Hipsters and drunks, tourists and locals

Abstract

This article uses linguistic and semiotic landscapes as tools to analyze the ideological work required for rendering Calle Loíza, an urban street in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as successfully revitalized. Linguistic Landscapes provide insight on discursive chains that circulate logics and produce values of places, and therefore form an intrinsic part of capital-driven urban change. I aim to show how perspectives of places can be structured, and how values of places are naturalized and embedded in the neoliberal political economy. Drawing from ethnographic and online sources of data, I argue that Calle Loíza is a site of ideological contestation and that the processes of rhematization and erasure are required for Calle Loiza’s indexical relation to progress and its articulation as a successfully revitalized urban neighborhood. The findings demonstrate that online spaces are also material, and that language is essential in the production and circulation of political economic values of places.