30 Years Later: Reflections on Julio Rivera’s Life and Death
Photos taken for the La Guardia and Wagner Archives at the Queens Pride Parade in Queens on Sunday, June 3, 2018. Photographer: Luisa Madrid. (Wikipedia Commons).
Julio Rivera was a gay, New York-born Puerto Rican, originally from the Bronx, who lived in Jackson Heights and worked as a bartender. On July 2, 1990, he was brutally murdered inside a schoolyard in Jackson Heights, Queens, by three young white men from the area. He was just 29 years old. The tragic loss of a brother, an uncle, a friend, and another young gay life can be witnessed in the 2016 documentary film Julio of Jackson Heights, by director Richard Shpuntoff.
Rivera’s murder resembled the deaths of at least a dozen other gay men killed in the neighborhood between 1970-1990. Up until this point, none of these hate crimes had ever been solved or prosecuted. Initially, the New York Police Department (NYPD) refused to classify Rivera’s death as a bias attack and instead classified it as a drug related crime. In response a local LGBT contingent, with help from larger Manhattan-based organizations like Queer Nation, and Julio’s family, took action. Candlelight vigils and protests were organized. As a result of their grassroots organizing and the related media attention, the city eventually re-classified his death as a hate crime, and put a reward out for the arrest of the killers. The three men were later arrested and ultimately convicted.
To commemorate Julio Rivera’s death and raise the visibility of the LGBT community in Jackson Heights, local gay activists founded the Queens Pride Parade in 1992. The parade has taken place in early June every year since and regularly attracts 10,000-40,000 people. The founding of the Queens Pride Parade was one major LGBTQ political and community organizing success that came after Julio Rivera’s murder, but it also marked the beginning of local LGBT activists creating social service organizations and broadening the political goals of the LGBT community. In a matter of a few years multiple organizations were founded in the neighborhood to provide services to different LGBT communities including youth groups, a center for gay elders, and electoral politics groups. On the 20th anniversary of Julio Rivera’s death, the City of New York memorialized his life by officially naming 37th Avenue and 78th Street - “Julio Rivera Corner.”
Now, as we approach the 30th anniversary of Julio Rivera’s death, how best can we commemorate his life and legacy amid the background of a public health and economic crisis caused by COVID-19, as well as during this time of revolutionary change spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement?
Today, Jackson Heights is defined by its ethnic, racial, and socio-economic diversity. Nearly two-thirds of Jackson Heights’ residents are foreign-born and speak over thirty languages. The neighborhood is the primary “gayborhood” of Queens. The political organizing and coalition building that emerged in the years after Julio Rivera’s death had a positive impact on the neighborhood, the lives of LGBT people and created a new norm of LGBT visibility and coalition building that remains to this day. And yet, while Jackson Heights (and the surrounding neighborhoods of Corona and Elmhurst) remains a mutally inclusive place of immigrant, Latinx, and queer life and celebration, these neighborhoods also continue to be places of white supremacy and immigrant, Latinx, and LGBT death.
Understanding Julio Rivera’s murder as more than an arbitrary violent act can inform how we think about other kinds of violence, including the COVID pandemic and police brutality. Similar to how hate crimes are not random acts of violence, but rather are rooted in structural violence, so too is disease and its impacts. Physician, health and human rights expert Dr. Paul Farmer writes a great deal about structural violence - the way institutions, power, wealth inequality, racism, and sexism intersect to create unequal health outcomes. He has brought attention to how the medical field may diagnose a person with AIDS or tuberculosis, but the underlying “pre-existing conditions” are almost always intersecting structural violence(s) like poverty and an oppressive government, that lead a person to become ill or die prematurely. Farmer’s lens of analysis from medical anthropology helps connect the dots between hate crimes, COVID deaths, and police abolition.
Jackson Heights, Corona, and Elmhurst were the early epicenter of the COVID outbreak in NYC and the nation. During March, April, and May of this year these neighborhoods suffered a disproportionate number of infections and deaths. We lost important community leaders like Trans Latina activist Lorena Borjas. Some reasons for the high rates of infection include housing overcrowding and density, residents being largely essential workers who continued to commute using public transit, and a lack of access to healthcare and insurance.
Since COVID began hate crimes have been up against Asian Americans. In fact, starting from President Trump’s election in 2016 the number of hate crimes have risen nationally against all minority groups; African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and LGBT folks. In recent years, the number of murdered trans women of color has been staggering - the Human Rights Campaign reported at least 26 transgender people died in 2019, and so far this year at least 15 transgender people have been killed, with over 80% of them being Black women. The police rarely investigate or solve these violent crimes. Like in the case of Julio Rivera’s murder, when these types of hate crimes are investigated and prosecuted, the activists who pushed law enforcement to care and be accountable, experience a conviction as a major accomplishment and win. At the end of 2019 when the NYPD launched a new hate crime investigation unit, to some this was perceived as a progressive step. In turn, similar and even more complicated questions can be asked about why the only justice for police officers who have committed abuse and murder is also imprisonment.
Photos taken for the La Guardia and Wagner Archives at the Queens Pride Parade in Queens on Sunday, June 3, 2018. Photographer: Luisa Madrid. (Wikipedia Commons).
The organizing that local LGBT activists, and Julio Rivera’s friends and family accomplished over thirty years—from holding vigils, marches, and press events until his death was recognized as a hate crime, his murderers brought to carceral justice, to later founding celebrations of gay life and social service organizations, to having a street named for him—has been a triumph. This progression of events set off by one tragedy is a testament to people power and the love for community.
The tragedy of George Floyd’s death at the hands’ of Minneapolis police officers and Black Lives Matter organizing is again demonstrating people power, love for community, and transforming the definition of what justice should be. This is a new framework of justice, different from the framework of justice for Julio Rivera from the 1990s till now.
In the midst of mass uprisings in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement – when the goal is the abolition of police, prisons, and to remake the entire criminal (in)justice system, beginning by defunding police departments–we must imagine new ways for communities to respond to hate crimes without the prison industrial complex. If neo-Nazis draw swastikas in Jewish neighborhoods, how can a city that is free of police respond? If an Asian American elder is pushed and a victim of racial slurs, how can a city that is free of police respond? If a Black Trans Woman is murdered, how can a city that is free of police respond? We must grapple with our desire to protect racial and religious communities, and in particular Queer and Trans Black people and people of color, with our desire for police and prison abolition. The way to memorialize the 30th anniversary of Julio Rivera’s death is to continue to fight for social change and an end to all types of violence against queer people, Black people, and people of color in Queens and beyond. How we bring justice for the friends and family of people who have been victims of hate crimes in the present and future without the police and incarceration, will be part of this revolutionary work.
Arianna Martinez is a Professor of Urban Studies at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. She received her PhD from Rutgers University in urban planning and geography in 2011. Arianna’s research has centered the criminalization of Latino immigrant communities in municipalities where both space and citizenship are hotly contested. Her current scholarship analyzes the political transformation(s) and empowerment of Latinx and immigrant LGBTQ enclaves. For the past four years Arianna has enjoyed putting urban theory into practice, fighting displacement and prioritizing community control of land with Queens Neighborhoods United (QNU). She is happy to call Queens her home.