The first story for the zine is one that centers the current pandemic with a view of the historical moment of the AIDS epidemic in NYC from 40 years ago and the relationship between disease, community activism, Latinidad, perception, and arts/culture. To learn more about that, I reached out to Gallatin student speaker Kaylee…
Week
A Trivial History of Loisaida
In doing background research for Quality of Life, I haver read countless historical documents about the neighborhood; I am veritably drowning in ephemera. However, despite the pages of footnotes I have scrutinized, there are random things that stick in my mind, things that don’t really have to do much with the zine, small events that…
A Short Dialogue With Bruno, My Inner Critic
Image from Daily Mail about Luca, an animated movie from Disney/Pixar Since starting work on Quality, I have become obsessed with the history of this tiny corner of Lower East Side, and I’m not even there. I’ve been reading the books, watching the documentaries, trying to understand this neighborhood remotely. I talk about it incessantly, it’s…
Spaces for Culture and the Arts
Following the New York City fiscal crisis of the early 1970s, the city’s decision to cut funding on public services and housing subsidies was particularly devastating to many low-income neighborhoods, including Loisaida. Now experiencing real estate abandonment and disinvestment, residents were not only prey to crime, absentee landlords, and lack of access to basic goods…
Loisaida as Urban Laboratory
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…
Alphabet City vs. Loisaida
The term “Loisaida” was first recorded by Bimbo Rivas in an unpublished 1974 bilingual poem. “En mi mente, mi amada,/ yo te llamo Loisaida/ Increible/ una mezcla, la perfecta,” he writes. (English: In my mind, beloved,/ I call you Loisaida./ Incredible/ a mix, the perfect one.) Rivas continues the poem by demonstrating a quixotic love…
On Narrative, Business Ownership, and Βelonging
“I’m getting tested; times are tough on this bodega/ Two months ago somebody bought Ortega’s/ Our neighbors started packin’ up and pickin’ up and ever since the rents went up/ It’s gotten mad expensive, but we live with just enough,” raps Anthony Ramos as Usnavi in in the opening scene of In the Heights, a Tony-winning Broadway…
