Building
the Loisaida Community in the 1960s
In the 1960s, while
the media, politicians and property owners were
inured with an "East Village" rather than a
Lower East Side, notable changes were well under way
in the Puerto Rican community east of Tompkins Square
Park. Two decades of migration flows, urban renewal
policies and a tightening of the city’s low-income
housing supply fostered the development of a sizeable
ethnic residential enclave called Loisaida ("Spanglish"
for Lower East Side).
Beauty parlors,
laundries, bodegas, and Latino social clubs
opened along Avenues C and D. Restaurants and
luncheonettes featured island favorites, such as cuchifritos
and comidas criollas. In summers, the
neighborhood streets and parks bustled with cultural
activities. Salsa music emanated from car radios and
open tenement windows. Middle-aged men peddled piragueros
("snow" cones made of shaved ice and
flavored syrups) on street corners and along the East
River Park. Young men worked late in the night in
makeshift auto body shops while others played dominos
with oldtimers on kitchen tables brought outdoors. As
prior generations of tenement dwellers had done
during summer months, residents preferred to
socialize on sidewalks, fire escapes and rooftops
than in their cramped, hot apartments.
Residents created
associations such as Pueblo Nuevo and The Real Great
Society/Charas, Inc., which peaked in the late 1960s.
The Real Great Society, whose agenda included
economic empowerment, emerged out of two street gangs,
the Lower East Side Dragons and the Assassins, who
were centered in the Chelsea neighborhood. Other
community-based organizations, such as the Lower East
Side Puerto Rican Action Committee, emerged as
advocates of rapid and often radical social change.
The Puerto Rican version
of the Black Panthers— the Young Lords Party (which
split with the Chicago-based Young Lords in 1969)
— was centered in the Bronx but was active on
the Lower East Side and other barrios across
the city. Local hermandades (brotherhoods),
organized around island hometowns, sponsored street
parties, dances, and extravagant neighborhood
processions on religious feast days. In the Lower
East Side barrio, local poets and writers
recounted the life left behind on the island, the
migration narrative, and the hopes and harsh
realities of urban life on the mainland. Poems, music
and other cultural forms almost always made direct
reference to the ancestral home but they also
acknowledged a commitment to the Lower East Side as a
Puerto Rican community. In 1974, two poets and
activists, Chino Garcia and Bimbo Rivas, called their
adopted home east of Avenue B, Loisaida to signify
the area’s Puerto Rican heritage and identity.
The name has since been retained.
Image
(click
to enlarge)
 |
____________________________________
The book upon which this
web site is based,
Selling
the Lower East Side,
is available
directly through 
or order through 
Site design © 2000:
Kurt
Reymers and Dan
Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of
Sociology)
|
