Empowered Culture? The Empowerment Zone and the Selling of El Barrio

By Arlene Davila, June 2004

It is not a question of getting money just for anybody who needs money, there's an aesthetic to the wealth. And Thelma's Lounge doesn't represent that. Bobby's Record shop does not represent that. Juan Valdez Cafeteria does not represent that. Starbucks does. HMV does.

Felix Leo Campos, Director of After Dark, speaking about The Empowerment Zone.

The marketing of culture, be it through museums, restaurants or even parades, is central to tourism, one of the most important industries feeding the City's international standing. It was hence expected that the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone legislation (EZ), introduced in Congress by Rep. Charles Rangel in 1994, and still in effect, would launch a Cultural Industry Investment Fund, providing a perfect example of the close alliance between culture and profit in urban centers like New York. Intended to "stimulate the production of cultural products and services which will attract larger audiences, create jobs, and increase the economic benefits of Heritage Tourism in Upper Manhattan,"[1] the initiative explicitly treats culture as a tool for the creation of jobs in amusement, recreation, travel, gifts and other services.

The EZ's stated goal of "preserving the distinct character" of neighborhoods is secondary on an application where grants are awarded on the basis of economic impact, increased tourist traffic and number of jobs created or retained. In short, "heritage" is ancillary to tourism, meant only to be put in the service of viable tourist districts containing cultural, entertainment, dining and recreational attractions.

I suggest this initiative has much to teach us about tourism as an urban development strategy, and about the intricate and tense relationship between culture as "industry" and culture as "ethnicity" in the development of such initiatives. Not that the intersection of ethnicity and tourism is new. In global urban centers like New York, ethnicity in the form of "diverse cuisines," or shopping and entertainment districts has long been touted and sold as a tourist attraction in its own right, and examples abound of ethnic enclaves such as Little Italy and Chinatown for long turned into sanitized tourist destinations.

Similarly, Latino culture and Latinidad have been the subject of culturally oriented urban development initiatives such as Paseo Boricua in Chicago and Villa Victoria in Boston. These developments have been described as spaces that showcase and celebrate Puerto Ricaness and as important barriers to gentrification, while also containing it to suit the needs and prerogatives of urban economic development (Matos 2000, Flores Gonzalez 2001, Rinaldo 2002).

But Manhattan is too expensive a piece of real estate, and Puerto Ricans too politically vulnerable, while still a likely threat because of their numbers, to give rise to comparable developments, local tourist proponents would soon learn. The application, or more appropriately, the misapplication of the EZ Culture Industry Fund hence presents a keen example of the overt ways in which ethnicity can be so easily underplayed in relation to industry, revealing the real objectives and priorities of neo liberal based tourism development initiatives.

In part, the EZ's stance can be easily explained by the antagonistic demands of tourism for difference, or that which vests places with value as "destinations," and for standardization or that which provides uniformity of services, pleasure and comfort to visitors (Kirsenblatt Gimblet 1998, MacCannell 1999). In other words, as dependent as current tourism strategies may be on the "uniquess" of particular places, events, things or people, they are also required to make these spaces safe, comfortable and entertaining. Which is to say, for purposes of tourism, ethnicity must always be contained in the right package, "tourist bubble" and cultural industry (Judd 1999).

This business treatment of culture is additionally explained by its likely use as a deterrent to ethnic and racial debates, by making business considerations, not culture, that is, its cultural value to residents or prospective visitors, into the primary award variable within the initiative. In so doing, the initiative speaks to contrasting systems of evaluations at play in the economic and the cultural realm that has for so long troubled cultural policy writers and their quest to find commensurable, yet uncontested value between these fields (Thorsby 2001).[2] Namely, the EZ business treatment of culture represented a direct challenge to the dominant definitions and uses of culture in East Harlem, where cultural initiatives have been recurrent resources for struggles over rights, representations and identity, and where most cultural institutions had been funded as part of such struggles.[3] Yet tourism always presupposes the creation of difference, which in El Barrio could only be tantamount to heritage and culture. Given this, the EZ approach to culture as primarily a profit making device, did little to exempt it from particular ethnic and identity associations, and was in fact a catalyst for tensions with important racial and cultural implications.

Lacking in cultural industries and entertainment infrastructure, Upper Manhattan communities (comprising Washington Heights, West, Central and East Harlem) had only their culture and the ethnic and historical identification of their neighborhoods to market. But whose culture? What aspects and representations? And on what basis? Upper Manhattan residents are over 50% Latino,[4] yet it is West and Central Harlem that carry a national and international reputation among prospective tourists.

By limiting East Harlem's funding eligibility to certain sections, and imposing requirements that only institutionalized cultural industries could meet, EZ virtually guaranteed that Black cultural institutions in Central and West Harlem, which are the most established cultural institutions in Upper Manhattan, would be most prominently featured in EZ sponsored tourist promotional materials and the ones eligible for the largest amounts of funding.[5] Hence, nine years into program, it was estimated that only 1.5 out of the 25 million cultural investment fund, had been directed to East Harlem (Kreinin Souccar 2003).

This, coupled with the lack of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos on the EZ board and staff, led to controversy over inequities in the distribution of grants, funds and resources, exposing the permanence of old ethnic/racial tensions in East Harlem, and the fact that ethnicity is as much a basis for distributing resources and entitlements today as it was in the 1960s. EZ, after all, was not targeting the raceless poor, but rather Blacks, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, with particular histories and experiences of struggling both with state redistributive systems and with one another over similar resources. The program's disavowal of ethnicity brought up these and other concerns to the forefront, primarily the difficulty of turning culture into a profit making device with little regard to the "people" that always author and inform it.

This chapter examines the implementation of the EZ Culture Industry Fund in East Harlem, and the problems East Harlemites, especially its Puerto Rican residents, encountered in the process of marketing their culture, particularly within EZ standards. I show how though blatantly tied to the logic of industry and business, this initiative became a catalyst for ethnic and racial contests, and telling of the close nexus between cultural initiatives and processes of gentrification. I suggest that the EZ initiative was foremost about educating and governing East Harlemites along neo liberal conventions, and most effective at poking on the political uses of culture as a recourse of identity and representation, by favoring, marketable, while containing, though never fully eradicating, politicized ethnicity.

The Problems and Perils of Marketing East Harlem

The EZ Heritage Tourism initiative was not the first government initiative that spurred residents to think about culture in terms of profit making and tourism. Shifts toward self sufficiency in state and federal government programs for culture and the arts, the expansion of audiences, and the privatization and diversification of funding sources, had already pressed local institutions and cultural workers to market themselves if they were to survive in a more competitive environment.[6]

Most East Harlem cultural institutions were founded during the peak of civil struggles over representation in the early 1970s, and sustained by government sources making pressures to privatize their funding particularly hurtful to their operations and, in some cases, to their mission. El Museo del Barrio, perhaps the only Puerto Rican cultural institution in East Harlem that has managed to grow and diversify its funding sources is a good example. For El Museo, becoming competitive entailed not only opening a gift shop and marketing itself more aggressively, but also shifting its mission to Latin American art, which by the mid 1980s had become far more attractive to private funders. This change worked wonders for El Museo which, since 1996 has attracted a range of private and non profit funders, and visitors from all over the city. Yet the lack of Puerto Ricans and Latinos, rather than Latin Americans and Anglos, on the museum's staff and the steep decline in Puerto Rican exhibitions became an immediate subject of great controversy. As we shall see, the shift marked the loss of an institution initially founded to place Puerto Ricans on the map locally and nationally; a vivid indicator of displacement.

Long before the EZ, marketing concerns were at play during the ten year planning process for the New Directions 197A plan, whose recommendations and portrayal of East Harlem as a centrally located and accessible neighborhood ripe for outside development, constitutes a marketing document in and of itself. The plan proposed the development of a cultural crossroads along 106th St. and Lexington Avenue at the present site of the Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, to complement other such crossroads (or core development centers) emphasizing business, education, transportation and retail, and serve as a cultural stronghold for the community.

Artist Fernando Salicrup, who spearheaded the Crossroads idea, explained that the plan was intended to stop gentrification by developing one sector that would function as the area's Latin stronghold, although like all recommendations in New Directions, the crossroads idea was simultaneously implicated in furthering this process. For one, the plan's recommendation for a tourism crossroads uniting larger Fifth Avenue institutions (such as the Museum of the City of New York, El Museo del Barrio and Central Park Conservancy Garden) and smaller local institutions, could easily backfire by submerging the latter to the logics and demands of the larger Fifth Avenue institutions.[7]

Moreover, designing an area as a "cultural stronghold" provides no guarantee that Latino cultural institutions will ensue. Instead, such designation could be potentially used to justify the development of any type of art and culture institution, which is not what was initially envisioned by the crossroads founder. At least for now, however, the "crossroads" area continues to serve as a Puerto Rican and Latino cultural hub. It is the site of the Puerto Rican restaurant, La Fonda Boricua, of Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, as well as of the Mixta Gallery. It is also the site of the annual Latin American arts and culture festival and of the studios of longtime resident Puerto Rican artists such as Diogenes Ballester, and Jose Morales, and James de la Vega. However, as primarily rental tenants in one of the most coveted spots in close proximity to the Upper East Side, the future of many of these artists, cultural institutions and the cultural renaissance in the crossroads, remains uncertain.[8]

The EZ and its Cultural Investment Fund, however, marked the first time in East Harlem's history that the community had been directly encouraged to market itself, and to think about how best to attract "footwork" into the area strictly in business and entrepreneurial ways.

As explained by Charles Rangel in the same empowerment zone forum with which I started this book, "we don't fund ideas unless other people believe in your idea." Hence funding criteria that included "broad impact through increased audience and tourist traffic and job creation, leverage of significant additional public or private investments, potential to increase the supply of quality cultural productions, merchandise, goods and services,..." along with sustainability, fiscal and programmatic feasibility and leadership qualifications. All of these business prerogatives were masterly listed on a twelve page questionnaire which, to further transmit the business tone of the initiative, questions applicants about their mission and audience services in terms of "products and services" that will be provided to "patrons and consumers." [9]

Obstacles were soon forthcoming. First and foremost there was the problem of recognition and evaluation of Upper Manhattan communities. This obstacle is amply evident in the Tourism Market Study commissioned by the EZ to study attitudes and spending habits of visitors to Upper Manhattan. The study attests to the general association of the area with "urban decay" and lack of safety. In fact, Upper Manhattan visitors were shown to come primarily from out of the city, often from abroad, to be white, and to come mostly as bus tour passengers, a choice of transportation telling of visitors' negative perception of the area. Most significant, the study shows East Harlem lagging far behind Central and West Harlem in public recognition; it is Jazz, gospel, Soul food and Harlem's historical landmarks that attract visitors to Upper Manhattan, and "Harlem" and its cultural heritage that first come to tourists' minds (Audience Research and Analysis 2000).

The most visited cultural sites include the Apollo Theaters, Sylvia's Restaurant and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which not solely are among the oldest and largest institutions in the area, but are the ones most targeted by tourist bus lines, evidencing the role of the bus tourist industry in shaping Harlem's image to the world. Overall, the study conclusively shows that there are few recognized tourist cultural attractions in East Harlem, translating into little cultural recognition of El Barrio, and of its Latino heritage.[10] Only the Museum of the City of New York and El Museo del Barrio were amply recognized by interviewees, but located along the upscale Fifth Avenue Museum Mile strip, visitors to these institutions are physically separated from the core of El Barrio. They would first have to cross a public housing project and an un illuminated commuter train underpass, both well recognized racially marked spaces, scorned by some, celebrated by others as physical deterrents to touring audiences and gentrifiers before reaching other sectors of El Barrio.

Indeed, in contrast to Central Harlem, with its housing stock originally created for an affluent class in the 19th century, only to be relegated to African Americans after the real estate market floundered, East Harlem was always one of the poorest communities, a bedrock of immigrants housed in "common tenements."[11] Not only does it lack the pretty brownstones and historic districts that draw visitors to Harlem, but East Harlem's architectural deficit was worsened after it became a target of urban renewal. Add to that the disparity in historical cultural capital between these communities.

East Harlem's Latino history is largely undocumented, and thus suffers under the misconception that Latinos' are a transient population, not a constituent component of U.S. society. Consequently, their history has and could never approximate the level of recognition enjoyed by Harlem and its Cultural Renaissance. Little wonder then that its more sympathetic chroniclers in the past described East Harlem as a "plain jane" in comparison to Harlem (Cayo Sexton 1965). Its cultural institutions, such as those at the cultural crossroads, are also considered too small to constitute a "complete destination" and keep "footwork" in the area, as demanded by contemporary tourist industries.

The predicaments discussed by Dolores Hayden when describing the problems of representing marginal history are hence amply evident in East Harlem, where that history is embedded not in architectural monuments but rather in "public processes and public memories" throughout the whole urban landscape (1999). For, just as a lack of nationally recognized history does not mean that there is no history, a lack of recognized attractions does not mean that there are no places residents value that may be marketed to tourists, but that tourist sites have yet to be created and valued as such. As tourist scholars have repeatedly reminded us, tourists attractions are not natural creations but the outcome of infrastructure, such as museums, trajectories, tour routes and other memory holding physical spaces that create a "safe" mode for discovery and pleasure (Kirshenblatt Gimblett 1998, Desmond 1999).

Nor is the "worthiness" or the value of things and places inherent to them, but rather result of their assessment against established systems of value and signification. Within the Western canon, as writers have repeatedly noted, these values prioritize the supposedly universal appeal and applicability of art and culture, over and above, their ever present ethnic, cultural and social content and significance, constructs that are only achieved through the erasure of heterogeneity and the maintenance and creation of exclusions (Bourdieu 1993, Marcus and Myers 1995, Deutsch 1998). Leo Campos reiterates this same point in the opening epigraph when he recalls that there is indeed a sense of "aesthetics" at play in the EZ tourism initiative, favoring that which is sanctioned according to "universalist" aesthetic standards or rightly packaged in "safe" and "efficient" ways.

In fact, no time was lost in conversation before people listed numerous tourist worthy sites, all of which spoke to El Barrio's history and its Puerto Rican and Latino's heritage: from festivals and celebrations such as the old timers' stickball game, the Three Kings and the 116th Street festival, as well as newer events such as Cinco de Mayo now celebrated by the growing Mexican population, to mural walls, casitas and community gardens.

Ismael Nuñez, a resident, then member of the cultural affairs committee of the Community Board and a freelance journalist whose writing has appeared in Harlem Times among other local publications, came up with numerous possible tourist sights after my initial prompts: "We can put up plaques where Don Pedro Albizu Campus lived, where Vito Marcantonio lived, where the first stickball game was played, and where Julia de Burgos used to live. People need to know about the Spanish Methodist Church, which was taken over by the Young Lords, and about the Park Palace Ballroom, (formerly at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street) where Machito, Tito Puente and Ismael Rivera and other Latino stars played. All this can make up a trajectory for tourists."

Noteworthy, far from the static image tourist sights oftentimes command, many of these sites are still centrally important to this community. A good example is the "retaking" of The Spanish Methodist Church, a.k.a. The Fist People's Church after the Young Lords occupation more than thirty years ago, this time by the "Poets Opposing War," as part of the anti war demonstrations mobilized in March 2003 in New York City. A program of music and poetry gathered new generations of poets, of the likes of hip hop/urban plena activist group the Welfare Poets, and Nuyorican Poetry Movement veterans Papoleto Melendez and Pedro Pietri, the latter present at the first takeover. Again, along the lines described in Chapter Two, the past and the present converge in a cultural program asserting El Barrio's cultural memory, while marking the Church's significance as a community landmark.[12]

The point is that East Harlem's problem is not that it lacks cultural resources, nor places, nor memories, nor a willingness to market their culture, but the resources to promote their value not to mention a value at odds with dominant aesthetic hierarchies devaluing ethnicity over "universalist" sanctioned culture. Also challenging is the abundance of sites imbricated in a history of opposition and struggle by a minority people, undoubtedly a difficult prospect for tourist purposes, not easily packaged in the "proper infrastructure" where tourists can comfortably linger.

Put simply, East Harlemites' non placed memories, events, and cultural appropriations of place, such as murals and casitas, or places of remembrance of past and continuing political struggles, are directly at odds with the treatment of culture as a venue of entertainment and consumption located in identifiable structures and places ready to generate profit, employment and visitors. As we saw earlier, this predicament has led to a renewed interest among Puerto Rican artists in marketing their culture with a politicized and historically aware agenda, as a means of marking culture unto space. But against this admittible difficult situation many others were disheartened. As if repeating what they had been told by EZ staff about their community, more than one tourist enthusiast believed that East Harlem's lack of visibility to tourists was simply a byproduct of its lack of tourist, cultural and historical attractions.

A member of East Harlem's Chamber of Commerce put it this way: "Harlem has the Apollo, Sylvia's, the Studio Museum, and they have their brownstones and their ethnic vendors on the street. I bet you they won't lose those vendors. But what are you going to do in El Barrio? There are no real museums, not even one restaurant where you could feel comfortable, with AC for the summer or a banquet room." Air Conditioning, a banquet room, and a "real" museum, are the keywords here, denoting residents' awareness of the high scale aesthetics they know are expected by EZ pundits from tourist developments in Upper Manhattan.

Thus, in addition to hindering the evaluation of East Harlem's cultural value, as determined by many of its Latino/a residents, the EZ confronted East Harlemites with the question of how to sell culture along EZ stipulations, through organizations, entertainment or dining venues that would be recognized by outsiders as "worthy" of footwork.

By emphasizing the need for specific places "infrastructure" in EZ terms that can be showcased and sold to visitors, the initiative made El Barrio particularly susceptible in a context where culture and hence space was up for grabs to contending interpretations of its history. In this way, the initiative was complicitous with processes of gentrification and with Latinos' marginalization. It communicated to tourism enthusiasts that their only available recourse was either to transform their institutions along measures they could never meet, or to embrace the nationally recognized cultural institutions that were either threatening to leave (such as the Museum of the City of New York), or that are being proposed as part of new developments, (as in the case of the Museum of African Art which I discuss in the next chapter). Nationally recognized as they were, these institutions were less vulnerable to doubts about their ability to anchor tourism in the area as were the Latino institutions.

But embracing these institutions came at a cost. Not only did they ease the path for new developments in the area, but they also fed into the dominant alternative multicultural history for East Harlem, to which I now turn.

East Harlem: The Resolving Door of Immigrants

Earlier we saw that not all East Harlemites considered the area as a Puerto Rican and Latino stronghold, but as a multicultural community, and a revolving door of immigrants that is of and for everyone to claim. Developers are amongst the most avid advocates of this view, but so are the largest and oldest social service and cultural institutions in the area. These include Union Settlement, the first social service organization in the area, which celebrates an annual Multicultural Festival, and the Museum of the City of New York. The Museum, which while located in East Harlem targets the entire city and its different constituencies, has played a pivotal role in the representation of this image through programs such as the "Celebrate East Harlem," festival where arts and music of different groups historically connected to the area are jointly presented and walking tours on "Multiethnic East Harlem" where visitors are taken through "one of Manhattan's most diverse communities." Indeed, like other ethnic poor neighborhoods in New York City, East Harlem has a very diverse history that warrants study, celebration and public dissemination.

The why, how and when this multicultural vision of East Harlem's history is deployed and embraced, many times altogether veiling Puerto Ricans and Latinos history and presence in the present, however, is not insignificant. For one, as we previously saw, this view is not solely deployed to communicate inclusivity, but also to justify gentrification as a process that is intrinsic to the community's history. Indeed, their continued representation as one of the many groups that have disappeared, that is, as temporary transients, was always challenged by Puerto Rican tourist enthusiasts, who were always quick to clarify they had outnumber other population segments since the 1950s. Most resented by them was the consistent pressure to underplay their identity they felt exerted on them by institutions, politicians and the media, in ways that hindered their ability to market their culture and El Barrio, particularly as a response to gentrification. The comments of District leader Felix Rosado are evocative here:

One of the biggest assets we've had in this community that we've never exploited, is our name. Corporations would pay millions of dollars to be able to say Spanish Harlem. And yet we have never marketed ourselves as Spanish Harlem. Instead we have to dance around these issues for fear of offending any other communities or ethnic groups. We have to dance around our ethnic heritage and our culture. We should be able to say, well look, we have ethnic groups, Irish, Jewish, etc., yet we're proud to be PR, Dominican or Cuban and market that, Aretha Franklin sang about it, Elton John sang about it...yet we can't market ourselves as Spanish Harlem to try to get some of that 5th Ave crowd over here to say, hey we are Spanish Harlem!

Notice Rosado's strategic use of Spanish Harlem to imply unity among Latinos, a common strategy to strengthen validity of Puerto Rican's claim to Latino space in a context where Puerto Ricans felt they were being asked to "dance" around, rather than promote, their past. Assertions of the area's Latino identity, however, presented their own set of challenges. This identity was also being eagerly embraced by interests intent on advancing the area's transformation in ways that de legitimized criticisms or claims by Puerto Ricans to place and to history as petty, chauvinistic and narrow.

This is why the shift of El Museo del Barrio's mission from representing Puerto Ricans to showcasing all Latinos and Latin American Cultures in the mid 1990s remains such a heated topic of community discussion. While primarily motivated by the preeminence of mainstream sanctioned categories such as "Latin American art" over Puerto Rican and Latino art among art foundations, corporations, and the art establishment, it was presented as a response to the area's changing demographics, or as an act of inclusiveness toward our "Latin American neighbors."[13]

Hidden within this mission were the institution's elitism and disconnect from the area's primarily poor and working class Latinos.[14] The debate over the museum was then evocative of the threats presented by processes of Latinization, particularly when co opted to further marketable ethnicity, that is, Latino culture to the liking of corporate interests. This threat was posed to all Latinos, since Latinidad was used to veil exclusions around the axes of class and race along with the museum's Eurocentric designs, a realization that galvanized a few non Puerto Ricans Latinos alongside Puerto Ricans in rallies seeking community representation in El Museo's Board of Directors.

But most of all, the threat was most challenging to Puerto Ricans since the museum's repeated public claims of its desire to become a "world class institution" and supersede its Barrio roots were a direct affront to the institution's history, as an outgrowth of their struggles for community control of education to counter the elitism and racism of U.S. museums. Tellingly, heightened debate over El Museo del Barrio throughout 2002, was triggered by the discovery of trash bins loaded with art catalogues from the institutions' early exhibitions, ready to be dispensed with, and with them, important archival documentation of its past. Overtly symbolic of the institution's expungement of its Puerto Rican history, this act outraged residents and non residents alike, leading to the launching of the "We're Watching You Campaign" by the Cultural Affairs Committee of the Community Board, then headed by Debbie Quiñones.

The campaign sought a say in the institution, a reconfiguration of its board, as well as the development of policies, such as a catalogue distribution plans, that would insure the institution remain true to its Puerto Rican past and to its community mission. Incidents like this vividly displayed the unique predicaments hindering acknowledgment of Puerto Rican culture and history, in particular its subordinate "dispensable" status, making activists ever more vigilant about the uses and misuses of discourses of Latinidad. The comments of Gloria Quiñones about El Museo del Barrio are evocative here:

I feel as passionately about the roots and history of El Museo del Barrio and anguish over the marginalization of the Puerto Rican participation in the Museo. However, I think it's really wonderful that we have the Mexican community and its art represented at the museum. The Museo is la casa puertorriqueña and it was founded because the Met and the MoMA would not show our artists' work. It was established with a lot of struggle, blood, sweat and tears of the people of this community. We don't want to lose that.... That does not mean that you don't invite another as you do to your own house, but you have them in the living room, you have them in the dining room. But you don't give up your toilet and your kitchen and your bedroom and your bed forever and ever right? So it's fine to bring in our guests, to bring in our Mexican and Dominican and Filipino brothers and sisters to come and show their art and hopefully encourage them to develop their institutions in the community.... I don't see going to the Harlem museum and say, give up your space for Puerto Rican art and Dominican art and dilute yourself. We would not dare do that.

Not everyone who criticized El Museo's Latin American turn did so on the same bases: some sought a return to the institution's original mission encompassing only Puerto Rican culture, though most others sought an adherence to its mission to represent Puerto Rican and Latin American culture in the United States, but in an equitable and grassroots oriented fashion that be true to the institution's original and alternative mission. Older artists and activists, particularly those who had contributed to the institution's growth, were particularly more nationalistic on this issue. Younger generations, particularly college educated and scholars who supported the campaign, myself included, however, were more embracing of a mission that included all Latinos.

This pattern is itself suggestive of the numerous variables accounting for the acceptance, strategically or outright of this category; in this case, the recency of involvement in institutional settings such as universities, or in Latino advocacy institutions, involved in the dissemination Latinidad as an identity category. What nevertheless united all groups was concern over the increasing devaluation of Puerto Rican culture visa a vis the Latin American construct so embraced by government and corporate entities and, a commitment to reinstating, not diluting or undermining what Puerto Ricans had for so long struggled, namely an open cultural space that be attentive to the needs of the Barrio community.

In all instances, what people sought to communicate with their concerns in meetings and public debates on this issue, was always more complex, open, and politically charged, than what reverberated publicly. The local press in particular, was quick to posit the issue around the facile dichotomies of "Puerto Ricans versus Latinos" or else between "a ghetto or barrio museum versus a world class museum," dichotomies that as noted in the previous chapter, fall short from representing local demands for equitable, mainstream and even global recognition of Puerto Rican culture and of El Barrio's history. That is, the debate was about the mere irreconcilability of a barrio identity and past with the board's desire for a "world class museum." That is, people were amply aware that el Museo's Latin American mission implies hierarchies of recognition and representation whereby all that is Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, diasporic, and Latino, paradoxically in fact, that which is most "global" would be most marginalized.[15]

Particularly disconcerting to tourist and cultural activists were the difficulties they seemed to face when defending El Barrio as a Latino stronghold when Harlem's ethnic roots as a national Black bastion were seemingly never in doubt, but rather actively promoted as part of the so called economic boom of Upper Manhattan communities. In their view, Harlem's gentrification did not seem to convey a "cultural gentrification" or an erasure of its Black identity, at least in regards to its public image, as it did for Puerto Rican in East Harlem. Thus to many, the valence of East Harlem's multicultural history, spoke foremost of their marginality and of the little recognition of Puerto Rican culture by established evaluative structures of art, tourism and by the wider society.

A telling instance of the predicaments presented by this multicultural history is provided by the "Rediscovering East Harlem" map, coordinated by the East Harlem Historical Society in conjunction with the Union Settlement Society.

Launched by a group of primarily non resident professionals working at the MCNY, the map was developed as an educational and empowering tool for East Harlemites, intended to show the different immigrant groups that have left an imprint on the area. Fitting the tourism criteria from EZ, a second printing was produced, turning the map into a walking tour aid.[16] Loaded with markings, lines and other inscriptions for many events, pictures, trajectories, and legends identifying up to eleven ethnicities, in addition to a multiethnic category for those places and institutions that played a significant role among more than one group, the maps is difficult to read.

But its message is sufficiently clear: that all groups that have ever lived in East Harlem have their own memory places in the area and that their independent histories and trajectories can be easily equated one to another, through a story of ethnic succession and assimilation. East Harlem is hence presented as "many places at once" and "one of New York's City's most dynamic and spirited neighborhoods," a relativistic message that is further stressed by the presentation of the memory places of long gone or declining groups in the area, such as the Finnish, Dutch, Greeks and Italians alongside African Americans and Puerto Ricans, the two largest groups in the area since the 1950s.

This is a presentation that necessarily dissipates these groups' presence as just one more ethnic group that, as the Finnish, is marked to disappear  read "assimilate"  leaving only its memory places. Not surprisingly, the map's historic and hence frozen approach to East Harlem's heritage leaves no room for addressing contemporary issues, or memory places still in the making. In the words of artist Fernando Salicrup: "The problem is that they only care about the past, they are interested in folklore, what happened to the community before. Or they want to know about the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, but they forget we've been struggling since."

Indeed, the Young Lords, the civil rights activist group of the late 1960s and early 1970s, who were once demonized and persecuted, are now safely mentioned in the map, but they too are melded into a story exalting the political radicalism shared by all working class immigrants in the past.[17] Given their limited portrayal Puerto Rican cultural activists have discussed developing a Latino map, modeled after the multicultural map, but devoted solely to marking and promoting Puerto Rican and Latino memory places. Lacking the institutional support enjoyed by the makers of the first map, however, this plan has languished.

Altogether the map along with locals' apprehension about their inability to freely promote Puerto Rican culture and Puerto Rican institutions in El Barrio, presents us with yet another problem for the evaluation of East Harlem's Puerto Rican and Latino history: a cleansed past, even if ethnically tainted, is always more marketable than an ethnically tainted present. Speaking to these dynamics is the small but growing Harlem tourist industry, one of the most vocal proponents of East Harlem's multicultural vision, where El Barrio/ East Harlem is repeatedly subsumed into Harlem, or else bypassed altogether. A case in point is the reduction of East Harlem to "little Italy" in this racially loaded ad by Harlem Your Way! Tours, promising visitors a lavishly exotic visit to the greater Harlem area:

Take a syncopated Champagne Jazz Safari to a Harlem cabaret. Feast on a hearty, soulful breakfast at a Harlem church followed by a tour of the Harlem community. Visit our museums, art galleries, churches, schools, stores, restaurants, and for a unique hands on experience browse in the African Vendor's Market. Bargains galore! Explore the WORLD OF HARLEM BROWNSTONES! Exercise while seeing Harlem. Bike it or walk it! Do Harlem up RIGHT. Go in a grand style limo with champagne! See "Little Italy" in East Harlem.[18]

This last reference is to the eastern strip of East Harlem, where tourists can buy Italian ice at Rex, and visit the Church for Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. The inclusion of "Italian" sites while Puerto Rican and Latino ones are entirely obviated by this upscale tour is hence another reminder that what is less ethnically identified and tainted is more valuable as a bait for tourists. Bonnie Urciuoli's (1993) discussion of Italian Americans and Puerto Ricans in relation to the celebration of the Quincentenary is relevant here. The fact that Italian Americans were able to commodify aspects of Italian culture, some of which have been successfully tied to high culture European past, while Puerto Ricans lacked this option, she notes, is intrinsically connected to the ethnicization of Italian American culture versus the racialization of Puerto Ricans.

Constructed as such, the latter's culture was deemed to have less "heritage" value, rendering Puerto Ricanness always less marketable than Italian culture. Similar dynamics are at play here, where Italian culture is used as the conduit to cleanse the area's ethnically tainted past. After all, El Barrio, like all of Harlem, is best known as a ghetto and raced community, and as an unlikely tourist destination. Even Central Harlem, despite the tourist renaissance that it is supposedly undergoing, faces this problem. No wonder then, the popularity of tour buses, and why the regular fare of "authentic Harlem" the churches, jazz clubs and restaurants is always complemented with a visit to the Old Navy, Starbucks and Disney Stores, obviously intended to challenge negative stereotypes about Harlem as poor, crime ridden, and underdeveloped.

East Harlem residents have had ample affirmation of this pervasive image problem affecting the development of any local tourist initiative. Henry Calderon, President of the East Harlem Chamber of Commerce remembered in great dismay when Discovery Tours announced bus tours in which East Harlem was included as a place to "explore gang territories and their graffiti messages"[19] a controversy that made it to the New York Times. Many others were well aware of the kind of misinformation disseminated on those few tours coming into East Harlem, which are primarily led by non Latinos, yet another concern. Ismael Nuñez was aghast at what he heard during a multicultural tour of the area by the Big Onion Tour Company, in conjunction with the Museum of the City of New York: "They said that Puerto Ricans started coming to East Harlem after World War II, which is not true, and they did not know who is Muñoz Marín, after which 116th Street is named, or that Schomburg, the black intellectual leader, was Puerto Rican. And there was no mention of Mexicans." Most problematically, residents are afraid that the area's multicultural image helps validate the area's gentrification by presenting it as a natural process, the inevitable outcome of the area's history. But for now, I want to return to the EZ, where the fight over El Barrio's history and its representations was most directly waged around struggles for money and Latino representation.

The EZ

The meeting was held at Taino towers in the summer of 2001, and gathered East Harlem's leadership, (at least those invited by Charles Rangel's office), to meet with its elected officials over breakfast. Neither Puerto Rican state senator Olga Mendez, nor Adam Clayton Powell IV,[20] were present, which polarized the exchange, at least in the eyes of the Puerto Ricans present, as one between "Puerto Rican residents" and "black elected officials."[21] When the floor was finally opened for questions, there was a short but heated debate between Rangel and Puerto Rican district leader Felix Rosado, well known for his Pro Puerto Rican position as well as an ardent critic of East Harlem's longstanding leadership; Rosado was the only Puerto Rican candidate that has publicly challenged Senator Mendez by running against her. Angered and defiant, Rosado lost no time to accuse the congressman of dismissing and hence disrespecting his Puerto Rican heritage, by favoring Black institutions over Puerto Rican applications to the EZ.

When Rangel claimed to be unaware of such complaints, Rosado insisted that Latinos' lack of representation was common knowledge, well documented in the media; after which, and to the obvious surprise of the audience, he ended by openly remarking: "I'm Puerto Rican and proud." In swift support of Rosado, the Puerto Rican District Administrator for Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV, stood up and applauded, quickly attracting the admonishment of Rangel, uncomfortable with the suddenly ethnically charged situation. But she persisted. In her words, "Rosado had the courage to stand and raise the issue of how he feels about Latinos instead of what you'd like to hear." After the meeting, some were angered at the congressman's patronizing tone toward Latinos, for dismissing their concerns over the EZ, and for chiding them when they openly complained. "A blind man would have seen through it," one stated.

This was not the only meeting, exchange or interview in which Puerto Rican leaders expressed such heated resentment and frustration over the EZ, and where Blacks and the black leadership were blamed for the lack of success of Puerto Rican projects and proposals in El Barrio. Indeed, the EZ may have tried to underplay race and ethnicity in favor of industry, but ethnic and racial issues were overtly in play and the subject of debate among Blacks and Puerto Ricans.

No other topic was as charged as complaints over Central and Black Harlem receiving greater amounts of funding than East Harlem, and over the lack of Puerto Ricans in leadership positions at the EZ. It was a regular topic of discussion in the meetings of "Boricuas del Barrio" where charts of funding given to West and East Harlem, stating that "Less than 2% to a Puerto Rican group in El Barrio/East Harlem"[22]were circulated during deliberations about whether to sue the institution for funding parity. Politicians, for their part, pointed to their funding of East Harlem institutions, dismissing the complaints.

Indeed, funding for cultural institutions had gone to East Harlem, but mostly to large institutions such as Hope Community, to rebuilt its Recital Hall for art exhibition purposes, or to El Museo del Barrio or to new ones with funding and infrastructure, such as the National Museum of Catholic Art and History, organizations that are already in a position to attract private and governmental monies. In the eyes of many Puerto Rican activists, funds did not go to the most needy and most "Puerto Rican" institutions. In particular, people bemoaned the lack of funding for programming for new alterative spaces such as Julia's Jam, described in the previous chapter, and of similar innovative projects and programming developed in response to gentrification. Many Puerto Rican leaders, seeing this funding pattern as a move to "de Latinize the area" saw their complaints de legitimized and invalidated as ethnic chauvinism by the EZ's black leadership, who in turn were seen by Puerto Ricans as presenting Black "interests" as "global interests."

In this way, the EZ reignited a debate that is decades old and strongly connected to policies for ethic accommodation and containment. The direct connection between an initiative popularly dubbed "Charles Rangel's baby," intimated the influence of an elite cadre of long time black politician's contemporaries to Rangel, who have long made their political trajectories in Central and West Harlem. This was so notwithstanding the fact that, not unlike Puerto Ricans in East Harlem, the political base of Harlem's long time black leadership was also dwindling as result of a variety of factors, not least of which were demographic and political changes in the area.[23]

This perception of EZ's Black control along with preference given to Harlem over East Harlem in the media and tourist promotion materials, plus the paucity of Latinos on either the staff or the board were triggers to numerous debates with unavoidable racial and ethnic implications. During the two years that I followed this debate, some accommodation to Puerto Rican demands was made: more Latinos were appointed to the staff, and Puerto Rican Irving Mac Manus member of El Museo del Barrio's Board, was appointed to the UMEZ Executive Staff as vice president of the Non for Profit Division.

But Latinos' representation on the EZ board remained unchanged at eight out of approximately twenty four members. Questions were also still raised about the representation of East Harlem board appointees with regards to their ethnicity, race, place of residence, and backgrounds and associations with important area institutions such as El Museo del Barrio or Mt. Sinai Hospital, one of the largest private employers in East Harlem[24] exposing the fragility of these actions toward appeasing deeply held qualms about the initiative. For one, people were fully aware that EZ's corporate centric stand was unaffected by such appointments. In fact, Irving Mac Manus, the Puerto Rican head of the Culture Industry Fund appointed to quench demands for representation, was the first to explain to me that East Harlemites suffered from a legacy of entitlement, that they lacked "entrepreneurial spirit" to produce "competitive" proposals.

Undoubtedly, some "incompetent" proposals were probably submitted by East Harlemites while "chanchulleros" (opportunists) are never and anywhere lacking whenever money and resources are at stake. During the course of my research I heard enough gossip and hearsay implicating many Puerto Rican cultural institution in El Barrio with economic self interest, clientelism, mismanagement, and opportunism, or blaming them for being more or less representative of Puerto Ricans, particularly if they managed to receive some support from politicians or the EZ, however small.

And tempted as I was to uncover the who and what of particular cases, just as I was when I first heard of the debate over the "Barons of El Barrio" and their contested legacy, I soon desisted from this task. I heard equally passionate positions defending these same local institutions for safeguarding "our" culture and history to surmise that these charges are best seen in relation to the abiding concerns over issues of representation and accountability that were becoming so charged in an increasingly speculative environment.

This is why I purposefully focus on the premises and operations of the EZ initiative favoring marketable ethnicity, not only because I consider them responsible for much of the debate among groups and between groups and the EZ, but because they remained largely unchallenged as the standard against which local demands and proposals were swiftly dismissed and invalidated. Most significantly, these premises affected, not solely Latinos in East Harlem, but also most of Central and West Harlem's small businesses and residents.

After all, the largest economic loans and incentives were given to large corporations and developers, who were in turn displacing local merchants pushed out by high rents and stiff competition from chain stores of the likes of HMV and Old Navy.[25] Expressing the sentiment of smaller cultural organizations in West and Central Harlem, Voza Rivers, Chairman of the Harlem Arts Alliance a group of 160 organizations and individual artists, churches and tavern owners evoked similar criticisms to East Harlemites when he noted: "The only voices at the board are from the big giants like Schomburg and the Studio Museum, but they do not represent the broader community. The institutions that have been doing good work with little money, and have constituency and have been consistent with their work in this community are not getting the money. And there are a number of us that feel disenfranchised."

Even the struggle over who dominated the EZ board and staff was basically flawed given the little decision making power vested in board members. One of the new Puerto Rican board appointees in 2001 complained of being baffled about what the board does, or can do. Folders are provided at the last minute, with undecipherable information, he explained, and one could ask a few questions at the meeting, but then "you have to vote and it's all ready to go." In this way, the debate over EZ funding pitted one group against another in a conflict whose resolution was out of their reach, and where the greatest beneficiaries were large developers.[26]

This was also a struggle in which the terms of debate became twisted and muddled, and always in favor of development. Consider the fact that debates over the paucity of funding for El Barrio was turning Latino community activists and former foes of gentrification into advocates of development. The ethnically charged environment also left little room for awareness of the common problems affecting both East Harlem and Harlem residents and merchants, which was not reducible to faulting "black politicians," the EZ bureaucracy, or politics and contacts, but was far more insidious, and concerned the interest of capital in penetrating these communities.

The fact is that both Blacks and Latinos were adversely affected by the EZ's lack of outreach and by impossible guidelines, by excessive bureaucracy and by applications that, as I repeatedly heard, "everyone except The Pope had to sign." They were also affected by requirements that applicants develop detailed business plans, explain how they will generate jobs, and even transform themselves as needed, requisites that are extremely taxing for smaller cultural institutions which are primarily understaffed and under funded. But East Harlemites were additionally hurt by the lack of an EZ location in the area and of Latino staff in the EZ that could serve as local envoys to the initiative, or of materials in Spanish. Erica Gonzalez, who we met earlier, and was then also one of three Puerto Ricans in the EZ Board noted: "They say that they've done outreach, but outreach is not about leaving flyers for a seminar outside an ATM. That's far from outreach to our community."

Latino residents also felt that they were more likely to be sent to technical assistance, or "camp," to learn how to restructure their organization, or look at budgets on a long term basis, a move that added to the perception that the EZ was demeaning and patronizing to Latinos.

Debbie Quiñones, a former member of the EZ Board and then Chair of Cultural Affairs Committee, explained her frustrations at realizing that applications from East Harlem were indeed inappropriate for the funding requirements as set up by the EZ. They lacked annual reports, books, business plans and were not accountable, she noted; yet sending thirty year old institutions to technical assistance communicated to them that they were inept. The tensions were hence unavoidable. In her words: "They are telling us that our culture is colorful, and all, but not ready for economic assistance."

The staff in charge of the Cultural Industries initiative was well aware, and frustrated, with the criticisms from Latino institutions, and defensively insisted that they had done the outreach, but applications from East Harlem were not forthcoming, while many of those submitted were inappropriate for the funding requirements. Yet, for the EZ staff outreach translated to more preparatory workshops that delayed the funding process, undoubtedly leading to more resentment. A particularly telling example is the impasse involving the exchange between Candy Jackson, a staff member at the EZ non profit division, and Jose Carrero, a local Puerto Rican entrepreneur, then manager of La Marqueta, at a meeting where Jackson had gone to address people's complaints about the EZ.

Candy had been at the EZ for less than a year, and almost as a frame up, had been asked to announce a workshop purposely designed to address the lack of proposals from the community, with the intended goal of helping "institutions get the funding and ultimately create infrastructures that led to sustainability," repeating the charged issues of quality and sustainability that East Harlemites had been hearing over and over. She obviously could do little more than public relations to assuage the community; and people noticed. In the solemn and patronizing tone of someone who's been there and done that, Carrero made this apparent when he noted:

You've been there for less than a year, but we've been going back and forth with this for almost five years. Your staff turnover is faster than McDonalds, okay, and we get less service than we do at McDonalds. With all due respect, I know you're doing a good job and you're trying to reach out, we have gone to workshops time and time and time again. If somebody in the community has a restaurant and can convince a bank which is the most conservative group of human beings, of institutions that I have ever met besides some Orthodox churches, and he can turn his business into a viable business and get money from them, why can't we convince the EZ of the same things, what's the difference?....I'm wondering now, we started out with $26 million, what's left?

By then $11 million of that had already been earmarked, the representative explained, while another young woman from the EZ stressed what everyone else knew very well already: that if they had complaints they needed to see their elected officials, underscoring the importance of contacts and politics in the funding process. Yet East Harlemites felt they had little access to the powers that be, particularly to Charles Rangel, the mastermind behind the EZ. Meetings with Rangel, such as the one described at the start of this section, were open only to invited leaders and guests. In fact, I had access to the meeting only because I had literally "crashed" it with Yolanda Sánchez, a long time and well known Puerto Rican community activist and founder and director of PRACA, with whom I had met a day earlier. She too was uninvited, but had enough connections to at least hear of the meeting. Activists known for their assertiveness and criticism of previous development projects and younger leaders were not usually invited.

But it is the issue of quality and the business demands of any culture initiative that EZ demanded that was most heavily charged, for what it communicated to East Harlemites about the value of their culture and cultural institutions. These issues are most evident in the difficulties faced by small organizations seeking to tap into EZ funding. A good example is provided by Raices, a Latin music collection and research center founded in 1981, and one of the few local organizations that was funded by the initiative. As the director Ramón Rodriguez conceded, it got funding thanks to its parent organization, Boys and Girls Harbor, a large non profit children's organization with an entire development staff at its disposal.

Still, lacking a business plan, it received funds for a feasibility study, but had serious problems appraising their collection as required by the EZ. As the director noted, "there was no bag of reference for this collection. A Hispanic record had never been appraised. To us this collection is worth gold, but to society it's unworthy." The director was annoyed and bewildered.

When Machito and Tito Puente died, he had been interviewed by all the major TV networks, and it was to Raices that people had come for information on these famous musicians. The Mambo Kings movie staff had spent four months doing research in his collection, for free, not even giving him a contribution, he noted. Yet proving the value of his collection had been a struggle. The final appraisal came in the hands of Colombian ethnomusicologist Jorge Arevalo who gave it a market replacement value of about 100,000, far from what could be considered a "valuable" collection. Sensitive to the collection's historical, educational and cultural and documentational value from the perspective of Latino history, however, Arevalo added another value, that is, its cultural value which he described as priceless.[27]

Another example of the clash between EZ standards and local projects is provided by the Made in Puerto Rico store and "International Salsa Museum," a small institution with big aspirations, as suggestive by its self denomination as the "ONLY salsa museum on the planet." The store was founded by Efrain Suarez, a local Puerto Rican businessman in 1996, spurred by the lack of bodegas selling Puerto Rican products in the area. Two years later, the museum opened in a small room behind the store, to document, according to the founder, the unknown history of musicians who developed this New York based rhythm.

The involvement of Jose Obando, an Ecuadorian Salsa museologist, an enthusiast from his hometown in Coastal Guayaquil, in Ecuador, who is a marketing and communication expert, soon led to an educational program, and a website.[28] The museum is not big enough to comfortably hold even four visitors at once, yet through its website, a weekly cable channel, and an innovative, unlabeled and cluttered makeshift collection of salsa paraphernalia collected from locals, it has received a lot of local and even international attention since its founding. During a Saturday visit I made to the museum, visitors included a local youth looking for a Puerto Rican flag sticker for his boom box, a family from the Bronx, a couple of students, and some tourists, among them a salsa enthusiast from Germany who had found it on the Internet and proceeded to interview the owner about salsa, much to the owner's delight.

As a new project then lacking an official museum charter, the Museum was undoubtedly an unlikely candidate for EZ funding. However, it was not their rejection that most irked the museum proponents I spoke with, but rather the skepticism they encountered at the EZ over the value of their institution and their ability to carry out their plans. These and other doubts were communicated in a rejection letter, that Suarez was quick to share with me and others, as proof of EZ's patronizing assessment of their work, which they vehemently challenged.

The letter explained to them that the institution lacked a "stable formal structure necessary to implement operations that will sustain a museum of the magnitude you propose," questioned the appropriateness of its staff and even the attractiveness of salsa music to international visitors: "The current staff consists of salsa 'icons' but does not include staff with museum management or curatorial expertise. Management should be familiar with museum industry best practices and strategic models to ensure development of the most efficient and appropriate strategies....The proposal also lacks analysis that demonstrates an understanding of the audience demographics and demand for salsa music from domestic and international visitors."[29] Suarez was astounded by these words, which he felt disregarded not only his ability to carry out the project to completion, but most significantly raised questions about the value of salsa by asking him to prove that salsa could be a potential a draw for national and international visitors.

In addition to leaving little room for cultural initiatives that provide validation and memory, unless they could readily prove their profitable, it is also noteworthy that the EZ business stance provided no recognition for community needs that were not closely aligned with outward requirements and the demands of tourists, developers and visitors.

A vivid example is the case of St. Cecilia Church, a Roman Catholic church with a primarily Latino, increasingly Mexican parishioners. Its proposal to the EZ for a handicapped ramp entry was initially denied, but was then rerouted to the tourist initiative to repair the roof and steps, that is, the more "visible" areas. Father Skelly, the parish priest, noted in disbelief how he had been encouraged to apply under a tourism initiative when his church is rarely visited by tourists and when there are no plans for bringing tourists to his church. Last we spoke he was thinking of applying, reasoning that "the stoops are used by locals."

Evidently, there were a variety of responses, from accommodation, to outright resistance, to "making do," toward a policy that found many critics and few converts in East Harlem. Many simply ignored the initiative altogether, not caring to even apply or attend its educational workshops, one of the reasons there were few proposals originating from East Harlem while others decided to re apply after being rejected, purposefully adopting the business requirements and lingo of the EZ, though most often reluctantly, nonchalantly, and with considerable skepticism toward the initiative. Not that these types of accommodations are new.

Local institutions have long been subject to similar pressures from funding sources, always with costs involved. The difference is the heightened pressure exerted by the EZ and its neo liberal cultural policies on institutions, not only in their programs, but on their outlook and their very structure.

Debbie Quiñones put it in succinct terms when she shared her concerns: "I worry that East Harlem residents will suffer. Who will provide services? What you have now is an educational facility becoming a theater, a housing group becoming an arts group, while an arts group becomes a housing one. It's all opportunism and a fad." Indeed, for those that sought support, accommodations were unavoidable. But people were far from silent. Condemning the initiative, and making EZ's rejection of proposals by Puerto Ricans or about Puerto Rican culture examples of discriminatory trends by the EZ, were important devises for their resistance and struggle.

Moreover, as in other instances documented in this work, it is important to point out that the ethnic claims by Puerto Ricans, so undermined by local politicians and EZ officials, had larger repercussions for East Harlem. Indeed, imputations of EZ's ill treatment of East Harlem were initially voiced by and on behalf of Puerto Ricans, but many of the same actors were simultaneously calling attention to the issue, this time phrased as an "East Harlem" not solely a Puerto Rican problem.

The community board was important in this regard, leading to an official letter from this body to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which oversees EZ legislation, requesting an in depth investigation into its failures in East Harlem. When HUD's secretary dismissed their criticisms, claiming that monies had been allotted to East Harlem, community activists were adamant. In a letter responding to the Secretary, they once more reiterated the specific nature of their criticisms: "We ask that your report exclude projects and programs that are not exclusively East Harlem projects and programs.... Furthermore, of the projects claimed to benefit East Harlem, we are interested in knowing how many are owned or operated by individuals reflective of the demographics of East Harlem which is largely Puerto Rican, African American and Mexican. Moreover, we also want the data on how many projects are owned or operated by East Harlem residents." (My emphasis) [30] In other words, the race and ethnicity card was not abandoned, as contrasting definitions to those of EZ pundits, about who and on what bases should receive monies, despite being consistently contested, were never entirely appeased.

In fact, everyone I spoke to recognized that these practices had done the most to bring about changes in the EZ, such as greater openness to the need to recruiting Latino members for the Board or awareness of the need to solicit proposals from East Harlem. This outcry was also connected to the opening of a local office of the Empire State Development Corporation in El Barrio in 2003, to address issues of economic development and the failures of the EZ in El Barrio. The director, Hector Santana, another Puerto Rican returnee to the area and chairman of a newly founded Tourism Task Force, evoked a newly found optimism for the prospects of linking culture and development, when he described his plans to "use their rules to create bulletproof proposals" that remain true and sensitive to the community.

Ultimately, however, and to the dismay of some though predictable I was repeatedly told, those that seemed to be emerging as the greatest beneficiaries from these claims would be amongst the most politically connected, evidencing the many prerogatives always veiled behind so called impartial or neutral policies. Others quickly dismissed these concerns. They at least came from inside the community, I was told; they were not outsiders, evidencing again the contradictory corollaries to the linkage of culture and space. Among the emerging projects, is one by Fernando Salicrup and another by Eddie Baca, a former Chairman of the Community Board, both of which proposed affordable housing, artists housing, cultural and community space. While in their initial stages, and facing insurmountable odds in the present fiscal climate, both proposals are good examples of the culture based developments that were emerging then part and parcel of the growing concern with the promotion of Latino controlled and Latino directed development projects in the area.

Are Tourists Coming?

The EZ initiative may have tried to erase racial and ethnic tensions by treating culture as a profit making device but this neither freed it from its racial and ethnic ties in the area nor erased the spatial identification of different groups with particular neighborhoods. Residents of East Harlem were amply aware that the selling of Upper Manhattan and Harlem had implications for their future, including the possibility of their displacement, as Blacks and Latinos would be once again pitted against each other for a piece of the pie, in a struggle now waged around national and international recognition in arts, culture and tourism. But this is a contest that ultimately has no winners. It was not "culture" but culture industries that were the object of economic interest; and the largest beneficiaries, developers and outside visitors, not local residents or their needs for representation, leisure and entertainment spaces. Namely, it was marketable ethnicity that was favored, not the kind of cultural strategies and programs of self assertion proposed by local economic and tourist enthusiasts, such as those spurred alongside and in response to gentrification.

In effect, what the EZ Culture Industry fund told East Harlemites is that the future of tourism in the area is not likely to depend on its Puerto Rican and Latino roots, but on the existence and development of nationally recognized institutions whose value be never doubted. The EZ generalized a discourse of quality and efficiency, requiring that cultural institutions make themselves "efficient" institutions, along the lines of standardized art and non profit museums, in a context where the threat of gentrification had made everyone fearful and defensive of their heritage. People were repeatedly told that popular sites events and cultural institutions will always be eclipsed by "high art" and corporate projects as anchors for tourist and cultural initiatives, and that their legacy was not good enough, that it needed to be packaged in "official" and "efficient" institutions that can be visited by tourists, create jobs, income and consumers.

Sour grapes those that complained, or even worse, opportunists and inefficient. Evidently, residents of El Barrio were skeptical of the business version of culture, and challenged it in numerous ways. Highlighting considerations of race and ethnicity within an initiative that was deeply embedded in the idiom of business and efficiency, was arguably amongst the most important mediums for this challenge. Most significantly, EZ demands for quality and business results were consistently challenged, and rejections by EZ were interpreted as a lack respect for Latino cultural initiatives. These criticisms exposed that, contrary to EZ's vision, cultural initiatives are never just about business, but about people and about their dreams and aspirations for assertion and identity, even if they did little to change the discourse of business efficiency and quality that was so impedingly interweaving culture and economic development.

In hindsight, the EZ initiative is better seen as a disciplining force insofar as it was not aimed so much at promoting culture as a tool of economic development, but rather at disseminating a particular way of dealing with culture. Evidence of this is the fact that local institutions obtained funding for studies, business plans, technical support and other instruments of instruction rather than to develop and expand their institutions. We could say this is a prelude to effective growth and expansion, but then we would have to ask, expansion on what basis, to benefit whom, what audiences, what types of art and what kinds of producers and consumers? Considering that canons of quality are never universal, but always socially constructed and implicated with social hierarchies and exclusions, these questions challenge us to ask who are the ultimate beneficiaries of transformations in the name of quality and efficiency.

In other words, the cultural investment fund was not meant to increase openness or opportunities for residents to market, or define their culture or community, but rather to secure El Barrio for private development. For one, despite numerous challenges to the mantra that only institutionalized cultural institutions can lead the way toward tourism, there was so much they could accomplish with limited resources with which to back alternative programs. If they wanted tourism, they necessarily had to develop "marketable" and "sustainable" proposals or else, support the more marketable and efficient cultural institutions in the area, including those that had previously disparaged their location in El Barrio, or that were proposed as bait for new developments.

As a result, willingly or not, tourist enthusiasts, found themselves supporting projects implicated in the area's gentrification. Indeed, beyond controversy over EZ funds, the reports that the Museum of the City of New York would leave the area in favor of a downtown location, that El Museo del Barrio to revamp its Barrio origins, and that there were proposals to build a new location for the Museum of African Art, dominated the cultural news and discussions in the Community Board and among local activists. On the one hand, the proposal by the Museum of the City of New York to move to a downtown location touted as "A New Site for a New Century" and a "world class museum" for the "capital of the world," citing the poor location in East Harlem as a reason for insufficient attendance, confirmed the community's fears that El Barrio was far from a coveted location.[31] Add to this El Museo del Barrio's plan to also wean itself from El Barrio and we can see why substantive criticisms of these institutions' marginalization of Puerto Ricans and U.S. Latinos would be simultaneous with requests that they remain in El Barrio to help anchor tourism and attract name recognition and visitors to the area. This is the context that framed discussions about the Edison project and the Museum of African Art, to which I now turn.

Notes for Chapter Three