The 82nd Street Partnership has appointed a new executive director. Her name is Leslie Ramos and she is an alumnus of the neoliberal Bloomberg administration. In 2008 Ms. Ramos was appointed as the Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses. She has also worked as an Assistant Commissioner at the NYC Department of Housing and Preservation. In short, Ms. Ramos has impeccable neoliberal credentials that should serve her well in marketing the controversial Roosevelt Avenue BID.
In researching her background, it appears that Ms. Ramos is of Puerto Rican descent and speaks Spanish fluently. These cultural and linguistic skills and sensibilities will clearly be touted as positive attributes that should permit Ms. Ramos to efficiently carry out her assigned BID functions. And in an article – addressing her appointment as the BID director – which appeared in the New York Daily News, Ms. Ramos was quoted as claiming that she “went through that immigrant experience, so I can understand and relate to (immigrants).” This quote, unfortunately, is both disingenuous and historically problematic. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens as a function of Puerto Rican Federal Relations Act of 1917 (otherwise known as the Jones Act). To rewrite U.S. imperial history and to cavalierly infer that Puerto Ricans are immigrants reinforces a long-standing marginalization of Boricuas as outsiders.
Ms. Ramos’ conflation and homogenization erases important cultural and class differences that mark the diverse characteristics of the poly-ethnic Spanish language immigrants that live and work within and around the proposed BID catchment zone. For a newly appointed administrator – that is self-branding herself as a culturally sensitized “immigrant” of sorts – Ms. Ramos has dropped the proverbial ball by homogenizing local Spanish language residents. This unfortunate form of cultural and economic standardization reinforces the a-historical neoliberal presumption that “one size fits all.” In this context, place and culture count for very little, and are reduced to impediments that will be eventually minimized by the supposed market efficiency that characterizes the BID model.
Ms. Ramos’ initial public comments, are not as forthright as one would expect, considering that she will be spearheading the controversial and highly contested establishment of the Roosevelt Avenue Business Improvement District (BID). And as an outcome of the neighborhood-based, bottom-up, and anti-BID resistance — the on-going neoliberal corporate incursion into our immigrant barrios will be closely monitored and assessed by a growing cadre of politically sophisticated immigrant and second-generation activists and local entrepreneurs.
Why the ongoing resistance? Because the political struggle over the Roosevelt Avenue BID is not about individuals, personalities, efficiency, or Spanish language and/or cultural dexterity. It is about social justice, immigrant political incorporation, local democracy, and the kind of city we want for our fellow immigrants, our children, and our grandchildren. And, in the final analysis, the struggle for social justice entails contesting neoliberal initiatives that highlights profits over people.
Arturo Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is chairperson of the Newest New Yorkers Committee of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught contemporary immigration, entrepreneurship, and urban planning at Barnard College, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, and Pratt Institute.
arturosanchez@queenslatino.com
