The most important thing that we had to do was to educate the public, the parents, Rutgers union members, and the community at large. We needed to lay out the issues and what was at stake here, who the powerful entities were behind this plan to tear down the school and to build the cancer center, because the city and DEVCO were already circulating an alternative narrative.
Lilia Fernandez
We would hear that coming from some of the parents and community residents, they would make this moral argument, saying, “Well, but it’s for a good cause, it’s for a cancer center.” Of course, the irony is that so many residents in New Brunswick don’t have health insurance coverage and don’t really have access to adequate health care. A really important strategy was educating the public and making people aware of the millions of dollars at stake here and who these big operators were. One of the flyers that we put together based on Juan [González]’s research was the salaries of all the hospital and Cancer Center executives. These are guys making two, three, five million dollars a year, while the families in the neighborhood whose children were going to be displaced were struggling to make $40,000.
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