Gentrification, discourse, and the body: Chicago's Humboldt Park

Gentrification today spreads and deepens in US cities. In this paper we examine the progentrification rhetoric and tactics confronted by the second largest Puerto Rican community in the United States, Chicago's Humboldt Park. Three points are documented in this current case. First, real-estate capital and the media now target and script Puerto Rican youth bodies to communicate a new gentrification-sanitizing theme: a disgust for 'ghetto' morals and social order. Second, this coding of bodies involves a key process, taking readers to imaginary spaces in discourse. Third, possibilities to thwart gentrification exist but organizing strategies are ineffective in that they fail to confront the politics of youth bodying. The results shed light on one of the ascendant strategies of capital to restructure Spanish-speaking neighborhoods and a subset of them, Puerto Rican communities.