Members of the Movement for Justice in El Barrio speaking before the film screening. A photo of Mark-Viverito, caricatured as the devil, is visible in the background. Bilal Lakhani/Northattan.
“Twenty years ago, a public servant was a public servant,” said Fernando Salicrup, executive director of Taller Boricua (Puerto Rican Workshop), who called Mark-Viverito “a dictator.”
“This woman is not concerned about East Harlem,” complained Nellie Bailey of the Harlem Tenants Council, who read out a charge sheet of Mark-Viverito’s positions that Bailey said damaged the neighborhood — including support for Columbia University’s expansion and a proposed rezoning on 125th Street.
Bailey said Mark-Viverito’s political agenda was highly supportive of big business, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Economic Development Corporation, which has recently moved to push Taller Boricua out of its current location. Taller Boricua was one of the organizers of the Tuesday screening.
“She keeps saying that she’s doing this for progress,” said Bailey. “But whose progress is it if we’re the ones losing our homes?”
As the pile-on against Mark Viverito grew, a lone voice shouted from the back of the auditorium: “Those are lies.” The speaker was Gloria Quinones from a group called the “Concerned Citizens of El Barrio.”
Quinones’s attempts to defend Mark-Viverito were drowned out by chants from the crowd: “El Barrio is not for sale.”
The chant was taken from the title of the film whose screening was much delayed. “El Barrio is not for sale; it is to be loved and defended” was the somewhat long-winded title for a short video that featured scenes from a recent protest against gentrification in East Harlem. The audience for the screening included some who participated in the protest, which featured a street confrontation with Mark-Viverito’s supporters. When the film showed a scene of Gloria Quinones snatching a placard from a protestor and tearing it up, a whisper of boos ran through the cultural center auditorium.
Discussion following the film confirmed that the audience was almost entirely sympathetic to the protestors and critical of Mark-Viverito. In an interview afterward, Quinones said she was puzzled by the “obsession with Melissa and the power she doesn’t have. Someone is funding these folks. I don’t know who.”
