Gentrification in Latin America

Gentrification has generated heated debates since Ruth Glass introduced the term to the academic world in 1964 to describe the process of residential succession and displacement of low-income households happening in central London. The reaction was no different in Latin America, even if the concept entered the regional research field much later. The first aspect to notice on the discussions about gentrification in Latin America are the dimensions of colonialism, patrimonialism, and developmentalism, which produced cities marked by great concentration of public and private investments, social segregation, and exclusion. On the one hand, researchers dispute the adequacy of gentrification to explain processes taking place in social and urban structures radically different from those of Europe and North America, where the concept was first coined. On the other hand and exposing a more profound challenge, critical studies and decolonial perspectives advanced by authors such as Quijano, Mignolo, and Escobar have questioned the knowledge produced in global centers of power, arguing that theory-building should be contextualized and territorialized. Along these lines, many Latin American authors became suspicious of the colonizing effect of discourses from the Global North and their appropriateness in the Latin American context. For gentrification studies, these debates would lead some authors to argue for the use of terms such as elitization or ennobltiement to better reflect these processes in local realities. Gentrification, nonetheless, caught additional attention with the neoliberal reforms imposed and adopted in Latin America in the last decades of the 20th century, expanding the use of the concept to explain recent processes of urban change. Meanwhile, although popular discourses and the media made gentrification a common word, scholars have been more careful in its use, calling for careful and systematic scrutiny given the above-mentioned debates. Studies have explored the applicability of the term to local realities and leading researchers have insisted on the need to incorporate contextual factors resulting in new perspectives on mediating structures, displacement, and local geographies of gentrification. It is also important to point out here that Latin America has substantial and dynamic forms of academic activism and social movements that dispute mainstream theories and practices of political, economic, and social development. In this sense, the concept has been incorporated also into political resistance and to counter displacement while academics have highlighted its class-based definition. This annotated bibliography draws from works in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, referring to original studies in Latin America as of fundamental relevance to have situated knowledge and critical perspectives. It includes both general theories addressing gentrification in the region and case studies, mostly from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. A major challenge in the development of this annotated bibliography came from the difficulty of accessing studies on other cities and countries, exposing an unevenness in distribution, research, and publications across the region. This challenge calls for efforts to expand these studies to other cities and to make existing ones more easily available so that the discussion of gentrification can reflect the diversity of cultures and social, economic, and political environments proper of Latin America.