Puerto Rican Newark: The Past and Present

Puerto Rican culture flourishes in New York City, the hub of the Nuyorican Art Movement in neighborhoods like Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem. However, although Newark’s Puerto Rican community is lesser known, its art is just as vibrant and as outspoken in its critique of colonialism and racism within the United States. The city has been home to many Puerto Rican activists such as Miguel “Don Mike” Rodriguez and Rutgers professor Hilda Hidalgo. It also has been the home base for community centers such as La Casa de Don Pedro, and uprisings such as the Puerto Rico Rebellion at Branch Brook Park in 1974. In 2024, the Newark Puerto Rican parade celebrated its 63rd year! 

This Thursday, the Newark Public Library and the Price Institute will be hosting its next installment of the Our Newark Futures series, inviting performers Chris Rodriguez, Clara Diaz, and Julio Evans to bring to life Bomba, one of the most popular music and dance styles in Puerto Rico. This event will continue a conversation about the connection between art and place, how art can be an act of community making in the midst of a diaspora. The larger topic of culture and place is one that Newarkers engage with everyday, as Newark’s wards have held ethnic enclaves of all kinds during its rapid growth. They have come to represent their own eras in Newark history: Irish Newark, Jewish Newark, Italian Newark etc. Considering that this week’s event is highlighting Puerto Rican culture in Newark, it seems only fair to focus our inaugural blog post on the Puerto Ricans who have come together to shape Newark’s public spaces and cultural landscape in the past 50+ years. 

Let’s start with El Club del Barrio, fully named the St. Columba Neighborhood Club. It was established in 1975 as a nonprofit organization meant to provide health and social services to low-income residents living around Lincoln Park. First centered at 25 Pennsylvania Ave, later moving to 76 Clinton Ave, these services included a daycare, support groups for pregnant mothers, house visits for seniors, a food pantry, ESL classes, and various divisions centered on providing information to those with HIV. Although open to everyone in the neighborhood, the organization served mostly a Latino population which thrived following an exodus of Irish Newarkers and an influx of Puerto Rican migrants in the 1960s.

Like the Healing Garden here at the Price Institute, El Club Del Barrio recognized that the residents of Newark and the Indigenous people of the Americas shared a common plight in regards to a disconnect from the land in which they live. A Florence and John Schumann Foundation report from 1978 compared the relocation of the Navajo in New Mexico to the evictions of Hispanic renters on South Broad Street, stating that while the Navajo lived thousands of miles away in an entirely different arid environment, “The Hispanic faces the challenge of getting an education, then getting a job, in effort to survive in what is often an urban desert where prejudice and injustice still bloom”. 

This report was in reference to Project Encounter, in which Sister Debbie Humphreys of the St. Columba Catholic Church and others came together to work towards providing better housing, jobs, and safety to the residents of the neighborhood. The community closed a bar that was attracting crime close to an elementary school, and fought against the evictions of almost 60 families on Thanksgiving who could not read the eviction notices placed on their houses in English. What they could not stop was the destruction of housing, leading to many open lots of rubble in the area. This was part of the urban renewal movement that Newark pushed for in the mid 20th century, a predecessor to the gentrification of Puerto Rican neighborhoods that artists such as Julio Evans seek to stop fifty years later. In the midst of this loss, the organization would go on to renovate a storefront on 57 Pennsylvania Avenue, used to house their club Taller, Spanish for “workshop”.

Like the Price Institute’s Healing Garden, El Club Del Barrio also planted a garden near their home base. Their garden was formed from an empty lot, as many urban community gardens start out, directly next to 57 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was known as the workshop garden, in connection to the storefront, and would not be the only land that they would reuse as a green space. Pictured here is another rubble-filled lot, where the club would plant tomatoes and other crops. Today the workshop garden is gone, along with the original 57 Pennsylvania Ave, but the legacy of the club remains through the continual use of their public spaces. In 1989, the club reopened Skull Field as “El Club Del Barrio” athletic field in what is today known as Raymond Brown Park on Route 21. In 1995, they constructed the Peace Park that is still used by local children thanks to a grant received in 2005 by the Trust for Public Land.

Vestiges of the club remain throughout the city and the same can be said for much of Newark’s Puerto Rican figures and symbols. Take a walk across Rutgers-Newark campus and you’ll find yourself on Hilda Hidalgo Way. Dr. Hidalgo was an esteemed professor, community leader, and lesbian activist. She was also a prominent member of New Jersey’s chapter of ASPIRA, La Casa De Don Pedro, and NJ’s Puerto Rican Congress. Walk up to Harriet Tubman Square and into the Newark Museum, where Puerto Rican art is showcased among other works of Spanish Caribbean art. A bus ride to Mt Prospect Place in the North Ward will bring you to “Fotos y Recuerdos”, a mural by artist José R. Beltrán Ramos, celebrating the landmarks of Newark’s sister city San Sebastián. Street signs, museums, and publicly accessible murals are all ways in which the everyday Newarker interacts with Puerto Rican culture hundreds of miles from the island. Their permanent place amongst Newark’s streetscapes and institutions remind us all that although much of the early Puerto Rican communities have lost their houses or gardens, much still remains. 

Yet the biggest celebration of Puerto Rican culture in Newark takes place just once a year on Broad Street. A bustling avenue cutting through the city on an average day, every third Sunday in September the city street transforms to become the site of the Newark Puerto Rican Day parade. Spectators line the street as floats adorned with Puerto Rican flags pass them by, singers raise their voices, and beauty queens wave to the adoring crowds. Like the event this Thursday evening, drummers add to the excitement as well. When asked about the significance of this parade to the people of Newark in 1978, Dr. Hidalgo considered it “a one-day holiday from poverty, bias, bad housing and desperate job‐hunting and struggle”. It is this kind of holiday that we are looking to engage in again this week as we all convene at the Newark Public library for a night of music, dance, and celebration.

Newark is a mixed bowl of different cultures, races, and ethnicities, with residents whose ancestors stretch back beyond colonial times and those who are working towards gaining citizenship after a long trip to America. Puerto Ricans are one woven thread in this tapestry, one that has created a lasting impression on this city and its houses, gardens, streets, signs, and walls. 

For further information on the Puerto Rican history of Newark, especially the rebellion of 1974, arrive early at the Newark Public Library to view their current exhibition, Newark ’74: From Rebellion To Excellence Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Newark’s Puerto Rican Rebellion co curated by William Q. Sánchez, Yesenia López, Juber Ayala and Fabian Paredes and open until January 18th. 

We’ll see you at the Newark Public Library on December 12th!

 

Sources:

Images courtesy of the Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center, Newark Public Library