A stroll through old photos of the Anglo/Euro-fusion lookalike wannabe British architecture neighborhoods in Queens, New York, serves to explain why people like Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and Rudolph Giuliani have engaged in an open war of offensive descriptions of those of us encased in the Latino ethno-identity, cultural and historical framework. The American faux Tudor houses and their front gardens were transformed by the new residents into a more complex set of images: colors of walls, window frames, types of doors and all kinds of ads offering diverse and specialized services in Chinese, Colombian, Dominican, Ecuadorean Spanish, replacing the wannabe English gentry neighborhood image and atmosphere.
The Queens' neo European setting was created by immigrants from Hungary, Germany, Poland, Ireland, who had made it into the USA middle classes and transferred their desires to move-up into a “higher class”, a new view of the self, projecting his/her achievement, into a copy of what had been envied or admired back home. The gray walls and lace curtains are now gone; as if guided by the design ideas of Frank Gehry or to demonstrate to the "Euro-centrics" that they were in the Americas and could not copy what was left behind. The new residents supplanted the old faux Tudor wannabe look with new populist Latin American and Asian immigrant fiesta narratives. You see, mestizaje is a delicate process, it can also destroy previous ways of seeing the world, displace the sense of self into new realms, requiring adaptations or defensive survival strategies. Perhaps, because of how aware they are of this existential condition, the urban millenials in Puerto Rico have as a motto, as howled by Bad Bunny: "Deja que el flow fluya".
The Queens' neo European setting was created by immigrants from Hungary, Germany, Poland, Ireland, who had made it into the USA middle classes and transferred their desires to move-up into a “higher class”, a new view of the self, projecting his/her achievement, into a copy of what had been envied or admired back home. The gray walls and lace curtains are now gone; as if guided by the design ideas of Frank Gehry or to demonstrate to the "Euro-centrics" that they were in the Americas and could not copy what was left behind. The new residents supplanted the old faux Tudor wannabe look with new populist Latin American and Asian immigrant fiesta narratives. You see, mestizaje is a delicate process, it can also destroy previous ways of seeing the world, displace the sense of self into new realms, requiring adaptations or defensive survival strategies. Perhaps, because of how aware they are of this existential condition, the urban millenials in Puerto Rico have as a motto, as howled by Bad Bunny: "Deja que el flow fluya".
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