What’s happening in the Bronx
There’s a lot of fear we are feeling here in the Bronx. Fear for our communities and families. Fear of the growing surveillance and policing of the public spaces we occupy together, our buildings, blocks, buses, trains, parks. Fear of kidnappings and disappearances of ourselves and each other. Fear for the violated and exploited children who are bombed, killed, starved. For children and families separated, deported, lost in detention centers. For all people of the Global South whose oppression links to our tax dollars. Minerals taken from the Continent and used to build the very technology killing Black people worldwide. The very technology that terrifies us because it is surveilling, kidnapping, deporting people from Sudan to Palestine to Congo to Puerto Rico to Haiti. To Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami. The Bronx.
We are trying to make sense of a chaotic and changing world, choosing and learning to exist outside of and alongside the oppressive, violent systems controlling our time, our lives. This terrifies, and alongside terror, we are emboldened, responsible for changing our world into something better, more liberated. A more cared-for planet. J.P. Hill writes in yesterday’s New Means: “It’s on us to get to the roots of violence when our so-called leaders refuse to do so. The first step is seeing through the lies and the euphemisms used to hide the true cost and the true violence of war from us. The first step is ripping aside the thin veil of distorted language that allows vicious, bloody violence to pass under the radar of our anger and repulsion.” We cannot let the very systems oppressing us tell us who we are, or who and what to fear.
We are not the first to try to make sense of violence and chaos, and we cannot resist imperial violence alone. Despite our fear, our people fight back.
All throughout the Bronx, tenants fight back against slumlords and the inhumane conditions we are forced to live in, rallying for rent freezes and refusing to pay rent. (From Bronx Times, “Tenants rally for rent freeze ahead of Rent Guidelines Board’s Bronx public hearing”; and from Hunts Point Express, “Longwood Tenants Take Back Control of Their Homes.”) Community members are starting ICE watch groups, growing food, and sharing plant remedies as the borough’s air quality continues to sicken us. Our communities educate us, support and feed us, keep us safe. We are all connected, and each of our struggles is connected.
Tomorrow, the Block Times will hold a press conference and rally at Fordham Plaza to alert the community and press to ICE office in the Bronx.
“Did you know that ICE is operating a black site and disappearing migrants in the Bronx?” asks the Block Times, a bilingual grassroots newspaper in the Bronx, in a statement published earlier this week.
They write that the site, located on 189th and Park Avenue, houses an office for ISAP, “an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program administered by GEO Group to track migrants through ankle bracelets and the immigration detention system.” They add that kidnapped community members are taken to this location and “carried away in unmarked vans as they appear for their scheduled appointments.”
The group’s reporting focuses on resistance in the Bronx. Their articles report on MTA surveillance, migrant organizing against the xenophobia of the Eric Adams administration; settler colonialism in Puerto Rico, solidarity with Palestine; tenant organizing on Ward Avenue; and BROINTELPRO, “user-made content that feeds on insecure violent masculinity, sells assimilation as empowerment, and misleads us to equate our identity with the aspiration to get over on others.” You can read and learn more about the Block times, including all past issues, here.
Tomorrow’s rally occurs a month after the ICE kidnapping of Dylan Lopez Contreras, a high-school student at ELLIS Prep who was taken after he showed up for his immigration hearing in Manhattan. The 20-year-old is from Venezuela, arriving in the United States last April. Last week Dylan released his first public statement through his lawyers. From Chalkbeat: “It’s frustrating to be here knowing that I didn’t do anything wrong…To people who are speaking out and taking action to support me: Thank you so much, I really didn’t expect all of the support and it fills me with hope…All I want is to go home so I can continue studying, to see the people who I love, and to be free.”
More reading and resources:
The air quality in the Bronx has not been great these last few weeks, and countless people in the community are sick. As air quality issues continue this summer, I am learning to collect supplies for and build an air purifier. Here’s one of the many links I’ve watched this year: “Here's how to build your own DIY air purifier.”
From People’s Dispatch: Black labor history: “When workers resisted labor exploitation at the Bronx ‘slave markets’”
From Hunts Point Express: “Bronx Reps Side With Chemical Giants Over Environmentalists on Waste Bill, After Industry Lobbying”
