Conclusion

Abstract

Over a half-century ago, we learned from geographer Kevin Lynch that urban experience was not constituted alone by the complicated structure of the city but also by the psychic and imaginative processes of its users. “People did not live in the city as such,” Lynch might say, “but inside the mental picture that they had built up of the city.”² The preceding chapters have attempted to excavate what six writers have seen of the marginal urban spaces they encountered in the twentieth century. Similar to Lynch’s ethnographic respondents fifty years ago, these artists have left a record of their cognitive apprehension of the city for us to explore. They have done so by turning their experience of ghettos into fictional documents, aestheticizing these spaces so that they and their readers can better understand the meaning these enclaves possessed for the people who inhabited them.

Deborah was the complete opposite of Blanca. She wasn’t pretty, wasn’t Pentecostal, she cursed, drank Budweiser from the can, and got into fights. She was so much the opposite of her kid sister that from the time Blanca was ten and Deborah was twelve, everyone called her Negra.

—Ernesto Quinonez, Bodega Dreams¹