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A wide-ranging collection of essays that centers Latinos in the history of American cities and suburbs.
 
Latino urban history has been underappreciated not only in its own right but for the centrality of its narratives to urban history as a field. A scholarly discipline that has long scrutinized economics, politics, and the built environment has too often framed race as literally Black and white. This has resulted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the full social canvas of American cities since at least the early twentieth century.
 
Traversing metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Chicago, El Paso, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, this collection of essays brings together both established and emerging scholars, including long-time urbanists and academics working in the fields of Latino, borderlands, political, landscape, and religious history. Organized at different scales—including city, suburb, neighborhood, and hemisphere—this impressive body of work challenges long-standing narratives about metropolitan America. The contributors—Llana Barber, Mauricio Castro, Eduardo Contreras, Sandra I. Enríquez, Monika Gosin, Cecilia Sánchez Hill, Felipe Hinojosa, Michael Innis-Jiménez, Max Krochmal, Becky M. Nicolaides, Pedro A. Regalado, Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez, and Thomas J. Sugrue—engage a diverse range of subjects, such as urban rebellions, the suburbanization of Latinos, affordable housing, labor, the built environment, transnationalism, place-making, and religious life. The scholars also explore race within Latino communities, as well as the role that political and economic dynamics have played in creating Latino urban spaces. After reading this book, you will never see American cities the same way again.

The birth of the world’s great megacities is the surest and starkest harbinger of the “urban age” inaugurated in the twentieth century. As the world’s urban population achieves majority for the first time in recorded history, theories proliferate on the nature of urban politics, including the shape and quality of urban democracy, the role of urban social and political movements, and the prospects for progressive and emancipatory change from the corridors of powerful states to the routinized rhythms of everyday life. At stake are both the ways in which the rapidly changing urban world is understood and the urban futures being negotiated by the governments and populations struggling to contend with these changes and forge a place in contemporary cities.

Transdisciplinary by design, Monstrous Politics first moves historically through Mexico City’s turbulent twentieth century, driven centrally by the contentious imbrication of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its capital city. Participant observation, expert interviews, and archival materials demonstrate the shifting strategies and alliances of recent decades, provide the reader with a sense of the texture of contemporary political life in the city during a time of unprecedented change, and locate these dynamics within the history and geography of twentieth-century urbanization and political revolution. Substantive ethnographic chapters trace the emergence and decline of the political language of “the right to the city,” the establishment and contestation of a “postpolitical” governance regime, and the culmination of a century of urban politics in the processes of “political reform” by which Mexico City finally wrested back significant political autonomy and local democracy from the federal state.

A four-fold transection of the revolutionary structure of feeling that pervades the city in this historic moment illustrates the complex and contradictory sentiments, appraisals, and motivations through which contemporary politics are understood and enacted. Drawing on theories of social revolution that embrace complexity, and espousing a methodology that foregrounds the everyday nature of politics, Monstrous Politics develops an understanding of revolutionary urban politics at once contextually nuanced and conceptually expansive, and thus better able to address the realities of politics in the “urban age” even beyond Mexico City.