For Sonia Cortes, the battle for Sunset Park began with soup. Two years ago, after the pandemic ended her job as a dressmaker, Ms. Cortés began selling pozolea hot Mexican soup, a la park, a 25-acre strip of green in southwest Brooklyn. On a good Sunday, I might make $600 or $700. “I was able to pay my rent,” he said.
By last fall, the Sunday market had grown to more than 80 vendors, mostly immigrant women selling Mexican food and wares on the street to large weekend crowds. They called it Tonatiuh Square, after an Aztec sun god. Every Sunday there were musicians and children’s activities; there were political education sessions, led by the organizers of the market, members of a group of activists called Mexicanos Unidos, talking about Mao Zedong’s “Five Golden Rays” or Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonialism.The Wretched of the Earth.”
Then, last month, police and park enforcement officers moved to shut down the market, citing community complaints and the fact that Tonatiuh Square didn’t have a permit. Easter Sunday, dozens of agents they clashed violently with vendors and organizers, which closed its arms to the resistance. Two people were arrested.
“The police hurt us,” said Ms. Cortés, who said she was pushed into the fight. “They were violent with us,” he said. “We weren’t selling, and they still took us out.” A police spokesman said the crowd blocked efforts to reach one of the members of the plaza and someone punched a park ranger.
Without the market, Ms. Cortés said she now has $2,000 in bills she can’t pay. According to her, the closure of the square pitted the city against some of its most vulnerable residents, who were simply trying to survive.
“They’ve taken the bread off our table,” he said.
Samuel Sierra, who has been using the park for five decades, had a different vision for the square. Last summer, he was handing out get-out-the-vote pamphlets for the Democratic County Committee when three of the Plaza Tonatiuh organizers told him to leave.
“They were very aggressive,” said Mr. Sierra. “There’s a sense that they own the area.” He added that he was not against the sellers. “They have a right to thrive,” he said. “But it shouldn’t be at the expense of the community.”
In a city where shared resources are scarce, who controls public space? Is an 80-vendor market an initial response to economic hardship? Or is it a private takeover of a neighborhood park?
The Sunset Park neighborhood is home to large working-class Asian and Latino populations, bordered by Park Slope to the north and Bay Ridge to the south. The development known as Industry City along the western edge of the neighborhood has brought an influx of new money and tensions over gentrification. The park itself brings together all population groups, with grassy expanses and views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan.
After the Easter showdown, Alexa Avilés, who represents Sunset Park on City Council, called a community meeting that quickly turned into controversy. Vendors and organizers waved signs that read “Decriminalize street vendors” and “We want the cops out of our park” and called on elected officials to find a solution. Two young children began to describe being in the park during the police sweep, but stopped in tears.
Then, at a signal from Brian Garita, founder of Plaza Tonatiuh, all the vendors and organizers left.
“Comrades, we said what we wanted to say,” said Mr. Sentry in the group outside the meeting. “There was no reason for us to stay there.”
Mr Garita, 26, sees the Plaza as a step towards a wider radical movement. Critics say he is the problem, an outsider pursuing an ideological agenda.
Mr. Garita, who also goes by the first name Leo, has a master’s degree in public administration and urban development and sustainability, and works four days a week as a barista in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Although she said she grew up in Sunset Park, she now lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. “I was displaced,” he said.
In the park, he is the mega guy.
In the spring of 2020, I was working at a non-profit organization in the Bronx when the killing of a Mexican-American soldier named Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood in Texas sparked protests across the country. From these manifestations, Mr. Garita helped start Mexicanos Unidos to connect protests over Ms. Guillén’s killing with other movements, including Black Lives Matter.
The following March, he focused on Sunset Park vendors, organizing them into a unified market and holding political education sessions.
“We talk about the things that are happening around us, these patterns of colonialism, gentrification, oppressor and oppressed,” said Roy Baizan, one of the organizers, who comes to the park from the Bronx.
But as the market grew, neighbors began to complain, Ms. Avilés said. Many vendors used open flames, which are prohibited in the park, and he said neighbors objected that it was difficult to get through the market.
“Also, we started to have some vendors who felt intimidated by the tactics of the organizers,” he added. Some vendors complained that they had to pay to be part of the Plaza.
“I’m nice,” said Ms. Avilés, a democrat who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America. “My aunt made clothes and we sold them on the street. But this is public space, and there were real tensions with the prosecution of public space and its control. You can’t do that.”
Benito Bravo, who leads children’s folkloric dance shows in the park, said an organizer at Plaza Tonatiuh told him last year during a Day of the Dead performance that he had to leave.
“He said, ‘If you don’t come out, I’m going to have to call my people,'” Mr. Bravo said. “Thirty people came up to me and said, ‘If you don’t go, it’s going to be trouble for you.’ . They were in my face and all my children are crying.”
During a standoff with park rangers last year, Mr. Garita threw a plate of food and was charged with second-degree assault. The charge was dismissed this month because he was not given a speedy trial.
Mr. Garita said the Plaza does not charge vendors to participate, but all had to be approved to be part of the Plaza. He made no apologies for keeping some people out of the market. But despite his vocal presence in Plaça Tonatiuh, Mr. Garita has no authority over who can or cannot use the park.
“The people we’ve dealt with have only been opportunistic people,” Garita said. “People who are electoral, who come to the park and put pressure on these candidates that no one has ever seen. We do not support this type of electoral tactic. We have been confronted with people who come to promote themselves. This is a collective thing, and we must support the whole before the parts.”
Critics of the Plaza say organizers are putting vendors, many of them undocumented immigrants, at risk by provoking clashes with law enforcement.
“They’re using these vendors to make a broader point about law enforcement, about red tape, a bunch of things,” said Andrew Gounardes, the Democratic state senator whose district includes Sunset Park. “And the sellers are the ones caught in the middle.”
Edwin Rodríguez, NYC Parks’ assistant commissioner for the city park service, said that over the past two years, communication to vendors about the permitting process has been met with aggression, particularly by various organizers. “From an enforcement standpoint,” Rodriguez said, “the vendors have been very peaceful, while the organizers have not been, playing a large role in stirring up the crowd.”
Sellers say the city’s permitting process is too burdensome. The city capped the number of permits in the 1980s, with little growth since then, said Mohamed Attia, managing director of the Street vendors project at the Urban Justice Center, so most of the city’s estimated 20,000 vendors operate without the required permits or licenses. Since the pandemic, he said, the number of sellers has skyrocketed, and so has the number of tickets issued, which can carry a $1,000 fine.
On a recent Sunday, dozens of vendors and organizers gathered in an industrial warehouse near Sunset Park for a private version of the plaza, complete with children’s activities and food. A DJ played Latin and pop music, vendors offered food and T-shirts, and a woman ran a tea-making workshop. Without the crowds in the park, or exposure to the police, the meeting was more social than economic.
Blanca Nicolas and her daughter, Ariana Garcia, prepared elotes – ears of corn smeared with lime juice and mayonnaise, then sprinkled with red pepper and cheese – for sale to other vendors and organizers.
Ms. Nicolas said he appreciated the political agenda of the organizers. “We learn more about what we can do,” he said. And selling at the market had made her 12-year-old son more outgoing, she said.
Mrs. Avilés, councilor of the City Council, said that she was working to find other places for the square, perhaps a closed street, perhaps smaller markets in different parts of the neighborhood.
Mr. Garita said he was also looking for other premises. But in the meantime, he was working with lawyers to expand the project to include a workers’ cooperative, and then an ad hoc credit union, or signal. “We’re even looking ahead to see if we can field a candidate in Sunset Park in the future,” he said.
Ms. Cortés, with her $2,000 in unpaid bills, tried to remain optimistic. For two years, she and the other vendors had managed to survive the turmoil caused by the pandemic. Now, if they returned to the market that had supported them, they risked arrest or confrontation. However, they needed the revenue to stay afloat.
“We will sell again,” he said. “If god wants.”
Jo Corona and Lexi Parra contributed to this report.
