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La Calle: Spatial Conflicts
and Urban Renewal
in a Southwest City
by
Lydia R. Otero
About the book
When La Calle appeared in 2010, it established a place-based framework for understanding Tucson’s barrios, the working class, and the layered cultural and political histories that define Arizona. The book continues to shape how scholars, urban planners, and government officials interpret the forces of displacement, preservation, and memory across Arizona. It endures as a foundational work for those interested in how local histories reveal broader forces shaping the modern Southwest. La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City was originally published by the University of Arizona Press in 2010.
Original Book Description (2010)
On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project—Arizona’s first major urban renewal project—which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called “la calle.” Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle’s residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning.
Otero examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. Otero gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance.
La Calle explores the forces behind the mass displacement: an unrelenting desire for order, a local economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the pivotal power of federal housing policies. To understand how urban renewal resulted in the spatial reconfiguration of downtown Tucson, Otero draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines: Chicana/o, ethnic, and cultural studies; urban history, sociology, and anthropology; city planning; and cultural and feminist geography.
In the Words of the University of Arizona Press (2016)
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“La Calle was widely and well reviewed, an important contribution to the history of urban renewal in the United States and to our understanding of structures of power, racism, resistance, and historical memory.”
“La Calle took root in our community… It became a touchpoint in dialogue around new urban renewal efforts… and inspired the Barrio Stories Project.”
“Lydia Otero documented the history of a place. The University of Arizona Press helped take that history to the community.”
Quotes from Kathryn Conrad, Director of the University of Arizona Press, taken from “Making Connections, Building Community,” Against the Grain, 2016.
La Calle continues to be widely cited in scholarship about Tucson, Arizona, and urban renewal across the U.S. Southwest. Its place-based framework has informed public history projects, university courses, and preservation conversations that connect local experiences to national questions of space, race, and belonging. It even inspired Barrio Stories, a site-specific, three-day performance staged at the Tucson Convention Center in 2016.
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