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Gina M. Pérez, Frank A. Guridy and Adrian Burgos, Jr (eds). New York University Press, New York, 2010, 296pp., $24.00,
ISBN: 978-0814791295 (Paperback)
Within the dominant social imagination and certain academic works, the "barrio" is often associated with urban blight and poverty. Existing scholarship on Latina/o urban communities has vacillated on whether "el barrio" provides an analytic tool with which to study cultural and political resistance, or whether it functions primarily as a stigmatizing term. For the editors of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America , el barrio remains a generative analytical concept because it enables the study of Latina/o culture within a geographic place, an ideological space and public discourse. Gina M. Pérez, Adrian Burgos, Jr and Frank Guridy define the barrio as a "material and ideological space that can both sustain and marginalize" (2) Latina/o communities. They further argue for the need to push past static depictions of Latina/o communities - many of which rely on the barrio as a metaphor for stagnation, degeneracy and delinquency. The chapters in each section redefine life in el barrio as they move geographically across the United States, to new and familiar Latina/o population centers on the East and West Coasts and in the Midwest.
Because the collection focuses on US barrios, scholars of transnationalism might assume that the volume presents a primarily nation-based analysis. While the chapters focus on US cities, they transcend those boundaries as they trace migrant social networks, transnational political organizing and the histories of displaced Latina/o communities....