Judah Trujillo, 3, the son of Chainbreaker Collective employee Jessica Montoya Trujillo, takes the cap off a bicycle wheel so air can be pumped into the tire Friday at Chainbreaker’s new facility on Fifth Street. The bike will be donated to a child in the community.
Yetzali Reyna, a community organizer with Chainbreaker Collective, picks a bicycle helmet for co-worker Jessica Montoya Trujillo’s son, Judah, on Friday at Chainbreaker Collective’s new facility on Fifth Street.
Jessica Montoya Trujillo, who has been with Chainbreaker Collective for eight years, helps her son Judah Trujillo pump air into tires of a bicycle that will be given away.
Judah Trujillo, 3, the son of Chainbreaker Collective employee Jessica Montoya Trujillo, takes the cap off a bicycle wheel so air can be pumped into the tire Friday at Chainbreaker’s new facility on Fifth Street. The bike will be donated to a child in the community.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
Jessica Montoya Trujillo, who has been with Chainbreaker Collective for eight years, helps her son Judah Trujillo pump air into tires of a bicycle that will be given away.
The Chainbreaker Collective’s annual Posolada holiday party was the place to be Dec. 17, as elected officials and everyday Santa Feans alike enjoyed tamales, biscochitos and mariachi music while kids and teens vied for one of the 40-plus bicycles being raffled.
It was the organization’s first indoor Posolada since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and there was plenty more to celebrate: The event was the first major event in Chainbreaker’s new building on Fifth Street, which the group began leasing in November.
The organization also is coming off the high of the passage of the city’s 3% excise tax on the sale of high-end homes, a ballot measure the organization had a hand in winning. Chainbreaker members knocked on more than 3,400 doors to push for the measure before the election. The effort was perhaps a prelude for what leaders say will be a momentous 20th anniversary year.
“We’re fully anticipating 2024 to be a monumental year for many, many reasons,” Executive Director Tomás Rivera said.
Chainbreaker Collective was founded as a bicycle repair shop in 2004, catering largely to working-class residents in the Hopewell Mann neighborhood.
“For them, a bike wasn’t an accessory or a fun toy,” Chainbreaker spokeswoman Cathy Garcia said of the clients the organization served. “It was necessary to go to work.”
Yetzali Reyna, a community organizer with Chainbreaker Collective, picks a bicycle helmet for co-worker Jessica Montoya Trujillo’s son, Judah, on Friday at Chainbreaker Collective’s new facility on Fifth Street.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
From there, Chainbreaker has burgeoned into a membership-based community organization of more than 800 dues-paying people advocating for economic, housing and transportation-related issues with a continued focus on the Hopewell Mann neighborhood, where the largest percentage of its base lives.
The new building is just several doors down from its old location, and Garcia said ensuring Chainbreaker could stay in the neighborhood as it searched for a new center of operations was crucial.
“We’re so excited to move in here,” she said at the Posolada.
Rivera said Chainbreaker plans to have an official opening later in the winter as it moves out of the several other buildings it uses on the same block.
The new, two-story building is slightly larger than its other spaces, Rivera said, and will allow Chainbreaker to operate out of a centralized location. Its growing tenants rights clinics won’t have to compete for space with the bike repair program.
Along with the passage of the so-called mansion tax, Rivera said Chainbreaker’s work supporting renters is the accomplishment he was most proud of in 2023. Chainbreaker helped form renters committees in mobile home parks and has been holding a series of renters rights clinics, a program it’s been building back up to pre-COVID levels.
Some of the clinics have drawn more than 75 people, and Rivera said Chainbreaker hopes to capitalize on its efforts by lobbying the City Council to pass legislation that would make it harder for landlords to retaliate against renters who pursue their legal rights by trying to have them evicted.
“Every victory builds on the next,” he said.
Yetzali Reyna, a community organizer with Chainbreaker Collective, hangs a banner Friday at the organization’s new facility on Fifth Street.
Gabriela Campos/The New Mexican
Another focus for the year is the ongoing development of the midtown campus. The city is touting its plans for the campus — including new arts spaces, a film studio and apartment developments — as an investment in the city’s cultural scene, which will bring in needed jobs and housing. But for longtime Hopewell Mann residents, it also has raised fears about gentrification and displacement, which Garcia said has been a major concern ever since the College of Santa Fe shut down in 2009.
In the fall, the city applied for a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help stabilize Hopewell Mann, which Garcia said was “a result of the years of community pushing on them.”
If received, the $1 million grant would be used to mitigate displacement pressures in the neighborhood as development continues on midtown.
“We’re very excited about that,” city Community Development Director Rich Brown said at a Quality of Life Committee meeting Wednesday.
In an email, Affordable Housing Director Alexandra Ladd said the city hopes to hear back from HUD about the grant by the end of January. Rivera said he’s optimistic about what Chainbreaker will be able to accomplish in 2024. Coming back from the pandemic has been a challenge, but he said there’s been “a sense of relief” the group is still around.
“People were excited to know that not only have we not stopped, but we’re kept growing,” Rivera said.
