For Sonia Cortes, the fight for Sunset Park started with soup. Two years ago, after the pandemic wiped out her job as a seamstress, Ms. Cortes started selling pozolea brothy Mexican soup, in the park, a 25-acre green belt in southwestern Brooklyn. On a good Sunday, she could make $600 or $700. “I was able to pay my rent,” she says.
Last fall, the Sunday market had grown to more than 80 vendors, mostly immigrant women selling Mexican street food and wares to large weekend crowds. They called it Plaza Tonatiuh, after an Aztec sun god. Every Sunday there were musicians and children’s activities; there were political education sessions, led by the market’s organizers, members of an activist group called Mexicanos Unidos, which advocated Mao Zedong’s “Five Golden Rays” or Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonialist “The wretched of the earth.”
Last month, police and park enforcement officials decided to close the market, citing community complaints and the fact that Plaza Tonatiuh was unlicensed. Dozens of agents on Easter Sunday clashed violently with vendors and organizers, who closed arms in the resistance. Two people were arrested.
“The police hurt us,” said Ms Cortes, who said she was pushed into the fray. “They were violent towards us,” she said. “We didn’t sell and they still took us out.” A police spokesman said the mob blocked attempts to reach one of the Plaza members and one punched a park official.
Excluding the market, Ms. Cortes said she now has $2,000 in bills she can’t pay. As she saw it, the closure of the Plaza pitted the city against some of its most vulnerable residents, who were simply trying to survive.
“They took bread from our table,” she said.
Samuel Sierra, who has used the park for five decades, had a different take on the Plaza. Last summer, he was handing out pamphlets to the Democratic County Commission when three of Plaza Tonatiuh’s organizers told him he had to leave.
“They were very aggressive,” Mr. Sierra said. “There’s a feeling like they own the area.” He added that he was not against sellers. “They have a right to prosper,” he said. “But it shouldn’t be at the expense of the community.”
Who controls public space in a city where shared resources are scarce? Is an 80-supplier market a bootstrap response to economic hardship? Or is it a private takeover of a neighborhood park?
The Sunset Park neighborhood is home to a large working-class Asian and Latino population, 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 led to an influx of new money and tensions over gentrification. The park itself brings all populations together, with lawns and views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan.
After the Easter standoff, Alexa Avilés, who represents Sunset Park on the city council, called a community meeting that quickly became contentious. Vendors and organizers waved signs reading “Decriminalize Street Vendors” and “We Want Cops Out of Our Park,” calling on elected officials to come up with a solution. Two young children began to describe being in the park during the police investigation, but they stopped in tears.
Then, at a signal from Brian Garita, a founder of Plaza Tonatiuh, the vendors and organizers all walked out.
“Comrades, we have said what we wanted to say,” Mr. Garita told 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 as a barista four days a week in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Although he said he grew up in Sunset Park, he now lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. “I was displaced,” he said.
In the park he is the man with the megaphone.
In the spring of 2020, he was working at a non-profit organization in the Bronx when the murder of a Mexican-American soldier named Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood in Texas sparked demonstrations across the country. From these demonstrations, Mr. Garita Mexicanos helped found Unidos to link the protests over Ms. Guillén’s murder with other movements, including Black Lives Matter.
The following March, he focused on the Sunset Park vendors, organizing them into a unified market and conducting political education sessions.
“We talk about the things that are happening around us, these patterns of colonialism, gentrification, oppressor and downtrodden,” says 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 she said residents objected that it was difficult to get through the market.
“We also started to get some vendors who felt intimidated by the organizers’ tactics,” she added. Some vendors complained that they had to pay to be part of the Plaza.
“I’m sympathetic,” said Ms. Avilés, a Democrat who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America. “My aunt used to make clothes and we sold them on the street. But this is public space, and there were real tensions with claiming and controlling public space. You can not do that.”
Benito Bravo, who organizes folkloric dance performances for children at the park, said an organizer from Plaza Tonatiuh told him to leave at a Day of the Dead performance last year.
“He told me, ‘If you don’t go 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, you’re going to be in trouble.’ They were in my face and all my children are crying.
During a clash with park enforcement officers last year, Mr. Garita threw a plate of food and was charged with second-degree assault. The charges were dismissed this month because he was not given a speedy trial.
Mr Garita said the Plaza does not charge vendors to participate, but all must be approved to be part of the Plaza. He made no apologies for keeping some people away from the market. But despite his vocal presence at Plaza Tonatiuh, Mr. Garita has no say in who may or may not use the park.
“The people we confronted were just opportunistic people,” said Mr. Garita. “People campaigning, coming to the park and putting pressure on these candidates that no one has ever seen. We do not support such electoral tactics. We have confronted 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 endangering vendors — many of them undocumented immigrants — leading to clashes with law enforcement.
“They’re using these vendors to make a broader point about law enforcement, about bureaucratic processes, a lot of things,” said Andrew Gounardes, the Democratic senator whose district includes Sunset Park. “And the sellers are the ones in the middle.”
NYC Parks deputy city parks commissioner Edwin Rodriguez said reaching out to vendors about the permitting process over the past two years has been met with aggression, particularly from several organizers. “From an enforcement point of view,” said Mr. Rodriguez, “the vendors have been very peaceful, while the organizers have not, playing too big a role in the public unrest.”
Sellers say the city’s permitting process is too onerous. The city capped permits in the 1980s, and there has been little growth since then, says Mohamed Attia, the city’s general manager. Street vendor 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, as has the number of tickets issued, which can carry a $1,000 fine.
On a recent Sunday, several dozen vendors and organizers gathered in an industrial building near Sunset Park for a private version of the Plaza, with children’s activities and food. A DJ played Latin American and pop music, vendors offered food and T-shirts, and a woman led a tea-making workshop. Without the crowds of the park — or police exposure — the gathering was more social than economic.
Blanca Nicolas and her daughter, Ariana Garcia, prepared elotes—ears of corn rubbed with lime juice and mayonnaise, then sprinkled with red chilli and cheese—to sell to other vendors and organizers.
Ms. Nicolas said she appreciated the organizers’ political agenda. “We’re learning more about what we can do,” she said. And selling at the market had made her 12-year-old son more extroverted, she said.
Ms. Avilés, a member of the city council, said she was looking for other places for the Plaza – maybe a closed street, maybe smaller markets in different parts of the neighborhood.
Mr. Garita said he was also looking for other locations. But in the meantime, he worked with lawyers to expand the project with a workers’ cooperative and then an ad hoc credit union, or tanda. “We’re even looking ahead to see if we can lead a candidate in Sunset Park in the future,” he said.
Mrs. Cortes, with her $2,000 in unpaid bills, tried to remain optimistic. For two years, she and the other sellers had managed to survive the turmoil caused by the pandemic. If they now returned to the market that had supported them, they risked arrest or confrontation. Still, they needed the income to keep their heads above water.
“We’re going back to sales,” she said. “If God wants it.”
Jo Corona and Lexi Parra contributed reporting.