Mutuality in El Barrio: Stories of the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service

The stories of 18 immigrant families from East Harlem and their experiences with one of New York’s deeply-rooted organizations

On any given weekday, people stream in and out of Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service’s bright, airy building on 115th Street. They are mostly mothers who find their way to LSA, sometimes only weeks after crossing the border from Mexico, having heard of the support that las hermanitas (＂the little sisters＂) offer. Opening a window into the world of New York’s Spanish-speaking newcomers, Mutuality in El Barrio combines oral histories with archival research of the history, spirituality, and ministry of LSA to present how this well-established organization serves vulnerable populations with a unique approach they call ＂mutuality.＂

LSA is part of a network of East Harlem’s powerful grassroots organizations that draws from the remarkable strengths of local families in its community. It is a place of healing and empowerment focused on the overall holistic health of resident families. Long-term relationships are cultivated here rather than quick fixes, and it is a place that nurtures people’s full potential as leaders, parents, and advocates for themselves. In Mutuality in El Barrio, eighteen mothers share how, through the help of LSA, they managed to navigate a strange city and an unfamiliar language in a neighbor-hood that has long been a site of incredible challenges and extraordinary strength, creativity, and cultural vitality.

These personal accounts of mothers, long-time LSA staff, and nuns reveal how these women found solidarity, accompaniment, care, neighborhood transformation, and binding connections through mutuality that helped them grow and connect in East Harlem. Their stories shine a light on an organization that began as a small community of vowed nuns who, like these mothers, also trace their origins abroad.

Carey Kasten (Edited By)
Carey Kasten is an Associate Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at Fordham University. She researches contemporary Spanish culture and Spanish-speaking communities in New York City. She is the author of The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater: Representing the Auto Sacramental (Bucknell, 2012). Dr. Kasten works with the Kino Border Initiative to bring students to the Arizona-Mexico border and learn about the complex realities of migration. In 2021, she curated ＂Hostile Terrain 94,＂ an art installation that depicts the loss of migrant life in the Sonoran desert, at Fordham University’s Lipani Gallery.

Brenna Moore (Edited By)
Brenna Moore is a Professor of Theology at Fordham University. She is a specialist in
the area of modern Christianity, with a focus on Catholic intellectual and cultural history in twentieth century Europe . Her most recent book is Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (Chicago, 2021) where she explores a community of Catholic artists and thinkers who responded creatively to the far right surges of xenophobia and nationalism in the mid twentieth-century. She is a longtime volunteer at the Little Sisters
of the Assumption Family Health services and has spent many years engaged with organizations of service and solidarity as a partner and collaborator for teaching, research,
and life.