Locked in, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City by Zaire Dinzey-Flores (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Locked in, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City by Zaire Dinzey-Flores Rima Brusi Zaire Dinzey-Flores. 2013. Locked in, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City (A volume in The City in the Twenty-First Century). University of Pennsylvania Press. 240 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-0820-7. Locked In, Locked Out is a timely, important and engaging ethnographic exploration of the interplay of race, class and the built environment in four gated communities in the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico. The four sites are geographically close to one another: one could in theory walk easily from one to the next. But two of them are inhabited by relatively well-off Ponce families who have erected formidable gates, complete with alarm systems and even metal knife-like contraptions reminiscent of medieval fortresses. They seek to protect themselves from the intrusion of the danger and crime assumed to threaten them from the outside. The other two communities are public housing complexes, where low-income families see their access to and from the outside world shaped and limited by an architecture of exclusion and surveillance designed not so much to protect them from crime but rather to protect others from the crime that, for many Puerto Ricans, the government, and the media, they seem to have come to represent. The topic is hardly neutral. Last summer, for example, news shows and papers reported, recorded and photographed plastic pools dotting housing projects throughout the island. The pools’ discovery led to a flurry of social media activity, a myriad tweets, Instagram, Facebook pages and even full-blown websites that denounced the ownership and use of pools inside the projects as “shameless,” a use of “dirty drug money,” and a “violation of law and order.” Columnists and commentators echoed the indignation of bloggers and facebookers in stern appeals for public housing dwellers to “understand that the law is the law and that we all need to follow it,” or internalize that “we all want nice things but they come with hard work, not just because we want them to.” The director of Public Housing in Puerto Rico held a press conference showing the memo he had sent to all residents—pools were forbidden, their filling and use punishable by a suspension of the family’s contract with the agency (read-expulsion from your home). The caseríos, in short, appear often in the local news because their image and peculiar architecture have come to represent (and serve as scapegoat for) some of Puerto Rico’s most urgent issues: Symbol of crime and dependence for some; of inequality and its discontents for others. They and their inhabitants [End Page 262] seem to be constantly exposed to the public eye in ways that other Puerto Rican places and people are not. Before the pools it was Wi-Fi. Before Wi-Fi, it was satellite dishes, cable, Christmas lights, x-boxes, bicycles and whatever other middle class symbols were spotted within the caserío landscape. Nobody pays much mind to the bigger pools of luxury or middle class apartment complexes or urbanizaciones, and if/when they do, the prompt response is something like “well, but the residents of those complexes do pay for their water.” Puerto Rico, according to those loudest and most powerful in social and traditional media, appears to contain two types of people: Those with “honest” jobs earning an “honest” salary, who can honestly buy and enjoy two cars and an urbanización house and often self-identify as “the middle class”; and those who are assumed to live from the government, remain lazily unemployed, sell/consume illegal drugs, and enjoy rent-free living in a public housing project. Like a popular, insidious version of Weber’s ideal types, the urbanización and the caserío are places but also function as tropes for “types” of people. Less explicitly (Puerto Ricans seem more comfortable talking, however inaccurately, about class than about race) these culture wars betray a racial/racist subtext: Those in the first type are “white,” those in the second “black.” Zaire Dinzey-Flores looks (and invites us to look) at place and day-to...