The Narrative of Race in the History of the Willowbrook State School, New York: 1947-1975

Jorge Matos Valldejuli Assistant Professor & Reference Librarian Hostos Community College, City University of New York (CUNY) History & Disability Studies 11/30/15 This paper will explore the theme of race in the... [ view full abstract ]

Jorge Matos Valldejuli
Assistant Professor & Reference Librarian
Hostos Community College, City University of New York (CUNY)
History & Disability Studies
11/30/15


This paper will explore the theme of race in the historical narrative surrounding the infamous Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York. The name Willowbrook is synonymous in both public health and disability studies as a pivotal milestone in exposing the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill in state asylums. In the early part of 1972, a young local news reporter by the name of Geraldo Rivera revealed in a televised expose, The Last Great Disgrace, to a shocked national audience, the appalling living conditions in which over five thousand children and adults lived inside the nation’s largest mental institution. The legal and social struggles which ensued to close asylums (de-institutionalization) and provide localized health services for developmentally disabled patients became a centerpiece of the national disability rights movement. But what is much less known, is that a significant portion of the hospital’s residents were of Puerto Rican and African-American descent, comprising the largest minority population in any asylum in the state of New York at the time. This major omission goes unnoticed despite the multiple intersections between race and class in the history of Willowbrook as a place and catalyst in rethinking our relationship with the developmentally disabled and their treatment. Understanding how this silence and invisibility of both race and the disabled body occurred and how it permeates Disability Studies, Latina/o Studies and African-American Studies will be the main focus of this paper.
Using archives, secondary sources, film and interviews, I will first examine the way the historical narrative of Willowbrook has been constructed within Disability Studies. This particular narrative has erased the presence of developmentally disabled Puerto Rican/Latin@s and African-Americans in the story of the hospital before the 1972 expose and scandal, as well as the aftermath in diverse mediums such as disability rights history, activism, the press, film and academic literature. I will argue that an overarching identity of the disabled has omitted or subsumed race for a unitary category of identification and resistance in place of disunity. Second, I will explore how a significant historical incident in which both Puerto Rican/Latin@s and African-Americans were present as patients, staff and activists was largely ignored in both communities within the press, social activism and in the developing fields of Black & Latin@ Studies. How such a silence occurred in the heyday of the liberationist narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement and Puerto Rican/Latino movements such as the Young Lords Party will be examined. I will argue for a re-evaluation of the place of the disabled body in the history of the aforementioned struggles and within the fields of Puerto Rican/Latin@ Studies and African-American Studies. Essentially, I wish to interrogate the construction of historical narratives in the formation of disciplinary categories and the resulting incivility unintended, disavowed or otherwise which erases disabled bodies and their fundamental neurodiversity common to us all.