Chicano Neighborhoods

The Mexican American (or Chicano) housescape consists of detached, single-family houses in an urban barrio in the Southwest. This particular housescape is a complex of elements that includes property enclosures, bright exterior house colors, and yard shrines. These landscape elements indicate the most recent evolution of a historic landscape practice that has links to pre-Columbian Mexico and Iberia.

• property enclosures: almost continuous extent of front-property enclosures through a variety of fence types, particularly chain-link fences. The Iberian architectural tradition of enclosing yards in a Mediterranean climate has its origin in the 1,000-year old presence of Arabic culture in southern Spain.

• bright exterior house colors: often riotous use of brilliant colors (very bright green, blues, and hot pinks) on house exteriors. Maya temples were very colorful, particularly red. Roman Catholic colonial churches were tiled and painted brightly, reflecting the Spanish/Arabic tradition. Look at an example from Copacabana, Bolivia.
• yard shrines: private garden shrines are a common element of Roman Catholicism in North America to honor a saint or a particular event. Yet, they are not particularly common in the U.S. barrios compared with the Roman Catholic landscapes of Quebec and Central Minnesota.

In San Antonio, TX, barrio the percentage of cultural landscape elements that appear along a sample of streets is shown in this table:

Street #	Percent in San Antonio, TX			Although the house has a white color, the chain-linked fence in the front yard is distinctively Hispanic.
	Fenced	Bright Colors	Shrines
1	31	26	<1
2	24	42	0
3	80	51	<1
4	54	43	0
5	79	53	<1
6	56	67	<1
7	100	57	<1
8	93	54	<1
9	83	52	<1
10	85	40	<1
11	50	50	0
12	82	38	<1

Similarly, in the Brownsville, TX, barrio, 40-60 percent of the houses have bright colors.
In Tucson, AZ, a sample of Chicano and Anglo neighborhoods shows this pattern:

Tract #	Percent in Tucson, AZ
	Spanish surnames	Houses fenced	Chain-link fences
11 (Chicano)	97	79	82
23 (Chicano)	83	46	71
38 (Chicano)	80	79	74
9 (Chicano)	77	31	65
12 (Chicano)	76	76	64
15 (Anglo)	11	13	36

Source: Daniel Arreola, "Mexican American Housescapes," Geographical Review, Vol. 78 (1988), pp. 299-315; and "Fences as Landscape Taste: Tucson's Barrios," Journal of Cultural Geography, Vol. 2 (1989), pp. 96-105.