ABSTRACT
For a few minutes it is his house. He walks around, reads the spines of books, opens drawers and feels the mood of the house. This momentary occupation prior to destruction anticipates the conicts in Quiñonez’s novel. Who is allowed in a full-edged American house and for how long? Who is to remain outside of it? Who is to enjoy the wooden oors, the lawn with trees, the open space? Most frequently, the only time migrants or descendants of migrants get a chance to step into such an abode, the American Dream House, is to perform a task. Their presence is always short term and conditional. Such is the case of the narrator of Quiñonez’s novel, Julio. Before he bought the apartment he shares with his parents, the only time he could claim a place was by collecting refrigerator boxes, painting them, and
placing them on a vacant lot full of rats.2 It was his Brown House, his casita, and he would appoint himself as the president of Spanish Harlem. These childhood adventures aside, his ephemeral occupation of the house is part of a business transaction: “The house gets lit, the neighborhood stays the same color, and the property gets rebuilt with funneled insurance money” (5). It is a cycle that is repeated over and over in the novel and that illustrates how, to recall Lefebvre, urbanism is ideology and practice. The practice, the novel illustrates, has traditionally immobilized immigrants in designated areas of the city and excluded them from others. For the majority of people of color and immigrants in the city, Luis Aponte-Parés claims, “the built environment of New York City has no apparent relationship to their history, i.e. they are guests in someone else’s city” (in Kandiyoti 2009, 155). The image of the guest in the city implies a temporary and conditional occupation, as explored in Chapters 2 and 4. Immigrants are granted permission to stay in a city but they will never belong to its streets; they will simply remain as permanent outsiders. Such has been the struggle over geography, over its forms, images and imaginings, as Said (1994) has commented.
