K004 → Research
Gentrification and its Discontents: Gang Injunctions, Encampment Sweps, Anti-Prostitution Zones and Aesthetic Disruptions to Mass Surveillance in Los Angeles
Abstract: Using Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta this paper explores spaces in the process of gentrification such as Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and Los Angeles’ Echo Park with the horror film’s connections to haunting, memory, and racial trauma. I develop what I call layered geographies of racialized classed gender to think about these complex issues of racialization and settler-colonial histories that manifest in the land and to theorize how gentrification re-produces historical legacies of dispossession of minoritized residents that is registered in terms of space, hauntings and embodiment.
Spatial Disruptions at UCLA’s Thinking Gender Conference Feminists Confronting the Carceral State 2019
M.A. Thesis
In the summer of 2011 the city of Los Angeles granted Echo Park, a neighborhood to the immediate northwest of downtown, a 45-million-dollar renovation grant to clean up Echo Park Lake. During the grand reopening of the park in 2013, the neighborhood of Echo Park wa simultaneously met with the Glendale Corridor Gang Injunction, a civil law suit against six alleged gangs in Echo Park. Despite the neighborhood’s significantly decreased crime rate the gang injunction was quietly passed without notification. Using Marcia Ochoa’s methodology of time travel and huecos negros (2016), I examine a long history of dispossession an displacement in Echo Park beginning with Chavez Ravine and continuing into The Belmont Tunnel dubbed the graffiti mecca of the west coast as examples of displacement due to what I call an affective economy of white pleasure. Additionally, I look at how stipulations in gang injunctions by policing what is considered non-normative expressions of femininity and masculinity through style and dress on bodies of color. I argue that graffiti and placas become visual spatial disruptors to ongoing narratives of Latinx erasure in Echo Park
Research Featured Online
LATV.com Echo Park History