Johana Londoño - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Johana Londoño
Identities-global Studies in Culture and Power, Nov 24, 2010
Social Semiotics, Mar 15, 2015
To reflect on current Latino-themed typography in built environments and marketing venues, this p... more To reflect on current Latino-themed typography in built environments and marketing venues, this paper examines the early 1990s, barrio-inspired typographic design of Pablo Medina, a Cuban-Colombian-American award-winning designer currently working in NYC, in relation to two diverse socio-aesthetic value systems. The first value system is a modernist ideology, which insists that language and expression can be universal and communicate across racial, ethnic, and cultural differences without carrying any particular meaning, bias, or identity. In contrast, Medina's Cuba typeface is in conversation with an ethnic place approach to cultural production that has its origins in 1960s Latino social movements that sought to affirm the cultural value of barrios. This design approach is often associated with postmodern socio-aesthetic preferences that "localize" culture. I argue that this type's articulation with the urban requires rethinking its postmodern categorization. This short article offers a window into new ways of thinking about hand-painted letteringproduced by designers and sign artiststhat indexes barrio landscapes.
Routledge eBooks, Dec 8, 2022
Duke University Press eBooks, 2020
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
The Journal of American History, Dec 1, 2020
Latino Studies, Aug 3, 2020
This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and c... more This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and centers US Colombian community formations, transnational imaginaries, media representations, involvement in electoral politics, and queer activism in relation to other (not “other”) Latina/o/xs. In thinking of US Colombians alongside Latina/o/xs of multiple national, racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic identities, we collectively unveil the uniquely Colombian stories that have shaped and continue to shape Latina/o/x cultures, politics, and lives. Our goal for this introduction and for all of the articles included herein is to contribute to an interdisciplinary archive of US Colombian scholarship, to intentionally deploy citational politics in the service of helping scholars pursue research on US Colombianidades, and to provide readers with a sense of the various experiences and narratives of Colombianidad.
allacademic.com
This paper examines the ways in which Latino culture is incorporated into the design industry. It... more This paper examines the ways in which Latino culture is incorporated into the design industry. It argues that the design industry's imperative to diversify demographically has mystified other practices for equitable representation and membership within architecture urban planning ...
Routledge eBooks, Dec 8, 2022
<p>This chapter focuses on the career of urban developer and former Secretary of the Depart... more <p>This chapter focuses on the career of urban developer and former Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros, in order to open up a larger discussion on the role that Latinxs and their barrio spaces play in shaping the built environment of the United States. Construction workers, community organizers, artists, and muralists have long been included, and rightfully so, in Latinx studies scholarship as key producers of Latinized built environments. This chapter extends that conversation by grappling with the rarely discussed figure of the professional urban designer. Cisneros, I suggest, is a high-profile example, though not entirely representative, of how professional urban designers imagine a Latinization of US cities. His work, I argue, uses design to socially engineer Latinx belonging to cities in a way that underscores anti-poor, normative housing aesthetics and spaces.</p>
Latino Studies, 2020
This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and c... more This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and centers US Colombian community formations, transnational imaginaries, media representations, involvement in electoral politics, and queer activism in relation to other (not “other”) Latina/o/xs. In thinking of US Colombians alongside Latina/o/xs of multiple national, racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic identities, we collectively unveil the uniquely Colombian stories that have shaped and continue to shape Latina/o/x cultures, politics, and lives. Our goal for this introduction and for all of the articles included herein is to contribute to an interdisciplinary archive of US Colombian scholarship, to intentionally deploy citational politics in the service of helping scholars pursue research on US Colombianidades, and to provide readers with a sense of the various experiences and narratives of Colombianidad.
Journal of American History, 2020
American Quarterly, 2014
cholarship on the cultural production of Latina/os has underexamined the role of designers, even ... more cholarship on the cultural production of Latina/os has underexamined the role of designers, even as urban design, architecture, and graphic design are increasingly marketed to appeal to Latina/o tastes in housing, commercial packaging, branding, advertising, and other consumer goods. Academic disinterest may stem partly from a fine arts perspective that usually portrays design, especially the commercial kinds, such as graphic design, as a less cerebral, transcendent, and rarified visual field, linking design's roots in applied arts to an instrumental, capitalist approach to creative practice where the client or message rules, not the creator's conceptual brilliance. Though some artists are also designers, and some designers assume an artistic prerogative and eschew the client for their own conceptual interests, design of mass production is by and large emblematic of the "death of the author" and thus in contrast to the dominant conceit of the fine artist as genius. 1 Designers seldom sign their creations. Authorship is often concealed in portfolio compilations, hardto-come-by award announcements, or design magazines that circulate almost exclusively among professionals or knowledgeable amateurs. Communication between the audience and product or message, rather than the identity of the creative, is central to the field. To this complex arena of expectations for what designers can and should do enter Latina/o designers whose creative output is-by will or the client's demand-linked to cultural identity. Why and how these designers express identity while most designers continue to operate under a modernist premise that design should follow a pseudoscientific method to solve visual problems that communicate at a universal level-trumpeting the very universality that has subsumed Latina/o and other minority cultural difference-is the question underlying this article. Part of the answer has to do with the role of place in Latina/o identity formation and cultural expression and the desire to represent the barrio and render it culturally valuable. This is what Raul Homero-Villa terms "barriological" practices: the cultural and social affirmations of the barrio that Latina/o scholars and activists have promoted since the Latino nationalist | 530 American Quarterly movements of the 1960s and 1970s to counter dominant perceptions of the barrio as blighted and devoid of praiseworthy culture. 2 These barriological practices took barrio life and culture as a source of inspiration to provide its very residents with new spaces of enjoyment and pride, such as Mexican murals and Puerto Rican casitas. 3 This article argues that in the field of design, desires for representing Latino-majority places are emerging and transforming the spatial and cultural contours of long-standing barrio cultural politics. Discussions of place and identity should be familiar to a design history in which the nation or region prominently figures. Graphic design history books are organized by categories such as French art nouveau, Russian constructivism, De Stijl (Dutch for "the style"), and Swiss design, and current practitioners and marketers promote, among others, Scandinavian design, Italian design, and Brooklyn design. Latina/o, Latin American, Asian, African, or African American designs, however, are rarely provided with the legitimacy of a placebased style in graphic design literature. In Philip B. Meggs's classic History of Graphic Design (1983), a chapter titled "The Asian Contribution" is reduced to ancient paper and printing technologies in Asia prior to the year 1150, and African and Latin American designs are limited to revolutionary propaganda of the mid-to late twentieth century. 4 Among modern architecture styles alone, European nationalisms such as De Stijl, the Glasgow School, and the Nordic tradition, and Latin American nationalisms, such as the Spanish colonial and Mexican and Brazilian modern architecture, are among the most popular styles. 5 Several designers are calling for ethnic-specific design to fill the lack of Latina/o representation in design history and using the barrio in lieu of a nation for this design production. 6 Urban planners and architects have emerged at the forefront of this Latina/o-based design, proposing related but incommensurate practice-oriented categories such as the urban planner Michael Mendez's "Latino New Urbanism," the urban planner James Rojas's "Latino urbanism," and the designer Henry Muñoz's "mestizo regionalism." 7 Proponents of these models believe that by elevating the contributions of Latina/o culture in cities, especially the marginalized barrios that conventional urban place-making has ignored, these practice-oriented urbanisms will diversify the built environment and represent the needs of a growing Latina/o population. The models are certainly contemporary, professional manifestations of barriological practices. 8 Yet these models, especially Latino New Urbanism and its typologies of Latino urban living, are also aestheticized developments that reify cultural stereotypes and are at a distance from the actual diversity and vivacity of the barrio. 9 Thus, such designs risk merely reflecting a multiculturalism that plays into the ethnic atomization convenient for current neoliberal marketing strategies. 10
Identities, 2010
Page 1. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 17:487509, 2010 Copyright © Taylor &... more Page 1. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 17:487509, 2010 Copyright © Taylor &amp; Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 online DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2010.526884 Latino Design in an Age ...
Identities-global Studies in Culture and Power, Nov 24, 2010
Social Semiotics, Mar 15, 2015
To reflect on current Latino-themed typography in built environments and marketing venues, this p... more To reflect on current Latino-themed typography in built environments and marketing venues, this paper examines the early 1990s, barrio-inspired typographic design of Pablo Medina, a Cuban-Colombian-American award-winning designer currently working in NYC, in relation to two diverse socio-aesthetic value systems. The first value system is a modernist ideology, which insists that language and expression can be universal and communicate across racial, ethnic, and cultural differences without carrying any particular meaning, bias, or identity. In contrast, Medina's Cuba typeface is in conversation with an ethnic place approach to cultural production that has its origins in 1960s Latino social movements that sought to affirm the cultural value of barrios. This design approach is often associated with postmodern socio-aesthetic preferences that "localize" culture. I argue that this type's articulation with the urban requires rethinking its postmodern categorization. This short article offers a window into new ways of thinking about hand-painted letteringproduced by designers and sign artiststhat indexes barrio landscapes.
Routledge eBooks, Dec 8, 2022
Duke University Press eBooks, 2020
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
The Journal of American History, Dec 1, 2020
Latino Studies, Aug 3, 2020
This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and c... more This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and centers US Colombian community formations, transnational imaginaries, media representations, involvement in electoral politics, and queer activism in relation to other (not “other”) Latina/o/xs. In thinking of US Colombians alongside Latina/o/xs of multiple national, racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic identities, we collectively unveil the uniquely Colombian stories that have shaped and continue to shape Latina/o/x cultures, politics, and lives. Our goal for this introduction and for all of the articles included herein is to contribute to an interdisciplinary archive of US Colombian scholarship, to intentionally deploy citational politics in the service of helping scholars pursue research on US Colombianidades, and to provide readers with a sense of the various experiences and narratives of Colombianidad.
allacademic.com
This paper examines the ways in which Latino culture is incorporated into the design industry. It... more This paper examines the ways in which Latino culture is incorporated into the design industry. It argues that the design industry's imperative to diversify demographically has mystified other practices for equitable representation and membership within architecture urban planning ...
Routledge eBooks, Dec 8, 2022
<p>This chapter focuses on the career of urban developer and former Secretary of the Depart... more <p>This chapter focuses on the career of urban developer and former Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros, in order to open up a larger discussion on the role that Latinxs and their barrio spaces play in shaping the built environment of the United States. Construction workers, community organizers, artists, and muralists have long been included, and rightfully so, in Latinx studies scholarship as key producers of Latinized built environments. This chapter extends that conversation by grappling with the rarely discussed figure of the professional urban designer. Cisneros, I suggest, is a high-profile example, though not entirely representative, of how professional urban designers imagine a Latinization of US cities. His work, I argue, uses design to socially engineer Latinx belonging to cities in a way that underscores anti-poor, normative housing aesthetics and spaces.</p>
Latino Studies, 2020
This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and c... more This special issue foregrounds overlooked instances of Colombianidades in the United States and centers US Colombian community formations, transnational imaginaries, media representations, involvement in electoral politics, and queer activism in relation to other (not “other”) Latina/o/xs. In thinking of US Colombians alongside Latina/o/xs of multiple national, racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic identities, we collectively unveil the uniquely Colombian stories that have shaped and continue to shape Latina/o/x cultures, politics, and lives. Our goal for this introduction and for all of the articles included herein is to contribute to an interdisciplinary archive of US Colombian scholarship, to intentionally deploy citational politics in the service of helping scholars pursue research on US Colombianidades, and to provide readers with a sense of the various experiences and narratives of Colombianidad.
Journal of American History, 2020
American Quarterly, 2014
cholarship on the cultural production of Latina/os has underexamined the role of designers, even ... more cholarship on the cultural production of Latina/os has underexamined the role of designers, even as urban design, architecture, and graphic design are increasingly marketed to appeal to Latina/o tastes in housing, commercial packaging, branding, advertising, and other consumer goods. Academic disinterest may stem partly from a fine arts perspective that usually portrays design, especially the commercial kinds, such as graphic design, as a less cerebral, transcendent, and rarified visual field, linking design's roots in applied arts to an instrumental, capitalist approach to creative practice where the client or message rules, not the creator's conceptual brilliance. Though some artists are also designers, and some designers assume an artistic prerogative and eschew the client for their own conceptual interests, design of mass production is by and large emblematic of the "death of the author" and thus in contrast to the dominant conceit of the fine artist as genius. 1 Designers seldom sign their creations. Authorship is often concealed in portfolio compilations, hardto-come-by award announcements, or design magazines that circulate almost exclusively among professionals or knowledgeable amateurs. Communication between the audience and product or message, rather than the identity of the creative, is central to the field. To this complex arena of expectations for what designers can and should do enter Latina/o designers whose creative output is-by will or the client's demand-linked to cultural identity. Why and how these designers express identity while most designers continue to operate under a modernist premise that design should follow a pseudoscientific method to solve visual problems that communicate at a universal level-trumpeting the very universality that has subsumed Latina/o and other minority cultural difference-is the question underlying this article. Part of the answer has to do with the role of place in Latina/o identity formation and cultural expression and the desire to represent the barrio and render it culturally valuable. This is what Raul Homero-Villa terms "barriological" practices: the cultural and social affirmations of the barrio that Latina/o scholars and activists have promoted since the Latino nationalist | 530 American Quarterly movements of the 1960s and 1970s to counter dominant perceptions of the barrio as blighted and devoid of praiseworthy culture. 2 These barriological practices took barrio life and culture as a source of inspiration to provide its very residents with new spaces of enjoyment and pride, such as Mexican murals and Puerto Rican casitas. 3 This article argues that in the field of design, desires for representing Latino-majority places are emerging and transforming the spatial and cultural contours of long-standing barrio cultural politics. Discussions of place and identity should be familiar to a design history in which the nation or region prominently figures. Graphic design history books are organized by categories such as French art nouveau, Russian constructivism, De Stijl (Dutch for "the style"), and Swiss design, and current practitioners and marketers promote, among others, Scandinavian design, Italian design, and Brooklyn design. Latina/o, Latin American, Asian, African, or African American designs, however, are rarely provided with the legitimacy of a placebased style in graphic design literature. In Philip B. Meggs's classic History of Graphic Design (1983), a chapter titled "The Asian Contribution" is reduced to ancient paper and printing technologies in Asia prior to the year 1150, and African and Latin American designs are limited to revolutionary propaganda of the mid-to late twentieth century. 4 Among modern architecture styles alone, European nationalisms such as De Stijl, the Glasgow School, and the Nordic tradition, and Latin American nationalisms, such as the Spanish colonial and Mexican and Brazilian modern architecture, are among the most popular styles. 5 Several designers are calling for ethnic-specific design to fill the lack of Latina/o representation in design history and using the barrio in lieu of a nation for this design production. 6 Urban planners and architects have emerged at the forefront of this Latina/o-based design, proposing related but incommensurate practice-oriented categories such as the urban planner Michael Mendez's "Latino New Urbanism," the urban planner James Rojas's "Latino urbanism," and the designer Henry Muñoz's "mestizo regionalism." 7 Proponents of these models believe that by elevating the contributions of Latina/o culture in cities, especially the marginalized barrios that conventional urban place-making has ignored, these practice-oriented urbanisms will diversify the built environment and represent the needs of a growing Latina/o population. The models are certainly contemporary, professional manifestations of barriological practices. 8 Yet these models, especially Latino New Urbanism and its typologies of Latino urban living, are also aestheticized developments that reify cultural stereotypes and are at a distance from the actual diversity and vivacity of the barrio. 9 Thus, such designs risk merely reflecting a multiculturalism that plays into the ethnic atomization convenient for current neoliberal marketing strategies. 10
Identities, 2010
Page 1. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 17:487509, 2010 Copyright © Taylor &... more Page 1. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 17:487509, 2010 Copyright © Taylor &amp; Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1070-289X print / 1547-3384 online DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2010.526884 Latino Design in an Age ...