Gente de Bushwick: Melo’s Block Shop

Melodi Conze, owner of Melo’s Block Shop, wants to offer services to bilingual children no matter their background. Photo provided from Melodi Conze.

This monthly feature on Soy Bushwick introduces the faces in the Latinx community of Bushwick. 

Who: Melo’s Block Shop is a Bushwick-based online retail store that sells educational posters in both English and Spanish on Amazon. Melodi Conze, founder and owner of Melo’s Block Shop is also an English teacher at a high school in Bushwick.

What: Melo’s Block Shop focuses on offering educational tools for toddlers to learn the alphabet, days of the month and more that can be used both at home and in the classroom. The Bilingual Bear is a cartoon that’s featured on the products and resembles the shop’s mission. Conze combined both her teaching and Afro-Latinx background to create this small business.

Here we speak to Conze, on Melo’s Block Shops background and connection to Latinx culture.

What is the story behind Melo’s Block Shop? 

Melodi Conze: My overarching company name is Melo’s Block Shop, and our tagline is ‘From Our Block, To Yours.’ The reason being, I am a native New Yorker, and the multilingual experience is part of daily life in this city. My products are educational tools for multilingual learning. My launch product is a skew of educational posters with the ABCs, days of the week and months of the year, in English and Spanish. The name of the launch product is called The Bilingual Bear.

What is Melo’s Block Shop’s purpose? 

My goal is to grow this out to multiple languages, where we go beyond days of the week and months of the year. If kids learn basic greetings, manners and ways to express themselves in other languages, it’s a great foundation for all kinds of learning and skill-building. Bilingual children learn faster and with greater ease, have improved problem-solving skills and creativity. These children have more career opportunities in adulthood. Bilingual children also find it easier to connect with other cultures which makes them more open-minded and tolerant of diversity.

How does Melo’s Block Shop reflect your Latinx identity? 

This business is closely related to my Latinx identity and my experience as a Latinx person in New York City and Bushwick. Being Puerto Rican was and is a designation of second class citizenship as an American. To this day people do not know that Puerto Ricans are Americans. When people move from Puerto Rico to the states, they call them immigrants. Would you call someone who moves from Florida to New York an immigrant? It’s bizarre.

Coming in a variety of skin tones, Latinx folks can be someone who is black and doesn’t speak English and face double racial discrimination. Or you can be white-passing and have access to white privilege as soon as you speak the language. This experience is not specific to Puerto Ricans. It’s the reason you can see all kinds of Latinx’s at Black Lives Matter protests, and factions of Latinx Trump supporters. What it means to be Latinx in Bushwick means, Puerto Ricans forged a community where Spanish was the first language and English was the second, in our community. It made room for all other Latin American, and Latin Caribbean people to find familiarity and community. Bushwick, pre-gentrification was a small homely community of mainly working-class Latinx’s from across the Latinx diaspora. Connected by the language we have made bonds over an immigrant experience, as well as what it means to be marginalized in a layered way.

What changes would you like to see in the Latinx community? 

We need to be more united. This election has really brought out the worst in people. The last four years have uncovered the issues we have in our own community. I would like the Latinx community to be more united. First, second and third-generation Latinx immigrants look down on newcomers. We love the stories of how someone in our family came here and worked hard for everything we have, and yet we put our nose up to those who are here now doing the same thing. I am grateful that in Bushwick we did not have popular rhetoric or support for Trump on a wide scale, but when people say things like ‘hey, what he’s saying is kind of true,’ it makes me cringe.

This rhetoric towards the people from Mexico and South America is not new. They did it to Puerto Ricans, Cubans and to Dominicans. We forget how deeply we were once the target of deep hate and discrimination. How can Latinx people not acknowledge that they are also the descendants of slaves? It’s so obvious to me. You relax your curls, blow dry it bone straight, you’re afraid to be out in the sun, and you’re not white. Those who are white-passing, forget that Spanish people were also sent to the back of the bus during the American segregation. We have a short memory. We are creating barriers between us that are a figment of our imagination.

Do you have a message for the Latinx community in Bushwick? 

To the Latinx community in Bushwick, we need to hold on as long as we can. We created an untouched world for us, for a long time. We still have poverty issues, and petty crime, but we can be better. Us giving up on the community we built, has made room for gentrification to run us out. Other groups have done it. Greenpoint is known for its thriving Polish community. Flushing has a thriving Asian community. I want Latinx people to have a neighborhood, that when it’s filled with people from the Latinx diaspora, it’s not just associated with poverty and crime, but a thriving, tight-knit community that is hard to get into. Not because it is trendy and priced out, but because we support each other on every level.