La Peña celebrates 21 years of resistance

More than 150 community members, old and young, Black, white, and Latin@, gathered at St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx on Sept. 21 to celebrate the 21st birthday of La Peña del Bronx. This community center has fought against racism, gentrification, environmental pollution and police brutality. They dedicated the activity to amnesty for all immigrants.

La Peña was founded by two Chilean exiles. Víctor Toro is an original member of the MIR, the revolutionary organization that advocated arming the working people in Chile to defend the social gains they won under the Allende government. Toro’s companion, activist Nieves Ayress, was captured and tortured during the coup against Allende sponsored by the U.S. in 1973. Víctor Toro, who was declared “dead’ in Chile under the Pinochet regime, came here without papers.

Under the leadership of these two, La Peña became a community center for the homeless, persons with HIV, the unemployed, youth, the elderly and the disabled. It has consistently promoted and protected cultural expression. La Peña offers English classes, silkscreen workshops and lends its space to music, theater and folkloric dance groups.

Maintaining solidarity with revolutionary struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean, La Peña members face police and federal repression. Toro was captured in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in the summer of 2007 and faces deportation. Members of Rebel Diaz, a political hip-hop group that got its start at La Peña, were arrested by the police last summer because the artists interceded against the police in defense of a street vendor.

Until the day before the fiesta in the park, the police were refusing a sound permit and said that every speaker and performer would have to be identified in advance to the police. That didn’t happen. Instead, the community celebrated with music, food, dance, solidarity and the resistance that began with its revolutionary founders 21 years ago. Their struggle continues.

—Report and photo by Heather Cottin