Policing the Subway and the Politics of Endurance
Photo credit: Andrew Padilla.
Recently, videos of cops went viral. They were caught pointing guns, sucker punching young black men and arresting Latina womxn selling churros at the MTA train stations of New York City. We have learned from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements (Remember Ramsey Orta), and others around the world that to distrust and record the police is justified, can be a militant gesture of care, and can help protect people’s lives .
Womxn selling churros in front of the train station asked, “Why did they handcuff her? She is not doing anything wrong.” Tragically, the vendor who was arrested said the same thing, all the while explaining to the police that she doesn’t understand English. What do we make of this? The routinary presence of womxn selling churros on subway platforms are not accessories or part of immigrant “culture,” but an economy threatened by a reinvigorated ‘broken windows’ policing, which bestows power on the NYPD to deem the underground sale of fried dough illegal. People are responding in solidarity with vendors, yet the City, MTA and NYPD response to protests against this abuse is to compartmentalize and justify it with superficial concerns about sanitary handling of food—a pretext to the criminalization of womxn selling churros. This hides the violent, dehumanizing treatment of immigrant womxn street vendors in public space (whose health is of no concern). Moreover, if public health was a legitimate concern, it would include the working conditions of womxn vendors who stand for long hours in cold weather, rain, extreme heat, and no shade. For many, this job is the only other alternative to domestic work—an industry that belittles and exploits womxn— the added plus is not having a boss. Mayor de Blasio does not shy away from standing by the police and vendor arrests, because as he said, “they cause congestion and shouldn’t have been there.” While vending regulations are outside of the cops’ jurisdiction, they allegedly arrest persistent offenders.
The increased police presence in the subway provides some journalists with adjectives for headlines that delight the legality-thirsty crowds with dehumanizing dog whistles. They produce articles that normalize describing human beings as “illegal,” speaking about people’s immigration status, and brazenly asking about modes of migration on record. The act of coming out as undocumented has inadvertently created hierarchies between immigrants. The good, hardworking migrant versus the bad, illegal, criminal and unemployed. Under this view, some migrants, like the young and the educated, are congratulated for their achievements “without” immigration status, while for others, endurance is demanded.
The result is that today, journalists, opinion makers, and politicians contribute to the criminalization of vendors on the subway platform and all things related to their existence. The demand for vending permits has also created hurdles that furthered their vulnerability. Street vendor womxn are often the main breadwinners of their household. Some of them are probably the mothers of Dreamers or could have been Dreamers themselves, but missed the age deadline.
Photo credit: Emma Whitford.
We are currently grappling with how predatory real estate moguls are the dominant class in this city and how the city and state government enable their power to set the prices of every square meter. This is an alliance that grants them the ability to rearrange our neighborhoods, spaces and skyline. The role of the NYPD then is to keep the city amenable for business so that they keep profiting from the bloated prices of real estate and hyper-speculation of space. Our subway is an example of how the city fulfills the interests of capitalist accumulation of real estate, plowing through the city to open up new pipelines. The city and state want to run the subway as an enterprise for profit rather than as a common good. When Governor Cuomo announced plans to spend 249 million dollars hiring police to save $200 million on fare evasion, we understood that is wasn’t about a bankrupt MTA but about policing the poor. Currently, there are more than 2,500 officers patrolling the MTA. Cops confiscating the merchandise of womxn selling churros and fruit in the subway (and on the street) are not new practices, yet it continues to affect womxn street vendors disproportionately.
More cops in MTA subway stations under the pretext of preventing fare evasion contributes to the privatization of public space. It extends control over the already limited and surveilled spaces for people who live in New York. The subway platforms are among the few remaining spaces where people in New York congregate massively besides department stores. MTA service is hell and yet the everyday journey worsens by police interactions with people who are barely able to stop and catch a breath during their ant-like swirling movements. Still, for outgoing police commissioner James O’Neill, fare evasion is the beginning act of a chronic criminal; a hallmark in broken windows policing ideology. This is the same ideology that deems the unhoused and people with mental illness that use the subway platform as persistent offenders vis-a-vis poverty and abandonment. The reality is that quality of life in New York City for the non-rich, the underemployed, unhoused, and womxn of color is unsustainable. Any cursory glance at homelessness and incarceration rates of African American and Latinx populations would quickly dispel the myth of New York City as the harmonious melting pot.
Now the city, in join cooperation between a warring governor and mayor has declared poverty illegal? In the past decade the regime of white supremacy has increased its methods of criminalization against immigrant womxn, men, and children. The federal programs of immigrant detention provides enough images of vulnerable immigrants. These images confirm in the imagination of US bootstrap ideology, the expected prerequisite of enduring hardship, pain, rejection and difficulty that one must overcome in order to enjoy the fruits of the US imperialist project. It is not worth it. The act of being malagradecidxs, ungrateful; is also a militant gesture of care to protect our dignity. Whether at the hands of ICE on a federal level or in confrontation with NYPD at the city level, we have come to understand the maxim, converted into a protest chant on the streets of New York, “La migra, la policia, la misma porqueria!” Such an understanding demands of any immigrant movement an abolitionist position, and must join with the call in New York City to abolish jails and abolish police in the same breath that we call for the abolition of ICE.
Despite it all, we must keep each other safe with militant gestures of care. Womxn in Latin America and the Caribbean are taking to the streets and plazas to protest gender-based violence and the state. Everywhere we are tired of enduring. The economy of womxn in the Global South is linked to the ones created by womxn here in the internal Global South within the U.S. Our militant gesture of care is a transnational feminism and we follow their lead in saying that patriarchy are the judges that don’t prosecute cops that kill black womxn, trans people and youth. It’s the state that creates concentration camps for immigrant children. Patriarchy is the cop arresting food vendors, brutalizing black youth selling candy. And it is the Governor and the Police Commissioner who criminalize womxn for taking in their hands the means to make a living. Let’s continue to record them and find more militant gestures of care and be in the streets.
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maría a garcía is an andina, migrantx from Quito, Ecuador. She is a feminist educator, and organizer. She’s a cooperative worker interpreter, translator and language justice practitioner. Currently she’s a doctoral candidate in the Geography Department at Rutgers University and is conducting dissertation research on North-South migration to Ecuador and its transnational economies and landscapes. She documents the economies of the migrant Global South within the United States. Her interests are co-creating and decolonizing knowledge that contributes to feminist transnational social movements that fight for social, economic, spatial, gender and racial justice. She organizes with the transnational feminist comité de mujeres ecuayork.