Revisiting the Community Las Madrinas Built in Los Sures
Marta Avilés, one of the main subjects in Los Sures (1984), and her children. Image Credit: UnionDocs.
“They were Mother Teresa in high heels, carrying a switchblade. And they were virtuous, classy, but they were ‘dangerous’ when anybody wanted to mess with us.” —Evelyn Borges on the madrinas of Los Sures
Puerto Rican madrinas from Los Sures in 1980s Williamsburg were the thread weaving their community together. While many lived in poverty, up against the patriarchy and rampant discrimination, these caretakers were a lifeline, a sense of place, to newcomers and longtime residents alike.
The neighborhood was the focus of Los Sures, director Diego Echeverria’s 1984 documentary. The 40-year-old film followed five people in the once-impoverished but vibrant Southside community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, then mostly inhabited by Puerto Ricans and a few Dominican families. Three of the interviewees were women—Marta Aviles, Ana Maria Soto, and Evelyn Borges—all single mothers; but they had dreams and ideas of life that at the time weren’t fully appreciated. Yet, they lived on, a stronghold in communities deeply committed to religion and each other.
Poster for Los Sures. Image Credit: UnionDocs
One of the women was Evelyn Borges, a daughter of a madrina, who worked for the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, a Williamsburg-based nonprofit that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2024. The organization helped empower poor and working-class women through self-realization, economic self-determination, and support groups. Reflecting today, Borges speaks of these women, who never fully received their flowers, with admiration.
“These caretakers were a lifeline, a sense of place, to newcomers and longtime residents alike.”
“Before we even talk about the women and their strength and who they were in the ‘80s, we have to talk about women before us, those women who we stand on the shoulders of,” Borges begins.
Attracted by the factory jobs available in the area, the first waves of Puerto Rican migration to Williamsburg came post-WWII in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of the young women already arrived in Brooklyn disadvantaged; they sought a better life for their families. However, largely due to prejudice, the only viable option for them was to get married to make ends meet.
But the men also struggled to find work, leaving the women to emotionally uphold their families on the mainland as best they could. As the men hustled, the women also had to make sure their partners didn’t lose their integrity and pride, especially as the men sometimes directed their anger at the world at them. Over time, some of these women became madrinas, providing guidance, a safe haven, or food whenever someone from the neighborhood knocked on their doors. They passed this way of living to subsequent generations, so by the 1960s—when Borges moved into the neighborhood—there was a robust network of madrinas.
La Borinqueña, 2004, Photographic print, 2009.004.8; James and Karla Murray Counter Culture exhibition photographs, Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.
In 1963, after living in Brownsville, Brooklyn, for a couple of years, 12-year-old Borges and her mom packed their bags and headed to Los Sures after a young girl, who suffered a gunshot injury to the eye, knocked on their door after the local hospital refused to treat her.
The girl specifically sought Borges’s mom, a madrina in Brownsville. When the family moved to Los Sures, her mom continued to show up for her community as a madrina. “Some of my classmates were beaten up by their parents and they would come to my mom's house, and it was a safe house,” Borges recalls.
When Borges moved into Los Sures, las madrinas were mostly young grandmothers, who migrated as part of earlier waves, now with children in their 40s and grandchildren in their teens and preteens. Physically exhausted and beaten down by the system, they continued to fight. Some became drug dealers, seeking to financially provide for their families, amid the return of soldiers from the Vietnam War and the start of the AIDS epidemic. Despite the systemic challenges and lack of governmental support, they persisted because of sisterhood and their or their children’s dreams.
Evelyn Borges, one of the main subjects in Los Sures, in 1984. Image Credit: UnionDocs
Evelyn Borges, one of the main subjects in Los Sures, in 2014. Image Credit: UnionDocs
They and their community also turned to religion, leaning on their faith for hope and repentance. “When I was about 15 in 1966, there was a young girl being brought out in a body bag,” Borges says. “Everybody knew that she . . . had an abortion. And all the madrinas of that neighborhood were outside praying for the child. They understood they were the sisterhood of pain.”
When people suffered, they looked to the madrinas, who would sometimes carry out santería rituals. The film depicted these moments in ceremonies held in small commercial spaces on the ground floor of a residential building. People gathered for cleanses from the neighborhood santeros as a way to cope with socioeconomic circumstances and hold on to their cultures. It would even affect how they dressed. “You would wear the colors on a particular dress with the blue colors of the Virgin Mary,” Borges explains. “San Martin de Porres would be black and beige, and you would tie the skirt. You would only wear that and not curse and give up something.”
Despite the struggles and the sadness that could permeate the neighborhood, there was also an impenetrable aura, partially due to religion but also because they had each other. “The spirit. It was a feeling of extension from our apartment to the building to the block to the corner,” Borges adds. “A family of love. We were together. If something happens to us, we’ll be taken care of. It was home.”
Borges remembers a fire that could have had a more disastrous result. “[It was] due to something electrical in our building where I was living. Everybody had to run out in the middle of the night,” Borges says. “It was five floors, and everybody was out except one little old lady, Doña Fefa. The sweetest little old lady in the world. She was on the top floor. Three of the [neighborhood] men went into the fire in the building, and Doña Fefa was taking a bath. They banged the door down, and the men took her out. They wrapped her up in a blanket and brought her downstairs. She was carried by these grown men with such love and such care. And all the women were in tears because Doña Fefa was saved.”
“It was a feeling of extension from our apartment to the building to the block to the corner.”
As the daughter of a madrina, Borges first became a surrogate madrina as a young adult. For example, her neighbors would seek her help to fill out their housing, food stamp, or welfare paperwork. She assisted them without passing judgment and kept their affairs confidential. “My mom and I always had an open door,” Borges says.
Just like the madrinas before her, she cared deeply about the people of Los Sures. In the film, a 32-year-old Borges, who was already working for Neighborhood Women in 1983, advocated for the people living in a neighboring building that caught on fire. She called on the community to help the affected families.
“One of the key points of The National Congress of Neighborhood Women was that they used the people that were in their communities as their leaders to organize,” she says. “For instance, in Cooper Housing, that was the Black population, [so they had a Black woman lead] and then they had someone in the Italian section. I called them Madrinas, the key point people,” she explains. Borges was the lead for the Latinx community.
At the time the organization received city grants to organize women and develop their leadership. It also provided GED and ESL classes, as well as neighborhood college programs, one of which operated out of Los Sures, so people could obtain their associate's degree. “Education was important to us in the organization in organizing against the war on poverty,” Borges says.
Marta Avilés, one of the main subjects in Los Sures, and her daughters (1984). Image Credit: UnionDocs
Marta Avilés, one of the main subjects in Los Sures, and her daughters (1984). Image Credit: UnionDocs
The group understood the important work women performed for their families and neighbors. “Neighborhood Women helped promote women to take on leadership roles and begin to see themselves as leaders and ultimately to organize and win these big issues like housing,” founder Jan Peterson says. “It was all movement-oriented, bringing in a framework of thinking that the women used later on. [However], the program ceased to exist because of defunding.”
After a year at Neighborhood Women, Borges took up a teaching position at the local high school, Eastern District, but quit after 10 days. Even though the teenagers, many who were from Los Sures, respected and listened to her, the school faced bigger issues and disregarded the students. In 1984, when the film premiered, Borges was working for NYC Health + Hospitals, in part, inspired by the discrimination she and the community experienced in medical institutions.
Borges left her mom’s building in 1987. By then drugs were prevalent in the neighborhood, and seeing the madrinas sell drugs was a painful reminder of the difficult circumstances and an impetus for her to move.
“There was a grandmother living above me who would sell drugs at night, and she would sleep during the day,” Borges says. “She had a grandchild, about 7 years old, who would run around during the day. One day he jumped out the window and fell into a skylight. And I looked out the window, and I decided I was going to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. I didn't want that for my children. So I did what my mother did. I just went out and looked for an apartment and moved in the next day three blocks away.”
She remained in the new building for three years before she moved to Greenpoint in 1990.
Borges, who now lives in Virginia, became part of Los Sures because the crew heard her name around the neighborhood. When they asked Borges to participate in the documentary, she turned it down because she never wanted to be the focal point. She believed it was las madrinas of Los Sures who deserved recognition. She proposed an alternative idea: Film four to five older women and document how they came from Puerto Rico and their lives in New York City. The filmmakers ended up choosing three women and two men.
Los Sures might not show the depth of the work the madrinas did, but thanks to the documentary, even four decades later, we can still see how they transformed their community.
For more information about Los Sures, visit Union Docs.
Damaly Gonzalez is a Brooklynite, Williamsburg-native of Puerto Rican descent that goes by she/her/hers. She is a freelance identity and culture journalist who writes about music, art, film/tv, and social justice issues through a critical and analytical lens. Her work mainly focuses on latinidad, memory, and displacement. She has been published in Refinery29, Rolling Stone, ARTNews, and others.
Damaly is also a Writing Tutor at LaGuardia Community College. She holds a Masters in History and Urban Sociology from The Graduate Center, CUNY, focused on the study of gentrification. Follow her on Instagram @damalywrites.