Project:
Spatializing Commercial Displacement and Narratives of Progress: Downtown Santa Ana, 1980-2020
This interdisciplinary project will map and contextualize the indirect displacement of businesses targeting low-income and immigrant consumers based on privilege. Few downtown Santa Ana commercial districts in the central city undergoing economic development remain affordable and welcoming economically insecure and immigrant communities. This project will utilize business dataset, photography, urban development documents, and other text and visuals, such as newspapers headlines, and graphic illustrations based on Dr. Gonzalez’s publications on downtown Santa Ana. This project is an opportunity to help fill methodological and population gaps in social science’s commercial gentrification literature and the digital humanities.
Faculty bio:
Erualdo González Romero is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He earned his Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of California, Irvine. As an ethnic studies and critical urbanist scholar, questions about what could lead to more equitable and just urban futures intrigue him. His research areas are gentrification, neighborhood change, planning processes, urban health, governance, and public policy, emphasizing Mexican immigrants and communities of color.
Erualdo’s upbringing in an underserved and dynamic immigrant neighborhood of the inner city of Santa Ana, CA, collaborations with the community, and his participatory research skillset position him well to write about ideas and real-world examples. He is the author of Latino City: Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots (2016), co-editor of Gentrification, Displacement, and Alternative Futures (2022), and has published in leading journals, such as the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Journal of Urban Affairs, Preventive Medicine, among others.
