Eva Mayhabal Davis testifies on language access, affordable space, and portable benefits

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair, Deputy Speaker, Dr.

Nantasha Williams.

Good to see you again.

To the City Council and all the support that you do for arts and culture across New York City.

My name is Eva Mayabal-Davis.

I'm here as a project manager for the Latinx Arts Consortium, LXNY.

We represent 55-plus Latino-serving cultural organizations across New York City, ranging from artist collectives to a couple of CIGs.

Our mission is to foster knowledge sharing and exchange, as well as collective action towards systemic change.

Several of our members were part of the multilingual, multiracial coalition of artists, cultural workers, and community organizers that published the People's Cultural Plan in May 2017, the initial response to create NYC.

Nearly a decade later, New York City has made progress in several areas identified by that plan,

yet many of its central concerns remain unresolved, particularly for Latinx, Black, immigrant, indigenous, and other historically under-resourced artists and cultural organizations.

Create NYC includes language for equity throughout the plan, and in order to more effectively comment on that progress that has been made, and as many of my colleagues have also pointed out, we need to know

more about the extent of those results since their inception.

So I really thank you for pushing on making sure that we better understand that data.

In response, I want to uplift three points.

One is language access.

Language access and funding was made available and proposed by Create NYC.

However, its disbursement and funding is not clear.

We cannot, we must support establishing partnerships with service communities with language needs that include translation services, live interpretation, captioning,

all of the ways in which language works so that we can have English to another language and other mother languages into a multilingual dimension.

This is especially important as mono speakers are currently being discriminated against through the federal administration.

And we know that language is culture and deserves the nuance of human translators who are cultural workers.

A second point, affordable cultural spaces.

It's been addressed by many of my colleagues.

What has been the impact of the subsidized rehearsal space to this point, which is now coming to an end?

The People's Cultural Plan identified displacement as one of the greatest threats to cultural life in New York City, arguing that artists cannot thrive when the communities that's a

Staying their work are priced out of neighborhoods.

For Latinx cultural organizations, especially these pressures, threaten more than physical infrastructure.

They jeopardize the community of cultural practices, intergenerational relationships, community-based artistic networks.

And we call to community ownership and control of cultural spaces that remain largely unrealized at a systemic level.

And I was very happy to hear more of my colleagues'initiatives for community land trust.

In addition, and as we've heard your follow-up on freelance cultural works frequently lacking access to health care, retirement benefits, paid leave, and unpredictable employment.

And today, many artists cannot afford the essential plan due to continued defunding.

And so we urge you to continue to consult with us, the experts, on what it means to push forward in co-designing portable benefits for health care.

Thank you.