Sweeping Suciedad: Feminist, Indigenous, Queer and Trans Responses to Policing Space, Sexualities and unhousedness in Latinx MacArthur Park

• In Event: Carceral Care

Abstract

The city of Los Angeles mobilizes gendered anti-Blackness, settler colonial, and carceral logics to achieve the goal of gentrifying majority working-poor communities of color through the banishment of subjects rendered undesirable. I identify technologies of surveillance and policing, such as encampment sweeps and the larger system of conditional care. I pay close attention to gang injunctions and encampment sweeps as spatial practices of policing and banishment in Echo Park and MacArthur Park, two central parks located in Los Angeles, California. Feminist theories that attend to how gender and sexuality are tied to coloniality and enslavement provide important frameworks to examine legacies of spatial exclusion and displacement (Lugones, 2010; Ochoa 2016; Spillers,1987;). Increasing surveillance of space leads to diminishing public and shared space, this paper centers on feminist, indigenous, Queer, and Trans negotiations within the spaces of two public parks, Echo Park and MacArthur Park and how community organizations become complicit with banishment. By analyzing the intricate relationships between non-profit organizations such as Urban Alchemy, city-sponsored Project Roomkey and now InsideSafe, this paper examines how the state works to mystify the process of banishment and gentrification in Los Angeles.

Author

• Kimberly M. Soriano, University of California, Santa Barbara