Documenting Urban Change: Gentrification, Representation, and Living Los Sures

Abstract

The 1984 documentary Los Sures is a portrait of the poverty-stricken Puerto Rican neighborhood of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 2014, the Brooklyn-based documentary nonprofit UnionDocs re-released this little-seen film, along with a host of new multimedia content. The project, titled Living Los Sures, is alternatively a statement on the neighborhood’s radical transformation and an appeal to a sense of community and continuity. This essay engages the politics and esthetics of such an undertaking through the lens of both documentary-film studies and critical geographic perspectives on gentrification. I argue that while Living Los Sures betrays a flawed liberalism consistent with much documentary filmmaking, it nevertheless offers a unique vantage point onto the spatiotemporal imaginary of the contemporary city. I trace the original film and its re-issue against New York City’s recent history and contend that this project illuminates questions of political solidarity and representation in the neoliberal era.

1984年的纪录片Los Sures，是美国纽约市布鲁克林区南威廉斯堡的贫困波多黎各社区的写照。2014年，总部位于布鲁克林的纪录电影非营利性组织UnionDocs，重新发布了这部鲜为人知的影片以及大量新的多媒体内容。这项名为Living Los Sures的工作，是一个社区彻底转变的声明，是对社区意识和连续性的呼吁。本文从纪录片研究和高档化批判地理的视角，探讨了这项工作的政治学和美学。我认为，尽管它违背了许多纪录片制作所遵从的非完美自由主义，Living Los Sures为当代城市的时空假想提供了一个独特的视角。我跟踪了原始影片、再发行和纽约市的近期历史，认为Living Los Sures阐明了新自由主义时代下的政治团结和政治表述。

El documental Los Sures de 1984 es un retrato de la muy empobrecida barriada portorriqueña de South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. La UnionDocs, entidad documentalista sin ánimo de lucro basada en Brooklyn, volvió a lanzar en 2014 esta casi desconocida película, junto con un montón de contenido multimedia nuevo. El proyecto, titulado Viviendo en los Sures, alternativamente es un recuento de la radical transformación del vecindario y la apelación en favor de un sentido de comunidad y continuidad. Este ensayo aboca la política y la estética de tal emprendimiento a través de la lente de los estudios de películas documentales y de las perspectivas geográficas críticas de la gentrificación. Yo sostengo que, si bien Viviendo en los Sures traiciona un liberalismo defectuoso consistente en gran parte con la filmación de documentales, proporciona sin embargo una atalaya única para el imaginario espaciotemporal de la ciudad contemporánea. Le sigo la pista al film original y a su reedición frente a la historia reciente de la Ciudad de Nueva York, y afirmo que este proyecto arroja luz sobre cuestiones de solidaridad política y representación en la era neoliberal.

Key Words:

• cultural geography
• cultural studies
• documentary
• film
• gentrification
• 文化地理学，文化研究，纪录片，电影，高档化。
• documental
• estudios culturales
• film
• gentrificación
• geografía cultural

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Olivia Gibian, Nick Nauman, and Dr. Priya Jaikumar, who each offered generous feedback on this piece. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their attentive, helpful comments.

Notes

1. Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique and edited collection Critique and Postcritique outline a host of scholarly approaches that question the hegemony of “critique,” which is to say the diagnostic interpretive style descendant from the Marx-Nietzsche-Freud triad described by Paul Ricoeur as the hermeneutics of suspicion. Bruno Latour’s 2004 essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” is likewise seen as marking this shift. Like most “posts,” “postcritique” has its problems: particularly the suggestion of a clear temporality—a definite move past or beyond critique. On the contrary, “critique” becomes one strategy among many, which on the one hand is nothing new, and on the other is a major intervention in the methods and politics of humanities scholarship.

2. Here I am drawing on Mary Louise Pratt’s much-cited notion of the contact zone—the border space where settler/colonizer and colonized societies collide and cross-pollinate, however skewed the power dynamics might be.

3. As a Chilean raised in Puerto Rico and trained as a filmmaker in New York, Echeverria no doubt brought a personal perspective to this migratory network.

4. The park was named after John Zuccotti, chairman of Brookfield Properties, the real-estate company that owns the space. In a bit of poetic symmetry, Zuccotti was deputy mayor under Abraham Beame in the ’70s and was instrumental to the negotiations during the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis (Roberts 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nick Earhart

NICK EARHART is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90007. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the history of Los Angeles, ecocritical theory, and relationships between artists and urban planners in the neoliberal era.