The Loisaida Center and David Harvey’s “A Right to the City”: How Art is Gentrified

Perhaps the most interesting way to examine Loisaida Inc.’s relationship to David Harvey’s concept of right to the city is by comparing their contemporary role in the neighborhood to the one they have played in the past. The evolution of the organization from primarily service oriented to primarily arts and culture focused parallels the way this group has approached the Latinx right to the Lower East Side.

In the mid 1970’s through the 1980’s, as highlighted in their newsletter “The Quality of Life in Loisaida,” Loisaida Inc. was dedicated to providing local residents, of predominantly Latinx heritage, with the resources and tools they needed to survive and succeed in the abandoned neighborhood that was the Lower East Side. Helpful articles (written in both English and Spanish) detailing how to keep warm in the winter, how to raise your children to be respectful and productive despite the massive unemployment rates, and what to eat to ensure proper balanced nutrition, provided residents with the information that could make or break an economically disenfranchised family. Moreover, this newsletter provided detailed, but comprehensible, directions on what to do if your landlord abandons your building or stops paying for the legally required amenities (such as heat and hot water.) In this way, Loisaida Inc. geared the community to reclaim their right to the city, by ensuring that they could continue to live in the neighborhood that they called their own despite government divestment from the area and by combatting, through the dissemination of information, the pressures that often accompany low-income neighborhoods (such as drugs, homelessness, and a lack of education.)

Today, the organization serves a far different purpose. While still classified as a service organization, the programming and workshops that Loisaida Inc. offers to the community are primarily artistic. During the first wave of gentrification, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, Loisaida was overtaken by artists (a majority of whom were not Latinx,) who were attracted to the cheap rents. The Lower East Side had always been a creative neighborhood, but the artists who moved into the area were not participating in the waste-recycling style art- inspired by the Puerto Rican roots of the community- that Loisaida had become known for, and in the presence of white up and comers, the Loisaidan Latinx artists remained unrecognized.

Art is how Loisaida Inc. fights for the Latinx community’s right to the city today- by recognizing the Latinx artists who shaped and continue to shape the community, and by providing a space for current artists of color to develop their projects. Through this mission, Loisaida Inc. is able to connect with organizations such as the Clemente Center, or Museo del Barrio, to collaborate on festivals, fairs, and long-term projects that provide workshops and art resources to a community that may not otherwise be able to access this type of creative field or outlet. While maintaining the Latinx community’s right to the Lower East Side may not be explicitly stated in Loisaida Inc.’s mission statement, the organization actively fights to connect residents with teachers and teachers with artists and artists with students, all in a manner that highlights the rich history of the community- and allows the art produced in its space to tell the stories that need to be told in order to remind the audience who exactly built Loisaida.