“Abortions are amazing, am I right?” local artist Viva Ruíz asked a crowd of some hundred people, gathered in Maria Hernandez Park over the weekend before leading a sing-along to Viva, Viva Palestina. The group had appeared, dressed in Black Panther-style berets and colorful vests that read, in bold white letters: THANK GOD FOR ABORTION.

Ruíz’s group had shown up on a chilly afternoon in Bushwick by invitation of an outfit called the Undocumented Women’s Fund, a pandemic-era mutual aid fund. The group organized these events, a volunteer told me, which they called the “Women’s Strike NYC Fest,” in early March, to commemorate International Women’s Day, and they used to do these every year over in Washington Square Park, which ended up getting booked these year for the first “Womxn’s March.” The fund decided, instead, to move to Brooklyn.

The change felt fitting; a move to a neighborhood with its own network of mutual aid groups and leftist political infrastructure and the occasional Zayn Malik look-a-like contest. That afternoon, both North Brooklyn DSA members — less than a month after swinging significant attention for booking a singles mixer inside a nearby club — and canvassers for Zohran Mamdani, the group’s chosen candidate for mayor, could be found moving around in the crowd, the latter trying to get signatures, though the Astoria politician himself has yet to make a campaign appearance in the neighborhood.  A college student, from one of the other leftist groups, was buzzing around, trying to dispose of old copies of newspapers published by the “Youth Section” of the League for the Fourth International, a Trotskyist outfit. The headline of one read: All-Purpose Bigot Trump or Genocide Joe’s VP Harris?

In that way, the current political moment hung over the event like an intersectional villain, tacitly addressed by the signs reading NO ONE IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND … EXCEPT THE THIEVES. Instead of local politicos, the group brought refugees who attacked Eric Adams’ semi-public endorsement of right-wind immigration political rhetoric and more pointed closing of refugee shelters in the city. In perhaps a nod toward Trump’s recent decree naming English the country’s official language, speeches were delivered in both English and Spanish. A short singer, wearing a cowboy hat, inaugurated the event by waving a Mexican flag and repeatedly exclaiming Viva Mexico. The music was, overall, wonderful.

The Thank God For Abortion folks — Ruíz has been doing this since 2015, she tells Interview magazine — combine vaguely religious, vaguely Jenny Holizer-esque messages with an avid interest in performance; Ruíz led the group through an elaborate dance routine, before giving another member of the troop, Megan Curet, a solo number. In a similar spirit, if not more so, was the performance group the Al Límite Collective, which also dates to the pandemic and, claims to have been founded by residual members of the still-persisting Living Theater collective that dates to the hippie-era Greenwich Village. In more recent years, the group has been making appearances at events like last year’s “Shakespeare to Gaza,” over at the People’s Forum in Manhattan, and “The Gaza Monologues” over at Emerson. Appearing now in Bushwick, the group did “a segment of ‘Signals,’ our international feminist theater project,” an evocative dance piece that involves pointing at the crowd and then chanting the names of notable political activists, like Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founding member of Pussy Riot, and Tạ Phong Tần, a blogger who was arrested in Vietnam a decade ago, while holding up rods meant to evoke prison bars.

---

Photos by Andrew Karpan.