Introduction
Holyoke, Massachusetts, is a working-class city that bears the visible scars of deindustrialization and disinvestment. At its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it boasted of 28 mills employing thousands of immigrant workers who turned out so much paper product that Holyoke earned the title of America’s “paper city.” The closing of the mills, which began slowly during the 1920s and picked up momentum after World War II, brought Holyoke’s era of industrial glory to an end.
Today, what immediately catches the visitor’s eye are the abandoned factories lining the famous canal system, which was constructed almost two hundred years ago and continues to generate hydro-electric power for local residences and businesses.
Holyoke is a Rust Belt city, among the poorest and most socially distressed in the state. If you were to rank-order the 351 incorporated municipalities of Massachusetts according to the standard metrics of unemployment, household income, homeownership and educational attainment, there is a good chance that Holyoke would be at or near the bottom of the list.
But Holyoke is much more than a Rust Belt city. It is a Latino city. To be more specific, Holyoke is a boricua city. Boricua is a word appropriated from the language of the Taino peoples, the original inhabitants of Puerto Rico. It is what Puerto Ricans call themselves, wherever they live, signifying the pride, affection and respect they feel for each other and their shared history and culture. The 2020 federal census reported that Latinos made up 51 percent of Holyoke’s 38,238 residents. Of these, more than nine out of ten were of Puerto Rican heritage, according to the 2016-2020 American Community Survey. Puerto Ricans increased their share of Holyoke’s population from 13.5 percent in 1980 to 44.7 percent thirty years later. Today, Holyoke has more people of Puerto Rican ancestry per capita than any other city outside of the island itself.
This reflection falls into two parts. I will first identify three historical "isms" that have shaped Holyoke: capitalism, neocolonialism and neoliberalism. I will then say something about the photos I took and how they speak to these isms.
Part I. Capitalism, Neocolonialism, Neoliberalism
Capitalism. The shifting dynamics of global capitalism and capitalist class power are the context in which Holyoke and its history need to be seen. The establishment of the city in 1850 represented a high-water mark of New England's first industrial revolution. An elite fraternity of deep-pocket capitalists, better known as “Boston Brahmins,” recognized that South Hadley Falls on the Connecticut River with its steep drop of 60 feet possessed enormous potential as a generator of hydro power for manufacturing. In 1848 they incorporated as the Hadley Falls Company and set about damming the river and constructing a system of locks and canals to satisfy the energy needs of the planned industrial community they envisioned rising in the Connecticut River valley. The company’s board of directors predicted that the town of Holyoke would have sufficient power for 50 mills employing 200,000 workers.
Even if those projections turned out to be overly optimistic, Holyoke was a great success, growing in population from 3,245 at the time of its incorporation to a peak of 60,203 in 1920. Those who crowded into the city's tenements were working-class immigrants from many parts of the world. At first, the mills recruited their workforce from Irish immigrants fleeing the horrors of the potato famine and the social dislocations wrought by primitive accumulation in the countryside. The inflow of French Canadians surpassed that of the Irish in the 1870s. By the early 20th century waves of Germans, Poles, Jews and Italians added new textures to this multiethnic working class. After World War II the boricua diaspora made their appearance, giving Holyoke the sights, sounds and aromas of a Caribbean outpost on the mainland.
The fusion of capitalism, manufacturing and immigration left an unmistakable imprint on working-class politics and consciousness in New England mill towns like Holyoke and Lawrence, 100 miles to the east. In both places, strikes and other actions of pan-ethnic class solidarity have co-existed uneasily with violent clashes over language, religion, race and ethnic turf. How these two identities, class and ethnicity, were articulated reflected circumstances peculiar to Holyoke as well as the broader regional, national and even global balance of political forces.
Responding to the intensification of overseas competition and the falling rate of industrial profit after World War II, Holyoke’s manufacturers faced a difficult choice: close down their operations or move them to places where labor was cheaper and easier to exploit, such as the U.S. South and overseas. By the 1980s capital flight from the Global North had merged with globalization and financialization to undermine the “Golden Age” of postwar capitalism (1945-1973), an era of unprecedented economic growth and broad-based material prosperity.
In the historic heartland of capitalism, the working class and its allies on the Left now found themselves in full-scale retreat before the superior material and cultural firepower of an emboldened capitalist class. Having suffered through the early stages of deindustrialization and disinvestment following the Second World War, Holyoke's boricua working-class was no match for the globalization of capital and the political offensive launched by capitalist class interests after 1973. The forlorn urban landscape of present-day Holyoke testifies to labor’s historic defeat in this class war.
Neocolonialism. The reconfiguration of global capitalism in the 20th century, which forms the essential backdrop of Holyoke's rise and fall as America's paper city, had no less dramatic an impact on Puerto Rico, 1,680 miles away. As a result of its victory over Spain in the War of 1898, the United States took outright possession of Puerto Rico and Guam, and exercised temporary protectorates over the Philippines, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Absorbed into the U.S. as an “unincorporated territory,” Puerto Rico became a colony in all but name, though its residents gained U.S. citizenship in 1917. This was not the classic colonialism practiced by the major European powers of the 19th century, but a distinct American brand of neocolonialism.
The emergence of capitalist relations of production during the period of Spanish rule accelerated dramatically under the economic and political umbrella of the new imperial power, creating preconditions for the later massive wave of immigration from Puerto Rico to the mainland. For example, the proletarianization of the insular rural population began in the years following the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), as markets for tobacco, sugar and coffee were liberalized, leading to a dramatic increase in propertylessness. The American victory over Spain deepened this social transformation of the countryside. Agricultural workers who had earlier lost ownership rights to the land now lost usufruct rights to the land as well, especially in the booming sugar zones along the coast, where the new empire, working closely with U.S. corporate capital, set out to create, in the words of Chris N. Lesser, “an increasingly monetized rural economy structured around global commodities and dominated by export monopsonies.”
If this story has echoes of Marx’s account of “primitive accumulation,” in which the English peasantry was dispossessed of its land and denied access to the traditional commons, it’s no wonder: the basic ground rules of rural proletarianization, including state-sponsored violence, haven’t changed that much since the bloody transformation analyzed by Marx in the last section of Capital.
The creation of a surplus population in rural Puerto Rico was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the “mass displacement” that sent unprecedented numbers of boricua to places like Holyoke after World War II. The latter required state intervention to channel the surplus to the mainland. Working closely with New Dealers in Washington, the Puerto Rican government under Luis Muñoz Marín launched Operation Bootstrap in 1947, which prioritized light industry for export to U.S. markets over the monocultural plantation agriculture that had been the leading economic sector since 1898. Mainland capital received a bounty of tax breaks and other incentives in return for investing in insular industry. Muñoz Marín wagered that the potential downside of becoming increasingly dependent on U.S. capital would be offset by the positive role new investment would play in correcting the historic imbalance between agriculture and manufacturing. He believed, wrongly as it turned out, that his market-driven policies would put Puerto Rico on a path to self-sustaining economic development.
While industrial employment on the island did increase significantly as a result of the new policies, it could not offset job loss in the agricultural sector, with the result that Puerto Rico experienced a net decline in overall employment after the Second World War. Realizing that light industry at home would never be able to absorb the rapidly growing and increasingly restive industrial reserve army in the countryside, the Puerto Rican government set up programs to ship the surplus population to the continental U.S. The annual average of Puerto Ricans leaving the island for the mainland skyrocketed from 1,800 in the 1930s to 43,000 two decades later. The seeming contradiction of Puerto Rican immigrants seeking a better life in an industrial town that was in decline speaks volumes about just how bad things were at home.
Neoliberalism. It is helpful to place Holyoke, Puerto Rico and the boricua diaspora in the context of Marxist Ernest Mandel’s conceptual framework of alternating waves of expansion and contraction in the historic development of capitalism. In Puerto Rico in the American Century, César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe apply this framework to the long 20th century, identifying four periods in capitalism's trend line: 1893-1913 (expansive) 1914-1939/47 (depressive), 1940/48-1966/73 (expansive), 1967/75-present (depressive). Neoliberalism dominates the most recent period we are now living through, one characterized by declining rates of profit, anemic rates of investment and slow rates of growth, at least by comparison with the preceding Golden Age of capitalism.
Neoliberalism is a multi-faceted phenomenon wherever it has taken hold, from Holyoke to San Juan. As a form of ideology, it trumpets the free market as the foundation of universal freedom and the most efficient arbiter of economic, political, social and cultural life. As a weapon of class power, it rolls back the postwar gains of organized labor and social democracy on the grounds that they impede the operation of the free market and therefore threaten freedom itself. As an instrument of finance capital, it deregulates financial markets, proclaims the supremacy of shareholder value and turns the political economy into a vast Ponzi scheme of fictitious capital. As a tenet of urban policy, it advances gentrification, plain and simple. As a modality of governance, it concentrates decision-making power in opaque public-private partnerships dominated by business interests and shielded from democratic accountability. As a tool of depoliticization, it disaggregates the public into discrete groups of "stakeholders" who seek market-driven solutions to whatever issue is on the negotiating table. As an expression of multiculturalism, it equates "inclusion" with opening up hierarchies of professional privilege and corporate power to women and minorities, thereby legitimating rather than challenging these institutional bastions of the capitalist status quo. Neoliberalism seemingly has something for everyone, except if you belong to the working class.
That neoliberalism would receive the red-carpet treatment in a hard-pressed, working-class city like Holyoke is surprising a first glance. But Holyoke is not atypical in this regard. The governing regimes of Rust Belt cities from Detroit to the Ruhr Valley have enthusiastically embraced the economic development strategies proffered by neoliberalism. The reason for this is simple: there is no alternative, to quote neoliberal queen bee Margaret Thatcher, given the setbacks suffered by the workers since the 1970s and the abandonment of the working class by liberalism and the political parties who speak for it.
Part II. The Photos
The transformations were on full display when I arrived in Holyoke in July 2025, if you knew where and how to look. All of the photos in this gallery were taken in the historic heart of the city, the site of its famous canal system, paper mills and working-class tenements. Comprising the neighborhoods of South Holyoke, the Flats, Downtown and Churchill, this compact area can be easily walked in a day, both north to south and east to west.
Let’s begin our tour in the epicenter of Holyoke’s Rust Belt neoliberalism (photos 1-6). The infrastructural anchor of this new built environment is the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), whose sleek functionalist architectural design forms a sharp contrast with what remains of the original industrial landscape of Holyoke, not to mention the old mill that was demolished to make way for the new facility. The proposal to build a 90,000-square-feet, state-of-the-art data center in Holyoke, operated by a consortium of six big-name universities, seemed like a gift from God when it first became public in 2009, promising to plug the struggling city into the new digital age. The promise seemed to become a reality when the data center opened for business in 2012. What drew the consortium to Holyoke was the bottom line: inexpensive real estate; an existing fiber-optic infrastructure; an eager-to-please municipal government; and cheap, dependable, publicly subsidized hydroelectric power courtesy of Holyoke Gas & Electric to slake the center’s thirst for energy. Fully aware of its enormous carbon footprint and its equally enormous reliance on taxpayer subsidies, MGHPCC has made a strategic public-relations move to tout its “green” credentials, boasting that its Power Usage Efficiency metric is significantly below the industry average. That’s sort of like bragging you have the most fuel-efficient gas guzzler on the streets. But I won’t deny that the MGHPCC has the greenest and best-manicured lawn I saw during my visit to Massachusetts. Whatever the final verdict on the “G” in MGHPCC, a local job creator it is not: as of 2025 only 20 people worked in the facility.
Those who predicted that the MGHPCC would catalyze local development can point with satisfaction to three repurposed buildings within a few blocks of the data center. The first is The Cubit, a 55,000-square-feet, live-work-play space that opened in 2019. Carved out of a century-old wire manufacturing facility, it houses on its first two floors the Holyoke Community College Center for Hospitality and Culinary Excellence. Here, Holyoke’s “creative class” can enjoy loft living, co-working space, high-speed fiber internet, enterprise-grade WiFi and proximity to a hothouse of “foodie culture,” a definite draw for the hipoisie. Note the partnership with a public institution of higher education, whose resources and institutional prestige confer high-brow legitimacy on this local real estate venture, not unlike what we have seen for the MGHPCC.
The second spill-over effect of MGHPCC is the 72,000-square-feet STEAM Building, renovated and converted into office space in 2018. What I find most interesting about this project is not the physical structure but its name, an acronym for Sustainability, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Arts and Media, which nails each of the contradictory assumptions so blithely cobbled together in the neoliberal view of the world. I would respectfully ask the brains behind the STEAM whether any meaningful notion of “S” is compatible with “TEAM.” I would also ask where is the creative synergy that such an acronym seems to promise, for on the day I went floor to floor looking for photo ops, I found lots of closed doors and precious few signs of human life.
The third and final neoliberal planet orbiting MGHPCC is the Residences on Appleton, an 86,000 square-feet facility of “market-rate housing for low- and moderate-income seniors 55 years or older,” which over a century ago was part of the largest alpaca wool mill in the world. At the ground breaking ceremony in 2023, Mayor Joshua García said: “This project represents our commitment to history, preservation, and housing. It also represents our commitment to senior living, affordability, compassion, and care.” My hunch is that the mayor was trying to thread the needle between policy priorities that did not necessarily line up. After all, next door to the Residences was MGHPCC, which had benefited enormously from public subsidies and tax write offs but had no obvious connection with history, preservation, housing, senior living, compassion or care. As for affordability, this is a weasel word that in real estate speak can mean just about anything—except affordability for the poor who are in most desperate need of housing. When I checked apartmentguide.com shortly after taking the pictures you see here and months before the first tenants were scheduled to move in, the estimated monthly costs of the 88 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments, including rent and electrical utilities, ranged from $1,308 to $1,733. To put these numbers in context, keep in mind that Holyoke’s median household income in the period 2013-2017 was $37,954, and the median per capita income was $22,625.
Rust Belt neoliberalism has colonized a small enclave in Holyoke. To appreciate how small, follow in my footsteps: stand on the Appleton Street bridge and take in the view of the MGHPCC and Residences which sit on opposite sides of the First Level Canal (Photo 1), then reposition yourself on the front lawn of MGHPCC and look down Appleton toward The Cubit and STEAM Building on the far side of the Second Level Canal (Photo 3). These four showcase projects are separated by a mere 1,000 feet.
But as soon as you cross over Appleton Street, the Potemkin village will give way to another world of empty and decaying structures like the abandoned American Thread mill (Photos 7-11). And as we venture further into South Holyoke, the Flats and Downtown, the forlorn evidence of physical abandonment and urban decay multiplies, reminiscent of the savage juxtapositions of modernism and dilapidation in movies like Blade Runner and Brazil. There is something about the doors of run-down buildings long since shed of their human occupants which fascinates me. I know next to nothing about Buddhist teachings, but the notion of “Open Doors to Emptiness,” which is central to the Mahayana tradition, appeals to me because it posits the interconnectedness of all phenomena and the illusory nature of thing-like appearances, which at the risk of overplaying my hand I will suggest also characterizes the Hegelian and Marxist dialectical traditions. But the doors I photographed in Holyoke were closed not open, more symbolic of despair than of enlightenment (Photos 13-18). The shape-shifting qualities of Holyoke’s canals likewise troubled me. In the enclave, they seemed to weave together the natural and built environments, especially in the golden hours after sunrise and before sunset when the light softens the sharp edge of things (Photos 1 and 2). But outside the enclave they took on a sinister edge of danger, conflict and, most disturbing of all, human misery (Photos 19-24).
I should say something in defense of why I took pictures of the three men sleeping on Open Square Way, which is a spit-and-shine pedestrian walkway running alongside the First Level Canal, opposite the Holyoke Heritage State Park (Photos 22-24). It was 7:30 in the morning, the day after I arrived in Holyoke. The walkway is newly bricked and separated from the canal by a handsome iron fence. Two of the three men are sleeping on recently installed benches designed to beautify the space as well as to give pedestrians a comfortable spot from which to view the canal and park. If you have had a chance to look over my other galleries, you know that I do not avert my gaze from unhoused people, for in every urban place I have visited from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt, they are the human casualties of capitalist dynamics in the time of neoliberalism. Some might argue that I am disrespecting three human beings who did not give me their permission to take the pictures you see. My response is simple: these three men have been not only disrespected but also devalued and dehumanized, not by me or my photography, but by the very system that is on display in the neoliberal enclave on the other side of Appleton Street, just a few hundred yards away. I will also venture to make a prediction based on my first-hand experience with the politics of urban revitalization and the criminalization of the unhoused. When those 88 apartments at the Residences on Appleton are rented out, the campaign to sweep the streets of homelessness will gather momentum, leaving these three men, or whoever takes their place, no choice but to seek what shelter they can find in less public and more dangerous spaces. And lest I be misunderstood, I mean more dangerous for them, not for pedestrians enjoying the sights.
