Perez-Plocharczyk recites "ELEMENT."
“A neighbor with a happy dog / A homeless man sleeping under the bridge / Poor houses with pretty flowers,” Vivian Perez-Plocharczyk intoned to an audience of 60 at Bregamos Community Theatre in Fair Haven. “My hood, my element.” She took a deep breath and tilted her head back. “Fair Haven!” she stage-whispered, drawing out the final consonant into rousing applause.
Perez was one of half a dozen “voices [to] unite, under the night” at Saturday evening’s Mic at the Mill, a community-oriented climate awareness event hosted in collaboration with Save the Sound’s Urban Water Initiative (UWI), Project Drawdown, Women Without Borders, and Semilla Collective.
Xóchitl Garcia spearheaded the event, which was the latest installment in UWI’s summer series aiming to foster stewardship of the Mill River. She spotlighted the parquecito, or parklet, at 162 James St. that has reduced excess flooding from the Mill and Quinnipiac rivers.
Save the Sound’s inaugural Environmental Justice Specialist Alex Rodriguez opened the showcase with a call to action. “When we build community, we share love, stories, and vulnerability. We are building community because Mother Earth’s problems are too big for one person to tackle alone.”
Mic at the Mill was inspired by UWI’s PhotoVoice project in 2022, which featured the Fair Haven community’s “environmental assets and hazards” as captured by residents. Photos depicting abandoned buildings, green and blue spaces, trash and litter, and safety hazards were on display.
Green and blue spaces through the eyes of Fair Haven residents.
Despite having grown up in West Hartford, Rodriguez was eager to center Fair Haven and its surrounding communities in Save the Sound’s outreach. He promised to “push my organization to invest more in restorative community initiatives.”
Semilla Collective’s Son Chanques Rebeldes launched into lively son jarocho, a regional folk style of music born in Veracruz, Mexico, and incorporating influences from West Africa to Spain.
Redlining, the practice of denying people access to housing insurance on the basis of location, fragmented New Haven in the mid-to-late 1900s. Javier Villatoro, who plays the jarana jarocha in Son Chanques Rebeldes, was keenly aware of redlining’s impact on his community.
“We aren’t putting ourselves as victims. We are reclaiming our identity.”
The band’s instruments worked in harmony, weaving soundwaves together that crashed over the audience with each strum. The melody was punctuated with the thumping of son jarocho dancing that found its footing in between the strings.
Son Chanques Rebeldes performs son jarocho music.
Perez-Plocharczyk then captivated the audience as she recounted a morning walk through Fair Haven in a piece entitled “ELEMENT.”
“Walking to work / Broken glass on the ground,” she started. “Birds flying and singing / Prostitutes saying hello / Green trees beautiful sunlight.”
The entire event was hosted in both English and Spanish, a challenge-turned-opportunity that Perez-Plocharczyk did not shy away from. As she reread poems in both languages, her performance thrummed with an electric stage presence that earned laughs both times. She concluded “ELEMENT” in Spanish with a long, breathy cry: “Mi capucha, mi elemento / Fair Haven!”
In talking about gardening, Perez-Plocharczyk reflected on the three sisters, an indigenous method of planting squash, corn, and beans together because those plants physically support and nourish one another. “I tell you this story because nature by itself can’t solve anything. We need to work with nature, not against it,” she said.
Perez-Plocharczyk ended her set with “Living by the Bucket,” dedicating the narrative poem to “the people who don’t appreciate the water coming from their faucet.”
“To be clean as a Dominican / could mean to hurt your shoulders. / If there is not electricity / for the cistern’s pump / you must carry the water with a bucket.”
As the narrator’s family adapted to life by the bucket, Perez-Plocharczyk assumed staggered postures to match her sliding voice, alternating between a defeated husband to a honey-toned wife.
“Ah! I moved to the U. S. of A.! / Where hot water comes out of a faucet! / Not to worry about heating up water / nor mixing it with cold in the bucket.”
Perez-Plocharczyk poeticized the all-too-common reality elsewhere of inaccessible clean water, alluding to Mic at the Mill’s emphasis on preserving Fair Haven’s blue spaces.
“When my children were too big / For having baths in the sink / And too small for a shower / I bathed them with the bucket.”
The poet’s performance was met with thunderous applause. She gave a humble curtsy before returning to her seat in the back of the audience.
Garcia took to the stage to thank Perez-Plocharczyk for her reading. “Thank you for making time to honor the environment through our lens.… I’m just glad to be in existence with you at this moment.”
The audiences listens to a presentation by Garcia (right).