Introduction

Perhaps the most vivid moment from my conversation with Wanda McAllister, the one where her voice seemed to drift beyond the confines of our spacious McDonald’s into the channels of my mind, was when she began to describe Morissania from her childhood. She said "Our neighborhood was our family, you know? It's like each one raised one, each one teached [sic] one." She went on to describe a neighborhood where neighbors knew one another and children respected each others' parents. Her words brought to life a community so intertwined that it felt, at least from my outside perspective, to be a family of hundreds. 

This neighborhood feel did not last. As the crack epidemic grew in prominence and families began to succumb to drug addiction and rising crime, the neighborhood began to disintegrate. Wanda no longer recognized her neighborhood, and families began to move away. Now, when taking an occasional drive through the area, Wanda's former home in Claremont Village seems all but unrecognizable to her eyes.

In positioning her rich family narrative against the rising social milieu of the crack epidemic, serialized forced displacement, and the frustrations of public housing, Wanda’s story complicates the common prototypic narrative of the South Bronx. By contextualizing her individual experience within a broader sociohistorical narrative, I found myself witnessing a natural tension that comes whenever a macrocosmic story is linked to an individual one: that which is remembered in one narrative is forgotten, or perhaps ignored, in another.