Image source: Mario Rueben Carrion from Comida Pal Pueblo
Image description: Bushwick residents attend a food distribution by Comida Pal Pueblo. Comida Pal Pueblo volunteers share vegetables and beverages with community members around a table.
Click here to view or download a digital version of the Nos Cuidamos zine that focuses on the interconnectedness of housing and food access in Bushwick during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the words of five mutual aid volunteers who shared their stories during oral history interviews.
Our deepest appreciation to all of the contributors and behind the scenes people who came together for this project, specifically members from many groups committed to mutual aid in Bushwick, including MayDay Space, Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, Mi Casa No Es Su Casa, Comida Pal Pueblo, G-Rebls, and RiseBoro.
Cities for People, Not for Profit is an ongoing oral history project that has been collecting first-hand stories from long-term and short-term residents, artists and activists in the neighborhood and gathering their thoughts on the gentrification and displacement taking place in Bushwick.
The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, critical cartography, and storytelling collective that documents dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes as a means to organize against mass displacement and eviction.
Nos Cuidamos is a collaborative oral history project between the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) and Cities for People, Not For Profit, that began in April 2020, documenting stories about how residents of Bushwick, Brooklyn organized to meet each other's needs during COVID-19.
We conduct oral histories with neighboring residents and organizers participating in mutual aid to understand how their work fits within the larger context of housing organizing and racial justice movements. The experiences shared so far especially reflect how food and housing insecurity issues, as experienced by BIPOC, poor, and working class communities in Bushwick, are intertwined and have been further compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis. We hope you hear these stories and honor with us the tenacity that neighbors in Bushwick have shown in caring for their community and mobilizing for justice.
To listen to full-length oral histories, visit the Cities for People, Not for Profit website: http://citiesforppl.org/
Stories of mutual aid in response to Covid