Review: Timo Schrader's Loisaida as Urban Laboratory: Puerto Rican Community Activism in New York
Reviewed by Hongdeng Gao
In the 1970s, New York City witnessed an unprecedented level of housing abandonment and disinvestment, especially in low-income neighborhoods including Harlem, the South Bronx, Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side. Amid the citywide housing crisis, one local newspaper in Loisaida — a term coined by the activist and poet Bittman “Bimbo” Rivas in 1974 to refer to the largely Puerto Rican and low-income community on the Lower East Side — proclaimed a “Miracle on Avenue C.”[1] According to the paper, by the summer of 1980, nineteen of twenty-four apartments at 55 Avenue C had been completely renovated thanks to the work of tenant and housing activists and the self-help housing organization, Adopt a Building (AAB). AAB also collaborated with a Great Society program to transform a large, antiquated windmill into a cheap and sustainable source of electricity for low-income families in the building. The windmill was a physical manifestation of what could be achieved through the hands-on work of community members coming and working together.[2]
Loisaida as Urban Laboratory: Puerto Rican Community Activism in New York
By Timo Schrader
The University of Georgia Press, 2020
204 pages
Timo Schrader’s Loisaida as Urban Laboratory: Puerto Rican Community Activism in New York traces how a dense and resilient, Puerto Rican-led network of activist organizations including AAB mobilized the Loisaida community to claim a stake in the life and design of the neighborhood from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Drawing from an amalgam of unprocessed organizational archives, oral histories, ephemera, and neighborhood publications as well as oral history interviews, Schrader argues that the organizations fought for socioeconomic and environmental justice and fostered a sense of place and belonging for the families and children who made Loisaida their home. These advocacy organizations employed at least threat distinct strategies: “youth engagement, network building, and the human right to the city.”[3] Urban Laboratory revises our understanding of Latino activism and New Yorkers’ responses to urban renewal and gentrification by highlighting the impact of small-scale and seemingly ordinary neighborhood-focused projects such as street clean-ups and community gardens on youth and community mobilization. As such, it is a welcome and important contribution to Puerto Rican and Latino studies, histories of social movements and education, and urban and environmental histories.
Schrader begins by discussing two organizations — Real Great Society (RGS) and Charas — that helped establish the three core strategies of sustainable activism in Loisaida. Schrader explores in chapter one the founding and activities of the RGS, which was founded in the 1960s by a group of former gang members who felt compelled by their harsh upbringing and Puerto Rican roots to improve the education and job prospects of gang members and poor or at-risk teenagers — something they believed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs were unable to fix. Schrader contends that through their Fabulous Latin House and University of the Streets project, RGS emphasized claiming physical spaces in their neighborhood and liberating the oppressed by valuing their real-life experience and teaching their true histories, helping them prepare for the job market, and providing them a positive space. This educational and activism philosophy that emphasized space and praxis resonated with global ideas of human rights in education that were embraced by Che Guevara and Paulo Freire.
Schrader then traces in chapter two how RGS transitioned into Charas in the early 1970s as RGS tried to professionalize its work. According to Schrader, Charas sought to solve basic housing and sanitation problems for its community by turning a dome building project and a recycling center project into community events. It believed that engaging with environmental technologies through a “praxis-oriented education” was the key to galvanizing the community, particularly reaching out to Black and Puerto Rican children and adolescents who struggled in the traditional schooling system.[4] Charas’s projects served as a visible symbol of the Loisaida community’s protest against the economic and political forces that threatened to erode their homes. Schrader highlights how Charas built a coalition with other community organizations including Seven Loaves and AAB to raise funds and formalize administrative structures while solving community problems. One wishes Schrader had discussed more about how structural forces of disinvestment, abandonment and War on Poverty programs specifically affected Loisaida residents to further demonstrate the impact of RGS and Charas.
In the next two chapters, Schrader examines Loisaida’s activist organizations in a transitional phase as they gradually shifted from an emphasis on tangible issues to a focus on cultural activism. Chapter three details the evolution of AAB’s tactics and organizing strategies to handle the various phases of tenant struggles in Loisaida from the urban decay of the 1960s to the urban renewal of the 1980s. With support from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, AAB first pioneered tenant-organizing and do-it-yourself sweat equity programs based on a vision that celebrated social interaction and a human right to the city. This grassroots advocacy and programming mobilized residents, including those apathetic members, toward action. In the 1980s and ‘90s, AAB had to switch to anti-gentrification campaigns and protests as the city began to sell residents’ houses and land.
Chapter four delves into another compelling example of all three strategies of sustainable activism at work through the CityArts Workshop (CAW)’s mural creation activities in Loisaida. Equally driven by the mission of youth employment and youth education, CAW worked with larger organizations including Charas and AAB to integrate murals into communitywide projects. These projects received money from CETA and the Summer Youth Employment Program (whose origins could be traced back to the War on Poverty programs) and engaged youths and other community residents in the painting of physical objects of the city in community plazas and storefronts. According to Schrader, CAW’s activities offered an alternative to problems of apathy, drug, and street life and allowed participants to develop a sense of neighborhood history and pride while articulating their concerns and rights regarding housing and survival. Despite Schrader’s acknowledgement that CAW was not founded in the Loisaida area proper and some of its organizers were Asian Americans including Tomie Arai, he does not discuss any cross-ethnic collaboration between the Puerto Rican-led organizations and Asian American activist groups. Given the equally vibrant Asian American activism around housing and other issues on the Lower East Side, this seems to be a missed opportunity for Schrader to further strengthen his argument about the “cross-generational, cross-ethnic and cross-cultural” nature of Puerto Rican activism during this time.[5] It also remains unclear what his position was on the War on Poverty and its legacies.
In the last two chapters of the book, Schrader explores the shifting strategies of the Loisaida movement toward cultural activism as funding and support from city and national agencies decreased in a neoliberal governance model. Following their adventures with environmental technologies and housing revitalization, Charas’s leaders claimed the abandoned and largely vandalized Public School 64 building at 605 E 9th Street as their new headquarters and named it El Bohío. In 1978, with the help of AAB, El Bohío served as an area focal point for the broad-based citizens’ movement to preserve the buildings in Loisaida despite the city’s fiscal crisis. Artists and community groups gathered in this mecca for community-centered cultural programs and after-class youth programs, as well as for film screenings that mobilized residents around important threats to the community. As Schrader astutely points out, Charas’s struggle and eventual failure to keep El Bohío in 1996 “exemplifies a major issue when it comes to sustaining community activism: the need for physical space.” According to Schrader, RGS, AAB, CityArts, Charas, and most community organizations in Loisaida frequently had to deal with the issue of maintaining a center of operations or office space. “The fact that Charas’s mission was cut short by simply being evicted from the property demonstrates the importance of ownership over physical neighborhood space for the vitality of community activism.”[6] El Embassy, which Schrader examines in detail in chapter six, represented the culmination of the shift to cultural activism that was not tied to a permanent space. Founded in 1994 by thirty-one Puerto Rican artists as an exhibition, El Embassy evolved in the next decade into a multimedia, interactive performance and art projects that aimed to celebrate Puerto Rican culture and empower Puerto Ricans to resist assimilation while asserting their “human, social and cultural rights” to the city.[7]
The story of Loisaida activists pushes beyond the narratives of gentrification and urban decline by focusing on the activities and power of marginalized residents to shape New York City’s future. As Schrader demonstrates, despite their eventual inability to prevent gentrification, Charas and other community organizations and activists in its network still touched many lives through both their concrete work on housing and education and their cultural and artistic outputs that endured and seeped into the larger legacy of Puerto Rican history in New York. By highlighting the power and legacies of hands-on, small-scale, and seemingly ordinary projects that have mostly been in obscurity, Urban Laboratory makes an important revision to histories of social activism in the United States that have focused largely on protests and marches that attracted critical media attention.
One wishes that Schrader provided a map of the Loisaida area to help readers better visualize and understand where the activist organizations worked, how they related to each other physically, and how the community would have perceived and related to them on a day-to-day basis. Given that health status was closely intertwined with housing, environmental and socioeconomic justice and Schrader acknowledges that there were issues with drug addiction and trafficking, one wonders how the Loisaida activist organizations thought about and approached health care in relation to their other activities. Schrader makes a bold and interesting claim that the Puerto Rican-led movement was crossing-cutting and inclusive, but he misses several opportunities where he could strengthen the claim. Although he discusses the participation of white former academics in the founding of RGS and the inclusion of Afro-American and Jewish New Yorkers in the Loisaida organizations’ activities, more discussion of the cross-cutting coalition that was formed between the Asian American activism on the Lower East Side and the Loisaida organizations would have made his point more compelling.
Hongdeng Gao is a History PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines how Cold War geopolitics and grassroots activism in New York City improved access to health care for under-served Chinese New Yorkers in the late 20th century.
[1] Timo Schrader, Loisaida as Urban Laboratory: Puerto Rican Community Activism in New York, Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation 51 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2020), 3, 65. Schrader defines the physical boundaries of Loisaida to run loosely from East Houston Street to E 14th Street and from First Avenue to the East River. He notes that the term really refers to the Puerto Ricans who were so dominant in the area in the mid-1970s. Drawing the boundaries in such a way merely helps to situate the core of the Puerto Rican residents in the Lower East Side. Many institutions and groups worked beyond and in between these boundaries, especially those that worked with Puerto Ricans in various New York areas to coordinate and publicize cultural activities. The use of this Spanglish term instead of other common labels honors the name that the residents chose themselves to counter real estate developers who called the area East Village or Alphabet City to ultimately gentrify the neighborhood.
[2] Ibid, 77.
[3] Ibid, 3.
[4] Ibid, 50.
[5] Ibid, 12.
[6] Ibid, 124.
[7] Ibid, 129.