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Glendalis: The Life and World of a Youngest Daughter

a young girl in a white hat poses next to a car with flames painted on the hood

For 10 years beginning in the late 90s, photographer Angela Cappetta captured the goings-on of a multi-generational Puerto Rican family living on NYC’s Lower East Side, focusing particularly on the youngest daughter, Glendalis. From a recent piece in the New Yorker by Ana Karina Zatarain:

The neighborhood was different then. During those years, just before a fierce wave of gentrification hit the area, the photographer Angela Cappetta often rose at dawn to roam the streets, a Fuji 6x9 camera in hand. (“I still use it,” she told me. “It looks fake, like a toy.”) It was on one of those mornings that Cappetta encountered a clan that reminded her of her own upbringing, within a multigenerational family of Italian immigrants, in Connecticut. As a child, Cappetta was shepherded among various homes by aunts, uncles, and older cousins-a constant and frenetic flow of relatives. The family she met that day, Puerto Rican New Yorkers living on multiple floors of a tenement building on Stanton Street, had a similar dynamic. Instinctively, she began placing each member in their role. “I looked at this beatific, beautiful family, and I thought, Yeah, I relate to this,” she recalled.