Reprint of “Emergent public space: Sustaining Chicano culture in North Denver”

• This essay tells the story of the emergence of a verdant space in an inner-city neighborhood.
• This essay examines a community garden that is at once a memorial, a cultural landmark, and a space fostering diversity.
• Using both ethnographic and archival methods, I show how a public space emerged on private property.
• Using both ethnographic and archival methods, I contextualize the emergence of this space in the history of North Denver.
• I conclude by showing how this public space is a space of cooperation between neighborhood old-timers and newcomers.

Vacant land located in deteriorating neighborhoods collects physical detritus and social malaise; overt signifiers of urban blight, these spaces often become gathering places for garbage instead of people, illicit activity instead of civility. This essay deconstructs what happens when community activists appropriate, develop, and continually manage vacant land in manners that align with and express their community’s culture. Moreover, it deconstructs the metamorphosis of vacant land into public space. Part of a larger research project exploring the roles public space plays in neighborhood change, this ethnography centers in Sunnyside, a gentrifying neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Combining ethnographic and archival methods, I explore how the physical, regulatory, and cultural facets interrelate to form something rather remarkable—public space on private property. The “Troy” Chavez Memorial Peace Garden is at once a community garden, a pedagogical space, and a memorial to the 108 youths who died in Denver’s 1993 “summer of violence”. Twenty years later it is still cherished as a garden and a memorial, as a living artifact of Aztec culture, and as a publicly accessible space that contributes to the cooperation between neighborhood old-timers and newcomers. Turning scholarly discourse of the privatization of public space on its head, I unpack the processes contributing to the publicizing private space.