Organized Hope: Reflections on the People’s Cultural Plan
“Pick It!”, Intervention at El Museo del Barrio 2011. Image courtesy of artist.
Due to the lack of rapid response to address the growing chaos unfolding in front of us, The People’s Cultural Plan (The PCP) organized an urgent list of demands to the city and to art institutions. It took us two days to complete our list as Facebook newsfeeds filled up with testimonials of teaching artists being laid off due to museum programming stoppage. Stories have augmented to include job terminations among people in the service industry, retail, fast food and small nonprofits. With no relief or any sick leave coverage offered for home attendants, doormen, and the millions working under the table—in addition to those mentioned above—we are witnessing what is a regular occurrence in working class Latinx communities. Being uninsured and living paycheck to paycheck within one the wealthiest art centers in the world has been a persistent reality for many IBPOC Latinx artists that is now more visible and widespread.
When The PCP came together in 2016 as a response to New York City’s first ever cultural plan, I do not think we anticipated our plan would need to readjust to a pandemic. Instead, we wanted to change the direction of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), which the City had begun using as a bridge for real estate developers to work with the Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) to decimate working class neighborhoods as middle-class and upper middle-class gentrifiers priced out of more expensive neighborhoods flocked in.
I decided to organize with The PCP because I love this tragic city. Growing up in it, I learned about my hixpanidad/latinx-idad entre comunidades de tíos y tías pegados desde el Caribe hasta Sudamérica. Living here as an adult, I have come to understand that I grew up on Mannahatta, the unceded land of the Lenni Lenape and that I am the child of immigrants from Quisqueya, the unceded land of the Taíno. I learned to be proud of my afrodescendientes and that my wide Antillean family was much more familiar familia. Here, I saw the fight for language access rights through the stories of my Puerto Rican tías telling me about being hit by white co-workers for speaking Spanish in the factories during the 1950s. During the Carter and Reagan presidencies, there was no such thing as Hudson or Hamilton Heights. The hydrants in these locations blasted water into cars whose passengers had not drawn up the windows fast enough on the hottest of summer days. I lived through quadruple double-parking in Inwood and table-to-table domino sidewalk games under the trees all along Broadway from 165th Street to 153rd. While in university, I experienced the inability of professors to understand that mine was what Gloria Anzaldúa calls in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, “a new consciousness.” Aquí, I experienced them splitting us up and then lumping us together into a convenient word, because it was easier for them to categorize us. They did not get us, yet they needed to have power over us. They knew they needed to willingly erase everything about us because of historical guilt over the brutality that created them, the “white American” and the cosmic that created us, la raza de muchxs colores.
Because of COVID-19, I’ve started hearing about restaurant workers being told not to come in, people in prisons not being able to communicate with family members, and the catatopshe awaiting migrants already fleeing the effects of the self-serving economic policies of the United States, Europe, and the World Bank. With little access to proper testing available in this country because of the arrogance of this administration and few receiving government aid to take preventative measures, The PCP felt that it had to hold art institutions and the DCLA accountable to all art workers on every level. It has astonished me that as of yet, not one billionaire has offered a billion of their dollars to help the working people of this country who have built their empires. There has never been a level playing field—it has always been a mudslide for the poor while the wealthy remain on stilts.
Perhaps thirty years from now, the COVID-19 pandemic will be considered the great equalizer the country has been waiting for. This virus has almost shut down Wall Street. It has also stopped evictions, brought low-cost internet deals from telecommunication monopolies, and caused discussion about the importance of paid sick leave. There is even talk about cancelling student debt. But after the pandemic is over, how long will any strides forward last for poor IBPOC communities who have always been living in the time of plague because of racism and systemically provoked job and food insecurities? This is already panning out as the richest get tested and prisoners are being allowed to die inside.
As artists, we are trained to ask questions. To analyze, observe, and then act. While the financial world falls apart, on social media is where community networks of residents, cultural workers, educators, and activists are asking the real questions to do work that reshapes the political conditions leading this country into an inevitable catastrophic collapse. Food distributions and money collections are only a few examples in which people are showing up for each other in ways the government has not, a historically consistent truth for IBPOC communities. In an effort to reduce social isolation, some Latinx artists have posted offerings, recipes, zoom DJ sessions, and poetry—all forms of mutual aid embedded in personal histories and knowledge. Inspiration grows through these collective practices of communities seeking communal control of land, food, and education. This work is not looking to hoard any of these resources away. The people doing mutual aid understand capitalism cannot be reformed. They are seeking to reshape how resources have been unfairly distributed favoring the most privileged. And they’re committed to ending the stealing and commodification of natural resources without which we would not be able to exist.
The opportunity is presenting itself for drastic change to finally occur in the city because no matter how hard many may wish to continue with the old, cruel way of business, the rest will have been practicing something else: Care. And this little idea will force most to accept that it is a new world no matter what happens tomorrow. Each day is another day further from the Earth we once knew. Renacimos unx dentro del otrx. Like star fruit. With fists up in the air, we are renacimientxs of the streets, de los barrios, of the border, prisons, universities, and beyond.
To read The PCP’s list of demands in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, click here.
Alicia Grullón is from and based in New York City. Grullón’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions including The 8th Floor, Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Latinx Project, BRIC House for Arts and Media, School of Visual Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University, Socrates Sculpture Park, Performa 11, and Art in Odd Places. She has received grants from the Puffin Foundation, Bronx Council on the Arts, the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York, and Franklin Furnace Archives. She has participated in residencies in the United States and Korea among them The Bronx Museum’s AIM program. She has presented for Creative Time Summit 2015, The Royal College of Art, and United States Association for Art Educators. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Creative Time Reports, ArtNet News, The Columbia Spectator and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory from Taylor and Francis. Grullón is the recipient of the inaugural Colene Brown Art Prize for 2019. She received a BFA from TISCH at New York University, an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz and has done doctoral coursework in Art and Art Education at the Teacher’s College at Columbia University. Grullón is an adjunct at The School of Visual Arts and the City University of New York. She is also currently Artist-in-Residence at the Hemispheric Institute.