Introduction Gentrification in US cities continues to be unpredictable and often contentious (Munoz, 1998; Wilson, 1996). `Protect community' undertakings are alive and well despite the engines of accumulation being acutely refined and deepened antipoor rhetoric and sentiment (the revanchist era) [see Munoz (1998) on New York and Mueller (1999) on St. Louis]. Successful antigentrification movements typically entail residents willing (or threatening) to obstruct development (for example, impeding construction, discouraging gentrifier in-movement, persuading retailers to resist `upscaling') (Diskin and Dutton, 2002; Mele, 2000; Smith, 1996). Such actions, we now know, can make developers turn to other neighborhoods or other forms of investment. But how residents in such threatened neighborhoods öoften politically disorganized, self-doubting, and inexperienced in activism ö become so transformed and active is unclear. This lack of knowledge stems from a superficial understanding of the discourses that transform and activate them. The most basic aspects of such discourses are still unexplored; for example, how such rhetorical projects are constructed, how central themes are made luminous and persuasive, how offered understandings are fitted into current bases of knowledge, and how such themes challenge and thwart gentri- fication. Such analysis in any setting is, we realize, potentially daunting. To Annette Hastings (1999) and Loretta Lees (2000), these discourses of opposition are complex human accomplishments that need to `sell' new ways of seeing while placing this in the terrain of normative and acceptable. Their making, to Hastings, requires diverse resources that meld in complicated and contingent ways öuse of space and history, use of language, and seizing and building on common understandings. Successful protect-community discourse: spatiality and politics in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood David Wilson, Jared Wouters Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 607 South Matthews Avenue, 220 Davenport Hall, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; e-mail: dwilson2@staff.uiuc.edu, wouters@uiuc.edu Dennis Grammenos Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, 500 N St Louis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625, USA; e-mail: D.Grammenos@neiu.edu Received 13 May 2003; in revised form 31 July 2003 Environment and Planning A 2004, volume 36, pages 1173 ^ 1190 Abstract. Protect-community movements across America are alive and well. The authors examine one such movement in a Chicago working-class neighborhood öPilsen. They focus on a discourse opposi- tional to gentrification that has effectively mobilized space and historicity to speak its truths. The results reveal that diverse mental spaces were constructed and used in discourse to offer two critical constructions: positive resident identities, and developers as villains. Such spaces, grounding medium in the discourse, framed, organized, and illuminated these constructions. This visual rhetoric, Henri Lefebvre's representation of spaces, was a key ingredient in discourse. With actual and threatened opposition to gentrification, many developers formed a sense of a `ready-to-rumble neighborhood'. Fears of virulent street tactics (that is, harassment of gentrifiers) most discouraged developers because they could make development projects risky. DOI:10.1068/a36121