Viva Loisaida : art and contested space in the Nuyorican Lower East Side, 1978-1988

Abstract

In the wake of New York City’s devastating fiscal crisis of 1975, the cycle of demolition and rebuilding that had typified the urban development of Manhattan came to a grinding halt. In poor neighbourhoods like the Lower East Side, with high numbers of residents of colour, derelict buildings proliferated as landlords abandoned their properties and municipal authorities cut services, leaving behind a crumbling and depopulated urban environment. At the time, the neighbourhood was home to a large Puerto Rican community, also known as Nuyoricans, who had long contested racialised and classed discrimination in housing, education, and employment. Embracing a turbulent but potential-filled reprise in capitalist urbanisation’s endless expansion, in the late 1970s, residents, artists, and activists in the Nuyorican enclaves of Loisaida and Pueblo Nuevo transformed derelict spaces into community gardens, cultural venues, and other sites for artmaking, social reproduction, and community organising, where new forms of collective life were imagined and instituted. In this thesis, I trace collective struggles to preserve and extend these practices and spaces in the 1980s, as the Lower East Side, bolstered by New York’s economic resurgence, became the site of a new art movement—the East Village scene—and rampant property speculation, both of which threatened to displace existing residents culturally and physically. Utilising a mixed methods approach that incorporates archival research, oral history, and digital research, and draws on art history, critical urbanism, and social theory, this thesis analyses projects that brought together different neighbourhood constituencies to critique and resist gentrification-led displacement. I argue that foregrounding Nuyorican art and activism offers vital perspectives on the conflicting social, cultural, political, and economic forces that reshaped the Lower East Side in the 1980s, the uneven ways in which these contested narratives have been remembered, and the archival practices that can facilitate their recognition in the present.