Great Brook Valley: A Community Demands to Be Seen

Note: what follows discusses a police killing and civil unrest. The account is based on documented historical record.

In the early morning hours of June twenty-first, nineteen seventy-nine, a housing authority police officer named Hiram Estremera shot and killed Angel Luis Allende, a twenty-eight-year-old Puerto Rican man, in the parking lot of the Great Brook Valley public housing project. Allende was handcuffed. He was sitting in the back of a police cruiser. A jury later found Estremera guilty of murder in the second degree.

The killing ignited three days of unrest in Great Brook Valley, a housing development on the city's northwest side that had been home to a large Puerto Rican community since the nineteen sixties. But the uprising was not simply a response to one shooting. For residents, the shooting expressed something they had been trying to communicate for years and had been ignored.

Great Brook Valley was physically isolated from the rest of Worcester, accessible by just a few roads and cut off from city services that other neighborhoods took for granted. Police routinely harassed young residents for sitting on their own porches or listening to music in the street. The neighborhood lacked adequate grocery stores, recreational facilities, and a public library branch. Community leaders described the situation as a social apartheid.

The riots forced the larger city to pay attention. In the aftermath, a new tenants' organization emerged, and the city gradually extended more basic services to the neighborhood. Other Worcester neighborhoods began accepting Puerto Rican residents who had previously been steered away by housing discrimination. The officer's conviction, though unusual, established that accountability was at least legally possible.

The Puerto Rican community of Worcester has grown substantially since nineteen seventy-nine. Today, Hispanic and Latino residents make up nearly a quarter of the city's population. Great Brook Valley still exists. The conversation about whose city this is has never fully stopped.