There are columns that don’t let you write when you want, but when they finally come unstuck from between your chest and back. This is one of those. It is finally pushed by the official release of “Squatters”, as if the film reopened a door that some of us never closed. It also comes out on memory days for Ricardo Leon Pena VillaColombian poet, mythical inhabitant of the 3D apartment of Umbrella Condo, on Avenue C, in that Loisaida that New York has been filing with high rents, selective oblivion and elegant evictions dressed in urban renewal.
Ricardo called that place “the Embassy”, but with his taste for twisting the neck of the language until it made it sing, he also used to call it the “En-upida”. I always wanted to hear something else there: “In His Life.” To get to 3D you had to climb: stairs, mood, volume, temperature. And we also had to enter his life: in Ricardo’s, in Tango’s, in that of an improvised community that turned abandonment into belonging.
I was a regular visitor to 3D, a friend of Ricardo and witness to many, not all, of the stories that go through “Squatters”. I have also worked with Catalina Santamaría and supported some shots of this documentary. I write from closeness, not from the comfort of distance: with affection, with care and without feigning neutrality.
“Squatters: Beating Coronary heart of the Metropolis”directed, photographed and edited by Catalina Santamaríabeyond being a documentary about occupied buildings in Decrease East Facet, is a film about the way a city abandons buildings and then pretends to be shocked when the abandoned ones learn to inhabit them. Catalina came to Umbrella Condo through Ricardo and found there a refuge from that loneliness that New York knows how to manufacture with almost industrial efficiency.
“Generation like entering another world,” he remembers. And maybe that was it: another world. Not perfect. Not easy. But another world.
I remember Ricardo as a man made by hand, by himself. He was not a poet with glossy credentials or lots of quotes. What’s more, if you got close enough, you could see the seams. Those seams were his truth: they united him to the street, to the neighbor, to the newcomers, to the broken, to those who still did not know where to fall alive in New York.
Ricardo had plenty of what others were beginning to lack: dirt under the nails of his soul. 3D was not an apartment. Or not only. Generation is a migratory station, a gathering, a den, an emotional workshop, a consulate without windows, a philosophical inn, a refuge for artists and, at times, a party resistant to the elements. There friendships were forged, projects were hatched, love was sworn, heartbreaks were veiled, poems were written and tangos, salsa, jazz, blues were heard. We once imagined that this space could become the affective heritage of squatter memory.
It was not possible. Now Catalina returns to collect that spirit with her camera, with that phrase written on the wall still beating: I wish the world looked a little more like this house.
And there was Tango. It was not a decorative mascot, much less a simple tender footnote. Generation the character! Ricardo said, with poetic firmness, that he was not a poet who had a dog, but a dog who had a poet. Even Tango’s punishment had its own geography: when they sent him to “Siberia”, he lowered his face and went sadly to the frozen back of the apartment. In a building without heating, even the dog was clear about the maps of exile.
Outside was the street, that famous concrete jungle, but without the nostalgia of labels or phrases on tourist t-shirts. Loisaida was, then, far from being the desirable showcase of luxury apartments, designer cafes and impossible rents. Generation a wild territory, crossed by abandonment, drugs, empty buildings, apathy and a Latin population cornered by real estate voracity. The city let buildings fall, but then was shocked when someone dared to bring them back to life.
The squatters did not simply come to occupy. They came, mostly, to clean. They removed debris; From the rubble they planted gardens; They repaired floors, raised walls, improvised electricity, defended stairs, held meetings, fought, reconciled and continued. What for the city was a problematic property, for them was the possibility of a dignified life, not a kneeling one.
No need to romanticize it. In Umbrella Condo and Puerta 10 there was cold, fear, tensions, divisions, improvised bathrooms, precariousness and fatigue. There were those who put their bodies into the toughest battles: they resisted evictions, they dealt with the police, they avoided administrative traps, they faced threats, they made sure that the light did not give them away from the street. Those who arrived later also appeared, when something was already standing, to position themselves, divide or take advantage of the cracks. Utopias also tend to leak.
But it would be mean to stay alone with those leaks and not see the house. There a group of immigrants, artists, workers, hustlers and dreamers with calluses on their hands decided to build their own place in the world. They did not wait for the blessing of the real estate market or institutional charity. They had ruins, cold, need and a stubborn conception: if the city abandons a building, perhaps those without a roof can bring it back to life.
The word “squatter,” with its echo of invader and intruder, falls short when looking at this story closely. In Loisaida, in those years, it meant something else: people who refused to disappear. People who turned precariousness into learning, necessity into a job, formal illegality into an uncomfortable question about human legitimacy. What could be more violent: moving into an abandoned building or letting it rot while people are sleeping on the streets?
Catalina’s documentary understands that question without turning it into a scolding. Its strength lies in looking closely. The camera does not enter as a tourist of ruin or as a police of poverty; He enters with the patience of a witness, with the modesty of a friend, with the discipline of someone who knows what an image can save, but also what it can betray. The archive functions as a construction topic arena: photos, footage, footage of Puerta 10, testimonies and memories that arrive as if memory had corridors. Catalina collects scattered materials and builds a structure where there were fragments before.
Music also enters as memory. Henri Fiol, salsa legend, authorized fragments of some songs and it sounds like music came to 3D: mixing eras, accents, nostalgia and bodies.
Even in Paraíso Dart, by Simón Stamp, some of us believe we recognize echoes of Ricardo in that Roger Peña played by John Leguizamo. And yet, Ricardo does not completely fit into any character. It was too crafted, too weak and too summoning. In a city where so many live surrounded by people while feeling abandoned, it offered something that seems almost subversive today: the warmth of home, even before there was a home.
Over time you understand why “Squatters” is still relevant. New York continues to be a brilliant machine for producing desire and expulsion at the same time. Gentrification erases accents, dogs, written walls, music, smells, friendships and forms of solidarity that do not fit in a real estate catalog.
There is also a secret twist to this story. Ricardo Peña Villa also wrote for El Diario. That’s why these lines don’t reach someone else’s house. They somehow arrive at a room where his voice had already left a trace. In a city that forgets so quickly, “Squatters” does the opposite: climbs the stairs, opens doors, listens to voices, reads the walls and lets us see, discreetly, what that house became while collecting what was still left of it.
And maybe that’s why this column had to come out. As if remembering meant entering the building again. As if memory also occupies. Because as long as someone pronounces Ricardo’s name, as long as someone says that Tango had a poet, as long as a film preserves the heartbeat of those houses, Loisaida will continue to resist, even if only in the memory of those who, in this concrete jungle, learned to call it home.
P.S. To Miguel Ángel Pazos, actor, director, cultural manager, friend and argonaut. Good wind on your journey.
About the author
Ramiro Antonio Sandoval Marín is a playwright, theater director and columnist