Doing research about a very specific part of New York City from far away, I’ve been very scared of writing from the point of view of a tone-deaf outsider and have tried to educate myself on the neighborhood’s rich history of media and activism.
To this end, I’ve been methodically making my way through Loisaida as Urban Laboratory (University of Georgia Press, 2018). As I found, the book was written from 2014-2018 as Schrader’s PhD project at the University of Nottingham and is a more academic history of the grassroots activism in the neighborhood from 1964 to 2001 “based on an amalgam of unprocessed archives, oral histories, ephemera, and neighborhood publications.”
Considering that Schrader’s twitter account lists him as being from Germany and he doesn’t have Puerto Rican or Latinx background (at least, as far as I can tell from the bio his website) I thought it was really interesting to read the work of someone who would be considered even more of an outsider than I am vis-a-vis Latinx culture. However, I have really learned a lot about the neighborhood through Schrader’s work.
I’m halfway through now, and in the course of reading the first couple chapters, I’ve been struck about how important art and imagination is to organizing. “As if fighting landlords and dealing with city agencies were not difficult enough for community activists,” Schrader writes, “the real obstacle was widespread apathy and hopelessnes among residents of Loisaida.”
Commenting on the methods of ongoing community organizing, Schrader writes that organizers were able to unite the neighborhood by”…turning Loisaida into a symbol behind which residents could unite, creating common enemies in developers, landlords, and the city, finding joy in activist tactics, and making their activism public through colorful and loud protests.”
Reading the chapter to exploring the role of community murals as activism, I was inspired to include some art and poetry in the zine that has been prose-only in the previous reissues. I’m not entirely sure what, exactly that will look like in my zine, but I’m excited to find out.
Of course, I know publishing a poem in a zine isn’t going to make a huge difference to the community, but I really like the idea of adding to the tradition of art as activism that is central to the mission and values of the Loisaida center as well.
Looks like you’ve found an excellent resource to give you important background and ideas! I think the poem in the Zine sounds like an excellent idea.
While it isn’t Lower East Side specific, you might also enjoy Joanna Fernandez’s excellent history of the Young Lords as a resource for Latinx activism history in NYC. (Forgive me if I’ve already mentioned this one. I can’t remember!)