was tax capture a secret?

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This is a short video about the money that was extracted from Detroit taxpayers by the "District Detroit" development for the oligarch Chris Ilitch, aided by Mayor Duggan's administration, City Council, and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation (DEGC). 

Our member Elena Herrada connects the history of the Mexican people of Southwest Detroit to that of their beloved Bowen Branch Library, by drawing parallels between the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, and the corporate looting of Detroit in the present day in the form of tax captures. The Bowen Library was known to the Mexican community by the 1960s as La Biblioteca de la Gente, or "The People's Library." 

Incidentally, the establishment of the Bowen Branch Library was concurrent (c1912) with the Mexican Revolution which, aside from the overthrow of the Díaz regime, had a strong component of bringing education to the rural Mexican community. The political status quo in today's Detroit, and its corporate looting of the people's libraries and schools for the uses of the rich can be seen as an echo of the similar cronyism, wealth inequality, and debt peonage in 1900s Mexico. 

It should be noted that about 15,000 Mexican-Detroiters who had come here as legal citizens after the revolution were abruptly deported to Mexico in the 1930s, in what was called the "Mexican Repatriation." Many of them eventually made their way back to Detroit. Herrada herself is a descendant of the repatriados who came back—and her grandfather was a Zapatista during the Mexican Revolution; she keeps an understanding of how libraries and schools are essential to political resistance in the forefront of her fight to protect the Bowen Branch Library, as well as the entire DPL system from the unethical looting represented by today's tax captures for downtown development.