Rican/Struction: Radical Placemaking, Memory and Latinx Futurity in the South Bronx Casitas

Keywords: memory, Latinx futurity, community gardens, South Bronx, sovereignty, placemaking, mutual aid, Puerto Rico
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 15

Abstract

South Bronx community gardens, and the rural casitas (small houses) that are sited within them, are a testament to the borough’s legacy of social movement and evidence of it being a geographic incubator for ideas of collective struggle and survival. Built during the 1970’s and 1980’s in abandoned or burned-out lots, in the Melrose neighborhood alone, there are over a dozen casitas that evoke the traditional rural homes of Puerto Rico – mixing in this case nostalgia with social action.

Collective memories nurtured the will of communities to implement these urban-based solutions as counter-institutional models of spatial production and community building – transforming memory into agency and the recent past into a precedent for the future. These gardens are still very active today – providing mutual aid to adjacent communities, organizing cultural activities, and establishing alternative modes of sovereignty and placemaking. Broader relationships exist between most of the casitas. For example, by collectivizing to sell the produce they grow under a program called Asociación Huerto y Cultura.

The future contains the past, but the past already contained a future. These communities and agents of change foresaw threats of future dispossession – like when land regained its status as property – and devised methods to stay in place. In that sense, casitas are time traveling vessels with the ability to transverse space – reinventing social relations and the places that help sustain them. They are intergalactic. As a Nuyorican poet recently said: “We built our republic spaceship, this is our casita.”