The Haunting of Hope: Unforgetting the Demolition of Ravenswood High School

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Historicizing Equity Since the Era of Desegregation

Abstract

This paper examines the 1995 demolition of Ravenswood High School in East Palo Alto, California, an event publicly framed as a moment of hope and progress for the historically marginalized city. Drawing on archival footage from the 1997 documentary Dreams of a City, this study employs a contrapuntal reading to challenge this official narrative of urban renewal. The analysis reveals a simultaneous, officially obscured history of grief and loss embodied in the gestures and words of community members. By theorizing demolition as an ideological and affective event, this paper argues that "unforgetting" requires listening to the hauntings that animate such sites of erasure and reckoning with the racial politics of memory and mourning.

Author

• Antonio D Lopez, Stanford University