Positionality and Perceptions of Displacement
In 1960, before his family’s apartment was razed to make way for the Mitchel NYCHA project, he, his mother, and his sister took the $500 they were paid by New York City government to vacate, and moved to Highbridge in the Bronx. They moved into a one-bedroom where they paid $70 a month, nearly twice the rent for the five-bedroom that accommodated his whole family in Mott Haven. When I asked Tony where his brothers and father went, he told me that the apartment could only accommodate him and his sister, the youngest two, and that his father had passed away from his alcoholism sometime before the move.6 Tony laid low for the next eleven years, occupying his time with work as an elevator repairman, and equal parts exercise and drinking4.
Leading up to the move, and during those eleven years that Tony stoked his alcoholism, the tides of displacement carried many of Tony’s friends and neighbors to Highbridge and many other neighborhoods further north, but not all in the willing pursuit of higher education, as he had made it out. “You could see it in the church, in the little struggle” said Father Bob of St. Joseph’s Church, “You can be threatened by enemies, but not everybody that doesn’t speak your language or dress the way you dress or eat the way you eat is an enemy after all. No sense of understanding. It was an alienation.”1 Father Bob hints at the fear of difference often called White Flight, which was undoubtedly aggravated by the extreme poverty being concentrated in the South Bronx. The toxic combination of deindustrialization and redlining meant that those who moved in were likely stuck there, unable to save any money or take out a loan so they might relocate. Thompson Fullilove put the onus on city planners like Robert Moses, saying “Planners had control over the directions in which people could move, and the spaces they would occupy … eliminating connecting streets to inhibit travel in and out; and housing people in public housing projects that were cut off from the flow of the city.”7 Fullilove reinforces the idea that physical segregation from the production of mainstream culture and wealth downtown has profound impact and those who are segregated. There were no productive outlets for people in the South Bronx, and everything surrounding them was screaming that they were something less than human. These feelings festered and were externalized in extreme ways: “By 1970 I would say that this neighborhood was completely decimated.”1 That is Father Bob again.
“In 1971, I buried my mother, and after that I wanted to do something with my life. Like I said, she didn’t carry me for nine months to be a drunken bum”4 Tony told me. At twenty-eight, he turned a new leaf: quitting drinking overnight and giving his time to the Church. He worked at a number of religious non-profit organizations, mostly working with poor and needy children, and then answering a call from two friends of his in 1980, he came back to the South Bronx to start a men’s homeless shelter. What he commented on rather than the burnt out buildings was the social condition: “Coming up in the area there was always people to help you. And what I seen coming the second time around: these people were forgotten and looked down on. And very few people were reaching out and trying to help ‘em.”4
Looking back, it does not seem there was much resistance amongst the white ethnics to their displacement. Father Bob provides a narrative which may suggest that residents of the South Bronx began to realize that the force of displacement was larger than the Puerto Ricans and African Americans themselves, that the white ethnics began to empathize with the conditions of their to-be successors as they understood how different the newcomers’ were from their own. Tony grew up poor, fighting to be fed in the morning with his many siblings, but he went on to live in apartments many times more expensive than where he was born. He never struggled to have a job. As Tony puts it, “people keep saying, ‘Yeah, well, we did it!’ Yeah, you did it, but you did it with a lot of help! We did it because we knew somebody who dragged us along. But they don’t know anybody to drag them along.”5