The Shadow of Palestine in Puerto Rico

There is an ominous feeling on the desolate streets of old San Juan. This gloom is made tangible by drastic changes that are immediately visible. The residents are gone, either by reluctant migration to the U.S. for perceived economic opportunities, or through forced displacement. Gone with them is the way of life that made Old San Juan what it once was. A Friday night on Calle San Sebastian is now a sleepy experience, peppered with a few bars that now largely cater to the latest gringo invasion. Those who remain, having lost their communities to Airbnbs and crypto pioneers, continue to make their feelings clear. “Gringo go home” is graffitied on the walls in English, made legible for the incoming colonizers. Still, this direct message from the natives has not deterred the influx of settlers. Many of them come to Puerto Rico because of Act 60, formally called Ley 20 y 22, instituted by governor Luis Fortuño in 2012. Act 60 allows foreigners to reap fiscal benefits while Puerto Ricans are subjugated under the U.S.-imposed fiscal control board who brutally oversees the economic governance of Puerto Rico. Very much like the Homestead Act of 1862, which accelerated the settlement of the western lands seized by the United States by granting white settlers 160 acres of surveyed public land, Act 60 promotes the relocation of settlers or individual investors “to stimulate economic development [of Puerto Rico] by offering nonresident individuals 100% tax exemptions on all interest, all dividends, and all long-term capital gains.” This law is accompanied by the designation of 98.5% of Puerto Rico including 99% of its beaches as opportunity zones. Opportunity zones are defined as “economically distressed communities, defined by individual census tract, eligible for preferential tax treatment to spur private and public investment.” What in 1862 was a ground invasion under the philosophy of Manifest Destiny is expressed today through Dictatorship for Democracy, the philosophy of PROMESA.

The tension now between gringos and Puerto Ricans is felt even in the most remote corners of Puerto Rico. Speculating settlers comb the archipelago snatching up properties as they benefit from both the disaster capitalism prompted by Hurricane María and the economic squeeze of PROMESA. Settlers, now growing in number as Puerto Ricans migrate into the U.S. as a result of this neoliberal perfect storm, have become more brazen with their entitlement, racism, and exploitation, evident in the documentation of exchanges between settlers and Puerto Ricans posted online. Wealth manager Kira Golden, who infamously declared in an interview that Hurricane María was “amazing for the island,” is the developer behind the purchase of eight properties in Río Piedras, pushing out its long-term residents after raising the rent by $300 a month. In Rincón, Martin William Drew (CEO of Planet Rincón, a real estate development business) became angry at a worker when he was refused service for failing to abide by the Covid mask policy at a local Econo supermarket. Drew spat in the face of the worker who promptly retaliated by punching him in the mouth. In 2021, Refugio Puerto Rico, a self-described “budding permaculture farm and wellness retreat,” posted an ad seeking two persons with construction or welding skills. The job offered no salary, only room and board and reimbursement for expenses related to the job. In Mayagüez, entrepreneur Thomas Bowen, owner of the now defunct Island Axe sports bar, sought to hire “two sales reps with no accents.” Bowen gloated online that settlers like himself “will continue to take over” to create “a Hawaii 2.0.” While the looming prospect of statehood hangs over the head of Puerto Rico, it is not Hawaii that Puerto Rico is poised to mirror, but rather, Palestine. 

The most influential settler in Puerto Rico is the crypto venture capitalist Brock Pierce. Pierce, whose net worth is about 2 billion dollars, was raised in Minnesota by his Christian missionary mother. Pierce’s missionary upbringing––untethered from its settler colonial roots––appears to shape his vision of a “Puertopia” described by Crypto bloggers as a “crypto-libertarian Jerusalem.” This reference to Al-Quds (Jerusalem) in occupied Palestine, which currently serves as Israel’s illegal capitol, is more than a coincidence. Pierce has significant ties to Israel, which appear to be both ideologically and strategically motivated. In 2022, Pierce appeared alongside Donald Trump’s secretary of State Mike Pompeo and New York City Mayor Eric Adams at an event held by the Israel Heritage Foundation (IHR). The main objective of this Zionist organization is “to strengthen Israel’s security, encourage worldwide Aliyah or immigration to Israel, and support sovereignty throughout Israel, including Judea and Samaria,” or as it is commonly known, the West Bank, encompassing one of two remaining Palestinian territories. During his speech, Pierce touched on a range of subjects: saluting Israel as a hub of innovation despite being a small country, defending the need for law and order, and stating his support for Israel and all of its causes. 

Given the reception Pierce has received in Puerto Rico, it is no surprise that he would look to Israel occupying Palestine, a small innovative country with a native population who refuses to yield, for answers. Brock Pierce has faced very public protests in Puerto Rico and his properties have been repeatedly vandalized. Countering this poor public image requires multiple strategies. One of Pierce’s tactics has been electoral politics, including a presidential run in 2020 and another for Senator in Vermont in 2021, which resulted in his dropping out of the race to start a pro-crypto super PAC, One America. Pierce’s most successful strategy, however, has been the establishment of his philanthropic project, Integro Foundation. Through Integro, Pierce wields significant funding power over start up nonprofits, small entrepreneurs, and environmental conservation projects. Indeed, Pierce has interest in co-opting and coercing the public. But if this is his tactic to assert soft power over Puerto Rico, then what would be the accompanying hard power tactic? Perhaps his flamboyant adoration of Israel might provide a clue. 

Pierce visited Israel earlier in 2022 to meet with multiple members of the Knesset, including Benjamin Netanyahu himself. Pierce told the Jerusalem Post of his visit, “I’m not really seeking anything. I’m talking to a number of governments around the world… But Jerusalem has been on my list of places to spend some time for a while…this trip serves multiple functions. I’m just offering information… I don’t want to say the specifics, but let’s just say I had conversations around things like national security, and other things that are critical to America’s future.” On this trip, Pierce was accompanied by his chief of staff Yidel Perlstein, who also happens to be the community board chairman in Borough Park Brooklyn and the first Hasidic Jew to fill the position. If Pierce is in the business of world making, the Zionist model which he publicly praises and has cultivated deep ties with seems to be what he imagines for Puerto Rico, making the brutal apartheid regime and current genocide of Palestinians in Gaza a future possibility for Puerto Ricans. Pierce isn’t the only Crypto venture capitalist in Puerto Rico invested in Israel. Others like David Malka and Jordan Fried have bankrolled $1 million to charter the Airbus A330-200 that transported over 150 Israeli Defense Force reservists from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. They also contribute $1.5 million to pay for supplies including bullet proof vests. In this way, the settlers exploiting and capitalizing off of Puerto Rican misery wrought by disaster capitalism and the neoliberal economic dictatorship of PROMESA are able to privately fund the genocide of Palestinians as they publicly profess their admiration for the settler colonial Zionist state. This is not the first time Puerto Rico and Palestine have been linked in this way. 

The small island of Vieques lies to the east of the Puerto Rican mainland alongside Culebra, while Isla de Mona flanks the mainland on the west. In 1941, the U.S. military forcibly removed an estimated 10,000 people from Vieques at gunpoint and relocated them to the center of the island. The rest of Vieques became a war zone, used for the deployment of as much as 3 million pounds per year of live artillery and explosives into Vieques’ land and sea, containing napalm, depleted uranium, lead, and other toxic chemicals. This violence took place for more than 60 years. The people’s protests against this military occupation that converted their land into a bomb testing site went largely unheard, until in 1999, when the navy accidentally dropped a 500lb bomb on a lookout post, killing a 35-year-old David Sanes, who worked at the base as a security guard. The struggle in Vieques then rippled out into the world, catalyzing actions, civil disobedience, and marches across the globe, where the anticolonial and anti-imperial struggle in Puerto Rico aligned with other struggles like Palestine. At the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York, for example, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition marched with Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. In 2001, George W. Bush announced the closure of the U.S. Naval base, and the people of Vieques finally succeeded in pushing them off of their land in 2003. However, the impact remains. Only 1,600 of the 4,000 hectares suspected of having munitions have been surface cleared. Further, unusually high concentrations of toxic metals like mercury, uranium, and arsenic are found in viequenses’ hair and urine. Residents in Vieques have significantly higher rates of heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, and infant mortality rates with a 280% higher chance to develop lung cancer compared with Puerto Ricans in the mainland. And yet, the island of Vieques does not have a hospital. It does, however, have luxury tourism destinations like the W Hotel, which was purchased by Brock Pierce in 2022.

What settler colonial occupation ultimately produces is dispossession, apartheid, and genocide. The creation of the settler colonial state of Israel produced the Nakba, or the catastrophe as Palestinians know it, removing 700,000 Palestinians from their land and destroying over 500 Palestinian villages, just as a Manifest Destiny doctrine produced a Trail of Tears for the Cherokee, Muscogee Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, forcibly removing them from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States. This was what the people of Vieques experienced at gunpoint in 1941 at a much smaller scale and what Puerto Ricans now fear as they confront the latest iteration of settler invasion. While there are particularities that make the settler colonial occupation of Palestine and Puerto Rico distinct, what brings them close together is the integral role of the United States in the maintenance of each project. The most recent data shows that the United States committed over $3.3 billion in foreign assistance to Israel in 2022. About $8.8 million of that went toward the country's economy, while 99.7% of the aid went to the Israeli military. For Puerto Rico, which has been subjugated under U.S. colonial rule since 1898, the subordination of the land, its resources, and its people shift with time according to U.S. interest. It is well understood by now that “settler colonialism is a structure, not an event.” The latest iteration renews the settler colonial violence of the Homestead Act through neoliberal measures like Act 60, driving entrepreneurs/pioneers into Puerto Rico where they are circling the wagons all across the archipelagos.

For Puerto Ricans, this danger is two-fold. First, it faces the power of a wealthy crypto class who profits from the colonial arrangement, acquiring land and economic power and wielding a tremendous amount of influence over the archipelago. As we have seen, this crypto class has expressed its affinity and even allegiance to Zionist settler colonial project which has already demonstrated for them its methods in attempting to “eliminate the native,” providing a template to confront the growing hostilities settlers in Puerto Rico regularly face. Second, as the growing entrepreneur/pioneer population gains political power as new residents of Puerto Rico, they may begin to exercise their electoral power and join this chorus, potentially pushing for statehood. Settlers would then become Puerto Ricans, as citizens of the state of Puerto Rico, ensuring the erasure of the Puerto Rican people and their culture. But the rich history of Puerto Rican anti-colonial resistance reverberates today in the defiant cry of “Gringo Go home.” The people of Puerto Rico will not go quietly. Inevitable confrontation is promised. For this reason, Puerto Ricans scream “Que viva Palestina!,” denouncing the Zionist occupation of Palestine and calling for an end to the genocidal bombardment and ethnic cleansing in Gaza by the hands of Israel. For Puerto Ricans, Palestine is intimately understood through the lens of the Puerto Rican struggle. The shadow of Palestine looms over Puerto Rico.

DIASPORIC PITFALLS: PUERTO RICO AND THE IRRECONCILABILITY OF COLONIALISM’S AFTERMATH by SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ

“The Muslim’s ‘X’ symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my ‘X’ replaced the white slavemaster name of ‘Little’ which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears.”

–The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965.

It’s almost a rite of passage. The bright-eyed Diasporican arrives in Puerto Rico to “find themselves” and discovers the brutal reality of their estrangement. This lament is an experience familiar for most diasporic peoples. How we engage with our cultural identity and our mother country (mother’s country), continues to be fraught with tension and trauma for both the diaspora coming from the United

States and Puerto Ricans who continue to live underUS colonial occupation. This text is an attempt to sketch out an anti-colonial and anti-imperial politic in alignment with Puerto Ricans at a time when the diaspora is the target market alongside white settlers,for both  cultural tourism and land appropriation in the wake of the 2017 Hurricane Maria, as well as the neoliberal austerity measures imposed by the fiscal control board of PROMESA (“Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act”). The land grab is facilitated through what is called Act 60, formally called Ley 20 y 22. Instituted by governor Luis Fortuño in 2012, it allows settlers to reap financial benefits while Puerto Ricans are subjugated under the US- imposed fiscal control board, who brutally oversees the economic

governance of Puerto Rico. Very much like the Homestead Act of 1862, which accelerated the settlement of the western lands seized by the United States by granting white settlers 160 acres of surveyed public land, Act 60 promotes the relocation of settlers or individual investors “to stimulate the economic development [of Puerto Rico] by offering nonresident individuals 100% tax exemptions on all interest, all dividends, and all long-term capital gains.” What in 1862 was a ground invasion under the philosophy of Manifest Destiny is expressed today through “Dictatorship for Democracy,” the philosophy of PROMESA.

US colonialism has forced Puerto Rican migration onto the stolen indigenous lands of Turtle Island, where it continues its racist genocidal settler colonial project internally and its imperialist project of world domination abroad. The creation of the diaspora is rooted in this tragedy and this violence is what sends its descendants off into the world searching, looking for an origin. But what Stuart Hall lays out so perfectly, is that there is no fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute return. The Puerto Rico my grandmother left in 1957 is long gone. The children she gave birth to and their own children, are further and further away from the innumerable transformations Puerto Rico has undergone with the passage of time. The cultural differences between us supersede

our commonalities. I have more resonance with the descendance of Jim Crow South that parallel the Puerto Rican migration triggered by Operation Bootstrap than I do with my second cousins in Cayey. In fact, Nuyoricans (the diaspora from New York City) and Black people from New York share a unique cultural hybridity, manifested for instance in the co-creation of hip hop culture. And this is what we are. A hybridity. Suspended between the violence of dispossession and the violence of the internal colonies on the periphery of the empire. We occupy a different positionality as “arrivants,”as Jodi Byrd names it as opposed to settlers; however, we are not innocent. We live as settlers on stolen land, and yet there is no avenue for repatriation to Puerto Rico that wouldn’t be stained with colonial and imperial violence. There is no way out for us. As a diaspora, we must contend with this reality. We cannot claim Puerto Rican “heritage”

through a parent born on the soil. We cannot borrow Puerto Rican identity from the migrants who raised us like one borrows a pair of shoes. They don’t fit, we cannot walk in them. Their nostalgia is not ours. The tragedy of being born in the empire as a result of US colonial occupation which triggered the migration of our parents, or our parent’s parents, means that we carry with us this imperial footprint.

To ignore this reality is to ignore the uneven power dynamics that one carries with them coming from the United States. Diasporic claims of heritage in this way are akin to notions of “birthright” to Puerto Rico. When we consider how this ideology pairs with the latest settler invasion Puerto Ricans are currently enduring under Ley 60, we find this thinking dangerously close to the zionist settler colonial logic. This is how we arrive to Puerto Rico as owners, partners, and intermediaries in disaster capitalism alongside the massive influx of

cryptocurrency investors taking advantage of Puerto Rico as a tax haven, while engaging in predatory land grabs to create air bnb businesses. Revisionism by way of precolonial identification is another mistake which creates a violent relationship with the archipelago. This is the attempt to look passed the history of genocidal colonial violence and claim indigeneity via the Taino people. Veneration

for the Taino forms part of Puerto Rican identity and has always been present. Myths about “las tres razas”– the three races forming the “perfect” Puerto Rican mixed identity (the Spanish colonizer, the Taino Indigenous, and the African Enslaved) – needs to be continuously challenged as a form of colorblindness that negates the rampant antiblackness on the archipelago. The Taino revivalist movement also engages in this antiblackness as it seeks to reinvent the Taino race through historical revisionism. Although these revivalist movements have come and gone since the 1970 into the 1990s, it emerged institutionally in 2015 via the non-profit organization with a P.O. box in New York City. The United Confederation of the Taino Peoples which describes itself as an “indigenous representative institution” to “promote the self-determination and protection of the human rights, culture, traditions, and sacred lands

of Taíno and other Caribbean Indigenous Peoples.” Behind the organization is Robert Múkaro Borrero, a self-described kasike (chief) of the so-called Guainía Taíno Tribe and the former Senior Programs Coordinator for Public Programs in the Education Department of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The museum is a violent institution with a recorded history of promoting the science of

eugenics, which they were forced to apologize for after years of sustained pressure from the group Decolonize This Place. AMNH currently holds the skeletal remains of over 12,000 humans, a significant portion belonging to the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island which they have yet to return. The error these Taino revivalists make is to believe that anything about their project isn’t in and of

itself a colonial violence. They seek to erase the brutal reality of the genocide that set in motion the creations of new world diasporas made up of enslaved Africans, colonizers, settlers, and the very small percentages of indigenous survivors whose world ended as they merged with those people who would eventually become Puerto Ricans. There is no record of the Taino people that isn’t mediated by the

colonizer’s reports, therefore, the entire construction of the Taino revivalist movement is based on deciphering racist colonial interpretations.

The danger in these revivalist practices is that they position themselves as an authority. As generations of diasporicans come to embrace ideas of decolonization, they often turn towards African spiritual technologies, itself an indigenous practice, and they begin to seek out what they can learn about the Taino, only to encounter this new age cosplay by Barrero and his network of so called taino tribal affiliates. This is a wrong turn into a kind of identity politics that seeks to uplift afroindigeneity while excluding the presence of the colonizer in our history. This erasure serves no one. We must not practice it. The Présence Européenne to invoke Stuart Hall once more is part of us whether we like it or not. The question Hall poses is whether we could ever recognize its irreversible influence, while resisting its imperialist eye is what we must contend with. A direct consequence of the violence done onto us, for centuries. There is a clarity in

this approach. We honor the Tainos when we acknowledge that we emerge from the decimation of their world. In this way, they are present for useven in their total absence. It also forces us to reckon with the fact that this violence has never ended. That settler colonialism is structural and appears again and again, recruiting a multitude of agents across identities to carry out its aims, including

the descendants of those who emerged from the recipients of the original violence.

There is no way to reverse it. The diaspora cannot return to Puerto Rico to become Puerto Ricans. This is what colonialism has taken from us and we must accept it. It bears a similar heartache rooted in the impossibility of the descendance of chattel slavery in the US to trace their ancestors back to Africa. The trail ends at the bill of sale, with the name of a plantation owner whose last name they carry. Hence, why Malcolm Little became Malcolm X before becoming El Hajj Malik El Shabbazz. Embrace the X. Embrace that as arrivants we are part of the collective body of the dispossessed, which grows each day, as war, neoliberalism, and climate crisis to just name a few continues to destabilize the planet. Adhere yourself to the collective body of the dispossessed, making home inside empire. Together we are poised to dismantle the beast who has consumed us all from inside its entrails, so that Puerto Ricans, and all peoples under the yoke of empire, can better position themselves to free themselves. This is our political role as the lost diasporic children who cannot return. Let us realign our relationship to the Archipelago. With clarity.

The Assimilation of Hip Hop, Hegemony, and the Empire State by Shellyne Rodriguez

In 2023, New York City celebrated the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop. The festivities were largely presided over and ordained by the self- assigned master of ceremony, Cop mayor Eric Adams. This entire premise, at first glance, might appear to be absurd. Hip Hop, a cultural offensive which developed on the margins of this neoliberal petri dish came into being very much in contention with the state apparatus and its ruling class hell bent on the destruction of its creators; The Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian industrial migrants who made New York home. 

The generation that created and reproduced Hip Hop did so in the midst of many plagues. After decades of working in precarious factories and no access to the union jobs hoarded by the white working class, deindustrialization left them facing a new level of poverty. By the mid 1970s, neoliberalism had thrown down the gauntlet of austerity, resulting in what Ruthie Gilmore calls organized abandonment in the form of municipal disinvestment 1 which could only have led to racist landlords burning down whole neighborhoods to collect fire insurance money. This generation endured an opioid epidemic carried via the veins of returning Vietnam vets with massive trauma, followed by a crack epidemic, the consequence of a manufactured narcotics economy planted by the feds which on the surface was a placebo effect on austerity and deindustrialization but ultimately set us up for the war on drugs and mass incarceration. 

How then do we come to a point where 50 years later, we are witnessing that generation’s assimilation and absorption into the state and their complicity with the hegemonic power of its institutions? This is not new. The past and present are filled with recycled iterations of this tendency. Namely, how a subjugated people becomes complicit in their own unfreedom. No one is exempt. Not even those Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian kids who survived the atrocity of racist capitalist neoliberal violence executed via the settler colonial logic of elimination and created hip hop in its wake. 2

The filtered images of lavish lifestyles that accost us all for the most part live in the realm of fantasy. For poor and underemployed people, it’s a kind of expensive cosplay. The influencers and social media personalities of the culture industry, as Adorno described it, are always the ideal types of 

the dependent middle class. 3 But, when lottery tickets are scratched and played, there might be a BBL in the budget –but, for the most part, the desire is profoundly a cliché middle class one. A home with a backyard. A two-car garage. A vacation. Tuition money. It isn’t the villas and penthouses of the ruling class that is desired. It’s a miniature kingdom, in the realm of the plain. This is what upward mobility looks like for the average Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian New Yorker. The white flight dream of Long Island and Westchester with plenty of clean air and open waterfronts. This might no longer qualify as a middle class possibility, but at one point, it did. The life that the cops and firemen and white workers with the good union jobs were able to live. Union jobs that historically were denied to the Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian migrants. The white working class in New York City, forever a racialized migrant town, violently held a monopoly over these industries leaving the rest to get by on precarious factory jobs. 

The pathway to the middle class opens up after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning discriminatory employment practices by federal agencies and all unions and companies engaged in war-related work. Black, Puerto Rican, and West Indian industrial migrants in New York go to work for the government, where they cannot be denied by law. What does that look like today? 

In a city that employs roughly 370,000 workers, 51% are Black & Latinx. 4 Jobs in the public sector encompass a wide variety of bureaucratic positions, from the Department of Motor Vehicle, Social services, the Post Office, Corrections officers, the courts and of course, the Police department where the current mayor got his start. The great lane carved for some Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian industrial migrants to barely enter middle class status was a bureaucratic one, as middlemen, gatekeepers, and enforcers, administering the mundane and often violent policies on behalf of the state. There is a kind of class split that happens as these antagonisms begin to play out. The bureaucratic authority granted to some of these workers functions like a kind of hierarchy drenched in respectability over their neighbors, or people who could easily be from their community. For example, the welfare case manager decides to withhold the benefits of the woman’s daughter who works in the bodega on her block. What attitudes and interactions they must have when they encounter each other around the way? Or the feeling of submitting paperwork at housing court over an eviction notice to the judgmental clerk, who happens to also live in your building. In this case, I am freeing the constitution of “class” from the old school way we might know it as Marxists. Not middle class or proletariat or poor. Just straight up, who has a steady job and maybe some 

benefits and who doesn’t.

These antagonisms however, haven’t been enough to separate the Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian barely middle class from their less employed counterparts. As Stuart Hall explains while breaking down Gramsci, “the diversification of social antagonisms, the dispersal of power, which occurs in societies where hegemony is not sustained exclusively through the enforced instrumentality of the state but, rather is grounded in the relations and institutions of civil society,” 5 (i.e. family, school, church, hood politics, ethnic nationalism), fuck us up. There are a dozen ways we continue to remain connected over and above this particular line in the sand. Hence the correction officer takes off his uniform and smokes a blunt after work with the cousin of the inmate he violated at work earlier in the day. Hegemony, to give a quick definition, is the political, economic, military, social and 

cultural domination activated on a subjugated class. It’s the social and cultural that we are focusing on here that muddies the water. Still make no mistake about it, that line in the sand is a ravine. Capitalism is always poised to employ one half of us to humiliate, hunt, beat, arrest, and kill the other half, and colonization makes every baton swing pregnant with the certitude of its own perceived inherent righteousness. It creates the illusion of power and the illusion of a secure place in the bosom of the ruling class, or the state. It is no different than how Fanon describes colonial subjects in the 

urban centers of Martinique and Algeria, “The workers, primary schoolteachers, artisans, and small shopkeepers who have begun to profit—at a discount, to be sure—from the colonial setup”6 and its exactly how El Hajj Malik Shabazz explains it in Harlem and in Detroit, where he delivered his metaphor on the house and field dichotomy in the antebellum south.

The dilemma is reflected in the numbers. Black and Latinx people make up 90 percent of jail admissions, but we comprise just 52 percent of New York City’s population. The bureaucratic administration and maintenance of the cages are also overwhelmingly Black and Latinx. Of the 17, 045 civilians employed by the NYPD, 46.4% are Black and 22.6% are latinx. Uniformed Black cops make up 15.9% while Latinx double that number at 31.4%.We are the muscle of the state. We are the cattle and its fodder. 7

Now, after almost 100 years since Executive Order 8802, this barely middleclass Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian workforce has assimilated into the cultural fabric of the settlers and Ellis Island whites. The Yiddish “Oy” is inverted and yelled as a “Yo” now on any given street corner. Here Gramsci serves up the logic once again. If we are the muscle of the state, then we also come together alongside those Italian, Irish and Jewish New Yorkers to form the guts of civil society. Civil society is how we meet each other. How we clash and coincide to create “culture” which becomes what Stuart Hall called “the grounded terrain of practices, representations, languages, and customs of any specific historical society.”8 When Gramsci says “civil society,” he means “the public sphere where ideas and beliefs are shaped and the hegemony of the ruling class is reproduced in cultural life through the media, universities and religious institutions to manufacture consent and legitimacy”9 Hegemony is the “scaffold” around the skyscraper baby. Where the ruling class peers down with a bird’s eye view, bobbing and weaving as needed to retain power. As Gramsci so eloquently spelled out for us in those prison notebooks, “the traditional ruling class is able to quickly recapture power when it is slipping from its grasp, by making sacrifices and exposing itself to an uncertain future with demagogic promises”10 adapting the morals, ethics, politics, culture, etcetera of the broadest masses to keep the machine of the economic apparatus of production cranking. 

In other words, the ruling class can afford what appears to be concessions or even make themselves in our likeness. Because these gestures are always enacted to solidify power. And what is this cultural scaffold or as Gramsci called it, “national-popular culture” made of? It’s the Yankee baseball cap and the Brooklyn Nets, a dollar slice of pizza, the collective dissatisfaction with the MTA and the collective grief around 9/11. It’s the Cyclone in Coney Island, the Rockefeller Christmas tree, and the spectacle of Times Square. Its Frank Sinatra and Jay Z. Its green beer for Saint Patrick’s Day and Salsa music at Orchard Beach in the Bronx. It’s a citywide celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop.

“And so, I need to say to you, hip hop, you must identify where you are right now. 50 years later, from block parties to carrying crates of records, to music in the park, to having to draw your own flyers, to doing the $5 events… Look at 50 years later. The mayor of the most powerful city on the globe is a hip hop mayor… The mayor of Chicago, hip hop. The mayor of Atlanta, hip hop. The mayor of Los Angeles, hip hop. We finally have reached where now the police commissioner, the first Puerto Rican police commissioner, it’s a hip hop commissioner…And I want us to know that you are now in Gracie Mansion. That’s how good God is. 50 years could have fallen when another mayor was here. God made the intersectionality of 50 years of hip hop to be at the time that Eric Adams, the hip hop Mayor, is in office.That is the significance of the moment.” 11

-Mayor Eric Adams on the 50th Anniversary of Hip Hop

It wasn’t difficult his summer to run into billboards across the city with big drippy graffiti style letters announcing the multiple celebrations of the 50th anniversary of hip hop. An irony considering the city’s ongoing hostile relationship with the artform. Still, while nearly every museum and institution got in on the festivities hosting numerous concerts, events, and exhibitions, the transit museum continues to blatantly ignore these iconic happenings, rejecting the conservation and archiving of graffitied trains as its official policy.13 Their relationship to this pillar of hip hop culture is an honest one. The cultural offensive that birthed hip hop was an enemy of the state, even if some of its soldiers defected. In his remarks on the 50th anniversary of hip hop, Adams points to the Black mayors of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta and labels them “Hip Hop mayors.” His laughable use of the term intersectionality one assumes references their blackness, their being of the generation that created and reproduced Hip Hop, and their occupation as highest ranking official in municipal government. Indeed, all of these mayors have been courting rappers and following the Adams blueprint, hosting citywide Hip hop festivities and bestowing honors on their favorite rappers while their homeless populations swell and they beef up their police departments. Cop City in Atlanta is a glaring example. But the love between rappers and the state is happening both ways. Lil’ Wayne has always been vocal about his love of police. Wayne serenaded Kamala Harris with his hit song “Mrs. Officer” at her Hip Hop anniversary bash. 

We also saw the Bronx bootlicker himself, Fat joe declare former President Bill Clinton and chief architect of the 1994 mass incarceration crime bill an honorary member of his crew, while gifting him a pair of Terror Squad x Nike Air force Ones. Fucking weirdos. We can dismantle the bloated pageantry of Adams and his cohort quite easily in a few ways. One, its important to challenge the notion of the “pioneer,” already a violent colonial term. This is not to say that Grand Wizard Theodore didn’t scratch the first record. But viewed through a feminist lens grounded in community, we would first say, that the scratch required his scolding mother to enter the room. We would notice that she provided a room for him, giving him the time and space to 

develop his craft. Kool Herc needed the people to lend their ears and bodies to the dance. The Hoe Avenue Peace Treaty needed to happen in order to ease gang tensions enough to allow the thing to flourish. Social reproduction. Secondly, on some occasions, it is necessary to confiscate the thing that was created from its creator. The vessel in which the thing emerged from is only a vessel. Its why we can still recite the lyrics to “Fuck The Police” even if we’ve discarded Ice Cube who is busy in his new lane as right wing media commentator alongside the likes of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. Lastly, we would have to recognize the ineffectuality of nostalgia, which is often removed from context, steeped in selective memory of “the good ol’ days, and a proven device of manipulation. It was nostalgia that put Trump in the White house and sent his army charging on January 6th. It is nostalgia keeping the mayor afloat. 

Adams, who was born in Brownsville Brooklyn and grew up in Southside Jamaica Queens, graduating from the New York City Police Academy in 1984, certainly bore witness to Hip hop’s emergence even as he hunted down ‘perps” who were also b-boys and b-girls, graff writers and emcees in his role as a pig. This nostalgic embrace of hip hop by the state as I have laid it out before you is further evidence of how Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian New Yorkers who oversaw the creation of Hip Hop have adopted every hallmark of what we recognize as a reactionary conservative right wing white middle class teetering on fascism. Whether they vote democrat or republican is beside the point. Adams, who unsurprisingly enjoys far reaching 

endorsements and support from this barely middle class Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian workforce himself was a registered Republican between 1997-2001 flip flopping back & forth as a political chess move. By now it is well understood that the essential role of the Democrats is to implement whatever draconian policy Republicans flagrantly impose by creating the bureaucracy around it. Democrats are public relations experts. The labels left or right just confuses things. The character of the people is heavily Christian, pro-police, pro real-estate development, anti-immigrant, and anti-poor. And where might we witness this spirit? On the radio.

The radio receiving set develops the sensorial, intellectual, and muscular powers of man in a given society. The radio in occupied Algeria is a technique in the hands of the occupier.

-Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism

New York City has three Hip Hop and R&B radio stations, two of which are considered sister stations, owned by Mediaco Holding and operated by Emmis Communication, Hot 97 (97.1) and WBLS (107.5). Advertising on both radio stations are repetitive and essentially the same. Seminars to learn to flip real estate, injury lawyers, car salesman, or the fearmongering “make a deal with the IRS” or “consolidate your debt” commercials but the culture of the stations are decidedly different and the character and demographics of the stations are very defined. Hot 97 plays newer music, and caters to a younger crowd while WBLS plays throwbacks and is geared towards middle aged folks and elders. In fact, many of the deejays, like Bugsy and Red Alert moved to WBLS as they aged out of Hot 97. In addition, WBLS has a more talk radio like character with a more conservative Christian bent. Radio hosts like comedian Steve Harvey could be heard offering relationship advice and setting a moral tone. On Sunday mornings, one can tune into OpenLine, a radio call-in show which has long been viewed as an important forum for the black community. Created by its host Bob Slade in 1989, Open Line was a political voice, taking sharp positions on issues such as advocacy for the Central Park Five and Black Lives Matter.14 While Slade, who passed away in 2019, opened the airwaves for critical debate during his tenure, what the audience has continuously revealed over time is its gradual assimilation into the psychological pitfalls of the same middle-class values of white flight New Yorkers. What began as a space for Black voices to be heard, and to resonate across the city, has now become a hegemonic device reinforcing the power of the state. 

Quite literally as in the case of Norman Seabrook, the powerful and corrupt Ex-Union boss of the Corrections Officers Benevolent Association (COBA) who held court on WBLS on Sunday evenings from 7pm-9pm where he spoke out on behalf of his constituents, against the closing of Riker’s Island. 15 COBA is a standing army of 20,000 active and retired members, 82% of which are Black and latinx. 16 Open Line continues to air on Sunday mornings from 8am-9am with replacement hosts. The show is followed by talking head Rev. Al Sharpton whose show “Keeping it Real” occupies the air waves from 9am-10am. Every other Sunday, Sharpton is followed by a thirty-minute segment called, “Hear from the Mayor.” The Hip Hop mayor himself Eric Adams takes over the airwaves to talk to “the people.” 17 According to WBLS’s operations manager, about 60,000 people tune in to Open Line each week. As it stands now, this time slot, historically transformed into a community forum by the late Bob Slade, is one potential site for struggle. Currently, it functions as an echo chamber for those barely middleclass Black, Puerto Rican and West Indian New Yorkers who I have defined by their adjacency to the emergence of hip hop. The dilemma forces us to draw on Fanon once again, as he observed the Algerian relationship to the radio and its useful transformation in the anticolonial fight. For them, it was a wholesale rejection of the device as a way to reject the colonial French voice of Radio-Alger. It isn’t until the establishment of The Voice of Fighting Algeria that the tides change, becoming as Fanon says, “of capital importance in consolidating and unifying the people.” 18

In such a context, “I can’t Live Without My Radio” by LL Cool J, who has played a cop on a police soap opera since 2009 comes to mind.

Its almost as if the colonial sounds of Radio Alger has penetrated us deeply, bursting through our boom boxes, taking on our appearance and stride. How might we begin to form an equivalent to The Voice of Fighting Algeria to drown them out? Where else might their ideals be challenged and replaced? What if there was a dedicated swarming of callers every Sunday clogging those lines, challenging this hegemonic fuckery by setting the tones of those discussions, presenting new ideas and better common sense that are anti-capitalist, anti- imperialist, anti-colonial and abolitionist for the aunties and uncles who tune in? What if we rendered the bullhorn of this cop mayor (and any mayor who follows him) useless as a war of manoeuvre? What is clear, and 90’s rap duo Mobb Deep warned us, is that “there’s a war going on outside nobody’s safe from.” 

How The Bronx Was Branded / The New Inquiry

ESSAYS & REVIEWS

How the Bronx was Branded

Art moguls, real-estate developers, city institutions, and local elites unite in the name of development for the few, displacement for the many

By SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ DECEMBER 12, 2018

IN July 2015, a slick, minimalist billboard appeared above the Bruckner Expressway in the South Bronx, proclaiming: “South Bronx—Piano District. Luxury Waterfront Living. World-Class Dining, Fashion, Art, + Architecture. Coming Soon.” The billboard featured the logo of Somerset Partners and their business associate the Chetrit Group and was funded by developer Keith Rubenstein. Earlier that year they had purchased land along the formerly industrial Bronx waterfront for $58 million, a process facilitated by Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. As with the renaming of other places in New York City like “SoHo” and “East Williamsburg” in previous decades, the billboard signaled with colonial arrogance that two working-class neighborhoods of color—currently known as Port Morris and Mott Haven—were now destined to be carved into new territories of luxury real-estate development. Two 25-story towers were to be constructed, with market-rate apartments starting at $3,500 per month. Angry Bronx residents revolted against the proposed name change, and it culminated with the “Piano District” billboard being defaced.

The billboard announced Rubenstein’s desire to purchase the South Bronx and build a luxury colony in one of the poorest regions of New York City, which for decades had been associated in mainstream media with stereotypical images of dereliction, crime, and violence. As suggested by the slogan of the billboard, an appeal to “art” would be crucial in transforming the image of the South Bronx from marginal working-class zone to among the most hyped-up frontiers of property speculation in the city—a process led by developers that would unfold with the full support of local and city government. Each of these entities—developers, local elected officials, and the city administration—weaponized the arts to move this initiative further along. It reveals an unnerving intersection of power that positions real-estate developers, the art world, and city government in an alliance to advance gentrification, as a process of systematic repopulation, further into poor and working-class communities.

Rather than simply erasing the cultural history of the Bronx, contemporary neoliberalism has worked to appropriate it in the service of rebranding. Though this process is spearheaded by figures like Rubenstein, Bronx-born elites have themselves been complicit in it, including homegrown celebrities like rapper-producer Swizz Beatz. In turn, the apparently more benign discourse of “social-practice art” is poised to play a role in this process as well, especially through the cultural initiatives of New York City Director of Cultural Affairs Tom Finkelpearl, whose work will inevitably be integrated with the pro-developer policies of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as Finklepearl makes appeals to community engagement and local cultural heritage.

During the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War and large-scale deindustrialization, which led to massive unemployment, the Bronx was largely abandoned by city and state agencies. New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan espoused a philosophy of “benign neglect,” also known as planned shrinkage, in the borough, which essentially withdrew city services such as sanitation, street repair, and firehouses. What followed was the murderous mass torching of buildings and homes in the Bronx by racist, greedy landlords looking to collect fire-insurance money from these properties. By 1977, “the Bronx is Burning” would be a catchphrase heard all across the world as it became a symbol of urban decay, sending Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan into the bombed-out borough to pander for votes.

In the midst of this wave of plagues, young people in the Bronx formed a new culture, a radical avant-garde art movement that would shape culture globally: hip-hop. The South Bronx continues to be a beacon of art and culture. Young people there reinvent language, fashion, music, and dance at lightning speed. By the time this genius is “discovered” by some corporate exec, it is already stale, and these young people have moved on to new iterations of joy and survival expressed through this cultural practice.

Despite this genius, honorable cultural distinction reserved for the Bronx has not affected its political economy; marked as the poorest U.S. congressional district in 2010, the Bronx continues to rank among the areas highest in poverty, unemployment, asthma, obesity, and malnutrition in the country. In New York, the importance of the Bronx as the birthplace of hip-hop has only recently been embraced and acknowledged—but as a marketing tool. The hip-hop origin story has become a selling point for luxury developers in the South Bronx.

While the aesthetics of Keith Rubenstein’s first “Piano District” billboard in July 2015 were minimalist and matter-of-fact, the kickoff promotional event for his campaign to rebrand the South Bronx was an extravagant spectacle of the borough’s traumatic history. The event, entitled “Macabre Suite,” was held on Halloween 2015 in one of Rubenstein’s newly purchased warehouses slated for development on the waterfront. It was orchestrated by Salon 94 gallerist Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who commissioned artist Lucien Smith to create installations in the former piano factory where the party took place. The installations entailed a clichéd reimagining of the South Bronx in the 1970s. Bullet-ridden cars were installed in the space along with hobo-style bonfires in metal barrels. Rubenstein then chartered buses for A-list celebrities and art-world impresarios making their way from Manhattan. The social-media accounts of attendees swarmed with the hashtag of the night, #thebronxisburning, creating a mockery of the arson committed by slumlords decades earlier.

Backlash ensued in protests and in the press and Rubenstein receded from the media spotlight to let the controversy die down quietly, launching an offshoot of Somerset Partners under the name Somerset Hospitality Group. This entity began systematically opening local businesses in the vicinity of the Piano District project as a way to expedite the gentrification process. La Grata Pizzeria and Filtered Coffee were the first to open in the neighborhood. Locally, he invested in young Bronx designer Jerome LaMaar’s boutique 9J, the boxing gym South Box, and the nonprofit art gallery BronxArtSpace. Under the guise of “trying to do right by the community,” Rubenstein hired locals to work in his pizzeria and coffee shop. As he told NPR, “People who live in the public housing down the street work at the new pizza place. The boxing gym will offer scholarships to local kids. And residents who’ve been clamoring for access to the waterfront will finally get it.” Rubenstein uses the deceptive rhetoric of “job creation,” forming a human shield to ward off criticism, but the relatively few people who are employed by the local businesses Rubenstein floats do not outweigh the massive number of people who will be forced to move because they can no longer afford their apartments. Rubenstein will shamelessly parade around the recipients of his benevolence, but the wages they earn will not be enough to save them from displacement.

The Rubenstein strategy is simple: build a planned community by planting “Trojan horse” businesses in the area to hold space. Artists in search of cheaper rents will inevitably flock to the South Bronx, where the rent is quickly becoming unaffordable for long-time residents but is considered affordable to newcomers who have been priced out of Brooklyn. Struggling artists will inevitably respond, and through no fault of their own set in motion the displacement of the people who live there, before they are eventually displaced too. Rubenstein’s shallow investment in local businesses and talent takes advantage of a people who have historically been locked out of pursuing creative business endeavors. While this is the case, protests and boycotts of those local Bronx residents who crossed the hypothetical picket line and accepted Rubenstein’s patronage are obligatory. Rubenstein knows all too well that artists and the poor and working-class people of the Bronx are starved of funding and opportunity and seeks to exploit these circumstances for his own profit. Developer tactics range from “lending” spaces to artists and curators for pop-up shows in new developments built in the middle of poor and working-class neighborhoods to draw in potential renters, to funding start-ups and small-business ventures to create ambiance and selling points for neighborhoods still considered too “edgy,” to donating free studio space to up-and-coming artists as a way of generating interest in their new investments.

Positioning himself as a benevolent and pragmatic capitalist with a conscience, Rubenstein insistently suggests that support for local upstarts and artists today might absolve him from travesties committed tomorrow, that charity will exonerate him when he eventually bulldozes and displaces a whole neighborhood. Rubenstein mimes the philosophies touted by progressive liberals who believe that working within the system can produce some kind of “conscious capitalism,” but his philanthropy is a smoke screen. With a significant amount of local support Rubenstein was ready to re-announce his venture in the South Bronx. Rather than throw another party himself, he brought in a famous Bronx native armed with his own philanthropic project: rapper-producer Swizz Beatz.

Kasseem Dean, who goes by his stage name Swizz Beatz and is a well-known art collector, joined the board of trustees of the Brooklyn Museum in 2015. In August 2016, Dean was hired as “Global Chief of Creative Culture” for Bacardi and launched the project No Commission, an art fair that showcased the work of emerging artists of color alongside prominent African-American artists. Dean’s motto, “If you free the artist, you free the world,” was widely applauded. The No Commission model allowed artists to sell their work directly to buyers without paying the high commissions charged by galleries. This commission-free selling took place in the context of a four-day music festival that was free and open to the public, as long as attendees RSVPed on the Bacardi website. The audience was privy to performances by DMX, Q-Tip, Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, Dean’s wife Alicia Keys, A$AP Rocky, Young Thug, Fabolous, and many more. There was a Ferris wheel on-site for partygoers to enjoy, and the outer walls of the venue were covered in a mural by TATS CRU, the legendary graffiti collective. The Bacardi was free.

“I think without the Bronx in the world, a big hole would be missing,” declared Dean nostalgically as he bicycled through his old neighborhood with A$AP Rocky in a promotional video for No Commission. But this nostalgia did not stop Dean from partying at the Macabre Suite event the year before, reveling in the mockery of the same people who were now the object of his sentimentality. In fact, the No Commission event served as a vehicle for reintroducing the Keith Rubenstein project to the Bronx, helping Rubenstein reframe the site where the Macabre Suite party had occurred. Dean’s street cred and social capital served as the ultimate buffer for Rubenstein’s project, though his musings about making the arts accessible to Bronx residents weren’t reflected in the event. The RSVP on the Bacardi website didn’t work for many, and the barricades surrounding the venue with manned NYPD officers certainly made it unwelcome to the people in the neighborhood.
As a result of Dean’s collaboration with Rubenstein, No Commission was heavily protested by groups such as Take Back the Bronx, Why Accountability, and a wide variety of folks from the community, among their numbers many outraged New York–based artists of color. When Dean was forced to respond, he applauded the “landlord” (Rubenstein) for pushing back his development project for two months so that Dean could hold the festival (the delay cost Rubenstein only $2 million). Ultimately, Dean treated the gentrification of the South Bronx as inevitable, and his indifference to how it would affect the borough that raised him was made plain in an interview he did with Vibe magazine about working with Rubenstein: “The plan is already done . . . so let’s go out with a blast.” The minute the No Commission event was over, Dean jet-setted out of the Bronx, leaving local artists and activists deeply divided. Some initiated conversations in the community about the implications of a famous hip-hop star from the Bronx lending his street cred to a developer. Others—missing the bigger picture entirely—focused on the fact that Dean didn’t include local Bronx artists in the show. Other artists who did participate resented the activists for protesting what they saw as their big break, since opportunities of this caliber for artists of color are rare. Meanwhile, Rubenstein made a clean getaway, as the debates around these complex issues turned the focus away from his development project.

The potential for social and economic advancement for a few puts countless long-time residents in danger of displacement. Hip-hop culture and its icons, from the oldest pioneers to the youngest up-and-coming emcees, are co-opted by developers who operate in the Bronx with strong government support thanks to Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. In 2016 Rubenstein hosted a $2,500-a-plate fundraiser at his home for Díaz’s reelection campaign. Díaz in turn champions gentrification as revitalization and is a long-standing ally of developers. He points to Rubenstein’s shiny new Potemkin village as an example of urban progress, and manipulates the desires of the people of the Bronx, who have endured decades of benign neglect. In his cozy relationship with real-estate interests, Díaz is not unusual among New York City politicians. Many of these politicians cower before the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) and the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), two powerful groups that lobby on behalf of landlords and fill the coffers of every politician from the Bronx to the state capital in Albany.

With a Bronx borough president in the pocket, Rubenstein is guaranteed to receive the proper governmental infrastructure necessary to accompany the lifestyle needs and aesthetic markers that define a neighborhood as “up and coming.” This appears as the revitalization of public spaces. The city plants new trees, replaces street signs, repairs and repaints roadways, and creates bike lanes. After years of neglect, public services beneficial to everyone are expedited solely because it serves a developer’s needs. In 2016, St. Mary’s Park, located a 20-minute walk from the Rubenstein property, received $30 million as part of the NYC “Anchor Parks” initiative. For Mott Haven, this upgrade of St. Mary’s Park is being accompanied by a new $50 million state-of-the-art architecturally avant-garde police station. The new 40th-precinct police station, whose completion is scheduled to coincide with the completion of the nearby Rubenstein project in 2019, will have a green roof, a courtyard, and a training area. It will also have the first-ever “community meeting room” located within the station itself. Inside the community room, a work of community-engaged art will be installed, commissioned by Percent for Art, a division of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, which requires that a percentage of the construction budget of new buildings be used for public art. This art project could be viewed as a step in building a bridge between the community and the police, but what it actually accomplishes is placing art in the service of an abusive and authoritative apparatus of state power that in turn maintains the institutional frameworks upholding the conditions for profitable capital accumulation.

Borinquen Gallo, one of the artists selected to create the installation, contributed a project informed by interviews she conducted with NYPD officers at the 40th precinct and neighboring Bronx residents. Her research culminated in the production of a pair of neon signs. An interior sign, facing the space where officers will hold briefings, will read “Black Lives Matter,” and an exterior neon sign, facing the community room, will read “Blue Lives Matters.” The work is intended to be an equalizer, an effort to bring the police and the community together, but Gallo’s effort collapses under her false assumption that the many generations of people who have lived under the authority of the NYPD, and who are routinely harassed, beaten, and arrested by police, can access equal power in a space located inside a police station. She assumes that the NYPD will not exercise its authority and just unplug the interior sign, leaving the Blue Lives Matter sign blazing and asserting the truth about the power dynamic Gallo glosses over.

The project at the 40th precinct is within the purview of the Department of Cultural Affairs, which is spearheaded by art-world darling and social-practice champion Tom Finkelpearl, who joined the de Blasio administration in 2014 and is charged with overseeing city funding of the arts. In his role as director of cultural affairs, Finkelpearl’s goal is to promote cultural diversity in arts programs citywide; he sees artists and cultural organizations as vital not only for the economic benefits they bring to the city but also for the integral roles they play in their communities. For this reason, Finkelpearl has championed social-practice art, which he understands as art that is not just isolated on the wall of a museum for judgement by an individual viewer but a form of collective participatory interaction engaging with public matters in an urban context.

To his credit, Finkelpearl understands clearly the dilemma faced by artists trying to pursue their practice while living in New York City. As he told Artnet News in 2014,

There are problems for artists related to housing, but the problem in general is that housing is too expensive, and actually I would combine that with the crisis related to student debt . . . But debt is also a big problem for low-income individuals in general. So how do you create coalitions to have artists and folks in the art world understand the coalitions that they should be building with other low-income folks? That’s fundamental to the vision of the administration.

However, as director of cultural affairs, Finkelpearl is beholden to the de Blasio administration. While his personal vision may not be aligned with the goal of assisting developers in hyper-development, his ideological underpinnings allow the city to co-opt his ideas and to bastardize them in the service of private development. This co-optation hinges on Finkelpearl’s idea of what praxis should be—an idea he derives from the famous community organizer and progressive liberal icon Saul Alinsky. Alinsky espoused “realistic pragmatism,” believing that one should focus on single issues and work within the system to achieve winnable goals. But in this approach, concessions won through struggle will always remain within the power structures that grant them. Finkelpearl could preside over the greatest overhaul in cultural equity this city has ever seen, but instead he risks inadvertently providing the channels for the city to utilize the arts as a path-clearing tool for predatory development.

In his book Rules for Radicals, Alinsky attempts to persuade future community organizers to follow his “pragmatic” approach, which he says must begin from the premise that we must “accept the world as it is.” In order to change it, one must work within the system. He is only interested in concessions that can be gained from the powerful elite, leaving undisturbed the structures that constrict freedom and hold time and space captive.

Writing extensively about the organizing he stewarded with his Back of the Yards organization, Alinsky propels the role of the organizer to the forefront as “the architect and engineer” of campaigns. This hierarchical positioning of the organizer over the community is also found within most union organizing, where bureaucratic negotiations are managed by a weak leadership that is uncomfortably cozy with the bosses. This absence of antagonism renders the unions largely powerless vis-à-vis their employers. Nonprofit organizations have also adopted Alinsky’s model of “single-issue,” service-oriented community work administered by a paid staff who, in order to keep their jobs, must prioritize the desires of the foundations that fund them over the needs of the community. At their core, philanthropic foundations aim to determine the priorities and limits of community organizing. Foundations requiring grant recipients to focus on a single issue is a tactic, and the Alinsky model of organizing follows suit.

In his classic 1969 text Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert L. Allen details the strategic interests of these powerful foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, the Urban Coalition, and the National Alliance of Businessmen, in the fight for civil rights and black liberation. The nonprofit foundation, he writes,

was designed to counter the potentially revolutionary thrust of the recent black rebellions in major cities across the country. This program was formulated by America’s corporate elite—the major owners, managers, and directors of the giant corporations, banks, and foundations which increasingly dominate the economy and society as a whole—because they believe that the urban revolts pose a serious threat to economic and social stability.

This mixture of counterinsurgency on the one hand and accommodation and integration on the other haunts what we now know as the “nonprofit industrial complex,” defined by Dylan Rodríguez as “set of symbiotic relationships that link together political and financial technologies of state and owning-class proctorship and surveillance over public political intercourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements.” This helps explain why Finkelpearl’s Department of Cultural Affairs has commissioned artists to decorate a new NYPD station house in the Bronx: Both departments are arms of the same apparatus.

The Rubenstein development in the South Bronx is well underway and has been sold to Brookfield Properties for $165 million. Rubenstein remains in the South Bronx, as he has opened offices for Somerset along the Bruckner and now owns other properties in the area. The coffee shops are open and the real estate is booming. Ultimately, the wave was too strong to escape, and the people in the Bronx scramble now to get ahead of any city planning sessions for rezonings to try to stop these developer giveaways in their tracks. What developers, city officials, and politicians have ultimately taken from us is space.

In New York City, artists experience this crisis of the disappearance of space alongside other New Yorkers in many ways. Less space on the subway, which is constantly delayed and in disrepair. There is less space for work, as opportunities to sustain our lives continue to disappear and our hours and budgets are trimmed while the rent on our studios and our apartments increases.

Like many other major cities, New York has been reorganized into roommate-driven living systems where we barely restore our bodies, in order to repeat the process of sustaining our lives so we might continue to prop up the structures that continue to allot less time to actively pursue leisure or, more importantly, to organize and agitate for our freedom. How would an artistic practice that aims to disrupt alienation appear in our hallways, elevators, and all the spaces we share in our communities? What if these considerations were practiced outside of the art world, without foundation grants or institutional support as just an act toward freedom? Rather than only thinking about the aesthetic qualities of space, artists can aim to topple the neoliberal scaffold that holds capitalism steady above us, like a firmament.