The Art of Gentrification

San Francisco has been home to political and cultural movements that have reshaped America. Cary Cordova’s The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco explores how Latina/o artists, residents and migrants both, produced art that spoke to their vision of themselves, their city, their transnational social movements, to the wealth-driven gentrification, and their American cultures.

Using oral histories and a vast array of archives, The Heart of the Mission dives deep into the Latin jazz scene of the 1940s, the Beat avant-garde of the 1950s, the Chicano movement and Third World movements, community mural movements, transnational liberation movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and AIDS activism to recover an important and obscured story.