Andrea Colon spent her Halloweens making the journey to the far side of Rockaway Peninsula, an 11-mile length of land jutting out of Queens, New York. She knew that the west side of the peninsula was where the rich families lived. And their wealth meant a bigger, better haul of treats than the one she would’ve earned had she stayed put on the east side.
But when she entered high school, she realized the holiday wasn’t just a night of costume and treats: It was a reflection of the myriad of disparities that divided the lives of the 127,000 residents of Rockaway Peninsula.
The houses along the west side tend to belong to wealthy, white families. Residents on the east side are typically minorities and lower-income residents. People who live on the west side have private beaches, yacht clubs and the Rockaway Farmers Market. The east side is regarded as a food desert lacking in options for affordable, fresh and healthy food — perhaps one of the key reasons why its residents face high rates of obesity and diabetes. Whereas wealthy commuters on the west side are better positioned — financially and geographically — to get to work, commuters on the east side are more likely to rely on public transportation, where the dearth of options means they must face commutes averaging 53 minutes in each direction a day, the longest commutes of any New York City residents.
The more Colon learned about the chasm of inequality in her own backyard, the more the high school student realized she had to do something. So in 2016, during her junior year, she joined the Rockaway Youth Task Force (RYTF).
RYTF is a “for youth, by youth” group of 60 young people organizing at the grassroots level to equalize outcomes across race and class lines within its community.
“It’s about coming together as young people and trying to get access to spaces where these things are talked about,” Colon, now 18 and lead organizer for the group, told NationSwell. “The youth voice is just not very present.”
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When RYTF was founded in 2011, it initially focused on neighborhood beautification projects and community improvements. Then, in the year following the organization’s founding, Hurricane Sandy hit.
“I think that’s when it all came full circle, and we all just started having more of a social justice lens in thinking about issues that impact our community,” Colon said.
The devastating superstorm left parts of Rockaway without electricity or access to medical attention for weeks and subway service was suspended for seven months. Local grocery stores were destroyed. Colon said families turned to bodegas for food, and despite their best efforts, those corner stores weren’t able to reliably provide fresh produce to customers.
So in 2013, the youth group rallied for access to a vacant, half-acre lot on Beach 54th Street and transformed it into something thriving: the largest youth-run urban farm in New York City for the past six years, bringing the possibility of fresh produce — and therefore healthy food — to a community where such offerings were a rarity.
But RYTF grows more than good greens. Its organizers pride themselves on helping young people grow into the kind of leaders who actually better their communities.
In 2013, the group became a nonprofit and grew to expand its focus into four core areas: food justice, educational equity, criminal justice reform and civic engagement. Those core areas extended out into hosting campaigns around voter registration, lobbying for restorative justice practices in schools and organizing Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the city.
Among its accomplishments was the successful campaign to extend the Q52 bus line 18 blocks east. This gave over 10,000 more residents access to the route, and therefore, access to jobs, schools and resources.
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Young people across Rockaway can join the task force by going through a 12-week course on the history of organized movements and basics of movement building. Then they get to work: The members attend community council meetings, lead rallies and organize protests.
Colon said other communities can and should create similar groups so young people’s voices can be heard.
“All these issues impact young people,” Colon said. “This is the world that we’re going to be living in for quite a while, so our voices should be validated and we should be given a seat at the table.”
RYTF was founded by the simple model of finding a problem, rallying people together and creating change. Its website provides an in-depth look at how the group approaches issues and theory of change. It’s a model that communities across the nation can adapt to their own unique neighborhoods. Colon’s advice is to get people together and act — or else.
“We’re going to be the ones either suffering from the consequences or reaping the benefits,” she warned.
More: Brooklyn Middle Schoolers Are Launching Homemade Boats to Test Their Stem Skills
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Andrea Colon is 22 and joined the task for in 2015. She is 18 and joined in 2016. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.
Tag: urban transportation
How a Fake Ad Campaign Led to the Real-Life Launch of a Massive Infrastructure Project
Donald Trump’s call for a “big, beautiful wall” along our southern border hasn’t resonated in the West Texas city of El Paso. Already connected to Mexico by the world’s largest border metroplex, local officials want to further link El Paso to its sister city, Ciudad Juarez. Last January, they started laying tracks for a streetcar line that officials hope eventually will shuttle passengers between the two countries, as it had once done for most of the 20th century.
Notably, and rather unusually, the El Paso streetcar initiative gained steam as a public and performance art project. In 2011, black-and-white portraits of a smiling train conductor started popping up around town, sometimes accompanied by the phrase Sube al futuro: Go to the future. A few months later, a wheat-pasted mosaic on an abandoned brick building featured hundreds of locals’ faces; together, the composite formed an ad for a retro streetcar, which resembled the Art Deco-ish trolley that ran 63 miles between El Paso and Juarez until 1974. At that point, conceptual artist Peter Svarzbein, an El Paso native, introduced himself as the creative mind behind the El Paso Transnational Trolley Project.
In the five years since, an even odder confluence of art and life took place. The fictional ad campaign gave a fresh face to the public transit movement, which helped turn it into a multimillion-dollar construction reality (the first 4.8-mile section is set to open in 2018). Meanwhile, Svarzbein ran for office and now sits on the nine-member city council, which provides direction to the agency responsible for the El Paso’s transit projects.
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“Border crossing is what defines us,” Svarzbein says of his city. “It’s in the best interest, for both El Paso and Juarez, to allow these people to cross over. They’re not doing it to take our jobs and our Medicaid, or whatever rhetoric is espoused. We understand our people crossing over symbolize the dreams of what this country has always been about.”
The son of an Argentine-born surgeon and a French-born nurse who moved to El Paso together in 1978, Svarzbein grew up accustomed to a border town’s cross-cultural influence. In high school, he and his friends regularly trekked next door to dine out at restaurants or take advantage of Mexico’s younger drinking age at nightclubs.
But shortly after Svarzbein moved away to attend Franklin & Marshall College, a liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, the tie between the sister cities was snipped. In 2006, the Mexican president Felipe Calderon launched an all-out assault against the country’s powerful drug cartels, an opening salvo that led to turf wars in Juarez and chaos along the border. To respond to the violence, Svarzbein began looking for a way to remind residents of both countries of the connections they shared, despite the brutality.
Researching symbols of unity, he came across pictures of El Paso’s old trolley line. For his master’s thesis at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, he decided to create a series of fake ads for the tram’s revival. Both conceptual and commercial, a historical documentary and a performance piece, the art project blurred genres — not unlike how living on the border can entwine residents’ identities.
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In 2012, Svarzbein’s fictional vision for a revitalized streetcar system started to become reality when he discovered the city planned on selling the old, rusting trolleys to San Francisco. “I said, ‘Oh, hell no,’” Svarzbein recalls. He began lobbying city officials to apportion part of a quality-of-life bond to reviving the streetcar, and he gathered over 1,800 signatures. The outpouring of support eventually won a $97 million grant from the Texas Department of Transportation.
When the first phase opens, the trolley will make 27 stops along a route from the University of Texas El Paso to the city’s downtown. It’s expected to pick up about 1,480 riders daily, topping 540,000 trips a year. The line will use six vintage Presidents’ Conference Committee cars, a tram design that became popular in 1936, around the time FDR was reelected for a third term; each is being refurbished with Wi-Fi and air-conditioning. “For some people, it taps into nostalgia. They remember when they were kids, riding the streetcar with their abuela, when it was easier to go into Mexico,” Svarzbein says.
The public-works project is a nod to the city’s history, but Svarzbein hopes that it will also create new opportunities on both sides of the border. “We have the ability in this region to not just design an idea, but to build it,” he says. “We need to make sure that people and businesses are able to cross the border in an efficient and safe way.”
That, after all, is the promise of an international streetcar, he adds, especially in a time where inflamed political rhetoric paints the US-Mexico border as an area in need of armed patrols, rather than more ports of entry. “What much of the country doesn’t understand — and what we understand all too well being in these twin cities — is that border security is economic security,” Svarzbein argues. “Providing jobs are how you make this area safe. Jobs are how the cartels don’t have as much power. Jobs are how you grow this region.”
An earlier version of this story suggested Svarsbein was the sole instigator of the project, when he was actually one of several people advocating for it, and that the cartel-related violence in Juarez had reached across the border. We regret the errors.
Homepage photo courtesy of Peter Svarzbein/mongovision.com.