East Harlem, a dense neighbourhood in New York City, has long attracted immigrants and newcomers from all over the world. In the late 18th century Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants called East Harlem home. In the early twentieth century, Puerto Rican families found their way to East Harlem, giving the neighbourhood its nickname El Barrio. With newer residents coming from Mexico and the Dominican Republic, today East Harlem is home to one of the largest Hispanic communities in New York City.
This community has a deep and complex history of experiments in solidarity across borders. Many forces have threatened the cohesion and health of their neighbourhood: ill-designed plans of ‘urban renewal,’ abandonment by city government, poor and unsafe schools, the HIV-AIDS and crack epidemics, the rise of xenophobia, anti-immigrant nationalism, gentrification, and much more. But it is also home to incredible stories of collective action, boundary-crossing alliances, and surprising networks of resilience and care.
Since 1958, one remarkable grassroots community organisation has worked to empower immigrant families, create communal bonds, and push back, collectively, against the structures of injustice that press down on East Harlem’s residents. What has it done that has worked so well for so long? The story of its successes is the heart of our new book, Mutuality in El Barrio: Stories of the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service.
Like most families in East Harlem, this community organisation (known by its abbreviated name LSA) also traces its roots abroad. In 1891 a small group of nuns from the Little Sisters of the Assumption religious order arrived in New York from France to work as nurses in the Lower East Side tenement houses. Their services quickly were in demand all over New York City. By the late 1950s, under Sister Margaret Leonard’s leadership, the sisters decided to focus their work on East Harlem to form deeper, more effective relationships with local families. They relocated their ministry and, invited by the East Harlem community, moved their living quarters there too.
LSA’s focus on one neighbourhood and the sisters’ insistence on forming part of that neighbourhood is quietly countercultural. They rejected the “bigger is better” mentality, refusing to disperse, overreach or overextend. Instead, the sisters chose focus, depth and community to learn about and uphold the assets of the neighbourhood. This spirit remains central to LSA today.
In the 1960s, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, the nuns were inspired by and contributed to experiments in liberation theology, a movement developed primarily in Latin America that interprets church doctrine in light of the experiences of the poor, emphasising liberation from structures of injustice. The Little Sisters broadened their nursing ministry to address larger issues affecting the health of East Harlem residents – unsafe housing, inadequate health care, community isolation. They partnered with hospitals, law firms, and housing rights organisations, shifting from crisis intervention to long-term relationship building that cultivated confidence and capacity in the neighbourhood.
All of LSA’s work fell under the auspices of ‘mutuality’ – a ‘power-with’ model of relational care aimed to enrich both the lives of the person serving and the one being served. Mutuality eschews a binary framework of helper and helped in an effort to co-create new realities in East Harlem that benefit all parties. Focusing on developing the strengths of low-income residents, mutuality cultivates grassroots leadership.
In addition to uncovering this history, Mutuality in El Barrio tells the story of 18 Mexican mothers who came to LSA in the 1990s and grew with the LSA community. Amongst these mothers is Melina, who first came to LSA for a parenting class and now works as a manager at the agency. Originally from Mexico City, Melina crossed the US-Mexico border at the age of 14 to join her family. Despite the fact that Melina’s father was a legal resident, Melina remained undocumented into her early 20s. The high school she attended was notorious for chaos, violence and failing academics. She dropped out of college because the out-of-state tuition she was forced to pay due to her migration status was too burdensome.
With LSA’s encouragement, she developed leadership skills and today is a valued staff member, sharing her knowledge and skills with local families. Melina’s journey from English language student at LSA to award-winning civic leader and LSA staff member embodies the radical results of mutuality in action. Her journey with the organisation reveals how the emphasis on mutuality empowers women to develop skills and self-confidence, first to address primary needs and then to apply these skills to the benefit of the community, all while working towards personal fulfillment.
Yolanda is another woman whose journey embodies LSA’s values of mutuality. She came to New York aged nineteen, from a small town in Mexico where she had only studied through sixth grade. When she was referred to LSA because of high blood pressure during her second pregnancy, she felt deeply alone. In New York she did not have friends, family, or the knowledge to navigate urban life. With LSA’s help, Yolanda began studying, eventually completing her bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. Since 2010 she has worked at LSA as an early education teacher.
Yolanda has spoken of the deep feeling of convivencia she experiences within the organisation. The term, which roughly translates as cohabitation or coexistence, invokes a sense of being with others not in spite of, but because of, creating community, sharing space, and together overcoming obstacles in profound solidarity. In 2017 Yolanda was chosen to travel to France along with other laypeople from across the world who support the work of the Little Sisters congregation. In Paris, the group spent time discussing how to centre the Little Sisters’ mission to serve and foster mutuality in moving the order and its numerous organisations into the future.
We do not tell stories like Melina’s and Yolanda’s to illustrate individual, heroic achievements. Instead, these stories highlight the power of vast webs of relationships in the East Harlem neighbourhood that have in turn created alternative networks of care and sociality. For so many years, the presence of vowed nuns has been central to these relational communities of mutual care to form grassroots power.
One such sister whom everyone considered an ‘icon’ in East Harlem was Sister Susanne Lachapelle, who lived in the neighbourhood for 45 years. On Christmas in 2022, Sister Susanne passed away. The Little Sisters of the Assumption nuns, like all communities of religious sisters, are facing a steep decline in numbers. While lay families like Melina’s and Yolanda’s embody the values of the Little Sisters, we do not yet know what mutuality in El Barrio will look like without the longstanding presence of women like Sister Susanne in their midst.
Although challenges and uncertainties remain, the stories of empowerment and mutual understanding that we highlight in our book are urgently relevant today. With the number of nuns shrinking in recent decades, it is critical to document their accounts in order to witness their work and vision. At the same time, we live in a world where bigger is often seen as better and where xenophobic narratives circulate to instil a fear of immigrants as a threat to Western cultures. LSA and its philosophy of mutuality point to different possibilities for our collective, pluralistic world. These stories of quiet, consistent collaboration to co-create narratives not just of survival but of flourishing provide essential intellectual and spiritual lessons.