Bronx Faces and Voices
By Bazona Bado
Ada Quiñones remembers a time living in the Bronx when her family was so hungry that they made candy from rotting tomatoes.
Quiñones was one of 16 people who shared their personal tales of the borough in “Bronx Faces and Voices,” a compilation of oral histories edited by Dr. Emita Brady Hill, a former professor of French language and literature at Lehman College, and Dr. Janet Munch, Special Collection Librarian in Leonard Life Library at Lehman College.
Hill and Munch held a reading of the collection in the Bronx Museum of the Arts in February. The interviews in the book were conducted from 1982 to 1986 and include activists along with political and religious leaders. They tell their stories of triumphs and trials, living through “troubled years of arson, crime, abandonment” as well as poverty.
“My mother raised five kids in times when they were very, very tough,” recalls Quiñones in the book. “We’d go pick up after pushcarts and bring home the discards. I remember once we picked up a whole lot of tomatoes that were kind of raw or a little damaged, and my mother put sugar in it and made us tomato candy.”
Reggie Williams
About 30 people attended the Bronx Museum event and some offered their perspectives during the reading. Reggie Williams, 45, sat in a wheelchair and listened as he stroked his dreadlocks. “I moved from Harlem to the Bronx in 1974,” he said. The Bronx is still a poor borough, continued Williams, but nothing like it was 30 or 40 years ago.
Between 1970 and 1980 the Bronx was symbolic of urban blight. Father Robert Banome, a priest at St. Joseph’s Church who moved to the Bronx in 1963, recalls the devastation of the borough in the book. “We had 500 fires a month, going constantly,” says Banome. “It was the greed for the landowners, those who owned these buildings and wanted to make a quick profit, who saw that a new element was coming in a difficult element that they would have to deal with, skyrocketing prices, which made them want to get their insurance. And so people on drugs would be hired; they were professional arsonists who would be hired to do in a building.”
The aftermath of that situation was a “mass exodus of businesses,” says Michael Núñez who came to the Bronx when he was around 10 years old. At the time, Núñez was a community activist. “The important thing is that something has to be done, and we are doing it,” he said.
Dr. Hill said that after living in the Bronx for almost three decades, she had witnessed many of the challenges Bronxites faced and that she wanted to give them the opportunity to open up their hearts and speak out in the Bronx Faces and Voices. The 16 stories are accompanied by black and white photos.
Poverty still exists in the Bronx but arson and abandoned building are much less frequent. Census figures from 2013 show that 29.8 percent of Bronxites live below the poverty level in the Bronx compared to 15.3 percent statewide. In 1980, that number was 27.6 percent versus 13.4 percent statewide.
Despite persistently high numbers of Bronxites living in poverty, Williams and Munch said living conditions in the borough had much improved. “There are more government services –- food stamps, Obama Care or government insurance — and more nonprofits such as food pantries, kitchen soups that are helping needy people,” said Munch.
Audience at the Bronx Museum