Photographer Joe Conzo remembers getting an early start on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to vote in the mayoral primary, which saw billionaire media mogulMike Bloomberg throw his hat in the ring for the very first time. As the grandson of Dr. Evelina López Antonetty (1922-1984), the legendary Puerto Rican activist affectionately known as “The Hell Lady of the Bronx,” Conzo was raised to fight for the rights of the community throughout his life.
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Growing up amid the rubble of “benign neglect,” wherein the Nixon White House implemented a policy to deny government services to Black and Brown communities nationwide throughout the 1970s, Joe Conzo learned the only way to create change was to do it yourself. Whether accompanying his grandmother and mother Lorraine Montenegro to protests or photographing the early years of Hip Hop as it came up on the streets of the Bronx, Conzo understood “all power to all the people” was not simply a slogan — it was the truth.
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While serving in the Army, Conzo trained as a combat medic and decided to continue in that line of work after being discharged. In 1992, he became a member of the Emergency Medical Services (EMS), which merged with the New York Fire Department (FDNY) in 1996. By 2001, Conzo was working as a union delegate, a position that would come to serve him and his colleagues in ways he could never have imagined.
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