Amid the global financial crisis, the private equity companies that once threatened to swallow up the last of Manhattans affordable housing stock may be on the road to mass extinction. And amid the political crisis in
But the Other New York is still here and still at it, fighting for the block and the dignity of its denizens. Here in East Harlem, known to its own as El Barrio, the banners insist, We will not be moved, or No nos moveran. To those who’ve watched this movement fight (and win) battle after David-and-Goliathian battle with local slumlords and multinational corporations, it is clear that they mean it.
On the evening of June 7, 2009, the Second Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement brought 38 organizations and scores of people, tenants, organizers, families with children, all gathered in the basement of an
This Second Encuentro (or encounter) was hosted by Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB), an organization based in the immigrant communities of
We are humble people. The majority of us are mothers who are fighting for a better future for our children, explained Ana Laura Merino of MJB at the opening of the encuentro. MJB awakens the desire to struggle in our community, added Sonia Guzman in the closing speech.
The tenants who live in the buildings, who organize, are the ones who make decisions in their own struggle, said Oscar Dominguez. We all together decide to see what is the path that were going to take as an organization and to develop a struggle against the enemy, which is capitalism and the bad governments. We practice autonomy and democracy. We go to the streets to consult the community.
The Second Encuentro, writes MJB, like the First Encuentro two years back, was inspired by the encuentros of the Zapatistasin order to get know each other and recognize one another in our struggles for a world where many worlds fit and against neoliberal exclusion.
Speaking of each of these struggles were members of not only MJB, but also CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, which is fighting the gentrification of Chinatown and beyond; the Harlem Tenants Council and the Coalition to Preserve Community, which persist in resisting the expansion of Columbia University and rezoning of 125th Street; the Sunset Park Alliance of Neighbors, building local power in south Brooklyn; and Thomas Jefferson Tenants Association, taking on police violence in public housing.
They were joined, too, by a troupe from Make the Road New York, the low-income community organization based out of Bushwick, Brooklyn, which expressed its own community’s struggles in little bits of theater pitting prowling loan sharks and cigar-chomping landlords against the good people of New York, who ultimately overpowered the powerful to the sound of maracas, guitars and accordions.
The conversations at the encuentro crisscrossed barrios and neighborhoods, as organizers, guarded on each side by a Zapatista puppet and introduced by Juan Haro of MJB, took on the conditions they face, how they struggle, who their enemies are and what their dreams look like.
Those at the frontlines of
This truly is neoliberalism at its worst, said Nellie Hester Bailey, director of the Harlem Tenants Council. We are its victims. She should know. Her husband was murdered by a brutal landlord 20 years ago this month. What we are fighting, she declared, is the ruling class. This is the epicenter of international finance capital. What we are talking about is whether poor people can live on expensive real estate. [With Plan 2030,] As rich people come into the city, Bloomberg is pushing us out of the city.
The presentations from Bailey and other speakers are periodically punctuated by chants of, Harlems Not For
Tom Demot, of the Coalition to Preserve Community, has been working to that end for 30 years. I like to talk about enemies, he told the crowd. Our enemies don’t want to hear the word, they want us all to be friends as they screw us. In addition to developers, Demot called out the elected officials at City Hall, most of whom have supported the rezoning and gentrification of Harlem, along with the local development corporations, the land use laws, and the elitist class system in the
Other organizers pointed to the alignment of the city’s policies and the landlords interests. The city is working with the landlords in kicking people out of their homes, says Bin Liang of CAAAV, who’s been organizing in
So its not about peoples human rights and their housing needs, Liang concluded, but how to make money the fastest way possible.
Its the rich people who are trying to take away our homes, and its the political system , including the mayor and the city councilmen [Mark-Viverito, Jackson and Dickens], that are helping them to do that, reported Dominguez of MJB. We decided not to work with the politicians, because they will never be in our favor, because they’re for the rich people.
Pearl Barkley, of the Thomas Jefferson Houses Tenants Association and Mothers Against Abusive Policing, suggested another means that the city has employed to implement policies of planned shrinkage of troubled neighborhoods: Aggressive policing of people who live in public housing.
We see the practices of NYPD, says Barkley, in concert with NYCHA [NYC Housing Authority], as a way of eliminating all low-income people who live in NYCHA. Its a very insidious thing. People cannot walk out of their building or empty the garbage without police asking them for ID. That’s the plan for eventually getting us out. How is NYPD and NYCHA doing it? Through criminalization of its tenants.
Javier Genao, an organizer with the Sunset Park Alliance of Neighbors, here with his young daughter, offered a warning to those assembled: We know that there’s a history of divide-and-conquer. This is something we’ve seen in the past that the city has done and developers have done, because they don’t want us to unite and struggle against our same enemy. Yet there are Latino and Asian neighbors organizing together, he reported, on issues from tenants rights to toxic developments.
The new villain on the block, Bailey went on to say, in addition to familiar ones like absentee landlords and imperially minded universities, is what she calls predatory equity investment the influx of private equity firms that once aimed to evict 20 to 30% of the tenants in their properties and quietly convert thousands of rent-regulated apartments into luxury units meant for a different kind of city.
On some blocks, the financial crisis has put such hostile takeovers on hold. The payday never dawned for Dawnay, Day, the London-based investment bank that once sought to build a
Something strange happened on the way to the bank, Bailey explained. You know what? Theyre all in foreclosure. All of those projects, including the
The Second Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement also opened up the floor to the voices of national and international movements for vivienda digna, dignified housing. Eviction and displacement are happening all over the world, noted Filiberto Hernandez of MJB. Which is why we have to organize so that united we can destroy this corrupt system in its entirety.
The speeches were accompanied by documentaries and dispatches from other fronts, including
More chantsLibertad y Justicia para Atenco! Presos Politicos, Libertad! Todos Somos Atenco!
Oralia Mondragon Ramirez, an MJB organizer, proceeded to read aloud a statement from Atenco sent by the Peoples Front in Defense of the Land:
One struggle unites us. The struggle against capitalism. It doesn’t matter where we encounter ourselves. In Harlem,
The land is not for sale, the statement proclaimed. It is to be loved and defended.
Each of the presenters went on to share a piece of their dream for their neighborhood and their world, just as they had shared a piece of their struggle.
Our dream, said Liang, is for every tenant to live peacefully, whether they have money or not, and not to be harassed.
That housing is not a privilege, said Bailey. That housing is a basic human right. It doesn’t matter if you have a job, if you’re old, if you’re inform, it is your right. That has to become a reality.
We dream of a world, said Guzman, in which we can exercise our rights to justice where we can advance together hand in hand where the powerful stop trying to manipulate the humble at their economic convenience where our children can have a shining future.
For our children to stop being killed. That’s very real for my community, said Barkley. We dream of the day when we are related to as full human beings, and not a cash crop to provide for the police and prison-industrial complex.
We dream of a victory, said Genao. We dream of having community control of our communities. We dream of the day when people don’t respect the authority of police officers or of elected officials, but that people respect the authority of what people decide together as a community.
Those are the dreams, he concluded, that carry us through this very difficult struggle.
Meanwhile, the young ones flitted back and forth next door ahead of the anticipated game of Gentrification Piata/Neoliberal Piata that was to be the final event of the evening. The piata, a mean and green and greedy-looking thing, hung by a single thread from the ceiling of the
Michael Gould-Wartofsky is a freelance writer from
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Images from the Second Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement (by Michael Gould-Wartofsky):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikegwphotos/sets/72157619573329881
Further
Movement for Justice in El Barrio. Chronicle of the Second NYC Encuentro for Dignity & Against Displacement, June 7, 2009, http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2009/06/105808.html.
Glen Ford, Holding on in East Harlem and Points West, North and South, Black Agenda Report, June 16, 2009, http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/holding-east-harlem-and-points-west-north-and-south.
Gretchen Morgenson, Questions of Rent Tactics by Private Equity, The New York Times, May 9, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/business/09rent.html?_r=1.
Jennifer Janisch, Victory in El Barrio: East Harlem Tenants Win One, The Indypendent, Nov. 17, 2008, http://www.indypendent.org/2008/11/15/victory-in-el-barrio.
Kavita Shah, The New Face of Gentrification, The Nation, June 9, 2008.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080623/shah.
Michael Gould-Wartofsky, We Will Not Be Moved: El Barrio Fights Back Against Globalized Gentrification, April 22, 2008, http://counterpunch.org/gould04222008.html.
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