City Life Vida Urbana: How evicted turn into activists

Boston, the city that hosts many of the most important universities in the world, and the headquarters of financial corporations that pull the strings of the world-economy, has today the highest income divide of the US: in Roxbury, Dorchester or East Boston, many miles from Harvard or MIT, thousands of latinos, afro-americans or caribbeans live in conditions of poverty not equalled in any city of Western Europe. Invariably, they are those who are hit by the evictions, the debt load, the expulsions. City Life / Vida Urbana since the 1970s keeps building a network of mutual support among those who suffer the consequences of these housing policies, also through the use of theater, rituals, symbols. Few know that Boston already suffered a great wave of evictions in the 1950s, with the complete demolition of the West End; today, in neighborhoods like Jamaica Plain or East Boston a battle is fought against real estate speculation, the same anti-social force that around 2007 foreclosed an american for each 20, and that keeps evicting people from the neighborhoods, both in the center and in the periphery.