Learning Places: The Urban Landscape as a Site of Contestation and Consequence in Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy

Abstract:This essay focuses on Ernesto Galarza’s classic migrant autobiography Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy’s Acculturation (1971). In this essay I demonstrate how Galarza uses the barrio space of Sacramento during the early 1920s to contest pressures of assimilation and pochismo. I argue that Galarza’s use of urban space allows him to reconceptualize the place of culture in the city in order to foster a more integrative transcultural and communal narrative. The location of the barrio as the physical and psychic place of la raza (Galarza’s term) provides Mexican immigrants in Sacramento a public space in which to openly practice cultural traditions. The argument is supported by two subsections within the essay. The first demonstrates how the barrio space provides Mexican culture “visibility” within the city’s geography; this allows the colonia to become the symbolic central space for the community. In the second, I show how the physical layout of the barrio space allows the young Galarza to receive an alternative barrio-based education on the value of cultural self-affirmation.