Great Brook Valley Riots

In the early morning hours of June 21, 1979, a police officer from the Worcester Housing Authority (WHA) killed a 28-year-old Puerto Rican man, Angel Luis Allende, at the Great Brook Valley public housing project. Hiram Estremera, a police officer with the WHA, had stopped Allende for what looked like theft of a community-owned stove. For residents, the shooting and the riot culminated a long history of marginalization and discrimination. Before confrontations with the WHA had begun the previous year, residents themselves had patrolled the neighborhood, armed with little more than flashlights. This practice reflected a greater sense of autonomy and self-ownership among the residents of Great Brook Valley. “But then they brought in their bullies,” one resident recalled of this new militarized force. Police routinely harassed residents, especially youth who lacked adequate recreational facilities, for sitting on porches or hanging out in the street listening to music.

Miguel Rivera, director of the Latin Association for Progress and Action (ALPA), characterized the situation as a “social apartheid” reinforced by the neighborhood’s physical isolation and the tactics of “pacification” and “manipulation” by police and other authorities. Rivera demanded a new era of self-determination for residents, only to be blamed for stoking the fires with his warnings that the community “was ready to blow.” “The riots happened because nobody was listening,” according to long-time Worcester resident, Judge Luis G. Pérez.

Indeed, the Johnson Administration’s Kerner Commission Report, issued in 1968, revealed the breadth and depth of systemic racism in the nation, particularly in the areas of housing policy and policing, that made such riots inevitable. The riots drew the larger public’s attention to the conditions facing the largely Puerto Rican community of Great Brook Valley and led to important changes. A new tenants’ organization, the Valley Residents for Improvement, emerged for residents to “have a hand in their own destiny.” Newspapers and magazines began to tell their stories. Other neighborhoods began to open up to the Puerto Rican community, and residents began to access more basic services such as groceries, a youth center for recreation, a public library branch, and housing improvements. (Narrative by Prof. Justin Poche, College of the Holy Cross)

Sources: Worcester Telegram; Marilyn Flores, “‘The System Considers Us Garbage’: Puerto Ricans and Worcester’s Great Brook Valley Housing Project, 1970-1980.”