Hate Free Zone Queens Arts and Culture Committee
It’s a Friday night in early March, but spring is nowhere in sight as members of Queens Neighborhoods United bundle up against the cold and huddle near a folding table dispensing hot champurrado, a traditional Mexican drink made from milk, chocolate, and cornmeal. About twenty organizers and supporters of the immigrant-led community group have gathered in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights as part of a years-long campaign to prevent a Target department store from being built there. The site for the proposed Target has sat empty since 2017, when real-estate developers who had purchased the lot demolished the Jackson Heights Cinema, one of the few movie theaters in the city that had offered movies with Spanish subtitles.
The empty lot is near the 7 subway line, nicknamed the “International Express” for stitching the borough’s immigrant communities together. The block is lined with Mexican bakeries, 99-cent stores, Chinese restaurants, and South Asian jewelers. It’s a microcosm of Queens, where 138 languages are spoken and which Guinness World Records has dubbed the “most ethnically diverse urban area on the planet.” By itself, Queens would be the fifth-largest U.S. city with almost 2.3 million residents, nearly half of whom are foreign-born.
One of the co-founders of Queens Neighborhoods United, also known as QNU, is Tania Mattos, thirty-five. An undocumented immigrant from Bolivia who has provisional legal status as a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, she has a masters’ degree in political science from CUNY. She says many people in the community oppose the new Target because “immigrant small businesses will suffer and it will lead to further gentrification and displacement.”
Some of the most vulnerable immigrants are street vendors. “There are dozens of women selling food in this neighborhood on the street,” Mattos says. “There is no other way for them to make money. They may not have work authorization. They may be the head of a household. It’s easy for them to cook and buy a cart.”
A Colombian woman walks by pushing a grocery cart. On top is a wooden board with a stack of thin wafers called obleas and squeeze bottles filled with jam and caramel sauce that she’ll use to sandwich the treat together for customers. After being approached by Josselyn Atahualpa, twenty-seven, a native of Peru who is an organizer with QNU, the vendor writes out a statement opposing Target.
“She was so against the store,” Atahualpa says. “Target comes, the rents are going to go up. A lot of the folks here have gotten to know us. Our community is highly politicized. They are low-income and are heavily impacted by issues such as policing.”
This is the type of direct organizing—by unpaid activists against a corporation valued at $39 billion—that defines QNU. The group, Mattos says, was founded in 2013 to stop the creation of the city’s largest Business Improvement District in Jackson Heights, which it believed would push up real-estate values and force out small businesses, low-income residents, and street vendors. The city dropped the plan in 2016.
QNU also banded together with scores of community groups, nonprofits, and labor unions to defeat Amazon’s plan to build a new headquarters in Queens, a decision announced in February. It was the Target campaign that led members of QNU to meet in early 2018 with a then-unknown candidate running for Congress, who would be both incorrectly credited and blamed for being the Amazon slayer a year later. Her name was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In September 2017, Amazon announced that it was looking for a place to locate a second headquarters, and 238 cities scrambled to submit bids. A few months later, the Seattle-based Internet giant narrowed the field to twenty cities and required finalists to sign nondisclosure agreements to bid for the corporate campus, known as HQ2.
Last November, Amazon said it had decided to split its headquarters between New York and the
Arun Gupta
Farhana, a member of Desis Rising Up & Moving, protests at a rally in March outside an Amazon store in Manhattan. The successful campaign against Amazon’s plan to build a new headquarters in the New York City borough of Queens highlighted its cooperation with ICE.
Washington, D.C., suburb of Arlington, Virginia. This allowed Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, is the wealthiest man in the world and which in 2018 became only the second corporation (after Apple) to pass $1 trillion in stock market value, to keep pitting the winning cities against each other in a Hunger Games-style competition to see who could cough up the most subsidies.
On November 13, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo giddily unveiled the plan for Amazon to occupy four- to eight-million square feet of office space in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, across the East River from Midtown Manhattan. To lubricate the deal, the city and state offered nearly $3 billion in subsidies and tax credits, or $120,000 for each of the 25,000 jobs promised by Amazon.
De Blasio and Cuomo had reason to be confident. The media were enamored of the numbers—50,000 jobs and a $5 billion investment by Amazon over the two cities!—and some claimed New York’s future depended on it becoming a tech heavyweight like the Bay Area. Hector Figueroa, president of the 175,000-member Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, praised the deal: “As New Yorkers, we should be proud that HQ2, and the thousands of good union jobs that will build, maintain, and secure this complex, are coming to Long Island City.”
But many New Yorkers were rankled by the $3 billion subsidy, as Cuomo and de Blasio have let the city’s subway system, one of the busiest in the world, slip into a state of decline. City council members were angered by the secret negotiations that circumvented their powers. And there was reason to believe Amazon did not need incentives to come to New York as it wanted access to the city’s 320,000 tech workers—the largest concentration in the country.
More significantly, the power brokers and opinion makers didn’t realize that the political landscape had been transformed.
A new generation of activists was rising: young, female, and from the Global South, many undocumented.
They were politicized by Obama-era movements like Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights, and Standing Rock, as well as Trump’s nativist and racist presidential campaign.
Last fall, as the fight over the Amazon deal was playing out, Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress in the midterms, running as a democratic socialist. In the same election cycle, left-leaning insurgents swept away six turncoat Democrats in the New York State Senate who had effectively handed control to Republicans since 2011, despite Democrats being in the majority, giving the pro-business Cuomo an excuse for not passing progressive legislation.
On November 12, Ocasio-Cortez amplified the community’s “outrage” to millions on Twitter: “Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.”
She added, “Displacement is not community development. Investing in luxury condos is not the same thing as investing in people and families. Shuffling working class people out of a community does not improve their quality of life.”
Atahualpa, of QNU, says the group debated whether it could stop a juggernaut like Amazon or if it should compromise in the hope of getting a better deal. She says it decided, “We can’t negotiate our survival.” Amazon and the media were dictating the terms, and group members were not buying it. As Atahualpa puts it, “A lot of what is sold to us isn’t for us.”
QNU released a statement that went viral on the day of Cuomo and de Blasio’s press conference. “We’ll do everything in our power to shut [Amazon] down,” it declared. “We will make it impossible for them. We will target the politicians, the individuals, the institutions, the organizations, and whoever else had the power to stop this deal.”
As Atahualpa recalls, “That set the tone for all the other organizations not to compromise.” The next day, as real-estate developers eyed the wave of money set to wash over housing in Queens, the first protest was staged by unions, grassroots groups, and elected officials. Speakers criticized corporate welfare, the deal’s end run around democracy, and Amazon’s reputation for being anti-union and killing small businesses.
One point was especially potent in the borough of immigrants: Amazon’s push to sell its facial recognition surveillance technology to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. “We talked about how Amazon collaborates with ICE, that it would eliminate immigrant communities here,” Mattos says.
Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union tested Amazon’s facial recognition technology on members of Congress. It misidentified twenty-eight of them as other people arrested for committing a crime; the false matches were “disproportionately of people of color.”
Maritza Silva-Farrell, executive director of ALIGN, an alliance of community groups and labor unions advocating for economic and environmental justice and sustainability, says her organization convened a citywide meeting days after the announcement. “There were close to 200 people there, community groups, land-use groups, unions, environmental organizations,” she recalls. “People were spilling out the door.”
Among those in attendance was Ocasio-Cortez, who came to listen. “Rather than offering her own thoughts, [she] was there to hear what people were saying,” says Silva-Farrell.
Fahd Ahmed, thirty-nine, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving, or DRUM, which organizes South Asian community members in Queens, arrived in the United States in 1991 as an undocumented immigrant from Pakistan. He says the group also debated whether to compromise with or take a hard line against Amazon. It chose the latter, based in large part on Trump’s war on immigrants.
After the 2016 election, DRUM worked with other Queens-based groups to conduct trainings on “copwatch, ICE watch, know your rights, self-defense, and bystander intervention.” These efforts, which they called “Hate Free Zones,” included artwork, assemblies, outreach to businesses and houses of worship, and rapid response to ICE raids. Hate Free Zones deepened ties among organizers, which proved invaluable for the Amazon campaign.
“There is no better deal,” Ahmed says. “We have to fight them tooth and nail. If Amazon comes here, it means the end of our communities.”
The campaign against Amazon was led by women, people of color, and immigrants. Many locals feared the influx of highly paid tech workers would lead to a rapid escalation of housing costs and displacement of their communities.
QNU member Arianna Martinez, professor of urban studies at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, says the group stumbled across Ocasio-Cortez while power-mapping Target. They realized that the area’s longtime Congressional Representative, Joseph Crowley, was the kingmaker in the district. Recalls Martinez, “We Googled up to see who was running against Crowley and ended up meeting with [Ocasio-Cortez] when there was three feet of snow on the ground,” months before the June 2018 primary catapulted her to stardom in a stunning victory over Crowley.
Martinez says Ocasio-Cortez told them, “I have nothing to lose. I have no financial backing or ties to anyone.” From QNU’s perspective, Martinez says, “It was mutually beneficial. We wanted to connect to her to get press and she was trying to build credibility in the community. In one debate, she brought up the Target development and Crowley had no idea about it, even though it was two blocks from his office.”
Josselyn Atahualpa was politicized after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. Avigail Aviles, twenty-one, also with QNU, was radicalized by Trump’s election. Her parents and older siblings immigrated to the United States from Puebla, Mexico, before she was born.
Many other activists in the #NoAmazon coalition cite similar experiences, such as growing up in a Muslim family after the September 11 attacks or seeing their parents being detained by ICE or being exploited by landlords because they were immigrants. The #NoAmazon coalition brought together many immigrant-led groups, including CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities;Chhaya CDC which organizes for housing and economic justice for South Asians; and Make the Road New York, an immigrant advocacy group.
Organizing was also lifted by a rising red tide. The Democratic Socialists of America, which has exploded to more than 50,000 members since Trump’s victory, cosponsored, publicized, and mobilized for #NoAmazon events and protests.
While most unions backed the Amazon deal or kept quiet, the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union and the Teamsters came out against the giveaways and Amazon’s anti-union history. Ahmed says, “Having them as major unions critical of the deal had a significant impact in the media and among elected officials.”
Atahualpa says support began pouring in. “People flooded our email and social media asking to get involved,” she says. “We heard from groups internationally. Folks in Berlin who are fighting Google contacted us.”
Two Seattle city council members flew to New York to share lessons in dealing with Amazon. Silva-Farrell says when organizers heard “what people went through in Seattle and that Amazon couldn’t be trusted, the consensus was to try to kill the deal.”
QNU organizer Mattos says the group confronted head-on Amazon’s promise to create 25,000 jobs, in a community with high underemployment and unemployment. “We explained those jobs are not for us. They are IT jobs. They wouldn’t go to the undocumented. They won’t go to your children.”
A common concern among activists engaged in the #NoAmazon coalition is the displacement of existing residents. Martinez says immigrant-led groups are fighting three forms of displacement: “gentrification of residents and small businesses, deportation, and mass incarceration. A lot of activists come from families who were involved in lands-rights movements in their home country. People are dealing with multiple forms of displacement, first from their home country then by gentrification here.”
The Amazon headquarters would have been located next to Queensbridge Houses, the nation’s largest public housing complex with approximately 6,000 mostly low-income residents. De Blasio gushed that the “synergy is going to be extraordinary” between Amazon and this housing complex. But New York state Senator Mike Gianaris of Queens, an opponent of the deal, said the company had talked about bringing only thirty jobs to the complex.
“For politicians, creating jobs is the end goal at any cost,” Silva-Farrell says, “but the cost is jobs that are poverty-wage or not sustainable.”
Sabrina Jalal, nineteen, a full-time student at the City College of New York and a full-time organizer at CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, canvassed Queensbridge tenants. “People felt like it was a good deal, but once we broke it down they realized it wasn’t going to benefit them,” Jalal, whose family emigrated from Kolkata, India, in 1998, says. “It was either going to displace them or make their life a living hell.”
#NoAmazon was winning over the community through door-knocking, banner drops, teach-ins, social media, and protest. “If Amazon sent out flyers, we countered with our own information,” Jalal says. “It was a lot of rapid response.”
ALIGN helped organize oversight hearings before the New York City Council. At the meeting in December, Amazon burned itself when a spokesperson refused to deny it was working with ICE. At the next hearing in January, an Amazon vice president said the company would not remain neutral in any unionization attempt. That prompted outrage all around. Some two weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Amazon announced it was abandoning its plans to build in Queens.
Activists were thrilled but stunned. They were gearing up for a campaign of direct action against Amazon.
“We thought this was going to be a five-year fight,” Mattos says. “This was important to us as an immigrant community, for our morale. We know we have the power and political knowledge and savviness. We can move mountains.”