A Tale of Two Brooklyns

I live in a neighborhood called Bushwick, the weirdest place on Earth. It’s home to a bunch of genderless gentrifiers and Latinx immigrants. Here, I discuss the clumsy collision of the two…

Brooklyn wears many faces. She could be boardwalks that run parallel to the ocean, underneath an amusement park fashioned from Tinker Toys (Coney Island). She could be brownstones bleached maroon on streets cooled and canopied by lush trees, her sidewalks padded by purebred dogs. She could be a bodega with cumbia music blasting along with two mega fans, where the least junky food for sale is a Kind bar and Diet Coke (Crown Heights, Flatbush, anywhere, really….)

But in my neighborhood, Bushwick, there seemed to be two Brooklyns, a dichotomy firmly drawn, but not partitioned. What kind of a mad scientist had decided to fuse together Latin immigrants with the hottest, weirdest, most genderless artists ever produced in a pod?

“It’s gritty and real, that’s what I like about it,” I would tell people back home. And it was: Bushwick wasn’t some white person’s movie set of what Latinos might look like (like West Side Story). It was messy and lively and unregulated. It was the opposite of whatever Target and Starbucks were, the earthy, anti-corporatacracy. I wondered how the two could’ve even grow from the same ground.