Dancers in Mott Haven, The Bronx, August 1956. Photo by David Gonzalez

I suddenly wake up and glance at my phone and my Instagram feed, bad habit I know!

Suddenly i come across this image which makes me stop and want to know more! Before I know it an hour has passed as I’ve entered the google web, pun intended, where it has taken me numerous places of information as i do my research due to the comment quoted by the photographer! .

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I have learned that during the 1970’s throughout to 1980 a shocking 90% of its buildings in the South Bronx of New York got burnt down !!

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.The South Bronx was populated by African Americans immigrants from the Deep South and Puerto Ricans that had moved to the city for a better life. It’s suggested the arson attack fires were caused by the landlords which displaced a quarter- million of its residents!

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David González who took this image at the age of 22 after graduating from Yale says : .

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.’The Dancers’ While we were there, a salsa band started playing, and a couple started dancing. I shot two frames of them. .

, ‘To me, this image speaks of a lot of things, especially given what was happening in the Bronx at the time. Here we have a couple, dressed to the nines, dancing in the streets when the outside world saw the South Bronx as irredeemable. Yet there, embracing and dancing to the soundtrack of an unseen band, they remind us how our roots, our culture, nourishes our souls.’ .

Being an immigrant myself, i so very much relate to the last paragraph, powerful words indeed.