Seeing the Essential Workers: Supporting Jackson Heights, Corona, and Elmhurst through Los Herederos’ Archival Project
Juana Suárez
Associate Arts Professor; Director, Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts
The concept of “essential workers” has become particularly salient during the COVID-19 crisis, raising urgent questions of who are the essential workers and what defines them as such. New York City’s “essential population” is largely made up of undocumented, and low wage/underpaid individuals who have migrated to the US under very different circumstances, and whose contributions are extremely undervalued and politicized. The Queens neighborhoods of Elmhurst, Corona, and Jackson Heights are home to a large population of these essential workers. During the peak of the pandemic, the dramatic images of crowded hospitals, statistics, and overall media coverage ranged from information to sensationalism, with these same neighborhoods and their inhabitants emerging as a focal point of the crisis.
In a paradoxical way, a NY Times article published on August 27, 2020 underlined the characteristics that make Jackson Heights one of the surviving global towns in New York. Presided by a large photograph of the subway station at Roosevelt Avenue and 80th St., the article delves into the characteristics of what has also become an advertisement for gentrifiers: diversity, booming cultural scenes, the polyphony of languages, and an urban activist movement. The lark filter of the photographs is reminiscent of the NYC of yesteryears; however, the number of pedestrians wearing masks serve as a reminder of the COVID crisis and its dramatic effects on this area of the city.
This cultural richness of place, and the way it relates to oral tradition and music, has been recorded over the years by some local residents. In the last five years, the non-profit organization Los Herederos (The Inheritors) has played an important role in amplifying the everyday cultural life of the neighborhoods, bringing storytelling and musical legacies through digital technologies that connect or reconnect young immigrants and their contemporary New York City communities with the music and traditions of their homelands. Documenting musical activities and creating an archive is at the core of Los Herederos’ work with a ratio of action that encompasses visiting performers, settled immigrants and younger generations. The latter, in many cases, have not even visited the country of origin of their families, and their musical production, like the local inflection of their native languages, is also keen to changes and transformations resulting from cross pollination and hybridization of cultures. An endeavor that aims to connect with people in the places they live, the “Sonicycle,” a bicycle equipped with DJ turntables that is used to visit Queens street corners and to foster community and conversation around family vinyl collections, has become one of the trademarks of the project.
Los Herederos was founded in 2015, by a diverse group of Queens-based friends and colleagues who, in addition to their own experiences with immigration and growing up in NYC, had been, for many years, working in various mediums to document musical performance in iconic local venues, creating platforms for grassroots cultural activities, and capturing momentary snapshots of the ever evolving city in which they live. As is the origin of many collections that ultimately become archival, there was random documenting with the expectation that the material would eventually prove useful for some major projects; however, creating protocols for recording and organizing content, not to mention the signing of releases for copyright, was not always in the mind of those creating content. Before thinking of itself as an organization, one of the co-founders, Mauricio Bayona would show up at different venues with his camera, often running into the same friends who came from training in sound, photography and social activism. The various artistic interests have imprinted the project with an interdisciplinary edge that is important to maintain. The team also shares an experience with thousands of migrants who come to New York City with the hope of pursuing a career in the arts, but with the awareness that other types of service work–work that we now categorize as essential–will be, in most cases, the way to make a living. As essential workers, many of them have faced the perils of immigration, the costs of becoming a documented worker, a permanent resident and eventually a citizen. As a result, the organization and its programs are deeply informed by this shared lived experience.
Over the years, Los Herederos has documented performances by musicians from Colombia such as Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto (2007 Grammy Award Winners for Folk Album), Gualajo, Paito and Diego Obregón. Many local established and amateur musicians such as Lucía Pulido, Sebastián Cruz and Martín Vejarano have been approached to collaborate in jamming, mixing and producing new sounds. In documenting these artists, members of Los Herederos like Bayona were inadvertently creating an archive on how the Afro Caribbean and Afro Pacific heritage from his native Colombia was being experienced and transformed in a cosmopolitan city like New York.
It was through contact with the Center for Traditional Music and Dance that Bayona first met Naomi Sturm, the organization’s other co-founder. At the time, Sturm was a graduate student in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University and an intern at the Center. She was able to shed light on the possibilities of organizing the project as the non-profit that it is today. Sturm herself has been an avid learner of Andean music traditions and pursued a similar project with Peruvian interpreters of Quechua and mestizo backgrounds. It was through a collection assessment of Sturm’s Urban Condors collection, now part of Los Herederos’ archives, conducted by NYU student Danielle Calle (NYU MIAP ’19) that Los Herederos first connected with NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. In fall 2018, Maddy Smith (NYU MIAP ’20) wrote a well-documented research paper on the organization and the purpose of the Sonycicle. Los Herederos contributed music and entertainment with the Sonicycle as part of the celebration of Home Movie Day in October 2019, an activity organized by the AMIA Chapter of NYU MIAP. They are currently listed as partners of the Regional Media Legacies, a project funded by the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation.
The different projects of the group and the services that Los Herederos provides to the community are listed on their website (photo shoots, audiovisual coverage of public programs, documentary films, and other). During the pandemic, they served as a catalyst for reaching out to economically depressed communities in the area during the pandemic, in an effort to supply basic needs and support invisible populations. At the start of the outbreak, given the geographical proximity to their own homes and to their history as New Yorkers, they decided to document how Corona, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights were experiencing the lockdown and uncertainty in the face of the crisis. The fact that the organization’s mission, work, and strategic approach to community development is inextricably linked to amplifying the migrant experience, was in itself, a call to action. All regular documentation and archival activities were halted to best respond to the challenge at hand: to turn a platform that, according to their website, has been providing “a link between artist, citizen, public, education and history” into a response to the crisis.
Some of Los Herederos’ members have been beneficiaries of services provided by Cabrini Immigrant Services, a non-profit that provides multilingual social and legal services to immigrants, refugees, asylees, and their families, and they were acquainted with the social stance on immigration of this organization. Based in the Lower East Side, Cabrini became the main partner so that Los Herederos could turn its archival infrastructure into a vehicle to reach these communities. In the process, another city was unveiled: one where people live in fear, hiding, afraid to reveal their origin but also proud of their roots. The pandemic has also intersected with a dramatic political moment where undocumented citizens have been the target of massive deportation campaigns, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) created in 2012 by former President Barack Obama has been at stake, and overall the immigration experience has been homogenized and has been severely criminalized during the administration of President Donald Trump. It should be noted that, of course, the diversity of Queens is a reality; the area is the locus of different waves of migration, different generations from all the corners of the world with complex and heterogeneous migration histories and statuses. In this context, one of the most difficult tasks is building trust to elicit information and guaranteeing that voluntary participation in the creation of databases or in furnishing information will not result in a deportation nightmare.
Cabrini’s long history of working with vulnerable populations provided informed protocols for responsible collection of information and data management. Access to food became one of the imperatives as supermarkets closed, jobs decreased and confusion continued due to lack of information on the virus, contagion, and protective measures. Cabrini compiled physical resources, websites and apps in many languages to be shared with immigrants. Those resources served as the first response at the very beginning of the pandemic.
Through the years, Cabrini has maintained a weekly food pantry in their offices on Henry Street. The pantry was extended to the Queens neighborhoods, and during the pandemic peak, they were able to provide approximately 40 bags of food per week. At a moment where masks and gloves were nearly impossible to obtain, mask kits were included in these bags. In order to fundraise to keep the initiative alive, Los Herederos organized a virtual party by broadcasting online via the Sonicycle and playing from a patio in Queens, while inviting local D.J.s to host the sessions. The Sonicycle also served as a vehicle to go around the neighborhood and glue fliers on light posts and walls to let residents know about contact points for COVID-19 information and resources. The fliers had a phone and an email address, offering the possibility to those interested to establish initial contact, and ask preliminary questions, once again, in an effort to build trust. The initiative got a spot in Univision, one of the Spanish language television networks on May 7.
Most deliveries were done by car; however, it was good for the communities to see the Sonicycle associated with good deeds. While doing all this work, Los Herederos members continued taking snapshots and short videos to capture the situation, always avoiding full frames or identifiable face images. Recorded as they traversed the streets and corners of these three Queens neighborhoods, these recordings unveiled a city that tends to be as invisible as the life of many of the residents. Records of the pandemic will be dormant in the archive for now in order to protect these individuals and prevent the circulation of images becoming the target of geolocation or other web/app location services.
Los Herederos is gradually resuming their musically-focused work, albeit with many limitations. As a social and archival experiment, all the members are volunteering time and resources, and no staff or collaborator is paid a regular salary. Revenue from some of the services advertised in their website goes to defray infrastructure costs. The pandemic also hit some of the members, as they have lost their day jobs or been furloughed. Some of them also later got the virus (not during the high peak and not while working with these communities).
People close to the organization have also been impacted. During the pandemic they lost Diego Obregón, a close friend of the organization who had been battling serious health conditions other than COVID. He was one of the musicians whose performances were recorded by Los Herederos. Born in the Colombian Pacific, he was a talented marimba player and also an experienced maker of this instrument. He used to combine his dreams as a musician with his work landscaping at Prospect Cemetery in Jamaica, Queens. One of Los Herederos’ members became a mother during the pandemic. As residents of the community they are documenting and archiving, the lives of the staff and collaborators are very similar to the ones of those being documented.
Life, death, hope and uncertainty are part of their daily life for immigrant communities in New York City. At the moment, Cabrini is in charge of the social action related to the pandemic, and Los Herederos continues to evolve their programs and services to reach even more diverse audiences throughout the borough, and the city at large. As Los Herederos’ projects are transmedia in nature, they utilize various methodologies to reach an array of communities from Sri Lankan enclaves on Staten Island, to Irish parishioners in Woodside, Queens. The coronavirus experience has been a reminder of the need to be prepared for new realities and adversities, and to strengthen the much-needed work to safeguard the lives and memories of immigrants whose status as essential workers places them on the front lines of the crisis.. While the organization’s mission remains the same, they are increasingly flexible and creative, showing us all how an archive serving communities that society renders invisible can become both a site of cultural memory and one of relief.
Juana Suárez is the Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University (NYU MIAP). She is a media preservation specialist and a scholar in Latin American Cinema. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University, and M.A. degrees from the University of Oregon and New York University. Author of Cinembargo Colombia: Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema (2009), published in English (Palgrave, 2012), and Sites of Contention: Cultural Production and the Discourse of Violence in Colombia (published in Spanish 2010); co-editor of Humor in Latin American Cinema (2015). She is the translator to Spanish of A Comparative History of Latin American Cinema by Paul A. Schroeder-Rodríguez (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2020). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Moving Images Archives, Cultural History and The Digital Turn in Latin America. She is the coordinator of arturita.net, a collaborative digital humanities project on Latin American AV archives.
