What does it mean to care for a place? Stories South of 22nd SS22.ST is a digital hub featuring an ongoing collaboration between Sunnyside Foundation (SF), whose mission centers on service to Tucson’s Southside and the University of Arizona, working to bring the Southside’s cultural, historical and speculative imaginaries into the public eye.
This site hopes to showcase what re-investment by and for the community looks like on the ground. Together with stakeholders, the collaboration results in an ongoing portfolio of exchanges that SS22.ST documents, including site-specific courses, community storytelling, arts and culture activations and creative making projects that narrate the treasures Southside holds, the caretaking its residents embody and the changes they seek to manifest. Drawing from a blended “urban humanities” research toolkit from urban planning, design and the humanities, these project build on case studies, visual literacy, archival research, mapping/site plans, site visits, community storytelling, spatial ethnography, pin-ups, community photo-shoots, image co-creation, co-curation, modeling, and other methods to bring the stories South of 22nd to life.
The heart of the Southside. Beginning in 2023, Sunnyside Foundation (SF), began directing reinvestment energies toward reactivating El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, a Southside hub for public services, neighborly exchange and community place-keeping in the area and beyond. Located at the intersection of Irvington & Sixth, it is adjacent to the Laos Transit center and the Tucson Rodeo Grounds, houses such key Tucson Chicano cultural landmarks as the Frank De La Cruz Public Library and the headquarters of US Congressman Raúl Grijalva.
A native Tucsonese, Liz Soltero has decades of experience serving local communities through city governance, academia, and public library administration. Liz is the CEO of Sunnyside Foundation. Sunnyside Foundation is committed to investing in projects rooted in courage, community, equity and imagination in Tucson's southside. Throughout her professional career and community leadership, she has dedicated her time to co-developing community-centered projects and relations to promote broad educational opportunities. Liz holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mexican American Studies and a Master’s of Library Science, MLS, from the University of Arizona. She serves on local boards attending to the needs of libraries, students, & families and advocating for mobility justice. Liz believes in public service, shared leadership, and in the power of community. She is an ardent community advocate who is dedicated to cultivating and sustaining strong community relations and to working from community strengths to meet community needs.
Selina Barajas
Selina Barajas is a fourth-generation Tucsonan and a proud graduate of the University of Arizona and UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning master’s program. She is deeply committed to environmental justice, working to ensure that historically disadvantaged groups have equitable access to healthy environments and green spaces. Selina is the founder of Reinas Who Hike, a collective based in Southern Arizona that promotes outdoor activities, particularly hiking, among women of color. This group focuses on creating safe, inclusive spaces for women to re:connect with nature, enhance their physical and mental well-being, and foster empowerment through outdoor adventures. Through organized hikes and free events, Reinas Who Hike encourages participants to reclaim their relationship with nature and challenge the historical underrepresentation of people of color in outdoor recreation.
Kenny Wong
Kenny Wong is a lecturer in the University of Arizona School of Landscape Architecture and Planning. He carries experience in the diverse facets of housing design and policy, with a concentration on affordable housing and community development. Driven by commitments to spatial and social justice, he has practiced as a housing advocate, multifamily designer, nonprofit developer, financial consultant, policy analyst and academic researcher between Southern California and the Oakland-East Bay Area. He was most recently the assistant director of design research at cityLAB, where his research explored connecting schools with housing development in the School Lands for Housing project and envisioned future scenarios of housing for the California 100. Creative design research and collaborative multidisciplinary approaches are crucial to his investigative and problem-solving methods as a teaching collaborator and former student in the Urban Humanities Initiative.
Jacqueline Barrios
Jacqueline Barrios is an assistant professor of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona. Her scholarship focuses on urbanism and narrative, with concentrations in the global 19th century, the contemporary Southwest city, and literature. Dr. Barrios specializes in the emerging field of urban humanities, activating stories of place and culture in interdisciplinary, socially engaged projects through a wide array of partnerships within the public humanities. She has curated and implemented multi-format exhibitions on urban histories, literature and experimental spatial design methods at multiple sites (public schools, galleries, universities, community centers) and across multiple platforms (installations, film festivals, sonic archives). She co-leads the inaugural Urban Humanities Network for global scholars and practitioners engaged in spatial transdisciplinary research, co-founded the DIGITAL SALON with UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative, and most recently, is involved in creative place-keeping initiatives centered around the historic El Pueblo Neighborhood Center and Tucson’s Southside.
Website design: Josh Nelson
Josh Nelson is an interdisciplinary designer working across web design, printmaking, jewelry, and spatial systems. With a background in architecture and urban design from UCLA, he was influenced by cross-disciplinary collaboration through the Urban Humanities Initiative. His practice takes a systemic approach, designing the platforms and processes that enable ongoing experimentation, research, and development. A central focus of his work is the relationship between materiality, light, and perception. This plays out in projects such as a dynamic billboard structure for West Hollywood, an all-clear mobile greenhouse cabinet for tropical plants, and an exhibition of glowing inflatable wells exploring urban design responses to natural disasters. His current studio, worksheet.xyz, serves as a platform for this evolving work—developing mica-based inks that shift color with light angle, investigating the contradictions between infrastructure and nature in the California landscape with the aim of making it visible in order to invite critique and reimagination.
Videographer: Raúl Netza Aguirre
Netza Aguirre is a multimedia producer for the Office of Congressman Raúl Grijalva. He is born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, a University of Arizona graduate, with a passion for agriculture and videography
Artist Collaboration: Jessica Wolff
Jessica Wolff is a Mexican-American artist, born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. She is interested in exploring family, community, and culture, especially regarding the ways in which they can become complicated when mixed. Jessica creates work primarily through photography, often changing techniques and exploring non-traditional approaches or mixed-media, reflecting the constant change and evolution that a community experiences. Jessica is an alum of the Sunnyside Unified School District (SUSD) and graduated with a bachelor's degree in Studio Art from the University of Arizona in May 2023. Jessica was introduced to photography from her mother and took her first course while a student at Desert View High School. She recently accepted a position as an art teacher at Los Ninos Elementary School and intends to continue her practice in Tucson.
Artist Collaboration The site features two collages created by Jessica Wolff, the first, a través de nuestros ojos / through our eyes as part of the landing page, and the second, de nuestras manos / from our hands to lead the feed.
The artist developed southside shapes, a collection of abstracted icons that are referenced in the collages and throughout the site, shaping ss.22.st’s graphic identity. As they write: “The shapes were created with the intention to build a visual identity of Tucson’s Southside through iconography. By mixing both geometric and organic shapes in this collection, the hope is to better reflect Tucson’s Southside desert and urban landscapes.”
a través de nuestros ojos / through our eyes, Jessica Wolde nuestras manos / from our hands
Glossary Tucson’s Southside, “ South of 22nd”
In Dr. Lydia Otero’s seminal work of Tucson urban history, La Calle: Spatial Conflicts in a Southwest City, the influx of Anglo-American settlers after US annexation of Tucson in the nineteenth century from Mexico contributed to a racialized pattern of urban development dividing native tucsonenses, as Mexican-American community members called themselves, from newer Anglo arrivals. 1 The pattern of displacement was mainly ever south- and eastward from the city center, and Otero’s work importantly establishes Tucson’s urban history at this time as “a period of shifting urban idealizations in the twentieth century that resulted in the destruction of a large Mexican American community in downtown Tucson.” A key part of this story is resistance staged by members of the Mexican-American community to this displacement, with cultural preservation efforts downtown, matched by members of the community who would go on to work and live in neighborhoods “south of 22nd [Street]” the urban boundary separating the Southsiders from the mainly Anglo centers of cultural and political power. In our usage, we invoke the history as well as learning and respecting neighborhood residents and leaders’ flexible and evolving definitions of Southside boundaries, identities and meanings. In general, Southside neighborhoods served by El Pueblo, the hub of ss22.st projects include Sunnyside, Fairgrounds, Cherry Ave, Barrio Nopal, Rose, National City.
1 Lydia R. Otero, La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City (Tucson, Ariz: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2010).
creative placekeeping
The term placekeeping refers to creative and cultural practices that cultivate attachments to place, that activate structures of feeling for belonging to them, and that expand moments for expressing them as well. In common usage among urban practitioners, “creative placemaking” refers to the suite of site-specific cultural and creative practices aimed to promote economic revitalization of cities post Great Recession, primarily through funding units like the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) and their signature placemaking grant, Our Town. 1 Compelling modifications of the term have emanated from BIPOC urbanists, revising placemaking to sharpen and contextualize these practices in light of minoritized communities’ histories of dispossession that work in part to diminish or erase their cultural presence. They offer the term “placekeeping” to acknowledge the already present store of cultural memory and relations that sustain minoritized communities. 2
1 Jen Hughes, “An Annotated History of Creative Placemaking at the Federal Level,” in The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking, ed. Tom Borrup et al., Routledge International Handbooks (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 27–37. 2 Robert Bedoya, “Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City,” Creative Time Reports, September 15, 2014, https://creativetime.org/reports/2014/09/15/spatial-justice-rasquachification-race-and-the-city/.
urban humanities
In the urban humanities, methods from the humanities, urban planning, and architecture are used to advance engaged scholarship and spatial justice interventions in collaboration with communities. 1
1 Dana Cuff et al., Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City, Urban and Industrial Environments (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020).
thick mapping
Challenging top-down, empirical or objective representations of space, thick mapping is a form of critical cartography that contest singular ways of geographic knowing through historical, creative or political frames of refence and content. Digital humanists Todd Presner, David Shepard and Yoh Kawano first defined this key practice of the urban humanities in HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanists as “processes of collecting, aggregating, and visualizing ever more layers of geographic or place-specific data.” 1 This process is not simply a drive for more accumulation or excavation of information. Rather: “Not unlike the notion of “thick description” made famous by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, thickness connotes a kind of cultural analysis trained on the political, economic, linguistic, social, and other stratificatory and contextual realities in which human beings act and create. By eschewing any kind of universalism, it is a kind of analysis that is intrinsically incomplete, always under contestation, and never reaching any kind of final, underlying truth. 2
1 Todd Samuel Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano, HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities, MetaLABprojects (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2014), 17.
2 Presner, Shepard, and Kawano, HyperCities, 18-19.
brief
In design, a “brief” is a document that describes a client’s or studio instructor’s requirements, detailing the constraints, challenges, and opportunities for a project in which the designer (or student’s) designs would serve as solutions. With clients, the brief may be developed collaboratively and refined throughout a process of testing and exchange. In studio or design pedagogy, the “crit” (short for critique) parallels this negotiation, where students present iterations of their projects to the studio instructor (a stand-in for the client) to receive advice and constructive criticism. Urban humanities adapts the brief to go beyond transactional or apprenticeship models and product-driven practices of traditional design, in order to imagine responses to the seemingly intractable and open-ended “problems” of the humanities. These so-called “wicked problems,” as design theorist Horst Rittel coined, are not extinguished by any particular “right” answer. 1 Because of the humanistic inquiry of the literature classroom, the brief elicits interdisciplinary thinking, reflecting the multiple constraints and opportunities inherent in engaging with such complex objects like the novel, and the city.
1 Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–69, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730.
social infrastructure
Scholar Eric Klinenberg discusses places that are instrumental in facilitating communal bonds as social infrastructure: “What counts as social infrastructure?.... Public institutions such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, and swimming pools are vital parts of the social infrastructure. So too are sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, and other green spaces that invite people into the public realm. Community organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructures when they have an established physical space where people can assemble, as do regularly scheduled markets for food, furniture, clothing, art, and other consumer goods. Commercial establishments can also be important parts of the social infrastructure, particularly when they operate as what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called "third spaces," places (like cafes, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they've purchased.” 1
1 Klinenberg, Eric. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York: Broadway Books, 2019.
resilience
A set of practices, and a communal identity, that enable neighborhoods to respond to forces of global change.
Reference
An onging compilation of references used in ss22.st can be found here.