 So this panel will reflect on efforts in Holyoke to support community-driven revitalization with a focus on the challenge of warding off gentrification and the development of creative placekeeping projects to make spaces of belonging for the Puerto Rican community in Holyoke. Good morning everyone. It's been a long week for me so just give me a little grace. My name is Maria Salgado Cartagena and I actually was just in our little group I was thinking about like my role and really like I'm a hybrid between community folks and the institutions. I also want to acknowledge a couple things is that this work of community engagement has been happening since some of the pioneers. I want to really mention the pioneers doing this work in the 90s including my friend Irma Medina who did early work with the campuses around the Puerto Rican studies seminar, Genera Candelario who I have always said she is a theorist and I'm the storyteller so our work complements each other and has some of the best practices when it comes to community-based learning. Folks think that this kind of work is easy. It's a lot of labor to do it right, to have good partnerships with community and so I think that I'm sort of a hybrid. I'll just tell a little story about Carlos and Betty who were my role models in Holyoke and my own mother that I just remember one semester we were supposed to have a bus tour for a campus and I must have been like 25 at the time I won't tell you how old I am now and Carlos came up to me and said Maria can you do this tour because I just don't feel well and I was like I used to call him Jefe. I was like Jefe I can't do that there's like all these smart students coming here like I'm the girl from South Holyoke like he's like Maria you have intellectual knowledge that these students pay organic intellectual knowledge as these students pay thousands of dollars to get and that was the imprints forever. So we're going to talk a little bit about our partnership and really oh and Vanessa do you want to introduce yourself? I'll say a few words and then hand it back to Maria. I just I wanted to also just acknowledge a few folks before we offer some comments and reflections today. The first person is that is Antonio Martinez who is no longer with us and just to say that that's was my or the person who really introduced me to this work here in western Massachusetts and I started working with Antonio in the spring of 2016 when he asked me to come on and be his partner for a really big project in Holyoke where I had the pleasure of working with Joseph and Joelle who is somewhere out here and was really just an opportunity to start to build some relationships in the area and I just learned so much from Antonio and the way that he did this work and I just really want to acknowledge him and also say that you know part of I think what Antonio and many of us struggled with is the way that these institutions that we work in don't acknowledge and value the work that we do in communities and how much labor it is and that Antonio really was just such a model and letting youth lead and us to kind of step back and get in line so I just want to give a big shout out to Antonio. The other people I want to acknowledge are of course Maria who is like family to me and just doing this work together. This is the first project that we really worked on together but I would say the majority of the time that we spend is reflecting on kind of the questions of this symposium today which would are the challenges of really doing this work and how we can just be be better at it. Other people in the room I'd like to acknowledge are Evelyn, Josie, Miriam, Irma, Vanessa, Nelson, Luke is not here today from Holyoke High School. Dana and Betty is being just real leaders in doing this work and again I just learned so much from all of you and just sharing a space with you. I just I'm incredibly humbled to be on a panel when I feel like y'all like just have really taught me so much and of course Joseph, Mari, Sonia Nieto and Janetta who when I first arrived here sent me her 20 page syllabus and I was like I can never do that so thank you Janetta because you have just shared so much with me and I've learned so much from you in these conversations and just really I bow down so thank you. A few other things I just like to say that maybe will set the context for my reflections today is also acknowledging my how much I've learned from my students in doing this work together because it is not easy and their patience and just kind of openness to doing this and thinking differently about what it means to be in college and to be learners from the folks that we're working with in community and to again step back and get out of the way and really listen because we have so much to learn to really kind of challenge as Mari opened with her comments today of thinking about how we understand what is knowledge and knowledge production. So I teach Latino Latino studies at Mount Holyoke and my kind of background expertise is in urban studies broadly thinking about gentrification and revitalization with the focus on housing and housing politics particularly public housing in the spring this upcoming spring I'm actually teaching a class based on Mari and Joseph's book called Latinx Studies in Action and just really want to acknowledge them for organizing this today as well. One of the reasons I when I first moved here in Antonio asked me to start doing this work together I was really reluctant because I was just doing a postdoc and didn't think that I was staying for the long haul and I want to acknowledge that as being one of the challenges of how many faculty who are really invested in this work who come in and and you know want to be committed and be long-term community partners but because of their positions within the academy that are often really challenging because of the neoliberal university system that that work that it's just hard to do frankly. So I think that's all I'll say now and I'll turn it over to Maria as we start to talk about our project that we've done together. So as many of you know the city of Holyoke is about to become the cannabis mecca of the world and so with that said for some of us in particular me it's I am damned if our history as Puerto Ricans in the city of Holyoke gets erased and so and so with that said I was really concerned about gentrification and ways in which in fact to be if I can be honest and folks can handle it the gentrification that's happening in Holyoke is a result of five colleges it's junior faculty it's students being able to obtain more affordable housing that they have in Northampton and and in Amherst and so with that said I just remember once walking or going to San Juan bakery and I saw no offense two white girls jogging on high street downtown Holyoke and then a couple weeks later I see a white man jogging with no t-shirt on main street in Holyoke and I immediately said these are the signs of gentrification my 15 year old daughter at the time said since when do white people jog in the downtown city of Holyoke of course she's my daughter and that really just started sort of this like feeling like I got to catch up and I I had been at Mount Holyoke one night when professor of Vanessa Rosa was talking about Canada and gentrification in an area where she had been doing her research and I just thought I need this woman on this team like I've got to figure this out I need the resources of the institutions to help us as community members figure out how do we identify gentrification what is it that's happening beyond the white guy jogging on main street and so I had a conversation we had met briefly of course we're connected to a lot of mutual folks and and but hearing her talk on gentrification in Canada I literally I remember being in the audience and saying are you talking about Canada are you talking about Holyoke because the similarities were so so parallel and so um I approached her at the time I was on the board of Nova Esperanza I'm no longer on the board um but I said I and we had just hired Nelson as an interim executive director and I said this is the work that Nueva did like this is the work that Nueva did South Holyoke was revitalized as a result of fires for hire which we just marked yesterday um post hurricane Maria anniversary we did a march in Holyoke to commemorate that same moment of the fires for hire um and uh Nueva Esperanza was born as a result of that to actually create safe and affordable housing in South Holyoke in particular um so as a board member um not just the board member I was the president by the way um I just remember saying to Nelson we've got to address this something's going to happen our history is going to be erased and I approached Vanessa um knowing that she had been teaching these um courses and that uh and so we she was able to identify a student and she'll talk about that process um but really that was the beginning of sort of this partnership um I when I say I'm a hybrid of I my paid job is I work at Hampshire College as the program coordinator for the community partnerships and social change office no wonder I'm in that office um but uh we so we do work with students as well and we do community engagement um but I always tell folks uh that's my paid job it pays it barely pays my bills um just speaking truth um but my passion is activism I am an activist in the womb of my mother um and um and so uh I still have my feet in Holyoke I still do a lot of activism in the city of Holyoke even though I'm not connected to nonprofits which by the way let just aside no just because you all are working with partners and you're working with um community organizations that's not necessarily saying that you're working with the people there's a whole lot of other structural class stuff around community organizations right so I'm just saying so when people ask me who are you working with I'm like I'm working with myself as a community activist um so that was just the final um but anyways uh yeah so we talked um and then uh Nelson was on board at the time still on board sorry didn't mean that uh Nelson was at the time we sort of developed like a plan to talk about gentrification and I'm going to give it all over to you thanks Maria so um after Maria approached me um I identified a student who has interest in um critical housing studies um her name is Issa Zulaga from Mount Holyoke and um when Maria first came to me we had originally talked about this doing a project with my class called Mikasa is not Tsukasa Latinos and housing um I didn't come up with that name David Hernandez did so I have to acknowledge him but it's good um and um but we had already I had already started a partnership with Springfield no one leaves where we were doing a large-scale project on the receivership um policy in Springfield so I knew that there couldn't we couldn't do anything with the class but the student wanted an opportunity um to um gain some kind of research research skills and was really interested in gentrification um and so I also acknowledged to them that I wouldn't be able to take that on because of my own commitment so I had to be really honest and kind of transparent about what my own limitations were that I would supervise the student but it wouldn't I wouldn't be the one kind of driving uh the project so we met the four of us met Nelson Maria Issa and myself and one of the first questions we asked is what do you want to know um and they kind of outlined some of their questions and I pushed back on some of them we had a really honest and transparent um kind of conversation around what was possible and the amount of time that we had which I think was core to our relationship and really kind of set the tone for moving forward so um key to that is that Nelson and Maria set the research agenda and they asked the research questions so it wasn't so I didn't go into Holyoke and say I want to do this project and that's something I've learned from the past I've definitely made mistakes along the way so I think we're kind of always learning and doing this work um so I think that that was really important so they set the research questions for Issa and then Issa spent the semester doing the work and I just want to um acknowledge her today she couldn't be here we did ask her to come she couldn't attend um and today we're not going to be talking about any of the findings because we want to obviously present that to the community first so we're going to be doing as um something that they asked for Maria and Nelson was that they wanted um a series of workshops in Holyoke presented to the community um and so that's something that we're going to be doing this fall so keep your eye out on that or for that um we're excited about about that so there will be a series of four workshops this fall that um Issa and Maria and Nelson will really be coordinating so very much um community driven with the idea of leveraging the resources of the five colleges um to kind of support the needs and one of the other things that we talked about in our first meeting and that I said to Nelson and Maria was well you know we'd really like the community to obviously be involved in some way so to really think about this as being the first phase of the research but then having um the community kind of obviously take over the project is being key but they did have a very specific kind of research need and so we just wanted to respond to that um right away um can I just say that the um one thing you pushed back on was um you can't really tell gentrification by a white guy without a shirt jogging on mainstream I did say that to Maria there's something and what Issa found is how do you track this so what she did was identify the variables of neighborhood change and one of the that is not one of them so it's a thing you've got to be honest not yet yeah maybe we'll add it into the formula so um so now we'll talk about um kind of five um key things that were really important to our relationship in working together yeah I mean I think for me um one of things that was really important was trust and I don't know if you learned this from um Jonathan or Janetta or any of your other mentors but um again because I'm this hybrid uh in fact in our back table I was saying that um if I had five dollars for every time a student a faculty member uh a staff of the five colleges interviewed me wrote a paper on me use my language use my knowledge I would own a home on the hill and yet of all the years that I've done this work I think I've received two papers back um that said here's what I did can you just look at it and I said no I don't have that kind of commitment but I can read the parts that you wrote about me and give you feedback um and so I for me it was really important that I knew that I was going to work with a professor that was going to hold her students accountable professors hold your students accountable and who I knew I was going to receive something that there was going to be some information some papers some numbers that I could then draw from um and that's why uh I had the conversation because I just knew that based on our relationship um that there was a mutual trust um I think I'm gonna want to speak for you um that there was a mutual trust and so I knew that um Vanessa would make sure that the student produced the work that we were asking for um something else we wanted to talk about and I think I mentioned this in my comments before was that it was really driven by Nelson and Maria that they set their research agenda um we brainstormed together we set a timeline and really made sure that we weren't the ones kind of um uh being the drivers behind the project that it was it was what y'all wanted um and to to just make sure that we were kind of meeting those expectations which then leads to my next um point is that one of the big challenges in this project um and this came up in our group too is the that we're on a college university schedule and so we frankly ran out of time in the fall um there was so much work that needed to be done and Nelson and Maria were so flexible I felt like I was emailing them constantly saying sorry we need more time we need more time and Nelson what's your what was your line to me constantly of about just willing to be patient every email he'd send back of saying no like don't worry we're we're willing to wait um and so here we are a year later um and now we have I think a really great project and something we're excited to um present but central was being kind of transparent and honest um about um what was kind of happening so Mari says our time's up but can we say two more quick things? I mean if um just in closing I will say that um in our group and I know we're gonna uh talk about them but one of the things that came up in our group is um reciprocity and this work is super important uh and one way that as a community partner I see that is that um we need to be visible in your research not just quoted we need to be co-authors we need to be co-publishers we need to uh our name has to be there with your name um and I think the last thing I will say is our a lot of folks who work with youth um we were just talking about transportation issues from the campuses to Holyoke to Springfield but that needs to go both ways our students need to be on these campuses our students need to see professors of color I our students need to see that they can be here and they can be learners and they can be scholars so I will just close with that I think something else we just um wanted to highlight as we wrap up our comments is to really think about the power dynamics that Maria um highlighted and the kind of elitism of the academy and what it means um to have these types of relationships and to think kind of carefully about how we navigate them with each other um and um the ways that uh in particular the five colleges kind of use uses Holyoke as this learning um environment but again that these relationships aren't reciprocal and then finally is um something to keep in mind is the ways that as academics we need to kind of again get out of the way and get in line because really it's um the communities that we should be thinking about as being knowledge producers and that we really just have so much to kind of um learn but that we need to be better at leveraging the resources of these institutions our next two presenters are Nelson Rafael Roman and Joseph Kropchinski so I want to start um by just taking a moment to acknowledge this badass woman to my left if she is an activist in her mother's womb uh I'm an activist in her true embrace Maria holds me in line she calls me out if she has to call me out uh we always have to see each other's face if we don't see each other for a long time but she's yeah she's like a lot chocolate all the time down the stairs um but in this work uh in this new world that I'm exploring as executive director or something when the community gas lit me when nobody stood with me uh Maria was there uh and so I just want to publicly say thank you because I don't think you get thanked enough from the young man of color who are coming up so I just want to thank you personally Maria for everything you've done for me um and we're specifically talking about space um and how badass Maria is at Hampshire and helping me when I came into the role as Nueva E.D. she stuck her neck out there she got me the interim job she fought for me and she put the institution's resources where her mouth was you know the very first summer Cora Siegel and Frankie were my first two interns ever and Cora I still am using the fund development list that she created um and then I got to really work with badass Joe Kropchinski and Maria um around this work and it leads and it ties into all this anti-gentrification work um and when I came to Nueva from the streets stuff in the hood hasn't changed whether it was Obama or Clinton or Bush and when I was staying in the street nothing has really changed it all feels the same to us and so I'm coming from that community and world saying listen Nueva almost lost it all in 2015 when we try to convene I tell everyone it's my biggest political failure that I've ever had I try to convene all the Latinos in one room and say let's come up with an agenda with no focus with no like being on the same political analysis and it failed and blew up in my face miserably I'll acknowledge that and and yet at the same time we heard that Nueva was going to be sold it was going to be given away to like the arch nemesis I'm a Jedi fan Nueva's called new hope that's what it means it's the Jedi temple and we were going to be sold off to the dark lord of the Sith who drinks out of a Ronald Reagan mug and and and I was like where do we go from here and it was people like Maria and Darlene I'll never forget that meeting and Maria said hell no I'll chain myself to the front of those doors but I'll be damned if this building goes to somebody else it belongs to the people doesn't belong to you doesn't belong to him it belongs to the people and so that was the foundation from which I started and it was Maria under her leadership in the board that they came out with our new badass mission and vision statement so Nueva now exists to be a partner and a catalyst for a vibrant powerful sustainable Puerto Rican Afro Caribbean community of Holyoke that's our mission that's the work that we do and so with that context and the reason why I'm here today is talk about their corazon project and why we're doing it exactly what Vanessa Maria were saying is true I'm a city councilor I fight with the city every day to say the gentrification is happening and they said prove it Nelson what we're doing as a city is that the low to moderate income percentage cap is at its max in the city of Holyoke what we are doing is increasing and diversifying the middle income stock of the city of Holyoke so percentage-wise low to moderate incomes at its capacity but it hasn't been renovated since Carlos Vega did the work right since Maria and all of them did the work to renovate these properties so we're living in 70s and 80s condition low to moderate income housing and guess what fires are happening again in Holyoke we had the new year's day fire I had a main street fire and guess what happens when those buildings burn down one of these new property developers buy it up and up goes the duplex home so on the northeast street fire those were almost 53 units I used to live at 106 northeast street Yoli came to my house for the first fundraiser for the mayor at the time and that whole building's gone they're going to build a duplex on that from 53 units to two duplex units we're not replacing them race street I call gentrification row and I know many of you have frequented there if you notice look at the people of color who go to that space not many of us we don't go we don't put our dollars there we don't support there because they don't include our community when we ask what percentage of people work here oh 53 percent but they're all in the kitchen or in the back they're not in the front they're not in the front lines and so we're seeing 100 percent of race street is sold to people who don't live in the city of Holyoke so on main street we're saying we're a block away we don't feel welcomed and so when I first came into office at Nueva me Maria the community I say we because we push for it we got past my very first day in office and I think Josie I don't think she's the badass lesbian who why I ran where's Josie she's still here hi Josie yes you have Josie round of applause thank you Josie for paving the way for being a latinx rebel in the council we pushed and we got the Puerto Rican cultural district passed the very first day in the city of Holyoke very first day and we said but how are we physically visibly present and visible and Maria's and I told you she I'm an activist in her true embrace she's the one that always calls out why is it that every year for the St. Patrick's Day parade we paint shamrocks and they stay 365 and yet we can't even paint a goddamn cookie on the street to claim our space right that's Maria talking um and so we said very publicly when I got into office I want to just put up banners on every light pole on main street to just say welcome to the Puerto Rican cultural district and I'm crazy I started calling Seatown and Goya and I don't care who it is can you give me some money to do this I contacted a company in Connecticut and I went to Marcos Moreto's office because in our city we do have the chief economic development officer is a Boricua and I challenge him all the time he knows I'm his biggest friend and his biggest headache when I call his office it's either for a complaint or for a moment of he had a great job and so Marcos Senersong why are you going to do this when there's this national announcement of the arts grant and Joe Kepinski CDE we just got this money to revitalize under 391 the 391 underpass and I remember seeing the initial sketches that I called Joseph because Joseph and I go back and I said like Art Park I said Joseph if that's not called G Park, Mark Anthony Park, Celia Prue Park, I'm a protest I'm gonna be Joseph said calm down, calm down brother Joseph's always my comic calm down, calm down, calm down, I said calm down talk talk to me look come to my office come me and I did and he said Nersong why don't we just blend them like and so we went back to Marcos and Joe and I have to give Karen credit Karen thank you for being a badass white woman who gets it in the institutional world thank you Karen um yes give her a great snap she's badass they resubmitted their NEA plan to now create El Corazon project and that came from an advisory group from the neighborhood and it's people it's places it's the homeless men who are in the Providence Ministry shelters it's us from the street like Maria said it's the people what we changed the narrative in the shift and I thank Joseph and Karen on it with this grant is I love you institutions but stop it with the goddamn focus groups with 10 people at a time that's not really our people you're not talking to nobody and I see the reports we did four focus groups 10 people came it's the same usual suspects when I look at that list of who signed in it's all of us it's like all of us going to the same meetings Joseph in the city got it they contracted Nueva Esperanza right and we could use that capacity money I'm a staff of three I'm at 30 hours a week at $30,000 and I have to raise $50,000 every year minimum that's open the board did that so I'm raising my money to be there because I believe in Nueva right the city gave us a $15,000 contract and I hired organizers from the street to go out and do surveys so Gustavo from Juan Holyoke Carmen Ocasio from the neighborhood association we hired a church organizer and we hired someone to go to the businesses and nonprofits and we did over 150 surveys and Joseph's going to go over that but we went door knocking we went back grassroots we went out to the community we listened we talked to people we only put up the online survey two days before just to see if anybody else wanted to participate okay just because you have to be fair but it's really our community that always gets left out but when it comes to the space now not only do we get that NEA grant which we're going to go very publicly so I expect you all to please donate because the banners are coming and Joseph's going to show you some of that stuff but we really took the time to really embed all of that in Nueva's programming so these two spaces you see here that mural to the left was on a handball wall at Susie Park and our Julio social justice kids and I'm going to play two minutes of what they've been learning they painted that with a collective of Puerto Rican mural artists from Puerto Rico women called More Vivir and the kids through our indigenous circle leadership process self selected three of their own pierce faces to appear on the murals so those are our kids and that's in the handball wall but that goes back to our history Nueva painted murals in the community to create space to prove that our ownership and I know Denise is here she used to work with our colleagues kids and they painted a mural that embedded the Puerto Rican and American flags and what did a density counter do at the time she came down and protested and said the Puerto Ricans were trying to take over we have the newspaper articles and we've submitted our archives to the wisteriors and then this this mural to the left this is one of us main building there's our headquarters at 401 Main Street you're all invited that mural the collect More Vivir artist painted again with our youth before they left back to Puerto Rico this is where I'm this is where I'm a hybrid Hampshire college used our summer money our summer grants to get them to work with Nueva and the youth from from so I just have to put a little plug because I have this little other hat too and I was going to think exactly and even this fall we are piloting now a fall program on Saturdays and Maria and her department again gave us Alex they're amazing they're fabulous their glitter nails the kids love it and it's and they're teaching gender studies right and LGBT studies which we love and those partnerships are critical in allowing us to do the work but think about if I didn't have those staff or be able to pay those two amazing women to do this work with our kids right and so that was done by our youth and so we are now creating all this and now we're a finalist because of this at Corazon project for a Bloomberg Foundation grant we're one of 14 cities in the whole US the only one in the northeast to possibly get this money and it's a lot of that work and a lot of endless nights and me going back with Joseph and Karen and poor them every time I don't like something or I don't agree like even the damn color of the Puerto Rican flag that might appear publicly I like that's dark blue I don't like that nope they go back or Joseph's initial ones for the banners I was like it doesn't say Puerto Rico it does a little Puerto Rican Joseph works endless nights and he'll send it at 2 3 in the morning and then text me at 1 or 2 in the morning can you send me more stuff Joseph when you I'm sleeping leave me alone and then but that's the kind of partnership between institutions and and the community that allow us to have and make our own space and so in the next three years you're going to come down to Holyoke and we have us doing some badass stuff so I encourage you to look us up online we have a black box theater company we're bringing a professional off-broadway cast that's doing Mike Dalena Gomez's work dancing on my cockroach killers October 12th through the 14th 25 dollars a ticket we sold out last year when we brought La Gringa from Chicago's Urban Theater Company we have a black box theater we're opening our coffee shop we have a cultural center now Martín Espada is donating his library we're gonna have the Martín Espada library Nueva Esperanza reference library come on down and so we're trying to create this antithesis or this hub saying our community has space and my vision is because I'm really tied to Puerto Rican Cultural Center of Chicago let's make Paseo Holyoke let's make a space that is calling out that structurally ours and I thank Joseph and Karen and Maria and Vanessa because we are going to create a gentrification task force and now every year that's where your institutions could come in with that base work that they did we hope annually to produce a report following those metrics looking at those categories that Vanessa and that amazing student Issa did to say every year we're going to come out with a report and we're going to track we're going to share what's going on with gentrification in Holyoke so when you tell me it's not happening I have hard data every year that shows us that it's happening but I need your help as institutions to do that research for us because I don't have that capacity and even Janetta I just pitched to her amazing students but even think about and I love Maria started this with we're some violent thing and I was just sharing it at my table I have my Elms College intern Javier here he's a social work intern and so he's doing and building 3d profiles for all of our tenants because we still own buildings but Elms College is allowing me to take a free three credit course as a guy who doesn't have a degree to go there and Maria with weird song in her department paid for community activists to take the colonization in our own backyard course so I got to take a hand I still got my hamster idea my partner works there now but I swear to God I carry with me because I don't have a degree and I show it to my mom and my grandma because I get real proud every time I swear to God look I got my hamster ID they they enrolled me in Hampshire college and I got to take that course for free so you talk about equity and creating space for our communities challenge your departments to say hey if we're going to go and do that work at Nueva can we offer one or two spaces I have a staff of three none of us have our degree right and we're all doing this work imagine three credit courses add up add up add up and send those students to do their internships with us I'm excited that Janetta students are now some of them one of them might take our work that Frankie and Cora did on our fund development and they're now going to help me continue that work we need those spaces so I'm going to end there I'm going to play the two minute video and I'm going to hand it over to Joseph just so you can get a flavor of gentrification and spaces are with young people and we're about still doing that work so we're just going to play the first two minutes so you can see some of these amazing kids I'm Isis Feliciano and I'm Cuyo my name is Denise Rivera and I am Cuyo my name is Joan Elise and I am Cuyo circle circle the is where you ask questions to the to the owner of the counselor of of this this circle circle process to me is really special because I love to know where my kids are at and especially when we come together at the beginning and just check in that's really important um we've sort of shied away from that part of life as a family and so I like that circle process will bring us together as a family to resolve issues to resolve conflict to just be open to express ourselves in a safe space um so to me circle is really important because it is providing that structure where kids can feel safe um I fun um active I've learned a lot and actually met a new family and community let's face it there's just a lot of things that aren't right with the world and they hurt and they're harmful and I want to be able to teach skills with my own people in my community on how to navigate through those systems my favorite workshops to have been a part of where Gus's workshops they're very powerful and also build an awareness that kids didn't have around a lot of social issues that are even happening now to date and so I really appreciated him bringing his knowledge especially since he is so relatable to our community you know he looks a lot like our kids and our kids can learn from that which is really important uh my favorite teaching they're singing so give it up for our cool yo kids aren't they amazing and so you can go on one of us uh youtube page we piloted this program like I said free of charge the first year I paid for their field trips every friday um but Maria like I said if it wasn't for her original Frankie taught them the gigante masks this year we had 30 youth all from holy majority from holy we had a youth as far as greenfield one kid who came up from Maryland to stay with his family to join the program we already have a waiting list of 54 youth and so we can't do it without partnerships and the kids sell all their artwork and we teach them entrepreneurship we teach them ownership of space and we're telling them they are the next generation to take over in Runueva they're the ones that and and we got to take them to Hampshire and some of them have never been on a campus before one of the kids erased a math equation we thought he erased like the cure to maybe something important uh even though Maria and them told him not to and he they blew up a gummy bear but they went to the massachusetts fine arts museum they saw the lion king some of these kids saw their first musical at the bush now and so those are the critical steps of creating ownership and by painting murals being in the community they're creating space and Joseph is going to work with them for their kota song project thank you so much you know one of the things just about uh I don't have them like I'm do my academic thing I take notes when people talk right and uh of course you know and there's a lot of things that that are being said here and there's a lot of things that maybe are being unsaid too you know and I and I think that when when we put together this uh this this afternoon or this day and and I thought about being on this panel these are all people that I love right so and and uh you know I think I was thinking about Jose and talking about how love is so important to our practices right uh as academics you know the love we have for our students for our community partners for for each other and I think that aspect of it is really you know important I mean there's other ways of expressing that on the way we we can talk about empathy but I think you know if you want to go you want to go to the core right you want to go to the heart the kota song we have to talk about love so I do think that I love all these folks and I think that it's so exciting to me to be on the panel and it's right yeah right on campus you can't say I love you right and someone who straddles these two worlds to be with a student I I really want I'm like I'm a hug or can I hug you but love is at the bottom of it and for us on these institutions yeah like people look at us like we have three eyes or something right but in fact we were having this conversation with I was talking to Katya at our staff meeting right and we talked about criticality you know we we want to bring a critical practice to our service learning to our education to our research and and you know Katya who's always asking good questions says what does that mean what does criticality mean and for me it includes love you know like love is a critical practice really right you know and I think that's something that's really a kind of essential thing that you know maybe one takeaway from today is to understand that so like I was writing you know like we talked about decolonizing practices right in Nelson's bio and you know love is a decolonized practice when you embody it with also a kind of you know the criticality that Vanessa brings to her research and the the deep knowing that both Nelson and Maria bring to their work in Holio so I think that you know because the other thing was about we talked about new knowledge creation right so this is something that we talk about as academic this is new knowledge creation right here we're seeing yet this is what it's about it's this you know this kind of idea that ways of speaking ways of understanding spaces and places and ways and actions provide new practices I mean one of the things within the book and you know Maddie was really so important about this is seeing how testimonials play a role in in the in the kind of storytelling plays a role in how we kind of convey knowledge and bring knowledge to each other so I just and the idea of like trust and reciprocity but you know when I you know I was writing on those notes but I you know that I kept that I wrote love because I knew that's what it was all about ultimately and that's so that's how I wanted to frame my presence you know on this panel and all these you know really fabulous people so I'm going to do just something really quick which is that we'll you know talking about the Coruscant project and you know working with Karen on it for the last couple of months I'm going to quickly start with a project I did with Karen called Arrivals which is in Holio at Moshe Street underpass and one of the kind of key characteristics of this work is how are people involved in the creation of spaces and places so in this particular piece it was a kind of underpass in Holio called very dark space the call for art was to provide light and then Karen and I recognizing the context that is next to the train station and that people arrive there develop a kind of a working process and they don't for for communicating and talking to people to get their arrival stories right to understand how those stories could be collected and then put upon put along that wall and that they could be shared and that those are the stories are bilingual the some of the stories we got in Spanish because people spoke to us in Spanish other stories we got in English but everything was translated both of Spanish and English because it's a bilingual city and one of the things you know I think once we put this up and the one of the things that was noted that it's actually the first piece of public thing in Holyoke that's bilingual right there's nothing in Holyoke that's bilingual that's official you know have like stores and things private places there's no public infrastructure that's bilingual that's amazing you know you have a city that's really a bilingual city so I think that was a you know a really important part of thinking about this work and then Holyoke visible product I did with with max page but which is to kind of create this trailer a trailer that's pulled by a bicycle and then goes to different places in Holyoke but the outside of the trailer and here this is where the relationship I have with Nelson gets revealed because Nelson was the best critic of this project because and I think you know maybe because I'm trained as an architect my my my understanding of critique is that it's part of the discourse I mean it's long you know as long as it's respectful as long as it's kind of reciprocal and it is but Nelson was you know the one of the kind of primary critics of this project and it became better and deeper because of that so I think also it's another thing kind of take away about work in community setting is that we can have discussions it's not about arguments it's about differences and we do and how do we and how do we begin to have those discussions and how do they play out in the work in this case it made it a lot better because you know Nelson the way he said this doesn't look like this doesn't look like Holyoke this doesn't look like Puerto Rican Holyoke this isn't you know so I so what did we do we set up a series of workshop for people to paint each of the slats that made the outside of the trailer so there's a two inch by 24 inch slat then a series of workshops and the theme was making things visible in Holyoke because part of the conversations were there are a lot of things that are going on in Holyoke that they just need to be made visible so we had on the left you can see food language and culture these were things that through our community meetings were determined to be the things that could be made more visible so so and as Nelson said we're you know we're started working on this project he kind of did the outline of it we're right now finalists for Bloomberg grant they got a lot of money but essentially what this is and this is so this is a kind of my academic thinking part of it is that I'm interested in two minutes okay I'm interested in the way we can make spaces that are anti gentrification spaces right because we you know we can see the studies and we can know the consequences but what can we literally do in the space to make the difference and kind of make a bulwark against gentrification and one of the things is that have the community there be reflected in the spaces that we make and do that in creative ways so this is two towers it's kind of a dark image with two towers that are at the end by 391 they used to hold electrical lines 8G need we're going to take them down Marcos Medado said no don't do that we can we can do something with them so that's what we're going to do to them right so we have these large scale then we go bomba dances and lighting and you know begin to they become gateways to the new main street to the new Puerto Rican cultural district that Nelson has shepherded through city council this is the political dimension of it then how do we follow up on that with an architectural and the spatial dimension and this is how we do it so we have a street corner here right by kayak social club there's a guy who's the hot dog guy is there every week that's part of the the nature is so what do what do we want to do we want to make a kind of pavilion there that then supports people buying the hot desert have a place to sit and eat it and confer it and have conversations so how do we build these kinds of spaces you know web is building right kind of classic holy oak 19th century building now it's a 21st century holy oak building and represented so so these are the kinds of key things that that I think it's about a kind of integrative approach because I'm you know I'm Karen and I work in the built environment realm Nelson is in the kind of community and political realm how do we collaborate how do we make projects together that begin to you know use our strengths to get to some of these very like wicked issues like the issue of gentrification so there's you know there's so much of the kind of like neoliberalism and capitalism that are pushing gentrifying processes so one way to do is that make these spaces very much about the people who are there and then and hopefully we'll be able to do that I think I'm done right I know there's so much to talk about but I want to be respectful of the time because we want to make sure that you know we have a lunch workshop and so forth and we also again the whole point is is also to have dialogue and community building here so first of all again can we give the panelists a big round of applause they're such our first one was amazing our second one is amazing so like the first session we're going to have our panelists actually join the tables and they're going to be separate so they're not going to be all sitting together but at separate tables and the question that we want to ask is you know how can partnerships help build capacity for Latinx communities that respond to complex cultural political and economic conditions so what kind of partnerships are you involved in that you can imagine could be developed that are needed that can build capacity for Latinx communities to respond to because again it's not us responding to but communities themselves responding to these questions that are related to cultural political and economic conditions so again we're going to give folks just 10 minutes and the same process that we would love for you to put it on either on this wall or the other wall those little stickies they are super important for us so if you can make sure you have a reporter who is jotting down what the response is in the conversation and dialogue and we're going to have the panelists come in and again during lunchtime there still will be time for dialogue and conversation and asking questions from our panelists as well so one more round of applause and then get to work