Description

Spatializing Chicano Power: Cartographic Memory and Community Practices of Care

This article endeavors to broaden the scope of the Chicano movement by moving away from an analysis of militant and protest forms of organizing. Instead, Herrera analyzes neighborhood grassroots organizing and institution-building projects centered on practices of community care. Utilizing ethnographic engagement with several community-based organizations in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California, Herrera demonstrates how Chicano movement activists built robust cultural politics of place that shaped how they understood the movement’s impacts on community formation. The author analyzes how for many activists, space served as an archive of organized practices of community care. Through deployments of what Herrera calls cartographic memory, activists challenged conceptions of the movement’s decline and pointed to space and institutions as proof of its continued significance.

Chicano movement, Oakland, California, community care

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 42, Nos. 3-4 (2015): 46-66