A new wing of Chicago's Movimiento Artístico Chicano, LACASA involves projects on Latin American/Caribbean, U.S. Latino, and Chicago Latino social and, primarily, cultural issues and concerns, with culture conceived in function of anthropology as well as the arts. in an effort to facilitate understandings, communications and interchanges as well as to promote and help implement policies and actions with respect to Latin American cultural transformations, projects and problems in the age of transnational and globalization processes.

In Chicago, the Latino cultural infrastructure has grown considerably in recent years. Most obviously there are the initiatives of massive Latino festival and Latino mass and popular culture programming organizations (some community, some commercially based); the development of Hispanic or Latino media; the programs of the Mexican Fine Arts Museum, the Latino Film Festival, the Instituto Cervantes and other larger cultural groups; the emergence of galleries, bookstores, literary and cultural journals, constantly emerging collective and individual arts projects and other small-scale but often highly dynamic enterprises.

Most recently at UIC, the COLMICH project has emerged as another systematic effort to foster the creation of relatively durable infrastructural relations that can provide the bases for extending and deepening projects over the years. And all of this has happened even as the Latino job base has eroded, as Latinos are being dislocated from their neighborhoods, and have been suffering from funding and resource cutbacks, threats to Affirmative Action, Bilingual Education and other entitlements, growing problems of gangs and marginalization, and the overall anti-Latino backlash which has been developing in Chicago as in the rest of the country.

The effects of new trade agreements and economic restructuring, of neo-liberal policies, transnational migration and globalization at economic and cultural levels, the recent anti-Latino backlash, the increasingly difficult situation of many Latinos and especially Latino youth and aged, as well as potential tensions among different Latino groups and between Latinos and Afro-Americans, Latinos and others--all these factors give a certain urgency to the LACASA project and will undoubtedly direct some of its most significant activities toward youth and poverty sectors.

LACASA can make no claims for being able to resolve any current or projected problems of Latinos and Latin Americans and others in Chicago or anywhere. However, it is conceived as a flexible ever-evolving and responsive project that could do some significant work looking for positive and creative outlets and and solutions. Furthermore it is imperative to underline that LACASA is in no way conceived or to be understood as some kind of supra-Coordinating Organization imposed over the much stronger organizations and projects which have emerged and have been developing in Chicago during the past several years. LACASA's goals are not imperialistic; it does not see itself in a hierarchical relation to other projects and organizations. Rather it is modestly conceived as a committee or perhaps task force with the goal of working with, plugging into, and establishing connections among already launched projects and organizations, working with academics like Louise Año Kerr, David Badillo, John Betancur, Marcia Farr, Nilda Flores, Victor Ortiz, Mary Kay Vaughan and countless others involved in related projects on our campus and other higher education centers throughout the city (as well as people in Berkeley, Zamora, Mexico, Puerto Rico, etc.).

Above all, we wish to work with several of the smaller local organizations and projects in community, academic or any of a number of settings, that predate or are growing up around the larger, more established entities, in an effort to develop local projects and connect them with each other and with the larger world beyond this city and its Latino communities (e.g., project groups and projects in other U.S. cities, as well as in Latin America and other parts of the so-called First and Third Worlds). In this sense, we would attempt to link given local projects and our overall efforts with already existing broader networks, such as ones established among Latin American Studies centers, Latin American Cultural Studies Center and specialists, etc.

Implicit in what we seek to develop is a program consonant with a vision of Chicago as a center of Latin American life and concerns for the coming century; of Chicago as, in one sense, one of the new hybrid cities of a Latin American world which no longer conforms to nation-based border paradigms and in which Latin American culture as narrowly conceived is now caught up in transformational processes involving African American, Asian and other ethnic and minority strands in and outside of the U.S.

Our main local purpose will be to explore and help develop Chicago's Latino cultural infrastructure in relation to the growing needs and concerns of its diverse and changing Latin American population, and to also help develop and explore Chicago's transforming relation to other Latin American and Latin Americanizing centers. Again, the task at hand involves work with predominant Latino institutions in Chicago and elsewhere; but our emphasis would be on working with more grassroots entities which exist on relatively limited funding by providing programs and perspectives somewhat excluded or obfuscated by the more dominant groups. Our more global purpose will be to serve as a connecting point between national and international Latin American concerns and their impact of contemporary societies, and above all the cities, with Chicago serving as a key and modelic point in Latin American, Latino and overall transformations projected for the age of globalization and transnational migration--and with special attention given to broader Third World and U.S. minority linkages, relations and conflicts.

SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Many of the major theoretical questions involved with LACASA’s project will soon be elaborated in a lengthy article on our website http://www.uic.edu/~marczim. Here, it would be useful to summarize some of the key theoretical perspectives on the question of contemporary cities and cultural theory which we have gleaned and extrapolated from a recent text on urban anthropology and cultural dimensions of globalization by Néstor García Canclini.

The starting point for contemporary understanding of the issues at stake in LACASA is that cities take on a new meaning in a period which has been variously designated as post-Fordist, postmodernist, transnationalized, globalized and hybrid. Indeed, García Canclini seems correct in arguing that the very definition of what is city and the very way in which cities are to be conceptualized in so-called first world and peripheral settings, are also in the process of transformation. Furthermore the processes of economic restructuration, the new global patterns of production, information, distribution and consumption the evolving processes of transnational migration and their relation to new social identities, new modes of citizenship and participation, indeed new social configurations (rivalries and alliances, new modes of social deactivation and mobilization, etc.). In all of this, and indeed as economic forces have moved to the fore and seem less mediated than in an era when many intellectuals argued that underneath it all, the economy ruled, the question of cultural patterns and transformations has also moved to the fore, with cultural factors no longer reducible (if they ever were) to mere superstructural reflexes of the economic questions or their political corollaries.

The centrality of cultural dimensions in the globalized new world order is indeed one of the implications of Arjun Appuradai’s recent book, Modernity at Large (1996). The impact of economic modernization and globalization on different human groups and their interactive processes is obvious. But how those groups pressure the globalization process in function of their "cultural capital", how they de-commodify objects in function of their cultural use values, how they are central in maintaining and rearticulating the differences which are essential to contemporary postmodern identities, urban spaces and the very reproduction of transnational capital (if only because of capital’s need for diversity for the ever dynamic extension of commodity production), all these matters make the question of culture more central to the study of the contemporary world and the cities which are in themselves so central to that world.

On this score, and in relation to the question of first and third world cities, it would be important to note the confluence of urban anthropology as a field and the overall field of urban studies. Of course one of the traditional sources of urban anthropology was the Chicago School and its study of ethnic and neighborhood groups from the 1920s on. For Chciago-based Latin Americanists, it is important to remember that Redfield’s studies of rural Mexico are preceded by his field work in Chicago’s Mexican barrios. But it is also important to remember that his work and those of many others who studied Latinos and other social groups (and this includes recent descendants of these earlier efforts–the anthropological work on Pilsen by Ruth Horowitz or Felix Padilla’s sociological work on Chicago Ricans and Chicago Rican gangs), were examples not of what we might today wish to call urban anthropology or sociology so much as anthropology and sociology in the cities. Now, "in the epoch of conurbanization, globalization and transnational transformations," Chicago Latino activities and studies must be seen, I would argue, first, as part of globalized, international social science examining global processes and patterns as they impinge on or involve the Americas and those living in Latin American countries or enclaves; and second Chicago Latino activities and their study must be seen in terms of an urban anthropology involving a comprehensive picture of the meaning of urban life in the midst of the new globalized context.

García Canclini provides some perspective on the change of the object and its theorization. In 1900 only 4 percent of the world’s population lived in cities; now more than half the population has become directly urbanized. And indirectly? Furthermore let me note that in 1950 only New York and London were considered megaloposes, and now the UN projects 33 megacities for 2015–cities notable for their unrestrained growth in people and often space as well as their multi-cultural complexity. Most of the cities are Asian, and of course Asians directly make up a significant number in the non-Asian cities. And what if we consider the Latin American populations as extensions of earlier Asian migrations? In certain peripheral regions, such as Latin America, where were the preferred subject of earlier anthropology, 70 percent of the population lives in urban settings. Since urban expansion is due to the influx of rural and indigenous populations, those social groups traditionaly studied by anthropologists are now in the large cities, where their traditions are passed on and transformed, and where the more comple3x exchanges arising from multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism occur. Indeed as the new megacities absorb other sites, they take in and of course transform earlier sites of non-urban anthropology. Finally, while the cities become larger, interrelations intensify through improved transportation and communication, though of course new modes of segregation and distancing intervene as do global patterns, which link given local groups more to out patterns than to adjacent ones.

During the first half of this century, urban anthropology sought to study the impact of city culture on the groups entering the city; to a lesser extent they studied the impact of the groups on the city. The question was that of rural as opposed or related to urban culture. But in today’s diverse, heterogeneous multicultural urbs, how can a monolithic notion like "urban culture" come to represent all the variety of city life? Is there really a unified and distinct phenomenon of urban space, especially in such complex and heterogenous agglomerations as New York, Beijing or Mexico City, or would it be preferable to speak of various types of cultures within the city? If so, should the prime categories of study be based on social class, organization of space or other criteria?

All of these considerations question standard modes of city anthropolgy–the old city/country contrastative approaches applied so frequently to Latin America, the geographic/spatial criteria of the Chicago school, the strictly economic and industrial approaches still current among many globalization theorists, and even the new communications theory specialists whose more cultural models would seem more fitting to dealing with ethnic, neighborhood and other cultural dimensions (e.g., the work of Appadurai as well as Antonio Mela, who deals with density of communications and needs for new communicative skills–which helps account for Latino problems and even subgroup and gang successes in their appropriation of counter-codes to those dominating globalization patterns and global cities) . Indeed, García Canclini argues that the contributions of anthropology should be recalled and drawn on for future theorizations. This is especially the case with anthropology’s emphasis on multicultural heterogeneity, intercultural and social segregation, and de-urbanization. Sociocultural heterogeneity is one of the most destabilizing elements to classical urban theory. The difficulty of defining what is meant by city derives in part from the variety of forms cities have taken throughout history (industrial, administrative, political capitals, services cities ports and tourist cities; but this complexity is even greater in the major metropolises which cannot be so reduced to one major function. It may be that today the parallel existence of many different functions and activities is the defining feature of the present urban structure. This multi-functional flexibility is expanding as the delocalization of production weakens historic ties between given cities and particular types of production. Manufactured goods and the most advanced electronic equipment can be produced just as well in the Mexican, Brazilian or South East Asian cities as in first world cities (cf. Castells, Hall, Sassen).

City diversity is usually a result of distinct stages of development: (a) historical, with monuments making them cities of artistic and touristic interest; (b) industrial, involving the restructuriing of land usage and human allocation in relation thereto; (c) a recent transnational and post-industrial architecture (financial and telecommunications industries--which has restructured the appropriation of space, movement in the city and urban habits, and the incorporation of the cities into supra-national networks. The co-existence of these different periods leads to a multi-temporal heterogeneity where processes of hybridization, intense conflicts and intercultural exchanges occur. These matters of the spatial organization of different time periods are further compounded by the fact that years of globalization have led to the cohabitation of immigrants from different regions of the same country and other countries. The immigrants bring their languages, behavior patterns and spatial structures from different cultures. And of course these patterns are occurring in metropolitan and peripheral countries to some extent canceling out the differences between cities in developed and undeveloped regions. This close proximites of different immigrant communities begins to erode some particularities and lead to new hybridizations through work and community and matrimonial contacts. Even as they change, they change the very traditional character-identifications for the cities. We find intenser patterns of urban homogeneity based on advertising, television, sports team identifications and the like, just as we experience more intense conflicts and oppositions among different groups, or generations, gangs and other divisions among the groups.

To this it should be added that processes of world systemization are leading to considerable disordering of pre-existent communities, allegiances, modes of being, etc. The more the cities fit into global networks, the more their former levels of ordering are threatened, disrupted or destroyed. Outsourcing, the generation of outsourcing migrants, lead to social and cultural transformations (including proliferation of gangs with varying degrees of integration into narcotraffic, etc.) that in turn lead to new modes of identification, new identities and an overall structuration of formal and informal economic patterns in an overall systematized disorder which both stirs new social coalitions and movements even as it marshals authoritarian forces to thwart them.

Macro-social planning, building and road standardization, and the unified development of the capitalist market have tended to turn cities into mechanisms of homogogenization. But these factors and others have not prevented forces of diversity from emerging and expanding. But the "explosion of differences in not just a concrete process; it is an urban ideology. Postmodern trends have promoted difference, multiplicity and decentralization as conditions of urban democracy. But these trends must be assessed differently in metropolitan and peripheral countries. We can’t equate the growth of selfmanagement and plurality after a phase of planning designed to regulate urban growth and satisfy basic needs (the European pattern) with the chaotic growth of survival efforts based on scarcity, erratic expansion and predatory use of land, water and air as in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Then too, there’s a question of scale. For countries entering the twentieth century with low mortality rates and with planned and democratically governed cities, the detours, shifts and loss of power by all-embracing institutions may be seen as part of the logic of decentralization. But cities like Caracas, Lima or Sao Paulo, dispersal–arising from the population explosion, popular or speculative land invasion, and undemocratic means of representing and administering urban spaces–maybe perceived as adding to a disorder which is always on the verge of exploding. In the advanced metropolis, the weakening of planned institutions may be a liberating step. But in peripheral country metropolis, the ideology of decentralization often serves to reproduce ungovernable agglomerations, encourage the perpetuation of authoritarian and centralized government reluctant to let people vote or make decisions.

Research into social movements generally considers that the restructuring of cities stimulates the formation of local, youth or ecological groups which tend to create alternatives to hegemonic (dis)order. Other disciplines equate decentralization with a heightening of chaos, the spread of gangs, urban terror and sexual aggression, or see it as any opportunity for business interests and neighborhood groups to appropriate public spaces and discriminate against others.

The popular exercise of democracy can therefore produce anti-democratic results. In many African, Asian and Latin American cities, a weakened regulatory authority does not increase freedom but leads to insecurity and injustice. Here postmodernity means exasperation with the contradictions of modernity; the disappearance of what little urbanization had, the emptiness of public affair, the private search for alternatives. Not to a different kind of city but to urban life, seen as stressful tumult. The abandonment of unified public policies gives rise to spatial segregation, the shutting off of people into enclaves, middle class ones with security guards and intercoms, the creation of new modes of urban segregation, symbolic walls and distances that reinforce physical barriers. Mexico City, the movement of the middle class to far corners, the promotion of home and rural entertainment to escape crime, pollution, and the new forms of urban violence or entertainment. Simultaneously, the growth of small cities into larger ones, implies at least partial reassertions of older dreams of urban utopianism. There and among large sectors who refuse to or cannot leave the greater urbs physically or psychologically, the city remains the battleground for resistance and participatory democracy.

As the nation state loses the ability to mobilize the public, cities re-emerge as strategic sites for development of new forms of citizenship with more concrete and manageable referents than those offered by national abstractions. Furthermore the urban centers become a medium for the international flow of good, ideas images and people. Whatever is taken out of the people’s hands by supranational decision-making appears to be recovered to some degree in the local arenas of home work and consumption. Those who feel they have become voting spectators rather than citizens of a nation are rediscovering ways of relocating the imagination and become citizens of their cities.

Such is the at least potential case of the Latino populations of Chicago and elsewhere in the U.S. They may partake of older wishes to volver, or newer patterns of transnational flux and flow; they may wish to vote in elections in Puerto Rico or Mexico, but they still enter into the struggles and conflicts of the cities affected by the new processes of economic restructuration, declining industrial job base and the like. These groups are not only affected by global and urban changes; they also impact and can potentially transform or at least inflect those processes. What’s more their transnational trends imply their impact both in the cities they visit as well as in their "sending areas." Their modes of insertion and development, their struggle for developmental space, their conflicts and possible alliances with other groups (Afro-Americans, Asians and others) will be part of the story of the century and millennium before us. Latinos are posed as part of the minority problem of interface with advanced technocratic late capitalism; but the retention of older traits while making inroads into an advancing technocracy make Latinos crucial in any conceptualization of tomorrow, no matter how mixed with globalized concerns for Asians, Afro-Americans and all the other groups caught up in the processes of globalization.

Chicago is not a mega-city, but it is a global city as defined in contemporary urban theory–a global city caught up in and significant to the international flows of capital, productive units, materials and persons

crucial to the global structures and struggles. The Latin American dimension of Chicago’s globalization is increasingly obvious and pervasive. LACASA sees itself as an arena for discussion and action; it’s a forum but also a wrestling facility. It will seek to act through the cultural mediation on the economic, political and other circuits in which Latinos and Latin Americans play out their roles in the new world (dis)order.

CURRENT AND PROJECTED LACASA AREAS, BRANCHES AND PROJECTS

The project involves four major subject areas of research and activity: (1) Chicago Latinos and their organizations; (2) key Latin America/Caribbean locales and groups involved with Chicago Latinos and Chicago's overall relations in their recent and foreseeable transnational patternings; (3) U.S. Latinos in relation to Chicago Latino local and transnational patterns; and (4) Chicago Latinos and broader local and global connections (e.g. with Chicago's African/American population and with given Third world areas and peoples). The kinds of projects under way, currently envisioned or already carried out by LACASA or groups connected with it may be classified and detailed as follows:

I. EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS.

UIC courses; classes and mini-seminars elsewhere throughout Latino Chicago and Latin America.

A. COLMICH project

II. PUBLICATIONS.

--To place materials with most appropriate publishers, and then distribute/promote; or "self publish" if deemed appropriate or feasible.

A. UIC Chicago Latino/Latin American Publications Committee or other venue.

Potential Publications Projects:

a.  Working papers from COLMICH Summer project/fall papers

B. MARCH Publications Projects:

1. MARCH Publications.

 Books Completed--in press or being formatted, etc.

Books in progress:

2. Affiliate Books (we are helping to publish, or promote/distribute)

--Completed--published or in Press.

In progress:

3. Collaboration with Zorros y Erizos a new Chicago Pilsen-based cultural journal, for networking and informational dimensions, etc. (see general project description)

4. Collaboration in Other Projects

5. Future Project developments: Chicago Latino Artists & Artisans Series. Small books or anthologies of Chicago Latino Artists, including a text on mural art--perhaps as publication spinoffs from our larger Semiotizing Latino Chicago project (see below).

III. EMAIL & WEBSITE PROJECTS

1. U.S. Latino Lit. Bibliography. Now being placed on interactive web so others can add to materials.

2. Announcing LACASA Projects, events, other initiatives.

3. Networking with other Latin American/Latino cultural centers, organizations workers,

4. Developing project: Latin American Films in Chicago. Annotated listings, places, including UIC Collection.

IV. RESEARCH (possibly involving Great Cities research assistants in initial phases).

In addition to or framing the local research work involved in all other project areas specified, we may consider various research projects in relation to one major research initiative, Semiotizing Latino Chicago (SLC): An ongoing project still in embryo form, to begin sometime in 1998, perhaps launched in relation to LASA and LASA-related meetings, perhaps involving students (see Education) and work on given artists or artist projects (murals, etc.). This project is designed to bring together, preserve, actually produce and exhibit and/or publish records of Chicago Latino life from the initial Mexican waves to the present. Emphasis will also be given to sending areas and also developing transnational immigration loops as envisioned in the COLMICH project. What seems implicit in all this is a stream of presentations, exhibits, education initiatives and book publications. As the project develops, the question of housing materials will inevitably emerge; indeed, development logic might lead to the eventual effort to establish a Chicago Latino Historical Museum of its own, although things might develop in function of smaller holdings representing different Latino groups and/or city areas.

A. Reconstructing and saving the past. Involved are efforts to gather photographs, sample publications, phonograph records, writings, etc. Somewhat on the model of the recent Pilsen Historical exhibit, this can be an ongoing aspect of SLC. and may well involve oral history or ethnographic projects to be developed in educational settings at all levels.

1. Early Chicago Latino records and publications. Starting at the Chicago Historical Society, involving Jane Addams Hull House, church archives, and other sources

2. Early Chicago Latino Writings.

 B. Recording the Present, projecting the future.

1. Inventorying and bringing together recent photography, video tapes, written journals, etc. on Latino neighborhood.

2. Film, video, photo, audio tapes, portraying the visual and audio worlds of Chicago Latinos in recent years: Murals, graffiti, neighborhood life, the schools, churches, community centers, the nightclub and bar, coffee shop and restaurant worlds--both in the barrios and in the Chicago world at large; soccer teams along the lake; new Latino suburban enclaves.

V. CULTURAL PROMOTION.

A. Art and music exhibits connected with publications and other public projects.

VI. PROJECT FUND-RAISING.

Grant development; grant materials bank; promotion and sales of publications, event tickets, etc. The list is yet to be developed, the strategy yet to be fully established.