Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America

Abstract

In 1992 Texas Monthly magazine commissioned Grover Lewis to write a long article about Oak Cliff, the Dallas neighborhood where he grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Lewis had made his name as a promising literary talent alongside figures such as Larry McMurtry and Dave Hickey and spent more than a quarter century helping define the New Journalism in such publications as Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. Lewis was not one to idealize the Oak Cliff of his youth. He entitled his essay “Farewell to Cracker Eden” and described “the ethos of the place” as having been “absolute white supremacy, reinforced by old-time religion and male chauvinist prickism.” But upon revisiting his “boyhood haunts,” he was moved to offer up an elegiac account of past decline and present blight. “The devastation was total,” he wrote, “an entire neighborhood sunk in rot. The surviving houses were vine-choked, boarded up, literally atomizing in a ghastly mockery of the thriving community I recalled.” Walking the length of Oak Cliff's main shopping street, Lewis continued: “I groped for terms to encompass the scope of the disaster: systemic collapse, municipal cancer, de facto apartheid, social time bomb, a thousand points of dark.” A description such as this one could have been written about any number of city districts that hit bottom in the depths of the urban crisis. Oak Cliff, like much of the urban United States, had reached its peak population and greatest prosperity at midcentury and then entered a lengthy period of decline.1