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Relational displacements: visual and textual cultures of resistance in the east Los Angeles barrios and banlieues of Paris, France
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Content
Relational Displacements:
Visual and Textual Cultures of Resistance in the
East Los Angeles Barrios and Banlieues of Paris, France
by
Michael Anthony Turcios
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES)
August 2022
Copyright 2022 Michael Anthony Turcios
ii
Dedication
To my resilient family. One day we will be together in the same room.
And to the kinships around the world that are displaced and separated.
iii
Acknowledgements
Writing is radical labor. This seemingly long process produces anxieties, doubts, and pain. In the
end, the words on the page confirm the urgency to write about marginal histories. Though a solitary
process, writing unquestionably requires the support, care, and generosity of several communities
with different perspectives to transform our thinking. Perhaps the truism “it takes a village” is
cliché, but it holds true and meaningful for writers from underrepresented backgrounds who are
reminded of the violent institutions that seek to discredit their knowledge and abilities.
Intellectual Guiding Lights
Priya Jaikumar is the paragon of excellence in mentoring. In the early days of my graduate career
as a Master of Arts student, I studied and worked under Priya, whose patience and constructive
feedback encouraged me to historicize the violence and displacement that communities of color
experience. A model for many scholars, Priya has undoubtedly influenced how I approach
scholarship in a rigorous and generous way. When I encountered Olivia C. Harrison in a
postcolonial studies course, I knew that my project would transform in fascinating ways. Olivia
has taught me a number of lessons from which I have developed my reading analysis of texts. Our
meetings to discuss the archive in France that we both study has been a pleasure, and I am sure we
will have more discussions on Palestine and Arab culture and identity. Panivong Norindr permitted
me to enroll in his doctoral seminar during my first semester in graduate school. Pani challenged
me to think rigorously about racialized histories and experiences in France and always pushed me
to think comparatively with care. For many students, Pani is strong ally. My committee has
modeled scholarly solidarity and I look forward to applying these lessons in my teaching and
mentoring.
iv
Thinking With
In the early phase of my dissertation development, Christine Acham, Anikó Imre, and Charlene
Villaseñor Black shaped my thinking during the screening processes, the qualifying examinations,
the prospectus, and in our conversations. Christine supported my ideas and queries about the
doctoral program, and our conversations on race were rewarding. Anikó’s rigorous and honest
feedback, advice, and insights helped me think about how I understand border studies and
nationalisms in a global perspective, including Eastern Europe. Charlene’s expertise helped me
develop my methods to approach visual culture through a decolonial lens when I enrolled in her
courses as the University of California, Los Angeles in the first two years of my doctoral career.
Lydie Moudileno played an important role in the early years of my scholarly formation in our
French courses, and I am indebted to her support of my project. I appreciate their guidance and I
look forward to our paths crossing in many scholarly futures.
Constellations of Support
I benefitted from the generous time and feedback of colleagues from across various institutions,
writing groups, courses, and informal contexts. At the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies
Fellowship Program, and especially in the dissertation writing group, my work on Latinx and
Chicanx perspectives expanded significantly with Pau Nava, Sonja Gandert, and Mayela Caro.
Our virtual writing sessions during the tumultuous period of the COVID-19 pandemic were
rewarding. I look forward to more inspirational and uplifting sessions in the future. I want to thank
Diana Bossa Bastidas for connecting the four of us.
v
My peers in the Hemispheric Americas: Race, Power, and Space research cluster in the Department
of American Studies and Ethnicity played a role in the final two years of my dissertation writing.
I thank Rocío León, Karina Santellano, Divana Olivas, Cassandra Flores-Montano, Rachel Leah,
and Nicola Chávez Courtright for reading chapter one in its early form. Conversing with these
colleagues on Latinx and Latin American scholarly shifts, and the work we developed, such as the
Spring 2021 Speaking Across the Hemisphere symposium, was rewarding and we undoubtedly
created intellectual constellations.
I would like to acknowledge the interdisciplinary Migration and Postcolonial Studies group out of
the program of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at USC. I thank Katherine Hammitt,
Alvin Chuan, and Jesus Garcia for their support over the years in sharing ideas, reading
postcolonial texts, and creating a community grounded in generous intellectual conversation.
I want to thank Emma Ben Ayoun, Ennuri Jo, and Huan He for their feedback on the first iteration
of chapter two. On a different occasion, Edith Adams, Aidan Diamond, Ifetayo Olutosin,
Jacqueline Johnson, Daisy Reid, and Jane Kassavin offered wonderful feedback on the final form
of chapter two in our practicum. Presenting this chapter to an interdisciplinary audience affirmed
the importance of reaching wide and across fields, and to engage in meaningful dialogues.
Chapter four on murals received generous attention and feedback from colleagues in the Critical
Refugee Studies Collective. Victor Bascara, Suhaila Meera, and Joe Wei prompted wonderful
questions on why migrant and refugee histories matter in our contemporary scholarship. I would
like to thank Lan Duong for her support and for cheering me on throughout the years.
vi
I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues Michaela Telfer, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera,
Nikita Allgire, Ichigo Mina Kaneko, Cord-Heinrich Plinke, Kendra Atkin, Veli N. Yashin, and
Erin Graff Zivin who played a role in my writing in the practicum courses in CSLC at USC.
As an Arnold L. Mitchem Fellow at Marquette University from 2020-2021, I had the pleasure of
collaborating with colleagues in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Though
I remained in Los Angeles throughout the academic year due to the pandemic, Eugenia
Afinoguénova, Tara Daly, and Dinorah Cortés-Vélez welcomed and included me and as if I were
sharing the space with them, even if virtual.
Funding from the Visual Studies Research Institute at USC and a USC Graduate School Summer
Writing and Research Grant helped lay the foundation for the archival research I conducted in
Paris. The Graduate School allowed me to carry out my research over the years with an Annenberg
Fellowship and an Endowed Annenberg Research Fellowship. In addition, as a recipient of a
Cinema and Media Studies BIPOC Summer Research Grant, I was able to complete a final research
trip to Paris.
This dissertation could not have been completed without the support of colleagues who shaped my
intellectual foundations in indirect ways. Their encouragement and support always crossed paths
with my writing. I thank my undergraduate mentor, advisor, and intellectual madrina Amalia L.
Cabezas, who literally nourished me by sending me meals. Natalie Belisle offered feedback and
advise on navigating the job market and her careful attention to some of my vulnerable writing
vii
was transformative. Lastly Curtis Marez made an impact in my scholarly aspirations in the last
two years of my graduate studies, thank you.
In the Division of Cinema and Media Studies, John D. Connor, Eszter Zimanyi, Darshana Sreedhar
Mini, Giancarlo Cornejo, Maria Cheteboune, William Whittington, Katherine Steinbach, and Luci
Marzola offered support in a myriad of ways that included encouragement and motivation to
overcome obstacles.
My students at USC, Marquette University, and UC Riverside reminded me of the importance to
mentor underrepresented communities and help them navigate their careers. As academia
continues to shift and create additional barriers, the students demonstrated that there is a future to
imagine radical spaces where knowledge and resources are no longer contained but distributed.
If I failed to include anyone else, please message me, and I will treat you to coffee.
Love and Patience
Finally, I want to thank my family and friends for excusing my solitary work and for their patience
over the many years. Bryant witnessed my many disappointments and achievements and offered
support whenever possible. My dog Benny has been a faithful companion through this process,
and he gently reminded me to take breaks when bringing me his toys for playtime. Though
hardships and other circumstances have systemically and geographically separated my family, my
mother Gabriela, my sisters Jessenia and Karen, and my brother Luis are always in my heart and
viii
thoughts. I dream of the day when we will be at a more stable place. I wholeheartedly share my
accomplishments with them.
Any errors herein are my own.
ix
Table of Contents
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... xii
Dissertation Abstract ..................................................................................................................... xv
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Relational Experiences .................................................................................................................... 1
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1
Relational Methods: Displacement and Media ........................................................................... 4
Comparative Models ................................................................................................................... 9
Historical Context and Specificity ............................................................................................ 11
Barrio and Banlieue Geographies ............................................................................................. 15
Anticolonial and Decolonial Resistance ................................................................................... 20
Return to Relationality .............................................................................................................. 30
Chapter Breakdown .................................................................................................................. 32
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 34
Chapter One .................................................................................................................................. 35
Decolonization/Décolonisation: Nontheatrical Films about the Barrio and the Banlieue ............ 35
Introduction: Barrio and Banlieue Nontheatrical Films ............................................................ 35
Displaced Violence as the Decolonial Watershed .................................................................... 46
Anticolonial and Decolonial Resistance ................................................................................... 55
The Urban Edges ....................................................................................................................... 66
Police Brutality ......................................................................................................................... 74
Arrests and Deportations ........................................................................................................... 79
Spatial Reclamation .................................................................................................................. 84
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 90
Chapter Two .................................................................................................................................. 94
x
Screenings/Visionnages: Non-Traditional Spaces of Film Exhibition ......................................... 94
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 94
A Brief Note on Method ........................................................................................................... 97
Assembling the Archive of Absence ....................................................................................... 100
Surviving Archival Material ................................................................................................... 102
Non-Traditional Spaces of Film Exhibition ............................................................................ 105
Underground and Radical Spaces in France ........................................................................... 111
Institutions of Higher Learning in Los Angeles ..................................................................... 121
A Relational Urgent Aesthetic ................................................................................................ 131
Surviving to Hold and Make Space ........................................................................................ 133
Conclusion: Toward Other Ephemera .................................................................................... 139
Chapter Three .............................................................................................................................. 143
Publications/Parutions: Writing Against Displacement .............................................................. 143
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 143
Historical Overview of La Raza and Sans Frontière .............................................................. 145
Rhetoric on Displacement ....................................................................................................... 154
Immigration and the Writing of Resistance ............................................................................ 166
Poetry and Experiences with Immigration .............................................................................. 175
Displacement and Poetry: The Barrio ..................................................................................... 185
Poetry and the Space of the Banlieue ..................................................................................... 189
Conclusion: The Newspaper/Magazine Archive and Writing New Histories ........................ 194
Chapter Four ............................................................................................................................... 198
Murals/Murs: Visual Histories and Decolonial Inscriptions of Liberation ................................ 198
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 198
Decolonial Inscriptions ........................................................................................................... 203
Palimpsestic Histories ............................................................................................................. 207
The Past is Prologue ................................................................................................................ 213
Local Histories/Transnational Solidarities .............................................................................. 222
Displacement and Reclamation ............................................................................................... 228
Conclusion: New Materialist Murals ...................................................................................... 239
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 241
xi
Reactivating the Archive of Displacement ................................................................................. 241
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 241
TikTok and the Challenges of the Archive ............................................................................. 243
Performance of Memory and Resistance ................................................................................ 246
The Flows of History and Memory of October 17 ................................................................. 248
Routes of Memory of the Chicano Moratorium ..................................................................... 251
Conclusion: Presence .............................................................................................................. 253
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 256
xii
List of Figures
Figure 1.1. Still from Les jeunes travailleurs étrangers, directed by Jean-Pierre Chartier
(1967), Le forum des images/Bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris, France.
Figure 1.2. Still from Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell (1976), USC School of Cinematic Arts
Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
Figure 1.3. Untitled flyer of anti-War poster collected by the Los Angeles Sherriff’s Department.
USC Special Collections Library.
Figure 1.4. Still from Les Algériens de Paris, directed by Alain de Sedouy and André Harris, Le
forum des images/Bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris, France.
Figure 1.5. Still from Yo soy Joaquín, directed by Luis Valdez (1969), USC School of Cinematic
Arts Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
Figure 1.6. Still from Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell (1976), USC School of Cinematic Arts
Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
Figure 1.7. Still from Les Algériens de Paris, directed by Alain de Sedouy and André Harris, Le
forum des images/Bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris, France.
Figure 1.8. Still from Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell (1976), USC School of Cinematic Arts
Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
Figure 1.9. Still from Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell (1976), USC School of Cinematic Arts
Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
Figure 1.10. Still from Mesures de protection de la police (1958), L’Institut national de
l’audiovisuel, Paris, France.
Figure 1.11. Still from Manifestations musulmanes (1961), L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel,
Paris, France.
Figure 1.12. Still from Départ de musulmans, 1961, L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Paris,
France.
Figure 1.13. Still from Expulsion des prisonniers algeriens, 1961, L’Institut national de
l’audiovisuel, Paris, France.
Figure 1.14. Still from The Murals of East Los Angeles: A Museum Without Walls, directed by
Humberto R. Rivera and Heather R. Howell (1976), USC School of Cinematic Arts Hugh M.
Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
xiii
Figure 1.15. Still from L’Islam en France, directed by Georges Baguet (1976), Le forum des
images/Bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris, France.
Figure 2.1. Flyer of Comité Palestine, Circa 1970s, Saïd Bouziri Files, La Contemporaine, Paris,
France.
Figure 2.2. Flyer of Comité de Soutien à la Résistance Palestinienne et les Maos, Circa 1970s, Saïd
Bouziri Files, La Contemporaine, Paris, France.
Figure 2.3. “3 Jours avec les Immigrés,” Circa 1970s, Saïd Bouziri Files, La Contemporaine, Paris,
France.
Figure 2.4. “Journée anti-raciste,” Circa 1970s, Saïd Bouziri Files, La Contemporaine, Paris,
France.
Figure 2.5. “Semana de la Raza,” La Raza (1968), East Los Angeles Archive, California State
University Los Angeles.
Figure 2.6. “Untitled flyer,” circa 1970s, Gloria Arellanes papers, East Los Angeles Archive, John
F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los Angeles.
Figure 2.7. “Barrio Film Festival,” circa 1969-1976, Center for the Study of Political Graphics,
Los Angeles, California.
Figure 2.8. “Barrio Film Festival,” circa 1969-1976, Center for the Study of Political Graphics,
Los Angeles, California.
Figure 2.9. “National Fight Back Organization Western Regional Conference,” 1979, East Los
Angeles Collections, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los
Angeles.
Figure 2.10. Barrio Bilingual Communications advertisement, La Raza (3.1), 1977, East Los
Angeles Collections, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los
Angeles.
Figure 4.1. Still from Défense d’afficher (1896), directed byGeorges Méliès, Ciné-Archives.
Figure 4.2. Photograph of “Ici on noie les Algériens, by Jean Textier.
Figure 4.3. Roberto Chavez, The Path to Knowledge and the False University (1974-1975),
photographed by Nancy Tovar, Nancy Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection, UCLA Chicano
Studies Research Center Library and Archive.
xiv
Figure 4.4. Gronk and Willie Herrón III, Moratorium: The Black and White Mural (1972),
photographed by Nancy Tovar, Nancy Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection, UCLA Chicano
Studies Research Center Library and Archive.
Figure 4.5. Dip Social Klub, La Danse de la Souffrance (2016).
Figure 4.6. Photograph in Journal L’Humananité, circa 1956-1957, Archives Départmentales de
la Seine-Saint-Denis.
Figure 4.7. Barrio Artistas de Aztlan, Local History (1974), photographed by Nancy Tovar, Nancy
Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library and
Archive.
Figure 4.8. Photograph by Senenne Abdelhak, Sans Frontière, 1 January 1980.
Figure 4.9. Journal L’Humanité, Union Française Photographique, Archives Départmentales de la
Seine-Saint-Denis.
Figure 4.10. Unknown photographer, Sans Frontière, 2 October 1979.
Figure 4.11. Unknown photographer, Sans Frontière, 24 June 1980.
Figure 4.12. Roberto Chavez, Porque Se Pelean? Que No Son Carnales? (1972), photographed by
Nancy Tovar, Nancy Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection, UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center Library and Archive.
Figure C.1. Still from clip, Sixtieth anniversary commemoration of October 17, 1961, TikTok.
Figure C.2. Still from clip, Fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Chicano Moratorium,
TikTok.
xv
Dissertation Abstract
My dissertation, “Relational Displacements: Visual and Textual Cultures of Resistance in
the East Los Angeles Barrios and Banlieues of Paris, France,” argues that though Chicanas/os and
Arabs in urban space of the 1960s and 1970s did not come in direct contact, their shared struggles
against similar forms of oppression tells a history of how race, ethnicity, class, and immigrant
status created urban zones of exclusion in so-called democratic countries of the Global North. A
relational framework enables us to study racialized groups facing similar injustices while attending
to their particularities. My definition of displacement accommodates a study of unchecked police
brutality on racialized bodies; detentions and deportations of undocumented migrants; evictions
and forced removals of people from private and public space; and deaths of community members
at the hands of authorities. I examine nontheatrical films about the barrios and banlieues,
community newspapers and magazines, and political inscriptions and images of resistance on
murals that showed how both communities foregrounded desires for liberation while advancing
anticolonial and decolonial resistance.
This project identifies the decolonial in barrio and banlieue textual and visual culture.
Decolonization is the process in which oppressed groups challenge Western domination, conquest,
and knowledge by creating oppositional radical possibilities of existence and resistance. I contend
that in studying the creative and political output from barrios and banlieues, we learn that these
distinct spaces, similar to other urban margins in cosmopolitan cities of the Global North,
organized to fight against systems and institutions of oppression that quelled self-determination,
social justice, and liberation.
Despite their particular geographical, historical, political, and spatial formations, the
barrios and banlieues equip us with the language and methods to study the scattered margins.
xvi
Chapter One, “Decolonization/Décolonisation: Nontheatrical Films of the Barrio and Banlieue,”
argues that though the nontheatrical films about these spaces were produced by nonmembers of
the community, the frames contain anticolonial expressions by Chicanas/os and Arabs. The
subjects speak before the camera about liberation, occupation of their communities, and political
engagement. I examine nontheatrical films by McGraw-Hill Films, BFA Educational Media, and
the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. Chapter two, “Screenings/Visionnages: Non-
Traditional Spaces of Film Exhibition,” considers the function of community spaces that screened
currently nonextant or inaccessible films. I consult archival material such as pamphlets, flyers, and
posters to speculate about the importance of film culture to resistance movements. Rather than
analyzing the films, I focus on how the selection of the films animated discussions on labor rights,
anti-police violence, and community organizing. Chapter three, “Publications/Parutions: Writing
Against Displacement,” examines the language, metaphors, rhetoric, and poetics that appeared on
the pages of La Raza (The People) in East Los Angeles and Sans Frontière (No Borders) in Paris
and I argue that these community newspapers and magazines connected with local, national, and
global movements and thus allowed the writers and communities to write against systems of power
as an anticolonial and decolonial enactment. Finally, I continue on the theme of absence in chapter
four, “Murals/Murs: Visual Histories and Decolonial Inscriptions of Liberation,” which analyzes
mostly nonextant murals. I include what today is called “graffiti” phrases and representations of
liberation that countered histories of displacement in the barrios and banlieues.
This study builds on early sociological studies of urban space of the 1980s and 1990s,
where Loïc Wacquant studied Black ghettos in the United States and the multicultural banlieues
of France. However, these studies did not take into account the barrios of the U.S., despite the
histories of migrant labor flows from the Global South that similarly occurred in France. The
xvii
relational framework I present in this project engages with and makes significant contributions to
emerging scholarship that interrogates relational race studies and how tactics of oppression
designed for one racial group are applied to others.
1
Introduction
Relational Experiences
The Latino diaspora that gave birth to an identity crisis in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and
the American Southwest is the same that is also reshaping (albeit at a slower pace) American
national identity.
-Ignacio López-Calvo, Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social
Anxiety.
[…] France, like other spaces and other nations, has always been multiple and plural, a space of
possibility to be invented and reinvented, to be lived in many different ways at once. The notion
of Arab France contains within itself many possibilities too. Moreover, there is not a single Arab
France, but many…
-Ian Coller, Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831.
Introduction
“Relational Displacements: Visual and Textual Cultures of Resistance in the East Los
Angeles Barrios and Banlieues of Paris, France,” argues that a relational framework on the
Chicana/o and Arab communities of the 1960s and 1970s shows that even though these two groups
never met or addressed each other, they articulated similar experiences with injustice in two cities
that are considered “democratic.” I further argue that a relational study of Chicana/o and Arab
resistance against displacement in the barrios and banlieues demonstrates that both racialized
groups enacted anticolonial and decolonial resistance through various media. A relational
framework reveals that both are linked by historical events such as colonization, labor migration,
urban neglect, containment, and criminality, though their historical trajectories and specificities
differ. Furthermore, the relational element that especially pertains to the barrio and banlieue is how
each challenged the discriminations and injustices in two major cosmopolitan centers that present
themselves as liberal democracies.
My interpretation of the relational expands on the concept by using visual and textual
cultures produced by Chicanas/os and Arabs as the primary sources for studying how state-
sanctioned logics of oppression are anchored in global colonial histories and applied to local
2
contexts. The relational in this study is generous and welcoming of connections that might appear
unrelated, including visual culture, histories, and contexts that pertain to racialized communities.
A relational framework encourages us to activate the resourcefulness of speculation and to forge
connections and links of solidarity between groups of people that have never interacted. What
better way to make sense of relationality than a sustained study of visual and textual cultures in
community archives that focus on specific local struggles that may have been experienced
elsewhere under different circumstances?
Ephemeral and nonextant visual and textual cultures illustrate how racialized communities
navigate the hurdles of subjection through radical creative expression across space and time. This
radical expression translates into urgent aesthetics created with limited resources and in
nontraditional settings. While relational frameworks in studies of race gravitate toward a focus on
written policies and laws, I include media in this intervention in order to show how Chicana/o and
Arab communities used visual and textual cultures to visualize and confront similar forms of
oppression within the urban borders of the imperial countries. Even though these communities did
not reference each other in their visual and textual materials, I take this opportunity to examine the
urgent messages that they communicated, especially in challenging displacement from the margins
in the imperial and colonial cities of the Global North.
Relationality allows a study on racialized people bonded by struggles against oppression
while respecting the specificities of each group and context. Both communities enacted
anticolonial and decolonial resistance in nontheatrical films, community newspapers and
magazines, and murals to visualize and articulate their experiences with displacement. In the
contemporary moment, displacement is linked to migration and refugee movements. These global
3
human-produced catastrophes have disproportionately led to unprecedented violence that is
perpetually visualized.
In this study, I broaden the definition of displacement to include police violence,
incarcerations and deportations of undocumented migrants, urban renewal projects that removed
people from their communities, and deaths of community members. These displacements during
the 1960s and 1970s in the barrios and banlieues illustrated that visual and textual culture played
a vital role in how the Chicanas/os and Arabs challenged these violent displacements.
I furthermore approach this concept through a study of media. Displacement is not linear;
it is an intentional violent act where power is exercised over precarious communities. In addition,
displacement seeks to disorder histories of belonging, thus negating the claims of people to the
right to stay rooted and to exist in space. While displacement is a physical phenomenon that
involves struggle, I broaden our comprehension of the term by including visual and textual cultures
as objects that document this violence. Chicanas/os and Arabs visualized displacement by
referencing cases of forced removal that took place through state apparatus’ surveillance and
policing of racialized people, the criminalization and deportation of migrants in order to legitimize
colonial relations as designed through the systems of deportation, the removal of Chicanas/os from
contested public space even when gathering peacefully, and the deaths of community members as
a form of state-sanctioned disposability. Applying the concept in a relational framework does not
raze over specificities or render universal these experiences. On the contrary, displacement
identifies the particularities in order to question and trouble how the logic of dispossession,
incarceration, deportations, and evictions, which are rooted in colonial histories, are experienced
across the world under various guises of policing.
4
Relational Methods: Displacement and Media
Barrios across the United States are predominantly populated by Chicanx and Latinx
people.
1
Similar to banlieues, barrios are marked by heterogenous ethnic, racial, and generational
differences. In this study, the barrio and banlieue are metonyms of living arrangements, situations,
materials, and experiences that disrupt traditional understanding of physical homes. These
racialized spaces are characterized by their contextual formations, and I include shantytowns,
shacks, worker housing quarters, and other improvised and precarious housing structures when
referring to barrios and banlieues. Though these varied spaces of habitation are not interchangeable
due to uneven infrastructure accessibility and security, the barrio and banlieue are racialized
geographies, and these spaces are thus operationalized to distinguish racial difference, for example
banlieuesards. The word barrio, etymologically deriving from the Arabic word barriya, referring
to open country, and later used in Spain as early as 1841, automatically becomes a contested term.
Signifying vastness and openness from Arabic, the lived realities contradict the origin of the term
because barrios are marginal geographic spaces intended to contain and keep out racialized people
from the center of the city. Along similar lines, the etymology of the banlieue, ban and lieue to
leuca (league in relation to distance), derived from Latin, indicates that this distant space, which
assumes an openness, conflicts with the rules and laws that are applied therein by local and regional
governments.
If the etymology of both urban spaces points to openness and distance, and the inverse is
the case, then this openness, though not geographical, shows us that despite the enclosures,
segregation, and displacement, Chicanas/os and Arabs were politically and intellectually open to
1
I use the “x” instead of the binary gendered letters “a/o” as an inclusive gesture to people who do not identify with
the gender binary and whom identity as trans. The “x” is currently gaining support in academic and activist circles,
although this inclusive move has been met with resistance and rejection, thereby illustrating how masculinist thought
and identity pervades intellectual activity.
5
various forms of resistance. This will become evident through an examination of diverse media,
including nontheatrical films, flyers and posters, murals, and community newspapers and
magazines.
Building on the work of comparative media studies and ethnic studies, I employ a relational
framework that scholars in postcolonial studies and ethnic studies have undertaken, but until
recently less explicitly. The Caribbean postcolonial theorist Édouard Glissant’s writing on
relationality from his influential text Poétique de la Relation is monumental to how we think about
connections across space and time. Glissant’s relationality, however, refers to the Caribbean. For
him, relationality means embracing the chaos and allowing uncertainty to motivate one into action.
“Relation,” writes Glissant, “is learning more and more to go beyond judgments into the
unexpected dark of art's upsurgings. Its beauty springs from the stable and the unstable, from the
deviance of many particular poetics and the clairvoyance of a relational poetics. The more things
it standardizes into a state of lethargy, the more rebellious consciousness it arouses.”
2
In this
passage, Glissant refers to how chaos transforms into resistance, allowing one to explore the sites
of tension, and to immerse oneself into the universe of heterogeneity.
One might find oneself at the intersection of disorientation while at the same time being
confronted with various points of departure. This study abides by Glissant’s remarks because the
relational framework and method that I build on acknowledges disciplinary boundaries and brings
two distinct spaces and racialized groups and their media under the same study. Furthermore, I add
that the author asks readers to reflect on and imagine cultural encounters in moments of chaos. For
example, what transformative possibilities materialize when racialized groups converse with each
other on how spatial segregation, urban redesign and destruction, and policing affect their
2
Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 139.
6
communities and how they resist? In our case, how does a relational framework assist in studying
two communities that never exchanged messages with each other to understand the global designs
and architecture of oppression across space and time?
When the archive does not yield the histories of resistance against injustice, relationality
breaks forth and imagines dialogue between groups of people. In this project, I use this poetic
concept as an organizing principle, which also taps into the speculative, to examine histories of
displacement and resistance in the barrios and banlieues. To speculate is to acknowledge that these
encounters unfold in other ways. For instance, we might say that the political and activist work
that originates from both the barrios and banlieues, and the acts of solidarity that Chicanas/os and
Arabs enacted, challenges assumptions that these spaces are completely detached from the rest of
the world.
Identifying how Chicanas/os and Arabs shared struggles against settler-colonial and white
supremacist projects in relational ways is not impossible. Despite the spatial disparity, the barrios
and banlieues share similar histories of resistance against displacement.
Ethnic studies scholars such as Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina offer methods
for studying race relationally in their work Relational Formations of Race. HoSang Martinez and
Molina write, “Colonialism and white supremacy have always been relational projects. They rely
on logics of sorting, ranking, and comparison that produce and naturalize categories of racial
difference necessary for the legitimization of slavery, settler colonialism, and imperial
expansion.”
3
Locating the forces that act on oppressive conditions, and identifying the transposable
architecture of discriminatory oppressive systems applied across multiple racialized groups in what
3
Daniel Martinez HoSang and Natalia Molina, “Introduction: Toward a Relational Consciousness of Race,” in
Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice, eds. Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and
Ramón A. Gutiérrez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 3.
7
Molina calls “racial scripts,” is our task at hand with the use of media.
4
As the term implies, these
scripts are written for restaging, reinterpretation, and remediation. Racial scripts comprise of laws,
policies, attitudes, discourses, and actions that are applicable to various groups, even though they
were intended for a specific one. In other words, racial scripts are blueprints of oppression that
maintain racial supremacy, inequality, and disenfranchisement. Molina explains, “a relational
treatment of race recognizes that race is a mutually constitutive process and thus demonstrates how
race is socially constructed, hence fighting essentialist notions of race. Furthermore, it attends to
how, when, where, and to what extent groups intersect. It recognizes that there are limits to
examining racialized groups in isolation,” thereby reflecting on what Glissant presents in
compelling us to consider how oppressed people share histories and experiences from afar.
5
My intervention here is to build on this concept by introducing film and media in these
conversations via a discussion of anticolonial and decolonial resistance against displacement. By
studying nontheatrical films made about both racialized groups by nonmembers of the community,
it becomes clear that external entities were interested in examining these racialized groups, while
not offering directives to spectators on how to help ameliorate the problems. While nontheatrical
films were being made, Chicanas/os and Arabs and their allies took their resistance to the streets
by visualizing and inscribing histories of displacement. By including murals in this study, I ask us
to consider how at a time of limited access to cameras and other mainstream outlets, communities
transformed urban walls into visual sites of liberation. Furthermore, muralists experiment with the
concept of moving images, in that they represent movement (narrative and physical) in radical
4
Natalia Molina, How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 6.
5
Natalia Molina, “Examining Chicana/o History through a Relational Lens,” in Relational Formations of Race:
Theory, Method, and Practice, eds. Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and Ramón A. Gutiérrez (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2019), 44.
8
ways. The posters and flyers, and newspapers and magazines show us that Chicanas/os and Arabs
were involved in challenging displacement by organizing film screenings and writing and
visualizing their experiences into history.
Theories are not entirely fixed; they are fluid. Similarly, the ideas, blueprints, and
infrastructure of oppression travel. Fortunately, the spirit of resistance travels fast. Edward Said’s
concept of “traveling theories” is pertinent to studying how theories and ideas are exchanged
through intellectual networks from one context to another and across geographical divides. Said
writes, “Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel—from person to person,
from situation to situation, from one period to another. Cultural and intellectual life are usually
nourished and often sustained by this circulation of ideas.”
6
This notion of traveling, when applied
to our context of the barrio and the banlieue, illustrates that a history of relational displacement
and the actions of resistance that followed were part of a global anticolonial and decolonial
resistance. The ethos of the decolonial and liberation movements fostered points of encounter
where people traveled and exchanged ideas and informed one another of their struggles. For
example, the Black Panther Party had a strong influence on Algerians and vice versa, Chicanas
and Chicanos strongly opposed the War in Vietnam, and many aggrieved groups modeled their
decolonial thinking from successful actions and their influential thinkers.
It is highly improbable that Chicanas/os and Arabs ever interacted in the 1960s and 1970s,
or that they reaffirmed each other’s struggles relating to the many forms of displacement. Although
this interaction most likely never took place, it does not mean one should entirely dismiss what
this interaction would have looked like. The relational framework allows us to identify the
common factors and examine how Chicanas/os and Arabs used film and media to resist
6
Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 157.
9
displacement in similar ways. Said reminds that “whether it takes form of acknowledged or
unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation, the movement of ideas and
theories from one place to another is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of
intellectual activity.”
7
This engenders creative intellectual work that underscores related struggles,
similar ways of resisting, and shared anticolonial and decolonial influences in response to
historical, cultural, and political violence.
The process of identifying connecting nodes is a project of speculation and deduction on
what direct solidarity between barrios and banlieues would have looked like. In this study, the
relational method is to read community archival material and the histories of resistance and place
them side by side to examine how displacements inspired creative anticolonial and decolonial
resistance in both spaces of the Global North.
Comparative Models
Surprisingly, comparative work on the barrio and banlieue has been overlooked despite
ostensible social similarities. It would benefit us to examine how Loïc Wacquant and Dider
Lapeyronnie’s comparative models in sociology and urban studies laid the foundation for the work
I carry out in this project.
Comparative studies of the U.S. ghettos and the French banlieues at the turn of the late
twentieth century in the field of sociology advanced our thinking on urbanization, racialization,
and marginality in major global centers. Through comparative methodologies, scholars such as
Wacquant and Lapeyronnie pointed us to similar issues endemic to public housing projects.
Although comparisons help us understand problems similarly experienced across space and time,
7
Ibid.
10
Wacquant cautioned against conflation. Wacquant and Lapeyronnie approached banlieues and
ghettos in different ways, demonstrating that a fixed method is impossible. In taking a critical
posture against conflation, Wacquant maintains that comparative approaches are useful if they
highlight the specificities. The sociologist explains that “social recruitment” of banlieues is
founded on “ethnoracial” and “social” heterogeneity.
8
Therefore, a simple comparison between
banlieue and Black ghettos would overlook the historical development of each space, and in the
case of the former, the study would inadvertently erase other racialized communities.
Similarly, Lapeyronnie proposes using the historical weight of the term “ghetto” while also
giving space to how the term is invoked through the interviews conducted with the residents of the
banlieue. This allows the inhabitants of those spaces to express their statements in relation to their
experience with injustices that they also observed in Black communities of the U.S.
9
“‘Ghetto’
n’était jamais qu’un ‘mot de trop’, inadéquat et excessif,” writes Lapeyronnie in adding that
sociologists “rappelaient qu’il était réservé à la situation des Noirs américains, après avoir
appartenu à l’histoire juive.”
10
Lapeyronnie reminds us that historical and cultural specificity is
imperative, as is the historical appropriation of the term. Even if scholars do not agree with the
term’s usage, it does not mean that the inhabitants’ experience with segregation, police brutality,
racism, poor housing conditions, and displacement is illegitimate. Instead, focusing on why the
residents compared their situation to the Black experience in U.S. ghettos is part of a relational
history of anti-Blackness, the shadow of slavery, and the systems that regard these bodies as
expendable.
8
Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Malden: Polity, 2008), 153.
9
Didier Lapeyronnie, Ghetto urbain. Ségrégation, violence, pauvreté en France aujourd’hui (Paris: Robert Laffont,
2008), 9.
10
Ibid. My translation: “The term ‘ghetto’ was inadequate and excessive […] it was reserved for the situation of Black
Americans after having belonged to Jewish history.”
11
In French sociological studies of banlieues and ghettos, a sustained consideration on the
question of colonialism is limited. In contrast, U.S. sociologist Robert Blauner addressed how the
state’s suppression of Black self-determination in the ghettos was a metonym of colonization.
Blauner explains that the Civil Rights movement and the liberation struggles that unfolded in the
U.S., and throughout the world, led some to draw colonial analogies. Blauner maintains that a
distinction between colonialism and colonization needs to be explicit; the former is a system and
the latter is a process.
11
Blauner is concerned with the former since it is immediately felt and
materially noticeable. Though the ghetto is not included in this study, the social dynamics and
Black resistance to ongoing legacies of slavery is part of the colonial project. Furthermore, the
historical events illustrate how the project of containment and displacement in the ghetto is part of
a relational form of oppression. How is a relational method productive for our project when the
histories of colonialism, racism, and immigration have unfolded differently in the barrio and
banlieue?
Historical Context and Specificity
In the early twentieth century, in the case of Los Angeles, westward expansion demanded
economical labor and expendable bodies for building infrastructure. Immigrants were contracted
to build railroads, roadways, and other vital infrastructure for circulating goods and people. In
addition, guest worker initiatives such as the Bracero program, comprised of mostly Mexican
laborer men in agricultural fields, exposed unregulated and dehumanizing work practices.
Furthermore, labor and limited housing set the stage for competition. According to George
Sanchez, the emergence of Los Angeles as a global capitalist city, the segregation of racialized
11
Robert Blauner, “Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt,” Social Problems (1969), 399.
12
people to the margins of the city, and the looming Great Depression and other episodes of
economic turmoil exacerbated deteriorating relationships between racialized groups who were
competing for jobs against each other in a diminishing labor force.
12
Despite their major
contributions to modernizing the U.S., Mexicans were treated as second-class citizens, where their
inferior social positions reflected their lived material realities. Rodolfo Acuña explains that the
urbanization of Los Angeles forced Mexicans to move to east of the city as a result of large
migration and a housing shortage.
13
Furthermore, the geographical alienation of Mexicans
displayed the ongoing colonial condition.
The center of Los Angeles was exclusively reserved for a white populace, centralized
government power, and the site for inventing the modern metropolis where racialized bodies were
removed. A similar historical event of migrant labor occurred in France, especially with the history
of migrant labor in the docks of Marseille and infrastructure work in Paris. Evidently, Arabs and
Black Africans played a monumental role in building the vital infrastructure of the nation.
14
As
mentioned earlier, the spaces to which migrant workers were forced to live in were unsanitary and
derelict due to a lack of basic infrastructure. For the reasons described above, studying the barrio
and the banlieue through a relational framework is necessary in order to understand that nation-
building projects were always completed by migrant workers who were already stripped of their
essential human rights, their bodies were merely perceived as expendable, and were relegated to
the margins of the city.
12
George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-
1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 77.
13
Rodolfo F. Acuña, A Community Under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945-1975
(Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 1984), 84.
14
See Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2007). Thomas argues that we must extend our analysis to the histories of colonialism to understand
contemporary immigration debates because displacement and forced movement of Africans to France has much to do
with the regime of colonialism. Some migrated to France for education, labor, and military participation.
13
In exerting control over racialized migrants—whether through policing, assimilation
projects, or in reinforcing other exclusionary parameters—the state exercises discriminatory power
at its discretion. Long considered as detached spaces from geographies of central power, the
residents of the barrios and banlieues resisted this imposed fatalistic narrative. Chicanas/os have
always felt the full brunt of exclusion ever since the U.S. annexed half of Mexico, where the former
violated the stipulation in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that would guarantee Mexicans
on the U.S. side of the border the right to keep their land. In addition, Americanization projects
were introduced to assimilate Mexicans due to their “otherness.” As Sanchez explains, Mexican
women in the barrios were targeted for Americanization efforts because city officials believed they
were the transmitters of culture and through them, the family could assimilate.
15
Although Mexican women participated in those projects, they subverted the governmental
efforts, proving that assimilation projects failed to recognize difference.
16
This failure is attributed
to the fact that Mexicans were forced to abandon their identities and perform whiteness.
Interestingly, much of that resistance emerged in the supposedly enclosed barrios. The families
were far more concerned with their humanity and to ameliorate the deplorable living conditions
than to compromise their cultural identity. This refutes ideas that barrios were politically inert.
These are the very same sites that have inspired generations of activists and community members
to develop decolonial work and solidarity with other aggrieved groups and to use visual and textual
culture to resist the violence of displacement.
Along the principles of assimilation, a similar project unfolded in France, especially after
the passage of the secularist law of 1905, which engendered conversations on which humans are
15
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, 99.
16
Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006), 13-14.
14
afforded the right to justice and equality. The French Republican model of integration assumes,
through its universal values, that all people on French soil are treated equal, and that discrimination
based on difference is illegal and therefore not an urgent issue. However, this is not the case as the
universalist claim is partly responsible for eluding questions on the unequal treatment of migrants
and racialized people in the banlieues.
17
The myth of the integrationist Republican model has been
disputed time and again by scholars and activists, including the people of the banlieue who have
protested against discrimination through various forms of political action, much of which has
resulted in uprisings.
Michel Wieviorka writes that the crisis of the Republican model has much to do with its
insistence on overlooking difference—religious, racial, ethnic, cultural; a missed opportunity to
embrace the plurality of France and to acknowledge its violent past and present. Wieviorka
explains that France does not acknowledge difference, despite the presence of migrants from all
over the world, including its former colonies and present overseas departments.
18
One might call
this reluctance to acknowledge difference a colorblindness, for this implies a refusal to accept and
come to terms with the reality of discrimination and it is inherently discursive violence.
Commenting on the notion of assimilation in France, Ahmed Boubeker differentiates between
“citoyens reconnus,” those who are assimilable and “citoyens de seconde zone,” those who
17
See Fred Constant, “Foreword,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, eds. Sue Peabody and Tyler
Stovall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Fred Constant explores the contentious debates on how France
deals with the question of race and how it is reduced to ideas of integration, republicanism, and free rights. This
flawed idea of integration is racially constructed and does more harm in failing to address that those who are
alienated and relegated to the fringes find themselves in those positions due to race and the notion that they must
prove their access to citizenship through hard work (meritocracy).
18
Michel Wieviorka, “La République, la colonisation. Et après…” in La Fracture Coloniale: La société française au
prisme de l’héritage colonial, eds. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: La Découverte,
2005), 118.
15
interrogate and contest the Republican model and the notion of equality and liberty.
19
The idea of
“seconde zone” suggests a social and geographical subordination, an interstitial space where
becoming French citizen never actualizes. This case is similar with the people in the barrios; their
geographical alienation and their racial “otherness” puts them at a disadvantage.
Because Chicanas/os and Arabs in both spaces are required to assimilate and prove
themselves worthy of humane treatment through the process of citizenship, they believe that these
assimilationist national metrics prolong the civilizing mission, and that the system of colonization
has branched out into local governments. This cycle of violence, as we have seen, comes in the
form of police surveillance, deportations and incarcerations of vulnerable undocumented people,
and the deaths of community members who are thus disappeared from the rest of the community.
In addition, the spatial setting plays a role in how institutions of power regard and treat Chicanas/os
and Arabs.
Barrio and Banlieue Geographies
The experiences of segregation and neglect became metonyms of colonization in urban
spaces and repeatedly invoked by community members. This reveals that the lived-experiences of
Chicanas/os and Arabs make a relational project even more viable. An entryway to a relational
study is to examine the visual and literary culture. By focusing on how each community visualized
and documented their experiences with displacement and resistance, it becomes evident that
Chicanas/os and Arabs were never alone in their struggle, because they too linked with other global
anticolonial and decolonial movements—Chicanas/os calling an end to the war in Vietnam and
Arabs organizing around the Palestinian struggle. The various forms of media that emerged during
19
Ahmed Boubeker, “Le ‘creuset français’ ou la légende noire de l’intégration,” in La Fracture Coloniale: La société
française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, eds. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: La
Découverte, 2005), 185.
16
the 1960s and 1970s call attention to Chicana/o and Arab self-determination. Around the same
historical period, Chicanas/os and Arabs enacted anticolonial and decolonial resistance. This
international solidarity was palpable due in part to the histories of migration and dispossession that
informed the living condition of Chicanas/os and Arabs in their respective spaces. By expressing
national and international forms of solidarity, both focused on labor abuse and exploitation, which
ran across the number of struggles they fought against.
The migration labor flows from the so-called global south to the so-called industrial nations
created vexed transnational movements, family separations, and other forms of displacement.
Arriving from former colonized regions, migrants soon faced a deceptive reality in France and the
U.S. The history of labor migration to France and the U.S. makes it clear that racialized bodies
have always been used as expendable commodities that could be exploited and shipped back to
their place of origins. In the French case, this is exceptionally true of North Africans. In La double
absence, Abdelmalek Sayad writes that migration from Algeria to France unfolded over three
generations, with the second and third generations permanently settling in France. Sayad explains,
immigrer c’est immigrer avec son histoire […], avec ses traditions, ses manières de vivre,
de sentir, d’agir et de penser, avec sa langue, sa religion ainsi que toutes les autres structures
sociales, politiques, mentales de sa société, structures caractéristiques de la personne et
solidairement de la société, les premières n’étant que l’incorporation des seconds, bref avec
sa culture.
20
The histories, traditions, and personal memories that migrants bring with them when moving to
urban centers like Los Angeles and Paris demonstrate that there are various factors at play, such
as negotiating their identity in inhospitable times and spaces. As a result of these hostilities, hybrid
20
Abdelmalek Sayad, La Double Absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrance de l’immigré (Paris : Seuil, 1999),
18. My translation: “To immigrate is to immigrate with a story […] with one’s traditions, ways of living, of sensing,
of acting on and thinking, with one’s language, as well as religion and the other social, political, and mental structures
of one’s society, structures characteristic of the person and their society.”
17
identities take shape and emerge as anticolonial and decolonial resistance; these are the sites where
militancy is born. However, these experiences were unfavorable considering that the barrios and
banlieues were designed as zones of exclusion, some built to function as provisional lodging.
In the U.S., as is the case of Los Angeles, Mexican migrants who fled from the ravages of
the Mexican Revolution settled in the city in search of work. Slums and improvised dwellings
were the only housing options for Mexican migrants in early twentieth century Los Angeles as the
city modernized, expanded, and segregated racialized groups. By the early 1930s, half a million
Mexicans were either deported or coerced to repatriate. Despite these living conditions, migrants
built communities and transnational networks. By the 1960s, deindustrialization near banlieues
and barrios, and global economic downturns activated xenophobic sentiments that pushed nativists
to scapegoat migrants and other racialized people for the changing social, political, and cultural
landscape. As a result, white nationalists rallied around labor scarcity and called for the expulsion
of migrants, thus triggering a displacement. Writing a relational history on displacement with
attention to film, media, murals, and newspapers, shows that migration has always been at the
heart of barrio and banlieue identity and visual and textual cultures of resistance.
Migration, race, class, systemic and institutional injustice, police brutality, and legacies of
colonization show that both urban spaces are defined by contextual histories rooted along the same
factors, yet particular in outcome. Therefore, it is important to avoid describing barrios and
banlieues, as well as other spaces, in positivist and essentialist terms. Barrios and banlieues are not
monolithic. Local and regional politics affected how both urban spaces were formed. For example,
this means that the barrios in Los Angeles and in New York City are by no means equally defined,
or that the residents are engaged in similar struggles against injustice. The same goes for the
banlieues in France; the Parisian banlieues and the those in Minguettes are unique. However, there
18
are larger relational factors such as segregation, police brutality, and displacement due to urban
renewal, and minor similarities such as transnational migration. The dynamics of the East Los
Angeles barrios and Parisian banlieues change across time and the political projects that residents
respond to are situational and contextual according to the urgent demands. Historical specificity is
therefore imperative. For example, the barrios that I examine in this study include Boyle Heights,
Lincoln Heights, Belvedere, and Whittier. As for the banlieues, I focus on Barbès-La Goutte d’Or,
Clichy, and Nanterre. Though geographically scattered in both cities, the barrio and banlieue are
metonyms of colonization.
Homi Bhabha cogently articulated concerns about the status of the periphery where he
writes, “I do want to make graphic what it means to survive, to produce, to labor and to create,
within a world-system whose major economic impulses and cultural investments are pointed in a
direction away from you,” adding that such exclusions “spurs you to resist the polarities of power
and prejudice, to reach beyond and behind the invidious narratives of center and periphery.”
21
In
other words, the author rejects fetishizing the peripheries and glorifying the struggles as being the
sole events that spur organizing. Bhabha is in favor of looking at resistance movements that emerge
from within the zones of neglect in a way that nuances their development. In this project, the
nontheatrical films, posters and flyers, murals, and community newspapers underscore in graphic
terms what it meant for Chicanas/os and Arabs to survive under precarity and terror. These visual
and textual cultures of self-representation demonstrate that these texts and media are part of longer
and complex histories with resistance and other anticolonial and decolonial work. Rather than
lamenting their situation, Chicanas/os and Arabs refused passivity.
21
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), xi.
19
How might one study relational displacements and the activity resistance of the barrio and
banlieue while respecting the differences of both spaces, Chicana/o and Arab identity, and media
production? Achille Mbembe explains that in the 1990s racialized communities in France
addressed the postcolonial question in the metropole by drawing on African American artistic and
media texts, namely the hip hop and rap music genres.
22
This is an example of relationality of the
banlieues and ghettos where music becomes the expressive channel to discuss a diasporic condition
with police brutality, racism, and the legacy of slavery. After all, the emergence of hip hop culture
in Black communities critiqued the governments for their oversight. Through this, questions of the
circulation of goods and cultural texts among aggrieved groups throughout the world ask how
artistic forms of resistance influence and encourage anticolonial and decolonial creativity and
resistance against displacement. Based on this example, one should think about how coalitions are
formed and how solidarities are established across space and time with minimal to no physical
encounter or interaction. As I presented earlier, Glissant’s postcolonial relationality allows points
of connections in moments of prolonged chaos, and studies of race encourages us to point out the
factors that bind groups together, even though the groups have presumably never been in direct
dialogue with each other.
Although barrios and banlieues are not in close geographic proximity to the Global South,
this does not dismiss the fact that community members who have roots in colonized spaces have
described their living conditions in colonial terms. The fact that both urban peripheries have been
described in such terms relates a history of racial subjugation and colonial violence. Furthermore,
the experience with urban displacement and policing as a metonym of colonization presumes that
22
Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011), 91.
20
racialized communities are excluded from the national body, as if they were temporary workers
with no prospects of guaranteed citizenship.
Anticolonial and Decolonial Resistance
The anticolonial and decolonial concerns in the barrios and banlieues differed due to the
trajectories of U.S. and French colonialism. The gift of anticolonial and decolonial resistance is
the refusal to be defined. The heterogenous definitions are productive for studying how
Chicanas/os and Arabs engaged in these struggles through visual and textual cultures in the barrios
and banlieues. While anticolonial and decolonial acts of resistance might invoke images of armed
struggle against colonial and imperial powers, anticolonial and decolonial activity from urban
space called attention to a specific anticolonial project that linked the deteriorating social
conditions with the experiences of victims of French and U.S. violence in the Global South.
Chicanas/os and Arabs sympathized with anticolonial and decolonial resistance across various
projects in order to call attention to the local violence of displacement.
I define Chicana/o and Arab anticolonial resistance as a revolutionary project that
forcefully critiqued imperial violence against racialized people by actively challenging the actors
of the state such as local police while refusing to support French and U.S. military projects. For
Chicanas/os and Arabs, anticolonial resistance hit closer to home because they were descendants
of people who experienced the violence of dispossession and forced acculturation to the colonizing
regime. An anticolonial posture is forceful and confrontational, and it actively identifies, names,
and targets the oppressive institutions, systems of exploitation, and other networks that preserve
colonial relations. Working from within the borders of U.S. and French empire, Chicana/o and
Arab anticolonial resistance in urban space became an imperative and urgent project along with
similar movements in urban and rural spaces across the world. To adopt an anticolonial posture is
21
to make sense of the contradictions of liberation and justice. There is a commitment to interrupt
colonization by going against the system of colonization that has been normalized and
unquestioned. In short, anticolonial resistance is contestatory.
I define Chicana/o and Arab decolonial resistance as a liberatory principle that eschews
forced assimilation and normalized violence of cultural erasure by breaking away from the bounds
of colonial-imposed discourses of identity, humanity, and belonging. Though in the contemporary
moment calls to decolonize virtually everything saturates every single structural and systemic
injustice, decolonial resistance of the 1960s and 1970s was a project that involved a willingness to
unlearn performing nationalist projects rooted in assimilation, to design alternative structures of
cultural self-determination and learning, and to breach through the thick barriers that the colonial
regime erected around racialized difference. Through visual and textual cultures, Chicanas/os and
Arabs employed decolonial resistance to forge radical and political paths that delinked from U.S.
and French colonial violence.
The barrios and banlieues are characterized by the coexistence of vibrant exchanges;
cultural, religious, and racial heterogeneity. Understanding the history of immigration is crucial
for thinking about the anticolonial and decolonial resistance in the barrios and banlieues. Étienne
Balibar, in what he calls the “recolonization of immigration,” cites three aspects that explain how
they stand in as metonyms of colonization. The colonial recruit of disposable bodies, a subject we
already touched on, is part of the three. In addition, the transformation of colonial administrative
laws restricting the mobility of Indigenous populations in colonized nations continues in the
present moment. This includes policing, surveilling, and containing racialized bodies in the
banlieues; state-sanctioned violence through local militarized authorities is a metonym of
22
colonization. The assimilation projects and the state’s discretion of assigning French citizenship is
the third aspect that prompts the residents of banlieues to invoke the legacies of colonization.
23
In fact, Balibar’s critique concerns the wider implications of recolonization in the banlieue
because such tensions “can be read both at the level of daily realities and at that of great effects of
representation on the scale of humanity as a whole...”
24
The urban fringes in the world where state-
sanctioned violence is enacted on aggrieved groups, social program failures, and restricted social
and physical mobility reifies the colonization paradigm. However, the history of colonial policing
is more complex. In his assessment of “endocolonial segregation,” Mathieu Rigouste explains that
in the 1930s, the colonial police in Paris, known as La Brigade nord-africaine (The North African
Brigade), applied the colonial design of containment developed in the Maghreb to police, search,
and contain Arabs, and more specifically Muslims.
25
Evidently, the banlieues and the racialized
spaces of Paris have always been policed under colonial logics. In considering recolonization and
its adjacent terms as travelling theories, or as a relational framework, one begins to note that the
complexity of the metonym of colonization and the decolonial action that emerged in response to
them requires analyzing visual and literary texts since these movements were absent in mainstream
media. I maintain that the project of colonization has been absorbed and transformed into projects
of displacement, racialization, and social control over immigrants and racialized bodies. Thus, we
can see how a resistance of decolonial actions proliferated to oppose these regimes of
displacement.
23
Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 39.
24
Ibid, 41.
25
Mathieu Rigouste, La domination Policière: Une violence industrielle (Paris: La fabrique, 2012), 21. For this
citation, I must thank Gerty Dambury who mentioned this text to me during her visit to USC.
23
Actions of resistance against spatial segregation, racial animosity, and immigration status
are entry points to discuss how chaotic social entanglements are productive for discussing
displacement due to police brutality, evictions, deportations, and deaths of community members.
Broadly speaking, resistance of relational displacements is found among oppressed people
throughout the world. The logic of settler-colonialism, human subjugation, and exploitation are
few of the main scripts that were used by empires, making resistance movements against regimes
of displacement even more relational. However, there are more specific histories that bind certain
groups closer. Studying resistance against displacement through anticolonial and decolonial
resistance via visual and literary culture obliges us to acknowledge that the barrio and banlieue are
located in “developed” nations that continue to justify their imperial enterprise. In updating the
system of colonization by enacting violence on Indigenous populations and containing aggrieved
groups to marginal urban zones, industrial nations hold on to power at the expense of the humanity
of racialized people. In other words, the oppressive condition in the barrio and banlieue as a
metonym of colonization is different from the perpetual systems of colonization in occupied
countries. Working through this dilemma requires making these distinctions clear to eschew
conflation and to prevent minimizing the ongoing settler-colonial realities that Indigenous people
face.
26
During the Chicano Movement, roughly from 1965 to 1974, the barrios witnessed the
emergence of Chicana/o militancy. The Brown Berets, a group of young people, modeled and
fashioned themselves after the Black Panther Party and the Puerto Rican Young Lords. In
borrowing ideologies from both groups, the Brown Berets maintained an oppositional stance
26
See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education
and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang warn about the uses of using decolonization as a
metaphor to describe naming injustices. They write that even well-intended people and institutions risk appropriating
the term, and thus erasing Indigenous resistance against this lived reality.
24
against the policing of their communities. In the era of anticolonial and decolonial activity,
racialized groups in the U.S. sought to establish themselves nationally. For example, the Black
liberation movement furthered and popularized the idea of claiming Black nationalism within the
body of the colonialist and racist U.S.
27
Black nationalism sought to construct a space that valued
Black humanity. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton wrote that Black people had to
question the values, norms, and ideologies of society. In doing so, Black people redefined
themselves through a radical posture that centered justice that bypassed the benevolent nation-
state. Carmichael and Hamilton explain, “Our basic need is to reclaim our history and our identity
from what must be called cultural terrorism, from the depredation of self-justifying white guilt.
We shall have to struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves
and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms recognized.”
28
This project of self-
actualization and self-determination resonated with racialized people whose histories were erased
and who were constantly reminded that they did not have a right to claim citizenship, humanity,
and membership.
Chicanas/os were similarly moved to action for a nationalist project. Through the Chicano
Movement, Chicanas/os established cultural sovereignty by invoking Aztlán, the mythohistorical
homeland of what is now the present-day U.S. Southwest. The internal nationalist movements of
the U.S. revealed the desire of racialized groups to fight against domination and to disrupt the
longue durée of colonization in urban spaces. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain in
what they call “cultural nationalisms,” these projects such as Aztlán “focused less on the political
27
The Jamaican Black Nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey, inspired pan-African nationalism in the early twentieth
century. However, during the decolonial and liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Garvey’s philosophy
inspired communities and revolutionary leaders like Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, to call
for Black nationalism and independence.
28
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York:
Vintage Books, 1967), 44.
25
and economic elements of the nation-based approach—demands for statehood and self-
determination within specific territorial boundaries for example—than it has on the cultural
elements that give rise to collective identity, community, and a sense of ‘peoplehood’…”
29
Chicanas/os desired to carve out a unique national identity rooted in cultural commonality in order
to value their worth and existence and to inspire collective action against imperialism. This was a
project of anticolonial and decolonial resistance. Although these internal nations did not
materialize, this does not mean that their performativity was ineffective. Urban space has always
been a contested site, where racial, cultural, national, linguistic, and generational difference create
clashing visions for achieving liberation.
Locating barrio and banlieue anticolonial and decolonial resistance through the cultural
and political productions of the community grasp the concept of relationality. I conceive of barrio
and banlieue urban decolonial resistance against displacement as a political and decolonial thought
emerging from the fringes of urban space, where the community channels its energy into art,
literature, and protest. Through urban anticolonial and decolonial resistance against displacement,
people in both urban spaces make sense of the subjugation of racialized groups around the world
through acts of solidarity and in naming their oppressor. Furthermore, they also make a call to the
people within their communities to join the struggle against racism and other injustices.
During the 1960s and 1970s, a trove of manifestos proliferated throughout the world. The
radical events that occurred in the decolonizing Third World inspired racialized groups in
colonizing countries to establish solidarity with oppressed peoples. In the act of solidarity,
racialized groups in the Global North questioned their own status as colonized subjects. In the U.S.
for example, the Ten-Point program that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense devised
29
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2015), 86.
26
addressed the specific needs of Black communities in the U.S. inner cities. Huey P. Newton and
Bobby Seale’s 1966 platform advocated for revolutionary demands grounded on reparations,
educational justice, shelter, food, and most importantly, the recognition of humanity:
WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING. I know you want,
a black leather jacket; don't worry we gonna get you one. LAND, BREAD, HOUSING,
EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE? Always looking for justice. Went to death row
looking for justice, and that's just what I found, just us. LAND, BREAD, HOUSING,
EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, AND WE WANT SOME PEACE. Yeah, I got
your peace; rest in peace.
30
This radical manifesto offered a grain of optimism for the Black community, illustrating that the
basic necessities for human survival lacked in Black communities, thereby showing us why a lack
of material needs led people to describe their conditions in terms of internal colonization.
At around the same time of the formation of the Black Panther Party, anticolonial and
decolonial activity spread to East Los Angeles, informing how Chicanas/os shared solidarity with
other racialized groups in the U.S. and especially in the Americas. Chicanas/os made it clear that
they could not rely on government assistance to address the needs of the community and that self-
determination was the pathway to liberation from white supremacy and white institutional and
structural violence. Inspired by the global activity for liberation, barrio residents mobilized on
multiple fronts to support and link with anti-colonial struggles, such as joining anti-War
movements concerned with the destruction of Vietnam, and to develop resistance apropos to their
conditions by visualizing these histories and resistance on film, murals, and community
newspapers and prints.
30
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, “10-Point Platform,” PBS,
http://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_platform.html, Accessed 7 April 2018.
27
In 1968, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” a manifesto presented at the National Chicano
Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, catalyzed political activity that would later
unfold in barrios. The manifesto set forth a Chicana/o political vision:
El Plan de Aztlán sets the theme that the Chicanos (La Raza de Bronze) must use their
nationalism as the key or common denominator for mass mobilization and organization.
Once we are committed to the idea and philosophy of El Plan de Aztlán, we can only
conclude that social, economic, cultural, and political independence is the only road to total
liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism. Our struggle then must be for the
control of our barrios, campos, pueblos, lands, our economy, our culture, and our political
life. El Plan commits all levels of Chicano society—the barrio, the campo, the ranchero,
the writer, the teacher, the worker, the professional—to La Causa.
31
The manifesto contoured the boundaries on how Chicanas/os would achieve self-determination
and resistance during the Chicano Movement. Dedicated to a liberationist future in their barrios
(and other fringe spaces), as evinced by the call of the manifesto, Chicanas/os activated militant
language. Although this militant resistance employed masculinist rhetoric, and generational
conflicts emerged, the manifesto nonetheless inspired barrios to spring into revolutionary action.
Acuña explains that “antiwar fervor spread throughout the barrios, especially among youth,”
showing that youth, more so than the older generation, immediately identified with the oppression
of people affected by imperialism and colonialism.
32
Similar to the Black Panther Party, barrio
militancy required anticolonial and decolonial thinking from the perspective of urban space. While
these examples are mostly contextual to the U.S. of the late 1960s, they nonetheless echo the
language of liberation envisioned in the manifestos around the world that engaged in radical
imaginations by opening up third spaces.
As it will become clear throughout this project, during the 1960s and 1970s Chicanas/os
and Arabs outlined visions for liberation in many similar ways, and across diverse media. I turn to
31
El Plan Espiritual.
32
Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Longman, 2000), 376.
28
the 2005 manifesto by The Parti des Indigènes de la République (The Party of the Natives of the
Republic), a political party that tasks itself with representing the inhabitants of the banlieue.
33
Though it does not concern the decolonial movements of the past, this shows that the decolonial
condition and the radical organizing of the past continues in the present and informs how racialized
communities engage with justice. The manifesto makes explicit calls to the metonym of
colonization as experienced in racialized urban space. For example, the manifesto declares that
French Republicanism is a social, political, and national failure:
La décolonisation de la République reste à l’ordre du jour! La République de l’Egalité est
un mythe. L’État et la société doivent opérer un retour critique radical sur leur passé-
présent colonial. Il est temps que la France interroge ses Lumières, que l’universalisme
égalitaire, affirmé pendant la Révolution Française, refoule ce nationalisme arc-bouté au «
chauvinisme de l’universel », censé « civiliser » sauvages et sauvageons. Il est urgent de
promouvoir des mesures radicales de justice et d’égalité qui mettent un terme aux
discriminations racistes dans l’accès au travail, au logement, à la culture et à la citoyenneté.
Il faut en finir avec les institutions qui ramènent les populations issues de la colonisation à
un statut de sous-humanité.
34
The call for anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles points us to the exclusionary system of the
French Republican model where liberté, égalité, and fraternité is foreclosed to racialized others.
The Party insists that unity against France’s ongoing colonial system in the metropole, and in the
Départements d’Outre-Mer, can lead to a true universal and egalitarian social democracy rooted
in radical justice.
35
33
The Parti des Indigènes de la République bases its political mobilization on the ground of Indigeneity. The question
of Indigeneity deserves attention elsewhere for it cannot be properly explored in this limited space.
34
“L’Appel des Indigènes. Nous sommes les indigènes de la République,” January 2005, Indigenes-republique.fr,
Accessed 10 January 2018. My translation: “The decolonization of the Republic remains today! The Republic of
Equality is a myth. The State and the society must critically reflect on its past-present colonial. It is time for France to
interrogate its Knowledge, that universal egalitarianism, affirmed during the French Revolution, rekindles the
nationalism against “universal chauvinism,” supposedly to “civilize” the savages. It is urgent to promote radical
measures of justice and equality that call into question racist discriminations in regard to work, housing, culture, and
citizenship. We must call an end to institutions that subjugate populations from colonial legacies to the status of sub-
humanity.”
35
Ibid.
29
Although there is no evidence or scholarship exploring a barrio and banlieue connection,
the anticolonial and decolonial movements emerging from the periphery show us that the histories
of social injustice have been expressed through manifestos. The “Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” and
“L’Appel des Indigènes” take urban spaces as sites of decolonial activity and political movement.
The manifestos publicize the subordination of racialized people as if they were under
governance of colonial administrations in what Ramon Grosfoguel terms “colonial situations.”
36
Grosfoguel writes that the “cultural, political, sexual and economic oppression/exploitation” of
minorities by those in power reflects how the specter of colonization is felt among racialized
groups even when such system is absent. In France, for example, the anticolonial fervor also led
to decolonial demands, where Black students of the African diaspora sought unity and support for
liberation. Félix Germain draws our attention to the political and activist work of the Black
community between 1960 and 1974 where they worked towards decolonizing postcolonial
relations and attitudes in Paris. In regard to communal Black activism, Germain explains that Black
communities operated along ethnic, cultural, and national differences, and asks, “Did Pan-
Africanism still influence their goals?”
37
On similar territory with Black urban activism in the U.S.
during the era of the decolonization movements, Chicanas/os responded to working-class struggles
with aggrieved people around the world.
The revolutionary struggles of the 1960s and 1970s precipitated several overlapping
movements, some of which unfolded as uprisings, revolutions, and calls for self-determination.
Aggrieved groups living in neglected urban spaces contended with forced assimilation projects.
36
Ramon Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity,
Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the
Luso-Hispanic World 1, no.1 (2011), np.
37
Félix Germain, Decolonizing the Republic: African and Caribbean Migrants in Postwar Paris, 1946-1974 (East
Lansing: Michigan State University, 2016), 118.
30
The inhospitable nations like France and the U.S. never abandoned the colonial logic. Chicanas/os
and Arabs continued to experience rejection, racism, and discrimination, triggering resentment and
resistance. The discriminatory practices against racialized people and immigrants since the outset
of the twentieth century drove these oppressed groups to rebel against regimes of displacement
through decolonial and political action. Barrios and banlieues are still characterized as racialized,
migrant spaces that continue to struggle against U.S. and French nationalism, respectively.
Return to Relationality
“Minor transnationalism,” a concept that Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih advance for
remapping how solidarities and coalitions shape horizontal modes of interaction between two
minor countries, regions, and groups of people, complements this study. For the authors, vertical
forms and systems conserve hierarchization and superiority. Disrupting verticality requires
thinking across, rather than through a top-down classical arrangement. According to Lionnet and
Shih, verticality interferes with the radical potential of oppressed groups speaking across to each
other. The horizon is promising in that it reaches wide and across, bypassing obstructions and
creating distinct modes of communication and visibility. “More often than not,” write Lionnet and
Shih, “minority subjects identify themselves in opposition to a dominant discourse rather than vis-
à-vis each other and other minority groups,” calling attention to how intellectuals uphold
verticality in studying “the center and the margin but rarely […] the relationships among different
margins.”
38
This is particularly relevant to our thinking on the relationality between barrios and
banlieues, with the understanding that Chicanas/os and Arabs did not speak to each other, but their
38
Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, Minor Transnationalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 2.
31
relational displacements are rooted in factors that have been used across space and time to racialize,
exclude, and displace.
Lionnet and Shih write that ethnic studies and Francophone studies share similar
decolonizing gestures. These studies take into account the “actual historical affiliations between
American civil rights movements and Third World liberation movements,” and that the Black
movements in the U.S. “were both national and international, with the agenda of civil rights
extending to a pan-African call for liberation of all black peoples from racism and colonialism…”
39
In following the authors’ statement, one can grasp that decolonial action in urban space of the
Global North was a global struggle because it also acknowledged the political work that influenced
transnational affiliations, conversations, and resistance. I argue that in placing in conversation the
fields of film and media studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies through this study, our
understanding about displacement and artistic resistance will provide us with the language and
tools to connect the struggles of peoples and spaces. It is undisputable, as I will show in this study,
that Chicanas/os and Arabs visualized their experiences with displacement and inspired their
communities into action.
Where comparative urban studies left off, I take as a point of departure to examine the
perpetual forms of displacement that affect Chicanas/os and Arabs who are connected to histories
of colonization. Though each space and situation are contextual and deserving of particular
attention, their histories reveal that in analyzing film, media, and literature, a clearer picture about
global justice in the interstices of the Global North advance a different kind of resistance that draws
inspiration from revolutionary movements taking place elsewhere.
39
Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, The Creolization of Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 18.
32
I maintain that a relational methodology that understands solidarity and coalitional work is
at the center of dismantling vertical structures of power. A relational study of the barrio and
banlieue appropriately initiates how we might place the histories of resistance of two distinct urban
spaces. For example, the nontheatrical films, the flyers and pamphlets of film screenings in radical
spaces, the inscriptions and visual histories on walls, and the community newspapers from both
spaces respond to government neglect, spatial alienation, and displacement on a scale that includes
police brutality.
Chapter Breakdown
Building a relational framework to discuss the resistance to displacement in the barrios and
the banlieues brings together interdisciplinary methods such as archival research, historiography,
discourse analysis, and visual analysis to study Chicana/o and Arab representations and self-
representation through a number of media. The archival material in this study remains inaccessible
to the communities described therein. Furthermore, I consider this material to be surviving visual
and textual culture that shows how this limited archival material speaks about displacement and
the threat of erasure. Generally, I work with nonextant materials or their photographic traces.
Chapter one, “Decolonization/Décolonisation: Nontheatrical Films of the Barrio and
Banlieue,” argues that though the nontheatrical films about the barrio and banlieue were produced
by educational organizations, publishing houses, state television, and government agencies, the
films contain decolonial images. These films were produced to edify audiences such as students
and other learned societies and yet Chicanas/os and Arabs ensured that their anticolonial critiques
and radical resistance were captured on camera.
Drawing on archival material such as pamphlets, flyers, and posters, chapter two,
“Screenings/Visionnages: Non-Traditional Spaces of Film Exhibition,” examines these texts and
33
the community spaces that screened currently nonextant or inaccessible films about the Arab world
and the Chicana/o experience. The chapter contends that these paper documents must be
considered part of film and visual culture because they illustrate how political organizations used
film screenings as a tool for organizing in underground and radical spaces. While the films are
inaccessible, I focus on the content of these flyers, pamphlets, and posters to ask why film viewing
was important for political inspiration.
Chapter three, “Publications/Parutions: Writing Against Displacement,” examines the
metaphors, rhetoric, and poetics of anticolonial resistance on the pages of community newspapers
and magazines such as La Raza in East Los Angeles and Sans Frontière in Paris. I contend that
these community publications are anticolonial texts because the writing shows how the project of
decolonization formed in urban spaces of the Global North by invoking the resistance throughout
the decolonizing world.
I continue on the theme of absence in chapter four, “Murals/Murs: Visual Histories and
Decolonial Inscriptions of Liberation,” by analyzing mostly nonextant murals. Destroyed, erased,
or forgotten, I instead analyze those visual histories of resistance through photographic traces from
various archival sources. I specifically focus on how artists and allies visualized displacement and
histories of resistance and how we must also consider writings on walls, which I call decolonial
inscriptions, as part of the visual culture of liberation.
Finally, I conclude with a mediation on how the archive of the past is reanimated through
social media, especially in examining TikTok videos. I examine how users reanimate the archive
of resistance in order to keep these histories alive by bridging the visual culture and histories of
the past with contemporary struggles in the U.S. and France.
34
Conclusion
While this study focuses on the barrios and banlieues, the relational method inspires
connections between two seemingly disparate and distinct spaces. For instance, how would a
relational study of refugee camps across the world demonstrate how displaced people narrate their
experiences via film and media? In today’s globalized, dispersed, and displaced world, these
questions come to the foreground more than ever as we confront existential catastrophe as a result
of nationalism, ecological disaster, and health crises.
35
Chapter One
Decolonization/Décolonisation: Nontheatrical Films about the Barrio and the Banlieue
Introduction: Barrio and Banlieue Nontheatrical Films
Toward the end of two films, the camera captures distinct spaces that second-generation
children occupy. In the first, five children enter the frame upon returning home from school, an
appropriate and timely arrival as the interviewer asks the mother her reflections on domesticity
and her role as matriarch. As the children file in, the camera pans and focuses on each beaming
face (figure 1.1). In the second film, the camera pans in close-up shot to document an empty
classroom decorated with drawings and other educational material, followed by shots of a
populated classroom where children do arts and crafts activities and read as a collective with their
instructor (figure 1.2).
The first film, Les jeunes travailleurs étrangers (Young foreign laborers) (1967), directed
by Jean-Pierre Chartier for the television series L’Avenir est à vous (The Future is yours), is a
visual remnant of the television programming that documented the life of youth in France during
a major period of social and political upheaval.
1
The interviewer asks each child about their career
aspirations and their reflections on France and Algeria. Two of the children explain that Algeria is
all but a formed impression passed down to them by their parents through their memories of the
homeland. Exemplifying a generational difference, the children do not speak Arabic, evincing that
they are part of a new generation with no strict ties to Algeria or the Arabic language. In the second
film, Chicano (1976), directed by J. Gary Mitchell for BFA Educational Media, the children do
not address the camera or even care to notice its presence as they exercise their creativity on paper;
1
Les jeunes travailleurs étrangers, directed by Jean-Pierre Chartier, 1967, VDP7625, Collection Paris Île-de-France,
Le forum des images, Paris, France.
36
Figure 1.1. Still from Les jeunes travailleurs étrangers, directed by Jean-Pierre Chartier (1967),
Le forum des images/Bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris, France.
Figure 1.2. Still from Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell (1976), USC School of Cinematic
Arts Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
the instructors are the interlocutors.
2
The teachers share that they attempt to inculcate their students
with important bicultural education, such as teaching them Mexican customs and traditions. The
teachers explain that the children do not speak Spanish due to the discriminatory education system
that forbids them to communicate in any language other than English. In both contexts, the mere
utterance of a language other than the so-called “official” one would result in the disciplining of
the pupils, making this institutional violence an example of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls “linguistic
terrorism.”
3
2
Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell, 1976, Los Angeles Public Library Film Collection, Hugh M. Hefner Moving
Image Archive, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.
3
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), 58. Gloria Anzaldúa
discusses that during her formative education years in public school in Texas, speaking Spanish was forbidden.
Anzaldúa expresses that Chicanas internalized the fear of speaking Chicano Spanish in spaces such as the school. This
37
These two instances of second-generation children on film foregrounds the relational
aspect on displacement that Chicana/o and Arab youth of the 1960s and 1970s experienced due to
unfair education systems in the U.S. and France that prohibited them from displaying their cultural
difference as a result of assimilationist French and American identity. The children and their
families in both films experienced some of the most intense forms of discrimination during this
era, and many of the youth in these two decades would eventually sympathize with the anticolonial
and decolonial resistance and engage in the radical politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Les jeunes
travailleurs étrangers and Chicano contextualize how the entrenched social inequities contributed
to the alienation of Arabs and Chicanas/os. How is displacement in the barrio and banlieue
captured on film by outsiders? How did community members and allies seize the opportunity to
forcefully express themselves in the presence of the camera?
This chapter examines nontheatrical films about the barrio and banlieue mostly shot by
filmmakers who were not residents of those urban spaces, or who did not possess affiliation to
Chicana/o and Arab identity and culture. I argue that nontheatrical films captured Arabs of the
banlieues in Paris and Chicanas/os from the barrios of East Los Angeles engaging in anticolonial
and decolonial resistance through their critiques of the systems of displacement in their
neighborhoods. Nontheatrical films were key platforms where both communities articulated a
stance against policing and other forms of oppression. I define anticolonial and decolonial
resistance in barrio and banlieue nontheatrical films as the radical practice in which community
members commanded the attention of spectators in order to narrate their struggles by flaunting
their political and militant identity. By fashioning themselves as radical and defiant through the
choice of their clothes, chanting protest slogans on cultural affirmation, occupying public space
linguistic terrorism also included the disciplining and surveillance of language, suppressing thought, and the
foreclosing a plurilingual diversity.
38
for protests, coordinating their body movements to reveal confidence, and by unapologetically
discussing their grievances before the camera, Arabs and Chicanas/os foregrounded liberation as
the ultimate project. I must underscore that the filmmakers and residents of the barrio and banlieue
did not define their activism as anticolonial and especially not decolonial. Though these concepts
might appear anachronistic, especially the latter, Chicanas/os and Arabs were politically oriented
to critique U.S. and French colonialism, imperialism, and they connected those forms of
displacement occurring elsewhere to their conditions in the urban margins. I maintain that by
activating anticolonial and decolonial resistance, Chicanas/os and Arabs subverted the intention of
the films to document narratives of vulnerability, victimization, and fatalism that the
commissioners of the films hoped to impose. In addition, the impassioned testimonies that Arabs
and Chicanas/os delivered before the camera underscore how intersecting struggles on
immigration, labor exploitation, insalubrious housing, education inequality, and police brutality
informed their activism and can thus be examined relationally.
In studying anticolonial and decolonial resistance in nontheatrical films that dealt with race,
I focus on how Chicanas/os and Arbs envisioned the project of liberation in urban space. In doing
so, I read Chicana/o and Arab resistance as decolonial resistance. In addition, I disrupt the accepted
celebrations of Los Angeles and Paris as epicenters of cinematic innovation by calling attention to
how the filmmaking institutions failed to maximize the potential use of the cameras to include
racialized people. Innovation requires critical and creative expansion, and the film institutions’
deliberate erasure and exclusion of racialized communities turns this innovation upside down.
Through a focus on nontheatrical films that recorded the not-so-picturesque reality of the city in
the periphery of the studios, I make a case why studying these media relationally illuminates the
radical work of Arabs and Chicanas/os. Mark Shiel explains that “Since the end of the nineteenth
39
century, the fortunes of cinema and the city have been inextricably linked on a number of levels,”
and adds that “Formally, the cinema has long had a striking and distinctive ability to capture and
express the spatial complexity, diversity, and social dynamism of the city through mise-en-scène,
location filming, lighting, cinematography, and editing…”
4
Shiel’s assessment of cinema and
urbanscapes reveals that the city is filmable insofar as the margins are excised from the frame. By
focusing on nontheatrical films of the barrios and banlieues, I demonstrate how the films expose
the incongruent cinematic imaginations of these two cities and revealed for spectators how spatial
segregation based on race, class, and immigration status was embedded into the fabric of these
cities.
Nontheatrical films from the U.S. and France drew attention to the grievances of each
racialized community to audiences beyond the immediate space of the barrio and the banlieue. As
noted by scholars, the definition of nontheatrical films varies according to historical, institutional,
social, political, and racial context. In Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United
States, Devin Orgeron, Marsha Gordon, and Dan Streible discuss that nontheatrical films have
been produced under various categories such as, “educational, instructional, informational,
practical, useful, pedagogical, nontheatrical, or nonfiction,” and their goals were to instruct
diverse spectators according to their identity, profession, and education status.
5
Furthermore,
nontheatrical films proved to be resourceful in teaching audiences how to perform labor, learn the
history and culture of racialized others, and acquire an intellectual breadth. Though many of these
films are no longer extant due to the fact that 16mm formats “have historically suffered from
4
Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a
Global Context, eds. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 1.
5
Devin Orgeron, Marsha Gordon, and Dan Streible, Introduction to Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film
in the United States, eds. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Gordon, and Dan Streible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
3.
40
limited access and archival scarcity,” I focus on nontheatrical films about the barrio and banlieue
to revisit how the interview subjects expressed desires for liberation and how they articulated
anticolonial critiques and enacted decolonization through self-determination and radical
militancy.
6
In their own right, nontheatrical films are historical visual documents that beg questions
about the metrics and criteria used to preserve these films, and why others were immediately
disposable. A niche cinematic genre, the limited circulation of nontheatrical films targeted
specialized audiences such as students. These films, shot with low budgets, were produced by
entities with limited resources, such as government agencies, publishing houses, and local
television networks. Though many are nonextant, those that exist are not immediately available to
the public. For example, the films in this chapter have been displaced across institutions and they
currently reside in university and film archives.
Recent scholarship in film studies has taken an interest to revisit nontheatrical films on
racial and cultural difference. Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon explicitly focus on
nontheatrical films that treat race in the context of the U.S. in order to shed light on the erasure of
films by and about people of color that were screened outside the conventional cinema theatre.
7
Field and Gordon explain that by centering race as the “organizing principle” in the study of
nontheatrical cinema, film studies would benefit from a rich and complex historical inquiry that
would open up new ways of revisioning and resituating this genre and the question of race in the
U.S.
8
I argue that examining nontheatrical films about the Chicana/o and Arab experience provides
an opportunity to read anticolonial critiques and decolonial elements that were concurrently taking
place throughout the decolonizing world. Considering the temporal scope of this study, I maintain
6
Ibid., 8.
7
Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, Introduction to Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, eds.
Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 2.
8
Ibid., 4.
41
that an analysis of how decolonization and liberation appeared in the frames of these films,
especially since decolonial films were produced at this time around the world, offers a relational
framework to study how nontheatrical films about racialized urban spaces in different national and
local contexts relied on paternalistic motifs when representing racialized communities.
Furthermore, a study of these specialized films illustrates that Chicanas/os and Arabs took the
opportunity to discuss anticolonial critiques and enact decolonization as a way of speaking back
against the powers of displacement at a time when the local press failed to cover their stories. A
nontheatrical film framework to study anticolonial and decolonial resistance in films about the
barrio and the banlieue encourage us to consider the legacies of colonization and racial injustice
as relational experiences. Though the residents of these spaces never referenced each other, what
a relational analysis underscores is the manner in which Arabs and Chicanas/os protested police
brutality, incarcerations, deportations, and deaths that occasioned displacement in the 1960s and
1970s. Furthermore, a study of nontheatrical films about the barrio and the banlieue shows us how
both spaces in countries that promulgated principles of so-called democracy and equality were
hammered by the force of policing and systems of oppression in order to conceal the contrasting
reality of the urban margins. This study thus offers a method to study visual culture about urban
spaces across the world bounded by relational systems of oppression, even if those spaces never
come in direct contact.
A nontheatrical film framework to study race relationally poses a number of challenges.
First, Field and Gordon’s definition of the term with attention to race pertains to the context of the
U.S. This raises a problem for the French context since the history of racial formation and race
dynamics differs from those in the U.S., thereby requiring a sustained analysis that affords careful
attention to studies of race and ethnicity in France. Scholars that study race dynamics in France
42
take into account the histories of colonization and the construction of racial categories as I
discussed in the introduction. These vital conversations in France are deflected when invoking
multiculturalism and secularism, which reinforces that “French racism is based on conformity or
assimilation to French cultural norms, and thus does not constitute ‘racism’ at all.”
9
First, I avoid
conflating the racial formation of both groups by stressing that racism and the experiences of
inequality in the banlieues and bidonvilles excluded Arabs from the center of Paris. Second, using
nontheatrical films to study Chicana/o and Arab anticolonial critiques and decolonial actions in
relation to displacement may puzzle readers. How does one allow for the documentary footage to
speak for itself while concurrently reading it through an anticolonial and decolonial reframe? And
by reading resistance to displacement on film, how does this expand our inquiry about the uses of
nontheatrical films and the themes that are not always readily apparent to spectators?
I employ both concepts to study the events within the frames and to tell a story that enriches
our relationship with the films. These terms allow me to contextualize the events that transpired in
the barrio and the banlieue, and foreground the work of their inhabitants against systems of
exclusion and containment. Third, the films about the barrio and the banlieue did not always share
the same concerns in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the French films on the experiences of
Arabs were privy to immigration and acculturation whereas in the U.S. a major theme concerned
generational conflicts and the contentious radical self-determination of the Chicano Movement.
Relationally, the nontheatrical films about the barrio and banlieue address labor organizing,
inadequate housing, and police violence. With these challenges in mind, I respect and acknowledge
the cultural, social, racial, and political particularities of Arabs and Chicana/os. Instead, I use their
9
Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, “Introduction,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, eds. Sue
Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 4.
43
struggles against oppression to tell a history of how both communities vocalized anticolonial
critiques and enacted decolonial action in nontheatrical films to combat displacement from the
urban edges of the Global North.
The films that emerged out of the 1960s and 1970s were substantially documentary-style
films responding to the wave of social change across the world. Some responded to the calls from
artists, filmmakers, and subaltern voices compelling those with access to cameras to use the
apparatus for liberation and revolutionary activity. Revolutionary films against colonial, imperial,
and dictatorial regimes multiplied at this time, proving that the function of the camera and moving
images could transcend escapist narratives and capitalist arrangements from which they were
produced.
In the French context, the films of Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Jean-Luc Godard
dominate the field of French documentary studies due to their innovative filmmaking styles that
subverted and challenged the conservative and traditional cinematic conventions. Against the
common backdrop of social movements, the theatrical films of 1960s and 1970s France focused
primarily on the collaboration between French working-class laborers and intellectuals who found
common ground in rejecting capitalist exploitation and to some extent the imperial projects
abroad.
10
Colonial relations were covered in early documentary films of the 1950s. For example,
spectators could not overlook the striking colonial elements embedded in the films of Jean Rouch.
In Rouch’s Les maîtres fous (1955) and Moi, un noir (1958), for example, the filmmaker shows us
that the postcolonial situation formed spaces of segregation that widened the gulf between the elite
10
See Rosemarie Scullion, “On the Waterfront: Class Action and Anti-Colonial Engagements in Paul Carpita’s ‘Le
Rendez-vous des quais’,” South Central Review 17, no. 3 (2000): 35-49. Paul Carpita’s Le Rendez-vous des quais
(1955) exemplifies how working-class struggles amidst intense labor movements were also concerned with French
colonial relations in Southeast Asia. The film itself was the subject of censorship, thereby illustrating that theatrical
films were not exempt from being forbidden to support the workers struggle and critique French colonialism.
44
and the common masses in Black Africa. Though the latter is fictional, it nonetheless contains
ethnographic elements that are evident in the documentary genre of the former. In both, the Black
subjects are placed under the colonial gaze of the camera, especially in intimate scenes that are not
meant for non-members of the community to witness. Peter J. Bloom explains that Rouch’s
identity as a French director filming Black subjects has positioned him “as an institutional figure
in the history of French anthropology and cinema” and that this has “coded him as very much
within the realm of the humanistic colonial inheritance.”
11
And although the films that preceded
Rouch’s work focused on race relations and the living conditions of racialized groups the urban
margins, the directors of such works, especially in France, were aware about the power of the
camera and its mission in transmitting images from the spaces of segregation and inequality. In
contrast, the filmmakers of the nontheatrical films used a different approach that enabled Arabs
and Chicanas/os to narrate their experiences, while adding anticolonial and decolonial resistance.
In France, entities such as the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française were tasked
with transmitting cultural and educational programming. The television specials produced and
aired during the 1960s and 1970s benefitted from an era that, as Sophie Bachmann characterizes,
“est restée dans les mémoires comme une des plus libérales qu'ait connue la télévision” (“remains
in memory as one of the most liberal years that television had experienced”).
12
Bachmann adds
that in 1974, the ORTF was the largest enterprise that informed viewers and offered
entertainment.
13
French television, as we will note in the examples shortly, concerned itself with
discussing matters related to social class inequities. Race was intimated sparingly in the
11
Peter J. Bloom, “Unraveling the Ethnographic Encounter: Institutionalization and Scientific Tourism in the oeuvre
of Jean Rouch,” French Forum 35 (2010): 83.
12
Sophie Bachmann, “La suppression de l'ORTF en 1974: La Réforme de la ‘Délivrance’,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue
d'histoire 17 (1988): 64. My translation: “The era remains in historical memory as one of the most liberal that
television has ever known.”
13
Ibid.
45
nontheatrical films. Though anti-immigrant sentiments were widespread at this time in France,
Monia Lecomte explains that state television sought to transmit cultural values and that television
opened the possibility to elevate the nation.
14
Evidently, the pedagogical component was designed
in the French context, especially in state television, to promote learning, but this did not necessarily
mean that the films engaged with racism, colonial situations, and discrimination.
Anticolonial critiques and decolonial actions in barrio and banlieue films, I argue,
proliferated at this time. The cameras recorded Arabs and Chicana/os in mid-action, protesting,
engaging in the wellbeing of the community, and putting their bodies in the frame and on the line
to convey their discontent on the impunity that systems of oppression enjoyed in regard to violence
committed upon racialized communities.
What do we gain in studying nontheatrical films about the barrio and the banlieue and what
can this study teach us about displacement in urban space of different national contexts? The first
part of this chapter situates the emergence of anticolonial critiques and decolonial actions in
nontheatrical films by starting off with two historical events: the October 17, 1961 massacre of
Algerians in Paris and the Chicano Moratorium of August 29, 1970. Although occurring nearly a
decade apart, I argue that these two episodes were the watershed moments in which anticolonial
and decolonial resistance of the barrio and banlieue activism were articulated most clearly in the
era of decolonization. I transition to elaborate on anticolonial critiques and decolonial resistance
and identify specific instances in which these came across in the films. I finally arrive at different
sections related to displacement where I show how the films recorded the hazardous conditions of
urban space as a result of government neglect, specifically the dilapidated housing, the abject
poverty, and community life under these toxic conditions; police brutality and occupation of the
14
Monia Lecomte, “La mission culturelle de la télévision française,” French Cultural Studies 10, no. 28 (1999): 40.
46
barrios and banlieues; and arrests and deportations of community members. The final section of
this chapter focuses on how community members reclaimed space in order to build community
and establish links of solidarity.
Displaced Violence as the Decolonial Watershed
Not all major decolonial events unfolded at once, and all were not exclusive to the so-called
Third World. In the case of France and the U.S., the cases of police brutality that took place in the
two cosmopolitan urban spaces were a reminder to the racialized groups that they lived in the
colonial matrix and that these atrocities concurrently unfolded in the Global South. The action that
ensued included antiracist and anticolonial organizing; the people in the barrios and banlieues
would no longer endure abuse and other displacements. As I will show in this section, colonial
violence was not endemic to the Global South; police applied this violence in Los Angeles and
Paris.
Los Angeles and Paris are marked by deeply seeded histories of violence in public space.
Through the militarized control by authorities over contested public space, the power displayed
over these sites reified the exclusion of racialized groups into the margins and it served to remind
the marginalized that their presence justified surveillance. How did the violence of urban space
relate to nontheatrical films? How does film help expand our understanding of decolonial
expressions enacted in East Los Angeles and Paris? Before exploring the anticolonial and
decolonial resistance of barrio and banlieue residents, I focus on the critical historical moments
that inspired the community members to make more vocal and visual anticolonial and decolonial
resistance. By revisiting the October 17, 1961 massacre of Algerians and the Chicano Moratorium
of August 29, 1970 as catalysts for barrio resistance against regimes of displacements, the
47
relational element of both urban margins becomes evident. The passage of time has not erased
these haunting events; they affect the political, cultural, and historical present.
In mid-twentieth century Paris, the displacements that took place in North Africa and in
the metropole coincided with the prolonged French war in Algeria. Perturbed by the violence
unfolding in their homelands, Arabs in Paris formed coalitions to demonstrate against French
colonial violence and rallied against injustices in the labor force. The history of anti-Arab
sentiments in France predates the notorious evening of October 17, 1961. We are reminded that
racial violence is slow violence and it does not always burst spontaneously. Rob Nixon articulates
how slow violence unfolds, and it often crawls, by writing that it “occurs gradually and out of
sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”
15
I contend that
the colonial violence outside of the metropole was slow and that it spread across the colonies, and
it eventually made its way to Paris, the center of the so-called Lumières. As Jean-Luc Enaudi
explains, Algerian involvement in labor organizing movements during the 1950s and the rise of
“Algerian nationalist tendencies” contributed to anti-Algerian bias and it influenced French
xenophobia.
16
To understand how the specter of colonial violence of October 17 dominated and
haunted the memories of Arabs in Paris before and after the event, we must return to the
mechanisms of policing and containment that were designed to maintain control over Arab
populations in the Maghreb and in the metropole.
In galvanizing Algerians into action against the discriminatory curfew implemented by the
Prefect of Police Maurice Papon on October 2, 1961, in response to the growing Algerian
resistance to the French war in Algeria, which the police justified required containment, the Front
15
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2.
16
Jean-Luc Einaudi, “Crime: Colonial Violence in the Metropole (1954–1961),” in Colonial Culture in France since
the Revolution, eds. Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, and Dominic Thomas (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2014), 380.
48
de Libération Nationale urged Algerians across Paris to protest against the orders. Algerians and
allies prepared with fastidious care through grassroot outreach in spaces of socialization such as
in the cafés. Arabs defied authorities by marching en masse through the streets of the city on
October 17. In donning their best outfits at the protests, Arabs projected an image of respectability
in order to garner sympathy for the Algerian cause.
17
I add that by protesting in their impressive
clothing, they invalidated orientalist ideas of Arabs as uncivilized, anachronistic colonial subjects
and they shattered the image of Arabs in labor uniforms. Sidi Mohammed Barkat eloquently
expressed that the peaceful protest of Arabs constituted for them “un acte positif de liberté contre
leur condition d'exclus du dedans, un acte de refus de la condition d'inégalité politique dans
laquelle ils étaient tenus” and that “Ces corps vêtus pour la circonstance de leurs plus beaux habits,
c'étaient les corps d'hommes et de femmes qui se pensaient et se voulaient désormais libres.”
18
Despite the peaceful demonstrations on that day, the police unleashed unrelentless violence against
Arabs, leading to displacements in the form of immediate removal from the streets, detentions,
deportations, and murder.
The police tactics and violence of October 17 against Arabs culminated with displacement.
These forms of violence are learned. The violence against Algerians in Paris were applied from
the blueprint of French colonial violence in North Africa in what Jim House and Neil McMaster
17
See Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandysim and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Duke
University Press, 2009). In the context of the U.S., a discourse on respectability politics and the Black community is
nuanced and includes questions of dress. For example, visual culture of the Civil Rights marches shows us that clothing
such as men’s tuxedos and women’s dresses were visual markers of respectability and humanity. Writing in the context
of Black dandyism, Monica L. Miller writes that the dandy’s body and his clothing tells a story about “African
diasporic identity and the representation of blackness across time and cultures” (7). In the context of the 1961 march,
the clothes on the bodies of Arab men and women also tell a history about the ways in which stereotypes about Arabs
were negated and how the clothes are a symbol of the respectability politics that conceal the “othered,” exploited body.
18
Sidi Mohammed Barkat, “A propos d’un massacre colonial. Le colonisé comme corps d’exception.”
http://17octobre1961.free.fr/pages/dossiers/barkat.htm. My translation: Peaceful protests constituted for Arabs “a
positive act of liberty against their exclusion from within, an act of refusal against political inequality under which
they were held against” and that “The clothed bodies byway of their best presentable outfits, belonged to men and
women who wanted to be free.”
49
have termed the “Papon System.”
19
Einaudi explains of the eventful day, “Relying on racist
typology naturally became a salient trait of mass colonial violence in the metropole.”
20
Properly
stated, violence and displacement are products of colonialism whose legacies are embedded in the
structures and systems of power that seek to undermine grassroot movements and quests for
liberation. These scholars have covered the violence of October 17, particularly concerning the
arrests and incarcerations (via concentration camps in Paris), deportations, and disappearances
through deaths. The overwhelming majority of the detained men were transported to camps such
as the Palais des Sports, Vincennes, and Beaujon, and some were later deported to Algeria, further
displacing them from the kinships they established in Paris. Those who did not make it to or out
of the camps were murdered and their bodies jettisoned into the Seine River. I draw these
connections in order to underscore that there were various displacements operating at once and
that protests were anticolonial and decolonial acts of resistance. These forms of displacement were
prominent prior to that evening, and as it is habitually known, history repeats itself when
institutions of power maintain the structures of colonial situations. The violence of arrests,
beatings, and evictions that took place in the urban spaces of Paris also unfolded in other cities
around the world where racialized groups were relegated to the peripheries.
Although the displacement of Arabs in October 1961 had occurred a decade before the
Chicano Moratorium, approaching both through a framework of relational displacements, it is
clear that the urban margins of the Global North were active in the decolonial imperative. In
addition, the communities refused passivity and instead organized major resistance movements.
19
Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State, Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 46. Jim House and Neil MacMaster write that in 1958, Maurice Papon flew into Paris “a small team of
specialist army officers whose task it was to establish a similar operation to the SAS [Sections Administratives
Spécialisées], an organization which could, through social work, penetrate the Algerian emigrant community and
gather intelligence (46). The SAS were tasked with normalizing French Algeria and pacifying insurgency.
20
Einaudi, “Crime,” 381.
50
In East Los Angeles, the history of settler-colonial violence has always been visible and a
present reality for Indigenous people. From the historical displacement of the Indigenous from
their ancestral land, and to the arrival of migrants from Latin America, Asia, and Europe, histories
of displacement have always coalesced in the city. Scholars have produced important discussion
on displacement of East Los Angeles and the barrios by particularly focusing on the construction
of freeways. The gargantuan urban renovation projects and histories of settler-colonial violence in
the city impacted racialized groups of the 1960s and 1970s. As I will cover in chapter three
community members wrote about how they perceived the presence of police in the barrios as
colonial occupation. Prior to the Chicano Moratorium, residents of the barrios wrote about police
brutality and displacement in community publications such as La Raza published out of East Los
Angeles. Community members were overwrought as urban renewal programs dawned on the
eastside. Anticolonial and decolonial activity included written text produced in and about the
community, but it also necessitated the support of visual culture. As engaged community members
grappled with the violence in the barrios, they were attentive to the political and activist
movements throughout the world, especially the decolonial struggles. As they developed affinities
for the organic mobilizations in Latin America and the Caribbean, Chicanas/os were equally
fascinated by the revolution in Vietnam. The U.S.’ invasion of Vietnam affected Chicanas/os due
to the fact that Brown servicemen in Southeast Asia were disproportionately dying. The barrio
members drew links between police brutality in their own communities and the military occupation
in Vietnam. As a result, they mobilized to call attention to the issue of police violence in the barrio,
U.S. imperialism, and what I call relational displacements (figure 1.3).
51
Figure 1.3. Untitled flyer of anti-War protest collected by the Los Angeles Sherriff’s
Department. USC Special Collections Library.
On August 29, 1970, Chicanas/os and their allies came together in East Los Aneles to
condemn the war in Vietnam and to honor the community’s political engagement during the
Chicano Movement. I consider August 29, known as the Chicano Moratorium, the impetus for
anticolonial critiques and decolonial resistance in films about the East Los Angeles barrios. At the
event, calls for liberation of the barrios and the Third World figured prominently, where multiple
struggles intersected metaphorically. The barrios were implicated in this decolonial imperative and
such efforts were visible and represented in visual culture. From Puerto Ricans walking alongside
Chicanas/os protesting the occupation of their island, to banners renouncing the war in Vietnam,
calls against the U.S.’ occupation of the Third World and the barrios reverberated loudly
throughout Chicana/o activism of the 1960s and 1970s. As evinced, the barrios functioned as
spaces of mediation through which anticolonial and decolonial resistance were enacted, thus
making the barrio a decolonial site in the Global North.
The events of the Chicano Moratorium devolved due to a lack of communication.
Allegedly, the owner of a liquor store near the park called to the police to report that adolescents
52
had ransacked the business. In an already policed community, authorities were dispatched to
investigate the incident, resulting in a scuffle between police and the youth. Unable to apprehend
the alleged youth who eluded police, and who had already taken refuge among the sea of peaceful
demonstrators at the park, police declared the organized rally an unlawful assembly. Authorities
seized the opportunity to harass protestors and spectators, triggering the community to retaliate
with force. Threatened by the large crowd, police began dispersing them through militarized tactics
such as launching teargas canisters at protestors, shooting rubber bullets, beating with batons
innocent bystanders, and corralling defenseless people. This egregious display of violence and
power only heighted how the violence was routine and commonplace in the barrios. In acts of self-
defense, Chicanas/os resisted and hurled rocks and bottles at authorities. Metaphorically, the police
suppression of Chicana/o demonstrating against imperialism and colonialism paralleled the same
tactics of surveillance and containment that took place in Paris and elsewhere.
The displacements of Arabs during the October 17, 1961 demonstrations in Paris and
Chicanas/os at the August 29, 1970 Moratorium, propelled both communities to enact resistance
that could be understood as anticolonial and decolonial. These two events highlighted the
tenuousness between barrio and banlieue residents and authorities. It becomes clear that when the
two racialized groups occupied public space to draw attention to their cause, local authorities were
threatened by how Arabs and Chicanas/os jeopardized national security, and by extension the
imperial and colonial project. However, it is the history of incarceration, disappearances, and
deaths of community members that are particular but nonetheless indicative of how systems of
power continued colonial violence and aggression toward racialized groups. The violent police
grip did not suffocate barrio and banlieue residents because they used visual and literary culture in
both contexts to struggle against displacement.
53
After these watershed moments, there was an explosion of literary and visual culture
production that recontextualized for audiences the violence that occurred during the October 17
and August 29 events and the fractures of inequality that cut across the barrios and banlieues.
Visual and literary culture fit conspicuously in this anticolonial and decolonial pursuit. The
creativity from East Los Angeles and Paris included, murals, political posters and prints, and
flyers. Regardless of the scale in which histories of displacement were visualized, the visual culture
of liberation posed so much of a threat to the hegemonic order of the state and the regimes of
displacement, that authorities deemed it critical to collect this material to incriminate the
community. In the case of East Los Angeles, for example, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department
collected “inflammatory” flyers at public demonstrations and interpreted the visuals and messages
according to its ideology as insurgent.
21
Months prior to the moratorium, the Sheriff’s Department
collected a flyer created by an unknown source calling for a “violent revolution” against police
brutality. The flyer asked the people to arm themselves and it contained a recipe and graphic on
how to concoct a Molotov cocktail. While certainly a provocative visual piece, the flyer illustrates
how the community felt about police occupation and how the rhetoric of “by all means necessary,”
famously articulated by revolutionaries across the world, echoed across urban space and
materialized in the creation of a visual culture calling for direct action. Scholars such as Edward
J. Escobar explain that the Los Angeles Police Department’s attempt to “destroy the movement”
and responses against injustices “all mirrored and were a part of a larger dynamic in American
21
Typescript of “Intelligence Report,” Box 5, Folder 15, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Salazar Files, Intelligence
Investigation of ELA Chicano Moratorium March and riot of August 29, 1970, Doheny Memorial Library Special
Collections, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. In an intelligence report dated September 10,
1970, addressed to head of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Peter J. Pitchess, the document relates that
“inflammatory” material such as flyers were collected in the community. The USC librarians named files containing
flyers as “inflammatory” in order to reflect the language that the Sheriff’s Department used.
54
society in the late 1960s and early1970s.”
22
In addition, Escobar highlights the intimate affinities
between the Chicano Movement and the liberation movements taking place at the time by
explaining that “While the Chicano movement developed in response to a historically unique set
of grievances and generated distinctive solutions to those grievances, it emerged within and
benefited from the broader currents of social protest that existed in the sixties,” notably the Black
Liberation movement.
23
These movements, as I mentioned, used visual culture as a medium for
resistance and it inspired community members into action.
The dissemination of visual and literary culture in the barrios and banlieues raised a
political and decolonial consciousness. Though not every visual piece explicitly announced the
term anticolonial or decolonial, the idea had always been present. In the contemporary moment,
revisiting these nontheatrical films allows us to understand how Chicanas/os and Arabs enacted
anticolonial and decolonial acts of resistance to illustrate that both terms belong to a theoretical
lineage that made sense of the revolutions in contested space. Whether visualizing police brutality
and destruction of homes, to rendering solidarities with other groups of people in similar situations,
the artists played a role in making the barrios and banlieues sites of revolutionary activity against
hegemonic, assimilationist project by carrying out projects of cultural resistance in media and
texts. In chapter four I elaborate on how murals were part of the corpus of anticolonial and
decolonial visual culture.
It comes as no surprise that the endless possibility of film has been exploited to legitimize
the colonial apparatus. Aside from projecting the inventiveness of the medium, film serviced
colonial regimes to further ideas of Western superiority in capturing images of Indigenous people
22
Edward J. Escobar, “The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano
Movement, 1968-1971,” The Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (March 1993): 1486.
23
Ibid.
55
in their homelands as “savages” and “inferior.” Furthermore, film was used as a tool “edify”
racialized groups who were perceived as “inferior” due to their cultural, racial, and political
otherness. The Western audience’s perception of the idiosyncratic nature of racialized others
helped promote ideas that film could serve as the conduit of learning about the other while
simultaneously subjecting them to learn and assimilate to Western proprieties. In light of this, it
makes sense that the documentary film genre, and its related subgenres, have been scrutinized and
excoriated for belonging to a tradition of filmmaking that extracts racial and cultural significance
and packages it as an abstract visual product without reference to the spatial, cultural, and colonial
histories. If the documentary genre is laid bare to these criticisms, what do we make of
nontheatrical films?
As noted, the majority of nontheatrical films about the barrio and banlieue in this study
were shot and produced by people who did not inhabit those spaces. How do we find the
anticolonial and decolonial resistance when the films were made to teach audiences about
Chicanas/os and Arabs?
Anticolonial and Decolonial Resistance
How do we identify the anticolonial and decolonial resistance in the films about the barrio
and banlieue? What defines decolonial resistance in films that are meant to educate audiences
rather than intentionally spotlight revolutionary activity? A framework of anticolonial and
decolonial resistance in nontheatrical films allows us to think about how community members
were aware of the radical possibilities of the camera and how they could exhibit militancy to
achieve cultural pride. If documentary filmmaking has functioned as an intrusive genre to examine
the dynamics of racialized groups and render them objects of study, I argue that in identifying
anticolonial and decolonial resistance in films about the barrio and banlieue, elements of the
56
radical, political quests for self-determination become visible within the frame. This is a project of
recuperation that places these films in a different context. In other words, by looking beyond the
face value of the frame and the themes that nontheatrical films present, I am interested in the body
movements, the chants, the material culture, and the testimonies of the participants in those films.
It would be safe to claim that the filmmakers who made films about the barrio and banlieue did
not intend to make films about urban decolonization. Yet, I suggest that this framework helps us
put into perspective the spirit of liberation and the radical activity in urban space along with the
revolutionary films of the Third World in which the people imagined infinite possibilities for
radical change.
Though the idea of a decolonizing body and mind has been explored in the context of the
Third World and in the postcolonial era, decolonial resistance belongs to this scholarly tradition.
Elizabeth Grosz’s study on bodies in cities shows us that both inform each other and are
inseparable when studying how space shapes bodies and vice versa. Writing through a feminist
lens, Grosz explains,
The city is one of the crucial factors in the social production of (sexed) corporeality: the
built environment provides the context and coordinates for contemporary forms of the
body. The city provides the order and organization that automatically links otherwise
unrelated bodies: it is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually,
and discursively framed.
24
In organizing bodies along gender lines, we see that built environments of the public and private
spheres subject women and nonbinary bodies to disciplinary violence. Along these lines, racialized
bodies are also exposed to similar oppression. The spatial organization of the urban margins and
discriminatory politics inform how minorities are treated and rendered invisible. The idea and
production of the city thus functions as a panoptic field in which racial, class, and gender difference
24
Elizabeth Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, eds., Janet Price and Margrit
Shildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999), 381-382.
57
reproduces hierarchies and uneven forms of power. The racialized body that is forcefully contained
and policed in urban space seeks to break past the political and spatial borders. Though I am not
invoking the metaphor that the urban margins function as body organs that are detached from the
heart of the city center, we begin to understand that space is racialized and subjected to violence
as a result of its “otherness.” As early colonial texts have shown us, space is feminized, racialized,
and emptied of history and culture. The racialized body under oppression thus fights against the
violence and thus enacts anticolonial and decolonial resistance in order to dismantle systems of
oppression that target the communities and the bodies that dwell in them.
In the aftermath of the October 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris, films about migrants
in the peripheries proliferated. I focus in particular on the Arab struggle in order to call attention
to the history of colonialism and the anti-Arab sentiments that entered the political and cultural
realms in France during this period. In drawing on examples from Les Algériens de Paris (The
Algerians of Paris) (1966) directed by Alain de Sedouy and André Harris, reported by François
Ribadeau and Guy Demoy, and Georges Baguet’s L’Islam en France (Islam in France) (1976), I
show that productions were becoming increasingly interested in the condition of Arabs. A similar
observation can be made when studying nontheatrical films in the context of the Chicano
Movement. Films such as Luis Valdez’s Yo soy Joaquín (I am Joaquín) (1969) and J. Gary
Mitchell’s Chicano (1976) covered topics that reflected the changes and tensions in Chicana/o
communities. Though I will focus on the anticolonial and decolonial resistance in these films, I
will return to them later based on the themes they cover.
The body of the colonized is a site of violence. In order for the colonized to reclaim their
body from colonial violence, Frantz Fanon tells us, the colonized must undergo a turbulent journey
of decolonization. Fanon reminds us that decolonization is a violent pursuit, “La décolonisation
58
est la rencontre de deux forces congénitalement antagonistes qui tirent précisément leur originalité
de cette sorte de substantification que sécrète et qu'alimente la situation coloniale. Leur première
confrontation s'est déroulée sous le signe de la violence et leur cohabitation—plus précisément
l'exploitation du colonisé par le colon…C'est le colon qui a fait et qui continue à faire le
colonisé.”
25
The legacies of colonization are marked on the bodies of racialized groups, even on
those who live in urban spaces of the Global North. This colonial difference is furthermore a
confrontation and a battle over contested space, as Fanon suggests. As the anticolonial and
postcolonial writers have demonstrated, the racialized body is conditioned to comport itself by
self-policing when in the presence of institutions of power. How then do we find the decolonial in
nontheatrical films and in what ways did Arabs and Chicanas/os challenge the vestiges of
colonization?
First and foremost, the presence of the racialized other in Paris invokes the history of
colonization; the French and the colonized cannot escape that visual reminder. In de Sedouy and
Harris’ Les Algériens de Paris, the notable anticolonial and decolonial elements in the film are
evident through the address of Algerians to the camera directly in the landscape of the bidonville
(figure 1.4).
26
In the middle sequence of the film, a man speaks with the interviewer and explains
to him that French racism has made it impossible for him and others to secure employment.
25
Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 40. My translation: “Decolonization is the
encounter of two opposing forces that are nourished by the colonial situation. Their first clash unfolds under the sign
of violence and cohabitation—more precisely the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer…It’s the colonizer
who has produces and continues to produce the colonized.”
26
Les Algériens de Paris, directed by Alain de Sedouy and André Harris, 1966, VDP2279, Collection Paris Île-de-
France, Le forum des images, Paris, France.
59
Figure 1.4. Still from Les Algériens de Paris, directed by Alain de Sedouy and André Harris, Le
forum des images/Bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris, France.
In naming the racial injustice and offering specific examples of how these aggressions materialize,
the Algerian man presumably confronts a French audience. In his additional remarks, he discusses
the insalubrious living situation to which Arabs have been spatially confined. This address to the
camera reflects Arab discontent with longstanding histories of labor exploitation, rejection, and
subjugation. This containment can be traced to the legacies of colonialism. In addition to
recounting this issue, the Algerian man raises other topics such as the hostility he receives from
the French during his commute on the metro. Two young Algerian men corroborate these
experiences by recounting their own. In touring the television crew, and by extension the spectator,
through the unpaved, muddy paths and tight corridors of shacks, the young men present the flawed
French republican project as reflected in the conditions of the space. Both men blame the
insouciant French government for the neglect. In other words, they were treated as the debris of
the Republic. Airing their grievances in this context become anticolonial critiques and decolonial
resistance because they call attention to racism and myriad inequality, limited housing conditions,
and the forms of community support they build for each other.
Though filmed in 1966, Les Algériens de Paris was one of the first instances in which we
see the struggle of laboring migrants. In the ten-year lapse, Baguet’s L’Islam en France (1976),
60
produced by Société Radio-Canada, offered more instances of anticolonial and decolonial
resistance from North African migrants in the community of Belleville.
27
Arabs in Belleville were
active in preserving their culture while surviving in an inhospitable climate. In the opening
sequence of Baguet’s film, a Muslim man chants in the streets, yet, the narrator explains that
religion is often hidden from public display. This is due in part to the loi de la laïcité. French
secularism supposedly does not discriminate according to religious beliefs and that such open
practices of religious and cultural difference challenge cohesion. As Étienne Balibar reminds us,
the French married the image of Arabs to Islam, consequently fabricating a fear of Arab identity
through abstraction. Balibar explains that contemporary “arabophobie” in France marks a crisis in
that white, Christian French believe Islam is “incompatible avec l’européité et entreprise de
domination idéologique universelle,” and therefore a challenge to French identity.
28
Balibar
suggests that the French do not envision Arab culture central or even visible in French culture and
that it always becomes an exterior, displaced peripheral image in the social and political
imagination. The narrator of the film explains that Islam is mostly visible to migrant workers. We
are then introduced to shots of a makeshift mosque in an undisclosed location. The camera
introduces us to a tight space, where men in rows pray in unison. In a later scene of the film, young
children at the mosque learn Arabic and read the Coran. This scene is critical to our understanding
of how religious difference in France is transmitted to younger generations and thus constitutes an
anticolonial and decolonial form of resistance through cultural pride that challenges French
assimilation. I consider decolonial resistance a kind of visibility where the racialized body claims
27
L’Islam en France, directed by Georges Baguet, 1976, Collection Paris Île-de-France, Le forum des images, Paris,
France.
28
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, nation, classe. Les identités ambiguës (Paris: La Découverte,
1997), 37. My translation: “Incompatible with Europeanity and the enterprise of universalism in the ideological
realm.”
61
public space, out in the open to mark and display their identity via cultural and religious difference.
In this regard, I consider the visibility of the Muslim man in public space and the children learning
Arabic and the Coran as decolonial resistance because these scenes of cultural pride and difference
subvert the French universalist and integrationist model within the spaces of the metropole. These
two instances show us how religious difference is forcefully displaced, but it serves as a lesson to
help us think about how practicing Islam and preserving cultural norms is an anticolonial and
decolonial act that rejects cultural deracination and it transgresses discriminatory laws. Belleville,
a cosmopolitan neighborhood, is thus implicated as a decolonial site where migrants and racialized
people hailing from colonial legacies carve out a radical space for themselves. By practicing Islam
and exchanging cultural beliefs, Arabs in Les Algériens de Paris and L’Islam en France challenged
the colonial attitudes and contributed to the ongoing efforts to question French hegemony.
The early Chicano films that emerged in the 1960s, such as Luis Valdez’s Yo soy Joaquín
(1969), adapted from the poem by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, and produced by El Teatro Campesino
(The Theatre of Farmworkers), integrated all aspects of Chicanismo and poetic consciousness.
29
Chon Noriega defines this use of the cinematic medium and the transmission of racial and cultural
history as “Chicano determination.”
30
Noriega adds that Yo soy Joaquín “expanded the domain for
Chicano expressions into the mass media of film and television” and that this also signaled a shift
in Chicano determination from rural and local grassroots organizing to media activism at the
national level.
31
Valdez’s film is composed of montage pre-colonial and contemporary
iconography complementing the themes of the poem. The images comprised of photographs of
29
Yo soy Joaquín, directed by Luis Valdez, 1969, Los Angeles Public Library Film Collection, Hugh M. Hefner
Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California.
30
Chon Noriega, Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 2000), 6.
31
Chon A Noriega, “Imagined Borders: Locating Chicano Cinema in America/América,” in The Ethnic Eye: Latino
Media Arts, eds., Chon A. Noriega and Ana M. López, 3-21. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 7.
62
racialized communities and Mexican American culture of the Southwest U.S. and the profound
voice of the director reading the poem in voice over brings the words to life, showing how the
power of liberation and self-determination in the poem, aided by the cinematic, advanced the
project of cultural pride and self-determination (figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5. Still from Yo soy Joaquín, directed by Luis Valdez (1969), USC School of Cinematic
Arts Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
Although filmmakers such as Valdez began using theatre and film to advance the Chicana/o cause,
media activism in the Chicana/o community expanded significantly in the early 1970s. As Chon
Noriega and Ana M. López’s historical analysis of Chicana/o media shows, this generation of
radical youth and students were the first to achieve access to these means of self-representation,
many of whom were students at public universities such as the University of California, Los
Angeles, and who used the camera unapologetically to affirm their identity.
32
This identity
affirmation translated into the visual. In this photomontage film, we see the community protest,
raise signs and banners, and chant. The film intermittently inserts references to the Mexican
Revolution. The Chicano Movement’s invocation of Mexican Revolutionaries functioned as a
source through which they would organize themselves, and it also pointed out the importance of
32
Chon Noriega and Ana M. López, “Introduction,” in The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, eds. Chon Noriega and
Ana M. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xi.
63
organizing against exploitative systems of power such as capitalist, colonial, and imperial regimes.
By especially focusing on Indigenous imagery, Valdez, and Chicanas/os, evoked the precolonial
past to comment on how the disruption of colonization was at fault for the oppression of
Chicanas/os. The precolonial past thus becomes the ontological juncture through which the present
struggles of the Chicano Movement were articulated.
In Mitchell’s Chicano (1976), the director examines the Chicano Movement and
intergenerational conflict on political ideologies.
33
The film opens with the song “De Colores,”
accompanied by shots of protestors marching at two different protests; one is centered on the
United Farm Workers movement and the other is broadly on the Chicano Movement (figure 1.6).
Figure 1.6. Still from Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell (1976), USC School of Cinematic
Arts Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
What distinguishes both is that in the former march, the protests are older and, in the latter, they
are young, engaged Chicanas/os. In either case, the close up shots of the intergenerational crowd,
some of whom appear despondent, determined, excited, and hopeful, show how the community
nevertheless came together on the shared struggles against racism. In the film, protestors carry
33
Los Angeles Public Library Audio Visual Film Catalogue, 1981-1982, Los Angeles Public Library Film Collection,
Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California,
http://uschefnerarchive.com/project/lapl/. The film is categorized under “Minority Groups,” “Minority Problems,”
“Mexican Americans” in the Los Angeles Public Library Catalogue of 1981.
64
signs that read “Chicano Power,” “Viva la Causa,” and “We will not be Intimidated.” They also
hoist up images of Mexican revolutionary figures such as Emiliano Zapata. Similar to Valdez’s
film, the montage in the opening scene of the film sets the tone and previews the narrative of the
tensions that will crystallize between younger Chicanas/os and the older Mexican and Mexican
American generation over the principles on political action and desires for liberation.
The anticolonial and decolonial resistance of Arabs and Chicanas/os in these nontheatrical
films offer us critical interventions to revision in a new frame how the project of liberation and
resistance was always present within these moving images. As the community members
showcased decolonial activity, they simultaneously dealt with unrelenting displacements. The
nontheatrical films in this chapter are critical in our inquiry to examine how these displacements
were shot and broadcasted to audiences beyond the barrio and banlieue.
The absence, suppression, destruction, and dismissal of “official” evidence relating to
traumatic events should not discourage one to seek for pieces of evidence elsewhere. Efforts to
compile, document, and piece together the oral histories and material culture of people who
remember the events of 1961 in Paris and 1970 in East Los Angeles have revealed the extent to
which more work remains to be done in the realms of material culture. If films are to be considered
as visual evidence of the atrocities that took place in the barrios and banlieues, we must then revisit
nontheatrical films and their role in the ways that highlight how relational displacements were
visualized, indexed, and transmitted to multiple audiences.
The nontheatrical films show how Arabs and Chicanas/os were proud of their cultural
heritage and their unrelenting commitment to political engaging projects. Interestingly, films about
barrio and banlieue liberation shared similar aesthetic choices and political goals of using cameras
to construct a narrative of freedom as seen in other situations within France, the U.S. and in the
65
decolonizing Third World. All things considered, filmmakers responded to the growing
disquietude with state-sanctioned violence in urban space and they were aligned with the global
frustration against policing regimes. These moving images from community members and allies
related a desire to transcend containment and to show that the community possessed the power to
visualize liberation according to its demands.
Films about the barrio and banlieue contained notable elements of anticolonial and
decolonial resistance as enacted by the community that paralleled the work being produced in
Third Cinema. In Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s seminal essay “Toward a Third
Cinema,” originally published in Spanish in the journal Tricontinental in 1969, published out of
Cuba, the authors explained that Third Cinema is the cinema that “recognizes in that struggle the
most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of
constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point—in a word, the
decolonization of culture.”
34
In this project of Third Cinema, Solanas and Getino included the
oppressed peoples who lived within the borders of imperialist countries to use the camera for
decolonial, revolutionary purposes. Though there are limited films made by residents of the barrio
and the banlieue of the 1960s and 1970s, the nontheatrical films in this study show that through
their testimonies, Chicanas/os and Arabs sought to rectify stereotypes and other deleterious
fabrications of their character floating in the social imaginary.
This desire to rise beyond outdated and overplayed racist labels stimulated a form of
hunger. In the 1965 essay “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha
wrote that Latin America remained a colony and that the political and economic deprivations
34
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,” Cinéaste 4, no. 3 (1970), 2.
66
caused “philosophical undernourishment.”
35
Rocha elaborates that this hunger is manifested in
Cinema Novo (New Brazilian Cinema), and that one of the manifestations of hunger is violence.
36
The Chicano Movement and the Arab workers struggles were political and philosophical
movements that helped foster social justice ideas for sustenance. In expressing solidarity with
people in and around their communities and around the world, Chicanas/os and Arabs had an
insatiable hunger for recognition of their humanity. I argue, and as evinced in the films, direct
action and justice satiated the desire of barrio and banlieue residents and it allowed them to subsist
in racist and violent environments. The filmmakers captured anticolonial and decolonial resistance
that might not have been conceived as such. Whether the filmmakers assumed an impartial position
in representing the Chicano Movement in East Los Angeles and Arab worker struggles in Paris,
both communities made sure that their actions and acts of self-determination were recorded. As
such, I consider these anticolonial and decolonial resistance. Filmmakers indisputably used the
camera to bring awareness to the scandalous immiseration of the barrios and banlieues.
In filming the community, the filmmakers recorded the living conditions of the barrio and
banlieue in ways that foregrounded the substandard housing arrangements. Similar to early
documentary films concerned with tenement housing, films about the barrios and the banlieues of
the 1960s and 1970s complicated the question of humanity by examining the intersections of race,
immigration status, and cultural difference.
The Urban Edges
The images of decaying barrios and banlieues illustrated the extreme degree of Chicana/o
and Arab exclusion from the center of Los Angeles and Paris. The images of material erosion
35
Glauber Rocha, “The Aesthetics of Hunger,” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology,
ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 219.
36
Ibid.
67
functioned as appropriate metaphors that commented on the threats of displacement with lack of
housing, police violence, and threats of incarceration and deportation. The degeneration of the
urban margins reflected the ills of governmental neglect. In writing about her experiences growing
up in Kentucky across the railroad tracks, bell hooks aptly wrote, “To be in the margin is to be part
of the whole but outside the main body.”
37
hooks elaborates on this marginality by explaining that
racialized others can frequent the center momentarily, but they are forced to return to the edges.
38
This is particularly accurate of the Chicanas/os and Arabs who were forced to live in these zones
of exclusion, though they were vital and essential to what hooks calls the “whole.” The films in
this section are critical to understand how the communities forged a space for themselves to
survive. I acknowledge the distinct social, cultural, and racial dynamics of each space and do not
conflate them. What some might consider housing, others might consider an alternative living
arrangement. The films in this study each approach the concept of community and urban space
according to the history of each city. The racial and colonial fault lines that cut through these
spaces renders noticeable the unevenness in urban space. The bidonvilles in Paris displayed the
fractures and inequalities of urban living. Racialized people who lived in shacks, tents, and other
makeshift structures illustrated what it meant to live and survive in the most uninhabitable spaces
of the Global North. It would be inappropriate to presume that barrio residents lived a better life
than most migrants and racialized groups in Paris, especially considering that displacement
affected both spaces. However, the homes and apartments in the barrio did not compare to the
shacks in the outskirts of Paris. Uneven infrastructure and the lack of access to basic utilities plays
a chief role in why communities expressed frustration at the government for their living condition
and how they searched for ways to survive. Despite these social and infrastructural asymmetries,
37
Bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), ix.
38
Ibid.
68
the films show that urban peripheries are not monolithic. The political action that emerged from
the barrios and banlieues imagined radical sites of possibility according to the immediate needs of
the inhabitants.
Why is the banlieue regarded as reprehensible and yet alluring to the gaze of outsiders?
Anna-Louise Milne explains that the banlieue has always been framed as a site of spectacular
violence. In taking into account how the forces of displacement were related to the colonial
legacies, we see that the residents of the space were by default “othered” and excluded from the
center. Milne writes, “The idea of la banlieue as the colonised other of the capital city does have
a certain, perhaps deceptive, self-evidence. Fund of cheap labour for the capital-intense centre,
industrial powerhouse for the nation during the whole of the twentieth century, home to large
communities of people of immigrant origin, the city’s hinterland looks like a dependent state
populated by a foreign multitude cooking up non-hegemonic writing along with their peppers.”
39
The banlieue becomes a site of extractive capitalism, where the racialized body is shuttled from
the periphery to the center only to be exploited and sent back to the margins of destitution.
Though my focus here is on how the barrios and banlieues were represented, early
nontheatrical films were concerned with housing in the tenements. The British film, Housing
Problems (1935), directed by Edgar Antsey and Arthur Elton, and sponsored by The Gas Light
and Coke Company, borrowed from earlier documentary forms of anthropology and sociology.
Housing Problems stands out from earlier films because Antsey and Elton experimented with
sound, camera mobility, and the role of the narrator’s interjection. In his analysis of the film, Erik
Barnow characterizes the use of slum dwellers who comment on their situation, rather than a
narrator or commentator imposing a narrative, as a “novel” method.
40
In Housing Problems, the
39
Anna-Louise Milne, “The Singular Banlieue,” L’Esprit Créateur 50, no. 3 (2010), 59.
40
Erik Barnow, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95.
69
subject leads the camera crew through the tenements facing an impending demolishment. These
novel cinematic techniques are seen in the films of the barrios and banlieues of the 1960s and
1970s, as these too reflect on the urban renovation projects and the health risks associated with
displacement. In the films about the barrio and the banlieue, the subjects also lead the camera and
the spectator through their neighborhood, with interspersed narration. In these films, race is the
conspicuous difference.
I return once again to de Sedouy and Harris’ Les Algériens de Paris in order to focus on
the quotidian life of the bidonville in a Parisian banlieue and because the footage of destitution
teaches us lessons about social justice organizing and decolonial resistance. The televised report
gave Algerian youth a platform to speak about the difficulties that they faced, notably
unemployment, racism, and “déchirement culturel.” The film begins with a close-up shot of a belly
dancer performing to the live music played by Algerian musicians at a community center. The
festive occasion embodies the cultural difference and racial enclaves in France. A stark comparison
to the previous scene, the establishing shot of the next sequence introduces the bidonvilles. The
panning shot from right to left obliges spectator to absorb the landscape. The narrator mentions
that young people who are raised in these spaces face an uncertain future in a society that has
facilitated their displacement into the periphery (figure 1.7).
Figure 1.7. Still from Les Algériens de Paris, directed by Alain de Sedouy and André Harris, Le
forum des images/Bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris, France.
70
A young Algerian man speaks on his lack of success in finding a job. He explains that though the
jobs available to migrants and racialized people are dangerous, possibly referring to construction
and manufacturing jobs, they have to take what is available in order to survive. As he recounts his
experiences with surviving in Paris, the shacks in the background of the frame substantiate his
statements. These frames accentuate the dyad between precarity and stability. The young man adds
that he would take any job since it is necessary to make a living, yet the structures in the
background tell a different story of how Arabs are not guaranteed the basic necessities such as
housing to live humanely and decently.
The camera crew accompanies the young man and his acquaintance trekking from factory
to factory to find employment. They are unsuccessful in their search and become disillusioned. As
the two carry on, another young man from the bidonville is introduced to spectators. The new
person stresses the importance of social and cultural networks. He explains that social networking
increases opportunities for securing decent housing and prospects of employment. This assertion
indicates that living in urban peripheries greatly reduces the chances for success, especially if one
lacks familial kinships or social circles to help facilitate their housing and employment needs.
Furthermore, as the camera shows us, the bleak situation of the bidonvilles heightens the chances
of displacement. The displacement in question is the continued marginalization of the residents
who desire to anchor their family in stability. Though the quests for the job search arrives at an
unpropitious time, there is some form of agency in the bidonville.
In the final scene of the film, the residents avoid the camera by shutting their doors. While
the camera has gained access to the spatial configuration of the bidonville, the residents foreclose
the camera and spectators further intrusion into their private, intimate lives. The residents set the
limits of visibility in order to avoid the domestic sphere from becoming a voyeuristic extraction of
71
poverty. This agency is important because despite being denied their humanity, the residents find
power in establishing their own boundaries. This can be read among the definitions of anticolonial
and decolonial resistance, in that they disrupt the sociological and anthropological gaze.
Throughout Les Algériens de Paris, the members of the community enact decolonial expressions.
For example, in naming the injustice and in deciding when and what the camera can record is an
example of autonomy. The testimonies and experiences of the Arab workers and families in the
bidonville brought to the foreground struggles specific to acculturation, unemployment, and poor
housing conditions.
To live in the periphery means to survive by whatever means necessary. In East Los
Angeles, we find parallels with the lived experiences of Arabs in the banlieue. I return to Mitchell’s
Chicano to examine that the Chicanas/os paved the path for a more liberated and fair living
condition. Urban infrastructure is one of the topics of conversation. In the middle of the film, a
panning shot reveals a set of homes and shacks situated adjacent to the train tracks (figure 1.8).
Figure 1.8. Still from Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell (1976), USC School of Cinematic
Arts Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
This scene is a visual metaphor of the community living at the crossroads of the Chicano
Movement, the myriad of displacements, and the desire to survive in the edges. The camera
presents to spectators a derelict space, a marginal zone severed by the infrastructure that powers
72
Los Angeles as a capitalist city. Visible in the background of one shot is the colossal Los Angeles
County-USC hospital, while the seemingly unstable shacks in the foreground next to the train
tracks augment this dramatic contrast. The narrator of the film explains that train tracks are the
ontological sites of the barrios. By focusing on the homes near the train tracks, we are reminded
of the long history of segregation, displacement, and containment of racialized groups and how
train tracks have functioned as racial and economic borders.
41
In another sequence of Chicano, a woman claims that she does not consider the barrio a
ghetto. Though the woman probably expressed this statement to explicitly distinguish the racial
composition of the barrios and to remove the barrio away from negative images of ghettos, there
is validity to her distinction, yet there are relational aspects that created forms of solidarity between
Black and Chicana/o residents.
42
The shots that follow include footage of Mexican shops on a busy
street corridor (figure 1.9).
Figure 1.9. Still from Chicano, directed by J. Gary Mitchell (1976), USC School of Cinematic
Arts Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
41
See William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2008). Estrada writes about the construction of the railroad station in the 1930s played a role in displacing
Mexicans and Chinese people around what is known today as Union Station. The construction of the station effaced
communities such as Sonoratown, displacing the inhabitants to Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and other
communities around Los Angeles.
42
See Gaye Theresa Johnson, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los
Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Johnson examines the ways in which Black and Brown
youth challenged spatial segregation and displacement through spatial reclamation via dancing in public space and via
the airwaves.
73
By including shots of Spanish-language record stores, botanicas, restaurants, and clothing stores,
as a ranchera song is inserted in the soundtrack, the film introduces to spectators how barrio
residents make community and space for themselves. These images of cultural celebration are
critical for the social and cultural organizing. The displacement of Brown people into the margin
leads to unfavorable consequences. For example, the narrator explains that in some areas, there is
a lack of recreational spaces and those that are in operation keep youth out of trouble. This pushes
us to think about how the lack of opportunities for social and cultural enrichment absent in the
barrios places the youth in unstable positions where they risk being targeted by police as criminals.
These displacements threaten to throw the youth and the rest of the community into a perpetual
cycle of violence.
In considering how Les Algériens de Paris and Chicano gazed into the lives of the residents
who worked hard to build community and create solidarity among each other, the material
conditions demonstrate that the marginal urban spaces were also subject to destruction as a result
of urban renewal programs. The films of East Los Angeles and Paris teach us that while the center
of cosmopolitan spaces are sustained by the impressive architectural designs, and the infrastructure
in place facilitates the easy physical and social mobility of white people across the city, the
peripheries prove that space is racialized and various forms of displacement creep up on the
community. As I discussed earlier, and as evinced in the films, when evictions take place and the
infrastructure of communities are derelict, those conditions put the people who dwell and survive
in them in vulnerable positions. Such is the case when police frequent the space and when the
community takes to the streets to protest injustices.
74
Police Brutality
The moving images of police brutality in the contemporary moment has arrested our gaze
and triggered pain in those who have experienced and witnessed these injustices. Mass
demonstrations against power imbalances have illustrated the kinds of possibilities that could
emerge out of radical care and solidarity with the downtrodden racialized others. The racialized
body moving through urban space, it appears, creates uneasiness. It is the racial difference, the
fashioning of the self, and the markers of cultural and class difference that is subject to
surveillance, or worse, death. In tracing the history of the emergence of the system and architecture
of surveillance to the disciplining of the body, particularly the body that is unfit (due to health,
criminality, or otherness) to be part of the whole, Michel Foucault reminds us that the spatial
organization of work, leisure, and urban space led to the hierarchization of surveillance. Foucualt
writes, “Le pouvoir dans la surveillance hiérarchisée des disciplines ne se détient pas comme une
chose, ne se transfère pas comme une propriété; il fonctionne comme une machinerie.”
43
In
operating as a machine, surveillance, and therefore discipline, become optics of control, requiring
far less the presence of an authority figure. If the racialized body is under the panoptic and intrusive
gaze of authorities, and their mobility is restricted, can one deem Los Angeles and Paris democratic
cities? How do we make sense of films that capture police violence, the occupation of barrio and
banlieue communities, and the deceitful sense of security that police purport to offer?
In this subsection I analyze the short reportage Mesures de protection de la police (1958)
produced by the Radiodiffusion Télévision Française and Kevin Rafferty’s What Really Happened
at the East Los Angeles Chicano Riot? (1971) in order to examine the experiences regarding police
occupation of urban space and police abuse. Though both films differ greatly in year, length,
43
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 179. My translation: “The
power in the hierarchized surveillance does not limit itself as a thing, and it is not transferred as property; it functions
as a machine.”
75
format, and theme, they both ultimately show spectators how the presence of authorities points out
the tactics of surveillance and the display of the injured racialized body.
Mesures de protection de la police is a short clip that shoots police patrols in Barbès-La
Goutte d’Or in the eighteenth arrondissement.
44
This cosmopolitanism community is known for
its militant and political engaged activity. In low angle shot, the clip situates spectators in
Boulevard de la Chapelle, the migrant community in Barbès-La Goutte d’Or. The camera captures
the French flag towering over the street sign, a perfect metaphor of French colonization over
racialized others. Moreover, this shot is a metaphor of how the French government continued to
monitor and exercise control over the racialized community. This surveillance is confirmed in the
following shots where heavily armed authorities patrol the community.
In close up shot, the camera captures an officer holding a riffle, not the usual handgun. This
militarized police figure creates a foreboding mood, a potential aggression towards racialized
people ready to break out at any moment. By walking the street with a weapon of this magnitude,
authorities project an image of defense, as if ready for urban combat, and to a degree, the scene
foreshadows the events that will transpire in the years to come. In the following shot, the police
stop a man and perform a body search on him. This invasive frisking violates his humanity and
that of the other man in the background (figure 1.10).
44
Mesures de protection de la police, L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Paris, France,
https://www.ina.fr/video/CAF96028276. The description of the film on the website explains that the camera records
the police taking precautions “contre le terrorisme en metropole.” The footage is shot at Barbès-La Goutte d’Or.
76
Figure 1.10. Still from Mesures de protection de la police (1958), L’Institut national de
l’audiovisuel, Paris, France, https://www.ina.fr/video/CAF96028276.
The camera in this regard is voyeuristic; it captures the invasive event from a safe distance. At the
end of the clip, a police vehicle cruises through the streets, functioning as a visual reminder of
police presence and occupation. While this clip does not necessarily show us the severity of the
situation in which police patrol and harass the community members of Barbès-La Goutte d’Or, the
militarization of the authorities is not dismissible. Their demeanor as they walk down the street in
packs, their display of rifles, and their command of the surveilled space illustrates that police
presence cannot be ignored. It is the visual oppression that reminds us that those who lived in the
vicinity encountered the interpellation of authorities and faced intimidation. As Louis Althusser
theorized, the act of authorities hailing someone in the sea of people in public space leads us to
think about each individual as a subject. The subject in the act of interpellation becomes the target,
someone who works from within the ideological apparatus that reinforces the subject’s otherness.
Althusser writes that the individual who responds to the open interpellation becomes a subject
“Parce qu’il a reconnu que l’interpellation s’adressait ‘bien’ à lui, et que ‘c’était bien lui qui était
interpellé’ et pas un autre,” adding that the subject understands their response to the hailing is an
77
acknowledgement of their role as a subject who must obey laws.
45
The title Mesures de protection
de la police compels us to ask: how are these preventative tactics against terrorism protecting
racialized communities when they are designed to target them? How did police act when cameras
were not recording their moves? What is the degree of complicity of the camera vis-à-vis the
surveillance of racialized people?
In East Los Angeles, police violence was regularly captured on film and in photography.
Similar to other racialized communities in the U.S. and Arabs in France fighting for their right to
move freely and exist as human beings, local governments failed to redress police misconduct. I
return to another film of police violence on Chicana/o bodies to remind us that the eastside was
engaged in intense anticolonial and decolonial forms of resistance after the Chicano Moratorium.
Rafferty’s What Really Happened at the East Los Angeles Chicano Riot? is an experimental film
of the January 31, 1971 police brutality demonstration. In the wake of police violence throughout
1970, the Chicana/o community began the year by making demands of ending police violence in
the barrios. However, as is the story with police brutality protests, the day ended in another episode
of trauma. The Chicano Moratorium Committee organized the Marcha por Justicia demonstration
at Belvedere Park in East Los Angeles, however, a group of about three hundred young
Chicanas/os broke off and marched toward the business district on Whittier Boulevard. According
to an article in La Raza magazine, a special unit of the Sherriff’s department blocked demonstrators
from going further. The writer claimed that the authorities cornered the protestors and opened fire
on them, leading to the death of an ally named Gustav Montag.
46
Calling the violence on the part
of authorities a “blatant slaughtering,” the writer elaborated that though it is not clear why the
45
Louis Althusser, Sur la reproduction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 226. My translation: “Because
he recognized that the interpellation addressed him, and that it was very well him who was hailed and not anyone
else.”
46
“Untitled.” La Raza 1, no. 5 (1971), 36.
78
group of people broke off and marched on their own, an evident response is “the youth of our
community (which makes up its largest overall percentage), is fed up with the promises of better
tomorrows and hopes for justice from this system.”
47
Rafferty’s film captures the Chicana/o
youth’s revolt against the very same system that surveils and interpolates them as subjects.
The narrator of the film explains, “This film is about what happened that day in East Los
Angeles. The evidence offered is impartial and you must judge where the blame lies for yourself.”
Though the film is experimental, the narrator removes himself and calls his work “evidence” in an
attempt at impartiality. This statement poses a great issue, in that one cannot remain impartial on
matters of injustice. Second, the experimental genre manipulates the narrative via the cuts, all
decided by the director. Thus, the film is not impartial. Third, by asking spectators to evaluate for
themselves where the blame lies, Rafferty assumes that the spectator is equipped with the
information on what transpired on that day. Regardless of these problematic statements, an astute
spectator would assess that the film undoubtedly qualifies as visual evidence concerning police
brutality and the Chicana/o community resisting this displacement.
What Really Happened at the East Los Angeles Chicano Riot? is a chaotic film in the sense
that the jarring sounds, the unstable camera movements, and the blurry stills pull the spectator into
a turbine of confusion.
48
To this effect, Rafferty reconstructs the instability that transpired on that
day. In sticking to his claims on offering an impartial film, Rafferty focuses on the self-defense
tactics of the youth against police. Rather than give Chicanas/os the opportunity to speak about
their actions, the narrator vicariously assumes the point-of-view of police and exclaims:
Look at that! Look at them! These people have absolutely no respect for the law and they’ve
got less for public property. Look at them fighting among themselves. The punks! What
47
Ibid.
48
What Really Happened at the East Los Angeles Chicano Riot?, directed by Kevin Rafferty, 1971, Los Angeles
Public Library Film Collection, Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, California.
79
good does it do? Attacking a CBS cameraman, innocent bystander. And making clubs.
What do you think they are going to do with those clubs? Don’t you know? And what do
you think they are doing there? I’ll tell you what they’re doing there. They’re throwing
rocks at policemen, that’s what they’re doing. Now if a Mexican throws a rock at you, what
are you going to do? What choice do you got? You gotta do something!...You’ve got a gun
and you’ve got to use it!
The narration functions to position spectators into the headspace of a horrified and offended
populace. The destructive violence in this film helps us understand how police brutality provoked
the community to erupt in violence. These conflicts in the frame are rooted in one single event: the
senseless police malpractice.
It would appear that Mesures de protection de la police and What Really Happened at the
East Los Angeles Chicano Riot? take an impartial position in regard to the police occupation and
assault of community members. The images speak for themselves and offer us a nuanced visual
narrative of police violence that besieged the barrios and banlieues. In both films, whether it is
police occupation or blatant use of force, the displacement and intimidation of racialized people
gives us a glimpse of how police and other authorities carry out this violent project. Displacement,
as I mentioned, includes arrests and deportations of community members. Arrests and deportations
affect community dynamics and the person in question. To be arrested and deported is to
experience multiple displacements and long itineraries of despair.
Arrests and Deportations
The histories of immigration in the U.S. and in France differ, and the status of being
undocumented in urban space posed particular challenges for Arabs and people of Latin American
descent. In this section, I will focus on the experiences of Arabs in Paris. I study the short clips
Manifestations musulmanes (Muslim protests) (1961) by United Press, Expulsion de prisonniers
Algériens (Deportation of Algerian prisoners) (1961), and Départ de musulmans (Departure of
80
Muslims) (1961) by Radiodiffusion Télévision Française to study how arrests and deportations
from France to Algeria were and are still considered displacements that create the conditions for a
precarious life. As evinced by the titles, Algerian and Muslim are conflated too many a times. The
dangerous conflation between racial identity and religious affiliation, as we have seen, has led to
xenophobic and racist policies. In interchanging both, French society racializes religion and fails
to take into account that Algerians could very well be devotees of other religions. I contend that
this conflation is a form of displacement that ignores the heterogeneity of Arab culture and identity.
In addition, these raids and checkpoints were an administrative performance where authorities
aimed to remove vagabonds, prostitutes, and other undesirable groups. These undesirable groups,
reminds us Emmanuel Blanchard, included racialized migrants. Blanchard writes that “Pour les
étrangers, les pouvoirs publics disposent de deux autres types de mesure,” which are detention and
deportation.
49
These acts of displacement that authorities carried out deliberately targeted Arabs,
and the consequences were grim. The three clips that I study in this section were produced in the
aftermath of the October 17 massacre of Algerians. Though to my knowledge there are no moving
images of the murder of Algerians, the arrests and deportations remind us that other forms of
displacement took place.
49
Emmanuel Blanchard, “L’encadrement des Algériens de Paris (1944-1954), entre contraintes juridiques et
arbitraire policier,” Crime, histoire, et sociétés 11, no. 1 (2007), 10. My translation: “For foreigners, the public
authorities disposed of them in two different ways…”
81
In Manifestations musulmanes, the clip begins with the image of a shattered window of a
poissonnière and a dry cleaner. This first scene serves as a metaphor of the community breaking
past the threshold that contains them. Following this brief footage, the second scene shows well-
dressed Algerian men apprehended en masse. With their hands over their head, their bodies from
an arch. Interestingly, the luminous Arc de Triomphe towers in the background (figure 1.11).
Figure 1.11. Still from Manifestations musulmanes (1961), L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel,
Paris, France.
The arch honors revolutionaries who died in notable French wars and its central geographical
position brings together various prominent streets, serving as a meeting point for protests. Though
the arch is a powerful symbol, the events that transpired on that evening, and as evinced by the
footage, shows us that Algerians were barred from congregating at this site and they were not
considered citizens for whom the French revolutionaries fought for. In the next shot, men are
ushered out of a metro station by police and corralled into a city bus commissioned by authorities.
As they exit the metro, the sign on the doors, “passage interdit,” calls attention to Arab exclusion,
particularly Algerians, who are denied entry or passage into French social, cultural, and political
life. This short scene foreshadows the detention and deportation of the men that will follow in the
days after.
82
The absence of sound in the video heightens the severity of the situation. This silence forces
spectators to read the facial expressions of the men and it requires spectators to reckon with the
injustice on screen. These shots are haunting as we are made aware that the protestors are being
displaced from public space and that many of them were later displaced via deportations and death.
Deportation is displacement when the expedited removal of the person prevents proper closure
with the networks of support and kinship they have formed in the host country. In this sense,
deportations are another traumatic event of uprooting.
In Départ de musulmans, the men file out of the police vehicle as reporters wait to
photograph them with oversized cameras and flashing bulbs.
50
A number of the detained men are
injured and bandaged (figure 1.12).
Figure 1.12. Still from Départ de musulmans, 1961, L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Paris,
France, https://www.ina.fr/video/CAF90041224/depart-de-musulmans-video.html.
This visual evidence is critical for it supports the accounts of the men who recount that they were
beaten and injured. Spectators cannot deny the evidence screened before them as the wounded
Algerian men march toward the airplane. This visual evidence reminds us that authorities were not
concerned with their integrity, and this was made clear with how the bandaged men were promptly
deported. As they mount the stairs to board the Air France airplane, the camera focuses on their
50
Départ de musulmans, 1961, L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Paris, France,
https://www.ina.fr/video/CAF90041224/depart-de-musulmans-video.html.
83
somber, sleepless, and helpless facial expressions. The final shot of the clip captures the airplane
taking off for Algeria. As spectators, we witness the deportation of Arabs and are left with no sense
of closure about their arrival to Algeria.
In Expulsion des prisonniers algériens, the clip transports us from Paris to Marseille.
51
The
apprehended Algerian men arrive at the Marseille-Saint-Charles train station and are transferred
to the dock. In the beginning of the clip, a decelerating train enters the frame. Typical of many
train arrival scenes throughout cinematic history, this one does not provoke astonishment in the
spectator because the train functions as a vehicle of containment and displacement of Arabs. Once
again, the incarcerated group of Algerian men are met with armed police waiting on the platform.
The camera takes a shot of Algerian men inside the train car, gazing out the window and into the
camera. From inside, one man pulls down the blind, obscuring the camera’s view into the interior.
This is yet another symbolic gesture of a racialized person’s autonomy, read as a form of resistance
to the spectacle of displacement taking place. Similar to the scene of the bidonville where the
residents did not allow the camera access to the domestic space, a similar act of resistance unfolds
here. The shackled prisoners deboard the train, bonded to each other by the chains of oppression
(figure 1.13).
Heavily armed authorities escort them to commissioned city buses that will drive them to
the port. Upon arrival, the camera introduces us to the name of the ship, Ville de Bordeaux. Similar
to the shot of the Air France airplane in Départ de musulmans, the camera captures the majesty of
French transportation.
51
Expulsion des prisonniers algeriens, 1961, L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel, Paris, France,
https://www.ina.fr/video/RAF05009544/expulsion-de-prisonniers-algeriens-video.html
84
Figure 1.13. Still from Expulsion des prisonniers algeriens, 1961, L’Institut national de
l’audiovisuel, Paris, France, https://www.ina.fr/video/RAF05009544/expulsion-de-prisonniers-
algeriens-video.html
What is it about the scale of these vessels of transportation that are shot as the displaced
Algerians are sent back to their homelands? Interestingly, it is the boat, the vehicle through which
many migrants arrived to France, that will deport them back to Algeria. These displacements via
the arrests and deportations were part of a larger narrative of containment and displacement used
to justify the othering of Arabs in Paris and throughout the metropole. When the regimes of
displacement devise deportation policies, morale in racialized communities depletes. Yet, despite
these circumstances, the community always finds a way to reclaim space. To reclaim space, and
to search for alternatives to survive, is to resist and to decolonize.
Spatial Reclamation
When Chicanas/os and Arabs took to the streets to protest unfair treatment, they reclaimed
space. The nontheatrical films about the barrio and banlieue demonstrate that contested space is
racialized public space. From direct action, to the protests, to parades, and to a myriad of
community organizing, Chicanas/os and Arabs understood that spatial occupation was critical to
the project of liberation. Spatial reclamation is a radical act of resistance, a contradistinction to the
85
various displacements as a result of police brutality, deportations, murders, and incarceration of
people who were brave to take to the streets their grievances. To reclaim space in order to bring
awareness to injustices and for the goal of a liberationist future, is to work through the history of
displacement in these sites of trauma.
Reclaiming space need not always demand protesting. In the barrios and banlieues, spatial
reclamation included surviving in clandestine spaces and creating art in lugubrious junctures. I
examine Humberto R. Rivera and Heather R. Howell’s The Murals of East Los Angeles: A Museum
Without Walls (1976) produced by RKO General, a division that produced nontheatrical films, and
Georges Baguet’s L’Islam en France (1976), and focus on anticolonial and decolonial resistance
that centers spatial reclamation. I previously cited the latter film when referring to the Muslim man
praying in the streets of Paris. His presence and religious expression in public space was a form of
spatial reclamation. In both films we see how the community reclaimed space for themselves
through creative and limited means. Both instances show us that in reclaiming space, Chicanas/os
and Arabs resisted displacement and transmitted cultural histories and knowledge.
Nontheatrical films about the Chicano Movement were made by people within and outside
of East Los Angeles. Such is the example of the film titled The Murals of East Los Angeles: A
Museum Without Walls (1976).
52
The film showcased the artistic talent of Chicana/o artists such
as Carlos Almaraz, Judith F. Baca, Wayne Alaniz Healy, and community members, by exploring
the mural-making processes and methods on the walls of public housing projects located in East
Los Angeles. And although this film came out of a studio that worked within a capitalist regime
that made racially and culturally problematic films, The Murals of East Los Angeles transports
52
The Murals of East Los Angeles: A Museum Without Walls, directed by Humberto R. Rivera and Heather R.
Howell, 1976, Los Angeles Public Library Film Collection, Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of
Southern California, Los Angeles, California.
86
spectators into a space where an artistic renaissance of revolutionary and decolonial action took
place.
53
The film begins with a ritual of Indigenous people dancing, followed by representations of
Indigenous people on murals. The artist Carlos Almaraz, whose name is anglicized in the film as
“Charles,” explains in voice-over that he feels responsible to share his talent with the rest of the
community. He elaborates, “And I say that I use my own art to bring about social consciousness
and hopefully someday social change so the conditions in the barrio will improve.” By hoping to
raise awareness and inspire change in the barrio, Almaraz enacts decolonial resistance and reclaims
space by bringing together residents of the barrio to express themselves artistically in visualizing
cultural histories. Furthermore, by using his artistic talents, Almaraz bridges the disconnect
between art and social injustices in order to bring both into the same frame.
Among the various anticolonial and decolonial forms of resistance in the film, Chicano
muralist Wayne Alaniz Healy’s interview stands out the most. As the camera pans up to showcase
Healy’s mural in progress, he explains that the U.S. bicentennial did not reflect the histories of
racialized people within the grand narrative of U.S. exceptionalism. He elaborates, “The people
here [in the barrio], it’s hard for them to identify with something that took place so far away,
although it did affect their lives.” As Healy recounts, the vanquished do not identify with the brutal
imperial and colonial history. Instead, he draws on his talents to create a visual history of resistance
in large scale. Healy describes that the mural in progress functioned to tell a history where, “I tried
to put here a Chicano bicentennial theme, if you will. The themes I have here, I have pre-
53
See Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and the Ethnographic Spectacle (Duke University Press,
1996). The Studio RKO produced Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933), a science-fiction
film that represented Indigenous people of a fictional island in racist ways. The scholar Fatimah Tobing Rony
investigates this film and the history of the ethnographic turn in cinema. Rony examines how fictional Hollywood
films such as King Kong helped advance exotic imaginaries of Indigenous people.
87
Columbian themes. I try to show aspects of religion, art, urban life, and the foundation of all that
here…planting of corn and generating a farm which was the foundation of the society” (Figure
1.14).
Figure 1.14. Still from The Murals of East Los Angeles: A Museum Without Walls, directed by
Humberto R. Rivera and Heather R. Howell (1976), USC School of Cinematic Arts Hugh M.
Hefner Moving Image Archive, Los Angeles, California.
In addition, Healy includes themes relating to histories of Spanish colonialism, Mexican
Independence, and the Mexican Revolution. While the film itself is not anticolonial or decolonial,
these elements are present via the murals and the artistic collaborations, thereby adding complexity
to our understanding of how the people in the barrio took on the project of liberation and
decolonization. This spatial reclamation is particularly important because the walls of the housing
projects belonged to the local government that neglected the community and the façades of the
businesses belonged to a larger capitalist system that exploited Chicanas/os. By transforming the
walls into visual historical documents, the artists and the community enacted anticolonial and
decolonial resistance that worked against displacement.
The margins, as we have seen, should not be glorified. Racialized people have managed to
survive in these zones of exclusion at detrimental costs. Nevertheless, the margins contain
fascinating stories related to resistance against displacement and the ways that the oppressed forge
networks of care. In L’Islam en France, small spaces are transformed into cultural sites. This is
88
one way that Arabs in Paris reclaimed space. In the early part of the film, the narrator explains that
Islam is obscure. What the narrator refers to here is the ways in which Muslims do not practice
their religion in public space, but that it is very much part of their cultural identity. In writing about
the migrant’s new life in the host country, Albert Memmi writes, “The ghetto is not only a
substitute for the illusory promised land, but a mitigated form of the abandoned homeland. It is
between these two representations that the immigrant’s new, uprooted, life will unfold. In the small
back alleys of the ghetto are places of worship, where exotic imams exhort their followers to
respect the Koran and maintain solidarity with other Muslims.”
54
Memmi guides us to think about
how in the face of decolonization the decolonized must find a space for themselves. L’Islam en
France shows this by focusing on how migrants navigate their identity in urban space of the
republic.
In the film, the community discusses the importance of attending Friday prayer, and that it
is an essential practice, despite the distance that some have to journey. This shows us that racialized
people believed it was critical to maintain religious and cultural ties and to feel a sense of intimacy.
The makeshift mosque in the film thus validates the importance of spatial reclamation. In fact, the
narrator explains that Islam is a source of pride for migrants, whether they practice it or not. We
can see that Islam, the mosque, and the cultural proximity with migrant workers gives them
validation and visibility within small circles. Considering that the mosque in this film functioned
as a site of cultural encounter, the space was also reclaimed as a site of instruction. In the film we
are introduced to young children at the mosque who come to learn Arabic and study the Coran
(figure 1.15). The children come to this space to learn about other Arab cultural identities and to
retain their own. We learn that the mosque is an important site in which cultural values and identity
54
Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2006), 83.
89
are transmitted to the younger generation. Students explain that they come to the mosque to learn
and speak Arabic because they are strictly forced to speak French in schools. In having transformed
the reclaimed space as a mosque and a site of instruction, the Arab community sought to offer
education, community-building, and other cultural opportunities.
Figure 1.15. Still from L’Islam en France, directed by Georges Baguet (1976), Le forum des
images/Bibliothèque François Truffaut, Paris, France.
The Murals of East Los Angeles: A Museum Without Walls and L’Islam en France bring
us into spaces of reclamation in which community members enacted anticolonial and decolonial
resistance and created space to shelter the people from the inequalities of displacement in Los
Angeles and Paris. These nontheatrical films offer us evidence that shows how barrios and
banlieues were sites of political, cultural, and pedagogical transmission. These films were critical
to the extent that they informed spectators that despite racism, violence, and displacements taking
place, residents of barrios and banlieues did not sit idle. Instead, they organized to create habitable
and convivial spaces. Had it not been for these nontheatrical films, would we have known about
these fascinating spatial reclamations? Where are the nontheatrical films of the 1960s and 1970s
located today and what is their relevance to contemporary displacements?
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Conclusion
I conclude with a consideration on the “itinerary” of barrio and banlieue films replete with
anticolonial and decolonial acts of resistance. I deliberately use the term itinerary over
“provenance,” as is habitually used when studying archival material, in order to comment on the
journeys of the films. Itinerary as a concept is useful for raising questions such as: Who viewed
these films? Under what circumstances where they screened? How did these films circulate?
Furthermore, by using the term itinerary, I think about how nontheatrical films on barrio and
banlieue liberation and struggles traveled beyond the borders of urban space. Though my thinking
on itinerary gives off the impression that these films circulated with ease, I reject that assumption
and, in the inverse, ask us to consider delays, reroutes, and final destinations. Nontheatrical films
that fortunately exist today eventually were transferred to or arrived at restrictive repositories of
knowledge. Many of these films remain inaccessible and have yet to benefit from restoration and
digitization. Along these lines of itinerary, I propose a consideration on the notion of décalage.
In French, décalage can be defined as a lag, a gap, a shift, and an interval. Films about the
barrio and banlieue were shot in and about interstitial spaces. As I mentioned, the shots about the
substandard infrastructure, the alienation of racialized groups, and the struggles for fair treatment
were thematically related to living in the edges of the U.S. and France. The images of regimes of
displacement mediated this décalage, especially as these forces delayed the communities’ quest
for liberation via police brutality, arrests, and deportations. We might add that the eventual landing
of these films in the archives and their being catalogued under vague terms invokes displacement.
For example, the nontheatrical barrios films that were labeled under the “educational film” section
of the Los Angeles Public Library Film Collection eventually landed at the Hugh M. Hefner
Moving Image Archive at the University of Southern California. Despite this final arrival, the films
have an afterlife. A few of them have been digitized from celluloid to digital formats. A similar
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observation can be made of nontheatrical films about the banlieue that were produced for television
and later acquired by archives such as Le Forum des images/Bilbiothèque François Truffaut and
l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. By taking these films as examples, we are propelled to think
about the itineraries of all films dealing with colonial and decolonial histories in other spaces. Our
task then is to chart their itineraries and put them in a new historical trajectory, a new path that
opens up new knowledge on their detours and destinations.
The film collection of nontheatrical films about the barrio that the University of Southern
California acquired from the Los Angeles Public Library enables the conservation of these films
and the preservation of film culture covering the urgent matters of earlier decades. What does it
mean for films about East Los Angeles and the decolonial expressions to have a geographical,
temporal, and institutional itinerary that one might consider to be a form of displacement?
Similarly, the films about the banlieue contain rich histories on racism and colonialism and their
being held in archives difficult to access shows that the actual object and the histories have once
again been displaced. In writing about the transfer of intact film collections across institutions,
Elena Rossi-Snook writes that deaccessioned films are nonetheless “displaced from its parent
institution and the population it served.”
55
Although these films mostly functioned as nontheatrical
films, as the digitized 1981-1982 film catalogue from the Los Angeles Public Library illustrates,
these films contain language where the community calls for liberation, which I read as anticolonial
and decolonial acts. As I mentioned earlier, I consider these films to contain decolonial expressions
because they visualized how the Chicana/o and Arab community’s frustration with injustice and
their desire to reaffirm their humanity played out in the frame.
55
Elena Rossi-Snook, “Continuing Ed: Educational Film Collections in Libraries and Archives,” in Learning with the
Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, eds., Devin Orgeron, Marsha Gordon, and Dan Streible. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 476.
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Considering that these films were produced for audiences interested in learning about the
“Mexican-American problem,” or the “immigrant” experience of Arabs in the banlieue, their
educational purpose puts forth innovative ways of filming and thinking about barrio and banlieue
residents vis-à-vis authorities and other systems of power. In the context of U.S. nontheatrical
films, Marsha Gordon writes that the 1960s and 1970s were a particular moment in which a
plethora of nontheatrical films about race in the “riot-era” envisioned using the apparatus to
understand disenfranchised communities, notably Black. Gordon explains,
In the midst of a decade of class- and race-based civil unrest, culminating in a series of
riots in the mid- to late 1960s, the nation was confronted with what was widely depicted
and perceived as a ghetto crisis. Articulations of concern about the present and future well-
being of the nation began to coalesce around American schools, especially of a particular
type.
56
Many non-theatrical films about the Chicana/o experience document and explain the famous 1968
student walkouts and home in on the poor educational and economic infrastructure as being key
contributing factors to the issues of inequality in the barrios. In the context of France, the Arab
labor movements and strikes in the 1960s and 1970s helped bring attention to their cause by
addressing French spectators. Studied in this context, the relational aspect of nontheatrical films
about the barrio and banlieue show us that Chicanas/os and Arabs wanted to address the camera
and enunciate their grievances loud and clear at a time when they were met with apathy.
Despite several of these films not being shot by immediate members of the community, the
iconography of liberation figures prominently within the frames, especially in protest footage. The
protests signs, the beautiful bilingual chants, and the body movements of the crowd raising its fists
in the air are indicative of how images of liberation were part of the moving image landscape of
56
Marsha Gordon, “‘A Decent and Orderly Society: Race Relations in Riot-Era Educational Films, 1966-1970,” in
Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, eds., Devin Orgeron, Marsha Gordon, and Dan
Streible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 424.
93
the 1960s and 1970s. The appearance of iconography of liberation destabilized ideas about how
racialized people occupied public space and it expanded on questions about liberation and its
meanings across urban and national contexts. Like the protestors who traveled through urban space
in East Los Angeles and in Paris to bring attention to their cause, the films reached destinations
that were unimaginable, such as in classrooms, libraries, and archives.
In retrospect, nontheatrical films about barrios and banlieues with visible anticolonial
critiques and decolonial acts helped circulate images about the communities’ desire for liberation
from oppression by using the power of the camera to narrate their hardships. Furthermore, these
films raised political consciousness among community members, enabling them to support
decolonial projects in their neighborhoods and around the world. Now that these films are
archived, catalogued, and stored in repositories of knowledge, perhaps the itineraries of these films
are yet to be finished when we make them accessible to the communities that appear in them.
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Chapter Two
Screenings/Visionnages: Non-Traditional Spaces of Film Exhibition
Film history is a history of survivors, and scholarly writing is consequently disproportionally
weighted toward extant films.
-Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility
of Black Modernity
Space in itself may be primordially given, but the organization, and meaning of space is a product
of social translation, transformation, and experience.
-Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies
Introduction
Whether in virtual or physical space, the work of resistance is elusive. Never fully archived
or preserved, the texts and material culture of radical organizing is at risk of disappearance. The
dialogues, debates, and conversations on the topic of racial justice are also ephemeral; those
fleeting words were not meant to be transcribed verbatim and yet decades later, we are left to ask:
How do we recuperate the Chicana/o and Arab anticolonial and decolonial resistance against
displacement? In this chapter, I examine the politics and uses of peripheral spaces, sites that
operated on the border of interior and exterior, by calling attention to non-traditional spaces of film
exhibition. Rather than performing an analysis of the films that were screened in labor organizing,
community meetings, and workshops, I study how the films were resourceful for inspiring radical,
political action. Screened outside the confines of the barrio and banlieue, the films of the 1960s
and 1970s were projected in spaces such as universities and underground and radical community
spaces throughout greater Los Angeles and Paris.
The existing wide-ranging scholarship on space and place continues to generate novel
methods for uncovering histories of survival and solidarity that have been otherwise opaque. I
incorporate cinematic and screening spaces in this endeavor. In especially working with limited
archival sources of the Arab and Chicana/o social justice movements, and studying space outside
95
the cartographical, topographical, and geographical imaginaries, our comprehension on film
spectatorship practices broadens through a relational framework. In film studies, writing on space
and place customarily addresses the camera’s representation of sites of memory and on-location
shooting. As scholars have shown, the mise-en-scène becomes the site of interrogation, where
spatial knowledge prepares spectators for the narrative. In Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed
Space, Priya Jaikumar reminds us that in writing about space and film, we write histories on several
“spatial registers,” which positions the spatiality of cinema as a “material, ideological, affective,
and social object.”
1
These spatial registers, in and off the screen, are marked by cultural meaning
to racialized communities, especially when those spaces have been forged out of necessity due to
displacement. Scholarship on space and place in the era of shifting, occupied, erased, and bordered
geographies poses challenges to how we produce research about care, empathy, and solidarity
among oppressed people around the world. How did Chicanas/os and Arabs organize in non-
traditional spaces of film exhibition to advance solidarity with neighboring racial and cultural
communities? How might film studies benefit in examining how Arabs and Chicanas/os used non-
traditional spaces of film exhibition to hold and make space for each other?
This chapter explores the respective non-traditional spaces of film exhibition of the Arab
and Chicana/o communities of the 1960s and 1970s and examines the political work that emerged
within. The non-traditional spaces of film exhibition that I study include sites outside the cinematic
and high art milieus, such as underground and radical spaces, universities, and other public sites
that created synergy for political and cultural exchange among marginalized groups. I specifically
examine surviving archival material such as flyers, posters, advertisements, and programs of
events that incorporated film screenings. These materials were created and disseminated by diverse
1
Priya Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 8.
96
entities in Paris such as Comité Palestine (Palestine Committee) and the Ateliers de Recherche et
Création (Workshop for Research and Creativity). In Los Angeles, La Raza Nueva and United
Mexican American Students, the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, and the National Fight
Back Organization programmed film screenings in their events. I choose to write about non-
traditional spaces of film exhibition and solidarity, rather than the actual films themselves, because
film studies privileges the moving image over ephemeral film material culture produced outside
cinema. My focus on the flyers and pamphlets emphasizes the political work of radical and political
organizations during the era of decolonization and major displacements and how film screenings
played an important role in this pursuit.
In addition, I analyze advertisements promoting the sale of nontheatrical films and related
media aimed for primary and secondary schools in Chicana/o communities. One of those media
organizations, The Barrio Bilingual Communications, advertised with the widely circulated La
Raza magazine in order to reach audiences beyond East Los Angeles. Considering that the
publication had a decent and sizeable readership, these advertisements helped circulate Chicana/o
film and media culture elsewhere. By examining these textual traces, I write a history of how film
screenings in non-traditional spaces of film exhibition united Arabs in Paris and Chicanas/os in
Los Angeles to supplement their political organizing strategies against displacement, notably
involving labor discrimination, substandard housing, social alienation, and police brutality.
The two epigraphs above orient this study and offer the theoretical and methodological
framework of working with limited archival materials. In Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of
African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity, Allyson Nadia Field researches the
production, distribution, and reception of early twentieth century Black film culture. More
importantly, Field writes a compelling and important history by working with non-extant African
97
American films. Field draws on archival ephemera such as pamphlets, budget reports, and press
articles to write a history of early African American film culture production and circulation in an
era of social, economic, and political transformation. Furthermore, Field’s scholarship helps me
conceptualize “surviving archival material” as a way of acknowledging that historical artifacts of
the oppressed are never entirely lost and that their existence compels us to write them into history.
This chapter is organized around three strands of thought that contribute to our
understanding on the importance of film screenings in non-traditional spaces of film exhibition
and how these films and spaces forged solidarity rooted in diverse struggles that Arabs and
Chicanas/os confronted in these two decades. First, I help us think through the survival of the
archival material and its significance for film culture and histories of resistance against
displacement. Second, I explore the surviving archival documents such as flyers and event
programs in the context of relational displacements. The paper trails advertise the event, such as
labor union organizing, and the films that were scheduled for screening. I examine the minimal
content such as location, space, and other activities included in the programs and study why film
culture was important to anticolonial and decolonial resistance and other forms of political
organizing. Finally, I explore the commitment to solidarity that these spaces offered and how they
were sympathetic to the struggles of Chicanas/os and Arabs. Researching the institutions that
offered up their spaces elucidates how these sites were transformed into film exhibitions and
spaces of solidarity.
A Brief Note on Method
Writing a history about non-traditional spaces of film exhibition with limited surviving
archival material challenges us to search for materials other than celluloid. A number of the films
projected during the meetings at these spaces are nonextant or inaccessible to the general public.
98
In the French context, Guy Hennebelle’s Guide des films anti-impérialiste is a small and
comprehensive source that attempts to summarize and offer brief citations of the political, militant,
and anti-imperial films that were screened in France. Recognizing the challenges to locate these
films, Hennebelle explains, “Nous avons souvent donné la priorité dans notre sélection aux films
qui se trouvent effectivement à Paris (ou à Bruxelles et Genève) en langue française mais nous
avons cru bon de mentioner, voire parfois d’analyser en détail, des films que l’on ne peut pas
trouver pour le moment en France...”
2
By acknowledging that his focus lies on films in the French
language, Hennebelle also includes films from other decolonizing spaces in the world, proving
that constituting an archive of militant films is a collective task of sharing sources and identifying
the locations where the copies reside.
In referring to the limited information about these films, and the urgency he and his
collaborators felt when compiling this source, Hennebelle released this guide in order to inform
readers about the existence of these militant visual texts. Hennebelle admits to the shortcomings
where he writes, “nous invitons ceux qui auraient des informations supplémentaires ou qui auraient
remarqué des erreurs, à nous écrire…”
3
In the spirit of radical collaboration and solidarity
organizing, the guide thus becomes a living and evolving text that encourages readers with
knowledge about these films to contact the writers of the guide.
As an alternative to summarizing the content of the films screened in these spaces and their
relation to the Arab diaspora in France, I follow Field’s methodology of working with obtainable,
surviving primary sources. By studying the flyers, posters, and pamphlets and the rhetorical and
2
Guy Hennebelle, Guide des films anti-impérialiste (Paris: Editions du Centenaire), 5. My translation: “We have
prioritized films that are found in Paris (or in Brussels and Geneva) in the French language but we also decide to
mention, even in detailed analysis, films that are not retrievable in France at this moment, but appropriate to include.”
3
Ibid, 4. My translation: “We invite those who have supplementary information or who have noted errors, to write
us.”
99
political work embedded in them, we are able to piece a history about how the organizations and
the spaces in which films were screened foregrounded solidarity and imagined a different kind of
spectatorship that actively discussed politics. I work with these paper-based materials and use the
limited information embedded in order to speculate and write about the centers and institutions
that offered their space for both communities to congregate and discuss problems affecting them.
Though limited material exists and its fragile condition demonstrates why it is important to write
about films in non-traditional spaces, a number of challenges emerge from this method, especially
pertaining to the scholarly genre-writing.
In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman offers us the term “critical fabulation” to tell a
history about the violent absence of Black history in the archive. As Hartman notes, the archive
fails to recount the history of Black women during their enslavement and their experiences during
captivity across the Atlantic Ocean. Hartman’s method of critical fabulation fills the gaps by
relying on the fundamental blocks of narrative to subvert the so-called authoritative and official
event. Hartman writes, “By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-
presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have
attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and
to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.”
4
In this
endeavor, Hartman sheds light on the disposability of Black histories and therefore challenges the
discipline of history by drawing attention to the horrifying absences of violence. Critical fabulation
thus offers a method for writing into history the experiences of racialized others without replicating
the violence of exclusion that the archive normalizes.
4
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11.
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My method of telling a story about the non-traditional spaces of film exhibition requires
me to invoke a speculative and critical history that draws on flyers, posters, and advertisements
that offer limited information about the conversations that may have transpired after the film
screenings. Instead, I speculate about the functions and conversations that may have taken place
by paying close attention to the dates, the purpose of the screenings, the genre and themes of the
film, and the accompanying sessions to explain why these non-traditional spaces of film exhibition
were critical for challenging displacement through anticolonial and decolonial work.
Assembling the Archive of Absence
We might be under the impression that working with an incomplete or repressed archive
of the state impedes us from writing a history of displacement in response to this violence.
However, our task is to search elsewhere in the constellation of “unofficial” traces. In writing about
the 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris, Lia Brozgal asks: “What happens, then, when those very
textual traces are repressed? How does the absence of the archive impact and inform identity,
culture, and knowledge?”
5
As Brozgal takes on this question to examine textual traces produced
by the state, it is nevertheless important to ruminate on the absence of the archive. The absence
should not deter us from writing histories of pain and resistance. In fact, absence offers us
generative methods that oblige us to enact creative methods for writing into history the surviving
archival documents and material culture located outside the institutions of knowledge and power.
While we should not romanticize the lack of documentation, we might find the void and silence
productive for replenishing the archive in imaginative ways that venture into the critical fabulation
method that Hartman employs in rescuing the history of Black women, violence, and slavery.
5
Lia Brozgal, “In the Absence of the Archive (Paris, October 17, 1961),” South Central Review 31, no.1 (2014): 35.
101
For example, Jenny Sharpe tells us that the omissions enable us to draw from intertextual
and scattered sources in order to reconstruct a fragmented history. In her analysis of M. NourbeSe
Philip’s Zong!, Sharpe examines how this poetic retelling of the atrocious event in which enslaved
people were jettisoned from the slave ship Zong in 1781, offer new ways of reading and writing
against so-called official records that the state produced. However, Sharpe writes that Philip’s
poetic retelling of this account through the use of legal documents from the court proceeding of
the case is confronted with a dilemma. “Yet, as a metaphoric tombstone,” writes Sharpe, “the legal
case does not contain the standard inscription: proper name and longevity of life, next of kin, and
inscription of love and/or grief. For this reason, it presents the poet with a conundrum: how to find
the humanity of slaves within a document that negates it? How to tell a story for which the evidence
works against its telling?”
6
Sharpe underscores that the absence in the archive produces power that
can be expressed through poetry, and to write into history the humanity of the nameless, enslaved
people. By reading against the “official” archive of the Zong case, Philip employs a vocabulary
and syntax that challenges the official record, compelling us to think about the wider implications
of what we can do with words, archives, and absence. If absence informs culture, identity politics,
and knowledge production, we must think about how the absence compels us to think alternatively
to create an otherwise account that claims a space in the annals of history. This opportunity of
creating archives and forging genres of writing that reject total absence is a radical method against
displacement, and an anticolonial and decolonial act of resistance.
In a broad sense, writing histories of displacement makes space for the people who have
been forgotten and excluded from the memory of spatial politics. Furthermore, writing these
histories confronts the absence and the gatekeepers who intentionally commit the violence of
6
Jenny Sharpe, “The Archive and Affective Memory in M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!,” Interventions: International
Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 4 (2014): 467.
102
epistemic displacement. As evinced in the previous chapter, it is particularly dangerous for
racialized groups to hold and make space in public settings. The Arabs who marched and protested
the War in Algeria, and the Chicanas/os who were removed from Whittier Park for opposing the
war in Vietnam, could not hold and make space when militarized authorities physically brutalized
them for exercising their political convictions. What should have concluded as a celebration of
resistance and self-determination instead turned out fatal. I turn to other spaces in order to tell a
history of how both communities resisted displacement. Though I could have focused on sites of
religious congregation, homes, and other intimate spaces, by way of writing, I enter non-traditional
spaces of film exhibition through the surviving archival documents in order to call attention to how
Arabs and Chicanas/os held and made space for allies to dialogue about political activism and to
create a setting for viewing films.
Surviving Archival Material
Survival is an affirmation of existence and resistance. Whether we write about survival in
relation to sentient beings, organic matter, or material objects, expanding our understanding on the
various meanings and implications of survival opens new channels of inquiry.
We are forced to search elsewhere to find alternative documents to write histories of
resistance. What happens when we locate those documents and they do not offer the detailed
accounts that we imagine or that we desire? How do we decolonize assumptions that speculation
risks misrepresenting historical events, or worse, work against the premature dismissal of the genre
as fiction? Is there an appropriate genre of using incomplete archives and disparate documents to
tell a history of solidarity? The traces, remains, and surviving texts in the repositories carry
significant value to the historical work we seek to write and when the methods are do not exist, we
are tasked with building the foundation of new forms of writing.
103
In Summer 2019, my research led me to Paris, France to consult and study the documents
that would give me greater insight into the histories of resistance in Paris of the 1960s and 1970s.
I was keen on visiting Association Génériques, to spend hours sitting with the documents that were
produced in those decades and immerse myself in the political, cultural, and rich intellectual voices
that racialized communities produced. To my dismay, Association Génériques was no longer in
operation; the organization became another defunct, nonextant institution whose focus on lesser-
known histories of racialized resistance offered radical ways of imagining the preservation of
community archives. The neighborhood was undergoing major public construction works and it
appeared that a new community was being created, one that catered to young and affluent people.
I could not help but think: What happened to the documents that the organization archived and
what were the conditions that led to its permanent closure? How could an organization active in
preserving racialized histories of Paris suddenly cease operation and discontinue updates via its
social media communication platforms? Though some of the work is digitally archived, the closure
of the archive stirred my emotions. The histories and documents of racialized people indeed do
not matter and are readily disposable.
I thus take this closure further and argue that Arab and Chicana/o documents of the 1960s
and 1970s are surviving archival materials because at any moment, or perhaps that moment already
took place without record, the documents were subject to disposal or destruction. The flyers,
pamphlets, and posters were not meant to survive, especially because they were created to inform
community members about political and cultural events, rather than to be presented as art pieces.
In working with flyers, programs, and advertisements selling visual culture to be shown in
classrooms for racialized pupils, these documents were critical in disseminating information about
events affecting Chicanas/os and Arabs, the location in which the organizers of these events were
104
making and holding space, and the focus of the community gatherings in regard to political
solidarity with revolutionaries in their communities and around the world. These surviving flyers
from the 1960s and 1970s broaden our understanding that some documents are not meant to exist
because of their production and distribution practices. These paper-based materials concerned
Arab communities in France post-Algerian Independence and in the midst of anti-Arab sentiments,
showing us that living conditions did not improve. Similarly, the textual documents that were
circulated in barrios concerned armed struggle and calls to political involvement.
The surviving documents, or historical traces, are evidence of the political work that took
place in spaces outside of public view. This informs how we think about space and its diverse uses,
especially when considering how space is repurposed to bring communities together. Furthermore,
we might also think about the successful survival of this material as a statement of Arabs and
Chicanas/os and their material culture overcoming institutional and archival refusal and disregard.
Fortunately, though some university archives offer a modicum of value to these works, it is
nevertheless important to pay attention to how these materials are inaccessible to these
communities. In addition, some materials might not even receive the care they deserve. For
example, the archive at La Contemporaine at Université Paris Nanterre, does not contain detailed
research guides, and the documents find themselves in a disorganized state that would alarm
archivists and scholars whose work on race already points to archival violence.
Despite the preservation shortcomings, the histories of resistance and racial survival show
that these documents are important to our understanding of displacement during the era of
anticolonial and decolonial resistance. The hindrance to studying subaltern material such as these
flyers includes undated and unauthored materials, and identifying information pertaining to how
these documents ended up in the archive. While this makes it difficult to write histories about who
105
created the documents, who circulated them, where they were posted, and other questions about
their survivability, the dispersed documents give us the opportunity to include visual culture in our
histories. The flyers and programs that I consult from the Saïd Bouziri collection at La
Contemporaine in Paris and the East Los Angeles Archive at California State University, Los
Angeles challenge me to think about the possibility of telling a history of a time and space in an
era of decolonization, police brutality, and exclusion on the uses and function of non-traditional
spaces of film exhibition.
Non-Traditional Spaces of Film Exhibition
How do we define a non-traditional space of film exhibition? What are the qualities of
these non-traditional spaces and how do audiences forge them? There is a history of moving image
exhibition in non-traditional viewing spaces, some of which continue to take place in
unconventional settings. Some of these sites include mobile rooms, convention halls, libraries,
classrooms and lecture halls, and outdoor screens, to name a few. The minimal equipment that is
required to project films is surely a notable element of non-traditional spaces of film exhibition as
mobile equipment is conveniently transportable. There is limited history on non-traditional spaces
of film exhibition when the occasion for screening these events were for the purposes of
establishing Arab and Chicana/o solidarity and political engagement against displacement in Paris
and East Los Angeles.
As Barbara Klinger suggests, it is important to think about how new media technologies,
especially the filmic ones, have long been invested in collapsing the boundaries between the
private and the public.
7
If film viewing is a collective social experience that is characterized by
7
Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 17-18.
106
bringing spectators into a public space, what happens when that experience is transferred outside
of the cinema and other traditional film viewing spaces? Before advancing, I must make a
distinction between clandestine spaces of film exhibition and non-traditional spaces of film
exhibition. The former is a space in which political and militant films were screened in
underground spaces. Those films were considered subversive to authority. Some of those films
risked censorship, while others were destroyed, and their producers and audiences disciplined by
the state. Non-traditional spaces of film exhibition, on the other hand, were not exclusively
clandestine; these spaces brought together Arabs and Chicanas/os and their allies in their respective
contexts in order to screen films, conduct discussions, and participate in other civic activities.
Several of the underground and radical spaces and educational institutions that hosted these groups
and sites in which the films were projected, welcomed political work.
Not all spaces were meant to project films, but the organizers of these events in Paris and
Los Angeles found the means to make it possible. In Useful Cinema, Charles Acland and Haidee
Wasson write about the various functions and purposes of nontheatrical films and the technology
available at the time that transformed how people experienced film viewing. I am, however, critical
of the term “useful” in the context of solidarity and community viewing because the criteria of
“useful” is subjective and risks waiving off radical and militant cinemas. For example, we should
restrain ourselves from thinking that films screened in those settings were pedagogical or that they
were screened to teach audiences. Instead, exploring the importance of film viewing in these spaces
and how the films helped facilitate Arab and Chicana/o solidarity is generative for the histories of
resistance and displacement. “Film technologies—screens, projectors, and cameras,” write Acland
and Wasson, “were long ago integrated into a surprising range of spaces and situations, shaping
the aesthetics as well as the display of and engagement with motion pictures,” where they elaborate
107
that portable and lightweight technology allowed films to be screened in a number of settings.
8
As
we explored in the previous chapter, nontheatrical films radically transgressed the generic
mainstream filmmaking formula, and the goals of these films were to instruct rather than to
entertain. In addition, when we take into account mid-twentieth century films about race,
injustices, and matters relating to cultural difference, the films functioned to raise awareness about
the struggle of racialized others. In the 1960s and 1970s, films about race and inequality were
screened outside traditional spaces of film exhibition, albeit in more formal settings.
As such, our understanding of these films changes dramatically because these moving
images were projected for diverse audiences at these underground and radical spaces and
institutions of higher learning. Acland and Wasson elaborate on the significance of film screenings
outside theatres by adding that “each has been a key site for the formation and reformation of
cinema itself.”
9
While their focus on transformation pertains to cinema, we could expand on this
contribution to include how these films equally transformed the space in which they were exhibited
and how the spectators themselves might have interacted with each other. Although Acland and
Wasson are primarily concerned with films screened at institutions for the purposes of edifying
audiences and instructing viewers on how to perform in the social and industrial sectors, they
provide us a framework for thinking about the utility of film beyond the escapist narratives of
mainstream cinema.
Writing in the context of the portability, mobility, and the scale of film equipment of the
1930s in the U.S., Ariel Rogers proposes the term extratheatrical screens to examine how the
proliferation of screens outside of the cinema into domestic spaces, places of worship, and public
sites of leisure and consumption “reconfigured familiar realms— whether homes, stores, or train
8
Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson, Useful Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
9
Ibid.
108
stations— not only by creating new conjunctions and divisions within these spaces but also by
conjoining them with and dividing them from the elsewheres and elsewhens pictured onscreen.”
10
Rogers’ concept of the extratheatrical screens offer us the historical framework to consider how
spectatorship practices and film, television, and other media exhibition informs our engagement
and relationship with the spaces we inhabit.
In the context of the Arab and Chicana/o viewing practices, the extratheatrical appeared in
ways that did not include the sophisticated redesigning of space, but rather it helped coordinate
and unite these communities to screen national and global anticolonial and decolonial struggles in
non-traditional spaces of film exhibition. Films screened at these non-traditional spaces of film
exhibition were useful in that they facilitated solidarity, and they were screened in contexts of
political engagement that directly affected racialized groups.
As we have briefly explored, the flyers and programs show us that the space in which the
films were screened were sympathetic to facilitating cultural encounters and emphasizing the
importance of political work. While we cannot wholly reconstruct the exact uses of these
underground and radical spaces and institutions of higher learning and configuration of the
screening space, we can affirm that the people who frequented those spaces were sympathetic to
liberation struggles. The transformation of these sites into non-traditional spaces of film exhibition
taps into notions of the reparative. In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of
Creativity, Dorinne Kondo, draws from Melanie Klein’s notion of the reparative to write about the
affective violence and how theatre and the creativity it affords performers and viewers helps repair
the violence that institutions with power inflict on racialized people. Kondo writes that reparative
worldmaking “necessarily navigates through violence, devastation, shattering, to work toward
10
Ariel Rogers, “Extratheatrical Screens in the Long 1930s: Film and Television at Home and in Transit,” in On the
Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926-1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 143.
109
integration,” which we can surmise might have happened in non-traditional spaces of film
exhibition through communal viewing experiences and discussion of the films and other relevant
topics.
11
In having transformed these cultural sites into exhibition spaces in order to bring Arabs
and Chicanas/os and their allies to discuss and mobilize around social injustices, the organizers
built toward reparative worldmaking.
The social justice committees concerned with the Arab and Chicana/o cause and the
deplorable living arrangements led them to create cultural and political events with film screenings
as organizing tools for putting communities in conversation with each other. In the context of the
U.S., Charles Acland writes that in the post-World War II era community organizations and film
council movements assessed that films were instrumental in building interinstitutional and
interpersonal rapport. Some councils even produced films to instruct cultural organizers on how
to run and project films and lead discussions and debates around them. Acland writes, “Along with
these ideas ran particular modes of serious consideration of community and curricular topics via
motion pictures as well as related uses of classroom and community space for gatherings,
screenings, and discussions. Put differently, cultural leaders deployed the mobile media of film to
gain access to and influence in locations for the molding of civic participation.”
12
Essentializing these non-traditional spaces of film exhibition as spaces of sanctuary or
refuge is a problem and thus one cannot positively make such a statement. There is limited archival
information on what these events and programs offered and how “solidarity” unfolded in these
spaces. Surely solidarity differed in context and situation. These non-traditional spaces of film
11
Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity, (Durham: Duke University Press,
2018), 33.
12
Charles Acland, “Celluloid Classrooms and Everyday Projectionists: Post-World War II Consolidation of
Community Film Activism,” in Learning with the Lights Off, eds. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 393.
110
exhibition have a deal to teach us about the space and the goals of the organizers. Building on her
understanding of Raymond Williams’ concept of the “signal system,” Klinger writes that the
artifact (the object in question) is consumed according to the systems that influence the exhibition
space through the “institutional cues.”
13
It is true that the exhibition of films in different spaces
alters the viewing experience of spectators, and in the context of this study, it perhaps influenced
the discussions that attendees engaged in at the meetings. Klinger elaborates, “If the same film
were to be shown at an art house and a drive-in theatre, the patterns of consumption already
associated with each venue would influence the audience’s viewing attitudes and behaviors…The
film is materially the same, but the experience of it changes dramatically.”
14
We can confidently
make the case that the films screened at meetings about labor rights, solidarity, antiracism, and
resistance shifted to accommodate the immediate needs of the community.
The films in these spaces covered a host of issues, many of which dealt with uprisings and
political instability in the Arab world and in the Chicana/o context, respectively. By screening non-
mainstream and nontheatrical films in non-traditional spaces of exhibition, the organizers of the
events organized film screenings as a radical political method to establish links of solidarity and a
shared commitment to justice. The transformation of these institutions and community space into
space of film exhibition illustrates the inventiveness and urgency of creating a space to bring
people together.
In the context of Paris, the films that were screened in the non-traditional spaces did not
always focus on the Arab world; some films pertained to other anticolonial and decolonial
struggles in the African continent, and they included a number of genres such as documentary and
fiction film. In the case of Los Angeles, the films pertained mostly to the Chicana/o experience
13
Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, 19.
14
Ibid.
111
and other racialized groups around the United States. While several of these films are nonextant
or inaccessible, the flyers deliver critical information about the organizations that coordinated the
event; the location in which these meetings were held; the topic or theme of the meeting; and the
films that were screened.
Underground and Radical Spaces in France
The early forms of radical organizing in Paris during the 1960s were made possible due in
part to the creation of the Palestine committees. As projectors proliferated, and an engaged genre
of cinema burgeoned, activists used film to invite community members in a collective experience
of political activity. For example, Comité Palestine (Palestine Committee), comprised of Arab
laborers, students, and allies were equipped with the language and methods for coordinating radical
events.
15
Those who engaged in the Palestinian struggle, circulated a flyer circa 1976 that called
attention to the Syrian armed forces occupying Lebanon, and the threat this posed for Palestinian
refugees and their political cause (figure 2.1). As Abdellalli Hajjat has written, the history of Arab
political organizing in the 1960s and 1970s is rooted in various intersecting struggles, especially
through the Palestinian cause. Through the creation of the Palestine committees, students, laborers,
and migrants introduced an anticolonial and decolonial resistance that critiqued displacement in
the Arab world and in France. Hajjat adds, “Les comités Palestine ne sont pas exclusivement
consacrés à la cause palestinienne, mais constituent un véritable laboratoire politique où fusionnent
les luttes de soutien au peuple palestinien, contre les crimes racistes, pour l’amélioration des
15
See Abdellali Hajjat, “Des comités Palestine au Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes (1970-1976),” in Histoire
Politique des Immigrations (Post)coloniales, eds. Ahmed Boubeker and Abdellali Hajjat (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam,
2008). Hajjat details that the Palestine Committees were formed by politically engaged Arab and French students and
Maoists from the proletarian left. A number of the Arab students came from countries in the Arab world hwere they
did not have the opportunity to fully engage in politics, and thus found a connection with the Palestinian cause.
Moreover, unlike the former political groups in the metropole, the students fought along the lines of immigrant causes
rather than nationalism.
112
conditions de vie des travailleurs immigrés, etc.”
16
As Hajjat shows, Palestine served as the
organizing principle for developing resistance against displacement and drawing connections to
relational oppression that concurrently unfolded in Palestine, France, and throughout the Arab
diaspora.
Figure 2.1. Flyer of Comité Palestine, Circa 1970s, Saïd Bouziri Files, La
Contemporaine, Paris, France.
The flyer presses on an urgent point, “Les travailleurs arabes en France, partie intégrante
du Mouvement Révolutionaire Arabe, sont solidaires du combat du Peuple Palestinien en territoire
occupé comme au Liban.”
17
The committee calls attention to how imperial, zionist, and other
complacent regimes were culpable in suppressing the Palestinian cause. The language in the flyer
underscores the urgency of why it was important for Arab laborers in Paris to express solidarity
16
Abdellali Hajjat, “Les comités Palestine (1970-1972). Aux origines du soutien de la cause palestinienne en France,”
Revue d’études palestiniennes (2006), 10. My translation: “The Palestine Committees are not exclusively focused on
the Palestinian cause, but are rather constituted by a political laboratory that fuses interrelated struggles such as support
for the Palestinian people, racist crimes, for the amelioration of labor conditions and immigrants, etc.”
17
My translation: “The Arab laborers in France, integral to the Revolutionary Arab Movement, stand in solidarity
with the struggle of the Palestinian people in occupied territory such as in Lebanon.”
113
with Palestinians as a political and relational move that focused on how the tactics of suppression,
violence, and displacement in Lebanon similarly took place in Paris. This suppression, though not
executed in a warfare manner, nevertheless pointed to how the political work of Arabs in the
metropole was part of an unsettling repression in the Arab world. The flyer called for the people
to attend the advertised meeting and to watch the screening of Agressions Sionistes (Sionist
Aggressions) and La Guerre des 4 Jours au Sud Liban (The Four Day War in South Lebanon) at
the Maison des Immigrés in Montbeliard and the Maison du Peuple in Belfort.
18
The screening of
these films took place on two different dates, underlining the urgency of the moment in France and
in the Arab world. Furthermore, by holding and making space for Arabs and allies invested in
common political organizing, Comité Palestine sought to suture the ideological and nationalist
differences by unifying Arabs to express solidarity with Palestinians and to connect the cause to
the struggles of migrants in the Global North.
Others such as the Comité de Soutien à la Résistance Palestinienne et les Maos (Committee
of Support for the Palestinian Resistance and the Maoists) organized a film screening at the town
hall in Lyon to discuss the alliance between King Hussein of Jordan and U.S. President Richard
Nixon’s violent suppression and disregard for Palestinian human rights (figure 2.2). Though this
event did not take place in Paris, the flyer draws our attention to the fact that these struggles against
French apathy and networks of solidarity with Arabs unfolded throughout the metropole. The
screening of the film Palestine Vaincra (Palestine Will Overcome) (1969), directed by Jean-Pierre
Olivier de Sardan, set the tone for the radical work that defined how Arabs in France engaged in
militancy with the vision of vanquishing the oppressive regimes of displacement. In addition, the
accompanying translation of the flyer in Arabic illustrates that the committee reached speakers of
18
I have been unable to locate a copy of these films or their synopsis at this point.
114
Figure 2.2. Flyer of Comité de Soutien à la Résistance Palestinienne et les Maos, Circa 1970s,
Saïd Bouziri Files, La Contemporaine, Paris, France.
the language whose proficiency in French was not strong considering that many were “postcolonial
migrants” of the first generation. Evidently, the committee relied on cultural and linguistic
inclusivity as a gesture of solidarity to combat labor and housing discrimination and anti-Arab
sentiments, and to raise awareness of the Palestinian cause.
In Hennebelle’s guide of anti-imperial films, the entry for Palestine Vaincra states that
Olivier de Sardan and his team traced the critical phases of the Palestinian conflict through archival
documents found at the National Library or those provided by the students in the G.U.P.S (the
Palestinian Student Union). Based on the synopsis, the film begins with a dark screen, creating a
psychological effect where the interviewee recounts the battle of Karameh, Jordan in 1969. The
115
entry explains that the filmmaker stressed that Palestine would overcome as long as popular and
engaged militant support continues.
19
As I explained, there is limited record on what the conversations may have looked like
before, during, and after the screenings. Fortunately, we are left with a trace of the contention that
emerged in politically engaged circles. In the film Compter sur ses propres forces (1972), directed
by Yannis Tritsibidas, made in Vincennes at the Atelier pour un cinéma de lutte, the disagreement
to screen Palestine Vaincra was evident. In speaking about the internal conflicts among the
laborers, protestors, union organizers, and other politically engaged groups at the Renault
automobile manufacturing factory in May 1971, one of the interview subjects, seated with two
other men and who conceal their faces with a cloth to maintain privacy, explains that Arab laborers
sought to unify themselves and express their collective solidarity by screening the film as part of
their engaged struggle. With the objective to raise the political consciousness of the workers by
situating the Palestinian struggle within the labor movement in France, the man explains that the
union was opposed to the screening. He goes further to say that the Palestinian struggle also
pertained to Arab laborers in France especially due to resistance against exploitation through the
occupation of housing quarters. Even though this scene does not capture the collective viewing
experience, it raises questions about how films were selected for screening in other contexts,
outside of the factories and non-political struggles. Furthermore, this raises a point about how film
screenings in radical spaces were contentious due to their subject matter.
Comité Palestine and Comité de Soutien à la Résistance Palestinienne et les Maos screened
films relating to Zionist occupation and imperialism in the Middle East for holding and making
space for Arabs in France. In the flyer, the word “frères,” meaning “brothers,” serves as a familial,
19
Hennebelle, Guide des films, 43.
116
diasporic, and cultural identification that mediated the solidarity of Arabs in France and in the
Arab world, showing us that the organizers of these events hoped to reach wide and across and to
electrify the people into action. In addition, this fraternal identification reflected the revolutionary
spirit of other radical movements where this language of comradery emphasized a recognition of
humanity. The flyer explicitly calls for the people to side with the revolutionaries because the
“rotten imperialists” have sided with the regimes of displacement. Furthermore, this militant action
is reflected through the drawing of the riffle, which bisects the text in a way that symbolizes armed
resistance against occupation and the right to self-defense. In visual culture about the Palestinian
struggle, and other armed resistance, the riffle symbolizes a desire to survive until victory.
The screening of the aforementioned films in non-traditional spaces of film exhibition
shows us that visual culture played a monumental role in helping political organizations hold and
make radical space. This work helped facilitate forms of solidarity among diverse Arab
communities. Furthermore, we might add that the organizers were aware that Arabs were not
cohere ideologically and that in order to establish a shared commitment to political involvement,
it was imperative to draw connections with labor, immigration, and racial discrimination in France
with the turmoil in the Middle East and in the Arab world.
The flyers and programs of the events did not always prioritize film screenings as a
communal experience. Some organized entertainment with the goal of bringing Arabs, allies, and
other community members to debate, discuss, and acknowledge the anticolonial and decolonial
struggles. Visual culture and performance served a critical purpose considering that these forms of
entertainment in the cultural centers of Paris were unwelcoming. Moreover, these community
events functioned to ingrain cultural pride and to promote cohesion between banlieues. As I will
momentarily show, the organizers of these events depended on visual culture to showcase the
117
vibrant life experiences of racialized groups that the French press portrayed as foreign. Several of
these events included photography exhibitions, musical performances, theatre, and poetry
readings. For example, at the event “3 Jours avec les Immigrés” (“Three Days with Immigrants”),
organized by the group Etude de Langue Arabe (Group of the Study of Arabic) at Ateliers de
Recherche et Création (Center for Research and Creativity) in Clichy, the organizers held a three-
day event that showcased the culture and art of migrants in France (figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3. “3 Jours avec les Immigrés,” Circa 1970s, Saïd Bouziri Files, La Contemporaine,
Paris, France.
Included in the program, the stage performance of C’est la vie de château pourvu que ça dure (It’s
a Dreamland provided that it lasts), by Théâtre Al Assifa; exposition of drawings by migrant
children; visual montage of “Mineurs Marocains” (“Moroccan Miners”) and “A Travail égal,
salaire égal” (“Equal Work, Equal Pay); and films such as Mektoub? (1970) directed by Ali
Ghanem, demonstrates that visual culture was central to the work of resistance, self-representation,
and anticolonial and decolonial resistance.
118
Mektoub?, a ninety-minute Algerian fiction film, focuses on the protagonist Ahmed
Chergui, an Algerian migrant who faces a series of unfortunate events common of the migrant
laborer experience in France. In the synopsis of the film, Hennebelle explains that though the
theme of the film does not address radical and engaged labor struggles, Mektoub? nevertheless
represents the experiences of Arab laborers in France in a humanizing manner. The writer of the
entry determined that the film was resourceful for screening in several contexts, “Il peut utilement
sensibiliser certain catégories de Français. Il peut servir aussi à informer les publics africains en
Afrique sur le sort qui les attend en Europe capitaliste.”
20
Evidently, this fiction film offered more
than entertainment, it transmitted a political message open to many interpretations about the jarring
Figure 2.4. “Journée anti-raciste,” Circa 1970s, Saïd Bouziri Files, La Contemporaine, Paris,
France.
20
Hennebelle, Guide des films, 10. My translation: “It can usefully raise awareness among the French. It can also
function to inform the African public in Africa about the condition that awaits them in capitalist Europe.”
119
realities in the metropole.
The plethora of visual culture proved to be successful, and the inclusion of Arab differences
and perspectives reflected a radical shift in creating spaces of exhibition. The Ateliers de
Recherche et Création hosted a different event “Journée anti-raciste” (“Day of Antiracism”), which
also included cultural entertainment throughout the day (figure 2.4). The entertainment included
an exposition of photographs, posters, and documents; film screenings and discussion of Étranges,
étrangers (Strange, Foreigners) (1970) directed by Marcel Trillat and Frédéric Variot, Mon
Village (My Village) (1972) by Taïeb Louhici, and Mektoub?; music; and a stage performance by
Théâtre Al Assifa. The twenty-minute Tunisian film Mon Village, un Village Parmi Tant D’Autres,
was shot with a low budget. Reflecting the limited resources, this aesthetic, according to
Hennebelle, is embodied throughout, symbolically reflecting the experiences of Maghrebi
immigration to Europe.
By focusing on a Tunisian village, Louhici shows how its gradual depopulation, and
notably the absence of men, is attributed to labor migration that benefits the elite in power.
21
As
the flyer illustrates, an hour-long debate followed the screening of Étranges, étrangers, which
complemented the topic of immigration in France. Étranges, étrangers, a fifty-minute 16mm film
in color directed by Crepac-Scopcolor in 1971, primarily focuses on the lived experiences of
Algerian and Portuguese migrants in France.
22
Though transcriptions, nor audio, and nor video of
the event exist, the “Journée anti-raciste” event is one of many where migrants, allies, and
racialized people came together for cultural entertainment, visual culture, and to nurture political
21
Hennebelle, Guide des films, 31.
22
Hennebelle, Guide des films, 33. Crepac (Centre Recherche Education Permanente et Action Culturelle) and
Scopcolor (Société de production de films) worked with the CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail)
to use visual culture in order to advance labor struggles and other similar issues.
120
awareness of related struggles in the banlieues and the Global South, and to decolonize
assumptions that they were devoid of cultural richness.
As the flyers illustrate, these pro-Arab, labor movements, and politically engaged groups,
benefitted in using visual culture to advance their struggles and to bring a number of communities
together. The flyers called for antiracist, pro-proletariat, and politically involved people to name
their grievances. These flyers offer numerous entryways to study them and discuss their
importance as part of French urban and film history.
What has become of these spaces in the contemporary? And do they hold the same political
influence as they did in the past? In Paris, one of the sites that offered itself to pro-Arab solidarity
was Centre 72 located in Bois-Colombes. Established in 1972 outside of Paris, the cultural center
was created alongside the concurrent social movements that took place in France at the time. It is
important to remember that spaces change their objectives over time. Although Centre 72 has since
evolved in its mission, as other spaces and institutions do, it nevertheless remains committed to
“Créer du lien social, promouvoir l’éducation populaire, proposer des activités culturelles et
artistiques pour tous les âges, favoriser les rencontres entre génération et entre groupes sociaux,
stimuler la réflexion, la solidarité et l’épanouissement des personnes, organiser des événements,
des concerts et des spectacles de qualité pour le plaisir de tous…”
23
The social justice goals
continue today, and we see how the space in the 1970s appealed to groups of all ages, generations,
and cultural difference at the time it offered its space for Arab solidarity.
In the 1970s, the Ateliers de Recherche et Création hosted several political events. This
site, presently known as Espace Henry Miller, is located in Clichy, a space outside of Paris known
23
My translation: “To create social networks, promote popular education, propose cultural and artistic activities for
all ages, facilitate intergenerational encounters between social groups, stimulate critical reflection, solidarity, organize
events, concerts, and offer high-quality entertainment for all.”
121
for its diverse community, notably of migrants. Even though the space has changed from its radical
activity, today the center remains committed to showcasing the work of artists and cultural groups
that are not afforded mainstream visibility. In our work of studying these non-traditional spaces of
film exhibition, we must also think about their evolution over time. And although Clichy is
undergoing gentrification that is displacing the racialized groups that have historically experienced
segregation and violence in this area of Paris, the flyers and program events of the 1970s tell us
that the history of the community during that decade cannot be erased in the shadow of
contemporary urban renovation projects.
Institutions of Higher Learning in Los Angeles
In the context of the Chicana/o Movement, there is a dearth of archival material on non-
traditional spaces of film exhibition. However, this limitation and scarcity of material nonetheless
shows us that film screenings were equally important as organizations informed audiences of
multiple struggles. These spaces were generative because they united communities in ways that
are arguably impossible to do in traditional filmgoing culture experiences.
The Chicana/o events that included film screenings in Los Angeles are notably important
because the majority, according to the archival documents, took place at college campuses. While
it is true that the Civil Rights Movement inspired students in the late 1960s and 1970s to challenge
the exclusionary practices of education, the young organizers used university facilities as sites of
radical political work and cultural exchange. Based on information in the flyers, the students
organized events at East Los Angeles College, California State University, Long Beach, and Los
Angeles City College. In other instances, students and community organizers collaborated with
the University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Center. The groups ranged from
Mexican American students enrolled in college to members of the Chicano Moratorium
122
Committee. Why were college campuses critical sties of non-traditional spaces of film exhibition
in Los Angeles? And what was the significance for organizers to bring Chicanas/os from the barrio
into these institutions of higher learning?
Curtis Marez’s study of California campuses and the history of white supremacy leads us
towards the direction of considering that Chicanas/os in East Los Angeles intentionally invited
their community into these spaces in order to collapse the boundaries of activist work and
education, address the legacies of racism, and to visually assert their presence on campus as a
political gesture. Marez reminds us that after all, the stakeholders of these universities in the early
twentieth century “were plantation owners, slavers, and merchants who profited from slavery,
while the schools themselves were built by Indigenous and African slaves.”
24
Marez adds that
conservative governor of California Ronald Reagan, who began his term in 1967, automatically
integrating him into the Regents of the University of California system, played a role in
suppressing the voices of the emerging radical generation. Though Reagan himself played roles in
several films about the college experience, his indifference of racialized students and their activism
for justice mirrored his staunch conservative ethos. Marez adds, “As a governor, then, Reagan was
in the forefront of a particular form of neoliberalism we might call settler-colonial privatization”
and goes further to explain that the former governor’s approach to the college experience
“combined symbolic and material attacks, imagining the UC system on the model of white settler-
colonial family and his role as governor as one of paternal protector and disciplinarian.”
25
It
appears, as Marez indicates, that Reagan preserved the university as a bastion of white supremacy
24
Curtis Marez, University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2020), 9.
25
Ibid, 83.
123
and exclusive citizenship. Thus, the activism of racialized students posed a threat to the settler-
colonial fantasy of knowledge production.
The demands that racialized students verbalized and delivered to university administrators
to increase enrollment of underrepresented groups took shape in the form of campus protests,
classroom teach-ins, and occupation of administrative buildings. In light of the Civil Rights
movement and the liberation movements of the time, politically energized students especially
played an important role in the occupation of public space, which included the university facilities.
Following this line of thought, it becomes clear that the presence of political and cultural
organizations at these universities were an antithesis to ideas that universities were the absolute
institutions with knowledge and power over the histories that were written and studied. These acts
of radical occupation are, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call, “the undercommons of the
university.” In their specific focus on Blackness and the political thought about how Black people
navigate institutions of power, they write, “To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and
enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal,
queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back,
where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons.”
26
Moten and Harney point
toward a critical point that brings attention to how aggrieved groups create the radical spaces that
the university cannot offer because this institution and its foundations are rooted in legacies of
theft, subjection, and exclusion often times quite literally. In the context of East Los Angeles,
Chicana/o students organized events in radical and underground ways. By opening the spaces of
the university to working-class, racialized, and other minoritized people, Chicanas/os set the
26
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor
Compositions, 2013), 28.
124
conditions for how they would challenge and transform institutions of knowledge into sites of
political contestation.
In the October 15, 1968 issue of La Raza newspaper, an advertisement appeared promoting
the event “Semana de La Raza” (“Week of the People”) organized by La Raza Nueva (The New
Race) and the United Mexican American Students at California State University, Long Beach
(figure 2.5).
27
Figure 2.5. “Semana de la Raza,” La Raza (1968), East Los Angeles Archive, California State
University Los Angeles.
Though the event took place in the south of the East Los Angeles barrios, this indicates
that the meaningful work of resistance also took place in settings of higher learning throughout the
region. First, due in part to affirmative action and civil rights work, Chicanas/os enrolled in
universities and utilized the tools and facilities of the institution to uplift and mobilize their
communities into political action. Second, by organizing this event at Cal State, Long Beach, the
27
“Semana de la Raza,” La Raza Vol. 2, no. 1, October 15, 1968, 7.
125
students intentionally dismantled the walls of exclusion by inviting community members and key
figures of the Chicano Movement into the university. This radical gesture was part of the cosmic
political landscape where universities became contested sites of political struggle. Third, the event
featured prominent figures of the Chicano Movement such as Cesar Chavez and Sal Castro,
thereby showing that this collaborative effort included community organizations and it was aimed
at bringing communities across various geographical points into common space for discussing
Chicana/o causes.
The advertisement announced that the purpose of the event was “To present cultural and
educational events and entertainment to the community and to the campus. The week is dedicated
to promoting an awareness of the Mexican American in our society.”
28
On Monday, October 14,
César E. Chávez spoke at the event at noon, followed by the screening of the film Huelga (Strike)
produced by El Teatro Campesino (Theatre of Farmworkers). The screening was followed by a
“Symposium on the Universal Campesino.” In addition, skits, poetry, and music performed by El
Teatro Campesino and El Teatro Urbano (Urban Theatre) were part of the program with the
purpose of addressing “community relations, education, police etc.”
29
Though there is no record of the conversations that took place following the film screening
of Huelga or the “Symposium on the Universal Campesino,” the document speaks to the
importance of using film as an organizing tool in order to develop conversations on labor, race,
and exclusion. One can only wonder: Did the speakers and attendees discuss the labor exploitation
of farmworkers throughout the Americas? How did they include other regions of the world in their
understanding of campesino labor? If they did not, what can we make of the “universal campesino”
and the colonial regime of labor exploitation of farmworkers in the U.S. and beyond that took
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
126
place at the time? Whatever the discussions, the organizers and the attendees were interested labor
exploitation through a universal lens.
In the untitled flyer circa early 1970s located in the Gloria Arellanes papers at California
State University, Los Angeles, it is clear that film was important to the National Chicano
Moratorium Committee in order to draw connections between the Chicano Movement and the
violence in Southeast Asia (figure 2.6). The event was held on May 26 at Los Angeles City
College.
Figure 2.6. “Untitled flyer,” circa 1970s, Gloria Arellanes papers, East Los Angeles Archive,
John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los Angeles.
Though open to the public, the organizers suggested a one-dollar donation to potentially offset
costs. Designed in a psychedelic-like pattern, the owner of the flyer traced the outline of the copy
with red, green, and blue colors with a permanent utensil. These patterns function as text bubbles
with information about the event. In the center of the design and text appears a faint image of a
man, perhaps a revolutionary figure such as Che Guevara. One of the text bubbles reads “Bring
127
Our Boys Back from Vietnam and Cambodia,” indicating that the war in Vietnam was still ongoing
before its end in 1975. Among the music by the Midniters and Victor’s Freedom Quartet, Mexican
Folk Dance, and speeches, one of the text bubbles reads “Film on the Moratorium.”
Though the year is not written, it certainly took place after the Chicano Moratorium of
August 29, 1970 based on the clues that a “Film on the Moratorium” was screened at LACC. In
addition, though the title of the film is not announced, perhaps it could have been David Garcia’s
Requiem 29 (1970). Nevertheless, the flyer reveals that the organizing committee centered the
Chicana/o struggle by calling an end to the war ravaging South East Asia.
While some of these events with film screenings took place outside of the barrios such as
institutions of higher learning throughout the city, others took place within radical artistic spaces
in the vicinity of the barrios, such as at the Mechicano Art Center in East Los Angeles. Two
undated posters produced between 1969-1976 advertised the Barrio Film Festival. In the first, the
word “Chicano” is spray-painted in black (figure 2.7).
Figure 2.7. “Barrio Film Festival,” circa 1969-1976, Center for the Study of Political Graphics,
Los Angeles, California.
128
This artistic choice reflects a hybrid style that Chicana/o artists such as Gronk used, where graffiti
communicated a language understood by members of the community. The phrase “Film Festival”
in blurred purple ink is set against a purple hued background. The remainder of the text at the
bottom is illegible. In the center of the poster, two Aztec figures occupy the space, each one holding
a film reel. Though the poster does not contain much legible information, nor does it list the films
that were screened, it is nevertheless intriguing for its simplicity and its stylistic choice. We can
infer from this Chicano Film Festival poster that the creator emphasized the importance of pre-
Conquest Indigenous culture of the Americas, which is one of the Chicano Movement’s
romanticization with Indigenous imagery, and one that reflected a desire to connect with the past,
thereby functioning as a decolonial principle.
In the second, a red and black poster, film strips dominate a significant part of the piece
(figure 2.8). Each film strip reveals a small narrative and information about the film festival. In
the first column, indistinguishable figures can be interpreted as a crowd, or words, eventually
rendering visible the face of a revolutionary figure and a Chicana/o. What appears to be an extreme
close-up shot of the United Farm Workers eagle on the banner in the second column concludes
with a protest. In the final column, the film strip squares contain text about the Barrio Film Festival.
The text reads “presented by CALMA…east los angeles…college auditorium…5357 brooklyn
ave….DONATION 50 ¢.”
30
The second square informs us that the event took place on August 14
and 15 from noon to nine in the evening. Most importantly, the poster emphasizes, “FILMS OF
AND BY LA GENTE DE LA RAZA,” thereby showcasing an anticolonial and decolonial
resistance against mass media representation and an opportunity for self-determination.
30
“Barrio Film Festival,” circa 1969-1976, #16325, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles,
California.
129
Figure 2.8. “Barrio Film Festival,” circa 1969-1976, #16325, Center for the Study of Political
Graphics, Los Angeles, California.
This installment of the Barrio Film Festival took place under the organization of the
recently established UCLA Chicano Studies Center. Though the content in the first three squares
is indistinguishable, this opacity refuses legibility. The stylistic choice might also suggest urgency
and rawness, similar to the footage of the Chicano films that covered protests and police brutality.
For example, footage of the Chicano Movement was generally shot with hand-held cameras. The
red background supports this idea, and it emphasizes some form of action, a revolutionary
awakening associated with the color. Though the year is not written, the film festival took place in
the auditorium of East Los Angeles College. This is important because these films were screened
for the community in a site of struggle at this institution of higher learning. In addition, we see
how a partnership with the then-inaugurated Chicano Studies Center at UCLA also emphasized
130
the importance to bring the films to the community, as opposed to the community commuting to
the west side, or the south, to attend these events.
The racial, cultural, and political diversity of Los Angeles is reflected in the political work
that took place across several communities. Some of these political and cultural exchanges allowed
groups to learn about the struggles of the other while also bringing to the table their own
perspectives and ideas on building solidarity. On July 21, 1979, the day-long National Fight Back
Organization Western Regional Conference took place at the John Anson Ford Park in Bell
Gardens (figure 2.9).
Figure 2.9. “National Fight Back Organization Western Regional Conference,” 1979, East Los
Angeles Archive, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los Angeles.
The conference sought to bring people from Southern California, and from across the United
States, to “encourage cooperation between different organizations” and to tackle problems such as
131
“inflation, cutbacks, and domination of our communities by big business interests.”
31
Furthermore,
the coordinators believed that, “The only way people can change this situation is through our own
efforts—organizing, education and acting together.”
32
At the event, the 1973 film With Babies and
Banners, about the Michigan automobile workers struggle, was screened in order to complement
the philosophy of cooperation and working-class resistance. The conference included workshops
for community organizers, workshops on energy and toxic waste, education injustices, housing
and rent control, organizing and sustaining community centers for action, and a workshop in
Spanish on community organizing.
Though the conference was not specifically about Chicanas/os and the barrios, the event
nonetheless welcomed allies, including Spanish speakers. This shows us that the conference
organizers’ goal of solidarity needed to include the Chicana/o and Latina/o communities
considering that the working-class faced relational oppressions. This event formed sympathy along
geographical, cultural, and linguistic differences. Furthermore, by screening With Babies and
Banners, the subject on deindustrialization of the automobile industry in Flint, Michigan and
economic precarity might have interested working-class Chicanas in East Los Angeles and their
Black neighbors in South Central Los Angeles. As evinced, film screenings mobilized Chicanas/os
to seek out allies in other spaces across the city while fostering a radical political consciousness.
A Relational Urgent Aesthetic
Most of the flyers stored in the archives are copies of the original sources, thereby
prompting questions about how these materials were not meant to survive. In this sense, those
copies are surviving material that have overcome disposability. Fortunately, these historical
31
“National Fight Back Organization Western Regional Conference,” East Los Angeles Archives, John F. Kennedy
Memorial Library, California State University, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.
32
Ibid.
132
documents reveal that the aesthetic and production of these flyers and posters show how the
creators of this material placed importance on the dissemination of information over aesthetic
presentation; they relayed urgent matters that concerned Arab communities in France and
throughout the Arab world and Chicanas/os in East Los Angeles and throughout the U.S. The
orthographic errors, handwritten Arabic characters, drawings, and jagged aesthetics indicate that
these flyers were produced with basic means with little attention to the aesthetic presentation of
the document. Partly due to the production and circulation of these flyers, the organizers of the
events held and made space for disenfranchised groups already marginalized in the banlieues and
barrios. Sequestered in the enclosed physical and social structures of French and U.S. society, I
argue that the people found refuge in these spaces in order to discuss their social conditions in the
era of major displacements. The notion that racialized people who dwelled in the urban interstices
were politically paralyzed is evidently disputed when tracing the histories of resistance through
film culture.
Scholars such as Jacqueline Stewart have convincingly explained that the archives
available to scholars and the public are never complete. In regard to Black film history, Stewart
notes that “many films made by and for members of socially marginalized groups have been lost,
largely unprotected from the ravages of time not only by archivists, but also by their makers and
distributors, and by scholars.”
33
Some archives are recontextualized and the materials catalogued
according to the interpretation of the host institution, not necessarily reflecting the history of the
people represented in them, similar to the nontheatrical films that I explored in the previous
chapter. This is even more true when institutions prioritize certain films over others for
preservation. Though the films screened at these non-traditional spaces of film exhibition are
33
Jacqueline Stewart, “Discovering Black Film History: Tracing the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection,” Film
History 23, no.2 (2011), 148-149.
133
nonextant or inaccessible, the flyers and posters point to the importance of using film as
supplementary texts to the meetings. This work could not have been possible without the support
of the institutions that made space for Arabs, Chicanas/os, and their allies to establish solidarity.
Surviving to Hold and Make Space
Aggrieved people who hold and make space for themselves and others while using film
screenings to unite, organize, and engage communities politically, reflect a willing openness to the
variegated meanings of “holding” and “making.” The term “holding” branches off into several
definitions, not all of which align with how I am mobilizing the term in relation to the Arab and
Chicana/o experience in urban space against displacement. Christina Sharpe eloquently writes a
history of enslaved people and the significance of the ship that transported captive bodies across
the Atlantic Ocean. The hold, Sharpe writes, invokes “the language of violence,” a profane
disregard of humanity where in the hold the language of “thirst and hunger,” “sore and heat,” and
“the foot and the knife” is articulated.
34
The hold is the site, as Sharpe suggests, of detritus and
violence, where the gatekeepers and regimes of displacement are afforded the power to govern,
structure, and institute laws and rules that affect racialized people. The holds, in many cases, are
hidden, invisible spaces of radical activity. My use of the hold aligns with agency and the power
to transform physical space. In the affective vein, some meanings of “holding” might include
possession (to hold dearly onto someone or something), delay (to hold someone or something in
order to prevent departure and arrival), and prevention (holding onto someone and something to
avoid a problem, to conceal and keep out of harm’s way). Holding, in the context of this study,
and certainly in progressive circles, is an act of sustaining and maintaining hospitable
34
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 70.
134
environments where measures are in place to protect people and allow them the opportunity to
organize. In holding space, groups of people assure that they are following measures to ensure
safety, or to forge a protective dome. It is parallel to the expression of “holding the fort,” delegating
to ensure inclusion. A definition for “making” space is far more complicated. How is space made
and which tools are used to make them when perhaps those vary same tools are soiled with the
residue complicit in the oppression of racialized groups? How is space made even in the absence
of consensus or predetermined norms of conviviality?
The threat of racial, nationalist, cisgender, and classist supremacy incubates animosity that
in return scapegoats minoritized groups for social problems, further alienating them. Barred from
participating in the larger social body, racialized groups are pushed into the peripheries, the so-
called sites of destitution. In the margins, the people are not powerless. Determined to subsist on
communal networks of support, subaltern groups hold and make alternative space for likeminded
individuals who have been shunned by regimes of displacement, permitting them to construct
alternative circles. Scholars such as Edward Soja call these alternatives sites “thirdspace.” In
Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Soja writes that
thirdspace “is a purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a
constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings.”
35
Soja
proposes a radical approach to space, history, and the social body by rethinking Eurocentric
theories and practices of spatial design to accommodate the uses of space outside the Western
paradigm of conquest. Urban spaces shift rapidly as a result of urban renewal projects and other
forms of displacement. In East Los Angeles and Paris, urban communities continue to forge
“thirdspaces” in the shadow of displacement in the contemporary era. The radical thirdspaces of
35
Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Hoboken: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996), 2.
135
today are not the same of yesteryear. Arabs and Chicanas/os have respectively attended to the
pressing matters of their time to challenge and create environments that protect vulnerable groups
against the external threats that displace racialized people. As Soja demonstrates, writing a history
about space, especially when it relates to racialized subjects, poses great challenges.
Depending on its definition, space need not be material. Space can assume transcendental,
elusive, and opaque qualities. Memory and imagination build the foundation for making space. In
this regard, so-called non-traditional spaces of film exhibition enable us to think beyond physical
boundaries.
A non-traditional space destabilizes assumptions on ownership, linking with concerns of
who is permitted entry, and the conditions and stipulations under which these spaces are forged.
Non-traditional spaces compel us to think about fluidity in the sense that these sites may transform
over time and that they might serve a different function. The non-traditional spaces of film
exhibition where Arabs and Chicanas/os screened films during their meetings and political and
cultural events operated as sites where the urban displaced came together to discuss matters
affecting their livelihood, survivability, and recognition. Furthermore, these non-traditional spaces
of film exhibition were intriguing because they operated in opposition to the elitist cultural spaces
that had already excluded them.
36
One might say that these spaces were far more generative
considering that the people recreated the space without having to worry about the strict and limiting
uses of space.
Arab solidarity and political organizing of the 1960s and 1970s in France helped lay the
groundwork for the major movements that emerged in the 1980s. To date, this work continues, as
36
In the context of Los Angeles, the collective Asco blended performance and film culture through their “No Movies”
project. The collective disseminated film culture such as prints and postcards of non-existent Chicana/o films as a
critique of the absence of Chicanas/os in the film industry. In a sense, by using film culture they created their own
space. Furthermore, the collective spray painted their names on the walls of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
136
the central aims to battle racism and historical amnesia of the colonial legacy remain relevant to
the political work against the alienation of racialized people, especially migrants. A return to the
1970s calls attention to the pro-labor organizations and allies that held and made space for Arab
solidarity during the decolonial epoch. Similar to the decolonial and anticolonial global
movements in the Third World sustained by visual culture, Arabs and allies in France tapped into
visual culture to share relational struggles affecting the Arab diaspora from North Africa, the
Middle East, and Europe, and to garner solidarity.
In the aftermath of French colonization in the Arab world, particularly in the Maghreb,
living arrangements for Arabs in the metropole were tenuous. Heightened French nationalism,
unemployment due to deindustrialization, and rampant xenophobia mobilized animosity directed
towards Arabs. At the time, and as a result of French defeat in Algeria, the French leveled their
anger at Arabs, and it often led to physical violence, and in some cases death. The participatory,
cultural, and spatial displacement of Arabs into the fringes of French society often led them to
resist and survive in unimaginable ways. Displacement is a forced removal that takes various
forms. During the intense decolonial era unfolding in Paris in the 1960s, Arabs experienced
displacement through incarcerations, deportations, and murders at the hands of authorities.
Though my focus on the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s explicitly examines
the history of decolonial work, the spatial history is critical, especially as it concerns the rapid
urbanization of Los Angeles during the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, Mexicans
and Mexican Americans would frequent the cinemas in downtown Los Angeles, specifically on
Broadway and Main streets. Colin Gunckel has written about Mexican participation in the
emergence of Hollywood by analyzing spectatorship in Los Angeles amidst the changing notions
of nationality, race, and urban renewal. Though the expansive urbanization of the downtown Los
137
Angeles in the early twentieth century enabled racialized, working-class groups to participate in
the emerging leisure venues such as theatres, the local press and reformists exacerbated anxieties
about the lack of social decorum. Gunckel explains, “During this period, the behavior of immigrant
cinema audiences held a particular ethnographic fascination for the local press that embraced this
reformist impulse,” leading the press to caricature the spectators and uphold whiteness and ideas
of proper spectatorship practices.
37
Though these sites of spectacle and leisure offered Mexicans
and Mexican Americans a communal film viewing experience, and a momentary escape from the
viciousness of segregation in the city, filmgoing experiences demonstrate how racialized people
found entertainment though forbidden from travelling to other parts of the city.
On the notorious evening of October 17, 1961, Arabs (mostly of Algerian descent) and
allies throughout Paris responded to the calls of the Front de Libération National to protest the
brutal war in Algeria. Marching en masse throughout the city, Arabs showed solidarity as they
claimed space by participating in peaceful demonstrations in order to garner the support of the
spectating French citizens. Assembled in public space, particularly in notable landmarks, Arabs
also took to the streets their frustrations with colonization and the substandard treatment they
received in the metropole. One part of the demonstration ended at the Grand Rex theatre. The
presence of Algerians in the center of the city troubled authorities. They were no longer contained
to the margins of the city, disposed of outside the visual arrangement and illusion of Paris as a
democratic and fraternal society. Thus, under the superintendence of the Prefect of Police Maurice
Papon, the Parisian authorities exerted unwarranted brutal force and dispersed Algerians from
public space by removing and dispersing them with various forms of violence. The displacement,
as I have noted in the previous chapter, concluded in deportations and containment of Arabs,
37
Colin Gunckel, Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 24.
138
internments in the camps around Paris, senseless beatings, murders, and disappearances of bodies
that were later recovered along the Seine River. The official number of Arabs who were murdered
on that horrific night remains disputed and a contentious historical event. This absent record is
once again indicative of how the French government’s apathy toward the murder of Arabs created
the conditions for the perpetual racist attitudes of migrant lives. Further, the lack of record absolves
authorities from claiming full responsibility. As this critical historical moment illustrates,
organized and peaceful protests in public space for the purpose of demonstrating against
oppression is a lethal risk. The embargo on state documents that recorded this violence proves how
absent these discourses are in the public realm and the difficulty of writing a history about violence
and resistance.
Displacement is a violent form of exclusion that reminds racialized subjects that they are
not to be included as part of the whole, and that their resistance will be met with violence. Though
there is a history of Mexican and Mexican Americans assembling in the public spaces of Los
Angeles in the early twentieth century, I focus on the 1960s and 1970s because the removal of
people from public space was met with organized resistance and self-defense. My focus on the
Chicano Moratorium and the subsequent police violence on protestors and community members
does not ignore or forget how authorities beat at young Chicanas/os who protested revisionist and
exclusionary school curriculums in 1968. Superficially, these displacements appear to be removals
from public space, but symbolically speaking, they are far more rooted in ideas of belonging. That
is, the young Chicanas/os who were brutalized in 1968 were reminded that they did not belong in
the history of Los Angeles and that their perceived second-class citizenship, or lack of citizenship,
turned them into targets of violence. It is disturbing to realize that these cases of violence were
139
only witnessed and recorded because of the presence of cameras. One can only imagine of the
horrific cases of displacement that were never recorded.
Conclusion: Toward Other Ephemera
We can speculate about the conversations that took place in non-traditional spaces of film
exhibition, but these experiences and histories reside in the memory and knowledge of those who
inhabited those spaces. How were the discussions after the film screenings facilitated? How did
attendees respond to the films especially when they concerned political struggles beyond the
barrios and the banlieues? The Chicana/o and Arab political work of the 1960s and 1970s left us
with documents that reveal how displacement of these communities inspired them to fight against
the systems of oppression. The flyers and programs in this chapter give us a piece of history that
undeniably attests to how visual culture was part of major social justice struggles in the urban
margins.
Though the focus on nonextant and inaccessible films led us to instead focus on the
importance of these films for the political gatherings in Los Angeles and Paris, and my analysis
on flyers and pamphlets broadens our understanding of how nontraditional spaces of film
exhibition helped facilitate solidarity and intercultural dialogue, there is other material and film
culture requires inclusion. For example, how do film strips, silk screens, murals, and oral histories
contribute to historical accounts against displacement?
In the 1977 edition of La Raza, the non-profit, educational organization Barrio Bilingual
Communications purchased an advertisement space to promote a number of film and video
resources relating to Mexican and Mexican American history (figure 2.10).
140
Barrio Bilingual Communications sold filmstrips and lesson plans designed for secondary and
college level instruction. These media transmitted histories of cultural identification and history to
younger generations, especially at a time when the vibrancy of the civil rights movement,
anticolonial projects, and justice-oriented practices energized Chicanas/os. Some of the film strips
Figure 2.10. Barrio Bilingual Communications advertisement, La Raza (3.1), 1977, East Los
Angeles Collections, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los
Angeles.
included: The Barrio, advertised as “An in-depth study of the life experience in the barrio”; Los
Angeles, A Multiethnic City, promoted as “A beautiful historical and cultural study of seven ethnic
groups that reside in Los Angeles, California”; and Blowouts which focused on the Chicana/o
student protests for better education and school facilities in 1968.
38
Though not necessarily moving
38
Barrio Communications Advertisement, La Raza 3, no. 1 (1977), 5, East Los Angeles Collections, California State
University, Los Angeles John F. Kennedy Memorial Library.
141
images, these film strips were meant to be projected in classroom spaces, or in a shared public
setting, for educational goals. Furthermore, as the titles suggest, Barrio Bilingual
Communications’ emphasis on ethnic Los Angeles corroborates, and in a sense, critiques,
Hollywood’s failure to engage with racialized communities in the vicinity.
In addition to these visual resources, the educational package included materials, such as:
Bilingual audiocassettes; a Comprehensive Bilingual Instructional Unit, which served as a
companion to the film strips; and a bilingual Reference Guide. Though distribution inventory is
unavailable, one can gather from this advertisement that Barrio Bilingual Communications
produced and distributed this media in order to tell antiracist histories while decentering state-
certified curricula. Furthermore, unlike the nontheatrical films about the barrio, these community-
produced media documented history from what one could call, a subaltern positionality. Similar
to the militant posture of radical activists, community members and media practitioners took
matters into their own hands to create new narratives and transmit histories that were deliberately
effaced or prohibited in schools.
La Raza benefited from a sizeable readership, especially for those committed to social
justice in and beyond East Los Angeles. By identifying this media history through another source,
the task of building an archive encourages one to consider searching for material culture outside
of traditional film and media archives because these media did not circulate widely.
Considering that the material was designed for high school and college students, the
classroom functioned as a non-traditional space of film exhibition. Eric Smoodin’s study of the
link between cinema and the classroom of the 1930s and how film viewing became increasingly
popular in various institutions of learning, helps us think about the utility of film across various
contexts, including barrio classrooms. Smoodin expands on the concept of cinema “and examine
142
not just films, but also film culture more broadly,” which he includes “the uses of film stills in the
classroom, film conferences that would take place in educational settings, and the activities of film
clubs.”
39
Interestingly, Smoodin explains that film culture and especially film viewing created
strong partnerships between pupils and their teachers, theatre managers and book clubs, and other
social entities using cinema as a pedagogical tool. My intervention, however, in this urban context
of East Los Angeles, pertains to how other ephemera that might not be properly considered as
moving images nevertheless played an important role in the education of the youth and resistance
to paternalistic histories.
Oral histories would play an imperative role in helping us understand how film screenings
in community centers and other institutions helped form solidarity and the language that was
verbalized at the time. We would equally learn about the challenges that emerged in those sites
when goals were not accomplished and polarizing ideologies clashed. Great emphasis is placed on
visuals, but listening would benefit us, especially if we seek to understand the experiences of those
who attended these events and were engaged in organizing them. Thinking about film histories
and the work of resistance requires us to engage broadly with the traces that remain and the
nonextant materials we did not consult. By writing histories about unconventional viewing spaces
and the urgent political work that took place, fascinating questions on film culture, surviving
artifacts, and memories would generate new knowledge and considerations that value the political
and radical work that subaltern communities enact.
39
Eric Smoodin, “‘What a Power for Education!’: The Cinema and Sites of Learning in the 1930s,” in Useful Cinema,
eds. Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 22.
143
Chapter Three
Publications/Parutions: Writing Against Displacement
La Raza aims at reflecting the thoughts and feelings of the community it intends to serve. There is
a new determination and a new spirit in the Mexican-American community, a mood of change for
improvement, and La Raza intends to be here whenever it happens.
1
Il est impensable de voir aujourd’hui qu’aucun moyen d’expression n’existe. Même pas un organe
de presse qui soit le leur et conçu selon leurs besoins, qui puisse les informer sur leurs droits, sur
leur situation, sur leur pays, un journal qui soit un moyen d’échange qui les informe aussi sur toutes
les activités culturelles qui se déroulent dans les divers points de Paris, de banlieue et de province.
2
Introduction
Racialized writers play a vital role in anticolonial and decolonial resistance, especially
when they identify the forms of displacement that subjects them to the status of second-class
citizen, or the infrahuman. In writing these injustices into public record, and naming the actors
involved in their displacement, the writers show that these experiences, while distinct, are
relational. This chapter argues that the publications La Raza (The People) (1967-1977) from East
Los Angeles and Sans Frontière (No Borders) (1979-1985) from Paris are anticolonial and
decolonial community archives that contain rhetoric and poetics against displacement and desires
for liberation. Though these publications did not reference each other due to their operation
timelines, publication trajectories, and national and cultural contexts, these sources nevertheless
remind us that urban publications from the 1960s and 1970s played a monumental role in inspiring
communities into action. By documenting local and racialized histories, and in creating links of
1
La Raza 1, no. 4, October 29, 1967, 3, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine Collection, University of California, Los
Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
2
Khali Hamoud, Untitled article, Sans Frontière: Pour un hebdo de l’immigration, March 27, 1979, 12, Sans Frontière
(collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris, France. My translation: “It is unthinkable to see
today that there is no outlet for expression. Not even a press that belongs to them and that addresses their needs, that
is there to inform them about their rights, or speak about their situation, or their country, a journal that functions as a
means of exchange that informs the readers about the cultural activities that take place in the diverse parts of Paris,
from the banlieue and the province.”
144
solidarity with other subaltern groups within and beyond the barrio and banlieue, the writers in
these community publications addressed relational displacement and the radical resistance that
emerged out of this predicament.
La Raza and Sans Frontière were predominantly concerned with topics such as:
immigration and deportations, housing crises, labor discrimination, and police brutality. Though
these publications were not the first of their kind to engage in radical politics during the 1960s and
1970s, I include them in a relational study because of their strong concern with the aforementioned
topics and how they amplified anticolonial and decolonial resistance through writing. Predating
Sans Frontière were newspapers such as Fedayyi, which centered the Palestinian cause in the Arab
labor movement, thus confirming a history of radical writing. La Raza followed a journalistic
trajectory of radicalism, and the newspaper came after several publications blossomed in the 1960s
such as Chicano Student Movement Newspaper. Though small in production and circulation, these
publications reached more readers than others through diverse topics that also called attention to
anticolonial and decolonial struggles. The overt political writing in these publications were radical
that spoke back against power, named the oppressor, and petitioned for racialized communities to
join the struggle against injustices.
In recounting the tenuous social and political situation in the barrios and the banlieues, the
writers from both publications employed rhetoric and poetics that countered inaccurate
assumptions about Chicana/o and Arab culture. Metaphors, symbolisms, language choice, and
modes of address in the writings about the barrio and banlieue in these publications excavated deep
into the consciousness of writers, thereby tapping into the political dimension of the community.
Writers of La Raza and Sans Frontière documented stories about injustice through militant
rhetoric. In the writings of the aggrieved and oppressed, one finds residual memories, experiences,
145
and histories. The words that are laid bare in these publications were concerned with legacies of
colonization and they were designed to engross sympathetic readers answering the calls for
political engagement and liberation. What do the literary transgressions in the publications reveal
about the anticolonial and decolonial projects in urban space? What do we gain in placing barrio
and banlieue writings within the framework of relational displacements?
Historical Overview of La Raza and Sans Frontière
As one ceased publication, the other set the ground for political mobilization. Produced in
the era of decolonization, and at a moment when underground and grassroot presses reported on
community news, La Raza and Sans Frontière also disseminated information on community
radical politics and the wave of global resistance against injustices. These two publications
belonged among the archive of radical publications of the 1960s and 1970s that surfaced from
oppression.
Interestingly, the two publications burgeoned at a time of intense anti-immigrant legislation
in the U.S. and in France, such as the Rodino Bill and “Operation Clean-Up” in the case of the
former, and loi Stoléru and loi Bonnet in the case of the latter. As I will elaborate shortly, the
publications printed timely information on the confusing immigration policies and processes, and
other forms of displacement as a result of arrests and deportations. La Raza and Sans Frontière
were equipped and ready to respond to external, racist attacks against migrants, and the
publications demystified assumptions and stereotypes about cultural difference due to the
perceived “illegality” of migrants and other racialized people.
Debuting out of Church of the Epiphany in Lincoln Heights in 1967, La Raza was
conceived by non-Chicanas/os. The three allies who helped inaugurate the journal attended to the
concerns and voices of the East Los Angeles community. Eliezer Risco, a Cuban American, John
146
Luce, an Episcopalian minister, and Ruth Robinson, a teacher and photojournalist, were guided by
the principle of racial justice. These principal figures launched the publication from the depths of
the church and into the streets. Risco, an organizer for the United Farm Workers, established a
working relationship with Father Luce; the latter allowed the former to transform the basement as
an organizing headquarter. Soon after the transition from his role in the UFW to the Social Action
Training Center, Risco met Robinson, both of whom developed a camaraderie based on their
community organizing. Community members of East Los Angeles volunteered to help spread
political awareness in the neighborhood in assisting with the distribution of the publication. The
goal of the publication was to reach readers wide and across spatial, class, and linguistic
differences. The writers of La Raza financed the newspaper with their own funds, and they also
depended on the support of readers through sales and subscriptions. Another notable publication
printing in parallel with La Raza was Chicano Student Movement. Primarily produced and
circulated by students, Chicano Student Movement’s fusion with La Raza fulfilled the mutual goal
of publishing radical Chicana/o literature and journalism.
3
During its operation, La Raza underwent a few transformations. When inaugurated, the
publication was printed as a newspaper between 1967 and 1970, thereafter printing in magazine
format until 1975, and finally reconceptualized as a journal in the final year of its abrupt end in
1977. The first few years of the publication prioritized social problems in the barrios of East Los
Angeles, later expanding beyond the borders of the barrio to include national Chicano Movement
struggles in the U.S. In addition, the magazine expanded its geographical interests on anticolonial
and decolonial resistance by covering Third World movements, notably in the Americas and the
Caribbean. In covering hemispheric and international currents, the magazine complicated the
3
Luis Garza, “Bearing Witness to a Legacy: The Fiftieth Anniversary of La Raza,” in La Raza, ed. Colin Gunckel
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 5.
147
discourse of liberation and informed Chicana/o readers why anticolonial and decolonial projects
were executed elsewhere and how it impacted them directly.
4
Similar to the genesis of La Raza, Sans Frontière was published out of the urban spaces of
Paris in the migrant community of La Goutte d’Or. Published between 1979 and 1985, Sans
Frontière was one of the underground publications in France to explicitly concern itself with issues
on immigration, labor rights, racism, and Third World struggles.
5
Several of the founders of the
publication such as Driss El Yazami, Faouzia Bouziri, and Saïd Bouziri, were receptive and aware
of the issues affecting migrants in France. In fact, they played a considerable role in the migrant
labor movements such as Comité Palestine and the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (Movement
of Arab Laborers). Their leadership in the labor movements and in the realm of publication was
undoubtedly invaluable to the success of Sans Frontière. In addition, the editorial board and
contributors were themselves migrants or descendants of migrants, and others were students
engaged in anti-racism. Despite the publication’s short operation, the editorial board had worked
on publications by the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes such as Fédaï and Al-Assifa. In respect
to Al-Assifa, Brigitte Jelen explains that the journal “voualit être à la fois témoin et acteur dans le
combat pour la liberation des ‘masses arabes’ aussi bien en France et au Maroc, qu’en Palestine et
en Égypte.”
6
In its endeavor to serve as a platform for witnessing and to highlight the struggle for
4
La Raza borrowed from the anticolonial and decolonial thought of influential revolutionary leaders, such as Frantz
Fanon. For example, in 1975, Alfred Arteaga wrote a compelling article titled “Frantz Fanon and the National Culture
of Aztlán.” Clearly well-versed in Fanon’s theory on national culture, Arteaga explains how Fanon’s ideas on the
struggle for national culture appropriately related to the Chicano Movement through the mythohistorical nationalist
project of Aztlán.
5
Earlier publications that circulated among the migrant and laboring community in the 1960s and 1970s were Fédaï,
Al-Assifa, and Comité Indochine-Palestine. These underfunded publications mostly concerned Arab struggles in
France and in the Arab world. Most importantly, the publications were resolute and unwavering in their support for
the Palestinian cause and considered Palestine as the organizing principle for liberation against colonial and capitalist
regimes.
6
Brigitte Jelen, “La presse portugaise et maghrébine des années soixante-dix, entre communauté et société,” Hommes
et Migrations 1250 (2004): 106. My translation: “[…] wanted to function at the same time as witness and actor in the
combat for liberation of the ‘Arab Masses’ as well in France and Morocco, and in Palestine and in Egypt.”
148
Arab liberation, Al-Assifa proved that grassroots publications were entrusted to lead the call for
social movements within and beyond France. These aforementioned journals subverted the
impartiality and objectivity of journalism; instead, the writers willfully mobilized a militant
language. The same characteristics are found in the pages of Sans Frontière, since after all, the
editorial board hailed from these former publications.
The multilingual, heterogenous ideologies, and particular concerns relative to space as
addressed in these publications showed that the project of Third World decolonization also reached
and influenced urban spaces in industrial countries. And while the concept of liberation resisted
fixed definitions and approaches, this rhetoric and language found its way into La Raza and Sans
Frontière. Print culture helped advance barrio and banlieue ideas of liberation, reaching readers
within and outside the immediate region of production. In doing so, the publications shared
information pertinent to local, national, and global struggles against regimes of displacement.
Khali Hamoud, the editor of the first edition of Sans Frontière, presented a list of goals in
the inaugural issue, which included calls to unify migrant readers and to rectify misrepresentations
and inaccuracies of their character. Hamoud outlined, “Ce journal n'est pas le journal de
l'immigration, il est un des projets de quelques immigrés qui veulent en finir avec la destruction
de leur personnalité, de leur dignité, de leur liberté.”
7
Over the years, the newspaper/journal offered
a platform to connect migrant readers and their allies, and to provide them a platform to write their
own narratives, which the French press misrepresented for decades. In this vein, the publication
archived the community’s experiences with discrimination, memories of their homeland, and
desires for liberation.
7
Khali Hamoud, “Souhaits,” Sans Frontière Numéro 1, March 27, 1979, 12, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de
périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris, France. My translation: “This is not the journal about immigration, it is
one of the projects of some engaged migrants who desire to end the destruction of their character, of their dignity, and
their liberty.”
149
In some similar trajectory as La Raza, the early years of its inception, Sans Frontière
covered stories on immigration, acculturation, and disillusionment mainly in Paris. From 1979 to
1981, the publication printed as a newspaper format titled Sans Frontière: Pour un hebdo de
l’immigration (Without Borders: An hebdomadal of immigration), expanding the thematic
parameters to focus on immigration movements in the metropole. The publication would
eventually transition to a magazine format from 1981-1985 as Sans Frontière: Hebdomadaire de
l’immigration et du tiers monde (Without Bordeers : An hebdomadal of immigration and the third
world). Though earlier issues had sparingly addressed Third World struggles, whereas the
magazine format helped contextualize for readers the relevance of those movements to the
immigrant experience in France and why political engagement was an imperative project toward
liberation. Unlike La Raza, Sans Frontière published frequently, from 1979 to 1983 as a weekly
publication and thereafter monthly.
The early editorial boards of La Raza and Sans Frontière were of paramount importance
to the longevity and operation of the publications. In both cases, community members and
sympathetic allies who were engaged in earlier social justice struggles, and who possessed
knowledge on community organizing, helped barrio and banlieue community members write their
experiences into history. Most critical to the vitality of the publications were the community
members who distributed the newspapers and magazines at events in their communities. The
grassroot organizing and circulation of the publications indicates that, unlike the English and
French-language press that wrote about the troubles of the barrio and banlieue from a so-called
objective and removed perspective, such as in the case of Los Angeles when Bill Demming
covered the events of the Chicano Moratorium through indifference and racist rhetoric, the writers
deemed it necessary to be physically present and distribute and publicize the newspapers/journals
150
at cultural events. Other radical newspapers benefitted from this outreach routine, particularly the
Black Panther newspaper.
In regard to the The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service newspaper, Judson L.
Jeffries writes that the Black Panther Party chapter in Seattle, Washington received a stream of
revenue from sales of the newspaper due in part to their collective participation in the distribution
of the publication. Jeffries explains, “Party members sold the newspaper on street corners and went
door-to-door, which gave them the opportunity to explain the party platform to members of the
community” and adds that at these festivals, the panthers “experienced the most success hawking
their papers.”
8
Evidently, the labor of the writers and volunteers who attended political and cultural
events made it possible for the Black Panther to thrive and gain a large readership. Similarly, the
presence of the editorial board members and dedicated readers of La Raza and Sans Frontière at
these events helped guarantee community support for the publications and it designated them as
interlocutors.
The history of La Raza and Sans Frontière allows us to consider how publications in urban
space of cities in the Global North that are marked by racial and colonial difference were critical
in amplifying the voice of the people who resisted the clutch of oppression. As these publications
expanded their operations, and as their goals and directorial visions accommodated the liberation
imperative of the barrios and banlieues, the writing reflected a shift in understanding relational
displacement. In this sense, the barrios and banlieues became sites of decolonization where the
movements and struggles of the Third World influenced and informed the writers and racialized
inhabitants in East Los Angeles and Paris. In the early years of publication, the militant language
8
Judson L. Jeffries, On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities Across America (Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 2010), 76.
151
reflected each community’s desire for liberation. The militancy in each publication continuously
evolved.
Though the barrios and banlieues were located in countries that continued their colonial
and imperial ventures, the residents in the interstices were sympathetic to the anticolonial and
decolonial efforts. The writers and readers related to one another on the grounds of antiracist
movements, calls to end police brutality, and an address to social and political exclusion. The
barrios of East Los Angeles and the banlieues of Paris led the calls for liberation while linking
with the decolonizing world in supporting their causes through journalism. Barrios and banlieues
of the 1960s and 1970s were sites of transformation, spaces that were rattled by the political and
cultural energy catalyzed by the Chicano Movement and the labor struggles of Arabs. Print culture
became an equally critical medium through which the community would articulate visions for
liberation, despite the contradictions and clashing ideologies on how that project would be realized.
Nonetheless, La Raza and Sans Frontière offered writers the ideal literary and radical space to
raise concerns against displacement in the community and in the Third World.
First and foremost, these publications were repositories of knowledge that documented the
life of the communities as racialized subjects under police occupation. In addition, the newspapers
and journals served as sites of intercultural exchange in advertising cultural activities and festivals
that promoted dialogue among migrants and allies. In documenting the lived experiences and
memories of Chicanas/os and Arabs, the publications challenged assumptions that people in the
urban margins were devoid of history, agency, political consciousness, and intellectual acuity. In
fact, by studying these publications, our scope for understanding of how racialized communities
resisted displacement becomes legible.
152
Writing Anticolonial and Decolonial Resistance
The decolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s left remarkable textual and visual
archives whose legacies offer new critical considerations. La Raza and Sans Frontière belong to
this wider archive since the publications brought together readers from different racial and cultural
backgrounds, and because they explored other decolonial worlds and possibilities for liberation.
9
In situating La Raza and Sans Frontière within the body of anticolonial and decolonial
archives, I study how the two publications broaden our understanding on the project of
decolonization and how it was enacted in urban spaces of the Global North. By especially focusing
on the various forms of displacement, we learn how the communities responded against these
systems and how they were tied to larger ideas of equality and citizenship.
Scholars in the contemporary moment continue to revisit and complicate the texts that their
predecessors left behind. These writings reveal to us that, though written in the past, topics on
oppression and displacement, unfortunately remain relevant to our contemporary history. In
writing about the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas, Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio
explain that the journal served as a “repository of seminal 1960s texts from across the colonized
and postcolonial world” and that the publication provided “a window onto the transnational
cultural and political movements that mark the heyday of Third Worldism and anticolonial
theory.”
10
Concerned with the political and cultural dimensions of the Maghreb, Souffles-Anfas at
the time circulated and mediated discussions on the evolving politics in North Africa and the Arab
9
See Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2016). Though writing through a world literature lens, Pheng Cheah’s study of postcolonial world literature fits
appropriately in this study. “Literature of the postcolonial South,” explains Cheah “is an important modality of world
literature defined as literature that worlds and makes a world” due in part to the injustices of globalization and it makes
“the opening of other worlds a matter of the greatest imperativity” (11).
10
Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, “Introduction: Souffles-Anfas for the New Millenium,” in Souffles-
Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, eds. Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa
Villa-Ignacio (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 1.
153
world. In addition, the intellectual queries therein on cultural identity in the aftermath of
colonization raised the stakes on how to make sense of this new political and cultural landscape.
Functioning as archives of resistance against local, national, and global regimes of displacement,
La Raza and Sans Frontière transmitted anticolonial and decolonial politics relative to local urban
space. As it will become evident, the writers experimented with genres and styles of writing to
confront the exclusions of the English and French press respectively. Moreover, though not the
first of their kind, these publications are part of a longer legacy of politically engaged writing.
However, my choice to examine them is based on how the writers were experienced in political
organizing and their attentiveness to the shifting social, cultural, and political landscape of the
1960s and 1970s.
In both publications, the writers were committed to cover the dangers of nation-state and
authoritarian rule, settler-colonial projects disguised as economic opportunity and prosperity, the
militarization of local and national police, and how community members mobilized to protect
themselves against the hammer of oppression. The barrio and banlieue residents exercised self-
determination when writing and publishing their personal and political goals for a unified
community. The writings breathe life into the resistance and solidarity movements that were forged
in urban space during this epoch. While the previous chapters focused on visual culture, the
provocative, incendiary, and dynamic writings in these two platforms created new readerships that
were militantly engaged. After all, the distribution and circulation of these publications often took
place at protests and other communal spaces.
Anticolonial and decolonial writing, as well as writings of resistance in the urban fringes
reveals personal historical narratives excluded from public view. That is, the specific events and
histories about the barrio and banlieue have always been erased from narratives of Los Angeles
154
and Paris, or they are continuously buried in the footnotes. The writers in the publications exposed
the fallacy of democracy, equality, and human rights in writing into the archive the cases of
displacement. From covering cases of police brutality, to informing readers about the forceful
displacement of people from their homes, and to the arrests and deportations of migrants, the
publications relied on a rhetoric and poetics of liberation to make sense of these social disasters.
The goal was to thrust the people into action.
The writing that appeared in both journals were anticolonial and decolonial forms of
resistance against monolingualism and displacement because the authors pushed back against
simplified narratives that the French and English-language press imposed on them. The articles
and poetry within the pages of the newspapers and journals complemented and sustained the
creative energy against displacement. Throughout the years, the rhetoric and poetics on
displacement added a dimension of political engagement that included topics on integration,
education, labor, housing, and culture in France and the U.S.
Rhetoric on Displacement
News on the displacement of barrio and banlieue residents covered broad terrain. The most
pressing issues on displacement consisted of police beatings and bodily searches, urban renewal
projects and evictions, draconian immigration laws and deportation, and the deaths and
disappearances of community members. Aware of the effectiveness of language, the rhetoric that
the writers employed reflected the ethos of the 1960s and 1970s liberationist projects that centered
racialized voices as agents of their image and stories. La Raza and Sans Frontière played important
roles in circulating unapologetic language while also informing community members of their
rights, about local and international events, and ways to survive displacement.
155
In the December 1968 issue of La Raza newspaper, George A. Solozano, a student and
member of the United Mexican American Students organization at the University of California,
Los Angeles published a statement that called on Chicanas/os to take a stand against systems of
oppression entrenched in educational and governmental institutions that serviced the barrios.
Solozano explained, “Today our people continue to squirm under the heel of oppression. Somehow
we have survived in the barrios of poverty, in the suburbs of bigotry and in the prisons of dejection.
We have survived in the much of exploitations and in the fierce heat of racial hatred. We have
survived; we have tolerated; we have yielded; but no mas!”
11
Coinciding with the 1968 student
walk outs, Solozano’s manifesto-like phrases expressed the disquietude of the people who
observed the erasure of their history in schools. In the text, the writer calls for camaraderie, and
specifically compels the people to exercise autonomy and learn their history. It appears that in
encouraging Chicanas/os to express their cultural identity, Solozano envisioned a liberationist
rupture, and therefore a decolonial enactment. The displacement in Solozano’s text is both the
suppression of Chicana/o history and the containment of the community. By containing Chicana/os
into the peripheries, Solozano points out how racialized urban histories are thus omitted from the
dominant narrative of the city. I consider these deliberate erasures a form of displacement from
history. The writers of Sans Frontière were equally attentive to the condition of urban space and
therefore wrote about these state of affairs.
In 1979, a writer by the name of Serge wrote that the movement against police abuse
rapidly gained momentum throughout all racialized corners of Paris. In describing the inequities
and forms of displacement that creeped up on migrant communities, Serge commented, “Partout
le scénario est le même: cités ghettos délabrés, parfois même insalubres, repoussés à la périphérie
11
George A. Solozano, “The Time is Now” La Raza 2, no. 2, December 13, 1968, 3, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine
Collection, University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
156
des grands centres urbains,” adding that the French who abandoned the neighborhoods as
demographics changed, enabled the police to perform unrestrained discriminatory practices such
as identity checks on racialized people.
12
Serge’s impassioned text characterizes the police as
“chiens” due to the surveilling of migrant communities. A provocative parallel is found in writings
by aggrieved groups, such as in the Chicana/o context where writers refer to authorities as “pigs.”
These similes, a popular language of resistance among policed, racialized people, functions as
expressions of rage that dehumanizes authority figures. Moreover, these metaphors distinguish the
oppressor as nonhuman, thereby allowing Arabs and Chicanas/os to reclaim their humanity. The
French authorities have derogatorily described Arabs as animals, such as ratons (rats). Thus, the
expression “ratonnade,” refers to beatings and other forms of violence against ethnic minorities,
especially Arabs. Serge elaborated on the displacement of oppressed groups by writing that these
dilapidated spaces in the edges of the city were subject to police surveillance and assault of
racialized communities. As such, identity checks were performed and these campaigns targeted
Arabs under suspicious assumptions, placing migrants at risk of prolonged detention and possibly
deportation.
By pairing these pieces, one detects that the writers cemented their commitment to
document oppression through their willingness to help the community survive. Though Solozano
explicitly includes the notion of survival in his statement, Serge references survival to the extent
where he writes that migrant communities in France create and maintain “espaces libérés.”
13
In
most editions, La Raza and Sans Frontière published noteworthy cases of police violence. A
number of the issues included surveillance, random identity checks, arrests, beatings, and deaths.
12
Serge, “La Colère des Ghettos,” Sans Frontière: Pour un hebdo de l’immigration Numéro 7, October 2, 1979, 13,
Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris, France.
13
Ibid.
157
The relationship between police and community members was precarious, and many of the
accounts in both publications charged the former with antagonizing the latter.
Police misconduct in East Los Angeles and Paris is unfortunately commonplace due to the
state’s normalization of violence under the pretense of civility and security. As long as racialized
people are contained to vulnerable zones where opportunities for social mobility are absent, police
will continue to exercise their power with minimal oversight. Prior to the 1960s and 1970s,
Chicanas/os and Arabs had always clashed with police. Whether in public or private property,
tense encounters between residents and authorities were grounded on contested urban space.
In an unauthored piece in the June 1969 edition of La Raza, the writer questioned the
principles of law and order. Alarmed by the rising cases of police violence in Southern California,
the writer explained, “From the lush green land of Riverside to the hills of San Fernando and the
busy streets of E.L.A., the action in the barrios for the past two months has fallen in the area of
placa [police] malpractices. Chicanos have been feeling the bullets and clubs of their respective
law and order advocates.”
14
This phrase of the opening paragraph illustrates that despite the
geographical dispersal of Chicanas/os, tackling police violence became a shared struggle across
regions. “Regardless of where the complaints of abuse are filed,” the author adds, “complaints
against LAPD placas are automatically routed to the Internal Affairs Division…”
15
The author
expresses suspicion of the institutions of power that purport law and order. In other words, the
author asks: How are authorities vested with power expected to bring justice to victims of police
violence when that very same system perpetuates its malpractice arbitrarily? The author intimates
14
“Law and Order?” La Raza 2, no. 7, June 1969, 7, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine Collection, University of
California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
15
Ibid.
158
that due process is a nefarious, administrative formality designed to appease and deflect reform
and disciplining.
Police violence is enacted in various forms of physical, psychological, and administrative
practices. It is not exclusively physical, it can be psychological, and above all, somatic. The racially
marked body is under surveillance; the gaze of authorities subdues the individual, hindering their
mobility. In the February 1980 issue of Sans Frontière, Salah El Kortobi wrote about the heavy
presence of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (French National Police) in the immigrant
community of Belleville-Ménilmontant. In characterizing the cosmopolitan neighborhood as “un
quartier sans frontière” (“a community without borders”), El Kortobi collapses the borders of
racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious difference.
16
Furthermore, by invoking the figure of the
border, the writer acknowledges that these racialized spaces are policed and contained. The
resistance to displacement develops here as the people’s desire to transgress barriers imposed by
the French authorities, and an opportunity to build links of solidarity. El Kortibi explains that the
Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité “irrite les habitants, énerve tout le monde. Les immigrés
se sentent agressés quotidiennement. Prendre le métro devient agaçant. Une fois sur deux, on leur
demande les papiers….”
17
By describing the presence of authorities as an irritation, annoyance,
and an aggression, the author highlights that an atmosphere of discomfort for the reader, a sensorial
experience that clouds over the multicultural community of Belleville-Ménilmontant. El Kortibi
shows that there is an affective dimension to oppression, and these bodily sensations are
unpleasant. As history shows us, police abuse elicits physical retaliation from the community.
16
Salah El Kortobi, “Belleville- Ménilmontant: Un quartier qui agonise,” Sans Frontière: Bimensuel pour un hebdo
de l’immigration Numéro 7, Feburary 12, 1980, 4, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association
Génériques, Paris, France.
17
Ibid. My translation: the CRS “irritate the inhabitants, anger everyone. Immigrants experience daily aggression.
Taking the metro becomes annoying. Half of the time the CRS ask for their papers…”
159
Though El Kortibi maintains that “Belleville-Ménilmontant résiste, ne se laisse pas
faire…,” the author does not discount that urban renovation and the accompanying forces of
displacements threaten the stability and cohesion of the community. Instead, El Kortibi offers a
sobering and careful assessment of the community, “Aujourd’hui le quartier est mort.
L’omniprésence des CRS, les rondes des flics qui sillonnent le boulevard et les rues, les contrôles
dans le métro, les expulsions et le spectre de la rénovation sont le lot quotidien des habitants du
quartier.”
18
By describing the surroundings as dead, El Kortibi suggests that the patrols and
checkpoints siphon the life out of the community, rendering the occupied landscape lifeless. By
drawing a connection between the presence of authorities and the displacement of people via urban
renovation projects, El Kortibi joins the chorus of writers and residents, aware of the multiple
displacements that operated concurrently to render the space unaffordable and unwelcoming for
racialized people.
As is the case with dense metropolitan urban spaces, evictions are displacements that target
working-class, racialized communities that have forged kinships of care in the face of government
neglect. When invoking the histories of geographical and land displacement, we must think about
the trajectories of uprooting. The specter of displacement follows migrants wherever they settle;
they dread and live in the vicious cycle of removal. In referring to migration from the homeland
to the metropole, Albert Memmi reminds us that immigration “is the product of poverty and fear,
hunger and frustration, an apparently hopeless future.”
19
This frustration is evident in the language
of writers from La Raza and Sans Frontière, especially at it concerns physical displacement of
18
Ibid. My translation: “Today the neighborhood is dead. The presence of the CRS, the rounds of authorities that walk
the boulevards and the streets, the identity checks in the metro, the evictions and the specter of the renovation projects
are the quotidian concerns of the inhabitants.”
19
Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized, trans. Robert Bononno (Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press, 2006), 73.
160
racialized and migrant communities. The writings on evictions and urban renewal projects in the
following pages underscore the imbrications of both with colonization. Make no mistake, we
cannot disentangle evictions and forced removals from homes as discrete from police violence,
deportations, and murders of community members. In fact, the presence of police in the barrio and
the banlieue assisted in maintaining the machinery of displacement in place.
In writing about the police incursion and destruction of shacks in the bidonville of La Folie
in August 1961, Jim House and Neil MacMaster draw historical parallels between the evictions of
the residents in the metropole to colonial violence in North Africa. House and MacMaster write,
“It would seem that destruction of huts was being systematically used as another form of
repression, a ‘disciplinary’ mechanism similar to that which had been deployed against nationalist
bastions in the bidonvilles of colonial Morocco and Algeria.”
20
In Paris, these forms of
displacement were prevalent in racialized spaces. The authority’s callousness of displacing
communities, children included, functioned as a dehumanizing mechanism that reminded
racialized subjects that their existence and livelihood was unwelcomed in all corners of the
metropole. The destruction of homes and the displacement of people shows us that local
governments continued this colonial project of violence and through renovation projects these
systems of power (or displacement) avoided responsibility and shifted the blame on racialized
people. In the face of these violent displacements in Paris and in East Los Angeles, a number of
articles in La Raza and Sans Frontière did their part in shedding light on what these occurrences
meant for racialized communities within the vicinity and beyond.
In “Los Barrios se Juntan,” an unauthored article published in September 1968, the writer
conveyed a sense of urgency in detailing the forms of displacement occurring in the barrios of East
20
Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 99.
161
Los Angeles, which included an unfair education system. The writer stressed that in order to
improve the substandard quality of life in the barrios, the local government had to intervene.
21
The
author drew on these experiences by highlighting the relational aspect that “the barrios of Los
Angeles and other cities are catching the same hell from the Anglo system.”
22
The “hell” that the
author referred to included the razing over of communities of color “so that the Anglo can build a
freeway that will be of more convenience to him” and references the mass displacement of the
Chavez Ravine residents “so that he [the Anglo] could build a ballpark to amuse himself.”
23
The
article illustrates how racial apathy and urban renewal programs, which the author calls “another
chicano [sic] removal program,” displaced communities of color and made it difficult for people
in the barrios to live harmoniously.
24
In calling our attention to the forced displacement of people
in Chavez Ravine in the 1950s for the construction of Dodger Stadium, and the subsequent major
freeway projects that dispersed communities of color, the author reminds us that displacement is
environmental racism that lives in the memory of the people.
25
The freeways that severed through
Brown and Black communities throughout Los Angeles wiped out communities that carved out a
space for themselves in the margins. Ignacio López-Calvo explains that “the barrio was sometimes
perceived as a cultural void, a tabula rasa that needed to be filled through urban renewal.”
26
We
see this enacted when the freeways were built over the barrios, erecting a border within occupied,
21
“Los Barrios se Juntan,” La Raza 1, no. 16, September 3, 1968, 2, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine Collection,
University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
See Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004). Eric Avila reminds us that the emerging culture of entertainment helped
elaborate a design in which Los Angeles was fabricated as a city of endless opportunity due in part to the easy mobility
for vehicle owners who were mostly affluent and White. This new spatial configuration of the freeways created a
narrative of the city that made racialized communities nonexistent because they were not visible to the cars zooming
above the fragmented ghettos and barrios.
26
Ignacio López-Calvo, Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2011), 46.
162
racialized space. As I have shown in the previous chapters, the barrios were rich cultural sites, as
evinced by the radical creative output. Similar attitudes were projected at the banlieues. In Paris,
the racialized communities were not spared from displacement.
In a 1979 article titled “Barbès: Un quartier à visage humain,” S. Mustapha and A. Farid
helped launched a series in the publication devoted to humanizing the Arab migrant community in
the era of la loi Bonnet.
27
Mustapha and Farid described Barbès-Goutte d’Or as the “creuset de
l’immigration” (“melting pot of immigration”) and that it was one of the last neighborhoods “de
Paris à visage humain” (“with a sense of humanity”).
28
Alarmed by the presence of the Compagnies
Républicaines de Sécurité in the community, the authors asked, “Va-t-il disparaître ?” (“Will it
disappear?”).
29
Concerned with disappearances, or displacement, the authors point out that urban
renovation projects risk displacing the community and rendering it empty. They add, “A petite
dose, Barbès s’asphyxie, Barbès meurt. Barbès disparaîtra certainement avec ses habitants, ses
commerçants, et ses vieux immeubles.”
30
The metaphor of asphyxiation describes, once again, the
somatic experience related to displacement: a physical death and a removal from space. The writers
emphasized that the government dismissed the community’s concerns and that the militarized
forces roaming the streets created tension. This image of forces of displacement suffocating the
community puts the reader, and the community, in a situation to resist against these oppressive
systems.
27
Written into law on January 10, 1980, Loi no. 80-9, also known as Loi Bonnet, prohibited undocumented migration
and it made stringent changes to labor migration, setting limits to the duration of stay.
28
S. Mustapha and A. Farid, “Barbès: Un quartier à visage humain,” Sans Frontière: bimensuel pour un hebdo de
l’immigration Numéro 3, December 18, 1979, 3, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association
Génériques, Paris, France.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid. My Translation: “Little by little, Barbès asphyxiates. Barbès will certainly disappear with its inhabitants, its
businesses, and its buildings.”
163
When placed together, the two articles communicate that urban space was a living “hell”
for Chicanas/os and Arabs. These displacements point to more than just evictions and forced
removals of people from communities. Rather, they show us that several forces of displacement
were at work and that they mutually supported one another to create inhospitable barrios and
banlieues. The language in both articles reflect the consciousness of the community and its
alertness to the ongoing violence against them. Though facing threats of evictions and forced
removals from their homes, Chicanas/os and Arabs reclaimed space for their own use. Whenever
the situation permitted, both communities mobilized politically to reclaim space.
When contested space becomes a battleground, and local governments hold unlimited
power over racialized communities, what spaces are left for communities to congregate in and
survive? What does it mean when communities unite and fight against government efforts to
obliterate spaces of socialization and leisure? In East Los Angeles and Paris, racialized
communities ferociously rejected urban renovation programs. The displacement of people and the
appropriation of land for commercial purposes threatens to stir up emotions and inspire the
community to take action through protests and other forms of rebellion. A confrontation is the call
of the people battling the forces of displacement in order to ensure that space is protected,
especially when it involves spaces for families and children.
In an unauthored July 1969 article in La Raza, “Ramona Gardens Fights for Their Mini
Park,” the author made more relatable the issue with contested space in discussing the lack of
bureaucratic coordination and its disregard of the barrios. The Ramona Gardens public housing
community came together to intercept the construction of a sewer by the State Highway
Department, the Los Angeles City Bureau of Public Works, and the Los Angeles City Recreation
164
and Park Department.
31
The residents of Ramona Gardens were part of an advisory council that
proposed five alternatives for the sewer construction project. Dissatisfied with the community’s
proposals, the State Highway Department rejected all five, including one that allowed the barrio
residents to “develop a 300 foot portion of the park, with the written understanding that the State
Highway Department would replace whatever they damaged within the 300 foot area.”
32
Though
unsuccessful, this fifth proposal corroborates that the residents of the barrio were invested in the
preservation and restoration of space and deemed the integrity of their environment an important
matter to combatting hazardous consequences. The article informed readers about the bureaucratic
disarray that negated the community’s input and it also revealed the tangible realities of
environmental racism.
By foreclosing this collaboration and failing to adopt an alternative construction project in
collaboration with the residents, the bureaucratic systems (or regimes of displacement) confirmed
that the local government did not vigorously contemplate how the community could play a role in
bridging government neglect and community autonomy. In the closing paragraph of the article, the
author highlighted that the residents of Ramona Gardens previously played a role in the
development of the surrounding area. “It is also the concern of the Council to demonstrate that
resident initiatives,” explains the author, “has successfully brought about improvement of the
Community by immediate starting of construction on the site.”
33
In this regard, the community
was a stakeholder and their recognition as such requires us to think about how oppressed residents
were not politically disinterested. Though not explicitly in the text, a metaphor is evident: the
proposal of the construction of the sewer in the park, and its close proximity to the public housing
31
“Ramona Gardens Fights for Their Mini Park,” La Raza 2, no. 8, July 1969, 3, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine
Collection, University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
165
site, suggests that the government treated Chicanas/os and other racialized communities as detritus
that could be flushed out.
In an unauthored article published in the June 1980 newspaper, “Enfants de la Goutte
d’Or,” we find a similar situation pertaining to the lack of recreational spaces for children. The
article exposed the ways in which the local Parisian government failed due diligence to develop
empty lots into community spaces. The residents named the site of a demolished structure “Le
Démol.” With no place to go, the community united and worked towards making Le Démol a
habitable and playful space for children.
34
Concerned with the limited spatial freedom afforded to
children, Le Démol functioned as one of the scarce spaces in which children could frequent and
amuse themselves, provided that “les chiens n’ont pas encore déposé leur crotte…”
35
Conjuring
up the image of children playing in the rubble and exposing themselves to the biological hazards
of excreta is unimaginable. This aggressive form of displacement that prohibited children from
developing social interactions with their peers shows that space is exclusively purposeful for real
estate, otherwise it is dead. Though spaces of recreation were inaccessible to children and the
community at large, the author writes that a number of associations in La Goutte d’Or attempted
to remedy the absence of spaces of leisure by welcoming youth into their premises.
In 1978, during a two-weekend period, the community assembled volunteers to clean and
transform an empty lot into a recreational site. However, the Ville de Paris interrupted the
community service project and shut the gates to the space.
36
Here, the community’s determination
to transform empty dead space into vibrant sites went in direct opposition to ideas of how urban
space was to be revitalized as capitalist hubs. Read in this light, the racialized community
34
“Enfants de la Goutte d’Or,” Sans Frontière Numéro 16, June 24, 1980, 3, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de
périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris, France.
35
Ibid. My translation: “that dogs have not yet taken a shit.”
36
Ibid.
166
attempted to repair the space by claiming it as their own for recreational purposes. In regard to the
community organizing to clean up Le Démol, the author asks, “Cette nouvelle action fera-t-elle
sortir les pouvoirs publics de leur inertie ?”
37
By asking if the community’s own response would
draw the attention of the local government, the author shows that it is in the precise moment of
spatial reclamation that authorities take notice.
These displacements on how local governments neglected the needs of the communities in
East Los Angeles and Paris serves as a testament of how racialized people in the peripheries are
ignored and their efforts trivialized. In both cases, we see that community members coordinated a
course of action by reclaiming those spaces to benefit the community. In the barrio and banlieue,
restricted space becomes a site for political organizing and to forge a cohesive, vibrant community.
Each respective local government’s apathy towards the well-being of both communities offers us
ways to look at the deliberate exclusion of Chicanas/os and Arabs from shared governance.
Displacement, as we have seen in the articles, concern the violence that systems of power
inflicted on racialized communities. In these spaces, the question of immigration was central to
how the people dealt with institutions and structures of power. How did the articles on immigration
help further community organizing that protected the members of these vulnerable urban spaces?
Immigration and the Writing of Resistance
The immigration raids on racialized communities in the contemporary moment are a
reminder that people of color are questioned about their citizenship status based on their epidermal
difference. La Raza and Sans Frontière covered immigration cases and news that largely related
to policies and on specific individuals. The removal of one person from the community affects the
37
Ibid. My translation: “Will this act make the public powers take action?”
167
composition of the immediate social circle to which the removed person belonged to. Both
publications were critical in disseminating information to the community by explaining the
outcomes and impacts of immigration laws in the U.S. and in France. The jargon of immigration
laws and the complex bureaucratic processes posed challenges for barrio and banlieue residents
especially since xenophobia of the 1960s and 1970s made it hard to navigate the political and
juridical terrain.
La Raza’s often-times bilingual publications addressed readers in Spanish, especially when
the articles addressed immigration. Chicanas/os in East Los Angeles were concerned with
immigration policies and raids considering that the colonial history of the U.S., specifically the
Southwest, excluded people of Mexican descent from citizenship after the U.S. annexed a
significant amount of land from Mexico in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Furthermore, Chicanas/os had been framed as anti-American, and therefore coded as illegal. In
being victims of xenophobia, the Chicana/o community organized to fight for the immigration
rights of the undocumented. La Raza played a role in this project. In the 1970s, with increased
immigration from Mexico and Latin America to the U.S., the latter monitored these communities.
Leo R. Chavez reminds us that countries like the U.S. mobilize narratives of invasion in order to
scapegoat migrants for the crises that are not of their doing. Chavez explains that after the U.S.
immigration act of 1965, the influx of Latin American migrants in the 1960s and 1970s triggered
cultural anxieties. Consequently, the government and media cited numbers to quantify the issue of
immigration and overwhelm the public. Chavez explains that numbers are abstract and they
“invoke simplified responses—low/high, good/bad, affirmative/alarmist, assurance/fear—
168
depending upon the prevailing sentiment toward immigration.”
38
The hyperbole of these numbers
engendered harmful consequences that threatened the cohesion of the community.
In 1973, Jaime Ugarte wrote in La Raza “Alien Raids: An Attack on the Whole Working
Class,” that spotlighted how federal authorities worked in tandem with local authorities to arrest
and deport undocumented people. Ugarte explained that Donald T. Williams, the then-Acting
District Director of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service worked with United
States Border Patrol agents to assist in the Los Angeles raids of “Operation Clean-Up” under the
directorship of Ellis Myers. Launched on May 23, 1973, the operation was designed to round up
10,000 to 12,000 undocumented people.
39
The author writes that 11,500 workers were
apprehended between May and June of that same year, a majority of those captured in Los
Angeles.
40
Ugarte offers context in his piece and writes that these large immigration raids are part
of a history of anti-Mexican and anti-Latin American immigration to the U.S., especially since
stringent procedures were put in place to target the former in the 1930s.
As the title of the article indicates, Ugarte looks beyond cultural differences by highlighting
that the raids affect the working-class. In citing another immigration bill, the Rodino-Kennedy Bill
(HR 16188), Ugarte explains that it sought “to legalize the persecution and intimidation of Brown
and other Third World workers.”
41
By citing yet another immigration bill, Ugarte shows that
various parties were keen on displacing migrants, and especially affect those who come from Third
World countries. Later in the article, the author makes the case for the right of undocumented
migrants to remain in the U.S.. He claims that the U.S. was responsible for the uprisings in Latin
38
Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2013), 29.
39
Jaime Ugarte, “Alien Raids: An Attack on the Whole Working Class,” La Raza 1, no.12, September 1973, 34, La
Raza Newspaper and Magazine Collection, University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center,
Los Angeles, California.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., 35.
169
American countries afflicted with penury.
42
The assertive language in this article brings out the
emotion from the author who understands the grave injustices committed upon vulnerable and
exploited communities. By writing against the injustice taking place in the barrios, Ugarte shows
that xenophobia affected all working-class, and other racialized people in Los Angeles. Ugarte
concludes by writing, “In view of the repression and exploitation of this branded section of the
working class, the working class as a whole is obligated morally and politically to join the
struggle…It is only by waging a fight against the division of undocumented workers from the rest
of the working class that we will be able to effectively combat the parasitic bosses.”
43
In
compelling the workers to unite along class struggle, positing that it is a working-class duty to care
for one another, Ugarte stirs the emotions of the reader in order to inspire action. By extension, the
writer asks the community and allies to form bonds of solidarity in order to tackle displacement of
people from their communities and from the U.S.
Bilingual articles such as the unauthored “La Migra: El Problema Actual en U.S.A. de
Emigracion, Su Origen, y Cual Seria Su Solucion,” covered the history of immigration. The article
informed Spanish-language readers about the current state of affairs and the origins upon which
immigration laws were conceived. The article situates the history of Mexican immigration to the
U.S. within the creation of labor programs that facilitated the temporary and exploitative labor
migration of poor people, notably the Bracero Program.
44
Furthermore, the author explains that as
a result of the termination of legal labor migration programs, migrants were pulled into a “mercado
negro de trabajo.”
45
In associating undocumented immigration to the exploitation of workers from
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
44
“La Migra: El Problema Actual en U.S.A. de Emigracion, Su Origen, y Cual Seria Su Solucion,” La Raza 2, no. 3,
1974, 8, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine Collection, University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies
Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
45
Ibid., 9. My translation: “dark market of the labor force.”
170
Latin America, the author points to how the U.S.’ immigration system intentionally excluded Latin
Americans from receiving the rights and protections afforded to citizens since they were viewed
as expendable laboring bodies. As a solution to remedy the problem, the author recommended the
U.S. consummate article 9 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: to grant citizenship and protection
to people of Mexican descent.
46
In a 1974 Spanish-language article “La Migra y Saxbe” (“Immigration and Saxbe”), Olga
Bastida explains to readers that Ohio Senator William B. Saxbe scapegoated immigrants for high
unemployment. Bastida charged Saxbe for his rhetoric, where she writes, “Deportando según dijo
el facista [sic] Saxbe un millón de mexicanos y con la ayuda de la prensa, radio y televisión desvía
la atención de los trabajadores del verdadero culpable, el sistema capitalista.”
47
By calling Saxbe
a fascist and a detractor, Bastida shows how the senator, along with other politicians and people
in power, allied English-language media in order to scapegoat migrants for the economic crisis.
The flaws of capitalism, as Bastida points out, are never questioned. In addition, Bastida comments
on the displacement of migrants via deportation and calls out these cruel practices. She writes,
“Que puede ser mas cruel e inhumano, que el de dividir las familiar [sic] cuyo solo crimen es el
de tener la piel morena o ser de origen mexicano o tener un apellido de sonido hispano.”
48
Skin
color and non-English last names, Bastida suggests, are the markers of racial and citizenship
difference and thus criminality.
La Raza did due diligence and fulfilled its obligation to publish articles on the immigration
crisis in full force, especially in cities such as Los Angeles. The authors responded to anti-
46
Ibid.
47
Olga Bastida, “La Migra y Saxbe,” La Raza 2, no. 4, 1975, 10, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine Collection,
University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California. My translation:
“Having deported one million people, according to the fascist Saxbe, the press, radio and television direct attention
away from the true culprit, the capitalist system.”
48
Ibid., 11. My translation: “What could be more cruel and inhumane than separating families whose crime is having
dark skin, or of Mexican descent, or having a Spanish surname.”
171
immigrant and anti-Mexican sentiments by raising the barrios’ political consciousness. In France,
Sans Frontière was more active on the question of immigration because this was the mission of
the newspaper and because the complicated histories of laboring migrants from former French
colonies placed them in unstable situations regarding their citizenship and humanity. To the best
of its ability and capacity, La Raza published articles on immigration in Spanish, but Sans
Frontière published entirely in French. Although the French publication achieved important feats,
a notable shortcoming was the monolingual constraint. Other associations in Paris and throughout
France published leaflets and print material in Arabic to inform Arab communities about their
rights and how to participate in these struggles.
49
Despite this multilingual deficiency, Sans
Frontière proved to be a critical force in disseminating news about the complicated immigration
laws and their repercussions for families and laborers.
To speak about immigration in the context of France is to take into account the brutal
histories of colonization and ongoing occupation of the so-called Third World by the French
empire. A. Farid in the article “Les immigrés et la guerre d’Algérie: Oublier…Peut Être?”
(“Immigrants and the War in Algeria: Forget…Maybe?”) wrote that after 1957, the Maghrebi
community in the metropole rallied in support of the Front de Libération Nationale and that as a
result, Arab prisoners in France launched hunger strikes in order to help migrants gain political
recognition.
50
Farid goes further to write that due to the French police assault on Arab
communities, specifically Algerians, the Front retaliated by attacking police stations. To be an
immigrant in France is to survive the violence of the intricate immigration system.
49
Labor unions such as the Mouvement des travailluers arabes published communiqués, tracts, and pamphlets in
Arabic. This allowed the publications to reach audiences whose first language was not French.
50
A. Farid, “Les immigrés et la guerre d’Algérie: Oublier…Peut Être?,” Sans Frontière: bimensuel pour un hebdo de
l’immigration Numéro 1, November 20, 1979, 7, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association
Génériques, Paris, France.
172
In the article “La politique du vautour” (“The politics of the vulture”), Bernard Lehembre
expressed that foreigners were politically unrepresented and that they were “sujets économiques”
(“economic subjects”).
51
What does it mean for a human to be an economic subject in the
metropole and dispossessed of their humanity? By making this declaration, Lehembre points to a
history of labor exploitation and indentured work. An economic migrant, or an economic subject
under the predatory watch of the “vulture,” as Lehembre’s title explicitly states, is the victim
devoured by capitalist and immigration systems, both trussed by the pillars of migrant labor.
Lehembre makes these remarks in response to la loi Bonnet, which he says sought to expand the
grounds for deportation, “faisant entrer dans notre droit l’internement administratif…”
52
The
danger of being apprehended and deported rested on the decision of local authorities. For example,
la loi Boulin-Stoléru, written by the secrétaire d’état aux travailleurs immigrés (Secretary of
Migrant Laborer Affairs) M. Stoléru, proposed a strict implementation in which the cartes de
travail (worker permit) would be renewed under the condition of work availability and that the
migrant would be deported if unemployed.
53
These callous proposals created the condition for a
revolving door of migrant laborers who were exploited in the metropole.
In the article “La loi raciste et discriminatoire” (“The racist and discriminatory law”)
published in December 1979, Zran Abdelwahab elaborates that loi Stoléru was adopted by the
French parliment on December 6 and in the senate on December 12 and that this law “prive les
étrangers de toute garantie juridique et les livre à l’arbitraire. Il constitue une menace pour
l’ensemble de la population, car il porte atteinte des libertés publiques.”
54
Abdelwahab’s concern
51
Bernard Lehembre, “La politique du vautour,” Sans Frontière: bimensuel pour un hebdo de l’immigration Numéro
1, November 20, 1979, 5, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris,
France.
52
Ibid. My translation: “Usher in without our right administrative detention.”
53
Ibid.
54
Zran Abdelwahab, “La loi raciste et discriminatoire,” Sans Frontière: bimensuel pour un hebdo de l’immigration
Numéro 3, December 18,1979, 7, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques,
173
with the fact that the law undermined civil liberties posed a major problem for the maintenance of
French democratic ideals. Loi Stoléru sought to legalize the detention without judicial procedures
and gave authorities the power to renew visas and other permits at their discretion. This law set a
dangerous precedent for what would lead to growing inequality and a biased immigration system
that used the labor of migrants. Fortunately, the communities would not compromise to a law that
actively discriminated against them, especially Arabs. Organizations such as Le Mouvement
Contre le Racisme, L’antisémitisme, et pour la paix (MRAP) (Movement Against Racism,
Antisemetism, and for Peace), La Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) (The General
Confederation of Labor), la Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) (The
French Democratic Confederation of Labor), and others rallied the people to fight for migrant labor
rights.
These forms of solidarity are in line with the forms of care that the community members
expressed. They were part and parcel of an urban movement that linked with various liberation
struggles around the world. La Raza and Sans Frontière played an important part in advocating
for migrants. For example, La Raza published resources for assistance with immigration services.
One of those resources was La Raza Unida Party in City Terrace, which began offering
immigration consultation services to the community in response to the raids. An article on this
topic stated that these new services were in part to the roundups “que se han venido llevando a
cabo en las calles, por parte del destacamento de Inmigración, especialmente a la salida de las
iglesias, los cines y en los barrios industriales—en violación a todos los derechos constitucionales
y humanos…”
55
By specifying that the raids at work sites and private spaces were constitutional
Paris, France. My translation: “deprives foreigners of due juridical process. This constitutes a threat for the entire
population, because it infringes on the civil liberties of the public.”
55
“Raza Unida de City Terrace Ofrece Servicio Emigracion,” La Raza 2, no. 2, 1974, 25, La Raza Newspaper and
Magazine Collection, University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles,
174
and human rights violations, the author points to how immigration as a system abstracted
undocumented people as data to be captured and deported. In Sans Frontière, Kamel Belarbi wrote
“Guide Pratique: La nationalité” (“Practical Guide: Nationality”) in the November 1979 issue.
This guide helped readers navigate the challenges of obtaining citizenship. The article explained
how citizenship is accorded to people and it explains the complex laws at the age in which children
of migrant parents are considered French and which Algerian populations are considered French
after Algerian Independence.
56
In publishing these sources, the two publications helped
communities protect themselves against deportations.
The writings on displacement in La Raza and Sans Frontière illustrate how language
inspired the barrios and banlieues to mobilize politically. The rhetoric in these articles rely on
passionate calls for unity and resistance against regimes of displacement. Despite the grammatical
issues and limited editorial operations, the articles display the impressive labor that the writers
took on in informing readers about their rights when systems of oppression continued to accrue
power. In reading these articles, the prose offers a sense of urgency. If the prose proved to be an
important mode of communication to impress on readers the need for political engagement, what
did poetry in the pages of La Raza and Sans Frontière achieve? Used in the service for writing
back against regimes of displacement, poetry is a form of resistance. The poetry in these
publications was significant in that it was published in a community outlet and the topic reached
readers about the trauma of migration.
California. My translation: “that have taken place in the streets, as part of the immigration efforts, especially at the
exits of churches, the cinemas, and in the industrial barrios—in violation of human and constitutional rights.”
56
Kamel Belarbi, “Guide Pratique: La nationalité,” Sans Frontière: bimensuel pour un hebdo de l’immigration
Numéro 1, November 20, 1979, 14, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques,
Paris, France.
175
Poetry and Experiences with Immigration
As we have studied, literature from urban peripheries of the 1960s and 1970s played an
important role in amplifying subaltern voices to readers within and beyond the barrio and banlieue.
Through these grassroot publications, the residents of those spaces constructed a cohesive
community and facilitated cultural encounters. The poetic genre permitted cultural expressions
from urban space to come alive and engage readers into political action and identification on shared
struggles against displacement. Poetry energized writers to channel their emotions and to process
pain and ordeals on the migrant experience in segregated urban environments of Los Angeles and
Paris.
In this subsection I perform a close reading of select poems in Sans Frontière that
addressed immigration. In the first years of publication, poets engaged with themes of nostalgia,
loss of history and culture, and assimilation. By the 1980s, the poetic shift to overt militancy that
critiqued discrimination and racism was conspicuous. Through poetry, writers contoured the
political imagination and they recruited racialized people and allies to object oppression. To this
extent, poetry functioned as anticolonial and decolonial resistance that cut ties with the French
republic’s colonialist attitude. Laurent Dubreuil proposes a “poetics of banlieue” in order “to help
us rethink our own ways and means to critique and interpret” urban space.
57
I agree that a poetics
of banlieue is resourceful provided that one does not lose sight of the social and political challenges
of these spaces. Dubreuil explains that “if we take poetry as a discursive genre,” it becomes evident
that clichés and negative discourses on the banlieue would be turned upside down.
58
In considering
that writers used language to reflect a common consciousness on experiences with discrimination
and desires for liberation, the words in the pages echoed Third World texts that made similar
57
Laurent Dubreuil, “Notes Towards a Poetics of Banlieue,” Parallax 18, no. 3 (2012), 100.
58
Ibid.
176
claims. Though the La Raza did not publish poetry on immigration, it was nevertheless
preoccupied with other displacements and cultural resistance. The people in both urban spaces
rejected the principles of assimilation and instead called for a more militant engagement that
foregrounded their identity, culture, and humanity in opposition to the discursive violence of the
state.
Our analysis of poetry in Sans Frontière requires a sustained discussion on the intersecting
themes of migration, assimilation, and political engagement. Though not the first poem to address
migrant pride in the publication, Smaïn Mebarki’s “Immigritude” (1981) is a point in case where
poetry allowed writers to share their intellectual, artistic, and personal experiences to unite readers.
In centering Mebarki’s poem to guide our analysis in this section I explore how other writers
lauded migrants who forged a third space in postcolonial France. Though Pius Adensami defines
migritude as negating “the return to the source philosophy of Négritude. For the migritude writer,
Paris is home and it is the context in which s/he seeks to articulate a resistant black identity that
refuses to construct Africa as a site of salutary return,” I depart from this term by aligning my
understanding of the term with Mebarki.
59
This is particularly accurate when considering that not
all people from the Third World settled in the metropole for family reunification or labor purposes;
some were displaced by wars and political upheavals, or simply desired to migrate.
To think of oneself as a migrant evokes despair as a result of contentious political
discourses attached to the individual. In the second stanza of the poem, Mebarki shows how
migrants were reminded of their citizenship status,
Quand j’ouvre un journal ou la télé
J’ai cette sensation bizarre
59
Pius Adesanmi, “Redefining Paris: Transmodernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction,” in Paris,
Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora, eds. Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 321.
177
Que c’est un crime d’être immigré
Qu’à quelqu’un je vole sa part
[…]
Que d’avoir autre couleur,
Que de parler un autre langage
60
As Mebarki shows, the demonization of migrants elicits a bodily response. Migrant identity is
embodied and the French government uses the label at face value to homogenize and criminalize.
The poem shows that immigritude is somatic and it creates internal splits and external conflicts.
As Mebarki points out, the media interpellates viewers, and in this case, the spectacle of
xenophobia unfolds via moving-images on the screen. These filmic and televisual images influence
public perception. Kara Keeling explains that perceptual and cognitive forces are involved in the
“reproduction of social reality,” where they “work to order, orchestrate, produce, and reproduce
social reality and sociality.”
61
Along Keeling’s point, media selects images and frames the migrant
as out of place, displaced from citizenship, and reminded that their existence as an immigrant
(clandestine and otherwise) is always subjected to illegality. This misidentification with the images
on television and the newspaper operates on two levels. On one level, the migrant identifies with
the stories and experiences of other migrants; the migrant forms links of solidarity on the basis of
exclusion. On a second level, the migrant is habituated to respond to their illegality. Mebarki shows
that negative media discourses are designed to make racialized migrants believe that their existence
and presence in France deprives citizens from work and resources, putting them in competition
with French society, as a parasitic other.
60
Smaïn Mebarki, “Immigritude,” Sans Frontière: hebdo, Numéro 18, April 10, 1981, 3, Sans Frontière (collection
numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris, France. My translation: “When I open a newspaper or turn
on the TV/I have a bizarre sensation/That it’s a crime to be an immigrant/That I am stealing someone’s opportunity/To
have a different skin color/To speak a different language.”
61
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007), 11.
178
Being the bearer of racial difference and ambiguous citizenship status places the migrant
in a position that forbids them from performing cultural otherness against French values. Thus, the
migrant is subjected under the panoptic gaze of institutions and systems of displacement that
negate their humanity.
Poets like Mebarki dispute these discourses by locating productive ways to raise political
consciousness. Rather than rejecting migrant identity, Mebarki underscores the importance of
embracing this marker of difference. He writes,
Immigritude, je t’aime
Comme on aime la liberté
Je n’veux pas, même si je pouvais
De toi me séparer
Immigritude, je t’aime
Pour toi je supporterai
Le poids de la bêtise
De tout l’humanité!
62
In this final stanza, Mebarki embraces immigritude and its contradictions. Immigritude, as he
shows us, is a source of cultural and political identity to fight for freedom, equality, and humanity
of migrants. It is not an easy identity to embrace considering that identity shifts, especially during
xenophobic legislation. Immigritude is a state of constant struggle, but it nonetheless humanizes
the individual and their difference vis-à-vis French society. A political tour-de-force, immigritude
is deliberately antagonistic to French Republicanism. Immigritude imagines an otherwise
existence that defies juridical categories, many of which are vestiges of colonization. Through
poetry, Mebarki transmits and raises consciousness on the migrant’s predicament.
62
Mebarki, “Immigritude.” My translation: “Immigritude, I love you/Such as one loves freedom/I would not want,
even if I could/Separate from you/Immigritidue I love you/For you I would withstand/The weight of foolishness/Of
all humanity!”
179
I want to problematize immigritude as articulated in Sans Frontière by briefly looking at
the pan-African and pro-Black movement, Négritude. Poetry of the Négritude movement,
catalyzed by writers such as Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Jeanne and Paulette Nardal
inspired a movement driven by the desire to build and sustain a pan-African consciousness around
the world in the early twentieth century. The neologism of immigritude, addresses migrants and
draws on their experiences to critique discrimination while envisioning a diverse migrant populace.
In this vein, immigritude marks a slight departure from the earlier political, cultural, and literary
work of the privileged authors of the Négritude movement in that for many writers of migritude,
there was no homeland to return to since many of them were born in France. This is also to account
for the fact that second-generation and future generations were still considered “issus de
l’immigration,” still considered foreign due to their racial and cultural otherness and because their
parents were subjects of illegality at times. For those who migrated as children, their memories
resided in the past. Furthermore, immigritude offers the space to include Arabs within this project
and the term accepts cultural difference and experiences with French colonization.
The shift from Négritude to migritude that I distinguish proves to be racially, ethnically,
and socially diverse. In addition, migritude is a source of enunciation from the French occupied,
urban spaces as it concerns the struggles of people living in marginal spaces, such as the banlieue.
In this sense, migrants from former French colonies unite together and find common ground
through migritude. Interestingly, migritude arrives at an historical juncture in which reunification
programs were put in place and during an intense economic crisis as a result of deindustrialization.
For example, Michel Wieviorka reminds us that there are two historical moments of immigration
in France, the first being during the Trente Glorieuses (the Glorious Thrities) when the former
colonized subjects mostly from Africa and the Caribbean came to France as laborers and the
180
second being the 1970s family immigration as anxieties mushroomed over unemployment and
economic instability. These created the conditions for the creation of intense xenophobic
legislation such as loi Stoléru.
63
No longer welcomed to build the infrastructure of France under
exploitative circumstances as they were subjected to in the early twentieth century, racialized
migrants faced rejection as they took up permanent residence in France. As such, racialized groups
felt profound isolation and frustration. These sentiments turned into melancholia.
Melancholia nuances the entanglements of memory, longing, sadness, and resentment. A
melancholic state of mind does not equate to stasis; the former experiences inspire action. David
Eng and Shinhee Han’s definition of melancholia is particularly invested in Asian American
experiences with immigration. Though their focus on cross-generations of Asians in the U.S., I
take a note from Eng and Han on melancholia and apply it to the French context because
immigration and its violent variations are part of the modern human condition. In addition, by the
1960s and 1970s Arab communities were becoming intergenerational. Important to their
definition, Eng and Han explain that although Freud pathologizes melancholia, they take the
concept further by depathologizing it. Eng and Han write, “From this particular vantage,
melancholia might be thought of as underpinning our everyday conflicts and struggles with
experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racialization. Furthermore, even though melancholia
is often conceived of in terms of individual loss and suffering, we are interested in addressing
group identifications.”
64
This compelling quote underscores the experiences of immigration and
63
Michel Wieviorka, “La République, la colonisation. Et après…,” in La fracture coloniale: La société française au
prisme de l’héritage coloniale, eds. Pascal, Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: La Découverte,
2005), 116.
64
David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 10, no. 4 (2000):
669.
181
assimilation that come at a heavy price, particularly affecting the psychological and emotional
health of migrants.
By offering a novel theoretical framework to study loss and the frustration that migrants
experience, the authors look at how racialized groups share relational experiences of oppression
rooted in white supremacy and questions of nationalism. Furthermore, Eng and Han’s definition
of melancholia transfers agency to migrants. The migrant is endowed with agency over their
emotions and sentiments. The intense and varied feelings and thoughts of migrants are rational,
especially since they deal with deracination and survival. Since immigration cannot be detached
from legacies of colonialism, studying melancholia is useful for thinking about how it takes shape,
especially from poets writing from within occupied spaces of the Global North such as the
banlieues. Similarly, Alicia Camacho has theorized “migrant melancholia” in the context of
Latina/o immigration to the U.S. as “an emergent mode of migrant subjectivity that contests the
dehumanizing effects of the unauthorized border crossing.”
65
Camacho elaborates that border
crossing and its attendant consequences generate mourn and that migrant melancholia “also marks
the loss of a social contract, the democratic ideal anchored in the Latin American nation-state.”
66
In this sense, uprooting induces melancholia. For example, the migrant who is already uprooted
from their homeland and forced to assimilate into another nation becomes abstracted in the eyes
of the new country. For instance, Gérard Noiriel writes that the initial trauma of the migrant’s
separation from their identity creates a long list of complications. He adds that the state legitimizes
biometric extraction from the migrant in order to “couper l’individu de son identité passé” (“sever
65
Alicia Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New
York University Press, 2008), 286.
66
Ibid.
182
the indivual from their past”).
67
Indeed, as we have seen with Chavez’s scholarship, the state
abstracts the migrant and in the process of assimilating the data, the government dehistoricizes the
migrant.
In Sans Frontière, a number of poems addressed deracination and melancholia as sources
of psychological and emotional distress on migrants. How do these two themes help us understand
the trauma of leaving the homeland and the limits of integration in France? In the early years of
Sans Frontière, poets and writers longed for their homelands and wrote about the travails of
assimilation. These emotions resonated with readers and it revealed similar patterns of alienation,
exile, longing, and melancholia among many racial and ethnic groups. Khali Hamoud’s untitled
poem from the inaugural issue published in 1979 explicitly comments on the psychological toll
anti-immigrant attitudes take on migrants.
Hamoud writes about the figure of the migrant, someone who is abstracted and
homogenized with others, deprived of their uniqueness. Hamoud stresses the struggles of being
forbidden an identity and categorized with an entire group of migrants,
J'ai perdu ma voix dans QUATRE MILLIONS D'HISTOIRE
QUATRE MILLIONS D'ESPOIRS ASSASSINES
QUATRE MILLIONS D'AVENIRS INCERTAINS
10 20 30 ans, ici je renais
J'ai égaré-retrouvé mon identité
A la frontière de mon terroir
Et de mon pays d'accueil.
« SANS FRONTIERE »
68
67
Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris : Edition du Seuil, 1988),
160.
68
Khali Hamoud, Untitled article, Sans Frontière: Pour un hebdo de l’immigration (Mardi 27 Mars 1979): 12, Sans
Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris, France. My translation: “I lost my
voice amidst four million stories/Four million assassinated hopes/Four million uncertain futures/10, 20, 30 years, I am
reborn/I found my identity/At the border of my territory/And in my host country/Without borders.”
183
Hamoud writes that departing from the homeland leads to the migrant’s loss of identity upon
arriving to France. This loss of individuality relates to the ways in which French society
essentializes migrants, violently stripping each individual of their voice and identity. The poet
writes that migrants lose their voice among four million stories, four million extinguished hopes
of prosperity and dignity, and four million undetermined futures. Most importantly, Hamoud
writes that the migrant’s identity lies between the homeland and the host country, a borderless
exilic, diasporic, and transnational identity. The capitalized letters in the conclusion evoke a
booming voice flowing from the pages of the newspaper, standing out from the four million voices
in France.
It is important to point out that the four million voices that Hamoud cites are not without
histories. By 1975, an estimated 3,442,000 migrants took up residence in France, many whom
were no longer returning to their homelands, including families benefiting from reunification
programs.
69
As Abdelmalek Sayad reminds us, migrants migrate with their histories, which
includes “ses traditions, ses manières de vivre, de sentir, d’agir et de penser, avec sa langue, sa
religion ainsi que toutes les autres structures sociales, politiques, mentales de sa société, structures
caractéristiques de la personne et solidairement de la société, les premières n’étant que
l’incorporation des seconds, bref avec sa culture.”
70
As Sayad shows, when studying immigration
in the French context, we have to consider that migrants bring with them intersectional histories;
the migrant is not an abstract figure, and much of their space making in the postcolony is troubled
by the longue durée of colonial regimes. In essence, migrants create new worlds and build
repositories of knowledge, which Sans Frontière recorded. Even before coming to France,
69
Musée de l’immigration.
70
Abdelmalek Sayad, La Double Absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrance de l’immigré (Paris:
Seuil, 1999), 18. My translation: “their tradition, their ways of living, of feeling, of acting and thinking, with their
language, their religion as well as the social structures, politics…”
184
migrants were aware of the conditions that awaited them, including the negative impressions of
them that circulated in the national imaginary.
Hamoud explains that anti-immigrant murmurs are loud. “HORS DE NOS MURS, HORS
DE NOS FRONTIERES” becomes a declarative warning from the French. This unwelcoming
utterance exposes the contradiction of the hospitable postcolony, gesturing toward France’s anti-
immigrant legislation. Upset and defeated with these attitudes, migrants transformed their anger
and melancholia into political organizing and other forms of resistance. Poetry undoubtedly
offered the space to present those opportunities.
The melancholic tone in Hamoud’s poem shows that migration is embodied and enacted in
ways that conjure a myriad of sentiments, legitimizing suffering, deracination, and other ways of
processing grief. Eng and Han write, “When one leaves one’s country of origin—voluntarily or
involuntarily—one must mourn a host of losses both concrete and abstract. These include
homeland, family, language, identity, property, status in community—the list goes on.”
71
Immigration, mourning, and melancholia are critical to understanding how generations of
racialized people descendants of early migrants continue to experience discrimination and the
aftermath of deracination. As Eng and Han point out, migration brings grief, especially when it
concerns forced assimilation and loss of culture, homeland, family, identity, and language. These
immaterial elements induce psychological trauma, and working through this loss can be
productive, as Hamoud writes. Furthermore, this poetry creates new relational literary and
community spaces. As Mebarki and Hamoud’s poems show, the writers in Sans Frontière resisted
displacement by writing about their experiences with melancholia and other injustices. Writing
71
Eng and Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” 680.
185
about displacements through poetry proved to be even more complex, especially as the writers
tried to make sense of the injustices in the barrios and the banlieues.
Displacement and Poetry: The Barrio
Poetry in La Raza offered a different means of political expression that enabled writers to
inspire readers with concepts of self-determination and liberation. If poetry allowed the writers to
explore their psychological and affective dimensions, and if the work resonated with readers, it is
fair to claim that this enabled those living in the margins to decolonize. The rawness of the poetry
in Sans Frontière and La Raza reveals a great deal about each community’s character and
immediate needs. It is through the unfiltered moods and feelings that accounts of self-
determination were related to the readers. In addition, these writings sparked dreams for liberation.
La Raza’s poetry touched on the lived-experiences of barrio residents and it imagined cohesion.
Through the figure of Aztlán, the writers imagined and fought for an egalitarian society where the
people would be liberated from the restraints of assimilation. In the poem “Somos Chicanas de
Aztlan…! [sic]” by Ana Nieto Gomez published in 1969, the resistance focuses on gender and
underscores the importance of women in the Chicano Movement. Nieto Gomez does not offer an
explicit critique of the patriarchy when emphasizing the role that women play in liberation
struggles. In revisiting this poem through a contemporary lens, it becomes apparent that the
construction of gender roles were part of a larger social and cultural conflict about how the
narratives of revolution were driven by masculinist rhetoric. The poem asks us to consider
liberation as an equal playing field.
Nieto Gomez prioritizes women’s engagement and commitment to revolution, where she
writes,
We as the Chicanas de Aztlán
186
Pledge our work and our fight
For revolution in society
And an end to the injustices to our people.
72
This poem places the needs of the community at the center, and Nieto Gomez articulates the desire
to ultimately envision a world where justice reigns. The poem concludes by reimagining a new
familial arrangement, where “La Raza Nueva” will construct “La Familia Nueva.”
73
This strict
focus on gender at the time drew attention to the work of women in the barrio, and it also
foregrounded revolution as a collaborative process in which women were implicated. As I
mentioned earlier, the various genres of writing published in La Raza imagined liberation
according to the immediate needs of the community, and the tone and language varied, most of the
prose assuming a confrontational and combative posture to the regimes of displacement working
against barrio liberation.
An unauthored poem in the 1968 edition of La Raza titled “El Pueblo de Ntrs Senora La
Reina de Los Angeles”
74
best captures the resistance of the community facing the various
displacements fracturing the barrio,
until yesterday you called me a good chicano…..
today you refer to ours as a bad chicano………
you label me a disgrace,
because i dare speak of truth,
because i dare not be silent,
because i dare destroy the image
you have built of me,
because i choose not to live
or end my life in an eternal siesta.
you point me as a militant,
because i will not crawl,
because i have learned to walk,
72
Ana Nieto Gomez, “Somos Chicanas de Aztlan…!,” La Raza 2, no. 9, November 1969, 4, La Raza Newspaper and
Magazine Collection, University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles,
California.
73
Ibid.
74
“El Pueblo de Ntrs Senora La Reina de Los Angeles,” La Raza 1, no.10, March 1, 1968, 6, La Raza Newspaper and
Magazine Collection, University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles,
California.
187
because i seek to uproot the hell
of being the system’s dog…
As we see, the language is confrontational, and it embodies the anger of subjection and silence.
By rejecting the notion of the “good Chicano,” the writer subverts respectability politics and defies
the silence on the various forms of displacement in motion. In the poem we locate the desire of the
community to rise up from inferiority and march towards humanity. The militant tone is
combative, an expression of rejecting silence. Reflecting the language in La Raza, this piece
diagnosed a latent militant posture that would emerge in the 1970s. Read in light of the 1968
revolutions and the Brown Blowouts where students walked out of schools, the poem
acknowledges the anger and confirms that the barrios were politically awake. The poetry about the
barrios has been particularly illuminating because the writers reveal a great deal about
communities under police occupation.
In an unauthored poem titled “Los Barrios de East Los” published in the July 1969 edition,
the writer offers us an image of contested space,
Chicano mecca ruled and patrolled by
honky cops, straight shooting chotas,
putrid placas
Mexican stronghold pacified by
dried up bones of poverty programs
[…]
Mexican Americans maligned by
Sociologist’s microscopic searches
for the cancer of their own brain
East Los, Mexican port of entry:
haven for muckraking missionaries
busily loosing [sic] their souls to make
America safe for capitalism
Barrios de East Los sold out by
carnales dying of broken dreams
and shrinking hearts
Barrios de East Los controlados por
la indiferencia de lod [sic] generales
irlandeses de la iglesia Catolica
188
Barrios de East Los, lleno de la gloria
de la raza soon to lead
the call for freedom
According to the writer, East Los Angeles is “patrolled,” “controlled,” and “sold out,” invoking
an image of occupation in which the community threatens to be displaced by policing and capitalist
forces.
75
In addition, the writer calls out scholars who conducted studies about the barrios but
rarely helped effectuate the change that they promised. In spite of these troubling signs, the author
puts faith on the barrios by envisioning the people leading the project of liberation. The poem
undoubtedly raised political consciousness and it placed readers in a position to side with the
decolonial and revolutionary movements shaking urban space.
In La Raza, poetry concerned with the status of the people in oppressive situations who
wanted to escape the wrath of inequality made it clear that speaking out against the injustices was
a worthy contribution. In “Those Who,” a poem by SA Estrada published in 1969, the writer
conveys the feelings of alienation and despair,
Those who dwell well
cannot know
the Chicano’s hell
and
[…]
Those who protect their rights
as purely white
are merely might
and
Those whose silence
roars with ear
do not hear
cannot hear
will not hear
Chicano sounds of freedom
drawing
near
75
“Los Barrios de East Los,” La Raza 2, no. 8, July 1969, 4, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine Collection, University
of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
189
In pointing that those who cannot relate to the “Chicano’s hell,” Estrada draws out the disconnect
between people along racial and class differences.
76
Estrada underscores that inaction is complicity
and thus violence. Despite these issues related to apathy, the writer spotlights that the “Chicano
sounds of freedom” will reverberate through the community and inspire change. It is the “roar”
that Estrada suggests will trigger the people into action and that the loud calls for liberation will
shift the dynamics in the community.
If a political consciousness is the mobilizing factor for social change in the barrios, then
poetry is the vessel of inspiration that allows people to connect with others in similar situations.
The barrios and banlieues are political sites where the inhabitants live in perpetual struggle, yet
their determination and resilience to fight for their humanity prevails over the ongoing debates on
citizenship and belonging. Despite the occupation and colonial-like dynamics where struggles over
freedom unfold between policing forces and the residents of those neighborhoods, the barrios and
banlieues were third spaces of possibility.
Poetry and the Space of the Banlieue
Along similar trajectories, Arabs and other migrant groups wrote poetry in the late 1970s
and well into the 1980s to discuss grievances. Tyler Stovall reminds us that the banlieue has
undergone several social, cultural, and political transformations since the early twentieth century.
Stovall writes: “…whereas during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century the
Paris suburbs achieved notoriety for their large working-class, politically radical population, in the
last twenty years they have, in contrast, become a central symbol of immigration and racial conflict
in France. The spatial margins of the French capital have thus successively come to represent
76
SA Estrada, “Those Who,” La Raza 2, no.7, February 7, 1969, 9, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine Collection,
University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
190
marginalities based first on class, then on race.”
77
This shift from working-class identity to race
adds an intersection to the former in that race and class are inseparable. Furthermore, this racial
demographic change reifies the idea that the people forced to live in those marginal spaces are
rendered expendable, and to some extent infrahuman. Despite contained to live in the edges of the
city, the residents in those spaces used expressive means such as poetry to break forth and
communicate their struggles to the rest of the world.
Public space unifies disparate communities via demonstrations, marches, rallies, and other
forms of disruptions. In having grown increasingly frustrated with inequities, racialized people in
France marched side-by-side in 1983 in what was known as La marche contre le racisme (The
march against racism). Didier Lapeyronnie writes that this extraordinary event was necessary as
it reflected a collective sentiment of political empowerment, especially in regard to youth
recounting their experiences with police violence. Lapeyronnie writes, “Il importe peu de savoir
si les faits avancés sont réels ou non, le sentiment qu’ils expriment s’enracine sur une expérience
qu’ils jugent propre et qui les conduit à se sentir solidaires et à se donner un adversaire.”
78
Sans
Frontière played an important role in disseminating news prior, during, and after the event,
showing that throughout France, racialized people faced shared struggles with racism and
discrimination linked to police violence and citizenship exclusion. In the poem “pour l’Egalité”
(“For Equality”) (1983), Saïd Amar called for migrants and their children to respond to the racist
crimes. Amar writes,
Pour tous ces crimes racistes
Nous voulons que justice soit faite
77
Tyler Stovall, “From Red Belt to Black Belt: Race, Class, and Urban Marginality in Twentieth-Century Paris,” in
The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, eds. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), 351.
78
Didier Lapeyronnie, “Assimilation, mobilisation, et action collective chez les jeunes de la seconde génération de
l’immigration maghrébine,” Revue française de sociologie 27, no. 1 (1987): 302. My translation : “It matters little to
know if the claims made are real or not, the sentiment that they express is rooted in an experience that they deem
appropriate and that guides them to establish solidarity and name an adversary.”
191
Pour tous nos frères qui sont tombés
Et qui n'ont toujours pas trouvé la paix.
Toi qui est toujours opprimé
Marche donc pour l'égalité
79
Though written in 1983, the movements that followed and the poem itself are vestiges of the
inequalities that new generations in the banlieue inherited. The poem’s assertive political tone
invokes the manifesto genre. In including the reader as part of the “we,” the poet reaches people
through the pages and drives forward a human rights message. The poem specifically addresses
younger generations, and first-generation migrants themselves, in characterizing everyone as “We,
the children of immigrants.” The demands for justice underscore French racist crimes committed
upon migrants and racialized people and the poetic genre allows the writer to express rage and
optimism. In reminding everyone that the political movements at the time were acts of justice for
the deceased, Amar does his part in keeping alive the memory and voices of the departed. In
identifying the people as “oppressed,” Amar envisions political engagement, and that in uniting
and creating solidarities with the rest of the oppressed, justice will prevail.
The notion of community is broad; a fixed definition would homogenize communities
always in flux, changing with the times, and adapting to social and cultural dynamics. In
complicating this notion of community, Bhabha explains that this concept also poses challenges
to notions of modernity. He explains: “in the metropolitan space it is the territory of the minority,
threatening the claims of civility; in the transnational world it becomes the border-problem of the
diasporic, the migrant, the refugee. Binary divisions of social space neglect the profound temporal
disjunction—the translational time and space—through which minority communities negotiate
79
Saïd Amar, “pour l’Egalité,” Sans Frontière: hebdo de l’immigration et du tiers monde Numéro 8, December 1983,
6, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris, France. My translation: “For
all these racist crimes/We want justice/For our fallen brothers/And for those who never found peace./You, who are
oppressed/March for equality.”
192
their collective identifications.”
80
The French Republic sees communautarisme a profane idea that
undermines Republican integrationism and equality.
81
Despite the fact that racialized people are
forced to live in the urban margins, it is important to recognize that oppressed communities create
third spaces in order to survive political hostilities. Even in spite of fostering support and solidarity
and sharing resources among themselves, racialized communities are blamed for their own
exclusion, accused of stubbornly refusing to assimilate.
If Amar’s poem stresses the importance of unity against injustices, then Djouri Ahmed’s
poem “Le démon des cités” calls attention to the containment and perpetual cycle of oppression
that racialized people in the banlieue encounter. Sociologists such as Lapeyronnie have conducted
studies and interviews with people from the banlieue that shed light on the various forms of
inequality that pounces on youth at every corner. Lapeyronnie explains that “L’individu se trouve
assigné à une identité négative, identité construite et définie par le regard extérieur, mais identité
qu’il ne peut affirmer ou revendiquer positivement.”
82
These negative identities that French society
imposes upon racialized people maintains the structures of oppression that constraints them.
However, as we have seen through a poetics of resistance, the community navigates these regimes
of displacement.
Ahmed’s poem addresses the “you,” likely a young person in a marginal position who runs
into trouble with the law. In the first stanza, Ahmed writes,
Tu marches dans la cité
80
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 330-331.
81
See Didier Lapeyronnie, “La banlieue comme théâtre colonial, ou la fracture coloniale dans les quartiers,” in La
Fracture Coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, eds. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and
Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2005). Didier Lapeyronnie writes about how Arab communities are charged
with being enclosed, unwilling to participate or integrate into the French republic. This kind of discourse frames
racialized groups as self-alienating, thus shifting the blame on them as opposed to the racist structures.
82
Lapeyronnie, “La banlieue comme théâtre colonial, ou la fracture coloniale dans les quartiers, ” 213. My translation:
“The individual finds themselves assigned to a negative identity, an identity constructed and defined by the exterior
gaze, an identity that they cannot affirm or revindicate.”
193
Tu es rejeté par toute la société
T'as les cheveux frisés, le teint foncé
Toutes les boites pour toi sont des clubs privés
Je suis le diable et tu es l'ange.
83
The first stanza addresses errantry, racialized people forced to live in la cité, walking in the rejected
spaces of France. The poem describes the shunned person as bearing the physical traits of racial
difference by specifying hair texture and skin color. All forms of socialization, including the clubs,
are exclusionary spaces that racialized people are forbidden to access. It is clear, as the poem points
out, that the banlieue becomes the site where the rejected dwell and socialize, that is if they are
even afforded the right to exist. While it is first unclear why the dyad figures of the devil (“I”) and
angel (“you”) are invoked here, the poem later illustrates that this symbiotic relationship reflects
the youth’s experience with internal and external forces at play.
This internalized conflict is a product of discrimination and stereotypes. For instance, the
author expands on this in the final stanza where authorities murder the protagonist,
Tu tentes de résister, ils tirent sur toi
Tu es touché, tu tombes foudroyé
Tu ne peux plus regretter de m'avoir cédé
Je t'ai arnaqué moi le démon des cités
Je suis le diable, mais tu n'es plus l'ange.
84
After writing about the rejected person’s vices and petty crimes, which the poet does not demonize,
but rather humanize and complicates as being part of a condition of limited social mobility and
inclusion, we advance to this final standoff. The rejected person, the manifestation of the devil and
the angel, has ceded the place to the former, who is the metaphor of the demons in the cités,
83
Ahmed Djouri, “Le démon des cités,” Génération Beur (Paris: Editions Sans Frontière, 1985), 108-109. My
translation: “You walk around the housing projects/You are rejected by society/Your hair is curly and your skin is
bronzed/All the clubs are exclusive/I am the devil, and you are the angel.”
84
Ibid. My translation: “You attempt to resist, but they shoot you/ You are struck down/You can no longer regret
having ceded your place/I anarchanized you, I the demon of the housing projects/I am the devil, but you are no longer
the angel.”
194
meaning the social and institutional forces culpable in the denigration and death of the rejected
individual, a physical and social death, we might add. This is particularly important to our query
on the third spaces that inhabitants created and the poetry that Sans Frontière published. As
Lapeyronnie writes, “Les habitants de quartiers populaires, et particulièrement les jeunes ‘issue de
l’immigration’, inventent sans cesse de langages parce qu’ils sont privés de langage, parce que la
domination qu’ils subissent et l’absence d’intervention politique les privent de langage.”
85
Lapeyronnie’s remark is important because when one is deprived of representation and visibility,
a language of resistance manifests itself through poetry, a language that shatters stereotypes and
breaches the conventions of writing.
Poetry creates a third space for barrio and banlieue residents to use writing as anticolonial
and decolonial forms of resistance. The poetic genre allows the writers to express their feelings
and draw on provocative language that reflects the general sentiment with occupation. Several of
the poems show that resistance is an important matter and vital to the success of achieving
liberation and recognition of the residents’ humanity. In addition, the poems reference entangled
histories of oppression that inspire younger generations to cross the thresholds and social borders
of the U.S. and France.
Conclusion: The Newspaper/Magazine Archive and Writing New Histories
By bringing La Raza and Sans Frontière together in this study, I am pointing out how both
communities wrote about resistance against regimes of displacement. However, I also want to
stress that in the process the publications documented history. These histories of the barrio and
85
Lapeyronnie, “La banlieue comme théâtre colonial, ou la fracture coloniale dans les quartiers,” 216. My translation:
“The inhabitants of the public housing projects, and especially the youth from migrant legacies, create their own
language because they are deprived of language, because the oppression they experience and the absence of political
intervention deprives them of language.”
195
banlieue, and other spaces beyond these, showed that the writers were cognizant that their
condition was related to major systems of oppression working against racialized and working-class
groups in other contexts of the Global North. In their own right, these two publications function
as archives; they saved the histories of the spaces, people, and movements that are no longer here
today.
For example, the two publications gave community members the opportunity to write
letters to the editor and it offered them a space where they could opine about matters concerning
immigration, urban rehabilitation, and cultural anxieties. As contemporary readers, we come
across the testimonies and calls for action from the people who were not part of the editorial team.
In the January 1971 edition of La Raza, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Esparza wrote a letter condemning
the police for beating their son Fred Samuel Esparza on November 7, 1970. The two expressed, “I
feel there was no reason and they unjustly choked my son until he became unconscious. They
threw him face down on the pavement, causing severe lacerations to his mouth and chin. They
then (while my son was helpless) handcuffed him and Officer Steer applied another laceration to
his head, requiring 6 stiches.”
86
Mr. and Mrs. Esparza demand a thorough investigation to charge
the officer for this gross act of violence. In the letter, they invoked urgency, a feeling that was
many community members felt when it concerned police violence. In this regard La Raza offered
the parents a space to air their grievance and to also communicate the details of the arrest and
beating. By making this account public on the pages of La Raza, the parents challenged the
displacement of their son from public space and from the community.
86
Manuel Esparza, “Police Brutality,” La Raza 1, no. 4, January 1971, 2, La Raza Newspaper and Magazine
Collection, University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles, California.
196
In Sans Frontière, Zerfi Kamel wrote “Expulsion: Appel Pour Une Résistance,” where the
writer called on the people and organizations to support his case against deportation.
87
Born in
Algeria in 1957, Kamel migrated to France at the age of eight months with his parents. He explains
that in his youth, he committed petty crimes, but was never convicted for the wrongdoings.
Deported to Algeria in 1977 after being the victim of a violent assault in the streets, Kamel
eventually returned to France in November of the same year but police apprehend him in a case of
mistaken identity, sequestering him for two months in Aix-en-Provence. Kamel’s lawyer proved
to the judge that he was the wrong suspect because he was in Algeria at the time of the alleged
crime. In his plea to community members and organizations, Kamel writes, “Je ne puis accepter
tout cela…Je ne comprends pas les raisons pour lesquelles je suis expulsé, et je ne les trouve pas
normales. Je compte entamer une grève de la faim le plus vite possible pour protester contre ce
système d’expulsion…J’en appelle à toutes les organisations de gauche, à toutes les personnes de
bonne volonté et je hurle pour leur demander de ne pas rester indifférentes.”
88
By writing that he
shouts against indifference, Kamel underscores desperation. His coordinated hunger strike
becomes the ultimate political act where he appeals against his displacement.
In making space in the pages for community members under precarious situations, I
contend that La Raza and Sans Frontière served as repositories of knowledge. It is often expressed
that little archival documents exist to tell the stories of violence, especially in the context of the
October 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris. While we do not have the visual evidence of the
murders of Arabs, we do have the testimonies and commemorations in the pages of Sans Frontière,
87
Zerfi Kamel, “Expulsion: Appel Pour Une Résistance,” Sans Frontière: Bimensuel pour un hebdo de l’immigration
Numéro 5, January 15, 1980, 3, Sans Frontière (collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris,
France.
88
Ibid. My translation: “I cannot accept all of this…I do not understand the reasons for my deportation, and I do not
find them normal. I hope to go on a hunger strike as soon as possible to protest against this unfair system…I call on
leftist organizations and people of good faith and I shout to not remain indifferent.”
197
and elsewhere. For example, in the December 1979 issue of the French publication, SI Ahmed
recounts the memory in detail of that evening.
89
By including this history, the publication kept the
memory of 1961 alive, and consequently archived it for future generations. The Chicano
Moratorium of August 1970 was recorded at length in a special issue of La Raza. The issue
included testimonies, photographs, and other forms of writing that recounted the events that
transpired that day throughout East Los Angeles.
Though the histories and writings of the residents of the barrio and the banlieue remain
marginal, La Raza and Sans Frontière helped preserve a significant deal. Both publications show
us that community newspapers and magazines were critical in disseminating information and for
raising awareness about the liberation projects in urban space. Both platforms helped lead the fight
against displacement and the writings included in them help us understand the contemporary
struggles between racialized people in urban space and the regimes of displacement that
unfortunately remain intact.
89
SI Ahmed, “200 morts, 400 disparus, c’était hier à Paris…,” Sans Frontière, December 4, 1979, 11, Sans Frontière
(collection numérisée de périodiques), Association Génériques, Paris, France.
198
Chapter Four
Murals/Murs: Visual Histories and Decolonial Inscriptions of Liberation
Like the pachuco style, graffiti was a visual statement filled with apparent contradiction. It was,
on the one hand, blatant defacement, public disorder, the expression of people without genuine
respect for the mainstream aesthetic. On the other hand, it was bold community imagery, a private
language that could be used to convey community-oriented information.
-Max Benavidez and Kate Vozoff, Mexican Art of the 1970s Images of Displacement.
Walls, both written upon and read, are an important feature of the anarchive.
-Lia Brozgal, Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961.
Introduction
In Georges Méliès’ short silent comedy film, Défense d’afficher (Post No Bills) (1896), the
narrative revolves around three men who vie for artistic and territorial dominance over a public
wall. In the beginning of the gag, a fixed camera captures an armed soldier guarding the wall that
reads “Défense d’afficher.”
1
As he exits right frame, a poster (un colleur d’affiches) sneaks by,
seizing the opportunity to plaster an advertisement. The comedic routine unfolds as yet another
colleur d’affiches layers a larger poster over the small one (figure 4.1). As the first man returns to
the scene, he happens upon the crime scene and notices the second claiming the space, resulting
in a scuffle that continues out of frame. Upon returning to his post, the soldier misses the fight and
fails to notice that posters now conceal the directive. Soon after, a superior officer reprimands the
soldier for his neglect, dismissing him from the post.
1
See Gustave Dutruc, Explication pratique de la Loi du 29 juillet 1881 sur la presse d'après les travaux parlementaires
et la jurisprudence (Paris: Librairie générale de jurisprudence, 1883). Known as the Loi du 29 juillet 1881 sur la liberté
de la presse (Law of July 29, 1881 on the freedom of the press), the French government of the third republic passed
legislation on the display of governmental and other political posters. While posters of this type could not be displayed
at places of worship, historical monuments, and other contentious sites of non-political public space, private property
owners cited the law to prohibit the posting of bills and other material on the exterior of their buildings.
199
Figure 4.1. Still from Défense d’afficher (1896), directed by Georges Méliès, Ciné-
Archives.
Aside from the historical importance of Défense d’afficher as a surviving silent film of the
late nineteenth century located in the archives of the Parti Communiste, and given that the film
was made in the nascent stages of cinema, we can infer that the Communist Party of France found
relevance in the politics of subversion and transgression that challenged the state and policing
apparatus as displayed in the film. Though not clearly legible, the word “L’Alger” appears on the
poster. At the time, France had already colonized Algeria and questions on citizenship, identity,
and political power began to shape and raise questions on postcolonial migration in the metropole.
2
Méliès delivers a political message by refusing to discipline the colleurs d’affiche for violating the
1881 law that prohibited the posting of bills in certain sites around the city in order to allow the
freedom of press devoid of propagandistic influence or sway. In addition, the law reorganized the
optics of urban space by helping declutter urban walls from undesired posters. To post a bill, or a
poster, or to write a provocative message on a wall, or to use public façades for political
expression—whether artistic or otherwise—shows that contentious politics are indeed theatrical.
2
In 1905, Méliès directed a short film titled Le Fantôme d'Alger. Though a copy of this film is currently nonextant,
this shows us that the filmmaker continued to use Algeria as an orientalist backdrop for his films. It is unclear what
political position Méliès took in regard to Algeria. For a more sustained discussion on orientalism, see Edward Said’s
Orientalism.
200
These walls, whether on private or public property, play a crucial role in visualizing and inscribing
radical histories and messages. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the boundary between public
and private space is collapsed when the displayed histories address the concerns of communities
under siege and displacement. While the bills in Défense d’afficher may not have assumed a
political stance, the delinquent act shows that images and writings on walls are by virtue interpreted
as political propaganda, even revolutionary statements.
This chapter examines decolonial inscriptions and visual histories of resistance on walls of
the barrios of East Los Angeles and the banlieues of Paris, France during the 1960s and 1970s. I
argue that a relational study of the creative energy that Chicanas/os and Arabs projected on the
walls of both urban spaces shows us how public façades were sites of political struggle that
visualized displacement by calling attention to social and political alienation, government neglect,
and cases of displacement. In this process, the residents of the barrio and banlieue enacted
anticolonial and decolonial acts through self-representation in rendering visible radical aesthetics.
Revolutionary and provocative, these murals reflected the politics of each community in different
ways that encourage us to also consider the function of murals and how murals are defined. Artists
offered the vigorous language and tools for imagining a liberationist future by transforming the
walls into tableaus of radical engagement, and the presence of these works in urban space
undoubtedly initiated resistance and the desire to transcend containment. These visual and
inscriptive acts of resistance were met with consternation.
I am cautiously employing the term “mural” in order to accommodate its diverse forms. In
addition, I am strategically using “decolonial inscriptions” as opposed to “graffiti” in order to
historicize the provenance of these political writing on walls that relayed specific messages mostly
concerning the war in Algeria in the French context. Though definitions of a mural shift according
201
to artistic practices, methods, and scale, I define murals as mediums through which visual and
decolonial inscriptions transmit to the public histories of displacement and where self-
determination, solidarity, and dreams for liberation, contributed to a shift in revolutionary
consciousness. Murals need not be stationary; they function as historical documents that convey
layered histories. These histories often include representations of the past or the present reality
(though they can also include speculative futures), the aesthetic choices and the conditions in
which the mural was produced, and the status of visual culture.
Similar to the theme on absence concerning nonextant and inaccessible films that motivates
chapter two, this chapter is focused on mostly nonextant murals and decolonial inscriptions on
walls. I draw from a series of archival sources such as photographs and newspapers in order to tell
a history about how Chicanas/os, Arabs, and their allies took their political messages of liberation
to the monochromatic walls of the barrios and banlieues. By mostly focusing on nonextant murals,
it becomes evident that racialized visual culture is always under threat of destruction. Furthermore,
a relational study of murals shows how both spaces enacted anticolonial and decolonial resistance
as Chicanas/os and Arabs engaged with questions of postcolonial migration and displacement.
A relational study of art unavoidably raises challenges related to the particularities of mural
production. First, though the Chicano Movement is known for producing breathtaking visual
culture, especially murals, there is limited study on how this kind of art transpired in the context
of the radical struggles of displaced Arabs in Paris. After all, the muralist tradition that Chicanas/os
adhered to originates from Mexico’s legacy of socialist visual histories displayed in governmental
institutions. Second, rather than solely focusing on visual histories in the context of Paris, I mostly
examine decolonial inscriptions. As I will momentarily explain, these inscriptions were writings
on walls and I distinguish them from graffiti. These traces of the past appear in archived
202
photographs, many on the pages of the newspaper and magazine Sans Frontière. Though my
search to locate murals with visual histories in 1960s and 1970s Paris has slightly hindered the
visual culture I hoped to uncover, I am instead motivated by this limitation and alternatively work
with scarce photographs that captured anticolonial and decolonial inscriptions and other
indistinguishable images on urban walls. Third, by citing nonextant murals of those decades, I risk
overlooking the rich material of the present. As muralism continues to flourish in Paris and the
images of these creative and political expressions are circulated on social media, I focus on the
1960s and 1970s era of decolonization in order to stress that artistic and political expressions of
liberation are always fragile and subject to erasure. By working with nonextant sources whose
traces are now photographic, I urge us to avoid forgetting about these histories and to search within
our own vicinities and observe what urgent messages reside on the walls. A number of these murals
are decayed and forgotten, and the passage of time has blurred the histories they communicate.
How can we rescue those visual histories and decolonial inscriptions and reactivate them in order
to understand how they influenced communities in the periphery to visualize their histories when
mainstream media brushed off their grievances?
Writing in the context of the photomontage mural in Paris during the 1930s, Romy Golan
explains that the very idea of artists creating large scale images composed of personal and press
photographs, vexed spectators who associated the black and white aesthetic to “militantly
engagement.”
3
Along these lines, even the medium through which these murals were created also
gestured towards political urgency. One could argue that the very act of creating a mural is
inherently political, radical, and liberatory. A canvas, a wooden board, a cloth, and other surface
media of display could equally qualify as a mural, especially if artists work with limited resources,
3
Romy Golan, “The Medium of the Decade: The Photomural in 1937,” in With Black and White you can Keep more
of a Distance, eds. Monika Wagner and Helmut Lethen (Frankfurt: Campus Verlagn 2015), 97.
203
lack of space, and other material constraints that pose a challenge for their creativity and thus
raising the significance of their urgent and radical work. Francis V. O’Connor writes that murals
are characterized by their “pictorial or abstract composition” and that they “portray with deliberate
intent the ideology of what goes on within or before those walls.”
4
For this reason, it is imperative
to avoid conflating muralism and street art. Historicizing the production and aesthetic of murals
shows that these pictorial, and often-didactic messages, were tasked with sharing histories of
displacement.
When we think about the history of graffiti, much of the scholarship focuses on the
production of urban culture of 1970s New York City. However, graffiti contains a distinctive style
and its political inflections are grounded on particular struggles linked to deindustrialization, urban
decay, an emerging hip hop culture, and radical desires for visibility in a segregated metropolis.
Instead, I urge us to think about inscriptions to include anticolonial and decolonial phrases. For
this reason, I use the term decolonial inscriptions, especially because in the context of Paris, the
phrases were tied to histories of displacement and postcolonial migration to the metropole. There
are occasions when these writings on the wall are referred to as “slogans.” A more sustained study
is needed beyond the scope of this chapter in order to trace the differences in each. Ultimately,
graffiti and decolonial inscriptions are not entirely discrete when expressing a spatial history or
situation, but their production requires nuance.
Decolonial Inscriptions
The artists of the barrio and banlieue visualized the decolonial activity on walls as an act
of liberation made possible through a radical aesthetics that transgressed the policing of space. The
4
Francis V. O’Connor, “The Mural: An Art Form for the People,” in Art for the People: The Rediscovery and
Preservation of Progressive-and WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1943, ed. Heather Becker
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 9.
204
inscription of names, events, issues, and cultural identity functioned as an act of defiance and self-
determination, despite the contention they generated. In writing about graffiti and the effect of
words on walls and the messages they transmit, David Fieni writes about the significance of this
radical act for communities abandoned in the margins. Writing about then-Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy’s comments following the 2005 uprisings in Clichy-sous-Bois when he referred
to racialized youth as “racaille,” or scum, that needed washing with a high powered machine
habitually used for removing graffiti from hard surfaces (Karcher), Fieni explains that such
incendiary language evoked sentiments akin to “ethnic cleansing” and “urban cleaning,” both of
which are violent displacements that have historically targeted racialized, migrant groups that find
themselves engulfed by nationalism, jingoism, and white supremacy.
5
Furthermore, the act of
power washing the writing off walls is an erasure of identity, history, and radical expression. In
regard to graffiti, Fieni writes: “To ask what a wall wants and how graffiti thinks in this context is
to interrogate the historical processes by which the contemporary French State subsumes mobility
and ‘reforms smooth space,’ particularly in the exurban enclave known as the banlieue.”
6
In posing
this question, Fieni points to the affective register and transgressive acts visualized on walls. For
example, this materializes in the artists’ commitment to document and visualize histories of
injustice and the struggle for self-representation. Furthermore, in the context of graffiti, and as
Fieni adds that this practice is mobile that allows “a new way of relating to the earth and marking
one’s position on it in a way that does not presuppose a fixed, passive writer or reader. It bypasses
technocratic legislative procedures and claims an immediate ‘right to the city’…”
7
Read through
5
David Fieni, “What a Wall Wants, or How Graffiti Thinks,” Diacritics 40, no.2 (2012), 73.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid, 79.
205
this proposal, the decolonial inscriptions reclaim space, occupying the public with militant
language that expresses a collective, social condition anchored in marginalization and injustice.
This self-representation is political, especially when the writing on walls functions to
communicate a message to insiders, hailing those who interpret the substance and weight of the
remark. As Holly Barnet-Sanchez explains of Chicana/o graffiti, “Mexican American gang graffiti
was (and is) a powerful and graphically compelling form of communication, legible to those who
need to read it, but opaque to outsiders,” explaining that this form of writing is resourceful because
it names and addresses a particular public, while puzzling to others.
8
Building on Barnet-Sanchez’s
assessment of graffiti, I contend that decolonial inscriptions are endowed with the power to
perform illegibility, and yet the presence of this writing functions as a form of memorialization,
serving as counter-memory to so-called official narratives. Furthermore, it defies perceptions on
the proper uses of public space to write back against authorities, and it encourages multivalent
readings. To conjecture that anticolonial and decolonial inscriptions offer a surface reading, is to
misunderstand the intricate qualities that are invested in making these words public at the risk of
facing punishment.
Under contexts of urban containment, policing, and displacement, writing or drawing on a
wall, is a an anticolonial and decolonial act. The writing on walls validate uprisings and other
forms of rebellion in response to policing regimes and the colonial situations of urban space. To
write on a wall means to radically claim freedom of speech, to humanize racialized people, and to
inscribe that a violent displacement took place. Walls, barriers, and other structures of policing are
tools of the state that are imposed on the architecture to remind marginalized communities of their
physical and social place. Fieni explains that these structures “align themselves on capitalism’s
8
Holly Barnet-Sanchez, “Radical Mestizaje in Chicano/a Murals” in Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, eds.
Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adèle Greeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 253.
206
internal limit, which must constantly displace itself, moving incrementally away from the center
in order to accommodate and temporarily contain the contradictions it generates.”
9
In a sense, the
highways, train tracks, barriers, walls, fences, and blockades in and around barrios and banlieues
function as panoptic infrastructures that hide and contain the downtrodden, racialized bodies
whose mere existence contradicts capitalist, human rights discourses, and integrationist,
universalizing models. In other words, barrios and banlieues are enclosed by walls because they
undermine the faulty logic of capitalism and universalism, showing us that racialized and
marginalized people are barred from enjoying the privileges of freedom of mobility. Even though
these urban housing projects are hidden from the center of the city, the images of colonial situations
and the community’s determination for decolonization reveals the immense power that images
hold for understanding universal forms of oppression operating at once in different places.
10
Based on the Communist Party’s archive of images with radical inscriptions on walls in
1950s and 1960s Paris, my study shows that the party had an interest in these inscriptions because
they rendered visible imperial, colonial, and violent histories. Moreover, a number of these
inscriptions expressed solidarity with migrants, refugees, and other displaced people, mostly from
Algeria at the time. These political inscriptions were never permanent, and they were effaced,
leading us to think about the palimpsest.
9
Fieni, “What a Wall Wants,” 77.
10
See Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, (Minnesota, University of
Minnesota Press, 2014). Along with these sentiments of containment and refusal, Eric Avila writes that the freeways
that segmented East Los Angeles from the rest of the city functioned to distinguish the sociality, and I add, the racial
composition rooted in logics of colonization. Avila explains that just “Like the U.S.–Mexican border, the freeway
attempts to distinguish one social world from another, dividing the barrio from the urban core” (138).
207
Palimpsestic Histories
I previously focused on surviving textual documents such as pamphlets and flyers to
illustrate and emphasize the ephemerality of racialized visual culture in times of flux. Here, I focus
on surviving visual culture, especially murals and decolonial inscriptions on urban walls that were
considered radical at their time. Though murals are not afforded the same care, resources, and
attention as monuments, some manage to survive the passage of time, inclement weather, and
deliberate destruction. On the other hand, others are forgotten, erased, and disregarded.
Fortunately, the nonextant murals that I include in this study were photographed. The targets of
these surviving photographs (in this case the murals), are what Roland Barthes called the
“Spectrum.”
11
Barthes explains that the word itself relays the concept of “spectacle,” which in this
case, is the resuscitation of the nonextant mural into public existence via the photograph.
12
These
photographs refuse erasure, keeping alive the visual histories and decolonial inscriptions and
serving as testaments of the radical work that Chicanas/os and Arabs carried out. As it will become
evident in the subsections that follow, some of the murals were not meant to withstand various
elements of destruction, and therefore we are fortunate to have photographic evidence as a way of
rethinking how to use speculative methods for writing media histories. We might be compelled to
ask and imagine: What has replaced these murals? Are these radical traces visible? Are these
murals rescuable and do they need to be if we write and reanimate their histories in new ways?
The concept of the palimpsest is productive for this discussion on erased and disregarded
murals. Sarah Dillon traces the use of the term back to 1845, when Thomas de Quincey, an English
writer, expanded on the possibility of broadening the definition. Dillon writes, “Palimpsests were
created by a process of layering whereby the existing trace was erased, using various chemical
11
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981), 9.
12
Ibid.
208
methods, and the new text was written over the old one.”
13
The palimpsest, as Dillon suggests,
functioned to recreate a document or to recycle the material in order to create something new.
Though this notion of the palimpsest concerns paper and writing, the concept presents to us an
important consideration on how to mobilize a discussion of the palimpsest with murals by focusing
on erasure and disregard, especially during the era of decolonization and the major displacements
that unfolded at the same time.
If as Dillon writes that “The palimpsest is an involuted phenomenon where otherwise
unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each
other,” there is a case to make about the histories of resistance against displacement that continue
to exist in the surviving walls of the barrios and banlieues.
14
Though the nonextant murals are
forgotten, their traces are still embedded in the walls over the layers of paint, and we can add that
the original haunts the surface. Any material layered on top of those visual histories and decolonial
inscriptions informs how new histories are created, thereby forming a symbiotic relationship where
the past and present coexist.
To think about the palimpsest requires a sustained engagement with historical hauntings,
or the histories that resist total obliteration. Maxim Silverman draws a connection between the
palimpsest and hauntings. Silverman explains that the present is haunted by the past, and though
these hauntings are not readily visible, they become apparent over time. “The relationship between
present and past,” writes Silverman, “therefore takes the form of a superimposition and interaction
of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that
one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by, another.”
15
The visual histories and
13
Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2007), 245.
14
Ibid.
15
Maxim Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and
Film (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 3.
209
decolonial inscriptions of resistance are not entirely lost; the traces of the past live within the
present, demonstrating that history is layered, interwoven, composite, and never linear.
Furthermore, the photographic traces cement these histories of resistance against displacement by
reminding us of the timeless specter of violence.
Coming primarily from literary studies, the concept of the palimpsest, we can add, moves
beyond notions of layers, erasures, rewriting, and so forth. The palimpsestic quality of murals tells
histories of experiences in the barrio and banlieue that reflect a struggle with neglect by using the
limited means for self-representation. Writing on the feminist literature of Edwidge Danticat and
Dionne Brand, Saskia Fürst explains that “While palimpsests are usually thought of as documents
and texts,” she argues that bodies are palimpsests.
16
For instance, Fürst contends that narratives
with ghostly figures that appear in the dreams of the main characters in the novels are an extension
and part of the psyche of the protagonists. Along this line of thought, the nonextant murals are part
of the urban landscape and the history of resistance movements of the past and present. Though
non-human, the murals represent ghostly figures who are commemorated as revolutionaries and
there is a spectral quality about murals in relation to the visualization of history and their finite
presence in photographs. My contribution here is to reanimate the significance of those murals by
writing and activating their political purpose in a relational framework that calls attention to radical
urban space resistance.
One of the most infamous erased, but not forgotten, political writing on the wall in Paris is
the prominent “Ici on noie les Algériens” (“Here they drown Algerians”). Photographed in 1961
by Jean Textier, who was accompanied by Claude Angeli, in the aftermath of the Algerian
16
Saskia Fürst, “Palimpsests of Ancestral Memories: Black Women’s Collective Identity Development in Short
Stories by Edwidge Danticat and Dionne Brand,” A Journal of English Studies 34, no.2 (2017), 68.
210
massacre of October 17, 1961, the phrase was written on the riverbank of La Seine, across the
street from the Institut de France (figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2. Photograph of “Ici on noie les Algériens, by Jean Textier.
Jean-Michel Mension, one of the authors of the militant phrase, recounts that he was
compelled to react to the massacre and mark the space where this violent scene took place, leading
him between the Pont Saint-Michel and L’Institut de France. Textier explains that upon
encountering the inscription, he jumped out of his vehicle and snapped two photographs of the
mural after having observed two officers gazing at the incriminating phrase. Upon noticing his
interest to immortalize the phrase with his camera, the officers waved their arms, laboring to
obstruct the inscription from being indexed into history. Similar to the French government’s
attempts at erasing traces of the brutal massacre, the political inscription was effaced, but its
photographic reproduction is now an historical trace, whose evidentiary weight charges the French
policing regimes of embellishing its version of the story. Furthermore, though the political phrase
is no longer extant, but the concrete barrier remains, the site is marked by the palimpsestic qualities
that remind us there once existed a public declaration of the massacre.
Erasure, censure, and disregard are violent acts, especially when the histories and
experiences with oppression expose the faulty logics of nationality and belonging that do not
complement the curated narrative of the imagined liberal city. A noteworthy example in the context
211
of Los Angeles, which has received ample attention, is Mexican muralist David Siqueiros’
América Tropical (1932). In having benefitted from a recent extensive and costly restoration, the
mural is once again visible on Olvera Street in Downtown Los Angeles, having survived decades
of whitewash since 1934. Siqueiros’ visual critique of U.S. imperialism exposed the horrors of
anti-Indigenous, colonial violence.
17
I call attention to this case because it is one of the most
notable erasures of murals that is marked by a violent conviction to omit reference to genocide.
These practices of mural destruction continue in contemporary Los Angeles, with little to no
institutional support to protect and rehabilitate these visual histories about survival and resistance.
Considered a Chicano Renaissance, the murals of the barrios that proliferated during the 1960s
and 1970s relayed radical histories of self-determination. Unfortunately, a number of the murals
produced in that era were erased for a number of reasons, including lack of funding to maintain
them, or willfully destroyed.
Roberto Chavez’s mural, The Path to Knowledge and the False University (1974-1975),
painted at East Los Angeles College, visualized a story about race, knowledge production,
environmental disaster, militarization, and displacement (figure 4.3). Another case of
whitewashing in 1979, the mural repulsed administrators who refused to assume responsibility of
its destruction, though it is believed that then-president of the college Arthur Avila authorized its
removal. Chastised for its abstract style, the mural was mired in contentious debates concerning
Mexican American representation and respectability politics. College administrators such as
Manuel Ronquillo believed that the piece was deplorable as it did not represent the entire
17
See Anna Indych-López, “Mexican Muralism in the United States: Controversies, Paradoxes, and Publics” in
Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, eds. Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adèle Greeley
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 217. Anna Indych-López’s analysis of the artwork explains that the
“The sight of an ancient American civilization in ruins, overrun by vegetation, armed conflict, and torture, clearly
countered the civic aims of stemming urban decay and of giving a street recently revitalized as an essentially fake
folkloric market a sense of history…,” challenging the narrative of downtown Los Angeles as a romanticized site of
Mexicaness.
212
Figure 4.3. Roberto Chavez, The Path to Knowledge and the False University (1974-1975),
photographed by Nancy Tovar, Nancy Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection, UCLA Chicano
Studies Research Center Library and Archive.
Chicana/o community.
18
Composed of pre-conquest motifs, jagged designs to reflect the violence
and militarization of the world, and abstracted expendable bodies, the mural was commissioned in
order to encourage student enrollment in Chicano Studies. Evidently, the mural reflected the
militant and urgent spirit of the times to mobilize knowledge production outside of the university.
Though the mural did not tell a digestible history of triumph, it visualized themes that were
pertinent to the movements of liberation and the militarized presence of police in racialized spaces,
including in the barrios of East Los Angeles. The destruction of the mural raises questions about
why certain murals are targeted for destruction when the artwork and themes do not satisfy the
imagined qualities and aesthetics that positively represent Chicanas/os.
A relational history of these two contexts of erased murals and decolonial inscriptions with
themes of displacement illustrates that rendering visible or writing histories unpleasant for the state
18
Jessica Hough, “Too Chicano?,” in Murales Rebeldes: L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals Under Siege, eds. Erin M.
Curtis, Jessica Hough, and Guisela Latorre (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2017), 72.
213
that pertain to police brutality, epistemic violence, and resistance is an urban struggle that further
accentuates the violence of disregard. In both, the erasure of the phrase “Ici on noie les Algériens”
in Paris and The Path to Knowledge and the False University in East Los Angeles shows us that
though these murals are no longer extant, they survive through the photographs, and most
importantly, to the history of resistance that pressures institutions of power in both cities to address
displacement, especially as it concerned racialized, refugee, and migrant communities. Though the
latter is a decolonial inscription and the former a visual history, both represented what it meant to
be displaced from French and American public history. These crises of political displacement carry
into the contemporary, and they offer frameworks to read murals relationally.
The Past is Prologue
We are reminded that in order to make sense of the historical turbulence of the present, we
have to understand the past and avoid, interrupt, and disengage with the errors that structure our
contemporary life. Furthermore, the past contains lessons that can make our immediate present
and future more equitable, provided that we take note and commit to centering the experiences of
excluded people, particularly migrants, refugees, and the displaced. How do we study the relational
displacements of the barrios and banlieues as visualized and inscribed on murals when the
examples are spatially and temporally discrete? In this section I analyze Willie Herrón III and
Gronk’s Moratorium: The Black and White Mural (1972) and Dip Social Klub’s portable mural
La Danse de la Souffrance (The Choreography of Suffering) (2016), and identify how
214
displacement via police brutality, remains ever so relevant and why these visual histories continue
to haunt our present realities (figures 4.4 and 4.5).
Figure 4.4. Gronk and Willie Herrón III, Moratorium: The Black and White Mural (1972),
photographed by Nancy Tovar, Nancy Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection, UCLA Chicano
Studies Research Center Library and Archive.
Figure 4.5. Dip Social Klub, La Danse de la Souffrance (2016).
As I have stressed throughout this project, it is unlikely that residents of the barrios and
banlieues have ever been in direct contact, or expressed solidarity. Though these spaces are marked
by their particular histories of segregation, colonial legacies, and immigration flows, the
experiences with the various forms of displacement in the barrios and banlieues bring out the
relational aspect of how racialized people who live in urban space struggle against policing forces
215
that are equipped with the means to produce violence, harm racialized bodies, and ultimately
benefit from impunity. Most urgently, Chicanas/os and Arabs continue to deal with policing,
discrimination, alienation, and dehumanization through more sophisticated means, but the logics
of displacement remain intact. Writing about these shared struggles allows us to identify, name,
and home in on relational dynamics rooted in oppression that haunt the barrios and banlieues.
Murals help to visualize these experiences and they provide the language and critical concepts for
thinking about the relationship between urban space and colonial relations and how the creation of
visual histories and decolonial inscription is anticolonial and decolonial resistance.
Situated in the Estrada Courts housing projects in East Los Angeles, Moratorium: The
Black and White Mural (1972) shares a representation of police violence and resistance with the
portable mural La Danse de la Souffrance (2016). Both murals visualize the experiences with
occupation and rebellion, where racialized bodies defy restraint that authorities require of them.
Beside their glaring difference due to the date of creation, both are unique in material production.
The former mural exists in situ, whereas the latter is portable and drawn on a soft textured surface.
As I mentioned, I am generous to the idea that the medium and definition of a mural shifts. The
purpose of murals in this context nevertheless addresses histories of injustice and their hallmark
purpose is to exhibit histories of displacement. The portability and mobility of murals offers the
potential to display and introduce local histories of resistance in other spaces undergoing similar
experiences as a form of solidarity building through visual culture that emphasizes a liberationist
principle.
19
Furthermore, portability refuses visual stasis, thus proving that the visual history of
19
See Anna Indych-López, A Ver: Judith F. Baca (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press,
2018). Anna Indych-López’s analysis of Judith F. Baca’s portable mural Uprising of the Mujeres underscores that this
piece “broke free from a static wall hanging,” especially because murals of the 1930s in Mexico were created for the
purpose of avoiding “its own destruction by being marginally moveable (in case of a building’s demolition, for
example) rather than circulating throughout the city to reach distinct audiences” (108). Furthermore, the mural’s
portability is famously shot in Agnès Varda’s Mur Murs (1981).
216
police violence is not grounded to a particular geographical space, but simultaneously experienced
elsewhere. Even if murals are not portable, their concepts, visual histories, ideas, and
representations are: messages transcend the material objects and arrive to spaces and people via
different forms of knowledge.
20
In our examples, these accounts of police brutality and rebellious
bodies subverting these systems, reaches communities with similar histories across the world.
Despite the temporal and spatial differences of both murals, they gesture toward a relational
experience that defines how racialized groups struggle against regimes of power that encroach on
their human rights. The representation of community members resisting authorities in Gronk and
Herrón and Dip Social Klub’s work shows how resistance and documentation are decolonial acts
that racialized people use in order to visualize these violent displacements that undermine their
humanity. Moratorium and La Danse de la Souffrance cannot be categorized as “street art,” for
both intentionally replay the scenes of police violence and the collective resistance from the
contained urban communities. In addition, the visualization of police violence and community
resistance is not decorative. Rather, these visual histories of urban resistance commemorate
racialized survival in the face of violent repression and serve to remind spectators that these cases
endemic to racialized, urban space continue to structure the present. In fact, these murals force the
spectator to dwell with these histories; disregard, a quick glimpse, or surface reading are not an
option. The former mural depicts vignettes from the August 29, 1970 Chicano Moratorium, while
the latter represents an act of resistance against state-sanctioned violence in the so-called “city of
lights.” Evidently, both murals respond to communal events rooted in legacies of police terror,
20
See Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927-1957 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009). Romy Golan explores the history of mobility and paintings, showing us that panels during the Middle
Ages were portable and that in the nineteenth century the French experimented with canvas in the studios.
217
violence, brutality, and death of racialized subjects. By visualizing these displacements, the artists
document historical moments that are archived for the community to see.
A cursory glance of Black and White and La Danse de la Souffrance makes readily apparent
how racialized people visualize chaos and disorientation in the moment of rebellion. From the
presence of militarized police, to community members assembling in public space, the murals
represent spatial reclamation and resistance against regimes of displacement. Standing in front of
Moratorium produces the illusion that one is gazing at several screens. The vignettes function as
jump cuts working in rapid succession, following the aesthetic tradition of Soviet montage; the
violent scenes assault and unsettle the spectator. In fact, the cinematic is present in this mural. As
Max Benavidez has stated, Gronk was inspired by, and makes a connection to, Marcel Carné’s
film Les enfants du paradis (1945). Filmed during the Nazi occupation of France, Carné’s
character in the film, the mime artist Baptiste, appears in Moratorium. Gronk therefore connects
the experiences of police brutality in East Los Angeles to the Nazi occupation of France.
21
I read
the small vignettes of the moratorium as television screens because our practice of seeing and the
design of the mural conditions us to consume these images in ways that require sustained attention
and thorough analysis.
The barrio bodies assemble in public space, protesting and observing police attacks.
Furthermore, incarcerated bodies and murdered bodies are present, unsettling our perception of
what a mural does and what its aesthetic achieves when used for liberation. Unable to escape the
violence visualized therein, the mural challenges us to focus on the faces on the silhouette and
faces of community members. In addition, the mural represents the events that unfolded during the
Chicano Moratorium Movement in 1970 in East Los Angeles where Chicanas/os united against
21
Max Benavidez, A Ver: Gronk (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2007), 30.
218
the War in Vietnam. Images of despair, protest, and police in the backdrop of the urban landscape
evoke colonial situations and the need for liberation in Moratorium.
In Danse de la Souffrance we gaze at yellow paint against a textured, black background.
The indistinguishable faces of the community members participating in an uprising due to police
brutality depicts histories of resistance and trauma that are also represented in Moratorium. By
focusing on this question of “danse,” we can visually read that the violence is ritualistic, that the
choreography of uprisings and resistance is secondhand memory, a motor skill. As Frantz Fanon
writes of the schematic structure of the Black body in regard to the “spatial and temporal world,”
informing how he and other Black persons navigate the world, Fanon explains it “creates a real
dialectic between my body and the world.”
22
Along this line of thought, Danse de la Souffrance
shows how Black and other racialized bodies rebel against the systems that contain these bodies
by representing the young men disrupting the routinized violence. For instance, the portable mural
visualizes this disruption and liberation by representing the silhouette youth climbing on top of
police patrols, while maintaining a sense of anonymity and allowing the spectator to identify with
those bodies through the illegible faces. As Mustafa Dikeç reminds us, the urban revolts reveal
“not only once again the geographical dimension of inequalities, discrimination, and police
violence, but also the contemporary transformation of the French state along increasingly
authoritarian and exclusionary lines.”
23
In especially referring to the 2005 uprisings, the
authorities’ response to rebellion maintains power and security structured around the colonial
blueprint in urban space that has transformed over time. Furthermore, the rebellious response to
police violence is not an act of willful violence, but “a demand for justice and as reactions against
22
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 111.
23
Mustafa Dikeç, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy (Hoboken: Riley, 2008), 152.
219
perceived injustices. ‘Let justice be done’ or ‘J’ai la haine,’ as was heard—again—during the
revolts of autumn 2005.”
24
Revisiting these images is timely due to the recent prolific cases involving police brutality
on people of color in the U.S. and France. The deaths, incarceration, and deportation of youth of
color in the banlieues of Paris invokes the legacies of terror in different space and time. Danse de
la Souffrance acknowledges police brutality as the inscription reads: “En hommage à toutes les
victimes de crimes policières” (“Dedicated to the victims of police brutality”). These words show
us the reach of radical art as it commemorates the oppressed and relays a visual narrative of police
violence. In this light, I read the murals as visual histories of anticolonial and decolonial resistance
through the aesthetics of liberation that they put forth.
In “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” Sylvia Wynter
examines the power of images in relation to humanness, lived experience, and embodied
knowledge. The inclusion of these frameworks in studies of murals opens horizons for reading the
aesthetic complexities that constitute the human, especially the racialized body. These topics also
concern our query on the function of murals in East Los Angeles and Paris. Plenty of work has
been written on aesthetics, political purposes, and its cultural significance. Wynter’s investigation
differs, where she asks:
What does aesthetics do? What it its function in human life? What, specifically, is its
function in our present ‘form of life’? What correlation does it bear with the ‘social
effectivities’ of our present order, including that into which the real-life citizens and
‘captive populations’ of the U.S. inner cities and the Third World shantytown
archipelagoes […] are locked? What correlation therefore is there with the non-linear
structuring dynamics of our present global order, as well of its nation-state subunits?
25
24
Ibid, 153.
25
Wynter, Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Ex- Iles: Essays on
Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 241
220
In the same essay, Wynter proposes foregrounding the function and utility of aesthetics in order to
understand racialized humanness and to make sense of aesthetics in relation to origin narratives,
the social text, and the disciplinary courses that drive forward conversations on aesthetics.
26
Wynter compels us to rethink aesthetics in a way that promotes thinking about human conditions,
rather than using aesthetics as a tool to critique, define, and expand a discipline. I contend that
Wynter calls on us to decolonize aesthetics, a responsibility that some scholars have already taken
on, including artists such as Herrón and Gronk and Dip Social Klub. Decolonial aesthetics are
productive for making connections with similar art movements around the world, especially when
urban spaces are impacted by similar displacements.
Studies on murals should center concepts of humanness and the representation of living in
order to engage with questions concerning racialized humanity. Though I do not depart from
traditional scholarship on murals, most of which primarily centers content, form, and style, I center
displacement to analyze enraged, policed, and rebellious bodies. These visual histories of rebellion
raise questions about public memory, mobilization against displacement, and urban aesthetics.
Though the barrios and banlieues are characterized by their unique historical formations, Wynter’s
“archipelagoes of poverty,” which references bidonvilles, favelas, and ghettos, is a useful
framework for thinking about the disaggregated spaces that share histories of policing due in part
to racial containment.
27
In this light, aesthetics offer the opportunity to examine the artistic,
political, and cultural expressions that tell stories about survival and resistance.
Though Wynter does not invoke relationality in her essay on aesthetics and “archipelagoes
of poverty,” the reference to archipelagoes is linked to traditional studies on relationality in the
context of the Caribbean. These questions of aesthetics enable us to think about relationality
26
Ibid, 253-254.
27
Ibid, 234.
221
through displacement as visualized on murals. To think about urban spaces and the relational
experiences of those who dwell within these communities encourages one to imagine connections
with other urban peripheries across the world. It is no accident that racialized urban spaces are
tucked away in the margins of cosmopolitan cities; they are in fact designed to compartmentalize
human bodies and cultures by casting them away in deserts of poverty.
28
The representation of
militarized police and young bodies rebelling against these systems of oppression and
displacement illustrates that artists invest their creativity for critiquing the regimes of power that
normalize violence.
The rebellious bodies remind us of what it means to inhabit a racialized, migrant, and
displaced identity and how expressing anger and disillusion leads to processing collective trauma
in radical ways that bring forward a transformative act of rebellion and liberation. Barrio and
banlieue bodies are marked by histories of containment and exclusion. Relationally, the murals
humanize rebellious bodies by forcing spectators to activate a different optic, along the lines of
what Christina Sharpe calls “seeing and imagining” to contemplate how racialized bodies under
occupation, and in colonial situations, respond to and contest terror.
29
The terror that these bodies
and the artists responded to were located within their communities and in the rest of the
decolonizing world.
28
Wynter’s use of the term “poverty archipelagoes” opens up the possibility for us to think about barrios and banlieues
constituting their own archipelagoes. For example, barrios and banlieues are archipelagoes when thinking about how
these spaces have been geographically segmented from other similar spaces in proximity to them, how they are
considered as hotbeds of criminal activity, and how they are described by politicians as detritus. Following Wynter, I
too think about these urban spaces as archipelagoes whose histories of racial and economic segregation, enclosure,
and perpetual injustice bring them together. I maintain that a study of murals can help us visualize relationality between
barrios and banlieues through naming a common system of oppression with images.
29
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 20.
222
Local Histories/Transnational Solidarities
Though a number of the murals addressed local struggles such as violence and the uneven
distribution of resources in urban space, the artists and unknown producers of the murals in East
Los Angeles and Paris connected their precarity to the imperial and colonial systems across the
Global South. Community members of the barrios and banlieues connected their experiences with
other transnational movements of decolonization and liberation, which were visualized and
inscribed in the façades of urban space. Though these transnational connections between these
urban settings and the decolonizing world were realized through decolonial inscriptions and visual
histories of resistance, the mere fact that they were visualized and displayed in public space
indicates that the philosophies, struggles, and desires of Third World liberation influenced the
racialized communities of the Global North to engage in anticolonial critiques of the countries that
they lived in.
Appearing in a photograph dated between 1956 and 1957 in Journal L’Humanité, a
horizontal, white painted inscription “Paix en Algérie Non à Speidel” covers a brick wall (figure
4.6).
30
Visualized on the wall of an unknown location in Noisy-le-Grand, a suburb east of Paris,
the decolonial inscription stands out in the landscape of homes, with the photograph immortalizing
a woman walking away from the wall, barely visible in the background. At the time of the
ephemeral mural’s creation, Noisy-le-Grand, similar to other suburbs outside of central Paris,
became home for racialized, family migrants who lived in precarity.
31
Here the inscription protests
Hans Speidel, who served in Germany against the Nazi party.
32
Though he was against the white
30
Journal L’Humanité, Archives Départmentales de la Seine-Saint-Denis, Cote 83FI/530 6.
31
See Antonin Gay-Dupuy, “Noisy-le-Grand, dans la France des années 1954 à 1972,” Revue Quart Monde 250
(2019): 57-60. According to Antonin Gay-Dupuy, at the height of the war in Algeria, Noisy-le-Grand had a large
population of Algerians. Contained to the bidonvilles, Gay-Dupuy shows that this spatial containment was a policing
design that was also applied in the colonized world.
32
See Thomas Lansford, “Hans Speidel,” in Germany at War: 400 Years of Military History, ed David T. Zabecki
(Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014). Though taking on a position as a professor at the University of Tubingen, Speidel
223
supremacist politics of the party, it should not be forgotten that Speidel agreed with Hitler’s vision
for Germany to achieve global supremacy, thus contradicting Speidel’s disagreement over white
supremacy considering that colonization was organized on similar principles.
Figure 4.6. Photograph in Journal L’Humananité, circa 1956-1957, Archives Départmentales de
la Seine-Saint-Denis.
Communists resisted fighting for France in the Algerian war and they also protested against
Speidel’s appointment as Supreme Commander of the Allied NATO ground forces in Europe. The
Union of Young Communists in France decried this appointment and some of those reasons being
that he played a role in the displacement of Jews during World War II. Furthermore, his imperial
politics of displacement, superiority, and conquering directly affected Algerians who were situated
in and around Noisy-le-Grand. Though the decolonial inscription is unauthored, and there is no
way of knowing whether an Arab or a French ally created this inscription, its political critique
connects the dismal living conditions of Algerians in the community with the displacement and
horror of war in their homelands. The mural is evidently ephemeral, and the decolonial inscription
sympathized with Algerian migrants in this suburb, acknowledging that the violence in Algeria
immediately impacted the displaced in Paris. Though this inscription appeared in the late 1950s,
continued to play a role in military politics as a consultant. In April 1957, he became the commander in chief of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Land forces and eventually promoted in higher rank to general.
224
these decolonial sentiments were relevant beyond those years, especially as the 1960s introduced
some of the most intense, radically engaged decolonial movements.
As evinced, writing a history about murals with decolonial inscriptions is challenging,
especially since these were written anonymously. In East Los Angeles, though murals dominate
the cultural landscape of the 1970s in regard to radical activity, and cultural self-determination,
many murals were subject to destruction. Mural production in the barrios is quite distinct because
the styles are traced back to Mexican muralism and their didactic nature of displaying histories of
injustices and proletariat solidarity made them stand out. Similar to the case of Noisy-le-Grand,
artists and community members linked their struggles to anticolonial movements mostly in the
Americas for inspiration in the urban context.
The nonextant Local History mural, created in 1974 in East Los Angeles outside the walls
of the St. Anne's Home for the Aged, operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor, visualized a history
of occupation, incarceration, and revolution in the U.S. and across the world. Made under the
supervision of the renowned Chicana muralist Judith F. Baca, Local History was painted in the
same year as the first segment of her masterpiece The Great Wall of Los Angeles. What
distinguishes each is that the former was located in the barrios and the latter far away from these
spaces. In addition, The Great Wall of Los Angeles currently survives and has been designated a
historical landmark. In a similar historical temporal design, Local History unfolds horizontally, as
if visualizing a moving image. In this collaborative piece, over fifty community members,
including youth, joined the collective “Las Vistas Nuevas por Varrio Artistas de Aztlan [sic].”
33
Baca’s colleagues Christina Schlesinger, Manuel Cruz, Sylvia Morales, Fernando Saucedo, and
33
See Mario Ontiveros, Baca: Art, Collaboration, & Mural Making (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2017). As part
of the collaborative process of mural making, Baca explains that she formulated the Las Nuevas Vistas (The New
View) group composed of youth from different neighborhoods and gang affiliations (25).
225
Joe Hernandez were involved in this project, partly funded by The Model Cities Summer Program
and the Department of Recreation and Parks, thus allowing Baca to mobilize city resources and
her artistic social networks to visualize cultural histories of resistance in the barrio.
34
Baca’s use
of funds from the very same city government that contained the Chicana/o community was a
transgressive and radical act, especially because the resources were used to visualize histories of
displacement while offering so-called at-risk and delinquent youth the space and opportunity to
set aside turf wars and other interspatial conflicts and help transform public walls into vibrant
displays of resistance against injustice.
Borrowing from other Chicana/o mural themes, Local History begins with an origin story,
replete with Indigenous motifs, and makes reference to historical revolutionary figures who
influenced desires for liberation across the Americas. In line with the anticolonial and decolonial
history it visualized, the mural included figures such as Emiliano Zapata and Che Guevara, thereby
connecting local histories and struggles to the resistance of the Global South and the people who
led revolutions against systems of imperial and proletariat oppression. Another section of the mural
is dedicated to Benito Juárez, whose head appears in the foreground of the French flag, referencing
Juárez’s successful victory in the Battle of Puebla against the French military on May 5, 1862. The
histories of resistance in the Americas resonated with the artists and youth in 1970s East Los
Angeles, especially because the community was jolted by the institutional and systemic violence
that relegated them to precarious positions and art functioned as a tool for critiquing state violence.
As Shifra Goldman writes, Chicana/o artists were “Informed by the new nationalist and separatist
philosophy of Chicano activism,” and though contentious at the time, several murals “addressed
34
See Dennis Deslippe, Protesting Affirmative Action: The Struggle over Equality after the Civil Rights Revolution
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012). President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration created the Model
Cities Program as part of the initiatives emerging from the Civil Rights. Movement. This program specifically was
designed to address urban problems, especially, especially as a result of urban violence.
226
themselves to overcoming the ‘colonial mentality’…,” reifying my argument that mural making
was an anticolonial and decolonial act of resistance.
35
Visualizing and inscribing anticolonial and
decolonial histories afforded youth a different kind of power through which they could reclaim
their cultural and political self-determination in public space.
While Zapata and Guevara are prolific in Chicana/o visual culture, Baca and team went
further by focusing on relational histories of oppression in the U.S. and beyond. In one part of the
mural, the artists include a section that foregrounds a Japanese woman as the Japanese flag serves
as a backdrop. The woman’s back is turned against spectators, as she plays the shamisen. Though
we cannot read her facial expressions, the mural celebrates and highlights the importance of
Japanese culture and identity, especially considering that this representation is located on the
mural’s section close to the events of World War II. In addition, the mural honors the Japanese
community as it is part of the social and historical fabric of Los Angeles. Symbolically, the
Chicana/o panels next to the Japanese woman reflects how these communities are geographically
in close proximity, despite the Los Angeles River and railroad tracks dividing East Los Angeles
from Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.
Another panel of the mural contrasts the serene environment of the Japanese woman
playing the instrument, with its focus on a dark chapter in U.S. history. In the second section, the
mural shares the history of the Japanese internment camps in the U.S., visualizing a jarring
difference (figure 4.7).
35
Shifra M. Goldman, “Resistance and Identity: Street Murals of Occupied Aztlán,” Latin American Literary Review
5, no. 10 (1977), 125.
227
Figure 4.7. Barrio Artistas de Aztlan, Local History (1974), photographed by Nancy Tovar,
Nancy Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library
and Archive.
In this blue, black, and white mural, the artists reproduced Clem Albers’ famous photograph of
two-year old Yuki Okinaga Hayakawa seated on top of a suitcase, surrounded by bags that are
presumably her family’s personal possessions, waiting for a train at the Los Angeles Union Station
to transport her and people of Japanese descent to the internment camp in Manzanar, California.
In her right hand she holds a half-eaten apple and on her left she holds a small purse. She directs
us with her gaze to our left, outside of the mural. A portion of the 1942 Western Defense Command
and Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration’s order of “Instructions to all Persons of
Japanese Ancestry” towers over the child. The torn, oversized document symbolizes the
foreboding and violent history of containment, and its onerous language complements the dark
hues in the section, thereby visualizing the dark history of collective displacement. This panel
exemplifies how the artists visualized the oppression of one group impacting the other, particularly
as it relates to deportations, thus illustrating how a relational framework occupies visual culture.
36
36
Mario Ontiveros’ historical writing on Baca’s method as artist offers detail into her intent. He writes, “Baca also
included historians in the process to meet with the participants and began researching and debating the subject matter
that would depict California’s prehistory up to 1910. Along with this research and the group’s weekly meeting
schedule, Baca sought feedback and expertise of a diverse group of artists to work with the youth…” (30).
228
In each context, the decolonial inscriptions and the visual histories of liberation reference
other colonial situations in the world and within these countries. Though in these examples the
artists of the barrios and banlieues do not reference each other, we are left with the task to find the
relational elements that bring together the experiences and histories of resistance in both, while
respecting their particularities. The members of these communities witnessed how the events of
the Global South informed their radical engagement with liberation via decolonization in visual
culture. An urban anticolonial and decolonial project, as exemplified here, Local History visualizes
and inscribes transnational and global struggles in urban space, reminding others that the events
abroad carry implication for the immediate, lived-realities of racialized community members in
the Global North.
If transnational solidarity offered the means for Arabs and Chicanas/os to situate their
experiences with displacement in relation to the Global South, and if by inscribing and visualizing
these solidarities it offered them the vocabulary of decolonization and liberation, then it is
necessary to think about these murals as acts of spatial reclamation over contested public space.
Displacement and Reclamation
Displacement, as I have discussed throughout, includes forms of violence that seek to
remove racialized people from public space. A violent project sustained by by xenophobia and
racism, displacement does not debilitate communities in struggle. On the contrary, displacement
marks a point of departure in which the community demands better living conditions. Active in
creating and forging a new path that acknowledges their humanity, the community takes radically
decisive actions.
229
In the January 1, 1980 edition of Sans Frontière, a photograph by Senenne Abdelhak shows
an Arab man sweeping a sidewalk, as he stands in front of a wall with the inscription “La France
au Français,” [sic] with what appears to be two Celtic crosses (figure 4.8).
37
Figure 4.8. Photograph by Senenne Abdelhak, Sans Frontière, 1 January 1980.
The violence in this photograph is both the inscription and the symbol. The inscription
deliberately reminds racialized people that France is exclusively white, thus creating an
inhospitable environment for displaced people and migrants from the countries that France
colonized. Furthermore, the two celtic crosses, function to especially remind Muslims that their
religious difference threatens the racial and cultural composition of the metropole, and that their
religious identity exists outside the realms of French republican identity, read as non-Christian. As
Thomas Deltombe and Mathieu Rigouste recall, especially in referring to the 1980s, the anxieties
37
The inscription contains a misspelling. “La France au Français” reads as “France for the French” in the singular
due to the preposition au. However, it should read as “La France aux Français,” in the plural with the addition of the
“x” at the end of the preposition.
230
in France concerned questions about cultural identity and the figure of the Muslim Arab, which
led to the abstract representation of Arab culture and thus used to contour political exclusion.
38
By
printing this violent photograph, the writers reminded readers that these aggressions take place on
many scales. Here, the inscription is a displacement, in that it exteriorizes racialized people. These
inscriptions are part of a longer history of racial exclusion. Painful and demoralizing, these racist
inscriptions were also found in the background of fiction and nonfiction films.
39
In other words,
the archive of racist inscriptions on walls in the 1960s and 1970s is at once difficult and easily
locatable in other visual culture and yet nonextant in the present.
Though focusing on the deaths of Mali nationals, Jean Mailland film Un Malien d’Ivry (A
Malian from Ivry) (1970), focuses on the deplorable housing quarters in which migrant laborers
were subjected to live in. Filmed in the aftermath of a deadly fire that claimed the lives of five
laborers at the migrant housing quarters, the film shows the community and French officials
organizing against the horrific living conditions. The camera captures writing on the walls that
read “Patrons Assassins” (“Murderous Bosses”) and “Le proletariat vengera les 5 morts
d’Aubervil...” (“The proletariat will avenge the 5 dead of Aubervil…”). Here, the inscriptions
amplify the political struggle of the migrants, and it also underscores the importance of making
visible the rage of the community in response to the deaths of their compatriots and colleagues.
One can read from the inscription that this political transgression has allowed the community to
transform the space, and hold accountable, the institutions that profited from migrant labor. I read
this mural as a direct critique of displacement because the deaths of the five migrants was the
38
Thomas Deltombe and Mathieu Rigouste, “L’ennemi intérieur: la construction médiatique de la figure de l’‘arabe’,”
in La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage coloniale, eds. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas
Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 192.
39
In the documentary film Ibrahima (1966), directed by Max Zelenka, the camera follows William Ibrahima
throughout Paris, where he faces several aggressions. In a scene on the metro, the camera pans to reveal racist
inscriptions written inside the train, such as “Les nègres volent notre pain” (“The negroes steal our bread” or “our
jobs”), “trop de nègres” (“too many negroes”), and “Nègres = Syphilis” (“Negroes=syphilis”).
231
ultimate form of removal, and whose deaths are no longer a problem of control for the French
government.
The political inscriptions that I describe above are anticolonial and decolonial acts since
they reclaim the space from which racialized people are at once visually excluded and physically
contained. Though the examples of graffiti come to mind here, given the context of the 1970s,
spatial reclamation is a radical act of using public walls to become visible and to some extent
legible. These inscriptions make it possible for the individual or community to write themselves
into the narrative of the city, and to call the spectator’s attention to the existence of racialized
violence and displacement. Whether these inscriptions create a visual nuisance due to their lack of
appealability, to the eye of aggrieved groups, these inscriptions help materialize into existence the
struggle of being marked a racial problem. This spatial reclamation via the inscriptions, though
ephemeral, reveals that the desire to make a grievance public requires transgressing and defying
the function of public space and walls.
In having opened this chapter with the short silent comedy film by Méliès, in this section
of the chapter I return to a few more examples of the decolonial inscriptions that appeared
throughout the city at a time when posting and writing on walls was still prohibited. In 1958, a
photograph with the decolonial inscription “Paix en Algérie” (“Peace in Algeria”) was published
in Journal L’Humanité. The inscription appeared on the wall of Lycée Fénelon in the fifth
arrondissement. In contrast with the first mural with a decolonial inscription from Noisy-le-Grand
that I included in the previous section, this mural was located in the center of Paris. The totality of
the phrase is not visible to the camera, but the word “fasciste” precedes this phrase. In addition,
the barely legible directive “Défense d’Afficher” appears at the top, chiseled into the concrete
block of the school premises. The inscription reclaims this space of interdiction by overtly citing
232
the war in Algeria in white paint. Though it is difficult to say if the phrase was authored by an
Algerian or an ally, the phrase publicizes the horrors of war in Algeria and the deplorable social
conditions of Algerians in the metropole, linking both spaces via the inscription. Appearing in the
1950s, this decolonial inscription exemplifies the subversion of state laws and regulations,
especially because these phrases signified the collapse of the private and the public. As Hannah
Feldman notes in regard to the 1881 law, “Space was thus reserved for a public authority
empowered with the exclusive right to police and patrol that very same space in a self-sustaining
cycle,” thus demonstrating that the law posed a number of contradictions.
40
Around 1958-1962, the inscription “Le Fascisme Ne Passera Pas. Massu Hors la Loi” was
visible on a different wall in Paris (figure 4.9).
41
French General Jacques Massu, the commander
of the 10
th
airborne division, was accused of torture against members of the Front de Libération
National in Algeria.
Figure 4.9. Journal L’Humanité, Union Française Photographique, Archives Départmentales de
la Seine-Saint-Denis.
Massu was delegated with the task to police the Greater Algiers on 7 January 1957 and where he
“created the system that enclosed the Muslim population within certain neighborhoods of the city,”
40
Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014), 113.
41
Journal L’Humanité, Union Française Photographique, Archives Départmentales de la Seine-Saint-Dénis, Cote
83Fi/176 15.
233
thereby illustrating how these colonial blueprints of policing and surveillance were also
implemented in France.
42
Imposed over “Paix en Algérie,” the newer phrase demonstrates how
murals are palimpsestic. Decolonial inscriptions are inherently palimpsestic considering that their
appearance on public walls are subject to immediate erasure. Though an exact location of the
phrase is unavailable, based on the architecture and design of the buildings, the mural is situated
in a dense area of Paris.
The inscriptions transgress the use of space as it defies the law that forbids using public
walls to display, thereby subverting the government’s control of standardizing the optics of the
city. Though the decolonial inscriptions do not assault the sight of spectators as do the consumerist
advertisements throughout the city, the inscriptions nevertheless draw attention to the urgent topic
of the war in Algeria and the support for Algerian independence. Though these inscriptions inform
us about the engaged decolonial, political struggles in the metropole, there is limited surviving
ephemera on these visual histories on urban walls. Though this does not limit writing about these
histories, it does present one with challenges that require searching for ephemeral material that
was produced by racialized communities and sympathizers with the Arab struggle in France. Other
photographs capture murals that symbolize a creative imagination, mostly created by children.
In the pages of Sans Frontière, select photographs about life in the banlieue and
experiences in urban space contained small-scale murals. Appearing in the background, the murals
were not the primary subject of the articles or the photographs; the displacement and urban renewal
projects and their effects on children were the main preoccupation. In addition, these photographs
captured community members in moments of joy. In several of these images, the photographs
captured children playing in derelict space. Though these photographs appeared in 1981, outside
42
Stephen J. Whitfield, “Cine Qua Non: The Political Import and Impact of The Battle of Algiers,” Revue LISA:
Littératures, histoire des idées, et Sociétés du Monde Anglophone 10, no.1 (2012), Np.
234
the temporal scope of this study, it is nevertheless important to include them in this corpus because
the anticolonial, radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s continued to inform the radical, political
commitments of Arab and other racialized communities in the decades that followed.
In the October 2, 1979 edition, a photograph captured three young boys in the foreground,
formed in a circle, carrying out a conversation (figure 4.10).
43
In the background, an indistinct
drawing on the wall is partially visible.
Figure 4.10. Unknown photographer, Sans Frontière, 2 October 1979.
Drawn over a partial white patch of a building, and though difficult to discern, the drawing calls
attention to the opacity via the photograph. This demonstrates that the photograph operates on a
number of levels. On the first, the photograph captures the community’s spatial reclamation by
underscoring how these neglected sites were transformed from dead spaces into vibrant sites of
possibility.
Writing in the context of Chicana/o muralism, Sandra de la Loza’s remarks about the
transformation of space applies to the French context. De la Loza writes, “By adopting such
43
Sans Frontière, 2 October 1979, page 6.
235
surfaces as the site of their art, Chicana/o muralists subverted the physical structures that sought
to divide and define them and reshaped their environs to reflect their own identities and enact ideas
for social change.”
44
Presumably drawn by children, the picture on the wall in the photograph
occupies a contested wall exposed to the urban renewal project. Ephemeral in its context, and
though not necessarily a decolonial or political inscription, the drawing’s existence illustrates how
racialized communities, and in respect to the photograph, the children from families displaced by
colonial regimes, employed their creativity to transform the urban landscape into an exuberant
space of possibility. Second, the drawing is not an oeuvre, and it might not interest scholars to
study its elements, but the small-scale mural had some degree of significance for its unknown
creator or creators. The mural presents a number of considerations about what these images meant
for the racialized children impacted by French institutional neglect. Third, the photograph
communicates the children’s desire to transcend their containment and displacement by gathering
with their peers in contested public space.
In the June 24, 1980 edition, an article titled “Enfants de la Goutte d’Or” elaborates on the
lack of recreational spaces for children and the city’s apathetic response to the immediate needs of
the community (figure 4.11).
45
Named Le démol, the space was one of the few places where
children played and found creative freedom, albeit the unsanitary conditions. In one of the
photographs, four children stand in front of a mural that decorates this reclaimed lot. In another, a
young girl actively paints the mural. The phrase “Ici, terrain d’aventure” (“Here, an adventure
zone”) is accompanied by simple drawings of flowers, hearts, and stick figures. Similar to what I
described above, this mural does not carry political weight, but the inscription and the minor stick
44
Sandra de la Loza, “La Raza Cósmica: An Investigation into the Space of Chicana/o Muralism,” in LA Xicano,
eds. Chon A. Noriega et al. (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011), 66.
45
Sans Frontière, 24 June 1980, page 3.
236
Figure 4.11. Unknown photographer, Sans Frontière, 24 June 1980.
figures gesture towards a different sort of spatial reclamation that shows the community’s
inventiveness in transforming deserted lots into provisional playgrounds.
On another occasion, a photograph by Amadou Gaye published in the October 16, 1981
edition shows eight young boys posing in front of a mural that reads “New York 1997” with a
phrase below it that partially reads “Lancés seront punies selon la loi les…” Though there is
insufficient information about the mural and its context, including the space it occupied, it is
worthwhile to mention how ephemeral visual culture appears on the walls of decayed urban space
and how it brings life to community expression. The description of the photograph reads: “Le seul
lieu de distraction pour ces jeunes: le béton” (“The only space of leisure for this young people: le
béton”). This image description shows us how young people made space for themselves in the
improvised concrete playgrounds and it exposed how urban space was inhospitable to racialized
children of migrant descent. It is possible that the mural references John Carpenter’s film Escape
from New York (1981), released as New-York 1997 in France. The plot of this dystopic science
fiction film is set on the enclosed island of Manhattan in the future, where the circulation of goods
and people is prohibited by a gigantic wall. Here we might draw a parallel to examine how the
237
youth felt about being enclosed and surveilled in urban space and how they understood their
exclusion as a form of oppression and displacement.
Similar to the murals of Paris as the ones mentioned above, the works in the East Los
Angeles barrios were created out of exclusion. Responding to the injustices of living in enclosed
spaces marked by gang violence, police brutality, and other demoralizing situations, artists and
residents visualized their experiences and shared with neighbors a collective sense of self-
determination grounded on principles of justice. Though studies on Chicana/o muralism have
significantly focused on Los Angeles, there is minor attention to the pieces that have vanished and
whose trace is indexical. As I have suggested, the tragedy of reclamation also means erasure. To
visualize histories of displacement or to inscribe decolonial phrases on public urban walls is an
ephemeral act of resistance.
For example, in 1972, Roberto Chavez created an anti-war mural titled Porque Se Pelean?
Que No Son Carnales? (Why do they fight? Are they not brothers?) (1972) in East Los Angeles,
making it a distinguishable piece due to the style and remarkable use of abstraction that he would
later use in The Path to Knowledge and the False University (figure 4.12). In the context of spatial
reclamation, the mural confronts the spectator with images of militarization and death.
Figure 4.12. Roberto Chavez, Porque Se Pelean? Que No Son Carnales? (1972), photographed
by Nancy Tovar, Nancy Tovar Murals of East L.A. Collection, UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center Library and Archive.
238
Furthermore, by highlighting the war-like conditions in the barrios of East Los Angeles, Chavez
makes a connection to Vietnam. Painted outside of a one-story building, next to an empty muddy
and grassy land, the nonextant mural illustrates militarized police with batons, war tanks, fiend-
like figures, and sharp weapons. Created two years after the Chicano Moratorium, the mural
reflects the anti-war posture of the community, especially as it critiqued U.S. imperialism, as
illustrated by the inclusion of an Uncle Sam-like figure. The connection here between the U.S.
militarized presence in the Third World and in the racialized urban edges of the Global North is
more tangible when these visual histories are displayed in the public setting, especially in the
communities that felt the immediate impacts of surveillance and police presence while vital
resources were diverted to other parts of the city.
Though it is evident that Porque Se Pelean? raises a magnifying glass to inspect the
microcosm of militarization around the world with specific attention to local space, the creation of
the mural fits with the idea of spatial reclamation, and it offers a glimmer of hope for the resistance
efforts in light of the oppressive policing tactics used against Chicanas/os. Overshadowed by
representation of violent symbols, in the bottom part of the mural sunflowers sprout, flourishing
despite the inhospitable conditions that render humans expendable and their communities target
sites of violence. One could make the case that Chavez’s inclusion of the sunflowers functions as
a metaphor of the community’s resilience and imagining toward a future of possibility. The spatial
reclamation of the urban space via the creation of the mural and the inclusion of the sunflowers is
a political act that reclaims the East Los Angeles narrative from total obscurity, rooting those
histories in acts of resistance and liberation.
239
Conclusion: New Materialist Murals
If studies on muralism have privileged the visual, what potential entry points might one
encounter in studying the affect of muralism? How can we feel the emotions and commitments of
the artists in the process of visualizing histories of injustice? How do representations of rebellious
bodies move spectators into action? In Agnès Varda’s documentary film Mur Murs (1981) offers
to French spectators a glimpse about the murals in East Los Angeles that emerged during the
1970s. Featuring prominent Chicana/o muralists, artists, and their work, Varda plays with the
concept of sound. The film’s title is a pun on sound murmure in French, and murmur in English,
which brings attention to how through the visual histories, Chicana/o resistance is quite thunderous
though it may sound as murmurs to outsiders. Tina M. Campt writes about images and sound by
specifically elaborating on how listening to images as a method allows one to imagine the murals
coming alive to sound and to listen to the stories and accounts that are not recorded in the
archives.
46
With a leap of imagination and ingenuity, we can also listen to the sounds that the
subjects of the murals make. The screaming, the grief, the police violence, the clamor, and the
rebellious chants unsettle the violence of silence. We can equally feel rhythm in the dance of pain
and rebellion. Though our media landscape is saturated with images of racialized death and
suffering, the aesthetic of the mural produces a different kind of movement, one that pushes
spectators to think with the artists, making urban walls sites of collective cultural history.
In regard to feeling, we can also feel our way through the unrelenting forms of resistance
between barrios and banlieues. Even though both spaces are marked by their specific historical
contexts, relational histories of displacement and its manifestation of violence, is an immediately
recognizable aesthetic across spaces facing precarious futures. In fact, the aesthetics and visual
46
Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 5.
240
representation of injustices as experienced by racialized bodies is indeed an act of feeling and
expressing solidarity.
I return one final time to Moratorium: The Black and White Mural and Danse de la
Souffrance to conclude this chapter. These murals do not sensationalize the brutality of
displacement, but they represent trauma and grief, and unruly, rebellious bodies that risk their life
by putting everything on the line. We can add that the murals visualize the lived experiences of
barrio and banlieue bodies by creating small moving images to communicate grief as seen through
the uprisings and other forms of so-called violent resistance. Art presents a case for a relational
study of barrios and banlieues by identifying cases of police oppression and the dehumanization
of racialized bodies in contained space. Though these murals are not meant to survive, especially
because they are not afforded the cultural significance in the Western paradigm of high art value,
murals document histories that are absent in the landscape of film and other moving images.
241
Conclusion
Reactivating the Archive of Displacement
While in many places archives are still hard to enter and documents are guarded under tight
surveillance, digitalization means that we are living in, and are part of, an archive-saturated era.
Everyone everywhere is archiving. Everyone everywhere is questioning the impetus to archive and
its value.
1
-Gil Hochberg, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future.
Introduction
In uncovering the history of Chicana/o and Arab resistance during the 1960s and 1970s
through a study of nonextant, inaccessible, and ephemeral media, the possibilities to reanimate
these histories across more contemporary media is vital for expanding conversations on how more
audiences and younger generations come to understand histories of displacement and creative
resistance. In some sense, the histories of Chicana/o and Arab resistance against displacement
refuse erasure. Fortunately, as savvy social media users revision the histories of the October 17,
1961 massacre of Algerians and the Chicano Moratorium of August 29, 1970, the users become
agents of resistance against erasure and disregard by remixing the archive and democratizing
access to these documents and histories. Relationally, social media and the accessibility to editing
tools has permitted Chicana/o and Arabs to engage in radical forms of archiving and historical
documentation by organizing around the defining events that demanded a new form of political
consciousness.
When the archive of displacement is incomplete, and the dearth of information on
monumental events prompts an anxiety about the risk of forgetting, the memories of the
community, and the work of resistance replenishes the gaps in the archives under different
circumstances. While the desire to search for traces, remains, and surviving texts and objects that
1
Gil Hochberg, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2021), 11.
242
document violent histories may motivate the researcher, or community, to preserve as much of the
past in order to avoid replicating the violence, we must also come to terms and contend with the
fact that repositories of knowledge that house these selected and curated historical pieces cannot
offer a complete picture. After all, these institutions have the power to accord significant value to
the historical work we seek to write, and to some extent, they create narratives about the work that
do not reflect the context of the documents. In addition, by solely relying on these institutions to
write histories of displacement, this reinforces the violence of epistemological exclusion and
thwarts the work of preservation and remembering that takes place in other radical realms.
This conclusion meditates on the vitality of bridging Chicana/o and Arab relational
histories of resistance on social media to specifically study how users reactivate the archive for
younger generations. The relational method that I have laid out in this project encourages us to
search for new archives on social media and to place them in conversation to discuss how the work
of resistance is simultaneously visualized, commemorated, and performed. I draw on videos from
the social media platform TikTok in order to examine how the Chicano Moratorium of August 29,
1970, and the massacre of Algerians on October 17, 1961 is reactivated, remembered, and
remediated in digital space through the use of publicly available historical texts such as
photographs and moving images. In writing about the 1961 massacre, Lia Brozgal calls the various
intertextual and intermedial traces of the event the “anarchive.”
2
The anarchive refuses a master
narrative, and its resistance to coherence opens the opportunity to examine the cultural productions
that constitute this archive: from the speculative to the creative. Along these lines, the Chicano
Moratorium related histories of resistance through various texts and thus makes it an anarchive
2
Lia Brozgal, Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2020), 31.
243
because activists and artists continue to build on those events, showing that the afterlife of the
archive is generative.
TikTok and the Challenges of the Archive
The accessibility of cellphones equipped with cameras, digital cameras, and other
technology designed to record moving images, has enabled racialized communities to document
injustices, recount histories of violence, and create new community archives. The reactivation of
past historical events through the use of archival sources for a social media audience unsettles how
we think about public histories and the role of the archive in nontraditional contexts. In avoiding
technological determinism, it would help to think about how Chicanas/os and Arabs write and
visualize themselves into history as a form of reclamation. As Jamie Baron points out, “Indeed,
while amateur photography, film, and video have always existed in an uneasy relationship with
official archives, the increased availability of still and video cameras, analog and then digital, has
led to a proliferation of indexical documents outside of official archives.”
3
Baron’s assessment of
the availability of instantaneous technology and his question about what this means for traditional
archives and the value of preservation underscores how communities use their own media to share
histories of displacement and resistance restricted to them. Though not necessarily creating
competing narratives, this raises a point about how communities disseminate their cultural, spatial,
and racial experiences and histories.
Since the start of the Novel Coronavirus Disease-19 pandemic, TikTok’s prominence has
significantly expanded. Its initial purpose as a lifeline that connected the world under quarantine
where users documented pandemic self-care and survival, quirky choreography and lip sync
3
Jamie Baron, “The Archive Effect: Archival Footage as an Experience of Reception,” Projections 6, no. 2 (2012),
102.
244
routines, and video diary entries of life under physical and social isolation, the short moving
images that users shared on the platform connected multigenerational audiences. This intimacy
transformed how users and creators would interact, mostly through the reply feature. TikTok
indisputably offered a flow of continuous entertainment and news updates in the face of collective
fatigue and malaise. Though not the first of its kind to offer short reels, TikTok’s usefulness and
popularity as new media proved to be resourceful for young people and activists. For instance, in
the wake of the mass protests in 2020 following the outrage due to the murders of George Floyd,
Breonna Taylor, and countless others abused at the hands of authorities and representatives of
institutions of power, politically conscious users reimagined TikTok. The creators documented
this consequential moment in history by narrating the protests, offering analyses on other historical
cases of police violence for reference, and responding to intersecting social injustices that mostly
affected racialized people in the midst of a ravaging global health crisis.
TikTok users mobilized politically and participated in antiracist efforts in order to
challenge the right-wing politics that intensified during the 2020 election year in the U.S. Though
imperfect and controversial for concerns on data mining, algorithmic surveillance, and a host of
problems on the subject of privacy and security, TikTok has allowed users the opportunity to create
content and visualize underrepresented histories. However, I must voice a concern. Similar to any
other form of writing and content creation, these histories risk reduction and misrepresentation,
thereby raising questions on how to read and analyze these accounts on social media. Furthermore,
with the proliferation of false information and the deliberate misinformation campaigns, the stakes
are high for content creators to avoid creating and circulating inaccurate information about
histories of racial resistance.
245
Through hashtags, soundbites, and algorithms, these short videos have reached users
beyond the intended audience. More daringly, I suggest, the users have taken it upon themselves
to remix archives that reactivate the past via engaging formats. While questions about proper
archives may lead us to debate how these histories are categorized, TikTok users utilize limited
historical texts publicly available. In primarily scouting images from search engines, and
borrowing from other public knowledge, the users apply their media literacy and creativity to draw
links between the past and present. As Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme write, the limitations
and restrictions of existing archives inspires the creation of new ones, even as far as inspiring
activists and artists to use the restricted documents that are not meant to leave these repositories of
knowledge. Abass and Abou-Rahme explain, “Hence, the re-contextualizing, re-arranging, re-
organizing, re-enacting, re-evaluating or re-introducing of documents, the archive’s content, and
the critical reflection on the archive’s ontology, the archival, have proven to be cornerstones of
artistic practices in different places of the present.”
4
By concluding this study with how the
Moratorium and the massacre of Algerians are reactivated on social media, this conclusion offers
a method and vision for writing relational cultural histories of resistance by assessing how archives
are reimagined.
Rather than strictly legitimizing the limited documents that are housed in the archives, how
would our knowledge about histories of displacement shift when gazing in our horizon to see the
existence and circulation of memories, knowledge, and ephemera within aggrieved communities
on social media? There certainly are challenges, reservations, and apprehensions when assessing
social media texts as historical documents. To the traditional historian, TikTok videos might not
qualify TikTok as historical documents is contentious because the producers of those visual
4
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, “The Archival Multitude,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no.3 (2013), 345-
346.
246
projects manipulate which narrative elements are included in the final product. Writing in the
context of film and the representation of history, Robert A. Rosenstone explains that film radically
changes how history is written and shared with readers, especially because the historical film genre
produces “its own sort of truths, truths which arise from a visual and aural realm that is difficult to
capture adequately in words.”
5
Here Rosenstone refers to Hollywood cinema and the production
of historical pictures, but his remarks are relevant to how we think about moving images in digital
space, especially in how these histories and experiences are manipulated, aestheticized, and
researched. How does the coalescence of moving images, text, and historical documentation on
social media facilitate a contemporary form of commemoration and archiving as a political project
that resists historical amnesia, forgetting, and disregard?
Performance of Memory and Resistance
What significance does revisiting these histories and the sites in which they took place hold
for our understanding of displacement? For instance, histories of the Chicano Movement and the
Arab struggle of the 1960s and 1970s are reanimated on TikTok for users to revisit the longue
durée of racial violence. By revisiting these events and the spaces of violence, TikTok users bring
into digital, public view the racialized histories in two major cities that have long been considered
paragons of multiculturalism. I must point out that this is not the first time that archival material
has been used to reactivate the Chicano Moratorium and October 17. In fact, moving images such
as film has always played a role. In the context of the Chicano Moratorium, films such as David
Garcia’s Requiem 29 (1970) have used footage and photographs of the event in order to recount
what happened on that uneventful day. Similarly, films about October 17 such as Jacques Panijel’s
5
Robert R. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 15.
247
Octobre à Paris (1962) are part of an archive that reconstructs the tragic event through
performances, testimonies, and other visual culture. These films helped rescue these incriminating
events from erasure, denial, and obscurity. The short reel format that TikTok offers shifts the power
to the users to create moving images and narrate these histories.
Through the short reel format made possible on TikTok, content creators capture and share
cultural and historical encounters, particularly in capturing scenes of unity, anger, and liberation.
In addition, these histories are remembered and visualized in new contexts that reach audiences
beyond the intended demographic. As Diana Taylor notes, the act of revisiting the past through
embodied acts is an act of performance. In this context, TikTok users capture the scenes of protest
and resistance against displacement which function as a performance of memory with regard to
racial violence, policing, and removal from public space. Taylor writes that the concept of
performance allows scholars to examine historical and social events as performance which include
“Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity,” and that “To
understand these as performance suggests that performance also functions as an epistemology.”
6
These contemporary scenes of resistance and memory are recorded and shared on TikTok and thus
function as performances of memory that connect past and present by drawing on existing
historical documents, revisiting these sites of violence, and archiving ongoing resistance to
displacement.
As I have demonstrated throughout, the peaceful Chicano Moratorium of August 29, 1970
and the massacre of Algerians on October 17, 1961 each marked a turning point that forced both
communities to engage in radical activism. This ethos is still felt decades later. Though each event
commemorated the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversary respectively during the pandemic, these
6
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3.
248
memories and acts of resistance are not contained to the past or forgotten; Chicanas/os and Arabs
keep these struggles alive when organizing in the contemporary moment. In this regard, the
October 17 and the Chicano Moratorium are intergenerational events, and I contend that they are
intergenerational and intermedial. This intermediality is seen through the liveliness of the event,
and through the use of various sources to recount these histories. Whether recounted through
specific visual media such as murals, films, or posters, a fundamental question persists about how
these histories are transmitted and made relevant for understanding ongoing injustices and
informing how communities organize resistance.
While some users stitch photographs of each commemorative event and protest with visual
culture of the past, the archives of the barrio and banlieue continue to expand. Writing in the
context of films that incorporate restrictive archival material, Baron writes, “Documents produced
at an earlier historical moment can never fully anticipate their future uses.”
7
This aptly applies to
the videos on TikTok because the users draw on the available documents about these events in
order to tell a history about displacement. Building on an archive of a past event requires revisiting
its relevance to the contemporary and revisiting these sites of struggle.
The Flows of History and Memory of October 17
In the context of Paris, the TikTok videos revisit the scene of the crime at the Seine River.
I maintain that the Seine River functions as a metaphor where histories of resistance converge and
flow together. Videos of the commemoration are situated in and around the commemorative plate
at the Pont Saint-Michel.
8
By focusing on videos commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the
7
Baron, “The Archive Effect,” 116.
8
The plate, installed in 2001 by Parisian mayor Bertrand Delanoë, reads: “A la memoire des nombreux algeriens
tues lors de la sanglante repression de la manifestation pacifique du 17 octobre 1961” [sic] (“In memory to the
numerous Algerians murdered in the violent repression of the peaceful protest on 17 October 1961”), my translation.
249
event, it becomes clear that TikTok users capture scenes of unity where Arab communities relive
and perform collective memory by gathering in public space. By assembling in the very same
space in which their compatriots were beaten and murdered decades ago, the Arab community
enacts a radical spatial reclamation. Furthermore, filming these sites of resistance and solidarity
brings together past and present through digital space and it reclaims the event from state and
political history to community-oriented retellings and revisioning.
In a video uploaded by the user “fifipapillon0,” images of press clippings and other publicly
available images of photographs and posters that relate October 17 are stitched together. By
bringing together these disparate visual culture sources in order to retell the story of the violence,
the user remediates the archive by selecting specific images that condense this history into less
than a minute. By bringing these discrete images together, the user recreates the archive for
contemporary social media users, thereby reanimating the event, which in some sense, refuses to
allow institutions of knowledge and power to keep this history boxed in. Another video by user
“kwakinettiktok,” uploaded on the sixtieth anniversary, documents a commemorative protest. The
interposed text reads, “Massacre du 17 octobre 1961: onze maires franciliens lancent un appel pour
la reconnaissance en crime d’État” (“Massacre of October 17, 1961: eleven Parisian mayors make
a call to recognize the state’s crime”). Taking place at the Place du Châtelet, a popular tourist area,
Arab protestors make themselves and their struggles visible. In the video, Arabs hoist banners and
protest signs that call attention to Algerian sovereignty, and where they make demands for the
release of political prisoners, and vocalize calls for systemic and political change.
250
In a video uploaded via the Grande Mosquée de Paris account, the video documents a group
of imams chanting, while protestors encircle and join them. Approximately a minute in length, the
video is divided into different scenes of proud Algerians hoisting the national flag, some wearing
it as a veil. These nationalist and religious markers of identity function here as a form of spatial
reclamation that defies the integrationist model that threatens to erase the traces of the massacre.
The final shot of the video concludes with footage of countless bouquet of flowers placed next to
the commemorative plate at Pont Saint-Michel. This gesture brings life to the monochromatic plate
and riverbank stone, as one could argue that the brightly colored flowers transform the site of
violence into a space of remembrance (figure c.1). Furthermore, I add that by placing the flowers
next to the Seine River, protestors reclaim the abstracted lives of the drowned bodies and those
who suffered beatings in a symbolic way.
Figure C.1. Sixtieth anniversary commemoration of October 17, 1961, TikTok.
In a different video by user “remybuisine,” the video focuses on Algerians jettisoning
flowers into the river. The camera captures the flowers floating away, a sentimental image in
contrast to the photographs associated with the event which comprise of the battered bodies and
lifeless Arabs drowned in the very same river. In another of footage of this video, a woman holds
251
a cardboard sign that reads, “Ni oubli, ni pardon” (Never forget, never forgive), which functions
here as a reminder that these histories must continue to hold institutions of power accountable for
this major displacement. In capturing this protest sign, the video symbolically continues to recall
the event to a younger generation and in a new social media platform, thereby keeping October 17
a public and remediated event.
Routes of Memory of the Chicano Moratorium
Though the Chicano Movement took place across several Chicana/o and Mexican
American communities in the U.S., I choose to examine TikTok videos about East Los Angeles
because the violence that took place during the Moratorium in August 1970 marked a significant
turning point for Chicana/o activism. This spatial selection does not reflect the wide struggles of
the Chicano Movement and how it is remembered today, and this by no means reflects an erasure.
In fact, the presence of these histories is sufficient to motivate conversations about archives,
memory, and relationality.
In one of the videos on the fiftieth anniversary commemoration, the user
“alejandrocovarru002” recorded footage of a march that took place on Whittier Boulevard, the
same route where Chicanas/os marched peacefully towards Whittier Park before the chaos on that
historic day. In the video, an Indigenous group of dancers lead the procession, thus honoring the
Indigenous legacy of rituals and resistance, followed by images and sounds of protestors calling
out “Chicano Power!” and “Que viva la raza” (“Long live the people”) (figure c.2). Furthermore,
as the user captures this march and contemporary calls for justice, there are relational calls here
through the presence of the Black Lives Matter protest signs and flag, and the pride flag. Reflecting
the Chicanx community’s engagement with Blackness, queerness, and other minoritized identities
within Latinx communities, the video shows that the event acknowledges the vitality of
252
intersectional movements, which taps into the relational, and reckons with its role in the exclusion
of Blackness.
Figure C.2. Fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Chicano Moratorium, TikTok.
Illustrating the vicarious and intense experience of revisiting these sites of trauma during
the milestone anniversary, the resistance to displacement became evident in the posture and energy
of the people. Relevant to the contemporary moment, these memories and experiences of police
brutality continue to shape the social and cultural reality of Chicanas/os. In fact, a display of police
confrontation sparks immediate action and resistance. For example, in a video uploaded by user
“ciudadpolitica,” a skit on the reenactment of the violent murder of the esteemed Mexican
American journalist Ruben Salazar at the Silver Dollar bar was staged. Performing a convincing
act of violence where a sheriff officer actor confronts a Chicana actor, an actual member of the
Brown Berets intervened, under the impression that the scene was real. The text over the video
reads “Una persona del publico penso que se tratada de un caso de repression policial” [sic] (“A
253
person from the public believed that this was a case of police brutality”). As evinced through this
video, the racialized people who occupy public space are on heightened alert at protests because
they have familiarized themselves with the routine violence that the police enact. Though this route
along Whittier Boulevard has always been a site of resistance and spatial reclamation, the
memories of police violence during the 1960s and 1970s are ever present.
Within their reach, TikTok users create archives of the contemporary moment by recording
scenes of remembrance and protest, all while integrating historical photographs to reactivate the
past. While these short reels circulate on TikTok, these visual texts risk deletion due to their
ephemerality in digital space. The method of building relational archives enables us to assess how
users preserve the past, the number of interactions the videos receive, the labelling methods
through the hashtags that in some sense subvert institutional forms of preservation, and how these
communities are never alone in their historical struggles.
Conclusion: Presence
The expansion of film and media studies requires forging paths to study the flow of
racialized media through a relational lens. More specifically, such framework enables centering
global ethnic and racialized media at the heart of our query to examine how people in occupied,
policed, and racialized spaces share histories rooted in resistance against white supremacist and
settler-colonial logics, even if these groups have never exchanged messages, but are connected by
similar struggles. Though these media are marked by their contextual and particular cultural,
political, linguistic, and racial formation histories, a sustained study illuminates how racialized
groups create radical media in order to survive under precarious circumstances when mainstream
media deliberately neglects their stories.
254
While a sizeable portion of the actual materials objects in this study are nonextant, and
record of them exists via photography, the existence of the trace, the residue, the vestige, requires
a conversation on presence. The very existence and presence of these histories via all forms of
media speaks about the importance of memory, justice, and visual culture. Presence is a political
project as it concerns visibility and a resistance to a degree of displacement. Diana Taylor’s writing
on the Spanish concept of “¡Presente! gives us an idea of how to approach these media histories.
Taylor writes,
As much an act, a word, and an attitude, ¡presente! can be understood as a war cry in the
face of nullification; an act of solidarity as in responding, showing up, and standing with;
a commitment to witnessing; a joyous accompaniment; present among, with, and to,
walking and talking with others” and more importantly, “as participatory and relational,
founded on mutual recognition…a militant attitude, gesture, or declaration of presence…
9
As we study the flows and routes of histories of resistance in film and media today, my
research calls for us to revisit the past, and especially to delve within the thickness of social
movement archives to find relational histories. The archive of how racialized and oppressed groups
use film and media to engage in revolutionary activity is expanding as more forms of resistance
across the world proliferate against systems of displacement that include environmental
destruction, the obliteration of justice projects, and the ongoing forms of apartheid. In employing
relationality, our depth and horizon of film and media history would transform our commitment to
centering underrepresented communities and histories in conversation with each other, creating a
new axis of justice.
In conclusion, the relational framework and method that I presented throughout this project
is suitable for studying discrete groups of people, histories, and experiences via media located in
community archives. What makes this method promising to our understanding of justice in the
9
Diana Taylor, ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 4.
255
ever-evolving mediascape is the urgency and willingness to bridge spatial, temporal, and
experiential processes. United by a shared commitment to vigorously engage with how visual and
textual media have offered the possibility for racialized communities to visualize, document, and
historicize their survival in a world destabilized by displacement on several scales.
256
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
My dissertation, “Relational Displacements: Visual and Textual Cultures of Resistance in the East Los Angeles Barrios and Banlieues of Paris, France,” argues that though Chicanas/os and Arabs in urban space of the 1960s and 1970s did not come in direct contact, their shared struggles against similar forms of oppression tells a history of how race, ethnicity, class, and immigrant status created urban zones of exclusion in so-called democratic countries of the Global North. A relational framework enables us to study racialized groups facing similar injustices while attending to their particularities. My definition of displacement accommodates a study of unchecked police brutality on racialized bodies; detentions and deportations of undocumented migrants; evictions and forced removals of people from private and public space; and deaths of community members at the hands of authorities. I examine nontheatrical films about the barrios and banlieues, community newspapers and magazines, and political inscriptions and images of resistance on murals that showed how both communities foregrounded desires for liberation while advancing
anticolonial and decolonial resistance.
This project identifies the decolonial in barrio and banlieue textual and visual culture. Decolonization is the process in which oppressed groups challenge Western domination, conquest, and knowledge by creating oppositional radical possibilities of existence and resistance. I contend that in studying the creative and political output from barrios and banlieues, we learn that these distinct spaces, similar to other urban margins in cosmopolitan cities of the Global North, organized to fight against systems and institutions of oppression that quelled self-determination, social justice, and liberation. Despite their particular geographical, historical, political, and spatial formations, the barrios and banlieues equip us with the language and methods to study the scattered margins.
Chapter One, “Decolonization/Décolonisation: Nontheatrical Films of the Barrio and Banlieue,” argues that though the nontheatrical films about these spaces were produced by nonmembers of the community, the frames contain anticolonial expressions by Chicanas/os and Arabs. The subjects speak before the camera about liberation, occupation of their communities, and political engagement. I examine nontheatrical films by McGraw-Hill Films, BFA Educational Media, and the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française. Chapter two, “Screenings/Visionnages: Non-Traditional Spaces of Film Exhibition,” considers the function of community spaces that screened currently nonextant or inaccessible films. I consult archival material such as pamphlets, flyers, and posters to speculate about the importance of film culture to resistance movements. Rather than nanalyzing the films, I focus on how the selection of the films animated discussions on labor rights, anti-police violence, and community organizing. Chapter three, “Publications/Parutions: Writing Against Displacement,” examines the language, metaphors, rhetoric, and poetics that appeared on
the pages of La Raza (The People) in East Los Angeles and Sans Frontière (No Borders) in Paris and I argue that these community newspapers and magazines connected with local, national, and global movements and thus allowed the writers and communities to write against systems of power as an anticolonial and decolonial enactment. Finally, I continue on the theme of absence in chapter four, “Murals/Murs: Visual Histories and Decolonial Inscriptions of Liberation,” which analyzes mostly nonextant murals. I include what today is called “graffiti” phrases and representations of liberation that countered histories of displacement in the barrios and banlieues.
This study builds on early sociological studies of urban space of the 1980s and 1990s, where Loïc Wacquant studied Black ghettos in the United States and the multicultural banlieues of France. However, these studies did not take into account the barrios of the U.S., despite the histories of migrant labor flows from the Global South that similarly occurred in France. The relational framework I present in this project engages with and makes significant contributions to emerging scholarship that interrogates relational race studies and how tactics of oppression designed for one racial group are applied to others.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Turcios, Michael Anthony
(author)
Core Title
Relational displacements: visual and textual cultures of resistance in the east Los Angeles barrios and banlieues of Paris, France
School
School of Cinematic Arts
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Cinema and Media Studies
Degree Conferral Date
2022-08
Publication Date
07/22/2024
Defense Date
07/22/2022
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
anticolonial,Arab,decolonial,displacement,immigration,Latinx,militant,nontheatrical cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest,urban space
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Jaikumar, Priya (
committee chair
), Harrison, Olivia C. (
committee member
), Norindr, Panivong (
committee member
)
Creator Email
maturcio@usc.edu,michael.turcios@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111373706
Unique identifier
UC111373706
Legacy Identifier
etd-TurciosMic-10905
Document Type
Dissertation
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Turcios, Michael Anthony
Type
texts
Source
20220722-usctheses-batch-960
(batch),
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
anticolonial
decolonial
displacement
Latinx
militant
nontheatrical cinema
urban space