THREE Empowered Culture? the Empowerment Zone and the Selling of El Barrio

THREE Empowered Culture? the empowerment zone and the selling of el barrio It is not a question of getting money just for anybody who needs money; there’s an aesthetic to the wealth. And Thelma’s Lounge doesn’t represent that. Bobby’s Record Shop does not represent that. Juan Valdez Cafeteria does not represent that. Starbucks does. HMV does. Felix Leo Campos, director of After Dark, speaking about the Empowerment Zone The marketing of culture, be it through museums, restaurants, or even parades, is central to tourism, one of the most important industries feed- ing the city’s international standing. It was therefore expected that the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (EZ) legislation, introduced in Congress by Charles Rangel in 1994, and still in effect, would launch a Cultural Industry Investment Fund, providing a perfect example of the close alliance between culture and profit in urban centers like New York City. Intended to “stimulate the production of cultural products and services which will attract larger audiences, create jobs, and increase the economic benefits of Heritage Tourism in Upper Manhattan,” the initiative explicitly treats culture as a tool for the creation of jobs in amusement, recreation, travel, gifts, and other services.1 The EZ’s stated goal of “pre- serving the distinct character” of neighborhoods is subordinate to the 97 98 chapter 3 awarding of grants on the basis of economic impact, increased tourist traffic, and job creation and retention. In short, “heritage” is ancillary to tourism, put in the service of viable tourist districts containing cultural, entertainment, dining, and recreational attractions. I suggest this initiative has much to teach us about tourism as an urban development strategy, and about the intricate and tense relation- ship between culture as “industry” and culture as “ethnicity” in the development of such initiatives. Not that the intersection of ethnicity and tourism is new. In global urban centers like New York City, ethnicity in the form of “diverse cuisines” or shopping and entertainment districts has long been touted and sold as a tourist attraction in its own right, and examples abound of ethnic enclaves such as Little Italy and Chinatown as sanitized tourist destinations. Similarly, Latino culture and Latinidad have been the subject of culturally oriented urban development initiatives such as Paseo Boricua in Chicago and Villa Victoria in Boston. These developments have been described as spaces that showcase and celebrate Puertoricanness and as important economic development projects that provide barriers to gentrification (Matos 2001; Florez González 2001; Rinaldo 2002). But Manhattan is too expensive a piece of real estate, and Puerto Ricans too politically vulnerable to establish comparable developments, local tourist proponents would soon learn. The application, or more appropriately, the misapplication of the EZ Cultural Industry Investment Fund therefore presents a keen example of the overt ways in which ethnicity can be easily underplayed in relation to industry, reveal- ing the real objectives and priorities of neoliberal-based tourism development initiatives. In part, the EZ’s stance can be easily explained by the antagonistic demands of tourism for difference, or that which vests places with value as “destinations,” and standardization that provides uniformity of services, pleasure, and comfort (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; MacCannell 1999). In other words, as dependent as current tourism strategies may be on the “uniqueness” of particular places, events, things, or people, they are also required to make these spaces safe, comfortable, and entertain- ing. Which is to say, for purposes of tourism, ethnicity must always be contained in the right package, “tourist bubble,” and cultural industry empowered culture? 99 (Judd 1999). This business treatment of culture is also explained by its likely use as a deterrent to ethnic and racial debates by making business considerations the primary award variables within the initiative. In so doing, the initiative speaks to contrasting systems of evaluations at play in the economic and cultural realms that have for so long troubled cultural policy writers and their quest to find commensurable, yet uncon- tested, value between these fields (Throsby 2001).2 Namely, the EZ business treatment of culture represented a direct challenge to the dominant definitions and uses of culture in East Harlem, where cultural initiatives have been recurrent resources for struggles over rights, representations, and identity, and where most cultural institutions had been funded as part of such struggles.3 Yet tourism always presupposes the creation of difference, which in El Barrio could only mean heritage and culture. Given this, the EZ approach to culture as primarily a profit-making device did little to exempt it from particular ethnic and identity associa- tions, and was in fact a catalyst for tensions with important racial and cultural implications. Lacking in cultural industries and entertainment infrastructure, Upper Manhattan communities (comprising Washington Heights and West, Central, and East Harlem) were left with marketing their culture and the ethnic and historical identification of their neighborhoods. But whose culture? What aspects and representations? And on what basis? Upper Manhattan residents are more than 50 percent Latino, yet it is Black cultural institutions in West and Central Harlem that carry a national and international reputation among prospective tourists.4 By limiting East Harlem’s funding eligibility to certain sections and imposing require- ments that only institutionalized cultural industries could meet, the EZ virtually guaranteed that cultural institutions in West and Central Harlem would be most prominently featured in EZ-sponsored tourist promotional materials and the ones eligible for the largest amounts of funding.5 Hence, as of 2001, it was estimated that only 1.5 million out of the twenty-five million-dollar Cultural Industry Investment Fund had been directed to East Harlem (Kreinin Souccar 2003). Coupled with the lack of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos on the EZ board and staff, this disparity led to controversy over inequities in the distribution of grants, 100 chapter 3 funds, and resources, exposing the permanence of old ethnic/racial tensions in East Harlem; ethnicity was as much a basis for distributing resources and entitlements in 2002 as it was in the 1960s. The EZ, after all, was not targeting the raceless poor, but rather Blacks, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans with particular histories and experiences of struggle, both with state redistributive systems and with one another over similar resources. The program’s disavowal of ethnicity brought these and other concerns to the forefront, primarily the difficulty of turning culture into a profit-making device with little regard to the “people” who always author and inform it. Blatantly tied to the logic of industry and business, this initiative became a catalyst for ethnic and racial contests, and is telling of the close nexus between cultural initiatives and processes of gentrification. The EZ initiative was foremost about educating and governing East Harlemites along neoliberal conventions. It was most effective at confronting the political uses of culture as a recourse of identity and representation by favoring marketable ethnicity. The Problems and Perils of Marketing East Harlem The EZ Cultural Industry Investment Fund was not the first government initiative that spurred residents to think about culture in terms of profit making and tourism. Shifts toward self-sufficiency in state and federal government programs for culture and the arts, the expansion of audiences, and the privatization and diversification of funding sources had already pressed local institutions and cultural workers to market them- selves if they were to survive in a more competitive environment.6 Most East Harlem cultural institutions were founded during the peak of civil struggles over representation in the early 1970s. They were sustained by government sources; thus later pressures to privatize their funding were particularly hurtful to their operations and mission. El Museo del Barrio, perhaps the only Puerto Rican cultural institution in East Harlem that has managed to grow and diversify its funding sources, is a good example. empowered culture? 101 For El Museo, becoming competitive entailed not only opening a gift shop and marketing itself more aggressively, but also shifting its mission from specifically Puerto Rican art to Latin American art, which by the mid-1980s had become far more attractive to private funders. This change worked wonders for El Museo, which since 1996 has attracted a range of private and nonprofit funders and visitors from all over the city. Yet the lack of Puerto Ricans and Latinos on the museum’s staff and the steep decline in Puerto Rican exhibitions became an immediate subject of great controversy. The shift marked the loss of an institution initially founded to place Puerto Ricans on the map locally and nationally—a vivid indicator of displacement. Long before the EZ, marketing concerns were at play during the ten- year planning process of the community board’s planning document, New Directions, which portrayed East Harlem as a centrally located and accessible neighborhood ripe for outside development, and which thus constituted a marketing document in and of itself. Section 197-A pro- posed the development of a cultural

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