One Day Symposium: Visual, Scholarly and Activist Responses to Spatial Precarity

The Latinization of U.S. cities has been accompanied by the rapid displacement of Latinx from their historically stronghold communities. Art and culture have been central to these processes, both to expediting gentrification and to strategies of resistance and Latinx place making. This is evident in the role art galleries and culture-based developments have played in the gentrification of urban cities as well as in the rise of Latinx artistic interventions that place culture and place-making at the forefront of their practice.

9:30 AM: Opening Remarks

Gigi Dopico, Vice Provost of Undergraduate Academic Affairs

Arlene Davila, Founding Director of the Latinx Project *

10 AM-11:45 AM Panel I: Thinking Through Capital and the Politics of Space

Johana Londoño is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She holds a PhD in American Studies from NYU and a BFA from The Cooper Union. Londoño is currently completing her book, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in US Cities. You can follow her on twitter @jlondonoo and Instagram @jolondono.

Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores is an Associate Professor in Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Sociology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her research focuses on understanding how urban space mediates community life and race, class, and social inequality.

Amanda Boston is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University and an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. Her research, writing, and teaching focus on twentieth-century African American urban history, politics, and popular culture, with an emphasis on the politics and culture of race in the post-civil rights era. Her current projects focus on gentrification’s racial operations in post-1970 Brooklyn, New York, and their role in the making and unmaking of the borough’s black communities. You can follow her on Twitter at @atboston.

Miguel Robles-Durán is an urbanist, Associate Professor of Urbanism and member of the Parsons School of Design Graduate Urban Council in New York. He is a Senior fellow at “Civic City”, a post-graduate design/research program based at the Haute École d’Art et de Design (HEAD) Geneva, Switzerland and is a current fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center Sally & Don Lucas Artists Residency Program in Saratoga, California.

NOON - 1 PM: Lunch and Break

1:30-3 PM Panel 2: Into Action

Shellyne Rodriguez a visual artist who works in multiple mediums to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against false hope, a device employed in the service of subjugation. She’s also an activist and organizer with Take Back the Bronx. Rodriguez has recently been commissioned by the city of New York for a permanent public sculpture, which will serve as a monument to the people of the Bronx.

Rigoberto Lara is from Sunset Park for a Liberated Future, an abolitionist, anti-capitalist collective based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We work with love to build community power and organize against policing, displacement, and other forms of systemic oppression affecting our neighborhood.

Lena Melendez from the Northern Manhattan Not for Sale, a coalition fighting gentrification and to keep affordable housing.

Sam Stein is a geography PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and an Urban Studies instructor at Hunter College. His work focuses on the politics of urban planning, with an emphasis on housing, real estate and gentrification in New York City. In 2019, Verso published his first book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State.

3 PM - 4 PM Curator Walkthrough of PELEA: Visual Responses to Spatial Precarity

4PM -5:30PM Reception

Please follow @LatinxProjNYU on Twitter and use the hashtags #latinxprojnyu to see our discussions and get more info about upcoming events.

Symposium organized by The Latinx Project Co-Sponsored by: Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD) , the Institute for African American Affairs/ Center for Black Visual Culture IAAA/CBVC, (CLACS) Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Urban Democracy Lab, NYU Urban Initiative, and the King Juan Carlos Center

*Flyer image is a photo from a collaboration by Mi Casa No Es Su Casa in East Harlem, 2018.