NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 2021
“It’s hard to pinpoint one experience, when growing up in this neighborhood has been an entire experience within itself. Bed-Stuy is artistic. It has always been – way before the gentrification.” Jennely Pichardo, 20, a City College Film major and textile artist, grew up in one of Brooklyn’s most gentrified areas. “A city within a city,” Pichardo reminisces on her experiences growing up in a rapidly changing community of color.
Her views on gentrification are fair. She cares a lot about making sure communities that are food deserts learn about healthy food options. She also cares about establishing a financially stable future so she does not have to live through the negative changes that will come from the rapid growth of gentrification. “[My classmates and I] were all living in an overlooked neighborhood. We were used to the trash that would pile up, always on the lookout for undercover cops who would ask us about drugs to pin something on us, avoiding walking down certain blocks because we knew which building could potentially be raided, and used to seeing new sneakers hung on the cable lines. For most of us, we didn’t even know there was another New York. We were too young to have left to see it on our own. But not too young for the new corner store owners to profit from us,” Pichardo said.
Pichardo is concerned about her community. She wanted to find a way to speak about her points of view on the world around her. She realized that she had the opportunity to use a powerful tool, to achieve this. Filmmaking. Pichardo was first introduced to her interest in film at Magic Studios at Rochester Institute of Technology. There she learned video editing, while being exposed to other film roles and techniques. She used this knowledge to take her down the route she is now, as a documentary film student and personal assistant.
Through her film work, Pichardo aims to use her platform to speak on issues that matter most to her, like gentrification and social injustices. As a filmmaker, she is aware of the power that her platform holds, and wants to help amplify the voices in the community she is currently in, while moving away from it to pursue her goals. She said, “It’s surreal walking past glass buildings when the projects are on the other side of the street. Most of us have nothing else if not for what we’ve built in Bed Stuy. I sometimes lose hope that we’ll be able to stop it because it genuinely feels like the corporations that are gentrifying the neighborhood, and the government that allows it, truly don’t care about us. But, despite coming from severely underfunded schools, we’re making something of ourselves.”
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