Jennifer Sanchez
CHIC 3221 Merla-Watson
23 October 2008
St. Paul’s East Side: a New Kind of Barrio for a Transforming Individual Identity
America’s Melting Pot theory of Assimilation claims that all the different immigrants,
“races” and national groups of the United States could be assimilated into a single homogeneous
“American” (Sperling Cocrkroft and Barnet-Sanchez, 7). I argue however, that there is no such
thing as a single homogeneous assimilated immigrant in the United States. Furthermore, as I will
show, the idea that there is a single, unitary notion of a Mexican-American identity is a
fabrication. While there is a dominant culture in the United States, which I will term Anglo or
mainstream society, its infiltrating practices does not deny the ability to form a divergent identity.
I argue the East Side barrio, or neighborhood with a predominant Latino population, has an
environment of cultural fusion leading to a redefinition of space and identity (Allatson, 30). As a
diverse community, it serves to disrupt the prevailing representation of the barrio by being a
structured space redefined into an incorporated place in which identities and the lines of
classification blur in ways that challenge existing stereotypes of Mexican Americas in general.
Paul Allatson defines identity as the imagined, yet often deeply and necessarily felt, sense
of personal sameness, over time and place, that enables a person to differentiate himself or
herself from, or liken himself or herself to, another person (128). I argue that the nature of
identity is fluid and complex; there is no possibility for absolutes when defining a collective of
people. It is only possible to have a category of relative sameness in which the majority chooses
at least some qualifications to relate with. Individual identities are formed through lived
experience within a shaped environment of mixed cultural interaction. The Mexican American
in the East Side is commonly affiliated with the linguistic requirement of speaking Spanish
Sanchez 2
(Latinos en East Side, 18). I argue this stereotype is countered in the East Side through an
extension of barrio-logos, a generated response to re-define space and identity off dominant
society’s pressures (Villa, 6).
Numerous historical and current presentations of oppressive practices of dominant Anglo
culture in the United States exist in all fields of cultural studies. These oppressive practices were
the insurance needed for mainstream society to intentionally or unintentionally secure the failure
of the Melting Pot theory of Liberal Multiculturalism. This theory ignored the existence of
separate cultural enclaves within the United States as well as blatant discrimination and racism
(Sperling Cockcroft and Barnet-Sanchez, 7). Ethnic studies scholar Laura Elisa Perez continues
this line of reasoning through stating, “Mexicans were incorporated into the body of the nation in
a disorderly and ultimately disordering manner, a method that produced a separate/d Mexican
American community,” (Between Woman and Nation, 21). If the dominant Anglo society does
not incorporate ‘others’ in a proper and accepting manner, these ‘others’ will revolt and not
assimilate into what is expected of them and therefore render the theory unsuccessful.
The very existence of barrios is a testament to the Melting Pot failure. Tamar Jacoby also
critiques that the Melting Pot may no longer be applicable to American society. However, he
argues against the existence of barrios as a positive force for ethnic correlation. Jacoby asserts
that Mexican barrios pose a negative risk to assimilation due to their insolating nature (Jacoby, 7).
Barrios provide and all-encompassing lifestyle as they provide the essentials in a language and
manner that are accommodating to those who live within them. Jacoby states that this effects
barrio residents’ need and desire to go into the world outside (Jacoby, 7). However, that is not
the entire story on barrio life. These ethnically centered neighborhoods provide a welcoming
Sanchez 3
environment for those of a common identity. Interacting within them does not necessarily reduce
one’s ability to integrate into the larger culture, as proven in the East Side.
William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor argue, as do I, that “rather than “disuniting
America” or tearing apart its “social fabric,” difference produces new cultural forms that, in fact,
define America- and have done so throughout history,” (Latino Cultural Citizenship, 5).
Therefore, barrio enclaves and the minority populations that dwell within them are adding to the
cultural definition of America. Raul Homero Villa argues that Mexican Americans make this
addition through cultural defiance of mainstream Anglo culture. Barrio-logos is a re-creating and
re-imagining of dominant urban space as a community enabling place (Villa, 6). This place fights
barrioizing, the imposed pressure of dominant culture to live in a designated area, by reasserting
barrio culture through identifying as Mexican Americans.
In the East Side of St. Paul, the process of barrio-logos goes beyond that of Villa’s
description. The area allows individuals to analyze its very practice and identify outside of it’s
called for designations of Mexican American. In other words, individuals can continue to
identify as Mexican American while they also see themselves as a part of the other (Anglo
culture) which barrio-logos designs itself against. This is because the East Side is a new type of
barrio. Barrios are commonly thought of as inner city ghettos marked by governmental and
commercial neglect and to have problems with gangs, crime and violence (Allatson, 30). The
Mexican American community has a history of the lowest crime rates within the area (Kunz, 82).
While the Mexican American community in the East Side is sizable, it is not condensed
into a single section; they live throughout the area (Latinos en East Side, 7). Their presence is
felt though their booming small businesses and with the presence of the Mexican Consulate and
a Spanish speaking health clinic (Milburn, 85). But these spaces are not exclusively used by the
Sanchez 4
Mexican American population. The East Side has businesses and cultural centers produced by its
African American, Anglo, and Hmong cultures which create community cohesion and cultural
production. This new claiming of space is barrio logos; however, it is not just a place for the
Mexican Americans, it is a place for all to interact.
This framework allows hybrids of identities to be created individually. Here the Melting
Pot theory becomes invalidated because individuals practice barrio logos and form a Mexican
American identity against the dominant Anglo culture, just as Villa proposes. However, they are
also able to identify against the dominant perspective of the Mexican American identity as they
interact and connect with other ethnicities. Sperling Cockcroft and Barnet-Sanchez argue that the
Melting pot theory is insufficient because it ignores the complex dialectic between isolation and
assimilation and the problem of identity for people like Mexican Americans who are neither
wholly “American” nor “Mexican” but a new, unique and constantly changing composite of a
dual identity (7).
The sometimes seemingly forced assimilation still exists within the East Side. For
example, children attend schools where English must be spoken and their parents are facing
obstacles in creating new businesses due to their linguistic abilities (Latinos en East Side, 29).
However, in the same publication, HACER reports that they are attracted to the area because it is
a good place to raise children and find homes (20). The linguistic isolation is combated in the
area with the sense of community cohesion around the goal of economic and social success as
Congresswoman Betty McCollum states (Milburn, 1). For the Mexican Americans, this translates
to a creation of two common languages, Spanish and English.
Louis Mendoza and Toni Nelson Herrera continue the argument of dialectic for their
stance against language and cultural loyalty as synonymous (12). They state that the complexities
Sanchez 5
of Mexican history in the United States are such that absolutes cannot be asserted; people’s
relationship with language in context of identity exist on a continuum of experiences that is
capable of shifting over time and is contingent on choice, opportunity, and community (Mendoza
and Nelson Herrera, 13). This continuum of experience is why I am arguing that the fluidity of
identity is exemplified in the East Side as individuals are able to associate themselves with more
than a single formed identity, through dialectic.
In Between Woman and Nation, Laura Elisa Perez describes the formation of Mexican
American, or Chicano identity as taking cannibalized material, cultural, and ideological products
defined as waste by the US and Mexican dominant cultures, and re-defining them with the
indígena, the rural, the working class (20). This creates a lower class and tacky identity or,
rasquache. Rafael Perez-Torres agrees with Perez; he states that it formed through the
construction of a historical memory of shared oppression and political resistance (117). Both
scholars are in agreement with Villa’s barrio-logos. They frame Mexican Americans as a
counteracting force against Anglo dominant culture.
Particularly through Perez’s argument, the Mexican American identity is posed as a sort
of virus on the dominant culture. I disagree with this. Instead of a virus I see Mexican Americans,
or Chicanos, as a food for the dominant cultures. This food grants an opportunity for dominant
cultures to learn and grow from new identities just as identities grow into unique forms through
blending of the dominant and minority. In addition, I disagree with Perez’s association of
Mexican American re-defined space and ideologies with waste. Waste is commonly regarded as
meaningless, if this were true, Mexican Americans would have no desire to re-structure it and
further, the dominant culture would not continue the cycle of growth through embracing the new
definition.
Sanchez 6
Flores and Benmayor complement this argument through stating that this country is
strengthened, not weakened, by the vibrancy brought to it by immigrant and non-white
communities (5). If “American” or Anglo-dominant society rejected all things new or exotic that
immigrants introduced, as the Melting Pot theory presupposes, its values would not have
transgressed far beyond the society of the American Revolution, with some technological
advances of course. Variety is what defines American culture. It embraces new practices and
customs, and makes them its own; Americans transform ethnic cuisines and they become a staple
of the American diet. This variety and new mainstream innovation is introduced through
individuals who enter the country and market their practices and values into their community,
just as the East Side is presently doing. Their Mexican Americans are not a lower class that can
easily be separated and degraded. Instead they are an integral element of the area’s composition.
Through acts of individual agency, the East Side is not only introduces Mexican
American traditions through barrio-logos, it also allows all ethnicities to form a community
cohesion through an innovative process of restructuring space into an all-encompassing place.
Josh Lerner’s description of lines of flight connects to barrio-logos through its emphasis on
individual agency and re-structuring of space. He also ties to Perez’s rasquache, as individuals
are re-defining less significant elements of dominant society. A line of flight is not conforming to
the standard use of public space and practices (Lerner). Individuals are making do with what is
given to them, and moving beyond that given structure. This is exactly what East Side residents
are doing as they cross cultural boundaries and create communal locations. They are introducing
a new form of barrio-logos.
Flores and Benmayor’s argument of cultural citizenship also easily connects to barriologos as a call for an identity negotiated through a space of cultural definition (1). While I agree
Sanchez 7
with this general point, I do not associate with their method of achieving this goal. Citizen is a
very inclusive term as it mandates who can and cannot be a part of that identity. Experiences
with racism, sexism, and classism differ among all individuals of all ethnicities. Through
allocating necessary terms of entrance, citizen does not allow others to claim a connection to a
different identity, as I argue is occurring in the East Side. It also complicates the notion of a dual
identity; as Sperling Cockcroft and Barnet-Sanchez argue exist in all Mexican Americans (6).
I also want to note that I am not arguing for a pluralist society with the downfall of liberal
multiculturalism’s Melting Pot. While a pluralist society allows difference, it does not allow for a
change in power relations. Pluralism’s salad bowl analogy does not account for the emergent
hybrid identities as they are neither the bulk lettuce (Anglo culture), nor the “color and spice”
vegetables (Mexican ethnic culture); instead, they are both (Flores and Benmayor, 9). This places
a direct challenge on pluralism as it destroys the clean-cut power dichotomy of the mainstream
Anglo’s dominance and the minorities’ obedience.
Perez-Torres states that personhood and self-identity are not fully created by free will;
identity is delimited by the geographic, cultural, political, and social landscapes through which it
moves (131). This new process of barrio-logos is not denying the existence of a power structure
that forms individual and community relations; it is transforming this structure. In Telling to
Live, personal narratives are used as a tool for Latinas to theorize oppression, resistance and
subjectivity and to reveal the interrelationships among these systems of power that create the
social landscape (19). The same is true for those living in the East Side; individuals are using
their personal experiences, and the experiences of others to discover these interrelations, and restructure them.
Sanchez 8
Although the stereotypical image of a Mexican American speaking Spanish and being
emerged in Mexican traditions still exists in the East Side, this requirement is changing.
Individuals are transforming what it means to be a Mexican American in the area through
multicultural interaction of practices and ideologies. It is no longer a necessity for individuals to
speak Spanish in order to feel fully assimilated to the Mexican American ethnicity. Through
Villa’s process of barrio-logos, individuals are able to recognize their duality of identities which
Sperling Cockfcroft and Barnet-Sanchez describe. Thus, through their interactions, the residents
of the area re-define constructed space to a multi-ethnically accepting place. The East Side
transforms the process of barrio-logos to deny the existence a universal stereotypical image of a
Mexican American.
Sanchez 9
Works Cited
Allatson, Paul. Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies. Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 2007.
Barnet-Sanchez, Holly and Sperling Cockcroft, Eva. Signs From the Heart: California Chicano
Murals. University of New Mexico Press 1993.
Between Woman and Nation : Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Ed. Caren
Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem. Durham, [N.C.] <br/>; Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1999.
Kunz, Virginia Brainard. Saint Paul : The First 150 Years. St. Paul]: Saint Paul Foundation, 1991.
Latinos Building Power through Economic Development. Minnesota: Latino Economic
Development Center. 2003
Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights. Ed. William Vincent Flores
and Rina Benmayor. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.
Lerner, Josh. “About Lines of Flight.” linesofflight.net/index.html.
Los Latinos En El East Side De St. Paul : Una Investigación Dirigida Por HACER (Asesoría
Hispana Para Apodera a La Comunidad Por Medio De Investigación. Ed. Minn.). HACER
Saint Paul. Minneapolis: HACER, 2001.
Sanchez 10
Milburn, Curt. The Phalen Corridor : Rebuilding the Pride of the East Side of St. Paul. St. Paul,
Minn.: East Side Neighborhood Development Company, 2006.
Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Mestizaje : Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Reinventing the Melting Pot : The New Immigrants and what it Means to be American. Ed.
Tamar Jacoby. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Telling to Live : Latina Feminist Testimonios. Ed. Luz del Alba Acevedo. Durham [N.C.]: Duke
University Press, 2001.
Telling Tongues : A Latin@ Anthology on Language Experience. Ed. Louis Gerard Mendoza.
National City, Califas: Austin, Tejas: Calaca Press; Red Salmon Press, 2007.
Villa, Raúl. Barrio-Logos : Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2000.
Works Referenced
Almirall, Catie. “Latino Buying Power in Minnesota.”HACER June 2004: Issue 1, 3-5.
Francisco Poitevin, René. “David Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness.” Rev. of Working
Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. David Roediger. Solidarity.
2005. <http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/184/print>
Sanchez 11
They Chose Minnesota : A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups. Ed. June Drenning Holmquist
and Minnesota Historical Society. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1981.
Torres, Edén E. Chicana without Apology = Chicana Sin Vergüenza : The New Chicana Cultural
Studies. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Valdes y Tapia, Daniel, 1916-. Hispanos and American Politics. Arno Press, 1964 New York.
Valdés, Dennis Nodín. Barrios Norteños : St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the
Twentieth Century. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
Valdés, Dionico. Mexicans in Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society and Press. 2005.