The struggle for the gardens: Puerto Ricans, redevelopment, and the negotiation of difference in a changing community

The Lower East Side community gardening movement began in the 1970s as local people reclaimed polluted city-owned vacant lots for open space. This Manhattan neighborhood is gentrifying, and in 1996 the city began aggressively promoting development on these sites. Between 1996 and 1999 gardening activists mobilized to protect the gardens from destruction. Competing claims about the working class, ethnic, and counter cultural identity of the Lower East Side were a central issue in the struggle among different local use groups, and against the city's pro-development regime. This ethnographic study of the garden preservation movement examines how activists in the movement negotiated the ethnic and class based tensions among “artist” and Puerto Rican gardeners through the symbolic construction of an inclusive community identity. The central questions of this dissertation are: How do users' relationships to these spaces inform their local community identity? How do unequal power relationships among local constituencies, and between activists and the city, inform how “community” is constituted and politically deployed? How do activists in the contentious environment of a gentrifying neighborhood forge alliances despite differences? In addressing these questions, this study engages with literature on: (1) community politics and urban redevelopment; (2) identity formation and inter-group relations; and (3) social movements. To examine the sources of conflict among the two use groups, I look at the struggle between the ethnically centered community identity professed by Puerto Rican oldtimer gardeners, and the broadly communitarian ethos of more recently arrived “artist gardeners”. Puerto Rican gardeners feared losing control of their gardens to non-Puerto Ricans, and related their loss of control over gardens to their displacement through gentrification. Artist gardeners saw the ethnic exclusivity of Puerto Ricans as anti-community, and a political liability in the garden preservation fight. However, I find that these groups can create common action through ritual and political rhetoric that encompass, within community boundaries, differences in what is considered “authentic” community. I also find that the negotiation of difference is easier when activists are confronting together an overriding challenge from outside the neighborhood.