MIRABAL CENTER PROMOTES TENANTS' RIGHTS, SUPPORTS HARLEM ARTISTS
ORGANIZATION TAKING ACTION AGAINST PROPOSED MANHATTANVILLE EXPANSION
By JONATHAN BASILE
Columbia Daily Spectator
February 9, 2007

In a storefront office on 142nd Street, among portraits of Diego Rivera, Che Guevara, and local artists and activists, members of the Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center are working to honor the memory of their namesake.

The activist organization takes its name from a group of sisters who were executed for their opposition to the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. A poster on the wall in the center proclaims, "The tyrant died, you did not."

Since 1993, the group has been promoting local artists, providing programs for youth and families, and fighting discriminatory hospital practices. They have also recently taken on fights against the Pinnacle Group, a housing developer, and Columbia's proposed Manhattanville expansion.

The Mirabal Sisters' most recent success has come from their work in the Language Access Coalition, a group that consists of activists fighting for better translation services in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

The coalition released a report on the hospital's translation services in July of 2005 called "Lost in Translation," which chronicled Spanish-speaking patients' discontent with hospital services.

A year after the coalition's first demonstration, the hospital announced it would provide full translation services in 12 languages. The coalition has since found that language-related complaints have decreased from 72 percent of patients, according to the report, to 12 percent of patients, according to Luis Tejada, the group's co-founder and executive director.

The center's members also say they are taking a ground-up approach to community building. They hold parenting skills training, after-school programs for youth, computer skills workshops, and Síntesis Cultural, a monthly event welcoming artists from the community and beyond to share their work. They also publish the writings of local youth in a newsletter called "Word Up!"

Their next efforts will include expanding the translation issue to Beth Israel hospitals in New York City and reforming education in West Harlem.

But for the organization's leaders, empowering the Hispanic community also depends on preserving the neighborhood against developers who are seeking to transform it. "People have been living here for years, have the right to live in a nice place, a beautiful place," project director Luis Gil said.

Mirabal Sisters' leaders said they have put considerable effort into demonstrations against Columbia's plan to build a new campus in a 17-acre area of Manhattanville because they feel that Columbia is not taking the necessary steps to protect the culture of West Harlem from gentrification.

"To stop Columbia, we're organizing the people. If we organize the community-if we let them know their rights-no one will push them out ... The community is our leader," Tejada said.

The University is more optimistic about the effects of its proposed expansion plan, saying that it will leave both the University and residents of the neighborhood better off.

"The community has a positive impact on Columbia, and we believe Columbia has a positive influence on the community. We believe we will grow together," University spokeswoman La-Verna Fountain said.

Another target the organization has taken on is the Pinnacle Group, a major landlord in northern Manhattan that has spent billions of dollars buying apartment buildings and, according to the Mirabal Sisters, has sent out 5,000 dispossess notices to begin the process of eviction among its approximately 21,000 apartments.

"It's like an army come to the community and pushing people out," Tejada said.

Courts have found Pinnacle guilty of willfully overcharging rent and billing tenants for remodeling that never took place. Some of their attempted evictions have not held up in court. Pinnacle's lawyers have referred to these situations as honest mistakes.

The Mirabal Center regularly hosts tenants' rights workshops that draw about 15 to 20 people every week. "People say, 'I know where to go-I know I have the right to defend myself,' and they're fighting," Gil said.

© Copyright 2007 Columbia Daily Spectator