brookings Institution Survey Series Census 2000, July 2002; see also: Betsy Guzmám, The Hispanic Population: Census 2000 Brief, US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Census Bureau, May 2001. 8. Michael Omi, “Out of the Melting Pot and Into the Fire: Race Relations Policy,” in Policy Issues to the Year 2020: The State of Asian Pacific America—A Public Policy Report (Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute/UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1993) 9. 9. Rubén Martínez, The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond (New York: Vintage Departures, 1993) 3-4. 10. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 7. 11. See: George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 12. See: Marcia Roberts-Deutsch, “Double Vision: Problems of Art Criticism Across Cultural Boundaries” in Frontiers of Transculturality in Contemporary Aesthetics: Proceedings Volume of the Intercontinental Conference University of Bologna, Italy (October 2000).
This project and publication made possible by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Chancelor’s Diversity Challenge Fund and the Maxine Frankel Award at Woodbury University