Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on sustaining a self-identifying Latino group in North Brooklyn whose life ways are at a stage of disintegration and whose residential presence in a Brooklyn “neighborhood” is increasingly vulnerable due to factors usually glossed as “gentrification and displacement.”

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on sustaining a self-identifying Latino group in North Brooklyn whose life ways are at a stage of disintegration and whose residential presence in a Brooklyn "neighborhood" is increasingly vulnerable due to factors usually glossed as "gentrification and displacement." The paper analyzes the tactics employed by local religious and political elites to "divide and conquer" a primarily Latino and Roman Catholic population, whose efforts to unite in the face of rising housing costs and alter the political scene were thwarted; hence the need to reorganize. This paper examines strategies that advocate for affordable housing to maintain a community presence for this cultural group, but also to reproduce the kind of network that a group of progressive priests created between the 1950s and 1990s, namely a resource base that sustains a spiritual, social, cultural and, to a certain extent, economic, unity able to express itself in New York City's political scene to garner resources for community sustainability.