Audio-Visual Discussion Board Posts. You must both start a thread and respond to at least one student’s thread about each AV assignment. Your posts can address any of the following questions: 1.) What is the subject matter of the video or recording? 2.) What stood out to you about its narrative? What did you see or hear that illuminated its most interesting meanings? 3.) How does the video or recording connect with the readings? Requirements: 250 words for the discussion and 100 words for the response. I will attach the post to be responded. Boyle Heights and the Fight against Gentrification as State Violence Kean O’Brien, Leonardo Vilchis, Corina Maritescu American Quarterly, Volume 71, Number 2, June 2019, pp. 389-396 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2019.0033 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/728851 Access provided at 21 Mar 2020 23:17 GMT from University of California, San Diego Boyle Heights and the Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence | 389 Boyle Heights and the Fight against Gentrification as State Violence Kean O’Brien, Leonardo Vilchis, and Corina Maritescu T he history of the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles is a chronicle of Los Angelinos struggling against all odds to build community. Over generations, Jewish, African American, Mexican, and Japanese people were pushed to become one community in Boyle Heights, through racially restrictive covenants banning property sales to people of color. Boyle Heights is now a predominantly Mexican neighborhood with a history of anticapitalist, antiracist resistance: against the Vietnam War, against the gang and crack epidemics, against state brutality. This is the place where the coalition of antiwar Chicano activists including the Chicano Moratorium and the ‘Brown Berets’ (who organized student walkouts in the late 1960s) held an antiwar march in 1970 attended by over thirty thousand people. Over the last twenty years, many women residents of Boyle Heights came together through the organization Union de Vecinos and fought to end violence from gang members and from police in their neighborhood, literally negotiating ceasefires between members of rival gangs. These struggles have created a strong sense of identity for the people of Boyle Heights, who want to enjoy the fruits of their labor over the decades. But the city has a different idea for this neighborhood: after women risked their lives for this tightly knit community, once the neighborhood became ‘safe,’ Los Angeles real estate developers, administrators, and politicians had a newfound interest in its development and began laying down plans for a new arts district, which will result in mass displacement. According to research from Union De Vecinos, over the last twenty years, more than $3 billion has been invested into Boyle Heights by the city and the state, resulting in the displacement of twenty-five hundred families at the hands of development. The Housing Authority actively pushed out families whose members had been formally criminalized or penalized via immigration status, credit, and police records. After decades fighting for their community, Boyle Heights residents are losing their businesses, their neighbors, and their homes, watching with grief as their neighborhood becomes a gentrified ghost of years past and a vulnerable 2019 The American Studies Association 390 | American Quarterly market for speculative development. And so the resistance continues today, against police brutality, immigration raids, and mass displacement, as Boyle Heights residents fight to protect their neighborhood from being disappeared by the state. This project of aggressive arts-oriented development in Boyle Heights began with a $36 million ‘revitalization’ project for the Sixth Street Bridge, started in 2015, which would connect the ‘new arts district’ in Boyle Heights with the existing Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles, itself once a thriving multiethnic community that was turned into a gentrified ‘arts district’ through arts-oriented development. The redevelopment has also included an expansion of the Metro public transit line, and the arrival of more than a dozen new art galleries, which took over factories and warehouses that closed after struggling to pay their increasing rents. These galleries were promoted and supported by local politicians, speculated on by investors, and rightly understood by the community to be an advance offense of gentrification. The community saw that Boyle Heights had been slated for specifically arts-oriented gentrification, and therefore an interruption in the arrival of outsider art, artists, and speculators was critical if the community was to stand a chance at protecting the neighborhood against successive waves of gentrification, like real estate development. In real estate parlance, an arts-centered neighborhood is a ‘beautiful up-andcoming’ neighborhood, and a ‘beautiful up-and-coming’ neighborhood is a lot harder to defend. Boyle Heights residents banded together to ask that these artists and gallerists leave their neighborhood. When artists invested in housing rights joined the fight, an alliance was born: B.H.A.A.A.D (Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement), made up of members from Union de Vecinos, Defend Boyle Heights, Los Angeles Tenants Union, School of Echoes, and multiple affinity groups of L.A. Artists. B.H.A.A.A.D. named a boycott of the nascent Boyle Heights ‘arts district’ and all its galleries, calling for galleries to close their doors and leave Boyle Heights, and for all artists to stop exhibiting in, supporting, or frequenting these galleries. One of these galleries was PSSST, a queer-run space whose stated intention was to showcase underrepresented QTPOC (Queer, Trans, People of Color) artists. PSSST also inhabited a space less than four hundred feet away from public housing, which was at the time under threat of privatization due to gentrification. Over the next few months, PSSST became a kind of ‘ground zero’ for the fight for a few different reasons. One, a few of the artist members of B.H.A.A.A.D. had personal or professional relationships with the PSSST gallerists, and hoped they might leverage these relationships to foster an hon- Boyle Heights and the Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence | 391 est critical dialogue. Two, a large contingent of B.H.A.A.A.D. members were QTPOC artists who were deeply invested in supporting, challenging, and critiquing spaces that claimed to share their identities, practices, and struggles. And three, PSSST’s own mission statement seemed to invite the exact type of dialogue and criticism B.H.A.A.A.D. was asking for, and members began to hope they might negotiate a peaceful and constructive PSSST departure that could serve as a model to the other galleries. PSSST positioned itself as a radical space, writing in a statement we sourced from their now-defunct website that ‘Artists supporting artists is / engaging in hard conversations / . . . / questioning existing power structures / holding ourselves accountable / letting go of control / looking / listening / slowing down/ showing up.’ And so, when PSSST entered Boyle Heights in 2016, B.H.A.A.A.D. demanded that it act as advertised: that it delay the opening and make space for a community dialogue on the impact of the galleries on the low-income neighborhood. PSSST delayed the opening, but found the community of Boyle Heights had more demands around the dialogue: they wanted more time to organize more residents, to give folks a chance to create a list of demands, and the community wanted this conversation to be ongoing. PSSST wanted to get back to business as usual, so it rescheduled the opening for a few weeks later. The problems with PSSST became obvious: it positioned its programming as radical and intersectional, but the queer and trans artists involved in the gallery did not question their investment in the racist, classist, displacing process of gentrification. B.H.A.A.A.D mounted a campaign of sustained efforts and direct actions with the goal of shutting PSSST’s doors and turning the space over to the community of Boyle Heights. One of these demonstrations was a block party on the steps of PSSST to celebrate the delayed opening, where activists projected images and information sourced from the community, where residents spoke about the constant threat of gentrification and the long-term struggle to defend Boyle Heights, and where musicians and DJs performed for dozens of Boyle Heights residents and accomplices. These demonstrations continued with every new exhibition opening. PSSST eventually closed because of this constant pressure. Some chose to ignore the gentrifying context of Boyle Heights and frame this as an attack on queerness and the few opportunities for queer artists to exist inside the capitalist art world. This created a divide within the queer art world in Los Angeles around questions of access and issues of class: if PSSST gave access to queer artists, but endangered the poor working-class community it took up space in, then who is this access for and how do race and class complicate ideas of queer artist identity? Two years later, the traces of this divide are ever present, and not without state intervention. 392 | American Quarterly By the fourth month of B.H.A.A.A.D.’s existence, Boyle Heights was littered with agents of the state. Los Angeles Police Department officers harassed organizers, police camped outside galleries, and officers with guns came to every opening to protect the gallerists, the art, and the wealthy patrons. After one of the galleries was tagged ‘Fuck White Art,’ the LAPD opened a hate crime investigation (even though ‘white art’ is an institution immune to harm by any individual graffiti artist and is always protected).1 All these tactics aim to instill fear in the resistance and slow down protesting. By collaborating with the police, these gallerists and artists agreed to silence dissent. They decided it was more important to protect private property than the people in the neighborhood. Figure 1. Block Party at PSSST, May 13, 2016. Photograph courtesy of B.H.A.A.A.D. Artwashing As a state-sponsored strategy, gentrification relies on the ‘artist as pioneer’ to both enact and mask its violence, which takes on many forms (rising rents, lack of rent control, policies that favor landlord over renter, enhanced racial police profiling, developer-friendly rezoning, forced homelessness). In the analysis of School of Echoes Los Angeles, an experimental laboratory with a membership of artists and community organizers who coined the phrase ‘artist as pioneer,’ Boyle Heights and the Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence | 393 artwashing presents gentrification as beneficial to communities (variations on ‘improving the artistic life of a neighborhood’) while ignoring the material impacts and effacing the actual needs of the neighborhood (Boyle Heights, for one, needed job-providing factories, grocery stores, and laundromats more than it needed galleries). The state displaces low-income folx, immigrant families, and other vulnerable communities under the cover of ‘building arts districts,’ or ‘river revitalization’ efforts, together with public investment and tax subsidies, and the development of so-called affordable housing and luxury living. Like Boyle Heights, these neighborhoods were historically ignored, persecuted, redlined, and denied resources from the city and state until such a time when they became appealing to city and private developers. As a strategy, gentrifying in the name of the arts necessitates a cultural understanding of artists as a financially disadvantaged, culturally vital, class of our own, which in turn justifies the prioritization of our individual practices, studios, and galleries at the expense of the poor and working-class people of color whose neighborhoods we often move into. The ‘artist as pioneer’ purports to bring art into a neighborhood lacking in it, erasing people of color from these neighborhoods’ long histories of artmaking, art as protest, and art as part of cultural identity. Boyle Heights is a community with a deep investment in art. But this is not the art, and these are not the artists, that are shown in galleries in Boyle Heights. It is not enough for artists to engage in a surface-level critique of the politics of their time. They must engage with the politics of their own practice. On February 12, 2017, Charles Gaines, Andrea Fraser, Tom Lawson, Barbara Kruger, Veronique d’Entremont, and many other artists who have built their careers on institutional critique (a framework for building an arts practice out of critiquing and investigating arts institutions such as museums, arts schools, and art galleries) participated in a group event, Artists Political Action Network (APAN), at 356 Mission Gallery in Boyle Heights, one of the galleries B.H.A.A.A.D. is boycotting. The APAN meeting was for artists who wanted to activate in anti-Trump work and figure out ways to ‘be involved.’ Yet the meeting, which had a focus on ‘defending immigrants,’ was not capable of addressing what was happening on that block, in that neighborhood: another form of racialized displacement and removal. B.H.A.A.A.D members interrupted the presentation with a call to action to every artist in the room to leave the space of boycott and stand on the side of working-class undocumented people from Boyle Heights. The artists ignored them. Fraser continued with her presentation while community members yelled into a bullhorn about the violence these artists were enacting by using this space for their own ‘political 394 | American Quarterly dissent.’ At that moment, it was clear that the ‘artist pioneers’ were unable to analyze their own privilege. Gaines, a renowned Black artist who in his work centers histories of institutional critique, wrote an essay to artists about his thoughts on the Boyle Heights boycott (he was critical of B.H.A.A.A.D, the boycott, and the interventions at APAN).2 B.H.A.A.A.D. responded with a letter published in Hyperallergic: If you want to assist in fighting ICE deportations, racist police abuse, and other terrors of the US government (pre-Trump and post-Trump), figure out a way to trust the connections and strategies being brought to your attention by the people affected most by these abuses. Deportations and housing displacement are a feedback loop. Newly opened art institutions and property values rising correlate with increased policing. Increased property values correlate with increased harassment, intimidation tactics, evictions, and homelessness.3 B.H.A.A.A.D. also followed 356 Mission founder Laura Owens to her retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York City. Over fifty housing rights organizers from across New York City came to the Whitney to hold Owens accountable for her actions in Boyle Heights. Owens announced the closing of 356 Mission soon after. For B.H.A.A.A.D, the call for artists is clear: Art careers are not more important than people’s rights to housing! To begin thinking about what it means to have a just arts practice, we have to engage with our roles as gentrifiers. If art is so closely tied to gentrification through arts development, then we must first acknowledge our interaction with developers. Are we renting studios in gentrifying neighborhoods? Are we showing in museums and galleries built in gentrifying spaces? Are we contributing to the ‘beautification’ of neighborhoods, helping in a racist process of whitewashing over the art of local communities, or artists indigenous to the land? Every decision to exhibit in a museum, create site-specific work, photograph, or write about a community we do not belong to has to be consciously and carefully considered, if we are to interrupt the state’s project of racial and economic violence through displacement. Practice, Resistance, and Community Building This is the beginning of a new resistance to artwashing, a resistance that has successfully closed seven galleries in two years. Of course, B.H.A.A.AD.’s goal isn’t just for the galleries to shut their doors but for all artists to divest from these spaces and stand in solidarity with the community of Boyle Heights. That goal is still off in the distance, as artists continue to refuse to investigate their participation in the oppression of poor and working-class people of Boyle Heights and the Fight Against Gentrification As State Violence | 395 color through arts development. But it no longer feels unattainable. In the beginning, B.H.A.A.A.D. members often heard that there is no purpose to fighting arts development. The arts district had been planned by the city and was therefore inevitable. Going up against galleries would be like fighting windmills. And yet seven of those windmills have toppled over. And so, at gallery opening after gallery opening, B.H.A.A.A.D. continues to create boycott lines, driving business away from these commodified, capitalist spaces. B.H.A.A.A.D. has also made a practice of writing statements in conjunction with direct actions, contextualizing the dissent, supporting the media in writing about this anti-artwashing movement and supporting its spread, nationally and internationally. Even as they close, the galleries do not acknowledge the work of the resistance as their reason for leaving. Yet it is clear that the resistance has made it impossible for them to thrive any longer. The effects of these B.H.A.A.A.D actions on the Los Angeles art world are growing far beyond gallery doors in Boyle Heights. Communities and artist allies across the world are reaching out for advice and help for their own fights against artwashing. In an Figure 2. Protest of Laura Owen at Whitney Museum, November 8, 2017. Photograph courtesy of B.H.A.A.A.D. 396 | American Quarterly ever-gentrifying world, people are becoming ready to prioritize the fight for housing justice over their career aspirations. They now have an example of a coalition of poor and working-class people of color, artists, and queers who interrupted a state-sponsored and state-protected project of gentrification. Gentrification in contemporary American urban spaces is shrouded in a kind of inevitability—seen as a natural part of city development and city life. Artists, as pioneers, know this first hand, being both displacers and the displaced, and continuing to make art and live in silent complicity. But B.H.A.A.AD.’s victory in interrupting the arts development of Boyle Heights is proof that gentrification is not unavoidable but a carefully constructed and, perhaps surprisingly, vulnerable state strategy. It offers hope that the fight for housing may be bolstered by alliances across lines of geography, race, and class. The outcome has yet to be truly seen. This is the beginning of the fight, but the tides of change are swelling. Notes We would like to thank the women of Pico Aliso, members of Defend Boyle Heights, Los Angeles Tenants Union, members of B.H.A.A.A.D, and Union de Vecinos for their tireless work and inspiration. It is an honor to work alongside such amazing people. Gentrification is class warfare and is not inevitable. 1. Brittny Mejia, ‘LAPD Investigating Boyle Heights Vandalism as Possible Hate Crimes Sparked by Gentrification Fight,’ Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2016, www.latimes.com/local/california/la-meln-boyle-heights-20161102-story.html. 2. Charles Gaines, ‘Unpacking the Binary: The Politics of Gentrification,’ 2017, drive.google.com/ file/d/0B8LcdfCW9ALFMlVlNkZ1X2lKVEE/view. 3. Boyle Heights Alliance against Artwashing and Displacement, ‘An Open Letter to Charles Gaines and the Artists of APAN,’ Hyperallergic, May 31, 2017, hyperallergic.com/382283/a-boyle-heightsalliance-challenges-charles-gaines-and-other-artists-for-ignoring-local-voices/. Purchase answer to see full attachment Tags: Latino Community Emiliano Zapata Boyle Heights film Vida storytelling prowess User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool’s honor code & terms of service.