New book shows how Latina/x artists resist oppression

Artist and scholar Jessica Lopez Lyman has been thinking about the term “placemaking.”

She prefers the term “place-keeping,” which is at the heart of her new book “Place-Keepers: Latina/x Art, Performance, and Organizing in the Twin Cities,” published by the University of Minnesota Press.

“Placemaking” is often used in city revitalization efforts, urban planning proposals and gentrification pushes to cultivate a sense of cultural meaning around a place or space.

In her role as an artist with a mobile screen printing service, she’s often called upon to help “place-make” by nonprofits or different civic entities. But the term, she says, is a bit backwards.

“Placemaking really perpetuates a settler colonial idea that there's nothing there, so we have to go make something,” Lopez Lyman say