Good evening Class,
My name is Brian Lazo Bautista and I have been a Woodside/Sunnyside, Queens resident for 18 years now. Personally, I feel like Queens New York is my home and I know everything about the neighborhood and aspects of it. Being from Woodside/ Sunnyside Queens, I have seen many changes and renovations to my community. The effects of Neo-Liberalism and gentrification in Queens are unreal. Personally, I experienced gentrification with the new renovations of public spaces and small business workplaces transformed into private institutions and private buildings for capital gain. The sad reality of this is we see throughout history that lower-income individuals get neglected and taken advantage of due to their financial status. The reality is Gentrification mainly prioritizes the needs of wealthy individuals in the United States. In The Making of Space Race and Place”, Maggie Dickinson states “ Maybe if this art was not from a ghetto, there would be a different approach to art from our society. If it wasn’t just a bunch of kids who weren’t expected to make anything with their lives anyway.” This quote demonstrates how Dickinson wanted to clearly inform the reader that race and identity play a huge role in the war on graffiti, targeted towards low-income families the majority being Latino and black people. The War on Graffiti shows that the main agenda of Politicians is to attract private owned businesses to create a prosperous and more wealthy city that only benefits them. Lastly, the meme in the Blog post to me means that uniqueness or something not normal to society is bad unless the rich people or people in power can benefit from it and exploit it. In the context of the article, the meme correlates with the article by demonstrating how the politicians main agenda is to push and remove low-income families, majority Black and Latino, out of neighborhoods so that private owned businesses can come in and take control for capital gain. The war on graffiti is shutting down the voices and self expression of graffiti of low income minorities through criminalization .