NYU student, community organizer, founder of Young Lordes

Collective

Last July, a subway station in New York City’s Washington Heights went
viral on Instagram as transit riders captured video footage of massive
flooding after a rainstorm.

The deluged station was Sumaya Bouhbal’s stop in the Heights, and for her,
it really cemented the huge gap between the low-income areas of the city, and
the gentrified neighborhoods. The intersection of climate change, poor
infrastructure and the impact on the low-income residents needed to be seen
as more than just a minor inconvenience.

She began educating those on the opposite side of Manhattan, letting them
know what is going on in other parts of their city, via posts on Instagram, and
encouraging them to put pressure on local officials.

Meanwhile in the Heights, Bouhbal addressed ground-level issues, filling up

community fridges and passing around flyers in Spanish and English to let
people know they shouldn’t fish in the Hudson River because the water
quality is toxic.

“Before I could finish filling up the fridge, the food was gone,” she says. Her
neighborhood has some of the largest statistics of food insecurity in the city.

Distributing food continues to play into the efforts of the arts activist group
she founded in March 2021, called the Young Lordes Collective (YLC).

The group of young BIPOC creatives started handing out grocery kits on the
street in the Heights, with healthy meal ingredients, and food specifically
meant for kid’s lunches.

“Much of my life has been prohibited or constrained by the systems of

oppression that exist here,” says Bouhbal, who also serves as the group’s
creative director. “That little kid who's finally going to get a meal, he could
be the next Pablo Picasso. Our kids just aren't being given a chance, so we’re
trying to do work that indirectly allows opportunities.”
The YLC’s two goals are to put a spotlight on underrepresented issues and
people, and to reallocate wealth.

Ahead of their Spring Art Festival in May in Brooklyn, the YLC gave five
young POC photographers from the city $500 to create a photo project – a
printer company sponsored the prints – which were displayed at the event.
Afterwards, those prints went back into the hands of the photographers.

The $10 entrance fee went to pay the performers, some of them who’d never
been paid for performing. “We had people doing interviews [to a] roomful of
100 people … young black men from the hood who take pictures who never
thought that people would ever want to hear about what they have to say.”

The profits also helped to fill up a community fridge, fund the zine the
Collective produces, and support its next event (which are all promoted via
the YLC Instagram account).

Sales from the zine, comprised of almost 100 pages of work from
underrepresented artists, are going towards helping a queer Indigenous artist
not get evicted, via another gallery event.

“We're going to try to make it an immersive experience, to show people the

power of direct action and crowdfunding,” Bouhbal says.

She hopes that it will show attendees what can happen when you help one
person, and encourage them to do things on a larger scale.

Boubhal’s aspirations stem from work she did at the New York Historical
Society as a Teen Leader. She was researching 60s and 70s activist groups,
like the Combahee River Collective, black Queer feminists who organized in
Boston in the 1970s; and the Young Lords Party, which was dedicated to the
liberation and self-determination of Puerto Rican, Latino and colonized
people in Chicago.

“It was at the time where pretty much every oppressed person in this country
was like, we're not going to ask any more, we're just going to take, and I was
really inspired by this idea of self-advancement for oppressed people,” she
says.
Inspired, Bouhbal brought together her friends, Fredi G-P, Anya Jimenez,
and Jillian Louie, to create change. The Collective now boasts around 15
members, many of them she met from the New York Historical Society,
while others came from the performance arts high school that Bouhbal
attended.

“It was a predominantly white institution and there were a lot of kids that
came from very specific walks of life that are privileged here in the city --
they're gentrifiers, they're people with generational wealth,” says Bouhbal.
“They have these things that me and my friends didn't have, and so
inevitably, we learned how to be activists at my school. I was really inspired
by the kids who were a year older than me, just shaking shit up at my high
school.”

Now an NYU student, studying Recorded Music, Bouhbal says the Collective
continues to meet on Zoom, and connect on the group chat. They’re planning
for their next moves, which include a YLC website, a gentrification-focused
zine, and distributing free defence kits to black and brown trans and gender
nonconforming people.

She is adamant that she could not do any of this work alone, based on her
skill sets, and neither could one individual within the collective. “We kind of
have no choice but to get together with a really cool group of people that we
love, and do it,” she says.

With growing awareness and support of the Collective’s work, it seems

inevitable that Bouhbal and the other members’ work will bring positive
change to their neighborhoods, their boroughs, and beyond.

“I'm unable to accept no as an answer from the world when we ask for
certain things because I see the people that support what I'm doing and what
my Collective is doing,” she says. “And I know that literally anything is
possible.”