Skeely Street Game, Spanish Harlem, New York, 1987. © Joseph Rodriguez Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen.

In the wake of World War I, Puerto Rican and Latin American immigrants first began arriving in New York, settling in a little corner of upper Manhattan around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue, which is now known as Spanish Harlem. With a foothold firmly established in El Barrio, the neighborhood blossomed after World War II, when a new wave of immigration transformed the face of the city.

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By 1960, some 63,000 Puerto Ricans called Spanish Harlem home, bringing the culture of the Caribbean to the northern climes. With bodegas and botánicas catering to the culinary and spiritual needs of the people, Spanish Harlem became an enclave unto itself.

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But the land of the free was hardly this to the immigrants who faced a system of exclusion that kept them in a state of poverty. By 1970, Nixon aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan established a policy of “benign neglect” that deprived Latinx and African-American communities nationwide of basic government systems. Add to this a drug war started by the Nixon White House to flood these neighborhoods with heroin in order to destabilize and criminalize the population, and the results were devastating.

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By the late 1980s, after crack made its way through the streets, the people of Spanish Harlem were struggling with rampant crime, addiction, and poverty. At the same time, AIDS was taking innocent lives while the Reagan White House turned a blind eye on a plague that was disproportionately harming the Latinx and African American communities.

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Born and raised in Brooklyn, Puerto Rican-American photographer Joseph Rodriguez became familiar Spanish Harlem as a child, when he traveled uptown to visit his uncle who had a candy shop in El Barrio. Like many of his generation, he fell victim to the heroin epidemic and ended up incarcerated on Rikers Island for drug possession during the early 1970s.

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© Joseph Rodriguez