Desettlerising public space: Isabel Coatlicue Durón, Indigenizing Public Space: Challenging the Colonial Present in Los Angeles, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Desettlerising public space: Isabel Coatlicue Durón, Indigenizing Public Space: Challenging the Colonial Present in Los Angeles, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2025

17Sep25

Abstract: Los Angeles is rarely examined as an on-going site of colonialism. This dissertation brings to the fore the ways in which indigenous thought leaders, artists, and activists challenge the colonial present in Los Angeles. Building on settler colonial studies, the colonial present considers the multilayered matrix of colonial legacies including Spanish, Mexican, and that of the United States to consider the fraught nature of how colonialism continues to operate in urban places such as Los Angeles. There are three questions at the heart of this study: How are colonial logics inscribed, spatialized, and experienced in Los Angeles, particularly at the nexus between public space and public art? How do Indigenous peoples, particularly the Tongva, contest colonial logics? And how do they articulate, conceptualize, and imagine a world that reconnects people to one another and to land? I interrogate how art is wielded as a tool for and against colonialism in public space and examine the ways in which Indigenous and Chicanx/Latinx activists in Los Angeles contest the colonial present and articulate a vision and path for indigenizing public space by examining three sites of struggle: (1) the struggle to deaccession and remove the Christopher Columbus Statue from Grand Park; (2) a Tongva-led walk in Placita Olvera that challenged the multiple colonialities at work in architecture, statues, and plaques; and (3) #Tongvaland, a billboard series that reflected the artistic and cultural production of Tongva artists including River Garza, Weshoyot Alvitre, and L. Frank and incorporated photographs of Tongva people taken by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero. The central theoretical concept of Indigenizing Public Space emerges from dialogues over the struggle to deaccession and remove the Columbus Statue from Grand Park. No singular way of indigenizing public space exists, and this dissertation provides different possibilities for transforming public space as enacted and theorized by Tongva and Indigenous Activists in Los Angeles.

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