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Dislocation Pueblo Nuevo, Madrid / Harlem, New York

       1968-1972
When I was six years old, the single-family rentals in my neighborhood started being vacated. Tenants were pushed out by owners who wanted to use the land to build apartment buildings, which were far more profitable than single-family units. This was in “Pueblo Nuevo,” within the city limits of Madrid, Spain in 1965. A man in a hat and a suit, who appeared tall from a child’s point of view, harassed my mother, my sister and me while my father was at work. All the houses in the community had been vacated, but my family had resisted the move. A developer who’d recently bought the land to build an apartment building was waiting for my family to leave in order to get a construction permit from the building department.

 The developers sent the man in a hat and a suit to press my family to leave. He would appear almost every day for years, sometimes removing roof tiles and threatening to demolish the house over night if we didn’t move out. The developers also sent threatening letters. Despite constant harassment, my parents choose not to leave their home until they were given what the law allowed after a tenant had been in a house for at least seven years: the provision of an alternate place to live, when it was necessary for them to vacate. After two years of harassment, my family settled with the owner. Eventually, my parents paid less than market value for an apartment in the new building built on the property of the house they had vacated, and therefore, didn’t have to leave their neighborhood. But before the construction of the new building was complete, we were moved to a temporary rental unit provided for us by the developer. In the third floor apartment I felt as if I were locked inside a cage. I had no yard to play in and spent my time on this fenced-in balcony. Holding onto the fence, I got dizzy looking down at the cars.

I only remembered the event on my childhood after being assaulted in my apartment while my boyfriend was away in 2000, at the age of 35, when I lived in the United States in an apartment on 129th St. and Convent Avenue in Harlem, New York. No matter in which part of the world you are, if in a poor area, this process will happen over and over again.