ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the possibilities and challenges of a course entitled “Residents in the City: Latinx Spaces and Human Mobility in the Quad Cities.” The course was conceived as a combination of critical theory on culture, human mobility and space with extensive community engagement in the Floreciente neighborhood in Moline (Quad Cities, Illinois), an area going through increasing gentrification and traversed by migration histories, with Mexican being the most current. The chapter illustrates how an urban cultural studies framework serves to articulate theory and praxis, the material and the imaginary, ultimately undoing broad definitions of “migration” and the “immigrant” and paving the way for a thicker understanding of how those who reside in a city, ultimately make it.
